IV—A DIVERSION AT SAN REMO
The Royal Hotel, San Remo, has the reputation of being the best hotel, and the most expensive, on the Italian Riviera. It is the abode of correctness and wealth, and if a stray novelist or so is discovered there, that is only an accident. It provides distractions of all kinds for its guests: bands of music, conjuring shows, dances; and that week it provided quite a new thing in the way of distraction, namely, an address from Prebendary Carlile, head of the Church Army, which was quite truthfully described as a “national antidote to indiscriminate charity.” We looked forward to that address; it was a novelty. And if we of the Royal Hotel had a fault, our fault was a tendency, after we had paid our hotel bills, to indiscriminate charity. Indiscriminate charity salves the conscience just as well as the other kind, and though it costs as much in money, it costs less in trouble. However, we liked to be castigated for our sins, and, in the absence of Father Vaughan, we anticipated with pleasure Mr. Carlile. We did not all go. None of the representatives of ten different Continental aristocracies and plutocracies went. Nor did any young and beautiful persons of any nation go. As a fact, it was a lovely afternoon.
To atone for these defections, the solid respectability of all San Remo swarmed into the hotel. (A notice had been posted that it might order its carriages for 3.30.) We made an unprepossessing assemblage. I am far removed from the first blush of youth; but I believe I was almost the youngest person present, save a boy who had been meanly “pressed” by his white-haired father. We were chiefly old, stout, plain, and of dissatisfied visage. Many of us had never been married, and never would be. We were prepared to be very grave. But the mischief was that Mr. Carlile would not be grave.
Mr. Carlile looked like a retired colonel who had dressed by mistake in clerical raiment. His hue was ruddy, his eye clear, and his moustache martial. He is of a naturally cheerful disposition. It is impossible not to like him, not to admire him, not to respect him. It really requires considerable selfrestraint, after he has been speaking for a few minutes, not to pelt him with sovereigns for the prosecution of his work. Still, appreciation of humour was scarcely our strong point. We could not laugh without severe effort. We were unaccustomed to laugh. It is no use pretending that we were not a serious conclave (we were not basking in the sun, nor dashing across the country in our Fiat cars; we had the interests of the Empire at heart). Therefore, though we took the Prebendary’s humorous denunciation of our indiscriminate charity with fairly good grace, we should have preferred it with a little less facetiousness. People burdened as we were with the responsibilities of Empire ought not to be expected to laugh. As protectionists, we were not, if the truth is to be told, in a mood for gaiety. Hence we did not laugh; we hardly smiled. We just listened soberly to the Prebendary, who, after he had told us what we ought not to do, told us what we ought to do.
“What we try to do,” he said, “is to bridge the gulf—to bridge the gulf between the East End and the West End. We don’t want your money, we want your help, we want each of you to take up one person and look after him. That is the only way to bridge the gulf.” He kept on emphasising the phrase “bridge the gulf”; and to illustrate it, he mentioned a Christmas pudding that was sent from a Royal palace to his “Pudding Sunday” orgy labelled for “the poorest and loneliest widow.”
“We soon found her,” he said. “She worked from 8.30 A.M. to 6:30 p.m. and again two hours at night, sewing buttons, and in a good week she earned six shillings. Her right hand was all distorted by rheumatism, so that to sew gave her great pain. We found her, and we pushed her upstairs, with great difficulty—because she was so bad with bronchitis—and she had her pudding. Someone insisted on giving her 1s. a week for life, and someone else insisted on giving her 2s. a week for life, so now she’s a blooming millionaire. Give us money, if you like, but please don’t give us any more money for her....”
“There’s another class of women,” continued the Prebendary, “the drunkards. Drunkenness is growing among women owing to the evil of grocers’ licences. We should like some of you to take up a drunken woman apiece and look after her. We can easily find you a nice, gentle creature, to whom getting drunk is no more than getting cross is to us. Very nice women are drunkards, and they can be reclaimed by bridging the gulf. Then there’s the hooligans—you have them on the Riviera, too. I’ve had a good deal of experience of them myself. I was once picked up for dead near the Army and Navy Stores after meeting a hooligan. Only the other day a man put his fist in my face and said: ‘You’ve ruined our trade.’ ‘What trade? The begging trade?’ I said, ‘I wish I had.’ And then the discharged prisoners. We offer five months’ work to any discharged prisoner who cares to take it; there are 200,000 every year. I was talking to a prison official the other day, who told me that 90 per cent, of his ‘cases’ he sent to us. We reclaim about half of these. The other half break our hearts. One broke all our windows not long since. ..”
And the Prebendary said also: “My greatest pleasure is a day, a whole day, in a thoroughly bad slum. I went down to Wigan for such a day, and at a meeting, when I asked whether anyone would come forward and speak up for beer, not for Christ, a man came along and threw three pence at my feet—remains of pawning his waistcoat—and then fell down dead drunk. We picked him up, and I charged a helper with 6d., so that he could be filled up with tea or coffee beyond his capacity to drink any more beer at all. I don’t know whether it was the beer or the tea, but he joined us. All due to emotion, or excitement, perhaps! Yes, but the next morning I was going out to the 7.30 prayer-meeting and I came across a Wigan collier dead drunk in the road. I tried to pick him, up. I had my surplice on: I always wear my surplice, for the advertisement, and because people like to see it. And I couldn’t pick him up. I was carrying my trombone in one hand. Then another man came along, and we couldn’t get that drunkard up between us. And then who should come along but my reclaimed drunkard of the night before! He managed it.”
And the Prebendary further said: “Come some day and have lunch with me. It will take you two hours. You ought to chop ten bundles of firewood, but I’ll let you off that. Or come and have tea. That will take four hours. There’s a Starvation Supper to end it at 8.30, and something going on all the time. We have a brass band, thirty players, all very bad. I’m the worst, with my trombone. We also have a women’s concertina band. It’s terrible. But it goes down. As one man said, ‘It mykes me ’ead ache, but it do do me ’eart good.’”
Then Lord Dundonald proposed a vote of thanks to everybody who deserved to be thanked. He indicated that we ought to help Mr. Carlile, just to show our repentance for having allowed the people free access to public-houses for several centuries. (Faint applause.) Unless we prevented the people from getting at beer and unless we prevented aliens from entering England—(Loud applause)—Mr. Carlile’s efforts would not succeed. If we stopped the supply of beer and of aliens then the principal steps [towards Utopia?] would have been accomplished. This simple and comprehensible method of straightening out the social system appealed to us very strongly. I think we preferred it to “bridging the gulf.” At the back of our minds was the idea that if we lent our motor-cars or our husbands’ or brothers’ motor-cars to the right candidates at election time we should be doing all that was necessary to ensure the millennium. Upon this we departed. In the glow of the meeting the scheme of attaching ourselves each to a nice, gentle drunken woman seemed attractive; but really, on reflection...! There was a plate at the door. However, Mr. Carlile had himself said, “I don’t depend much on the plate at the door.”
FONTAINEBLEAU—1904-1909
I—FIRST JOURNEY INTO THE FOREST
Just to show how strange, mysterious, and romantic life is, I will relate to you in a faithful narrative a few of my experiences the other day—it was a common Saturday. Some people may say that my experiences were after all quite ordinary experiences. After all, they were not. I was staying in a little house, unfamiliar to me, and beyond a radius of a few hundred yards I knew nothing of my surroundings, for I had arrived by train, and slept in the train. I felt that if I wandered far from that little house I should step into the unknown and the surprising. Even in the house I had to speak a foreign tongue; the bells rang in French. During the morning I walked about alone, not daring to go beyond the influence of the little house; I might have been a fly wandering within the small circle of lamplight on a tablecloth; all about me lay vast undiscovered spaces. Then after lunch a curious machine came by itself up to the door of the little house. I daresay you have seen these machines. You sit over something mysterious, with something still more mysterious in front of you. A singular liquid is poured into a tank; one drop explodes at a spark, and the explosion pushes the machine infinitesimally forward, another drop explodes and pushes the machine infinitesimally forward, and so on, and so on, and quicker and quicker, till you can outstrip trains. Such is the explanation given to me. I have a difficulty in believing it, but it seems to find general acceptance. However, the machine came up to the door of the little house, and took us off, four of us, all by itself; and after twisting about several lanes for a couple of minutes it ran us into a forest. I had somehow known all the time that that little house was on the edge of a great forest.
Without being informed, I knew that it was a great forest, because against the first trees there was a large board which said “General Instructions for reading the signposts in the forest,” and then a lot of details. No forest that was not a great forest, a mazy forest, and a dangerous forest to get lost in, would have had a notice board like that. As a matter of fact the forest was fifty miles in circumference. We plunged into it, further and further, exploding our way at the rate of twenty or thirty miles an hour, along a superb road which had a beginning and no end. Sometimes we saw a solitary horseman caracoling by the roadside; sometimes we passed a team of horses slowly dragging a dead tree; sometimes we heard the sound of the woodman’s saw in the distance. Once or twice we detected a cloud of dust on the horizon of the road, and it came nearer and nearer, and proved to be a machine like ours, speeding on some mysterious errand in the forest. And as we progressed we looked at each other, and noticed that we were getting whiter and whiter—not merely our faces, but even our clothes. And for an extraordinary time we saw nothing but the road running away from under our wheels, and on either side trees, trees, trees—the beech, the oak, the hornbeam, the birch, the pine—interminable and impenetrable millions of them, prodigious in size, and holding strange glooms in the net of their leafless branches. And at intervals we passed cross-roads, disclosing glimpses, come and gone in a second, of other immense avenues of the same trees. And then, quite startlingly, quite without notice, we were out of the forest; it was just as if we were in a train and had come out of a tunnel.
And we had fallen into the midst of a very little village, sleeping on the edge of the forest, and watched over by a very large cathedral. Most of the cathedral had ceased to exist, including one side of the dizzy tower, but enough was left to instil awe. A butcher came with great keys (why a butcher, if the world is so commonplace as people make out?), and we entered the cathedral; and though outside the sun was hot, the interior of the vast fane was ice-cold, chilling the bones. And the cathedral was full of realistic statues of the Virgin, such as could only have been allowed to survive in an ice-cold cathedral on the edge of a magic forest. And then we climbed a dark corkscrew staircase for about an hour, and came out (as startlingly as we had come out of the forest) on the brink of a precipice two hundred feet deep. There was no rail. One little step, and that night our ghosts would have begun to haunt the remoter glades of the forest. The butcher laughed, and leaned over; perhaps he could do this with impunity because he was dressed in blue; I don’t know.
Soon afterwards the curious untiring machine had swept us into the forest again. And now the forest became more and more sinister, and beautiful with a dreadful beauty. Great processions of mighty and tremendous rocks straggled over hillocks, and made chasms and promontories, and lairs for tigers—tigers that burn bright in the night. But the road was always smooth, and it seemed nonchalant towards all these wonders. And presently it took us safely out of the forest once again. And this time we were in a town, a town that by some mistake of chronology had got into the wrong century; the mistake was a very gross one indeed. For this town had a fort with dungeons and things, and a moat all round it, and the quaintest streets and bridges and roofs and river and craft. And processions in charge of nuns were walking to and fro in the grass grown streets. And not only were the houses and shops quaint in the highest degree, but the shopkeepers also were all quaint. A greyheaded tailor dressed in black stood at the door of his shop, and his figure offered such a quaint spectacle that one of my friends and myself exclaimed at the same instant: “How Balzacian!” And we began to talk about Balzac’s great novel “Ursule Mirouët.” It was as if that novel had come into actuality, and we were in the middle of it. Everything was Balzacian; those who have read Balzac’s provincial stories will realise what that means. Yet we were able to buy modern cakes at a confectioner’s. And we ordered tea, and sat at a table on the pavement in front of an antique inn. And close by us the landlady sat on a chair, and sewed, and watched us. I ventured into the great Balzacian kitchen of the inn, all rafters and copper pans, and found a pretty girl boiling water for our tea in one pan and milk for our tea in another pan. I told her it was wrong to boil the milk, but I could see she did not believe me. We were on the edge of the forest.
And then the machine had carried us back into the forest. And this time we could see that it meant business. For it had chosen a road mightier than the others, and a road more determined to penetrate the very heart of the forest. We travelled many miles with scarcely a curve, until there were more trees behind us than a thousand men, could count in a thousand years. And then—you know what happened next. At least you ought to be able to guess. We came to a castle. In the centre of all forests there is an enchanted castle, and there was an enchanted castle in the centre of this forest. And as the forest was vast, so was the castle vast. And as the forest was beautiful, so was the castle beautiful. It was a sleeping castle; the night of history had overtaken it. We entered its portals by a magnificent double staircase, and there was one watchman there, like a lizard, under the great doorway. He showed us the wonders of the castle, conducting us through an endless series of noble and splendid interiors, furnished to the last detail of luxury, but silent, unpeopled, and forlorn. Only the clocks were alive. “There are sixty-eight clocks in the castle.” (And ever since I have thought of those sixty-eight clocks ticking away there, with ten miles of trees on every side of them.) And the interiors grew still more imposing. And at length we arrived at an immense apartment whose gorgeous and yet restrained magnificence drew from us audible murmurs of admiration. Prominent among the furniture was a great bed, hung with green and gold, and a glittering cradle; at the head of the cradle was poised a gold angel bearing a crown. Said the sleepy watchman: “Bed-chamber of Napoleon, with cradle of the King of Rome.” This was the secret of the forest.
II—SECOND JOURNEY INTO THE FOREST
We glided swiftly into the forest as into a tunnel. But after a while could be seen a silvered lane of stars overhead, a ceiling to the invisible double wall of trees. There were these stars, the rush of tonic wind in our faces, and the glare of the low-hung lanterns on the road that raced to meet us. The car swerved twice in its flight, the second time violently. We understood that there had been danger. As the engine stopped, a great cross loomed up above us, intercepting certain rays; it stood in the middle of the road, which, dividing, enveloped its base, as the current of a river strokes an island. The doctor leaned over from the driving-seat and peered behind. In avoiding the cross he had mistaken for part of the macadam an expanse of dust which rain and wind had caked; and on this treachery the wheels had skidded. “Ça aurait pu être une sale histoire!” he said briefly and drily. In the pause we pictured ourselves flung against the cross, dead or dying. I noticed that other roads joined ours at the cross, and that a large grassy space, circular, separated us from the trees. As soon as we had recovered a little from the disconcerting glimpse of the next world, the doctor got down and restarted the engine, and our road began to race forward to us again, under the narrow ceiling of stars. After monotonous miles, during which I pondered upon eternity, nature, the meaning of life, the precariousness of my earthly situation, and the incipient hole in my boot-sole—all the common night-thoughts—we passed by a high obelisk (the primitive phallic symbol succeeding to the other), and turning to the right, followed an obscure gas-lit street of walls relieved by sculptured porticoes. Then came the vast and sombre courtyard of a vague palace, screened from us by a grille; we overtook a tram-car, a long, glazed box of electric light; and then we were suddenly in a bright and living town. We descended upon the terrace of a calm café, in front of which were ranged twin red-blossomed trees in green tubs, and a waiter in a large white apron and a tiny black jacket.
The lights of the town lit the earth to an elevation of about fifteen feet; above that was the primeval and mysterious darkness, hiding even the housetops. Within the planes of radiance people moved to and fro, appearing and disappearing on their secret errands; and glittering tramcars continually threaded the Square, attended by blue sparks. A monumental bull occupied a pedestal in the centre of the Square; parts of its body were lustrous, others intensely black, according to the incidence of the lights. My friends said it was the bull of Rosa Bonheur, the Amazon. Pointing to a dark void beyond the flanks of the bull, they said, too, that the palace was there, and spoke of the Council-Chamber of Napoleon, the cradle of the King of Rome, the boudoir of Marie Antoinette. I had to summon my faith in order to realise that I was in Fontainebleau, which hitherto had been to me chiefly a romantic name. In the deep and half-fearful pleasure of realisation—-“This also has happened to me!”—I was aware of the thrill which has shaken me on many similar occasions, each however unique: as when I first stepped on a foreign shore; when I first saw the Alps, the Pyrenees; when I first strolled on the grand boulevards; when I first staked a coin at Monte Carlo; when I walked over the French frontier and read on a thing like a mile-post the sacred name “Italia”; and, most marvellous, when I stood alone in the Sahara and saw the vermilions and ochres of the Aurès Mountains. This thrill, ever returning, is the reward of a perfect ingenuousness.
I was shown a map, and as I studied it, the strangeness of the town’s situation seduced me more than the thought of its history. For the town, with its lights, cars, cafés, shops, halls, palaces, theatres, hotels, and sponging-houses, was lost in the midst of the great forest. Impossible to enter it, or to leave it, without winding through those dark woods! On the map I could trace all the roads, a dozen like ours, converging on the town. I had a vision of them, palely stretching through the interminable and sinister labyrinth of unquiet trees, and gradually reaching the humanity of the town. And I had a vision of the recesses of the forest, where the deer wandered or couched. All around, on the rim of the forest, were significant names: the Moret and the Grez and the Franchard of Stevenson; Barbizon; the Nemours of Balzac; Larchant. Nor did I forget the forest scene of George Moore’s “Mildred Lawson.”
After we had sat half an hour in front of glasses, we rushed back through the forest to the house on its confines whence we had come. The fascination of the town did not cease to draw me until, years later, I yielded and went definitely to live in it.
III—THE CASTLE GARDENS
On the night of the Feast of Saint Louis the gardens of the palace are not locked as on other nights. The gardens are within the park, and the park is within the forest. I walked on that hot, clear night amid the parterres of flowers; and across shining water, over the regular tops of clipped trees, I saw the long façades and the courts of the palace: pale walls of stone surmounted by steep slated roofs, and high red chimneys cut out against the glittering sky. An architecture whose character is set by the exaggerated slope of its immense roofs, which dwarf the walls they should only protect! All the interest of the style is in these eventful roofs, chequered continually by the facings of upright dormers, pierced by little ovals, and continually interrupted by the perpendicularity of huge chimneys. The palace seems to live chiefly in its roof, and to be top-heavy.
It is a forest of brick chimneys growing out of stone. Millions upon millions of red bricks had been raised and piled in elegant forms solely that the smoke of fires below might escape above the roof ridge: fires which in theory heated rooms, but which had never heated aught but their own chimneys: inefficient and beautiful chimneys of picturesque, ineffectual hearths! Tin pipes and cowls, such as sprout thickly on the roofs of Paris and London, would have been cheaper and better. (It is always thus to practical matters that my mind runs.) In these monstrous and innumerable chimneys one saw eccentricity causing an absurd expense of means for a trifling end: sure mask of a debased style!
With malicious sadness I reflected that in most of those chimneys smoke would never ascend again. I thought of the hundreds of rooms, designed before architects understood the art of planning, crowded with gilt and mahogany furniture, smothered in hangings, tapestries, and carpets, sparkling with crystal whose cold gaiety is reflected in the polish of oak floors! And not a room but conjures up the splendour of the monarchs and the misery of the people of France! Not an object that is associated with the real welfare of the folk, the makers of the country! A museum now—the palace, the gardens, and the fountained vistas of lake and canal—or shall I not say a mausoleum?—whose title to fame, in the esteem of the open-mouthed, is that here Napoleon, the supreme scourge of families and costly spreader of ruin,-wrote an illegible abdication. The document of abdication, which is, after all, only a facsimile, and the greedy carp in the lake—these two phenomena divide the eyes of the open-mouthed.
And not all the starers that come from the quarters of the world are more than sufficient to dot very sparsely the interminable polished floors and the great spaces of the gardens. The fantastic monument is preserved ostensibly as one of the glories of France! (Gloire, thou art French! Fontainebleau, Pasteur, the Eiffel Tower, Victor Hugo, the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranean Railway—each has been termed a gloire of France!) But the true reason of the monument’s preservation is that it is too big to destroy. The later age has not the force nor the courage to raze it and parcel it and sell it, and give to the poor. It is a defiance to the later age of the age departed. Like a gigantic idol, it is kept gilded and tidy at terrific expense by a cult which tempers fear with disdain.
IV—AN ITINERARY
I have lived for years in the forest of Fontainebleau, the largest forest in France, and one of the classic forests—I suppose—of the world. Not in a charcoal-burner’s hut, nor in a cave, but in a town; for the united towns of Avon and Fontainebleau happen to be in the forest itself, and you cannot either enter or quit them without passing through the forest; thus it happens that, while inhabiting the recesses of a forest you can enjoy all the graces and conveniences of an imperial city (Fontainebleau is nothing if not Napoleonic), even to cafés chantants, cinematograph theatres, and expensive fruiterers. I tramp daily, and often twice daily, in this forest, seldom reaching its edge, unless I do my tramping on a bicycle, and it is probably this familiarity with its fastnesses and this unfamiliarity with its periphery as a continuous whole that has given me what I believe to be a new idea for a tramping excursion: namely, a circuit of the forest of Fontainebleau. It is an enterprise which might take two days or two months. I may never accomplish it myself, but it ought to be accomplished by somebody, and I can guarantee its exceeding diversity and interest. The forest is surrounded by a ring of towns, townships, and villages of the most varied character. I think I know every one of them, having arrived somehow at each of them by following radii from the centre. I propose to put down some un-Baedekerish but practical notes on each place, for the use and benefit of the tramp er who has the wisdom to pursue my suggestion.
One must begin with Moret. Moret is the show-place on the edge of the forest, and perhaps the oldest. I assisted some years ago at the celebration of its thousandth anniversary. It is only forty-three miles from Paris, on the main line of the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranean railway, an important junction; two hundred and fifty trains a day pass through the station. And yet it is one of the deadest places I ever had tea in. It lies low, on the banks of the Loing, about a mile above the confluence of the Seine and the Loing. It is dirty, not very healthy, and exceedingly picturesque. Its bridge, church, gates and donjon have been painted and sketched by millions of artists, professional and amateur. It appears several times in each year’s Salon. This is its curse—the same curse as that of Bruges: it is overrun by amateur artists. I am an amateur artist myself; in summer I am not to be seen abroad without a sketching-stool, a portfolio, and a water-bottle in my hip pocket. But I hate, loathe and despise other amateur artists. Nothing would induce me to make one of the group of earnest dabbers and scratchers by the bridge at Moret. When I attack Nature, I must be alone, or, if another artist is to be there, he must be a certified professional. I have nothing else to say against Moret. There are several hotels, all mediocre.
A more amusing and bracing place than Moret is its suburb St. Mammès, the port at the afore-mentioned confluence, magnificently situated, and always brightened by the traffic of barges, tugs, and other craft. There is an hotel and a pension. The Seine is a great and noble stream here, and absolutely unused by pleasure-craft. I do not know why. I once made a canoe and navigated the Amazonian flood, but the contrivance was too frail. Tugs would come rushing down, causing waves twelve inches high at least, and I was afraid, especially as I had had the temerity to put a sail to the canoe.
The tramper should cross the Seine here, and go through Champagne, a horrible town erected by the Creusot Steel Company—called, quite seriously, a “garden city.” He then crosses the river again to Thomery—the grape town. The finest table grapes in France are grown at Thomery. Vines flourish in public on both sides of most streets, and public opinion is so powerful (on this one point) that the fruit is never stolen. Thomery’s lesser neighbour, By, is equally vinous. These large villages offer very interesting studies in the results of specialisation. Hotels and pensions exist.
From Thomery, going in a general direction north by west, it is necessary to penetrate a little into the forest, as the Seine is its boundary here, and there is no practical towing-path on the forest side of the river. You come down to the river at Yalvins Bridge, and, following the left bank, you arrive at the little village of Les Plâtreries, which consists of about six houses and an hotel where the food is excellent and whose garden rises steeply straight into the forest. A mile farther on is the large village of Samois, also on the Seine. Lower Samois is too pretty—-as pretty as a Christmas card. It is much frequented in summer; its hotel accommodation is inferior and expensive, and its reputation for strictly conventional propriety is scarcely excessive. ‘However, a picturesque spot! Climb the very abrupt stony high street, and you come to Upper Samois, which is less sophisticated.
From Samois (unless you choose to ferry across to Féricy and reach Melun by Fontaine-le-Port) you must cut through an arm of the forest to Bois-le-Roi. You are now getting toward the northern and less interesting extremity of the forest. Bois-le-Roi looks a perfect dream of a place from the station. But it is no such thing. It is residential. It is even respectably residential. All trains except the big expresses stop at Bois-le-Roi, which fact is a proof that the residents exert secret influences upon the railway directors, and that therefore they are the kind of resident whose notion of architecture is merely distressing. You can stay at Bois-le-Roi and live therein comfortably, but there is no reason why you should.
The next place is Melun, which lies just to the north of the forest. It is the county town. It is noted for its brewery. It is well situated on a curve of the Seine, and it is more provincial (in the stodgy sense) and more ineffably tedious even than Moret. It possesses neither monuments nor charm. Yet the distant view of it—say from the height above Fontaine-le-Port, is ravishing at morn.
From Melun you face about and strike due south, again cutting through a bit of the forest, to Chailly-en-Bière. (All the villages about here are “en bière”) Chailly is just a nice plain average forest-edge village, and that is why I like it. I doubt if you could sleep there with advantage. But if you travel with your own tea, you might have excellent tea there.
The next village is Barbizon, the most renowned place in all the Fontainebleau region; a name full of romantic associations. It is utterly vulgarised, like Stratford-on-Avon. “Les Charmettes” has become a fashionable hotel with a private theatre and an orchestra during dinner. What would Rousseau, Daubigny and Millet say if they could see it now? Curiosity shops, art exhibitions, and a very large café! An appalling light railway, and all over everything the sticky slime of sophistication! Walking about the lanes you have glimpses of superb studio interiors, furnished doubtless by Waring or Lazard. Indeed Barbizon has now become naught but a target for the staring eyes of tourists from Arizona, and a place of abode for persons whose mentality leads them to believe that the atmosphere of this village is favourable to high-class painting.
All the country round about here is exquisite. I have seen purple mornings in the fields nearly as good as any that Millet ever painted. A lane westward should be followed so that other nice average villages, St. Martin-en-Bière and Fleury-en-Bière can be seen. At Fleury there is a glorious castle, partly falling to ruin, and partly in process of restoration. Thence, south-easterly, to Arbonne.
Arbonne is only a few miles from Barbizon, and I fancy that it resembles what Barbizon used to be before Barbizon was discovered by London and New York. It is a long, straggling place, with one impossible and one quite possible hotel. As a field of action for the tramping painter I should say that it is unsurpassed in the department. From Arbonne you must cross another arm of the forest, and pass from the department of Seine-et-Marne to that of Seine-et-Oise, to the market town of Milly. From Milly onwards the human interest is less than the landscape interest until you come to Chapelle-la-Reine; from there you are soon at Larchant, whose ruined cathedral is one of the leading attractions of the forest edge.
You are now within the sphere of Nemours. From Larchant to Nemours the only agreeable method of locomotion is by aeroplane. The high road is straight and level, and, owing to heavy traffic caused by quarries, atrociously bad. It reaches the acme of boredom. Its one merit is its brevity, about five miles. Nemours is a fine Balzacian town, on the Loing, with a picturesque canal in the heart of it, a frowning castle, a goodish church and bridge, a good hotel and delightful suburbs.
At Nemours, cross the river, and keep to the high road which follows the Loing canal through Episy back to Moret. Or, in the alternative, refrain from crossing the river, and take the Paris high road, leaving it to the left at Bourron, and so reach Moret through Marlotte and Montigny. Marlotte and Montigny are Parisian villages in July, August, and September, new, artistic, snobbish; in winter they are quite tolerable. Montigny is “picturesquely situated” on the Loing, and Marlotte has a huge hotel. The road thence on the rim of the forest back to Moret is delightful.
I do not know how many miles you will have done—anything from sixty to a hundred and twenty probably—when you arrive for the second time in Moret. But you must find strength to struggle onwards from Moret to Fontainebleau itself, about seven miles off in the forest. Fontainebleau contains one of the dearest hotels in the world. Ask for it, and go somewhere else.
SWITZERLAND—1909-1911
I—THE HOTEL ON THE LANDSCAPE
I do not mean the picturesque and gabled construction which on our own country-side has been restored to prosperity, though not to efficiency, by Americans travelling with money and motor-cars. I mean the uncompromising grand hotel—Majestic, Palace, Métropole, Royal, Splendide, Victoria, Belle Vue, Ritz, Savoy, Windsor, Continental, and supereminently Grand—which was perhaps first invented and compiled in Northumberland Avenue, and has now spread with its thousand windows and balconies over the entire world. I mean the hotel which is invariably referred to in daily newspapers as a “huge modern caravanserai.” This hotel cannot be judged in a town. In a town, unless it possesses a river-front or a sea-esplanade, the eye never gets higher than its second storey, and as a spectacle the hotel resolves itself usually into a row of shops (for the sale of uselessness), with a large square hole in the middle manned by laced officials who die after a career devoted exclusively to the opening and shutting of glazed double-doors.
To be fairly judged, the grand hotel must be seen alone on a landscape as vast as itself. The best country in which to see it is therefore Switzerland. True, the Riviera is regularly fringed with grand hotels from Toulon to the other side of San Remo; but there they are so closely packed as to interfere with each other’s impressiveness, and as a rule they are at too low an altitude. In Switzerland they occur in all conceivable and inconceivable situations. The official guide of the Swiss Society of Hotel Keepers gives us photographs of over eight hundred grand hotels, and it is by no means complete; in fact, some of the grandest consider themselves too grand to be in it, pictorially. Just as Germany is the land of pundits and aniline dyes, France of revolutions, England of beautiful women, and Scotland of sixpences, so is Switzerland the land of huge modern caravanserais.
You may put Snowdon on the top of Ben Nevis and climb up the height of the total by the aid of railways, funiculars, racks and pinions, diligences and sledges; and when nothing but your own feet will take you any farther, you will see, in Switzerland, a grand hotel, magically and incredibly raised aloft in the mountains; solitary—no town, no houses, nothing but this hotel hemmed in on all sides by snowy crags, and made impregnable by precipices and treacherous snow and ice. I always imagine that at the next great re-drawing of the map of Europe, when the lesser nationalities are to disappear, the Switzers will take armed refuge in their farthest grand hotels, and there defy the mandates of the Concert. For the hotel, no matter how remote it be, lacks nothing that is mentioned in the dictionary of comfort. Beyond its walls your life is not worth twelve hours’ purchase. You would not die of hunger, because you would perish of cold. At best you might hit on some peasant’s cottage in which the standards of existence had not changed for a century. But once pass within the portals of the grand hotel, and you become the spoiled darling of an intricate organisation that laughts at mountains, avalanches, and frost. You are surrounded by luxuries surpassing even the luxuries off ered by the huge modern caravanserais of London. (For example, I believe that no London caravanserai was, until quite lately, steam-heated throughout.) You have the temperature of the South, or of the North, by turning a handle, and the light of suns at midnight. You have the restaurants of Piccadilly and the tea-rooms of St. James’s Street. You eat to the music of wild artistes in red uniforms. You are amused by conjurers, bridge-drives, and cotillons. You can read the periodical literature of the world while reclining on upholstery from the most expensive houses in Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. You have a post-office, a telegraph-office, and a telephone; pianos, pianolas, and musical-boxes. You go up to bed in a lift, and come down again to lunch in one. You need only ring a bell, and a specially trained man in clothes more glittering than yours will answer you softly in any language you please, and do anything you want except carry you bodily.. . . And on the other side of a pane of glass is the white peak, the virgin glacier, twenty degrees of frost, starvation, death—and Nature as obdurate as she was ten thousand years ago. Within the grand hotel civilisation is so powerful that it governs the very colour of your necktie of an evening. Without it, cut off from it, in those mountains you would be fighting your fellows for existence according to the codes of primitive humanity. Put your nose against the dark window, after dinner, while the band is soothing your digestion with a waltz, and in the distance you may see a greenish light. It is a star. And a little below it you may see a yellow light glimmering. It is another grand hotel, by day generally invisible, another eyrie de luxe.
You go home and calmly say that you have been staying at the Grand Hotel Blank. But does it ever occur to you to wonder how it was all done? Does it ever occur to you that orchestras, lampshades, fresh eggs, fresh fish, vanilla ices, champagne, and cut flowers do not grow on snow-wreathed crags? You have not been staying in a hotel, but in a miracle of seven storeys. In the sub-basement lie the wines. In the basement women are for ever washing linen and men for ever cooking. On the ground-floor all is eating and drinking and rhythm. Then come five storeys of slumber; and above that the attics where the tips are divided.
In judging the hotel on the landscape, you must thus imaginatively realise what it is and what it means.
The eye needs to be trained before it can look seeingly at a grand hotel and disengage its beauty from the mists and distortions which prejudice has created. This age (like any other age, for the matter of that) has so little confidence in itself that it cannot believe that it has created anything beautiful. It is incapable of conceiving that an insurance office may be beautiful. It is convinced, with the late Sir William Harcourt, that New Scotland Yard is a monstrosity. It talks of the cost, not of the beauty, of the Piccadilly Hotel. No doubt the Romans, who were nevertheless a sound artistic race of the second rank, talked of the cost (in slaves) of their aqueducts, and would have been puzzled could they have seen us staring at the imperfect remains of the said aqueducts as interesting works of art. The notion that a hotel, even the most comfortable, is anything but a blot on the landscape, has probably never yet occurred to a single one of the thousands of dilettanti who wander restlessly over the face of Europe admiring architecture and scenery. Hotels as visual objects are condemned offhand, without leave to appeal, unheard, or rather unseen—I mean really unseen.
For several weeks, once, I passed daily in the vicinity of a huge modern caravanserai, which stood by itself on a mountain side in Switzerland; and my attitude towards that hotel was as abusive and violent as Ruskin’s towards railways. And then one evening, early, in the middle dusk, I came across it unexpectedly, when I was not prepared for it: it took me unawares and suddenly conquered me. I saw it in the mass, rising in an immense, irregular rectangle out of a floor of snow and a background of pines and firs. Its details had vanished. What I saw was not a series of parts, but the whole hotel, as one organism and entity. Only its eight floors were indicated by illuminated windows, and behind those windows I seemed to have a mysterious sense of its lifts continually ascending and descending. The apparition was impressive, poetic, almost overwhelming. It was of a piece with the mountains. It had simplicity, severity, grandeur. It was indubitably and movingly ground of pines and firs. Its details had vanished. What I saw was not a series of parts, but the whole hotel, as one organism and entity. Only its eight floors were indicated by illuminated windows, and behind those windows I seemed to have a mysterious sense of its lifts continually ascending and descending. The apparition was impressive, poetic, almost overwhelming. It was of a piece with the mountains. It had simplicity, severity, grandeur. It was indubitably and movingly beautiful. My eye had been opened; the training had been begun.
I expected, naturally, that the next morning I should see the hotel again in its original ugliness. But no! My view of it had been permanently altered. I had glimpsed the secret of the true manner of seeing a grand hotel. A grand hotel must be seen grandiosely—that is to say, it must be seen with a large sweep of the eye, and from a distance, and while the eye is upon its form the brain must appreciate its moral significance; for the one explains the other. You do not examine Mont Blanc or an oil painting by Turner with a microscope, and you must not look at a grand hotel as you would look at a marble fountain or a miniature.
Since the crepuscular hour above described, I have learnt to observe sympathetically the physiognomy of grand hotels, and I have discovered a new source of æsthetic pleasure. I remember on a morning in autumn, standing on a suspension bridge over the Dordogne and gazing at a feudal castle perched on a pre-feudal crag. I could not decide whether the feudal castle or the suspension bridge was the more romantic fact (for I am so constituted as to see the phenomena of the nineteenth century with the vision of the twenty-third), but the feudal castle, silhouetted against the flank of a great hill that shimmered in the sunshine, had an extraordinary beauty—moral as well as physical, possibly more moral than physical. As architecture it could not compare with the Parthenon or New Scotland Yard. But it was far from ugly, and it had an exquisite rightness in the landscape. I understood that it had been put precisely there because that was the unique place for it. And I understood that its turrets and windows and roofs and walls had been constructed precisely as they were constructed because a whole series of complicated ends had to be attained which could have been attained in no other way. Here was a simple result of an unaffected human activity which had endeavoured to achieve an honest utilitarian end, and, while succeeding, had succeeded also in producing a work of art that gave pleasure to a mind entirely unfeudal. A feudal castle on a crag as impossible to climb as to descend is, and always was, exotic, artificial, and against nature—like every effort of man!—but it does, and always did, contribute to the happiness of peoples.
Similarly I remember, on a morning in winter, standing on a wild country, road, gazing at another castle perched on a pre-feudal crag. But this castle was about fifteen times as big as the former one, and the crag had its earthy foot in a lake about a mile below. The scale of everything was terrifically larger. Still, the two castles, seen at proportionate distances, bore a strange, disconcerting, resemblance the one to the other. The architecture of the second, as of the first, would not compare with the Parthenon or New Scotland Yard. But it was not ugly. And assuredly it had an exquisite rightness in the landscape. I understood, far better than in the former instance, that it had been put precisely where it was, because no other spot would have been so suited to its purposes; its geographical relation to the sun and the lake and the mountains had been perfectly adjusted. I understood profoundly the meaning of all those rows of windows and all those balconies facing the south and southeast. I understood profoundly the intention of the great glazed box at the base of the castle. I could read the words that the wreath of smoke from behind the turreted roof was writing on the slate of the sky, and those words were “Chauffage central” From the façades I could construct the plan and arrangement of the interior of the castle. I could instantly decide which of its two hundred chambers were the costliest, and which would be the last to be occupied and the first to be left. I could feel the valves of its heart rising and falling. Here was the simple result of an unaffected human activity, which had endeavoured to achieve an honest utilitarian end, and, while succeeding, had succeeded also in giving pleasure to a mind representative of the twenty-third century. A grand hotel on a crag as impossible to climb as to descend is, and always will be, exotic, artificial, and against nature—like every effort of man! Why should a man want to leave that pancake, England, and reside for weeks at a time in dizzy altitudes in order to stare at mountains and propel himself over snow and ice by means of skis, skates, sledges, and other unnatural dodges? No one knows. But the ultimate sequel, gathered up and symbolised in the grand hotel, contributes to the happiness of peoples and gives joy to the eye that is not afflicted with moral cataract.
And I am under no compulsion to confine myself to Switzerland. I do not object to go to the other extreme and flit to the Sahara. Who that from afar off in the Algerian desert has seen the white tower of the Royal Hotel at Biskra, oasis of a hundred thousand palm-trees and twenty grand hotels, will deny either its moral or its physical beauty in that tremendously beautiful landscape?
Conceivably, the judgment against hotel architecture was fatally biassed in its origin by the horrible libels pictured on hotel notepapers.
In estimating the architecture of hotels, it must be borne in mind that they constitute the sole genuine contribution made by the modern epoch to the real history of architecture. The last previous contribution took the shape of railway stations, which, until the erection of the Lyons and the Orleans stations in Paris—about seventy years after the birth of stations—were almost without exception desolate failures. It will not be seriously argued, I suppose, that the first twenty years of grand hotels have added as much ugliness to the world’s stock of ugliness as the first twenty years of railway stations. If there exists a grand hotel as direfully squalid as King’s Cross Station (palace of an undertaking with a capital of over sixty millions sterling) I should like to see it. Hotel architecture is the outcome of a new feature in the activity of society, and this fact must be taken into account. When a new grand hotel takes a page of a daily paper to announce itself as the “last word” of hotels—what it means is, roughly, the “first word,” as distinguished from inarticulate babbling.
Of course it is based on strictly utilitarian principles—and rightly. Even when the grand hotel blossoms into rich ornamentation, the aim is not beauty, but the attracting of clients. And the practical conditions, the shackles of utility, in which the architecture of hotels has to evolve, are extremely severe and galling. In the end this will probably lead to a finer form of beauty than would otherwise have been achieved. In the first place a grand hotel, especially when it is situated “on the landscape,” can have only one authentic face, and to this face the other three must be sacrificed. Already many hotels advertise that every bedroom without exception looks south, or at any rate looks direct at whatever prospect the visitors have come to look at. This means that the hotel must have length without depth—that it must be a sort of vast wall pierced with windows. Further, the democratic quality of the social microcosm of a hotel necessitates an external monotony of detail. In general, all the rooms on each floor must resemble each other, possessing the same advantages. If one has a balcony, all must have balconies. There must be no sacrificing of the amenities of a room here and there to demands of variety or balance in the elevation. Again, the hotel must be relatively lofty—not because of lack of space, but to facilitate a complex service. The kitchens of Buckingham Palace may be a quarter of a mile from the dining-room, and people will say, “How wonderful!” But if a pot of tea had to be carried a quarter of a mile in a grand hotel, from the kitchen to a bedroom, people would say, “How absurd!” or, “How stewed!” The “layer” system of architecture is from all points of view indispensable to the grand hotel, and its scenic disadvantages must be met by the exercise of ingenuity. There are other problems confronting the hotel architecture, such as the fitting together of very large public rooms with very small private rooms, and the obligation to minimise externally a whole vital department of the hotel (the kitchens, etc.); and I conceive that these problems are perhaps not the least exasperating.
From the utilitarian standpoint the architect of hotels has unquestionably succeeded. The latest hotels are admirably planned; and a good plan cannot result in an elevation entirely bad. One might say, indeed, that a good plan implies an elevation good in, at any rate, elementals. Save that bedrooms are seldom sound-proof, and that they are nearly always too long for their breadth (the reason is obvious), not much fault can be found with the practical features of the newest hotel architecture. In essential matters hotel architecture is good. You may dissolve in ecstasy before the façade of the Chateau de Chambord; but it is certainly the whited sepulchre of sacrificed comfort, health, and practicability. There also, but from a different and a less defensible cause, and to a different and not a better end, the importance of the main front rides roughly over numerous other considerations. In skilful planning no architecture of any period equals ours; and ours is the architecture of grand hotels.
The beholder, before abruptly condemning that uniformity of feature which is the chief characteristic of the hotel on the landscape, must reflect that this is the natural outer expression of the spirit and needs of the hotel, and that it neither can be nor ought to be disguised. It is of the very essence of the building. It may be very slightly relieved by the employment of certain devices of grouping—as some architects in the United States have shown—but it must remain patent and paramount; and the ultimate beauty of more advanced styles will undoubtedly spring from it and, in a minor degree, from the other inner conditions to which I have referred. And even when the ultimate beauty has been accomplished the same thing will come to pass as has always come to pass in the gradual progress of schools of architecture. The pendulum will swing too far, and the best critics of those future days will point to the primitive erections of the early twentieth century and affirm that there has been a decadence since then, and that if the virtue of architecture is to be maintained inspiration must be sought by returning to the first models, when men did not consciously think of beauty, but produced beauty unawares!
It was ever thus.
The salvation of hotel architecture, up to this present, is that the grand hotel on the landscape, in nineteen cases out of twenty, is remuneratively occupied only during some three or four months in the year. Which means that the annual interest on capital expenditure must be earned in that brief period. Which in turn means that architects have no money to squander on ornament in an age notorious for its bad ornament. If the architect of the grand hotel were as little disturbed by the question of dividends as Francis the First was in creating his Chambord and other marvels, the consequences might have been offensive even to the sympathetic eye.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland, the hotel architect may flatter himself that he has suddenly given architecture to a country which had none. This is a highly curious phenomenon. “Next door” to the grand hotel which so surprised me in the twilight is another human habitation, fairly representative of all the non-hotel architecture on the Swiss countryside. It is quaint, and it would not hurt a fly. But surely the grand hotel is man’s more fitting answer to the challenge of the mountains?