THE TOURIST AND THE TUTOR
counts of tours in France and Italy, but, although a few give evidence of competence for the task, the majority do little more than repeat the well-worn stock of conventional information. Walpole is a typical and very favorable example. He was in every fiber a man of the world and exceptionally clever; he could not fail to be entertaining if he tried; but many of his comments on things abroad are strikingly superficial. Two of his letters written in 1740, the first in January and the last in October, well illustrate how rapidly he lost his keen interest in the very sights he had gone so far to see. "I see several things that please me calmly, but, a force d'en avoir vu, I have left off screaming Lord! this! and Lord! that! To speak sincerely, Calais surprised me more than any thing I have seen since. I recollect the joy I used to propose if I could but see the Great Duke's gallery; I walk into it now with as little emotion as I should into St. Paul's."[1] "When I first came abroad every thing struck me, and I wrote its history; but now I am grown so used to be surprised, that I don't perceive any flutter in myself when I meet with any novelties; curiosity and astonishment wear off, and the next thing is, to fancy that other people know as much of places as one's self; or, at least, one does not remember that they do not."[2] "I have contracted so great an aversion to inns and post-chaises, and have so absolutely lost all curiosity, that, except the towns in the straight road to Great Britain, I shall scarce see a jot more of a foreign land."[3]
As might be expected, then, the comments in most eighteenth-century books of travel are singularly common-place. When we exclude a few well-known works, those that remain are full of remarks trivial in the extreme.[4] Were it not laughable, the flippant way in which some travelers dispose of cities like Padua, Verona, Vicenza, Siena, and many others, as containing little or nothing worth seeing, would stir our wrath. At Siena even Dupaty found nothing remarkable except the group of the three graces in the cathedral.[5]
Another typical instance is Pistoia. Few places of it
109
- ↑ Letters, i, 35. (Florence, January 24, 1740, N.S.)
- ↑ Letters, i, 42.
- ↑ Letters, i, 59. (Walpole to West, Florence, October 2, 1740, N.S.)
- ↑ Hazlitt hits off the wild generalizations common in his day: "Because the French are animated and full of gesticulation, they are a theatrical people; i£ they smile and are polite, they are like monkeys — an idea an Englishman never has out of his head, and it is well if he can keep it between his lips." Journey, Works, ix, 139. "If we meet with anything odd or absurd in France, it is immediately set down as French and characteristic of the country, though we meet with a thousand odd and disagreeable things every day in England (that we never met before) without taking any notice of them." Ibid., ix, 141.
- ↑ Lettres sur l'Italie, p. 147.
