on swiss hotels
in this the antique, and well-noted face
of plain old form is much disfigured.—shakespeare.
for the word or two i have to say about the swiss monster hotels, i can make the one mentioned at the close of the twelfth chapter my point de départ with safety; for i never entered it, and only know from what i saw outside, that it is fire-new, and as monstrous as new. as you look at one of these modern caravansaries, you are amused at thinking how precisely everything in it is the facsimile of all that you have seen in a score of others. the swiss believe, and act, too, on the belief, that they have reduced hotel-keeping to an exact science; among them, therefore, in this matter, there cannot be any longer two opinions about the form of, or the way of doing, any one thing whatsoever. everywhere the building itself appears arranged, externally and internally, on the same plan. of an hotel, as of a five-pound note, there can be but one idea. in either case 195any deviation from the archetypal paradigm would disqualify the thing produced from being regarded as that which it professes to be.
as to life within the hotel, everywhere you have the same breakfast: coffee, two kinds of bread (the more solid kind almost always sticky and sour, the flour having been made from imperfectly ripened and imperfectly harvested grain), butter that is somewhat insipid, and honey that will inevitably soil your fingers, and perhaps trouble your interior. exact science has demonstrated, beyond controversy, that precisely this breakfast, for every day in the three hundred and sixty-five, hits with mathematical rigour the point at which the wants and rights of the traveller—though, indeed, he has no business himself to think about his having any rights or wants at all—meet the scientifically regarded economies of the innkeeper. this unvarying breakfast is everywhere served to you on the same unvarying china—always white, solid, and heavy. exact science informs us that if china of this kind be used there is a smaller amount of breakage, and that replacements are easy: and from exact science there is no appeal. that you who have to use it would prefer a little variety now and then has nothing at all to do with the matter.
and then as to your dinner: it also is always the same. as the dinner-bell reminds you of this, you find that you are agitated by an involuntary shudder. 196always, and everywhere, the same viands cooked in the same fashion; and served, too, again on the same white, solid, heavy china. there is the inevitable filet de bœuf: more inevitable than the conscience of an evil deed, for that does not rise up before you throughout your whole life every day. one feels that one could almost give a year’s income never to see or hear mention made of this filet de bœuf any more. then come mutton and chicken, the latter always with salad. sometimes, however, one of the two latter is replaced with veal. but the beef, the mutton, the veal, and the chicken, before they were roasted or ragouted, had been passed through the already-mentioned bath, in order to make the potage with which you commenced your repast. the mind, encouraged by the wilfulness of the palate, refuses to form a conception of a sirloin of beef, or of a leg of mutton, that had been boiled before it was roasted; or of a beef-steak, or of a mutton-chop, that had passed through the digester on its way to the gridiron; or of a veal-cutlet that has had its natural insipidity aggravated by this exhaustive treatment. the regale concludes with, every day, the same dried figs and the same raisins; or if it be late enough in the season, with the same plums and the same pears, so called, eked out by the same little cakes and the same little biscuits. swiss hotel science repudiates entirely the ideas of roasted joints, and almost entirely of puddings. as to the wine, it has 197not, as might be expected, any exceptional merit; and as to the varieties indicated on the carte, they do not always correspond with the varieties of nature: for science has demonstrated that a variety of labels constitute a variety of kinds.
you are pursued by this scientific sameness to your bed-room; and are soon haunted in your dreams with the idea that you are carrying about with you everywhere your bed and your bed-room furniture. as to the looking-glass, it is never on a dressing-table, but always nailed to the wall; for the science of swiss hotel-keeping has discovered that the frame for a glass of this kind is cheaper than what would be required for one placed on a table; and that, besides, there is a far less chance of the glass itself being broken when it has become a fixture on the wall. this, however, obliges you to encumber yourself with a glass of your own; for a man cannot shave by a glass that has not its back to the light. not even in the lock of your bed-room door is there a shadow of variation. it is always of iron, for iron is cheaper than brass; and always of the same form and size: they must all have been made at the same factory. and this unfailing black iron lock, always of the same size, is always attached to the surface of the door instead of being let into it. your candlestick, too, is always the same—you fall back again on the theory of a single factory—a mere pedestal of brass with a glass cup at the 198top—i have, however, occasionally seen them without this glass cup—to receive the overflowings of the compo, which is often euphoniously described in the bill as bougie. but possibly where the glass is now wanting, it may, as exact science does not recognise disturbing causes, have originally existed. the candle again, in the unvarying candlestick, is always everywhere the same, with a wick that is but little more than a thread. the rationale of this tenuity of the wick is that the compo may not be consumed too rapidly for science. but then the least gust of air, or a careless quick movement of the candle, extinguishes it. you then have to relight it with a sulphurous lucifer, always everywhere sulphurous.
as to the traveller himself, he soon comes to find that he is not regarded as a thinking, feeling, and acting, or in any way independent entity. he is not supposed to have any likes or dislikes; any wants or ways of his own: he is merely one of the constituent molecules of an aggregated mass of inert, insentient matter, which must be manipulated in a certain fixed manner, which the discoveries of hotel science have shown to be necessary in order to produce a certain determinate result in the form of a certain amount of profit. or he may compare himself to one of the milch-cows belonging to the hotel, which must have that amount of attention bestowed upon it, that amount of daily provender, and of that kind, and at 199night that berth and bedding, which at the least cost will produce the greatest amount of milk. finding yourself treated in this way, merely as a unit in a large herd, you become aware that you are losing your sense of personal identity. how can you go on believing that you are what nature made you, or that you have any special nature at all of your own, when, from being constantly herded with a hundred other people, all fed during the day, and provided for during the night, in precisely the same fashion, everything is conspiring to impress upon you the self-obliterating conviction that you are exactly what all the rest are: nothing more, nothing less, and nothing different?
of your associate molecules, your fellow milch-cows, in these monster hotels, the majority speak your own language. of these perhaps you will regard with most sympathy and favour the mountain-climbers, although you may yourself have ceased, as will probably be the case, if you are on the shady side of fifty, to look upon athletics, pure and simple, as the object of life. still these vigorous specimens of youthful british humanity have set themselves something to do, and are doing it; and it is something that requires, at all events, enterprise and endurance. not many of them, however, are to be found in the most aggravated form of the monster hotel, for that belongs to the towns rather than to the mountains. another class is composed of those who do not climb, 200but are merely enthusiasts on the subject of mountain scenery. of these the most gushing are of the fairer sex. with them, too, you can go as far as they go; though not quite to the extent of applying the epithet of ‘lovely’ to everything indiscriminately, even to rugged peaks, and rivers of ice; nor of being consumed by their uncontrollable desire to know, for a few moments, the name of every peak and point that happens to be in sight, and to arrive at this evanescent knowledge by the process of questioning the bystanders. you meet also multitudes of lawyers, clergymen, schoolmasters, and literary men. these, speaking generally, are the élite of the corresponding classes you have at home. another large item is made up of men engaged in trade and business, from london and the manufacturing districts. it is a very good thing for them that they are able to leave their counters, and counting-houses, and factories; and to exchange, for a time, the murky atmosphere, and the moil and toil of the routine of their ordinary lives for the mountains. this makes you glad to see them also.
everybody knows that our transatlantic cousins will be met with everywhere in shoals, and nowhere are these shoals greater than in switzerland. some of those you fall in with will be new york shoddy-lords, some will be pennsylvanians who have struck oil, some will be successful speculators in real estate in 201the neighbourhood of rising western cities. but if you have known the american in his own country, and in his own home, and are not dissatisfied with a man, merely because he cannot pronounce the shibboleths of eton and oxford, you will be glad to make the acquaintance of a large proportion of the americans you encounter. they are clear-headed and hard-headed; men who hold their own ground, and are, at the same time, sociable and friendly.
the germans come next in number to those who speak our own tongue, they are quiet, honest, and earnest; and have evidently come to switzerland for the purpose—there is no doubt about that—of constructing in their minds a correct idea of the nucleus, and central watershed, of europe. but, as few of us speak german, there is little intercourse between them and english travellers.
among the inmates of all these large hotels, because it is in them that such wanderers find most nearly what suits them, there remains a conspicuous residuum, that of those who have nothing in the world to do, and who, as thoroughly as if they were peak-and-pass-men, do it. they belong to all countries: russia, france, england, and america supply each its respective quota. they are, for the most part, carefully, sometimes rather loudly got up: they have not much else to attend to. and from this, perhaps also from a little assumption in their manner, they 202contrive somewhat to obtrude themselves on the general notice of the world in the hotel. they belong to the class of failures, the coups manqués, of civilised humanity. they are the waifs and strays of modern society, with money enough, and often plenty of it, to live out of their own country. sometimes with not enough left to live at home as they once did. they have no sense of home, nor love of country; but a sufficient sense of the duty men owe to themselves. you sometimes hear them intimating, as a reason for their voluntary expatriation, that they do not quite like their own country, and countrymen—perhaps no great proof of the demerit of either, or of their own judgment. the largest portion of the self-depreciators of this kind belong to the english quota of the class.
the disciples of so exalted and serene a philosophy, having got beyond home, and country, and all inconveniently large ideas of duty, can have no prejudices. pet ideas, however, like the rest of the world, they have; and the one they most pet is expressed in our time-honoured, home-manufactured phrase, though amongst ourselves its use is prompted by the anxieties and fears of deep love, that ‘the sun of england has set.’ this is quite intelligible in a certain class of frenchmen and russians. the wish, with them, was father to the thought. they, as might have been expected, have become dazzled 203at the excess of light which radiates from our sun, and can now only look at it through the green lens. this old familiar phrase, coming from such oracular lips (but the announcement as it comes from them is history, not prophecy, for it is the announcement of a fait accompli), is accepted, with thorough satisfaction, by those of our countrymen who are disposed to regard its promulgators with submissive admiration, and are vainly endeavouring to form themselves on their model. they are only too thankful for any crumbs which fall from such tables. but be this as it may, the business of these wanderers is to go up and down, and to and fro, upon the earth. in this respect their occupation resembles the description the reprobate sprite gave of his. and he, too, had lost the sense, if we may so put it, of home, and country, and duty; and must also have had in his eyes some tint of green. but they go only where locomotion and life are easy; and where they may expect to find the society of congenial sprites, who will not ruffle them, will not be blind to their merits, and will take them, occasionally, at the price they set upon themselves.
it may, then, be placed on the credit side of the account of these scientifically managed hotels, though, at the time, one, being averse to entering them, and not averse to leaving them, is not disposed to credit them with much good, that they supply some materials 204for ‘the proper study of mankind.’ it was not, however, for the purpose of obtaining facilities for the prosecution of this study that you came to switzerland: perhaps, rather it was that you might lose sight of it for a time.
