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In describing their "monuments," French guide-books confine themselves to facts, and the adjectives "fine" and "remarkable"; they are almost always strictly impersonal, and the traveller who uses them as a cicerone, has a sense of unexpected discovery, a peculiar elation, in finding a monument of rare beauty; but he is never subjected to that disappointed irritation which comes when one stands before the "monument" and feels that one's expectations have been unduly stimulated.
This south porch, with its seven hundred and eighty-three statues and statuettes, spoken of by the guide-books as the most attractive of all, was to artists, on the contrary, the least absorbing; for, with the exception of the noble effigies of Saint Theodore and Saint George, the glorification of the others who dwell there was on the whole, from the artistic point of view, very inferior in interest to the sculpture on the twelfth-century west front, or even to that of the north porch that complete embodiment of the Two Testaments where the sculpture, if more barbarous, was less placid and cold.
Barnum bought a large number of pistols, bullets, brass French eagles, buttons, etc., for the Museum, and the others were equally liberal in their purchases. They bought also maps, guide-books and pictures, until Mr. Stratton expressed his belief that the "darned old battle of Waterloo" had cost more since it was fought than it ever did before.
If this be incorrect, how could such swarms of artistic folk paint and actually lodge in Staithes? The steep road leading past the station drops down into the village, giving a glimpse of the beck crossed by its ramshackle wooden foot-bridge the view one has been prepared for by guide-books and picture postcards. Lower down you enter the village street.
From being the most brilliant capital of the Western world in the time of the Caliphs it is now allowed by all the guides and guide-books and most of the travelers, to be one of the dullest of provincial towns.
And alongside the terrace parapet, on the very crown of the Trastevere, there are always rows of tourists, slim Englishmen and square-built Germans, agape with traditional admiration, or consulting their guide-books in order to identify the monuments.
We had only had sandwiches, you see, that we brought with us, and some funny little drinks at a café down there," and she pointed vaguely towards the lake, "because we found we had only one franc fifty between us all. But we were so happy, and Clementine knows a great deal, and told us many things which were quite different from what was in the guide-books but it seems so long, long ago.
We have promised friends at home that we will inform them of our safe arrival immediately. How can we do this? By mail? Is there not a quicker way? How many know of the cable? How many have ever sent a cablegram? Can we cable from Puerto Rico? How much will it cost? Our guide-books give us all this information. We must have guide-books, phrase books, toilet articles and writing materials.
Were not the groves God's first temples? Guide-books have not yet invaded the far East, or we should be told how many square inches of bronze is contained in the Dai-Butsu figure, and how many ounces it weighs; statistics concerning which we felt a most sublime indifference, while we gazed upon its combined and wonderful effect.
It was like a scene from an opera in real life. It always puzzled me to think how the water for these fountains can have been provided on that dead-flat plain in pre-steam days. There must have been pumps of some sort. Before 1914, tens of thousands of tourists visited Nuremberg annually, but the guide-books are almost silent about Brunswick, which is fully as picturesque.
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