Diary of a Pilgrimage Part 13

TUESDAY, THE 27TH--CONTINUED

We Discuss the Performance.--A Marvellous Piece of Workmans.h.i.+p.--The Adam Family.--Some Living Groups.--The Chief Performers.--A Good Man, but a Bad Judas.--Where the Histrionic Artist Grows Wild.--An Alarm!

"And what do you think of the performance _as_ a performance?" asks B.

"Oh, as to that," I reply, "I think what everyone who has seen the play must think, that it is a marvellous piece of workmans.h.i.+p.

"Experienced professional stage-managers, with all the tricks and methods of the theatre at their fingers' ends, find it impossible, out of a body of men and women born and bred in the atmosphere of the playhouse, to construct a crowd that looks like anything else except a nervous group of broken-down paupers waiting for soup.

"At Ober-Ammergau a few village priests and representative householders, who have probably never, any one of them, been inside the walls of a theatre in their lives, dealing with peasants who have walked straight upon the stage from their carving benches and milking-stools, produce swaying mult.i.tudes and clamouring mobs and dignified a.s.semblages, so natural and truthful, so realistic of the originals they represent, that you feel you want to leap upon the stage and strangle them.

"It shows that earnestness and effort can very easily overtake and pa.s.s mere training and technical skill. The object of the Ober-Ammergau 'super' is, not to get outside and have a drink, but to help forward the success of the drama.

"The groupings, both in the scenes of the play itself and in the various tableaux that precede each act, are such as I doubt if any artist could improve upon. The tableau showing the life of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden makes a beautiful picture. Father Adam, stalwart and sunbrowned, clad in sheepskins, rests for a moment from his delving, to wipe the sweat from his brow. Eve, still looking fair and happy--though I suppose she ought not to,--sits spinning and watching the children playing at 'helping father.' The chorus from each side of the stage explained to us that this represented a scene of woe, the result of sin; but it seemed to me that the Adam family were very contented, and I found myself wondering, in my common, earthly way, whether, with a little trouble to draw them closer together, and some honest work to keep them from getting into mischief, Adam and Eve were not almost better off than they would have been mooning about Paradise with nothing to do but talk.

"In the tableau representing the return of the spies from Canaan, some four or five hundred men, women and children are most effectively ma.s.sed.

The feature of the foreground is the sample bunch of grapes, borne on the shoulders of two men, which the spies have brought back with them from the promised land. The sight of this bunch of grapes, we are told, astonished the children of Israel. I can quite understand its doing so.

The picture of it used to astonish me, too, when _I_ was a child.

"The scene of Christ's entry into Jerusalem surrounded by the welcoming mult.i.tude, is a wonderful reproduction of life and movement, and so also is the scene, towards the end, showing his last journey up to Calvary.

All Jerusalem seems to have turned out to see him pa.s.s and to follow him, the many laughing, the few sad. The people fill the narrow streets to overflowing, and press round the spears of the Roman Guard.

"They throng the steps and balconies of every house, they strain to catch a sight of Christ above each other's heads. They leap up on each other's backs to gain a better vantage-ground from which to hurl their jeers at him. They jostle irreverently against their priests. Each individual man, woman, and child on the stage acts, and acts in perfect harmony with all the rest.

"Of the chief members of the cast--Maier, the gentle and yet kingly Christ; Burgomaster Lang, the stern, revengeful High Priest; his daughter Rosa, the sweet-faced, sweet-voiced Virgin; Rendl, the dignified, statesman-like Pilate; Peter Rendl, the beloved John, with the purest and most beautiful face I have ever seen upon a man; old Peter Hett, the rugged, loving, weak friend, Peter; Rutz, the leader of the chorus (no sinecure, his post); and Amalie Deschler, the Magdalen--it would be difficult to speak in terms of too high praise. Themselves mere peasants--There are those two women again, spying round our door; I am sure of it!" I exclaim, breaking off, and listening to the sounds that come from the next room. "I wish they would go downstairs; I am beginning to get quite nervous."

"Oh, I don't think we need worry," answers B. "They are quite old ladies, both of them. I met them on the stairs yesterday. I am sure they look harmless enough."

"Well, I don't know," I reply. "We are all by ourselves, you know.

Nearly everyone in the village is at the theatre, I wish we had got a dog."

B. rea.s.sures me, however, and I continue:

"Themselves mere peasants," I repeat, "they represent some of the greatest figures in the world's history with as simple a dignity and as grand a bearing as could ever have been expected from the originals themselves. There must be a natural inborn n.o.bility in the character of these highlanders. They could never a.s.sume or act that manner _au grand seigneur_ with which they imbue their parts.

"The only character poorly played was that of Judas. The part of Judas is really _the_ part of the piece, so far as acting is concerned; but the exemplary householder who essayed it seemed to have no knowledge or experience of the ways and methods of bad men. There seemed to be no side of his character sufficiently in sympathy with wickedness to enable him to understand and portray it. His amateur attempts at scoundrelism quite irritated me. It sounds conceited to say so, but I am convinced I could have given a much more truthful picture of the blackguard myself.

"'Dear, dear me,' I kept on saying under my breath, 'he is doing it all wrong. A downright unmitigated villain would never go on like that; he would do so and so, he would look like this, and speak like that, and act like the other. I know he would. My instinct tells me so.'

"This actor was evidently not acquainted with even the rudiments of knavery. I wanted to get up and instruct him in them. I felt that there were little subtleties of rascaldom, little touches of criminality, that I could have put that man up to, which would have transformed his Judas from woodenness into breathing life. As it was, with no one in the village apparently who was worth his salt as a felon to teach him, his performance was unconvincing, and Judas became a figure to laugh rather than to shudder at.

"With that exception, the whole company, from Maier down to the donkey, seemed to be fitted to their places like notes into a master's melody.

It would appear as though, on the banks of the Ammer, the histrionic artist grew wild."

"They are real actors, all of them," murmurs B. enthusiastically, "the whole village full; and they all live happily together in one small valley, and never try to kill each other. It is marvellous!"

At this point, we hear a sharp knock at the door that separates the before-mentioned ladies' room from our own. We both start and turn pale, and then look at each other. B. is the first to recover his presence of mind. Eliminating, by a strong effort, all traces of nervousness from his voice, he calls out in a tone of wonderful coolness:

"Yes, what is it?"

"Are you in bed?" comes a voice from the other side of the door.

"Yes," answers B. "Why?"

"Oh! Sorry to disturb you, but we shall be so glad when you get up. We can't go downstairs without coming through your room. This is the only door. We have been waiting here for two hours, and our train goes at three."

Great Scott! So that is why the poor old souls have been hanging round the door, terrifying us out of our lives.

"All right, we'll be out in five minutes. So sorry. Why didn't you call out before?"

FRIDAY, 30TH, OR SAt.u.r.dAY, I AM NOT SURE WHICH

Troubles of a Tourist Agent.--His Views on Tourists.--The English Woman Abroad.--And at Home.--The Ugliest Cathedral in Europe.--Old Masters and New.--Victual-and-Drink-Scapes.--The German Band.--A "Beer Garden."--Not the Women to Turn a Man's Head.--Difficulty of Dining to Music.--Why one should Keep one's Mug Shut.

I think myself it is Sat.u.r.day. B. says it is only Friday; but I am positive I have had three cold baths since we left Ober-Ammergau, which we did on Wednesday morning. If it is only Friday, then I have had two morning baths in one day. Anyhow, we shall know to-morrow by the shops being open or shut.

We travelled from Oberau with a tourist agent, and he told us all his troubles. It seems that a tourist agent is an ordinary human man, and has feelings just like we have. This had never occurred to me before. I told him so.

"No," he replied, "it never does occur to you tourists. You treat us as if we were mere Providence, or even the Government itself. If all goes well, you say, what is the good of us, contemptuously; and if things go wrong, you say, what is the good of us, indignantly. I work sixteen hours a day to fix things comfortably for you, and you cannot even look satisfied; while if a train is late, or a hotel proprietor overcharges, you come and bully _me_ about it. If I see after you, you mutter that I am officious; and if I leave you alone, you grumble that I am neglectful.

You swoop down in your hundreds upon a tiny village like Ober-Ammergau without ever letting us know even that you are coming, and then threaten to write to the _Times_ because there is not a suite of apartments and a hot dinner waiting ready for each of you.

"You want the best lodgings in the place, and then, when at a tremendous cost of trouble, they have been obtained for you, you object to pay the price asked for them. You all try and palm yourselves off for dukes and d.u.c.h.esses, travelling in disguise. You have none of you ever heard of a second-cla.s.s railway carriage--didn't know that such things were made.

You want a first-cla.s.s Pullman car reserved for each two of you. Some of you have seen an omnibus in the distance, and have wondered what it was used for. To suggest that you should travel in such a plebeian conveyance, is to give you a shock that takes you two days to recover from. You expect a private carriage, with a footman in livery, to take you through the mountains. You, all of you, must have the most expensive places in the theatre. The eight-mark and six-mark places are every bit as good as the ten-mark seats, of which there are only a very limited number; but you are grossly insulted if it is hinted that you should sit in anything but the dearest chairs. If the villagers would only be sensible and charge you ten marks for the eight-mark places you would be happy; but they won't."

I must candidly confess that the English-speaking people one meets with on the Continent are, taken as a whole, a most disagreeable contingent.

One hardly ever hears the English language spoken on the Continent, without hearing grumbling and sneering.

The women are the most objectionable. Foreigners undoubtedly see the very poorest specimens of the female kind we Anglo-Saxons have to show.

The average female English or American tourist is rude and self-a.s.sertive, while, at the same time, ridiculously helpless and awkward. She is intensely selfish, and utterly inconsiderate of others; everlastingly complaining, and, in herself, drearily uninteresting. We travelled down in the omnibus from Ober-Ammergau with three perfect specimens of the species, accompanied by the usual miserable-looking man, who has had all the life talked out of him. They were grumbling the whole of the way at having been put to ride in an omnibus. It seemed that they had never been so insulted in their lives before, and they took care to let everybody in the vehicle know that they had paid for first-cla.s.s, and that at home they kept their own carriage. They were also very indignant because the people at the house where they had lodged had offered to shake hands with them at parting. They did not come to Ober-Ammergau to be treated on terms of familiarity by German peasants, they said.

There are many women in the world who are in every way much better than angels. They are gentle and gracious, and generous and kind, and unselfish and good, in spite of temptations and trials to which mere angels are never subjected. And there are also many women in the world who, under the clothes, and not unfrequently under the t.i.tle of a lady, wear the heart of an underbred sn.o.b. Having no natural dignity, they think to supply its place with arrogance. They mistake noisy bounce for self-possession, and supercilious rudeness as the sign of superiority.

They encourage themselves in sleepy stupidity under the impression that they are acquiring aristocratic "repose." They would appear to have studied "att.i.tude" from the pages of the _London Journal_, coquetry from barmaids--the commoner cla.s.s of barmaids, I mean--wit from three-act farces, and manners from the servants'-hall. To be gus.h.i.+ngly fawning to those above them, and vulgarly insolent to everyone they consider below them, is their idea of the way to hold and improve their position, whatever it may be, in society; and to be brutally indifferent to the rights and feelings of everybody else in the world is, in their opinion, the hall-mark of gentle birth.

They are the women you see at private views, pus.h.i.+ng themselves in front of everybody else, standing before the picture so that no one can get near it, and shouting out their silly opinions, which they evidently imagine to be brilliantly satirical remarks, in strident tones: the women who, in the stalls of the theatre, talk loudly all through the performance; and who, having arrived in the middle of the first act, and made as much disturbance as they know how, before settling down in their seats, ostentatiously get up and walk out before the piece is finished: the women who, at dinner-party and "At Home"--that cheapest and most deadly uninteresting of all deadly uninteresting social functions--(You know the receipt for a fas.h.i.+onable "At Home," don't you? Take five hundred people, two-thirds of whom do not know each other, and the other third of whom cordially dislike each other, pack them, on a hot day, into a room capable of accommodating forty, leave them there to bore one another to death for a couple of hours with drawing-room philosophy and second-hand scandal; then give them a cup of weak tea, and a piece of crumbly cake, without any plate to eat it on; or, if it is an evening affair, a gla.s.s of champagne of the you-don't-forget-you've-had-it-for-a-week brand, and a ham-sandwich, and put them out into the street again)--can do nothing but make spiteful remarks about everybody whose name and address they happen to know: the women who, in the penny 'bus (for, in her own country, the lady of the new school is wonderfully economical and business-like), spreads herself out over the seat, and, looking indignant when a tired little milliner gets in, would leave the poor girl standing with her bundle for an hour, rather than make room for her--the women who write to the papers to complain that chivalry is dead!

B., who has been looking over my shoulder while I have been writing the foregoing, after the manner of a _Family Herald_ story-teller's wife in the last chapter (fancy a man having to write the story of his early life and adventures with his wife looking over his shoulder all the time! no wonder the tales lack incident), says that I have been living too much on sauerkraut and white wine; but I reply that if anything has tended to interfere for a s.p.a.ce with the deep-seated love and admiration that, as a rule, I entertain for all man and woman-kind, it is his churches and picture-galleries.

We have seen enough churches and pictures since our return to Munich to last me for a very long while. I shall not go to church, when I get home again, more than twice a Sunday, for months to come.

The inhabitants of Munich boast that their Cathedral is the ugliest in Europe; and, judging from appearances, I am inclined to think that the claim must be admitted. Anyhow, if there be an uglier one, I hope I am feeling well and strong when I first catch sight of it.