The Tourist

The Tourist by Agnes Repplier (1909)

"The Tourist" is an essay by Agnes Repplier that examines with sharp wit and literary erudition the phenomenon of modern travel and the peculiar animosity that tourists invariably feel toward one another. Repplier opens by observing that while human beings generally tolerate their fellow creatures at home, abroad they regard all other travellers as personal affronts and unpardonable intruders. The irony she develops immediately is that every tourist who despises the presence of other tourists is himself an equally unwelcome presence in someone else's eyes. She cites Henry James, who honestly acknowledges his own inherent undesirability as a traveller, admitting that wherever tourists carry their labelled luggage and poor French, they rub away the bloom of local color they came to find. She surveys the national varieties of tourist with comic precision. The German traveller she identifies as the most formidable, possessing a military genius for securing the best windows, the sunniest tables, and the most advantageous seats, executing his plans with complete indifference to the comfort of others. She supports this characterization by quoting Froissart, noting that what the medieval chronicler wrote of Germans centuries ago remains equally accurate. The English tourist is affable to no nation but his own. Americans are described, by other Americans, as noisy, self-assertive, and contemptuous. Each nationality detests the others while remaining blind to its own offenses. Repplier then turns to a broader historical view of travel itself. She contrasts the modern tourist with earlier travellers such as James Howell, who wandered Europe for years with genuine curiosity and delight, living simply on bread and grapes and finding in travel a profitable school and running academy. Roger Ascham fled Italy after nine days, scandalized by its corruptions, while Hannah More's sister wrote in alarm about curates traveling to revolutionary France. Byron bore discomfort with endurance and gaiety. These figures represent an older relationship to travel, in which hardship was accepted and enthusiasm was genuine. The discovery that the Alps were beautiful rather than merely hideous obstacles, she argues, was the pivotal moment that transformed travel from an arduous education into a popular spectacle. Once poets had sung the praises of the mountains and unpoetic men had been persuaded to admire them, the advance guard of the modern tourist army began to gather. James is quoted prophesying, with gloomy accuracy, that Switzerland would become a show country with hotels atop every peak. A central concern of the essay is how tourism corrupts the very places it seeks to enjoy. Venice becomes a grand bazaar, Vaucluse is packed with souvenir stalls, and the Falls of the Rhine are lit by electricity for theatrical effect. Chillon castle sells comic wooden bears to visitors too free of sentiment to feel the weight of its history. Repplier describes watching a young American woman carry away from Chillon a humorous tableau of bears as a souvenir, and uses this vignette to mourn the disappearance of youthful capacity for illusion and enthusiasm. The modern tourist, she observes, requires enormous quantities of food and comfort to sustain whatever enthusiasm he possesses. Unlike Byron or Howell, he concentrates his attention on the slowness of trains, the shortness of beds, the rudeness of officials, and above all on the debatable quality of tea and the certainty that he is being overcharged. Table d'hôte conversation revolves around costs and germs. Shelley's complaint about the misery of constant financial disbursement is echoed in every hotel dining room. Repplier concludes not with a call for tourists to love one another, which she considers contrary to the laws of nature, but with a more modest proposal. Quoting Lord Chesterfield on good breeding as the combination of sense, good nature, and self-denial for the sake of others, she suggests that meditating soberly on the impossibility of other tourists loving us might lead to a common platform of tolerance and mutual recognition. It is a characteristically dry and reasonable conclusion, offering not sentiment but the humility of self-awareness as the only available remedy for the universal affliction of the tourist's contempt for his own kind.

By Agnes Repplier · First published 1909 · Genre: Essay, Travel Writing, Satire · 2,853 words

First lines

See Thrale's grey widow with a satchel roam, / And bring in pomp laborious nothings home. / _The Baviad._

Genres

Tags

travel · tourism · essays · literary nonfiction · social commentary · cultural observation · European travel · American travelers · humor · satire · reflections · civilization

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