In my youth, it was still an event to cross.I remember my first voyage on the old side-wheeled SCOTIA, and Captain Judkins in a wheeled chair, and a perpetual bad temper, being pushed about the deck; and our delight, when the inevitable female asking him (three days out) how far we were from land, got the answer "about a mile!""Indeed! How interesting! In which direction?""In that direction, madam," shouted the captain, pointing downward as he turned his back to her.
If I remember, we were then thirteen days getting to Liverpool, and made the acquaintance on board of the people with whom we travelled during most of that winter.Imagine anyone now making an acquaintance on board a steamer! In those simple days people depended on the friendships made at summer hotels or boarding-houses for their visiting list.At present, when a girl comes out, her mother presents her to everybody she will be likely to know if she were to live a century.In the seventies, ladies cheerfully shared their state-rooms with women they did not know, and often became friends in consequence; but now, unless a certain deck-suite can be secured, with bath and sitting-room, on one or two particular "steamers," the great lady is in despair.Yet our mothers were quite as refined as the present generation, only they took life simply, as they found it.
Children are now taken abroad so young, that before they have reached an age to appreciate what they see, Europe has become to them a twice-told tale.So true is this, that a receipt for making children good Americans is to bring them up abroad.Once they get back here it is hard to entice them away again.
With each improvement in the speed of our steamers, something of the glamour of Europe vanishes.The crowds that yearly rush across see and appreciate less in a lifetime than our parents did in their one tour abroad.A good lady of my acquaintance was complaining recently how much Paris bored her.
"What can you do to pass the time?" she asked.I innocently answered that I knew nothing so entrancing as long mornings passed at the Louvre.
"Oh, yes, I do that too," she replied, "but I like the 'Bon Marche'
best!"
A trip abroad has become a purely social function to a large number of wealthy Americans, including "presentation" in London and a winter in Rome or Cairo.And just as a "smart" Englishman is sure to tell you that he has never visited the "Tower," it has become good form to ignore the sight-seeing side of Europe; hundreds of New Yorkers never seeing anything of Paris beyond the Rue de la Paix and the Bois.They would as soon think of going to Cluny or St.Denis as of visiting the museum in our park!
Such people go to Fontainebleau because they are buying furniture, and they wish to see the best models.They go to Versailles on the coach and "do" the Palace during the half-hour before luncheon.
Beyond that, enthusiasm rarely carries them.As soon as they have settled themselves at the Bristol or the Rhin begins the endless treadmill of leaving cards on all the people just seen at home, and whom they will meet again in a couple of months at Newport or Bar Harbor.This duty and the all-entrancing occupation of getting clothes fills up every spare hour.Indeed, clothes seem to pervade the air of Paris in May, the conversation rarely deviating from them.If you meet a lady you know looking ill, and ask the cause, it generally turns out to be "four hours a day standing to be fitted." Incredible as it may seem, I have been told of one plain maiden lady, who makes a trip across, spring and autumn, with the sole object of getting her two yearly outfits.
Remembering the hundreds of cultivated people whose dream in life (often unrealized from lack of means) has been to go abroad and visit the scenes their reading has made familiar, and knowing what such a trip would mean to them, and how it would be looked back upon during the rest of an obscure life, I felt it almost a duty to "suppress" a wealthy female (doubtless an American cousin of Lady Midas) when she informed me, the other day, that decidedly she would not go abroad this spring.
"It is not necessary.Worth has my measures!"
