Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/156

 tower built by the Saracens on the enclosure of the arena at Arles, had to make an effort to understand the cause of that laugh, then continued:

“Well, of course, I mean if you should happen to be in that neighbourhood. I never met anything like it elsewhere. I’d become used to disappointment on seeing the things that were cracked up so much. For instance, you go and see the Falls that people speak and write about so much. Personally, I have felt little or nothing at Tondano, Maros, Schaffhausen, and Niagara. One has to consult one’s guide-book to have the necessary measure of admiration handy about ‘so many feet of water-fall’ and ‘so many cubic feet of water a minute,’ and if the figures are high, one has to say: ‘Heavens!’ I never want to see any more falls, at least not if I have to go out of my way for them. Those things say nothing to me! Buildings speak to me somewhat louder, especially when they are pages of history. But in this there speaks a feeling of a very different nature! One calls up the past, and the shades of days gone by pass in review. Among them there are most horrible ones, and so, however interesting this may be at times, the emotions evoked do not always afford satisfaction to one’s sense of beauty never, at any rate, unmixed! And the appeal of history there may be much beauty in some buildings, but it is usually spoilt by guides—whether of paper or of flesh and bone, it’s all the same!—guides who steal your impression by their monotonous: ‘This chapel was erected by the Bishop of Munster in 1223  the columns are 63 feet high and rest upon’  I don’t know what and I don’t care either. That babbling is a bore, for one feels that one has to get up exactly three and sixty feet of admiration, in order not to pass in the eyes of some people for a Vandal or a Commercial Traveller and those  a race!”

“The Vandals?”

“No, the others. Well, one may say: keep your guide in your pocket if he is a printed one, and leave him outside or tell him to