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Panoramas, Etc.
Harper’s Weekly (June 12, 1909) : 27
hathitrust : link
archive.org : link
 

      Staying quietly in one’s room, with a busy back turned to the windows, panoramas seem things easily avoided. It is possible, or so the housed person happily feels, to skirt panoramas, to turn one’s head away, to do any number of rescuing things if panoramas happen to affect one unpleasantly. But once out in the open, they assault you on every side. Considering their size, it is amazing how many there are, almost all countries giving them room without visible inconvenience. With a tightening of the throat islands are suddenly beloved, islands so small that “views” are out of the question. Islands just able to hold detail and nothing a whit bigger. The weakness for panoramas must be very general, or if we of this generation have outgrown the failing, then our grandfathers liked to a discouraging degree a comprehensive view. The knowledge of their tastes has spread into the still corners of the world and buffets and saddens us when we least expect it. A child with a hot, crushed flower in its hand and a head heavy with shyness will before your eyes become electrified with an idea. It runs up the road, stops, beckons infinitesimally, and you follow aflutter with guesses, willing to go anywhere as long as this perfect bit trots before you. It turns a corner, and another, plods up a hill, making sure of you by throwing enthralling glances over its shoulder. The tad obviously has a treasure, perhaps never before shown to a strange eye. You alone out of all the world have been chosen to inspect and share this baby’s secret. Beyond a doubt, it is a rabbit, a tiny white one. You will be allowed to give it a leaf, and in return it will wrinkle its nose for you. Your steps quicken and one scarcely has the heart to write it — that child issues on to a terrace, climbs upon the iron bench placed with a sickening knowledge of the ways of mankind, and waits for the “Oh!” with which you should properly greet the panorama lying before you.
      It is a moment for all the fortitude one can summon. You have been tricked, fooled, slapped in your most sensitive dislike; not so much by this smugly smiling little wretch as by the countless people who have by their liking called panoramas into being. You look at the hated extensiveness, because what else is one to do with one’s eyes? A panorama is so large a thing that it is a question of that or one’s boots. And once having succumbed to looking, unhappiness suffuses you and the exhausting process has begun. Your eyes are sluice-gates, and through them every last scrap of you scurries forth to be lost in that undisciplined panorama. Every distressing little hill is climbed, every dip and rise of the land covered. Your eyes are sluice-gates, and through them every last scrap of you scurries forth to be lost in that undisciplined panorama. Every distressing little hill is climbed, every dip and rise of the land covered. Up and down the banks of the river you race, unable to find a ford, and you at last pull yourself over by a bridge that possibly exists behind a clump of trees. They look as though they hid something. You fall over some precipices, sustaining fearful injuries, and scale others, holding on by nothing but your tortured imagination. If a city is included you look out of all the windows and straighten all the streets. Finally, when there seems little hope that you will ever again become bulk, just as you are reconciled to being thinly spread over the endless landscape, a last piecemeal absorption as one’s only outlook, a great effort is made and you manage to reunite. You come together like a thousand pieces of rejoining quicksilver, and, once having rescued yourself from the disintegration attendant on panoramas, you turn and run to where your vision is comfortably stopped fifty feet away and your our loosely woven self is confined within livable bounds.
      The only comfort to be got out of such a catastrophe is the thought of the surprise, on the part of that treacherous child, when no penny was forthcoming. You may have in this way saved future travellers of trusting dispositions. That little girl may of her acquired wisdom in time teach her sons, so that when they are brisk young guides (though these are instinctively suspected and never followed without a clear idea of their intentions); and, later, when they are brooding old men who on beckoning give you the impression that if followed to a quiet corner stores of homely knowledge will be drooned forth, and between you all mistakes of the past and present may be corrected, even at these two periods, when the desire to show bella vistas is so strong upon the kindest men, they will remember their mother’s childish experience and desist.
      This is a pleasant thought, and on such slight provocation one revives a little, and feels strong enough to again emerge from the house and run that ever-present risk of another panorama.

      It was raining, and the American signora turned into the nearest church with the faint hope that it might contain a chair and be otherwise lacking in points of interest. It was raining, and the American signora turned into the nearest church with the faint hope that it might contain a chair and be otherwise lacking in points of interest. She was reduced to the state of abandoned shuffling which proves, when one is a well-regulated being, that one has just done a museum and has succeeded in living through it. The signora was numbly thinking that it must have been in the fifth gallery where she lost her sense of beauty, her interest in life and desire to be educated going at the eighth. She sighed with gratitude at having come out with her legs intact and sat down suddenly on the door-sill of the cloister. It may be as well to say here that she never saw the interior of the church and will not, for a reasonably long time, forget the cloister. Directly in front of her stood a row of Italian youngsters varying from the size that toddles and falls for no reason at all on its round face to the size that calls after one in the street and makes faces at its betters. Before them stood a young man with a cigarette in his mouth and a critical light in his eye. A slap-stick :
“from the Italian batacchio or bataccio — called the ‘slap stick’ in English — a club-like object composed of two wooden slats used in commedia dell'arte... among the earliest special effects”
wikipedia slap-stick was stuck under his arm, and when he turned it was tweacked by the giggling boys. The signora wondered if she was watching a school or a military drill. There were no chairs or desks, there was nothing but the slap-stick and the rain dripping into the cloister well. Perhaps the group before her was a band of insurgents preparing for civil war, the slap-stick being used as a blind. Yet insurgents aged two and at most ten seemed a shade unlikely. The signora watched and gave up wondering. The young man with lazy ardor was ranging the children so that they formed perfect steps. He took a connoisseur’s joy in the work and yanked Luigi out of the line to be, after a moment’s serious measuring, put in Giuseppe’s place. A matter of an eighth of an inch was corrected by taking a tallish cap from one boy and putting it on the head of his shortish neighbor. One child’s cowlick was forcibly made to lie down, as it spoiled the symmetry; and just as perfection was about to be attained the third boy from the end became unaccountably shorter. His place in the line was changed. He became still shorter. The slap-stick came down on his shoulders, and he grew fully four inches. This caused a general to-do, and everybody wanted to know what he meant by it. He explained that he really was tall, but he was very tired and his knees bent wholly without his consent. Every one was shocked at such duplicity, but as he began to cry he was at once appointed lieutenant and took his place at the young man’s side. That settled it; the signora now knew they were insurgents and trembled for the safety of Italy. Stentorian orders at this point being issued, they broke into companies of four, wheeled, went once around the cloisters, and returned to their former positions. In soft chirps they sang out numbers and got along very nicely until it was the turn of a round young person, who had, apparently, been eating the ink-bottle. His face and hands were a brilliant blue-black , and when he smiled his tongue was in harmony. Instead, however, of his singing out three, which he knew perfectly to be his number, such was his imitative nature that he sang out what every one else did, and was silent when his turn came, thus threatening to upset the entire regiment. He was remonstrated with, given another chance, and again he went wrong. The young man allowed his cigarette to go out in the excitement, but the baby only smiled his inky smile. When it was explained to him that three meant he was to fall into the third line he nodded happily, and when with much losing of slippers (it did not seem right that insurgents should wear bedroom slippers to drill, so lacking in proper fierceness) three fairly straight lines were formed there was that small scamp holding his big brother, the lieutenant, firmly by the hand and indifferent to the fact that his place in the third line was empty. Every one shrugged his shoulders — it was the first thing they had done in unison — and started on a second turn around the cloister. By this time the signora felt so at home, almost a member of the guilty band, that she ventured to bow to the passing regiment. Every one shrugged his shoulders — it was the first thing they had done in unison — and started on a second turn around the cloister. By this time the signora felt so at home, almost a member of the guilty band, that she ventured to bow to the passing regiment. Some giggled, one winked, a few looked sternly away, and half a dozen raised their caps. With absolute ferocity the lieutenant ordered a halt. The signora vaguely felt that she was the cause of it. Then, with astonishing eloquence, the lieutenant pointed out the iniquity of soldiers bowing to their lady friends while on duty. The young man was on the other side of the cloister rolling a fresh cigarette, so no help was to be expected from him. The signora was in the hands of the lieutenant. He ignored her coldly, but his anger lashed the offending regiment. It was plain that he longed for the slap-stick. Heads began to be hung, and as all drooped except that of the inky baby, who placidly licked his blackened cheeks, a pair of bare brown feet crosed the sill, and before any one knew what was happening the lieutenant’s ears were being boxed. The avenging woman — it was a woman — carried a harvest-knife stuck into her belt at the back, and her head was bound in a pink handkerchief. When she had finished with the lieutenant she delivered herself frankly to the young man, after which she turned to the boy, who so frequently stepped out of his slippers, and commanded him to take off his cap to the signora. Was it not her own daughter and his mother who did the signora’s washing? Was he to grow up an ingrate? Rather should he be removed from a school where such manners were taught? (Then it was a school; yet one might be pardoned for having failed to recognize it.) The young man — one might as well give him his title and call him the schoolmaster — was most sorry; he had not known of the connection. He would have all the boys bow next time round. He brought about sudden order, started off his pupils at a trot. With the aid of the slap-stick had every man jack take off his cap to the signora, did it himself, gained a grim nod from the old woman with the harvest-knife, and when the signora, feeling rather red and fearing future developments, rose to go the school was playing ring around the rosy about the cloister well, and the young schoolmaster was putting a rose in his button-hole .
 

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