Cruising down the rivers of the world.

ONCE upon a time the great rivers of Europe were also great passenger waterways, and those whose business let them sail on the Danube, the Rhine, or other navigable rivers, had an easier time than those on Alpine passes who had to bump over the Brenner or shiver on the Great Saint Bernard.

For example, the Grand Tour of the seventeenth-century English diarist John Evelyn, involved sailing on the rivers Seine, Rhone, Loire, Po, Brenta, and Adige as well as along Lake Geneva and on various Italian coasts and canals. He also noted that galleys could be built as far inland as Pisa and floated down the Arno to the sea.

Even the first waves of nineteenth-century tourists, Baedeker or Murray in hand, thought the risk of a burst boiler on a steam-boat more acceptable than the ardours and extortions of post-chaises and diligences, with their stops for tough chicken and sour wine. Across the Atlantic the great rivers opened up the New World for settlement and commerce long before later immigrants got cheaper tickets on the railroads. Charles Dickens seems to have devised the most depressing parts of Martin Chuzzlewit from his steamboat travels on the Ohio River and on the Mississippi, 'the beastliest river in the world', where Mark Twain found his pen-name.

As late as 1873 the Baedeker guides, which owed their first success to the popularity of the Rhine, were still recommending that the best way to see Budapest was to take the daily 6.30 a.m. Danube steamer from Vienna for the twelve-hour downstream journey. But the triumph of the trains was not to be denied, and even Baedeker by then blanched at the slower upstream return and advised the railway. And, long before the business travellers and the tourists took to the air, the great rivers had been largely left to the great barges. Their passenger boats were mainly for local excursionists and summer-evening revellers, though the Rhine and Danube retained some short-distance passenger traffic.

But the long-distance passengers are coming back to the long rivers. However, the ships they sail on are part of a worldwide tourist-industry phenomenon rather than a system of national or international transport. Like ocean-cruise liners, they are essentially navigable floating hotels. And though they are much smaller and far more sedate, they have less opportunity than an ocean liner to look beautiful. Their length and breadth is determined by conditions on particular rivers and their height by the need to pass under low bridges. The result can resemble the traditional notion of a Noah's Ark, but a bit elongated and with the top storey sliced off. They are really self-propelled luxury barges, but the Noah's Ark comparison applies in one other respect. The passengers are expected to go in two by two, for the cost of a single cabin can take an up-market holiday into the heights. A fully-booked Seine or Danube boat probably has about 150 passengers.

By their nature and style river-cruises tend to be for the comfortably-off and the middle-aged or older, with the American participants perhaps slightly younger on average than the European ones. Prosperous American family parties, with teenagers getting a first trip to Europe, are sometimes seen, but not similar British ones.

Such cruises do not figure on holiday agendas in the Club-Med and similar '18 to 30' styles. They are not for tourists in a hurry but for those anxious to cover some distance and see a succession of sights without daily packing and unpacking, and on some routes to see places which are awkward or daunting for the individual traveller. They are also for those ready to accept regular, generous, and expensive wining and dining rather than face the joys, travails, pot-luck, and nameless carafes of local restaurants. On one recent cruise the gastronomy mattered so much to one couple, from a State adjoining the fried-chicken country, that they solemnly photographed the courses, admittedly decoratively presented, at each lunch and dinner. It will provide an unusual variation on a holiday-snap show for the long winter evenings.

And though the scenic quality of the great rivers may vary--even the Danube has dull stretches after Bratislava and in deepest Hungary--they are all livelier, safer, and more beautiful than motorways. Probably most of the passengers who disembark leave with a feeling that they have not seen enough for long enough but that they have eaten and drunk more than enough. On the other hand they have probably seen far more and with far less trouble than they could have achieved by any other means in an even longer time.

The river-cruising phenomenon is most obvious and best established on the historic commercial rivers of Western and Central Europe--the Rhine from the Netherlands to Switzerland by way of the Lorelei Rock, with side-trips up the Moselle, and the Danube from Regensburg to Vienna, Budapest, and even into the Balkans. But it is also developing on the Seine, another great commercial river laden with vast barges, and on the Saone and Rhone from above Lyons to the delta near Marseilles. It ventures up the Po from the Venetian lagoon (sometimes with an expensive optional extra trip to the open-air Aida at Verona) and even sails languidly on the Guadalquivir.

It also flourishes on the Elbe between Madgeburg and the Czech frontier port of Decin, formerly Tetschen, which allows the tour-companies comfortably to package Dresden and its galleries with Berlin and Prague; and to sail into Dresden in the twilight is probably the one approach to it which emphasizes what survives of its grandeur and not what was lost in the Second World War.

Sometimes modern infra-structure development, undertaken for industrial reasons or to transport goods, opens up new possibilities. The German canal system which links the Rhine and Main to the Danube is a commercial waterway for heavy goods but it lets the tour operators offer berths from Amsterdam to Vienna. The series of dams and locks on the Douro has opened up the hinterland of Oporto and the vineyard country to navigation. If the ships on the Portuguese river do not quite match the food and fittings of the Central European ones, which are as likely to fly Dutch or Swiss flags as German or Austrian ones, they can also fit into more ambitious travel plans. For the Douro is not all that far from Santiago de Compostela and, at the Spanish border, within two hours' drive from Salamanca.

The phenomenon is a world-wide one. It flourishes on the Nile, surely the most senior of all cruise-rivers, despite the vulnerability of tourism in Egypt to terrorist outrages. Prices may have to dip drastically (though briefly) after any much-publicised attack but the Nile's appeal is enduring and the market recovers. But even at current prices it is possible to cruise more cheaply on the Nile than on the Elbe or on a high-class Rhine or Danube boat.

Elsewhere the phenomenon is influenced in different ways by political relaxation or continuing difficulties, but its significance is unmistakable. The great Chinese river-routes that were once the channels for Western economic and missionary penetration have been opened up to American and European tourism since Communism there decided to embrace a good deal of capitalism, both stimulating market forces and responding to them. The Chinese tours are probably even more vigorously marketed in the United States than in Europe. The more hesitant Vietnamese regime has gone along with a far smaller scale of operation on the Mekong. Even the authoritarian rulers of Burma, usually anxious to exclude the contagion of the outside world, tolerate what in a more benign political and economic environment might become one of the most popular and attractive river-cruises in the world, the long haul up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay and beyond.

When the phenomenon flourishes in such areas of Asia that once seemed physically remote and so culturally isolated from the world's main tourist markets, it is not surprising that it has made even more progress beyond what was once the European Iron Curtain. The great rivers and canals of Ukraine and Western Russia are heavily promoted in the brochures, and would probably sell even more readily if some bureaucratic (and mildly expensive) Soviet-style formalities about visas fell by the wayside. For all that, the river cruise is a fairly painless opportunity for people who might hesitate about fixing up a trip to St Petersburg, Moscow, or even Kiev on the Internet. But for the more adventurous tourist to Russia, especially one for whom real novelty will outweigh a good deal of scenic monotony, there are boats to be joined somewhere in Central Siberia for the long stately progress downstream towards the Arctic. Enthusiasts for the flora and fauna are said to fly back happy.

The river-cruise is also to be found in countries where tourism is less of a novelty but where river-travel has a fine historical pedigree: on the Mississippi of course, and on the St Lawrence and the Amazon, if such vast waterways can be counted as rivers in the ordinary sense. It has also reached the Australian Murray River, and the brochures bold enough to offer the Irrawaddy sometimes also offer the Brahmaputra. Probably every river, from the Volga to the Yukon, that is or once was a major commercial artery is now being developed or reassessed as a tourist route.

That involves consideration both of the practicability of navigation for large vessels and the economic viability of substantial initial investment and high staff costs, in the galleys as well as on the wheelhouse-bridge. Even though much of the more basic work may be done by workers from relatively low-wage economies--Slovaks on the Danube, Portuguese on the Seine--the business needs to buy expertise and provide a very high ratio of crew to passengers.

Of course not every historic or scenic river is suitable for the trade, especially those where there has not been a surviving goods traffic to maintain an infrastructure for navigation including lights, signs, dredging, quays, and access. Even where this infrastructure has not been lost or can be restored, the kind of operation which flourishes on the great European waterways may be beyond the capacity of rivers and canals. In Britain for example many waterways have been restored but the impetus has come from a different kind of leisure sailing by boat-owners, holiday hirers, and sometimes smaller passenger vessels. The nearest British equivalent of the up-market and rather gastronomic Continental inland voyages is probably the niche market in the Scottish Highlands which exploits the reviving Caledonian Canal and the lochs linked by it in the Great Glen between Fort William and Inverness. There are similar coastal and sea-loch cruises on the Scottish West coast for those who want to pay more than even Caledonian Macbrayne charge on their scheduled routes to the isles.

It is tempting to move from this description of an enjoyable and comfortable development of tourism to exaggerated praise. River-cruising does reward entrepreneurs and provide employment. As tourism goes it is relatively unobtrusive. It helps sustain the economic vigour of great waterways, and contributes to a return on investment in their development or expansion. It introduces tourists, in manageable numbers, to river-ports and adjacent regions which they would otherwise find hard to visit.

But it probably does not have the local economic impact that might be expected or the cross-cultural contact that might be hoped for. It is doubtful, for example, whether any river cruise route allows the contact with the life of a country, necessarily superficial but none the less real, provided by the great, long Norwegian coastal voyage which takes cruise passengers as well as local people and goods from Bergen to beyond the North Cape with stops at numerous small ports on the mainland and a quick link-up with the Lofoten islands. The economic benefit from the tourists is not the relatively modest amount they have time to spend in port shops and cafes but their contribution to the survival of a great historic sea-route that depends on local sailors and still serves many local purposes.

The river passengers also have relatively little time to spend their money in port, though some local benefit comes from the expensive 'optional excursions' which are part of most cruise programmes and from the included ones, usually less exciting, which are offered on some. Local economies also benefit to some extent from the voracious appetite for ships' supplies, though much has obviously to be stocked up in advance and in bulk rather than bought in transit. But rather less is spent on shore than might be expected. One problem is that cruise companies who hire expensive chefs and squads of cooks and waiters want a return on the cost by ensuring a full attendance at lunch as well as dinner, with the cost passed on to passengers. The result is that when a river ship is in port for a full day all but the most extravagant passengers head back to the ship for lunch as well as dinner, or are brought back from excursions always timed accordingly. No wonder riverside restaurant owners sometimes seem to view the cruise-ships with an indifferent or even unfriendly eye.

The need to cover considerable distances in a week or ten days means that relatively fleeting visits to cities on the river allow passengers only a limited amount of cross-cultural contact, though some of the crews may have explored the possibility of having a girl in almost every port. And on board ship the cross-cultural contacts are of a limited and different kind, especially on the main European cruise routes. There many of the crews are as far from home as most of the passengers, sometimes attracted not just by the tips (often shared among the whole crew) but by the prospect of improving their English. It is usually the dominant language of the bar, dining room, and a ship's library largely composed of discarded paperbacks, supplemented by Scripture supplied in various tongues by mariners' Bible societies. The Hungarian musician or the Ukrainian barman may have interesting tales to tell, but if they are told at Rouen or Wittenberg they are unlikely to have much relation to the life and culture beyond the quays.

It is easy to be critical, but it would be hard to convict river-cruising of the ecological or cultural offences which are sometimes committed when vast hotels are set down on what were once unspoiled beaches or clifftops. They revive a few neglected rivers but more often they add to the vigour and variety of the traffic on busy ones. They take tourists of the less raucous sort in relatively modest numbers to places which they otherwise might not visit and where they are generally welcome.

Even the gastronomic emphasis, which sometimes becomes excess, has a respectable historical pedigree. When in 1644 John Evelyn sailed down the Rhone from Lyons to Avignon, his 'waterman' paused for the night at Vienne. 'Here we supped and lay, having among other dainties a dish of truffles, which is a certain earth nut found out by a hog trained to it and for which these animals are sold at a great price. It is in truth an incomparable meat'.

Something similar can be arranged today. See the brochures. Watch the prices.

ART NOTES: The Artist as Outsider

The London National Gallery's assemblage of artists under such a subjective theme and so contentious a title as Rebels and Martyrs was bound to be incoherent; all the more so when tagged with the subtitle, The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century. The terms, 'rebels' and 'martyrs', are stretched until they snap. Here we have the wanderer (from Greifswald to Dresden) Friedrich; the recluse (among a cheerful fraternity of medievalists) Overbeck and the exile (with frequent visits to Paris) Gauguin; the sloven Cezanne and the dandy Manet; the Communard Courbet, the Anarchist Pissarro and the anti-Dreyfusard Degas. The curators of the exhibition lacked scepticism about how artists dramatise themselves. Insolently, reprobate artists such as van Gogh and Ensor represent themselves as surrogate Christs crucified by their critics. The syphilitic roisterer Gauguin places himself in Gethsemane, with his betrayers advancing through a tropical undergrowth.

The pictures displayed were chosen for their subject rather than their merit, although many of them are more attractive than the hastily daubed sketch by Delacroix of Ovid, profuse as ever with a great parcel of scrolls, in exile among the spear-toting, mare-milking Scythians. Although Delacroix proclaimed himself a rebel, he received unending state commissions from the age of twenty-three onwards. Is the artist or his subject the outsider: Henry Wallis, the meticulous decorator of porcelain, or his Death of Chatterton (like Ovid a poet, not a painter), a piece of highly finished Dickensian morbidity? Still more puzzling is the inclusion of a tribute by one eminently successful painter to another: Ingres's picture of Leonardo's triumphant expiry in the arms of King Francois I.

The exhibition, paradoxically, has been successful in one respect: in bringing back to notice artistic achievements which were regarded as peripheral, not in their own time but in ours. One hopes for a revival of interest in the subtle and penetrating portraits of Fantin-Latour and Jaques-Emile Blanche, the lyrical mythologies of Gustave Moreau and, above all, the delectable historical reconstructions of Ingres.

D.B.