Vignettes of Travel. Some comparative sketches in England and Italy

Front matter

VIGNETTES OF TRAVEL SOME COMPARATIVE SKETCHES IN ENGLAND AND ITALY. BY W. W. NEVIN. PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 1881. Copyright, 1880, by W. W. Netin. INTRODUCTORY. These papers are in piirt a recast of some letters contributed to the public press of the United States during a visit to Europe in 1879 and 1880, and in part fresh matter from original notes then taken. The wide republication here and abroad of many of the newspaper letters suggested the prep aration of this volume. The several sketches are mainly in the direction of com parative studies of social and political life in other countries. The volume is, however, less symmetrical in this respect than I could have wished now, for the reason that this line of treatment was not an original plan — the work only drifting that way in the gradual course of travel and writing. .

Comparative study has been the rule of advancement in all knowledge this century, and advance in the sciences of politics and society will best be made by the same means. We cannot compare our own institutions and form of government with those of other nations until we understand them, and we can never thoroughly understand them until we see them brought out in relief against the background of other countries. In other countries and in former times responsibility for the social and political progress of any nation has been confined to a small and highly-favored class. With us it rests upon the whole people. The education of foreign travel — once the privilege and pleasure of a few — has, therefore, become the duty of every American citizen. The citizen is the statesman now. If this is not the Providential intent of the flood of European travel which annually leaves our shores, it is certainly its fortunate opportunity.

Any contribution, however imperfect, to this comparative study of ourselves ought to be of some use to some portions of our people. In Chapter XVII. of this work I have at tempted to show that aid in this work is the most useful function now left to our diplomatic service and the best reason for its present existence. Along the pathway of travel and study I have endeavored INTRODUCTORY. to give, wherever possible, some of that more intimate and personal information which every educated traveller so often feels the want of, and which for some reason will not get into the guide-books — the special uses of special places, the best economies of time and route and intellectual energies, the tried and tested equipment of books, — that kind of information gotten only by experience, always costly, and which to one en route for the first or only time generally comes too late for use.

Chapter I. Chester

The Entrance-Porch to England — An Initial Walk— The Old Home — Vitiation of the Language — The Soldier and the Beggar — Coming Differentiation of the English and American Language — The Vignette Cathedral Scene of England. Chester is the vignette scene of England, and a very charming one. Within fifteen miles of Liver pool, and trains running out almost hourly, the expe rienced traveller can, and the judicious one will, avoid that monotonous town consecrated to trade and lucre, and spend his first night in England in a little country village representative and typical of the most English of English scenery. Indeed, if circumstances permit, I would advise that the visitor walk from Liverpool to Chester. It is a short distance, over excellent roads, and the walk will give one at once an idea of English landscape which it would take weeks of railway travel to acquire.

The walk will be made along green lanes and by hedges and under avenues of great trees which form a picture not to be forgotten, and answering completely to what is, perhaps, the conventional conception of any well-read person of rural England. To an educated American, indeed, all England is so familiar by pictures, literature, and legend that, entering it for the first time, he feels as if he were coming home again instead of visiting a strange land, — as if he had been there before in a half-remembered childhood or in a dream, and were part of it. This indefinable sense of a previous knowledge is not, I think, a mere intellectual photograph or illusion, the impression of years of early or long reading. It is the assertion of a race in stinct. Froissart — that most picturesque of old chroni clers — does not prepare one so for Normandy, nor does Boccaccio for Italy.

Any one who goes to Rome for the first time recognizes at once the Pantheon or the Col osseum, and the stranger at Paris enters the Madeleine confidently without question of guide or guide-book, but he knows them, however, as he knows the pyra mids and obelisks, and he has not that feeling of kin dredship, that sense of his own merger in them, which is one of the great charms of English travel. Although to American eyes simply a charming country village of a few thousand inhabitants, Chester is by English law a city, being a cathedral site, and fairly bubbles over with tradition, legend, and history, so that one feels like looking on its very humblest people with respect as the richly-dowered " heirs of all the ages." These heirs, however, save the cultured aristocracy, who are few in numbers and mostly of ecclesiastical savor or relation of some kind to the cathedral, with its ancient establishment, seem poor and struggling, and I fancy would gladly give up all their historic privileges for a quarter-section of American prairie.

Our Pennsylvania town preserves the full name and tradition of this site better than its English ancestor. For long periods of history this old Chester was known as West Chester, — just what it was under the Romans, the " west camp" of the province, " Chester" being the very natural corruption of our rude forefathers for the Latin castra. Chester's first interest, indeed, comes to us from its associations as an ancient Roman fortress or stronghold. Here, about the time of Christ, was sta tioned the Twentieth Legion (about a brigade of our army), keeping down our barbarian ancestors. Stone collins and other Roman antiquities are still dug up from time to time, and one or two handsome Roman CHESTER. 11 crypts, discovered after centuries of disuse, have been put to modern use as wine-cellars.

It is a natural military position, having been seized on by those excellent soldiers, the Romans, and well fortified, and has been a centre of tough fighting ever since. Its distinction in this respect is grounded on sound military and geographical reasons, and will endure. When the Romans had gone, the Danes held its abandoned walls to the bitter end against King Alfred. It was the last point taken by William the Conqueror, the last fortress to lower the Saxon standard before the Norman banners. From a tower on its walls, which is now a relic, they show you the spot where King Charles I. stood aud saw his army and his kingdom melt away before his eyes down on the moors below. There will be a battle here again when the Germans invade England, if Englishmen still keep up their fathers' fashion of fighting for their soil inch by inch.

From a military point of view, Chester is topographically " the last ditch" of a lost cause in England. All the town is surrounded by a huge wall with balustrades of brick, and at the angles fortified with towers, which in their day swept the faces of their sections of the w.all and commanded its approaches. Along the top of this wall you walk now, and see on one side the moors — which, I suppose, in the old times, when defence was the first consideration, could be flooded by the Dee, a tranquil little stream answering in size and appearance to the American creek — and the other the near hills of Wales. Our guide, an enthusiastic and slightly bibulous " freeman" of Chester, looked on these hills yet with only half-repressed indignation as the abode of marauders and thieves, whom we might momentarily expect to swoop down.

Indeed, in the excitement of historic declamation, relating the past military and ecclesiastical glories of his native city, I think sometimes he got the centuries n^xed up, and mingled his own troubles with the statelier tragedies which marked the fall of thrones and turned the course of history. Inside the walls, in the "old city," every building and street is quaint and picturesque, and the narrow ways are fairly crowded with houses that are historic and pregnant with suggestion. There is the summer residence of King Henry VIIL, a low, mud-walled building, not twelve feet high, but which so short a time ago was a fit dwelling for a monarch. It sounds rather comical now, but there is in Chester a charitable foundation of this many-wived King Henry for the perpetual support of " six widows."

The widows are to-day enjoying this benefit. Through a brick alley-passage not five feet wide you come on the ancient palace of the great Earl of Derby, a soldier and statesman, who in old times headed armies, levied war against his king, and for that act parted with his head on the scaffold. This place is a rackety structure of two low stories, hardly high enough to stand up in, and is now occupied by a family of the poorest sort in a city where poverty is squalid and wretched to an extent that we happily know nothing of. A dirty, red-haired girl with torn petticoats and a hungry-looking face received us on the threshold and offered the modern hospitalities of the palace. Another building strikingly quaint and suggestive of ancient manners is a long, low structure, gabled and antique, which, some six or seven hundred years ago, was the residence of a great bishop who ruled iu Chester.

It is more spacious and imposing than either of the others just mentioned. Along the entire front, of some eighty feet, runs a gallery something like the inclosed porch of a Lancaster County hotel. The whole front of this house, from the roof to the ground, is covered with carved and graven images in wood of curious and often grotesque design. Two entirely nude figures, man and woman, are shown you by the guide, and one CHESTER. 13 facade has been cancelled and shaven plain, the imagery being too gross for modern eyes. These odd old buildings, their whole fronts covered with curious wooden carvings, and many of them de voted now to the commonest and humblest uses, give a geueral effect to Chester which is stronger and more im pressive than any of the detached " shows" which here, as in any locality, are always forced on the stranger.

This fantastic tracery of steep gables and overhanging eaves and brown skeleton rafters, the lean ribs of centuries, and quaint relievos, half-religious, half-pagan, — this and the beautiful view stretching out over peaceful water and meadow to the delicate filmy contour of the Welsh mountains are the pictures of the place. The great sight of Chester, of course, is her cathedral, the central point which gathers up her history from the time of King Alfred. It is not large compared with others in the island, but, half in ruins, is beautiful and picturesque beyond description. This cathedral, like all the great churches of England, is a pantheon. In St. Paul's and Westminster lie the dead of the nation. In Chester and other country churches or cathedrals sleep the local great. These grand graves, where those men who have deserved well of their country and their fellows are gathered in noble companionship and hon ored for ages, are a powerful stimulus to great thought and heroic action, and must tend strongly to elevate those who live near them and worship in them, drawing them daily away from the ignoble struggle for mere gain of money, and lifting them up to better things.

For in all this country, for which wealth has done so much, I have not found one name enshrined there in honor merely for its riches, and any man or boy may be buried in the greatest church of his county or the kingdom if he does some service to his fellows worthy of recognition and remembrance. In this beautiful cathedral of Chester, consecrated by art, legend, and re ligion, among the bishops and statesmen and generals of centuries, I have found the names of young soldiers, without rank, fortune, or family, who died only a few years ago in the Crimea. In St. Paul's grand pile, where lie Wellington, and Nelson, and Sir John Moore, and Dr. Samuel Johnson, and John Howard, and Bishop Heber, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, there are inscribed, with equal honor, the names of some poor unknown ship-boys who in a great naval action went down nobly, standing to their duty as grandly and as faithfully as admiral or general.

As I looked at this tablet some young sergeants, proud of their early chevrons, and of a regiment on its way to the African war, were poring earnestly over the names, and I knew that the real service of this cathe dral would be offered some day in silence on the battle fields of Zululand. It is impossible, of course, to describe in words such a cathedral as this, — a building which is the result of the consecrated labor, art, and devotion of centuries. And it is but one of many. They must be seen to be conceived, and when seen can only be known through the eye of culture and history. Chester cathedral is not by any means the one to select as the prelude to a course of systematic study, but it does well enough to break in with. One must do his æsthetic teething somewhere, and Chester answers very well for that purpose.

Right here at Chester, on the threshold of England, one strikes an English habit which is offensive to Amer ican taste, and which will jar on the ear during one's entire stay in the country, — viz., the corruption, by illiter ate contraction, of the language. This process of de terioration is going steadily on in all classes. Cheshire, the county name, is slovenly and ignorant English for Chester.shire, but it has been adopted by all England, although its origin must have been from the thick-lipped hinds. Cheshire is clownish, and means nothing; Ches- CHESTER. 15 tershire is sonorous, stately, and records two volumes of English national history, — the Latin rule of the camp and the Saxon rule of the shire. The lower-class Englishman is thoroughly illiterate, and often succeeds in stamping his illiteracy on the na tion.

There cannot be a neglected class in any com munity without the whole community suffering for it. Just as the Southern people in our country acquired a negro twang and dialect, the black nurses teaching it to the white children, so to-day the English language in England suffers at the hands of its large uneducated and neglected class, and it has come to pass that Eng lish gentlemen cannot keep even their aristocratic names intact, but accept them back from their servants mutilated and vulgarized in sound. Thus Beauchamp has deteriorated to Beacham, Beauvoir to Beaver, Stan hope to Stannup, Cholmondeley to Chumly, St. John to Sinjin, Marjoribanks to Marshbanks, Worcester to Wooster, Leicester to Lester, Greenwich to Greenitch, Chaworth to Chorth, Woolwich to Woolich, Ha worth to Horth, Hawarden to Harden, Warwick to Warick, Taliaferro to Toliver, St. Botolph's-town to Boston, Sandys to Sands, Wemyss to Weems, Dillwyn to Dil lan, Strachan to Strawn, Mainwearing to Mannering, and so on from one end of the island to the other.

This vulgar and servile pronunciation, especially of the lordly old Norman names, is very marked and very unpleasant to a stranger. But it is retribution. Eng land has not been true to her trust in the matter of common education. With universities and schools far beyond anything we can pretend to, with a clergy educated greatly beyond our grade and enjoying in the days of priories and abbeys the monopoly of education, she has kept her talent of learning selfishly folded in a napkin for the exclusive ustes of one class. Now the wronged classes avenge themselves. Indeed, the wrong against the noble language of Mil ton and Shakespeare is very prevalent throughout all England, high and low. If the lower-class Englishman drops his "h's," the upper-class Englishman drops his " w's ;" and I do not know that the offence is in any way mitigated because fashion approves the one elision and disapproves the other.

"Extraordinary" is a good shibboleth with which to test the Englishman. Very rarely does he successfully master the " d." It sometimes seems as if the special function of the United States with regard to our common English language were to be its preservation by the general education of the whole people. England has shown that no special centresof education, however excellent, respected, or sacred, will protect the purity of the tongue against masses of ignorance and servility. This lazy vitiation of the English by the dropping of letters, and sometimes of whole syllables, is in con stant progress in England on a grand scale, enervating the language in form and sound, and were there no communication between the two countries would soon, with other influences, result in two tongues related to each other like French and Spanish or Spanish and Italian.

As it is, the process of differentiation has al ready set in, but it is hourly counteracted by the inces sant intercommunication of the two peoples. As this different use of words will confront the stranger all the time in England, I give here some illustrations to show on how large a scale the variation has already begun : English. American. .Shop. Shopkeeper. Shares, shareholder. Chairman (of a company). Railway. High level (railway). Store. Storekeeper, merchant. Stock, stockholder. President. Railroad. Elevated. Station. ■Shunt. Stoker. Guard. Driver. Depot. Switch. Fireman. Conductor. Engineer. CHESTER. 17 English. Booking-office. Goods. Carriage. "The cars." Line. Chemist. Lift. Tram, tramways. Outing. Post. To book. To post (a letter). To book (a seat). To " take in" (a newspaper) Quite, in the sense of Public-house.

Spirits. Meat-shop. Tub. Cab, cabman. Inn. Luggage, luggage-van. To register (luggage). Stick. The hustings. The Ministry. Member. " Contesting a seat" for Parliament. American. Ticket-office. Freight. Car. "The train." Track. Druggist. Elevator. Street-cars. Excursion. Mail. To charge. To mail. To buy a ticket. To subscribe for. Entirely. Tavern. Liquor. Butcher-shop. Bath. Hack, hack-driver. Hotel. Baggage, baggage-wagon, -car. To check (baggage). , Cane. The stump. The Cabinet. Representative. " Running" for Congress. Who can translate into exact American " young per son" as uttered by a British dame ? How shall one ex press, under our different social conditions, the contempt and disgust of "cad" ? What equivalent have we on this side of the Atlantic for those great structural ver tebra? of an Englishman's speech, " really," " ah," " haw," " now" ?

Were it not for the large and continuous intercom munication of books and magazines and newspapers, of letters and telegrams and travel, the languages would even now be stauding widely apart. The "Rows," the guide-book feature of Chester, were a disappointment. They are a curiosity, of course, but b 2* greatly overrated. The best description, perhaps, is in one of Dickens's later novels, but the great novelist wrote of them like a reporter paid by the column, and from his trained imagination built up a curiously in volved and very interesting structure on a rather com monplace foundation of fact. The Rows run only for a few short blocks, and are simply a deep porch set far in each house and open from house to house. One can walk continuously for the distance of a block along the porches just as on the street below.

At the end of each block, however, he must descend to the street, ascending again at the next block. In time, small shops have been opened in the second story, and you have thus a double shopping-front for a small distance. It is only this, and nothing more. Chester's greatness and interest lie in her historic riches, — her wealth of culture, legend, religious tradi tion, and power, — and it seems a pity that she should be labelled and ear-marked for travellers by what is at best but a curiosity and but an item in her vast repertoire of things curious and quaint. Entering this pleasing vestibule of England, you meet at once two figures unpleasant to the American eye, — the soldier and the beggar. Here they are in these quiet sylvan shades and echoless cloisters, and they never leave you wherever you go in Europe.

The poverty and beggary of Chester are very repulsive to one unacquainted with the squalor and wretchedness of this continent, and it is something very sad to see them in a village town whose chief monument and distinction is a venerable cathedral, and which itself is almost a cathedral close. The British scarlet and gold, too, flashes along these leafy streets and under ruined walls and still moss-grown arches, — wherever, in fact, a Brit ish nursemaid strays. The English drum-beat echoes every day around the entire globe, which is grand, but it is also heard every night in every peaceful county of England, which is not so grand. YORK 19

Chapter II. York

An Old Cathedral City — The Gateway to Historic England — A Traveller's Plight — The English Cathedrals — Story of their Building and what they Cost — The new Uses of the Old Temples Stripped of their Pictures and Idols — An English Rest. York is the historic gateway by which to enter Eng land. The stress of modern travel carries one to Liverpool, and, while its suburban confine of Chester is a very picturesque and pleasing vignette portal, it has no historical significance. The traveller who comes to study England will do well to leave there after a day and strike directly for York. This is in conflict with all the modern routes of travel; but, as these routes have been determined for the use and advantage of railway companies rather than the pleasure or profit of travellers, they are no guide to an intelligent seeing of the country, and are often a harm.

York was a stronghold of our ancient Briton fathers and a capital seat of rude power away back in the mists before the time of Christ. It was the capital of the Roman empire in Britain, and the old Roman military walls around the city are still standing in a wonderful state of preservation. You could fight a battle from them to-day did the conditions of modern warfare allow it. In the streets and buildings and remains you see the record successively of the Roman period of English history, the Saxon, the Norman, and modern England from the Plantagenets through the Commonwealth down to Victoria. In the walls and arches of the great minster you read the whole history of English architecture, — Saxon, Norman, Late Norman, Early English, Decorated, Early Perpendicular, Perpendicular, Late Perpendicular.

York is a kindergarten of English history for grown folks. In its name York is another illustration of the in herited and hopeless tendency of the Englishman to a corruption, by contraction, of the language. " York" is the stately and civilized " Eboracum" of the Latins as it has come down to us through the thick-lipped Saxons and half-articulating Britons, only the rude guttural remains of a once polished word. Coming to York on the last day of a racing week, I had an experience very odd to an American. This town, with a modern population of fifty thousand and some twenty centuries of dignity, has hardly the hotel accommodation of one of our Western towns of ten thousand people. Every inn was full, and the land lords did not seem to feel under the least obligation to provide for any one. When all their rooms were full they seemed to think their duty ended, although this thing must occur again and again.

In nearly all the old towns of England the hotel provision is simply ridiculous, judged by our necessities. After driving to the half-dozen or so modest-sized inns of the place without getting a lodgment, I was about taking the train again to find a roof for the night, when some citizen who had watched the quest directed me to a private house where lodging, he thought, might be had. I found there very good apartments and fair service and meals, but at a cost greater than the Windsor in New York or the St. George in Philadelphia. Much of the interest of the town attaches to its Norman period, as you read it in castle and bar and ruined abbey, although in this epoch of its splendor and power York was but a town of ten thousand in habitants. The Normans, however, cared very little for monotonous figures.

Although great sailors, they had only moderate capacity as traders ; but as soldiers YORK 21 priests, artists, poets and builders, the force of their time, they left their stamp indelibly. They made his tory rather than textile fabrics or patent machinery. The glory of York, however, — as it is one of the glories of England, — is its great cathedral or minster; and it is the object chiefest worthy of study in the place. It is indeed a very good specimen with which to begin the study of the English cathedrals. These noble cathedrals of England, spread over all the land, are one of the first and strongest impressions of the kingdom on the stranger. They are so grand, so beautiful, so living, like breathing hearts of stone, that seeing them one feels at once as if he had never seen a church before.

They seem not of this world, but of some other world; higher and better houses not made with hands, but born of an art and a conception beyond our modern powers. But when one reflects what they are and what they mean, they start a singularly involved social problem, and the cold judgment inclines against them. They are the product and represent that dreary and profitless stretch of English history from the Norman conquest to the Reformation, — five wretched centuries of want and ignorance and human suffering and stagnation. They are the outcome, and with a few castle? and splendid abbeys the whole outcome, of the five hundred years in which England was a province of the modern Roman empire, the people and the kings of England ruled over by cardinal-princes, — the ecclesiastical pro consuls of Rome.

During this period all the other countries of Europe were similar provinces, and these wonderful cathedrals went up in them all. You recognize at once the essential idea of them, the grand con ception, the spirit of the work, as you meet them again in France and Germany and North Italy. The cathedral stands out everywhere as the dominant idea of that period and the symbol of its power. This idea in the different development of our day is lost, and you cannot reproduce these old cathedrals now. It has been tried, but with inevitable failure. No study or imitation of the old proportions will fashion a building like unto those which yet speak for their dead age. You may get something which is like the form, but it is not the living form : it is a corpse. The soul has forever fled. Now, what is painful to think of in relation to these lovely cathedrals is this : These magnificent buildings, that seem almost to glow with faith and beauty, drank the life-blood of England.

During the period of their building England was almost stationary. There was no social advance and no social hope. There were no homes in England as we know them now. There was no freedom as we know it now, little of comfort, and nothing of progress. From a.d. 1100 to a.d. 1400 the population of England advanced but ten per cent, a century, less than one-tenth of one per cent, a year. For the people there was no wealth, no education, no trade or commerce. There was deficient food, shelter, and clothing, and, in consequence, continuous disease and epidemic. There was chronic war. It was a time of plague, pestilence, and famine, of battle and murder, and of sudden death. There was no science, there was no art save in the direction of ecclesiastical architecture and adornment. Yet it was the same England, with the same people, soil, climate, and resources, as to-day.

But one-fourth of the adult population of that time are computed to have been priests, monks, nuns, and their hangers-on and attendants, non-productive persons and an eco nomic burden on the other three-fourths, whose produc tive powers were still further lessened by a long list of saints' days, and a heavy drain for military purposes. This is the England of these beautiful abbeys and ven erable priories and stately cathedrals. All over Europe these buildings are a magnificent demonstration of or ganized ecclesiastical power and a wonderful flowerino- YORK. 23 of æsthetic force, but it has been all at the cost and sac rifice of the common people, whose " bodies are the temples of the living God." For them these silent gray cathedrals meant intellectual and civil starvation, social degradation, physical ill health, and the shorten ing of life.

For one who wants to drink in the beauty of the cathedrals of Europe it is better to begin with those of England, — Lincoln, and Ely, and Peterborough, and Durham, and Lichfield, and Canterbury, aud Salisbury, and Exeter, and Winchester, and Wells, all of which are worth a visit, and many others. It is better to begin with these English cathedrals and enjoy them while one may; for, with all their impressive splendor to our unaccustomed Puritan eyes, they come to look empty and bare and cold after one has once felt the sensuous glories of the churches of Southern Europe. The beauty of these Northern churches is too severely intellectual in contrast with the warmth and rich color of the South. Coming back from there, one feels the nakedness of the stern gray cathedrals of England and longs for the Madonnas and bright coloring of Italy, the ascending incense, the burning lamps and warm pic tures, the family altars, the noble armies of saints, the marble flight of pure white angels, — thousands and thousands of them, — and the splendor of the trembling altar with its sacred lights flaming over silver and precious stones.