The European tour

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I. The Use of Europe i

Chapter I

X70UNG man, go to Europe/ •*■ It is not without due reflection that I venture thus to reverse the geographical direction of a famous saying. Horace Greeley requires revision. As America now stands, I believe by far the most valuable education a young man can obtain is a European trip, undertaken during the years most often devoted to a college course. It costs no more ; it may even cost less ; and I make bold to say it is immeasurably more educative.

If I were a European born, indeed, I would not have the audacity thus to address the American public. Readers might suspect me of that celebrated " condescension observable in foreigners " on which Lowell insisted. But I speak from experience. I am myself a brand plucked from the burning. Born and bred on the American continent, I came to Europe as a very young man ; I have lived here now for over thirty years ; and I have slowly learnt how to appreciate its educational advantages. Allowing that America is the best country in which to be born, I still maintain that Europe is the best country in which to get a year's education.

I do not mean a year spent at school or college. I do not even mean a year of strenuous and conscientious sight-seeing, undertaken solely with an eye to edification. I mean a year of travel^ enjoyment, observation ; a year of free use of lungs and limbs ; a year of pleasant touring through beautiful country and beautiful cities. The best learning of all is the learning we acquire without ever knowing it. Mugging up a subject, cramming for an examination — these are the ways to undermine and destroy our interest in knowledge. Going about the world, to amuse ourselves, with our eyes open, — that is the way to preserve and enlarge it. For everything depends upon the enjoyment we receive. Nothing makes impressions so vivid as pleasure. Just as it is better exercise to play base-ball, cricket, foot-ball, lawn-tennis, to row, to ride, to swim, to climb mountains, than to drill in a prison yard or to walk up and down a measured mile in Central Park, so it is better education to visit the Louvre, Notre-Dame, Venice, Munich, Athens, than to grub up Greek roots with a dictionary and grammar. Let the other education come afterwards, if you like ; but gain first a living interest in the languages, the literatures, the history of Europe by delightful tours through the lands that produced them.

• Nor do I intend this solemn advice for paradox. I utter it as serious practical reasoning. You are a father, let me suppose, and you are thinking of sending your son to college. Why to college? Now, sit down and argue it out with yourself like a man — which will be really the best for him in the end ? Will he learn more that is ultimately useful to him in life by spending three years over dead languages which he never fully masters, and for which he can have no personal use hereafter — or by travelling from a year to eighteen months in Europe ; seeing England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland ; storing his mind with knowledge of art, knowledge of history, knowledge of geography, knowledge of human nature ; gaining an insight into the manner of thought, of speech, of life, and of industry among the living peoples who have contributed to build up the population, the laws, and the institutions of his own country ? I say unhesitatingly, the latter. One year in the great university we call Europe will teach him more than three at Yale or Columbia. And what it teaches him will be real, vivid, practical, abiding ; a part of himself thenceforth; flesh of his flesh, and blood of his blood ; ingrained in the very fibre of his brain and thought ; an inalienable possession to carry through life with him. He will read deeper meaning thenceforward in every picture, every building, every book, every newspaper; he will have put himself in touch with the earlier phases of human thought and craft in every one of their manifold departments.

Only two obstacles, I believe, have prevented everybody in America from recognising long since that a year in Europe ought to be an indispensable part of every young American's liberal education.

The first obstacle is the long-surviving Puritan idea — equally rife in England — that knowledge, to be solid and useful, must be laboriously, painfully, and almost unwillingly acquired — that what is learned with ease, with enjoyment, with delight, almost unconsciously to the learner, cannot be really valuable. Learning is taken as a sort of penance ; in the sweat of his brow, people think, must man till the field of knowledge. The exact opposite, I believe, is the actual truth ; only what is learned with joy and spontaneously, ever really and deeply benefits the learner. " No profit comes where is no pleasure ta'en," says the poet : " Study what you most affect " is sound wisdom as well as good poetry. Few men remember in middle life any of the beggarly stock of Greek and Latin they acquired for the moment at school or college. Why ? Because they never cared for it ; therefore they never really learned it. They cribbed it up for the moment, with the aid of a Bonn's translation, to pass an examination or gain a degree; and as soon as that was done, they gladly forgot it all. How different is the knowledge one has drunk in with pleasure in examining some stately cathedral, some exquisite temple, some fresco of Fra Angelico's, some relief from the perfect chisel of Pheidias ! Those things and the knowledge of them live with one forever. You don't try to remember them. You could n't forget them.

The second obstacle is the good old belief, still more or less current, that "a European education" unfits a young man for life in America — gives him ideas and sympathies out of harmony with those of the mass of his fellow-countrymen. I believe there is some grain of truth in this prejudice, if by " a European education " is meant an education at Oxford or Heidelberg. I don't think European universities afford the best training for a man who has to earn his living by commerce or finance in the United States or Canada. But a real " European education" is quite another matter — the sort of education that is got by seeing Europe — the education of which Europe itself is the main factor. To graduate in that great school is easy and pleasant. Wherever a man is going to live and work, however a man is going to earn his livelihood, it can do him nothing but good to have seen and understood London, Paris, Vienna ; to have learnt how men built at Cologne and at Oxford; to have realised how men painted at San Marco in Florence or at the Hospital at Bruges ; to have beheld the Roman Forum and the Athenian Acropolis ; to have stood beside the Pyramids — which are Europe enough for my purpose — and to have walked with a torch through the pictured Tombs of the Kings at Thebes. All that is education ten thousand times better than one can get out of books ; and the American can only obtain it in perfection by European travel.

By far the best and truest teachers are the eyes. Books substitute for them the ears, and even the ears but symbolically. The current misapprehension about what constitutes a good education dates back to the days when travel was difficult, dangerous, and expensive, — when men had to be content with book-knowledge about most subjects of human interest. At the present day that misapprehension persists unduly, out of accord with our times; it has lived on into an age when travel is cheap, safe, and comfortable, and when first-hand knowledge is easier and pleasanter to acquire than second-hand. Yet we insist upon setting our young men to puzzle out Homer and Herodotus, who are to them mere names, when half an hour spent intelligently among the Parthenon sculptures at the British Museum would give them a more real and vivid interest in Hellas and the Hellenes than months of poring over irregular verbs or the uses of the optative. Moreover, if once you have learned to love and sympathise with Hellenic art, you are already more than half a Hellene ; the language, the poetry, the history of Hellas will become easy and simple to you, because you want to know them : you will study them now with enthusiasm and pleasure, out of pure desire to understand and appreciate the beautiful things that have begun by interesting you. I well remember a striking remark which a lady once made to me at Venice — " History seems to be real here."

History seems to be real! That is the true secret of the great good of travel. Till you go to see the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy at Bruges, you have probably never troubled your head for one moment about the existence and fate of the Burgundian duchy. But as soon as you have seen those exquisite monuments, you cannot help reading about them ; and when you go on to Dijon, you put two and two together ; or when you see the Burgundian statues in the Renaissance sculpture gallery at the Louvre, you build up your knowledge, piecing this and that; till, little by little, without an effort on your part, you find that what was once a vast unconscious blank has filled itself up everywhere with facts and instances. You begin to understand and know your Burgundy ; it has wrought itself into your brain by many twining strands which cannot ever again be lightly untwisted.

Furthermore, one of the surviving absurdities of our existing system of education is the ridiculous importance still attached to the acquisition of languages. A great many people speak as if knowledge of tongues were the highest conceivable form of knowledge. " Such a very accomplished girl ! " they say : " why, she can speak three languages ! " The fallacy is due to the traditional notion that Latin and Greek constitute u a liberal education." That notion was natural enough in the sixteenth century, when most knowledge had still to be dug out of books, and when books were mainly written in the dead languages. It is absurd at the present day, when knowledge is chiefly to be gained by contact with things, and when all useful works are written in or translated into the various vernaculars. Yet so strangely does the old idea persist that most people, when they talk of abandoning Greek and Latin as the basis of education, think of " modern languages" as the only tenable alternative. As though you could get any more education out of existing French or existing German than out of the early speech of Greece and of Italy !

I am not prejudiced against the academic system. I certainly am not opposed to it from sheer ignorance. To guard against misapprehension on this score, I will even venture to add that I am an Oxford graduate, a first-class-man in classics, and that I was for several years of my life a classical master in English public schools, and a Professor of Classics in a colonial college. Therefore I hope I do not speak with the mere jealousy of the unlearned, who think slightingly of arts they have not themselves acquired. But my own experience has been that all that was valuable in my education began after I had left the University. It is from things, not from words, that one may learn most of io The European Tour

what is truly useful. If a professor wants to teach young men natural history or anatomy, does he make them read books? Not a bit of it. He takes them out into the fields, and sets them to collect and observe for themselves the various plants and flowers in all their stages. He puts them to watch the developing leaf, the opening petals; to note how the stamens stand, and how insects disperse the fertilising pollen. He gets them to catch and examine bees and butterflies, to cut them up so as to observe their internal structure under the microscope, and to learn at first hand by actual inspection how the creatures are built up, in head and limb and organs and integuments. That is the source of all real knowledge. Books may be used concurrently, no doubt, as useful helps to accurate observation ; but those books themselves are at best but registers of previous careful and exceptionally fortunate observations. Their use is to supplement, not to supersede, individual inspection. Science is but the record of things seen and noted. So too with chemistry and geology. We do not set the beginner to read books, books, books. We turn him into a laboratory, with test-tubes and blowpipes, to find out for himself the composition of substances ; or into the fields with a hammer, to determine for himself the structure of rocks, and to note their dip, their tilt, their weathering, their sculpture. Books are useful in their place, of course, to help him on his way; to direct his attention to what others have observed ; and to point out the most fruitful methods of personal investigation. But at best they are guides to knowledge, not knowledge itself. They show you where to look, that you may see and understand ; they are finger-posts which point you the road to the museum, not the actual museum and all its contents.

Now, travel holds the same position with regard to mankind, its history, its industry, its arts, its organisation, as laboratory work holds to chemistry, field work to geology, and dissection to biology. If you want to know and understand the world of men, you must go and see it. If you want to know the origin of the art of building, the art of painting, the art of sculpture, as you find them to-day in contemporary America, you must look them up in the churches and the galleries of early Europe. If you want to know the origin of American institutions, American law, American thought, and American language, you must go to England ; you must go farther still to France, Italy, Hellas, and the Orient. Our whole life is bound up with Greece and Rome, with Egypt and

Assyria. In this connection, I would say, there are certain lands which have a first claim upon the American, and also on the modern western European — the lands which lie in the direct line of ancestry of our own civilisation. To see these is the first duty we owe to our own culture. It we care at all for our intellectual development, we ought at least to make a strenuous effort to visit them. China and Japan do not belong to our world — do not form links in the immediate genetic chain of European and American civilisation. Algeria and Russia, Norway and Denmark, hardly enter into it. Even Spain is rather a backwater on the course (to vary the metaphor) than an integral portion of the main stream. But England, France, Italy, Constantinople, Greece, Assyria, Egypt — I name them in inverse order, like one looking backward over the history of development — do so belong to the direct line of our culture : and some acquaintance at any rate with all these lands, or at least with their ancient arts and monuments, is of the highest value as part of a truly liberal education.

Sight will teach one much more about them all than mere language. Gibson the sculptor knew no Greek ; but he was a far truer Hellenist than half the graduates of Harvard or of Oxford. I have met enthusiastic archaeologists who had merely picked up what Latin they knew from deciphering inscriptions, but who were nevertheless scholars to put to shame most of our college-bred students. We can learn more of what Greeks really thought and felt by a few visits to the sculpture at the British Museum than by hours of poring over iEschylus and Aristophanes. Not that I underrate the value of the last, — for the few who really possess the linguistic faculty. But as a rule, only about five per cent of our college-bred lads ever really learn and assimilate enough Greek to feel they understand and enter into Plellenic thought ; while a schoolgirl who speaks no tongue but English can easily be made to read the meaning of the iEginetan marbles in the Pinakothek at Munich. Or, to take another and still more unequivocal example. No one has yet deciphered the ancient Etruscan language. Nobody can do himself much good by reading even so admirable a work as Dennis's Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria by his own fireside, without objects at hand for reference and identification. Such knowledge as that is mere false knowledge, — like the knowledge of chemistry or of botany obtained from books, and as soon forgotten as read. But go to Volterra, and stand among cyclopean Etruscan walls; go to Assisi, and descend into the tombs of the Etruscan

Volumnii ; go to Tarquinii, and roam through painted Etruscan chambers of death — and you must feel you have entered into the very soul of Etruria. Then read Dennis, if you will, by the side of the objects he describes and deciphers for you ; and you will realise at once how vastly more his words now mean to you. It is " the specimen that teaches" as we say in biology ; the book merely interprets.

Well, in the sciences which deal with external nature, such as chemistry, geology, zoology, physics, everybody in America is thoroughly aware of the need for the direct method of observation and experiment. But because America is a comparatively new country, lying remote from the origins and remains of early art, early architecture, early institutions, early history, the need and value of the direct method of observation in the sciences which deal with man and his products is not quite always equally well recognised. And even when it is recognised, the recognition is too often in a narrow specialist sense ; the investigator goes to inspect a particular object for a particular purpose. He wants to discover. American scholars have done great and splendid work in this way, as, for example, in Greece. But what I plead for here is more general recognition of the educational value of travel at large, apart from research in the more special sense of the word. I plead that, just as a general acquaintance with literature is expected of educated men, so should be a general acquaintance with countries and their contents. I plead that young men, instead of receiving their whole education within a single country — the United States — and that a country unequalled for the relative uniformity and homogeneity of its system over a vast area — should be sent regularly to travel for at least six months in Europe (a year is better, and two years still more excellent), so as to familiarise them with the origins of their own world and their own institutions, to give them the wholesome mental shock of a complete reversal of many preconceived opinions. If it is good for a young man to read Shakespeare and Dante, Virgil and Sophocles, it is better for him to have lived in the actual world from which Shakespeare and Dante, Virgil and Sophocles drew all their inspiration. Only Florence can teach you fully to understand the Divina Commedla ; only Athens can teach you fully to understand the Jjax and the Electra.

It is to the young man, therefore, and to the young man's father, that I specially address myself in this chapter. I want him to consider whether a year in Europe is not better spent than a year (shall we say ?) at Cornell or Princeton. Let him do the one, by all means ; but let him not leave the other undone. To have seen Europe is a very great gain ; and, whatever comes, it cannot be taken away from him. He may fail in business, but he has the memory of the Grand Canal and the Doges' Palace ; he may get encrusted in clogging wealth and overwhelmed with affairs, but he has beheld the great Van Eyck at Ghent, and gazed in the face of the Sistine Madonna at Dresden ; he may gain the whole world and lose his own soul — his higher nature — on the Stock Exchange, but he will be haunted still by Donatello's St. George, and redeemed at times by the floating form of Michael Angelo's David. So once more I say it, " Young man, go to Europe ! " As for the elder members of families , and also for the women, I have no need to exhort them. Every American hopes, of course, some day, to see the world across the Atlantic. What I want to do here is to point out the advisability of making the trip while still young, if possible, as an element in education : it is the spiritual importance of the European tour that especially appeals to me. Not that I mean to advise its being done in any doctrinaire fashion. Go about as if to amuse yourself; you will pick up by the way quite as much knowledge as is easily assimilable. Grubbing and grinding means overfeeding the brain. I once asked my friend, Mr. Herbert Spencer, how it came about that a man who had thought so much and so deeply as he, should have no wrinkles on his forehead at over seventy. " George Eliot asked me that," he said with a smile ; " and I answered at once, c I suppose it is because I never worried over anything. I let my thinking come of itself. Never in my life did I sit down deliberately to get up a subject. I read, observed, and thought, when I liked and where I liked, and allowed my ideas to frame themselves naturally.' " The result is that Mr. Spencer knows more at this moment than anybody else in the whole world ; simply because all his knowledge has come to him spontaneously and vividly. I may further add that he does not know the letters of the Greek alphabet — and, as far as I can judge, manages to get on very well without them.

And now I have finished with the educational value of the European tour, and will not again recur to that serious subject. I 'm not going to bore you. The rest of my book will be more practical in character, consisting of advice for persons of all ages and both sexes on what I have found it best worth while to see, and on how to set about seeing: it to the greatest advantage. I want to throw out hints for a tour in Europe ; and I feel myself the better able to perform this delicate task because I have wasted a great deal of good time myself in seeing the wrong things, or seeing the right ones badly and in the worst order ; so, having learned by my mistakes the more excellent way, I am prepared to impart my knowledge to others for a moderate sum — the price, that is to say, of this little volume.

Chapter II

' I V HE use of Europe, then, we are agreed, is •*■ that Americans should employ it as a means of culture. Other incidental uses it may possess, of course — for Europeans ; as a place to make a living in, to love, to die for. But these are unessential. Its true purpose in the scheme of nature is clearly for you and me to enjoy ourselves in, without prejudice to a little concomitant instruction. At least, I shall say so to my American readers.

This point being taken for granted at the outset, the question which next arises is somewhat more serious, — what parts of Europe are best worth visiting ?

In the nature of things, it may be safely asserted, England is the land which possesses the greatest intrinsic claim upon the attention of Americans. In the nature of things, only, I say ; for, as will be seen hereafter, I do not mean to advise that any large proportion of a moderate visit should be devoted to England. The reasons in favour of seeing England are indeed obvious. Englishmen were the first great colonising body in the United States ; and though I believe the amount and proportion of the English blood in America is usually overestimated (as against Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Cornish, French, Dutch, German, and so forth), it must at least be allowed that England has given the Union its language, its laws, its political institutions, its prevailing feeling. Therefore the American who visits Europe with some desire to know and learn as well as merely to enjoy himself, will naturally wish to see something of England. In many cases he traces back his ancestry more or less certainly to an English family. Even if he comes of Dutch or French or German parentage, the history of England is still part of the history of the institutions under which he lives. The literature of England is the literature with which his childhood has been most familiar. Stratford-on- Avon and Salisbury are to him a sort of sentimental Mecca. More than Englishmen even he often feels the glamour of England, for he has not always been familiar with its antiquity and its beauty, to which mere use and wont have frequently dulled the senses of Englishmen. If you have lived from childhood beside a Norman church of the twelfth century, you naturally accept Norman churches with as little enquiry as the New Englander accepts his own place of worship ; but if you have never before beheld one, its antique arches come upon you with a burst of surprise and aesthetic gratification.

Literature and association, indeed, can thus gild for us even the commonest and vulgarest objects. I once crossed the Atlantic from New York with an eager young Pennsylvanian, who came to Europe prepared to be interested in everything he saw, including even the first glimpse of grimy Liverpool. At Lime Street station we had a few minutes to spare before taking the train to London ; and we strolled into the Refreshment Room, to consider whether it would be possible for us to swallow any of the goods provided for our appetite. I gazed at the uninviting wares on the counter with a familiar sinking. " The only thing one could venture to eat," I said at last, u is a pork pie." " Pork pic ? " the young Pennsylvanian exclaimed with delight. " Oh, do let me see them ! Why, one reads about them in Dickens ! "

Allowing, then, that many natural reasons exist why the American who visits Europe should desire to pass some time in England, I will go on to say why I think that time should be cut down as a rule to a much smaller proportion than has of late been usual. To put it very briefly, the chief reason why the American need not trouble himself long about England is simply this — that he knows it almost all already. The very facts I have mentioned above implicitly suggest this idea. England to-day is so like America, America is so largely derived from or based upon England, that the visitor finds little which is fresh and interesting to him, little that is unfamiliar, little that is instructive. He is still, on the whole, at home — in an older, a quainter, a more picturesque home, with fewer modern conveniences and the occasional outcrop of some delightful anachronism ; but still, taking it all round, at home, as the Kentuckian considers himself at home in Ohio, or the Bostonian considers himself at home in San Francisco. He has not got away from our common Englishry.

Another reason is that England for the most part is horribly modernised. Especially is this the case with London, which most Americans take as their sample of England. Now London is not an old town at all as it stands — it is as modern, indeed, as New York or Boston — much more modern than Quebec or New Orleans. There was once an old London, it is true, a picturesque mediaeval city ; but it was almost entirely destroyed by the Great Fire in the reign of Charles II. ; and though a few earlier buildings still survive as by miracle — such as St. Bartholomew's in Smithfield — yet the town as a whole dates back at best but to the eighteenth century, while most of it is frankly of the last two decades. I allow that the neighbouring city of Westminster, now partially united with London, retains some relics of the fabric of its ancient abbey, stripped of its sculpture and decorations at the Reformation, and scraped and cleaned out of all recognition in the present generation by the sacrilegious vagaries of so-called " restorers." But, looking at it in the lump, London is almost as brand-new as Chicago ; it contains little or nothing of historical and antiquarian interest, and of local origin, to delay the tourist. Its collections of Greek sculpture, of Italian pictures, and of Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian antiquities, however, brought from elsewhere, stand on quite a different plane ; I shall discuss the importance and interest of these in the special chapter devoted to the things really worth seeing in England.