Touring in 1600

In speaking of relics, the secular ones must be remembered, too: foremost among them the original Ephesus statue of Diana, which Hentzner saw at Fontainebleau and Evelyn at the Louvre. Most frequently mentioned is the buck's head at Amboise. It bore antlers of enormous size, and for that reason had enjoyed Francis I's special protection while alive. By Sir John Reresby's time (1654) it had been ascertained that the buck was of English birth, having reached France by swimming the Channel; while thirty-three years later it had been dead for three hundred years and at the date of its death was nine hundred years old. These details need no explanation; any caretaker can equal them under pressure. The writer once asked the sextoness of the church where Spinoza lies buried how he came to be laid there considering he was not exactly orthodox: the answer was, without hesitation, that he became a Protestant before he died!

These secular relics cannot possibly be left without a digression concerning unicorn's horns, which were more prized than any other kind of exhibit. St. Mark's Treasury at Venice seems to have been the only museum that possessed more than one; it contained three. Dresden owned one, which hung by a golden chain; that at Fontainebleau, three yards high, was valued at one hundred thousand crowns. It was, however, a wise unicorn that knew its own horn: the Danish sailors kept their secrets quiet and prices high, the more easily since, owing to disasters, there were temporary cessations in the Greenland whale-fishery, of which unicorns' horns were a by-product, thus rendering the supply small and fluctuating. It was an open secret by this time that sea-unicorns existed, but the heraldic animal had the overwhelming advantage of support from Pliny, Aristotle, and the Bible and therefore fought for the "crowns" so to speak, with every success. It was not till this time, in 1603, that the unicorn was introduced into the arms of the King of England; and its horn was in the greater request because of its supposed quality of an antidote to poison. To the lore of this part of the subject Zinzerling makes an addition. At Tours lived a lawyer who had travelled in Spain and India, and had brought back three great rarities: "Rolandi gladium, Librum in pergameno Geographiæ et Hydrographiæ, membrum masculum Monocerotis majoris contra toxica efficaciæ quam cornu."

He did not see these personally, but mentions them because it would be a pity for any one to miss them for lack of a word or two from him. For himself, he could not find the lawyer, a kind of trouble from which these tourists ordinarily suffered, for it was part of their experience to make acquaintance with private collections. Not that there were any public ones to the extent we are accustomed to, except the churches, which, as picture galleries, had this advantage, that the pictures were seen in the setting for which they were designed. Practically all the official "treasuries" were only public to the extent that a remarkable country house like Compton Winyates is so now; yet on the other hand, and for that very reason, it was somewhat more customary for private collections to be accessible to strangers than is the case, probably, at present. What attracted the greatest number of visitors, however, was water-mechanisms.

Up till the beginning of the seventeenth century these were found at their best only in Italy; and of the Italian, those at Pratolino ranked first, belonging to the Duke of Florence, who was reputed to spend more on his water than on his wine. The invariable custom of secret devices for soaking the visitor as he sat down or walked about was there carried further, and with greater variety, than elsewhere. Besides, there was Fame blowing a trumpet; a peasant offering a drink to a tiger who swallows it and then looks all round; Syrinx beckons to Pan to pipe, whereupon Pan gets up from his seat, puts it aside, pipes, pulls his seat towards him and sits down again with a melancholy look because Syrinx has not rewarded him with a kiss. And so on, with a multitude of devices for making music and attracting attention, only equalled by those at the Villa d' Este at Tivoli.

It is noteworthy how long it took to introduce them into France, where everything Italian was fashionable. Marguerite de Valois speaks of those she saw in Flanders in 1577 in a way that implies no previous acquaintance with anything of the kind, but when peace was restored, we find St. Germain-en-Laye stocked with a poet who plays on a lyre, and with various animals which gather round him, and trees which bend down, as he plays; and the king passes by with his suite. On the other side of the Rhine ingenuity seems to have been devoted rather to clock-work. The clock at Strassburg, one of the chief marvels of Europe, was outdone by one in a private house at Augsburg: for besides displaying all the clever puerilities which the seventeenth century rejoiced in, it reproduced the movements and stations of the planets and the advent and effect of eclipses, all in their due time. Somewhat later, at Lübeck, the striking of the hour by the town clock was accompanied by the Virgin kissing her Baby, and St. Peter dropping his key and picking it up again, while at Hamburg could be seen a marvellous Annunciation, with a most gorgeous Gabriel and five attendant cherubim who flapped gilded wings, and a Blessed Virgin dressed in the French fashion who was discovered reading a book and ended by dropping a curtsey.

Of amusements which required people to take part in them, card games were rarely seen in Germany, and in Italy were banned as much by public opinion as by law, whereas in England they were an occupation rather than an amusement. So also with hawking and hunting. In six years abroad Moryson saw hawking but twice, once in Bohemia and once in Poland, and implies that in England it was common; while of hunting he definitely says, "England lacks not Actæons, eaten up by their own dogs." The same contrast he observes with regard to itinerant musicians and plays, of which latter he is sure that more are performed in London than in all the other parts of the world that he had visited put together. A variety of angling, on the other hand, he notes as peculiar to Italy: that with bait and hooks fastened to corks and held out of window for birds; while golf was only played in Scotland, Holland, and Naples; and the most frequently played game in Europe, pallone, was as unknown in Britain then as now. The piazza S. Stefano at Venice was reserved for pallone every Sunday evening, and in the disused papal palace at Avignon one room was given up to pallone and another to tennis, which came next in popularity, the chief centre being Paris. In 1577 it was credited with 1800 courts, but the Dutch ambassador resident there eighty years later had them counted and only discovered 118.

And so the list might go on and on and on – in all its seeming irrelevancy! And yet, when it is borne in mind that every detail is one that some tourist or other noticed, to the point of thinking it worth recording, a certain, at least symbolic, relevancy comes into view, even though it be nothing more vital than that of a 16th-century variety of subjective imbecility under the stimulus of a jog-trot. On the other hand, all this comes under the heading of

… thingsWhich cannot in their huge and proper lifeBe here presented.

So the scenery must be shifted.

PART II

THE UNVISITED NORTH

" … a few days earlier I had read certain News-Sheets printed here in Venice by these good fathers [the Jesuits], relating their progress in Muscovy, the conversion of a King in Africa, and so on. I said to myself, all right about Muscovy, it's a cold Country, far away, few go there – and few return…"

Sir Henry Wotton,56 1606.

Andrew Boorde has something to say about Iceland in his guide to Europe. He puts into the mouth of a native the words, —

"I am an Icelander, as brute as a beast,When I eat candle ends, I am at a feast."

And that is all they knew about Iceland. As a country with a political history and a literature it was no more present in their minds than as a holiday resort. Nor were any of the countries that bordered the Baltic, except on the South. But Danzig alone was enough to keep the Baltic a busy sea, and consequently Denmark was not as much ignored as would otherwise have happened; for both sides of the entrance to the Baltic belonged to the King of Denmark, whose extortions in the way of tolls kept his name before the public.

Norway was thus practically isolated from Europe. Sweden, however, during the Thirty Years' War, attracted some attention, partly on account of its share in the war, partly on account of the development of its silver mines. There is an interesting account of a visit to those at "Sylfbergen," twenty leagues from Stockholm, in 1667, which may serve as an indication of experiences that might have been met with at an earlier date. The visitor, a Frenchman,57 descended, half-naked, in half a cask, which was attached to a cable by three iron chains, accompanied by two workers whose grimness, flavour, and unpleasant personalities, gave him an attack of nerves. Among the miners he found French, Germans, English, Italians and Russians, all, as he says, digging their own graves, for the conditions of mining in those days was terrible. A traveller through Hungary in 161558 notes that the miners there could not work more than four hours at a stretch, and that few reached middle age, what with the number of casualties and the conditions of the mines. One result of this was that they usually married at fifteen. Yet weekly wages, after making allowance for the cheapness of living in Hungary, were equivalent to no more than twelve to fourteen shillings at present values. It was a most natural question at the time to ask whether, working as they did in the bowels of the earth, they ever came across demons. To which question a miner answered that sometimes they did, and on those occasions they appeared in the shape of little black boys, chattering, but doing no harm beyond blowing the lamps out.

Returning northwards and continuing the journey to the other side of the Baltic, the dominions of the Grand Duke of Muscovy would not be reached immediately. Riga, the port most usually aimed at, belonged to Poland; the alternative harbour of Revel to Sweden. The choice of Riga is another instance of the contemporary preference for travelling by water rather than by land. However far out of the straight line between Danzig and Moscow, it was both the nearest coast town to the latter and also at the mouth of the river, the Dwina, which is navigable for the longest distance west of Moscow. One other route remains, discovered by the English, left wholly to them and to the Dutch, and only used by them because of commercial quarrels with the rulers of the Baltic. This was the sea-voyage of about two months from London to Archangel, then up the Dwina and Suchona to Vologda, and thence by land to Moscow.

Moscow then possessed about forty thousand houses. It may be doubted if any town in Europe surpassed that number. Yet it was not size that caused going to Muscovy to be practically identical with going to Moscow, but the fact that the latter was the residence of a ruler whose despotism was so unlimited that every other settlement became insignificant compared with that where he dwelt. This is typified by the prominence given by all foreigners to the banquet they generally attended as the guests of the Tsar, a display of barbaric magnificence that must evidently have been one of the most striking sights of Europe. Unfortunately the magnificence was apt to stop short at the door of the banquet-hall. One Italian59 in particular could not forget leaving after three hours, picking his way through the outer rooms, pitch dark and strewn with courtiers in the weeping-stage of drunkenness, down the stairs. About twenty yards away from the foot of the stairs a crowd of servants were waiting with horses to take their masters home. Towards these they had to wade, knee-deep in mud, still in pitch-darkness, and so continue a good part of the way home, since no one was allowed to ride till he had passed out of the palace precincts.

Nowhere was this despotism more felt than in relation to travel: every foreigner was half a prisoner from the day he entered the kingdom to the day he left, even though he were an ambassador. The very Jesuits sent by the Pope, in 1581, at the Tsar's own request, to negotiate a peace between himself and the King of Poland were under surveillance to such an extent that they were not allowed to water their own horses. Neither was any subject allowed to leave the land: the penalty for unlicensed travel being death. It is clear that leave must have been more freely granted than one might imagine from the general statements of visitors, since Russian pilgrims and merchants are by no means uncommon, and indeed, at this period, Peter Mogila, Metropolitan of Kiev, and Boris Godunov, ruler at Moscow, endeavoured to encourage travel by Russians as a means of education.

Godunov's efforts, in fact, beginning as they did with his accession in 1586, synchronised with the growth of the same idea in England. But his efforts failed through being too far ahead of public opinion; those whom he sent stayed away permanently, those who stayed at home remained unconverted.60 Two instances of public opinion as regards foreigners may be quoted, both occurring on the direct road to Moscow at the very end of this period, during the whole of which the number of visitors goes on increasing. The first is the experience of some Dutchmen who came by invitation of the Tsar and consequently had a house commandeered for them. The wife of the owner, seeing no help was to be had from the local authorities, rushed to St. Nicholas and would, she believed, have obtained a miraculous expulsion of the visitors had not her husband tired of the length of her prayer and stopped it by force. The second is that of a Danish gentleman who, with his companions, was prevented from entering a village by bees which the peasants had irritated for that purpose.

So, too, with the Muscovites and travel on their own account. Whereas other Europeans only thought of dying when they travelled, the Muscovite only thought of travelling when he died. Then his friends shod him with a new pair of shoes for the long journey that he had to go, and put a letter in his hand to St. Nicholas, by way of passport, testifying that the bearer died a Russian of the Russians in the one true faith.

The distinctive characteristics of the people as seen by strangers were drunkenness, endurance of heat, cold, and torture, and slavish obedience to the Tsar. Drunkenness in particular. As the English verse-writer, Turberville, who went there, puts it, —

Drink is their whole desire, the pot is all their pride,The soberest head doth once a day stand needful of a guide.

The habit went the farther since it was encouraged by the government, for the recent taking-over of the drink-traffic by the State was but a reversion to the state of affairs in 1600, though then it was an offence against the State to urge a man to leave one of the State-owned taverns, even though he was pledging the clothes off his back: a common custom. At every season of public rejoicing in winter two or three hundred died in the streets of Moscow as they lay there naked and dead-drunk, and the stranger might see the bodies brought home by tens and twelves, half-eaten by dogs. One traveller tells a tale of a Muscovite whom he saw come out of a tavern in shirt and breeches only, meet a friend, return, and come out again with no shirt. The traveller, who knew Russian, expressed sympathy with him as if he had been robbed, but was answered, "No, it's the man at the bar and his wine that have brought me to this, but as my shirt's there my breeches may as well keep it company." And accordingly, a few minutes afterwards, he came out once more with nothing to cover him but a handful of flowers picked at the tavern-door!

There had been a Tsar who tried to repress drunkenness, but he became a dead failure in every sense of the phrase shortly before the above incident happened, and even during his lifetime achieved nothing more than preventing people going about the streets naked. Neither was it just the average man who could not endure life sober, but the priest frequently needed a lay-helper on either side of him in order to get through the marriage service, a result of the festivities preceding the wedding. And the women were no better than the men. When a Russian lady entertained her friends, it was etiquette to send round afterwards to know if they all got home safely. Yet one traveller unconsciously gives the Muscovite's own point of view: there was a quarter of Moscow known as the "drunken" quarter: that was where the foreign soldiers lodged.

The excessive misuse of tobacco was also bound to be noticed, considering that smoking became general more quickly there than anywhere else outside England and Turkey. But the Tsar who failed to check drunkenness succeeded against smoking, which he prohibited, under penalty of slitting the nostrils, in 1634, on the ground of it being a frequent cause of fires among the houses, all wooden ones, and of the unholy state of the Muscovite's breath when he addressed the saints.

Along with other accusations which the travellers have to lodge, such as that of a grossness of indecency without parallel in their experience, is hardly to be found one note of pleasure, except with regard to the charm of the Russian spring. It may be doubted if foreigners' opinions underwent much change until such writers as Turgenev compelled attention to the point of creating sympathy. But yet, if their tales be few and their enjoyment scanty, their records possess all the greater comparative value from the very fact of their fewness. That the pre-Christian Slav religion still remained in memory, if not in use, at Pskov as late as 1590 would probably never even have been guessed but for the remark of one Johann David Wunderer, who was there at that date, that he saw two stone statues there, one holding a cross, the other standing on a snake with a sword in one hand and fire in the other, idols, he was told, who were still known as "Ussladt" and "Corsa."61

PART III

THE MISUNDERSTOOD WEST

Et si pur effecti quasi miraculosi vi trovasse, come ja vi sono, V. S. non l'imputi al scriptore, ma a la variatione et deità de la natura.

Antonio da Beatis, 1518.

It will have been noticed that the tourist was nothing if not unsympathetic. Yet nowhere does this stand out so sharply as in regard to the two countries farthest west. So far as the Spanish peninsula was concerned, a reason may be sought in the route usually chosen, a route which treated the peninsula as part of "European Europe" and implied seeing a little of it, seeing that little in a one-sided way, and mistaking it for an epitome of the whole.

Starting from the southwest corner of France, the most direct way was taken for the Escorial and Madrid, whence the return journey led past Barcelona to Montserrat and so over the Pyrenees again to the southeast corner of France. The objective, of course, was the capital and the court. And it was taken for granted, here as elsewhere, that the other chief objects of interest were the towns, which claimed an even greater proportion of attention than in other countries, inasmuch as the hardships of travel in Spain were more trying to a foreigner than those experienced elsewhere, and his mental energies were often, in consequence, the less free for observation in Spain as long as he kept on the move. Now it unfortunately happened that the seamy side of Spanish life thrust itself to the front in undue proportion in the towns. Moreover, the French districts which lay nearest to Spain were those whose characteristics contrasted most favourably as against those of the Spanish districts that lay nearest to France. The liveliness and gaiety of the Bayonnais, playing bowls all day on the carefully levelled, sanded court between his house and the street, was thrown into relief by the sternness of the Pyrenees and the poverty and gloom of the Vizcaino.

The injustice done by these first impressions was deepened by almost all that caught the attention on a journey like that just outlined, whatever the momentary point of view, whether historical, geographical, social, superficial, or political, – especially political.

The Spanish king was looked on as the most powerful Christian monarch of the time, in prestige, in financial resources, and as the head of an empire whose limits were the more impressive for being mathematicians' lines imagined in the midst of the Unexplored. It was natural, then, to consider his capital the centre of each, as well as of all, of his dominions, and as the Holy of Holies of European kingship; and this, too, at a date when monarchical ideals were so strong that a highly respectable middle-class man like William Camden could allude to Simon de Montfort, who figures in modern school-books as the ever-glorious founder of "representative" government, as – "our Catiline."62 In addition, the annexation of Portugal in 1580, and its revolt in 1640, accentuate such ideas more in this period than in any other as the only one during which the whole peninsula was under one king.

Neither was this illusion of solidarity merely a traveller's mirage which those on the spot would rectify. Philip II's people loved to have it so; witness one of Sancho Panza's favourite proverbs: "Un rey, Una fe, Una ley"; and how was the tourist to know that the Spaniard did not appreciate his differentiation between ideals and facts? The voice of Sancho Panza is, of course, the voice of Castile, but then Castile has always the monopoly of forming foreign, and leading Spanish, opinion on things Spanish.

The choice of route, then, predetermined by the usual considerations, applicable only to other countries, failed to do justice to Spain. Yet it was accompanied by these special assumptions, as regards political supremacy, at the back of the tourist's mind, no evidence in favour of which was forthcoming; at least, no evidence of a kind which he came prepared to recognise as such. On the contrary, he could not avoid being struck by the insignificance of Spanish buildings, especially, curiously enough, at Madrid itself, where the houses were mostly of one story; a result of it being necessary to obtain a license from the King for anything higher, the conditions imposed by which license, such as that of housing ambassadors in the second story, would prove too burdensome. This particular impression was deepened in the latter half of the period by the linen window-panes, which made the interiors seem gloomy at a date when the use of glass in windows was spreading in the countries which the visitor had come from and had passed through. And so with many other matters, until one Dutchman who had travelled viâ Italy, after being taken to see a water-mill as something quite out of the common, makes the general deduction: "What is very common elsewhere, here often passes for miraculous."

Furthermore, as has been said, there were the historical illusions, too, which would be shaken. What Montaigne experienced at Venice took place on a larger scale in the minds of all who visited Spain. The deeper the previous study, the deeper the disappointment; but the latter was felt nevertheless by him in whom it was unconscious; and in both cases the recovery was slower than at Venice where all that was visible was so near. In fact, it is clear enough that with most a recovery never happened.

The histories they depended on were a variety of heroic fiction whose theory of causation consisted of immediate causes and God. National limitations only appeared, therefore, in so far as they had contributed to national achievements. But to the tourist these limitations, and even the qualities which were simply strange to him, stood out as defects, and the necessary minutiæ of daily life as the unworthy preoccupations of degenerate descendants; while the people, accordingly, whose ancestors were represented as having done nothing but conquer for centuries, showed up as ordinary human beings, muddling along in the way customary among one's own countrymen. Yet successes of Spanish diplomacy were so recent, and the supremacy of Spanish infantry so terribly obvious, that strangers could not account for all this disillusion by assuming degeneration to be the sole reason; while it was likewise too sudden for them to see in it nothing but an example of the falsification of proportions inherent in all knowledge drawn from books or other second-hand sources. Their attitude to Spain when they revised their journals was thus mystification rather than contempt or disgust, though both the latter are usually present.