Old Tavern Signs Part 13

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cavallo Bianco, Borgo San Dalmazzo, Italy]

CHAPTER XII

THE ENEMIES OF THE SIGN AND ITS END

"Ne songez pas meme a reformer les enseignes d'une ville!"

In mediaeval times the signs were not only charming or pious decorations of the snug narrow streets, but they were also very useful and practical guides for the wayfarer through the labyrinth of crooked lanes. Even the uneducated understood their pictorial language like ill.u.s.trations in a book which give even to a child a certain clue to its meaning. For this very reason the learned Sebastian Brant decorated his edition of Virgil of 1522 with elaborate pictures,--_expolitissimis figuris atque imaginibus nuper per Sebastianum Brant superadditis_,--firmly hoping that now even the unlearned would easily understand the beauties of his beloved author: "_Nec minus indoctus perlegere illa potest_." While the learned men in general continued to despise pictures in their editions of the cla.s.sics, the first popular books tried through their wood-cuts to speak to the fancy of the common people and thus win their applause.

Just as these pictures in the old books, so the signs in the streets spoke to the _indoctus_. Therefore, if somebody wished to send a letter to his banker in Fleet Street, London, he needed only to tell his messenger that it was at the "Three Squirrels," and he was sure that even the greatest numskull could find it. Unfortunately the owners of this old banking-house have withdrawn the sign, so it took me quite a while before I found it safely hung up on a modern iron arm in the office of Messrs. Barclay & Co., No. 19, Fleet Street. The characteristic interpretation of the sign, given to me by the banker himself, was: "May you never want a nut to crack."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THREESQUIRRELSLONDON]

In the old times the streets were not yet numbered, as Macaulay tells us, not even at the end of the seventeenth century. "There would indeed have been little advantage in numbering them; for of the coachmen, chairmen, porters, and errand-boys of London, a very small proportion could read.... The shops were therefore distinguished by painted signs, which gave a gay and grotesque aspect to the streets.

The walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through an endless succession of Saracens' Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears, and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer required for the direction of the common people." As a useful guide to find one's way the sign was expressly recognized by the state authorities; so in a privilege granted by Charles I to the inhabitants of London to hang out signs "for the better finding out such citizens' dwellings, shops, arts, or occupations." For the landlords, it was even made obligatory so as to facilitate the police in determining if the laws concerning the liquor trade were properly observed. An Act of Parliament in the reign of Henry VI forced the brewers to hang out signs and an ordinance of Louis XIV for Paris distinctly demands: "Pour donner a connoitre les lieux ou se vendent les vins en detail et si les reglements y sont observez, nul ne pourra tenir taverne en cette dite ville et faubourgs sans mettre enseigne et bouchon." Similar regulations we find in Switzerland; as, for instance, in Maienfeld where the city fathers punished every one who kept tavern without an "open sign." Through such restrictions they hoped to stop the compet.i.tion of the simple burgher, "the temporary landlord," who tried to sell the surplus product of his own vineyard, and thus to secure the patronage of all thirsty souls for the legal "Schildwirt," the landlord with a sign, even if he lived only from the "bouchon" or cork and could not accommodate guests overnight.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ZUR GLOCKE WINNENDEN]

If they had not a sign out, how could the watchman, after the night-bell--sometimes called "Lumpenglocke" in Germany--had sounded, investigate properly if the tavern-keepers really stopped to furnish the guests with new wine? And was it not the duty of the city fathers to look after the morals of their subjects and to teach them the wisdom of the German saying:--

"Er hat nicht wol getrunken, der sich ubertrinket.

Wie ziemet das biderbem Mann, daz ihm die Zunge hinket?"

So the sign was in many ways a useful inst.i.tution topographically, politically, and morally. Its merits are not yet exhausted: it was a good weather prophet, too. When the old iron things began to moan and to squeak, storm and rain surely were not far, as an English rhyme whimsically says:--

"But when the swinging signs your ears offend With creaking noise, then rainy floods impend."

How was it possible, then, that such an inst.i.tution as our amiable sign, approved and furthered by the State, such a popular, often artistically charming creation, could have enemies? The first reason, as we have seen in our chapter on "Religious Signs," was that pious signs were used by impious innkeepers or that religious themes were represented in a manner insulting to all religious feeling. No wonder, if a French landlord called his tavern "Au sermon," and ill.u.s.trated the word "sermon" by a deer (_cerf_) and a mountain (_mont_), that the really pious citizen protested and exclaimed indignantly: "Ne devrait-on pas cond.a.m.ner a une grosse amende un miserable cabaretier qui met a son enseigne un cerf et un mont pour faire une ridicule equivoque a sermon? Ce qui autorise des ivrognes a dire qu'ils vont tous les jours au sermon ou qu'ils en viennent."

Surely the really pious signs subsisted beside their frivolous brothers, as the English doctor-sign of 1623, beautifully carved and gilded and now a treasure of a collector, proves by its inscription: "Altissimus creavit de terra medicynam et vir prudens non abhorrebit illam." Curiously enough, the schoolmaster souls took offense at the sign's absurd combinations, its lack of "sound literature and good sense," its impossible orthography and ridiculous mottoes, which, by the way, were added only later to the pictures. All this was extremely shocking to these people and many of them thought it a n.o.ble life-task to reform the signs. One of these reformers developed his programme in one of the oldest English periodicals, "The Spectator," in an April number of the year 1710, fully aware of attempting an herculean labor.

Combinations, such as "Fox and Goose," he deigns to admit; but what sense, asks he, in logical indignation, "is in such absurdities as 'Fox and the Seven Stars,' or worse still, in the 'Three Nuns and a Hare'?" Moliere, in "Les Facheux," has ridiculed these sign reformers, a species not unknown in Paris either, in the person of Monsieur Caritides, who humbly solicited Louis XIV to invest him with the position of a General Sign Controller. His pet.i.tion reads, in Moliere's inimitable French, as follows:--

_Sire_:

Votre tres-humble, tres-obeissant, tres-fidele et tres savant sujet et serviteur Caritides, Francais de nation, Grec de profession, ayant considere les grands et notables abus qui se commettent aux inscriptions des enseignes des maisons boutiques, cabarets, jeux de boule et autres lieux de votre bonne ville de Paris, en ce que certains ignorants, compositeurs des dites inscriptions, renversent, par une barbare, pernicieuse et detestable orthographe, toute sorte de sens et de raison, sans aucun regard d'etymologie, a.n.a.logie, energie ni allegorie quelconque au grand scandale de la republique des lettres et de la nation Francaise, qui se decrie et deshonore, par les dits abus et fautes grossieres, envers les etrangers, et notamment envers les Allemands, curieux lecteurs et inspecteurs des dites inscriptions ... supplie humblement Votre Majeste de creer, pour le bien de son etat et la gloire de son empire une charge de controleur, intendant-correcteur, reviseur et restaurateur general des dites inscriptions et d'icelle honorer le suppliant....

[Ill.u.s.tration: ZUM SCHLuSSEL BOZEN.]

In all impartiality we have to admit that really the sign lost by and by its usefulness as a street-guide, since the trades and crafts occupying a house changed often, while the old signs, especially those which formed a part of its architecture, remained unchanged, thus producing the most ridiculous contradictions against which the above-mentioned reformer of "The Spectator" protested not without reason, saying: "A cook should not live at 'The Boot' nor a shoemaker at 'The Roasted Pig.'"

But the most ruthless enemy of the sign became the police itself, who once protected it. As early as the year 1419 we find an English police regulation, threatening with a fine of forty pence--in those days quite a sum--"that no one in future should have a stake bearing either his sign or leaves, extending or lying over the King's highway, of greater length than seven feet at most." As every innkeeper tried to outdo the other by the size and the magnificence of his sign, one arrived finally at absurdly great constructions which really hampered the traffic: as in England, where we find wrought-iron signs which, like arches of triumph, reached from one side of the street to the other. A precious old book, "A Vademec.u.m for Malt-Worms" (British Museum), in a quaint woodcut, "The Dog in Sh.o.r.editch," gives us a picture of such a sign monument. To the artist's eyes they were charming things, combining happily great lanterns with the sign into a harmony which we so often find lacking in modern days, where beautiful old signs through the addition of ugly modern lamps lose all their artistic charm of yore.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THEDOGINSh.o.r.eDITCH]

Mercier's "Tableau de Paris" tells us of ridiculously great signs: spurs as large as a wheel, gloves big enough to house a three-year-old babe, and the like. In old Germany, too, the sight of the giant signs, as Victor Hugo describes them from Frankfurt-on-the-Main, must have been fantastic enough. "Under the t.i.tanic weight of these sign monuments caryatides are bowed down in all positions of rage, pain, and fatigue." Some of them carry an impudent bronze negro in a gilded tin mantle; others an enormous Roman emperor--a monolith of twenty feet in height--"dans toute la pompe du costume de Louis XIV avec sa grande perruque, son ample manteau, son fauteuil, son estrade, sa credence ou est sa couronne, son dais a pentes decoupees et a vastes draperies."

Especially objectionable to the police in London were those signs that reached far out over the street and, shaken by the wind, const.i.tuted a real danger to the pa.s.ser-by. So the fall of such a huge inn sign in Fleet Street, London, in 1718, caused the death of two ladies, a court jeweler, and a cobbler. Similar dangers threatening an innocent public were vividly set forth in a Parisian police ordinance in 1761, in an amusing bureaucratic French: "Les enseignes saillantes faisaient paraitre les rues plus etroites et dans les rues commercantes elles nuisaient considerablement aux vues des premiers etages, et meme a la clarte des laternes, en occasionnant des...o...b..es prejudiciables a la surete publique; elles formaient un peril perpetuellement imminent sur la tete des pa.s.sants, tant par l'inattention des proprietaires et des locataires sur la vetuste des enseignes ou des potences, qui en ont souvent abattu plusieurs et cause les accidents les plus funestes."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE QUEENIN EXETER]

If the police had contented itself in eliminating the offensive or really dangerous signs, n.o.body could have blamed it. Unfortunately it was much more aggressive, especially in France, the paradise of the "ronds de cuir," and attempted to cut down every individual or artistic invention on the part of the signmakers. We are, therefore, not surprised to find so little in modern France that could remind us of the old abundance. The officials of the Revolution proved themselves just as narrow-minded as those of royal times. Both, animated by the bureaucratic instinct to confine everything to narrow rules, tried to suppress all individual poetical invention that once was the charm of the sign. A royal edict of 1763 prescribes a very uninteresting design as a binding model for all signs, giving at the same time the exact measurements of the same and warning the public not to dare to make any changes on the "dessein cy-dessus marque." It was a poor consolation for the owners of beautiful old signs that the same edict granted them the great privilege of giving their art-treasures in account as old iron--"quinze deniers la livre"--when paying the bill for the new sign patented by the State. Still more radically acted the men of the Revolution, who sincerely hated the signs, with their crowns and heraldry, as abominable "marques du despotisme." They made short work, and simply ordered: "Toutes les enseignes qui portent des signes de royalisme, feodalite et de superst.i.tion seront renouvelees et remplacees par des signes republicains: les enseignes ne seront plus saillantes mais simplement peintes sur les murs des maisons."

Another danger for the sign resulted from the attempt to number the houses of which we hear, perhaps for the first time in France, as early as 1512. This first attempt failed, but in the enlightened eighteenth century the new and certainly more reasonable method of distinguishing a house from its neighbor decidedly gained ground. In 1805 it was made obligatory by the Parisian police. A similar development we observe in England. n.o.body will deny the practical progress and no business man would like to return to the old times when an English bookseller, for instance, had to give the address of his shop in the following way: "Over against the Royal Exchange at the Sugar Loaf next Temple Bar." In Germany, where the centralization in large capitals made slower progress and a mult.i.tude of small social and political centers kept their own, the rational inst.i.tution of numbering the houses, so necessary in great cities like Paris or London, was not accepted so quickly. In 1802 Dresden, for instance, had not even on the street corners signs indicating their names; "an inst.i.tution that facilitates topography and topography facilitates business," remarks a judicious contemporary. Here in Germany the cold number did not conquer so easily over the poetical warmth of the dear old sign. In the quiet, imperial towns of the south the artistic sign of the Rococo period and the Empire style, unpersecuted and unmolested, keep their place in the sun up to the present day in spite of some ill-advised landlords who thought it necessary to hide the humble oxen or lamb in the garret and call their house by some new pretentious French name like "Hotel de l'Europe" or the like.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Stuttgart]

In our own enlightened times of general school education, n.o.body needs any more the sign as a guide through even the most modest town.

Everywhere the number has taken its place for this purpose and we regret to admit for the history of the sign too the truth of Darwin's words: "Progress in history means the decline of phantasy and the advance of thought."

ENVOY AND THE MORAL?

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sonne Neckarsulm, Wurttemberg]

ENVOY AND THE MORAL?

"I am here in a strange land and have perhaps the seat of honor at table in this inn; but the man down there on the end has just as good a right here and there as I, since we are both here only guests."

MARTIN LUTHER: Sermons. Jubilate, 1542.

It is not very much the fashion in these modern days to ask for the moral meaning of things, but we are old-fashioned enough to hold with those who believe that things have not only a soul, but that they give us a lesson too in revealing their soul to us, "la lecon des choses,"

as the French, whom we are inclined to call condescendingly the immoral French, call it. Old Frederic the Great in his famous interview with the poet Gellert in Leipzig, after hearing from him one of his fables "The Painter of Athens," did not fail to ask the all-important question: "And the Moral?"

Many a reader who has followed us but hesitatingly into regions that seemed to him at the beginning of doubtful moral value, will be perhaps surprised to see us conclude our investigations with this same question. But I am sure we will do it with good profit, since in doing so we shall have the chance to hear many a sermon of Doctor Martinus Luther, whose moral force we children of the twentieth century would love to dig out of his writings if its gold did not seem to us so hopelessly buried under the sand of antiquated dogmatical quarrels.

The tavern sign has its moral lesson for all concerned, guests and landlords alike. From its modest and unknown creators the modern artist too may receive many a valuable inspiration. When the poet Seume, in December, 1801, started from Grimma in Saxony on his long pilgrimage to Syracuse, his way seems to have led him soon to a knightly George, who fights the dragon in all Christian lands, over many a tavern door for centuries and whom Shakespeare celebrated in the verses:--

"St. George that swindg'ed the Dragon, and e'er since Sits on his horseback at mine hostess' door."

Looking at the great green beast our romantic pilgrim prayed: "May heaven grant me honest, friendly landlords and polite guardians at the city gates from Leipzig to Syracuse!" In those old days when the gate was dangerously near the tower and its dungeon, it was indeed of the highest importance to find polite officials at the city gates; just as we might sometimes pray to-day for polite customs officials, the successors of the old grumpy watchmen who guarded the city entrance and wrote the newcomer's name in their big books. Still more important, too, is it for the modern traveler to find friendly landlords. They seem as in the old days a gift from heaven, for which we must pray and which we cannot buy. Truly many travelers seem to think a full purse buys everything, but they forget the old truth which Charles Wagner, in his book "La vie simple," has expressed rightly in the following sentence: "Le travail d'un homme n'est pas une marchandise au meme t.i.tre qu'un sac de ble ou un quintal de charbon. Il entre dans ce travail des elements qu'on ne peut evaluer en monnaie." And just these fine elements in the work of a landlord and his servants which we cannot weigh or pay for make the simplest inn so homelike and cozy. A good landlord does not need to fear even Death, who seems to seize only the dishonest one, if we believe the author of a "Dance of Death" from the fifteenth century in the Stuttgarter Hofbibliothek. In a few forceful lines the old artist traces the figure of the bad landlord sitting behind his counter and trying to win the good favors of the uncanny musician Death, by offering him a great stein of beer and humbly confessing: "Against G.o.d and against law I sought to win earthly goods, taking money unjustly from knights and peasants as a robber does. Oh, if I only should not die now, I could hope to improve and to win grace."

Many a landlord would gladly follow the example of Abraham if only his guests would try to learn a little from the angels. But how often come to him such wild fellows who claim every good thing he has in cellar and kitchen, and when it comes to pay take French leave.

It is well known that, as the old Bible saying goes, the sun is shining over good and bad, over just and unjust, but Luther thought he does not do it gladly. Perhaps the Doctor, who knew so many roads from his own experience, even thought of the golden tavern sun when he said: "The sun would prefer that all the bad fellows should get not a single little gleam from him and it is a great grief and cross to him that he must shine over them, wherefore he sighs and moans."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ZUR SONNE WINNENDEN]

n.o.body has admonished us so heartily as Doctor Martinus to hold ourselves as pious guests in this inn of Life, to live honestly and decently in it as it becomes a guest. "If you wish to be a guest, be peaceful and behave yourself as a Christian; otherwise they will soon show you the way to the tower." It is characteristic for Luther to remind the unruly guest of the tower, i.e., the prison. In other connections too he readily refers to Master John the Hangman who is to his mind a very useful, nay, even charitable man.