Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume I Part 1

Seeing Europe with Famous Authors.

Volume I.

by Various.

Vol. I

Great Britain And Ireland

Part One

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

A two-fold purpose has been kept in view during the preparation of these volumes--on the one-hand, to refresh the memories and, if possible, to enlarge the knowledge, of readers who have already visited Europe; on the other, to provide something in the nature of a subst.i.tute for those who have not yet done so, and to inspire them with new and stronger ambitions to make the trip.

Readers of the first cla.s.s will perhaps find matter here which is new to them--at least some of it; and in any case should not regret an opportunity again to see standard descriptions of world-famed scenes and historic monuments. Of the other cla.s.s, it may be said that, in any profitable trip to Europe, an indispensable thing is to go there possest of a large stock of historical knowledge, not to say with some distinct understanding of the profound significance to our American civilization, past, present, and future, of the things to be seen there. As has so often been said, one finds in Europe what one takes there--that is, we recognize there exactly those things which we have learned to understand at home.

Without an equipment of this kind, the trip will mean little more than a sea-voyage, good or bad, a few rides on railroads somewhat different from our own, meals and beds in hotels not quite like ours, and opportunities to shop in places where a few real novelties may be found if one searches for them long enough.

No sooner has an American tourist found himself on board a ship, bound for Europe, than he is conscious of a social system quite unlike the one in which he was born and reared. On French ships he may well think himself already in France. The manners of sailors, no less than those of officers, proclaim it, the furniture proclaims it, and so do woodwork, wall decorations, the dinner gong (which seems to have come out of a chateau in old Touraine), and the free wine at every meal. The same is quite as true of ships bound for English and German ports; on these are splendid order, sober taste, efficiency in servants, and calls for dinner that start reminiscences of hunting horns.

The order and system impress one everywhere on these ships. Things are all in their proper place, employees are at their proper posts, doing their work, or alert to do it when the need comes. Here the utmost quiet prevails. Each part of the great organization is so well adjusted to other parts, that the system operates noiselessly, without confusion, and with never a failure of cooperation at any point. So long as the voyage lasts, impressions of a perfected system drive themselves into one's consciousness.

After one goes ash.o.r.e, and as long as he remains in Europe, that well ordered state will impress, delight and comfort him. Possibly he will contrast it with his own country's more hurried, less firmly controlled ways, but once he reflects on causes, he will perceive that the ways of Europe are products of a civilization long since settled, and already ancient, while the hurried and more thoughtless methods at home are concomitants of a civilization still too young, too ambitious, and too successful to bear the curbs and restraints which make good manners and good order possible among all cla.s.ses. It is from fine examples in these social matters, no less than from visits to historic places, that the observing and thoughtful tourist derives benefit from a European tour.

The literature of travel in Europe makes in itself a considerable library.

Those who have contributed to it are, in literary quality, of many kinds and various degrees of excellence. It is not now so true as it once was that our best writers write for the benefit of tourists. If they do, it is to compile guide-books and describe automobile trips. In any search for adequate descriptions of scenes and places, we can not long depend on present-day writers, but must hark back to those of the last century.

There we shall find Washington Irving's pen busily at work for us, and the pens of others, who make up a n.o.ble company. The writings of these are still fresh and they fit our purposes as no others do.

Fortunately for us, the things in Europe that really count for the cultivated traveler do not change with the pa.s.sing of years or centuries.

The experience which Goethe had in visiting the crater of Vesuvius in 1787 is just about such as an American from Kansas City, or Cripple Creek, would have in 1914. In the old Papal Palace of Avignon, d.i.c.kens, seventy years ago, saw essentially the same things that a keen-eyed American tourist of today would see. When Irving, more than a century ago, made his famous pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey, he saw about everything that a pilgrim from Oklahoma would see today.

It is believed that these volumes, alike in their form and contents, present a ma.s.s of selected literature such as has not been before offered to readers at one time and in one place.

FRANCIS W. HALSEY.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLS. I AND II

Great Britain and Ireland

The tourist who has embarked for the British Isles lands usually at Liverpool, Fishguard, or Plymouth, whence a special steamer-train takes him in a few hours to London. In landing at Plymouth, he has pa.s.sed, outside the harbor, Eddystone, most famous of lighthouses, and has seen waters in which Drake overthrew the Armada of Philip II.

Once the tourist leaves the ship he is conscious of a new environment.

Aboard the tender (if there be one) he will feel this, in the custom house formalities, when riding on the steamer-train, on stepping to the station platform at his destination, when riding in the tidy taxicab, at the door and in the office of his hotel, in his well-ordered bedroom, and at his initial meal. First of all, he will appreciate the tranquility, the un.o.btrusiveness, the complete efficiency, with which service is rendered him by those employed to render it.

When Lord Nelson, before beginning the battle of Trafalgar, said to his officers and sailors that England expected "every man to do his duty," the remark was merely one of friendly encouragement and sympathy, rather than of stern discipline, because every man on board that fleet of ships already expected to do his duty. Life in England is a school in which doing one's duty becomes a fundamental condition of staying "in the game."

Not alone sailors and soldiers know this, and adjust their lives to it, but all cla.s.ses of public and domestic servants--indeed, all men are subject to it, whether servants or barristers, lawmakers or kings.

Emerging from his hotel for a walk in the street, the tourist, even tho his visit be not the first, will note the ancient look of things. Here are buildings that have survived for two, or even five, hundred years, and yet they are still found fit for the purposes to which they are put. Few buildings are tall, the "skysc.r.a.per" being undiscoverable. On great and crowded thoroughfares one may find buildings in plenty that have only two, or at most three, stories, and their windows small, with panes of gla.s.s scarcely more than eight by ten. The great wall ma.s.s and dome of St.

Paul's, the roof and towers of Westminster Abbey, unlike the lone spire of old Trinity in New York, still rise above all the buildings around them as far as the eye can reach, just about as they did in the days of Sir Christopher Wren.

Leaving a great thoroughfare for a side street, a stone's throw may bring one to a friend's office, in one of those little squares so common in the older parts of London. How ancient all things here may seem to him, the very street doorway an antiquity, and so the fireplace within, the hinges and handles of the doors. From some upper rear window he may look out on an extension roof of solid lead, that has survived, sound and good, after the storms of several generations, and beyond may look into an ancient burial ground, or down upon the gra.s.s-plots and ample walks around a church (perchance the Temple Church), and again may see below him the tomb of Oliver Goldsmith.

In America we look for antiquities to Boston, with her Long Wharf, or Faneuil Hall; to New York, with her Fraunccs Tavern and Van Cortlandt Manor House; to Jamestown with her lone, crumbling church tower; to the Pacific coast with her Franciscan mission houses; to St. Augustine with her Spanish gates; but all these are young and blushing things compared with the historic places of the British Isles. None of them, save one, is of greater age than a century and a half. Even the exception (St.

Augustine) is a child in arms compared with Westminster Hall, the Tower of London, St. Martin's of Canterbury, the ruined abbey of Glas...o...b..ry, the remains of churches on the island of Iona, or the oldest ruins found in Ireland.

What to an American is ancient history, to an Englishman is an affair of scarcely more than yesterday. As Goldwin Smith has said, the Revolution of 1776 is to an American what the Norman conquest is to an Englishman--the event on which to found a claim of ancestral distinction. More than seven hundred years divide these two events. With the Revolution, our history as a nation began; before that we were a group of colonies, each a part of the British Empire. We fought single-handed with Indians, it is true, and we cooperated with the mother country in wresting the continent from the French, but all this history, in a technical sense, is English history rather than the history of the United States.

Our Revolution occurred in the reign of the Third George; back of it runs a line of other Hanoverian kings, of Stuart kings, of Tudor kings, of Plantagenet kings, of Norman kings, of Saxon kings, of Roman governors, of Briton kings and queens, of Scottish tribal heads and kings, of ancient Irish kings. Long before Caesar landed in Kent, inhabitants of England had erected forts, constructed war chariots, and reared temples of worship, of which a notable example still survives on Salisbury Plain. So had the Picts and Scots of Caledonia reared strongholds and used war chariots, and so had Celts erected temples of worship in Ireland, and Phoenicians had mined tin in Cornwall. When Cavaliers were founding a commonwealth at Jamestown and the Puritans one on Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, the British Isles were six hundred years away from the Norman conquest, the Reformation of the English church had been effected, Chaucer had written his "Tales,"

Bacon his "Essays," and Shakespeare all but a few of his "Plays."

Of the many races to whom belong these storied annals--Briton, Pict, Scot, Saxon, Dane, Celt, Norman--we of America, whose ancestral lines run back to those islands, are the far-descended children, heirs actual. Our history, as a civilized people, began not in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, not at Jamestown, not at Plymouth Rock, but there in the northeastern Atlantic, in lands now acknowledging the sway of the Parliament of Westminster, and where, as with us, the speech of all is English. Not alone do we share that speech with them, but that matchless literature, also English, and more than that, racial customs, laws and manners, of which many are as old as the Norman conquest, while others, for aught we know, are survivals from an age when human sacrifices were made around the monoliths of Stonehenge.

It is not in lands such as these that any real American can ever feel himself a stranger. There lies for so many of us the ancestral home--in that "land of just and of old renown," that "royal throne of kings," that "precious stone set in the silver sea," that "dear, dear land, dear for her reputation through the world."

F.W.H.

I

LONDON

A GENERAL SKETCH [Footnote: From articles written for the Toronto "Week."

Afterward (1888) issued by The Macmillan Company in the volume ent.i.tled "The Trip to England."]

BY GOLDWIN SMITH

The huge city perhaps never imprest the imagination more than when approaching it by night on the top of a coach you saw its numberless lights flaring, as Tennyson says, "like a dreary dawn." The most impressive approach is now by the river through the infinitude of docks, quays, and shipping. London is not a city, but a province of brick and stone. Hardly even from the top of St. Paul's or of the Monument can anything like a view of the city as a whole be obtained.

It is indispensable, however, to make one or the other of these ascents when a clear day can be found, not so much because the view is fine, as because you will get a sensation of vastness and mult.i.tude not easily to be forgotten. There is, or was not long ago, a point on the ridge which connects Hampstead with Highgate from which, as you looked over London to the Surrey Hills beyond, the modern Babylon presented something like the aspect of a city. The ancient Babylon may have vied with London in circ.u.mference, but the greater part of its area was occupied by open s.p.a.ces; the modern Babylon is a dense ma.s.s of humanity....

The Empire and the commercial relations of England draw representatives of trading committees or subject races from all parts of the globe, and the faces and costumes of the Hindu, the Pa.r.s.ee, the Lascar and the ubiquitous Chinaman mingle in the motley crowd with the merchants of Europe and America. The streets of London are, in this respect, to the modern what the great Palace of Tyre must have been to the ancient world. But pile Carthage on Tyre, Venice on Carthage, Amsterdam on Venice, and you will not make the equal, or anything near the equal, of London.

Here is the great mart of the world, to which the best and richest products are brought from every land and clime, so that if you have put money in your purse you may command every object of utility or fancy which grows or is made anywhere without going beyond the circuit of the great cosmopolitan city. Parisian, German, Russian, Hindu, j.a.panese, Chinese industry is as much at your service here, if you have the all-compelling talisman in your pocket, as in Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Benares, Yokohama, or Peking. That London is the great distributing center of the world is shown by the fleets of the carrying trade of which the countless masts rise along her wharves and in her docks. She is also the bank of the world. But we are reminded of the vicissitudes of commerce and the precarious tenure by which its empire is held when we consider that the bank of the world in the middle of the last century was Amsterdam.

The first and perhaps the greatest marvel of London is the commissariat.

How can the five millions be regularly supplied with food, and everything needful to life, even with such things as milk and those kinds of fruits which can hardly be left beyond a day? Here again we see reason for excepting to the sweeping jeremiads of cynicism, and concluding that tho there may be fraud and scamping in the industrial world, genuine production, faithful service, disciplined energy, and skill in organization, can not wholly have departed from the earth. London is not only well fed, but well supplied with water and well drained. Vast and densely peopled as it is, it is a healthy city. Yet the limit of practical extension seems to be nearly reached. It becomes a question how the increasing mult.i.tude shall be supplied not only with food and water, but with air.

The East of London, which is the old city, is, as all know, the business quarter. Let the worshiper of Mammon when he sets foot in Lombard Street adore his divinity, of all whose temples this is the richest and the most famous. Note the throng incessantly threading those narrow and tortuous streets. Nowhere are the faces so eager or the steps so hurried, except perhaps in the business quarter of New York. Commerce has still its center here; but the old social and civic life of the city has fled. What once were the dwellings of the merchants of London are now vast collections of offices. The merchants dwell in the mansions of the West End, their clerks in villas and boxes without number, to which when their offices close they are taken by the suburban railways. On Sunday a more than Sabbath stillness reigns in those streets, while in the churches, the monuments of Wren's architectural genius which in Wren's day were so crowded, the clergyman sleepily performs the service to a congregation which you may count upon your fingers.

It is worth while to visit the city on a Sunday. Here and there, in a back street, may still be seen what was once the mansion of a merchant prince, ample and stately, with the rooms which in former days displayed the pride of commercial wealth and resounded with the festivities of the olden time; now the sound of the pen alone is heard. These and other relics of former days are fast disappearing before the march of improvement, which is driving straight new streets through the antique labyrinth. Some of the old thoroughfares as well as the old names remain. There is Cheapside, along which, through the changeful ages, so varied a procession of history has swept. There is Fleet Street, close to which, in Bolt Court, Johnson lived, and which he preferred, or affected to prefer, to the finest scenes of nature. Temple Bar, once grimly garnished with the heads of traitors, has been numbered with the things of the past, after furnishing Mr.

Bright, by the manner in which the omnibuses were jammed in it, with a vivid simile for a legislative deadlock....

Society has migrated to the Westward, leaving far behind the ancient abodes of aristocracy, the Strand, where once stood a long line of patrician dwellings, Great Queen Street, where Shaftesbury's house may still be seen; Lincoln's Inn Fields, where, in the time of George II, the Duke of Newcastle held his levee of office-seekers, and Russell Square, now reduced to a sort of dowager gentility. Hereditary mansions, too ancient and magnificent to be deserted, such as Norfolk House, Spencer House and Lansdowne House, stayed the westward course of aristocracy at St. James's Square and Street, Piccadilly, and Mayfair; but the general tide of fashion has swept far beyond.