Touring in 1600. Bates Ernest Stuart
printing. Morelli, in his essay12 on little-known Venetian travellers, quotes Giosaffate Barbaro as writing in 1487, "I have experienced and seen much that would probably be accounted rubbish by those who have, so to speak, never been outside Venice, by reason that such things are not customary there. And this has been the chief reason for my never having cared to write of what I have seen, nor even to speak much thereof." Yet by 1600 there were probably few countries in Europe in which recent accounts of the regions visited by Barbaro could not be read in the vernacular, accounts out of which some one expected to see a profit. Indications, on the contrary, of enormous numbers leaving home may be found in this one fact; that the names are known of twelve hundred Germans who passed beyond the limits of civilised Christendom during the sixteenth century.13 What must then be the number of Europeans, ascertainable and otherwise, who were going about Europe then?
As regards the Average Tourist, however, we are not left to our imagination. He is often to be found in person, young, rich, abroad to learn. Yet – why should he, rather than his contemporaries of the lower classes, need teaching? The answer will come of its own accord if we stop to consider the similarities and divergences existent between the Jesuits and the Salvation Army. Both are the outcome of the same form of human energy, that of Christianity militant against present-day evils; it is circumstances that have caused the divergence. The Jesuits were as keen at first for social reform as the Salvation Army have become; the Salvation Army used to be as much preoccupied with theology as the Jesuits. In details the resemblance is more picturesque without being any more accidental. The Salvation Army describe themselves after the fashion of the Papal title of "servus servorum Dei," as the "servants of all"; and the first thing that Loyola did when his associates insisted on his adopting the same title that "General" Booth has assumed, was to go downstairs and do the cooking. The two societies with one and the same root-idea essentially, have been drawn into ministering to the lower class in the nineteenth century and the upper class three hundred years earlier: the identity of spirit consisting in the class that was ministered to being that which possessed the greatest potentialities and the greatest needs.14 And in all the prescribed occupations of the Average Tourist we shall find this implied, that the future of his country depended on the use he made of his tour.
Let us take two specimens; one in the rough, the other in the finished, state: No. 1 shall be John Lauder of Fountainhall; No. 2, the Duc de Rohan. The former's diary is not to be equalled for the insight it gives into the development of the mind of the fledgling-dignitary abroad; not a pleasant picture always, not the evolution of a mother's treasure into an omniscient angel, but of a male Scot of nineteen into the early stages of a man of this wicked world; but – it happened. We note his language becoming decidedly coarser and an introduction to Rabelais' works not improving matters. Still, the former would have happened at home, only in a narrower circle; and for Rabelais, who that has read him does not know the other side? Then, he did not always work as a good boy should: he was studying law at Poictiers, and a German who was there twenty years earlier tells us that at Poictiers there were so many students that those who wanted to work retired to the neighbouring St. Jean d'Angely. Lauder stopped at Poictiers and writes, "I was beginning to make many acquaintances at Poictiers, to go in and drink with them, as," – then follow several names, then a note by the editor that twenty-seven lines have been erased in the MS. It continues: "I was beginning to fall very idle." Later on: "I took up to drink with me M. de la Porte, de Gruché, de Gey, de Gaule, Baranton's brother, etc."; [twenty-two lines erased] "on my wakening in the morning I found my head sore with the wine I had drunk." Even if one was wrong-headed enough to agree with what the minister at Fountainhall would feel obliged to remark about such occurrences, nothing could counterbalance the advantage to a Scot of learning that the Scottish opinion of Scots was not universally accepted. Lauder is surprised, genuinely humiliated, to find his countrymen despised abroad for the iconoclasm that accompanied their "conversion."
Lauder wrote a diary: the Duc de Rohan a "letter" to his mother, summarising the valuable information acquired in a virtuous perambulation through Italy, Hungary, Bohemia, Germany, the Low Countries, England, including a flying visit to Scotland; an harangue of flat mediocrity, imitative in character, thoughtful only in so far as, and in the way, he had been taught to be thoughtful. But, read between the lines, it is most interesting; better representing the Average Tourist in his nominal every-day state of mind than any other book. He embodies the sayings and doings of hundreds of others whose only memorials are on tombstones or in genealogies; he endures the inns in silence; never ate nor drank nor saw a coin or a poor man, for aught he says; passed the country in haste, ignoring the scenery except where "classical" authors had praised it, considered the Alps a nuisance, and democratic governments a degraded, albeit successful, eccentricity; and hastened past the Lago di Garda, in spite of the new fortress in building there, to Brescia, the latter being "better worth seeing." It was just 1600 when he travelled, and the ideas of the year are reflected in his opening lines with an exactitude possible only to one who has the mind of his contemporaries and none of his own. "Peace having been made, I saw I could not be any use in France." So he employed his idleness in attempting to learn something, in noting the differences in countries and peoples. Yet he would not be the Average Tourist made perfect that he is if there was not some idea of the future hovering in him – he is the only traveller, except Sir Henry Blount, the philosopher, who notes, or even seems to note, that the chief factor of differences between human being and human being is geography.
Yet underneath all the special characteristics which distinguish everyone of these tourists from every other, there remains one that all share with each other and with us, that expressed with the crude controversial Elizabethan vigour in some lines which Thomas Nashe wrote towards the close of the sixteenth century – "'Countryman, tell me what is the occasion of thy straying so far … to visit this strange nation?' … 'That which was the Israelites' curse we … count our chief blessedness: he is nobody that hath not travelled'" – the sense of the inexhaustible pleasure of travel. Had it been otherwise they would not have cared to write down their experiences; nor we to read them. And if at times it is hard to find a reflection of their pleasure in what they have written, it is certainly there, if only between the lines, manifesting how this continual variety of human beings is brought into touch, even if unconsciously, with the infinite change and range of the ideas and efforts of millions of persons over millions upon millions of acres, each person and each acre with its own history, life, fate, and influence. If, too, in the course of summarising what they experienced, the more trivial details seem to occupy a larger proportion of the space than is their due, it may be suggested that that is the proportion in which they appear in the tourists' reminiscences.
The permanent undercurrent I have tried to suggest where circumstances bring it to the surface in some one of its more definite forms.
CHAPTER II
GUIDE-BOOKS AND GUIDES
Now resteth in my memory but this point, which indeed is the chief to you of all others; which is, the choice of what men you are to direct yourself to; for it is certain no vessel can leave a worse taste in the liquor it contains, than a wrong teacher infects an unskilful hearer with that which will hardly ever out.
From what has been said already, two conclusions may be drawn: first, that the Average Tourist was given much advice; secondly, that he did not take it. Let us too, then, see the theory for one chapter only; and, in all chapters after, the practice.
It must have amused many a youngster to hear the down-trodden old gentleman, whom his father had hired, setting forth how the said youngster must behave in wicked Italy if he was to grow up in favour with God and man; all the more so if the old gentleman, whose name, perhaps, was the local equivalent for John Smith, published his advice in Latin under a Latin pseudonym, say, Gruberus or Plotius. Gruberus and Plotius suggest themselves because they are the very guidiest of guide-book writers. They, like all the orthodox of their kind, begin by a solemn argument for and against travelling. They bring up to support them a most miscellaneous host: the Prophets, the Apostles, Daedalus, Ulysses, the Queen of Sheba, Theseus, Anacharsis, the "Church of Christ," Pythagoras, Plato, Abraham, Aristotle, Apollonius of
Hantzsch,