Touring in 1600

An example of the pilgrim we have already met in Della Valle. Bartholomew Sastrow in his autobiography reveals a man travelling in search of work, a very unpleasant man, perhaps, but so strikingly true a picture of the every-day life and every-day thought of a lower middle-class man of the sixteenth century as not to be surpassed for any other century, past, present, or future, not even among autobiographies.

But for the man who is trying to avoid work, the third of the mediæval types, the vagabond, it would be out of place to select an individual to stand for the class in Renascence days, seeing that it became a stock literary type; vagabondage in general being epitomized for the time in the Spanish picaro. The picaro was one who saw much of the seamy side of life and remembered it with pleasure – it was all life and the true picaro was in love with life. The only enemy he had permanently was civilisation; yet he and it became reconciled in his old age: a picaro who grew old ceased to be a picaro. Meanwhile he was always forgiving civilisation, and being forgiven; both had equal need of forgiveness. Yet there is one picaro characteristic hard to overlook – his passion for being dull at great length when he drops into print: Lazarillo de Tormes and Gil Bias being the only ones of whom it may be said that from a reader's standpoint they were all that they should have been and nothing that they should not. The rest, when met between the covers of a book, resemble the parson whom one of themselves, Quevedo's Pablos, caught up on the way to Madrid and whom he hardly prevented from reciting his verses on St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, fifty octavetts to each virgin; even then he could not escape a comedy containing more scenes than there were days in a Jerusalem pilgrimage, besides five quires concerning Noah's Ark. This same Pablos explains incidentally what his kind talked about to chance companions on the road, for meeting another making for Segovia they fell into "la conversacion propia de picaros." Whether the Turk was on the downhill and how strong was the king: how the Holy Land might be reconquered, and likewise Algiers: party politics were then discussed and afterwards the management of the rebellious Low Countries. There were, too, picaros of high degree, but these were all men of war, whereas nothing but hunger made an ordinary picaro fight. High and low, however, had this in common, that they preferred living at others' expense to working, and consequently shifted their lodgings as often as any other class of tourist, in deference to local opinion.

Of the fourth mediæval type, the knight-errant, it is hard to say whether it was extinct or not: all depends on the extent to which the knight-errant is idealised. It is certainly true in this degree, that contemporary fiction must be reckoned as a cause of travel. Don Quixote is not to be ignored as a traveller and he was not alone. The first Earl of Cork's eldest son was so affected by the romances that the "roving wildness of his thoughts" which they brought about was only partially cured by continual extraction of square and cube roots. But perhaps the knight-errant of this date is better identified with the picaro of high degree, and as such the class may be exemplified by Don Alonzo de Guzman, the first chapter of whose autobiography gives a better insight into the psychology, and life on the road, of the picaro than the whole flood of nineteenth-century comment on the subject. At the age of eighteen he found himself with no father, no money, and a mother pious but talkative; after having provided for his needs for a while by marriage, he left home with a horse, a mule, a bed, and sixty ducats. And though what follows belongs more to the history of lying than the history of the world, it throws side-lights. And at any rate, any excuse is good enough to turn to it, for Don Alonzo has much in common with Benvenuto Cellini.

Now we have passed beyond the mediæval types and come to such as are somewhat more prominent in this, than in the previous, centuries. Exiles, for instance. The economic changes that took place during the sixteenth century made it increasingly difficult for the equivalents for Chancellors of the Exchequer to meet the yearly deficits. The legal authorities were therefore called upon to assist, and a working arrangement was established in practically all European countries whereby the political ferment of the time was taken advantage of for the betterment of the finances. Instead of the slow process and meagre results of waiting for death-duties, a man of wealth suffered premature civil death, or was harried into civil suicide. He was exiled, or fled: he had become a tourist.

Inseparable from political is religious self-exile. What happened very often in England was this. A youngster is seized with that belief in the likelihood of an ideal life elsewhere and that desire for a change, which are characteristic of the age of twenty. The theological cast of the age gives the former a religious bias. He escapes. After a time it seems to him that human characteristics have the upper hand of the apostolic, even in Roman Catholics, to a greater extent than he once believed, and that he would like to go home. He lands, is questioned by the Mayor, reported on to the Privy Council, in which report his experiences are to be found summarised.

One class of men, however, which might be expected to provide many examples, is for the most part absent, – missionaries, – occupied at home converting each other at this date, or re-converting themselves. The chief, in fact, the Jesuits, were confined each one to his nation by order, and only in respect of their early training days do they appear as foreigners abroad. Acknowledgements are due, on the other hand, for information received, to captives set free, soldiers, artists, herbalists, antiquaries, and even to those who, so far as we know, only looked on, like Shakespeare; and to many others led abroad by special reasons, such as the Italian Marquis who felt it necessary for him to have a long holiday after the privations of Lent.

But with all these varieties of tourist, we still have not come to the Average Tourist. The type is extinct, killed by reference-books, telegraphy, and democracy. For the Average Tourist left his fatherland to get information which he could not get at home, and he wanted this information because he was a junior member of the aristocracy, at that time the governing class more exclusively than at present. In feudal days isolation was, comparatively, taken for granted, and the fact of that voluntary isolation implied many hindrances to touring. The need of acquiring information of every kind that affected political action had been therefore less realised and the difficulty of acquiring it greater. These years near 1600 are the years of transition, transition to a custom for travellers to

… seek their place through storms,In passing many seas for many formsOf foreign government, endure the painOf many faces seeing, and the gainThat strangers make of their strange-loving humours:Learn tongues; keep note-books; all to feed the tumoursOf vain discourse at home, or serve the courseOf state employment…5

Herein lies the unity of subject of this book; not in its concern with a given class of experiences during a given period. Roughly speaking, in the two half-centuries preceding and succeeding the year 1600, the practice of the upper classes of sending sons abroad as part of their education became successively an experiment, a custom, and, finally, a system. By the middle of the seventeenth century this system had become a thoroughly set system, and the "Grand Tour" a topic for hack-writers. Of the latter, James Howell was the first. His "Instructions for Foreign Travel" (1642) may serve to date the beginning of "Grand Touring" in the modern sense of the phrase, while the publication of Andrew Boorde's "Introduction of Knowledge" a century earlier, does the same for this preceding period, that of the development of travel as a means of education.

Delimiting the movement by means of English books suggests that it was a merely English movement, but it was in fact European, though true of the different countries in varying degrees. The increase of diplomatic journeys,6, already mentioned, the core of this development and its chief instrument, was common to all divisions of Europe in proportion to the degree of the civilisation attained. In the Empire and Poland the custom grew up less suddenly; it had begun earlier. In Italy, it began later, since it was not till later that there was much for an Italian to learn that he could not learn better at home. Sir Henry Wotton7 noted in 1603 that travelling was coming into fashion among the young nobles of Venice. In France, an early beginning was broken off by the civil wars, not to start afresh till Henry IV's sovereignty was established. As for Spaniards and Portuguese, they alone had dominions over-sea to attend to.

In England, on the other hand, political reversals being at once frequent, thorough, and peaceable, migrations were very common and usually short. That touring would result from migration was certain, because it familiarised English people with the attractions and the affairs of the continent and with the uses of that familiarity, and established communications. Other special causes existed, too, truisms concerning which are so plentiful that there is no need to repeat them here.

But the certainty of the change did not prevent it being slow. Andrew Boorde, who knew Europe thoroughly, found hardly any of his countrymen abroad except students and merchants, and for the following half century it is the tendency rather than the fact that may be noted, as indicated, for example, by Sir Philip Sidney, who started in 1572, writing later to his brother that "a great number of us never thought in ourselves why we went, but a certain tickling humour to do as other men had done." In 1578 Florio could still write in one of his Italian-English dialogues published in London:8 "'Englishmen, go they through the world?' 'Yea some, but few.'" Yet in 1592 and again in 1595 the Pope complained about the number of English heretics allowed at Venice,9 and in 1615 an Englishman, George Sandys, leaves out of his travel-book everything relating to places north of Venice, such being, he says, "daily surveyed and exactly related." Three years earlier James I's Ambassador at Venice writes10 to the Doge that there are more than seventy English in Venice whereas "formerly" there had been four or five; and when he adds that there are not more than ten in the rest of Italy it must be remembered that he is making out a case and even then refers to Protestants only: between 1579 and 1603, three hundred and fifty Englishmen had been received into the English College at Rome.11

The development, then, of the English tourist may be synchronised with the rise of the English Drama and the expansion of English Commerce. In other words, the preparation for it came before the failure of the Spanish Armada; the actuality directly afterwards. But it could not have followed the course it did except in conjunction with wider causes, which emphasise its place as but part of a European movement. These may be sought in (1) the slight, but definite, advance in civilisation which made people more accessible to the ideas which peace fosters; (2) the greater area over which peace prevailed round about the year 1600: (3) the increase in centralisation in government, which decreased the obstacles in the way of the traveller, and increased the attractiveness of particular points, i. e., where the courts were held.

At the same time the increase in touring which really took place would be greatly over-estimated if one considered the evidence of bibliography as all-sufficient. Almost all that the latter proves is an increase in writing about it, due to the greatly increased demand for the written word which was the outcome of 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.

Sir Philip Sidney's advice to his brother(about 1578).

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 Tyana, Euclid, Zamolxis, Lycurgus, Naomi, Cicero, Galen, Dioscorides, him who travelled from farthest Spain to see Livy ("and immediately," as some one most unkindly says, "immediately he saw him, went away"); Solon also and St. Paul, and Mithridates, the Roman Decemviri, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pausanias, Cluverius, Moses, Orpheus, Draco, Minos, Rhadamanthus, Æsculapius, Hippocrates, Avicenna, the physicians of Egypt and the gods of Greece. But there is not a word about Jonah; perhaps his luck and experiences were considered abnormal; or perhaps because, as Howell says, "he travelled much, but saw little."

Then there are those who have to be refuted or explained away: Socrates, Seneca, the Lacedaemonians, Athenians, Chinese, Muscovites, Psophidius, Elianus, and Pompeius Laetus. Cain, also, the first traveller, creates a prejudice. Likewise, the argument from experience has to be met. Some return from travel, they say, using phrases without meaning, pale, lean, scabby and worm-eaten, burdens on their consciences, astounding garments on their backs, with the manners of an actor and superciliously stupid. Yet is this not due to the thing itself, but to the abuse thereof; peradventure he shall be corrupted more quickly at home than abroad, and there is less to be feared from universities and strange lands than from the indulgent mother. Moreover "non nobiliora quam mobiliora"; the heavens rejoice in motion, and transplantation yieldeth new life to plants. And shall the little sparrow travel as he pleases and man, lord of the animals, be confined to a farm or a hamlet?

Reason, erudition and emotion having thus conquered, instruction begins. The forethought necessary is as great as if he were choosing a wife. For tutors and horses, it seems, the most that can be expected from them is that they shall not imperil his soul and body respectively. First among requisites is a book of prayers and hymns effective for salvation without being so pugnacious, doctrinally, as to cause suspicion. Next, a note-book, a watch, or a pocket sun-dial; if a watch, not a striker, for that warns the wicked you have cash; a broad-brimmed hat, gaiters, boots, breeches (as if his friends would let him start without any!), gloves, shoes, shirts, handkerchiefs, "which come in useful when you perspire"; and if he cannot take many shirts, let those he takes be washed, he will find it more comfortable. Also, a linen overall, to put over his clothes when he gets into bed, in case the bed is dirty. Let him get to know something of medicine and, "like Achilles," learn to cook before he leaves home. Travel not at night, and, in daytime, be guarded by the official guards which German and Belgian towns provide; or travel in company.

Now, the aim of travelling is the acquisition of knowledge; stay, therefore, in the more famous places rather than keep on the move. Enquire, concerning the district, its names, past and present; its language; its situation; measurements; number of towns, or villages; its climate, fertility; whether maritime or not, and possessing forests, mountains, barren or wooded; wild beasts, profitable mines; animal or vegetable life peculiar to itself; navigable or fish-yielding rivers; medicinal baths; efficient fortresses. And concerning towns: the founder, "sights," free or otherwise; what the town has undergone, famines, plagues, floods, fires, sieges, revolutions, sackings; whether it has been the scene of councils, conferences, synods, assemblies, gatherings, or tournaments.