Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

may wander far away from the good plain dinner he desires, especially if an awakened curiosity induce him to try the dishes with queer incomprehensible names. French cookery asserts the supremacy of its own elaborate scientific nomenclature over every compound that it consents to patronise. In Germany, however, the native name of a dish is preserved at least partially, and as in some states there seems to be a morbid desire to introduce the culinary peculiarities of all parts of the earth, the effect is bewildering, and not easily dealt with. A Briton feels his heart and stomach warm to "Rumpsteaks mit Kartoffeln" -rump steaks with potatoes; but what is he to make of the immediately following compound, equally at his service, "Zvazy Polnisk mit ditto?"

So the old scenes of contest between the new-come tourist and the established customs of the country, which used to give a good deal of vivacity to German travelling, are now wearing away, and will be soon forgotten. As of a scene now not easily witnessed, save, perhaps, in remote places, let me sketch what was generally the first occurrence that, on their alighting on German soil, befell a thoroughly English family-rich Birmingham manufacturer's, say, or retired tradesman's from Clapham Rise. The scene lies, not in a hotel, but a true German "gasthof." The great coach, containing Herr Englander himself, with his countless family domestics and trunks, has thundered into the court-yard, with the usual volley of whip-cracks and other noises, which, like military salutes, are intended to proclaim his dignity. These marks of respect, the extent of the edifice, and the number of attendants, are rather gratifying, and, on the whole, productive of cheerful prospects. Having seen that the young folks and the trunks are getting extricated, the Herr proceeds to business in his usual prompt way. Seeming to especially covet his

[ocr errors]

attention, and quite ready to be civil and useful, is Kellner Karl, standing on the first landing-place. Of him the Herr inquires if he can speak English. The short answer, ees, mi lord," gratifies him with its accurate estimate of the social position which his deportment is calculated to proclaim, and he has immediate confidence in the discretion and fidelity of Kellner Karl. To preserve the impression which he has made, he then utters his instructions in the highest of what is termed the haw-waw-baw dialect. Luncheon at one-plain, but good. Dinner rather early-say six o'clock -private parlour, of course. And so he contents himself with having decreed the fate of his household for this day.

Kellner Karl looks intelligent, bows, and moves off with more than the average activity of a German, as if he were proceeding without delay to put in execution the direction just received. Far other are the ideas and designs of Karl. He has just one prominent object in view, and that is, that he and the stranger shall not meet face to face during the remainder of the day; and, from the extent of the premises, his superior knowledge of their recesses and windings, and the number of other Kellners who frequent them, he has well-founded hopes of being successful.

The Herr indulges himself in placid confidence, as little doubting that his draft for £100 would be honoured at Coutts's, as that his orders shall be duly fulfilled. The lapse of the time when the first instalment became due, awakens anxieties which, as minutes pass on without the faintest trace of preliminary arrangements, deepens into disappointment and wrath. He looks distractedly for a bell, that he may pull it savagely; but there is none to be seen, either in his bedroom or in the passages through which he makes an adventurous sortie. If by the way it had been his good fortune to be born north of the Tweed, he might have

observed that, attached to a ponderous machine in the court-yard, was an ancient-looking inscription, importing something very like that ane Klink would bring a certain member of the establishment, and tway Klinks another. Perhaps, however, he is so fortunate as to meet another Kellner, on whom he pours forth his woes and his wrath. This one also looks bland, respectful, and intelligent, and moves off rapidly with a face which seems to say,

66

Ah, I see a dreadful blunder has been committed, fatal to the reputation of the establishment; let me have the good fortune to remedy it." Kellner number two is, however, of the same kidney with his brother, and adopts the same course he, too, disappears with the fervent determination not again to confront Herr Englander if he can help it. Possibly it may happen that in the course of their distressed wanderings, the whole family encounter the Stube-mädchen, but that damsel takes to instantaneous and rapid flight. Her object is to get relief for the shout of laughter that must get out; for we British and the Dutch are the only part of the civilised world that indulge in the practice of laughing in one's face; in fact, being a steady play-goer, she has been forcibly reminded of a late irresistible performance, in which impatient and angry Englishmen are the prominent characters.

Conducting their investigations further a-field, the family see many strange sights-some of them not quite satisfactory; but the human beings who swarmed on their arrival are invisible. The reason of this is, that the strangers avoid a quarter of the mansion whence issue various active odours, among which that of tobacco-smoke predominates. These indicate the whereabouts of the Speise Zimmer, where all the acclimated guests have been assembled for some hour and a half or so, at the great mid-day meal, where also all the attendants are congregated. Perhaps issuing from

this the stranger party may notice a majestic, corpulent, bearded figure, bestowing his solemn attention on a large pipe. The Herr would as soon think of stating his difficulties to a Bonz or a Fakeer. He can find no common ground on which he could venture to address such a figure, though, had he known it was that of the landlord of the house, he might have found one. Boniface looks blandly at the party, as a wool-stapler might at a very promising lot coming forward to be shorn by him; he knows they are his, and will not put himself to the trouble of offering them information, or doing them any turn of service not included in the fixed routine of the establishment. The Germans not being naturally a cruel people who would willingly starve any one to death, the erratic family get themselves supplied at last with the means of needful sustentation, much after the fashion in which the passengers in a shipwrecked vessel, or the travellers in a broken down stage-coach, might be relieved by hospitable peasants.

Night and the arrangements for repose bring their own peculiar train of anxieties and calamities. Many special comforts which habit has made indispensable are applied for; but being made in the English language, with which no one in that barbarous place is acquainted, the applications meet with no practical success, and the unhappy travellers have no more satisfactory recourse than to rail at those who cannot understand any Christian tongue, as if it were their fault that they are invaded by a parcel of strangers ignorant of their language. It is a sight worth seeing, when each one, on approaching his couch, finds that, instead of Witney blankets and snowy linen, he is expected to repose under a dingy-coloured eider-down mattrass-not a mere dainty cushion auxiliary to the bed-clothes, the condition to which this national institution has now dwindled-but a heavy, frowsy, smothering mass, emitting a slight but distinct odour

of tobacco, which it has derived from the breath of the successive plethoric Deutschers who have snored beneath it since the unknown period when it was last purified. When weariness has conquered this horror, there comes another more lively and not so easily defeated. A certain colony of sanguinary scaly animals, in their timber caverns, sniff the fresh full blood of an Englishman, and make at it with a rush. If, after long contest with this versatile enemy, nature's "kind restorer,balmy sleep," sets in, perchance the hour of six o'clock may have arrived, when it is the duty of the Stube-mädchen, followed by the Hausknecht, to rouse each guest and offer a cup of coffee, accompanied with a little twisted cake about an ounce in weight, which the young ladies say is more like a curl-paper than anything else. This, then, is breakfast --and that to people accustomed to hot muffin, rolls, eggs, chop, saus ages, and the loaf and round of beef to fall back upon! The next morning grievance is, perhaps, a negative answer to the ancient schoolboy question-"How are you off for soap?" and this is still a specialty. Man does nothing persistently without a reason; and we shall sometimes find that those practices which are furthest apart from our own are yet not entirely destitute of goodness. The Germans are much abused for neglecting to supply this article to the traveller, and the guide-books advise you to take soap of your own with you. This is quite sound advice, and 'Bradshaw' ekes it out with a valuable notification of a shop in London where you may purchase this useful commodity -about the strongest instance, by the way, that I have noticed, of their belief in the utter helplessness and stupidity of tourists, which seems to be a first principle with all persons who undertake the special duty of serving them. This abandonment of the article of soap to the influence of the voluntary principle, acting upon travellers, is ever

brought up as a testimony of German dirtiness. No doubt, there is a deal of dirt in Germany-perhaps more than in the United Kingdom, where there is a deal too. German dirt, also, has its favoured centres, and so has ours; and there is nearly as great a difference between north and south there, as between Kent and Kerry with us. But is it true that leaving soap to voluntary effort, instead of official control, is an element of dirtiness? I think it might be quite as fairly charged on fastidiousness, as arising from a disinclination to use the lubricator which has become too familiar with stranger cuticles; and we may depend on it, that would be the view adopted in this country were the practice reversed.

To return to our English family. The state of antagonism into which they have got cannot last long. If Herr Englander does not determine to rush back to roast beef,port,plumpudding, and all the other elements of real civilisation, he is, perhaps, induced to join in a resolution, solemnly passed by the rest of the family, to give in their adherence to the ways of the natives. They take up the revolution with all the natural ardour of the British temperament, and what is very likely to happen is, that having set themselves in motion in the direction of change, they do not know the precise boundary at which they should stop, and so end by becoming more German than the Germans, and presenting a coarse caricature of all the national peculiarities witnessed by them. So the young hope of the family becomes a conspicuous object in all the Sunday theatres, concerts, and dancing-rooms, without any consideration for their grade in respectability-rather, indeed, affecting those lowest in the scale, and even in these he presents himself in a condition in which native scamps are not apt to be found, and performs feats on which they would not venture. To the national institution of the pipe he has taken with all his heart, and, after physical

sufferings and endurance worthy of a better cause, he succeeds in establishing himself as a seasoned and inveterate smoker. As in everything that they do, the British beat the rest of the world, he is not content with the coffee-cup-sized vessel whence the German gentleman breathes the breath of Kanaster. Accordingly, he sets his affections on a mighty specimen exhibited by way of symbol or sign at a tobacconist's door, as one may see a gigantic boot over a shoemaker's, or a mighty bell over a bell-hanger's. When he next finds himself in an eilwagen, while his German fellow-travellers are considering whether their smoking will annoy the English party, he puts them at their ease by producing his treasure, and tearing away at its contents with his powerful lungs until nothing becomes visible to the inmates of the vehicle save the semblance of a lurid moon dimly visible through a veil of mist.

He must also take to the laborious function of browning a meerschaum; and here I have got in among customs now growing so obsolete, even in Germany itself, that they are likely to be soon forgotten if no note be preserved of their specialties. Not that smoking has become obsolete there. It is as rife as ever, but it has changed its character, the less unmanageable cigar having almost entirely superseded the pipe. How the Germans of the last generation performed the other duties of life at the same time that they took due charge of the portentous smoking apparatus, always in blast, used to be a great marvel. In a bank or a passport office, for instance, the clerk or surveyor, whose hands were full of business, had at the same time to attend to that pipe of his, built of five or six pieces or compartments, the putting together of which was as complex as a Chinese puzzle a pipe ever going out, or getting stopped up, or leaking, or discharging essential oil, or doing some other offence demanding the most sedulous attention on

the part of its owner, whose affection for it was such that no other toils or anxieties would tear him for a moment from its society. The meerschaum was a great improvement on this cumbrous machinery. The world will probably soon require to be informed by the antiquaries that this material is a porous clay found in some parts of Asia, which absorbs that essential oil generated by smoking, the removal of which is the object of the complex devices connected with the old china pipe. In this absorption, it at the same time performs the function of beautifying itself. The oil colours the clay, and when the surface of this is kept at a fine polish, it gradually assumes a rich translucent, mottled, and veined tawny-brown colour, like that of some of the finest jaspers. The satisfactory browning of a meerschaum used to be a matter of considerable labour, skill, and anxiety; for not only did it take a deal of industrious, meritorious smoking to accomplish it to perfection, but during the operation not a single scratch must appear on the shining surface. Those who would put their mind at ease had the bowl of the pipe carefully cased with leather during the operation, and when thus secured the labour and the gratification of the task might be shared by companions. Our friend, with whom we are now to part, getting a little tired of the process of browning the enormous bowl he had undertaken, handed it, on his return home for temporary service, to the privates of the company of foot in which he held a commission, and gave them a general credit on his tobacconist. The meerschaum, under their energetic treatment, browned apace, but scarcely in the same ratio as its owner's account for cavendish and negrohead accumulated.

The object of this typical sketch of the career of an English family on the Continent, is to point to two offensive peculiarities which we are apt to exhibit to strangers. The one is a haughty, hard, hostile an

tagonism to all the cherished usages and favourite customs of the people we may be among. The other, which often comes in a reactionary form, is a determination to adopt an exaggerated caricature of the example they set us, which generally leads to the superinduction of their own defects and vices upon ours. It is difficult to say which of the two courses is the more offensive. The antagonism, which is the Englishman's first instinct, is the creature of that intolerable conceit which makes us count that all differences from ourselves infer inferiority; and thus whatever is other wise than with us is, of course, by so much on a lower scale of merit. I am afraid it will yet be some time ere we contemplate human beings as we do the other creatures in natural history, concerning which we take note of the characteristics and types of difference as matters of ordinary interest, not necessarily rendering the one inferior to the other in the general scale. As the strength of the bull, the gracefulness and agility of the chamois, the lustrous colours of the peacock, the sweet singing of the thrush, are all admired as separate characteristics without our setting the one above the other, why should we not do the same by the different races of man, and note their specialties without making these matter of reproach, because they happen to diverge from our own egotistic standard?

It is when they alight upon religious observances differing from their own, that the conduct of the yahoos among our travellers becomes most offensive. Of course we are all banded together as thorough Protestants, anxiously indulging in the hope that we may see the final downfall of the Man of Sin, and an awakened people at last abjuring the corruptions of the Church of Rome. But it seems to me that the personages I refer to are not helping on this consummation. It is scarcely calculated to awaken in the minds of the blind devotees of Antichrist a conscious

ness of our superior light and purity, that in the places held sacred by them our sons should stamp about with their hats on, continuing the loud 'pon-honourish talk they have indulged over in the street, and that our daughters should accompany them with giggle and grimace. There are some places where, from the fierce passions of the people, the traveller is warned that such practices are unsafe; but to a people so haughtily exactive as we are of deference to our own solemnities and usages, it seems unaccountable that any beings, with human flesh and blood, should calmly endure the insults which British tourists discharge at the religious usages they encounter. I suppose they solace themselves with the firm conviction that we shall all have to pay for it in the next world.

The following passage, from a book in two solid octavos, exhibits a very fair specimen of the feelings of charity and brotherly love with which our Pilgrims of the Rhine and elsewhere enter the places dedicated to Christian worship :

:

"The church was full of people; about fifty persons at a time knelt without the rails of an altar; and within stood a priest, who slightly and rapidly touched the eyes of each individual with a sort of box or ring, which was fastened on his finger, and which he wiped every

time with a cloth.

The ring was held to every person to kiss, and this precious relic was held to be no other than the

true and veritable eye of St Odilia enclosed under glass in a gold case, and pronounced to be an infallible cure for sore eyes! Once a-year, on this day, the festival of the saint, all come to this ceremony who have bad eyes, or The guide who led us through the who are anxious to avoid having them. church said that he had formerly received the application. Though quite a youth, the poor fellow seemed perfectly priest-ridden; and when he told us some strange stories about miracles and relics, we found it impossible to shake his bepersuaded of the supernatural virtues of lief, and were obliged to leave him fully St Odilia's veritable eye!'

Here, as usual, the poor deluded devotee was obliged immediately to pay

« ElőzőTovább »