Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Various
SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS
Selected And Edited With Introductions, Etc.
By Francis W. Halsey
_Editor of "Great Epochs in American History" Associate Editor of "The
Worlds Famous Orations and of The Best of the World's Classics" etc._
In Ten Volumes
Illustrated
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 substitute 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 class 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 class, 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 ashore, 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 classes. 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 noble 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 passing 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, Dickens, 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 mass 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 passed,
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
unobtrusiveness, 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 classes 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 "skyscraper" 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 glass
scarcely more than eight by ten. The great wall mass 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 grass-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 Glastonbury, 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 Massachusetts 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.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--PART ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION AND INTRODUCTION TO
VOLS. I AND II--By the Editor
I--LONDON
A GENERAL SKETCH--By Goldwin Smith
WESTMINSTER ABBEY--By Washington Irving
THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
ST. PAUL'S--By Augustus J.C. Hare
THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND THE CRYSTAL PALACE--By H.A. Taine
THE TEMPLE'S GALLERY OF GHOSTS PROM DICKENS--By J.R.G. Hassard
THE TEMPLE CHURCH--By Augustus J.C. Hare
LAMBETH CHURCH AND PALACE--By Augustus J.C. Hare
DICKENS'S LIMEHOUSE HOLE--By J.E.G. Hassard
WHITEHALL--By Augustus J. C. Hare
THE TOWER--By W. Hepworth Dixon
ST. JAMES'S PALACE--By Augustus J. C. Hare
LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON--By William Winter
II--CATHEDRALS AND ABBEYS
CANTERBURY--By the Editor
OLD YORK--By William Winter
YORK AND LINCOLN COMPARED--By Edward A. Freeman
DURHAM--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
ELY--By James M. Hoppin
SALISBURY--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
EXETER--By Anna Bowman Dodd
LICHFIELD--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
WINCHESTER--By William Howitt
WELLS--By James M, Hoppin
BURY ST. EDMUNDS--By H. Claiborne Dixon
GLASTONBURY--By H. Claiborne Dixon
TINTERN--By H. Claiborne Dixon
III--CASTLES AND STATELY HOMES
LIVING IN GREAT HOUSES--By Richard Grant White
WINDSOR--By Harriet Beecher Stowe
BLENHEIM--By the Duke of Marlborough
WARWICK--By Harriet Beecher Stowe
KENILWORTH--By Sir Walter Scott
ALNWICK--By William Howitt
HAMPTON COURT--By William Howitt
CHATSWORTH AND HADDON HALL--By Elihu Burritt
EATON HALL--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
HOLLAND HOUSE--By William Howitt
ARUNDEL--By Anna Bowman Dodd
PENSHURST--By William Howitt
IV--ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES
STRATFORD-ON-AVON--By Washington Irving
NEWSTEAD ABBEY--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
HUCKNALL-TORKARD CHURCH (Byron's Grave)--By William Winter
DR. JOHNSON'S BIRTHPLACE--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
_(English Literary Shrines continued in Vol. II)_
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME I
FRONTISPIECE
TRAFALGAR SQUARE, LONDON
PRECEDING PAGE I
WESTMINSTER ABBEY
RIVER FRONT OF THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT
ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL
INTERIOR OF ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL
CHAPEL OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, WESTMINSTER ABBEY
THE TOWER OF LONDON
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL
TINTERN ABBEY
DRYEURGH ABBEY
WINDSOR CASTLE
FOLLOWING PAGE 95
THE ALBERT MEMORIAL CHAPEL, WINDSOR
THE THRONE ROOM, WINDSOR CASTLE
POETS' CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY
THE GREAT HALL AT PENSHURST
THE ENTRANCE HALL OF BLENHEIM PALACE
GUY'S TOWER AND THE CLOCK TOWER, WARWICK CASTLE
WARWICK CASTLE
THE BEAUCHAMP CHAPEL, WARWICK
THE RUINS OF KENILWORTH CASTLE CHATSWORTH
ALNWICK CASTLE
HOLLAND HOUSE
EATON HALL
I
LONDON
A GENERAL SKETCH [Footnote: From articles written for the Toronto "Week."
Afterward (1888) issued by The Macmillan Company in the volume entitled
"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 multitude 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
circumference, but the greater part of its area was occupied by open
spaces; the modern Babylon is a dense mass 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 Parsee, 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, Japanese, 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 multitude 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.
In that vast realm of wealth and leisure, the West End of London, the eye
is not satisfied with seeing, neither the ear with hearing. There is not,
nor has there ever been, anything like it in the world. Notes of
admiration might be accumulated to any extent without aiding the
impression. In every direction the visitor may walk till he is weary
through streets and squares of houses, all evidently the abodes of wealth,
some of them veritable palaces. The parks are thronged, the streets are
blocked with handsome equipages, filled with the rich and gay. Shops blaze
with costly wares, and abound with everything that can minister to luxury.
On a fine bright day of May or early June, and days of May or early June
are often as bright in London as anywhere, the Park is probably the
greatest display of wealth and of the pride of wealth in the world. The
contrast with the slums of the East End, no doubt, is striking, and we can
not wonder if the soul of the East End is sometimes filled with bitterness
at the sight. A social Jeremiah might be moved to holy wrath by the
glittering scene. The seer, however, might be reminded that not all the
owners of those carriages are the children of idleness, living by the
sweat of another man's brow; many of them are professional men or chiefs
of industry, working as hard with their brains as any mechanic works with
his hands, and indispensable ministers of the highest civilization. The
number and splendor of the equipages are thought to have been somewhat
diminished of late by the reduction of rents.
The architecture of the West End of London is for the most part drearily
monotonous; its forms have too plainly been determined by the builder, not
by the artist, tho since the restoration of art, varieties of style have
been introduced, and individual beauty has been more cultivated. It is the
boundless expanse of opulence, street after street, square after square,
that most impresses the beholder, and makes him wonder from what
miraculous horn of plenty such a tide of riches can have been poured.
A beautiful city London can not be called. In beauty it is no match for
Paris. The smoke, which not only blackens but corrodes, is fatal to the
architecture as well as to the atmosphere. Moreover, the fine buildings,
which if brought together would form a magnificent assemblage, are
scattered over the immense city, and some of them are ruined by their
surroundings. There is a fine group at Westminster, and the view from the
steps under the Duke of York's column across St. James's Park is
beautiful. But even at Westminster meanness jostles splendor, and the
picture is marred by Mr. Hankey's huge tower of Babel rising near. London
has had no edile like Haussmann.
The Embankment on the one side of the Thames is noble in itself, but you
look across from it at the hideous and dirty wharves of Southwark. Nothing
is more charming than a fine water street; and this water street might be
very fine were it not marred by the projection of a huge railway shed. The
new Courts of Law, a magnificent, tho it is said inconvenient, pile,
instead of being placed on the Embankment or in some large open space, are
choked up and lost in rookeries. London, we must repeat, has had no edile.
Perhaps the finest view is that from a steamboat on the river, embracing
the Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the Temple, with St. Paul's
rising above the whole.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY [Footnote: From "The Sketch Book." Published by G.P.
Putnam's Sons.]
BY WASHINGTON IRVING
On one of those sober and rather melancholy days in the latter part of
Autumn, when the shadows of morning and evening almost mingle together and
throw a gloom over the decline of the year, I passed several hours in
rambling about Westminster Abbey. I spent some time in Poet's Corner,
which occupies an end of one of the transepts or cross aisles of the
abbey. The monuments are generally simple; for the lives of literary men
afford no striking themes for the sculptor. Shakespeare and Addison have
statues erected to their memories; but the greater part have busts,
medallions, and sometimes mere inscriptions. Notwithstanding the
simplicity of these memorials, I have always observed that the visitors to
the abbey remained longest about them. A kinder and fonder feeling takes
the place of that cold curiosity or vague admiration with which they gaze
on the splendid monuments of the great and heroic. They linger about these
as about the tombs of friends and companions; for indeed there is
something of companionship between the author and the reader. Other men
are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is
continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the
author and his fellow men is ever new, active and immediate.