POLITICAL SIGNS
“Au-dessus de ma tête, Charles Quint, Joseph II ou Napoléon
pendus à une vieillie potence en fer et faisant enseigne, grands
empereurs qui ne sont plus bons qu’à achalander une auberge.”
VICTOR HUGO, _Le Rhin_.
At the first glance our peaceful sign seems to have nothing to do with
politics whatsoever, except perhaps in so far as under its symbol the
Philistines assemble, not only to drink and be merry, but, as a
side-issue, to solve the world’s problems. The contrast of human
strife and battle outside, somewhere in distant lands, with the
undisturbed comfort of the tap-room has been for ages one of the chief
fascinations of the tavern, and none has described this selfish
attitude of the Philistine more graphically than Goethe in the
conversation of the two citizens in his “Faust”:--
“On Sundays, holidays, there’s naught I take delight in,
Like gossiping of war, and war’s array.
When down in Turkey, far away,
The foreign people are a-fighting.
One at the window sits, with glass and friends,
And sees all sorts of ships go down the river gliding:
And blesses then, as home he wends
At night, our times of peace abiding.”
This opinion the other citizen, who reminds us curiously of certain
modern neutrals, approves with the following words:--
“Yes, Neighbor! that’s my notion too:
Why, let them break their heads, let loose their passions,
And mix things madly through and through,
So, here, we keep our good old fashions!”
This seems about all the political wisdom the tavern sign has to
suggest; but if we investigate more closely the varying forms and
continual changes of the sign we shall discover in its evolution
nothing less than a little history of civilization in pictures. Every
great event in the world’s history finds its echo in some
transformation of the sign, that proves itself a sensitive indicator
for the popular valuation of leading men and important occurrences. In
the eagle-names of the Roman signs we seem to hear the conquering
wings of the Roman eagles soaring over the world, and on the Cymbrian
shield over the cocktavern on the Forum we read the pride of the
victorious Roman soldier.
In our chapter on “Heraldic Signs” we recognized the relationship
between the landlords and the ruling powers. The swinging sign of a
“crown” means the rule of kings, and thankful subjects who enjoy the
peace secured by their monarch and the comfort of settling down in
“The Crown” to a blessed meal. It means good times, efficient
landlords and easy food-supply, if you get such an excellent and
abundant dinner as Heine was offered on his wanderings through the
Harz by the tavern-keeper of “The Crown” in Klausthal: “My repast
consisted of spring-green parsley-soup, violet-blue cabbage, a pile of
roast veal which resembled Chimborazo in miniature and a sort of
smoked herrings, called Bückings from their inventor William Bücking,
who died in 1447, and who, on account of the invention, was so greatly
honored by Charles V that the great monarch in 1556 made a journey
from Middleburg to Bievlied in Zealand for the express purpose of
visiting the grave of the great fishdrier. How exquisitely such dishes
taste when we are familiar with their historical associations!”
[Illustration: Degerloch]
And do not the kings themselves appear on the sign? The “Three Kings”
were originally the “Wise Men” from the East. How the Catholic Church
came to represent them as kings we read in Fischart’s quaint old
German of his amusing “Bienenkorb” of 1580: “Und das sie weiter auss
den treien Weisen aus Morgenland trei König gemacht hat und den eynen
so Bechschwarz als eynen Moren, ist aus den Weissagungen Salomonis
oder Davids gefischet, die da sagen, dass die König aus Morenland
Christum anzubeten kommen werden.” The East, the land of the morn,
was thus confused with the land of the Moors which we should rather
seek to the south of Bethlehem. On “Three Kings’ Day,” of course, the
taverns of this name were scenes of special merriment, the good
Catholics joyfully shouting, “The King drinks.” “The three gentlemen,”
as Carlyle calls them disrespectfully, are buried in the Cologne
Cathedral, but their memory is honored still by many a visitor of a
“Three Kings” tavern in good Rhenish wine which our forefathers called
the theological wine. We find the sign of the famous travelers from
distant lands especially on the great roads of commerce leading from
Italy over the Alps, so in Augsburg and Basle. Originally a royalist
symbol of the landlord’s loyalty to monarchy, of his eagerness to
serve crowned guests if fortune should lead them his way, it was
changed in the times of the Revolution to the democratic “Three
Moors,” and the first landlord who is said to have deprived his three
kings of their crowns was the landlord in Basle. Maybe time helped him
to make this change, slowly wearing away the gilded glitter of the
crowns and darkening the kings to black-a-moors. To-day the famous
house in Augsburg, where Charles V once lodged as guest of the rich
banker Fugger for more than a year, is called “Three Moors.” The
traveler still may see the big fireplace in which the generous
merchant burned all the imperial promissory notes.
But whatever the explanation of this “Three Moors’” sign may be, there
can be no doubt that the Revolution had a noticeable influence on
signs in general. The inn “Zum Rosenkrantz” in Strassburg was called
after 1790 “A la couronne civile,” to please the rationalistic
worshipers of the “Supreme Being,” and countless king-signs were sold
as old iron. Sébastien Mercier, in his “Tableau de Paris,” has given a
merciless report of this great catastrophe which swept away so many of
the signs which we have learned to respect and to love: “Chez les
marchands de ferrailles du quai de la Mégisserie, sont des magazins de
vieilles enseignes, propre à décorer l’entrée de tous les cabarets et
tabagies des faubourgs et de la banlieu de Paris. Là tous les rois de
la terre dorment ensemble: Louis XVI et Georges III se baisent
fraternellement; le roi de Prusse couche avec l’impératrice de
Russie, l’empereur est de niveau avec les électeurs; là enfin la tiare
et le turban se confonde. Un cabaretier arrive, remue avec le pied
toutes ces têtes couronnées, les examine, prend au hasard la figure du
roi de Pologne, l’emporte et écrit dessous: Au grand vainqueur. Un
autre gargotier demande une impératrice; il veut que sa gorge soit
boursouflée, et le peintre, sortant de la taverne voisine, fait
présent d’une gorge rebondie à toutes les princesses d’Europe. Le même
peintre coiffe d’une couronne de laurier une tête de Louis XV lui ôte
sa perruque et sa bourse, et voilà, un César.--Toutes ces figures
royales ont d’étranges physionomies et font éternellement la moue à la
populace qui les regarde. Aucun de ces souverains ne sourit au peuple,
même en peinture; ils out tous l’air hagard ou burlesque, des yeux
éraillés, un nez de travers, une bouche énorme....”
We see those were bad days for kings, even for painted ones. If the
landlord had Jacobin blood in his veins he would not content himself
with such harmless changes as removing the painted crowns. He would
call his tavern no longer “Le Roi Maure,” but forthwith “Le Roi
Mort,” and on the sign the picture of the dead king Louis XVI would
testify to his stanch republicanism. Or he would choose as sign-hero
Brutus the famous regicide. Dickens has introduced us to such a
tavern, “The good Republican Brutus,” in the “Tale of Two Cities,” and
his picture of the place, although in a book of fiction, shows clearly
the colors of historical truth: “It had a quieter look than any other
place of the same description they had passed, and though red with
patriotic caps was not so red as the rest.” The guests were a rather
suspicious-looking crowd. One workman with bare breast and arms reads
aloud the latest terrible news to the rest who listen attentively. All
are armed, some have laid their weapons aside to be resumed, if
needed. In the classical chapter “The Wine-Shop,” where he describes
the hopeless misery of the poor people crowded together in the narrow
streets of the St. Antoine quarter, he sees even in the merchants’
signs symbols of misery or threats of future atrocities: “The
trade-signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were all grim
illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted up, only
the leanest scraps of meat, the baker the coarsest of meager loaves.
The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops croaked over
their scanty measures of thin wine and beer.... Nothing was
represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but
the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s
hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was murderous.”
It was in a tavern in Varennes that the fate of Louis XVI was sealed.
Here the fugitive king was arrested and forced to go back to Paris to
pay with his blood the debt of sins which his ancestors had
accumulated. “Forty-eight years after the royal coach was stopped in
this town,” says Victor Hugo, “I saw hanging from an old iron bracket
the picture of Louis Philippe with the inscription: ‘Au grand
Monarque.’” Nowhere do we observe quicker changes than in governments
and tavern signs, remarks the German tramp-poet Seume; and Victor Hugo
indulges in similar reflections, passing in review the signs of the
last one hundred years from Louis XV to Bonaparte and Charles X:
“Louis XVI s’est peut-être arrêté au Grand Monarque, et s’est vu là
peint en enseigne, roi en peinture lui-même.--Pauvre ‘Grand
Monarque?’” he exclaims in pathetic pity. This supposition of Hugo’s,
however, is not correct, as we learn from Carlyle, who, scrutinizing
with the prophetic vision of a poet the darkness of the past,
possessed at the same time the exactness and sincerity of a true
historian and who has given us, based on a personal visit to the
locality, the following description of the nocturnal scene: “The
village of Varennes lies dark and slumberous, a most unlevel Village
of inverse saddle-shape, as men write. It sleeps; the rushing of the
River Aire singing lullaby to it. Nevertheless from the Golden Arm,
Bras d’or Tavern across that sloping Marketplace, there still comes
shine of social light....”
Even the American Revolution left its traces on the tavern signs of
the Yankeeland. The old Baptist pastor and Professor of Theology,
Galusha Anderson, who has given us, in his charming book, “When
Neighbors were Neighbors,” in his simple way a kind of social history
of the early United States, mentions signs that he saw in his youth
“where the English red-coats were represented flying before our
revolutionary forefathers.” And Washington Irving has given us, in his
“Rip Van Winkle,” a classical example of the political changes the
signboard had to undergo. When this curious dreamer and unhappy
husband, after many years of mysterious absence, came back to his
native village, nothing perhaps surprised him so much as to find on
the old tavern the strange words, “The Union Hotel, by Jonathan
Doolittle,” and to see even the good old sign strangely altered: “He
recognised on the sign, however, the ruby face of King George, under
which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe; but even this was
singularly metamorphosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and
buff, a sword was held instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated
with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters,
General Washington.” Thus he received from the signboard the necessary
instruction on the great changes that had taken place during his
absence, how his country had developed from an English Colony to a
free Republic.
There are still a few signs in existence that might give us an idea
how such old American signs probably looked. We refer especially to
the “Governor Hancock” sign in the old Boston State House and a couple
of amusing signs in the little historical museum at Lexington.
In its long political career the sign was not spared the humiliation
of being used as gallows. One of the first victims of the French
Revolution was Foulon. He was charged with making the people eat
grass; and now a raging mob forced into his dead mouth the food he had
proposed for others. According to tradition this old sinner was
hanged to a lantern on the corner of the Place de la Grève and the Rue
de la Vannerie. But this is contradicted by such an old Parisian as
Victorien Sardou, who says that Foulon was hanged to a sign which, as
he remembers well from his childhood days, was still to be seen, under
Louis Philippe, although nobody really seemed to give attention to it
in those days of Romanticism.
Another gruesome story we are told by Macaulay, how under James II,
after the defeat of the unhappy Duke of Monmouth, the partisans of the
pretender were suspended from a signpost before a tavern in Taunton by
order of a certain Colonel Percy Kirke. “They were not suffered even
to take leave of their nearest relations. The signpost of the White
Hart Inn served for a gallows. It is said that the work of death went
on in sight of the windows where the officers of the Tangier regiment
were carousing, and that at every health a wretch was turned off. When
the legs of the dying men quivered in the last agony, the colonel
ordered the drums to strike up. He would give the rebels, he said,
music to their dancing. The tradition runs that one of the captives
was not even allowed the indulgence of a speedy death. Twice he was
suspended from the signpost, and twice cut down. Twice he was asked if
he repented of his treason, and twice he replied that if the deed were
to do again, he would do it. Then he was tied up for the last time.”
The Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor Jeffreys, who continued the work
of persecution against the partisans of the Duke of Monmouth,--the man
whose Bloody Assizes will not be easily forgotten in England,--once
nearly paid with his life the foolish desire to climb up on a signpost
in a happy hour of complete intoxication. After a wild orgy in company
with the Lord Treasurer, he and his companion decided to undress until
they were “almost stark naked” and to drink the king’s health from the
airy height of a signpost. Jeffreys took a severe cold and alarmed not
a little the king, who feared the irreparable loss of such a valuable
servant.
After the uncanny stories of the signpost’s function as a gallows, we
find a certain comfort in hearing that the sign occasionally offered a
refuge to persecuted political offenders. In the days of the
Corsican, the partisans of the Bourbons, called by the beautiful name
of “Chouans,” were happy to find such a refuge, “une cache fameuse,”
behind the big sign of the perfumer Caron. The persecuted Chouan had
only to step out through a window and to close the blinds behind him
and he was perfectly safe against the detectives of Fouché, the chief
of the police. If the fugitive, however, made a blunder and stepped by
mistake into the barber shop of M. Teissier, he was undone; because
this was the man who had the honor of shaving the Cæsarean face of
Napoleon.
Before the French Revolution another great event in the world’s
history had produced considerable changes on the signboard--the
Reformation. We have already noticed how the new ideas and motives of
the Renaissance influenced, not only the sculptured frame of the sign,
but created new forms, such as the Dolphin, the Siren, the Pegasus,
the Sagittary, Fortuna, Apollo, Phœnix, Minerva, Hercules, Castor
and Pollux, Bacchus, all favorite themes of this classical period. The
discovery of America at the same time brought the “Wild Man” into
great popularity, and the newly introduced tobacco, “the filthy weed,”
caused the creation of countless Indian and Huron signs,
“black-a-moors and other dusky foreigners.”
The Reformation itself had a more negative effect on the sign. It
tried to eliminate or to change the old saint signs. Cromwell in
England declaimed against Catholic-sounding tavern names. “St.
Catherine and Wheel” was changed to “Cat and Wheel,” and degenerated
further into “Cat and Fiddle,” a sign still popular in England and
celebrated in the famous children’s rhyme:--
“Heigh diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle.”
On some signs the fiddling cat inspires with its music a cow to jump
in ecstasy over a grinning moon. Thus we see everywhere the old
religious motives and symbols turned into ridicule and blasphemy. This
process began at the end of the Middle Ages, as the study of
miniatures and of cathedral sculptures will amply prove. We cannot be
surprised, therefore, to find such anti-papal signs as “Le cochon
mitré” in Compiègne. The mediæval illuminators and sculptors loved to
“hommifier” the swine and to attack under this disguise hypocritical
and voluptuous priests. In the “Doctrinal rurale” of Pierre Michault
of 1486 (in the National Library at Paris), we see a fat monk in the
pedagogue’s chair, representing “concupiscence,” and evidently making
such shocking remarks that his girl pupils put their fingers in their
ears, while in the delicate framework of the miniature a preaching
swine reveals the real character of this strange teacher.
The touching scene of the “Salutatio,” which inspired the artists of
the Renaissance with such noble creations as Donatello’s marble relief
in Florence, is degraded now to a ridiculous bowing and scraping
between a lady and her partner or between two stylish gentlemen. The
fanatical Puritans who thundered even against the harmless Christmas
customs, so dear to the people, of course took offense at the use of
the cross for a sign and in 1643 forced the landlord of the “Golden
Cross,” in the Strand, London, to take his “superstitious and
idolatrous” sign down. It is a curious irony of fate that Cromwell,
who to the present day is made responsible for nearly all
destructions in English cathedrals and who probably was an enemy, not
only of Catholic but of all signs, was himself made an object of the
signboard.
In England more than anywhere else the sign stands for heroes and
hero-worship. Peter the Great and his visit to London were remembered
in “The Czar’s Head”; English admirals and great generals like
Wellington and the Prussian King Frederic, “the great Protestant
hero,” all receive “signboard-honors.” London possessed still in 1881
thirty-seven “Duke of Wellington” taverns.
No less patriotic are the Dutch sign-painters, who love to picture
their own celebrities Rembrandt, Ruysdael, or Erasmus of Rotterdam and
the beloved Princes of Orange. One of them, the future King William
III of England, we find even as a boy on a signboard with the
inimitable Dutch inscription:--
“God laat hem worden groot
Bewaar hem voor de doot
Dat Kleine Manje.”
But other “merkwaardige Personen,” great men of other nations, too,
receive their share of this popular homage: Frederic the Great,
Schiller, Gustavus Adolphus, and even old Cicero. Sometimes the
popularity of a hero passes quickly. The English Admiral Vernon had
hardly received signboard honors when he had to yield his place to
Frederic, the “Glorious Protestant Hero,” as he was called after the
battle of Rossbach. As a rule, a few changes in the costume of the
portrait were considered sufficient by the landlord, who rarely
indulged in the luxury of an entirely new picture for the new hero. To
the English statesman, Horace Walpole, these rapid changes on the
signboard suggested the following melancholy remarks: “I pondered
these things in my breast and said to myself, ‘Surely all glory is but
as a sign!’”
The French people were more loyal to their Bonaparte signs, long after
the beloved emperor had been dethroned. For a long time the
“napoléonisme cabaretier” refused to capitulate, says Carteret. In the
country even serious fights were sometimes caused by the signs of the
Imperialists, who ten years after Waterloo showed still the famous
words, “La garde meurt et ne se rend pas,” or represented the meeting
of Napoleon and Frederic with the inscription, “Le soleil luit pour
tous les héros.” A tavern-keeper near Cannes, where Napoleon landed
on his return from Elba, to reconquer France, honored the memory of
the great man who rested in his inn with the words:--
“Chez moi c’est reposé Napoléon,
Venez boire et célèbrer son nom!”
On the other hand, we find the men who delivered their country from
the yoke of the Corsican equally honored in signs; the tavern in which
these great men had rested were for a long time held sacred by the
people. “In Innsbruck, in the ‘Golden Eagle,’” we read in Heine’s
“Reisebilder,” “where Andreas Hofer had lodged, and where every corner
is still filled with his portraits and mementoes, I asked the
landlord, if he knew anything of the ‘Sandwirth.’ Then the old
gentleman boiled over with eloquence....”
To our great astonishment, we find even the idea of an invasion on old
English tavern signs. We know well this fear of invasion is nothing
new with our cousins. “Down the northeast wind the sea-thieves were
always coming. England should always beware of the northeast wind. It
blows her no good,”--that is the lesson the English school-children
already learn in such books as C. R. L. Fletcher’s “History of
England” (Oxford, 1911), to which Rudyard Kipling has contributed most
passionate songs of patriotism. As early as 1753 the English had the
black suspicion that Frederic the Great might land fifteen thousand of
his Spartan Prussian soldiers on their coast, as if he just then had
nothing else to do. Carlyle has refuted these suspicions as
ridiculous: “King Friedrich distinguished himself by the grand human
virtue of keeping well at home--of always minding his own affairs.” In
these days of the Entente Cordiale and its result the World-War, the
south wind, blowing from France, is entirely forgotten, but
nevertheless it is just there that the most serious preparations for
an invasion of England have been made repeatedly. In the year 1756 the
cry resounded: “If France land on us, we are undone”; and in 1759
Admiral Conflans actually attempted to execute the idea with eighteen
thousand men, but the enterprise failed completely, “not on the shores
of Britain, but of Brittany.” Under Napoleon the danger increased, but
after Nelson’s victory of Trafalgar, Napoleon had to abandon his
maritime plans. The regained feeling of security was manifested in
many caricatures mocking Napoleon, among which we have to reckon the
sign “Old Bonaparte.” Using the familiar motive of “The ass in the
bandbox,” the sign-painter represents the French Emperor riding on a
donkey and sailing in a bandbox over the Channel to fight “Perfidious
Albion.”
In this connection we ask permission to tell the story of another
donkey-sign. Joseph II, Emperor of the old German Empire, whom we
might call the “traveling Kaiser” of the eighteenth century, loved to
put up at simple inns; even when he was invited by Frederic the Great,
at their first interview in Neisse, to lodge in the castle, he
preferred the liberty of having his ease at “The Three Kings.” Once,
in Maestricht, he stopped at a hotel called “The Gray Donkey,” and
gave the landlord as proof of his complete satisfaction the privilege
to call his house hereafter “Kaiser Joseph” and to paint on his sign
the equestrian portrait of his noble guest. But the Dutch customers
did not recognize their old tavern under such a glorious name, and the
landlord was finally obliged to put under the imperial picture the
odd words: “The Real Gray Donkey.” Duke Charles of Württemberg, who
knew this fancy of the Emperor, once pleased him enormously by hanging
a big sign, “Hotel de l’Empereur,” out over the portal of his castle
in Stuttgart, himself receiving the imperial visitor in the humble
costume of an obedient landlord.
More serious political events are equally reflected in the history of
the sign. When Richard III lost throne and life at Bosworth in 1485,
the Black Bears, the heraldic animals of his royal escutcheon,
disappeared from the tavern sign and were replaced by the Blue Bear of
the Count of Oxford. It was even a dangerous thing in those days to
play with the seemingly harmless sign. A landlord of a Crown inn, who
once said jokingly that he intended to make his son the heir of the
crown, was accused of high treason and had to suffer death in 1467.
Another sign, still popular in England, “The Royal Oak,” came into
vogue after the restoration of Charles II, because it reminded the
good people of the oak in which the persecuted king had found a
shelter against his enemies. When Charles I’s proud head fell, a day
after his execution, “The Crown” of the poet tavern-keeper Taylor, who
possessed the courage of his conviction, appeared veiled in black.
The sign in mourning occurs again, but this time for a very frivolous
reason. In 1736 the tavern-keepers, disgusted with the “New Act
against spirituous liquors,” covered their signs with “deep mourning”
as symbol of protest. That this law had not been too severe is
evidenced by Hogarth’s engraving “Gin Lane,” published fifteen years
later, where we read over a tavern the disgusting announcement: “Here
gentlemen and others can get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for
twopence.”
Macaulay has pointed out the great importance of public-houses as
political meeting-grounds. Party congresses of the Liberals were held
in the early day in “The Rose,” but in general the Whigs preferred
places that had a punchbowl on their sign, punch being at the end of
the seventeenth century not only a very popular beverage, but
decidedly a “Whig drink,” while the Tories drank mostly--_noblesse
oblige_--wine or champagne. We find the punchbowl either alone or in
more or less logical combinations, as “Ship and Punchbowl,” “Parrot
and Punchbowl,” “Half-Moon and Punchbowl,” and the like.
An old American sign, “The Federal Punch,” is evidently a revised
edition of the Whig sign of the mother country. The business of
imbibing the party drink was not forgotten in these political
meetings. In fact, the Tories attended to it one time so thoroughly in
their Apollo Tavern in Fleet Street that they were unable to execute
their own decision to go “in a body” to King William to present him an
address of thanks. “They were induced to forego their intention; and
not without cause: for a great crowd of squires after a revel, at
which doubtless neither October nor claret had been spared, might have
caused some inconvenience in the present chamber.” Finally they
decided to send as their representative an elderly country gentleman
who was, for a wonder, still sober.
Beside these respectable meeting-places of the two great parties there
were “treason taverns,” suspicious ale-houses, where plotters and
hired murderers, not without the encouragement of the exiled king
James II, forged their black plans against the life of William, the
Prince of Orange. One of these places had the fitting name “The Dog”
in Drury Lane, “a tavern which was frequented by lawless and desperate
men.”
[Illustration: THE·DOG·AND·POT·196·BLACKFRIARS·ROAD·IN·LONDON·]
We will end our enumeration of politically important taverns with the
“Cadran Bleu” in Paris, where the Marseillais were greeted by the
Parisians after they had completed their long journey across the whole
of France, singing for the first time the famous song of the
Revolution: “Marchez, abattez le tyran.” “Patriot clasps dusty
patriot to his bosom, there is footwashing and reflection: dinner of
twelve hundred covers at the Blue Dial, Cadran Bleu.”
To the present day the right to assemble freely in the tavern, “this
temple of true liberty,” is suspiciously guarded by all parties. To
the present day the tavern serves all kinds of political and social
clubs and sometimes even burial societies similar to those of which
Washington Irving has told us such amusing stories, as “The Swan and
Horseshoe” and “Cock and Crown,” once flourishing in the heart of
London, in Little Britain.