Foreign parts, 14th August 1862.
Dear Mr. Editor-There are few sweeter moments in the year than those
in which one is engaged in choosing the vacation hat. No other garment
implies so much. A vista of coming idleness floats through the brain as
you stop before the hatter’s at different points in your daily walk, and
consider the last new thing in wideawakes. Then there rises before
the mind’s eye the imminent bliss of emancipation from the regulation
chimney-pot of Cockney England. Two-thirds of all pleasure reside in
anticipation and retrospect; and the anticipation of the yearly exodus
in a soft felt is amongst the least alloyed of all lookings forward to
the jaded man of business. By the way, did it ever occur to you, sir,
that herein lies the true answer to that Sphinx riddle so often asked in
vain, even of _Notes and Queries_: What is the origin of the proverb “As
mad as a hatter”? The inventor of the present hat of civilisation
was the typical hatter. There, I will not charge you anything for the
solution; but we are not to be for ever oppressed by the results of this
great insanity. Better times are in store for us, or I mistake the signs
of the times in the streets and shop windows. Beards and chimney-pots
cannot long co-exist.
I was very nearly beguiled this year by a fancy article which I saw
in several windows. The purchase would have been contrary to all my
principles, for the hat in question is a stiff one, with a low, round
crown. But its fascination consists in the system of ventilation--all
round the inside runs a row of open cells, which, in fact, keep the hat
away from the head, and let in so many currents of fresh air. You might
fill half the cells with cigars, and so save carrying a case and add
to the tastefulness of your hat at the same time, while you would get
plenty of air to keep your head cool through the remaining cells.
My principles, however, rallied in time, and I came away with a genuine
soft felt after all, with nothing but a small hole on each side for
ventilation. The soft felt is the only really catholic cover, equal to
all occasions, in which you can do anything; for instance, lie flat on
your back on sand or turf, and look straight up into the heavens--the
first thing the released Cockney rushes to do. Only once a year may it
be always all our lots to get a real taste of the true holiday feeling;
to drop down into some handy place, where no letter can find us; to
look up into the great sky, and over the laughing sea, and think about
nothing; to unstring the bow, and fairly say: “There shall no fight be
got out of us just now; so, old world, if you mean to go wrong, you may
go and be hanged!” To feel all the time that blessed assurance which
does come home to one at such times, and scarcely ever at any other,
that our falling out of the fight is not of the least consequence; that,
whatever we may do, the old world will not go wrong but right, and ever
righter--not our way, nor any other man’s way, but God’s way. A good
deal of sneering and snubbing has been wasted of late, sir (as you have
had more occasion than one to remark), on us poor folks, who will insist
on holding what we find in our Bibles; what has been so gloriously put
in other language by the great poet of our time:--
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete.
I suppose people who feel put out because we won’t believe that the
greatest part of creation is going to the bad can never in the nature of
things get hold of the true holiday feeling, so one is wasting time in
wishing it for them. However, I am getting into quite another line from
the one I meant to travel in; so shall leave speculating and push across
the Channel. There are several questions which might be suggested with
advantage to the Civil Service Examiner, to be put to the next Belgium
attachés who come before them. Why are Belgian hop-poles, on an average,
five or six feet longer than English? How does this extra length affect
the crops? The Belgians plant cabbages too, and other vegetables (even
potatoes I saw) between the rows of hops. Does it answer? All the
English hop-growers, I believe, scout the idea. I failed to discover
what wood their hop-poles are? One of my fellow-travellers, by way of
being up to everything, Informed me that they were grown in Belgium on
purpose; a fact which did not help me much. He couldn’t say exactly what
wood it was. Then a very large proportion of the female population of
Belgium spends many hours of the day, at this time of year, on its knees
in the fields; and this not only for weeding purposes, for I saw women
and girls cutting the aftermath and other light crops in this position.
Certainly, they are thus nearer their work, and save themselves
stooping; but one has a sort of prejudice against women going about
the country on all fours, like Nebuchadnezzar. Is it better for their
health? Don’t they get housemaid’s knees? But, above all, is it we or
the Belgians who don’t, know in this nineteenth century, how to make
corn shocks? In every part of England I have ever been in in harvest
time, we just make up the sheaves and then simply stand six or eight of
them together, the ears upwards, and so make our shock. But the Belgian
makes his shock of four sheaves, ears upwards, and then on the top of
these places another sheaf upside down. This crowning sheaf, which is
tied near the bottom, is spread out over the shock, to which it thus
forms a sort of makeshift thatch. One of the two methods must be
radically wrong. Does this really keep the rain out, and so prevent the
ears from growing in damp weather? I should have thought it would only
have helped to hold the wet and increase the heat. If so, don’t you
think it is really almost a _casus belli?_ Quin said to the elderly
gentleman in the coffee-house (after he had handed him the mustard for
the third time in vain), dashing his hand down on the table, “D------
you, sir, you shall eat mustard with your ham!” and so we might say to
the Belgians if they are wrong, “You shall make your shocks properly.”
Fancy two highly civilised nations having gone on these thousand years
side by side, growing corn and eating bread without finding out which is
the right way to make corn shocks.
Bonn, 22nd August 1862.
I am sitting at a table some forty feet long, from which most of
the guests have retired. The few left are smoking and talking
gesticulatingly. I am drinking during the intervals of writing to you,
sir, a beverage composed of a half flask of white wine, a bottle of
seltzer water, and a lump of sugar (if you can get one of ice to add it
will improve the mixture). I take it for granted that you despise the
Rhine, like most Englishmen, but, sir, I submit that a land where one
can get the above potation for a fraction over what one would pay for a
pot of beer in England, and can, moreover, get the weather which makes
such a drink deliciously refreshing, is not to be lightly thought of.
But I am not going into a rhapsody on the Rhine, though I can strongly
recommend my drink to all economically disposed travellers.
All I hope to do, is, to gossip with you, as I move along; and as my
road lay up the Rhine, you must take that with the rest.
Our first halt on the river was at Bonn. A university town is always
interesting, and this one more than most other foreign ones, as the
place where Prince Albert’s education was begun, and where Bunsen ended
his life. I made an effort to get to his grave, which I was told was
in a cemetery near the town, but could not find it. I hope it will long
remain an object of interest to Englishmen after the generation who knew
him has passed away. There is no one to whom we have done more scanty
justice, and that unlucky and most unfair essay of W------‘s is
the crowning injustice of all. I am not going into his merits as
a statesman, theologian, or antiquary, which, indeed, I am wholly
incompetent to criticise. The only book of his I ever seriously tried
to master, his _Church of the Future_, entirely floored me. But the
wonderful depth of his sympathy and insight!--how he would listen to and
counsel any man, whether he were bent on discovering the exact shape of
the buckle worn by some tribe which disappeared before the Deluge, or
upon regenerating the world after the newest nineteenth century pattern,
or anything between the two--we may wait a long time before we see
anything like it again in a man of his position and learning. And what a
place he filled in English society! I believe fine ladies grumbled
about “the sort of people” they met at those great gatherings at Carlton
Terrace, but they all went, and, what was more to the purpose, all
the foremost men and women of the day went, and were seen and heard of
hundreds of young men of all nations and callings; and their wives,
if they had any, were asked by Bunsen on the most thoroughly catholic
principles. And if any man or woman seemed ill at ease, they would find
him by their side in a minute, leading them into the balcony, if the
night were fine, and pointing out, as he specially loved to do, the
contrast of the views up Waterloo Place on the one hand, and across the
Green Park to the Abbey and the Houses, on the other, or in some other
way setting them at their ease again with a tact as wise and subtle
as his learning. But I am getting far from the Rhine, I see, and the
University of Bonn. Of course I studied the titles of the books exposed
for sale in the windows of the booksellers, and the result, as regards
English literature, was far from satisfactory. We were represented in
the shop of the Parker and Son of Bonn, by one vol. of Scott’s _Poems_;
the puff card of the London Society, with a Millais drawing of a young
man and woman thereupon, and nothing more; but, by way of compensation
I suppose, a book with a gaudy cover was put in a prominent place,
and titled _Tag und Nacht in London_, by Julius Rodenburg. There was
a double picture on the cover: above, a street scene, comprising an
elaborate equipage with two flunkeys behind, a hansom, figures of
Highlanders, girls, blind beggars, etc., and men carrying advertisements
of “Samuel Brothers,” and “Cremorne Gardens”; while in the lower
compartment was an underground scene of a policeman flashing his bull’s
eye on groups of crouching folks; altogether a loathsome kind of book
for one to find doing duty as the representative book of one’s country
with young Germany. I was a little consoled by seeing a randan named
_The Lorelei_ lying by the bank, which, though not an outrigger, would
not have disgraced any building yard at Lambeth or at Oxford. Very
likely it came out of one of them, by the way. But let us hope it is the
first step towards the introduction of rowing at Bonn, and that in a few
years Oxford and Cambridge may make up crews to go and beat Bonn,
and all the other German Universities, and a New England crew from
Cambridge, Massachusetts. What a course that reach of the Rhine at Bonn
would make! No boat’s length to be gained by the toss for choice of
sides, as at Henley or Putney; no Berkshire or Middlesex shore to be
paid for. A good eight-oar race would teach young Germany more of young
England than any amount of perusal of _Tag und Nacht_, I take it. I
confess myself to a strong sentimental feeling about Rolandseck. The
story of Roland the Brave is, after all, one of the most touching of all
human stories, though tourists who drop their H’s may be hurrying under
his tower every day in cheap steamers; and it is one of a group of
the most characteristic stories of the age of chivalry, all having a
connecting link at Roncesvalles. What other battle carries one into
three such groups of romance as this of Roland, the grim tragedy
of Bernard del Carpio and his dear father, and that of the peerless
Durandarté? When I was a boy there were ballads on all these subjects
which were very popular, but are nearly forgotten by this time. I used
to have great trouble to preserve a serene front, I know, whenever I
heard one of them well sung, especially that of “Durandarté” (by Monk
Lewis), I believe. Ay, and after the lapse of many years I scarcely know
where to go for the beau ideal of knighthood summed up in a few words
better than to that same ballad:
Kind in manners, fair in favour,