He has lost his hat and broken his stick, but he is afraid to get down because he has a basket of excited live fowl on his arm. Occasionally the humour is a little grim, after the true North Country fashion. Such is the case in the tailpiece to the Curlew where a blacksmith (or is it a tanner?) looks on pitiless at the unhappy dog with a kettle dangling at its tail; such, again, in the vignette of the mischievous youngster who leads the blind man into mid-stream. As a moralist, Bewick is never tired of exhibiting the lachrimo rerum, the brevity of life, the emptiness of fame. The staved-in, useless boat; the ruined and deserted cottage, with the grass growing at the hearthstone; the ass rubbing itself against the pillar that celebrates the 'glorious victory;' the churchyard, with its rising moon, and its tombstone legend, 'Good Times, bad Times, and all Times got over,' are illustrations of this side of his genius. But the subject is one which could not be exhausted in many papers, for this little gallery is Bewick's 'criticism of life,' and he had seventy-five years' experience. His final effort was a ferryman waiting to carry a coffin from Eltringham to Ovingham; and on his death-bed he was meditating his favourite work. In a lucid moment of his last wanderings he was asked of what he had been thinking, and he replied, with a faint smile, that he had been devising subjects for some new Tailpieces.
XIX. A GERMAN IN ENGLAND.
WHEN, in 1768, the yet undistinguished the world his 'Journal of a Tour to Corsica,' Gray wrote to Horace Walpole from Pembroke College that the book had strangely pleased and moved him. Then, with the curious contempt for the author which that egregious personage seems to have inspired in so many of his contemporaries, Gray goes on: 'The pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.' This is an utterance which suggests that sometimes even the excellent critic Mr. Gray, like the Sage of Gough Square, 'talked James Boswell of Auchinleck gave to laxly.' At all events this particular example scarcely illustrates his position. There was more than mere veracity in Boswell's method. Conscious or unconscious, his faculty for reproducing his impressions effectively, and his thoroughly individual treatment of his material, are far more nearly akin to genius than folly. Nor could his success be said to be a matter of chance, since on two subsequent occasions—in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' and the 'Life of Johnson'—he not only repeated that success, but carried further towards perfection those fortunate characteristics which he had exhibited at first. Walpole, if we may trust the title-page of the 'little lounging miscellany' known as 'Walpoliana,' reported his friend's dictum with greater moderation. 'Mr. Gray the poet has often observed to me, that, if any person were to form a Book of what he had seen and heard himself, it must, in whatever hands, prove a most useful and entertaining one.' As a generalisation, this leaves nothing to be desired. That the unaffected record of ordinary experiences, 'honestly set down,' is seldom without its distinctive charm, needs no demonstration; and when lapse of time has added its grace of remoteness, the charm is heightened. These considerations must serve as our excuse for recalling a half-forgotten 'pamphlet'—as Gray would have styled it—which points the moral of his amended aphorism far better than Boswell's 'Tour.'
The narrative of Charles P. Moritz's 'Travels, chiefly on Foot, through several Parts of England,' belongs to 1782. It was first published at Berlin in 1783, and the earliest English version is dated 1795. The second edition (now before us) came two years later, and other issues are occasionally met with in booksellers' catalogues; besides which, John Pinkerton, the compiler of the 'Walpoliana' above mentioned, included the book in the second volume of his 'Collections of Voyages,' et.c., and Mayor also reprinted it in vol. ix. of his 'British Tourist.' *
* It is also included, with some omissions, in Cassell's
excellent 'National Library.'
The English translator was a 'very young lady,' said to be the daughter of an unidentified personage referred to by the author: the editor, who, in a copious preface, testifies, among other things, to the favourable reception of the work in Berlin and Germany generally, remains anonymous. Moritz himself, the writer of the volume, was a young Prussian clergyman, enthusiastic about England and things English, who came among us 'to draw Miltonic air' (in Gay's phrase), and to read his beloved 'Paradise Lost' in the very land of its conception. He stayed exactly seven weeks in this country, three of which he spent in London, the rest being occupied by visits to Oxford, Birmingham, the Peak, and elsewhere. What he sees, and what he admires (and luckily for us he admires a great deal), he describes in letters to one Frederic Gedike, a professorial friend at Berlin.
His first communication, dated 31st May, depicts his progress up the Thames, which he regards as greatly surpassing even 'the charming banks of the Elbe.' Then he disembarks near Hartford, whence, with two companions, he posts to London, behind a round-hatted postilion 'with a nosegay in his bosom.' He is delighted with the first view he gets of an English soldier, 'in his red uniform, his hair cut short and combed back on his forehead, so as to afford a full view of his fine broad manly face.' He is interested also to see two boys engaged in the national pastime of boxing; and he marvels at the huge gateway-like sign-posts of the village inns. Passing over Westminster Bridge, he does not, like Wordsworth, burst into a sonnet, but he is impressed (as who would not be!) by that unequalled coup d'oil. 'The prospect from this bridge alone,' he says, 'seems to afford one the epitome of a journey, or a voyage in miniature, as containing something of everything that most usually occurs on a journey.' Presently, a little awed by the prodigious greatness and gloom of the houses (which remind him of Leipzig), he takes lodgings in George Street, Strand, with a tailor's widow, not very far, as he is pleased to discover, from that Adelphi Terrace where once 'lived the renowned Garrick.' To his simple tastes his apartments, with their leather-covered chairs, carpeted floors and mahogany tables, have an air of splendour. 'I may do just as I please,' he says, 'and keep my own tea, coffee, bread and butter, for which purpose [and here comes a charming touch of guilelessness!] my landlady has given me a cupboard in my room, which locks up.' With one of his landlady's sons for guide, he makes the tour of St. James's Park (where you may buy milk warm from the cow), and he experiences for the first time 'the exquisite pleasure of mixing freely with a concourse of people, who are for the most part well dressed and handsome.' His optimism finds a further gratification in the 'sweet security' (the expression is not his, but Lamb's) which is afforded 'from the prodigious crowd of carts and coaches,' by the footways on either side of the streets; and he explains to his 'dearest Gedike' the mysteries of giving the wall. He thinks London better lighted than Berlin (which implies little short of Cimmerian darkness in that centre of civilization!), and he waxes sorrowful over the general evidence of dram-drinking and the sale of spirituous liquors. 'In the late riots [i.e. the Gordon Riots of 1780], which even yet are hardly quite subsided, and which are still the general topic of conversation, more people have been found dead near empty brandy-casks in the streets, than were killed by the musket-balls of regiments, that were called in.'
Another thing which strikes him as foreign to his experience is the insensibility of the crowd to funerals. 'The people seem to pay as little attention to such a procession, as if a hay-cart were driving past.' Among more pleasurable novelties, are the English custom of sleeping without an eiderdown, and the insular institution of 'buttered toast,' which, incredible as it may sound, appears to have been still an unknown luxury in the land of Werther. *