In Muscovy were no native coins but silver, and those so small that the Muscovites used to keep dozens in their mouths because they slipped through their fingers—and that without incommoding their speech. In Spain,[158] so far as there was any standard, it was the Castilian real, which you might exchange for thirty-four Castilian maravedis, forty Portuguese rais, thirty-six Valencian dineros, twenty-four Aragonese, and thirty-eight Catalonian dineros. But these Portuguese coins would not be taken in Castile, nor the Castilian in Valencia, nor Valencian anywhere out of Valencia. Along the chief merchants' road in Spain, from Barcelona, you might go one hundred miles, as far as Lerida, and find every place with a different minor coinage, current there only, and in Barcelona one was especially liable to receive coins which no one, not even in Barcelona, would accept.
On the Jerusalem journey the higher payments were reckoned in foreign money usually, the Italian gold zecchini and silver piastri most frequently; smaller ones in brass meidines of Tripoli or of Cairo, equal to about a penny farthing and twopence respectively, or in aspers, about three farthings.
Just as, further, the tourist could examine a coin without being able to find out its nominal value, could ascertain the latter and still be ignorant of its real value, so, too, he was continually having to pay reckonings in coins which did not exist. The Venetian and Spanish ducat, the German gulden, the French livre tournois, the Muscovite rouble, and, later, their altine also, were coins of account only. All these coins were as commonly used in daily business in their own localities as guineas are in English charities; and the ducat and the gulden far outside them. In the seventeenth century the Spanish pistole was actual coin in its own country and coin of account in France; board and lodging on "pension" terms would be reckoned in pistoles in Paris. In fact, the French equivalent for "rolling in riches," "cousu de pistoles," is equally evidence of the international character of seventeenth-century gold and of the method of carrying it.
The tourist in 1600 has done his touring. His money is spent; his pleasure is buried; his wisdom gathered; and the fruit is ours. And now; was the pleasure worth the money? was the wisdom worth the gathering?
The answer is, most emphatically, Yes!—Yes for them, and Yes for us. But as to the latter question there were two answers then, and the subject has suggestions beyond those that have come up so far. Let us look at this adverse opinion, and one or two of the suggestions.
During the sixteenth century it became a convention to abuse travel, especially travel in Italy; a convention which may have been more fruitful in England than elsewhere, but certainly was not so to the exclusive extent which modern books in English seem to imply. The difficulty would be to find a nation whose literature at this time does not contain examples of it; even in Poland, where of all places travel was most taken for granted, this topic was one of the first to be dealt with when the vernacular was turned to literary account, namely, in the satires of Kochanowski. When examined, these invectives turn out to have won more attention than they are entitled to, written as they generally are, especially in England, by the class whose medium is nowadays the half-penny paper or the 'religious' novel. We find among their authors all the familiar figures, from the hack-journalist who parades a belated morality for the sake of his stomach down to the bishop to whom the subject, when worn rather thin, is revealed as a brand-new dummy-sin. It is curious that this very bishop, Joseph Hall, should in describing his own journeys, unconsciously provide the most clear-cut sketch of how not to travel that has, perhaps, ever been written.[159] If, among these types, we miss the retired colonel, we must remember that the title was so recently invented, the times so bloody, that all the colonels were probably either fighting or dead. At any rate, the interest of this type of pamphlet belongs rather to the history of publishing than to that of travel, as dating the time when publishers first discovered what a paying public can be created among the lower levels of Puritanism. The proportion of fact that gave them a starting-point may best be put in perspective by pointing out the parallel that exists between travel in Italy three hundred years ago and modern motoring. Nobody who could afford it went without; everybody who could not afford it abused everybody who did; it killed some, maimed others, benefited most, and brightened the life of many a poor rich man who otherwise would have departed this life little better off mentally than his own cows. These pamphleteers were committing the fundamental error of allowing their attention to be absorbed by the seven eighths of foolishness that characterises everything human instead of concentrating it on the other eighth which provides the justification as well as the driving-force. For a sober, all-round, view of the question as it appeared to a man who was both man of the world and scholar, one cannot do better than turn to a letter written by Estienne Pasquier, a letter of introduction for a son of Turnebus. "Comme il a l'esprit beau, aussi lui est-il tombé en teste, ce qui tombe ordinairement aux âmes les plus généreuses, de vouloir voyager pour le faire sage.... S'il m'en croit, il se contentera de voir l'Italie en passant; car ce que Pyrrhus Neoptolemus disoit de la Philosophie, qu'il falloit philosopher, mais sobrement, je le dy du voyage d'Italie, à tous nos jeunes François qui s'y acheminent par une convoitise de voir."[160]
Yet there is one defect of their travels which necessarily escaped notice at the time but cannot fail to strike any one now, which is, how much they passed by without a glance. It is commonly thought that the contrast of travel in days gone by with that of the later times is one of leisureliness as against universal effort to go "faster, farther, and higher" than one's neighbour. But the truth is that in what essentially characterises leisureliness in travelling, the leaving time and energy free for enjoying and studying places on the road, and still more, off it, they were more wanting than we. They went the greatest pace they could; where they stopped at the night they left at dawn; and overnight they had been too tired to explore amid the filth, the dangers, the darkness, the inextricable confusion, of a sixteenth-century town or hamlet. Yet if you call to mind the towns seen in passing which you recollect most vividly, most will probably be those in which your first walks happened after dark. And is there any Gothic cathedral, however grand, whose outside is not commonplace by day compared to its glory by night?
Moreover, the dearth of information narrowed not their opportunities merely, but their interests likewise. Carnac and Stonehenge were no doubt a long way out of their way, but the dolmen of Bagneux was no more than three-quarters of a mile from Saumur, where many of them stayed for weeks, or even months. Yet not a single one, apparently, went to see it. As for the opportunities, not only was Pompeii still buried for them, but Rome itself was, as Montaigne says, not so much ruins as a sepulchre of ruins. When, again, some one says of Lyons that the houses are fine but the streets so ill-smelling and dirty that one cannot stop to admire them, it may remind us that much that was nominally visible was practically invisible; whether through being what was, to them, a considerable distance off their routes, like Brou or Laon, or, as with most cathedrals, through houses being built up against them. Similarly, the Roman amphitheatre at Nîmes is a case in point; houses having been erected inside it so freely that in 1682 five hundred men capable of bearing arms were supposed to be dwelling there.[161] And along with these conditions of living went ideas to correspond; the total effect being half-prohibitive of the occupations of the artist, the historian, and the archæologist, and this at a period when a larger proportion of the greatest buildings of Europe coexisted than at any other period. In fact, so far as the Loire châteaux are concerned, it is clear that the modern tourist sees far more of some of the finest Renascence work than did its contemporaries, who were restricted here to a visit to Chambord and a glimpse of the outsides of Blois and Amboise.
But after all deductions of this kind have been granted, they may well reply that their concern was not so much with that part of the present which we term the past, but with that which we term the future, their individual futures, in particular; and that their object was achieved; adding, moreover, that travel under these conditions was certainly superior to travel of the twentieth century, considered as a form of education in the wider sense of the word. For not only was it obligatory to share the life of the country and its language to an extent which is optional now, but a traveller was continually being thrown on his own resources and presence of mind in matters which concerned his self-respect, his health, and his safety, whereas now everything is merely a matter of cash.