With creaking noise, then rainy floods impend.”
How was it possible, then, that such an institution as our amiable sign, approved and furthered by the State, such a popular, often artistically charming creation, could have enemies? The first reason, as we have seen in our chapter on “Religious Signs,” was that pious signs were used by impious innkeepers or that religious themes were represented in a manner insulting to all religious feeling. No wonder, if a French landlord called his tavern “Au sermon,” and illustrated the word “sermon” by a deer (cerf) and a mountain (mont), that the really pious citizen protested and exclaimed indignantly: “Ne devrait-on pas condamner à une grosse amende un misérable cabaretier qui met à son enseigne un cerf et un mont pour faire une ridicule équivoque à sermon? Ce qui autorise des ivrognes à dire qu’ils vont tous les jours au sermon ou qu’ils en viennent.”
ZUM SCHLÜSSEL BOZEN.
Surely the really pious signs subsisted beside their frivolous brothers, as the English doctor-sign of 1623, beautifully carved and gilded and now a treasure of a collector, proves by its inscription: “Altissimus creavit de terra medicynam et vir prudens non abhorrebit illam.” Curiously enough, the schoolmaster souls took offense at the sign’s absurd combinations, its lack of “sound literature and good sense,” its impossible orthography and ridiculous mottoes, which, by the way, were added only later to the pictures. All this was extremely shocking to these people and many of them thought it a noble life-task to reform the signs. One of these reformers developed his programme in one of the oldest English periodicals, “The Spectator,” in an April number of the year 1710, fully aware of attempting an herculean labor. Combinations, such as “Fox and Goose,” he deigns to admit; but what sense, asks he, in logical indignation, “is in such absurdities as ‘Fox and the Seven Stars,’ or worse still, in the ‘Three Nuns and a Hare’?” Molière, in “Les Fâcheux,” has ridiculed these sign reformers, a species not unknown in Paris either, in the person of Monsieur Caritidès, who humbly solicited Louis XIV to invest him with the position of a General Sign Controller. His petition reads, in Molière’s inimitable French, as follows:—
Sire:
Votre très-humble, très-obéissant, très-fidèle et très savant sujet et serviteur Caritidès, Français de nation, Grec de profession, ayant considéré les grands et notables abus qui se commettent aux inscriptions des enseignes des maisons boutiques, cabarets, jeux de boule et autres lieux de votre bonne ville de Paris, en ce que certains ignorants, compositeurs des dites inscriptions, renversent, par une barbare, pernicieuse et détestable orthographe, toute sorte de sens et de raison, sans aucun regard d’etymologie, analogie, énergie ni allégorie quelconque au grand scandale de la république des lettres et de la nation Française, qui se décrie et déshonore, par les dits abus et fautes grossières, envers les étrangers, et notamment envers les Allemands, curieux lecteurs et inspecteurs des dites inscriptions ... supplie humblement Votre Majesté de créer, pour le bien de son État et la gloire de son empire une charge de contrôleur, intendant-correcteur, réviseur et restaurateur général des dites inscriptions et d’icelle honorer le suppliant....
In all impartiality we have to admit that really the sign lost by and by its usefulness as a street-guide, since the trades and crafts occupying a house changed often, while the old signs, especially those which formed a part of its architecture, remained unchanged, thus producing the most ridiculous contradictions against which the above-mentioned reformer of “The Spectator” protested not without reason, saying: “A cook should not live at ‘The Boot’ nor a shoemaker at ‘The Roasted Pig.’”
But the most ruthless enemy of the sign became the police itself, who once protected it. As early as the year 1419 we find an English police regulation, threatening with a fine of forty pence—in those days quite a sum—“that no one in future should have a stake bearing either his sign or leaves, extending or lying over the King’s highway, of greater length than seven feet at most.” As every innkeeper tried to outdo the other by the size and the magnificence of his sign, one arrived finally at absurdly great constructions which really hampered the traffic: as in England, where we find wrought-iron signs which, like arches of triumph, reached from one side of the street to the other. A precious old book, “A Vademecum for Malt-Worms” (British Museum), in a quaint woodcut, “The Dog in Shoreditch,” gives us a picture of such a sign monument. To the artist’s eyes they were charming things, combining happily great lanterns with the sign into a harmony which we so often find lacking in modern days, where beautiful old signs through the addition of ugly modern lamps lose all their artistic charm of yore.
·THE·DOG·IN·SHOREDITCH·