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ART. V.-THE ART OF TRAVEL IN EUROPE. Handbook of France (1861); of the Continent, Belgium and North Germany (1852); of Southern Germany (1858); of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland (1858); of Russia (1849); of Rome (1862); of Florence (1861). John Murray, Albemarle Street.

Guides de Paris à Havre; de Paris à Bordeaux; de Paris à Strasbourg et à Bále; de Paris à Genève et à Chamounix. Hachette: Paris.

Guida dell' Italia Superiore di Massimo Fabi. Ronchi Milano. Caen: Guide portatif et complet, par G. S. Trébutien.

Caen.

Handbook of Travel-Talk. John Murray.

Bradshaw's Continental Railway Guide.

Hardel:

THE art of travel is rapidly becoming so vast a subject that no single professor will be able to expound it. Mr. Galton and Captain Burton have gone far to exhaust the science of life among wild-beasts and savages; and either of them could probably act as master of the ceremonies to the king of Dahomey. But they would, we suspect, be the first to disclaim any like acquaintance with the mysteries of the haute volée in Viennese society, or with mountain travelling in Switzerland. It must be a great chance at least if a hero of the Alpine Club would be as good a guide about Rome as many a shy scholar who has not the strength to scale ice-encrusted cliffs, or the peculiar knack of walking up perpendicular rocks. The East is a field in itself, and something more than mere going over the ground is wanted to make it intelligible. But for one traveller who has the leisure or the opportunity to explore the Zambesi river or to wander out towards Palmyra, there are at least a hundred who find every summer that six weeks in Germany or France do more to refresh the brain and turn the mind into a new track, than even the sea-side or the moors in their own country could do. It is a long time before the most cosmopolitan Englishman gets to feel as thoroughly at home in a foreign railway carriage as on the Great Western. In spite of all that has been done to Anglicise the Continent, where English churches, bifsteaks saignants and bottled beer, large basons, shooting-coats and wideawakes, have sprung up sporadically in the track of the locomotive, the differences of language and manner, if not of opinion, are still in all material respects unaffected by our superficial intercourse with our neighbours. One chief cause of this, no

doubt, lies in the strong objection a highly educated man feels to express himself in a language he can only speak imperfectly. He is painfully conscious of every blunder he makes, the moment after it is made, and the subjects he cares to talk about are precisely those which require a large vocabulary and a ready power of translating ideas by their foreign equivalents. Accordingly a bagman will go over half the Continent, joking, chattering, and making friends, with fewer words than enable a scholar to stumble through his wants in the railway terminus or the inn. But the chief reason no doubt is, that no man can catch the tone of a new society in a moment. All that difficult family history, which we learn half unconsciously in our own country, the distinction of great and small requirements in etiquette, and the chief political and religious shades of feeling, are a shibboleth that cannot be hastily mastered. Mr. Grattan mentions in his last book, that he once gave great offence in a country district of France because, in entire ignorance of days and seasons, he invited a large party on the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI. In the same way, we have heard of English people electrifying the residents of a foreign town by making promiscuous visits without letters of introduction. Our countrymen had no doubt been told that the custom abroad was for the last arrival to call first, and did not understand that the custom only warrants visits where there is some excuse for acquaintance. Every man who has lived out of England will probably remember some circumstances where he has acted awkwardly or given offence, in spite of the very best intentions to the contrary.

An excellent article on "Companions of Travel," that appeared rather more than two years ago in the Saturday Review (Nov. 2, 1861), among other hints to which we shall have occasion to refer, suggested that pictures of society and manners should form part of a future series of Handbooks. We should like to see the task attempted, but we confess to a grave doubt if it could be achieved to any thing like the extent the writer seems to contemplate. Take, for instance, the wonderful descriptions of German manners in the works of Baroness von Tautphoeus, to which the article referred, among other instances, as examples of what was possible. No one can read The Initials without instinctively feeling that it is true to life; but a German, while he admitted this, would say, and would say rightly, that it was true only of life under very exceptional circum-. stances. The interest of the plot turns mainly on the character of a young girl whose father has made a mésalliance, and whose stepmother takes a handsome young Englishman into her familyas a boarder. In a three-volume novel all this is gradually ex

plained away and becomes natural; but a selection of passages would give a very unfair idea of German habits and homes. Of course books may be mentioned where the plot is less exceptional, but the difficulty of epitomising a highly complex society, such as that of the upper classes always is, remains extremely great. Let an Englishman take the writings of Washington Irving, of Emerson, and of Esquiros, all excellent in their way and written by men who cordially appreciated our country, and ask himself if any alchemy could distil the perfume of these halfdozen volumes into one. Peasant life is to a certain extent simpler than the life of the salons. But the Lancashire peasants of Mrs. Gaskell are quite a different race to the Yorkshiremen of Miss Brontë and to Mr. Kingsley's Hampshire clowns. In fact, there is no royal road to the knowledge of society. A traveller must work it out for himself; and for every reason he had better read first-hand the novels and sketches of manners that contain matter to assist him.

In saying this, however, we do not mean that a few hints on little points of difference between English and foreign manners may not save the traveller some annoyance. There are two or three pages in the introduction to Murray's Handbook of Northern Germany which go directly to the point, but which, unfortunately, are so offensive and absurd as to be useless. The writer assumes that a large number of his countrymen are purse-proud, underbred, and swaggering, and lectures them gravely on faults which mostly do not exist, but which, if they do, are incurable. No doubt there is still here and there a rowdy Englishman to be found who scatters oaths and insults and gold over the Continent; but the type will soon be numbered with the dinotherium, and retains its place on the foreign stage only in the same unreal way as harlequin and columbine figure on our own. The real offences that make our countrymen unpopular are of a slighter kind: a habitual want of deference to foreign convenances, a custom of free speech, and an unlicensed sense of the ridiculous. We do not seek to extenuate these offences, in which our young men are naturally the worst sinners; but wearing a wide-awake in Paris, or chaffing a sergeant of police, are not, after all, very grave international crimes, and would scarcely be remembered against the offenders, if their country were not the first power in the world and the most jealously watched. Besides, those who rail at Englishmen for carrying England with them, should remember that soap and clean sheets have been introduced in this way into numberless districts which only know of them in the dictionary. Nor would it be difficult to retort the charge. There are quarters in London, neither small nor obscure, where the cockneyism of foreign capitals has been

reproduced even in its most trifling details. To add a very small matter, it seems curiously difficult for strangers to learn, that it is not the custom in England to call on a new acquaintance in evening or half dress between ten and twelve in the morning.

Quite as often as not the mistakes of Englishmen arise from a misappreciation of the structure and tone of foreign society at the very time when they are striving to conform to it. There is a common idea that people make acquaintance abroad more readily than in England. Admitting this to be, to a slight extent, a feature of the foreign bathing-places, it remains none the less certain that a well-bred and highly-cultivated man is pretty equally reserved and shy of chance comers on both sides the Channel. What has caused the mistake is, that the upper class is comparatively limited on the Continent, and the middle class comparatively large. An average English gentleman, if he go abroad without introductions, must therefore make up his mind that his chance of making friends, on a level with himself in refinement and education, will be decidedly less than in any part of his own country where he is equally unknown. With ladies the danger is of a different kind: they will meet with more intelligent deference in France than in their own country, and whatever mistakes they may commit, the courtesy of those around them will secure them from all unpleasantness. But the conventions of foreign society are far more rigid than our own for women; and the tone of that large and idle society for which French novelists write is painfully low. In the French provinces an unmarried lady is a little compromised if she is seen twenty yards behind her party with an unmarried man; and the freedom of an English country-house is regarded with wonder, and, we regret to say, with a feeling very like disgust. That this feeling is unhealthy and bad we do not pretend to deny; but, so long as it exists, our country women will do well not to part with any portion of their native reserve in travelling. Nor is there any great difference between different parts of the Continent. in this respect; the mere fact that no reputations are so safely demolished any where as those of foreigners, marks the Englishwoman from the first as the theme of idle gossip, which may easily become scandal. Lastly, on few points are foreigners so sensitive as on any thing that wounds their exaggerated amour-propre. A German is driven wild by the serene superciliousness of the chance Englishmen whom he meets, regards their morning-dress as a national outrage, and suspects that every sentence he does not understand is a sneer at the country. A Frenchman is commonly too certain of himself to suspect that he can be thought ridiculous, and quietly shrugs

his shoulders at eccentricities that are not his own. But even a Frenchman cannot understand irony. His own wit is badinage, a shuttlecock tossed between opposite players, who have no other thought than to keep it up skilfully. The heavy English irony, with its under-current of earnest, seems to him spiteful and cruel; he cannot comprehend men who hit one another so hard in jest. Before all things, we would recommend a man who wishes to be understood or to succeed in foreign society, to say nothing that is not absolutely transparent.

Perhaps the best suggestion of the Saturday Reviewer-as in fact it was his first-was in recommending that the recent history of the country should be given. Some of Mr. Murray's handbooks-as, for instance, those on Northern Europe-give a meagre and very dull outline of the country's general history. Now Michelet himself, whom we take to be the most fascinating of précis writers, and who is certainly the most unscrupulous, would infallibly break down in the task of such an abridgment. What we want for every country is the philosophical outline and the more picturesque details-every thing, in a word, that gives local colouring. A sensible man wanting to enjoy Norway, would read the Sagas and one or two modern novels; for Russia, he would take especially the Lives of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine II., with the History of the French Campaign, and Stanley's Eastern Church, and Tourguénef's or Tolstoi's novels. Conceive all this condensed under the hydraulic press of a gentleman whose chief business is to write about inns, roads, signs, and scenery. In fact, Mr. Murray's editors have wisely abstained from any similar attempt for France or Germany. In these matters every man must compile his own history, and the most a handbook can do is to point out the best sources of information in a catalogue raisonné. But the history of the last generation is something quite different. The state of parties, the history of different ministries, the court cliques that exist or are believed in, the biographies of the more notable men, the private history of the press, are all matters on which an intelligent man likes to have some knowledge before he visits a country. A chapter like Mr. Kinglake's episode on the Coup-d'Etat, but written from the point of view of historical fidelity, would be inappreciable to a tourist in France. It would be more difficult to give a résumé of Continental literature in such countries as France and Germany. The Saturday Reviewer, indeed, suggests two rules which he thinks would simplify the matter. First, that our writers mentioned should be well known; and secondly, that they should be typical. But this, after all, is a little like the old school discussion, whether logic was a science or an art, and turns entirely

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