CHAPTER IX

POLITICAL SIGNS

“Au-dessus de ma tête, Charles Quint, Joseph II ou Napoléon pendus à une vieillie potence en fer et faisant enseigne, grands empereurs qui ne sont plus bons qu’à achalander une auberge.”

VICTOR HUGO, _Le Rhin_.

At the first glance our peaceful sign seems to have nothing to do with politics whatsoever, except perhaps in so far as under its symbol the Philistines assemble, not only to drink and be merry, but, as a side-issue, to solve the world’s problems. The contrast of human strife and battle outside, somewhere in distant lands, with the undisturbed comfort of the tap-room has been for ages one of the chief fascinations of the tavern, and none has described this selfish attitude of the Philistine more graphically than Goethe in the conversation of the two citizens in his “Faust”:--

“On Sundays, holidays, there’s naught I take delight in, Like gossiping of war, and war’s array. When down in Turkey, far away, The foreign people are a-fighting. One at the window sits, with glass and friends, And sees all sorts of ships go down the river gliding: And blesses then, as home he wends At night, our times of peace abiding.”

This opinion the other citizen, who reminds us curiously of certain modern neutrals, approves with the following words:--

“Yes, Neighbor! that’s my notion too: Why, let them break their heads, let loose their passions, And mix things madly through and through, So, here, we keep our good old fashions!”

This seems about all the political wisdom the tavern sign has to suggest; but if we investigate more closely the varying forms and continual changes of the sign we shall discover in its evolution nothing less than a little history of civilization in pictures. Every great event in the world’s history finds its echo in some transformation of the sign, that proves itself a sensitive indicator for the popular valuation of leading men and important occurrences. In the eagle-names of the Roman signs we seem to hear the conquering wings of the Roman eagles soaring over the world, and on the Cymbrian shield over the cocktavern on the Forum we read the pride of the victorious Roman soldier.

In our chapter on “Heraldic Signs” we recognized the relationship between the landlords and the ruling powers. The swinging sign of a “crown” means the rule of kings, and thankful subjects who enjoy the peace secured by their monarch and the comfort of settling down in “The Crown” to a blessed meal. It means good times, efficient landlords and easy food-supply, if you get such an excellent and abundant dinner as Heine was offered on his wanderings through the Harz by the tavern-keeper of “The Crown” in Klausthal: “My repast consisted of spring-green parsley-soup, violet-blue cabbage, a pile of roast veal which resembled Chimborazo in miniature and a sort of smoked herrings, called Bückings from their inventor William Bücking, who died in 1447, and who, on account of the invention, was so greatly honored by Charles V that the great monarch in 1556 made a journey from Middleburg to Bievlied in Zealand for the express purpose of visiting the grave of the great fishdrier. How exquisitely such dishes taste when we are familiar with their historical associations!”

And do not the kings themselves appear on the sign? The “Three Kings” were originally the “Wise Men” from the East. How the Catholic Church came to represent them as kings we read in Fischart’s quaint old German of his amusing “Bienenkorb” of 1580: “Und das sie weiter auss den treien Weisen aus Morgenland trei König gemacht hat und den eynen so Bechschwarz als eynen Moren, ist aus den Weissagungen Salomonis oder Davids gefischet, die da sagen, dass die König aus Morenland Christum anzubeten kommen werden.” The East, the land of the morn, was thus confused with the land of the Moors which we should rather seek to the south of Bethlehem. On “Three Kings’ Day,” of course, the taverns of this name were scenes of special merriment, the good Catholics joyfully shouting, “The King drinks.” “The three gentlemen,” as Carlyle calls them disrespectfully, are buried in the Cologne Cathedral, but their memory is honored still by many a visitor of a “Three Kings” tavern in good Rhenish wine which our forefathers called the theological wine. We find the sign of the famous travelers from distant lands especially on the great roads of commerce leading from Italy over the Alps, so in Augsburg and Basle. Originally a royalist symbol of the landlord’s loyalty to monarchy, of his eagerness to serve crowned guests if fortune should lead them his way, it was changed in the times of the Revolution to the democratic “Three Moors,” and the first landlord who is said to have deprived his three kings of their crowns was the landlord in Basle. Maybe time helped him to make this change, slowly wearing away the gilded glitter of the crowns and darkening the kings to black-a-moors. To-day the famous house in Augsburg, where Charles V once lodged as guest of the rich banker Fugger for more than a year, is called “Three Moors.” The traveler still may see the big fireplace in which the generous merchant burned all the imperial promissory notes.

But whatever the explanation of this “Three Moors’” sign may be, there can be no doubt that the Revolution had a noticeable influence on signs in general. The inn “Zum Rosenkrantz” in Strassburg was called after 1790 “A la couronne civile,” to please the rationalistic worshipers of the “Supreme Being,” and countless king-signs were sold as old iron. Sébastien Mercier, in his “Tableau de Paris,” has given a merciless report of this great catastrophe which swept away so many of the signs which we have learned to respect and to love: “Chez les marchands de ferrailles du quai de la Mégisserie, sont des magazins de vieilles enseignes, propre à décorer l’entrée de tous les cabarets et tabagies des faubourgs et de la banlieu de Paris. Là tous les rois de la terre dorment ensemble: Louis XVI et Georges III se baisent fraternellement; le roi de Prusse couche avec l’impératrice de Russie, l’empereur est de niveau avec les électeurs; là enfin la tiare et le turban se confonde. Un cabaretier arrive, remue avec le pied toutes ces têtes couronnées, les examine, prend au hasard la figure du roi de Pologne, l’emporte et écrit dessous: Au grand vainqueur. Un autre gargotier demande une impératrice; il veut que sa gorge soit boursouflée, et le peintre, sortant de la taverne voisine, fait présent d’une gorge rebondie à toutes les princesses d’Europe. Le même peintre coiffe d’une couronne de laurier une tête de Louis XV lui ôte sa perruque et sa bourse, et voilà, un César.--Toutes ces figures royales ont d’étranges physionomies et font éternellement la moue à la populace qui les regarde. Aucun de ces souverains ne sourit au peuple, même en peinture; ils out tous l’air hagard ou burlesque, des yeux éraillés, un nez de travers, une bouche énorme....”

We see those were bad days for kings, even for painted ones. If the landlord had Jacobin blood in his veins he would not content himself with such harmless changes as removing the painted crowns. He would call his tavern no longer “Le Roi Maure,” but forthwith “Le Roi Mort,” and on the sign the picture of the dead king Louis XVI would testify to his stanch republicanism. Or he would choose as sign-hero Brutus the famous regicide. Dickens has introduced us to such a tavern, “The good Republican Brutus,” in the “Tale of Two Cities,” and his picture of the place, although in a book of fiction, shows clearly the colors of historical truth: “It had a quieter look than any other place of the same description they had passed, and though red with patriotic caps was not so red as the rest.” The guests were a rather suspicious-looking crowd. One workman with bare breast and arms reads aloud the latest terrible news to the rest who listen attentively. All are armed, some have laid their weapons aside to be resumed, if needed. In the classical chapter “The Wine-Shop,” where he describes the hopeless misery of the poor people crowded together in the narrow streets of the St. Antoine quarter, he sees even in the merchants’ signs symbols of misery or threats of future atrocities: “The trade-signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were all grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted up, only the leanest scraps of meat, the baker the coarsest of meager loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer.... Nothing was represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was murderous.”

It was in a tavern in Varennes that the fate of Louis XVI was sealed. Here the fugitive king was arrested and forced to go back to Paris to pay with his blood the debt of sins which his ancestors had accumulated. “Forty-eight years after the royal coach was stopped in this town,” says Victor Hugo, “I saw hanging from an old iron bracket the picture of Louis Philippe with the inscription: ‘Au grand Monarque.’” Nowhere do we observe quicker changes than in governments and tavern signs, remarks the German tramp-poet Seume; and Victor Hugo indulges in similar reflections, passing in review the signs of the last one hundred years from Louis XV to Bonaparte and Charles X: “Louis XVI s’est peut-être arrêté au Grand Monarque, et s’est vu là peint en enseigne, roi en peinture lui-même.--Pauvre ‘Grand Monarque?’” he exclaims in pathetic pity. This supposition of Hugo’s, however, is not correct, as we learn from Carlyle, who, scrutinizing with the prophetic vision of a poet the darkness of the past, possessed at the same time the exactness and sincerity of a true historian and who has given us, based on a personal visit to the locality, the following description of the nocturnal scene: “The village of Varennes lies dark and slumberous, a most unlevel Village of inverse saddle-shape, as men write. It sleeps; the rushing of the River Aire singing lullaby to it. Nevertheless from the Golden Arm, Bras d’or Tavern across that sloping Marketplace, there still comes shine of social light....”

Even the American Revolution left its traces on the tavern signs of the Yankeeland. The old Baptist pastor and Professor of Theology, Galusha Anderson, who has given us, in his charming book, “When Neighbors were Neighbors,” in his simple way a kind of social history of the early United States, mentions signs that he saw in his youth “where the English red-coats were represented flying before our revolutionary forefathers.” And Washington Irving has given us, in his “Rip Van Winkle,” a classical example of the political changes the signboard had to undergo. When this curious dreamer and unhappy husband, after many years of mysterious absence, came back to his native village, nothing perhaps surprised him so much as to find on the old tavern the strange words, “The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle,” and to see even the good old sign strangely altered: “He recognised on the sign, however, the ruby face of King George, under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe; but even this was singularly metamorphosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, General Washington.” Thus he received from the signboard the necessary instruction on the great changes that had taken place during his absence, how his country had developed from an English Colony to a free Republic.

There are still a few signs in existence that might give us an idea how such old American signs probably looked. We refer especially to the “Governor Hancock” sign in the old Boston State House and a couple of amusing signs in the little historical museum at Lexington.

In its long political career the sign was not spared the humiliation of being used as gallows. One of the first victims of the French Revolution was Foulon. He was charged with making the people eat grass; and now a raging mob forced into his dead mouth the food he had proposed for others. According to tradition this old sinner was hanged to a lantern on the corner of the Place de la Grève and the Rue de la Vannerie. But this is contradicted by such an old Parisian as Victorien Sardou, who says that Foulon was hanged to a sign which, as he remembers well from his childhood days, was still to be seen, under Louis Philippe, although nobody really seemed to give attention to it in those days of Romanticism.

Another gruesome story we are told by Macaulay, how under James II, after the defeat of the unhappy Duke of Monmouth, the partisans of the pretender were suspended from a signpost before a tavern in Taunton by order of a certain Colonel Percy Kirke. “They were not suffered even to take leave of their nearest relations. The signpost of the White Hart Inn served for a gallows. It is said that the work of death went on in sight of the windows where the officers of the Tangier regiment were carousing, and that at every health a wretch was turned off. When the legs of the dying men quivered in the last agony, the colonel ordered the drums to strike up. He would give the rebels, he said, music to their dancing. The tradition runs that one of the captives was not even allowed the indulgence of a speedy death. Twice he was suspended from the signpost, and twice cut down. Twice he was asked if he repented of his treason, and twice he replied that if the deed were to do again, he would do it. Then he was tied up for the last time.”

The Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor Jeffreys, who continued the work of persecution against the partisans of the Duke of Monmouth,--the man whose Bloody Assizes will not be easily forgotten in England,--once nearly paid with his life the foolish desire to climb up on a signpost in a happy hour of complete intoxication. After a wild orgy in company with the Lord Treasurer, he and his companion decided to undress until they were “almost stark naked” and to drink the king’s health from the airy height of a signpost. Jeffreys took a severe cold and alarmed not a little the king, who feared the irreparable loss of such a valuable servant.

After the uncanny stories of the signpost’s function as a gallows, we find a certain comfort in hearing that the sign occasionally offered a refuge to persecuted political offenders. In the days of the Corsican, the partisans of the Bourbons, called by the beautiful name of “Chouans,” were happy to find such a refuge, “une cache fameuse,” behind the big sign of the perfumer Caron. The persecuted Chouan had only to step out through a window and to close the blinds behind him and he was perfectly safe against the detectives of Fouché, the chief of the police. If the fugitive, however, made a blunder and stepped by mistake into the barber shop of M. Teissier, he was undone; because this was the man who had the honor of shaving the Cæsarean face of Napoleon.

Before the French Revolution another great event in the world’s history had produced considerable changes on the signboard--the Reformation. We have already noticed how the new ideas and motives of the Renaissance influenced, not only the sculptured frame of the sign, but created new forms, such as the Dolphin, the Siren, the Pegasus, the Sagittary, Fortuna, Apollo, Phœnix, Minerva, Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Bacchus, all favorite themes of this classical period. The discovery of America at the same time brought the “Wild Man” into great popularity, and the newly introduced tobacco, “the filthy weed,” caused the creation of countless Indian and Huron signs, “black-a-moors and other dusky foreigners.”

The Reformation itself had a more negative effect on the sign. It tried to eliminate or to change the old saint signs. Cromwell in England declaimed against Catholic-sounding tavern names. “St. Catherine and Wheel” was changed to “Cat and Wheel,” and degenerated further into “Cat and Fiddle,” a sign still popular in England and celebrated in the famous children’s rhyme:--

“Heigh diddle diddle, The cat and the fiddle.”

On some signs the fiddling cat inspires with its music a cow to jump in ecstasy over a grinning moon. Thus we see everywhere the old religious motives and symbols turned into ridicule and blasphemy. This process began at the end of the Middle Ages, as the study of miniatures and of cathedral sculptures will amply prove. We cannot be surprised, therefore, to find such anti-papal signs as “Le cochon mitré” in Compiègne. The mediæval illuminators and sculptors loved to “hommifier” the swine and to attack under this disguise hypocritical and voluptuous priests. In the “Doctrinal rurale” of Pierre Michault of 1486 (in the National Library at Paris), we see a fat monk in the pedagogue’s chair, representing “concupiscence,” and evidently making such shocking remarks that his girl pupils put their fingers in their ears, while in the delicate framework of the miniature a preaching swine reveals the real character of this strange teacher.

The touching scene of the “Salutatio,” which inspired the artists of the Renaissance with such noble creations as Donatello’s marble relief in Florence, is degraded now to a ridiculous bowing and scraping between a lady and her partner or between two stylish gentlemen. The fanatical Puritans who thundered even against the harmless Christmas customs, so dear to the people, of course took offense at the use of the cross for a sign and in 1643 forced the landlord of the “Golden Cross,” in the Strand, London, to take his “superstitious and idolatrous” sign down. It is a curious irony of fate that Cromwell, who to the present day is made responsible for nearly all destructions in English cathedrals and who probably was an enemy, not only of Catholic but of all signs, was himself made an object of the signboard.

In England more than anywhere else the sign stands for heroes and hero-worship. Peter the Great and his visit to London were remembered in “The Czar’s Head”; English admirals and great generals like Wellington and the Prussian King Frederic, “the great Protestant hero,” all receive “signboard-honors.” London possessed still in 1881 thirty-seven “Duke of Wellington” taverns.

No less patriotic are the Dutch sign-painters, who love to picture their own celebrities Rembrandt, Ruysdael, or Erasmus of Rotterdam and the beloved Princes of Orange. One of them, the future King William III of England, we find even as a boy on a signboard with the inimitable Dutch inscription:--

“God laat hem worden groot Bewaar hem voor de doot Dat Kleine Manje.”

But other “merkwaardige Personen,” great men of other nations, too, receive their share of this popular homage: Frederic the Great, Schiller, Gustavus Adolphus, and even old Cicero. Sometimes the popularity of a hero passes quickly. The English Admiral Vernon had hardly received signboard honors when he had to yield his place to Frederic, the “Glorious Protestant Hero,” as he was called after the battle of Rossbach. As a rule, a few changes in the costume of the portrait were considered sufficient by the landlord, who rarely indulged in the luxury of an entirely new picture for the new hero. To the English statesman, Horace Walpole, these rapid changes on the signboard suggested the following melancholy remarks: “I pondered these things in my breast and said to myself, ‘Surely all glory is but as a sign!’”

The French people were more loyal to their Bonaparte signs, long after the beloved emperor had been dethroned. For a long time the “napoléonisme cabaretier” refused to capitulate, says Carteret. In the country even serious fights were sometimes caused by the signs of the Imperialists, who ten years after Waterloo showed still the famous words, “La garde meurt et ne se rend pas,” or represented the meeting of Napoleon and Frederic with the inscription, “Le soleil luit pour tous les héros.” A tavern-keeper near Cannes, where Napoleon landed on his return from Elba, to reconquer France, honored the memory of the great man who rested in his inn with the words:--

“Chez moi c’est reposé Napoléon, Venez boire et célèbrer son nom!”

On the other hand, we find the men who delivered their country from the yoke of the Corsican equally honored in signs; the tavern in which these great men had rested were for a long time held sacred by the people. “In Innsbruck, in the ‘Golden Eagle,’” we read in Heine’s “Reisebilder,” “where Andreas Hofer had lodged, and where every corner is still filled with his portraits and mementoes, I asked the landlord, if he knew anything of the ‘Sandwirth.’ Then the old gentleman boiled over with eloquence....”

To our great astonishment, we find even the idea of an invasion on old English tavern signs. We know well this fear of invasion is nothing new with our cousins. “Down the northeast wind the sea-thieves were always coming. England should always beware of the northeast wind. It blows her no good,”--that is the lesson the English school-children already learn in such books as C. R. L. Fletcher’s “History of England” (Oxford, 1911), to which Rudyard Kipling has contributed most passionate songs of patriotism. As early as 1753 the English had the black suspicion that Frederic the Great might land fifteen thousand of his Spartan Prussian soldiers on their coast, as if he just then had nothing else to do. Carlyle has refuted these suspicions as ridiculous: “King Friedrich distinguished himself by the grand human virtue of keeping well at home--of always minding his own affairs.” In these days of the Entente Cordiale and its result the World-War, the south wind, blowing from France, is entirely forgotten, but nevertheless it is just there that the most serious preparations for an invasion of England have been made repeatedly. In the year 1756 the cry resounded: “If France land on us, we are undone”; and in 1759 Admiral Conflans actually attempted to execute the idea with eighteen thousand men, but the enterprise failed completely, “not on the shores of Britain, but of Brittany.” Under Napoleon the danger increased, but after Nelson’s victory of Trafalgar, Napoleon had to abandon his maritime plans. The regained feeling of security was manifested in many caricatures mocking Napoleon, among which we have to reckon the sign “Old Bonaparte.” Using the familiar motive of “The ass in the bandbox,” the sign-painter represents the French Emperor riding on a donkey and sailing in a bandbox over the Channel to fight “Perfidious Albion.”

In this connection we ask permission to tell the story of another donkey-sign. Joseph II, Emperor of the old German Empire, whom we might call the “traveling Kaiser” of the eighteenth century, loved to put up at simple inns; even when he was invited by Frederic the Great, at their first interview in Neisse, to lodge in the castle, he preferred the liberty of having his ease at “The Three Kings.” Once, in Maestricht, he stopped at a hotel called “The Gray Donkey,” and gave the landlord as proof of his complete satisfaction the privilege to call his house hereafter “Kaiser Joseph” and to paint on his sign the equestrian portrait of his noble guest. But the Dutch customers did not recognize their old tavern under such a glorious name, and the landlord was finally obliged to put under the imperial picture the odd words: “The Real Gray Donkey.” Duke Charles of Württemberg, who knew this fancy of the Emperor, once pleased him enormously by hanging a big sign, “Hotel de l’Empereur,” out over the portal of his castle in Stuttgart, himself receiving the imperial visitor in the humble costume of an obedient landlord.

More serious political events are equally reflected in the history of the sign. When Richard III lost throne and life at Bosworth in 1485, the Black Bears, the heraldic animals of his royal escutcheon, disappeared from the tavern sign and were replaced by the Blue Bear of the Count of Oxford. It was even a dangerous thing in those days to play with the seemingly harmless sign. A landlord of a Crown inn, who once said jokingly that he intended to make his son the heir of the crown, was accused of high treason and had to suffer death in 1467. Another sign, still popular in England, “The Royal Oak,” came into vogue after the restoration of Charles II, because it reminded the good people of the oak in which the persecuted king had found a shelter against his enemies. When Charles I’s proud head fell, a day after his execution, “The Crown” of the poet tavern-keeper Taylor, who possessed the courage of his conviction, appeared veiled in black.

The sign in mourning occurs again, but this time for a very frivolous reason. In 1736 the tavern-keepers, disgusted with the “New Act against spirituous liquors,” covered their signs with “deep mourning” as symbol of protest. That this law had not been too severe is evidenced by Hogarth’s engraving “Gin Lane,” published fifteen years later, where we read over a tavern the disgusting announcement: “Here gentlemen and others can get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence.”

Macaulay has pointed out the great importance of public-houses as political meeting-grounds. Party congresses of the Liberals were held in the early day in “The Rose,” but in general the Whigs preferred places that had a punchbowl on their sign, punch being at the end of the seventeenth century not only a very popular beverage, but decidedly a “Whig drink,” while the Tories drank mostly--_noblesse oblige_--wine or champagne. We find the punchbowl either alone or in more or less logical combinations, as “Ship and Punchbowl,” “Parrot and Punchbowl,” “Half-Moon and Punchbowl,” and the like.

An old American sign, “The Federal Punch,” is evidently a revised edition of the Whig sign of the mother country. The business of imbibing the party drink was not forgotten in these political meetings. In fact, the Tories attended to it one time so thoroughly in their Apollo Tavern in Fleet Street that they were unable to execute their own decision to go “in a body” to King William to present him an address of thanks. “They were induced to forego their intention; and not without cause: for a great crowd of squires after a revel, at which doubtless neither October nor claret had been spared, might have caused some inconvenience in the present chamber.” Finally they decided to send as their representative an elderly country gentleman who was, for a wonder, still sober.

Beside these respectable meeting-places of the two great parties there were “treason taverns,” suspicious ale-houses, where plotters and hired murderers, not without the encouragement of the exiled king James II, forged their black plans against the life of William, the Prince of Orange. One of these places had the fitting name “The Dog” in Drury Lane, “a tavern which was frequented by lawless and desperate men.”

We will end our enumeration of politically important taverns with the “Cadran Bleu” in Paris, where the Marseillais were greeted by the Parisians after they had completed their long journey across the whole of France, singing for the first time the famous song of the Revolution: “Marchez, abattez le tyran.” “Patriot clasps dusty patriot to his bosom, there is footwashing and reflection: dinner of twelve hundred covers at the Blue Dial, Cadran Bleu.”

To the present day the right to assemble freely in the tavern, “this temple of true liberty,” is suspiciously guarded by all parties. To the present day the tavern serves all kinds of political and social clubs and sometimes even burial societies similar to those of which Washington Irving has told us such amusing stories, as “The Swan and Horseshoe” and “Cock and Crown,” once flourishing in the heart of London, in Little Britain.