Part 2

Munich gives one a higher notion of the ex-king; as long as the city stands, he will have left his mark on it. On every side there are magnificent new streets, and public buildings and statues; the railway terminus is the finest I have ever seen; every church, from the Cathedral downwards, is in beautiful order, and highly decorated; and it is not only in the public buildings that one meets with the evidences of care and taste. The hotel in which we stayed, for instance, is built of brick, covered with some sort of cement, which gives it the appearance of terra-cotta, and is for colour the most fascinating building material. The ceilings and cornices of the rooms are all carefully and tastefully painted, and all about the town one sees frescoes and ornamentation of all kinds, which show that the people delight in seeing their city look bright and gay; and every one admits that all this is due to the ex-king Lewis. But he has another claim on the gratitude of the good folk of Munich. The Bavarians were given to beer above all other people, and the people of Munich above all other Bavarians, long before he came to the throne; and former kings, availing themselves of the national taste, had established a “Hof-Breihaus,” where the monarch sold the national beverage to his people. King Lewis found the character of the royal beer not what it should be, and the rest of the metropolitan brewers were also falling away into evil ways of adulterating and drugging. He reformed the “Hof-Breihaus,” so that for many years nothing but the soundest possible beer was brewed there, which is sold to the buyers and yet cheaper than in any other house in Munich. The public taste has been thus so highly educated that there is no selling unwholesome beer now. A young artist took me to this celebrated tap. Unluckily it was a wet evening, so we had to sit at one of the tables, under a long line of sheds, instead of in an adjacent garden. There was a great crowd, some 300 or 400 imbibers jammed together, of all ranks. At our table the company were the artist and myself, a Middlesex magistrate, two privates, and a non-commissioned officer, and a man whom I set down as a small farmer. My back rubbed against a vociferous student, who was hobnobbing with all comers. There were Tyrolese and other costumes about, one or two officers, and a motley crowd of work people and other folk. The royal brew-house is in such good repute that no trouble whatever is taken about anything but having enough beer and a store of stone drinking-mugs, with tops to them forthcoming. Cask after cask is brought out and tapped in the vaulted entrance to the cellars, and a queue of expectant thirsty souls wait for their turn. I only know as I drank it how heartily I wished that my poor overworked brethren at home could see and taste the like. But it would not pay any of our great brewers to devote themselves to the task of selling really wholesome drink to the poor; and I fear the Prince of Wales is not likely to come to the rescue. He might find easier jobs no doubt, but none that would benefit the bodily health of his people more. The beer is so light that it is scarcely possible to get drunk on it. Many of the frequenters of the place sit there boosing for four or five hours daily, and the chance visitors certainly do not spare the liquor; but I saw no approach to drunkenness, except a good deal of loud talk.

The picture collections, which form, I believe, the great attraction of Munich, disappointed me, especially the modern ones in the new Pinacothek, collected by the ex-king, and to which he is constantly adding now that he is living at his ease as a private gentleman. I daresay that they may be very fine, but scarcely any of them bite; I like a picture with a tooth in it--something which goes into you, and which you can never forget, like the great picture of Nero walking over the burning ruins of Rome, or the execution picture in the Spanish department, or the Christian slave sleeping before the opening of the amphitheatre, or Judas coming on the men making the cross, in the International Exhibition. I have read no art criticism for years, so that I do not know whether I am not talking great heresy. But, heresy or not, I am for the right of every man to his own opinion in matters of art, and if an inferior painting gives me real pleasure on account of its subject, I mean to enjoy it and praise it, all the fine art critics in Christendom notwithstanding. The pictures of the most famous places in Greece, made since the election of the Bavarian Prince Otho to the throne of Greece, have a special interest of their own; but apart from these and some half dozen others, I would far sooner spend a day in our yearly exhibition than in the new Pinacothek. The colossal bronze statue of Bavaria is the finest thing of the kind I have ever seen; but the most interesting sight in Munich to an Englishman must be the Church of St. Boniface, not the exquisite colouring proportions, or the magnificent monolithic columns of gray marble, but the frescoes, which tell the story of the saint from the time when he knelt and prayed by his sick father’s bed to the bringing back of his martyred body to Mayence Cathedral. The departure of St. Boniface from Netley Abbey for Rome, to be consecrated Apostle to the Germans, struck me as the best of them; but, altogether, they tell very vividly the whole history of the Englishman who has trodden most nearly in St. Paul’s footsteps. We have reared plenty of great statesmen, poets, philosophers, soldiers, but only this one great missionary. Yet no nation in the world has more need of St. Bonifaces than we just now. The field is ever widening, in India, China, Africa. We can conquer and rule, and teach the heathen to make railways and trade, nut don’t seem to be able to get at their hearts and consciences. One fears almost that were a St. Boniface to come, we should only measure him by our common tests, and probably pronounce him worthless, or a dangerous enthusiast. But one day, when men’s work shall be tested by altogether different tests from ours of the enlightened nineteenth century kind, it will considerably surprise some of us to see how the order of merit will come out. We shall be likely to have to ask concerning St. Boniface--whose name is scarcely known to one Englishman in a hundred--and of others like him in spirit, of whom none of us have ever heard, Who are these countrymen of ours, and whence come they? And we shall hear the answer which St. John heard: “Isti sunt qui venerunt ex magna tribulatione et laverunt stolas suas in sanguine Agni.” I felt very grateful to Munich for having appreciated the great Apostle to the Germans.

The one building in Munich which is quite unworthy of the use to which it is put, is the English Church. The service is performed in a sort of dry cellar, under the Odeon. We had a very small congregation, but it was very pleasant to hear how they all joined in the responses. What a pity it is that we are always ready to do it abroad, and shut up again as soon as we get home. Even the singing prospered greatly, though we had no organ. But, alas! sir, the Colonial Church Society have done their best to spoil this part of our service abroad. They seem to have accepted from the editor as a gift, the stereotyped plates of a hymn-book, copies of which were placed about in the Munich church, and, I daresay, may be found all over the Continent. The editor has thought it desirable to improve our classical hymns. Conceive the following substitution for Bishop Ken’s “Let all thy converse be sincere”--

In conversation be sincere;

Make conscience as the noon-day clear:

Think how th’ all-seeing God thy ways

And all thy secret thoughts surveys.

This is only a fair specimen of the book. Surely the Colonial Church Society had better hastily return the stereotype plates with thanks.

The Tyrol, 2nd September 1862.

Next to meeting an old friend by accident, there is nothing more pleasant than coming in long vacation on some flower or shrub which reminds one of former holiday ramblings. In the Tyrol the other day we came suddenly on a bank in the mountains gemmed over with the creamy white star of the daisy of Parnassus, and it accompanied us, to our great delight, for 200 miles or more, till we got fairly down into the plains again. The last time I had seen it was on Snowdon years ago. When we got a little higher I pounced on a beautiful little gentian, which I had never seen before except on the Alps above Lenk, in Switzerland (the Hauen Moos the pass was called, or some such name--how spelt, goodness knows), which I once crossed with two dear friends on the most beautiful day I ever remember.

The flora of the Tyrol, at least that part of it which lies by the roadside, seems to be much the same as ours. With the above exceptions, I scarcely saw a flower which does not grow on half the hills in England; but their size and colouring was often curiously different. The Michaelmas daisy and ladies’ fingers, for instance, were much brighter and more beautiful; on the other hand, there was the most tender tiny heartsease in the world, and forget-me-nots, which were very plentiful here and there, were quite unlike ours--delicate little creatures, of the palest blue in the world, all the fleshiness and comfortable look, reminding one of marriage settlements and suitable establishments, gone clean out of them. In moving eastward with the happy earth you may easily get from Munich to Strasburg in one day; but, if you do, you will miss one of the greatest treats in the world, and that is a run through the Tyrol, which you may do from Munich with comfort in a week. There is a little rail which runs you down south or so to Homburg, on the edge of the mountain country, from whence you may choose your conveyance, from post carriage down to Shanks’ nag. If you follow my advice, whatever else you do you will take care to see the Finstermunz Pass, than which nothing in the whole world can be more beautiful. I rather wonder myself that the Tyrol has not drawn more of our holiday folk, Alpine Club and all, from Switzerland. The Orteler Spitz and the glaciers of his range are as fine, and I should think as dangerous, as anything in the Swiss Alps--the lower Alps in the Tyrol are quite equal to their western sisters; and there is a soft Italian charm and richness about the look and climate of the southern valleys, that about Botzen especially, which Switzerland has nothing to match. The luxuriance of the maize crops (the common corn of the country) and of the vines trained over trellis work in the Italian fashion, and of the great gourds and vegetable marrows which roll their glorious leaves and flowers and heavy fruit over the spare corners and slips of the platforms on which the vineyards rest--the innumerable fruit-trees, pears, apples, plums, peaches, and pomegranates all set in a framework of beautiful wooded mountains, from which the course of the streams may be traced down through all the richness of the valley by their torrent beds of tumbled rock--. remind us vividly of the descriptions of the Promised Land in the Old Testament. Then the contrast of the people to the Bavarians is as great as that of the countries. The latter seem to live the easiest, laziest life of all nations, in their rich low flats, which the women are quite aide to cultivate, while the men drink beer and otherwise disport themselves. But in the part of the Tyrol next Bavaria it is all grim earnest: “Ernst is das Leben” must be their motto if they are to get in their crops at all, and keep their little patches of valley and hanging fields cultivated--and it does seem to be their motto. After passing through the country one can quite understand how the peasantry came to beat the regular troops of France and Bavaria time after time half a century ago, and the memoirs of that holy war hang almost about every rock. There is no mistake here about battle-fields, and no difficulty in realising the scene: the march of columns along the gorges, the piles of rock and tree above, with Tyrolean marksmen behind, the voices calling across over the heads of the invaders “Shall we begin?”

“In the name of the Holy Trinity, cut all loose”; and then the crash and confusion, the panic and despair, and the swoop of the mountaineers on the remnant of their foes. A great part of the country must be exceedingly poor, and yet only in the neighbourhood of two or three villages were we asked for alms, and then only by small children, who had apparently been demoralised by the passage of carriages. Except from one of these children, a small boy who flirted his cap in my face, and made a villainous grimace, when he got tired of running, and from the dogs, we had no uncourteous look or word. The dogs, however, are abominable mongrels, and there was scarcely one in the country which did not run barking and snapping after us. The people seem to me very much pleasanter to travel amongst than the Swiss.

I had expected to find them a people much given to the outward forms and ceremonies of religion at any rate--every guide-book tells one thus much; but I was not at all prepared for the extraordinary hold which their Christianity had laid upon the whole external life of the country. You can’t travel a mile in the Tyrol along any road without coming upon a shrine--in general by the wayside, often in the middle of the fields. I examined several hundreds of these; many of them little rough penthouses of plank, some well-built tiny chapels. I wish I had kept an exact account of the contents, but I am quite sure I am within the mark in saying that nine out of ten contain simply a crucifix; of the rest, the great majority contain figures or paintings of the Virgin or Child, and a few those of some patron saint. All bore marks of watchful care; in many, garlands of flowers or berries, or an ear or two of ripe maize, were hung round the Figure on the cross. Then in every village in which we slept, bells began ringing for matins at five or six, and in every ease the congregation seemed to be very large in proportion to the population. I was told, and believe, that in all the houses, even in the inns of most of these villages, there is family worship every evening at a specified hour, generally at seven. We met peasants walking along the road bare-headed, and chanting mass. I came suddenly upon parish priests and poor women praying before the crucifix by the wayside. The ostlers and stable-men have the same habit as our own, of pasting or nailing up rude prints on the stable-doors, and of all those which I examined while we were changing horses, or where we stopped for food or rest, there was only one which was not on a sacred subject. In short, to an Englishman accustomed to the reserve of his own country on such subjects, the contrast is very startling. If a Hindoo or any other intelligent heathen were dropped down in any English country, he might travel for days without knowing whether we have any religion at all; but, most assuredly, he could not do so in the Tyrol. Now which is the best state of things? I believe Her Majesty has no stauncher Protestant than I amongst her subjects, but I own that a week in the Tyrol has made me reconsider a thing or two. Outwardly, in short, the Tyroleans are the most religious people in Europe. Of course I am no judge after a week’s tour whether their faith has gone as deep as it has spread wide. You can only speak of the bridge as it carries you. Our bills were the most reasonable I have ever met with, and I could not detect a single attempt at imposition in the smallest particular. I went into the fruit market at Meran, and, after buying some grapes, went on to an old woman who was selling figs. She was wholly unable to understand my speech, so, being in a hurry, I put a note for the magnificent sum of ten kreutzer (or 3d. sterling) into her hand, making signs to her to put the equivalent in figs into a small basket I was carrying. This she proceeded to do, and when she had piled eight or ten figs on the grapes I turned to go, but by vehement signs she detained me, till she had given me the full tale, some three or four more. She was only a fair specimen of what I found on all sides. The poor old soul had not mastered our legal axiom of _caveat emptor_, but her trading morality had something attractive about it. They may be educated in time into buying cheap and selling dear, but as yet that great principle does not seem to have dawned on them.

There may be some danger of superstition in this setting up of crucifixes and sacred prints by the wayside and on stable-doors, but, on the other hand, the Figure on the cross, meeting one at every corner, is not unlikely, I should think, to keep a poor man from the commonest vices to which he is tempted in his daily life, if it does no more. He would scarcely like to stagger by it drunk from the nearest pot-house. If stable-boys are to have rough woodcuts on their doors, one of the Crucifixion or of the _Mater Dolorosa_ is likely to do them more good than the winner of the Derby or Tom Sayers.

But my letter is getting too long for your columns, so I can only beg all your readers to seize the first chance of visiting the Tyrol. I shall be surprised if they do not come away with much the same impressions as I have. It is a glad land, above all that I have ever seen--a land in which a psalm of joy and thankfulness seems to be rising to heaven from every mountain top and valley, and, mingled with and beneath it, the solemn low note of a people “breathing thoughtful breath”--an accompaniment without which there is no true joy possible in our world, without which all attempt at it rings in the startled ear like the laugh of a madman. Those words of the old middle-age hymn seemed to be singing in my ears all through the Tyrol:--

Fac me vere tecum flere,

Crucitixo condolere,

Donee ego vixcro.

I shall never find a country in which it will do one more good to travel.

Vienna, 10th September 1862.

The stage Englishman in foreign countries must be always an object of interest to his countrymen. He is a decidedly popular institution in Germany, not the least like the Dundreary type, or the sort of top-booted half fool, half miscreant, one sees at a minor theatre in Paris. The latest Englishmen on the boards of the summer theatres here are a Lord Mixpickl, and his man Jack, but the most popular, and those which appear to be regarded in fatherland as the real thing, are the Englishmen in a piece called “The Four Sailors.” It opens with a yawning chorus. Four young Englishmen are discovered sitting at a German watering-place, reading copies of the _Times_ and _Post_, and yawning fearfully. The chorus done, one says, “The funds are at 84.”

“I bet you they are at 86,” says another, and on this point they become lively. It appears by the talk which ensues, that they have come abroad resolved on finding some romantic adventure before marrying, which they are all desirous of doing. This they found impossible at home; hitherto have not succeeded here; have only succeeded in trampling on the police arrangements, and getting bored. They all imitate one another in speech and action, saying “Yaas” in succession very slowly, and always looking at one another deliberately before acting. Now the four sailors appear, who are three romantic young women and their maid, disguised as sailors, under the care of their aunt, a stout easy-going old lady, dressed as a boatswain, and of lax habits In the matters of tobacco and drink. After hornpipe dancing and other diversions, the young ladies settle to go and bathe, and cross the stage where the Englishmen are carrying their bathing-dresses. A cry is raised that their boat is upset; whereupon the Englishmen look at one another. At last one gets up, takes off his coat, folds it up, and puts it carefully on his chair, ditto with waistcoat and hat, the others doing the same. They walk off in Indian file, and return each with a half-drowned damsel across his shoulders. Having deposited their burthens, they return to the front of the stage to dress, when one suggests that they have never been introduced, upon which, after a pause, and looking solemnly at each other and the audience, they ejaculate all together, “Got dam!” They then take refuge in beer, silence, and pipes. At last one says, “This is curious!” Three yaas’, and a pause. Another, “This is an adventure!” Three yaas’, and a longer pause. At last, “Dat ist romantisch!” propounds another. Tumultuous yaas’ break forth at this discovery. The object of their journey is accomplished, they marry the four sailors, and return to love and Britain.

The summer theatres are charming institutions, but somewhat casual. For instance, while we were at Ischl, there were no performances because the weather was too fine. Ischl itself is wonderfully attractive, and as he has not the chance of getting a seaside watering-place, the Kaiser Konig has shown much taste in the selection of Ischl. The Traun and Ischl, which meet here, are both celebrated for beauty and trout (a young Englishman was wading about and having capital sport while we were there). You get fine views of glaciers from the hills which rise on all sides close to the town, and the five valleys at the junction of which it lies are all finely wooded and well worth exploring. The town is furnished with a drinking-hall (but no gambling), baths, a casino, pretty promenades, and Herzogs and other grand folk, with Hussar and other officers in plenty to enliven them. You can dance every evening almost if you like, and gloves are fabulously good, and only a florin a pair for men, or with two buttons, for ladies, a florin and ten kreutzers; so, having regard to the number which are now found necessary in London, it would almost pay young persons to visit Ischl once a year to make their purchases. There is also a specialty in the way of pretty old fashioned looking jewellery made and sold here cheap, but the Passau pearls found in the great cockle-shells of these parts are dear, though certainly very handsome. I must not forget the rifle-range amongst the attractions of the place. I fell in with two members of the Inns of Court, and we heard the well-known crack, and soon hunted out the scene of operations. We found some Austrian gentlemen practising at 100 yards at a target with a small black centre, within which was a scarcely distinguishable bull’s-eye. When a centre is made the marker comes out, bows, waves his arms twice, and utters two howls called “yodels.” When the bull’s-eye is struck a shell explodes behind, the Austrian eagle springs up above the target, and a Tyrolean, the size of life, from each side--which performance so fascinated one of my companions that he made interest with the shooters, who allowed him to use one of their rifles. I rejoice to say that he did not disgrace the distinguished corps to which he belongs. At his first shot he obtained the bow and two howls from the marker, and at his fourth the explosion and appearances above described followed, whereupon he wisely retired on his laurels.