Читать книгу Vacation Rambles - Thomas Smart Hughes - Страница 12

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A bird’s-eye view of any country must always be unsatisfactory. Still it is better than nothing, and in the absence of a human view, one may be thankful for it. My view of Wurtemberg was of the most bird’s-eye kind. The first thing that strikes one is the absence of all fences except in the immediate neighbourhood of towns. Even the railway has no fence, except for a few yards where a road crosses the line, and here and there a hedge of acacia, or barberry bushes (the berries were hanging red ripe on the latter), which are very pretty, but would not in any place keep out a seriously-minded cow or pig.

Wurtemberg is addicted to the cultivation of crops which minister to man’s luxuries rather than to his necessities. The proportion of land under fruit, poppies, tobacco, and hops, to that under corn, was very striking. There was a splendid hemp crop here also. They were gathering the poppy-heads, as we passed, into sacks. The women and girls both here and in Bavaria seem to do three-fourths of the agricultural work; the harder, such as reaping and mowing, as well as the lighter. The beds of peat are magnificent, and very neatly managed. At first I thought we had entered enormous black brick-fields, for the peat is cut into small brick-shaped pieces, and stacked in rows, just as one sees in the best managed of our brick-fields. As one nears Stuttgart the village churches begin to show signs of the difference in longitude. Gothic spires and arches give place to Eastern clock-towers, with tops like the cupolas of mosques, tinned over, and glittering in the hot sun. I hear that it was a fancy of the late Emperor Joseph to copy the old enemies of his country in architecture; but that would not account for the prevalence of the habit in his neighbour’s territory. I fancy one begins to feel the old neighbourhood of the Turks in these parts. The houses are all roomy, and there is no sign of poverty amongst the people. They have a fancy for wearing no shoes and scant petticoats in many districts; but it is evidently a matter of choice. Altogether, the whole fine, open, well-wooded country, from Bruchsal to Munich, gives one the feeling that an easy-going, well-to-do people inhabit and enjoy it.

As for Munich itself, it is a city which surprised me more pleasantly than almost any one I ever remember to have entered. One had a sort of vague notion that the late king had a taste for the fine arts, and spent a good deal of his own and his subjects’ money in indulging the taste aforesaid in his capital. But one also knew that he had been tyrannised over by Lola Montes, and had made a countess of her—and had not succeeded in weathering 1848; so that, on the whole, one had no great belief in any good work from such a ruler.

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.