The Primitive "Tripper"

No one takes the form and pressure of his age more readily than the enterprising man of small parts. For this reason the recently republished crudities of Thomas Coryate ¹ give, perhaps, a clearer notion of Shakespeare’s period than does Shakespeare himself. In addition, the author is interesting as an immortal type, as a sort of Sancho Panza done into meagre anatomy. There is something of the same sordid visionary in him, a readiness to leave home and kin for the sake of some absurd distortion of the brain, a moonish desire to roam and cut a figure in the world.

The date of Coryate’s birth is uncertain, — 1577 is only a guess, — but Odcombe in Somersetshire was his native place, and he loved the place of nativity as a roamer sometimes will. His father, a tuft-hunting clergyman, had secured its comfortable living, and had died there before his son had any chance to make a stir in the world. His mother, very dear to him, was to live on to a ripe old age long after his travel-worn body had been laid to rest in Bombay. To Odcombe he returned after his first travels to hang up his scarred shoes as a votive offering in the parish church; and there in his own extravagant way, the buffoonery of which was imperceptible to the Odcombian intelligence, he devised pleasant and fruitful pageants by which his townsmen engaged in rivalry with the neighboring villages. The spot was the centre of his affections. The very smoke thereof he preferred to the fire of all other places under the sun.

But he had not reached thirty years of age when Odcombe could no longer contain him. Modesty would have counseled him to remain where he was,but such counsel would have shrunk his world to a nutshell, and his mind was not of the subtle sort which could be king of infinite space in so narrow a compass. He must see the world and be a part of it. He was not unwilling, even, to make a disproportionate noise in it. A man cannot take a humble seat at this world’s table, and expect to be called to a better vantage point, unless he has a talent in his napkin. If a simple franklin were to hesitate, with the angels, he would lose a world of experience. Coryate resolved to set out for the court.

History fails to tell us how he first made himself known there; perhaps his father’s name was still something to conjure with; but when the wits discovered him, they received him with applause. Once, at least, he held the centre of the stage. It was just after the presentation of a court masque. Seized by two practical jokers, and thrust willy-nilly into a trunk, he was carried into the middle of the scene. At the right dramatic moment, they let him loose. As his lank body unfolded itself, he found that he was face to face with a situation. As to how he met it we can only guess. There was no poetic fire in him which could drive him, as it did the schoolboy Shelley, to rush upon his persecutors in a Berserker rage. There was no Irish pathos in him which could lend to his sorry figure the piquancy and whimsicality of a rueful Goldsmith. At times he was capable of a blunt repartee; but what was that against a hundred gorgeous, uproarious gentlemen and ladies?

It was always this way with him. When once out of the obscurity of Odcombe, wherever he was, and however he acted, he was sure to be a stage play to the pitiless spectators. Eagerness and a love of distinction among his fellows had thrust him beyond his element, and he must face matters out. It is nerve-racking business to play one’s rôle strenuously when all that one can succeed in playing is the fool. It was doubly so in an age when a bend of the thumb in the flourish of the toothpick or a turn of the wrist in the play of the rapier made all the difference between exquisite bravura and grotesque folly. The warning that we should not boast until we put our armor off, bravado disregards as a counsel to our fears. It bids us risk our reputation to increase it, though we risk it on a desperate chance. Coryate obeyed these more audacious promptings, for he loved the strenuous life.

In 1608 a bold project took possession of him. The gallery to which he played he determined to extend. It should stretch across Southern France, rise over the Alps, sweep around Venice, reach through Germany, and, circling into Holland, return to its point of departure in London. Before this theatre he would plod on foot, ride in carts, clutch and balance himself on the back of such dull beasts as his meagre purse could hire. It was any way to get there with him. Though he footed it along roads which braver men than he might well have avoided, he would come to foreign parts. With the corpses of highwaymen swinging in chains along the highway, it was natural that he should hold his sword uneasily in his hand as he drove through the woods of Abbeville. Alpine passes had not then been macadamized and placarded for summer tourists, and he scrambled breathlessly to keep the guides of other parties in sight, while they hurried on to elude so impecunious a beggar. Religion created dangers for him. His extraordinary figure and ill-timed polemics gathered a mob about him in the Venice Ghetto, from which the English ambassador’s gondola rescued him only on the nick of time. On his return from Northern Italy he very wisely skirled along by-roads out of sight of the Spanish garrisons for fear that they might seize and feed him to the Inquisition. Among a stupid peasantry his ignorance sometimes proved a menace to him. A few grapes picked from the roadside, an angry rush upon him by a rude German boor, and he was forced with tears to plead for his hat, — a task which he performed in the English, Greek, and Latin tongues. Only the casual passing of a scholar saved him from his predicament. “If thou shalt happen,” he remarks in his book, “to be caught in ipso facto (as I was) by Some rustical and barbarous Corydon of the country thou mayst perhaps pay a far dearer price for thy grapes than I did, even thy dearest blood.”

It is said of the great Marshal Turenne that an officer once exclaimed to him: “Sire, your knees are trembling.” Quickly came the reply, “They would tremble far worse if they knew where they must take me within the hour.” Coryate’s knees trembled, but on he marched, for in his own fashion he was a brave fellow. What that fashion was is picturesquely shown in another roadside experience.

“One notable accident happened unto me in my way a little before I came to this monastery and the city of Baden, of which I will here make mention before I write anything of Baden. It was my chance to meet two clowns, commonly called boors, who because they went in ragged clothes, strook no small terror into me; and by so much the more I was afraid of them, by how much the more I found them armed with weapons, myself being altogether unarmed, having no weapon at all about me but only a knife. Whereupon fearing lest they would either have cut my throat or have robbed me of my gold that was quilted in my jerkin, or have stripped me of my clothes, which they would have found but a poor booty. For my clothes being but a threadbare fustian case were so mean (my cloak only excepted) that the boors could not have made an ordinary supper with the money for which they should have sold them; fearing (I say) some ensuing danger I undertook such a politic and subtle action as I never did before in all my life. For a little before I met them, I put off my hat very courteously unto them, holding it a pretty while in my hand and very humbly (like a mendicant friar) begged some money of them (as I have something declared in the front of my book) in a language that they did but poorly understand, even the Latin, expressing my mind unto them by such gestures and signs that they well knew what I craved of them: and so by this begging insinuation I both preserved myself secure and free from the violence of the clowns, and withal obtained that of them which I neither wanted or expected. For they gave me so much of their tin money called fennies (as poor as they were) as paid for half my supper that night at Baden, even four pence half-penny.”

It was at Dover on the morning of the 14th of May that Coryate embarked upon his enterprise. By “five of the clock in the afternoon,” he found himself in papistical France. The country amazed him, but it also pleased him. Whatever his defects, he had never become so absorbed in securing the means to live that he had forgotten life’s enjoyments. On the contrary, he had sold two of his Odcombe manors for this very trip. He had a relish for experience, something of that lust of the eye and pride of life which is essential to every artist. Why the most appreciative of men should be called decadents it would be hard to say. But the word is here, and let us use it. Coryate was a precocious decadent. Frogs’ legs curiously dressed did exceedingly delight his palate. Sweet and pleasant waters and shaded gardens did tickle his spirits with inward delight. His eye, quick to catch what was picturesque in the landscape, would remark on one spot the fairest gallows that ever he saw, on another a pretty store of hemp. His style is full of the frankness of his pleasure. If he enjoys a profound draught of Rhenish or a cup of very neat wine, he imparts the fact to the reader. And his phrases are often as happy as they are naïve. Lanes are green ways. The canals of the Venetians are their liquid streets, that is, their pleasant channels. The Bridge of Sighs is a marvelous fair little gallery. Fans are conveyances which the men and women of Italy do carry to cool themselves withal in the time of heat by the often fanning of their faces. Umbrellas minister shadow unto them for shelter against the scorching heat of the sun; and they impart so long a shadow unto them that, it keepeth the heat of the sun from the upper parts of their bodies. The view from the Campanile at Venice is a little world of delectable objects which costs but a gazet. Thus may the most Coryatic of us, the most impoverished, look upon the world and find it good.

Like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Coryate reveled in artistic dexterity, and the mountebanks of Venice oftentimes ministered infinite pleasure unto him. But his delight was seldom of the sort which could dissipate itself altogether into jigs and corantoes, Every sensation — it might be the “toothsomeness” of the turnip that cost not a groat or the “privilege” of the little nightingale — left with him a critical afterthought of almost Pateresque gravity. Toward paintings he was like Raskin, prompt with a reason for every faith that was in him. With both, the reasons often dissipated the beauty, but they helped to keep the mind astir, and, in Coryate’s case at least, they made a consistent and very pretty theory of aesthetics. He stood entranced before “the picture of a hinder quarter of veal, hanged up in a shop, which a stranger at the first would imagine to be a natural and true quarter of veal. But it was not.” Another picture he enjoyed for the extraordinary length of the ass’s ears. In all his criticisms he hit upon the two most commonly received earmarks of art, eccentricity and imitation.

The nakedness of this merry Greek’s understanding was clothed with classical learning as with a garment, but it was a thin, translucent stuff, which only emphasized the contours of his mind. His intellectual machinery was usually so little affected by the passions that it may be said to have worked in the clear, pure light of innocence. He entered, he tells us, into a serious kind of examination of himself how it came to pass that one bank of the “Rhene” was planted with towns and fortresses and the other very slenderly. He would not aver that the martyred Saints Felix and Regula carried their heads in their hands, after the manner of St. Denis, for he never read the history in any authentic writer. These confessions illustrate the candor of the man. He had no pride of opinion, no reservations,and all his mental processes can be observed without hindrance or distraction.

In one particular, however, Coryate was biased. He was of a puritan disposition. He could finger “papish vanities” and even secrete a relic in his pouch as travelers will, but the glamour of Rome could not seduce him beyond a certain point, and the deformity of the tonsure was always very pitiful for him to see. It is said that the orthodox whirling dervishes divide themselves into factions according as they approach the dance with an Aristotelian or a Platonic turn of mind. And, within the fold of the English Church, this peripatetic was a Calvinist. In his vagabondage he liked to meet with painful laborers in the Lord’s vineyard, and at the final parting behold their cheeks bedewed with tears. Like Justice Shallow, he could quote Psalmody. The filial stork could teach him a little moral lesson. Occasionally he entered into the zest of polemics. Not that he was hostile to ideas. A cracked brain often admits light shut out from the skulls of more sensible fellows, and even the palpable lie exercised a power over his imagination. Providence, indeed, seeing that he could know but little, had bestowed upon him the privilege of believing much and contemplating still more. But he was a child of inheritance, and his father’s bequest to him of the puritan habit of mind was part of the instinctive thrift of the man, by which he was enabled to pass judgments, and do other intellectual business on a small capital.

“ He is always tongue major of the company,” Ben Jonson says of Coryate, on his return to London. “He will ask, How you do? Where you have been? How is it ? If you have travelled ? How you like his book? . . . He is frequent at all sorts of free tables, where though he might sit as a guest, he will rather be served in as a dish and is loth to have anything of himself kept cold against the next day.”

The wits thought him a fellow of a most ridiculous crudity; and yet wherein did their superiority consist ? To modern nostrils they would all smell most villainously of civet, and the fork which he brought back from Italy, to their exceeding merriment, would strike our taste as a better instrument for its purpose than their Elizabethan fingers. There was a touch of modernity, a democratic note about the fellow, quite beyond their capacity. He was not merely one of the last of the old traveling scholars of Europe; he was the primitive tripper, the prototype of all Cook’s tourists. The delight in simple going drew him on like the call of the Cook’s agent, and in many a city he would tarry but a day. Black-letter folios were his Baedekers, and by word of mouth he gathered such local traditions as nowmake the stock-in-trade of shilling guides. He would pace market places, put his arms around pillars, judge the size of paintings with his eye, for, after the fashion of the modern traveler, he liked to take the measure of the world.

There was much of the average man in him, yet it could not escape his notice that he was thought a queer fellow, and his complaisance made him seek to justify the imputation. He let men’s expectation take hold of him, and fashion him till he answered all its requirements. Humor was not his forte; he had only a dull sense of incongruity; but good-nature may do much, and Coryate set out to be amusing. He threw his vivacity into the form of witticisms. He became exuberant and bombastic. He was seized with an exhilarating passion not to disappoint.

When he announced to the literary that he was writing a book, and, in accordance with the vogue, asked their aid in puffing it, there was showered upon him such a series of ironical verses as have probably never been written before or since. The author demurred for a moment at their scurrility, and then, in obedience to the Crown Prince, who dearly loved his joke, received them with something between a grimace and a smile, and printed them in the fore part of his volume. The half deprecatory, half jocose notes with which Coryate commented on this raillery is as sorry a spectacle as the shabby side of Harlequin. If the poor jester was but a bungling humorist, he did not lack a sort of sheepish pathos.

This was in 1611. and the author, now thirty-four, was again at Odcombe. But the place was less likely than ever to contain him. Thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul disturbed and electrified him. “The mere superscription of a letter from Zurich,”says Jonson, “set him up like a top. Basil and Heidelberg made him spin.”He had stood in the church of Cremona, conscious that the bones of Hercules rested beneath him. He had identified Livy’s dwelling in Padua. The world had become his vista. Now the Orient called him, and the example of Ulysses buzzed in his ears.

All we know of his second journey comes from letters and fugitive papers. Like Falmage on Mars Hill, he delivered an oration above the ruins of Troy; he hunted for Abraham’s house in Ur of the Chaldees, a very delicate and pleasant city; he footed it, a journey of fifteen months and a distance of two thousand seven hundred miles, from Jerusalem to the court of the Great Mogul. There, the audacity with which his pauper fingers clutched the robes of the monarch raised the vice of beggary to the heroic proportions of a virtue. Men who gaze on the world must, somehow live, though they spend but twopence a day. Coryate raised his hands in supplication, and was not ashamed. Who shall explain the passion for diminutives? Though the globe was hardly large enough for all his projected wanderings, Coryate loved by epithet to diminish its elements, as if to bring them within the compass of his affection and understanding. Even the elephants of the Mogul’s court seemed to “justle each other like little mountains.”

He never returned to Christendom. A few cups of sack, made thrice welcome by the English hands which gave them, overcame his wearied, famished body in Surat. The voluminous copier of epitaphs was ready for his own. The “bottle of his brain,” “distended with the delectable liquor of observation,” was broken.

A hundred and fifty years after his death, his travels, with the addition of much collected material on his Oriental experiences, reappeared as three volumes in calf. To-day the additions have been dropped, and the three volumes have been diminished to two in buckram. Except for a few extraordinary splurges, his style runs as smoothly and freely as Xenophon’s. The globe-trotting, leg-stretching Odeombian cannot mark the hours or tab off the milestones without charming the ear.

“I remained,” he says,“in Lyons two whole days, and rode therehence about two of the clock in the afternoon on Monday being the sixth day of June, and came about half an hour after eight of the clock in the evening to a parish called Vorpillere, which is ten miles beyond Lyons. In this space I observed nothing but abundance of walnut trees and chestnut trees and sundry herds of black swine, and flocks of black sheep. I rode from Vorpillere the seventh day of June, being Tuesday, about half an hour after six of the clock in the morning, and came to a parish about ten miles therehence called la Tour du Pin, about eleven of the clock; in this space I saw nothing memorable. I went from la Tour du Pin about two of the clock in the afternoon, and came to a place called Pont de Beauvoisin about six of the clock. Betwixt these places there is six miles distance: at this Pont de Beauvoisin, France and Savoy do meet, the bridge parting them both. When I was on this side the bridge I was in France, when beyond, in Savoy.”

In a book much of which is as simple as this, is presented an extraordinary phenomenon. Coryate’s mind was of the shallowest, but over its surface there played a marvelous variety of interests and enthusiasms. And they were all human. His pedantries were a religion to him, and his credulities a joy. A simpleton such as the men of Gotham might have admitted into fellowship, he had one quality they lacked: an eagerness to see men, manners, and customs at first hand. He lay at the foot of a horse’s stall on the Rhine; he coped with pariahs in their native Hindustani; he forced the Great Mogul to speak with him. What makes the ant the most admirable of all beasts is not its industry, but its lack of all sense of proportion. Coryate’s industry is not his most conspicuous quality, it is his preposterous absurdity, his desire to accost creation. Though this uneasy clown was no big and burly Whitman, whatever measure of success he had, and it was not small, he fully earned. Gulliver jangled his sword among the Brobdingnagian giants, but not of his own accord. Macbeth played with the potent spirits of the air, but he had been invited. This man from Odcombe, by the sheer force of the will that was within him, justled among the people of a dozen nations, and in so doing made himself an amazing type of a great and stirring generation.