I must get in about the people one meets. The man who did not like
parrots because they were too intelligent. And the man who told me that
Handel’s _Messiah_ was “très chic,” and the smell of the cyclamens
“stupendous.” And the man who said it was hard to think the world was
not more than 6000 years old, and we encouraged him by telling him we
thought it must be even more than 7000. And the English lady who said of
some one that “being an artist, you know, of course he had a great deal
of poetical feeling.” And the man who was sketching and said he had a
very good eye for colour in the light, but would I be good enough to tell
him what colour was best for the shadows.
“An amateur,” he said, “might do very decent things in water-colour, but
oils require genius.”
So I said: “What is genius?”
“Millet’s picture of the _Angelus_ sold for 700,000 francs. Now that,”
he said, “is genius.”
After which I was very civil to him.
At Bellinzona a man told me that one of the two towers was built by the
Visconti and the other by Julius Cæsar, a hundred years earlier. So,
poor old Mrs. Barratt at Langar could conceive no longer time than a
hundred years. The Trojan war did not last ten years, but ten years was
as big a lie as Homer knew.
We went over the Albula Pass to St. Moritz in two diligences and could
not settle which was tonic and which was dominant; but the carriage
behind us was the relative minor.
There was a picture in the dining-room but we could not get near enough
to see it; we thought it must be either Christ disputing with the Doctors
or Louis XVI saying farewell to his family—or something of that sort.