It was with a rare audacity that the devil pitched his tent in Baden!
Perhaps, on the whole continent, another spot could not be found so
fully combining, in a small circuit, as many charms of picturesque
scenery; and it was a bold conception to set down vice, in all its
varieties, in the very midst of--in open contrast as it were to--a scene
of peaceful loveliness and beauty.
I do confess myself one of those who like living figures in a landscape.
I like not only those groupings which artists seem to stereotype, so
nearly alike they all are, of seated foreground figures, dark-shadowed
observers of a setting sun, or coolly watering cattle beneath a gushing
fountain. I like not merely the red-kirtled peasant knee-deep in the
river, or the patient fisherman upon his rock; but I have a strong
regard--I mean here, where the scene is Nature’s own, and not on
canvass--a strong regard for those flitting glimpses of the gayer world,
which, in the brightest tints that Fashion sanctions, are caught now,
in some deep dell of the Tyrol, now, on some snow-peaked eminence of a
Swiss glacier, beside the fast-rolling Danube or the sluggish Nile.
I have no sympathy for those who exclaim against the incongruity of pink
parasols and blue reticules in scenes of mild and impressive grandeur.
Methinks it bespeaks but scanty store of self-resources in those who
thus complain, not knowing any thing of the feelings that have prompted
their presence there. No one holds cheaper than I do the traveller who,
under the guidance of his John Murray, sees what is set down for him
through the eyes of the “Hand-book”--mingling up in his addled brain
crude notions of history and antiquarianism with the names of inns and
post-houses--counsels against damp sheets--cheating landlords--scraps
of geology, and a verse of “Childe Harold.” This is detestable: but for
otherwise is the meeting with those whose dress and demeanour tell of
the world of fashion--the intertwined life of dissipation and excess in
solitary unfrequented places. Far from being struck by their inaptitude
and unfitness for such scenes, I willingly fall back upon the thought of
how such people must be impressed by objects so far beyond the range of
daily experience, of objects, whose wondrous meaning speaks to hearts
the most cloyed and jaded, “as never man spoke.” I can luxuriate in
fancying how long-forgotten feelings, old memories of the past, long
buried beneath the load of daily cares, come back fresh and bright under
the influence of associations that recall parer, happier hours. I can
dwell in imagination on the sudden spring made from the stern ordinances
of a world of forms and conventionalities, to that more beautiful and
grander world, whose incense is the odour of wild flowers and whose
music is the falling cataract.
I love to speculate how the statesman, the wily man of forecasting
thought and deep devices, must feel in presence of agencies which make
those of mere man’s contrivance seem poor and contemptible; and how the
fine lady, whose foot knows no harder surface than a velvet carpet, and
whose artificial existence palls by its own voluptuousness, contemplates
a picture of grand and stern sublimity. Disguise it how they will, feign
indifference how they may, such scenes always are felt, and deeply felt!
The most accomplished lounger of St. James’s Street does not puff his
cigar so coolly as he affects to do, nor is that heart all unmoved that
throbs beneath the graceful folds of a rich Cashmere. Now and then some
Brummagem spirit intrudes, who sees in the felling torrent but a wasted
“water-power:” but even he has his own far-reaching thoughts imbued with
a poetry of their own. He sees in these solitudes new cities arise, the
busy haunts of acting heads and hands; he hears in imagination the heavy
bang of the iron hammer, the roar of the furnace, the rush of steam, the
many-voiced multitude called by active labour to new activity of mind;
and perhaps he soars away, in thought, to those far-off wilds of the
new world, whose people, clothed by these looms, are brought thus into
brotherhood with their kindred men.
I, myself, have few sympathies in common with these; but I respect the
feelings that I do not fathom. “_Nihil humani a me alienum puto_.”
What has suggested these thoughts? A little excursion that I made this
evening from the village of Lichtenthal towards the Waterfall, a winding
glen, narrowing as you advance; wilder too, but not less peopled; every
sheltered spot having its own dwelling-place--the picturesque _chalet_,
with its far-stretching eave, and its quaint galleries of carved
wood, its brightly shining windows sparkling between the clustering
vine-leaves, and its frieze of Indian corn hung up beneath the roof to
dry. Leaving the carriage, I followed the bank of the stream--just
such a river as in my boyish days I loved to linger by, and fancy I was
fishing. It was no more than fancy: for although my rod and landing-net
were in most fitting perfection, my hackles and orange bodies, my green
drakes and may-flies, all that could be wished, I was too dreamy and
_destrait_ for “the gentle craft;” and liked Walton better in his
rambling discursions than in his more practical teaching. What a
glorious day for scenery, too! Not one of those scorching, blue sky,
cloudless days, when a general hardness prevails, but a mingled light of
sun and cloud shadow, with misty distances, and dark, deep foregrounds
on the still water, where ever and anon a heavy plash, breaking in
widening circles, told of the speckled trout: save that, no other sound
was heard. All was calm and noiseless, as in some far-off valley of the
Mississippi, a little surging of the water on the rocky shore--a faint
melancholy plash--scarce heard even in the stillness.
I sat thinking, not sadly, but seriously, of the past, and of that
present time that was so soon to add itself to the Past; for the Future,
I felt, by sensations that never deceive, it must be brief! My malady
gained rapidly on me; symptoms, I was told to guard against, had already
shewn themselves, and I knew that the battle was fought and lost.
“It is sad to die at thirty,” saith Balzac, somewhere; and to the
Frenchman of Paris, who feels that death is the cessation of a round of
pleasures and dissipations, whose hold is hourly stronger; who thinks
that life and self-indulgence are synonymous; whose ideal is the
ceaseless round of exciting sensations that spring from every form of
human passion nurtured to excess;--to him, the sleep of the grave is the
solitude and not the repose of the tomb.
To me, almost alone in the world, to die suggests few sorrows or
regrets; without family, without friends, save those the world’s
complaisance calls such; with no direct object for exertion, nothing for
hope or fear to cling to; no ambition that I could nourish, no dream
of greatness or distinction to elevate me above the thought of daily
suffering; life is a mere monotony--and the monotony of _waiting_.
While watching the progress of my malady, seeing day by day the
advancing steps of the disease that never sleeps, I recognise in myself
a strange adaptation in my mind and feelings to the more developed
condition of my illness. At first, my cough irritated and fevered me.
It awoke me if I slept--it worried me as I read; my fast and hurried
breathing, too, exciting the heart’s action, rendered me impatient and
discontented. Now, both these symptoms are in excess, and yet, by habit
and some acquired power of conforming to them, I am scarcely aware of
their existence. I have learned to look on them as my normal, natural
condition. My cough on awaking in the morning--my hectic as night
falls--only tell of the day’s dawn and decline. I fancy that this dreamy
calm, this spirit of submissive waiting that I feel, is dependent on my
infirmity; for how otherwise could I, if strong in mind and body,
endure the thraldom of my present life? The watchful egotism of sickness
demands the mind of sickness.
In the whole phenomena of malady, nothing is more striking than the
accommodation of the mind to the condition of suffering. I remember
once--I was then in all the strength and confidence of youth and
health--discussing this point with a friend, a physician of skill and
eminence, now no more, and was greatly struck by a theory which was
new, at least to me. He regarded every species of disease, from the most
simple to the most complicated, as a sanatory process, an effort--not
always successful, of course--on the part of Nature to restore the
system to its condition of health. He instanced maladies the most
formidable, some of them attended by symptoms of terrible suffering; but
in every case he assumed to shew that they were efforts to oppose the
march of some other species of disorganisation. So far from there being
any taint of Materialism in these views, he deduced from them a most
devout and conscientious belief in a Supreme Power; and instead of
resting upon Contrivance and Design as the great attributes of the
Deity, he went further, and made the Forethought, the Providence of God
for his creatures, the great object of his wonderment and praise. His
argument, if I dare trust my memory, was briefly this: The presence of
a superintending guardian spirit, ever watchful to avert evil from its
charge, is the essential difference which separates every object of
God’s creation from the mere work of man’s hand. The ingenuity that
contrived the mechanism of a steam-engine or a clock, was yet unable to
endow the machinery with latent powers of reparation; secret resources
against accident or decay, treasured up for the hour of necessity, and
not even detectable, if existent, before the emergency that evoked them.
Not so with the objects of creation. _They_ are each and all, according
to various laws, provided with such powers; their operations, whether
from deficient energy or misdirection, constituting what we call
disease. What is dropsy, for instance, save the resolution of an
inflammatory action that would almost inevitably prove fatal? Formidable
as the malady is, it yet affords time for treatment; its march is
comparatively slow and uniform, whereas the disease that originated
it would have caused death, if effusion of fluid had not arrested the
violence of the inflammation.
Take the most simple case--a wounded bloodvessel, a cut finger: by all
the laws of hydraulics, the blood must escape from this small vessel,
and the individual bleed to death as certainly, though not so speedily,
as from the largest artery. But what ensues? after a slight loss
of blood, the vessel contracts--a coagulum forms--the bleeding is
arrested--the coagulum solidifies and forms a cicatrix; and the whole of
these varied processes--a series of strange and wonderful results--will
follow, without any interference of the Will, far less any aid from
the individual himself, being powers inherent in the organisation, and
providentially stored up for emergency.
The blood poured out upon the brain from an apoplectic stroke, must, and
does, prove fatal, save when the _vis medicatrix_ is able to interpose
in time, by encircling the fluid, enclosing it with a _sac_, and
subsequently by absorption removing the extraneous pressure. All these
are vital processes, over which the sufferer has no control--of which he
is not even conscious.
The approach of an abscess to the surface of the body, by a law similar
to that which determines the approach of a plant to the surface of
the earth--the reparation of a fractured bone, by the creation and
disposition of elements not then existing in the body--and many similar
cases, warranted him in assuming that all these processes were exactly
analogous to what we call disease, being disturbances of the animal
economy accompanied by pain; and that disease of every kind was only
a curative effort, occasionally failing from sufficient
energy--occasionally, from the presence of antagonistic agency,--and
occasionally, from our ignorance of its tendency and object.
I feel I have been a lame expositor of my friend’s theory. I have
omitted many of his proofs--some of them the best and strongest. I
have, besides, not adverted to objections which he foresaw and refuted.
Indeed, I fell into the digression without even knowing it, and I leave
it here in the same fashion. I fancy a kind of comfort in the notion
that my malady is, at least, an attempt at restoration. The idea of
decay--of declining slowly away, leaf by leaf, branch by branch--is very
sad; and even this “conceit” is not without its consolation.
And now to wander homewards. How houseless the man is who calls his inn
his home! It was all very well for “Sir John” to say, “I like to take
mine ease in mine inn;” and in his day the thing was practicable. The
little parlour, with its wainscot of walnut-wood and its bright tiles,
all shining in the tempered light through the diamond-paned window; the
neatly spread table, where smoked the pasty of high-seasoned venison,
beside the tall cup of sack or canary; and the buxom landlady herself,
redolent of health, good spirits, and broad jest;--these were all
accessories to that abandonment to repose and quiet so delightful to the
weary-minded. But think of some “Cour de Russie,” some “Angelo d’ Oro,”
or some “Schwarzen Adler,” all alive with dusty arrivals and frogged
couriers--the very hall a fair, with fifty bells, all ringing; postboys
blowing--whips cracking--champagne corks flying--and a Bable of every
tongue in Europe, making a thorough-bass din that would sour a saint’s
temper!...
I’ll leave at once--I’ll find some quiet little gasthaus in the Tyrol
for a few weeks, till the weather moderates, and it becomes cool enough
to cross the Alps--and die!