Every right-minded reader loves a few books in defiance of his own
critical canons. One cannot be for ever brooding over the best that
is known and thought in the world. Such an uncanonical book to me is
Ouida’s _Moths_. It was in Dresden, towards the end of May 1908, that
I read it for the first time. Summer was in the air, a German summer
of blue skies and lazy white clouds drifting to the south. In April,
when I arrived, I liked Dresden well enough, was prepared to stop there
quietly till October, learning German. But as the cold weather passed,
each day left me more restless, cramped by the monotonous, speckless
streets, irked by a vision of the summer Alps, a shining mountain wall
beyond the southern horizon. The spirit of romance was upon me, that
heedless of realistic truth invests with ideal charm whatever is far
off. To such a mood Ouida appealed strongly. For she was perhaps the
last of those romantics who created out of the dust and dreariness
of eighteenth-century Europe a fairyland of beauty. Germany to her
was still the mystic land, dreaming of the Middle Ages; Italy still
Mignon’s Italy, a place of orange groves and pillared palaces. In the
ardour of her revolt against the naturalist school she often, no doubt,
became grotesque. Her landscapes are as gloriously unreal as the heroes
and heroines who move through them. But what of that? Unreality has its
own charm, and even its own truth.
Certainly that May in Dresden I read with uncavilling love all that she
had to tell of Ischl, in the Austrian Alps, on whose mountains you may
shoot, if you will, the golden eagle and the vulture. And with envy and
longing I read how Vere and Correze retreated from the world to an old
house, simple yet noble, with terraces facing the Alps of the Valais.
Here on the hills above Sion the air is pure and clear as crystal,
strong as wine, the cattle maiden sings on the high grass slopes, and
the fresh-water fisherman answers her from his boat on the lake below.
In vain I reminded myself that one does not shoot golden eagles, and
that the Valaisan peasants, bent by ceaseless labour almost out of
human semblance, have neither the leisure nor the wish to carol songs
to one another. The divine unreason of romance was too strong for me,
quickening and giving colour to a prosaic discontent with a studious
life in a too orderly German town.
And so it came about, exactly when and how I forget, that I decided to
go to Switzerland: a simple decision, yet thrilling enough to me just
free from ten years of school discipline. The German family with which
I was staying had fixed on a Bavarian village, Oberkreuzberg by name,
for their summer holidays. It seemed to me that this village would be a
convenient base from which to make a hurried dash of two or three days
to the Alps. Bavaria, however, was a bigger place than I had thought,
and Oberkreuzberg, when I arrived there one evening in the middle of
July, seemed desolatingly apart from the world. And though, as the
days passed, I grew to love the place, this sense of detachment did
not weaken. Oberkreuzberg was set on a spur of the highest mountain in
the Bavarian Forest. From the church that crowned the hill the houses
fell sharply away to the south on either side of the straggling main
street. In all directions, except the north, the outlook was bounded
only by the horizon. To the east were the low-lying Bohemian hills,
to the south the Danube, and the plain beyond, where Munich lies, and
farther still the mountains of Tyrol, visible to the naked eye, so the
villagers said, on a clear winter day. And to the south-west, visible
to me alone, hung the chain of the Swiss Alps. The wide prospect made
the village seem not less but more obscure. To those locked in a narrow
valley, however desolate, the world lies on the other side of the
hills. But between Oberkreuzberg and the world lay expanses stretching
away to dim horizons.
The villagers took a frank delight and interest in me that further
strengthened my feeling of distance from ordinary life. Stray Germans
from the north, burghers from Munich, came with each summer, but
hitherto no Englishman had visited the village. My arrival was an
event. Indeed, Herr Göckeritz, the genial old Saxon with whom I stayed
in Dresden, told me that it had been mentioned in a sermon as a token
of Oberkreuzberg’s spreading fame. I was a reversed Haroun-al-Raschid,
important because unknown. The village children followed me about
curiously, and when I shut myself in my room clamoured outside till
appeased with largesse of pfennig pieces. On the grass in front of my
window lay logs ready for building purposes, and the Annas, Marias,
and Babettes of the village, small bare-legged girls, used to disport
themselves there every afternoon, chasing each other from log to log
with reckless agility. In the fields near by I could see their elders
working, bent battered peasants.
Outside the village were scattered some large boulders, and on the
flat top of one of these I would spend an hour or two each afternoon,
reading and meditating. The blue distances troubled me with the vague
longings which had stirred to song many a little German poet in the
days before Bismarck. The melodies of their heart’s unrest are mere
sentimental vapourings to the modern critic. What does it all mean,
he asks, this talk of wandering, knapsack on back, into the wide
world to seek the blue flower of romance on the blue hills of the
horizon? In the same spirit Leslie Stephen, the high-priest of orthodox
mountain-worship, found Byron’s Swiss poetry cheap and insincere. As
a hard-headed agnostic, suspicious of emotion not founded on fact, he
resented no doubt such verse as:--
‘The fish swam by the castle wall,
And they seemed joyous each and all.
The eagle rode the rising blast,
Methought he never flew so fast.’
This eagle, flying past Chillon to the mountains of Ouida’s Ischl, rode
a purely romantic blast, and was visible only to romantic eyes. The
orthodox climber, however, does not care for romance. His love of the
mountains is based, like domestic love, on knowledge and understanding.
It is reasoned, almost respectable. But the visions of Byron and of the
German Romantics have the magic of first love, passionately adoring
what is unknown and out of reach. It is profitless to weigh romance
against reason. I can only say that I never loved the mountains better
than in those long afternoons when they shone before my spirit, hidden
from the eyes of my body.
Cynara, when she reads these pages, will dismiss all this talk of
yearnings, spiritual unrest, and what not as literary verbiage. And
indeed I might never have left Bavaria, had it not been for memories
of the previous summer at Champex, where I had rowed and climbed and
quarrelled with Cynara, and where Cynara’s sister, who cultivated a
conscientious contempt for men in general, and myself in particular,
had stung my young soul by insisting that there were in me the
makings of a blameless curate. This summer they had gone to Saas
Fee, and Cynara wrote to me from there, praising the place ardently,
and ending her letter with the careless-cruel hope that I would like
Bavaria. Like Bavaria! And the letter had reached me on the damp,
dark evening of my arrival at Oberkreuzberg. The need for a personal
protest reinforcing my desire towards the Alps settled any lingering
hesitation. I had four pounds with me. Before leaving Dresden I wrote,
in the hope of increasing this sum, an essay for a competition in
the _Saturday Westminster_. The subject was, ‘On making a Fool of
Oneself,’ and I treated the theme with a humour which at the time
seemed quite delicious. In retrospect I am astonished that they gave
me an honourable mention. Cruder methods of raising money proved more
successful, and a generous uncle solved all material difficulties.
Two evenings before I started I went with Herr Göckeritz after supper
to one of the village inns. The landlord played the zither, and Herr
Göckeritz, after telling a few anecdotes rather broad than long, sang a
little wistful ditty of a poor fiddler wandering through the world in
sunshine and rain, with no friend but his fiddle:--
‘Und wenn einst vor der letzten Tür
Mein letztes Lied verklang,
Und wenn an meiner Geige mir
Die letzte Saite sprang,
Ach, nur ein Plätzchen gönnt mir dann
An stiller Friedhofswand,
Wo von der Wandrung ruhen kann
Der arme Musikant.’
The whole essence of that lovable absurd German romanticism is in these
lines. They haunted me on my journey, and long after, and even now have
power to quicken the memory of those days. As we walked home beneath a
quiet starry sky I told Herr Göckeritz that I was going to Switzerland.
His only comment was an offer to lend me some money. Life is like that.
It was shortly before five o’clock in the morning that I set out on
my journey. For economy’s sake I had decided to walk to a station
fifteen miles away, thus saving, as I later realised, a little more
than sixpence. My clothes were in a Gladstone bag which I hung over
my shoulders, pulling the straps into position with a handkerchief
tied across my chest. And so, a curious figure, I swung down a path
that led to the main road through a little wood. Before entering the
wood I turned round for a last look at the village. It seemed in the
still dawn a living thing, sad, and lonely, and patient, like its
inhabitants. For the moment I felt sorry to go. It was unlikely that
Saas Fee would welcome me with wonder and delight. It was probable
that neither Cynara nor Cynara’s sister would regard me with the
affectionate awe of Maria, Anna, and Babette. However, I did not return.
The memory of that walk has become like the memory of a dream. When I
think of it I understand those words of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘My life has
been a miracle of thirty years; which to relate were not a history,
but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.’ He was thinking,
I fancy, not of any events suitable as titles for the chapters in a
biography, but of stray incidents unrelated to the main course of his
life. Such stray incidents have a magical quality. They might have
happened, you feel, to a stranger in some forgotten age, so unattached
to ordinary life do they seem. By a lucky chance they happened to you,
and you remember them with a love and gratitude incomprehensible to
others. In those hours the melody of your own little life sounded in
accord with the universal harmony, and the echo of that music never
dies away.
I passed on through waking villages. On either side of the road were
low-lying hills, where trees half hid ruined castles. Were they
really castles? The early morning turned everything to magic, and I
seemed to walk in a dream-country of the Middle Ages, my journey a
pilgrimage, and my goal a noble one, though the way was over-easy.
With the tenth mile the enchantment vanished, as dawn dissolved into
day. I became conscious of my Gladstone bag, and the handkerchief
across my chest cramped me like a steel band. And so, when I came
over a small rising and saw before me the factory chimneys of Regen,
my destination, I welcomed modern ugliness with relief, and pressed
forward to the squalor of a train. The journey to Munich lasted for six
stifling summer hours. Opposite me in the railway carriage sat an old
woman, wrinkled and furrowed, incessantly munching ham sandwiches. I
suffered agonies of vicarious thirst, and being a teetotaller found no
assuagement in the draughts of beer which she drank at every station.
At last the train dawdled into Munich. The weather had changed, and I
spent seven hours taking shelter from sudden showers, and brooding on
the probability that for the next few days the Swiss mountains would
be hidden in clouds. A night’s journey brought me to Zurich, dull and
dismal in the early morning. By this time I had become an advanced
realist, with a super-shavian hatred of romance in every sense of that
word.
This was the lowest ebb, and now romance came flooding back. Lausanne
at noon was lovely. There was the white house where Cynara used to
live; old memories quickened at the sight. Martigny shone like a dream
against the Champex mountains. And then, as the train rushed up the
Rhone valley, I leant from the window, and the trees and the bushes
bending before the wind seemed swaying with my ecstasy.
Late in the afternoon I left Stalden for the last stage of my journey,
a fifteen-mile ascent to Saas Fee. Beyond the bridge near the village a
young climber overtook me as I stopped to readjust my bag. It appeared
that he too had come from Munich, that we had a common friend, and
that he wished to make the acquaintance of Cynara and her sister. So
we walked on together. Behind us the Bietschorn shone a golden peak in
the sunset. On each side of the narrow, high valley fell numberless
cascades, pouring into the central torrent. Yes, this was Switzerland
at last, far lovelier with its roaring waters and scent of pine-trees
than in the dim visions of those stifling Dresden days. I had reached
the blue hills of the horizon, and the sinking sun had turned them to
gold.
We came to Saas Grund at eve, and the last steep pull to Saas Fee was
made in the dark. As we entered the village my companion left me,
turning to the left towards his hotel. I stopped a minute to recover my
breath. It was the first of August, the day of the national festival.
All the hotels were illuminated; men and women crowded the balconies,
in fancy dress, and the crowd below ran here and there, laughing and
chattering. A fantastic sight; for a moment I was embarrassed by the
idea that they were celebrating my arrival. Moving forward diffidently,
I entered the Hôtel du Dom by the cellar door, and walked cautiously
upstairs. There was no more glory in me, and, except for my anxiety to
avoid Cynara, I was not conscious of any particular feeling.