Berne, _September_, 1873.--In Berne again, some eleven weeks after
having left it in July. I have never been in Switzerland so late, and
I came hither innocently supposing the last Cook’s tourist to have paid
out his last coupon and departed. But I was lucky, it seems, to discover
an empty cot in an attic and a very tight place at a table d’hôte.
People are all flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were
flocking in, and the main channels of egress are terribly choked. I
have been here several days, watching them come and go; it is like
the march-past of an army. It gives one, for an occasional change
from darker thoughts, a lively impression of the numbers of people now
living, and above all now moving, at extreme ease in the world. Here
is little Switzerland disgorging its tens of thousands of honest folk,
chiefly English, and rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children
of light in any eminent degree; for whom snow-peaks and glaciers
and passes and lakes and chalets and sunsets and a _café complet_,
“including honey,” as the coupon says, have become prime necessities
for six weeks every year. It’s not so long ago that lords and
nabobs monopolised these pleasures; but nowadays in a month’s tour in
Switzerland is no more a _jeu de prince_ than a Sunday excursion. To
watch this huge Anglo-Saxon wave ebbing through Berne suggests, no doubt
most fallaciously, that the common lot of mankind isn’t after all so
very hard and that the masses have reached a high standard of comfort.
The view of the Oberland chain, as you see it from the garden of the
hotel, really butters one’s bread most handsomely; and here are I don’t
know how many hundred Cook’s tourists a day looking at it through the
smoke of their pipes. Is it really the “masses,” however, that I see
every day at the table d’hôte? They have rather too few h’s to the
dozen, but their good-nature is great. Some people complain that they
“vulgarise” Switzerland; but as far as I am concerned I freely give
it up to them and offer them a personal welcome and take a peculiar
satisfaction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a “show country”--I am
more and more struck with the bearings of that truth; and its use in the
world is to reassure persons of a benevolent imagination when they
begin to wish for the drudging millions a greater supply of elevating
amusement. Here is amusement for a thousand years, and as elevating
certainly as mountains three miles high can make it. I expect to live
to see the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned with a
hotel setting three tables d’hôte a day.
{Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE}
I have been walking about the arcades, which used to bestow a grateful
shade in July, but which seem rather dusky and chilly in these
shortening autumn days. I am struck with the way the English always
speak of them--with a shudder, as gloomy, as dirty, as evil-smelling,
as suffocating, as freezing, as anything and everything but admirably
picturesque. I take us Americans for the only people who, in travelling,
judge things on the first impulse--when we do judge them at all--not
from the standpoint of simple comfort. Most of us, strolling forth into
these bustling basements, are, I imagine, too much amused, too much
diverted from the sense of an alienable right to public ease, to be
conscious of heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal smell
of strong _charcuterie_. If the visible romantic were banished from the
face of the earth I am sure the idea of it would still survive in some
typical American heart....
_Lucerne, September_.--Berne, I find, has been filling with tourists at
the expense of Lucerne, which I have been having almost to myself. There
are six people at the table d’hôte; the excellent dinner denotes on the
part of the _chef_ the easy leisure in which true artists love to work.
The waiters have nothing to do but lounge about the hall and chink in
their pockets the fees of the past season. The day has been lovely
in itself, and pervaded, to my sense, by the gentle glow of a natural
satisfaction at my finding myself again on the threshold of Italy. I am
lodged _en prince_, in a room with a balcony hanging over the lake--a
balcony on which I spent a long time this morning at dawn, thanking the
mountain-tops, from the depths of a landscape-lover’s heart, for their
promise of superbly fair weather. There were a great many mountain-tops
to thank, for the crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled away through the
morning mist in an endless confusion of grandeur. I have been all day
in better humour with Lucerne than ever before--a forecast reflection of
Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other day, is so furiously
a show-place, Lucerne is certainly one of the biggest booths at the
fair. The little quay, under the trees, squeezed in between the decks
of the steamboats and the doors of the hotels, is a terrible medley
of Saxon dialects--a jumble of pilgrims in all the phases of devotion,
equipped with book and staff, alpenstock and Baedeker. There are so
many hotels and trinket-shops, so many omnibuses and steamers, so many
Saint-Gothard _vetturini_, so many ragged urchins poking photographs,
minerals and Lucernese English at you, that you feel as if lake and
mountains themselves, in all their loveliness, were but a part of the
“enterprise” of landlords and pedlars, and half expect to see the Righi
and Pilatus and the fine weather figure as items on your hotel-bill
between the _bougie_ and the _siphon_. Nature herself assists you
to this conceit; there is something so operatic and suggestive of
footlights and scene-shifters in the view on which Lucerne looks out.
You are one of five thousand--fifty thousand--“accommodated” spectators;
you have taken your season-ticket and there is a responsible impresario
somewhere behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of beauty in the
prospect--such a redundancy of composition and effect--so many more
peaks and pinnacles than are needed to make one heart happy or regale
the vision of one quiet observer, that you finally accept the little
Babel on the quay and the looming masses in the clouds as equal parts of
a perfect system, and feel as if the mountains had been waiting so many
ages for the hotels to come and balance the colossal group, that
they show a right, after all, to have them big and numerous.
The scene-shifters have been at work all day long, composing and
discomposing the beautiful background of the prospect--massing the
clouds and scattering the light, effacing and reviving, making play
with their wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains rise, one
behind the other, in an enchanting gradation of distances and of melting
blues and greys; you think each successive tone the loveliest and
haziest possible till you see another loom dimly behind it. I couldn’t
enjoy even _The Swiss Times_, over my breakfast, till I had marched
forth to the office of the Saint-Gothard service of coaches and demanded
the banquette for to-morrow. The one place at the disposal of the office
was taken, but I might possibly _m’entendre_ with the conductor for his
own seat--the conductor being generally visible, in the intervals of
business, at the post-office. To the post-office, after breakfast, I
repaired, over the fine new bridge which now spans the green Reuss and
gives such a woeful air of country-cousinship to the crooked old wooden
structure which did sole service when I was here four years ago. The
old bridge is covered with a running hood of shingles and adorned with
a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings of the “Dance of
Death,” quite in the Holbein manner; the new sends up a painful glare
from its white limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a
meretricious imitation of platinum. As an almost professional cherisher
of the quaint I ought to have chosen to return at least by the dark and
narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. I was already demoralised.
I crossed the threshold of the timbered portal, took a few steps, and
retreated. It _smelt badly!_ So I marched back, counting the lamps in
their fine falsity. But the other, the crooked and covered way, smelt
very badly indeed; and no good American is without a fund of accumulated
sensibility to the odour of stale timber.
Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard of the postoffice,
waiting for my conductor to turn up and seeing the yellow malles-postes
pushed to and fro. At last, being told my man was at my service, I was
brought to speech of a huge, jovial, bearded, delightful Italian, clad
in the blue coat and waistcoat, with close, round silver buttons, which
are a heritage of the old postilions. No, it was not he; it was a friend
of his; and finally the friend was produced, _en costume de ville_, but
equally jovial, and Italian enough--a brave Lucernese, who had spent half
of his life between Bellinzona and Camerlata. For ten francs this worthy
man’s perch behind the luggage was made mine as far as Bellinzona, and
we separated with reciprocal wishes for good weather on the morrow.
To-morrow is so manifestly determined to be as fine as any other 30th
of September since the weather became on this planet a topic of
conversation that I have had nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne,
staring, loafing and vaguely intent on regarding the fact that, whatever
happens, my place is paid to Milan. I loafed into the immense new Hotel
National and read the _New York Tribune_ on a blue satin divan; after
which I was rather surprised, on coming out, to find myself staring at
a green Swiss lake and not at the Broadway omnibuses. The Hotel
National is adorned with a perfectly appointed Broadway bar--one of the
“prohibited” ones seeking hospitality in foreign lands after the manner
of an old-fashioned French or Italian refugee.
_Milan, October_.--My journey hither was such a pleasant piece of
traveller’s luck that I feel a delicacy for taking it to pieces to see
what it was made of. Do what we will, however, there remains in all
deeply agreeable impressions a charming something we can’t analyse. I
found it agreeable even, given the rest of my case, to turn out of
bed, at Lucerne, by four o’clock, into the chilly autumn darkness. The
thick-starred sky was cloudless, and there was as yet no flush of dawn;
but the lake was wrapped in a ghostly white mist which crept halfway up
the mountains and made them look as if they too had been lying down
for the night and were casting away the vaporous tissues of their
bedclothes. Into this fantastic fog the little steamer went creaking
away, and I hung about the deck with the two or three travellers who
had known better than to believe it would save them francs or midnight
sighs--over those debts you “pay with your person”--to go and wait for
the diligence at the Poste at Fliielen, or yet at the Guillaume
Tell. The dawn came sailing up over the mountain-tops, flushed but
unperturbed, and blew out the little stars and then the big ones, as a
thrifty matron after a party blows out her candles and lamps; the mist
went melting and wandering away into the duskier hollows and recesses of
the mountains, and the summits defined their profiles against the cool
soft light.
At Flüelen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches were actively
making themselves bigger, and piling up boxes and bags on their roofs
in a way to turn nervous people’s thoughts to the sharp corners of the
downward twists of the great road. I climbed into my own banquette, and
stood eating peaches--half-a-dozen women were hawking them about under
the horses’ legs--with an air of security that might have been offensive
to the people scrambling and protesting below between coupé and
intérieur. They were all English and all had false alarms about the
claim of somebody else to their place, the place for which they produced
their ticket, with a declaration in three or four different tongues of
the inalienable right to it given them by the expenditure of British
gold. They were all serenely confuted by the stout, purple-faced,
many-buttoned conductors, patted on the backs, assured that their
bath-tubs had every advantage of position on the top, and stowed away
according to their dues. When once one has fairly started on a journey
and has but to go and go by the impetus received, it is surprising what
entertainment one finds in very small things. We surrender to the gaping
traveller’s mood, which surely isn’t the unwisest the heart knows. I
don’t envy people, at any rate, who have outlived or outworn the simple
sweetness of feeling settled to go somewhere with bag and umbrella. If
we are settled on the top of a coach, and the “somewhere” contains an
element of the new and strange, the case is at its best. In this matter
wise people are content to become children again. We don’t turn about on
our knees to look out of the omnibus-window, but we indulge in very much
the same round-eyed contemplation of accessible objects. Responsibility
is left at home or at the worst packed away in the valise, relegated
to quite another part of the diligence with the clean shirts and the
writing-case. I sucked in the gladness of gaping, for this occasion,
with the somewhat acrid juice of my indifferent peaches; it made me
think them very good. This was the first of a series of kindly services
it rendered me. It made me agree next, as we started, that the gentleman
at the booking-office at Lucerne had but played a harmless joke when he
told me the regular seat in the banquette was taken. No one appeared
to claim it; so the conductor and I reversed positions, and I found him
quite as conversible as the usual Anglo-Saxon.
He was trolling snatches of melody and showing his great yellow teeth in
a jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona--and this in face of the sombre
fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scraping away into the
mountain, all the while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the
many-buttoned brotherhood. But he hopes, for long service’s sake, to be
taken into the employ of the railway; _he_ at least is no cherisher of
quaintness and has no romantic perversity. I found the railway coming
on, however, in a manner very shocking to mine. About an hour short of
Andermatt they have pierced a huge black cavity in the mountain, around
which has grown up a swarming, digging, hammering, smoke-compelling
colony. There are great barracks, with tall chimneys, down in the gorge
that bristled the other day but with natural graces, and a wonderful
increase of wine-shops in the little village of Göschenen above. Along
the breast of the mountain, beside the road, come wandering several
miles of very handsome iron pipes, of a stupendous girth--a conduit for
the water-power with which some of the machinery is worked. It lies at
its mighty length among the rocks like an immense black serpent,
and serves, as a mere detail, to give one the measure of the central
enterprise. When at the end of our long day’s journey, well down in warm
Italy, we came upon the other aperture of the tunnel, I could but uncap
with a grim reverence. Truly Nature is great, but she seems to me to
stand in very much the shoes of my poor friend the conductor. She is
being superseded at her strongest points, successively, and nothing
remains but for her to take humble service with her master. If she can
hear herself think amid that din of blasting and hammering she must be
reckoning up the years to elapse before the cleverest of Ober-Ingénieurs
decides that mountains are mere obstructive matter and has the Jungfrau
melted down and the residuum carried away in balloons and dumped upon
another planet.
The Devil’s Bridge, with the same failing apparently as the good Homer,
was decidedly nodding. The volume of water in the torrent was shrunken,
and I missed the thunderous uproar and far-leaping spray that have kept
up a miniature tempest in the neighbourhood on my other passages.
It suddenly occurs to me that the fault is not in the good Homer’s
inspiration, but simply in the big black pipes above-mentioned. They
dip into the rushing stream higher up, presumably, and pervert its
fine frenzy to their prosaic uses. There could hardly be a more vivid
reminder of the standing quarrel between use and beauty, and of the
hard time poor beauty is having. I looked wistfully, as we rattled into
dreary Andermatt, at the great white zigzags of the Oberalp road which
climbed away to the left. Even on one’s way to Italy one may spare a
throb of desire for the beautiful vision of the castled Grisons. Dear
to me the memory of my day’s drive last summer through that long blue
avenue of mountains, to queer little mouldering Ilanz, visited before
supper in the ghostly dusk. At Andermatt a sign over a little black
doorway flanked by two dung-hills seemed to me tolerably comical:
_Mineraux_, _Quadrupedes_, _Oiseaux_, _OEufs_, _Tableaux Antiques_. We
bundled in to dinner and the American gentleman in the banquette made
the acquaintance of the Irish lady in the coupé, who talked of the
weather as _foine_ and wore a Persian scarf twisted about her head. At
the other end of the table sat an Englishman, out of the intérieur, who
bore an extraordinary resemblance to the portraits of Edward VI’s and
Mary’s reigns. He walking, a convincing Holbein. The impression was
of value to a cherisher of quaintness, and he must have wondered--not
knowing me for such a character--why I stared at him. It wasn’t him I
was staring at, but some handsome Seymour or Dudley or Digby with a ruff
and a round cap and plume.
From Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny valley, we passed into
rugged little Hospenthal, and then up the last stages of the ascent.
From here the road was all new to me. Among the summits of the various
Alpine passes there is little to choose. You wind and double slowly into
keener cold and deeper stillness; you put on your overcoat and turn up
the collar; you count the nestling snow-patches and then you cease to
count them; you pause, as you trudge before the lumbering coach, and
listen to the last-heard cow-bell tinkling away below you in kindlier
herbage. The sky was tremendously blue, and the little stunted bushes
on the snow-streaked slopes were all dyed with autumnal purples and
crimsons. It was a great display of colour. Purple and crimson too,
though not so fine, were the faces thrust out at us from the greasy
little double casements of a barrack beside the road, where the horses
paused before the last pull. There was one little girl in particular,
beginning to _lisser_ her hair, as civilisation approached, in a manner
not to be described, with her poor little blue-black hands. At the
summit are the two usual grim little stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn,
the snow-white peaks, the pause in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to
rattle down with two horses. In five minutes we are swinging along the
famous zigzags. Engineer, driver, horses--it’s very handsomely done by
all of them. The road curves and curls and twists and plunges like the
tail of a kite; sitting perched in the banquette, you see it making
below you and in mid-air certain bold gyrations which bring you as near
as possible, short of the actual experience, to the philosophy of that
immortal Irishman who wished that his fall from the house-top would only
last. But the zigzags last no more than Paddy’s fall, and in due time we
were all coming to our senses over _cafe au lait_ in the little inn
at Faido. After Faido the valley, plunging deeper, began to take thick
afternoon shadows from the hills, and at Airolo we were fairly in the
twilight. But the pink and yellow houses shimmered through the gentle
gloom, and Italy began in broken syllables to whisper that she was at
hand. For the rest of the way to Bellinzona her voice was muffled in the
grey of evening, and I was half vexed to lose the charming sight of the
changing vegetation. But only half vexed, for the moon was climbing all
the while nearer the edge of the crags that overshadowed us, and a thin
magical light came trickling down into the winding, murmuring gorges. It
was a most enchanting business. The chestnut-trees loomed up with double
their daylight stature; the vines began to swing their low festoons like
nets to trip up the fairies. At last the ruined towers of Bellinzona
stood gleaming in the moonshine, and we rattled into the great
post-yard. It was eleven o’clock and I had risen at four; moonshine
apart I wasn’t sorry.
All that was very well; but the drive next day from Bellinzona to Como
is to my mind what gives its supreme beauty to this great pass. One
can’t describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor would one try if
one could; the floweriest rhetoric can recall it only as a picture on
a fireboard recalls a Claude. But it lay spread before me for a whole
perfect day: in the long gleam of the Major, from whose head the
diligence swerves away and begins to climb the bosky hills that divide
it from Lugano; in the shimmering, melting azure of the southern slopes
and masses; in the luxurious tangle of nature and the familiar amenity
of man; in the lawn-like inclinations, where the great grouped chestnuts
make so cool a shadow in so warm a light; in the rusty vineyards, the
littered cornfields and the tawdry wayside shrines. But most of all it’s
the deep yellow light that enchants you and tells you where you are.
See it come filtering down through a vine-covered trellis on the red
handkerchief with which a ragged contadina has bound her hair, and all
the magic of Italy, to the eye, makes an aureole about the poor girl’s
head. Look at a brown-breasted reaper eating his chunk of black bread
under a spreading chestnut; nowhere is shadow so charming, nowhere is
colour so charged, nowhere has accident such grace. The whole drive
to Lugano was one long loveliness, and the town itself is admirably
Italian. There was a great unlading of the coach, during which I
wandered under certain brown old arcades and bought for six sous, from
a young woman in a gold necklace, a hatful of peaches and figs. When
I came back I found the young man holding open the door of the second
diligence, which had lately come up, and beckoning to me with a
despairing smile. The young man, I must note, was the most amiable of
Ticinese; though he wore no buttons he was attached to the diligence
in some amateurish capacity, and had an eye to the mail-bags and other
valuables in the boot. I grumbled at Berne over the want of soft curves
in the Swiss temperament; but the children of the tangled Tessin are
cast in the Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a
Neapolitan; we walked together for an hour under the chestnuts, while
the coach was plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped singing
till we reached a little wine-house where he got his mouth full of bread
and cheese. I looked into his open door, a la Sterne, and saw the young
woman sitting rigid and grim, staring over his head and with a great
pile of bread and butter in her lap. He had only informed her most
politely that she was to be transferred to another diligence and must do
him the favour to descend; but she evidently knew of but one way for
a respectable young insulary of her sex to receive the politeness of a
foreign adventurer guilty of an eye betraying latent pleasantry. Heaven
only knew what he was saying! I told her, and she gathered up her
parcels and emerged. A part of the day’s great pleasure perhaps was my
grave sense of being an instrument in the hands of the powers toward the
safe consignment of this young woman and her boxes. When once you have
really bent to the helpless you are caught; there is no such steel trap,
and it holds you fast. My rather grim Abigail was a neophyte in foreign
travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her trade, which I inferred
to be that of making up those prodigious chignons worn mainly by
English ladies. Her mistress had gone on a mule over the mountains to
Cadenabbia, and she herself was coming up with the wardrobe, two
big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played my part, under the powers,
at Bellinzona, and had interposed between the poor girl’s frightened
English and the dreadful Ticinese French of the functionaries in the
post-yard. At the custom-house on the Italian frontier I was of peculiar
service; there was a kind of fateful fascination in it. The wardrobe
was voluminous; I exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as
the _douanier_ plunged his brown fists into it. Who was the lady at
Cadenabbia? What was she to me or I to her? She wouldn’t know, when she
rustled down to dinner next day, that it was I who had guided the frail
skiff of her public basis of vanity to port. So unseen but not unfelt do
we cross each other’s orbits. The skiff however may have foundered that
evening in sight of land. I disengaged the young woman from among her
fellow-travellers and placed her boxes on a hand-cart in the picturesque
streets of Como, within a stone’s throw of that lovely striped and toned
cathedral which has the facade of cameo medallions. I could only make
the _facchino_ swear to take her to the steamboat. He too was a jovial
dog, but I hope he was polite with precautions.
1873.