*****
I had before me what I have been told--by others than the hotel
proprietor--is one of the finest panoramas in Europe. Across a
Calvinistic lake, whose renown is familiar to the profane chiefly
because Byron wrote a mediocre poem about a castle on its shores, rose
the five-fanged Dent du Midi, twenty-five miles off, and ten thousand
feet towards the sky; other mountains, worthy companions of the
illustrious Tooth, made a tremendous snowy semicircle right and left;
and I on my mountain fronted this semi-circle. The weather was perfect.
Down below me, on the edge of the lake, was a continuous chain of towns,
all full and crammed with the final products of civilisation, miles of
them. There was everything in those towns that a nation whose destiny
it is to satisfy the caprices of the English thought the English could
possibly desire. Such things as baths, lifts, fish-knives, two-steps
and rag-times, casinos, theatres, rackets, skates, hot-water bottles,
whisky, beef-steaks, churches, chapels, cameras, puttees, jig-saws,
bridge-markers, clubs, China tea, phonographs, concert-halls,
charitable societies, money-changers, hygiene, picture post cards,
even books---just cheap ones! It was dizzying to think of the refined
complexity of existence down there. It was impressive to think of the
slow centuries of effort, struggle, discovery and invention that had
gone to the production of that wondrous civilisation. It was perfectly
distracting to think of the innumerable activities that were proceeding
in all parts of the earth (for you could have coral from India’s
coral strand in those towns, and furs from Labrador, and skates from
Birmingham) to keep the vast organism in working order.
And behind the chain of towns ran the railwayline, along which flew
the expresses with dining-cars and fresh flowers on the tables of
the dining-cars, and living drivers on the footplates of the
engines, whirling the salt of the earth to and fro, threading like
torpedo-shuttles between far-distant centres of refinement. And behind
the railway line spread the cultivated fields of these Swiss, who,
after all, in the intervals of passing dishes to stately guests in
hotel-refectories, have a national life of their own; who indeed have
shown more skill and commonsense in the organisation of posts, hotels,
and military conscription, than any other nation; so much so, that one
gazes and wonders how on earth a race so thick-headed and tedious could
ever have done it.
*****
I knew that I had all that before me, because I had been among it all,
and had ascended and descended in the lifts, lolled in the casinos and
the trains, and drunk the China tea. But I could not see it from the top
of my mountain. All that I could see from the top of my mountain was
a scattering of dolls’ houses, and that scattering constituted three
towns; with here and there a white cube overtopping the rest by half an
inch, and that white cube was a grand hotel; and out of the upper face
of the cube a wisp of vapour, and that wisp of vapour was the smoke of
a furnace that sent hot-water through miles of plumbing and heated 400
radiators in 400 elegant apartments; and little stretches of ribbon, and
these ribbons were boulevards bordered with great trees; and a puff
of steam crawling along a fine wire, and that crawling puff was an
international express; and rectangular spaces like handkerchiefs fresh
from a bad laundry, and those handkerchiefs were immense fields of
vine; and a water-beetle on the still surface of the lake, and that
water-beetle was a steamer licensed to carry 850 persons. And there was
silence. The towns were feverishly living in ten thousand fashions,
and made not a sound. Even the express breathed softly, like a child in
another room.
The mountains remained impassive; they were too indifferent to be even
contemptuous. Humanity had only soiled their ankles: I could see all
around that with all his jumping man had not found a perch higher than
their ankles. It seemed to me painfully inept that humanity, having
spent seven years in worming a hole through one of those mountains,
should have filled the newspapers with the marvels of its hole, and
should have fallen into the habit of calling its hole “the Simplon.”
The Simplon--that hole! It seemed to me that the excellence of Swiss
conscription was merely ridiculous in its exquisite unimportance. It
seemed to me that I must have been absolutely mad to get myself excited
about the January elections in a trifling isle called Britain, writing
articles and pamphlets and rude letters, and estranging friends and
thinking myself an earnest warrior in the van of progress. Land taxes! I
could not look down, or up, and see land taxes as aught but an infantile
invention of comic opera. Two Chambers or one! Veto first or Budget
first! Mr. F. E. Smith or Mr. Steel-Maitland! Ah! The tea-cup and the
storm!
The prescription of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus had “acted.”
*****
It is an exceedingly harmful prescription if employed long or often. Go
to the top of a mountain by all means, but hurry down again quickly.
The top of a mountain, instead of correcting your perspective, as is
generally supported by philosophers for whom human existence is not good
enough, falsifies it. Because it induces self-aggrandisement. You draw
illusive bigness from the mountain. You imagine that you are august,
but you are not. If the man below was informed by telephone that a being
august was gazing on him from above he would probably squint his eyes
upwards in the sunshine and assert with calmness that he couldn’t even
see a living speck on the mountain-crest. You who have gone up had
better come down. You couldn’t remain up twenty-four hours without the
aid of the ant-like evolutions below, which you grandiosely despise. You
couldn’t have got up at all if a procession of those miserable conceited
ants had not been up there before you.
The detached philosophic mountain view of the littleness of things is a
delightful and diverting amusement, and there is perhaps no harm in it
so long as you don’t really act on it. If you begin really to act on it
you at once become ridiculous, and especially ridiculous in the sight of
mountains.
You commit the fatuity of despising the corporate toil which has made
you what you are, and you prove nothing except that you have found a
rather specious and glittering excuse for idleness, for cowardice, and
for having permitted the stuffing to be knocked out of you.
When I hear a man say, when I hear myself say: “I’m sick of politics,”
I always think: “What you want is six months in prison, or in a slum, or
in a mine, or in a bakehouse, or in the skin of a woman. After that,
we should see if you were sick of politics.” And when I hear a lot of
people together say that they are sick of politics, then I am quite sure
that politics are more than ever urgently in need of attention. It is at
such moments that a man has an excellent opportunity of showing that he
is a man.