II

To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great and

dangerous step. With not a few, I think a large proportion of their

pleasure then comes to an end; ‘the malady of not marking’ overtakes

them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never again the

chime of fair words or the march of the stately period. _Non ragioniam_

of these. But to all the step is dangerous; it involves coming of age;

it is even a kind of second weaning. In the past all was at the choice

of others; they chose, they digested, they read aloud for us and sang to

their own tune the books of childhood. In the future we are to approach

the silent, inexpressive type alone, like pioneers; and the choice of

what we are to read is in our own hands thenceforward. For instance, in

the passages already adduced, I detect and applaud the ear of my old

nurse; they were of her choice, and she imposed them on my infancy,

reading the works of others as a poet would scarce dare to read his own;

gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on assonances and

alliterations. I know very well my mother must have been all the while

trying to educate my taste upon more secular authors; but the vigour and

the continual opportunities of my nurse triumphed, and after a long

search, I can find in these earliest volumes of my autobiography no

mention of anything but nursery rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M’Cheyne.

I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their school

Readers. We might not now find so much pathos in ‘Bingen on the Rhine,’

‘A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,’ or in ‘The Soldier’s

Funeral,’ in the declamation of which I was held to have surpassed

myself. ‘Robert’s voice,’ said the master on this memorable occasion,

‘is not strong, but impressive’: an opinion which I was fool enough to

carry home to my father; who roasted me for years in consequence. I am

sure one should not be so deliciously tickled by the humorous pieces:—

‘What, crusty? cries Will in a taking,

Who would not be crusty with half a year’s baking?’

I think this quip would leave us cold. The ‘Isles of Greece’ seem rather

tawdry too; but on the ‘Address to the Ocean,’ or on ‘The Dying

Gladiator,’ ‘time has writ no wrinkle.’

’Tis the morn, but dim and dark,

Whither flies the silent lark?’—

does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon these

lines in the Fourth Reader; and ‘surprised with joy, impatient as the

wind,’ he plunged into the sequel? And there was another piece, this

time in prose, which none can have forgotten; many like me must have

searched Dickens with zeal to find it again, and in its proper context,

and have perhaps been conscious of some inconsiderable measure of

disappointment, that it was only Tom Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of

poetry, to London.

But in the Reader we are still under guides. What a boy turns out for

himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and pleasure.

My father’s library was a spot of some austerity; the proceedings of

learned societies, some Latin divinity, cyclopædias, physical science,

and, above all, optics, held the chief place upon the shelves, and it was

only in holes and corners that anything really legible existed as by

accident. The _Parent’s Assistant_, _Rob Roy_, _Waverley_, and _Guy

Mannering_, the _Voyages of Captain Woods Rogers_, Fuller’s and Bunyan’s

_Holy Wars_,_ The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe_, _The Female

Bluebeard_, G. Sand’s _Mare au Diable_—(how came it in that grave

assembly!), Ainsworth’s _Tower of London_, and four old volumes of

Punch—these were the chief exceptions. In these latter, which made for

years the chief of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost as soon as

I could spell) with the Snob Papers. I knew them almost by heart,

particularly the visit to the Pontos; and I remember my surprise when I

found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and signed with a famous

name; to me, as I read and admired them, they were the works of Mr.

Punch. Time and again I tried to read _Rob Roy_, with whom of course I

was acquainted from the _Tales of a Grandfather_; time and again the

early part, with Rashleigh and (think of it!) the adorable Diana, choked

me off; and I shall never forget the pleasure and surprise with which,

lying on the floor one summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the

first scene with Andrew Fairservice. ‘The worthy Dr.

Lightfoot’—‘mistrysted with a bogle’—‘a wheen green trash’—‘Jenny, lass,

I think I ha’e her’: from that day to this the phrases have been

unforgotten. I read on, I need scarce say; I came to Glasgow, I bided

tryst on Glasgow Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth,

all with transporting pleasure; and then the clouds gathered once more

about my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half-asleep into

the clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith

recalled me to myself. With that scene and the defeat of Captain

Thornton the book concluded; Helen and her sons shocked even the little

schoolboy of nine or ten with their unreality; I read no more, or I did

not grasp what I was reading; and years elapsed before I consciously met

Diana and her father among the hills, or saw Rashleigh dying in the

chair. When I think of that novel and that evening, I am impatient with

all others; they seem but shadows and impostors; they cannot satisfy the

appetite which this awakened; and I dare be known to think it the best of

Sir Walter’s by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists.

Perhaps Mr. Lang is right, and our first friends in the land of fiction

are always the most real. And yet I had read before this _Guy

Mannering_, and some of _Waverley_, with no such delighted sense of truth

and humour, and I read immediately after the greater part of the Waverley

Novels, and was never moved again in the same way or to the same degree.

One circumstance is suspicious: my critical estimate of the Waverley

Novels has scarce changed at all since I was ten. _Rob Roy_, _Guy

Mannering_, and _Redgauntlet_ first; then, a little lower; _The Fortunes

of Nigel_; then, after a huge gulf, _Ivanhoe_ and _Anne of Geierstein_:

the rest nowhere; such was the verdict of the boy. Since then _The

Antiquary_, _St. Ronan’s Well_, _Kenilworth_, and _The Heart of

Midlothian_ have gone up in the scale; perhaps _Ivanhoe and Anne of

Geierstein_ have gone a trifle down; Diana Vernon has been added to my

admirations in that enchanted world of _Rob Roy_; I think more of the

letters in _Redgauntlet_, and Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece of

realism, I can now read about with equanimity, interest, and I had almost

said pleasure, while to the childish critic he often caused unmixed

distress. But the rest is the same; I could not finish _The Pirate_ when

I was a child, I have never finished it yet; _Peveril of the Peak_

dropped half way through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have since

waded to an end in a kind of wager with myself, the exercise was quite

without enjoyment. There is something disquieting in these

considerations. I still think the visit to Ponto’s the best part of the

_Book of Snobs_: does that mean that I was right when I was a child, or

does it mean that I have never grown since then, that the child is not

the man’s father, but the man? and that I came into the world with all my

faculties complete, and have only learned sinsyne to be more tolerant of

boredom? . . .

VIII.

THE IDEAL HOUSE

Two things are necessary in any neighbourhood where we propose to spend a

life: a desert and some living water.

There are many parts of the earth’s face which offer the necessary

combination of a certain wildness with a kindly variety. A great

prospect is desirable, but the want may be otherwise supplied; even

greatness can be found on the small scale; for the mind and the eye

measure differently. Bold rocks near hand are more inspiriting than

distant Alps, and the thick fern upon a Surrey heath makes a fine forest

for the imagination, and the dotted yew trees noble mountains. A

Scottish moor with birches and firs grouped here and there upon a knoll,

or one of those rocky seaside deserts of Provence overgrown with rosemary

and thyme and smoking with aroma, are places where the mind is never

weary. Forests, being more enclosed, are not at first sight so

attractive, but they exercise a spell; they must, however, be diversified

with either heath or rock, and are hardly to be considered perfect

without conifers. Even sand-hills, with their intricate plan, and their

gulls and rabbits, will stand well for the necessary desert.

The house must be within hail of either a little river or the sea. A

great river is more fit for poetry than to adorn a neighbourhood; its

sweep of waters increases the scale of the scenery and the distance of

one notable object from another; and a lively burn gives us, in the space

of a few yards, a greater variety of promontory and islet, of cascade,

shallow goil, and boiling pool, with answerable changes both of song and

colour, than a navigable stream in many hundred miles. The fish, too,

make a more considerable feature of the brookside, and the trout plumping

in the shadow takes the ear. A stream should, besides, be narrow enough

to cross, or the burn hard by a bridge, or we are at once shut out of

Eden. The quantity of water need be of no concern, for the mind sets the

scale, and can enjoy a Niagara Fall of thirty inches. Let us approve the

singer of

‘Shallow rivers, by whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.’

If the sea is to be our ornamental water, choose an open seaboard with a

heavy beat of surf; one much broken in outline, with small havens and

dwarf headlands; if possible a few islets; and as a first necessity,

rocks reaching out into deep water. Such a rock on a calm day is a

better station than the top of Teneriffe or Chimborazo. In short, both

for the desert and the water, the conjunction of many near and bold

details is bold scenery for the imagination and keeps the mind alive.

Given these two prime luxuries, the nature of the country where we are to

live is, I had almost said, indifferent; after that inside the garden, we

can construct a country of our own. Several old trees, a considerable

variety of level, several well-grown hedges to divide our garden into

provinces, a good extent of old well-set turf, and thickets of shrubs and

ever-greens to be cut into and cleared at the new owner’s pleasure, are

the qualities to be sought for in your chosen land. Nothing is more

delightful than a succession of small lawns, opening one out of the other

through tall hedges; these have all the charm of the old bowling-green

repeated, do not require the labour of many trimmers, and afford a series

of changes. You must have much lawn against the early summer, so as to

have a great field of daisies, the year’s morning frost; as you must have

a wood of lilacs, to enjoy to the full the period of their blossoming.

Hawthorn is another of the Spring’s ingredients; but it is even best to

have a rough public lane at one side of your enclosure which, at the

right season, shall become an avenue of bloom and odour. The old flowers

are the best and should grow carelessly in corners. Indeed, the ideal

fortune is to find an old garden, once very richly cared for, since sunk

into neglect, and to tend, not repair, that neglect; it will thus have a

smack of nature and wildness which skilful dispositions cannot overtake.

The gardener should be an idler, and have a gross partiality to the

kitchen plots: an eager or toilful gardener misbecomes the garden

landscape; a tasteful gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the

borders raw, and take the bloom off nature. Close adjoining, if you are

in the south, an olive-yard, if in the north, a swarded apple-orchard

reaching to the stream, completes your miniature domain; but this is

perhaps best entered through a door in the high fruit-wall; so that you

close the door behind you on your sunny plots, your hedges and evergreen

jungle, when you go down to watch the apples falling in the pool. It is

a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will

take care of themselves. Nor must the ear be forgotten: without birds a

garden is a prison-yard. There is a garden near Marseilles on a steep

hill-side, walking by which, upon a sunny morning, your ear will suddenly

be ravished with a burst of small and very cheerful singing: some score

of cages being set out there to sun their occupants. This is a heavenly

surprise to any passer-by; but the price paid, to keep so many ardent and

winged creatures from their liberty, will make the luxury too dear for

any thoughtful pleasure-lover. There is only one sort of bird that I can

tolerate caged, though even then I think it hard, and that is what is

called in France the Bec-d’Argent. I once had two of these pigmies in

captivity; and in the quiet, hire house upon a silent street where I was

then living, their song, which was not much louder than a bee’s, but

airily musical, kept me in a perpetual good humour. I put the cage upon

my table when I worked, carried it with me when I went for meals, and

kept it by my head at night: the first thing in the morning, these

_maestrini_ would pipe up. But these, even if you can pardon their

imprisonment, are for the house. In the garden the wild birds must plant

a colony, a chorus of the lesser warblers that should be almost

deafening, a blackbird in the lilacs, a nightingale down the lane, so

that you must stroll to hear it, and yet a little farther, tree-tops

populous with rooks.

Your house should not command much outlook; it should be set deep and

green, though upon rising ground, or, if possible, crowning a knoll, for

the sake of drainage. Yet it must be open to the east, or you will miss

the sunrise; sunset occurring so much later, you can go up a few steps

and look the other way. A house of more than two stories is a mere

barrack; indeed the ideal is of one story, raised upon cellars. If the

rooms are large, the house may be small: a single room, lofty, spacious,

and lightsome, is more palatial than a castleful of cabinets and

cupboards. Yet size in a house, and some extent and intricacy of

corridor, is certainly delightful to the flesh. The reception room

should be, if possible, a place of many recesses, which are ‘petty

retiring places for conference’; but it must have one long wall with a

divan: for a day spent upon a divan, among a world of cushions, is as

full of diversion as to travel. The eating-room, in the French mode,

should be _ad hoc_: unfurnished, but with a buffet, the table, necessary

chairs, one or two of Canaletto’s etchings, and a tile fire-place for the

winter. In neither of these public places should there be anything

beyond a shelf or two of books; but the passages may be one library from

end to end, and the stair, if there be one, lined with volumes in old

leather, very brightly carpeted, and leading half-way up, and by way of

landing, to a windowed recess with a fire-place; this window, almost

alone in the house, should command a handsome prospect. Husband and wife

must each possess a studio; on the woman’s sanctuary I hesitate to dwell,

and turn to the man’s. The walls are shelved waist-high for books, and

the top thus forms a continuous table running round the wall. Above are

prints, a large map of the neighbourhood, a Corot and a Claude or two.

The room is very spacious, and the five tables and two chairs are but as

islands. One table is for actual work, one close by for references in

use; one, very large, for MSS. or proofs that wait their turn; one kept

clear for an occasion; and the fifth is the map table, groaning under a

collection of large-scale maps and charts. Of all books these are the

least wearisome to read and the richest in matter; the course of roads

and rivers, the contour lines and the forests in the maps—the reefs,

soundings, anchors, sailing marks and little pilot-pictures in the

charts—and, in both, the bead-roll of names, make them of all printed

matter the most fit to stimulate and satisfy the fancy. The chair in

which you write is very low and easy, and backed into a corner; at one

elbow the fire twinkles; close at the other, if you are a little

inhumane, your cage of silver-bills are twittering into song.

Joined along by a passage, you may reach the great, sunny, glass-roofed,

and tiled gymnasium, at the far end of which, lined with bright marble,

is your plunge and swimming bath, fitted with a capacious boiler.

The whole loft of the house from end to end makes one undivided chamber;

here are set forth tables on which to model imaginary or actual countries

in putty or plaster, with tools and hardy pigments; a carpenter’s bench;

and a spared corner for photography, while at the far end a space is kept

clear for playing soldiers. Two boxes contain the two armies of some

five hundred horse and foot; two others the ammunition of each side, and

a fifth the foot-rules and the three colours of chalk, with which you lay

down, or, after a day’s play, refresh the outlines of the country; red or

white for the two kinds of road (according as they are suitable or not

for the passage of ordnance), and blue for the course of the obstructing

rivers. Here I foresee that you may pass much happy time; against a good

adversary a game may well continue for a month; for with armies so

considerable three moves will occupy an hour. It will be found to set an

excellent edge on this diversion if one of the players shall, every day

or so, write a report of the operations in the character of army

correspondent.

I have left to the last the little room for winter evenings. This should

be furnished in warm positive colours, and sofas and floor thick with

rich furs. The hearth, where you burn wood of aromatic quality on silver

dogs, tiled round about with Bible pictures; the seats deep and easy; a

single Titian in a gold frame; a white bust or so upon a bracket; a rack

for the journals of the week; a table for the books of the year; and

close in a corner the three shelves full of eternal books that never

weary: Shakespeare, Molière, Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, De Musset’s

comedies (the one volume open at _Carmosine_ and the other at

_Fantasio_); the _Arabian Nights_, and kindred stories, in Weber’s solemn

volumes; Borrow’s _Bible in Spain_, the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Guy

Mannering_ and _Rob Roy_, _Monte Cristo_ and the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_,

immortal Boswell sole among biographers, Chaucer, Herrick, and the _State

Trials_.

The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of

varnished wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf of

books of a particular and dippable order, such as _Pepys_, the _Paston

Letters_, Burt’s _Letters from the Highlands_, or the _Newgate Calendar_.

. . .

IX.

DAVOS IN WINTER

A mountain valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on the

imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an invalid’s

weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective kind. The

roads indeed are cleared, and at least one footpath dodging up the hill;

but to these the health-seeker is rigidly confined. There are for him no

cross-cuts over the field, no following of streams, no unguided rambles

in the wood. His walks are cut and dry. In five or six different

directions he can push as far, and no farther, than his strength permits;

never deviating from the line laid down for him and beholding at each

repetition the same field of wood and snow from the same corner of the

road. This, of itself, would be a little trying to the patience in the

course of months; but to this is added, by the heaped mantle of the snow,

an almost utter absence of detail and an almost unbroken identity of

colour. Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The sun touches it with

roseate and golden lights. Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own

richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with

wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it

is still water, and has watery tones of blue. But, when all is said,

these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a trite and

staring substitute for the infinite variety and pleasantness of the

earth’s face. Even a boulder, whose front is too precipitous to have

retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in your walk, a perfect gem

of colour, reminds you almost painfully of other places, and brings into

your head the delights of more Arcadian days—the path across the meadow,

the hazel dell, the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours,

and the whisper of the woods. And scents here are as rare as colours.

Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall smell

nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of frost. Sounds,

too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead,

windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and

that is all; you work all winter through to no other accompaniment but

the crunching of your steps upon the frozen snow.

It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from one end

to the other. Go where you please, houses will still be in sight, before

and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as high as an invalid

is able, and it is only to spy new habitations nested in the wood. Nor

is that all; for about the health resort the walks are besieged by single

people walking rapidly with plaids about their shoulders, by sudden

troops of German boys trying to learn to jödel, and by German couples

silently and, as you venture to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love’s

young dream. You may perhaps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses

as he walks about. Alas! no muse will suffer this imminence of

interruption—and at the second stampede of jödellers you find your modest

inspiration fled. Or you may only have a taste for solitude; it may try

your nerves to have some one always in front whom you are visibly

overtaking, and some one always behind who is audibly overtaking you, to

say nothing of a score or so who brush past you in an opposite direction.

It may annoy you to take your walks and seats in public view. Alas!

there is no help for it among the Alps. There are no recesses, as in

Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill; no sacred solitude of olive gardens on the

Roccabruna-road; no nook upon Saint Martin’s Cape, haunted by the voice

of breakers, and fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the rosemary

and the sea-pines and the sea.

For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the storms

of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure, chequer and by

their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-weather scenes. When

sun and storm contend together—when the thick clouds are broken up and

pierced by arrows of golden daylight—there will be startling

rearrangements and transfigurations of the mountain summits. A

sun-dazzling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms

and blackness; or perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will

be designed in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance

bright like a constellation, and alone ‘in the unapparent.’ You may

think you know the figure of these hills; but when they are thus

revealed, they belong no longer to the things of earth—meteors we should

rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for a moment

and return no more. Other variations are more lasting, as when, for

instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some windless hours, and

the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand each stock-still and loaded

with a shining burthen. You may drive through a forest so disguised, the

tongue-tied torrent struggling silently in the cleft of the ravine, and

all still except the jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy

yourself in some untrodden northern territory—Lapland, Labrador, or

Alaska.

Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down stairs in

a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by the glimmer of

one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find yourself by seven o’clock

outside in a belated moonlight and a freezing chill. The mail sleigh

takes you up and carries you on, and you reach the top of the ascent in

the first hour of the day. To trace the fires of the sunrise as they

pass from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly

against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of

clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills

half glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the

greyness of the western heaven—these will seem to repay you for the

discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and these

enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther side in yet

another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with such another

long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another senseless watercourse

bickering along the foot. You have had your moment; but you have not

changed the scene. The mountains are about you like a trap; you cannot

foot it up a hillside and behold the sea as a great plain, but live in

holes and corners, and can change only one for another.

X.

HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS

There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed in

the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the wounded soldiery of

mankind were all shut up together in some basking angle of the Riviera,

walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive-yards within earshot

of the interminable and unchanging surf—idle among spiritless idlers; not

perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes

fiercely, after livelier weather and some vivifying change. These were

certainly beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its

softness. Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were not

certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores would

sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death. There was a lack of a

manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write bits of poetry

and practise resignation, but you did not feel that here was a good spot

to repair your tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears, after all,

that there was something just in these appreciations. The invalid is now

asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air shall medicine him; the demon

of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded in his den. For even

Winter has his ‘dear domestic cave,’ and in those places where he may be

said to dwell for ever tempers his austerities.

Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental railroad

of America must remember the joy with which he perceived, after the

tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal moorlands of

Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone, the southern sky. It is

among these mountains in the new State of Colorado that the sick man may

find, not merely an alleviation of his ailments, but the possibility of

an active life and an honest livelihood. There, no longer as a lounger

in a plaid, but as a working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong

and begin anew his life. Instead of the bath-chair, the spade; instead

of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare

air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room—these are the

changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of self-respect,

with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors, none but an invalid

can know. Resignation, the cowardice that apes a kind of courage and

that lives in the very air of health resorts, is cast aside at a breath

of such a prospect. The man can open the door; he can be up and doing;

he can be a kind of a man after all and not merely an invalid.

But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains. We cannot all of us go

farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines the

medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of the old.

Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its wholesome duties;

again he has to be an idler among idlers; but this time at a great

altitude, far among the mountains, with the snow piled before his door

and the frost flowers every morning on his window. The mere fact is

tonic to his nerves. His choice of a place of wintering has somehow to

his own eyes the air of an act of bold contract; and, since he has

wilfully sought low temperatures, he is not so apt to shudder at a touch

of chill. He came for that, he looked for it, and he throws it from him

with the thought.

A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either hand

that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the higher you

climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a village of hotels;

a world of black and white—black pine-woods, clinging to the sides of the

valley, and white snow flouring it, and papering it between the

pine-woods, and covering all the mountains with a dazzling curd; add a

few score invalids marching to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating on

the ice-rinks, possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the door

of the hotel—and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium.

A certain furious river runs curving down the valley; its pace never

varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it; and its

unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to witness. It is a

river that a man could grow to hate. Day after day breaks with the

rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing,

down into the valley. From end to end the snow reverberates the

sunshine; from end to end the air tingles with the light, clear and dry

like crystal. Only along the course of the river, but high above it,

there hangs far into the noon, one waving scarf of vapour. It were hard

to fancy a more engaging feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to

believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature

of the incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon the sky is

arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour—mild and pale and melting in the

north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of purple blue.

What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable lustre of the snow,

space is reduced again to chaos. An English painter, coming to France

late in life, declared with natural anger that ‘the values were all

wrong.’ Had he got among the Alps on a bright day he might have lost his

reason. And even to any one who has looked at landscape with any care,

and in any way through the spectacles of representative art, the scene

has a character of insanity. The distant shining mountain peak is here

beside your eye; the neighbouring dull-coloured house in comparison is

miles away; the summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand;

the nigh slopes, which are black with pine trees, bear it no relation,

and might be in another sphere. Here there are none of those delicate

gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and spreadings-out into the

distance, nothing of that art of air and light by which the face of

nature explains and veils itself in climes which we may be allowed to

think more lovely. A glaring piece of crudity, where everything that is

not white is a solecism and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene

of blinding definition; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar,

more than scenically trying, and yet hearty and healthy, making the

nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile: such is the winter daytime in

the Alps.

With the approach of evening all is changed. A mountain will suddenly

intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten minutes the

thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that are no longer shone

upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile, overhead, if the weather be

rightly characteristic of the place, the sky fades towards night through

a surprising key of colours. The latest gold leaps from the last

mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon shall rise, and in her gentler light

the valley shall be mellowed and misted, and here and there a wisp of

silver cloud upon a hilltop, and here and there a warmly glowing window

in a house, between fire and starlight, kind and homely in the fields of

snow.

But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be eternally

exempt from changes. The clouds gather, black as ink; the wind bursts

rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead, the snow-flakes

flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail comes in later from the

top of the pass; people peer through their windows and foresee no end but

an entire seclusion from Europe, and death by gradual dry-rot, each in

his indifferent inn; and when at last the storm goes, and the sun comes

again, behold a world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright like

daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men. Or

perhaps from across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds

about the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain

valley. Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at a gust, a

load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the whole invalid

world huddles into its private chambers, and silently recognises the

empire of the Föhn.

XI.

ALPINE DIVERSIONS

There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanitarium. The place is

half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in double column,

text and translation; but it still remains half German; and hence we have

a band which is able to play, and a company of actors able, as you will

be told, to act. This last you will take on trust, for the players,

unlike the local sheet, confine themselves to German and though at the

beginning of winter they come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in turn,

long before Christmas they will have given up the English for a bad job.

There will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races; the German

element seeking, in the interest of their actors, to raise a mysterious

item, the _Kur-taxe_, which figures heavily enough already in the weekly

bills, the English element stoutly resisting. Meantime in the English

hotels home-played farces, _tableaux-vivants_, and even balls enliven the

evenings; a charity bazaar sheds genial consternation; Christmas and New

Year are solemnised with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to time the

young folks carol and revolve untunefully enough through the figures of a

singing quadrille.

A magazine club supplies you with everything, from the _Quarterly_ to the

_Sunday at Home_. Grand tournaments are organised at chess, draughts,

billiards and whist. Once and again wandering artists drop into our

mountain valley, coming you know not whence, going you cannot imagine

whither, and belonging to every degree in the hierarchy of musical art,

from the recognised performer who announces a concert for the evening, to

the comic German family or solitary long-haired German baritone, who

surprises the guests at dinner-time with songs and a collection. They

are all of them good to see; they, at least, are moving; they bring with

them the sentiment of the open road; yesterday, perhaps, they were in

Tyrol, and next week they will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk

still simmer in our mountain prison. Some of them, too, are welcome as

the flowers in May for their own sake; some of them may have a human

voice; some may have that magic which transforms a wooden box into a

song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with

respect as a violin. From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man,

seeking pence, accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry,

there is surely a difference rather of kind than of degree to that

unearthly voice of singing that bewails and praises the destiny of man at

the touch of the true virtuoso. Even that you may perhaps enjoy; and if

you do so you will own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly than here,

_im Schnee der Alpen_. A hyacinth in a pot, a handful of primroses

packed in moss, or a piece of music by some one who knows the way to the

heart of a violin, are things that, in this invariable sameness of the

snows and frosty air, surprise you like an adventure. It is droll,

moreover, to compare the respect with which the invalids attend a

concert, and the ready contempt with which they greet the dinner-time

performers. Singing which they would hear with real enthusiasm—possibly

with tears—from a corner of a drawing-room, is listened to with laughter

when it is offered by an unknown professional and no money has been taken

at the door.

Of skating little need be said; in so snowy a climate the rinks must be

intelligently managed; their mismanagement will lead to many days of

vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all goes well, it is

certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the invalid to skate

under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, through long

tracts of glare and passages of freezing shadow. But the peculiar

outdoor sport of this district is tobogganing. A Scotchman may remember

the low flat board, with the front wheels on a pivot, which was called a

_hurlie_; he may remember this contrivance, laden with boys, as,

laboriously started, it ran rattling down the brae, and was, now

successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot;

he may remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and

many a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neglected lesson. The toboggan

is to the hurlie what the sled is to the carriage; it is a hurlie upon

runners; and if for a grating road you substitute a long declivity of

beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of the tobogganist. The

correct position is to sit; but the fantastic will sometimes sit

hind-foremost, or dare the descent upon their belly or their back. A few

steer with a pair of pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use the

feet. If the weight be heavy and the track smooth, the toboggan takes

the bit between its teeth; and to steer a couple of full-sized friends in

safety requires not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a very

steep track, with a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too

appalling to be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world vanishes; your

blind steed bounds below your weight; you reach the foot, with all the

breath knocked out of your body, jarred and bewildered as though you had

just been subjected to a railway accident. Another element of joyful

horror is added by the formation of a train; one toboggan being tied to

another, perhaps to the number of half a dozen, only the first rider

being allowed to steer, and all the rest pledged to put up their feet and

follow their leader, with heart in mouth, down the mad descent. This,

particularly if the track begins with a headlong plunge, is one of the

most exhilarating follies in the world, and the tobogganing invalid is

early reconciled to somersaults.

There is all manner of variety in the nature of the tracks, some miles in

length, others but a few yards, and yet like some short rivers, furious

in their brevity. All degrees of skill and courage and taste may be

suited in your neighbourhood. But perhaps the true way to toboggan is

alone and at night. First comes the tedious climb, dragging your

instrument behind you. Next a long breathing-space, alone with snow and

pinewoods, cold, silent and solemn to the heart. Then you push of; the

toboggan fetches way; she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to, swim, to

gallop. In a breath you are out from under the pine trees, and a whole

heavenful of stars reels and flashes overhead. Then comes a vicious

effort; for by this time your wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and

you are spinning round a corner, and the whole glittering valley and all

the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at your feet; and the

next you are racing once more in the shadow of the night with close-shut

teeth and beating heart. Yet a little while and you will be landed on

the highroad by the door of your own hotel. This, in an atmosphere

tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night made luminous with stars

and snow, and girt with strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an

unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to the life of man upon his

planet.

XII.

THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS

To any one who should come from a southern sanitarium to the Alps, the

row of sun-burned faces round the table would present the first surprise.

He would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would lose his pains,

for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears the mark of sickness

on his face. The plump sunshine from above and its strong reverberation

from below colour the skin like an Indian climate; the treatment, which

consists mainly of the open air, exposes even the sickliest to tan, and a

tableful of invalids comes, in a month or two, to resemble a tableful of

hunters. But although he may be thus surprised at the first glance, his

astonishment will grow greater, as he experiences the effects of the

climate on himself. In many ways it is a trying business to reside upon

the Alps: the stomach is exercised, the appetite often languishes; the

liver may at times rebel; and because you have come so far from

metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that you shall recover. But

one thing is undeniable—that in the rare air, clear, cold, and blinding

light of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain troubled delight in his

existence which can nowhere else be paralleled. He is perhaps no

happier, but he is stingingly alive. It does not, perhaps, come out of

him in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthusiasm of the blood unknown

in more temperate climates. It may not be health, but it is fun.

There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this

baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness

of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks,

become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence.

The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast your shoe over the

hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in the words of an unverified

quotation from the Scotch psalms, you feel yourself fit ‘on the wings of

all the winds’ to ‘come flying all abroad.’ Europe and your mind are too

narrow for that flood of energy. Yet it is notable that you are hard to

root out of your bed; that you start forth, singing, indeed, on your

walk, yet are unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you is

volatile; and that although the restlessness remains till night, the

strength is early at an end. With all these heady jollities, you are

half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you prove not to be

so well as you had fancied; you weary before you have well begun; and

though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a

song-bird’s heart that you bring back with you when you return with

aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn.

It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters is its

own reward. Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth more permanent

improvements. The dream of health is perfect while it lasts; and if, in

trying to realise it, you speedily wear out the dear hallucination, still

every day, and many times a day, you are conscious of a strength you

scarce possess, and a delight in living as merry as it proves to be

transient.

The brightness—heaven and earth conspiring to be bright—the levity and

quiet of the air; the odd stirring silence—more stirring than a tumult;

the snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape: all have their part in the

effect and on the memory, ‘_tous vous tapent sur la téte_’; and yet when

you have enumerated all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to

qualify the delicate exhilaration that you feel—delicate, you may say,

and yet excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater than

an invalid can bear. There is a certain wine of France known in England

in some gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its nativity

still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as verse. It is more

than probable that in its noble natural condition this was the very wine

of Anjou so beloved by Athos in the ‘Musketeers.’ Now, if the reader has

ever washed down a liberal second breakfast with the wine in question,

and gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling

noontide, he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although

strangely grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among the

snow and sunshine of the Alps. That also is a mode, we need not say of

intoxication, but of insobriety. Thus also a man walks in a strong

sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial meditations.

And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he supposes, in either

case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.

The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary ways.

A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been recognised, and

may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as a sort peculiar to

that climate. People utter their judgments with a cannonade of

syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them; and the turn of a

phrase goes further than humour or wisdom. By the professional writer

many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone. At first he cannot write at

all. The heart, it appears, is unequal to the pressure of business, and

the brain, left without nourishment, goes into a mild decline. Next,

some power of work returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches.

Last, the spring is opened, and there pours at once from his pen a world

of blatant, hustling polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old joke,

to be positively offensive in hot weather. He writes it in good faith

and with a sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read what he

has written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind. What is he

to do, poor man? All his little fishes talk like whales. This yeasty

inflation, this stiff and strutting architecture of the sentence has come

upon him while he slept; and it is not he, it is the Alps, who are to

blame. He is not, perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him. Nor is

the ill without a remedy. Some day, when the spring returns, he shall go

down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter inflections and

more modest language. But here, in the meantime, there seems to swim up

some outline of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time coming, when

experienced advisers shall send a man to the proper measured level for

the ode, the biography, or the religious tract; and a nook may be found

between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr. Swinburne shall be able to

write more continently, and Mr. Browning somewhat slower.

Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain? It is a

sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all goes well,

to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness. It is certainly

congestion that makes night hideous with visions, all the chambers of a

many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted with vociferous nightmares, and many

wakeful people come down late for breakfast in the morning. Upon that

theory the cynic may explain the whole affair—exhilaration, nightmares,

pomp of tongue and all. But, on the other hand, the peculiar blessedness

of boyhood may itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for the two

effects are strangely similar; and the frame of mind of the invalid upon

the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of lassitude. The

fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in these parts; but there it

plays, and possibly nowhere else.

XIII.

ROADS

1873

No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single drawing,

over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so gradually study

himself into humour with the artist, than he can ever extract from the

dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions that send him, weary

and stupefied, out of some famous picture-gallery. But what is thus

admitted with regard to art is not extended to the (so-called) natural

beauties no amount of excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces of

cultivated lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or degrade

the palate. We are not at all sure, however, that moderation, and a

regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and

strengthening to the taste; and that the best school for a lover of

nature is not to the found in one of those countries where there is no

stage effect—nothing salient or sudden,—but a quiet spirit of orderly and

harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we can patiently

attend to each of the little touches that strike in us, all of them

together, the subdued note of the landscape. It is in scenery such as

this that we find ourselves in the right temper to seek out small

sequestered loveliness. The constant recurrence of similar combinations

of colour and outline gradually forces upon us a sense of how the harmony

has been built up, and we become familiar with something of nature’s

mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your ‘rural voluptuary,’—not to

remain awe-stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not to sit deafened over

the big drum in the orchestra, but day by day to teach himself some new

beauty—to experience some new vague and tranquil sensation that has

before evaded him. It is not the people who ‘have pined and hungered

after nature many a year, in the great city pent,’ as Coleridge said in

the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of himself; it is not

those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy with her, or who

are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto to enjoy. In this, as

in everything else, it is minute knowledge and long-continued loving

industry that make the true dilettante. A man must have thought much

over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is no youngling

enthusiasm on hilltops that can possess itself of the last essence of

beauty. Probably most people’s heads are growing bare before they can

see all in a landscape that they have the capability of seeing; and, even

then, it will be only for one little moment of consummation before the

faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of the windows

begin to be darkened and restrained in sight. Thus the study of nature

should be carried forward thoroughly and with system. Every

gratification should be rolled long under the tongue, and we should be

always eager to analyse and compare, in order that we may be able to give

some plausible reason for our admirations. True, it is difficult to put

even approximately into words the kind of feelings thus called into play.

There is a dangerous vice inherent in any such intellectual refining upon

vague sensation. The analysis of such satisfactions lends itself very

readily to literary affectations; and we can all think of instances where

it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid influence, even upon an

author’s choice of language and the turn of his sentences. And yet there

is much that makes the attempt attractive; for any expression, however

imperfect, once given to a cherished feeling, seems a sort of

legitimation of the pleasure we take in it. A common sentiment is one of

those great goods that make life palatable and ever new. The knowledge

that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even if they are

little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue

to the end to be one of life’s choicest pleasures.

Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit we have recommended to

some of the quieter kinds of English landscape. In those homely and

placid agricultural districts, familiarity will bring into relief many

things worthy of notice, and urge them pleasantly home to him by a sort

of loving repetition; such as the wonderful life-giving speed of windmill

sails above the stationary country; the occurrence and recurrence of the

same church tower at the end of one long vista after another: and,

conspicuous among these sources of quiet pleasure, the character and

variety of the road itself, along which he takes his way. Not only near

at hand, in the lithe contortions with which it adapts itself to the

interchanges of level and slope, but far away also, when he sees a few

hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining in the afternoon

sun, he will find it an object so changeful and enlivening that he can

always pleasurably busy his mind about it. He may leave the river-side,

or fall out of the way of villages, but the road he has always with him;

and, in the true humour of observation, will find in that sufficient

company. From its subtle windings and changes of level there arises a

keen and continuous interest, that keeps the attention ever alert and

cheerful. Every sensitive adjustment to the contour of the ground, every

little dip and swerve, seems instinct with life and an exquisite sense of

balance and beauty. The road rolls upon the easy slopes of the country,

like a long ship in the hollows of the sea. The very margins of waste

ground, as they trench a little farther on the beaten way, or recede

again to the shelter of the hedge, have something of the same free

delicacy of line—of the same swing and wilfulness. You might think for a

whole summer’s day (and not have thought it any nearer an end by evening)

what concourse and succession of circumstances has produced the least of

these deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look

for the secret of their interest. A foot-path across a meadow—in all its

human waywardness and unaccountability, in all the _grata protervitas_ of

its varying direction—will always be more to us than a railroad well

engineered through a difficult country. {231} No reasoned sequence is

thrust upon our attention: we seem to have slipped for one lawless little

moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect; and so we revert at once

to some of the pleasant old heresies of personification, always

poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of free-will, an active and

spontaneous life, to the white riband of road that lengthens out, and

bends, and cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before

our eyes. We remember, as we write, some miles of fine wide highway laid

out with conscious æsthetic artifice through a broken and richly

cultivated tract of country. It is said that the engineer had Hogarth’s

line of beauty in his mind as he laid them down. And the result is

striking. One splendid satisfying sweep passes with easy transition into

another, and there is nothing to trouble or dislocate the strong

continuousness of the main line of the road. And yet there is something

wanting. There is here no saving imperfection, none of those secondary

curves and little trepidations of direction that carry, in natural roads,

our curiosity actively along with them. One feels at once that this road

has not has been laboriously grown like a natural road, but made to

pattern; and that, while a model may be academically correct in outline,

it will always be inanimate and cold. The traveller is also aware of a

sympathy of mood between himself and the road he travels. We have all

seen ways that have wandered into heavy sand near the sea-coast, and

trail wearily over the dunes like a trodden serpent. Here we too must

plod forward at a dull, laborious pace; and so a sympathy is preserved

between our frame of mind and the expression of the relaxed, heavy curves

of the roadway. Such a phenomenon, indeed, our reason might perhaps

resolve with a little trouble. We might reflect that the present road

had been developed out of a tract spontaneously followed by generations

of primitive wayfarers; and might see in its expression a testimony that

those generations had been affected at the same ground, one after

another, in the same manner as we are affected to-day. Or we might carry

the reflection further, and remind ourselves that where the air is

invigorating and the ground firm under the traveller’s foot, his eye is

quick to take advantage of small undulations, and he will turn carelessly

aside from the direct way wherever there is anything beautiful to examine

or some promise of a wider view; so that even a bush of wild roses may

permanently bias and deform the straight path over the meadow; whereas,

where the soil is heavy, one is preoccupied with the labour of mere

progression, and goes with a bowed head heavily and unobservantly

forward. Reason, however, will not carry us the whole way; for the

sentiment often recurs in situations where it is very hard to imagine any

possible explanation; and indeed, if we drive briskly along a good,

well-made road in an open vehicle, we shall experience this sympathy

almost at its fullest. We feel the sharp settle of the springs at some

curiously twisted corner; after a steep ascent, the fresh air dances in

our faces as we rattle precipitately down the other side, and we find it

difficult to avoid attributing something headlong, a sort of _abandon_,

to the road itself.

The mere winding of the path is enough to enliven a long day’s walk in

even a commonplace or dreary country-side. Something that we have seen

from miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from us, as we wander

through folded valleys or among woods, that our expectation of seeing it

again is sharpened into a violent appetite, and as we draw nearer we

impatiently quicken our steps and turn every corner with a beating heart.

It is through these prolongations of expectancy, this succession of one

hope to another, that we live out long seasons of pleasure in a few

hours’ walk. It is in following these capricious sinuosities that we

learn, only bit by bit and through one coquettish reticence after

another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole loveliness of

the country. This disposition always preserves something new to be seen,

and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to many different points of

distant view before it allows us finally to approach the hoped-for

destination.

In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse with

the country, there is something very pleasant in that succession of

saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by, that peoples our ways

and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls ‘the cheerful voice of the

public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of the road.’ But out of the great

network of ways that binds all life together from the hill-farm to the

city, there is something individual to most, and, on the whole, nearly as

much choice on the score of company as on the score of beauty or easy

travel. On some we are never long without the sound of wheels, and folk

pass us by so thickly that we lose the sense of their number. But on

others, about little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of

moment; we have the sight far off of some one coming towards us, the

growing definiteness of the person, and then the brief passage and

salutation, and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps a great

while to come. Such encounters have a wistful interest that can hardly

be understood by the dweller in places more populous. We remember

standing beside a countryman once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in a

city that was more than ordinarily crowded and bustling; he seemed

stunned and bewildered by the continual passage of different faces; and

after a long pause, during which he appeared to search for some suitable

expression, he said timidly that there seemed to be a _great deal of

meeting thereabouts_. The phrase is significant. It is the expression

of town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways. A

meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the

pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the streets was

in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of such ‘meetings.’

And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that

sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our minds

by a road. In real nature, as well as in old landscapes, beneath that

impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is plunged and

saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with the vague sense

of desire up to the green limit of the horizon. Travel is brought home

to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in

the distance. _Sehnsucht_—the passion for what is ever beyond—is

livingly expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs

the uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining

furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is brought to

us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this wavering line of

junction. There is a passionate paragraph in _Werther_ that strikes the

very key. ‘When I came hither,’ he writes, ‘how the beautiful valley

invited me on every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top!

There the wood—ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the mountain

summits—ah, that I might look down from them over the broad country! the

interlinked hills! the secret valleys! Oh to lose myself among their

mysteries! I hurried into the midst, and came back without finding aught

I hoped for. Alas! the distance is like the future. A vast whole lies

in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling alike plunge and

lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to surrender our whole

being, and let it be filled full with all the rapture of one single

glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten to the fruition, when

_there_ is changed to _here_, all is afterwards as it was before, and we

stand in our indigent and cramped estate, and our soul thirsts after a

still ebbing elixir.’ It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit of

anticipation that roads minister. Every little vista, every little

glimpse that we have of what lies before us, gives the impatient

imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the body and already plunge

into the shadow of the woods, and overlook from the hill-top the plain

beyond it, and wander in the windings of the valleys that are still far

in front. The road is already there—we shall not be long behind. It is

as if we were marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far

before, heard the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some

friendly and jubilant city. Would not every man, through all the long

miles of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?

XIV.

ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES

1874

It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and we have

much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one side after

another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A few months

ago some words were said in the _Portfolio_ as to an ‘austere regimen in

scenery’; and such a discipline was then recommended as ‘healthful and

strengthening to the taste.’ That is the text, so to speak, of the

present essay. This discipline in scenery, it must be understood, is

something more than a mere walk before breakfast to whet the appetite.

For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood, and especially

if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we see, we must set

ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardour and patience

of a botanist after a rye plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the

art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as

people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly

on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or

inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit.

The traveller, as Brantôme quaintly tells us, ‘_fait des discours en soi

pour soutenir en chemin_’; and into these discourses he weaves something

out of all that he sees and suffers by the way; they take their tone

greatly from the varying character of the scene; a sharp ascent brings

different thoughts from a level road; and the man’s fancies grow lighter

as he comes out of the wood into a clearing. Nor does the scenery any

more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the scenery. We see

places through our humours as through differently coloured glasses. We

are ourselves a term in the equation, a note of the chord, and make

discord or harmony almost at will. There is no fear for the result, if

we can but surrender ourselves sufficiently to the country that surrounds

and follows us, so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling

ourselves some suitable sort of story as we go. We become thus, in some

sense, a centre of beauty; we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle

and sincere character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in

others. And even where there is no harmony to be elicited by the

quickest and most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a place

with some attraction of romance. We may learn to go far afield for

associations, and handle them lightly when we have found them. Sometimes

an old print comes to our aid; I have seen many a spot lit up at once

with picturesque imaginations, by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler,

or Paul Brill. Dick Turpin has been my lay figure for many an English

lane. And I suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs for most

tourists if a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for

them with harmonious figures, and brought them thither with minds rightly

prepared for the impression. There is half the battle in this

preparation. For instance: I have rarely been able to visit, in the

proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable places of our own Highlands. I

am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased without

trees. I understand that there are some phases of mental trouble that

harmonise well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the

dispensing power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in

spirit, and put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless,

unsociable way of life that was in its place upon these savage hills.

Now, when I am sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like

David before Saul; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in

me but an unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right humour

for this sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure in consequence.

Still, even here, if I were only let alone, and time enough were given, I

should have all manner of pleasures, and take many clear and beautiful

images away with me when I left. When we cannot think ourselves into

sympathy with the great features of a country, we learn to ignore them,

and put our head among the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times

together, over the changeful current of a stream. We come down to the

sermon in stones, when we are shut out from any poem in the spread

landscape. We begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds

and insects, we find many things beautiful in miniature. The reader will

recollect the little summer scene in _Wuthering Heights_—the one warm

scene, perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable novel—and the great

feature that is made therein by grasses and flowers and a little

sunshine: this is in the spirit of which I now speak. And, lastly, we

can go indoors; interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often more

picturesque, than the shows of the open air, and they have that quality

of shelter of which I shall presently have more to say.

With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the paradox

that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in a

few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours agreeably.

For, if we only stay long enough we become at home in the neighbourhood.

Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about uninteresting corners. We

forget to some degree the superior loveliness of other places, and fall

into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which is its own reward and

justification. Looking back the other day on some recollections of my

own, I was astonished to find how much I owed to such a residence; six

weeks in one unpleasant country-side had done more, it seemed, to quicken

and educate my sensibilities than many years in places that jumped more

nearly with my inclination.

The country to which I refer was a level and tree-less plateau, over

which the winds cut like a whip. For miles and miles it was the same. A

river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided; but the

valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I had the

heart to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads that had no

beauty or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but little

irregularity of surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the

beginning: there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to

see by the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead,

and here and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were

only accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt

telegraph-posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind.

To one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the

Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker

by suggested contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road

were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, ‘taken back to Nature’ by any

decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it

seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare

sunburnt plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue

transparent air; but this was of another description—this was the

nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and

was ashamed and cold.

It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had passed

into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when they

met with ‘Breezy, breezy,’ instead of the customary ‘Fine day’ of farther

south. These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze, that just

keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and serves to

set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you the smell of

the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were of the bitter,

hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and respiration, and

makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have their own merit in

proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them brandish great masses

of shadow. And what a power they have over the colour of the world! How

they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage, and make them shudder

and whiten like a single willow! There is nothing more vertiginous than

a wind like this among the woods, with all its sights and noises; and the

effect gets between some painters and their sober eyesight, so that, even

when the rest of their picture is calm, the foliage is coloured like

foliage in a gale. There was nothing, however, of this sort to be

noticed in a country where there were no trees and hardly any shadows,

save the passive shadows of clouds or those of rigid houses and walls.

But the wind was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could

you taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull, or a place of

opportune shelter. The reader knows what I mean; he must remember how,

when he has sat himself down behind a dyke on a hillside, he delighted to

hear the wind hiss vainly through the crannies at his back; how his body

tingled all over with warmth, and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort

of slow surprise, that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and

the far-away hills all marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a

beautiful passage of the ‘Prelude,’ has used this as a figure for the

feeling struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar

of the great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other

way with as good effect:—

‘Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,

Escaped as from an enemy, we turn

Abruptly into some sequester’d nook,

Still as a shelter’d place when winds blow loud!’

I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must have

been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape. He had

gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great cathedral

somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished

marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in dark stairways, he issued

at last into the sunshine, on a platform high above the town. At that

elevation it was quite still and warm; the gale was only in the lower

strata of the air, and he had forgotten it in the quiet interior of the

church and during his long ascent; and so you may judge of his surprise

when, resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over into the

_Place_ far below him, he saw the good people holding on their hats and

leaning hard against the wind as they walked. There is something, to my

fancy, quite perfect in this little experience of my fellow-traveller’s.

The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when we find ourselves

alone on a church-top, with the blue sky and a few tall pinnacles, and

see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened buttresses, and the

silent activity of the city streets; but how much more must they not have

seemed so to him as he stood, not only above other men’s business, but

above other men’s climate, in a golden zone like Apollo’s!

This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write.

The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all the

time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea that

any such sheltered places were to be found. Between the black worm-eaten

head-lands there are little bights and havens, well screened from the

wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand and weeds look

up into the gazer’s face from a depth of tranquil water, and the

sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb

the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my

memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water’s edge, old fighting

men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall to

wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between

their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood

in his own doorway. There is something in the juxtaposition of these two

enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and

bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at

night, when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter

wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct

for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we are

there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a

contrary impression, and association is turned against itself. I

remember walking thither three afternoons in succession, my eyes weary

with being set against the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the edge

of the down, I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter. The

wind, from which I had escaped, ‘as from an enemy,’ was seemingly quite

local. It carried no clouds with it, and came from such a quarter that

it did not trouble the sea within view. The two castles, black and

ruinous as the rocks about them, were still distinguishable from these by

something more insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that the

last storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely. It

would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took

possession of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, as I have

said, by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled by previous

tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the pigmies

who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual distrust

and enmity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this little cup of

shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet there were the

two great tracts of motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on,

unconcerned and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the

memorials of the precarious past. There is ever something transitory and

fretful in the impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it seems

to have no root in the constitution of things; it must speedily begin to

faint and wither away like a cut flower. And on those days the thought

of the wind and the thought of human life came very near together in my

mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments in the being of the

eternal silence; and the wind, in the face of that great field of

stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly’s wing. The placidity of

the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley speaks of the sea

as ‘hungering for calm,’ and in this place one learned to understand the

phrase. Looking down into these green waters from the broken edge of the

rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed to me that they

were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when now and again it was

disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the quick black passage of

a fish far below, they settled back again (one could fancy) with relief.

On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so subdued

and still that the least particular struck in me a pleasurable surprise.

The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped the

ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been saturated all day

long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like the breath

of a fellow-creature. I remember that I was haunted by two lines of

French verse; in some dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and

give expression to the contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating

to myself—

‘Mon cœur est un luth suspendu,

Sitôt qu’on le touche, il résonne.’

I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and for

that very cause I repeat them here. For all I know, they may serve to

complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they were certainly

a part of it for me.

And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least to

stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. ‘Out of

the strong came forth sweetness.’ There, in the bleak and gusty North, I

received, perhaps, my strongest impression of peace. I saw the sea to be

great and calm; and the earth, in that little corner, was all alive and

friendly to me. So, wherever a man is, he will find something to please

and pacify him: in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men and women,

and see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird singing at the

corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country, there is no country

without some amenity—let him only look for it in the right spirit, and he

will surely find.