I am passing through Lausanne. Every one passes through Lausanne except
the aborigines.
Outsiders do not live in Lausanne, in spite of the marvellous scenery
round it and of the fact that the English three times discovered it: once
after the death of Cromwell, once in the time of Gibbon, and now when
they are building houses and villas in it. Tourists stay only in Geneva.
The thought of that town is in my mind inseparable from the thought
of the coldest and driest of great men and the coldest and driest of
winds—of Calvin and of the _bise_; I can’t endure either of them. And
certainly in every native of Geneva there is something left of the
_bise_ and of Calvin, both of which have blown upon him physically and
spiritually from the day of his conception and even before, one from the
mountains, the other from the prayer-book.
Those two chilling influences, checked and diversified by different
currents from Savoy, from Valais, most of all from France, make up the
fundamental character of the citizens of Geneva—an excellent character,
but not a particularly agreeable one.
However, I am now writing my _impressions de voyage_ while I am _living_
in Geneva. Of that town I will write when I have retreated to an artistic
distance....
I reached Freiburg at ten o’clock in the evening and went straight to
the Zöhringhof. The same landlord in a black velvet cap who met me in
1851, with the same regular features and condescendingly polite face of
a Russian master of the ceremonies, or an English porter, came up to the
omnibus and congratulated us on our arrival.
And the dining-room is the same, the same rectangular folding little
sofas upholstered in red velvet. Fourteen years have passed over Freiburg
like fourteen days! There is the same pride in the cathedral-organ, the
same pride in their hanging bridge.
The breath of the new restless spirit, continually shifting and casting
down barriers, that was raised by the equinoctial gales of 1848, scarcely
touched towns which morally and physically stand apart, such as the
Jesuitical Freiburg and the pietistic Neufchâtel. These towns, too, have
advanced, though at the pace of a tortoise; they have improved, though
they seem to us out of date in their old-fashioned stony garb.... And of
course much in the life of old days was not bad; it was more comfortable,
more durable; it was better fitted for the small number of the elect,
and so it does not do for the vast number of the newly invited, who are
far from being spoiled or difficult to please.
Of course, in the present state of technical development, with the
discoveries that are being made every day, with the improvement of the
resources at our disposal, it is possible to organise modern life on a
free and ample scale. But the Western European, as soon as he has a place
of his own, is satisfied with little. As a rule, he has been falsely
charged, or rather he has charged himself, with the passion for comfort
and that love of luxury of which people talk. All that, like everything
else in him, is rhetoric and flourish. They have had free institutions
without freedom, why not have a brilliant setting for a narrow and clumsy
life? There are exceptions. One may find all sorts of things among
English aristocrats and French Camélias and the Jewish princes of this
world.... All that is personal and temporary; the lords and bankers have
no future and the Camélias have no heirs. We are talking about the whole
world, about the golden mean, about the chorus and the _corps de ballet_,
which now is on the stage, leaving aside the father of Lord Stanley, who
has twenty thousand francs a day, and the father of that child of twelve
who flung himself into the Thames the other day to relieve his parents of
the task of feeding him.
The old tradesman who has grown rich loves to talk of the comforts
of life. For him it is a novelty that he is a gentleman _qu’il a ses
aises_, ‘that he has the means to do this, and that doing that will not
ruin him.’ He glories in money and knows its value and how quickly it
flies, while his predecessors in fortune believed neither in its value
nor that it could be exhausted, and so have been ruined. But they ruined
themselves with good taste. The bourgeois has little notion of making
full use of his accumulated riches. The habits of the old narrow,
niggardly life he has inherited from his forbears remain. He may indeed
spend a great deal of money, but he does not spend it on the right things.
A generation which has come from behind the counter has absorbed
standards and ambitions of no wide horizon and cannot get away from
them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they
naturally aim at the greatest possible profit, gain and good bargain.
The _propriétaire_ instinctively diminishes the size of his rooms and
increases their number, not knowing why he makes the windows small and
the ceilings low; he takes advantage of every corner to snatch it from
his lodger or from his own family. That corner is of no use to him, but
in case he may need it, he will take it from somebody. With peculiar
satisfaction he builds two uncomfortable kitchens instead of one good
one, puts up a garret for his maid in which she can neither work nor
move, but succeeds in making it damp. To compensate for this economy of
light and space, he paints the front of the house, loads the drawing-room
with furniture, and lays out before the house a flower-bed with a
fountain in it, which is a source of tribulation to children, nurses,
dogs and workmen. What is not spoilt by miserliness is ruined by lack
of intelligence. Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of
daily life without mingling with it, flings its wealth to right and left,
but the boatmen do not know how to catch it. All the profit goes to the
wholesale dealers and filters in scanty drops to others; the wholesale
dealers are changing the face of the earth, while private life trails
along beside their steam-engines in its old lumbering waggon with its
broken-down nags....
The fire which does not smoke is a dream. A landlord in Geneva said to me
soothingly: ‘This fire _only_ smokes in the _bise_.’ That is only just
when one most wants a fire; and he says this as though the _bise_ were
something casual or newly invented, as though it had not been blowing
since before the birth of Calvin and would not blow after the death of
Fazy. In all Europe, not excepting Spain or Italy, one must make one’s
will at the approach of winter, as men used to do when they set off on a
journey from Paris to Marseilles, and must have a thanksgiving service
sung to the Iversky Madonna at mid-April.
Let these people tell me that they are not occupied with such vanities,
that they have many other things to do, and I would forgive them their
smoky chimneys, and the locks which at once open the door and bleed you,
and the stench in the passage, and so on; but I ask, what other work
have they, what are their higher interests? They have _none_.... They
only make a display of them to cover the inconceivable emptiness and
senselessness of their lives.
In the Middle Ages men lived in the very nastiest way and wasted their
efforts on utterly useless edifices which did not add to their comfort.
But the Middle Ages did not talk about their passion for comfort; on the
contrary, the more comfortless their life, the more nearly it approached
their ideal; their luxury took the form of the magnificence of the House
of God and of their assembly-hall, and there they were not niggardly,
they grudged nothing. The knight in those days built a fortress, not
a palace, and did not select for a site the most convenient road,
but an inaccessible precipice. Now there is no one to defend oneself
against, and nobody believes in saving his soul by adorning the church;
the peaceful and orderly citizen has dropped out of the forum and the
_Rathhaus_, out of the opposition and the club; passions and fanaticisms,
religions and heroisms, have all given way to material prosperity: _and
that has not been successfully organised_.
For me there is something melancholy, tragic, in all this, as though
the world were living anyhow, in expectation of the earth’s giving way
under its feet, and were seeking not reconstruction but forgetfulness.
I see this not only in the careworn, wrinkled faces, but also in the
fear of any serious thinking, in the turning away from any analysis of
the position, in the nervous thirst to be busy, to fill up the time with
external distractions. The old are ready to play with toys, ‘if only to
keep from thinking.’ The fashionable mustard-plaster is an International
Exhibition. The remedy and the disease form a sort of intermittent fever
centred first in one part and then in another. All are moving, rushing,
flying, spending money, striving, staring and growing weary, living even
more uncomfortably in order to keep up with _progress_—in what? Why, just
progress. As though in three or four years there can be much progress
in anything, as though, when we have railways to travel by, there were
any necessity to drag from place to place things like houses, machines,
stables, cannon, even perhaps parks and kitchen-gardens.
And when they are sick of exhibitions they will take to war and find
distraction in the sheaves of dead—anything to avoid seeing certain
_black spots_ on the horizon.
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