AUCTOR. Alas! alas! Dear Lector, in these houses there is no honest
dust. Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints inherited from
one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or Miss
Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which
makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts,
they do not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their
souls.
LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of common things?
AUCTOR. Why, I would leave them alone; but if I had to treat of them I
will show you how I would do it. Let us have a dialogue about this
road from Moutier.
LECTOR. By all means.
AUCTOR. What a terrible thing it is to miss one's sleep. I can hardly
bear the heat of the road, and my mind is empty!
LECTOR. Why, you have just slept in a wood!
AUCTOR. Yes, but that is not enough. One must sleep at night.
LECTOR. My brother often complains of insomnia. He is a policeman.
AUCTOR. Indeed? It is a sad affliction.
LECTOR. Yes, indeed.
AUCTOR. Indeed, yes.
LECTOR. I cannot go on like this.
AUCTOR. There. That is just what I was saying. One cannot treat of
common things: it is not literature; and for my part, if I were the
editor even of a magazine, and the author stuck in a string of
dialogue, I would not pay him by the page but by the word, and I would
count off 5 per cent for epigrams, 10 per cent for dialect, and some
quarter or so for those stage directions in italics which they use to
pad out their work.
So. I will not repeat this experiment, but next time I come to a bit
of road about which there is nothing to say, I will tell a story or
sing a song, and to that I pledge myself.
By the way, I am reminded of something. Do you know those books and
stories in which parts of the dialogues often have no words at all?
Only dots and dashes and asterisks and interrogations? I wonder what
the people are paid for it? If I knew I would earn a mint of money,
for I believe I have a talent for it. Look at this--
There. That seems to me worth a good deal more money than all the
modern 'delineation of character', and 'folk' nonsense ever written.
What verve! What terseness! And yet how clear!
LECTOR. Let us be getting on.
AUCTOR. By all means, and let us consider more enduring things.
After a few miles the road going upwards, I passed through another gap
in the hills and--
LECTOR. Pardon me, but I am still ruminating upon that little tragedy
of yours. Why was the guardian a duchess?
AUCTOR. Well, it was a short play and modern, was it not?
LECTOR. Yes. And therefore, of course, you must have a title in it. I
know that. I do not object to it. What I want to know is, why a
duchess?
AUCTOR. On account of the reduction of scale: the concentration of the
thing. You see in the full play there would have been a lord, two
baronets, and say three ladies, and I could have put suitable words
into their mouths. As it was I had to make absolutely sure of the
element of nobility without any help, and, as it were, in one
startling moment. Do you follow? Is it not art?
I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure so naturally full of
great, wonderful, far-off and holy things should breed such fantastic
nonsense as all this; but remember at least the little acolyte of
Rheims, whose father, in 1512, seeing him apt for religion, put him
into a cassock and designed him for the Church, whereupon the
youngling began to be as careless and devilish as Mercury, putting
beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the censer, and even
going round himself with the plate without leave and scolding the rich
in loud whispers when they did not put in enough. So one way with
another they sent him home to his father; the archbishop thrusting him
out of the south porch with his own hands and giving him the Common or
Ferial Malediction, which is much the same as that used by carters to
stray dogs.
When his father saw him he fumed terribly, cursing like a pagan, and
asking whether his son were a roysterer fit for the gallows as well as
a fool fit for a cassock. On hearing which complaint the son very
humbly and contritely said--
'It is not my fault but the contact with the things of the Church that
makes me gambol and frisk, just as the Devil they say is a good enough
fellow left to himself and is only moderately heated, yet when you put
him into holy water all the world is witness how he hisses and boils.'
The boy then taking a little lamb which happened to be in the
drawing-room, said--
'Father, see this little lamb; how demure he is and how simple and
innocent, and how foolish and how tractable. Yet observe!' With that
he whipped the cassock from his arm where he was carrying it and threw
it all over the lamb, covering his head and body; and the lamb began
plunging and kicking and bucking and rolling and heaving and sliding
and rearing and pawing and most vigorously wrestling with the clerical
and hierarchically constraining garment of darkness, and bleating all
the while more and more angrily and loudly, for all the world like the
great goat Baphomet himself when the witches dance about him on
All-hallowe'en. But when the boy suddenly plucked off the cassock
again, the lamb, after sneezing a little and finding his feet, became
quite gentle once more, and looked only a little confused and dazed.
'There, father,' said the boy, 'is proof to you of how the meekest may
be driven to desperation by the shackles I speak of, and which I pray
you never lay upon me again.'
His father finding him so practical and wise made over his whole
fortune and business to him, and thus escaped the very heavy Heriot
and Death Dues of those days, for he was a Socage tenant of St Remi in
Double Burgage. But we stopped all that here in England by the statute
of Uses, and I must be getting back to the road before the dark
catches me.
As I was saying, I came to a gap in the hills, and there was there a
house or two called Gansbrunnen, and one of the houses was an inn.
Just by the inn the road turned away sharply up the valley; the very
last slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight before
me all solemn, dark, and wooded, and making a high feathery line
against the noon. To cross this there was but a vague path rather
misleading, and the name of the mountain was Weissenstein.
So before that last effort which should lead me over those thousands
of feet, and to nourish Instinct (which would be of use to me when I
got into that impenetrable wood), I turned into the inn for wine.
A very old woman having the appearance of a witch sat at a dark table
by the little criss-cross window of the dark room. She was crooning to
herself, and I made the sign of the evil eye and asked her in French
for wine; but French she did not understand. Catching, however, two
words which sounded like the English 'White' and 'Red', I said 'Yaw'
after the last and nodded, and she brought up a glass of exceedingly
good red wine which I drank in silence, she watching me uncannily.
Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and she gave me a quantity of
small change rapidly, which, as I counted it, I found to contain one
Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead. This I held up
angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal
with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse
which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his
now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian
twaddle of accents I intoned to her--and so left her astounded to
repentance or to shame.
Then I went out into the sunlight, and crossing over running water put
myself out of her power.
The wood went up darkly and the path branched here and there so that I
was soon uncertain of my way, but I followed generally what seemed to
me the most southerly course, and so came at last up steeply through a
dip or ravine that ended high on the crest of the ridge.
Just as I came to the end of the rise, after perhaps an hour, perhaps
two, of that great curtain of forest which had held the mountain side,
the trees fell away to brushwood, there was a gate, and then the path
was lost upon a fine open sward which was the very top of the Jura and
the coping of that multiple wall which defends the Swiss Plain. I had
crossed it straight from edge to edge, never turning out of my way.
It was too marshy to lie down on it, so I stood a moment to breathe
and look about me.
It was evident that nothing higher remained, for though a new line of
wood--firs and beeches--stood before me, yet nothing appeared above
them, and I knew that they must be the fringe of the descent. I
approached this edge of wood, and saw that it had a rough fence of
post and rails bounding it, and as I was looking for the entry of a
path (for my original path was lost, as such tracks are, in the damp
grass of the little down) there came to me one of those great
revelations which betray to us suddenly the higher things and stand
afterwards firm in our minds.
There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had felt nothing but the
ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision.
What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or that, and if you think I
am inventing the words, you know nothing of men.
I saw between the branches of the trees in front of me a sight in the
sky that made me stop breathing, just as great danger at sea, or great
surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man stop
breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy, something
I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between the
branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond.
I pushed left and right along that edge of the forest and along the
fence that bound it, until I found a place where the pine-trees
stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, was a
tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply
below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast
cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further,
beyond my sight. I looked through this framing hollow and praised God.
For there below me, thousands of feet below me, was what seemed an
illimitable plain; at the end of that world was an horizon, and the
dim bluish sky that overhangs an horizon.
There was brume in it and thickness. One saw the sky beyond the edge
of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But right up--a belt in
that empyrean--ran peak and field and needle of intense ice, remote,
remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above them, a
steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the
immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' march, three days' march away,
they stood up like the walls of Eden. I say it again, they stopped my
breath. I had seen them.
So little are we, we men: so much are we immersed in our muddy and
immediate interests that we think, by numbers and recitals, to
comprehend distance or time, or any of our limiting infinities. Here
were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps, which now
for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and because they
were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile or two
high, they were become something different from us others, and could
strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there in
the sky, to which only clouds belong and birds and the last trembling
colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the
things of the sky. They were as distant as the little upper clouds of
summer, as fine and tenuous; but in their reflection and in their
quality as it were of weapons (like spears and shields of an unknown
array) they occupied the sky with a sublime invasion: and the things
proper to the sky were forgotten by me in their presence as I gazed.
To what emotion shall I compare this astonishment? So, in first love
one finds that _this_ can belong to _me._
Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted lines compelled my
adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky,
but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing
creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow
movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at
home in Heaven. I say that this kind of description is useless, and
that it is better to address prayers to such things than to attempt to
interpret them for others.
These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one's
immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest, those
few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more.
Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it
were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of
height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of
reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration
also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I
know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and
it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of
merriment in the soul of a sane man.
Since I could now see such a wonder and it could work such things in
my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it. That is what I
felt.
This it is also which leads some men to climb mountain-tops, but not
me, for I am afraid of slipping down.
Then you will say, if I felt all this, why do I draw it, and put it in
my book, seeing that my drawings are only for fun? My jest drags down
such a memory and makes it ludicrous. Well, I said in my beginning
that I would note down whatever most impressed me, except figures,
which I cannot draw (I mean figures of human beings, for mathematical
figures I can draw well enough), and I have never failed in this
promise, except where, as in the case of Porrentruy, my drawing was
blown away by the wind and lost--- if anything ever is lost. So I put
down here this extraordinary drawing of what I saw, which is about as
much like it as a printed song full of misprints is to that same song
sung by an army on the march. And I am consoled by remembering that if
I could draw infinitely well, then it would become sacrilege to
attempt to draw that sight. Moreover, I am not going to waste any more
time discussing why I put in this little drawing. If it disturbs your
conception of what it was I saw, paste over it a little bit of paper.
I have made it small for the purpose; but remember that the paper
should be thin and opaque, for thick paper will interfere with the
shape of this book, and transparent paper will disturb you with a
memory of the picture.
It was all full of this, as a man is full of music just after hearing
it, that I plunged down into the steep forest that led towards the
great plain; then, having found a path, I worked zig-zag down it by a
kind of gully that led through to a place where the limestone cliffs
were broken, and (so my map told me) to the town of Soleure, which
stands at the edge of the plain upon the river Aar.
I was an hour or more going down the enormous face of the Jura, which
is here an escarpment, a cliff of great height, and contains but few
such breaks by which men can pick their way. It was when I was about
half-way down the mountain side that its vastness most impressed me.
And yet it had been but a platform as it were, from which to view the
Alps and their much greater sublimity.
This vastness, even of these limestone mountains, took me especially
at a place where the path bordered a steep, or rather precipitous,
lift of white rock to which only here and there a tree could cling.
I was still very high up, but looking somewhat more eastward than
before, and the plain went on inimitably towards some low vague hills;
nor in that direction could any snow be seen in the sky. Then at last
I came to the slopes which make a little bank under the mountains, and
there, finding a highroad, and oppressed somewhat suddenly by the
afternoon heat of those low places, I went on more slowly towards
Soleure.
Beside me, on the road, were many houses, shaded by great trees, built
of wood, and standing apart. To each of them almost was a little
water-wheel, run by the spring which came down out of the ravine. The
water-wheel in most cases worked a simple little machine for sawing
planks, but in other cases it seemed used for some purpose inside the
house, which I could not divine; perhaps for spinning.
All this place was full of working, and the men sang and spoke at
their work in German, which I could not understand. I did indeed find
one man, a young hay-making man carrying a scythe, who knew a little
French and was going my way. I asked him, therefore, to teach me
German, but he had not taught me much before we were at the gates of
the old town and then I left him. It is thus, you will see, that for
my next four days or five, which were passed among the German-speaking
Swiss, I was utterly alone.
This book must not go on for ever; therefore I cannot say very much
about Soleure, although there is a great deal to be said about it. It
is distinguished by an impression of unity, and of civic life, which I
had already discovered in all these Swiss towns; for though men talk
of finding the Middle Ages here or there, I for my part never find it,
save where there has been democracy to preserve it. Thus I have seen
the Middle Ages especially alive in the small towns of Northern
France, and I have seen the Middle Ages in the University of Paris.
Here also in Switzerland. As I had seen it at St Ursanne, so I found
it now at Soleure. There were huge gates flanking the town, and there
was that evening a continual noise of rifles, at which the Swiss are
for ever practising. Over the church, however, I saw something
terribly seventeenth century, namely, Jaweh in great Hebrew letters
upon its front.
Well, dining there of the best they had to give me (for this was
another milestone in my pilgrimage), I became foolishly refreshed and
valiant, and instead of sleeping in Soleure, as a wise man would have
done, I determined, though it was now nearly dark, to push on upon the
road to Burgdorf.
I therefore crossed the river Aar, which is here magnificently broad
and strong, and has bastions jutting out into it in a very bold
fashion. I saw the last colourless light of evening making its waters
seem like dull metal between the gloomy banks; I felt the beginnings
of fatigue, and half regretted my determination. But as it is quite
certain that one should never go back, I went on in the darkness, I do
not know how many miles, till I reached some cross roads and an inn.
This inn was very poor, and the people had never heard in their lives,
apparently, that a poor man on foot might not be able to talk German,
which seemed to me an astonishing thing; and as I sat there ordering
beer for myself and for a number of peasants (who but for this would
have me their butt, and even as it was found something monstrous in
me), I pondered during my continual attempts to converse with them
(for I had picked up some ten words of their language) upon the folly
of those who imagine the world to be grown smaller by railways.
I suppose this place was more untouched, as the phrase goes, that is,
more living, more intense, and more powerful to affect others,
whenever it may be called to do so, than are even the dear villages of
Sussex that lie under my downs. For those are haunted by a nearly
cosmopolitan class of gentry, who will have actors, financiers, and
what not to come and stay with them, and who read the paper, and from
time to time address their village folk upon matters of politics. But
here, in this broad plain by the banks of the Emmen, they knew of
nothing but themselves and the Church which is the common bond of
Europe, and they were in the right way. Hence it was doubly hard on me
that they should think me such a stranger.
When I had become a little morose at their perpetual laughter, I asked
for a bed, and the landlady, a woman of some talent, showed me on her
fingers that the beds were 50c., 75c., and a franc. I determined upon
the best, and was given indeed a very pleasant room, having in it the
statue of a saint, and full of a country air. But I had done too much
in this night march, as you will presently learn, for my next day was
a day without salt, and in it appreciation left me. And this breakdown
of appreciation was due to what I did not know at the time to be
fatigue, but to what was undoubtedly a deep inner exhaustion.
When I awoke next morning it was as it always is: no one was awake,
and I had the field to myself, to slip out as I chose. I looked out of
the window into the dawn. The race had made its own surroundings.
These people who suffocated with laughter at the idea of one's knowing
no German, had produced, as it were, a German picture by the mere
influence of years and years of similar thoughts.
Out of my window I saw the eaves coming low down. I saw an apple-tree
against the grey light. The tangled grass in the little garden, the
dog-kennel, and the standing butt were all what I had seen in those
German pictures which they put into books for children, and which are
drawn in thick black lines: nor did I see any reason why tame faces
should not appear in that framework. I expected the light lank hair
and the heavy unlifting step of the people whose only emotions are in
music.
But it was too early for any one to be about, and my German garden,
_si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi,_ had to suffice me for an impression of
the Central Europeans. I gazed at it a little while as it grew
lighter. Then I went downstairs and slipped the latch (which, being
German, was of a quaint design). I went out into the road and sighed
profoundly.
All that day was destined to be covered, so far as my spirit was
concerned, with a motionless lethargy. Nothing seemed properly to
interest or to concern me, and not till evening was I visited by any
muse. Even my pain (which was now dull and chronic) was no longer a
subject for my entertainment, and I suffered from an uneasy isolation
that had not the merit of sharpness and was no spur to the mind. I had
the feeling that every one I might see would be a stranger, and that
their language would be unfamiliar to me, and this, unlike most men
who travel, I had never felt before.
The reason being this: that if a man has English thoroughly he can
wander over a great part of the world familiarly, and meet men with
whom he can talk. And if he has French thoroughly all Italy, and I
suppose Spain, certainly Belgium, are open to him. Not perhaps that he
will understand what he hears or will be understood of others, but
that the order and nature of the words and the gestures accompanying
them are his own. Here, however, I, to whom English and French were
the same, was to spend (it seemed) whole days among a people who put
their verbs at the end, where the curses or the endearments come in
French and English, and many of whose words stand for ideas we have
not got. I had no room for good-fellowship. I could not sit at tables
and expand the air with terrible stories of adventure, nor ask about
their politics, nor provoke them to laughter or sadness by my tales.
It seemed a poor pilgrimage taken among dumb men.
Also I have no doubt that I had experienced the ebb of some vitality,
for it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with
which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such
frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it
saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves. Seven nights
had I been on pilgrimage, and two of them had I passed in the open.
Seven great heights had I climbed: the Forest, Archettes, the Ballon,
the Mont Terrible, the Watershed, the pass by Moutier, the
Weissenstein. Seven depths had I fallen to: twice to the Moselle, the
gap of Belfort, the gorge of the Doubs, Glovelier valley, the hole of
Moutier, and now this plain of the Aar. I had marched 180 miles. It
was no wonder that on this eighth day I was oppressed and that all the
light long I drank no good wine, met no one to remember well, nor sang
any songs. All this part of my way was full of what they call Duty,
and I was sustained only by my knowledge that the vast mountains
(which had disappeared) would be part of my life very soon if I still
went on steadily towards Rome.
The sun had risen when I reached Burgdorf, and I there went to a
railway station, and outside of it drank coffee and ate bread. I also
bought old newspapers in French, and looked at everything wearily and
with sad eyes. There was nothing to draw. How can a man draw pain in
the foot and knee? And that was all there was remarkable at that
moment.
I watched a train come in. It was full of tourists, who (it may have
been a subjective illusion) seemed to me common and worthless people,
and sad into the bargain. It was going to Interlaken; and I felt a
languid contempt for people who went to Interlaken instead of driving
right across the great hills to Rome.
After an hour, or so of this melancholy dawdling, I put a map before
me on a little marble table, ordered some more coffee, and blew into
my tepid life a moment of warmth by the effort of coming to a
necessary decision. I had (for the first time since I had left
Lorraine) the choice of two roads; and why this was so the following
map will make clear.
Here you see that there is no possibility of following the straight
way to Rome, but that one must go a few miles east or west of it. From
Burgundy one has to strike a point on the sources of the Emmen, and
Burgdorf is on the Emmen. Therefore one might follow the Emmen all the
way up. But it seemed that the road climbed up above a gorge that way,
whereas by the other (which is just as straight) the road is good (it
seemed) and fairly level. So I chose this latter Eastern way, which,
at the bifurcation, takes one up a tributary of the Emmen, then over a
rise to the Upper Emmen again.
Do you want it made plainer than that? I should think not. And, tell
me--what can it profit you to know these geographical details? Believe
me, I write them down for my own gratification, not yours.
I say a day without salt. A trudge. The air was ordinary, the colours
common; men, animals, and trees indifferent. Something had stopped
working.
Our energy also is from God, and we should never be proud of it, even
if we can cover thirty miles day after day (as I can), or bend a peony
in one's hand as could Frocot, the driver in my piece--a man you never
knew--or write bad verse very rapidly as can so many moderns. I say
our energy also is from God, and we should never be proud of it as
though it were from ourselves, but we should accept it as a kind of
present, and we should be thankful for it; just as a man should thank
God for his reason, as did the madman in the Story of the Rose, who
thanked God that he at least was sane though all the rest of the world
had recently lost their reason.
Indeed, this defaillance and breakdown which comes from time to time
over the mind is a very sad thing, but it can be made of great use to
us if we will draw from it the lesson that we ourselves are nothing.
Perhaps it is a grace. Perhaps in these moments our minds repose...
Anyhow, a day without salt.