Mania--Titian's Venus--Difference between Seeing and Describing A Real
work of Art--Titian's Moses--Home
APPENDIX
A--The Portier analyzed
B--Hiedelberg Castle Described
C--The College Prison and Inmates
D--The Awful German Language
E--Legends of the Castle
F--The Journals of Germany
CHAPTER XLIII
[My Poor Sick Friend Disappointed]
Everybody was out-of-doors; everybody was in the principal street of the
village--not on the sidewalks, but all over the street; everybody was
lounging, loafing, chatting, waiting, alert, expectant, interested--for
it was train-time. That is to say, it was diligence-time--the half-dozen
big diligences would soon be arriving from Geneva, and the village was
interested, in many ways, in knowing how many people were coming and
what sort of folk they might be. It was altogether the livest-looking
street we had seen in any village on the continent.
The hotel was by the side of a booming torrent, whose music was loud
and strong; we could not see this torrent, for it was dark, now, but
one could locate it without a light. There was a large enclosed yard in
front of the hotel, and this was filled with groups of villagers waiting
to see the diligences arrive, or to hire themselves to excursionists for
the morrow. A telescope stood in the yard, with its huge barrel canted
up toward the lustrous evening star. The long porch of the hotel was
populous with tourists, who sat in shawls and wraps under the vast
overshadowing bulk of Mont Blanc, and gossiped or meditated.
Never did a mountain seem so close; its big sides seemed at one's very
elbow, and its majestic dome, and the lofty cluster of slender minarets
that were its neighbors, seemed to be almost over one's head. It was
night in the streets, and the lamps were sparkling everywhere; the broad
bases and shoulders of the mountains were in a deep gloom, but their
summits swam in a strange rich glow which was really daylight, and yet
had a mellow something about it which was very different from the hard
white glare of the kind of daylight I was used to. Its radiance was
strong and clear, but at the same time it was singularly soft, and
spiritual, and benignant. No, it was not our harsh, aggressive,
realistic daylight; it seemed properer to an enchanted land--or to
heaven.
I had seen moonlight and daylight together before, but I had not seen
daylight and black night elbow to elbow before. At least I had not seen
the daylight resting upon an object sufficiently close at hand, before,
to make the contrast startling and at war with nature.
The daylight passed away. Presently the moon rose up behind some of
those sky-piercing fingers or pinnacles of bare rock of which I have
spoken--they were a little to the left of the crest of Mont Blanc,
and right over our heads--but she couldn't manage to climb high enough
toward heaven to get entirely above them. She would show the glittering
arch of her upper third, occasionally, and scrape it along behind the
comblike row; sometimes a pinnacle stood straight up, like a statuette
of ebony, against that glittering white shield, then seemed to glide out
of it by its own volition and power, and become a dim specter, while the
next pinnacle glided into its place and blotted the spotless disk with
the black exclamation-point of its presence. The top of one pinnacle
took the shapely, clean-cut form of a rabbit's head, in the inkiest
silhouette, while it rested against the moon. The unillumined peaks and
minarets, hovering vague and phantom-like above us while the others
were painfully white and strong with snow and moonlight, made a peculiar
effect.
But when the moon, having passed the line of pinnacles, was hidden
behind the stupendous white swell of Mont Blanc, the masterpiece of the
evening was flung on the canvas. A rich greenish radiance sprang into
the sky from behind the mountain, and in this some airy shreds and
ribbons of vapor floated about, and being flushed with that strange
tint, went waving to and fro like pale green flames. After a while,
radiating bars--vast broadening fan-shaped shadows--grew up and
stretched away to the zenith from behind the mountain. It was a
spectacle to take one's breath, for the wonder of it, and the sublimity.
Indeed, those mighty bars of alternate light and shadow streaming up
from behind that dark and prodigious form and occupying the half of the
dull and opaque heavens, was the most imposing and impressive marvel I
had ever looked upon. There is no simile for it, for nothing is like
it. If a child had asked me what it was, I should have said, “Humble
yourself, in this presence, it is the glory flowing from the hidden head
of the Creator.” One falls shorter of the truth than that, sometimes, in
trying to explain mysteries to the little people. I could have found
out the cause of this awe-compelling miracle by inquiring, for it is not
infrequent at Mont Blanc,--but I did not wish to know. We have not the
reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how
it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into the matter.
We took a walk down street, a block or two, and a place where four
streets met and the principal shops were clustered, found the groups
of men in the roadway thicker than ever--for this was the Exchange of
Chamonix. These men were in the costumes of guides and porters, and were
there to be hired.
The office of that great personage, the Guide-in-Chief of the Chamonix
Guild of Guides, was near by. This guild is a close corporation, and is
governed by strict laws. There are many excursion routes, some dangerous
and some not, some that can be made safely without a guide, and some
that cannot. The bureau determines these things. Where it decides that a
guide is necessary, you are forbidden to go without one. Neither are you
allowed to be a victim of extortion: the law states what you are to pay.
The guides serve in rotation; you cannot select the man who is to take
your life into his hands, you must take the worst in the lot, if it is
his turn. A guide's fee ranges all the way up from a half-dollar (for
some trifling excursion of a few rods) to twenty dollars, according to
the distance traversed and the nature of the ground. A guide's fee
for taking a person to the summit of Mont Blanc and back, is twenty
dollars--and he earns it. The time employed is usually three days, and
there is enough early rising in it to make a man far more “healthy and
wealthy and wise” than any one man has any right to be. The porter's
fee for the same trip is ten dollars. Several fools--no, I mean several
tourists--usually go together, and divide up the expense, and thus make
it light; for if only one f--tourist, I mean--went, he would have to
have several guides and porters, and that would make the matter costly.
We went into the Chief's office. There were maps of mountains on the
walls; also one or two lithographs of celebrated guides, and a portrait
of the scientist De Saussure.
In glass cases were some labeled fragments of boots and batons, and
other suggestive relics and remembrances of casualties on Mount Blanc.
In a book was a record of all the ascents which have ever been made,
beginning with Nos. 1 and 2--being those of Jacques Balmat and De
Saussure, in 1787, and ending with No. 685, which wasn't cold yet. In
fact No. 685 was standing by the official table waiting to receive the
precious official diploma which should prove to his German household and
to his descendants that he had once been indiscreet enough to climb to
the top of Mont Blanc. He looked very happy when he got his document; in
fact, he spoke up and said he WAS happy.
I tried to buy a diploma for an invalid friend at home who had never
traveled, and whose desire all his life has been to ascend Mont Blanc,
but the Guide-in-Chief rather insolently refused to sell me one. I was
very much offended. I said I did not propose to be discriminated against
on the account of my nationality; that he had just sold a diploma to
this German gentleman, and my money was a good as his; I would see to
it that he couldn't keep his shop for Germans and deny his produce to
Americans; I would have his license taken away from him at the dropping
of a handkerchief; if France refused to break him, I would make an
international matter of it and bring on a war; the soil should be
drenched with blood; and not only that, but I would set up an opposition
show and sell diplomas at half price.
For two cents I would have done these things, too; but nobody offered me
two cents. I tried to move that German's feelings, but it could not be
done; he would not give me his diploma, neither would he sell it to me.
I TOLD him my friend was sick and could not come himself, but he said
he did not care a VERDAMMTES PFENNIG, he wanted his diploma for
himself--did I suppose he was going to risk his neck for that thing and
then give it to a sick stranger? Indeed he wouldn't, so he wouldn't. I
resolved, then, that I would do all I could to injure Mont Blanc.
In the record-book was a list of all the fatal accidents which happened
on the mountain. It began with the one in 1820 when the Russian Dr.
Hamel's three guides were lost in a crevice of the glacier, and it
recorded the delivery of the remains in the valley by the slow-moving
glacier forty-one years later. The latest catastrophe bore the date
1877.
We stepped out and roved about the village awhile. In front of the
little church was a monument to the memory of the bold guide Jacques
Balmat, the first man who ever stood upon the summit of Mont Blanc. He
made that wild trip solitary and alone. He accomplished the ascent
a number of times afterward. A stretch of nearly half a century lay
between his first ascent and his last one. At the ripe old age of
seventy-two he was climbing around a corner of a lofty precipice of the
Pic du Midi--nobody with him--when he slipped and fell. So he died in
the harness.
He had grown very avaricious in his old age, and used to go off
stealthily to hunt for non-existent and impossible gold among those
perilous peaks and precipices. He was on a quest of that kind when he
lost his life. There was a statue to him, and another to De Saussure, in
the hall of our hotel, and a metal plate on the door of a room upstairs
bore an inscription to the effect that that room had been occupied
by Albert Smith. Balmat and De Saussure discovered Mont Blanc--so to
speak--but it was Smith who made it a paying property. His articles in
BLACKWOOD and his lectures on Mont Blanc in London advertised it and
made people as anxious to see it as if it owed them money.
As we strolled along the road we looked up and saw a red signal-light
glowing in the darkness of the mountainside. It seemed but a trifling
way up--perhaps a hundred yards, a climb of ten minutes. It was a lucky
piece of sagacity in us that we concluded to stop a man whom we met and
get a light for our pipes from him instead of continuing the climb to
that lantern to get a light, as had been our purpose. The man said that
that lantern was on the Grands Mulets, some sixty-five hundred feet
above the valley! I know by our Riffelberg experience, that it would
have taken us a good part of a week to go up there. I would sooner not
smoke at all, than take all that trouble for a light.
Even in the daytime the foreshadowing effect of this mountain's close
proximity creates curious deceptions. For instance, one sees with the
naked eye a cabin up there beside the glacier, and a little above and
beyond he sees the spot where that red light was located; he thinks he
could throw a stone from the one place to the other. But he couldn't,
for the difference between the two altitudes is more than three thousand
feet. It looks impossible, from below, that this can be true, but it is
true, nevertheless.
While strolling around, we kept the run of the moon all the time, and we
still kept an eye on her after we got back to the hotel portico. I had
a theory that the gravitation of refraction, being subsidiary to
atmospheric compensation, the refrangibility of the earth's surface
would emphasize this effect in regions where great mountain ranges
occur, and possibly so even-handed impact the odic and idyllic forces
together, the one upon the other, as to prevent the moon from rising
higher than 12,200 feet above sea-level. This daring theory had been
received with frantic scorn by some of my fellow-scientists, and with
an eager silence by others. Among the former I may mention Prof. H----y;
and among the latter Prof. T----l. Such is professional jealousy; a
scientist will never show any kindness for a theory which he did not
start himself. There is no feeling of brotherhood among these people.
Indeed, they always resent it when I call them brother. To show how far
their ungenerosity can carry them, I will state that I offered to let
Prof. H----y publish my great theory as his own discovery; I even begged
him to do it; I even proposed to print it myself as his theory. Instead
of thanking me, he said that if I tried to fasten that theory on him he
would sue me for slander. I was going to offer it to Mr. Darwin, whom
I understood to be a man without prejudices, but it occurred to me
that perhaps he would not be interested in it since it did not concern
heraldry.
But I am glad now, that I was forced to father my intrepid theory
myself, for, on the night of which I am writing, it was triumphantly
justified and established. Mont Blanc is nearly sixteen thousand feet
high; he hid the moon utterly; near him is a peak which is 12,216 feet
high; the moon slid along behind the pinnacles, and when she approached
that one I watched her with intense interest, for my reputation as a
scientist must stand or fall by its decision. I cannot describe the
emotions which surged like tidal waves through my breast when I saw the
moon glide behind that lofty needle and pass it by without exposing more
than two feet four inches of her upper rim above it; I was secure, then.
I knew she could rise no higher, and I was right. She sailed behind all
the peaks and never succeeded in hoisting her disk above a single one of
them.
While the moon was behind one of those sharp fingers, its shadow was
flung athwart the vacant heavens--a long, slanting, clean-cut, dark
ray--with a streaming and energetic suggestion of FORCE about it, such
as the ascending jet of water from a powerful fire-engine affords. It
was curious to see a good strong shadow of an earthly object cast upon
so intangible a field as the atmosphere.
We went to bed, at last, and went quickly to sleep, but I woke up,
after about three hours, with throbbing temples, and a head which was
physically sore, outside and in. I was dazed, dreamy, wretched, seedy,
unrefreshed. I recognized the occasion of all this: it was that torrent.
In the mountain villages of Switzerland, and along the roads, one has
always the roar of the torrent in his ears. He imagines it is music, and
he thinks poetic things about it; he lies in his comfortable bed and is
lulled to sleep by it. But by and by he begins to notice that his
head is very sore--he cannot account for it; in solitudes where the
profoundest silence reigns, he notices a sullen, distant, continuous
roar in his ears, which is like what he would experience if he had
sea-shells pressed against them--he cannot account for it; he is drowsy
and absent-minded; there is no tenacity to his mind, he cannot keep hold
of a thought and follow it out; if he sits down to write, his vocabulary
is empty, no suitable words will come, he forgets what he started to do,
and remains there, pen in hand, head tilted up, eyes closed, listening
painfully to the muffled roar of a distant train in his ears; in his
soundest sleep the strain continues, he goes on listening, always
listening intently, anxiously, and wakes at last, harassed, irritable,
unrefreshed. He cannot manage to account for these things.
Day after day he feels as if he had spent his nights in a sleeping-car.
It actually takes him weeks to find out that it is those persecuting
torrents that have been making all the mischief. It is time for him
to get out of Switzerland, then, for as soon as he has discovered the
cause, the misery is magnified several fold. The roar of the torrent is
maddening, then, for his imagination is assisting; the physical pain
it inflicts is exquisite. When he finds he is approaching one of those
streams, his dread is so lively that he is disposed to fly the track and
avoid the implacable foe.
Eight or nine months after the distress of the torrents had departed
from me, the roar and thunder of the streets of Paris brought it all
back again. I moved to the sixth story of the hotel to hunt for peace.
About midnight the noises dulled away, and I was sinking to sleep,
when I heard a new and curious sound; I listened: evidently some joyous
lunatic was softly dancing a “double shuffle” in the room over my head.
I had to wait for him to get through, of course. Five long, long minutes
he smoothly shuffled away--a pause followed, then something fell with
a thump on the floor. I said to myself “There--he is pulling off his
boots--thank heavens he is done.” Another slight pause--he went to
shuffling again! I said to myself, “Is he trying to see what he can do
with only one boot on?” Presently came another pause and another thump
on the floor. I said “Good, he has pulled off his other boot--NOW he is
done.” But he wasn't. The next moment he was shuffling again. I said,
“Confound him, he is at it in his slippers!” After a little came that
same old pause, and right after it that thump on the floor once more. I
said, “Hang him, he had on TWO pair of boots!” For an hour that magician
went on shuffling and pulling off boots till he had shed as many as
twenty-five pair, and I was hovering on the verge of lunacy. I got
my gun and stole up there. The fellow was in the midst of an acre of
sprawling boots, and he had a boot in his hand, shuffling it--no, I mean
POLISHING it. The mystery was explained. He hadn't been dancing. He was
the “Boots” of the hotel, and was attending to business.
CHAPTER XLIX
[I Scale Mont Blanc--by Telescope]
After breakfast, that next morning in Chamonix, we went out in the yard
and watched the gangs of excursioning tourists arriving and departing
with their mules and guides and porters; then we took a look through
the telescope at the snowy hump of Mont Blanc. It was brilliant with
sunshine, and the vast smooth bulge seemed hardly five hundred yards
away. With the naked eye we could dimly make out the house at the Pierre
Pointue, which is located by the side of the great glacier, and is more
than three thousand feet above the level of the valley; but with the
telescope we could see all its details. While I looked, a woman rode by
the house on a mule, and I saw her with sharp distinctness; I could have
described her dress. I saw her nod to the people of the house, and rein
up her mule, and put her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. I was
not used to telescopes; in fact, I had never looked through a good one
before; it seemed incredible to me that this woman could be so far away.
I was satisfied that I could see all these details with my naked
eye; but when I tried it, that mule and those vivid people had wholly
vanished, and the house itself was become small and vague. I tried
the telescope again, and again everything was vivid. The strong black
shadows of the mule and the woman were flung against the side of the
house, and I saw the mule's silhouette wave its ears.
The telescopulist--or the telescopulariat--I do not know which is
right--said a party were making a grand ascent, and would come in sight
on the remote upper heights, presently; so we waited to observe this
performance. Presently I had a superb idea. I wanted to stand with a
party on the summit of Mont Blanc, merely to be able to say I had done
it, and I believed the telescope could set me within seven feet of the
uppermost man. The telescoper assured me that it could. I then asked him
how much I owed him for as far as I had got? He said, one franc. I asked
him how much it would cost to make the entire ascent? Three francs. I at
once determined to make the entire ascent. But first I inquired if there
was any danger? He said no--not by telescope; said he had taken a great
many parties to the summit, and never lost a man. I asked what he would
charge to let my agent go with me, together with such guides and porters
as might be necessary. He said he would let Harris go for two francs;
and that unless we were unusually timid, he should consider guides and
porters unnecessary; it was not customary to take them, when going by
telescope, for they were rather an encumbrance than a help. He said that
the party now on the mountain were approaching the most difficult part,
and if we hurried we should overtake them within ten minutes, and could
then join them and have the benefit of their guides and porters without
their knowledge, and without expense to us.
I then said we would start immediately. I believe I said it calmly,
though I was conscious of a shudder and of a paling cheek, in view of
the nature of the exploit I was so unreflectingly engaged in. But the
old daredevil spirit was upon me, and I said that as I had committed
myself I would not back down; I would ascend Mont Blanc if it cost me
my life. I told the man to slant his machine in the proper direction and
let us be off.
Harris was afraid and did not want to go, but I heartened him up and
said I would hold his hand all the way; so he gave his consent, though
he trembled a little at first. I took a last pathetic look upon the
pleasant summer scene about me, then boldly put my eye to the glass and
prepared to mount among the grim glaciers and the everlasting snows.
We took our way carefully and cautiously across the great Glacier des
Bossons, over yawning and terrific crevices and among imposing crags
and buttresses of ice which were fringed with icicles of gigantic
proportions. The desert of ice that stretched far and wide about us was
wild and desolate beyond description, and the perils which beset us were
so great that at times I was minded to turn back. But I pulled my pluck
together and pushed on.
We passed the glacier safely and began to mount the steeps beyond, with
great alacrity. When we were seven minutes out from the starting-point,
we reached an altitude where the scene took a new aspect; an apparently
limitless continent of gleaming snow was tilted heavenward before our
faces. As my eye followed that awful acclivity far away up into the
remote skies, it seemed to me that all I had ever seen before of
sublimity and magnitude was small and insignificant compared to this.
We rested a moment, and then began to mount with speed. Within three
minutes we caught sight of the party ahead of us, and stopped to observe
them. They were toiling up a long, slanting ridge of snow--twelve
persons, roped together some fifteen feet apart, marching in single
file, and strongly marked against the clear blue sky. One was a woman.
We could see them lift their feet and put them down; we saw them swing
their alpenstocks forward in unison, like so many pendulums, and then
bear their weight upon them; we saw the lady wave her handkerchief. They
dragged themselves upward in a worn and weary way, for they had been
climbing steadily from the Grand Mulets, on the Glacier des Bossons,
since three in the morning, and it was eleven, now. We saw them sink
down in the snow and rest, and drink something from a bottle. After a
while they moved on, and as they approached the final short dash of the
home-stretch we closed up on them and joined them.
Presently we all stood together on the summit! What a view was spread
out below! Away off under the northwestern horizon rolled the silent
billows of the Farnese Oberland, their snowy crests glinting softly in
the subdued lights of distance; in the north rose the giant form of the
Wobblehorn, draped from peak to shoulder in sable thunder-clouds; beyond
him, to the right, stretched the grand processional summits of the
Cisalpine Cordillera, drowned in a sensuous haze; to the east loomed the
colossal masses of the Yodelhorn, the Fuddelhorn, and the Dinnerhorn,
their cloudless summits flashing white and cold in the sun; beyond
them shimmered the faint far line of the Ghauts of Jubbelpore and the
Aiguilles des Alleghenies; in the south towered the smoking peak
of Popocatapetl and the unapproachable altitudes of the peerless
Scrabblehorn; in the west-south the stately range of the Himalayas lay
dreaming in a purple gloom; and thence all around the curving horizon
the eye roved over a troubled sea of sun-kissed Alps, and noted,
here and there, the noble proportions and the soaring domes of the
Bottlehorn, and the Saddlehorn, and the Shovelhorn, and the Powderhorn,
all bathed in the glory of noon and mottled with softly gliding blots,
the shadows flung from drifting clouds.
Overcome by the scene, we all raised a triumphant, tremendous shout, in
unison. A startled man at my elbow said:
“Confound you, what do you yell like that for, right here in the
street?”
That brought me down to Chamonix, like a flirt. I gave that man some
spiritual advice and disposed of him, and then paid the telescope man
his full fee, and said that we were charmed with the trip and would
remain down, and not reascend and require him to fetch us down by
telescope. This pleased him very much, for of course we could have
stepped back to the summit and put him to the trouble of bringing us
home if we wanted to.
I judged we could get diplomas, now, anyhow; so we went after them, but
the Chief Guide put us off, with one pretext or another, during all the
time we stayed in Chamonix, and we ended by never getting them at all.
So much for his prejudice against people's nationality. However, we
worried him enough to make him remember us and our ascent for some
time. He even said, once, that he wished there was a lunatic asylum
in Chamonix. This shows that he really had fears that we were going to
drive him mad. It was what we intended to do, but lack of time defeated
it.
I cannot venture to advise the reader one way or the other, as to
ascending Mont Blanc. I say only this: if he is at all timid, the
enjoyments of the trip will hardly make up for the hardships and
sufferings he will have to endure. But, if he has good nerve, youth,
health, and a bold, firm will, and could leave his family comfortably
provided for in case the worst happened, he would find the ascent a
wonderful experience, and the view from the top a vision to dream about,
and tell about, and recall with exultation all the days of his life.
While I do not advise such a person to attempt the ascent, I do not
advise him against it. But if he elects to attempt it, let him be warily
careful of two things: chose a calm, clear day; and do not pay the
telescope man in advance. There are dark stories of his getting advance
payers on the summit and then leaving them there to rot.
A frightful tragedy was once witnessed through the Chamonix telescopes.
Think of questions and answers like these, on an inquest:
CORONER. You saw deceased lose his life?
WITNESS. I did.
C. Where was he, at the time?
W. Close to the summit of Mont Blanc.
C. Where were you?
W. In the main street of Chamonix.
C. What was the distance between you?
W. A LITTLE OVER FIVE MILES, as the bird flies.
This accident occurred in 1866, a year and a month after the disaster
on the Matterhorn. Three adventurous English gentlemen, [1] of great
experience in mountain-climbing, made up their minds to ascend Mont
Blanc without guides or porters. All endeavors to dissuade them from
their project failed. Powerful telescopes are numerous in Chamonix.
These huge brass tubes, mounted on their scaffoldings and pointed
skyward from every choice vantage-ground, have the formidable look of
artillery, and give the town the general aspect of getting ready
to repel a charge of angels. The reader may easily believe that the
telescopes had plenty of custom on that August morning in 1866, for
everybody knew of the dangerous undertaking which was on foot, and
all had fears that misfortune would result. All the morning the tubes
remained directed toward the mountain heights, each with its anxious
group around it; but the white deserts were vacant.
1. Sir George Young and his brothers James and Albert.
At last, toward eleven o'clock, the people who were looking through the
telescopes cried out “There they are!”--and sure enough, far up, on
the loftiest terraces of the Grand Plateau, the three pygmies appeared,
climbing with remarkable vigor and spirit. They disappeared in the
“Corridor,” and were lost to sight during an hour. Then they reappeared,
and were presently seen standing together upon the extreme summit
of Mont Blanc. So, all was well. They remained a few minutes on that
highest point of land in Europe, a target for all the telescopes, and
were then seen to begin descent. Suddenly all three vanished. An instant
after, they appeared again, TWO THOUSAND FEET BELOW!
Evidently, they had tripped and been shot down an almost perpendicular
slope of ice to a point where it joined the border of the upper glacier.
Naturally, the distant witness supposed they were now looking upon three
corpses; so they could hardly believe their eyes when they presently saw
two of the men rise to their feet and bend over the third. During
two hours and a half they watched the two busying themselves over the
extended form of their brother, who seemed entirely inert. Chamonix's
affairs stood still; everybody was in the street, all interest was
centered upon what was going on upon that lofty and isolated stage
five miles away. Finally the two--one of them walking with great
difficulty--were seen to begin descent, abandoning the third, who was no
doubt lifeless. Their movements were followed, step by step, until they
reached the “Corridor” and disappeared behind its ridge. Before they had
had time to traverse the “Corridor” and reappear, twilight was come, and
the power of the telescope was at an end.
The survivors had a most perilous journey before them in the gathering
darkness, for they must get down to the Grands Mulets before they would
find a safe stopping-place--a long and tedious descent, and perilous
enough even in good daylight. The oldest guides expressed the opinion
that they could not succeed; that all the chances were that they would
lose their lives.
Yet those brave men did succeed. They reached the Grands Mulets in
safety. Even the fearful shock which their nerves had sustained was not
sufficient to overcome their coolness and courage. It would appear from
the official account that they were threading their way down through
those dangers from the closing in of twilight until two o'clock in the
morning, or later, because the rescuing party from Chamonix reached
the Grand Mulets about three in the morning and moved thence toward the
scene of the disaster under the leadership of Sir George Young, “who had
only just arrived.”
After having been on his feet twenty-four hours, in the exhausting work
of mountain-climbing, Sir George began the reascent at the head of the
relief party of six guides, to recover the corpse of his brother. This
was considered a new imprudence, as the number was too few for the
service required. Another relief party presently arrived at the cabin
on the Grands Mulets and quartered themselves there to await events. Ten
hours after Sir George's departure toward the summit, this new relief
were still scanning the snowy altitudes above them from their own high
perch among the ice deserts ten thousand feet above the level of the
sea, but the whole forenoon had passed without a glimpse of any living
thing appearing up there.
This was alarming. Half a dozen of their number set out, then early in
the afternoon, to seek and succor Sir George and his guides. The persons
remaining at the cabin saw these disappear, and then ensued another
distressing wait. Four hours passed, without tidings. Then at five
o'clock another relief, consisting of three guides, set forward from
the cabin. They carried food and cordials for the refreshment of their
predecessors; they took lanterns with them, too; night was coming on,
and to make matters worse, a fine, cold rain had begun to fall.
At the same hour that these three began their dangerous ascent, the
official Guide-in-Chief of the Mont Blanc region undertook the dangerous
descent to Chamonix, all alone, to get reinforcements. However, a couple
of hours later, at 7 P.M., the anxious solicitude came to an end, and
happily. A bugle note was heard, and a cluster of black specks was
distinguishable against the snows of the upper heights. The watchers
counted these specks eagerly--fourteen--nobody was missing. An hour and
a half later they were all safe under the roof of the cabin. They had
brought the corpse with them. Sir George Young tarried there but a few
minutes, and then began the long and troublesome descent from the cabin
to Chamonix. He probably reached there about two or three o'clock in the
morning, after having been afoot among the rocks and glaciers during two
days and two nights. His endurance was equal to his daring.
The cause of the unaccountable delay of Sir George and the relief
parties among the heights where the disaster had happened was a thick
fog--or, partly that and partly the slow and difficult work of conveying
the dead body down the perilous steeps.
The corpse, upon being viewed at the inquest, showed no bruises, and it
was some time before the surgeons discovered that the neck was broken.
One of the surviving brothers had sustained some unimportant injuries,
but the other had suffered no hurt at all. How these men could fall two
thousand feet, almost perpendicularly, and live afterward, is a most
strange and unaccountable thing.
A great many women have made the ascent of Mont Blanc. An English girl,
Miss Stratton, conceived the daring idea, two or three years ago, of
attempting the ascent in the middle of winter. She tried it--and she
succeeded. Moreover, she froze two of her fingers on the way up, she
fell in love with her guide on the summit, and she married him when she
got to the bottom again. There is nothing in romance, in the way of a
striking “situation,” which can beat this love scene in midheaven on
an isolated ice-crest with the thermometer at zero and an Artic gale
blowing.
The first woman who ascended Mont Blanc was a girl aged
twenty-two--Mlle. Maria Paradis--1809. Nobody was with her but her
sweetheart, and he was not a guide. The sex then took a rest for about
thirty years, when a Mlle. d'Angeville made the ascent --1838. In
Chamonix I picked up a rude old lithograph of that day which pictured
her “in the act.”
However, I value it less as a work of art than as a fashion-plate. Miss
d'Angeville put on a pair of men's pantaloons to climb it, which was
wise; but she cramped their utility by adding her petticoat, which was
idiotic.
One of the mournfulest calamities which men's disposition to climb
dangerous mountains has resulted in, happened on Mont Blanc in September
1870. M. D'Arve tells the story briefly in his HISTOIRE DU MONT BLANC.
In the next chapter I will copy its chief features.
CHAPTER XLV
A Catastrophe Which Cost Eleven Lives
On the 5th of September, 1870, a caravan of eleven persons departed
from Chamonix to make the ascent of Mont Blanc. Three of the party
were tourists; Messrs. Randall and Bean, Americans, and Mr. George
Corkindale, a Scotch gentleman; there were three guides and five
porters. The cabin on the Grands Mulets was reached that day; the ascent
was resumed early the next morning, September 6th. The day was fine
and clear, and the movements of the party were observed through the
telescopes of Chamonix; at two o'clock in the afternoon they were seen
to reach the summit. A few minutes later they were seen making the first
steps of the descent; then a cloud closed around them and hid them from
view.
Eight hours passed, the cloud still remained, night came, no one had
returned to the Grands Mulets. Sylvain Couttet, keeper of the cabin
there, suspected a misfortune, and sent down to the valley for help. A
detachment of guides went up, but by the time they had made the tedious
trip and reached the cabin, a raging storm had set in. They had to wait;
nothing could be attempted in such a tempest.
The wild storm lasted MORE THAN A WEEK, without ceasing; but on the
17th, Couttet, with several guides, left the cabin and succeeded in
making the ascent. In the snowy wastes near the summit they came upon
five bodies, lying upon their sides in a reposeful attitude which
suggested that possibly they had fallen asleep there, while exhausted
with fatigue and hunger and benumbed with cold, and never knew when
death stole upon them. Couttet moved a few steps further and discovered
five more bodies. The eleventh corpse--that of a porter--was not found,
although diligent search was made for it.
In the pocket of Mr. Bean, one of the Americans, was found a note-book
in which had been penciled some sentences which admit us, in flesh and
spirit, as it were, to the presence of these men during their last hours
of life, and to the grisly horrors which their fading vision looked upon
and their failing consciousness took cognizance of:
TUESDAY, SEPT. 6. I have made the ascent of Mont Blanc, with ten
persons--eight guides, and Mr. Corkindale and Mr. Randall. We reached
the summit at half past 2. Immediately after quitting it, we were
enveloped in clouds of snow. We passed the night in a grotto hollowed in
the snow, which afforded us but poor shelter, and I was ill all night.
SEPT. 7--MORNING. The cold is excessive. The snow falls heavily and
without interruption. The guides take no rest.
EVENING. My Dear Hessie, we have been two days on Mont Blanc, in the
midst of a terrible hurricane of snow, we have lost our way, and are
in a hole scooped in the snow, at an altitude of 15,000 feet. I have no
longer any hope of descending.
They had wandered around, and around, in the blinding snow-storm,
hopelessly lost, in a space only a hundred yards square; and when cold
and fatigue vanquished them at last, they scooped their cave and lay
down there to die by inches, UNAWARE THAT FIVE STEPS MORE WOULD HAVE
BROUGHT THEM INTO THE TRUTH PATH. They were so near to life and safety
as that, and did not suspect it. The thought of this gives the sharpest
pang that the tragic story conveys.
The author of the HISTOIRE DU MONT BLANC introduced the closing
sentences of Mr. Bean's pathetic record thus:
“Here the characters are large and unsteady; the hand which traces them
is become chilled and torpid; but the spirit survives, and the faith and
resignation of the dying man are expressed with a sublime simplicity.”
Perhaps this note-book will be found and sent to you. We have nothing to
eat, my feet are already frozen, and I am exhausted; I have strength to
write only a few words more. I have left means for C's education; I know
you will employ them wisely. I die with faith in God, and with loving
thoughts of you. Farewell to all. We shall meet again, in Heaven. ... I
think of you always.
It is the way of the Alps to deliver death to their victims with a
merciful swiftness, but here the rule failed. These men suffered
the bitterest death that has been recorded in the history of those
mountains, freighted as that history is with grisly tragedies.
CHAPTER XLVI
[Meeting a Hog on a Precipice]
Mr. Harris and I took some guides and porters and ascended to the Hotel
des Pyramides, which is perched on the high moraine which borders the
Glacier des Bossons. The road led sharply uphill, all the way, through
grass and flowers and woods, and was a pleasant walk, barring the
fatigue of the climb.
From the hotel we could view the huge glacier at very close range. After
a rest we followed down a path which had been made in the steep inner
frontage of the moraine, and stepped upon the glacier itself. One of the
shows of the place was a tunnel-like cavern, which had been hewn in the
glacier. The proprietor of this tunnel took candles and conducted us
into it. It was three or four feet wide and about six feet high. Its
walls of pure and solid ice emitted a soft and rich blue light that
produced a lovely effect, and suggested enchanted caves, and that sort
of thing. When we had proceeded some yards and were entering darkness,
we turned about and had a dainty sunlit picture of distant woods and
heights framed in the strong arch of the tunnel and seen through the
tender blue radiance of the tunnel's atmosphere.
The cavern was nearly a hundred yards long, and when we reached its
inner limit the proprietor stepped into a branch tunnel with his candles
and left us buried in the bowels of the glacier, and in pitch-darkness.
We judged his purpose was murder and robbery; so we got out our matches
and prepared to sell our lives as dearly as possible by setting the
glacier on fire if the worst came to the worst--but we soon perceived
that this man had changed his mind; he began to sing, in a deep,
melodious voice, and woke some curious and pleasing echoes. By and by he
came back and pretended that that was what he had gone behind there for.
We believed as much of that as we wanted to.
Thus our lives had been once more in imminent peril, but by the exercise
of the swift sagacity and cool courage which had saved us so often, we
had added another escape to the long list. The tourist should visit that
ice-cavern, by all means, for it is well worth the trouble; but I would
advise him to go only with a strong and well-armed force. I do not
consider artillery necessary, yet it would not be unadvisable to take
it along, if convenient. The journey, going and coming, is about three
miles and a half, three of which are on level ground. We made it in
less than a day, but I would counsel the unpracticed--if not pressed
for time--to allow themselves two. Nothing is gained in the Alps by
over-exertion; nothing is gained by crowding two days' work into one for
the poor sake of being able to boast of the exploit afterward. It will
be found much better, in the long run, to do the thing in two days, and
then subtract one of them from the narrative. This saves fatigue, and
does not injure the narrative. All the more thoughtful among the Alpine
tourists do this.
We now called upon the Guide-in-Chief, and asked for a squadron of
guides and porters for the ascent of the Montanvert. This idiot glared
at us, and said:
“You don't need guides and porters to go to the Montanvert.”
“What do we need, then?”
“Such as YOU?--an ambulance!”
I was so stung by this brutal remark that I took my custom elsewhere.
Betimes, next morning, we had reached an altitude of five thousand feet
above the level of the sea. Here we camped and breakfasted. There was
a cabin there--the spot is called the Caillet--and a spring of ice-cold
water. On the door of the cabin was a sign, in French, to the effect
that “One may here see a living chamois for fifty centimes.” We did not
invest; what we wanted was to see a dead one.
A little after noon we ended the ascent and arrived at the new hotel on
the Montanvert, and had a view of six miles, right up the great glacier,
the famous Mer de Glace. At this point it is like a sea whose deep
swales and long, rolling swells have been caught in mid-movement and
frozen solid; but further up it is broken up into wildly tossing billows
of ice.
We descended a ticklish path in the steep side of the moraine, and
invaded the glacier. There were tourists of both sexes scattered far and
wide over it, everywhere, and it had the festive look of a skating-rink.
The Empress Josephine came this far, once. She ascended the Montanvert
in 1810--but not alone; a small army of men preceded her to clear the
path--and carpet it, perhaps--and she followed, under the protection of
SIXTY-EIGHT guides.
Her successor visited Chamonix later, but in far different style.
It was seven weeks after the first fall of the Empire, and poor Marie
Louise, ex-Empress was a fugitive. She came at night, and in a storm,
with only two attendants, and stood before a peasant's hut, tired,
bedraggled, soaked with rain, “the red print of her lost crown still
girdling her brow,” and implored admittance--and was refused! A few days
before, the adulations and applauses of a nation were sounding in her
ears, and now she was come to this!
We crossed the Mer de Glace in safety, but we had misgivings. The
crevices in the ice yawned deep and blue and mysterious, and it made one
nervous to traverse them. The huge round waves of ice were slippery and
difficult to climb, and the chances of tripping and sliding down them
and darting into a crevice were too many to be comfortable.
In the bottom of a deep swale between two of the biggest of the
ice-waves, we found a fraud who pretended to be cutting steps to insure
the safety of tourists. He was “soldiering” when we came upon him, but
he hopped up and chipped out a couple of steps about big enough for a
cat, and charged us a franc or two for it. Then he sat down again, to
doze till the next party should come along.
He had collected blackmail from two or three hundred people already,
that day, but had not chipped out ice enough to impair the glacier
perceptibly. I have heard of a good many soft sinecures, but it seems
to me that keeping toll-bridge on a glacier is the softest one I have
encountered yet.
That was a blazing hot day, and it brought a persistent and persecuting
thirst with it. What an unspeakable luxury it was to slake that thirst
with the pure and limpid ice-water of the glacier! Down the sides of
every great rib of pure ice poured limpid rills in gutters carved by
their own attrition; better still, wherever a rock had lain, there was
now a bowl-shaped hole, with smooth white sides and bottom of ice, and
this bowl was brimming with water of such absolute clearness that the
careless observer would not see it at all, but would think the bowl was
empty. These fountains had such an alluring look that I often stretched
myself out when I was not thirsty and dipped my face in and drank till
my teeth ached. Everywhere among the Swiss mountains we had at hand the
blessing--not to be found in Europe EXCEPT in the mountains--of water
capable of quenching thirst. Everywhere in the Swiss highlands brilliant
little rills of exquisitely cold water went dancing along by the
roadsides, and my comrade and I were always drinking and always
delivering our deep gratitude.
But in Europe everywhere except in the mountains, the water is flat and
insipid beyond the power of words to describe. It is served lukewarm;
but no matter, ice could not help it; it is incurably flat, incurably
insipid. It is only good to wash with; I wonder it doesn't occur to
the average inhabitant to try it for that. In Europe the people say
contemptuously, “Nobody drinks water here.” Indeed, they have a sound
and sufficient reason. In many places they even have what may be called
prohibitory reasons. In Paris and Munich, for instance, they say, “Don't
drink the water, it is simply poison.”
Either America is healthier than Europe, notwithstanding her “deadly”
indulgence in ice-water, or she does not keep the run of her death-rate
as sharply as Europe does. I think we do keep up the death statistics
accurately; and if we do, our cities are healthier than the cities of
Europe. Every month the German government tabulates the death-rate of
the world and publishes it. I scrap-booked these reports during several
months, and it was curious to see how regular and persistently each city
repeated its same death-rate month after month. The tables might as well
have been stereotyped, they varied so little. These tables were
based upon weekly reports showing the average of deaths in each 1,000
population for a year. Munich was always present with her 33 deaths in
each 1,000 of her population (yearly average), Chicago was as constant
with her 15 or 17, Dublin with her 48--and so on.
Only a few American cities appear in these tables, but they are
scattered so widely over the country that they furnish a good general
average of CITY health in the United States; and I think it will be
granted that our towns and villages are healthier than our cities.
Here is the average of the only American cities reported in the German
tables:
Chicago, deaths in 1,000 population annually, 16; Philadelphia, 18; St.
Louis, 18; San Francisco, 19; New York (the Dublin of America), 23.
See how the figures jump up, as soon as one arrives at the transatlantic
list:
Paris, 27; Glasgow, 27; London, 28; Vienna, 28; Augsburg, 28;
Braunschweig, 28; Königsberg, 29; Cologne, 29; Dresden, 29; Hamburg, 29;
Berlin, 30; Bombay, 30; Warsaw, 31; Breslau, 31; Odessa, 32; Munich, 33;
Strasburg, 33, Pesth, 35; Cassel, 35; Lisbon, 36; Liverpool, 36;
Prague, 37; Madras, 37; Bucharest, 39; St. Petersburg, 40; Trieste, 40;
Alexandria (Egypt), 43; Dublin, 48; Calcutta, 55.
Edinburgh is as healthy as New York--23; but there is no CITY in the
entire list which is healthier, except Frankfort-on-the-Main--20. But
Frankfort is not as healthy as Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, or
Philadelphia.
Perhaps a strict average of the world might develop the fact that where
one in 1,000 of America's population dies, two in 1,000 of the other
populations of the earth succumb.
I do not like to make insinuations, but I do think the above statistics
darkly suggest that these people over here drink this detestable water
“on the sly.”
We climbed the moraine on the opposite side of the glacier, and then
crept along its sharp ridge a hundred yards or so, in pretty constant
danger of a tumble to the glacier below. The fall would have been only
one hundred feet, but it would have closed me out as effectually as one
thousand, therefore I respected the distance accordingly, and was
glad when the trip was done. A moraine is an ugly thing to assault
head-first. At a distance it looks like an endless grave of fine sand,
accurately shaped and nicely smoothed; but close by, it is found to be
made mainly of rough boulders of all sizes, from that of a man's head to
that of a cottage.
By and by we came to the Mauvais Pas, or the Villainous Road, to
translate it feelingly. It was a breakneck path around the face of a
precipice forty or fifty feet high, and nothing to hang on to but some
iron railings. I got along, slowly, safely, and uncomfortably, and
finally reached the middle. My hopes began to rise a little, but they
were quickly blighted; for there I met a hog--a long-nosed, bristly
fellow, that held up his snout and worked his nostrils at me
inquiringly. A hog on a pleasure excursion in Switzerland--think of it!
It is striking and unusual; a body might write a poem about it. He
could not retreat, if he had been disposed to do it. It would have been
foolish to stand upon our dignity in a place where there was hardly room
to stand upon our feet, so we did nothing of the sort. There were twenty
or thirty ladies and gentlemen behind us; we all turned about and went
back, and the hog followed behind. The creature did not seem set up by
what he had done; he had probably done it before.
We reached the restaurant on the height called the Chapeau at four in
the afternoon. It was a memento-factory, and the stock was large, cheap,
and varied. I bought the usual paper-cutter to remember the place by,
and had Mont Blanc, the Mauvais Pas, and the rest of the region branded
on my alpenstock; then we descended to the valley and walked home
without being tied together. This was not dangerous, for the valley was
five miles wide, and quite level.
We reached the hotel before nine o'clock. Next morning we left for
Geneva on top of the diligence, under shelter of a gay awning. If I
remember rightly, there were more than twenty people up there. It was
so high that the ascent was made by ladder. The huge vehicle was full
everywhere, inside and out. Five other diligences left at the same time,
all full. We had engaged our seats two days beforehand, to make sure,
and paid the regulation price, five dollars each; but the rest of the
company were wiser; they had trusted Baedeker, and waited; consequently
some of them got their seats for one or two dollars. Baedeker knows
all about hotels, railway and diligence companies, and speaks his mind
freely. He is a trustworthy friend of the traveler.
We never saw Mont Blanc at his best until we were many miles away; then
he lifted his majestic proportions high into the heavens, all white
and cold and solemn, and made the rest of the world seem little and
plebeian, and cheap and trivial.
As he passed out of sight at last, an old Englishman settled himself in
his seat and said:
“Well, I am satisfied, I have seen the principal features of Swiss
scenery--Mont Blanc and the goiter--now for home!”
CHAPTER XLVII
[Queer European Manners]
We spent a few pleasant restful days at Geneva, that delightful city
where accurate time-pieces are made for all the rest of the world, but
whose own clocks never give the correct time of day by any accident.
Geneva is filled with pretty shops, and the shops are filled with the
most enticing gimcrackery, but if one enters one of these places he is
at once pounced upon, and followed up, and so persecuted to buy this,
that, and the other thing, that he is very grateful to get out again,
and is not at all apt to repeat his experiment. The shopkeepers of the
smaller sort, in Geneva, are as troublesome and persistent as are
the salesmen of that monster hive in Paris, the Grands Magasins du
Louvre--an establishment where ill-mannered pestering, pursuing, and
insistence have been reduced to a science.
In Geneva, prices in the smaller shops are very elastic--that is another
bad feature. I was looking in at a window at a very pretty string of
beads, suitable for a child. I was only admiring them; I had no use for
them; I hardly ever wear beads. The shopwoman came out and offered them
to me for thirty-five francs. I said it was cheap, but I did not need
them.
“Ah, but monsieur, they are so beautiful!”
I confessed it, but said they were not suitable for one of my age and
simplicity of character. She darted in and brought them out and tried to
force them into my hands, saying:
“Ah, but only see how lovely they are! Surely monsieur will take them;
monsieur shall have them for thirty francs. There, I have said it--it is
a loss, but one must live.”
I dropped my hands, and tried to move her to respect my unprotected
situation. But no, she dangled the beads in the sun before my face,
exclaiming, “Ah, monsieur CANNOT resist them!” She hung them on my coat
button, folded her hand resignedly, and said: “Gone,--and for thirty
francs, the lovely things--it is incredible!--but the good God will
sanctify the sacrifice to me.”
I removed them gently, returned them, and walked away, shaking my head
and smiling a smile of silly embarrassment while the passers-by halted
to observe. The woman leaned out of her door, shook the beads, and
screamed after me:
“Monsieur shall have them for twenty-eight!”
I shook my head.
“Twenty-seven! It is a cruel loss, it is ruin--but take them, only take
them.”
I still retreated, still wagging my head.
“MON DIEU, they shall even go for twenty-six! There, I have said it.
Come!”
I wagged another negative. A nurse and a little English girl had been
near me, and were following me, now. The shopwoman ran to the nurse,
thrust the beads into her hands, and said:
“Monsieur shall have them for twenty-five! Take them to the hotel--he
shall send me the money tomorrow--next day--when he likes.” Then to the
child: “When thy father sends me the money, come thou also, my angel,
and thou shall have something oh so pretty!”
I was thus providentially saved. The nurse refused the beads squarely
and firmly, and that ended the matter.
The “sights” of Geneva are not numerous. I made one attempt to hunt up
the houses once inhabited by those two disagreeable people, Rousseau and
Calvin, but I had no success. Then I concluded to go home. I found
it was easier to propose to do that than to do it; for that town is a
bewildering place. I got lost in a tangle of narrow and crooked streets,
and stayed lost for an hour or two. Finally I found a street which
looked somewhat familiar, and said to myself, “Now I am at home, I
judge.” But I was wrong; this was “HELL street.” Presently I found
another place which had a familiar look, and said to myself, “Now I am
at home, sure.” It was another error. This was “PURGATORY street.” After
a little I said, “NOW I've got the right place, anyway ... no, this is
'PARADISE street'; I'm further from home than I was in the beginning.”
Those were queer names--Calvin was the author of them, likely.
“Hell” and “Purgatory” fitted those two streets like a glove, but the
“Paradise” appeared to be sarcastic.
I came out on the lake-front, at last, and then I knew where I was.
I was walking along before the glittering jewelry shops when I saw a
curious performance. A lady passed by, and a trim dandy lounged across
the walk in such an apparently carefully timed way as to bring himself
exactly in front of her when she got to him; he made no offer to step
out of the way; he did not apologize; he did not even notice her. She
had to stop still and let him lounge by. I wondered if he had done that
piece of brutality purposely. He strolled to a chair and seated himself
at a small table; two or three other males were sitting at similar
tables sipping sweetened water. I waited; presently a youth came by, and
this fellow got up and served him the same trick. Still, it did not seem
possible that any one could do such a thing deliberately. To satisfy my
curiosity I went around the block, and, sure enough, as I approached, at
a good round speed, he got up and lounged lazily across my path, fouling
my course exactly at the right moment to receive all my weight. This
proved that his previous performances had not been accidental, but
intentional.
I saw that dandy's curious game played afterward, in Paris, but not
for amusement; not with a motive of any sort, indeed, but simply from a
selfish indifference to other people's comfort and rights. One does not
see it as frequently in Paris as he might expect to, for there the law
says, in effect, “It is the business of the weak to get out of the way
of the strong.” We fine a cabman if he runs over a citizen; Paris fines
the citizen for being run over. At least so everybody says--but I saw
something which caused me to doubt; I saw a horseman run over an old
woman one day--the police arrested him and took him away. That looked as
if they meant to punish him.
It will not do for me to find merit in American manners--for are they
not the standing butt for the jests of critical and polished Europe?
Still, I must venture to claim one little matter of superiority in our
manners; a lady may traverse our streets all day, going and coming as
she chooses, and she will never be molested by any man; but if a lady,
unattended, walks abroad in the streets of London, even at noonday, she
will be pretty likely to be accosted and insulted--and not by drunken
sailors, but by men who carry the look and wear the dress of gentlemen.
It is maintained that these people are not gentlemen, but are a lower
sort, disguised as gentlemen. The case of Colonel Valentine Baker
obstructs that argument, for a man cannot become an officer in the
British army except he hold the rank of gentleman. This person, finding
himself alone in a railway compartment with an unprotected girl--but
it is an atrocious story, and doubtless the reader remembers it well
enough. London must have been more or less accustomed to Bakers, and the
ways of Bakers, else London would have been offended and excited. Baker
was “imprisoned”--in a parlor; and he could not have been more visited,
or more overwhelmed with attentions, if he had committed six murders and
then--while the gallows was preparing--“got religion”--after the manner
of the holy Charles Peace, of saintly memory. Arkansaw--it seems a
little indelicate to be trumpeting forth our own superiorities, and
comparisons are always odious, but still--Arkansaw would certainly have
hanged Baker. I do not say she would have tried him first, but she would
have hanged him, anyway.
Even the most degraded woman can walk our streets unmolested, her sex
and her weakness being her sufficient protection. She will encounter
less polish than she would in the old world, but she will run across
enough humanity to make up for it.
The music of a donkey awoke us early in the morning, and we rose up and
made ready for a pretty formidable walk--to Italy; but the road was so
level that we took the train.. We lost a good deal of time by this, but
it was no matter, we were not in a hurry. We were four hours going to
Chamb`ery. The Swiss trains go upward of three miles an hour, in places,
but they are quite safe.
That aged French town of Chambèry was as quaint and crooked as
Heilbronn. A drowsy reposeful quiet reigned in the back streets which
made strolling through them very pleasant, barring the almost unbearable
heat of the sun. In one of these streets, which was eight feet wide,
gracefully curved, and built up with small antiquated houses, I saw
three fat hogs lying asleep, and a boy (also asleep) taking care of
them.
From queer old-fashioned windows along the curve projected boxes of
bright flowers, and over the edge of one of these boxes hung the head
and shoulders of a cat--asleep. The five sleeping creatures were the
only living things visible in that street. There was not a sound;
absolute stillness prevailed. It was Sunday; one is not used to
such dreamy Sundays on the continent. In our part of the town it was
different that night. A regiment of brown and battered soldiers had
arrived home from Algiers, and I judged they got thirsty on the way.
They sang and drank till dawn, in the pleasant open air.
We left for Turin at ten the next morning by a railway which was
profusely decorated with tunnels. We forgot to take a lantern along,
consequently we missed all the scenery. Our compartment was full. A
ponderous tow-headed Swiss woman, who put on many fine-lady airs, but
was evidently more used to washing linen than wearing it, sat in a
corner seat and put her legs across into the opposite one, propping them
intermediately with her up-ended valise. In the seat thus pirated, sat
two Americans, greatly incommoded by that woman's majestic coffin-clad
feet. One of them begged, politely, to remove them. She opened her wide
eyes and gave him a stare, but answered nothing. By and by he proferred
his request again, with great respectfulness. She said, in good English,
and in a deeply offended tone, that she had paid her passage and was not
going to be bullied out of her “rights” by ill-bred foreigners, even if
she was alone and unprotected.
“But I have rights, also, madam. My ticket entitles me to a seat, but
you are occupying half of it.”
“I will not talk with you, sir. What right have you to speak to me? I
do not know you. One would know you came from a land where there are no
gentlemen. No GENTLEMAN would treat a lady as you have treated me.”
“I come from a region where a lady would hardly give me the same
provocation.”
“You have insulted me, sir! You have intimated that I am not a lady--and
I hope I am NOT one, after the pattern of your country.”
“I beg that you will give yourself no alarm on that head, madam; but at
the same time I must insist--always respectfully--that you let me have
my seat.”
Here the fragile laundress burst into tears and sobs.
“I never was so insulted before! Never, never! It is shameful, it is
brutal, it is base, to bully and abuse an unprotected lady who has
lost the use of her limbs and cannot put her feet to the floor without
agony!”
“Good heavens, madam, why didn't you say that at first! I offer a
thousand pardons. And I offer them most sincerely. I did not know--I
COULD not know--anything was the matter. You are most welcome to the
seat, and would have been from the first if I had only known. I am truly
sorry it all happened, I do assure you.”
But he couldn't get a word of forgiveness out of her. She simply sobbed
and sniffed in a subdued but wholly unappeasable way for two long hours,
meantime crowding the man more than ever with her undertaker-furniture
and paying no sort of attention to his frequent and humble little
efforts to do something for her comfort. Then the train halted at the
Italian line and she hopped up and marched out of the car with as firm a
leg as any washerwoman of all her tribe! And how sick I was, to see how
she had fooled me.
Turin is a very fine city. In the matter of roominess it transcends
anything that was ever dreamed of before, I fancy. It sits in the midst
of a vast dead-level, and one is obliged to imagine that land may be
had for the asking, and no taxes to pay, so lavishly do they use it. The
streets are extravagantly wide, the paved squares are prodigious, the
houses are huge and handsome, and compacted into uniform blocks that
stretch away as straight as an arrow, into the distance. The sidewalks
are about as wide as ordinary European STREETS, and are covered over
with a double arcade supported on great stone piers or columns. One
walks from one end to the other of these spacious streets, under shelter
all the time, and all his course is lined with the prettiest of shops
and the most inviting dining-houses.
There is a wide and lengthy court, glittering with the most wickedly
enticing shops, which is roofed with glass, high aloft overhead, and
paved with soft-toned marbles laid in graceful figures; and at night
when the place is brilliant with gas and populous with a sauntering and
chatting and laughing multitude of pleasure-seekers, it is a spectacle
worth seeing.
Everything is on a large scale; the public buildings, for instance--and
they are architecturally imposing, too, as well as large. The big
squares have big bronze monuments in them. At the hotel they gave us
rooms that were alarming, for size, and parlor to match. It was well the
weather required no fire in the parlor, for I think one might as well
have tried to warm a park. The place would have a warm look, though, in
any weather, for the window-curtains were of red silk damask, and the
walls were covered with the same fire-hued goods--so, also, were the
four sofas and the brigade of chairs. The furniture, the ornaments, the
chandeliers, the carpets, were all new and bright and costly. We did not
need a parlor at all, but they said it belonged to the two bedrooms and
we might use it if we chose. Since it was to cost nothing, we were not
averse to using it, of course.
Turin must surely read a good deal, for it has more book-stores to the
square rod than any other town I know of. And it has its own share of
military folk. The Italian officers' uniforms are very much the most
beautiful I have ever seen; and, as a general thing, the men in them
were as handsome as the clothes. They were not large men, but they had
fine forms, fine features, rich olive complexions, and lustrous black
eyes.
For several weeks I had been culling all the information I could about
Italy, from tourists. The tourists were all agreed upon one thing--one
must expect to be cheated at every turn by the Italians. I took an
evening walk in Turin, and presently came across a little Punch and Judy
show in one of the great squares. Twelve or fifteen people constituted
the audience. This miniature theater was not much bigger than a man's
coffin stood on end; the upper part was open and displayed a
tinseled parlor--a good-sized handkerchief would have answered for a
drop-curtain; the footlights consisted of a couple of candle-ends an
inch long; various manikins the size of dolls appeared on the stage and
made long speeches at each other, gesticulating a good deal, and they
generally had a fight before they got through. They were worked by
strings from above, and the illusion was not perfect, for one saw not
only the strings but the brawny hand that manipulated them--and the
actors and actresses all talked in the same voice, too. The audience
stood in front of the theater, and seemed to enjoy the performance
heartily.
When the play was done, a youth in his shirt-sleeves started around with
a small copper saucer to make a collection. I did not know how much to
put in, but thought I would be guided by my predecessors. Unluckily, I
only had two of these, and they did not help me much because they did
not put in anything. I had no Italian money, so I put in a small Swiss
coin worth about ten cents. The youth finished his collection trip and
emptied the result on the stage; he had some very animated talk with
the concealed manager, then he came working his way through the little
crowd--seeking me, I thought. I had a mind to slip away, but concluded
I wouldn't; I would stand my ground, and confront the villainy, whatever
it was. The youth stood before me and held up that Swiss coin, sure
enough, and said something. I did not understand him, but I judged he
was requiring Italian money of me. The crowd gathered close, to listen.
I was irritated, and said--in English, of course:
“I know it's Swiss, but you'll take that or none. I haven't any other.”
He tried to put the coin in my hand, and spoke again. I drew my hand
away, and said:
“NO, sir. I know all about you people. You can't play any of your
fraudful tricks on me. If there is a discount on that coin, I am sorry,
but I am not going to make it good. I noticed that some of the audience
didn't pay you anything at all. You let them go, without a word, but you
come after me because you think I'm a stranger and will put up with
an extortion rather than have a scene. But you are mistaken this
time--you'll take that Swiss money or none.”
The youth stood there with the coin in his fingers, nonplused and
bewildered; of course he had not understood a word. An English-speaking
Italian spoke up, now, and said:
“You are misunderstanding the boy. He does not mean any harm. He did
not suppose you gave him so much money purposely, so he hurried back to
return you the coin lest you might get away before you discovered your
mistake. Take it, and give him a penny--that will make everything smooth
again.”
I probably blushed, then, for there was occasion. Through the
interpreter I begged the boy's pardon, but I nobly refused to take back
the ten cents. I said I was accustomed to squandering large sums in that
way--it was the kind of person I was. Then I retired to make a note to
the effect that in Italy persons connected with the drama do not cheat.
The episode with the showman reminds me of a dark chapter in my history.
I once robbed an aged and blind beggar-woman of four dollars--in a
church. It happened this way. When I was out with the Innocents Abroad,
the ship stopped in the Russian port of Odessa and I went ashore, with
others, to view the town. I got separated from the rest, and wandered
about alone, until late in the afternoon, when I entered a Greek church
to see what it was like. When I was ready to leave, I observed two
wrinkled old women standing stiffly upright against the inner wall, near
the door, with their brown palms open to receive alms. I contributed to
the nearer one, and passed out. I had gone fifty yards, perhaps, when it
occurred to me that I must remain ashore all night, as I had heard that
the ship's business would carry her away at four o'clock and keep her
away until morning. It was a little after four now. I had come ashore
with only two pieces of money, both about the same size, but differing
largely in value--one was a French gold piece worth four dollars, the
other a Turkish coin worth two cents and a half. With a sudden and
horrified misgiving, I put my hand in my pocket, now, and sure enough, I
fetched out that Turkish penny!
Here was a situation. A hotel would require pay in advance --I must walk
the street all night, and perhaps be arrested as a suspicious character.
There was but one way out of the difficulty--I flew back to the church,
and softly entered. There stood the old woman yet, and in the palm of
the nearest one still lay my gold piece. I was grateful. I crept
close, feeling unspeakably mean; I got my Turkish penny ready, and was
extending a trembling hand to make the nefarious exchange, when I heard
a cough behind me. I jumped back as if I had been accused, and stood
quaking while a worshiper entered and passed up the aisle.
I was there a year trying to steal that money; that is, it seemed a
year, though, of course, it must have been much less. The worshipers
went and came; there were hardly ever three in the church at once, but
there was always one or more. Every time I tried to commit my crime
somebody came in or somebody started out, and I was prevented; but at
last my opportunity came; for one moment there was nobody in the church
but the two beggar-women and me. I whipped the gold piece out of the
poor old pauper's palm and dropped my Turkish penny in its place. Poor
old thing, she murmured her thanks--they smote me to the heart. Then I
sped away in a guilty hurry, and even when I was a mile from the church
I was still glancing back, every moment, to see if I was being pursued.
That experience has been of priceless value and benefit to me; for I
resolved then, that as long as I lived I would never again rob a blind
beggar-woman in a church; and I have always kept my word. The most
permanent lessons in morals are those which come, not of booky teaching,
but of experience.
CHAPTER XLVIII
[Beauty of Women--and of Old Masters]
In Milan we spent most of our time in the vast and beautiful Arcade or
Gallery, or whatever it is called. Blocks of tall new buildings of the
most sumptuous sort, rich with decoration and graced with statues, the
streets between these blocks roofed over with glass at a great height,
the pavements all of smooth and variegated marble, arranged in tasteful
patterns--little tables all over these marble streets, people sitting
at them, eating, drinking, or smoking--crowds of other people strolling
by--such is the Arcade. I should like to live in it all the time. The
windows of the sumptuous restaurants stand open, and one breakfasts
there and enjoys the passing show.
We wandered all over the town, enjoying whatever was going on in the
streets. We took one omnibus ride, and as I did not speak Italian and
could not ask the price, I held out some copper coins to the conductor,
and he took two. Then he went and got his tariff card and showed me
that he had taken only the right sum. So I made a note--Italian omnibus
conductors do not cheat.
Near the Cathedral I saw another instance of probity. An old man was
peddling dolls and toy fans. Two small American children bought fans,
and one gave the old man a franc and three copper coins, and both
started away; but they were called back, and the franc and one of the
coppers were restored to them. Hence it is plain that in Italy, parties
connected with the drama and the omnibus and the toy interests do not
cheat.
The stocks of goods in the shops were not extensive, generally. In the
vestibule of what seemed to be a clothing store, we saw eight or ten
wooden dummies grouped together, clothed in woolen business suits and
each marked with its price. One suit was marked forty-five francs--nine
dollars. Harris stepped in and said he wanted a suit like that. Nothing
easier: the old merchant dragged in the dummy, brushed him off with a
broom, stripped him, and shipped the clothes to the hotel. He said he
did not keep two suits of the same kind in stock, but manufactured a
second when it was needed to reclothe the dummy.
In another quarter we found six Italians engaged in a violent quarrel.
They danced fiercely about, gesticulating with their heads, their arms,
their legs, their whole bodies; they would rush forward occasionally
with a sudden access of passion and shake their fists in each other's
very faces. We lost half an hour there, waiting to help cord up the
dead, but they finally embraced each other affectionately, and the
trouble was over. The episode was interesting, but we could not have
afforded all the time to it if we had known nothing was going to come of
it but a reconciliation. Note made--in Italy, people who quarrel cheat
the spectator.
We had another disappointment afterward. We approached a deeply
interested crowd, and in the midst of it found a fellow wildly
chattering and gesticulating over a box on the ground which was covered
with a piece of old blanket. Every little while he would bend down
and take hold of the edge of the blanket with the extreme tips of his
fingertips, as if to show there was no deception--chattering away all
the while--but always, just as I was expecting to see a wonder feat of
legerdemain, he would let go the blanket and rise to explain further.
However, at last he uncovered the box and got out a spoon with a liquid
in it, and held it fair and frankly around, for people to see that it
was all right and he was taking no advantage--his chatter became more
excited than ever. I supposed he was going to set fire to the liquid
and swallow it, so I was greatly wrought up and interested. I got a cent
ready in one hand and a florin in the other, intending to give him the
former if he survived and the latter if he killed himself--for his loss
would be my gain in a literary way, and I was willing to pay a fair
price for the item --but this impostor ended his intensely moving
performance by simply adding some powder to the liquid and polishing
the spoon! Then he held it aloft, and he could not have shown a wilder
exultation if he had achieved an immortal miracle. The crowd applauded
in a gratified way, and it seemed to me that history speaks the truth
when it says these children of the south are easily entertained.
We spent an impressive hour in the noble cathedral, where long shafts
of tinted light were cleaving through the solemn dimness from the lofty
windows and falling on a pillar here, a picture there, and a kneeling
worshiper yonder. The organ was muttering, censers were swinging,
candles were glinting on the distant altar and robed priests were filing
silently past them; the scene was one to sweep all frivolous thoughts
away and steep the soul in a holy calm. A trim young American lady
paused a yard or two from me, fixed her eyes on the mellow sparks
flecking the far-off altar, bent her head reverently a moment, then
straightened up, kicked her train into the air with her heel, caught it
deftly in her hand, and marched briskly out.
We visited the picture-galleries and the other regulation “sights” of
Milan--not because I wanted to write about them again, but to see if
I had learned anything in twelve years. I afterward visited the great
galleries of Rome and Florence for the same purpose. I found I had
learned one thing. When I wrote about the Old Masters before, I said
the copies were better than the originals. That was a mistake of large
dimensions. The Old Masters were still unpleasing to me, but they were
truly divine contrasted with the copies. The copy is to the original as
the pallid, smart, inane new wax-work group is to the vigorous, earnest,
dignified group of living men and women whom it professes to duplicate.
There is a mellow richness, a subdued color, in the old pictures, which
is to the eye what muffled and mellowed sound is to the ear. That is the
merit which is most loudly praised in the old picture, and is the one
which the copy most conspicuously lacks, and which the copyist must not
hope to compass. It was generally conceded by the artists with whom I
talked, that that subdued splendor, that mellow richness, is imparted
to the picture by AGE. Then why should we worship the Old Master for it,
who didn't impart it, instead of worshiping Old Time, who did? Perhaps
the picture was a clanging bell, until Time muffled it and sweetened it.
In conversation with an artist in Venice, I asked: “What is it that
people see in the Old Masters? I have been in the Doge's palace and I
saw several acres of very bad drawing, very bad perspective, and very
incorrect proportions. Paul Veronese's dogs to not resemble dogs; all
the horses look like bladders on legs; one man had a RIGHT leg on
the left side of his body; in the large picture where the Emperor
(Barbarossa?) is prostrate before the Pope, there are three men in the
foreground who are over thirty feet high, if one may judge by the size
of a kneeling little boy in the center of the foreground; and according
to the same scale, the Pope is seven feet high and the Doge is a
shriveled dwarf of four feet.”
The artist said:
“Yes, the Old Masters often drew badly; they did not care much for truth
and exactness in minor details; but after all, in spite of bad drawing,
bad perspective, bad proportions, and a choice of subjects which no
longer appeal to people as strongly as they did three hundred years ago,
there is a SOMETHING about their pictures which is divine--a something
which is above and beyond the art of any epoch since--a something which
would be the despair of artists but that they never hope or expect to
attain it, and therefore do not worry about it.”
That is what he said--and he said what he believed; and not only
believed, but felt.
Reasoning--especially reasoning, without technical knowledge--must be
put aside, in cases of this kind. It cannot assist the inquirer. It
will lead him, in the most logical progression, to what, in the eyes of
artists, would be a most illogical conclusion. Thus: bad drawing, bad
proportion, bad perspective, indifference to truthful detail, color
which gets its merit from time, and not from the artist--these things
constitute the Old Master; conclusion, the Old Master was a bad painter,
the Old Master was not an Old Master at all, but an Old Apprentice. Your
friend the artist will grant your premises, but deny your conclusion;
he will maintain that notwithstanding this formidable list of confessed
defects, there is still a something that is divine and unapproachable
about the Old Master, and that there is no arguing the fact away by any
system of reasoning whatsoever.
I can believe that. There are women who have an indefinable charm in
their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold
stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would
fail. He would say of one of these women: This chin is too short, this
nose is too long, this forehead is too high, this hair is too red, this
complexion is too pallid, the perspective of the entire composition
is incorrect; conclusion, the woman is not beautiful. But her nearest
friend might say, and say truly, “Your premises are right, your logic
is faultless, but your conclusion is wrong, nevertheless; she is an Old
Master--she is beautiful, but only to such as know her; it is a beauty
which cannot be formulated, but it is there, just the same.”
I found more pleasure in contemplating the Old Masters this time than
I did when I was in Europe in former years, but still it was a calm
pleasure; there was nothing overheated about it. When I was in Venice
before, I think I found no picture which stirred me much, but this time
there were two which enticed me to the Doge's palace day after day, and
kept me there hours at a time. One of these was Tintoretto's three-acre
picture in the Great Council Chamber. When I saw it twelve years ago
I was not strongly attracted to it--the guide told me it was an
insurrection in heaven--but this was an error.
The movement of this great work is very fine. There are ten thousand
figures, and they are all doing something. There is a wonderful “go”
to the whole composition. Some of the figures are driving headlong
downward, with clasped hands, others are swimming through the
cloud-shoals--some on their faces, some on their backs--great
processions of bishops, martyrs, and angels are pouring swiftly
centerward from various outlying directions--everywhere is enthusiastic
joy, there is rushing movement everywhere. There are fifteen or twenty
figures scattered here and there, with books, but they cannot keep their
attention on their reading--they offer the books to others, but no one
wishes to read, now. The Lion of St. Mark is there with his book; St.
Mark is there with his pen uplifted; he and the Lion are looking
each other earnestly in the face, disputing about the way to spell a
word--the Lion looks up in rapt admiration while St. Mark spells. This
is wonderfully interpreted by the artist. It is the master-stroke of
this imcomparable painting.
I visited the place daily, and never grew tired of looking at that
grand picture. As I have intimated, the movement is almost unimaginably
vigorous; the figures are singing, hosannahing, and many are blowing
trumpets. So vividly is noise suggested, that spectators who become
absorbed in the picture almost always fall to shouting comments in each
other's ears, making ear-trumpets of their curved hands, fearing they
may not otherwise be heard. One often sees a tourist, with the eloquent
tears pouring down his cheeks, funnel his hands at his wife's ear, and
hears him roar through them, “OH, TO BE THERE AND AT REST!”
None but the supremely great in art can produce effects like these with
the silent brush.
Twelve years ago I could not have appreciated this picture. One year ago
I could not have appreciated it. My study of Art in Heidelberg has been
a noble education to me. All that I am today in Art, I owe to that.
The other great work which fascinated me was Bassano's immortal Hair
Trunk. This is in the Chamber of the Council of Ten. It is in one of
the three forty-foot pictures which decorate the walls of the room.
The composition of this picture is beyond praise. The Hair Trunk is not
hurled at the stranger's head--so to speak--as the chief feature of an
immortal work so often is; no, it is carefully guarded from prominence,
it is subordinated, it is restrained, it is most deftly and cleverly
held in reserve, it is most cautiously and ingeniously led up to, by the
master, and consequently when the spectator reaches it at last, he
is taken unawares, he is unprepared, and it bursts upon him with a
stupefying surprise.
One is lost in wonder at all the thought and care which this elaborate
planning must have cost. A general glance at the picture could never
suggest that there was a hair trunk in it; the Hair Trunk is not
mentioned in the title even--which is, “Pope Alexander III. and the Doge
Ziani, the Conqueror of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa”; you see,
the title is actually utilized to help divert attention from the Trunk;
thus, as I say, nothing suggests the presence of the Trunk, by any hint,
yet everything studiedly leads up to it, step by step. Let us examine
into this, and observe the exquisitely artful artlessness of the plan.
At the extreme left end of the picture are a couple of women, one of
them with a child looking over her shoulder at a wounded man sitting
with bandaged head on the ground. These people seem needless, but no,
they are there for a purpose; one cannot look at them without seeing
the gorgeous procession of grandees, bishops, halberdiers, and
banner-bearers which is passing along behind them; one cannot see the
procession without feeling the curiosity to follow it and learn whither
it is going; it leads him to the Pope, in the center of the picture, who
is talking with the bonnetless Doge--talking tranquilly, too, although
within twelve feet of them a man is beating a drum, and not far from the
drummer two persons are blowing horns, and many horsemen are plunging
and rioting about--indeed, twenty-two feet of this great work is all a
deep and happy holiday serenity and Sunday-school procession, and then
we come suddenly upon eleven and one-half feet of turmoil and racket and
insubordination. This latter state of things is not an accident, it has
its purpose. But for it, one would linger upon the Pope and the Doge,
thinking them to be the motive and supreme feature of the picture;
whereas one is drawn along, almost unconsciously, to see what the
trouble is about. Now at the very END of this riot, within four feet of
the end of the picture, and full thirty-six feet from the beginning
of it, the Hair Trunk bursts with an electrifying suddenness upon the
spectator, in all its matchless perfection, and the great master's
triumph is sweeping and complete. From that moment no other thing in
those forty feet of canvas has any charm; one sees the Hair Trunk, and
the Hair Trunk only--and to see it is to worship it. Bassano even placed
objects in the immediate vicinity of the Supreme Feature whose pretended
purpose was to divert attention from it yet a little longer and thus
delay and augment the surprise; for instance, to the right of it he has
placed a stooping man with a cap so red that it is sure to hold the eye
for a moment--to the left of it, some six feet away, he has placed a
red-coated man on an inflated horse, and that coat plucks your eye
to that locality the next moment--then, between the Trunk and the red
horseman he has intruded a man, naked to his waist, who is carrying
a fancy flour-sack on the middle of his back instead of on his
shoulder--this admirable feat interests you, of course--keeps you at
bay a little longer, like a sock or a jacket thrown to the pursuing
wolf--but at last, in spite of all distractions and detentions, the eye
of even the most dull and heedless spectator is sure to fall upon the
World's Masterpiece, and in that moment he totters to his chair or leans
upon his guide for support.
Descriptions of such a work as this must necessarily be imperfect, yet
they are of value. The top of the Trunk is arched; the arch is a perfect
half-circle, in the Roman style of architecture, for in the then
rapid decadence of Greek art, the rising influence of Rome was already
beginning to be felt in the art of the Republic. The Trunk is bound or
bordered with leather all around where the lid joins the main body. Many
critics consider this leather too cold in tone; but I consider this its
highest merit, since it was evidently made so to emphasize by contrast
the impassioned fervor of the hasp. The highlights in this part of the
work are cleverly managed, the MOTIF is admirably subordinated to the
ground tints, and the technique is very fine. The brass nail-heads are
in the purest style of the early Renaissance. The strokes, here, are
very firm and bold--every nail-head is a portrait. The handle on the
end of the Trunk has evidently been retouched--I think, with a piece of
chalk--but one can still see the inspiration of the Old Master in the
tranquil, almost too tranquil, hang of it. The hair of this Trunk is
REAL hair--so to speak--white in patches, brown in patches. The details
are finely worked out; the repose proper to hair in a recumbent and
inactive attitude is charmingly expressed. There is a feeling about this
part of the work which lifts it to the highest altitudes of art; the
sense of sordid realism vanishes away--one recognizes that there is SOUL
here.
View this Trunk as you will, it is a gem, it is a marvel, it is a
miracle. Some of the effects are very daring, approaching even to
the boldest flights of the rococo, the sirocco, and the Byzantine
schools--yet the master's hand never falters--it moves on, calm,
majestic, confident--and, with that art which conceals art, it finally
casts over the TOUT ENSEMBLE, by mysterious methods of its own, a subtle
something which refines, subdues, etherealizes the arid components and
endures them with the deep charm and gracious witchery of poesy.
Among the art-treasures of Europe there are pictures which approach the
Hair Trunk--there are two which may be said to equal it, possibly--but
there is none that surpasses it. So perfect is the Hair Trunk that it
moves even persons who ordinarily have no feeling for art. When an Erie
baggagemaster saw it two years ago, he could hardly keep from checking
it; and once when a customs inspector was brought into its presence,
he gazed upon it in silent rapture for some moments, then slowly and
unconsciously placed one hand behind him with the palm uppermost, and
got out his chalk with the other. These facts speak for themselves.
CHAPTER XLIX
[Hanged with a Golden Rope]
One lingers about the Cathedral a good deal, in Venice. There is a
strong fascination about it--partly because it is so old, and partly
because it is so ugly. Too many of the world's famous buildings fail of
one chief virtue--harmony; they are made up of a methodless mixture
of the ugly and the beautiful; this is bad; it is confusing, it is
unrestful. One has a sense of uneasiness, of distress, without knowing
why. But one is calm before St. Mark's, one is calm within it, one
would be calm on top of it, calm in the cellar; for its details are
masterfully ugly, no misplaced and impertinent beauties are intruded
anywhere; and the consequent result is a grand harmonious whole, of
soothing, entrancing, tranquilizing, soul-satisfying ugliness. One's
admiration of a perfect thing always grows, never declines; and this is
the surest evidence to him that it IS perfect. St. Mark's is perfect. To
me it soon grew to be so nobly, so augustly ugly, that it was difficult
to stay away from it, even for a little while. Every time its squat
domes disappeared from my view, I had a despondent feeling; whenever
they reappeared, I felt an honest rapture--I have not known any happier
hours than those I daily spent in front of Florian's, looking across the
Great Square at it. Propped on its long row of low thick-legged columns,
its back knobbed with domes, it seemed like a vast warty bug taking a
meditative walk.
St. Mark's is not the oldest building in the world, of course, but it
seems the oldest, and looks the oldest--especially inside.
When the ancient mosaics in its walls become damaged, they are repaired
but not altered; the grotesque old pattern is preserved. Antiquity has
a charm of its own, and to smarten it up would only damage it. One day
I was sitting on a red marble bench in the vestibule looking up at an
ancient piece of apprentice-work, in mosaic, illustrative of the command
to “multiply and replenish the earth.” The Cathedral itself had seemed
very old; but this picture was illustrating a period in history which
made the building seem young by comparison. But I presently found an
antique which was older than either the battered Cathedral or the date
assigned to the piece of history; it was a spiral-shaped fossil as large
as the crown of a hat; it was embedded in the marble bench, and had
been sat upon by tourists until it was worn smooth. Contrasted with the
inconceivable antiquity of this modest fossil, those other things were
flippantly modern--jejune--mere matters of day-before-yesterday. The
sense of the oldness of the Cathedral vanished away under the influence
of this truly venerable presence.
St. Mark's is monumental; it is an imperishable remembrancer of the
profound and simple piety of the Middle Ages. Whoever could ravish a
column from a pagan temple, did it and contributed his swag to this
Christian one. So this fane is upheld by several hundred acquisitions
procured in that peculiar way. In our day it would be immoral to go on
the highway to get bricks for a church, but it was no sin in the old
times. St. Mark's was itself the victim of a curious robbery once. The
thing is set down in the history of Venice, but it might be smuggled
into the Arabian Nights and not seem out of place there:
Nearly four hundred and fifty years ago, a Candian named Stammato, in
the suite of a prince of the house of Este, was allowed to view the
riches of St. Mark's. His sinful eye was dazzled and he hid himself
behind an altar, with an evil purpose in his heart, but a priest
discovered him and turned him out. Afterward he got in again--by false
keys, this time. He went there, night after night, and worked hard and
patiently, all alone, overcoming difficulty after difficulty with his
toil, and at last succeeded in removing a great brick of the marble
paneling which walled the lower part of the treasury; this block he
fixed so that he could take it out and put it in at will. After
that, for weeks, he spent all his midnights in his magnificent mine,
inspecting it in security, gloating over its marvels at his leisure, and
always slipping back to his obscure lodgings before dawn, with a
duke's ransom under his cloak. He did not need to grab, haphazard, and
run--there was no hurry. He could make deliberate and well-considered
selections; he could consult his esthetic tastes. One comprehends how
undisturbed he was, and how safe from any danger of interruption,
when it is stated that he even carried off a unicorn's horn--a mere
curiosity--which would not pass through the egress entire, but had to
be sawn in two--a bit of work which cost him hours of tedious labor. He
continued to store up his treasures at home until his occupation lost
the charm of novelty and became monotonous; then he ceased from it,
contented. Well he might be; for his collection, raised to modern
values, represented nearly fifty million dollars!
He could have gone home much the richest citizen of his country, and
it might have been years before the plunder was missed; but he was
human--he could not enjoy his delight alone, he must have somebody to
talk about it with. So he exacted a solemn oath from a Candian noble
named Crioni, then led him to his lodgings and nearly took his breath
away with a sight of his glittering hoard. He detected a look in his
friend's face which excited his suspicion, and was about to slip a
stiletto into him when Crioni saved himself by explaining that that look
was only an expression of supreme and happy astonishment. Stammato
made Crioni a present of one of the state's principal jewels--a huge
carbuncle, which afterward figured in the Ducal cap of state--and the
pair parted. Crioni went at once to the palace, denounced the criminal,
and handed over the carbuncle as evidence. Stammato was arrested, tried,
and condemned, with the old-time Venetian promptness. He was hanged
between the two great columns in the Piazza--with a gilded rope, out of
compliment to his love of gold, perhaps. He got no good of his booty at
all--it was ALL recovered.
In Venice we had a luxury which very seldom fell to our lot on the
continent--a home dinner with a private family. If one could always stop
with private families, when traveling, Europe would have a charm which
it now lacks. As it is, one must live in the hotels, of course, and that
is a sorrowful business. A man accustomed to American food and American
domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe; but I
think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.
He would have to do without his accustomed morning meal. That is too
formidable a change altogether; he would necessarily suffer from it. He
could get the shadow, the sham, the base counterfeit of that meal; but
it would do him no good, and money could not buy the reality.
To particularize: the average American's simplest and commonest form of
breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak; well, in Europe, coffee is
an unknown beverage. You can get what the European hotel-keeper thinks
is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles
holiness. It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff, and
almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel. The
milk used for it is what the French call “Christian” milk--milk which
has been baptized.
After a few months' acquaintance with European “coffee,” one's mind
weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich
beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it,
is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed.
Next comes the European bread--fair enough, good enough, after a
fashion, but cold; cold and tough, and unsympathetic; and never any
change, never any variety--always the same tiresome thing.
Next, the butter--the sham and tasteless butter; no salt in it, and made
of goodness knows what.
Then there is the beefsteak. They have it in Europe, but they don't know
how to cook it. Neither will they cut it right. It comes on the table in
a small, round pewter platter. It lies in the center of this platter,
in a bordering bed of grease-soaked potatoes; it is the size, shape, and
thickness of a man's hand with the thumb and fingers cut off. It is a
little overdone, is rather dry, it tastes pretty insipidly, it rouses no
enthusiasm.
Imagine a poor exile contemplating that inert thing; and imagine an
angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better land and setting before him
a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering
from the griddle; dusted with a fragrant pepper; enriched with
little melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness and
genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining
the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender,
yellowish fat gracing an outlying district of this ample county of
beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the
tenderloin still in its place; and imagine that the angel also adds a
great cup of American home-made coffee, with a cream a-froth on top,
some real butter, firm and yellow and fresh, some smoking hot-biscuits,
a plate of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup--could words
describe the gratitude of this exile?
The European dinner is better than the European breakfast, but it has
its faults and inferiorities; it does not satisfy. He comes to the table
eager and hungry; he swallows his soup--there is an undefinable
lack about it somewhere; thinks the fish is going to be the thing he
wants--eats it and isn't sure; thinks the next dish is perhaps the one
that will hit the hungry place--tries it, and is conscious that there
was a something wanting about it, also. And thus he goes on, from dish
to dish, like a boy after a butterfly which just misses getting caught
every time it alights, but somehow doesn't get caught after all; and at
the end the exile and the boy have fared about alike; the one is full,
but grievously unsatisfied, the other has had plenty of exercise, plenty
of interest, and a fine lot of hopes, but he hasn't got any butterfly.
There is here and there an American who will say he can remember rising
from a European table d'hôte perfectly satisfied; but we must not
overlook the fact that there is also here and there an American who will
lie.
The number of dishes is sufficient; but then it is such a monotonous
variety of UNSTRIKING dishes. It is an inane dead-level of
“fair-to-middling.” There is nothing to ACCENT it. Perhaps if the roast
of mutton or of beef--a big, generous one--were brought on the table and
carved in full view of the client, that might give the right sense of
earnestness and reality to the thing; but they don't do that, they pass
the sliced meat around on a dish, and so you are perfectly calm, it does
not stir you in the least. Now a vast roast turkey, stretched on the
broad of his back, with his heels in the air and the rich juices oozing
from his fat sides ... but I may as well stop there, for they would not
know how to cook him. They can't even cook a chicken respectably; and as
for carving it, they do that with a hatchet.
This is about the customary table d'hôte bill in summer:
Soup (characterless).
Fish--sole, salmon, or whiting--usually tolerably good.
Roast--mutton or beef--tasteless--and some last year's potatoes.
A pate, or some other made dish--usually good--“considering.”
One vegetable--brought on in state, and all alone--usually insipid
lentils, or string-beans, or indifferent asparagus.
Roast chicken, as tasteless as paper.
Lettuce-salad--tolerably good.
Decayed strawberries or cherries.
Sometimes the apricots and figs are fresh, but this is no advantage,
as these fruits are of no account anyway.
The grapes are generally good, and sometimes there is a tolerably
good peach, by mistake.
The variations of the above bill are trifling. After a fortnight one
discovers that the variations are only apparent, not real; in the third
week you get what you had the first, and in the fourth the week you get
what you had the second. Three or four months of this weary sameness
will kill the robustest appetite.
It has now been many months, at the present writing, since I have had
a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one--a modest, private affair,
all to myself. I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill
of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me, and be hot
when I arrive--as follows:
Radishes. Baked apples, with cream
Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs.
American coffee, with real cream.
American butter.
Fried chicken, Southern style.
Porter-house steak.
Saratoga potatoes.
Broiled chicken, American style.
Hot biscuits, Southern style.
Hot wheat-bread, Southern style.
Hot buckwheat cakes.
American toast. Clear maple syrup.
Virginia bacon, broiled.
Blue points, on the half shell.
Cherry-stone clams.
San Francisco mussels, steamed.
Oyster soup. Clam Soup.
Philadelphia Terapin soup.
Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style.
Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad.
Baltimore perch.
Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas.
Lake trout, from Tahoe.
Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans.
Black bass from the Mississippi.
American roast beef.
Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style.
Cranberry sauce. Celery.
Roast wild turkey. Woodcock.
Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore.
Prairie liens, from Illinois.
Missouri partridges, broiled.
'Possum. Coon.
Boston bacon and beans.
Bacon and greens, Southern style.
Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips.
Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus.
Butter beans. Sweet potatoes.
Lettuce. Succotash. String beans.
Mashed potatoes. Catsup.
Boiled potatoes, in their skins.
New potatoes, minus the skins.
Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot.
Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes.
Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper.
Green corn, on the ear.
Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style.
Hot hoe-cake, Southern style.
Hot egg-bread, Southern style.
Hot light-bread, Southern style.
Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk.
Apple dumplings, with real cream.
Apple pie. Apple fritters.
Apple puffs, Southern style.
Peach cobbler, Southern style
Peach pie. American mince pie.
Pumpkin pie. Squash pie.
All sorts of American pastry.
Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are
not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way.
Ice-water--not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere
and capable refrigerator.
Americans intending to spend a year or so in European hotels will
do well to copy this bill and carry it along. They will find it an
excellent thing to get up an appetite with, in the dispiriting presence
of the squalid table d'hôte.
Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can
enjoy theirs. It is not strange; for tastes are made, not born. I might
glorify my bill of fare until I was tired; but after all, the Scotchman
would shake his head and say, “Where's your haggis?” and the Fijian
would sigh and say, “Where's your missionary?”
I have a neat talent in matters pertaining to nourishment. This has
met with professional recognition. I have often furnished recipes for
cook-books. Here are some designs for pies and things, which I recently
prepared for a friend's projected cook-book, but as I forgot to furnish
diagrams and perspectives, they had to be left out, of course.
RECIPE FOR AN ASH-CAKE Take a lot of water and add to it a lot of coarse
Indian-meal and about a quarter of a lot of salt. Mix well together,
knead into the form of a “pone,” and let the pone stand awhile--not on
its edge, but the other way. Rake away a place among the embers, lay it
there, and cover it an inch deep with hot ashes. When it is done, remove
it; blow off all the ashes but one layer; butter that one and eat.
N.B.--No household should ever be without this talisman. It has been
noticed that tramps never return for another ash-cake. ----------
RECIPE FOR NEW ENGLISH PIE To make this excellent breakfast dish,
proceed as follows: Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of
flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough. Work this into the form of
a disk, with the edges turned up some three-fourths of an inch. Toughen
and kiln-dry in a couple days in a mild but unvarying temperature.
Construct a cover for this redoubt in the same way and of the same
material. Fill with stewed dried apples; aggravate with cloves,
lemon-peel, and slabs of citron; add two portions of New Orleans sugars,
then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve
cold at breakfast and invite your enemy. ----------
RECIPE FOR GERMAN COFFEE Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil;
rub a chicory berry against a coffee berry, then convey the former into
the water. Continue the boiling and evaporation until the intensity of
the flavor and aroma of the coffee and chicory has been diminished to
a proper degree; then set aside to cool. Now unharness the remains of a
once cow from the plow, insert them in a hydraulic press, and when you
shall have acquired a teaspoon of that pale-blue juice which a German
superstition regards as milk, modify the malignity of its strength in a
bucket of tepid water and ring up the breakfast. Mix the beverage in a
cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head
to guard against over-excitement.
TO CARVE FOWLS IN THE GERMAN FASHION Use a club, and avoid the joints.