← catalogue

Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete

by John Addington Symonds · English · Gutenberg #18893 · 2,061,102 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete

Author: John Addington Symonds


        
Release date: July 22, 2006 [eBook #18893]
                Most recently updated: October 17, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18893

Credits: Turgut Dincer, Ted Garvin, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE, COMPLETE ***

[Illustration]




Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece

by John Addington Symonds


Contents

 VOLUME I.
 THE LOVE OF THE ALPS
 WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS
 BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN
 OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE
 THE CORNICE
 AJACCIO
 MONTE GENEROSO
 LOMBARD VIGNETTES
 COMO AND IL MEDEGHINO
 BERGAMO AND BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI
 CREMA AND THE CRUCIFIX
 CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE
 A VENETIAN MEDLEY
 THE GONDOLIER'S WEDDING
 A CINQUE CENTO BRUTUS
 TWO DRAMATISTS OF THE LAST CENTURY

 VOLUME II.
 RAVENNA
 RIMINI
 MAY IN UMBRIA
 THE PALACE OF URBINO
 VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI
 AUTUMN WANDERINGS
 PARMA
 CANOSSA
 FORNOVO
 FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI
 THE DEBT OF ENGLISH TO ITALIAN LITERATURE
 POPULAR SONGS OF TUSCANY
 POPULAR ITALIAN POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE
 THE ‘ORFEO’ OF POLIZIANO
 EIGHT SONNETS OF PETRARCH

 VOLUME III.
 FOLGORE DA SAN GEMIGNANO
 THOUGHTS IN ITALY ABOUT CHRISTMAS
 SIENA
 MONTE OLIVETO
 MONTEPULCIANO
 PERUGIA
 ORVIETO
 LUCRETIUS
 ANTINOUS
 SPRING WANDERINGS
 AMALFI, PÆSTUM, CAPRI
 ETNA
 PALERMO
 SYRACUSE AND GIRGENTI
 ATHENS
 INDEX FOR ALL THREE VOLUMES




PREFATORY NOTE


In preparing this new edition of the late J.A. Symonds's three volumes
of travels, 'Sketches in Italy and Greece,' 'Sketches and Studies in
Italy,' and 'Italian Byways,' nothing has been changed except the order
of the Essays. For the convenience of travellers a topographical
arrangement has been adopted. This implied a new title to cover the
contents of all three volumes, and 'Sketches and Studies in Italy and
Greece' has been chosen as departing least from the author's own
phraseology.

HORATIO F. BROWN.

Venice: _June_ 1898.




SKETCHES AND STUDIES
IN
ITALY AND GREECE




VOLUME I.




THE LOVE OF THE ALPS[1]


Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving on
the outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day's journey
from Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travel to
Basle by night. He courts the heat of the sun and the monotony of
French plains,—their sluggish streams and never-ending poplar trees—for
the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach to the great
Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is about Mulhausen
that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden
into rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams; the green
Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin to tuft the
slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has set, the stars come
2out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights; and he feels—yes,
indeed, there is now no mistake—the well-known, well-loved magical
fresh air, that never fails to blow from snowy mountains and meadows
watered by perennial streams. The last hour is one of exquisite
enjoyment, and when he reaches Basle, he scarcely sleeps all night for
hearing the swift Rhine beneath the balconies, and knowing that the
moon is shining on its waters, through the town, beneath the bridges,
between pasture-lands and copses, up the still mountain-girdled valleys
to the ice-caves where the water springs. There is nothing in all
experience of travelling like this. We may greet the Mediterranean at
Marseilles with enthusiasm; on entering Rome by the Porta del Popolo,
we may reflect with pride that we have reached the goal of our
pilgrimage, and are at last among world-shaking memories. But neither
Rome nor the Riviera wins our hearts like Switzerland. We do not lie
awake in London thinking of them; we do not long so intensely, as the
year comes round, to revisit them. Our affection is less a passion than
that which we cherish for Switzerland.

 [1] This Essay was written in 1866, and published in 1867. Reprinting
 it in 1879, after eighteen months spent continuously in one high
 valley of the Grisons, I feel how slight it is. For some amends, I
 take this opportunity of printing at the end of it a description of
 Davos in winter.

Why, then, is this? What, after all, is the love of the Alps, and when
and where did it begin? It is easier to ask these questions than to
answer them. The classic nations hated mountains. Greek and Roman poets
talk of them with disgust and dread. Nothing could have been more
depressing to a courtier of Augustus than residence at Aosta, even
though he found his theatres and triumphal arches there. Wherever
classical feeling has predominated, this has been the case. Cellini's
Memoirs, written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well express the
aversion which a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitable
wildernesses of Switzerland.[2] Dryden, in his dedication to 'The
Indian 3Emperor,' says, 'High objects, it is true, attract the sight;
but it looks up with pain on craggy rocks and barren mountains, and
continues not intent on any object which is wanting in shades and green
to entertain it.' Addison and Gray had no better epithets than
'rugged,' 'horrid,' and the like for Alpine landscape. The classic
spirit was adverse to enthusiasm for mere nature. Humanity was too
prominent, and city life absorbed all interests,—not to speak of what
perhaps is the weightiest reason—that solitude, indifferent
accommodation, and imperfect means of travelling, rendered mountainous
countries peculiarly disagreeable. It is impossible to enjoy art or
nature while suffering from fatigue and cold, dreading the attacks of
robbers, and wondering whether you will find food and shelter at the
end of your day's journey. Nor was it different in the Middle Ages.
Then individuals had either no leisure from war or strife with the
elements, or else they devoted themselves to the salvation of their
souls. But when the ideas of the Middle Ages had decayed, when improved
arts of life had freed men from servile subjection to daily needs, when
the bondage of religious tyranny had been thrown off and political
liberty allowed the full development of tastes and instincts, when,
moreover, the classical traditions had lost their power, and courts and
coteries became too narrow for the activity of man,—then suddenly it
was discovered that Nature in herself possessed transcendent charms. It
may seem absurd to class them all together; yet there is no doubt that
the French Revolution, the criticism of the Bible, Pantheistic forms of
religious feeling, landscape-painting, Alpine travelling, and the
poetry of Nature, are all signs of the same movement—of a new
Renaissance. Limitations of every sort have been shaken off during the
last century; all forms have been destroyed, all questions asked. The
classical spirit loved to 4arrange, model, preserve traditions, obey
laws. We are intolerant of everything that is not simple, unbiassed by
prescription, liberal as the wind, and natural as the mountain crags.
We go to feed this spirit of freedom among the Alps. What the virgin
forests of America are to the Americans, the Alps are to us. What there
is in these huge blocks and walls of granite crowned with ice that
fascinates us, it is hard to analyse. Why, seeing that we find them so
attractive, they should have repelled our ancestors of the fourth
generation and all the world before them, is another mystery. We cannot
explain what rapport there is between our human souls and these
inequalities in the surface of the earth which we call Alps. Tennyson
speaks of

Some vague emotion of delight
In gazing up an Alpine height,


and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physical
science has created for natural objects has something to do with it.
Curiosity and the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns, no
cultivated tracts of Europe however beautiful, form such a contrast to
our London life as Switzerland. Then there is the health and joy that
comes from exercise in open air; the senses freshened by good sleep;
the blood quickened by a lighter and rarer atmosphere. Our modes of
life, the breaking down of class privileges, the extension of
education, which contribute to make the individual greater and society
less, render the solitude of mountains refreshing. Facilities of
travelling and improved accommodation leave us free to enjoy the
natural beauty which we seek. Our minds, too, are prepared to
sympathise with the inanimate world; we have learned to look on the
universe as a whole, and ourselves as a part of it, related by close
ties of friendship to all its other members 5Shelley's, Wordsworth's,
Goethe's poetry has taught us this; we are all more or less Pantheists,
worshippers of 'God in Nature,' convinced of the omnipresence of the
informing mind.

 [2] See, however, what is said about Leo Battista Alberti in the
 sketch of Rimini in the second series.

Thus, when we admire the Alps, we are after all but children of the
century. We follow its inspiration blindly; and while we think
ourselves spontaneous in our ecstasy, perform the part for which we
have been trained from childhood by the atmosphere in which we live. It
is this very unconsciousness and universality of the impulse we obey
which makes it hard to analyse. Contemporary history is difficult to
write; to define the spirit of the age in which we live is still more
difficult; to account for 'impressions which owe all their force to
their identity with themselves' is most difficult of all. We must be
content to feel, and not to analyse.

Rousseau has the credit of having invented the love of Nature. Perhaps
he first expressed, in literature, the pleasures of open life among the
mountains, of walking tours, of the '_école buissonnière_,' away from
courts, and schools, and cities, which it is the fashion now to love.
His bourgeois birth and tastes, his peculiar religious and social
views, his intense self-engrossment,—all favoured the development of
Nature-worship. But Rousseau was not alone, nor yet creative, in this
instance. He was but one of the earliest to seize and express a new
idea of growing humanity. For those who seem to be the most original in
their inauguration of periods are only such as have been favourably
placed by birth and education to imbibe the floating creeds of the
whole race. They resemble the first cases of an epidemic, which become
the centres of infection and propagate disease. At the time of
Rousseau's greatness the French people were initiative. In politics, in
literature, in fashions, and in 6philosophy, they had for some time led
the taste of Europe. But the sentiment which first received a clear and
powerful expression in the works of Rousseau, soon declared itself in
the arts and literature of other nations. Goethe, Wordsworth, and the
earlier landscape-painters, proved that Germany and England were not
far behind the French. In England this love of Nature for its own sake
is indigenous, and has at all times been peculiarly characteristic of
our genius. Therefore it is not surprising that our life and literature
and art have been foremost in developing the sentiment of which we are
speaking. Our poets, painters, and prose writers gave the tone to
European thought in this respect. Our travellers in search of the
adventurous and picturesque, our Alpine Club, have made of Switzerland
an English playground.

The greatest period in our history was but a foreshadowing of this. To
return to Nature-worship was but to reassume the habits of the
Elizabethan age, altered indeed by all the changes of religion,
politics, society, and science which the last three centuries have
wrought, yet still, in its original love of free open life among the
fields and woods, and on the sea, the same. Now the French national
genius is classical. It reverts to the age of Louis XIV., and
Rousseauism in their literature is as true an innovation and
parenthesis as Pope-and-Drydenism was in ours. As in the age of the
Reformation, so in this, the German element of the modern character
predominates. During the two centuries from which we have emerged, the
Latin element had the upper hand. Our love of the Alps is a Gothic, a
Teutonic, instinct; sympathetic with all that is vague, infinite, and
insubordinate to rules, at war with all that is defined and systematic
in our genius. This we may perceive in individuals as well as in the
broader aspects of arts and literatures. The classically minded man,
the reader of Latin poets, the lover 7of brilliant conversation, the
frequenter of clubs and drawing-rooms, nice in his personal
requirements, scrupulous in his choice of words, averse to unnecessary
physical exertion, preferring town to country life, _cannot_ deeply
feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will dislike German art, and
however much he may strive to be Catholic in his tastes, will find as
he grows older that his liking for Gothic architecture and modern
painting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing admiration
for Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect of
speculation all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, in respect
of taste all men are either Greek or German.

At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands; the
Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so much
about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our
_cultus_,—a strange reflection, proving how much greater man is than
men, the common reason of the age in which we live than our own
reasons, its constituents and subjects.

Perhaps it is our modern tendency to 'individualism' which makes the
Alps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point—no
claims are made on human sympathies—there is no need to toil in
yoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our own dreams,
and sound the depths of personality without the reproach of
selfishness, without a restless wish to join in action or money-making
or the pursuit of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this
absence of social duties and advantages may be barbarising, even
brutalising. But to men wearied with too much civilisation, and
deafened by the noise of great cities, it is beyond measure refreshing.
Then, again, among the mountains history finds no place. The Alps have
no past nor present nor future. The human beings who live upon their
sides are at odds 8with nature, clinging on for bare existence to the
soil, sheltering themselves beneath protecting rocks from avalanches,
damming up destructive streams, all but annihilated every spring. Man,
who is paramount in the plain, is nothing here. His arts and sciences,
and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty works, and conquests and
decays, demand our whole attention in Italy or Egypt. But here the
mountains, immemorially the same, which were, which are, and which are
to be, present a theatre on which the soul breathes freely and feels
herself alone. Around her on all sides is God, and Nature, who is here
the face of God and not the slave of man. The spirit of the world hath
here not yet grown old. She is as young as on the first day; and the
Alps are a symbol of the self-creating, self-sufficing, self-enjoying
universe which lives for its own ends. For why do the slopes gleam with
flowers, and the hillsides deck themselves with grass, and the
inaccessible ledges of black rock bear their tufts of crimson primroses
and flaunting tiger-lilies? Why, morning after morning, does the red
dawn flush the pinnacles of Monte Rosa above cloud and mist unheeded?
Why does the torrent shout, the avalanche reply in thunder to the music
of the sun, the trees and rocks and meadows cry their 'Holy, Holy,
Holy'? Surely not for us. We are an accident here, and even the few men
whose eyes are fixed habitually upon these things are dead to them—the
peasants do not even know the names of their own flowers, and sigh with
envy when you tell them of the plains of Lincolnshire or Russian
steppes.

But indeed there is something awful in the Alpine elevation above human
things. We do not love Switzerland merely because we associate its
thought with recollections of holidays and joyfulness. Some of the most
solemn moments of life are spent high up above among the mountains, on
the barren tops of rocky passes, where the soul has seemed to hear in
solitude 9a low controlling voice. It is almost necessary for the
development of our deepest affections that some sad and sombre moments
should be interchanged with hours of merriment and elasticity. It is
this variety in the woof of daily life which endears our home to us;
and perhaps none have fully loved the Alps who have not spent some days
of meditation, or it may be of sorrow, among their solitudes. Splendid
scenery, like music, has the power to make 'of grief itself a fiery
chariot for mounting above the sources of grief,' to ennoble and refine
our passions, and to teach us that our lives are merely moments in the
years of the eternal Being. There are many, perhaps, who, within sight
of some great scene among the Alps, upon the height of the Stelvio or
the slopes of Mürren, or at night in the valley of Courmayeur, have
felt themselves raised above cares and doubts and miseries by the mere
recognition of unchangeable magnificence; have found a deep peace in
the sense of their own nothingness. It is not granted to us everyday to
stand upon these pinnacles of rest and faith above the world. But
having once stood there, how can we forget the station? How can we
fail, amid the tumult of our common cares, to feel at times the hush of
that far-off tranquillity? When our life is most commonplace, when we
are ill or weary in city streets, we can remember the clouds upon the
mountains we have seen, the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the
scent of countless flowers. A photograph of Bisson's or of Braun's, the
name of some well-known valley, the picture of some Alpine plant,
rouses the sacred hunger in our souls, and stirs again the faith in
beauty and in rest beyond ourselves which no man can take from us. We
owe a deep debt of gratitude to everything which enables us to rise
above depressing and enslaving circumstances, which brings us nearer in
some way or other to what is eternal in the universe, and which makes
us know 10that, whether we live or die, suffer or enjoy, life and
gladness are still strong in the world. On this account, the proper
attitude of the soul among the Alps is one of silence. It is almost
impossible without a kind of impiety to frame in words the feelings
they inspire. Yet there are some sayings, hallowed by long usage, which
throng the mind through a whole summer's day, and seem in harmony with
its emotions—some portions of the Psalms or lines of greatest poets,
inarticulate hymns of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, waifs and strays not
always apposite, but linked by strong and subtle chains of feeling with
the grandeur of the mountains. This reverential feeling for the Alps is
connected with the Pantheistic form of our religious sentiments to
which I have before alluded. It is a trite remark, that even devout men
of the present generation prefer temples _not_ made with hands to
churches, and worship God in the fields more contentedly than in their
pews. What Mr. Ruskin calls 'the instinctive sense of the divine
presence not formed into distinct belief' lies at the root of our
profound veneration for the nobler aspects of mountain scenery. This
instinctive sense has been very variously expressed by Goethe in
Faust's celebrated confession of faith, by Shelley in the stanzas of
'Adonais,' which begin 'He is made one with nature,' by Wordsworth in
the lines on Tintern Abbey, and lately by Mr. Roden Noel in his noble
poems of Pantheism. It is more or less strongly felt by all who have
recognised the indubitable fact that religious belief is undergoing a
sure process of change from the dogmatic distinctness of the past to
some at present dimly descried creed of the future. Such periods of
transition are of necessity full of discomfort, doubt, and anxiety,
vague, variable, and unsatisfying. The men in whose spirits the
fermentation of the change is felt, who have abandoned their old
moorings, and have not yet 11reached the haven for which they are
steering, cannot but be indistinct and undecided in their faith. The
universe of which they form a part becomes important to them in its
infinite immensity. The principles of beauty, goodness, order and law,
no longer connected in their minds with definite articles of faith,
find symbols in the outer world. They are glad to fly at certain
moments from mankind and its oppressive problems, for which religion no
longer provides a satisfactory solution, to Nature, where they vaguely
localise the spirit that broods over us controlling all our being. To
such men Goethe's hymn is a form of faith, and born of such a mood are
the following far humbler verses:—

At Mürren let the morning lead thee out
    To walk upon the cold and cloven hills,
To hear the congregated mountains shout
    Their pæan of a thousand foaming rills.
Raimented with intolerable light
    The snow-peaks stand above thee, row on row
Arising, each a seraph in his might;
    An organ each of varied stop doth blow.
Heaven's azure dome trembles through all her spheres,
    Feeling that music vibrate; and the sun
Raises his tenor as he upward steers,
    And all the glory-coated mists that run
Below him in the valley, hear his voice,
And cry unto the dewy fields, Rejoice!


There is a profound sympathy between music and fine scenery: they both
affect us in the same way, stirring strong but undefined emotions,
which express themselves in 'idle tears,' or evoking thoughts 'which
lie,' as Wordsworth says, 'too deep for tears,' beyond the reach of any
words. How little we know what multitudes of mingling reminiscences,
held in solution by the mind, and colouring its fancy with the
iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the sentiments 12which
music or which mountains stir! It is the very vagueness, changefulness,
and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which cause their charm;
they harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs and seem to make our
very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious that unrestrained
indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery may tend to destroy
habits of clear thinking, sentimentalise the mind, and render it more
apt to entertain embryonic fancies than to bring ideas to definite
perfection.

If hours of thoughtfulness and seclusion are necessary to the
development of a true love for the Alps, it is no less essential to a
right understanding of their beauty that we should pass some wet and
gloomy days among the mountains. The unclouded sunsets and sunrises
which often follow one another in September in the Alps, have something
terrible. They produce a satiety of splendour, and oppress the mind
with a sense of perpetuity. I remember spending such a season in one of
the Oberland valleys, high up above the pine-trees, in a little châlet.
Morning after morning I awoke to see the sunbeams glittering on the
Eiger and the Jungfrau; noon after noon the snow-fields blazed beneath
a steady fire; evening after evening they shone like beacons in the red
light of the setting sun. Then peak by peak they lost the glow; the
soul passed from them, and they stood pale yet weirdly garish against
the darkened sky. The stars came out, the moon shone, but not a cloud
sailed over the untroubled heavens. Thus day after day for several
weeks there was no change, till I was seized with an overpowering
horror of unbroken calm. I left the valley for a time; and when I
returned to it in wind and rain, I found that the partial veiling of
the mountain heights restored the charm which I had lost and made me
feel once more at home. The landscape takes a graver tone beneath the
mist that hides the higher 13peaks, and comes drifting, creeping,
feeling, through the pines upon their slopes—white, silent, blinding
vapour-wreaths around the sable spires. Sometimes the cloud descends
and blots out everything. Again it lifts a little, showing cottages and
distant Alps beneath its skirts. Then it sweeps over the whole valley
like a veil, just broken here and there above a lonely châlet or a
thread of distant dangling torrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath the mist
are more strange. The torrent seems to have a hoarser voice and grinds
the stones more passionately against its boulders. The cry of shepherds
through the fog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills. The
bleating of penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cowbells,
are mysteriously distant and yet distinct in the dull dead air. Then,
again, how immeasurably high above our heads appear the domes and peaks
of snow revealed through chasms in the drifting cloud; how desolate the
glaciers and the avalanches in gleams of light that struggle through
the mist! There is a leaden glare peculiar to clouds, which makes the
snow and ice more lurid. Not far from the house where I am writing, the
avalanche that swept away the bridge last winter is lying now, dripping
away, dank and dirty, like a rotting whale. I can see it from my
window, green beech-boughs nodding over it, forlorn larches bending
their tattered branches by its side, splinters of broken pine
protruding from its muddy caves, the boulders on its flank, and the
hoarse hungry torrent tossing up its tongues to lick the ragged edge of
snow. Close by, the meadows, spangled with yellow flowers and red and
blue, look even more brilliant than if the sun were shining on them.
Every cup and blade of grass is drinking. But the scene changes; the
mist has turned into rain-clouds, and the steady rain drips down,
incessant, blotting out the view. Then, too, what a joy it is if the
clouds break towards evening with a north wind, and a rainbow in 14the
valley gives promise of a bright to-morrow! We look up to the cliffs
above our heads, and see that they have just been powdered with the
snow that is a sign of better weather.

Such rainy days ought to be spent in places like Seelisberg and Mürren,
at the edge of precipices, in front of mountains, or above a lake. The
cloud-masses crawl and tumble about the valleys like a brood of
dragons; now creeping along the ledges of the rock with sinuous
self-adjustment to its turns and twists; now launching out into the
deep, repelled by battling winds, or driven onward in a coil of twisted
and contorted serpent curls. In the midst of summer these wet seasons
often end in a heavy fall of snow. You wake some morning to see the
meadows which last night were gay with July flowers huddled up in snow
a foot in depth. But fair weather does not tarry long to reappear. You
put on your thickest boots and sally forth to find the great cups of
the gentians full of snow, and to watch the rising of the cloud-wreaths
under the hot sun. Bad dreams or sickly thoughts, dissipated by
returning daylight or a friend's face, do not fly away more rapidly and
pleasantly than those swift glory-coated mists that lose themselves we
know not where in the blue depths of the sky.

In contrast with these rainy days nothing can be more perfect than
clear moonlight nights. There is a terrace upon the roof of the inn at
Courmayeur where one may spend hours in the silent watches, when all
the world has gone to sleep beneath. The Mont Chétif and the Mont de la
Saxe form a gigantic portal not unworthy of the pile that lies beyond.
For Mont Blanc resembles a vast cathedral; its countless spires are
scattered over a mass like that of the Duomo at Milan, rising into one
tower at the end. By night the glaciers glitter in the steady moon;
domes, pinnacles, and buttresses stand 15clear of clouds. Needles of
every height and most fantastic shapes rise from the central ridge,
some solitary, like sharp arrows shot against the sky, some clustering
into sheaves. On every horn of snow and bank of grassy hill stars
sparkle, rising, setting, rolling round through the long silent night.
Moonlight simplifies and softens the landscape. Colours become scarcely
distinguishable, and forms, deprived of half their detail, gain in
majesty and size. The mountains seem greater far by night than
day—higher heights and deeper depths, more snowy pyramids, more
beetling crags, softer meadows, and darker pines. The whole valley is
hushed, but for the torrent and the chirping grasshopper and the
striking of the village clocks. The black tower and the houses of
Courmayeur in the foreground gleam beneath the moon until she reaches
the edge of the Cramont, and then sinks quietly away, once more to
reappear among the pines, then finally to leave the valley dark beneath
the shadow of the mountain's bulk. Meanwhile the heights of snow still
glitter in the steady light: they, too, will soon be dark, until the
dawn breaks, tinging them with rose.

But it is not fair to dwell exclusively upon the more sombre aspect of
Swiss beauty when there are so many lively scenes of which to speak.
The sunlight and the freshness and the flowers of Alpine meadows form
more than half the charm of Switzerland. The other day we walked to a
pasture called the Col de Checruit, high up the valley of Courmayeur,
where the spring was still in its first freshness. Gradually we
climbed, by dusty roads and through hot fields where the grass had just
been mown, beneath the fierce light of the morning sun. Not a breath of
air was stirring, and the heavy pines hung overhead upon their crags,
as if to fence the gorge from every wandering breeze. There is nothing
more oppressive than these scorching sides of narrow rifts, shut in by
woods 16and precipices. But suddenly the valley broadened, the pines
and larches disappeared, and we found ourselves upon a wide green
semicircle of the softest meadows. Little rills of water went rushing
through them, rippling over pebbles, rustling under dock leaves, and
eddying against their wooden barriers. Far and wide 'you scarce could
see the grass for flowers,' while on every side the tinkling of
cow-bells, and the voices of shepherds calling to one another from the
Alps, or singing at their work, were borne across the fields. As we
climbed we came into still fresher pastures, where the snow had
scarcely melted. There the goats and cattle were collected, and the
shepherds sat among them, fondling the kids and calling them by name.
When they called, the creatures came, expecting salt and bread. It was
pretty to see them lying near their masters, playing and butting at
them with their horns, or bleating for the sweet rye-bread. The women
knitted stockings, laughing among themselves, and singing all the
while. As soon as we reached them, they gathered round to talk. An old
herdsman, who was clearly the patriarch of this Arcadia, asked us many
questions in a slow deliberate voice. We told him who we were, and
tried to interest him in the cattle-plague, which he appeared to regard
as an evil very unreal and far away—like the murrain upon Pharaoh's
herds which one reads about in Exodus. But he was courteous and polite,
doing the honours of his pasture with simplicity and ease. He took us
to his châlet and gave us bowls of pure cold milk. It was a funny
little wooden house, clean and dark. The sky peeped through its tiles,
and if shepherds were not in the habit of sleeping soundly all night
long, they might count the setting and rising stars without lifting
their heads from the pillow. He told us how far pleasanter they found
the summer season than the long cold winter which they have to spend in
gloomy houses in Courmayeur. This, indeed, is 17the true pastoral life
which poets have described—a happy summer holiday among the flowers,
well occupied with simple cares, and harassed by 'no enemy but winter
and rough weather.'

Very much of the charm of Switzerland belongs to simple things—to
greetings from the herdsmen, the 'Guten Morgen,' and 'Guten Abend,'
that are invariably given and taken upon mountain paths; to the tame
creatures, with their large dark eyes, who raise their heads one moment
from the pasture while you pass; and to the plants that grow beneath
your feet. The latter end of May is the time when spring begins in the
high Alps. Wherever sunlight smiles away a patch of snow, the brown
turf soon becomes green velvet, and the velvet stars itself with red
and white and gold and blue. You almost see the grass and lilies grow.
First come pale crocuses and lilac soldanellas. These break the last
dissolving clods of snow, and stand upon an island, with the cold wall
they have thawed all round them. It is the fate of these poor flowers
to spring and flourish on the very skirts of retreating winter; they
soon wither—the frilled chalice of the soldanella shrivels up and the
crocus fades away before the grass has grown; the sun, which is
bringing all the other plants to life, scorches their tender petals.
Often when summer has fairly come, you still may see their pearly cups
and lilac bells by the side of avalanches, between the chill snow and
the fiery sun, blooming and fading hour by hour. They have as it were
but a Pisgah view of the promised land, of the spring which they are
foremost to proclaim. Next come the clumsy gentians and yellow
anemones, covered with soft down like fledgling birds. These are among
the earliest and hardiest blossoms that embroider the high meadows with
a diaper of blue and gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas
begin to tuft the dripping rocks, while frail white fleur-de-lis,
18like flakes of snow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled
ranunculuses join with forget-me-nots and cranesbill in a never-ending
dance upon the grassy floor. Happy, too, is he who finds the
lilies-of-the-valley clustering about the chestnut boles upon the
Colma, or in the beechwood by the stream at Macugnaga, mixed with
garnet-coloured columbines and fragrant white narcissus, which the
people of the villages call 'Angiolini.' There, too, is Solomon's seal,
with waxen bells and leaves expanded like the wings of hovering
butterflies. But these lists of flowers are tiresome and cold; it would
be better to draw the portrait of one which is particularly
fascinating. I think that botanists have called it _Saxifraga
cotyledon_; yet, in spite of its long name, it is beautiful and poetic.
London-pride is the commonest of all the saxifrages; but the one of
which I speak is as different from London-pride as a Plantagenet upon
his throne from that last Plantagenet who died obscure and penniless
some years ago. It is a great majestic flower, which plumes the granite
rocks of Monte Rosa in the spring. At other times of the year you see a
little tuft of fleshy leaves set like a cushion on cold ledges and dark
places of dripping cliffs. You take it for a stonecrop—one of those
weeds doomed to obscurity, and safe from being picked because they are
so uninviting—and you pass it by incuriously. But about June it puts
forth its power, and from the cushion of pale leaves there springs a
strong pink stem, which rises upward for a while, and then curves down
and breaks into a shower of snow-white blossoms. Far away the splendour
gleams, hanging like a plume of ostrich-feathers from the roof of rock,
waving to the wind, or stooping down to touch the water of the mountain
stream that dashes it with dew. The snow at evening, glowing with a
sunset flush, is not more rosy-pure than this cascade of pendent
blossoms. It loves to be alone—inaccessible ledges, chasms where winds
combat, or 19moist caverns overarched near thundering falls, are the
places that it seeks. I will not compare it to a spirit of the
mountains or to a proud lonely soul, for such comparisons desecrate the
simplicity of nature, and no simile can add a glory to the flower. It
seems to have a conscious life of its own, so large and glorious it is,
so sensitive to every breath of air, so nobly placed upon its bending
stem, so royal in its solitude. I first saw it years ago on the
Simplon, feathering the drizzling crags above Isella. Then we found it
near Baveno, in a crack of sombre cliff beneath the mines. The other
day we cut an armful opposite Varallo, by the Sesia, and then felt like
murderers; it was so sad to hold in our hands the triumph of those many
patient months, the full expansive life of the flower, the splendour
visible from valleys and hillsides, the defenceless creature which had
done its best to make the gloomy places of the Alps most beautiful.

After passing many weeks among the high Alps it is a pleasure to
descend into the plains. The sunset, and sunrise, and the stars of
Lombardy, its level horizons and vague misty distances, are a source of
absolute relief after the narrow skies and embarrassed prospects of a
mountain valley. Nor are the Alps themselves ever more imposing than
when seen from Milan or the church-tower of Chivasso or the terrace of
Novara, with a foreground of Italian cornfields and old city towers and
rice-ground, golden-green beneath a Lombard sun. Half veiled by clouds,
the mountains rise like visionary fortress walls of a celestial
city—unapproachable, beyond the range of mortal feet. But those who
know by old experience what friendly châlets, and cool meadows, and
clear streams are hidden in their folds and valleys, send forth fond
thoughts and messages, like carrier-pigeons, from the marble parapets
of Milan, crying, 'Before another sun has set, I too shall rest beneath
the shadow of their pines!' It is in truth not more 20than a day's
journey from Milan to the brink of snow at Macugnaga. But very sad it
is to _leave_ the Alps, to stand upon the terraces of Berne and waft
ineffectual farewells. The unsympathising Aar rushes beneath; and the
snow-peaks, whom we love like friends, abide untroubled by the coming
and the going of the world. The clouds drift over them—the sunset warms
them with a fiery kiss. Night comes, and we are hurried far away to
wake beside the Seine, remembering, with a pang of jealous passion,
that the flowers on Alpine meadows are still blooming, and the rivulets
still flowing with a ceaseless song, while Paris shops are all we see,
and all we hear is the dull clatter of a Paris crowd.

THE ALPS IN WINTER

The gradual approach of winter is very lovely in the high Alps. The
valley of Davos, where I am writing, more than five thousand feet above
the sea, is not beautiful, as Alpine valleys go, though it has scenery
both picturesque and grand within easy reach. But when summer is
passing into autumn, even the bare slopes of the least romantic glen
are glorified. Golden lights and crimson are cast over the grey-green
world by the fading of innumerable plants. Then the larches begin to
put on sallow tints that deepen into orange, burning against the solid
blue sky like amber. The frosts are severe at night, and the meadow
grass turns dry and wan. The last lilac crocuses die upon the fields.
Icicles, hanging from watercourse or mill-wheel, glitter in the noonday
sunlight. The wind blows keenly from the north, and now the snow begins
to fall and thaw and freeze, and fall and thaw again. The seasons are
confused; wonderful days of flawless purity are 21intermingled with
storm and gloom. At last the time comes when a great snowfall has to be
expected. There is hard frost in the early morning, and at nine o'clock
the thermometer stands at 2°. The sky is clear, but it clouds rapidly
with films of cirrus and of stratus in the south and west. Soon it is
covered over with grey vapour in a level sheet, all the hill-tops
standing hard against the steely heavens. The cold wind from the west
freezes the moustache to one's pipe-stem. By noon the air is thick with
a coagulated mist; the temperature meanwhile has risen, and a little
snow falls at intervals. The valleys are filled with a curious opaque
blue, from which the peaks rise, phantom-like and pallid, into the grey
air, scarcely distinguishable from their background. The pine-forests
on the mountain-sides are of darkest indigo. There is an indescribable
stillness and a sense of incubation. The wind has fallen. Later on, the
snow-flakes flutter silently and sparely through the lifeless air. The
most distant landscape is quite blotted out. After sunset the clouds
have settled down upon the hills, and the snow comes in thick,
impenetrable fleeces. At night our hair crackles and sparkles when we
brush it. Next morning there is a foot and a half of finely powdered
snow, and still the snow is falling. Strangely loom the châlets through
the semi-solid whiteness. Yet the air is now dry and singularly
soothing. The pines are heavy with their wadded coverings; now and
again one shakes himself in silence, and his burden falls in a white
cloud, to leave a black-green patch upon the hillside, whitening again
as the imperturbable fall continues. The stakes by the roadside are
almost buried. No sound is audible. Nothing is seen but the
snow-plough, a long raft of planks with a heavy stone at its stem and a
sharp prow, drawn by four strong horses, and driven by a young man
erect upon the stem.

So we live through two days and nights, and on the third 22a north wind
blows. The snow-clouds break and hang upon the hills in scattered
fleeces; glimpses of blue sky shine through, and sunlight glints along
the heavy masses. The blues of the shadows are everywhere intense. As
the clouds disperse, they form in moulded domes, tawny like sunburned
marble in the distant south lands. Every châlet is a miracle of
fantastic curves, built by the heavy hanging snow. Snow lies mounded on
the roads and fields, writhed into loveliest wreaths, or outspread in
the softest undulations. All the irregularities of the hills are
softened into swelling billows like the mouldings of Titanic statuary.

It happened once or twice last winter that such a clearing after
snowfall took place at full moon. Then the moon rose in a swirl of
fleecy vapour—clouds above, beneath, and all around. The sky was blue
as steel, and infinitely deep with mist-entangled stars. The horn above
which she first appears stood carved of solid black, and through the
valley's length from end to end yawned chasms and clefts of liquid
darkness. As the moon rose, the clouds were conquered, and massed into
rolling waves upon the ridges of the hills. The spaces of open sky grew
still more blue. At last the silver light came flooding over all, and
here and there the fresh snow glistened on the crags. There is
movement, palpitation, life of light through earth and sky. To walk out
on such a night, when the perturbation of storm is over and the heavens
are free, is one of the greatest pleasures offered by this winter life.
It is so light that you can read the smallest print with ease. The
upper sky looks quite black, shading by violet and sapphire into
turquoise upon the horizon. There is the colour of ivory upon the
nearest snow-fields, and the distant peaks sparkle like silver,
crystals glitter in all directions on the surface of the snow, white,
yellow, and pale blue. The stars are exceedingly keen, but only a few
can shine in the intensity of moonlight. 23The air is perfectly still,
and though icicles may be hanging from beard and moustache to the furs
beneath one's chin, there is no sensation of extreme cold.

During the earlier frosts of the season, after the first snows have
fallen, but when there is still plenty of moisture in the ground, the
loveliest fern-fronds of pure rime may be found in myriads on the
meadows. They are fashioned like perfect vegetable structures, opening
fan-shaped upon crystal stems, and catching the sunbeams with the
brilliancy of diamonds. Taken at certain angles, they decompose light
into iridescent colours, appearing now like emeralds, rubies, or
topazes, and now like Labrador spar, blending all hues in a wondrous
sheen. When the lake freezes for the first time, its surface is of
course quite black, and so transparent that it is easy to see the
fishes swimming in the deep beneath; but here and there, where rime has
fallen, there sparkle these fantastic flowers and ferns and mosses made
of purest frost. Nothing, indeed, can be more fascinating than the new
world revealed by frost. In shaded places of the valley you may walk
through larches and leafless alder thickets by silent farms, all
silvered over with hoar spangles—fairy forests, where the flowers and
foliage are rime. The streams are flowing half-frozen over rocks
sheeted with opaque green ice. Here it is strange to watch the swirl of
water freeing itself from these frost-shackles, and to see it eddying
beneath the overhanging eaves of frailest crystal-frosted snow. All is
so silent, still, and weird in this white world, that one marvels when
the spirit of winter will appear, or what shrill voices in the air will
make his unimaginable magic audible. Nothing happens, however, to
disturb the charm, save when a sunbeam cuts the chain of diamonds on an
alder bough, and down they drift in a thin cloud of dust. It may be
also that the air is full of floating crystals, like tiniest most
restless fire-flies 24rising and falling and passing crosswise in the
sun-illumined shade of tree or mountain-side.

It is not easy to describe these beauties of the winter-world; and yet
one word must be said about the sunsets. Let us walk out, therefore,
towards the lake at four o'clock in mid-December. The thermometer is
standing at 3°, and there is neither breath of wind nor cloud. Venus is
just visible in rose and sapphire, and the thin young moon is beside
her. To east and south the snowy ranges burn with yellow fire,
deepening to orange and crimson hues, which die away and leave a
greenish pallor. At last, the higher snows alone are livid with a last
faint tinge of light, and all beneath is quite white. But the tide of
glory turns. While the west grows momently more pale, the eastern
heavens flush with afterglow, suffuse their spaces with pink and
violet. Daffodil and tenderest emerald intermingle; and these colours
spread until the west again has rose and primrose and sapphire
wonderfully blent, and from the burning skies a light is cast upon the
valley—a phantom light, less real, more like the hues of molten gems,
than were the stationary flames of sunset. Venus and the moon meanwhile
are silvery clear. Then the whole illumination fades like magic.

All the charms of which I have been writing are combined in a
sledge-drive. With an arrowy gliding motion one passes through the
snow-world as through a dream. In the sunlight the snow surface
sparkles with its myriad stars of crystals. In the shadow it ceases to
glitter, and assumes a blueness scarcely less blue than the sky. So the
journey is like sailing through alternate tracts of light irradiate
heavens, and interstellar spaces of the clearest and most flawless
ether. The air is like the keen air of the highest glaciers. As we go,
the bells keep up a drowsy tinkling at the horse's head. The whole
landscape is transfigured—lifted high up out of commonplaceness. 25The
little hills are Monte Rosas and Mont Blancs. Scale is annihilated, and
nothing tells but form. There is hardly any colour except the blue of
sky and shadow. Everything is traced in vanishing tints, passing from
the almost amber of the distant sunlight through glowing white into
pale greys and brighter blues and deep ethereal azure. The pines stand
in black platoons upon the hillsides, with a tinge of red or orange on
their sable. Some carry masses of snow. Others have shaken their plumes
free. The châlets are like fairy houses or toys, waist-deep in stores
of winter fuel. With their mellow tones of madder and umber on the
weather-beaten woodwork relieved against the white, with fantastic
icicles and folds of snow depending from their eaves, or curled like
coverlids from roof and window-sill, they are far more picturesque than
in the summer. Colour, wherever it is found, whether in these cottages
or in a block of serpentine by the roadside, or in the golden bulrush
blades by the lake shore, takes more than double value. It is shed upon
the landscape like a spiritual and transparent veil. Most beautiful of
all are the sweeping lines of pure untroubled snow, fold over fold of
undulating softness, billowing along the skirts of the peaked hills.
There is no conveying the charm of immaterial, aë;rial, lucid beauty,
the feeling of purity and aloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the
fine touch on all our senses of light, colour, form, and air, and
motion, and rare tinkling sound. The magic is like a spirit mood of
Shelley's lyric verse. And, what is perhaps most wonderful, this
delicate delight may be enjoyed without fear in the coldest weather. It
does not matter how low the temperature may be, if the sun is shining,
the air dry, and the wind asleep.

Leaving the horse-sledges on the verge of some high hill-road, and
trusting oneself to the little hand-sledge which the 26people of the
Grisons use, and which the English have christened by the Canadian term
'toboggan,' the excitement becomes far greater. The hand-sledge is
about three feet long, fifteen inches wide, and half a foot above the
ground, on runners shod with iron. Seated firmly at the back, and
guiding with the feet in front, the rider skims down precipitous slopes
and round perilous corners with a rapidity that beats a horse's pace.
Winding through sombre pine-forests, where the torrent roars fitfully
among caverns of barbed ice, and the glistening mountains tower above
in their glory of sun-smitten snow, darting round the frozen ledges at
the turnings of the road, silently gliding at a speed that seems
incredible, it is so smooth, he traverses two or three miles without
fatigue, carried onward by the mere momentum of his weight. It is a
strange and great joy. The toboggan, under these conditions, might be
compared to an enchanted boat shooting the rapids of a river; and what
adds to its fascination is the entire loneliness in which the rider
passes through those weird and ever-shifting scenes of winter radiance.
Sometimes, when the snow is drifting up the pass, and the world is
blank behind, before, and all around, it seems like plunging into
chaos. The muffled pines loom fantastically through the drift as we
rush past them, and the wind, ever and anon, detaches great masses of
snow in clouds from their bent branches. Or again at night, when the
moon is shining, and the sky is full of flaming stars, and the snow,
frozen to the hardness of marble, sparkles with innumerable crystals, a
new sense of strangeness and of joy is given to the solitude, the
swiftness, and the silence of the exercise. No other circumstances
invest the poetry of rapid motion with more fascination. Shelley, who
so loved the fancy of a boat inspired with its own instinct of life,
would have delighted in the game, and would probably have pursued it
recklessly. At the same time, 27as practised on a humbler scale nearer
home, in company, and on a run selected for convenience rather than for
picturesqueness, tobogganing is a very Bohemian amusement. No one who
indulges in it can count on avoiding hard blows and violent upsets, nor
will his efforts to maintain his equilibrium at the dangerous corners
be invariably graceful.

Nothing, it might be imagined, could be more monotonous than an Alpine
valley covered up with snow. And yet to one who has passed many months
in that seclusion Nature herself presents no monotony; for the changes
constantly wrought by light and cloud and alternations of weather on
this landscape are infinitely various. The very simplicity of the
conditions seems to assist the supreme artist. One day is wonderful
because of its unsullied purity; not a cloud visible, and the pines
clothed in velvet of rich green beneath a faultless canopy of light.
The next presents a fretwork of fine film, wrought by the south wind
over the whole sky, iridescent with delicate rainbow tints within the
influences of the sun, and ever-changing shape. On another, when the
turbulent Föhn is blowing, streamers of snow may be seen flying from
the higher ridges against a pallid background of slaty cloud, while the
gaunt ribs of the hills glisten below with fitful gleams of lurid
light. At sunrise, one morning, stealthy and mysterious vapours clothe
the mountains from their basement to the waist, while the peaks are
glistening serenely in clear daylight. Another opens with silently
falling snow. A third is rosy through the length and breadth of the
dawn-smitten valley. It is, however, impossible to catalogue the
indescribable variety of those beauties, which those who love nature
may enjoy by simply waiting on the changes of the winter in a single
station of the Alps.

28




WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS


I

Light, marvellously soft yet penetrating, everywhere diffused,
everywhere reflected without radiance, poured from the moon high above
our heads in a sky tinted through all shades and modulations of blue,
from turquoise on the horizon to opaque sapphire at the zenith—_dolce
color_. (It is difficult to use the word _colour_ for this scene
without suggesting an exaggeration. The blue is almost indefinable, yet
felt. But if possible, the total effect of the night landscape should
be rendered by careful exclusion of tints from the word-palette. The
art of the etcher is more needed than that of the painter.) Heaven
overhead is set with stars, shooting intensely, smouldering with dull
red in Aldeboran, sparkling diamond-like in Sirius, changing from
orange to crimson and green in the swart fire of yonder double star. On
the snow this moonlight falls tenderly, not in hard white light and
strong black shadow, but in tones of cream and ivory, rounding the
curves of drift. The mountain peaks alone glisten as though they were
built of silver burnished by an agate. Far away they rise diminished in
stature by the all-pervading dimness of bright light, that erases the
distinctions of daytime. On the path before our feet lie crystals of
many hues, the splinters of a thousand gems. In the wood there are
caverns of darkness, alternating with spaces of star-twinkled sky, or
windows opened between russet stems and solid branches for the 29moony
sheen. The green of the pines is felt, although invisible, so soft in
substance that it seems less like velvet than some materialised depth
of dark green shadow.

II

Snow falling noiseless and unseen. One only knows that it is falling by
the blinking of our eyes as the flakes settle on their lids and melt.
The cottage windows shine red, and moving lanterns of belated wayfarers
define the void around them. Yet the night is far from dark. The
forests and the mountain-bulk beyond the valley loom softly large and
just distinguishable through a pearly haze. The path is purest
trackless whiteness, almost dazzling though it has no light. This was
what Dante felt when he reached the lunar sphere:

Parova a me, che nube ne coprisse
Lucida, spessa, solida e pulita.


Walking silent, with insensible footfall, slowly, for the snow is deep
above our ankles, we wonder what the world would be like if this were
all. Could the human race be acclimatised to this monotony (we say)
perhaps emotion would be rarer, yet more poignant, suspended brooding
on itself, and wakening by flashes to a quintessential mood. Then fancy
changes, and the thought occurs that even so must be a planet, not yet
wholly made, nor called to take her place among the sisterhood of light
and song.

III

Sunset was fading out upon the Rhætikon and still reflected from the
Seehorn on the lake, when we entered the gorge of the Fluela—dense
pines on either hand, a mounting drift of snow in front, and faint
peaks, paling from rose to saffron, far above, beyond. There was no
sound but a tinkling stream 30and the continual jingle of our
sledge-bells. We drove at a foot's pace, our horse finding his own
path. When we left the forest, the light had all gone except for some
almost imperceptible touches of primrose on the eastern horns. It was a
moonless night, but the sky was alive with stars, and now and then one
fell. The last house in the valley was soon passed, and we entered
those bleak gorges where the wind, fine, noiseless, penetrating like an
edge of steel, poured slantwise on us from the north. As we rose, the
stars to west seemed far beneath us, and the Great Bear sprawled upon
the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly moving onward,
upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but was
immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind,
immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a
formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim
mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and still
below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet above
sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity of frost.
The cold, and movement, and solemnity of space, drowsed every sense.

IV

The memory of things seen and done in moonlight is like the memory of
dreams. It is as a dream that I recall the night of our tobogganing to
Klosters, though it was full enough of active energy. The moon was in
her second quarter, slightly filmed with very high thin clouds, that
disappeared as night advanced, leaving the sky and stars in all their
lustre. A sharp frost, sinking to three degrees above zero Fahrenheit,
with a fine pure wind, such wind as here they call 'the mountain
breath.' We drove to Wolfgang in a two-horse sledge, four of us inside,
and our two Christians on the box. Up 31there, where the Alps of Death
descend to join the Lakehorn Alps, above the Wolfswalk, there is a
world of whiteness—frozen ridges, engraved like cameos of aë;rial onyx
upon the dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow,
enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft
into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift
descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted
tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the
dazzling snow from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon an
ermine robe. At the proper moment we left our sledge, and the big
Christian took his reins in hand to follow us. Furs and greatcoats were
abandoned. Each stood forth tightly accoutred, with short coat, and
clinging cap, and gaitered legs for the toboggan. Off we started in
line, with but brief interval between, at first slowly, then glidingly,
and when the impetus was gained, with darting, bounding, almost savage
swiftness—sweeping round corners, cutting the hard snow-path with keen
runners, avoiding the deep ruts, trusting to chance, taking advantage
of smooth places, till the rush and swing and downward swoop became
mechanical. Space was devoured. Into the massy shadows of the forest,
where the pines joined overhead, we pierced without a sound, and felt
far more than saw the great rocks with their icicles; and out again,
emerging into moonlight, met the valley spread beneath our feet, the
mighty peaks of the Silvretta and the vast blue sky. On, on, hurrying,
delaying not, the woods and hills rushed by. Crystals upon the
snow-banks glittered to the stars. Our souls would fain have stayed to
drink these marvels of the moon-world, but our limbs refused. The magic
of movement was upon us, and eight minutes swallowed the varying
impressions of two musical miles. The village lights drew near and
nearer, then the sombre village huts, and soon the speed grew less, and
soon we glided to our rest into the sleeping village street.

32

V

It was just past midnight. The moon had fallen to the western horns.
Orion's belt lay bar-like on the opening of the pass, and Sirius shot
flame on the Seehorn. A more crystalline night, more full of fulgent
stars, was never seen, stars everywhere, but mostly scattered in large
sparkles on the snow. Big Christian went in front, tugging toboggans by
their strings, as Gulliver, in some old woodcut, drew the fleets of
Lilliput. Through the brown wood-châlets of Selfrangr, up to the
undulating meadows, where the snow slept pure and crisp, he led us.
There we sat awhile and drank the clear air, cooled to zero, but
innocent and mild as mother Nature's milk. Then in an instant, down,
down through the hamlet, with its châlets, stables, pumps, and logs,
the slumbrous hamlet, where one dog barked, and darkness dwelt upon the
path of ice, down with the tempest of a dreadful speed, that shot each
rider upward in the air, and made the frame of the toboggan
tremble—down over hillocks of hard frozen snow, dashing and bounding,
to the river and the bridge. No bones were broken, though the race was
thrice renewed, and men were spilt upon the roadside by some furious
plunge. This amusement has the charm of peril and the unforeseen. In no
wise else can colder, keener air be drunken at such furious speed. The
joy, too, of the engine-driver and the steeplechaser is upon us. Alas,
that it should be so short! If only roads were better made for the
purpose, there would be no end to it; for the toboggan cannot lose his
wind. But the good thing fails at last, and from the silence of the
moon we pass into the silence of the fields of sleep.

33

VI

The new stable is a huge wooden building, with raftered lofts to stow
the hay, and stalls for many cows and horses. It stands snugly in an
angle of the pine-wood, bordering upon the great horse-meadow. Here at
night the air is warm and tepid with the breath of kine. Returning from
my forest walk, I spy one window yellow in the moonlight with a lamp. I
lift the latch. The hound knows me, and does not bark. I enter the
stable, where six horses are munching their last meal. Upon the
corn-bin sits a knecht. We light our pipes and talk. He tells me of the
valley of Arosa (a hawk's flight westward over yonder hills), how deep
in grass its summer lawns, how crystal-clear its stream, how blue its
little lakes, how pure, without a taint of mist, 'too beautiful to
paint,' its sky in winter! This knecht is an Ardüser, and the valley of
Arosa lifts itself to heaven above his Langwies home. It is his duty
now to harness a sleigh for some night-work. We shake hands and part—I
to sleep, he for the snow.

VII

The lake has frozen late this year, and there are places in it where
the ice is not yet firm. Little snow has fallen since it froze—about
three inches at the deepest, driven by winds and wrinkled like the
ribbed sea-sand. Here and there the ice-floor is quite black and clear,
reflecting stars, and dark as heaven's own depths. Elsewhere it is of a
suspicious whiteness, blurred in surface, with jagged cracks and
chasms, treacherously mended by the hand of frost. Moving slowly, the
snow cries beneath our feet, and the big crystals tinkle. These are
shaped like fern-fronds, growing fan-wise from a point, and set at
various angles, so that the moonlight takes 34them with capricious
touch. They flash, and are quenched, and flash again, light darting to
light along the level surface, while the sailing planets and the stars
look down complacent at this mimicry of heaven. Everything above,
around, beneath, is very beautiful—the slumbrous woods, the snowy
fells, and the far distance painted in faint blue upon the tender
background of the sky. Everything is placid and beautiful; and yet the
place is terrible. For, as we walk, the lake groans, with throttled
sobs, and sudden cracklings of its joints, and sighs that shiver,
undulating from afar, and pass beneath our feet, and die away in
distance when they reach the shore. And now and then an upper crust of
ice gives way; and will the gulfs then drag us down? We are in the very
centre of the lake. There is no use in thinking or in taking heed.
Enjoy the moment, then, and march. Enjoy the contrast between this
circumambient serenity and sweetness, and the dreadful sense of
insecurity beneath. Is not, indeed, our whole life of this nature? A
passage over perilous deeps, roofed by infinity and sempiternal things,
surrounded too with evanescent forms, that like these crystals, trodden
underfoot, or melted by the Föhn-wind into dew, flash, in some lucky
moment, with a light that mimics stars! But to allegorise and sermonise
is out of place here. It is but the expedient of those who cannot etch
sensation by the burin of their art of words.

VIII

It is ten o'clock upon Sylvester Abend, or New Year's Eve. Herr Buol
sits with his wife at the head of his long table. His family and
serving folk are round him. There is his mother, with little Ursula,
his child, upon her knee. The old lady is the mother of four comely
daughters and nine 35stalwart sons, the eldest of whom is now a
grizzled man. Besides our host, four of the brothers are here to-night;
the handsome melancholy Georg, who is so gentle in his speech; Simeon,
with his diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; and my
friend, colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later, worried
with many cares, but happy to his heart's core. No optimist was ever
more convinced of his 6philosophy than Palmy. After them, below the
salt, were ranged the knechts and porters, the marmiton from the
kitchen, and innumerable maids. The board was tesselated with plates of
birnen-brod and eier-brod, küchli and cheese and butter; and Georg
stirred grampampuli in a mighty metal bowl. For the uninitiated, it may
be needful to explain these Davos delicacies. Birnen-brod is what the
Scotch would call a 'bun,' or massive cake, composed of sliced pears,
almonds, spices, and a little flour. Eier-brod is a saffron-coloured
sweet bread, made with eggs; and küchli is a kind of pastry, crisp and
flimsy, fashioned into various devices of cross, star, and scroll.
Grampampuli is simply brandy burnt with sugar, the most unsophisticated
punch I ever drank from tumblers. The frugal people of Davos, who live
on bread and cheese and dried meat all the year, indulge themselves but
once with these unwonted dainties in the winter.

The occasion was cheerful, and yet a little solemn. The scene was
feudal. For these Buols are the scions of a warrior race:

A race illustrious for heroic deeds;
Humbled, but not degraded.

During the six centuries through which they have lived nobles in Davos,
they have sent forth scores of fighting men to foreign lands,
ambassadors to France and Venice and the Milanese, governors to
Chiavenna and Bregaglia and the much-contested Valtelline. Members of
their house are 36Counts of Buol-Schauenstein in Austria, Freiherrs of
Muhlingen and Berenberg in the now German Empire. They keep the patent
of nobility conferred on them by Henri IV. Their ancient coat—parted
per pale azure and argent, with a dame of the fourteenth century
bearing in her hand a rose, all counterchanged—is carved in wood and
monumental marble on the churches and old houses hereabouts. And from
immemorial antiquity the Buol of Davos has sat thus on Sylvester Abend
with family and folk around him, summoned from alp and snowy field to
drink grampampuli and break the birnen-brod.

These rites performed, the men and maids began to sing—brown arms
lounging on the table, and red hands folded in white aprons—serious at
first in hymn-like cadences, then breaking into wilder measures with a
jodel at the close. There is a measured solemnity in the performance,
which strikes the stranger as somewhat comic. But the singing was good;
the voices strong and clear in tone, no hesitation and no shirking of
the melody. It was clear that the singers enjoyed the music for its own
sake, with half-shut eyes, as they take dancing, solidly, with
deep-drawn breath, sustained and indefatigable. But eleven struck; and
the two Christians, my old friend, and Palmy, said we should be late
for church. They had promised to take me with them to see bell-ringing
in the tower. All the young men of the village meet, and draw lots in
the Stube of the Rathhaus. One party tolls the old year out; the other
rings the new year in. He who comes last is sconced three litres of
Veltliner for the company. This jovial fine was ours to pay to-night.

When we came into the air, we found a bitter frost; the whole sky
clouded over; a north wind whirling snow from alp and forest through
the murky gloom. The benches and 37broad walnut tables of the Bathhaus
were crowded with men, in shaggy homespun of brown and grey frieze. Its
low wooden roof and walls enclosed an atmosphere of smoke, denser than
the external snow-drift. But our welcome was hearty, and we found a
score of friends. Titanic Fopp, whose limbs are Michelangelesque in
length; spectacled Morosani; the little tailor Kramer, with a French
horn on his knees; the puckered forehead of the Baumeister; the
Troll-shaped postman; peasants and woodmen, known on far excursions
upon pass and upland valley. Not one but carried on his face the memory
of winter strife with avalanche and snow-drift, of horses struggling
through Fluela whirlwinds, and wine-casks tugged across Bernina, and
haystacks guided down precipitous gullies at thundering speed 'twixt
pine and pine, and larches felled in distant glens beside the frozen
watercourses. Here we were, all met together for one hour from our
several homes and occupations, to welcome in the year with clinked
glasses and cries of _Prosit Neujahr!_

The tolling bells above us stopped. Our turn had come. Out into the
snowy air we tumbled, beneath the row of wolves' heads that adorn the
pent-house roof. A few steps brought us to the still God's acre, where
the snow lay deep and cold upon high-mounded graves of many
generations. We crossed it silently, bent our heads to the low Gothic
arch, and stood within the tower. It was thick darkness there. But far
above, the bells began again to clash and jangle confusedly, with
volleys of demonic joy. Successive flights of ladders, each ending in a
giddy platform hung across the gloom, climb to the height of some
hundred and fifty feet; and all their rungs were crusted with frozen
snow, deposited by trampling boots. For up and down these stairs,
ascending and descending, moved other than angels—the friezejacketed
38Bürschen, Grisons bears, rejoicing in their exercise, exhilarated
with the tingling noise of beaten metal. We reached the first room
safely, guided by firm-footed Christian, whose one candle just defined
the rough walls and the slippery steps. There we found a band of boys,
pulling ropes that set the bells in motion. But our destination was not
reached. One more aë;rial ladder, perpendicular in darkness, brought us
swiftly to the home of sound. It is a small square chamber, where the
bells are hung, filled with the interlacement of enormous beams, and
pierced to north and south by open windows, from whose parapets I saw
the village and the valley spread beneath. The fierce wind hurried
through it, charged with snow, and its narrow space was thronged with
men. Men on the platform, men on the window-sills, men grappling the
bells with iron arms, men brushing by to reach the stairs, crossing,
recrossing, shouldering their mates, drinking red wine from gigantic
beakers, exploding crackers, firing squibs, shouting and yelling in
corybantic chorus. They yelled and shouted, one could see it by their
open mouths and glittering eyes; but not a sound from human lungs could
reach our ears. The overwhelming incessant thunder of the bells drowned
all. It thrilled the tympanum, ran through the marrow of the spine,
vibrated in the inmost entrails. Yet the brain was only steadied and
excited by this sea of brazen noise. After a few moments I knew the
place and felt at home in it. Then I enjoyed a spectacle which
sculptors might have envied. For they ring the bells in Davos after
this fashion:—The lads below set them going with ropes. The men above
climb in pairs on ladders to the beams from which they are suspended.
Two mighty pine-trees, roughly squared and built into the walls, extend
from side to side across the belfry. Another from which the bells hang,
connects these massive trunks at right 39angles. Just where the central
beam is wedged into the two parallel supports, the ladders reach them
from each side of the belfry, so that, bending from the higher rung of
the ladder, and leaning over, stayed upon the lateral beam, each pair
of men can keep one bell in movement with their hands. Each comrade
plants one leg upon the ladder, and sets the other knee firmly athwart
the horizontal pine. Then round each other's waist they twine left arm
and right. The two have thus become one man. Right arm and left are
free to grasp the bell's horns, sprouting at its crest beneath the
beam. With a grave rhythmic motion, bending sideward in a close
embrace, swaying and returning to their centre from the well-knit
loins, they drive the force of each strong muscle into the vexed bell.
The impact is earnest at first, but soon it becomes frantic. The men
take something from each other of exalted enthusiasm. This efflux of
their combined energies inspires them and exasperates the mighty
resonance of metal which they rule. They are lost in a trance of what
approximates to dervish passion—so thrilling is the surge of sound, so
potent are the rhythms they obey. Men come and tug them by the heels.
One grasps the starting thews upon their calves. Another is impatient
for their place. But they strain still, locked together, and forgetful
of the world. At length they have enough: then slowly, clingingly
unclasp, turn round with gazing eyes, and are resumed, sedately, into
the diurnal round of common life. Another pair is in their room upon
the beam.

The Englishman who saw these things stood looking up, enveloped in his
ulster with the grey cowl thrust upon his forehead, like a monk. One
candle cast a grotesque shadow of him on the plastered wall. And when
his chance came, though he was but a weakling, he too climbed and for
some moments hugged the beam, and felt the madness of the 40swinging
bell. Descending, he wondered long and strangely whether he ascribed
too much of feeling to the men he watched. But no, that was impossible.
There are emotions deeply seated in the joy of exercise, when the body
is brought into play, and masses move in concert, of which the subject
is but half conscious. Music and dance, and the delirium of battle or
the chase, act thus upon spontaneous natures. The mystery of rhythm and
associated energy and blood tingling in sympathy is here. It lies at
the root of man's most tyrannous instinctive impulses.

It was past one when we reached home, and now a meditative man might
well have gone to bed. But no one thinks of sleeping on Sylvester
Abend. So there followed bowls of punch in one friend's room, where
English, French, and Germans blent together in convivial Babel; and
flasks of old Montagner in another. Palmy, at this period, wore an
archdeacon's hat, and smoked a churchwarden's pipe; and neither were
his own, nor did he derive anything ecclesiastical or Anglican from the
association. Late in the morning we must sally forth, they said, and
roam the town. For it is the custom here on New Year's night to greet
acquaintances, and ask for hospitality, and no one may deny these
self-invited guests. We turned out again into the grey snow-swept
gloom, a curious Comus—not at all like Greeks, for we had neither
torches in our hands nor rose-wreaths to suspend upon a lady's
door-posts. And yet I could not refrain, at this supreme moment of
jollity, in the zero temperature, amid my Grisons friends, from humming
to myself verses from the Greek Anthology:—

The die is cast! Nay, light the torch!
    I'll take the road! Up, courage, ho!
Why linger pondering in the porch?
    Upon Love's revel we will go!

Shake off those fumes of wine! Hang care
    And caution! What has Love to do
With prudence? Let the torches flare!
    Quick, drown the doubts that hampered you!

Cast weary wisdom to the wind!
    One thing, but one alone, I know:
Love bent e'en Jove and made him blind
    Upon Love's revel we will go!

41

And then again:—

I've drunk sheer madness! Not with wine,
    But old fantastic tales, I'll arm
My heart in heedlessness divine,
    And dare the road, nor dream of harm!

I'll join Love's rout! Let thunder break,
    Let lightning blast me by the way!
Invulnerable Love shall shake
    His ægis o'er my head to-day.

This last epigram was not inappropriate to an invalid about to begin
the fifth act in a roystering night's adventure. And still once more:—

Cold blows the winter wind; 'tis Love,
    Whose sweet eyes swim with honeyed tears,
That bears me to thy doors, my love,
    Tossed by the storm of hopes and fears.

Cold blows the blast of aching Love;
    But be thou for my wandering sail,
Adrift upon these waves of love,
    Safe harbour from the whistling gale!


However, upon this occasion, though we had winter-wind enough, and cold
enough, there was not much love in the business. My arm was firmly
clenched in Christian Buol's, and Christian Palmy came behind, trolling
out songs in Italian dialect, with still recurring _canaille_ choruses,
of which the facile rhymes seemed mostly made on a prolonged
42_amu-u-u-r_. It is noticeable that Italian ditties are specially
designed for fellows shouting in the streets at night. They seem in
keeping there, and nowhere else that I could ever see. And these
Davosers took to them naturally when the time for Comus came. It was
between four and five in the morning, and nearly all the houses in the
place were dark. The tall church-tower and spire loomed up above us in
grey twilight. The tireless wind still swept thin snow from fell and
forest. But the frenzied bells had sunk into their twelvemonth's
slumber, which shall be broken only by decorous tollings at less
festive times. I wondered whether they were tingling still with the
heart-throbs and with the pressure of those many arms? Was their old
age warmed, as mine was, with that gust of life—the young men who had
clung to them like bees to lily-bells, and shaken all their locked-up
tone and shrillness into the wild winter air? Alas! how many
generations of the young have handled them; and they are still there,
frozen in their belfry; and the young grow middle-aged, and old, and
die at last; and the bells they grappled in their lust of manhood toll
them to their graves, on which the tireless wind will, winter after
winter, sprinkle snow from alps and forests which they knew.

'There is a light,' cried Christian, 'up in Anna's window!' 'A light! a
light!' the Comus shouted. But how to get at the window, which is
pretty high above the ground, and out of reach of the most ardent
revellers? We search a neighbouring shed, extract a stable-ladder, and
in two seconds Palmy has climbed to the topmost rung, while Christian
and Georg hold it firm upon the snow beneath. Then begins a passage
from some comic opera of Mozart's or Cimarosa's—an escapade familiar to
Spanish or Italian students, which recalls the stage. It is an episode
from 'Don Giovanni,' translated to this dark-etched scene of snowy
hills, and 43Gothic tower, and mullioned windows deep embayed beneath
their eaves and icicles. _Deh vieni alla finestra!_ sings
Palmy-Leporello; the chorus answers: _Deh vieni! Perchè non vieni
ancora?_ pleads Leporello; the chorus shouts: _Perchè? Mio amu-u-u-r_,
sighs Leporello; and Echo cries, _amu-u-u-r!_ All the wooing, be it
noticed, is conducted in Italian. But the actors murmur to each other
in Davoser Deutsch, 'She won't come, Palmy! It is far too late; she is
gone to bed. Come down; you'll wake the village with your
caterwauling!' But Leporello waves his broad archdeacon's hat, and
resumes a flood of flexible Bregaglian. He has a shrewd suspicion that
the girl is peeping from behind the window curtain; and tells us,
bending down from the ladder, in a hoarse stage-whisper, that we must
have patience; 'these girls are kittle cattle, who take long to draw:
but if your lungs last out, they're sure to show.' And Leporello is
right. Faint heart ne'er won fair lady. From the summit of his ladder,
by his eloquent Italian tongue, he brings the shy bird down at last. We
hear the unbarring of the house door, and a comely maiden, in her
Sunday dress, welcomes us politely to her ground-floor sitting-room.
The Comus enters, in grave order, with set speeches, handshakes, and
inevitable _Prosits_! It is a large low chamber, with a huge stone
stove, wide benches fixed along the walls, and a great oval table. We
sit how and where we can. Red wine is produced, and eier-brod and
küchli. 44Fräulein Anna serves us sedately, holding her own with decent
self-respect against the inrush of the revellers. She is quite alone;
but are not her father and mother in bed above, and within earshot?
Besides, the Comus, even at this abnormal hour and after an abnormal
night, is well conducted. Things seem slipping into a decorous
wine-party, when Leporello readjusts the broad-brimmed hat upon his
head, and very cleverly acts a little love-scene for our benefit.
Fräulein Anna takes this as a delicate compliment, and the thing is so
prettily done in truth, that not the sternest taste could be offended.
Meanwhile another party of night-wanderers, attracted by our mirth,
break in. More _Prosits_ and clinked glasses follow; and with a fair
good-morning to our hostess, we retire.

It is too late to think of bed. 'The quincunx of heaven,' as Sir Thomas
Browne phrased it on a dissimilar occasion, 'runs low.... The huntsmen
are up in America; and not in America only, for the huntsmen, if there
are any this night in Graubünden, have long been out upon the snow, and
the stable-lads are dragging the sledges from their sheds to carry down
the mails to Landquart. We meet the porters from the various hotels,
bringing letter-bags and luggage to the post. It is time to turn in and
take a cup of black coffee against the rising sun.

IX

Some nights, even in Davos, are spent, even by an invalid, in bed. A
leaflet, therefore, of 'Sleep-chasings' may not inappropriately be
flung, as envoy to so many wanderings on foot and sledge upon the
winter snows.

The first is a confused medley of things familiar and things strange. I
have been dreaming of far-away old German towns, with gabled houses
deep in snow; dreaming of châlets in forgotten Alpine glens, where
wood-cutters come plunging into sleepy light from gloom, and sinking
down beside the stove to shake the drift from their rough shoulders;
dreaming of vast veils of icicles upon the gaunt black rocks in places
where no foot of man will pass, and where the snow is weaving eyebrows
over the ledges of grey whirlwind-beaten precipices; dreaming of
Venice, forlorn beneath the windy drip of rain, the gas lamps
flickering on the swimming piazzetta, the barche 45idle, the gondolier
wrapped in his thread-bare cloak, alone; dreaming of Apennines, with
world-old cities, brown, above the brown sea of dead chestnut boughs;
dreaming of stormy tides, and watchers aloft in lighthouses when day is
finished; dreaming of dead men and women and dead children in the
earth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six feet deep. And then I lift
my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid moon is on the valley, and
the room is filled with spectral light.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is a hospice in an unfrequented
pass, between sad peaks, beside a little black lake, overdrifted with
soft snow. I pass into the house-room, gliding silently. An old man and
an old woman are nodding, bowed in deepest slumber, by the stove. A
young man plays the zither on a table. He lifts his head, still
modulating with his fingers on the strings. He looks right through me
with wide anxious eyes. He does not see me, but sees Italy, I know, and
some one wandering on a sandy shore.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is S. Stephen's Church in Wien.
Inside, the lamps are burning dimly in the choir. There is fog in the
aisles; but through the sleepy air and over the red candles flies a
wild soprano's voice, a boy's soul in its singing sent to heaven.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his father,
the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across the heath, a
little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half asleep. His
father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his
fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the glasses on the
table.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. I am on the parapet of a huge circular
tower, hollow like a well, and pierced with windows at irregular
intervals. The parapet is broad, and 46slabbed with red Verona marble.
Around me are athletic men, all naked, in the strangest attitudes of
studied rest, down-gazing, as I do, into the depths below. There comes
a confused murmur of voices, and the tower is threaded and rethreaded
with great cables. Up these there climb to us a crowd of young men,
clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodies sideways on aë;rial
trapezes. My heart trembles with keen joy and terror. For nowhere else
could plastic forms be seen more beautiful, and nowhere else is peril
more apparent. Leaning my chin upon the utmost verge, I wait. I watch
one youth, who smiles and soars to me; and when his face is almost
touching mine, he speaks, but what he says I know not.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. The whole world rocks to its
foundations. The mountain summits that I know are shaken. They bow
their bristling crests. They are falling, falling on us, and the earth
is riven. I wake in terror, shouting: INSOLITIS TREMUERUNT MOTIBUS
ALPES! An earthquake, slight but real, has stirred the ever-wakeful
Vesta of the brain to this Virgilian quotation.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. Once more at night I sledge alone upon
the Klosters road. It is the point where the woods close over it and
moonlight may not pierce the boughs. There come shrill cries of many
voices from behind, and rushings that pass by and vanish. Then on their
sledges I behold the phantoms of the dead who died in Davos, longing
for their homes; and each flies past me, shrieking in the still cold
air; and phosphorescent like long meteors, the pageant turns the
windings of the road below and disappears.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is the top of some high mountain,
where the crags are cruelly tortured and cast in enormous splinters on
the ledges of cliffs grey with old-world ice. A ravine, opening at my
feet, plunges 47down immeasurably to a dim and distant sea. Above me
soars a precipice embossed with a gigantic ice-bound shape. As I gaze
thereon, I find the lineaments and limbs of a Titanic man chained and
nailed to the rock. His beard has grown for centuries, and flowed this
way and that, adown his breast and over to the stone on either side;
and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice, ancient beyond the
memory of man. 'This is Prometheus,' I whisper to myself, 'and I am
alone on Caucasus.'

48




BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN


I

Some years' residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiar
with all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough _Inferno_,
generous _Forzato_, delicate _Sassella_, harsher _Montagner_, the
raspberry flavour of _Grumello_, the sharp invigorating twang of
_Villa_. The colour, ranging from garnet to almandine or ruby, told me
the age and quality of wine; and I could judge from the crust it forms
upon the bottle, whether it had been left long enough in wood to ripen.
I had furthermore arrived at the conclusion that the best Valtelline
can only be tasted in cellars of the Engadine or Davos, where this
vintage matures slowly in the mountain air, and takes a flavour unknown
at lower levels. In a word, it had amused my leisure to make or think
myself a connoisseur. My literary taste was tickled by the praise
bestowed in the Augustan age on Rhætic grapes by Virgil:

Et quo te carmine dicam,
Rhætica? nec cellis ideo contende Falernis.

I piqued myself on thinking that could the poet but have drank one
bottle at Samaden—where Stilicho, by the way, in his famous recruiting
expedition may perhaps have drank it—he would have been less chary in
his panegyric. For the point of inferiority on which he seems to
insist, namely, that Valtelline wine does not keep well in cellar, is
only proper to this vintage in Italian climate.

49Such meditations led my fancy on the path of history. Is there truth,
then, in the dim tradition that this mountain land was colonised by
Etruscans? Is _Ras_ the root of Rhætia? The Etruscans were accomplished
wine-growers, we know. It was their Montepulciano which drew the Gauls
to Rome, if Livy can be trusted. Perhaps they first planted the vine in
Valtelline. Perhaps its superior culture in that district may be due to
ancient use surviving in a secluded Alpine valley. One thing is
certain, that the peasants of Sondrio and Tirano understand viticulture
better than the Italians of Lombardy.

Then my thoughts ran on to the period of modern history, when the
Grisons seized the Valtelline in lieu of war-pay from the Dukes of
Milan. For some three centuries they held it as a subject province.
From the Rathhaus at Davos or Chur they sent their nobles—Von Salis and
Buol, Planta and Sprecher von Bernegg—across the hills as governors or
podestàs to Poschiavo, Sondrio, Tirano, and Morbegno. In those old days
the Valtelline wines came duly every winter over snow-deep passes to
fill the cellars of the Signori Grigioni. That quaint traveller Tom
Coryat, in his so-called 'Crudities,' notes the custom early in the
seventeenth century. And as that custom then obtained, it still
subsists with little alteration. The wine-carriers—Weinführer, as they
are called—first scaled the Bernina pass, halting then as now, perhaps
at Poschiavo and Pontresina. Afterwards, in order to reach Davos, the
pass of the Scaletta rose before them—a wilderness of untracked
snow-drifts. The country-folk still point to narrow, light
hand-sledges, on which the casks were charged before the last pitch of
the pass. Some wine came, no doubt, on pack-saddles. A meadow in front
of the Dischma-Thal, where the pass ends, still bears the name of the
Ross-Weid, or horse-pasture. It was here that the beasts 50of burden
used for this wine-service, rested after their long labours. In
favourable weather the whole journey from Tirano would have occupied at
least four days, with scanty halts at night.

The Valtelline slipped from the hands of the Grisons early in this
century. It is rumoured that one of the Von Salis family negotiated
matters with Napoleon more for his private benefit than for the
interests of the state. However this may have been, when the Graubünden
became a Swiss Canton, after four centuries of sovereign independence,
the whole Valtelline passed to Austria, and so eventually to Italy.
According to modern and just notions of nationality, this was right. In
their period of power, the Grisons masters had treated their Italian
dependencies with harshness. The Valtelline is an Italian valley,
connected with the rest of the peninsula by ties of race and language.
It is, moreover, geographically linked to Italy by the great stream of
the Adda, which takes its rise upon the Stelvio, and after passing
through the Lake of Como, swells the volume of the Po.

But, though politically severed from the Valtelline, the Engadiners and
Davosers have not dropped their old habit of importing its best
produce. What they formerly levied as masters, they now acquire by
purchase. The Italian revenue derives a large profit from the frontier
dues paid at the gate between Tirano and Poschiavo on the Bernina road.
Much of the same wine enters Switzerland by another route, travelling
from Sondrio to Chiavenna and across the Splügen. But until quite
recently, the wine itself could scarcely be found outside the Canton.
It was indeed quoted upon Lombard wine-lists. Yet no one drank it; and
when I tasted it at Milan, I found it quite unrecognisable. The fact
seems to be that the Graubündeners alone know how to 51deal with it;
and, as I have hinted, the wine requires a mountain climate for its
full development.

II

The district where the wine of Valtellina is grown extends, roughly
speaking, from Tirano to Morbegno, a distance of some fifty-four miles.
The best sorts come from the middle of this region. High up in the
valley, soil and climate are alike less favourable. Low down a coarser,
earthier quality springs from fat land where the valley broadens. The
northern hillsides to a very considerable height above the river are
covered with vineyards. The southern slopes on the left bank of the
Adda, lying more in shade, yield but little. Inferno, Grumello, and
Perla di Sassella are the names of famous vineyards. Sassella is the
general name for a large tract. Buying an Inferno, Grumello, or Perla
di Sassella wine, it would be absurd to suppose that one obtained it
precisely from the eponymous estate. But as each of these vineyards
yields a marked quality of wine, which is taken as standard-giving, the
produce of the whole district may be broadly classified as approaching
more or less nearly to one of these accepted types. The Inferno,
Grumello, and Perla di Sassella of commerce are therefore three sorts
of good Valtelline, ticketed with famous names to indicate certain
differences of quality. Montagner, as the name implies, is a somewhat
lighter wine, grown higher up in the hill-vineyards. And of this class
there are many species, some approximating to Sassella in delicacy of
flavour, others approaching the tart lightness of the Villa vintage.
This last takes its title from a village in the neighbourhood of
Tirano, where a table-wine is chiefly grown.

Forzato is the strongest, dearest, longest-lived of this 52whole family
of wines. It is manufactured chiefly at Tirano; and, as will be
understood from its name, does not profess to belong to any one of the
famous localities. Forzato or Sforzato, forced or enforced, is in fact
a wine which has undergone a more artificial process. In German the
people call it Strohwein, which also points to the method of its
preparation. The finest grapes are selected and dried in the sun (hence
the _Stroh_) for a period of eight or nine weeks. When they have almost
become raisins, they are pressed. The must is heavily charged with
sugar, and ferments powerfully. Wine thus made requires several years
to ripen. Sweet at first, it takes at last a very fine quality and
flavour, and is rough, almost acid, on the tongue. Its colour too turns
from a deep rich crimson to the tone of tawny port, which indeed it
much resembles.

Old Forzato, which has been long in cask, and then perhaps three years
in bottle, will fetch at least six francs, or may rise to even ten
francs a flask. The best Sassella rarely reaches more than five francs.
Good Montagner and Grumello can be had perhaps for four francs; and
Inferno of a special quality for six francs. Thus the average price of
old Valtelline wine may be taken as five francs a bottle. These, I
should observe, are hotel prices.

Valtelline wines bought in the wood vary, of course, according to their
age and year of vintage. I have found that from 2.50 fr. to 3.50 fr.
per litre is a fair price for sorts fit to bottle. The new wine of 1881
sold in the following winter at prices varying from 1.05 fr. to 1.80
fr. per litre.

It is customary for the Graubünden wine-merchants to buy up the whole
produce of a vineyard from the peasants at the end of the vintage. They
go in person or depute their agents to inspect the wine, make their
bargains, and seal the cellars where the wine is stored. Then, when the
snow has 53fallen, their own horses with sleighs and trusted servants
go across the passes to bring it home. Generally they have some local
man of confidence at Tirano, the starting-point for the homeward
journey, who takes the casks up to that place and sees them duly
charged. Merchants of old standing maintain relations with the same
peasants, taking their wine regularly; so that from Lorenz Gredig at
Pontresina or Andreas Gredig at Davos Dörfli, from Fanconi at Samaden,
or from Giacomi at Chiavenna, special qualities of wine, the produce of
certain vineyards, are to be obtained. Up to the present time this wine
trade has been conducted with simplicity and honesty by both the
dealers and the growers. One chief merit of Valtelline wine is that it
is pure. How long so desirable a state of things will survive the slow
but steady development of an export business may be questioned.

III

With so much practical and theoretical interest in the produce of the
Valtelline to stimulate my curiosity, I determined to visit the
district at the season when the wine was leaving it. It was the winter
of 1881-82, a winter of unparalleled beauty in the high Alps. Day
succeeded day without a cloud. Night followed night with steady stars,
gliding across clear mountain ranges and forests of dark pines
unstirred by wind. I could not hope for a more prosperous season; and
indeed I made such use of it, that between the months of January and
March I crossed six passes of the Alps in open sleighs—the Fluela
Bernina, Splügen, Julier, Maloja, and Albula—with less difficulty and
discomfort in mid-winter than the traveller may often find on them in
June.

At the end of January, my friend Christian and I left Davos long before
the sun was up, and ascended for four 54hours through the interminable
snow-drifts of the Fluela in a cold grey shadow. The sun's light seemed
to elude us. It ran along the ravine through which we toiled; dipped
down to touch the topmost pines above our heads; rested in golden calm
upon the Schiahorn at our back; capriciously played here and there
across the Weisshorn on our left, and made the precipices of the
Schwartzhorn glitter on our right. But athwart our path it never fell
until we reached the very summit of the pass. Then we passed quietly
into the full glory of the winter morning—a tranquil flood of sunbeams,
pouring through air of crystalline purity, frozen and motionless. White
peaks and dark brown rocks soared up, cutting a sky of almost purple
blueness. A stillness that might be felt brooded over the whole world;
but in that stillness there was nothing sad, no suggestion of suspended
vitality. It was the stillness rather of untroubled health, of strength
omnipotent but unexerted.

From the Hochspitz of the Fluela the track plunges at one bound into
the valley of the Inn, following a narrow cornice carved from the
smooth bank of snow, and hung, without break or barrier, a thousand
feet or more above the torrent. The summer road is lost in snow-drifts.
The galleries built as a protection from avalanches, which sweep in
rivers from those grim, bare fells above, are blocked with snow. Their
useless arches yawn, as we glide over or outside them, by paths which
instinct in our horse and driver traces. As a fly may creep along a
house-roof, slanting downwards we descend. One whisk from the swinged
tail of an avalanche would hurl us, like a fly, into the ruin of the
gaping gorge. But this season little snow has fallen on the higher
hills; and what still lies there, is hard frozen. Therefore we have no
fear, as we whirl fast and faster from the snow-fields into the black
forests of gnarled cembras and wind-wearied pines. Then 55Süss is
reached, where the Inn hurries its shallow waters clogged with
ice-floes through a sleepy hamlet. The stream is pure and green; for
the fountains of the glaciers are locked by winter frosts; and only
clear rills from perennial sources swell its tide. At Süss we lost the
sun, and toiled in garish gloom and silence, nipped by the
ever-deepening cold of evening, upwards for four hours to Samaden.

The next day was spent in visiting the winter colony at San Moritz,
where the Kulm Hotel, tenanted by some twenty guests, presented in its
vastness the appearance of a country-house. One of the prettiest spots
in the world is the ice-rink, fashioned by the skill of Herr Caspar
Badrutt on a high raised terrace, commanding the valley of the Inn and
the ponderous bulwarks of Bernina. The silhouettes of skaters, defined
against that landscape of pure white, passed to and fro beneath a
cloudless sky. Ladies sat and worked or read on seats upon the ice. Not
a breath of wind was astir, and warm beneficent sunlight flooded the
immeasurable air. Only, as the day declined, some iridescent films
overspread the west; and just above Maloja the apparition of a mock
sun—a well-defined circle of opaline light, broken at regular intervals
by four globes—seemed to portend a change of weather. This forecast
fortunately proved delusive. We drove back to Samaden across the silent
snow, enjoying those delicate tints of rose and violet and saffron
which shed enchantment for one hour over the white monotony of Alpine
winter.

At half-past eight next morning, the sun was rising from behind Pitz
Languard, as we crossed the Inn and drove through Pontresina in the
glorious light, with all its huge hotels quite empty and none but a few
country-folk abroad. Those who only know the Engadine in summer have
little conception of its beauty. Winter softens the hard details of
bare rock, and rounds the melancholy grassless mountain 56flanks,
suspending icicles to every ledge and spangling the curved surfaces of
snow with crystals. The landscape gains in purity, and, what sounds
unbelievable, in tenderness. Nor does it lose in grandeur. Looking up
the valley of the Morteratsch that morning, the glaciers were
distinguishable in hues of green and sapphire through their veil of
snow; and the highest peaks soared in a transparency of amethystine
light beneath a blue sky traced with filaments of windy cloud. Some
storm must have disturbed the atmosphere in Italy, for fan-shaped mists
frothed out around the sun, and curled themselves above the mountains
in fine feathery wreaths, melting imperceptibly into air, until, when
we had risen above the cembras, the sky was one deep solid blue.

All that upland wilderness is lovelier now than in the summer; and on
the morning of which I write, the air itself was far more summery than
I have ever known it in the Engadine in August. We could scarcely bear
to place our hands upon the woodwork of the sleigh because of the
fierce sun's heat. And yet the atmosphere was crystalline with windless
frost. As though to increase the strangeness of these contrasts, the
pavement of beaten snow was stained with red drops spilt from
wine-casks which pass over it.

The chief feature of the Bernina—what makes it a dreary pass enough in
summer, but infinitely beautiful in winter—is its breadth; illimitable
undulations of snow-drifts; immensity of open sky; unbroken lines of
white, descending in smooth curves from glittering ice-peaks.

A glacier hangs in air above the frozen lakes, with all its green-blue
ice-cliffs glistening in intensest light. Pitz Palu shoots aloft like
sculptured marble, delicately veined with soft aë;rial shadows of
translucent blue. At the summit of the pass all Italy seems to burst
upon the eyes in those steep serried ranges, with their craggy crests,
violet-hued in noonday 57sunshine, as though a bloom of plum or grape
had been shed over them, enamelling their jagged precipices.

The top of the Bernina is not always thus in winter. It has a bad
reputation for the fury of invading storms, when falling snow hurtles
together with snow scooped from the drifts in eddies, and the weltering
white sea shifts at the will of whirlwinds. The Hospice then may be
tenanted for days together by weather-bound wayfarers; and a line drawn
close beneath its roof shows how two years ago the whole building was
buried in one snow-shroud. This morning we lounged about the door,
while our horses rested and postillions and carters pledged one another
in cups of new Veltliner.

The road takes an awful and sudden dive downwards, quite irrespective
of the carefully engineered post-track. At this season the path is
badly broken into ruts and chasms by the wine traffic. In some places
it was indubitably perilous: a narrow ledge of mere ice skirting thinly
clad hard-frozen banks of snow, which fell precipitately sideways for
hundreds of sheer feet. We did not slip over this parapet, though we
were often within an inch of doing so. Had our horse stumbled, it is
not probable that I should have been writing this.

When we came to the galleries which defend the road from avalanches, we
saw ahead of us a train of over forty sledges ascending, all charged
with Valtelline wine. Our postillions drew up at the inner side of the
gallery, between massive columns of the purest ice dependent from the
rough-hewn roof and walls of rock. A sort of open _loggia_ on the
farther side framed vignettes of the Valtelline mountains in their hard
cerulean shadows and keen sunlight. Between us and the view defiled the
wine-sledges; and as each went by, the men made us drink out of their
_trinketti_. These are oblong, hexagonal wooden kegs, holding about
fourteen litres, 58which the carter fills with wine before he leaves
the Valtelline, to cheer him on the homeward journey. You raise it in
both hands, and when the bung has been removed, allow the liquor to
flow stream-wise down your throat. It was a most extraordinary Bacchic
procession—a pomp which, though undreamed of on the banks of the
Ilissus, proclaimed the deity of Dionysos in authentic fashion.
Struggling horses, grappling at the ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked
shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some clad in sheepskins from Italian
valleys, some brown as bears in rough Graubünden homespun; casks,
dropping their spilth of red wine on the snow; greetings, embracings;
patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and German roaring around the low-browed
vaults and tingling ice pillars; pourings forth of libations of the new
strong Valtelline on breasts and beards;—the whole made up a scene of
stalwart jollity and manful labour such as I have nowhere else in such
wild circumstances witnessed. Many Davosers were there, the men of
Andreas Gredig, Valär, and so forth; and all of these, on greeting
Christian, forced us to drain a _Schluck_ from their unmanageable
cruses. Then on they went, crying, creaking, struggling, straining
through the corridor, which echoed deafeningly, the gleaming crystals
of those hard Italian mountains in their winter raiment building a
background of still beauty to the savage Bacchanalian riot of the team.

How little the visitors who drink Valtelline wine at S. Moritz or Davos
reflect by what strange ways it reaches them. A sledge can scarcely be
laden with more than one cask of 300 litres on the ascent; and this
cask, according to the state of the road, has many times to be shifted
from wheels to runners and back again before the journey is
accomplished. One carter will take charge of two horses, and
consequently of two sledges and two casks, driving them both by voice
and gesture rather than by rein. When they leave the Valtelline, 59the
carters endeavour, as far as possible, to take the pass in gangs, lest
bad weather or an accident upon the road should overtake them singly.
At night they hardly rest three hours, and rarely think of sleeping,
but spend the time in drinking and conversation. The horses are fed and
littered; but for them too the night-halt is little better than a
baiting-time. In fair weather the passage of the mountain is not
difficult, though tiring. But woe to men and beasts alike if they
encounter storms! Not a few perish in the passes; and it frequently
happens that their only chance is to unyoke the horses and leave the
sledges in a snow-wreath, seeking for themselves such shelter as may
possibly be gained, frost-bitten, after hours of battling with
impermeable drifts. The wine is frozen into one solid mass of rosy ice
before it reaches Pontresina. This does not hurt the young vintage, but
it is highly injurious to wine of some years' standing. The perils of
the journey are aggravated by the savage temper of the drivers.
Jealousies between the natives of rival districts spring up; and there
are men alive who have fought the whole way down from Fluela Hospice to
Davos Platz with knives and stones, hammers and hatchets, wooden staves
and splintered cart-wheels, staining the snow with blood, and bringing
broken pates, bruised limbs, and senseless comrades home to their women
to be tended.

Bacchus Alpinus shepherded his train away from us to northward, and we
passed forth into noonday from the gallery. It then seemed clear that
both conductor and postillion were sufficiently merry. The plunge they
took us down those frozen parapets, with shriek and _jauchzen_ and
cracked whips, was more than ever dangerous. Yet we reached La Rosa
safely. This is a lovely solitary spot, beside a rushing stream, among
grey granite boulders grown with spruce and rhododendron: a veritable
rose of Sharon 60blooming in the desert. The wastes of the Bernina
stretch above, and round about are leaguered some of the most
forbidding sharp-toothed peaks I ever saw. Onwards, across the silent
snow, we glided in immitigable sunshine, through opening valleys and
pine-woods, past the robber-huts of Pisciadella, until at evenfall we
rested in the roadside inn at Poschiavo.

IV

The snow-path ended at Poschiavo; and when, as usual, we started on our
journey next day at sunrise, it was in a carriage upon wheels. Yet even
here we were in full midwinter. Beyond Le Prese the lake presented one
sheet of smooth black ice, reflecting every peak and chasm of the
mountains, and showing the rocks and water-weeds in the clear green
depths below. The glittering floor stretched away for acres of
untenanted expanse, with not a skater to explore those dark mysterious
coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured from clefts in the
impendent hills. Inshore the substance of the ice sparkled here and
there with iridescence like the plumelets of a butterfly's wing under
the microscope, wherever light happened to catch the jagged or oblique
flaws that veined its solid crystal.

From the lake the road descends suddenly for a considerable distance
through a narrow gorge, following a torrent which rushes among granite
boulders. Chestnut trees begin to replace the pines. The sunnier
terraces are planted with tobacco, and at a lower level vines appear at
intervals in patches. One comes at length to a great red gate across
the road, which separates Switzerland from Italy, and where the export
dues on wine are paid. The Italian custom-house is romantically perched
above the torrent. Two courteous and elegant _finanzieri_, mere boys,
were sitting wrapped in 61their military cloaks and reading novels in
the sun as we drove up. Though they made some pretence of examining the
luggage, they excused themselves with sweet smiles and apologetic
eyes—it was a disagreeable duty!

A short time brought us to the first village in the Valtelline, where
the road bifurcates northward to Bormio and the Stelvio pass, southward
to Sondrio and Lombardy. It is a little hamlet, known by the name of La
Madonna di Tirano, having grown up round a pilgrimage church of great
beauty, with tall Lombard bell-tower, pierced with many tiers of
pilastered windows, ending in a whimsical spire, and dominating a
fantastic cupola building of the earlier Renaissance. Taken altogether,
this is a charming bit of architecture, picturesquely set beneath the
granite snow-peaks of the Valtelline. The church, they say, was raised
at Madonna's own command to stay the tide of heresy descending from the
Engadine; and in the year 1620, the bronze statue of S. Michael, which
still spreads wide its wings above the cupola, looked down upon the
massacre of six hundred Protestants and foreigners, commanded by the
patriot Jacopo Robustelli.

From Madonna the road leads up the valley through a narrow avenue of
poplar-trees to the town of Tirano. We were now in the district where
Forzato is made, and every vineyard had a name and history. In Tirano
we betook ourself to the house of an old acquaintance of the Buol
family, Bernardo da Campo, or, as the Graubündeners call him, Bernard
Campbèll. We found him at dinner with his son and grandchildren in a
vast, dark, bare Italian chamber. It would be difficult to find a more
typical old Scotchman of the Lowlands than he looked, with his clean
close-shaven face, bright brown eyes, and snow-white hair escaping from
a broad-brimmed hat. He might have sat to a painter for 62some
Covenanter's portrait, except that there was nothing dour about him, or
for an illustration to Burns's 'Cotter's Saturday Night.' The air of
probity and canniness combined with a twinkle of dry humour was
completely Scotch; and when he tapped his snuff-box, telling stories of
old days, I could not refrain from asking him about his pedigree. It
should be said that there is a considerable family of Campèlls or
Campbèlls in the Graubünden, who are fabled to deduce their stock from
a Scotch Protestant of Zwingli's time; and this made it irresistible to
imagine that in our friend Bernardo I had chanced upon a notable
specimen of atavism. All he knew, however, was, that his first ancestor
had been a foreigner, who came across the mountains to Tirano two
centuries ago.[3]

 [3] The Grisons surname Campèll may derive from the Romansch Campo
 Bello. The founder of the house was one Kaspar Campèll, who in the
 first half of the sixteenth century preached the Reformed religion in
 the Engadine.

This old gentleman is a considerable wine-dealer. He sent us with his
son, Giacomo, on a long journey underground through his cellars, where
we tasted several sorts of Valtelline, especially the new Forzato, made
a few weeks since, which singularly combines sweetness with strength,
and both with a slight effervescence. It is certainly the sort of wine
wherewith to tempt a Polyphemus, and not unapt to turn a giant's head.

Leaving Tirano, and once more passing through the poplars by Madonna,
we descended the valley all along the vineyards of Villa and the vast
district of Sassella. Here and there, at wayside inns, we stopped to
drink a glass of some particular vintage; and everywhere it seemed as
though god Bacchus were at home. The whole valley on the right side of
the Adda is one gigantic vineyard, climbing the hills in tiers 63and
terraces, which justify its Italian epithet of _Teatro di Bacco_. The
rock is a greyish granite, assuming sullen brown and orange tints where
exposed to sun and weather. The vines are grown on stakes, not
trellised over trees or carried across boulders, as is the fashion at
Chiavenna or Terlan. Yet every advantage of the mountain is adroitly
used; nooks and crannies being specially preferred, where the sun's
rays are deflected from hanging cliffs. The soil seems deep, and is of
a dull yellow tone. When the vines end, brushwood takes up the growth,
which expires at last in crag and snow. Some alps and chalets, dimly
traced against the sky, are evidences that a pastoral life prevails
above the vineyards. Pan there stretches the pine-thyrsus down to
vine-garlanded Dionysos.

The Adda flows majestically among willows in the midst, and the valley
is nearly straight. The prettiest spot, perhaps, is at Tresenda or S.
Giacomo, where a pass from Edolo and Brescia descends from the southern
hills. But the Valtelline has no great claim to beauty of scenery. Its
chief town, Sondrio, where we supped and drank some special wine called
_il vino de' Signori Grigioni_, has been modernised in dull Italian
fashion.

V

The hotel at Sondrio, La Maddalena, was in carnival uproar of masquers,
topers, and musicians all night through. It was as much as we could do
to rouse the sleepy servants and get a cup of coffee ere we started in
the frozen dawn. 'Verfluchte Maddalena!' grumbled Christian as he
shouldered our portmanteaus and bore them in hot haste to the post.
Long experience only confirms the first impression, that, of all cold,
the cold of an Italian winter is most penetrating. As we lumbered out
of Sondrio in a heavy diligence, I could 64have fancied myself back
once again at Radicofani or among the Ciminian hills. The frost was
penetrating. Fur-coats would not keep it out; and we longed to be once
more in open sledges on Bernina rather than enclosed in that cold
coupé. Now we passed Grumello, the second largest of the renowned vine
districts; and always keeping the white mass of Monte di Disgrazia in
sight, rolled at last into Morbegno. Here the Valtelline vintage
properly ends, though much of the ordinary wine is probably supplied
from the inferior produce of these fields. It was past noon when we
reached Colico, and saw the Lake of Como glittering in sunlight,
dazzling cloaks of snow on all the mountains, which look as dry and
brown as dead beech-leaves at this season. Our Bacchic journey had
reached its close; and it boots not here to tell in detail how we made
our way across the Splügen, piercing its avalanches by low-arched
galleries scooped from the solid snow, and careering in our sledges
down perpendicular snow-fields, which no one who has crossed that pass
from the Italian side in winter will forget. We left the refuge station
at the top together with a train of wine-sledges, and passed them in
the midst of the wild descent. Looking back, I saw two of their horses
stumble in the plunge and roll headlong over. Unluckily in one of these
somersaults a man was injured. Flung ahead into the snow by the first
lurch, the sledge and wine-cask crossed him like a garden-roller. Had
his bed not been of snow, he must have been crushed to death; and as it
was, he presented a woeful appearance when he afterwards arrived at
Splügen.

VI

Though not strictly connected with the subject of this paper, I shall
conclude these notes of winter wanderings in 65the high Alps with an
episode which illustrates their curious vicissitudes.

It was late in the month of March, and nearly all the mountain roads
were open for wheeled vehicles. A carriage and four horses came to meet
us at the termination of a railway journey in Bagalz. We spent one day
in visiting old houses of the Grisons aristocracy at Mayenfeld and
Zizers, rejoicing in the early sunshine, which had spread the fields
with spring flowers—primroses and oxlips, violets, anemones, and bright
blue squills. At Chur we slept, and early next morning started for our
homeward drive to Davos. Bad weather had declared itself in the night.
It blew violently, and the rain soon changed to snow, frozen by a
bitter north blast. Crossing the dreary heath of Lenz was both
magnificent and dreadful. By the time we reached Wiesen, all the
forests were laden with snow, the roads deep in snow-drifts, the whole
scene wintrier than it had been the winter through.

At Wiesen we should have stayed, for evening was fast setting in. But
in ordinary weather it is only a two hours drive from Wiesen to Davos.
Our coachman made no objections to resuming the journey, and our four
horses had but a light load to drag. So we telegraphed for supper to be
prepared, and started between five and six.

A deep gorge has to be traversed, where the torrent cleaves its way
between jaws of limestone precipices. The road is carried along ledges
and through tunnels in the rock. Avalanches, which sweep this passage
annually from the hills above, give it the name of Züge, or the
Snow-Paths. As we entered the gorge darkness fell, the horses dragged
more heavily, and it soon became evident that our Tyrolese driver was
hopelessly drunk. He nearly upset us twice by taking sharp turns in the
road, banged the carriage against telegraph 66posts and jutting rocks,
shaved the very verge of the torrent in places where there was no
parapet, and, what was worst of all, refused to leave his box without a
fight. The darkness by this time was all but total, and a blinding
snow-storm swept howling through the ravine. At length we got the
carriage to a dead-stop, and floundered out in deep wet snow toward
some wooden huts where miners in old days made their habitation. The
place, by a curious, perhaps unconscious irony, is called Hoffnungsau,
or the Meadow of Hope. Indeed, it is not ill named; for many wanderers,
escaping, as we did, from the dreadful gorge of Avalanches on a stormy
night, may have felt, as we now felt, their hope reviving when they
reached this shelter.

There was no light; nothing above, beneath, around, on any side, but
tearing tempest and snow whirled through the ravine. The horses were
taken out of the carriage; on their way to the stable, which
fortunately in these mountain regions will be always found beside the
poorest habitation, one of them fell back across a wall and nearly
broke his spine. Hoffnungsau is inhabited all through the year. In its
dismal dark kitchen we found a knot of workmen gathered together, and
heard there were two horses on the premises besides our own. It then
occurred to us that we might accomplish the rest of the journey with
such sledges as they bring the wood on from the hills in winter, if
coal-boxes or boxes of any sort could be provided. These should be
lashed to the sledges and filled with hay. We were only four persons;
my wife and a friend should go in one, myself and my little girl in the
other. No sooner thought of than put into practice. These original
conveyances were improvised, and after two hours' halt on the Meadow of
Hope, we all set forth again at half-past eight.

I have rarely felt anything more piercing than the grim 67cold of that
journey. We crawled at a foot's pace through changeful snow-drifts. The
road was obliterated, and it was my duty to keep a petroleum
stable-lamp swinging to illuminate the untracked wilderness. My little
girl was snugly nested in the hay, and sound asleep with a deep white
covering of snow above her. Meanwhile, the drift clave in frozen masses
to our faces, lashed by a wind so fierce and keen that it was difficult
to breathe it. My forehead-bone ached, as though with neuralgia, from
the mere mask of icy snow upon it, plastered on with frost. Nothing
could be seen but millions of white specks, whirled at us in eddying
concentric circles. Not far from the entrance to the village we met our
house-folk out with lanterns to look for us. It was past eleven at
night when at last we entered warm rooms and refreshed ourselves for
the tiring day with a jovial champagne supper. Horses, carriage, and
drunken driver reached home next morning.

68




OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE


Travellers journeying southward from Paris first meet with olive-trees
near Montdragon or Monsélimart—little towns, with old historic names,
upon the road to Orange. It is here that we begin to feel ourselves
within the land of Provence, where the Romans found a second Italy, and
where the autumn of their antique civilisation was followed, almost
without an intermediate winter of barbarism, by the light and delicate
springtime of romance. Orange itself is full of Rome. Indeed, the ghost
of the dead empire seems there to be more real and living than the
actual flesh and blood of modern time, as represented by narrow dirty
streets and mean churches. It is the shell of the huge theatre,
hollowed from the solid hill, and fronted with a wall that seems made
rather to protect a city than to form a sounding-board for a stage,
which first tells us that we have reached the old Arausio. Of all
theatres this is the most impressive, stupendous, indestructible, the
Colosseum hardly excepted; for in Rome herself we are prepared for
something gigantic, while in the insignificant Arausio—a sort of
antique Tewkesbury—to find such magnificence, durability, and vastness,
impresses one with a nightmare sense that the old lioness of Empire can
scarcely yet be dead. Standing before the colossal, towering, amorphous
precipice which formed the background of the scena, we feel as if once
more the 'heart-shaking sound of Consul Romanus' might be heard; as if
Roman knights and deputies, arisen 69from the dead, with faces hard and
stern as those of the warriors carved on Trajan's frieze, might take
their seats beneath us in the orchestra, and, after proclamation made,
the mortmain of imperial Rome be laid upon the comforts, liberties, and
little gracefulnesses of our modern life. Nor is it unpleasant to be
startled from such reverie by the voice of the old guardian upon the
stage beneath, sonorously devolving the vacuous Alexandrines with which
he once welcomed his ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little
man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and
grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But
his voice—thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient
architect, which, even in the desolation of at least thirteen
centuries, has not lost its cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and
fills the whole vast hollow with its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank
heaven, there is no danger of Roman resurrection here! The illusion is
completely broken, and we turn to gather the first violets of February,
and to wonder at the quaint postures of a praying mantis on the grass
grown tiers and porches fringed with fern.

The sense of Roman greatness which is so oppressive in Orange and in
many other parts of Provence, is not felt at Avignon. Here we exchange
the ghost of Imperial for the phantom of Ecclesiastical Rome. The fixed
epithet of Avignon is Papal; and as the express train rushes over its
bleak and wind-tormented plain, the heavy dungeon-walls and
battlemented towers of its palace fortress seem to warn us off, and bid
us quickly leave the Babylon of exiled impious Antichrist. Avignon
presents the bleakest, barest, greyest scene upon a February morning,
when the incessant mistral is blowing, and far and near, upon desolate
hillside and sandy plain, the scanty trees are bent sideways, the
crumbling castle turrets shivering like bleached skeletons in the dry
ungenial air. Yet 70inside the town, all is not so dreary. The Papal
palace, with its terrible Glacière, its chapel painted by Simone Memmi,
its endless corridors and staircases, its torture-chamber,
funnel-shaped to drown and suffocate—so runs tradition—the shrieks of
wretches on the rack, is now a barrack, filled with lively little
French soldiers, whose politeness, though sorely taxed, is never
ruffled by the introduction of inquisitive visitors into their
dormitories, eating-places, and drill-grounds. And strange, indeed, it
is to see the lines of neat narrow barrack beds, between which the
red-legged little men are shaving, polishing their guns, or mending
their trousers, in those vaulted halls of popes and cardinals, those
vast presence-chambers and audience-galleries, where Urban entertained
S. Catherine, where Rienzi came, a prisoner, to be stared at. Pass by
the Glacière with a shudder, for it has still the reek of blood about
it; and do not long delay in the cheerless dungeon of Rienzi. Time and
regimental whitewash have swept these lurking-places of old crime very
bare; but the parable of the seven devils is true in more senses than
one, and the ghosts that return to haunt a deodorised, disinfected,
garnished sepulchre are almost more ghastly than those which have never
been disturbed from their old habitations.

Little by little the eye becomes accustomed to the bareness and
greyness of this Provençal landscape; and then we find that the scenery
round Avignon is eminently picturesque. The view from Les Doms—which is
a hill above the Pope's palace, the Acropolis, as it were, of
Avignon—embraces a wide stretch of undulating champaign, bordered by
low hills, and intersected by the flashing waters of the majestic
Rhone. Across the stream stands Villeneuve, like a castle of romance,
with its round stone towers fronting the gates and battlemented walls
of the Papal city. A bridge used to connect the two towns, but it is
now broken. The remaining fragment is of 71solid build, resting on
great buttresses, one of which rises fantastically above the bridge
into a little chapel. Such, one might fancy, was the bridge which
Ariosto's Rodomonte kept on horse against the Paladins of Charlemagne,
when angered by the loss of his love. Nor is it difficult to imagine
Bradamante spurring up the slope against him with her magic lance in
rest, and tilting him into the tawny waves beneath.

On a clear October morning, when the vineyards are taking their last
tints of gold and crimson, and the yellow foliage of the poplars by the
river mingles with the sober greys of olive-trees and willows, every
square inch of this landscape, glittering as it does with light and
with colour, the more beautiful for its subtlety and rarity, would make
a picture. Out of many such vignettes let us choose one. We are on the
shore close by the ruined bridge, the rolling muddy Rhone in front;
beyond it, by the towing-path, a tall strong cypress-tree rises beside
a little house, and next to it a crucifix twelve feet or more in
height, the Christ visible afar, stretched upon His red cross; arundo
donax is waving all around, and willows near; behind, far off, soar the
peaked hills, blue and pearled with clouds; past the cypress, on the
Rhone, comes floating a long raft, swift through the stream, its rudder
guided by a score of men: one standing erect upon the prow bends
forward to salute the cross; on flies the raft, the tall reeds rustle,
and the cypress sleeps.

For those who have time to spare in going to or from the south it is
worth while to spend a day or two in the most comfortable and
characteristic of old French inns, the Hôtel de l'Europe, at Avignon.
Should it rain, the museum of the town is worth a visit. It contains
Horace Vernet's not uncelebrated picture of Mazeppa, and another, less
famous, but perhaps more interesting, by swollen-cheeked David, the
72'genius in convulsion,' as Carlyle has christened him. His canvas is
unfinished. Who knows what cry of the Convention made the painter fling
his palette down and leave the masterpiece he might have spoiled? For
in its way the picture is a masterpiece. There lies Jean Barrad,
drummer, aged fourteen, slain in La Vendée, a true patriot, who, while
his life-blood flowed away, pressed the tricolor cockade to his heart,
and murmured 'Liberty!' David has treated his subject classically. The
little drummer-boy, though French enough in feature and in feeling,
lies, Greek-like, naked on the sand—a very Hyacinth of the Republic, La
Vendée's Ilioneus. The tricolor cockade and the sentiment of upturned
patriotic eyes are the only indications of his being a hero in his
teens, a citizen who thought it sweet to die for France.

In fine weather a visit to Vaucluse should by no means be omitted, not
so much, perhaps, for Petrarch's sake as for the interest of the drive,
and for the marvel of the fountain of the Sorgues. For some time after
leaving Avignon you jog along the level country between avenues of
plane-trees; then comes a hilly ridge, on which the olives, mulberries,
and vineyards join their colours and melt subtly into distant purple.
After crossing this we reach L'Isle, an island village girdled by the
gliding Sorgues, overshadowed with gigantic plane-boughs, and echoing
to the plash of water dripped from mossy fern-tufted millwheels. Those
who expect Petrarch's Sorgues to be some trickling poet's rill emerging
from a damp grotto, may well be astounded at the rush and roar of this
azure river so close upon its fountain-head. It has a volume and an
arrow-like rapidity that communicate the feeling of exuberance and
life. In passing, let it not be forgotten that it was somewhere or
other in this 'chiaro fondo di Sorga,' as Carlyle describes, that
Jourdain, the hangman-hero of the Glacière, stuck fast upon his pony
when flying from his foes, 73and had his accursed life, by some
diabolical providence, spared for future butcheries. On we go across
the austere plain, between fields of madder, the red roots of the
'garance' lying in swathes along the furrows. In front rise ash-grey
hills of barren rock, here and there crimsoned with the leaves of the
dwarf sumach. A huge cliff stands up and seems to bar all passage. Yet
the river foams in torrents at our side. Whence can it issue? What pass
or cranny in that precipice is cloven for its escape? These questions
grow in interest as we enter the narrow defile of limestone rocks which
leads to the cliff-barrier, and find ourselves among the figs and
olives of Vaucluse. Here is the village, the little church, the ugly
column to Petrarch's memory, the inn, with its caricatures of Laura,
and its excellent trout, the bridge and the many-flashing, eddying
Sorgues, lashed by millwheels, broken by weirs, divided in its course,
channelled and dyked, yet flowing irresistibly and undefiled. Blue,
purple, greened by moss and water-weeds, silvered by snow-white
pebbles, on its pure smooth bed the river runs like elemental diamond,
so clear and fresh. The rocks on either side are grey or yellow,
terraced into oliveyards, with here and there a cypress, fig, or
mulberry tree. Soon the gardens cease, and lentisk, rosemary, box, and
ilex—shrubs of Provence—with here and there a sumach out of reach,
cling to the hard stone. And so at last we are brought face to face
with the sheer impassable precipice. At its basement sleeps a pool,
perfectly untroubled; a lakelet in which the sheltering rocks and
nestling wild figs are glassed as in a mirror—a mirror of blue-black
water, like amethyst or fluor-spar—so pure, so still, that where it
laps the pebbles you can scarcely say where air begins and water ends.
This, then, is Petrarch's 'grotto;' this is the fountain of Vaucluse.
Up from its deep reservoirs, from the mysterious basements of the
mountain, wells the silent stream; pauseless 74and motionless it fills
its urn, rises unruffled, glides until the brink is reached, then
overflows, and foams, and dashes noisily, a cataract, among the
boulders of the hills. Nothing at Vaucluse is more impressive than the
contrast between the tranquil silence of the fountain and the roar of
the released impetuous river. Here we can realise the calm clear eyes
of sculptured water-gods, their brimming urns, their gushing streams,
the magic of the mountain-born and darkness-cradled flood. Or again,
looking up at the sheer steep cliff, 800 feet in height, and arching
slightly roofwise, so that no rain falls upon the cavern of the pool,
we seem to see the stroke of Neptune's trident, the hoof of Pegasus,
the force of Moses' rod, which cleft rocks and made water gush forth in
the desert. There is a strange fascination in the spot. As our eyes
follow the white pebble which cleaves the surface and falls visibly,
until the veil of azure is too thick for sight to pierce, we feel as if
some glamour were drawing us, like Hylas, to the hidden caves. At
least, we long to yield a prized and precious offering to the spring,
to grace the nymph of Vaucluse with a pearl of price as token of our
reverence and love.

Meanwhile nothing has been said about Petrarch, who himself said much
about the spring, and complained against those very nymphs to whom we
have in wish, at least, been scattering jewels, that they broke his
banks and swallowed up his gardens every winter. At Vaucluse Petrarch
loved, and lived, and sang. He has made Vaucluse famous, and will never
be forgotten there. But for the present the fountain is even more
attractive than the memory of the poet.[4]

 [4] I have translated and printed at the end of the second volume some
 sonnets of Petrarch as a kind of palinode for this impertinence.

The change from Avignon to Nismes is very trying to the latter place;
for Nismes is not picturesquely or historically 75interesting. It is a
prosperous modern French town with two almost perfect Roman
monuments—Les Arènes and the Maison Carrée. The amphitheatre is a
complete oval, visible at one glance. Its smooth white stone, even
where it has not been restored, seems unimpaired by age; and Charles
Martel's conflagration, when he burned the Saracen hornet's nest inside
it, has only blackened the outer walls and arches venerably. Utility
and perfect adaptation of means to ends form the beauty of Roman
buildings. The science of construction and large intelligence displayed
in them, their strength, simplicity, solidity, and purpose, are their
glory. Perhaps there is only one modern edifice—Palladio's Palazzo
della Ragione at Vicenza—which approaches the dignity and loftiness of
Roman architecture; and this it does because of its absolute freedom
from ornament, the vastness of its design, and the durability of its
material. The temple, called the Maison Carrée, at Nismes, is also very
perfect, and comprehended at one glance. Light, graceful, airy, but
rather thin and narrow, it reminds one of the temple of Fortuna Virilis
at Rome.

But if Nismes itself is not picturesque, its environs contain the
wonderful Pont du Gard. A two or three hours' drive leads through a
desolate country to the valley of the Cardon, where suddenly, at a turn
of the road, one comes upon the aqueduct. It is not within the scope of
words to describe the impression produced by those vast arches, row
above row, cutting the deep blue sky. The domed summer clouds sailing
across them are comprehended in the gigantic span of their perfect
semicircles, which seem rather to have been described by Miltonic
compasses of Deity than by merely human mathematics. Yet, standing
beneath one of the vaults and looking upward, you may read Roman
numerals in order from I. to X., which prove their human origin well
enough. 76Next to their strength, regularity, and magnitude, the most
astonishing point about this triple tier of arches, piled one above the
other to a height of 180 feet above a brawling stream between two
barren hills, is their lightness. The arches are not thick; the
causeway on the top is only just broad enough for three men to walk
abreast. So smooth and perpendicular are the supporting walls that
scarcely a shrub or tuft of grass has grown upon the aqueduct in all
these years. And yet the huge fabric is strengthened by no buttress,
has needed no repair. This lightness of structure, combined with such
prodigious durability, produces the strongest sense of science and
self-reliant power in the men who designed it. None but Romans could
have built such a monument, and have set it in such a place—a
wilderness of rock and rolling hill, scantily covered with low
brushwood, and browsed over by a few sheep—for such a purpose, too, in
order to supply Nemausus with pure water. The modern town does pretty
well without its water; but here subsists the civilisation of eighteen
centuries past intact: the human labour yet remains, the measuring,
contriving mind of man, shrinking from no obstacles, spanning the air,
and in one edifice combining gigantic strength and perfect beauty. It
is impossible not to echo Rousseau's words in such a place, and to say
with him: 'Le retentissement de mes pas dans ces immenses voûtes me
faisait croire entendre la forte voix de ceux qui les avaient bâties.
Je me perdais comme un insecte dans cette immensité. Je sentais, tout
en me faisant petit, je ne sais quoi qui m'élevait l'âme; et je me
disais en soupirant, Que ne suis-je né Romain!'

There is nothing at Arles which produces the same deep and indelible
impression. Yet Arles is a far more interesting town than Nismes,
partly because of the Rhone delta which begins there, partly because of
its ruinous antiquity, and 77partly also because of the strong local
character of its population. The amphitheatre of Arles is vaster and
more sublime in its desolation than the tidy theatre at Nismes; the
crypts, and dens, and subterranean passages suggest all manner of
speculation as to the uses to which they may have been appropriated;
while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous,
like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri,' present the wildest pictures
of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins of the smaller
theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragments and their
standing columns, might be sketched for a frontispiece to some
dilettante work on classical antiquities. For the rest, perhaps the
Aliscamps, or ancient Roman burial-ground, is the most interesting
thing at Arles, not only because of Dante's celebrated lines in the
canto of 'Farinata:'—

Si come ad Arli ove 'l Rodano stagna,
Fanno i sepolcri tutto 'l loco varo;


but also because of the intrinsic picturesqueness of this avenue of
sepulchres beneath green trees upon a long soft grassy field.

But as at Avignon and Nismes, so also at Arles, one of the chief
attractions of the place lies at a distance, and requires a special
expedition. The road to Les Baux crosses a true Provençal desert where
one realises the phrase, 'Vieux comme les rochers de Provence,'—a
wilderness of grey stone, here and there worn into cart-tracks, and
tufted with rosemary, box, lavender, and lentisk. On the way it passes
the Abbaye de Mont Majeur, a ruin of gigantic size, embracing all
periods of architecture; where nothing seems to flourish now but
henbane and the wild cucumber, or to breathe but a mumble-toothed and
terrible old hag. The ruin stands above a desolate marsh, its vast
Italian buildings of Palladian splendour 78looking more forlorn in
their decay than the older and austerer mediæval towers, which rise up
proud and patient and defiantly erect beneath the curse of time. When
at length what used to be the castle town of Les Baux is reached, you
find a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, worn away by nature into
bastions and buttresses and coigns of vantage, sculptured by ancient
art into palaces and chapels, battlements and dungeons. Now art and
nature are confounded in one ruin. Blocks of masonry lie cheek by jowl
with masses of the rough-hewn rock; fallen cavern vaults are heaped
round fragments of fan-shaped spandrel and clustered column-shaft; the
doors and windows of old pleasure-rooms are hung with ivy and wild fig
for tapestry; winding staircases start midway upon the cliff, and lead
to vacancy. High overhead suspended in mid-air hang chambers—lady's
bower or poet's singing-room—now inaccessible, the haunt of hawks and
swallows. Within this rocky honeycomb—'cette ville en monolithe,' as it
has been aptly called, for it is literally scooped out of one mountain
block—live about two hundred poor people, foddering their wretched
goats at carved piscina and stately sideboards, erecting mud
beplastered hovels in the halls of feudal princes. Murray is wrong in
calling the place a mediæval town in its original state, for anything
more purely ruinous, more like a decayed old cheese, cannot possibly be
conceived. The living only inhabit the tombs of the dead. At the end of
the last century, when revolutionary effervescence was beginning to
ferment, the people of Arles swept all its feudality away, defacing the
very arms upon the town gate, and trampling the palace towers to dust.

The castle looks out across a vast extent of plain over Arles, the
stagnant Rhone, the Camargue, and the salt pools of the lingering sea.
In old days it was the eyrie of an eagle race called Seigneurs of Les
Baux; and whether they took their 79title from the rock, or whether, as
genealogists would have it, they gave the name of Oriental
Balthazar—their reputed ancestor, one of the Magi—to the rock itself,
remains a mystery not greatly worth the solving.

Anyhow, here they lived and flourished, these feudal princes, bearing
for their ensign a silver comet of sixteen rays upon a field of
gules—themselves a comet race, baleful to the neighbouring lowlands,
blazing with lurid splendour over wide tracts of country, a burning,
raging, fiery-souled, swift-handed tribe, in whom a flame unquenchable
glowed from son to sire through twice five hundred years until, in the
sixteenth century, they were burned out, and nothing remained but
cinders—these broken ruins of their eyrie, and some outworn and dusty
titles. Very strange are the fate and history of these same titles:
King of Arles, for instance, savouring of troubadour and high romance;
Prince of Tarentum, smacking of old plays and Italian novels; Prince of
Orange, which the Nassaus, through the Châlons, seized in all its
emptiness long after the real principality had passed away, and came
therewith to sit on England's throne.

The Les Baux in their heyday were patterns of feudal nobility. They
warred incessantly with Counts of Provence, archbishops and burghers of
Arles, Queens of Naples, Kings of Aragon. Crusading, pillaging,
betraying, spending their substance on the sword, and buying it again
by deeds of valour or imperial acts of favour, tuning troubadour harps,
presiding at courts of love,—they filled a large page in the history of
Southern France. The Les Baux were very superstitious. In the fulness
of their prosperity they restricted the number of their dependent
towns, or _places baussenques_, to seventy-nine, because these numbers
in combination were thought to be of good omen to their house. Beral
des Baux, Seigneur of Marseilles, was one day starting on a journey
80with his whole force to Avignon. He met an old woman herb-gathering
at daybreak, and said, 'Mother, hast thou seen a crow or other bird?'
'Yea,' answered the crone, 'on the trunk of a dead willow.' Beral
counted upon his fingers the day of the year, and turned bridle. With
troubadours of name and note they had dealings, but not always to their
own advantage, as the following story testifies. When the Baux and
Berengers were struggling for the countship of Provence, Raymond
Berenger, by his wife's counsel, went, attended by troubadours, to meet
the Emperor Frederick at Milan. There he sued for the investiture and
ratification of Provence. His troubadours sang and charmed Frederick;
and the Emperor, for the joy he had in them, wrote his celebrated lines
beginning—

Plas mi cavalier Francez.


And when Berenger made his request he met with no refusal. Hearing
thereof, the lords of Baux came down in wrath with a clangour of armed
men. But music had already gained the day; and where the Phoebus of
Provence had shone, the Æolus of storm-shaken Les Baux was powerless.
Again, when Blacas, a knight of Provence, died, the great Sordello
chanted one of his most fiery hymns, bidding the princes of Christendom
flock round and eat the heart of the dead lord. 'Let Rambaude des
Baux,' cries the bard, with a sarcasm that is clearly meant, but at
this distance almost unintelligible, 'take also a good piece, for she
is fair and good and truly virtuous; let her keep it well who knows so
well to husband her own weal.' But the poets were not always adverse to
the house of Baux. Fouquet, the beautiful and gentle melodist whom
Dante placed in paradise, served Adelaisie, wife of Berald, with long
service of unhappy love, and wrote upon her death 'The Complaint of
Berald des Baux for Adelaisie.' Guillaume de Cabestan loved Berangère
des Baux, and was 81so loved by her that she gave him a philtre to
drink, whereof he sickened and grew mad. Many more troubadours are
cited as having frequented the castle of Les Baux, and among the
members of the princely house were several poets.

Some of them were renowned for beauty. We hear of a Cécile, called
Passe Rose, because of her exceeding loveliness; also of an unhappy
François, who, after passing eighteen years in prison, yet won the
grace and love of Joan of Naples by his charms. But the real temper of
this fierce tribe was not shown among troubadours, or in the courts of
love and beauty. The stern and barren rock from which they sprang, and
the comet of their scutcheon, are the true symbols of their nature.
History records no end of their ravages and slaughters. It is a tedious
catalogue of blood—how one prince put to fire and sword the whole town
of Courthezon; how another was stabbed in prison by his wife; how a
third besieged the castle of his niece, and sought to undermine her
chamber, knowing her the while to be in childbed; how a fourth was
flayed alive outside the walls of Avignon. There is nothing terrible,
splendid, and savage, belonging to feudal history, of which an example
may not be found in the annals of Les Baux, as narrated by their
chronicler, Jules Canonge.

However abrupt may seem the transition from these memories of the
ancient nobles of Les Baux to mere matters of travel and
picturesqueness, it would be impossible to take leave of the old towns
of Provence without glancing at the cathedrals of S. Trophime at Arles,
and of S. Gilles—a village on the border of the dreary flamingo-haunted
Camargue. Both of these buildings have porches splendidly encrusted
with sculptures, half classical, half mediæval, marking the transition
from ancient to modern art. But that of S. Gilles is by far the richer
and more elaborate. The whole façade of 82this church is one mass of
intricate decoration; Norman arches and carved lions, like those of
Lombard architecture, mingling fantastically with Greek scrolls of
fruit and flowers, with elegant Corinthian columns jutting out upon the
church steps, and with the old conventional wave-border that is called
Etruscan in our modern jargon. From the midst of florid fret and
foliage lean mild faces of saints and Madonnas. Symbols of evangelists
with half-human, half-animal eyes and wings, are interwoven with the
leafy bowers of cupids. Grave apostles stand erect beneath acanthus
wreaths that ought to crisp the forehead of a laughing Faun or Bacchus.
And yet so full, exuberant, and deftly chosen are these various
elements, that there remains no sense of incongruity or discord. The
mediæval spirit had much trouble to disentangle itself from classic
reminiscences; and fortunately for the picturesqueness of S. Gilles, it
did not succeed. How strangely different is the result of this
transition in the south from those severe and rigid forms which we call
Romanesque in Germany and Normandy and England!

83




THE CORNICE


It was a dull afternoon in February when we left Nice, and drove across
the mountains to Mentone. Over hill and sea hung a thick mist. Turbia's
Roman tower stood up in cheerless solitude, wreathed round with driving
vapour, and the rocky nest of Esa seemed suspended in a chaos between
sea and sky. Sometimes the fog broke and showed us Villafranca, lying
green and flat in the deep blue below: sometimes a distant view of
higher peaks swam into sight from the shifting cloud. But the whole
scene was desolate. Was it for this that we had left our English home,
and travelled from London day and night? At length we reached the edge
of the cloud, and jingled down by Roccabruna and the olive-groves, till
one by one Mentone's villas came in sight, and at last we found
ourselves at the inn door. That night, and all next day and the next
night, we heard the hoarse sea beat and thunder on the beach. The rain
and wind kept driving from the south, but we consoled ourselves with
thinking that the orange-trees and every kind of flower were drinking
in the moisture and waiting to rejoice in sunlight which would come.

It was a Sunday morning when we woke and found that the rain had gone,
the sun was shining brightly on the sea, and a clear north wind was
blowing cloud and mist away. Out upon the hills we went, not caring
much what path we took; for everything was beautiful, and hill and vale
were 84full of garden walks. Through lemon-groves,—pale, golden-tender
trees,—and olives, stretching their grey boughs against the lonely
cottage tiles, we climbed, until we reached the pines and heath above.
Then I knew the meaning of Theocritus for the first time. We found a
well, broad, deep, and clear, with green herbs growing at the bottom, a
runlet flowing from it down the rocky steps, maidenhair, black
adiantum, and blue violets, hanging from the brink and mirrored in the
water. This was just the well in _Hylas_. Theocritus has been badly
treated. They call him a court poet, dead to Nature, artificial in his
pictures. Yet I recognised this fountain by his verse, just as if he
had showed me the very spot. Violets grow everywhere, of every shade,
from black to lilac. Their stalks are long, and the flowers 'nod' upon
them, so that I see how the Greeks could make them into chaplets—how
Lycidas wore his crown of white violets[5] lying by the fireside
elbow-deep in withered asphodel, watching the chestnuts in the embers,
and softly drinking deep healths to Ageanax far off upon the waves. It
is impossible to go wrong in these valleys. They are cultivated to the
height of about five hundred feet above the sea, in terraces
laboriously built up with walls, earthed and manured, and irrigated by
means of tanks and aqueducts. Above this level, where the virgin soil
has not been yet reclaimed, or where the winds of winter bring down
freezing currents from the mountains through a gap or gully of the
lower hills, a tangled growth of heaths and arbutus, and pines, and
rosemarys, and myrtles, continue the vegetation, till it finally ends
in bare grey rocks and peaks some thousand feet in height. Far above
all signs of cultivation 85on these arid peaks, you still may see
villages and ruined castles, built centuries ago for a protection from
the Moorish pirates. To these mountain fastnesses the people of the
coast retreated when they descried the sails of their foes on the
horizon. In Mentone, not very long ago, old men might be seen who in
their youth were said to have been taken captive by the Moors; and many
Arabic words have found their way into the patois of the people.

 [5] This begs the question whether λευκόϊον does not properly mean
 snowflake, or some such flower. Violets in Greece, however, were often
 used for crowns: ΐοστέφανος  is the epithet of Homer for Aphrodite,
 and of Aristophanes for Athens.

There is something strangely fascinating in the sight of these ruins on
the burning rocks, with their black sentinel cypresses, immensely tall
and far away. Long years and rain and sunlight have made these
castellated eyries one with their native stone. It is hard to trace in
their foundations where Nature's workmanship ends and where man's
begins. What strange sights the mountain villagers must see! The vast
blue plain of the unfurrowed deep, the fairy range of Corsica hung
midway between the sea and sky at dawn or sunset, the stars so close
above their heads, the deep dew-sprinkled valleys, the green pines! On
penetrating into one of these hill-fortresses, you find that it is a
whole village, with a church and castle and piazza, some few feet
square, huddled together on a narrow platform. We met one day three
magnates of Gorbio taking a morning stroll backwards and forwards, up
and down their tiny square. Vehemently gesticulating, loudly
chattering, they talked as though they had not seen each other for ten
years, and were but just unloading their budgets of accumulated news.
Yet these three men probably had lived, eaten, drunk, and talked
together from the cradle to that hour: so true it is that use and
custom quicken all our powers, especially of 93gossiping and
scandal-mongering. S. Agnese is the highest and most notable of all
these villages. The cold and heat upon its absolutely barren rock must
be alike intolerable. In appearance 86it is not unlike the Etruscan
towns of Central Italy; but there is something, of course, far more
imposing in the immense antiquity and the historical associations of a
Narni, a Fiesole, a Chiusi, or an Orvieto. Sea-life and rusticity
strike a different note from that of those Apennine-girdled seats of
dead civilisation, in which nations, arts, and religions have gone by
and left but few traces,—some wrecks of giant walls, some excavated
tombs, some shrines, where monks still sing and pray above the relics
of the founders of once world-shaking, now almost forgotten, orders.
Here at Mentone there is none of this; the idyllic is the true note,
and Theocritus is still alive.

We do not often scale these altitudes, but keep along the terraced
glades by the side of olive-shaded streams. The violets, instead of
peeping shyly from hedgerows, fall in ripples and cascades over mossy
walls among maidenhair and spleen-worts. They are very sweet, and the
sound of trickling water seems to mingle with their fragrance in a most
delicious harmony. Sound, smell, and hue make up one chord, the sense
of which is pure and perfect peace. The country-people are kind,
letting us pass everywhere, so that we make our way along their
aqueducts and through their gardens, under laden lemon-boughs, the pale
fruit dangling at our ears, and swinging showers of scented dew upon us
as we pass. Far better, however, than lemon or orange trees, are the
olives. Some of these are immensely old, numbering, it is said, five
centuries, so that Petrarch may almost have rested beneath their shade
on his way to Avignon. These veterans are cavernous with age: gnarled,
split, and twisted trunks, throwing out arms that break into a hundred
branches; every branch distinct, and feathered with innumerable sparks
and spikelets of white, wavy, greenish light. These are the leaves, and
the stems are grey with lichens. The sky and sea—two blues, one full
87of sunlight and the other purple—set these fountains of perennial
brightness like gems in lapis-lazuli. At a distance the same olives
look hoary and soft—a veil of woven light or luminous haze. When the
wind blows their branches all one way, they ripple like a sea of
silver. But underneath their covert, in the shade, grey periwinkles
wind among the snowy drift of allium. The narcissus sends its arrowy
fragrance through the air, while, far and wide, red anemones burn like
fire, with interchange of blue and lilac buds, white arums, orchises,
and pink gladiolus. Wandering there, and seeing the pale flowers, stars
white and pink and odorous, we dream of Olivet, or the grave Garden of
the Agony, and the trees seem always whispering of sacred things. How
people can blaspheme against the olives, and call them imitations of
the willow, or complain that they are shabby shrubs, I do not know.[6]

 [6] Olive-trees must be studied at Mentone or San Remo, in Corfu, at
 Tivoli, on the coast between Syracuse and Catania, or on the lowlands
 of Apulia. The stunted but productive trees of the Rhone valley, for
 example, are no real measure of the beauty they can exhibit.

This shore would stand for Shelley's Island of Epipsychidion, or the
golden age which Empedocles describes, when the mild nations worshipped
Aphrodite with incense and the images of beasts and yellow honey, and
no blood was spilt upon her altars—when 'the trees flourished with
perennial leaves and fruit, and ample crops adorned their boughs
through all the year.' This even now is literally true of the
lemon-groves, which do not cease to flower and ripen. Everything fits
in to complete the reproduction of Greek pastoral life. The goats eat
cytisus and myrtle on the shore; a whole flock gathered round me as I
sat beneath a tuft of golden green euphorbia the other day, and nibbled
bread from my hands. The frog still croaks by tank and 88fountain,
'whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye,' in spite of Bion's
death. The narcissus, anemone, and hyacinth still tell their tales of
love and death. Hesper still gazes on the shepherd from the
mountain-head. The slender cypresses still vibrate, the pines murmur.
Pan sleeps in noontide heat, and goat-herds and wayfaring men lie down
to slumber by the roadside, under olive-boughs in which cicadas sing.
The little villages high up are just as white, the mountains just as
grey and shadowy when evening falls. Nothing is changed—except
ourselves. I expect to find a statue of Priapus or pastoral Pan, hung
with wreaths of flowers—the meal cake, honey, and spilt wine upon his
altar, and young boys and maidens dancing round. Surely, in some
far-off glade, by the side of lemon-grove or garden, near the village,
there must be still a pagan remnant of glad Nature-worship. Surely I
shall chance upon some Thyrsis piping in the pine-tree shade, or Daphne
flying from the arms of Phoebus. So I dream until I come upon the
Calvary set on a solitary hillock, with its prayer-steps lending a wide
prospect across the olives and the orange-trees, and the broad valleys,
to immeasurable skies and purple seas. There is the iron cross, the
wounded heart, the spear, the reed, the nails, the crown of thorns, the
cup of sacrificial blood, the title, with its superscription royal and
divine. The other day we crossed a brook and entered a lemon-field,
rich with blossoms and carpeted with red anemones. Everything basked in
sunlight and glittered with exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white
chapel stood in a corner of the enclosure. Two iron-grated windows let
me see inside: it was a bare place, containing nothing but a wooden
praying-desk, black and worm-eaten, an altar with its candles and no
flowers, and above the altar a square picture brown with age. On the
floor were scattered several pence, and in a vase above the holy-water
vessel stood 89some withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed
to the gloom, I could see from the darkness of the picture a pale
Christ nailed to the cross with agonising upward eyes and ashy aureole
above the bleeding thorns. Thus I stepped suddenly away from the
outward pomp and bravery of nature to the inward aspirations, agonies,
and martyrdoms of man—from Greek legends of the past to the real
Christian present—and I remembered that an illimitable prospect has
been opened to the world, that in spite of ourselves we must turn our
eyes heavenward, inward, to the infinite unseen beyond us and within
our souls. Nothing can take us back to Phoebus or to Pan. Nothing can
again identify us with the simple natural earth. '_Une immense
espérance a traversé la terre_,' and these chapels, with their deep
significances, lurk in the fair landscape like the cares of real life
among our dreams of art, or like a fear of death and the hereafter in
the midst of opera music. It is a strange contrast. The worship of men
in those old times was symbolised by dances in the evening, banquets,
libations, and mirth-making. 'Euphrosyne' was alike the goddess of the
righteous mind and of the merry heart. Old withered women telling their
rosaries at dusk; belated shepherds crossing themselves beneath the
stars when they pass the chapel; maidens weighed down with Margaret's
anguish of unhappy love; youths vowing their life to contemplation in
secluded cloisters,—these are the human forms which gather round such
chapels; and the motto of the worshippers consists in this, 'Do often
violence to thy desire.' In the Tyrol we have seen whole villages
praying together at daybreak before their day's work, singing their
_Miserere_ and their _Gloria_ and their _Dies Iræ_, to the sound of
crashing organs and jangling bells; appealing in the midst of Nature's
splendour to the Spirit which is above Nature, which dwells in darkness
rather than light, 90and loves the yearnings and contentions of our
soul more than its summer gladness and peace. Even the olives here tell
more to us of Olivet and the Garden than of the oil-press and the
wrestling-ground. The lilies carry us to the Sermon on the Mount, and
teach humility, instead of summoning up some legend of a god's love for
a mortal. The hillside tanks and running streams, and water-brooks
swollen by sudden rain, speak of Palestine. We call the white flowers
stars of Bethlehem. The large sceptre-reed; the fig-tree, lingering in
barrenness when other trees are full of fruit; the locust-beans of the
Caruba:—for one suggestion of Greek idylls there is yet another, of far
deeper, dearer power.

But who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cap S. Martin?
Down to the verge of the sea stretch the tall, twisted stems of Levant
pines, and on the caverned limestone breaks the deep blue water.
Dazzling as marble are these rocks, pointed and honeycombed with
constant dashing of the restless sea, tufted with corallines and grey
and purple seaweeds in the little pools, but hard and dry and rough
above tide level. Nor does the sea always lap them quietly; for the
last few days it has come tumbling in, roaring and raging on the beach
with huge waves crystalline in their transparency, and maned with
fleecy spray. Such were the rocks and such the swell of breakers when
Ulysses grasped the shore after his long swim. Samphire, very salt and
fragrant, grows in the rocky honeycomb; then lentisk and beach-loving
myrtle, both exceeding green and bushy; then rosemary and euphorbia
above the reach of spray. Fishermen, with their long reeds, sit lazily
perched upon black rocks above blue waves, sunning themselves as much
as seeking sport. One distant tip of snow, seen far away behind the
hills, reminds us of an alien, unremembered winter. While dreaming
there, this fancy came into my 91head: Polyphemus was born yonder in
the Gorbio Valley. There he fed his sheep and goats, and on the hills
found scanty pasture for his kine. He and his mother lived in the white
house by the cypress near the stream where tulips grow. Young Galatea,
nursed in the caverns of these rocks, white as the foam, and shy as the
sea fishes, came one morning up the valley to pick mountain hyacinths,
and little Polyphemus led the way. He knew where violets and sweet
narcissus grew, as well as Galatea where pink coralline and spreading
sea-flowers with their waving arms. But Galatea, having filled her lap
with bluebells, quite forgot the leaping kids, and piping Cyclops, and
cool summer caves, and yellow honey, and black ivy, and sweet vine, and
water cold as Alpine snow. Down the swift streamlet she danced
laughingly, and made herself once more bitter with the sea. But
Polyphemus remained,—hungry, sad, gazing on the barren sea, and piping
to the mockery of its waves.

Filled with these Greek fancies, it is strange to come upon a little
sandstone dell furrowed by trickling streams and overgrown with English
primroses; or to enter the village of Roccabruna, with its mediæval
castle and the motto on its walls, _Tempora labuntur tacitisque
senescimus annis_. A true motto for the town, where the butcher comes
but once a week, and where men and boys, and dogs, and palms, and
lemon-trees grow up and flourish and decay in the same hollow of the
sunny mountain-side. Into the hard conglomerate of the hill the town is
built; house walls and precipices mortised into one another, dovetailed
by the art of years gone by, and riveted by age. The same plants grow
from both alike—spurge, cistus, rue, and henbane, constant to the
desolation of abandoned dwellings. From the castle you look down on
roofs, brown tiles and chimney-pots, set one above the other like a big
card-castle. Each house has 92its foot on a neighbour's neck, and its
shoulder set against the native stone. The streets meander in and out,
and up and down, overarched and balconied, but very clean. They swarm
with children, healthy, happy, little monkeys, who grow fat on salt
fish and yellow polenta, with oil and sun _ad libitum_.

At night from Roccabruna you may see the flaring gas-lamps of the
gaming-house at Monaco, that Armida's garden of the nineteenth century.
It is the sunniest and most sheltered spot of all the coast. Long ago
Lucan said of Monaco, '_Non Corus in illum jus habet aut Zephyrus_;'
winter never comes to nip its tangled cactuses, and aloes, and
geraniums. The air swoons with the scent of lemon-groves; tall
palm-trees wave their graceful branches by the shore; music of the
softest and the loudest swells from the palace; cool corridors and
sunny seats stand ready for the noontide heat or evening calm; without,
are olive-gardens, green and fresh and full of flowers. But the witch
herself holds her high court and never-ending festival of sin in the
painted banquet-halls and among the green tables.

Let us leave this scene and turn with the country-folk of Roccabruna to
S. Michael's Church at Mentone. High above the sea it stands, and from
its open doors you look across the mountains with their olive-trees.
Inside the church is a seething mass of country-folk and townspeople,
mostly women, and these almost all old, but picturesque beyond
description; kerchiefs of every colour, wrinkles of every shape and
depth, skins of every tone of brown and yellow, voices of every
gruffness, shrillness, strength, and weakness. Wherever an empty corner
can be found, it is soon filled by tottering babies and mischievous
children. The country-women come with their large dangling earrings of
thin gold, wearing pink tulips or lemon-buds in their black hair. A low
buzz of gossiping and mutual recognition keeps the air alive. The whole
service seems a holiday—a general enjoyment of gala dresses and
friendly greetings, very different from the silence, immobility, and
_noli me tangere_ aspect of an English congregation. Over all drones,
rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ; wailing, querulous, asthmatic,
incomplete, its everlasting nasal chant—always beginning, never ending,
through a range of two or three notes ground into one monotony. The
voices of the congregation rise and sink above it. These southern
people, like the Arabs, the Apulians, and the Spaniards, seem to find
their music in a hurdy-gurdy swell of sound. The other day we met a
little girl, walking and spinning, and singing all the while, whose
song was just another version of this chant. It has a discontented
plaintive wail, as if it came from some vast age, and were a cousin of
primeval winds.

At first sight, by the side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. The
valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey
upon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat earth
is wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed
invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the
kitchen-garden. The country does not suggest a single Greek idea. It
has no form or outline—no barren peaks, no spare and difficult
vegetation. The beauty is rich but tame—valleys green with oats and
corn, blossoming cherry-trees, and sweet bean-fields, figs coming into
leaf, and arrowy bay-trees by the side of sparkling streams: here and
there a broken aqueduct or rainbow bridge hung with maidenhair and
briar and clematis and sarsaparilla.

In the cathedral church of San Siro on Good Friday they hang the
columns and the windows with black; they cover the pictures and deface
the altar; above the high altar they 94raise a crucifix, and below they
place a catafalque with the effigy of the dead Christ. To this sad
symbol they address their prayers and incense, chant their 'litanies
and lurries,' and clash the rattles, which commemorate their rage
against the traitor Judas. So far have we already passed away from the
Greek feeling of Mentone. As I listened to the hideous din, I could not
but remember the Theocritean burial of Adonis. Two funeral beds
prepared: two feasts recurring in the springtime of the year. What a
difference beneath this superficial similarity—καλος νέκυς οι΅α
καθεύδων—_attritus ægrâ macie_. But the fast of Good Friday is followed
by the festival of Easter. That, after all, is the chief difference.

After leaving the cathedral we saw a pretty picture in a dull old
street of San Remo—three children leaning from a window, blowing
bubbles. The bubbles floated down the street, of every colour, round
and trembling, like the dreams of life which children dream. The town
is certainly most picturesque. It resembles a huge glacier of houses
poured over a wedge of rock, running down the sides and along the
ridge, and spreading itself into a fan between two torrents on the
shore below. House over house, with balcony and staircase, convent
turret and church tower, palm-trees and olives, roof gardens and
clinging creepers—this white cataract of buildings streams downward
from the lazar-house, and sanctuary, and sandstone quarries on the
hill. It is a mass of streets placed close above each other, and linked
together with arms and arches of solid masonry, as a protection from
the earthquakes, which are frequent at San Remo. The walls are tall,
and form a labyrinth of gloomy passages and treacherous blind alleys,
where the Moors of old might meet with a ferocious welcome. Indeed, San
Remo is a fortress as well as a dwelling-place. Over its gateways may
still be traced the pipes for molten lead, and on its walls the
eyeloops for 95arrows, with brackets for the feet of archers. Masses of
building have been shaken down by earthquakes. The ruins of what once
were houses gape with blackened chimneys and dark forlorn cellars;
mazes of fungus and unhealthy weeds among the still secure habitations.
Hardly a ray of light penetrates the streets; one learns the meaning of
the Italian word _uggia_ from their cold and gloom. During the day they
are deserted by every one but babies and witchlike old women—some
gossiping, some sitting vacant at the house door, some spinning or
weaving, or minding little children—ugly and ancient as are their own
homes, yet clean as are the streets. The younger population goes
afield; the men on mules laden for the hills, the women burdened like
mules with heavy and disgusting loads. It is an exceptionally
good-looking race; tall, well-grown, and strong.—But to the streets
again. The shops in the upper town are few, chiefly wine-booths and
stalls for the sale of salt fish, eggs, and bread, or cobblers' and
tinkers' ware. Notwithstanding the darkness of their dwellings, the
people have a love of flowers; azaleas lean from their windows, and
vines, carefully protected by a sheath of brickwork, climb the six
stories, to blossom out into a pergola upon the roof. Look at that mass
of greenery and colours, dimly seen from beneath, with a yellow cat
sunning herself upon the parapet! To reach such a garden and such
sunlight who would not mount six stories and thread a labyrinth of
passages? I should prefer a room upon the east side of the town,
looking southward to the Molo and the sea, with a sound of water
beneath, and a palm soaring up to fan my window with his feathery
leaves.

The shrines are little spots of brightness in the gloomy streets.
Madonna with a sword; Christ holding His pierced and bleeding heart;
l'Eterno Padre pointing to the dead Son stretched upon His knee; some
souls in torment; S. Roch 96reminding us of old plagues by the spot
upon his thigh;—these are the symbols of the shrines. Before them stand
rows of pots filled with gillyflowers, placed there by pious, simple,
praying hands—by maidens come to tell their sorrows to our Lady rich in
sorrow, by old women bent and shrivelled, in hopes of paradise or
gratitude for happy days, when Madonna kept Cecchino faithful to his
home, or saved the baby from the fever.

Lower down, between the sea and the hill, is the municipal,
aristocratic, ecclesiastical quarter of San Remo. There stands the
Palace Borea—a truly princely pile, built in the last Renaissance style
of splendour, with sea-nymphs and dolphins, and satyric heads, half
lips, half leafage, round about its doors and windows. Once it formed
the dwelling of a feudal family, but now it is a roomy anthill of a
hundred houses, shops, and offices, the Boreas of to-day retaining but
a portion of one flat, and making profit of the rest. There, too, are
the barracks and the syndic's hall; the Jesuits' school, crowded with
boys and girls; the shops for clothes, confectionery, and trinkets; the
piazza, with its fountain and tasselled planes, and flowery
chestnut-trees, a mass of greenery. Under these trees the idlers
lounge, boys play at leap-frog, men at bowls. Women in San Remo work
all day, but men and boys play for the most part at bowls or toss-penny
or leap-frog or morra. San Siro, the cathedral, stands at one end of
the square. Do not go inside; it has a sickly smell of immemorial
incense and garlic, undefinable and horrible. Far better looks San Siro
from the parapet above the torrent. There you see its irregular
half-Gothic outline across a tangle of lemon-trees and olives. The
stream rushes by through high walls, covered with creepers, spanned by
ferny bridges, feathered by one or two old tufty palms. And over all
rises the ancient turret of San Siro, like a Spanish giralda, a minaret
of pinnacles and 97pyramids and dome bubbles, with windows showing
heavy bells, old clocks, and sundials painted on the walls, and a
cupola of green and yellow tiles like serpent-scales, to crown the
whole. The sea lies beyond, and the house-roofs break it with grey
horizontal lines. Then there are convents, legions of them, large white
edifices, Jesuitical apparently for the most part, clanging importunate
bells, leaning rose-blossoms and cypress-boughs over their jealous
walls.

Lastly, there is the port—the mole running out into the sea, the quay
planted with plane-trees, and the fishing-boats—by which San Remo is
connected with the naval glory of the past—with the Riviera that gave
birth to Columbus—with the Liguria that the Dorias ruled—with the great
name of Genoa. The port is empty enough now; but from the pier you look
back on San Remo and its circling hills, a jewelled town set in
illimitable olive greyness. The quay seems also to be the
cattle-market. There the small buff cows of North Italy repose after
their long voyage or march, kneeling on the sandy ground or rubbing
their sides against the wooden cross awry with age and shorn of all its
symbols. Lambs frisk among the boats; impudent kids nibble the drooping
ears of patient mules. Hinds in white jackets and knee-breeches made of
skins, lead shaggy rams and fiercely bearded goats, ready to butt at
every barking dog, and always seeking opportunities of flight. Farmers
and parish priests in black petticoats feel the cattle and dispute
about the price, or whet their bargains with a draught of wine.
Meanwhile the nets are brought on shore glittering with the fry of
sardines, which are cooked like whitebait, with cuttlefish—amorphous
objects stretching shiny feelers on the hot dry sand—and prickly purple
eggs of the sea-urchin. Women go about their labour through the throng,
some carrying stones upon their heads, or unloading boats and bearing
planks of wood in single file, two marching 98side by side beneath one
load of lime, others scarcely visible under a stack of oats, another
with her baby in its cradle fast asleep.

San Remo has an elder brother among the hills, which is called San
Romolo, after one of the old bishops of Genoa. Who San Remo was is
buried in remote antiquity; but his town has prospered, while of San
Romolo nothing remains but a ruined hill-convent among pine-trees. The
old convent is worth visiting. Its road carries you into the heart of
the sierra which surrounds San Remo, a hill-country something like the
Jura, undulating and green to the very top with maritime pines and
pinasters. Riding up, you hear all manner of Alpine sounds; brawling
streams, tinkling cowbells, and herdsmen calling to each other on the
slopes. Beneath you lies San Remo, scarcely visible; and over it the
great sea rises ever so far into the sky, until the white sails hang in
air, and cloud and sea-line melt into each other indistinguishably.
Spanish chestnuts surround the monastery with bright blue gentians,
hepaticas, forget-me-nots, and primroses about their roots. The house
itself is perched on a knoll with ample prospect to the sea and to the
mountains, very near to heaven, within a theatre of noble
contemplations and soul-stirring thoughts. If Mentone spoke to me of
the poetry of Greek pastoral life, this convent speaks of mediæval
monasticism—of solitude with God, above, beneath, and all around, of
silence and repose from agitating cares, of continuity in prayer, and
changelessness of daily life. Some precepts of the _Imitatio_ came into
my mind: 'Be never wholly idle; read or write, pray or meditate, or
work with diligence for the common needs.' 'Praiseworthy is it for the
religious man to go abroad but seldom, and to seem to shun, and keep
his eyes from men.' 'Sweet is the cell when it is often sought, but if
we gad about, it wearies us by its 99seclusion.' Then I thought of the
monks so living in this solitude; their cell windows looking across the
valley to the sea, through summer and winter, under sun and stars. Then
would they read or write, what long melodious hours! or would they
pray, what stations on the pine-clad hills! or would they toil, what
terraces to build and plant with corn, what flowers to tend, what cows
to milk and pasture, what wood to cut, what fir-cones to gather for the
winter fire! or should they yearn for silence, silence from their
comrades of the solitude, what whispering galleries of God, where never
human voice breaks loudly, but winds and streams and lonely birds
disturb the awful stillness! In such a hermitage as this, only more
wild, lived S. Francis of Assisi, among the Apennines.[7] It was there
that he learned the tongues of beasts and birds, and preached them
sermons. Stretched for hours motionless on the bare rocks, coloured
like them and rough like them in his brown peasant's serge, he prayed
and meditated, saw the vision of Christ crucified, and planned his
order to regenerate a vicious age. So still he lay, so long, so like a
stone, so gentle were his eyes, so kind and low his voice, that the
mice nibbled breadcrumbs from his wallet, lizards ran over him, and
larks sang to him in the air. There, too, in those long, solitary
vigils, the Spirit of God came upon him, and the spirit of Nature was
even as God's Spirit, and he sang: 'Laudato sia Dio mio Signore, con
tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo frate sole; per suor luna, e
per le stelle; per frate vento e per l'aire, e nuvolo, e sereno e ogni
tempo.' Half the value of this hymn would be lost were we to forget how
it was written, in what solitudes and mountains far from men, or to
ticket it with some abstract word like Pantheism. Pantheism it is not;
but an acknowledgment of that brotherhood, beneath the love of God, by
which the sun 100and moon and stars, and wind and air and cloud, and
clearness and all weather, and all creatures, are bound together with
the soul of man.

 [7] Dante, Par. xi. 106.

Few, of course, were like S. Francis. Probably no monk of San Romolo
was inspired with his enthusiasm for humanity, or had his revelation of
the Divine Spirit inherent in the world. Still fewer can have felt the
æsthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely. It was as much as they could
boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, and attended
to the concerns each of his own soul. A terrible selfishness, if
rightly considered; but one which accorded with the delusion that this
world is a cave of care, the other world a place of torture or undying
bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong
abandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence. Why, then,
should monks, so persuaded of the riddle of the earth, have placed
themselves in scenes so beautiful? Why rose the Camaldolis and
Chartreuses over Europe? white convents on the brows of lofty hills,
among the rustling boughs of Vallombrosas, in the grassy meadows of
Engelbergs,—always the eyries of Nature's lovers, men smitten with the
loveliness of earth? There is surely some meaning in these poetic
stations.

Here is a sentence of the _Imitatio_ which throws some light upon the
hymn of S. Francis and the sites of Benedictine monasteries, by
explaining the value of natural beauty for monks who spent their life
in studying death: 'If thy heart were right, then would every creature
be to thee a mirror of life, and a book of holy doctrine. There is no
creature so small and vile that does not show forth the goodness of
God.' With this sentence bound about their foreheads, walked Fra
Angelico and S. Francis. To men like them the mountain valleys and the
skies, and all that they contained, were full of deep significance.
Though they reasoned '_de conditione 101humanæ miseriæ_,' and '_de
contemptu mundi_,' yet the whole world was a pageant of God's glory, a
testimony to His goodness. Their chastened senses, pure hearts, and
simple wills were as wings by which they soared above the things of
earth, and sent the music of their souls aloft with every other
creature in the symphony of praise. To them, as to Blake, the sun was
no mere blazing disc or ball, but 'an innumerable company of the
heavenly host singing, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty."' To
them the winds were brothers, and the streams were sisters—brethren in
common dependence upon God their Father, brethren in common
consecration to His service, brethren by blood, brethren by vows of
holiness. Unquestioning faith rendered this world no puzzle; they
overlooked the things of sense because the spiritual things were ever
present, and as clear as day. Yet did they not forget that spiritual
things are symbolised by things of sense; and so the smallest herb of
grass was vital to their tranquil contemplations. We who have lost
sight of the invisible world, who set our affections more on things of
earth, fancy that because these monks despised the world, and did not
write about its landscapes, therefore they were dead to its beauty.
This is mere vanity: the mountains, stars, seas, fields, and living
things were only swallowed up in the one thought of God, and made
subordinate to the awfulness of human destinies. We to whom hills are
hills, and seas are seas, and stars are ponderable quantities, speak,
write, and reason of them as of objects interesting in themselves. The
monks were less ostensibly concerned about such things, because they
only found in them the vestibules and symbols of a hidden mystery.

The contrast between the Greek and mediæval modes of regarding Nature
is not a little remarkable. Both Greeks and monks, judged by
nineteenth-century standards, were 102unobservant of natural beauties.
They make but brief and general remarks upon landscapes and the like.
The ποντίων τε κυμάτων άνήριθμον γέλασμα is very rare. But the Greeks
stopped at the threshold of Nature; the forces they found there, the
gods, were inherent in Nature, and distinct. They did not, like the
monks, place one spiritual power, omnipotent and omnipresent, above
all, and see in Nature lessons of Divine government. We ourselves
having somewhat overstrained the latter point of view, are now apt to
return vaguely to Greek fancies. Perhaps, too, we talk so much about
scenery because it is scenery to us, and the life has gone out of it.

I cannot leave the Cornice without one word about a place which lies
between Mentone and San Remo. Bordighera has a beauty which is quite
distinct from both. Palms are its chief characteristics. They lean
against the garden walls, and feather the wells outside the town, where
women come with brazen pitchers to draw water. In some of the marshy
tangles of the plain, they spring from a thick undergrowth of spiky
leaves, and rear their tall aë;rial arms against the deep blue
background of the sea or darker purple of the distant hills. White
pigeons fly about among their branches, and the air is loud with
cooings and with rustlings, and the hoarser croaking of innumerable
frogs. Then, in the olive-groves that stretch along the level shore,
are labyrinths of rare and curious plants, painted tulips and white
periwinkles, flinging their light of blossoms and dark glossy leaves
down the swift channels of the brawling streams. On each side of the
rivulets they grow, like sister cataracts of flowers instead of spray.
At night fresh stars come out along the coast, beneath the stars of
heaven; for you can see the lamps of Ventimiglia and Mentone and
Monaco, and, far away, the lighthouses upon the promontories of Antibes
and the Estrelles. At dawn, a vision of Corsica grows from the sea. The
island lies eighty miles away, but 103one can trace the dark strip of
irregular peaks glowing amid the gold and purple of the rising sun. If
the air is clear and bright, the snows and overvaulting clouds which
crown its mountains shine all day, and glitter like an apparition in
the bright blue sky. 'Phantom fair,' half raised above the sea, it
stands, as unreal and transparent as the moon when seen in April
sunlight, yet not to be confounded with the shape of any cloud. If
Mentone speaks of Greek legends, and San Romolo restores the monastic
past, we feel ourselves at Bordighera transported to the East; and
lying under its tall palms can fancy ourselves at Tyre or Daphne, or in
the gardens of a Moslem prince.

Note.—Dec. 1873. My old impressions are renewed and confirmed by a
third visit, after seven years, to this coast. For purely idyllic
loveliness, the Cornice is surpassed by nothing in the South. A very
few spots in Sicily, the road between Castellammare and Amalfi, and the
island of Corfu, are its only rivals in this style of scenery. From
Cannes to Sestri is one continuous line of exquisitely modulated
landscape beauty, which can only be fully appreciated by travellers in
carriage or on foot.

104




AJACCIO


It generally happens that visitors to Ajaccio pass over from the
Cornice coast, leaving Nice at night, and waking about sunrise to find
themselves beneath the frowning mountains of Corsica. The difference
between the scenery of the island and the shores which they have left
is very striking. Instead of the rocky mountains of the Cornice,
intolerably dry and barren at their summits, but covered at their base
with villages and ancient towns and olive-fields, Corsica presents a
scene of solitary and peculiar grandeur. The highest mountain-tops are
covered with snow, and beneath the snow-level to the sea they are as
green as Irish or as English hills, but nearly uninhabited and
uncultivated. Valleys of almost Alpine verdure are succeeded by tracts
of chestnut wood and scattered pines, or deep and flowery brushwood—the
'maquis' of Corsica, which yields shelter to its traditional outlaws
and bandits. Yet upon these hillsides there are hardly any signs of
life; the whole country seems abandoned to primeval wildness and the
majesty of desolation. Nothing can possibly be more unlike the smiling
Riviera, every square mile of which is cultivated like a garden, and
every valley and bay dotted over with white villages. After steaming
for a few hours along this savage coast, the rocks which guard the
entrance to the bay of Ajaccio, murderous-looking teeth and needles
ominously christened Sanguinari, are passed, and we enter the splendid
land-locked harbour, on the northern shore of which 105Ajaccio is
built. About three centuries ago the town, which used to occupy the
extreme or eastern end of the bay, was removed to a more healthy point
upon the northern coast, so that Ajaccio is quite a modern city.
Visitors who expect to find in it the picturesqueness of Genoa or San
Remo, or even of Mentone, will be sadly disappointed. It is simply a
healthy, well-appointed town of recent date, the chief merits of which
are, that it has wide streets, and is free, externally at least, from
the filth and rubbish of most southern seaports.

But if Ajaccio itself is not picturesque, the scenery which it
commands, and in the heart of which it lies, is of the most
magnificent. The bay of Ajaccio resembles a vast Italian lake—a Lago
Maggiore, with greater space between the mountains and the shore. From
the snow-peaks of the interior, huge granite crystals clothed in white,
to the southern extremity of the bay, peak succeeds peak and ridge
rises behind ridge in a line of wonderful variety and beauty. The
atmospheric changes of light and shadow, cloud and colour, on this
upland country, are as subtle and as various as those which lend their
beauty to the scenery of the lakes, while the sea below is blue and
rarely troubled. One could never get tired with looking at this view.
Morning and evening add new charms to its sublimity and beauty. In the
early morning Monte d'Oro sparkles like a Monte Rosa with its fresh
snow, and the whole inferior range puts on the crystal blueness of dawn
among the Alps. In the evening, violet and purple tints and the golden
glow of Italian sunset lend a different lustre to the fairyland. In
fact, the beauties of Switzerland and Italy are curiously blended in
this landscape.

In soil and vegetation the country round Ajaccio differs much from the
Cornice. There are very few olive-trees, nor is the cultivated ground
backed up so immediately by stony mountains; but between the seashore
and the hills there is 106plenty of space for pasture-land, and
orchards of apricot and peach-trees, and orange gardens. This
undulating champaign, green with meadows and watered with clear
streams, is very refreshing to the eyes of Northern people, who may
have wearied of the bareness and greyness of Nice or Mentone. It is
traversed by excellent roads, recently constructed on a plan of the
French Government, which intersect the country in all directions, and
offer an infinite variety of rides or drives to visitors. The broken
granite of which these roads are made is very pleasant for riding over.
Most of the hills through which they strike, after starting from
Ajaccio, are clothed with a thick brushwood of box, ilex, lentisk,
arbutus, and laurustinus, which stretches down irregularly into
vineyards, olive-gardens, and meadows. It is, indeed, the native growth
of the island; for wherever a piece of ground is left untilled, the
macchi grow up, and the scent of their multitudinous aromatic blossoms
is so strong that it may be smelt miles out at sea. Napoleon, at S.
Helena, referred to this fragrance when he said that he should know
Corsica blindfold by the smell of its soil. Occasional woods of holm
oak make darker patches on the landscape, and a few pines fringe the
side of enclosure walls or towers. The prickly pear runs riot in and
out among the hedges and upon the walls, diversifying the colours of
the landscape with its strange grey-green masses and unwieldy fans. In
spring, when peach and almond trees are in blossom, and when the
roadside is starred with asphodels, this country is most beautiful in
its gladness. The macchi blaze with cistus flowers of red and silver.
Golden broom mixes with the dark purple of the great French lavender,
and over the whole mass of blossom wave plumes of Mediterranean heath
and sweet-scented yellow coronilla. Under the stems of the ilex peep
cyclamens, pink and sweet; the hedgerows are a tangle of vetches,
convolvuluses, 107lupines, orchises, and alliums, with here and there a
purple iris. It would be difficult to describe all the rare and lovely
plants which are found here in a profusion that surpasses even the
flower-gardens of the Cornice, and reminds one of the most favoured
Alpine valleys in their early spring.

Since the French occupied Corsica they have done much for the island by
improving its harbours and making good roads, and endeavouring to
mitigate the ferocity of the people. But they have many things to
contend against, and Corsica is still behind the other provinces of
France. The people are idle, haughty, umbrageous, fiery, quarrelsome,
fond of gipsy life, and retentive through generations of old feuds and
prejudices to an almost inconceivable extent. Then the nature of the
country itself offers serious obstacles to its proper colonisation and
cultivation. The savage state of the island and its internal feuds have
disposed the Corsicans to quit the seaboard for their mountain villages
and fortresses, so that the great plains at the foot of the hills are
unwholesome for want of tillage and drainage. Again, the mountains
themselves have in many parts been stripped of their forests, and
converted into mere wildernesses of macchi stretching up and down their
slopes for miles and miles of useless desolation. Another impediment to
proper cultivation is found in the old habit of what is called free
pasturage. The highland shepherds are allowed by the national custom to
drive down their flocks and herds to the lowlands during the winter, so
that fences are broken, young crops are browsed over and trampled down,
and agriculture becomes a mere impossibility. The last and chief
difficulty against which the French have had to contend, and up to this
time with apparent success, is brigandage. The Corsican system of
brigandage is so very different from that of the Italians, Sicilians,
and Greeks, that 108a word may be said about its peculiar character. In
the first place, it has nothing at all to do with robbery and thieving.
The Corsican bandit took to a free life among the macchi, not for the
sake of supporting himself by lawless depredation, but because he had
put himself under a legal and social ban by murdering some one in
obedience to the strict code of honour of his country. His victim may
have been the hereditary foe of his house for generations, or else the
newly made enemy of yesterday. But in either case, if he had killed him
fairly, after a due notification of his intention to do so, he was held
to have fulfilled a duty rather than to have committed a crime. He then
betook himself to the dense tangles of evergreens which I have
described, where he lived upon the charity of countryfolk and
shepherds. In the eyes of those simple people it was a sacred duty to
relieve the necessities of the outlaws, and to guard them from the
bloodhounds of justice. There was scarcely a respectable family in
Corsica who had not one or more of its members thus _alla campagna_, as
it was euphemistically styled. The Corsicans themselves have attributed
this miserable state of things to two principal causes. The first of
these was the ancient bad government of the island: under its Genoese
rulers no justice was administered, and private vengeance for homicide
or insult became a necessary consequence among the haughty and warlike
families of the mountain villages. Secondly, the Corsicans have been
from time immemorial accustomed to wear arms in everyday life. They
used to sit at their house doors and pace the streets with musket,
pistol, dagger, and cartouch-box on their persons; and on the most
trivial occasion of merriment or enthusiasm they would discharge their
firearms. This habit gave a bloody termination to many quarrels, which
might have ended more peaceably had the parties been unarmed; and so
the seeds of _vendetta_ were constantly being 109sown. Statistics
published by the French Government present a hideous picture of the
state of bloodshed in Corsica even during this century. In one period
of thirty years (between 1821 and 1850) there were 4319 murders in the
island. Almost every man was watching for his neighbour's life, or
seeking how to save his own; and agriculture and commerce were
neglected for this grisly game of hide-and-seek. In 1853 the French
began to take 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/18893