The glimpse of La Belotte (to mention only one of the dozen places that charmed us as we approached the great city) would have inspired a painter. Boats were drawn up along the gently shelving shore; there were several picturesque brown houses which looked from the distance like fish-houses, only neater than most of those we see along our New England coast. Anauewith two butterfly sails was just coming in from up the lake. Men were evidently hurrying to make the boats safe from the gale, if it should develop into a real storm.
The lake approach to Geneva even under a grey and threatening sky gives as it were the key-note to its extraordinary charm. Its noble waterfront, its lofty buildings, its background of escarped rocks and its general air of prosperity, beckon a friendly welcome. We darted in between the two phares or lighthouses which decorate the long jetties, and turning aside from the surf current, we came alongside the pleasant Quai du Mont Blanc.
THE WATERFRONT AND THE ILE ROUSSEAU, GENEVA
THE WATERFRONT AND THE ILE ROUSSEAU, GENEVA
SHORTLYafter we reached the Grand Hôtel des Bergues, which is so beautifully situated on the quai of the same name, it began to rain. My room looked down on the Ile Rousseau with its clustering trees. The five tall poplars stood dignified and disdainful and only bent their heads when a gust of wind swept them; but the old chestnut-trees turned up their pallid green leaves and looked unhappy. Pradier’s bronze monument streamed with raindrops. The white swans ignored the downpour and sailed about like little boats. The enforced monotony of quietude required by confinement even in a commodious cockpit made exercise indispensable, and, after luncheon, we protected ourselves against the weather and sallied out for a walk. We had all the long afternoon. I proposed to go to Ferney and pay our respects to the memory of Voltaire, but we found it was too early in the season. A few weeks later,however, one beautiful bright Wednesday, we ran over in the Moto and carried out my pious desire.
My next proposition was to walk down to the junction of the two rivers. There is nothing more fascinating on earth than such an union; it is a perpetually renewed marriage. From far-separated sources, as if from different families, the two streams come. Like human beings, each has received a multitude of accessions as if from varied ancestry. Then at last they meet and cast in their lots together, never again to be parted till they are swallowed up in the great Ocean of Death which is Life.
With them it is a perpetual circle or cycle of reincarnation or rather redaquation. The greedy air sucks up the water and carries it away on its windy wings until it is caught like a thief by the guardian mountains and compelled to disgorge. The mountains are unable to keep it even in the form of snow. It flows down their sides in the slower rivers called glaciers, which toss up mighty waves and carry with them great freight of boulders. Then the fierce Sun shouts down: “Surrender,” and he liberates the imprisoned ice and, once more changed into water, it gallops down the mountains revenging itself for its years orcenturies of imprisonment in the chains of the Frost by carrying away with it the very foundations on which the mountains rest, until, undermined, the proud peaks fall with a mighty crash.
The Rhône and the Arve do not fulfil the marriage injunction all at once and become one. The muddy grey Arve brings down a quantity of sand and rolls considerable-sized pebbles along its channel. The Rhône emerges clear and blue. Read Ruskin’s famous description from the Fourth Book of the “Modern Painters:”—
“The blue waters of the arrowy Rhône rush out with a depth of fifteen feet of not flowing but flying water; not water neither, melted glacier matter, one should call it; the force of the ice is in it and the wreathing of the clouds, the gladness of the sky and the countenance of time.”
So we plashed along, crossing the Rhône by the Pont de la Coulouvrenière, where we paused to wonder at the great city water works installed in 1886 by the clever engineer, Turretini. The so-called Forces Motrices, utilizing the swift descent of the Rhône makes Geneva an ideal manufacturing city. Imagine six thousand horses at work, never wearied, never requiringgrain, noiseless, joyous! Indeed there is something rather fine in the idea of turning the old element, Water, into its Protean manifestation, light and electric power. It goes through the turbines, sets them whirling and comes out, having lost nothing by this tremendous output of energy—just as clear, just as beautiful, just as sparkling. It does not harm an element any more than it harms a man or a horse to do some useful work.
But it is evident that Switzerland, like other parts of the world, is going to have some trouble to unite the interests of those that would convert her hundreds of waterfalls into centres of manufacturing-power and the interests of those that would keep scenic beauties free from all mercantile desecration. What would the World of Travel say if some concessionaire should take possession of the Staubbach, or as more certain the Trümmelbach, and pipe it in an ugly steel stand-pipe to create electrical energy for the purpose of manufacturing nitrates! Yet even now there is a project for damming the Rhône between Pyremont and Bellegarde. This structure would be one hundred and one meters in height and would cause the water to back up even to the Swiss frontier, submerging the whole valley.
I may as well say here that I renewed acquaintance with my steamship friend, M. Criant, and had the pleasure of going with him and my nephew, some weeks later, when the river was much diminished in volume, to that wonderful curiosity of nature called La Perte du Rhône. We examined the narrow deep gorge between the Crêt d’Eau and the Vuache Mountain and just above where the Rhône and the Valserine meet, the river narrows to about fifteen meters in width. Here for a distance of twenty kilometers it suddenly disappears. M. Criant explained the cause of this “loss.” The bed of the stream consisted of two strata or matrasses—the upper harder than the lower. Stones of various sizes brought down by the Arve and whirled around by the swift current of the big torrent—falling not far from twenty-five meters between Bellegarde and Malpertuis made pot-holes, and then when they reached the softer strata they excavated it, making a tunnel: through this the stream when reduced in volume makes its tortuous and invisible way.
M. Criant did not believe at all in the wisdom of building this dam which would be one of the highest in the world. It would cover the Perte du Rhône with a lake nearly seventymeters deep, and although power enough would be created to supply all Lyons and perhaps be carried as far as Paris, still it would be a menace to the safety of the towns below. He agreed with his friend Professor Blondel, of the Ecole Superieure des Ponts et Chaussées, that the whole valley of the Rhône is in unstable equilibrium, and such a mass of water with its enormous weight would be likely to tear out its walls and overwhelm even Lyons with its catastrophe. He told me what was said by another friend of his, M. E. A. Martel. He did this as a compliment, and I hardly dared tell him what the Congress of the United States was likely to do in turning over the wonderful Hetch-Hetchy Valley to the water-seeking vandals of San Francisco. M. Martel said:—
“In the United States, that great country, famous for its monumental works and the utilization of hydraulic forces, the discussion of the two projects would not even be entered into; for the Americans who, generally speaking, are not embarrassed with a sentiment for art, at least respect and worship the natural beauties of their country. We must recognize their talent for being able to conciliate at once the protection of nature and the development of industries. Long since they would have declaredthe Perte and the Canyon of the Rhône to be a National Park and the two dams (lower down) would have become an accomplished fact.
“At Niagara Falls an agreement was made with the Canadian Government so that the primitive natural aspect of the banks themselves was preserved. Its immediate shores are freed from all installations, constructions and parasitic shops. But this has not prevented the establishment and development, in a discreet and invisible way, of methods of taking the water above the falls, while the machinery that transforms the force of the water into electric energy is placed below, thereby not injuring the beautiful features of the landscape.”
M. Criant showed how easy it would be to solve the difficulty here in a more economical way and at the same time make the approach to this wonderful curiosity of nature more feasible.
My nephew and I walked down as far as the end of the fascinating Sentier des Saules, out to the very point where the two swirling streams begin their passionate wooing. If it had been a pleasant afternoon we should have crossed the Arve by the Pont de Saint-Georgesand penetrated the Bois de la Bâtie, but an umbrella has no place in a grove, and so we came back by the boulevard named for the same popular saint, past the Vélodrome and the gas works, the cemetery of Plainpalais to the Place Neuve. Here we admired Le Grand Théâtre, standing by itself with ample approaches and artistic façade adorned with sculptures and stately columns.
It is a splendid thing for a man, whether prince or pawnbroker, enriched through the forced or accidental gift of the people, to return his fortune in the form of a benefactionen bloc. This the true osmose of wealth, to use a chemical figure. The slow flowing of countless littles into the hands of the One Overmaster Great is suddenly reversed. So it was with the fortune of Duke Charles II of Brunswick, who died in 1873 and left Geneva twenty millions of francs for public purposes. This has enabled Geneva to build the opera-house, and to carry on many other municipal undertakings. Duke Charles had fifteen years of sovereignty though a good part of that time he had to be studying his lessons while a regent ruled for him. When he became of age he became a tyrant and his people drove him out. He gave Napoleon the Little pecuniary aid and expected to be reinstated,but after 1848 that was hopeless. In 1870 he retired to Geneva and died there.
Of course the duke himself had to be commemorated by a decorative monument and place was found for it between the Quai du Mont Blanc and the plaza des Alpes. It takes up considerable room. There is a platform more than sixty-seven meters long (two hundred and twenty-two feet) and nearly twenty-five meters (seventy-eight feet) wide and about twenty-one meters (sixty-six feet) high. On this stands a three-story hexagonal canopy sheltering a sarcophagus bearing a recumbent figure of the duke by Iguel, who also designed the reliefs depicting historic events in Brunswick. At each of the six corners are marble statues of his Guelf kinsmen. At a pedestal to the right is a bronze equestrian statue of Charles II. Two colossal lions of yellow marble, like those in Pilgrim’s Progress warranted not to bite, guard the entrance. The architect, Franel, went for his inspiration to the flamboyant Gothic tomb of the Della Scala princes at Verona but it is generally considered that he did not improve on his model. The equestrian statue was at first mounted on top of the monument and there are pictures of it in that position but apparently people wonderedhow a horse could have climbed so high and so they made him back down.
Sculpture at its best is the most decorative of all the arts, at least for out-of-doors, but mediocre statuary ought to be regarded as what Mrs. Malaprop called a statuary offence. Geneva is not much more fortunate than other cities in the appropriateness of its sculptures.
Victor Hugo, who made a flying visit to Geneva in September, 1839, thought the city had lost much by its so-called improvements. He did not like it that the row of old worm-eaten dilapidated houses in the Rue des Domes, which made such a picturesque lake-front, had been demolished, and he thought the white quais with the white barracks which the worthy Genovese regard as palaces could not compare with the old dirty ramshackle city which he had known a dozen or so years previous. He complained bitterly because they had been putting it through a process of raking, scraping, levelling and weeding out, so that with the exception of the Butte Saint-Pierre and the bridges across the Rhône there was not an ancient structure left. He called it “a platitude surrounded by humps.”
“Nothing,” he said, “is more unattractive than these little imitation Parises which onenow finds in the provinces, in France and out of France. In an ancient city with its towers and its carved house-fronts, one expects to find historic streets, Gothic or Roman bell-towers; but one finds an imitation Rue de Rivoli, an imitation Madeleine resembling the façade of the Bobino Theater, an imitation Column Vendôme looking like an advertising-tower.”
I wonder what he would have thought of the Duke Charles II imitation. Nevertheless time has justified the Genevans; its brand-new quais are no longer glaringly new, and “its yellow and its white and its plaster and its chalk” have been toned down by time. It has grown into a truly imperial city. I was surprised at the number of buildings of seven stories and more; it cannot be called an imitation of Paris.
In one of the second-hand book-shops—I wonder why they are always on quais, where there are quais—I picked up an amusing little volume entitled, “The Present State of Geneva,” published in 1681 and purporting to have been composed in Italian for the Great Duke of Florence by Signior Gregorio Seti. He begins with this bold statement:—“Geneva, as appears by some chronicles of the County of Vaux, is one of the ancientist cities of Europe, being commonly supposed to have been built byLemanus, son of Hercules, the great King of the Gaules, who gave his name likewise to the Lake Lemanus. The first foundation of it was laid in the Year of the World 3994, upon a little rising Hill covered with Juniper Trees called by the FrenchGeneuriers, from whence it afterwards took the name ofGeneura.”
He goes on to say:—“In the time of Julius Cæsar this City was of great renown and by him called the Bulwork of Helvetia and frontiere town of the Allobrogi, which name at present it deserves more than ever.
“When the eruption was made upon theSwissersin the year of God 230, by the Emperor Heliogabalus Geneva was almost utterly destroyed by Fire but in the Time of Aurelian the Emperour about the Year of Grace 270, it was by the same Emperour rebuilt, who having bestowed many priviledges on those that came to repair it, commanded it for the future to be called Aurelia, but the inhabitants could not easily banish from their minds the ancient name of Geneva which to this day it bears, though during the Life of Aurelian they called it Aurelia.”
He tells how on the south it is “adorned with a spatious Neighboring Plain reaching to the very Walls and encompassed by two large Rivers,theRoneand theArue. This Plain,” he says, “serves the Citizens for a place of diversion and Recreation and here they walk to take the Air and refresh themselves in the delightful Gardens which inviron it, of which there is a great number. There likewise they train and exercise their Souldiers and divert themselves at Play in a long Mall.
“This Plain is commonly called the Plain Palace and in a Corner thereof where theAruefalls into theRonethere is a spatious burying place for the dead.”
At that time there were four bridges. All four had originally houses and shops on them but in 1670 a terrible fire broke out on one of the largest and most inhabited of them and destroyed seventy houses, leaving one hundred and thirty families homeless and taking the lives of more than a hundred persons. The new bridges that took the places of the old ones were by edict freed from all such incumbrances, which, however picturesque, are certainly dangerous and unsanitary.
The little book contained a good deal of information in small space, in spite of its erratic spelling. It stated, for instance, that Calvin was originally buried in Plain Palace, but when the Genevians heard that the Savoyards werecoming “to dig up and insult over his bones they were removed and buried within the cloyster of Saint Peter’s Church.”
We had plenty of time to go there. We could see its towers and spire high in the driving clouds, and its roof, which reminded me of a Western political-convention hall. Considering that it was built so early as the Tenth Century, it ought to have the deepest historical interest. Probably the Emperor Conrad, who founded it, would probably hardly recognize it, so much has it been altered since his stormy life closed. No wonder he wanted a cathedral in those Alps which he was for ever crossing. As soon as he got out of sight down in Italy his German subjects revolted; then when he had returned and punished them the Italians would try to throw off his yoke. Life was not smooth for him either as King of the Germans, or as Emperor of the Romans or as ruler of the Burgundians, but five years before he died he saw his cathedral consecrated. Something happened to it a couple of hundred of years later (about the middle of the eighteenth century): it was probably enlarged. Then its Romanesque style of architecture was made ridiculous by a Corinthian portico.
A Corinthian portico, being Greek, perhapswas not theoretically so out of place if Don Gregorio Seti was right in telling us that “Saint Peter’s Church was in ancient times dedicated to Apollo, as is to be seen in some very old inscriptions.”
SWISS MEDIAEVAL CARVINGS.
SWISS MEDIAEVAL CARVINGS.
We went into the venerable edifice and my nephew suggested that I had better initiate myself first of all by sitting down in the sacred chair that once belonged to John Calvin. If there had been any risk of inoculating myself with his grim and forbidding theology by sitting in the seat of the Calvinists, be sure I should have refrained. Calvin was a wonderful man, but at heart a tyrant. He could not endure contradiction. Jerome Bolsec found that out when he got the better of him in his argument on predestination: “You make God the author of sin,” said he, “for you say in your Institution, ‘God foresaw Adam’s Fall and in this Fall the ruin of all mankind; but He willed it, He ordered it and predetermined it in His eternal plan. God willed that the Israelites should worship the golden calf and that men should be guilty of the sins that they commit every day.’ God being a simple and changeless Being, how can He be in accord with Himself, since in Him are two things contrary, Will and Not-will? How can He order and forbid thesame thing? On the other hand, if the Will of God is the substance of God Himself, it is the cause of the sins committed by men; consequently God is the author of evil.”
Calvin tried to creep out of the dilemma by saying:—“I have said that God’s will as a supernatural cause is the necessity for all things; but I have declared at the same time that God does what He does with such justice that even the wicked are constrained to glorify Him.”
Bolsec, who could see no equity in such a justice as that, would not give in and Calvin used his power to exile him. He was forbidden to return under pain of being whipped through all the squares of the city.
It is wonderful what an influence and for so long a time was exercised by Calvin. Certainly during all the years while the fortifications stood and the gates were shut at night no one dared contravene the strict regulations which his theocracy enjoined.
There are other famous people buried in the Cathedral of Saint Peter. Near the main entrance is a tablet commemorating Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, the Huguenot adviser to Henry IV who spent the last twenty years of his life in Geneva and died there in 1630. Hewas the grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, wife of a poet and wife of a king. We noted the black tombstone to Cardinal Jean de Brogny who built the lovely Gothic Chapelle des Macchabées, now excellently restored. “Anno 1628,” says our friend Signior Seti, “was interred Emilia of Nassau and sometime after the Princess her sister, both Sisters to the Prince of Orange, Emilia being Wife to Don Antonio, King of Portugal, who was banished by the Spaniards. In another Chappel lies the Body of the Duke of Rohan, buried in the year 1638 in a most magnificent monument built by the Dutchess, who was laid there also near her husband in the year 1660, as their son Tancred was in the year 1661.”
Perhaps the “magnificent monument” is the black marble sarcophagus, but the statue of the duke who was leader of the French Protestants and fell at the battle of Rheinfelden is modern—the work of Iguel.
His “Dutchess” was the daughter of the famous “reformer of finances,” the Duc de Sully, whose great scheme for an International Amphyctionic Council supplied by the fifteen Christian States of Europe seems to have fore-shadowed the modern Interparliamentary Union.
By rare good fortune some one was practising on the excellent organ. Whoever it was played a prelude and fugue of Bach and a brilliant piece which I recognized as by Saint-Saëns.
On our way back from the cathedral we swung round by the English Garden and the National Monument with its two figures representing symbolically Helvetia and Geneva. Like most such colossal sculptures the farther away one gets the better it looks: that may be carried to its logical extreme! Then we crossed the long Pont du Mont Blanc but his Majesty was wholly hidden in the clouds. There were people fishing, however, just as they have always fished from the beginning of time. What says Signior Seti?—“Fishing in the Lake of this City is very considerable both for the profit and pleasure; they commonly take trouts of four score pound weight at twelve ounces the pound and in the Middle of the River opposite it the Town preserve their fish alive for use on two little deal board houses made for that purpose. In the Summer time it is a very pleasant recreation to go a Fishing here and both strangers and Citizens mightily delight in it.”
Not then, but at another time, I amused myselfwatching the dozens of washerwomen by the riverside, in booths roofed over and closed at the ends—leaning forward on their bare arms and spending more time gossiping in their terrible dialect or watching the little boats flying by. The Billingsgate of a Genevanblanchisseuseis not so melodious as the notes of a Vallombrosan nightingale, but it has a picturesque quality all its own.
As it was still raining we decided not to go out after dinner. But in spite of the rain I confessed to myself that I liked my first sight of Geneva and cherished a sneaking regret in my heart that Will and Ruth had not chosen their residence there instead of locating at Lausanne. Any place that is cheerful in a rain-storm is the place for me, and I thought Geneva actually smiled through her tears, if I may so express myself.
THEweather showed unusual good humour by clearing in the night. Geneva woke up to bright sparkling sunshine. I went out before breakfast, indeed before sunrise, on the bridge, and had a most glorious view up the lake and up to the very summit of Mont Blanc. White as sugar, it lifted its aerial head into the azure—a solid cloud which looked as if it might at any moment take wings and fly away. A well-informed policeman told me the names of the other peaks: L’Aiguille du Midi, nearly a thousand meters lower than the crowning height: La Dent du Géant; Les Grandes Jorasses (from that same word,joux, meaning rock); Les Aiguilles Rouges; La Mole, contrasting with the sharp peak of the Aiguille d’Argentière, rightly suggesting silver. If any one is satisfied with a distant prospect of mountains, his eye would never weary of that glorioussight; but there is an attractive power in the great mountain-masses. They beckon, they say:—“Come to us; we want you; you are ours.”
LES GRANDES JORASSES.
LES GRANDES JORASSES.
That is, however, a wholly modern conception. If in the old days human consciousness felt the call, heard the summons, it was with the horror with which a bird feels the impulse to fly into the serpent’s jaws. Not so many years ago the popular imagination filled the ravines of the higher mountains with other terrors besides the frost. Dragons haunted caverns; with bated breath men told of having seen the dance of Wotan on the Diablerets, or of having heard fiends playing nine-pins with great stones which, when they missed their mark, went dashing and crashing down into the valleys. What herdsman would dare approach the Grotte de Balme, that cavern, hollowed out in the limestone rock, where dark-skinned fairies, with no heels to their feet, but with long, rippling hair, lured young men to their destruction! There was the spectral ram of Monthey; there was the three-legged horse of Sion; there was the giant ox of Zauchet, with glowing horns and flaming torch of a tail; there was the blue-haired donkey of Zermatt. Down from the mountains to Neuchâtel there used to come aghost, wearing a cloth dripping with blood, and vanishing toward the lake. It was that of the widow of Walther, Comte de Rochefort, publicly accused of forgery and beheaded in 1412. The sight of her presaged a conflagration.
The Lord of Grimmelstein killed a doe and her fawns and was condemned to hunt through the mountains—one of those famous Wild Hunts which are accompanied by terrible tempests, and overwhelming snows.
There was a herd of chamois tended by dwarfs. Woe to those hunters who killed too many!
As in Schiller’s poem, the gazelle climbs to the ruggedest top of the naked precipice with the huntsman close behind and, just as he is about to fit the arrow to the string, the ancient Spirit of the Mountain, the good Genius of the trembling creature, appears to him:—“Earth has room for all to dwell—Why chase my belov’d gazelle?”
At the entrance of the Rhône into the lake there used to be low banks and wandering islands. Here dwelt the nixies and their queen, Finetta of the White Hand. She wore lilies in her golden hair. Any one who saw her was sure to die within a year.
That most delightful and poetic and enthusiastic of mountain-climbers, Emile Javelle, made friends with the guides and herdsmen, and was for ever eliciting from them avowals of their belief in spirits and dragons. He says that any night passed among the good herdsmen of Salanfe, under the Dent du Midi, will be rich in old tales, and he thus relates the legend of the Monster of the Jorat:—
“The herdsmen tell me that formerly (some even think they can recall the time) there dwelt on the Col du Jorat, a monster, a dragon, in fine an animal of unknown species and horrible aspect, who guarded the passage of the Col by night. He had already claimed many victims and the boldest hunters dared not attack him. Night having fallen, he descended from the glacier. He reigned over the whole mountain, and woe betide the man who approached the Jorat.
“One day, at last, a man of the Rhône valley had been condemned to death. He possessed uncommon strength and boldness. Pardon was offered him on condition that he should fight the monster and succeed in destroying him. He accepted, climbed up to Salanfe, waited for night and mounted the path of the Jorat. It is said that the battle was terrible;but the man was victorious and tranquillity was after that restored to the pastures of Salanfe.”
Javelle explained the reluctance of the mountaineers at climbing to the upper heights by this universal belief in supernatural powers, and he explained the belief in these supernatural powers by their very familiarity with the strange phenomena of the mountains:—“They see the boulders come rolling down from the cliffs, the avalanches breaking off from the heights and dashing down to demolish their châlets—in the heights originate the storms; and there also they hear those mysterious crackings of the glacier. It is not strange that such phenomena should be explained by them in legends.”
Their imagination, too, is shown in the various names which they confer on the Devil. He is Lo Grabbi, the Miser; La Bêta Crotze (Bête-à-griffe), the beast with claws; Le Niton, the Tricky One; Lo Tannai, Cavern-haunter; L’Ozé or Lo Maffi, the Sly One; Lo To-frou, the Always Abroad. One of his assistants is the Nion-neloû (Nul-ne-l’entend), who hides behind trees and jumps out to scare horses. The Diablerets are the very stamping-ground of dwarfs, gnomes, and dragons. When a pinnacleis doomed to fall, they quarrel as to its direction. At Rubli these supernatural beings are calledgommes: they guard mines; at night they are seen as meteors going from place to place.
Whence came the great heaps of stones, as for instance at the foot of Jolimont? We know that these vast masses, often of a different kind of rock from that characteristic of the locality, were brought down by glaciers; but the ignorant peasants attribute them to Satan, who, of course, was intending to crush some Christian church with them, but, perhaps through catching sight of a cross, was compelled to drop them. Some of these stones are of enormous size—the Plowstone, for instance, which rises almost twenty meters (sixty feet) above the ground between Erlenbach and Wetzweil and has been traced to its original source in the canton of Glarus.
But there is one more than twice as big at Montet, near Devent, and when, later, we were going over the Monte Moro pass, we saw one near the Mattmark See which it is estimated contains two hundred and forty thousand cubic feet of Serpentine. Clever old Devil to get rid of his burden! The Swiss Government nowprohibits breaking up these blocks of stone for building purposes. This was due to the initiative of the Swiss Scientific Societies.
Forbes, in his “Travels through the Alps of Savoy,” gives a very good description of these masses of rock as seen at Monthey, overlooking the valley of the Rhône:—
“We have here a belt or band of blocks—poised, as it were, on a mountain-side, it may be five hundred feet above the alluvial flat through which the Rhône winds below. This belt has no great vertical height, but extends for miles—yes, for miles—along the mountain, composed of blocks of granite of thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty feet to the side, not a few, but by hundreds, fantastically balanced on the angles of one another, their gray weather-beaten tops standing out in prominent relief from the verdant slope of secondary formation on which they rest. For three or four miles there is a path, preserving nearly the same level, leading amidst the gnarled stems of ancient chestnut-trees which struggle round and among the pile of blocks, which leaves them barely room to grow: so that numberless combinations of wood and rock are formed where a landscape-painter might spend days in study and enjoyment.”
The very Pierres de Niton which entered into the foreground of the picture which I was contemplating have been traced to the Saint Bernard, and it is estimated that it took a thousand years for the glacier to bring them down from that height and deposit them in what is now the lake.
As I stood there I was especially led to think of the influence that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is supposed to have exerted in stimulating people to enjoy the grander aspects of Nature. Literature, before Rousseau’s time, has little to say of the beauty of mountains. They were regarded with annoyance as obstacles, with terror as filled with dangers. Joseph Addison, speaking of the Savoy Alps, says they are “broken into so many steeps and precipices that they fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror and form one of the most irregular, mis-shapen scenes in the world.”
I am not sure but Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who became Baron d’Aubonne, from the name of his estate near Geneva, does not deserve priority. After he had ended his travels in the Far East and had decided to settle in Switzerland he wrote his friends in Paris of his choice:
“Friends, I have long been looking for acountry-house where to end my life in tranquillity.
“Now you would doubtless choose France; it is the loveliest country in the world; no other approaches it.
“Gentlemen, France is a charming, delightful country, I agree with you, ... but my heart and my eyes are in Switzerland.
“‘What! That country of ice and sterile mountains, whose inhabitants would not have a quarter of the subsistence necessary for them, if other countries did not support a large part of its inhabitants!’
“You know Switzerland very well, as I can see. Gentlemen, such as it is, for me it is the loveliest country in the world.”
It was one of the boasts before Rousseau’s time that a seigneur’s place should have no view. Both Madame de Genlis, in Voltaire’s lifetime, and James Fenimore Cooper, fifty years after the great Frenchman’s death, noticed the fact that the view from Ferney was quite cut off by shrubbery, evidently showing that he cared little for it. Madame de Staël, though she was sympathetic enough with Rousseau, cared little for natural scenery. When some enthusiastic visitors were praising the beauties of Lake Leman she exclaimed:—“Ohfor the gutters of the Rue de Bac.”
But, after all, it is only fair to give Rousseau’s own words, his invitation to the world to come to Switzerland and share with him these marvellous scenes. They are eloquent words, indeed! Nor did they fall on unheeding ears.
“I conduct you to the loftiest mountains of the old world, to the most ancient laboratory of Nature, where she operated with boundless energy before man existed, and where she produces objects of inexpressible sublimity and beauty, now that there are mortals to admire them. I conduct you to the secret sources of the rivers that irrigate and fertilize half Europe. I conduct you on one and the same day from the scorching heat of Spain to the cold of Lapland or Spitzbergen; from the vine and the chestnut-tree to the Alpine rose, and from the Alpine rose to the last insignificant moss that grows on the extreme verge of animated Nature.
“You shall find fragrance in flowers, which in the valleys yield no scent; you shall pluck strawberries on the margin of everlasting ice.
“I conduct you to the fountain of the dews and rains that dispense blessings over half ourquarter of the globe; to the birthplace of refreshing breezes and of storms which temper and purify the atmosphere.
“I conduct you to the clearest and freshest springs, the most magnificent water-falls, the most extensive glaciers, the most stupendous snow-clad mountains and the most fertile pastures. The tremendous avalanche shall pursue before you its thundering career.
“The brilliant crystal, the swift chamois, the harmless marmot, the soaring eagle, the rapacious vulture, as unusual objects, will strike your eye and excite pleasure and admiration.
“From the toiling husbandman you will ascend to the happy cowherd. Innumerable flocks of cattle, of extraordinary beauty and spirit, will bound about you. In the foaming milk and the clotted cream you will taste of the riches of the country which are poured forth into the most distant regions.
“But, above all, you will be delighted with the inhabitants, men of rare symmetry of form, active and robust, cheerful and independent,—women, decked with unsophisticated charms and graces and manifesting the childlike curiosity and the engaging confidence of the ancient ages of innocence.
“Old traditions and rural songs will meet your ear, and the picture presented in the idyls of Theocritus will be realized, but on a grander scale and with more diversified accompaniments.
“Lastly, in those elevated regions you will yourself become better; you will verify the promise of the moral philosopher; you will feel greater facility of respiration, more suppleness and vigor of body, and greater buoyancy of spirits. All the passions are here softened down and pleasure is less intense. The mind is led into a grand and sublime train of thought, suited to the objects which surround us; it is filled with a certain calm delight unalloyed with anything that is painful or sensual. It seems as if in rising above the habitations of men we left behind us all base and earthly feelings; and as if the soul in approaching nearer to the ethereal heaven acquired somewhat of its unruffled serenity.”
And quite à propos, it seems to me, here is Rousseau’s famous description of the sunrise:
“Let us betake ourselves to some lofty place before the Sun appears. We see him announced from afar by the fiery darts which he sends before him. The fire increases; the eastseems all in flames. By their dazzling splendor one looks for the orb long before it shows itself. Each instant one thinks to see it appear. There it is at last! A brilliant point shoots off like a flash and instantly fills all space....
“The veil of darkness is rent and falls; man recognizes his dwelling-place and finds it ever-more more beautiful. During the night the verdure has taken on new vigor; the dawning day which lights it, the first rays which gild it, bring it before us with a glittering panoply of dew, flashing brilliant colors into our eyes. The birds join in chorus and salute the father of life. The concourse of all these objects brings to the senses an impression of freshness which seems to penetrate into the depths of the soul. Here is a half-hour of enchantment which no man can resist. A spectacle so grand, so beautiful, so delicious, leaves no one unmoved.”
Rousseau attributed his love of Nature to the two peaceful years which he spent at the parsonage at Borsey, developing as they did his taste and enabling him later to bring about a complete revolution in the esthetic and literary tendencies of the century. If Rousseau got up to see a sunrise, why, then it became the fashion to get up and see sunrises; if Rousseau wentto a high mountain-top, then it became fashionable to go to high mountain-tops. Here is his recipe for mountain-climbing, written after he had made an excursion on foot to Valais in the Autumn of 1759:—
“I gradually realized that the purity of the air was the real cause of the return of that interior peace which I had lost so long. In fact on high mountains, where the air is pure and subtle, we feel a greater facility in breathing, greater physical lightness, greater mental serenity. Our meditations take on a peculiar character of grandeur and sublimity, proportioned to the objects surrounding us. It seems as if in rising above the dwellings of men, we left behind all low and terrestrial thoughts and, in proportion as we approach the upper regions, the soul attains something of their changeless purity. Here we are grave, but not melancholy; peaceful, but not indolent; simply content to be and to think. I doubt if any violent agitation, if anymaladie des vapeurscould resist such a sojourn if prolonged, and I am amazed that baths in the wholesome and beneficent mountain-air are not one of the sovereign remedies of medicine and morals.”
The same idea is found in quaint lines in a Mountain Poem by Usteri:
“Uf Bergen, uf BergenDa isch’s eim so wohlDe Berg is de DoktorFür Seel und für Lyb!”
“Uf Bergen, uf BergenDa isch’s eim so wohlDe Berg is de DoktorFür Seel und für Lyb!”
“Uf Bergen, uf Bergen
Da isch’s eim so wohl
De Berg is de Doktor
Für Seel und für Lyb!”
Alexander Pope and other old English writers are always talking about fits of “vapours.” I wonder how the name arose, and why it went out of style. Vapour comes from water, tears are water; hence vapours,—perhaps that is the logic of the term. Of course then they would evaporate in the dry mountain-air.
I recollected how Rousseau loved this very lake. I remembered his apostrophe to it after he had been out sailing on it:—
“As we skirted the shores, I admired the rich and charming landscapes of the Pays de Vaud, where the hosts of villages, the green and well-kept terraces on all sides form a ravishing picture; where the land, everywhere cultivated and everywhere fertile, offers the plowman, the herdman, the vintner the assured fruit of their labors, not devoured as elsewhere by the grasping tax-collector.... The lake was calm. I kept perfect silence. The even and measured noise of the oars set me to dreaming. A cloudless sky, the coolness of the air, the sweet rays of the moon, the silvery shimmer of the water shining around us, filled mewith the most delicious sensations. Oh, my lake! thou hast a charm which I cannot explain, which does not arise wholly from the beauty of the scene, but from something more interesting, which affects me and touches me. When the eager desire of this sweet and happy life for which I was born comes to kindle my imagination, it always attaches itself to the lake.”
ACROSS LAKE LEMAN.
ACROSS LAKE LEMAN.
And then again his poignant cry of farewell:
“Oh, my lake, on the shores of which I spent the peaceful years of mine infancy, charming landscapes where for the first time I witnessed the majestic and touching sunrise, where I felt the first emotions of my heart, the first impulse of genius, alas! become too imperious.... Oh, my lake, I shall never see thee more.”
APPARENTLYGeneva is prouder of being the Mother of Rousseau than of having adopted Calvin. Both were exiled—Calvin by his enemies; Rousseau by his worst enemy, himself. Calvin, having settled the basis of his theology, built himself on it, never shaken; Rousseau canted and recanted and rerecanted. He was a Protestant; he was a Catholic; he was a free-thinker; he was a deist.
Once, at Madame d’Epinay’s, Saint Lambert avowed himself an atheist. Rousseau exclaimed:—“If it is cowardice to allow anyone to say ill about an absent friend, then it is a crime to allow anyone to say evil of his God who is present, and, gentlemen, I believe in God.”
Saint Lambert indulged in still another sneering remark and Rousseau threatened to leave if anything more of the kind were said.
Curiously enough, Rousseau, who was a stickler for free speech, sided against Voltaire in his battle against Calvinism. He saw that the great scoffer wanted to upset the habits and customs of Calvin’s city, to introduce a love of pleasure and of luxury and especially of the theatre. He wrote:—
“So Voltaire’s weapons are satire, black falsehood, and libels. Thus he repays the hospitality which Geneva by a fatal indulgence has shown him. This fanfaron of impiety, this lofty genius and this low soul, this man so great through his talents, so base (vil) in his use of them, will leave long and cruel memories among us. Ridicule, that poison of good sense and of uprightness, satire, enemy of the public peace, flabbiness, arrogant pomp will henceforth make a people of trivialities, of buffoons, of wits, of commerce, who in place of the consideration once enjoyed by our literary men will put Geneva on the level of the Academies of Marseilles and of Angers.”
This letter was widely circulated. Voltaire, who might have been more offended by its lack of style than by its attack on him, henceforth used every opportunity to injure and insult Rousseau.
When “Emile” appeared it shocked thetheologians. The City ordered it to be burned by the official hangman. The Church said to him:—“You extol the excellence of the Gospel yet you destroy its dogmas. You paint the beauty of the virtues yet you snuff them out in the souls of your readers.” He was even condemned by Parliament to be imprisoned. The pious Jacob Vernet, Pastor Mouton and Pastor Vernes wrote him letters expressing their admiration of his talents but criticizing some of his views. After he published his “Lettres de la Montagne,” which caused a terrible hubbub, Vernes, Chapuis and Claparède publicly attacked him.
Voltaire wrote:—“Grand and edifying spectacle presented by the venerable Company of Pastors at Geneva! While the Government is burning Rousseau’s books, the clergy approves of them and finds itself very happy to be reduced to a natural religion which proves nothing and asks little.”
And those that stoned the prophets raise monuments to them. Calvin, whom Rousseau called “esprit dur et farouche,” has no monument, unless a street named after him may be considered as one; but Rousseau has a whole island with a big bronze statue on it and a street besides.
This is the substance of our breakfast-table conversation. When we had finished our coffee and rolls we started out for a long walk. Ruth, like a woman, wanted to look at the shops; Will and I would go hunting for Rousseau and Calvin.
For a long time a house in Geneva bore the inscription:—
ICI EST NEJEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAULE 28 JUIN1712.
But that was a mistake. It is now known that he was born in his father’s house, Number 2, Grand’ Rue, and there he lived till 1719. Then he went to live at 73, Rue de Constance. His father, Isaac Rousseau, though of a family which had emigrated from Paris, where they had been booksellers, and had for two hundred years enjoyed a highly respectable position in the bourgeoisie of Geneva, was regarded as rather frivolous. Probably that was because he varied his trade of watch-making by giving dancing-lessons. Dancing in the city of Calvin, in spite of the illustrious example of King David before the Ark of the Tabernacle, was regarded with little favour. He engaged in aquarrel with the retired Captain Goutier and they fought a duel contrary to the law. Goutier was wounded. On investigation Isaac was found guilty and condemned to beg pardon on his two knees. He chose to expatriate himself, and Jean Jacques went to live with his Uncle Bernard at 19, Grand’ Rue, and at Bossey with Pastor Lambercie. His education was not wholly neglected. He himself says:—
“At the age of seven I used to read books of history with my father. Plutarch became my favourite study. Agesilaus, Brutus, Aristotle were my heroes; from the discussions which these readings caused between my father and me, grew that free and republican spirit, that proud indomitable character, impatient of any yoke or servitude, which has so tormented me all the days of my life. Born a citizen of a republic, son of a father whose patriotism was his strongest passion, I took fire by his example; constantly occupied with Athens and Rome, I became the very person whose life I was reading; the story of the acts of constancy and bravery which struck me, made my eyes sparkle, my voice grow strong.”
Whatever his training really was, for he is not always a reliable chronicler of his own actions, he contrasts what he considered the idealup-bringing of children as conducted in Switzerland with that of the French children. His words were destined to bear fruit:—
“Is it not supremely ridiculous to educate boys like young girls? Ah, it is truly fine to see these little twelve-year-old fops, walking out, their hands plump, their voices delicate (flutées), with pretty green parasols to protect them from the sun. They were less finical in my country: children, brought up in rustic fashion, had no complexions to preserve; they feared no harm from the air. Their fathers took them out hunting and gave them all kinds of exercise. They were reserved and modest in the presence of their elders; they were bold, proud, even quarrelsome, among themselves; they were rivals in wrestling, running, boxing; they were skilled in fencing. They came home rugged; they were genuine little rascals; but they grew into men whose hearts were full of zeal in their country’s service and ready to give their lives for her.”
In April, 1725, he was apprenticed to an engraver, named Abel Ducommun, Rue des Etuves, Number 96, third floor. He liked the trade, for, as he says, he had a lively taste for drawing; but his master was brutal, and at last, on a Sunday evening in March, 1728, havingbeen locked out of the city through returning too late from a long walk beyond the walls and having spent the night wretchedly on the glacis “in a transport of despair” he suddenly swore never to return to his master’s. Rogers, in one of his poems, thus refers to this inhospitality on the part of Geneva, which, of course, was possible only in a small city surrounded with walls:—