II


To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great
and dangerous step.  With not a few, I think a large proportion of
their pleasure then comes to an end; 'the malady of not marking'
overtakes them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear
never again the chime of fair words or the march of the stately
period.  Non ragioniam of these.  But to all the step is dangerous;
it involves coming of age; it is even a kind of second weaning.  In
the past all was at the choice of others; they chose, they
digested, they read aloud for us and sang to their own tune the
books of childhood.  In the future we are to approach the silent,
inexpressive type alone, like pioneers; and the choice of what we
are to read is in our own hands thenceforward.  For instance, in
the passages already adduced, I detect and applaud the ear of my
old nurse; they were of her choice, and she imposed them on my
infancy, reading the works of others as a poet would scarce dare to
read his own; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on
assonances and alliterations.  I know very well my mother must have
been all the while trying to educate my taste upon more secular
authors; but the vigour and the continual opportunities of my nurse
triumphed, and after a long search, I can find in these earliest
volumes of my autobiography no mention of anything but nursery
rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M'Cheyne.

I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their
school Readers.  We might not now find so much pathos in 'Bingen on
the Rhine,' 'A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,' or in
'The Soldier's Funeral,' in the declamation of which I was held to
have surpassed myself.  'Robert's voice,' said the master on this
memorable occasion, 'is not strong, but impressive':  an opinion
which I was fool enough to carry home to my father; who roasted me
for years in consequence.  I am sure one should not be so
deliciously tickled by the humorous pieces:-

'What, crusty? cries Will in a taking,
Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking?'

I think this quip would leave us cold.  The 'Isles of Greece' seem
rather tawdry too; but on the 'Address to the Ocean,' or on 'The
Dying Gladiator,' 'time has writ no wrinkle.'

'Tis the morn, but dim and dark,
Whither flies the silent lark?' -

does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon
these lines in the Fourth Reader; and 'surprised with joy,
impatient as the wind,' he plunged into the sequel?  And there was
another piece, this time in prose, which none can have forgotten;
many like me must have searched Dickens with zeal to find it again,
and in its proper context, and have perhaps been conscious of some
inconsiderable measure of disappointment, that it was only Tom
Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of poetry, to London.

But in the Reader we are still under guides.  What a boy turns out
for himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and
pleasure.  My father's library was a spot of some austerity; the
proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity,
cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, held the
chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners
that anything really legible existed as by accident.  The Parent's
Assistant, Rob Roy, Waverley, and Guy Mannering, the Voyages of
Captain Woods Rogers, Fuller's and Bunyan's Holy Wars, The
Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, The Female Bluebeard, G. Sand's
Mare au Diable--(how came it in that grave assembly!), Ainsworth's
Tower of London, and four old volumes of Punch--these were the
chief exceptions.  In these latter, which made for years the chief
of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost as soon as I could
spell) with the Snob Papers.  I knew them almost by heart,
particularly the visit to the Pontos; and I remember my surprise
when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and signed
with a famous name; to me, as I read and admired them, they were
the works of Mr. Punch.  Time and again I tried to read Rob Roy,
with whom of course I was acquainted from the Tales of a
Grandfather; time and again the early part, with Rashleigh and
(think of it!) the adorable Diana, choked me off; and I shall never
forget the pleasure and surprise with which, lying on the floor one
summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the first scene with
Andrew Fairservice.  'The worthy Dr. Lightfoot'--'mistrysted with a
bogle'--'a wheen green trash'--'Jenny, lass, I think I ha'e her':
from that day to this the phrases have been unforgotten.  I read
on, I need scarce say; I came to Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow
Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all with
transporting pleasure; and then the clouds gathered once more about
my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half-asleep into
the clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith
recalled me to myself.  With that scene and the defeat of Captain
Thornton the book concluded; Helen and her sons shocked even the
little schoolboy of nine or ten with their unreality; I read no
more, or I did not grasp what I was reading; and years elapsed
before I consciously met Diana and her father among the hills, or
saw Rashleigh dying in the chair.  When I think of that novel and
that evening, I am impatient with all others; they seem but shadows
and impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this
awakened; and I dare be known to think it the best of Sir Walter's
by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists.  Perhaps
Mr. Lang is right, and our first friends in the land of fiction are
always the most real.  And yet I had read before this Guy
Mannering, and some of Waverley, with no such delighted sense of
truth and humour, and I read immediately after the greater part of
the Waverley Novels, and was never moved again in the same way or
to the same degree.  One circumstance is suspicious:  my critical
estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed at all since I
was ten.  Rob Roy, Guy Mannering, and Redgauntlet first; then, a
little lower; The Fortunes of Nigel; then, after a huge gulf,
Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein:  the rest nowhere; such was the
verdict of the boy.  Since then The Antiquary, St. Ronan's Well,
Kenilworth, and The Heart of Midlothian have gone up in the scale;
perhaps Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein have gone a trifle down;
Diana Vernon has been added to my admirations in that enchanted
world of Rob Roy; I think more of the letters in Redgauntlet, and
Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece of realism, I can now read about
with equanimity, interest, and I had almost said pleasure, while to
the childish critic he often caused unmixed distress.  But the rest
is the same; I could not finish The Pirate when I was a child, I
have never finished it yet; Peveril of the Peak dropped half way
through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have since waded to
an end in a kind of wager with myself, the exercise was quite
without enjoyment.  There is something disquieting in these
considerations.  I still think the visit to Ponto's the best part
of the Book of Snobs:  does that mean that I was right when I was a
child, or does it mean that I have never grown since then, that the
child is not the man's father, but the man? and that I came into
the world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned
sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom? . . .



CHAPTER VIII--THE IDEAL HOUSE



Two things are necessary in any neighbourhood where we propose to
spend a life:  a desert and some living water.

There are many parts of the earth's face which offer the necessary
combination of a certain wildness with a kindly variety.  A great
prospect is desirable, but the want may be otherwise supplied; even
greatness can be found on the small scale; for the mind and the eye
measure differently.  Bold rocks near hand are more inspiriting
than distant Alps, and the thick fern upon a Surrey heath makes a
fine forest for the imagination, and the dotted yew trees noble
mountains.  A Scottish moor with birches and firs grouped here and
there upon a knoll, or one of those rocky seaside deserts of
Provence overgrown with rosemary and thyme and smoking with aroma,
are places where the mind is never weary.  Forests, being more
enclosed, are not at first sight so attractive, but they exercise a
spell; they must, however, be diversified with either heath or
rock, and are hardly to be considered perfect without conifers.
Even sand-hills, with their intricate plan, and their gulls and
rabbits, will stand well for the necessary desert.

The house must be within hail of either a little river or the sea.
A great river is more fit for poetry than to adorn a neighbourhood;
its sweep of waters increases the scale of the scenery and the
distance of one notable object from another; and a lively burn
gives us, in the space of a few yards, a greater variety of
promontory and islet, of cascade, shallow goil, and boiling pool,
with answerable changes both of song and colour, than a navigable
stream in many hundred miles.  The fish, too, make a more
considerable feature of the brookside, and the trout plumping in
the shadow takes the ear.  A stream should, besides, be narrow
enough to cross, or the burn hard by a bridge, or we are at once
shut out of Eden.  The quantity of water need be of no concern, for
the mind sets the scale, and can enjoy a Niagara Fall of thirty
inches.  Let us approve the singer of

'Shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.'

If the sea is to be our ornamental water, choose an open seaboard
with a heavy beat of surf; one much broken in outline, with small
havens and dwarf headlands; if possible a few islets; and as a
first necessity, rocks reaching out into deep water.  Such a rock
on a calm day is a better station than the top of Teneriffe or
Chimborazo.  In short, both for the desert and the water, the
conjunction of many near and bold details is bold scenery for the
imagination and keeps the mind alive.

Given these two prime luxuries, the nature of the country where we
are to live is, I had almost said, indifferent; after that inside
the garden, we can construct a country of our own.  Several old
trees, a considerable variety of level, several well-grown hedges
to divide our garden into provinces, a good extent of old well-set
turf, and thickets of shrubs and ever-greens to be cut into and
cleared at the new owner's pleasure, are the qualities to be sought
for in your chosen land.  Nothing is more delightful than a
succession of small lawns, opening one out of the other through
tall hedges; these have all the charm of the old bowling-green
repeated, do not require the labour of many trimmers, and afford a
series of changes.  You must have much lawn against the early
summer, so as to have a great field of daisies, the year's morning
frost; as you must have a wood of lilacs, to enjoy to the full the
period of their blossoming.  Hawthorn is another of the Spring's
ingredients; but it is even best to have a rough public lane at one
side of your enclosure which, at the right season, shall become an
avenue of bloom and odour.  The old flowers are the best and should
grow carelessly in corners.  Indeed, the ideal fortune is to find
an old garden, once very richly cared for, since sunk into neglect,
and to tend, not repair, that neglect; it will thus have a smack of
nature and wildness which skilful dispositions cannot overtake.
The gardener should be an idler, and have a gross partiality to the
kitchen plots:  an eager or toilful gardener misbecomes the garden
landscape; a tasteful gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the
borders raw, and take the bloom off nature.  Close adjoining, if
you are in the south, an olive-yard, if in the north, a swarded
apple-orchard reaching to the stream, completes your miniature
domain; but this is perhaps best entered through a door in the high
fruit-wall; so that you close the door behind you on your sunny
plots, your hedges and evergreen jungle, when you go down to watch
the apples falling in the pool.  It is a golden maxim to cultivate
the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
Nor must the ear be forgotten:  without birds a garden is a prison-
yard.  There is a garden near Marseilles on a steep hill-side,
walking by which, upon a sunny morning, your ear will suddenly be
ravished with a burst of small and very cheerful singing:  some
score of cages being set out there to sun their occupants.  This is
a heavenly surprise to any passer-by; but the price paid, to keep
so many ardent and winged creatures from their liberty, will make
the luxury too dear for any thoughtful pleasure-lover.  There is
only one sort of bird that I can tolerate caged, though even then I
think it hard, and that is what is called in France the Bec-
d'Argent.  I once had two of these pigmies in captivity; and in the
quiet, hire house upon a silent street where I was then living,
their song, which was not much louder than a bee's, but airily
musical, kept me in a perpetual good humour.  I put the cage upon
my table when I worked, carried it with me when I went for meals,
and kept it by my head at night:  the first thing in the morning,
these maestrini would pipe up.  But these, even if you can pardon
their imprisonment, are for the house.  In the garden the wild
birds must plant a colony, a chorus of the lesser warblers that
should be almost deafening, a blackbird in the lilacs, a
nightingale down the lane, so that you must stroll to hear it, and
yet a little farther, tree-tops populous with rooks.

Your house should not command much outlook; it should be set deep
and green, though upon rising ground, or, if possible, crowning a
knoll, for the sake of drainage.  Yet it must be open to the east,
or you will miss the sunrise; sunset occurring so much later, you
can go up a few steps and look the other way.  A house of more than
two stories is a mere barrack; indeed the ideal is of one story,
raised upon cellars.  If the rooms are large, the house may be
small:  a single room, lofty, spacious, and lightsome, is more
palatial than a castleful of cabinets and cupboards.  Yet size in a
house, and some extent and intricacy of corridor, is certainly
delightful to the flesh.  The reception room should be, if
possible, a place of many recesses, which are 'petty retiring
places for conference'; but it must have one long wall with a
divan:  for a day spent upon a divan, among a world of cushions, is
as full of diversion as to travel.  The eating-room, in the French
mode, should be ad hoc:  unfurnished, but with a buffet, the table,
necessary chairs, one or two of Canaletto's etchings, and a tile
fire-place for the winter.  In neither of these public places
should there be anything beyond a shelf or two of books; but the
passages may be one library from end to end, and the stair, if
there be one, lined with volumes in old leather, very brightly
carpeted, and leading half-way up, and by way of landing, to a
windowed recess with a fire-place; this window, almost alone in the
house, should command a handsome prospect.  Husband and wife must
each possess a studio; on the woman's sanctuary I hesitate to
dwell, and turn to the man's.  The walls are shelved waist-high for
books, and the top thus forms a continuous table running round the
wall.  Above are prints, a large map of the neighbourhood, a Corot
and a Claude or two.  The room is very spacious, and the five
tables and two chairs are but as islands.  One table is for actual
work, one close by for references in use; one, very large, for MSS.
or proofs that wait their turn; one kept clear for an occasion; and
the fifth is the map table, groaning under a collection of large-
scale maps and charts.  Of all books these are the least wearisome
to read and the richest in matter; the course of roads and rivers,
the contour lines and the forests in the maps--the reefs,
soundings, anchors, sailing marks and little pilot-pictures in the
charts--and, in both, the bead-roll of names, make them of all
printed matter the most fit to stimulate and satisfy the fancy.
The chair in which you write is very low and easy, and backed into
a corner; at one elbow the fire twinkles; close at the other, if
you are a little inhumane, your cage of silver-bills are twittering
into song.

Joined along by a passage, you may reach the great, sunny, glass-
roofed, and tiled gymnasium, at the far end of which, lined with
bright marble, is your plunge and swimming bath, fitted with a
capacious boiler.

The whole loft of the house from end to end makes one undivided
chamber; here are set forth tables on which to model imaginary or
actual countries in putty or plaster, with tools and hardy
pigments; a carpenter's bench; and a spared corner for photography,
while at the far end a space is kept clear for playing soldiers.
Two boxes contain the two armies of some five hundred horse and
foot; two others the ammunition of each side, and a fifth the foot-
rules and the three colours of chalk, with which you lay down, or,
after a day's play, refresh the outlines of the country; red or
white for the two kinds of road (according as they are suitable or
not for the passage of ordnance), and blue for the course of the
obstructing rivers.  Here I foresee that you may pass much happy
time; against a good adversary a game may well continue for a
month; for with armies so considerable three moves will occupy an
hour.  It will be found to set an excellent edge on this diversion
if one of the players shall, every day or so, write a report of the
operations in the character of army correspondent.

I have left to the last the little room for winter evenings.  This
should be furnished in warm positive colours, and sofas and floor
thick with rich furs.  The hearth, where you burn wood of aromatic
quality on silver dogs, tiled round about with Bible pictures; the
seats deep and easy; a single Titian in a gold frame; a white bust
or so upon a bracket; a rack for the journals of the week; a table
for the books of the year; and close in a corner the three shelves
full of eternal books that never weary:  Shakespeare, Moliere,
Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, De Musset's comedies (the one volume open
at Carmosine and the other at Fantasio); the Arabian Nights, and
kindred stories, in Weber's solemn volumes; Borrow's Bible in
Spain, the Pilgrim's Progress, Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, Monte
Cristo and the Vicomte de Bragelonne, immortal Boswell sole among
biographers, Chaucer, Herrick, and the State Trials.

The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of
varnished wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf
of books of a particular and dippable order, such as Pepys, the
Paston Letters, Burt's Letters from the Highlands, or the Newgate
Calendar. . . .



CHAPTER IX--DAVOS IN WINTER



A mountain valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on
the imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an
invalid's weakness make up among them a prison of the most
effective kind.  The roads indeed are cleared, and at least one
footpath dodging up the hill; but to these the health-seeker is
rigidly confined.  There are for him no cross-cuts over the field,
no following of streams, no unguided rambles in the wood.  His
walks are cut and dry.  In five or six different directions he can
push as far, and no farther, than his strength permits; never
deviating from the line laid down for him and beholding at each
repetition the same field of wood and snow from the same corner of
the road.  This, of itself, would be a little trying to the
patience in the course of months; but to this is added, by the
heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an
almost unbroken identity of colour.  Snow, it is true, is not
merely white.  The sun touches it with roseate and golden lights.
Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny
sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful
depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is
still water, and has watery tones of blue.  But, when all is said,
these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a
trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety and
pleasantness of the earth's face.  Even a boulder, whose front is
too precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon
it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost
painfully of other places, and brings into your head the delights
of more Arcadian days--the path across the meadow, the hazel dell,
the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours, and the
whisper of the woods.  And scents here are as rare as colours.
Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall
smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of
frost.  Sounds, too, are absent:  not a bird pipes, not a bough
waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere.  If a sleigh goes by, the
sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to
no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the
frozen snow.

It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from
one end to the other.  Go where you please, houses will still be in
sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left.  Climb as
high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations
nested in the wood.  Nor is that all; for about the health resort
the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids
about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to
learn to jodel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture
to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love's young dream.  You may
perhaps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks
about.  Alas! no muse will suffer this imminence of interruption--
and at the second stampede of jodellers you find your modest
inspiration fled.  Or you may only have a taste for solitude; it
may try your nerves to have some one always in front whom you are
visibly overtaking, and some one always behind who is audibly
overtaking you, to say nothing of a score or so who brush past you
in an opposite direction.  It may annoy you to take your walks and
seats in public view.  Alas! there is no help for it among the
Alps.  There are no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill;
no sacred solitude of olive gardens on the Roccabruna-road; no nook
upon Saint Martin's Cape, haunted by the voice of breakers, and
fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-
pines and the sea.

For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the
storms of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure,
chequer and by their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-
weather scenes.  When sun and storm contend together--when the
thick clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of golden
daylight--there will be startling rearrangements and
transfigurations of the mountain summits.  A sun-dazzling spire of
alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms and blackness; or
perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will be designed
in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance bright like
a constellation, and alone 'in the unapparent.'  You may think you
know the figure of these hills; but when they are thus revealed,
they belong no longer to the things of earth--meteors we should
rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for a
moment and return no more.  Other variations are more lasting, as
when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some
windless hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand each
stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen.  You may drive
through a forest so disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling
silently in the cleft of the ravine, and all still except the
jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy yourself in some
untrodden northern territory--Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska.

Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down
stairs in a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by
the glimmer of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find
yourself by seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight and a
freezing chill.  The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on,
and you reach the top of the ascent in the first hour of the day.
To trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak,
to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted
sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading
shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half
glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the
greyness of the western heaven--these will seem to repay you for
the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and
these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther
side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with
such another long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another
senseless watercourse bickering along the foot.  You have had your
moment; but you have not changed the scene.  The mountains are
about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold
the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can
change only one for another.



CHAPTER X--HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS



There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has
followed in the lives of sick folk.  A year or two ago and the
wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some
basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting
in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable and
unchanging surf--idle among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying,
yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after
livelier weather and some vivifying change.  These were certainly
beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its
softness.  Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were
not certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores
would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death.  There was a
lack of a manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write
bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that
here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve.
And it appears, after all, that there was something just in these
appreciations.  The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a
ruder air shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be
fled from, but bearded in his den.  For even Winter has his  'dear
domestic cave,' and in those places where he may be said to dwell
for ever tempers his austerities.

Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived,
after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and
dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone,
the southern sky.  It is among these mountains in the new State of
Colorado that the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of
his ailments, but the possibility of an active life and an honest
livelihood.  There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a
working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew
his life.  Instead of the bath-chair, the spade; instead of the
regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare
air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room--these
are the changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of
self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors,
none but an invalid can know.  Resignation, the cowardice that apes
a kind of courage and that lives in the very air of health resorts,
is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect.  The man can open the
door; he can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all
and not merely an invalid.

But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains.  We cannot all of us go
farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines
the medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of
the old.  Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its
wholesome duties; again he has to be an idler among idlers; but
this time at a great altitude, far among the mountains, with the
snow piled before his door and the frost flowers every morning on
his window.  The mere fact is tonic to his nerves.  His choice of a
place of wintering has somehow to his own eyes the air of an act of
bold contract; and, since he has wilfully sought low temperatures,
he is not so apt to shudder at a touch of chill.  He came for that,
he looked for it, and he throws it from him with the thought.

A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either
hand that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the
higher you climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a
village of hotels; a world of black and white--black pine-woods,
clinging to the sides of the valley, and white snow flouring it,
and papering it between the pine-woods, and covering all the
mountains with a dazzling curd; add a few score invalids marching
to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating on the ice-rinks,
possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the door of the
hotel--and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium.
A certain furious river runs curving down the valley; its pace
never varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it;
and its unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to
witness.  It is a river that a man could grow to hate.  Day after
day breaks with the rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and
creeps, growing and glowing, down into the valley.  From end to end
the snow reverberates the sunshine; from end to end the air tingles
with the light, clear and dry like crystal.  Only along the course
of the river, but high above it, there hangs far into the noon, one
waving scarf of vapour.  It were hard to fancy a more engaging
feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to believe that
delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature of the
incontinent stream whose course it follows.  By noon the sky is
arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour--mild and pale and melting
in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of
purple blue.  What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable
lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos.  An English
painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger
that 'the values were all wrong.'  Had he got among the Alps on a
bright day he might have lost his reason.  And even to any one who
has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the
spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of
insanity.  The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your
eye; the neighbouring dull-coloured house in comparison is miles
away; the summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand;
the nigh slopes, which are black with pine trees, bear it no
relation, and might be in another sphere.  Here there are none of
those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and
spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of air and
light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in
climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely.  A glaring
piece of crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism
and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding
definition; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more
than scenically trying, and yet hearty and healthy, making the
nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile:  such is the winter
daytime in the Alps.

With the approach of evening all is changed.  A mountain will
suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten
minutes the thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that
are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile,
overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the place,
the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours.
The latest gold leaps from the last mountain.  Soon, perhaps, the
moon shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be
mellowed and misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon
a hilltop, and here and there a warmly glowing window in a house,
between fire and starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow.

But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be
eternally exempt from changes.  The clouds gather, black as ink;
the wind bursts rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead,
the snow-flakes flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail
comes in later from the top of the pass; people peer through their
windows and foresee no end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and
death by gradual dry-rot, each in his indifferent inn; and when at
last the storm goes, and the sun comes again, behold a world of
unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright like daylight, a joy to
wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men.  Or perhaps from
across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds about
the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain
valley.  Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at a
gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the
whole invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently
recognises the empire of the Fohn.



CHAPTER XI--ALPINE DIVERSIONS



There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanitarium.  The
place is half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in
double column, text and translation; but it still remains half
German; and hence we have a band which is able to play, and a
company of actors able, as you will be told, to act.  This last you
will take on trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet,
confine themselves to German and though at the beginning of winter
they come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long before
Christmas they will have given up the English for a bad job.  There
will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races; the German
element seeking, in the interest of their actors, to raise a
mysterious item, the Kur-taxe, which figures heavily enough already
in the weekly bills, the English element stoutly resisting.
Meantime in the English hotels home-played farces, tableaux-
vivants, and even balls enliven the evenings; a charity bazaar
sheds genial consternation; Christmas and New Year are solemnised
with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to time the young folks
carol and revolve untunefully enough through the figures of a
singing quadrille.

A magazine club supplies you with everything, from the Quarterly to
the Sunday at Home.  Grand tournaments are organised at chess,
draughts, billiards and whist.  Once and again wandering artists
drop into our mountain valley, coming you know not whence, going
you cannot imagine whither, and belonging to every degree in the
hierarchy of musical art, from the recognised performer who
announces a concert for the evening, to the comic German family or
solitary long-haired German baritone, who surprises the guests at
dinner-time with songs and a collection.  They are all of them good
to see; they, at least, are moving; they bring with them the
sentiment of the open road; yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol,
and next week they will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk
still simmer in our mountain prison.  Some of them, too, are
welcome as the flowers in May for their own sake; some of them may
have a human voice; some may have that magic which transforms a
wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle
into what we mention with respect as a violin.  From that grinding
lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the beat
of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference
rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing
that bewails and praises the destiny of man at the touch of the
true virtuoso.  Even that you may perhaps enjoy; and if you do so
you will own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly than here, im
Schnee der Alpen.  A hyacinth in a pot, a handful of primroses
packed in moss, or a piece of music by some one who knows the way
to the heart of a violin, are things that, in this invariable
sameness of the snows and frosty air, surprise you like an
adventure.  It is droll, moreover, to compare the respect with
which the invalids attend a concert, and the ready contempt with
which they greet the dinner-time performers.  Singing which they
would hear with real enthusiasm--possibly with tears--from a corner
of a drawing-room, is listened to with laughter when it is offered
by an unknown professional and no money has been taken at the door.

Of skating little need be said; in so snowy a climate the rinks
must be intelligently managed; their mismanagement will lead to
many days of vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all goes
well, it is certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the
invalid to skate under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in
a sweat, through long tracts of glare and passages of freezing
shadow.  But the peculiar outdoor sport of this district is
tobogganing.  A Scotchman may remember the low flat board, with the
front wheels on a pivot, which was called a hurlie; he may remember
this contrivance, laden with boys, as, laboriously started, it ran
rattling down the brae, and was, now successfully, now
unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot; he may
remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and many
a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neglected lesson.  The
toboggan is to the hurlie what the sled is to the carriage; it is a
hurlie upon runners; and if for a grating road you substitute a
long declivity of beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of
the tobogganist.  The correct position is to sit; but the fantastic
will sometimes sit hind-foremost, or dare the descent upon their
belly or their back.  A few steer with a pair of pointed sticks,
but it is more classical to use the feet.  If the weight be heavy
and the track smooth, the toboggan takes the bit between its teeth;
and to steer a couple of full-sized friends in safety requires not
only judgment but desperate exertion.  On a very steep track, with
a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too appalling to
be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world vanishes; your blind
steed bounds below your weight; you reach the foot, with all the
breath knocked out of your body, jarred and bewildered as though
you had just been subjected to a railway accident.  Another element
of joyful horror is added by the formation of a train; one toboggan
being tied to another, perhaps to the number of half a dozen, only
the first rider being allowed to steer, and all the rest pledged to
put up their feet and follow their leader, with heart in mouth,
down the mad descent.  This, particularly if the track begins with
a headlong plunge, is one of the most exhilarating follies in the
world, and the tobogganing invalid is early reconciled to
somersaults.

There is all manner of variety in the nature of the tracks, some
miles in length, others but a few yards, and yet like some short
rivers, furious in their brevity.  All degrees of skill and courage
and taste may be suited in your neighbourhood.  But perhaps the
true way to toboggan is alone and at night.  First comes the
tedious climb, dragging your instrument behind you.  Next a long
breathing-space, alone with snow and pinewoods, cold, silent and
solemn to the heart.  Then you push of; the toboggan fetches way;
she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to, swim, to gallop.  In a
breath you are out from under the pine trees, and a whole heavenful
of stars reels and flashes overhead.  Then comes a vicious effort;
for by this time your wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and
you are spinning round a corner, and the whole glittering valley
and all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at your
feet; and the next you are racing once more in the shadow of the
night with close-shut teeth and beating heart.  Yet a little while
and you will be landed on the highroad by the door of your own
hotel.  This, in an atmosphere tingling with forty degrees of
frost, in a night made luminous with stars and snow, and girt with
strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune and
adds a new excitement to the life of man upon his planet.



CHAPTER XII--THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS



To any one who should come from a southern sanitarium to the Alps,
the row of sun-burned faces round the table would present the first
surprise.  He would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would
lose his pains, for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears
the mark of sickness on his face.  The plump sunshine from above
and its strong reverberation from below colour the skin like an
Indian climate; the treatment, which consists mainly of the open
air, exposes even the sickliest to tan, and a tableful of invalids
comes, in a month or two, to resemble a tableful of hunters.  But
although he may be thus surprised at the first glance, his
astonishment will grow greater, as he experiences the effects of
the climate on himself.  In many ways it is a trying business to
reside upon the Alps:  the stomach is exercised, the appetite often
languishes; the liver may at times rebel; and because you have come
so far from metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that you
shall recover.  But one thing is undeniable--that in the rare air,
clear, cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a
certain troubled delight in his existence which can nowhere else be
paralleled.  He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive.
It does not, perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he
feels an enthusiasm of the blood unknown in more temperate
climates.  It may not be health, but it is fun.

There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this
baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile
joyousness of spirits.  You wake every morning, see the gold upon
the snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your
prolonged existence.  The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast
your shoe over the hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in the
words of an unverified quotation from the Scotch psalms, you feel
yourself fit 'on the wings of all the winds' to 'come flying all
abroad.'  Europe and your mind are too narrow for that flood of
energy.  Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of your
bed; that you start forth, singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are
unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you is
volatile; and that although the restlessness remains till night,
the strength is early at an end.  With all these heady jollities,
you are half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you
prove not to be so well as you had fancied; you weary before you
have well begun; and though you mount at morning with the lark,
that is not precisely a song-bird's heart that you bring back with
you when you return with aching limbs and peevish temper to your
inn.

It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters
is its own reward.  Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth
more permanent improvements.  The dream of health is perfect while
it lasts; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out
the dear hallucination, still every day, and many times a day, you
are conscious of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in
living as merry as it proves to be transient.

The brightness--heaven and earth conspiring to be bright--the
levity and quiet of the air; the odd stirring silence--more
stirring than a tumult; the snow, the frost, the enchanted
landscape:  all have their part in the effect and on the memory,
'tous vous tapent sur la tete'; and yet when you have enumerated
all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to qualify the
delicate exhilaration that you feel--delicate, you may say, and yet
excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater than
an invalid can bear.  There is a certain wine of France known in
England in some gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its
nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as
verse.  It is more than probable that in its noble natural
condition this was the very wine of Anjou so beloved by Athos in
the 'Musketeers.'  Now, if the reader has ever washed down a
liberal second breakfast with the wine in question, and gone forth,
on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling noontide,
he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although strangely
grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among the snow
and sunshine of the Alps.  That also is a mode, we need not say of
intoxication, but of insobriety.  Thus also a man walks in a strong
sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial
meditations.  And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he
supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.

The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary
ways.  A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been
recognised, and may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as
a sort peculiar to that climate.  People utter their judgments with
a cannonade of syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them;
and the turn of a phrase goes further than humour or wisdom.  By
the professional writer many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone.
At first he cannot write at all.  The heart, it appears, is unequal
to the pressure of business, and the brain, left without
nourishment, goes into a mild decline.  Next, some power of work
returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches.  Last, the spring
is opened, and there pours at once from his pen a world of blatant,
hustling polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to be
positively offensive in hot weather.  He writes it in good faith
and with a sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read
what he has written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind.
What is he to do, poor man?  All his little fishes talk like
whales.  This yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting
architecture of the sentence has come upon him while he slept; and
it is not he, it is the Alps, who are to blame.  He is not,
perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him.  Nor is the ill
without a remedy.  Some day, when the spring returns, he shall go
down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter inflections
and more modest language.  But here, in the meantime, there seems
to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time
coming, when experienced advisers shall send a man to the proper
measured level for the ode, the biography, or the religious tract;
and a nook may be found between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr.
Swinburne shall be able to write more continently, and Mr. Browning
somewhat slower.

Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain?  It is
a sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all
goes well, to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness.
It is certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions,
all the chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted with
vociferous nightmares, and many wakeful people come down late for
breakfast in the morning.  Upon that theory the cynic may explain
the whole affair--exhilaration, nightmares, pomp of tongue and all.
But, on the other hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may
itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for the two effects
are strangely similar; and the frame of mind of the invalid upon
the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of
lassitude.  The fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in
these parts; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere else.



CHAPTER XIII--ROADS--1873



No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single
drawing, over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so
gradually study himself into humour with the artist, than he can
ever extract from the dazzle and accumulation of incongruous
impressions that send him, weary and stupefied, out of some famous
picture-gallery.  But what is thus admitted with regard to art is
not extended to the (so-called) natural beauties no amount of
excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces of cultivated
lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or degrade the
palate.  We are not at all sure, however, that moderation, and a
regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and
strengthening to the taste; and that the best school for a lover of
nature is not to the found in one of those countries where there is
no stage effect--nothing salient or sudden,--but a quiet spirit of
orderly and harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we
can patiently attend to each of the little touches that strike in
us, all of them together, the subdued note of the landscape.  It is
in scenery such as this that we find ourselves in the right temper
to seek out small sequestered loveliness.  The constant recurrence
of similar combinations of colour and outline gradually forces upon
us a sense of how the harmony has been built up, and we become
familiar with something of nature's mannerism.  This is the true
pleasure of your 'rural voluptuary,'--not to remain awe-stricken
before a Mount Chimborazo; not to sit deafened over the big drum in
the orchestra, but day by day to teach himself some new beauty--to
experience some new vague and tranquil sensation that has before
evaded him.  It is not the people who 'have pined and hungered
after nature many a year, in the great city pent,' as Coleridge
said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of himself;
it is not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy
with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto
to enjoy.  In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge
and long-continued loving industry that make the true dilettante.
A man must have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to
enjoy it.  It is no youngling enthusiasm on hilltops that can
possess itself of the last essence of beauty.  Probably most
people's heads are growing bare before they can see all in a
landscape that they have the capability of seeing; and, even then,
it will be only for one little moment of consummation before the
faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of the
windows begin to be darkened and restrained in sight.  Thus the
study of nature should be carried forward thoroughly and with
system.  Every gratification should be rolled long under the
tongue, and we should be always eager to analyse and compare, in
order that we may be able to give some plausible reason for our
admirations.  True, it is difficult to put even approximately into
words the kind of feelings thus called into play.  There is a
dangerous vice inherent in any such intellectual refining upon
vague sensation.  The analysis of such satisfactions lends itself
very readily to literary affectations; and we can all think of
instances where it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid
influence, even upon an author's choice of language and the turn of
his sentences.  And yet there is much that makes the attempt
attractive; for any expression, however imperfect, once given to a
cherished feeling, seems a sort of legitimation of the pleasure we
take in it.  A common sentiment is one of those great goods that
make life palatable and ever new.  The knowledge that another has
felt as we have felt, and seen things, even if they are little
things, not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to
the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.