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KETCHES
OF
J RAVEL
IN JcrERMANY.
By Professor Blackie.
PART III.
Having learnt at Berlin that the grand triumphal entry of the troops
■returned from the late war, was not to take place till about the middle
of June, I made a short excursion to Russia, and on my way thither
passed through the good old Prussian town of Königsberg, known
to corn merchants by its flourishing corn trade, but to me interesting
chiefly for very different things.
Here, first I called on Professor
Lehrs, and found in his powerful eye and strong well-chiselled features
exactly those evidences of fine Roman strength which I had derived, at
a distance, from the perusal of his ‘ Aristarchusa work which for
soundness of view, and masculine vigour of expression, will maintain its
place in the libraries alongside of the great Latin masterpieces of
Wolf, Hermann, Ruhnken, and Wyttenbach.
After being ciceronized
by this excellent scholar through the stately and commodious new
buildings of the University, I passed through the small narrow street
which contains the house once inhabited by Immanuel Kant, a meta
physician, who had the singular merit of teaching European thinkers to
believe in their souls, after my subtle, self-puzzling countryman, David
Hume had fairly lost his identity in a whirl of unstable impressions
and ideas which he had spun out of the juggling phraseology of the
schools. Rounding the corner of this little street, I came suddenly, at
the top of a short descent, called Kant Street, on the bronze statue of
the venerable thinker. Here he stood, with his cocked hat under his
left arm, and bag-wig on his head, peering out curiously into the unsym
pathetic world of merchants, corn-dealers, and ship captains, in the
midst of whom it was his destiny, for so many years, persistently to
philosophise.
But Immanuel was too wise a man to complain of this
want of sympathy, as a mere technical metaphysical professor might
have done. As not only a thinker, but a really wise man, he knew that
nothing is so prejudicial to sound thinking as habitual confined inter
course with only one class of men. ‘ Nothing,’ he said, ‘ is so intolerable
�SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN GERMANY.
321
as a company Consisting only of learned men;’ so he dined every day
at the common table of the principal inn, 'with sailors and ship captains,
and in this singular way added to the narrow limits of his solitary
thinking the large range of experience which belongs to the mercantile
and commercial classes.
After taking off my hat before this most
reputable philosopher, I proceeded to make an inspection of the old
Schloss, Castle, or Palace of the Prussian kings. I had in my memory
the humorous picture drawn by Carlyle of the coronation which took
place here of the first King of Prussia, in the first year of the last
■century, on which august occasion, his philosophical spouse, Sophia,
solaced her soul for the extreme weariness of the prolonged ceremonial
by publicly injecting a familiar pinch of snuff into her nose, beneath
the sublime frown of her royal lord.
So what fixed itself in my
memory principally was the room in which this coronation took place,
with the very throne on which self-created majesty placed the crown
{like the Czar of Russia) with his own hands on his own head, and a
¿significant environment of royal portraits hung on the walls. But my
■.eye was also attracted by a splendid dining hall or reception room, nearly
.three hundred feet long, or as long as some of our finest cathedrals,
which, with a necessary addition to its height (expected to be realised
when the present Crown Prince becomes kaiser-king), will certainly be
■ one of the largest and most imposing halls in Europe.
So much for
Königsberg. Want of time prevented me from an intended visit to the
battle-field of Eylau, which lies some considerable distance to the south
east of the town ; so I proceeded on through a grey and grim monotony
•of sand, and bogs, and blasted pines, for a space of nearly six hundred
miles, to the city of the Czar, and on the road, according to my custom,
.amused myself by spinning into verse my meditations on Immanuel
Kant, as follows :
Who’s here? a strange, old-fangled German Heir,
With hat three-cornered and bag-wig behind ;
Who peers with curious gaze, as if he were
New wafted from the moon by some stray wind
On the strange earth ! Ah ! now I know the man,
The sage who from this outmost Teuton station,
Marked their just bounds to all the thinking clan,
And pruned their wings to sober speculation.
Happy who, humanly, with human kind,
Works human work, well pleased from day to day,
Nor dares with high-plumed venture unconfined
Through trackless voids to push his plunging way !
God laughs at lofty thoughts ; but whoso proves
His ponder’d j ath, and walks by faith, He loves.
■vol.
II.—NO.
IX.
R
�322
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN GERMANY.
After a fortnight of very magnificent panoramic views of a. great
country, and very suggestive glimpses into social states, very far
removed from British, I returned from Moscow and St. Petersburg,
through Warsaw, to Berlin.
At Warsaw, the whole style of architec
ture, and the long rows of poplar trees along the turnpike roads,,
declared plainly enough that, though still under Russian sway, I was.
no longer in a Russian atmosphere. The civilization of Poland comes,
from the west, that of Moscow from the east ; and this contrast spoke
plainly out from every house-top, and from every street corner,
notwithstanding the forced Russian appearance given to the signs of
thé shops, which, by police order, are printed first in Russian charac
ters, and then in the native Polish, as of inferior dignity, below. But
my business here is only with Germany.
A railway rattle of about
fifteen hours’ duration brought us to Berlin, early on Wednesday
morning (the 14th), two days before the great military entry, and in.
time to learn that apartments in the best inns had risen from a dollar
a night—their usual rate—to a Frederick d’or.
I, of course, had
expected this, and, by travelling second class (contrary to Murray’s,
advice), all through Russia, had left my pocket in a comfortable flow
of cash, quite up to the need of the great foreseen pressure on the.
hotels.
But I am a Sonntagskind, as the Germans say, and always,
fall on my feet.
A kind friend took compassion on me, and opened,
his door for my shelter ; so that a week’s stay in Berlin cost me
nothing in the way of cash, and was a great gain to me in the way of
balmy and brilliant sociality. Now, no one, of course, expects that I
am here to attempt a detailed description of the grand patriotic display
which we call the Einzug : the newspapers have done the thing to satis
faction, and even to satiety ; and achtnn agere is as little my business at.
any time as it can be anybody’s pleasure at this time ; so with regard to
this matter, I will only set down one or two remarks with regard to the
general tone, effect, and significance of the affair, as it struck me. My
German friend had kindly procured for me a seat on the platform or
gallery raised in front of the University, and looking into the grand
open place, circled writh palaces and monuments, into which the Unter
den Linden opens at its east end : certainly the most pictorial point in
the otherwise somewhat monotonous and wearisome stateliness of Berlin
architecture. From this post—for which I paid only three dollars—I
had a broad unhindered view of the different regiments of the Guard,
that to the number of between forty and fifty thousand came spreading
forth their steely ranks from the comparatively narrow line of the Lin
den j and unquestionably, for the eye of a grey civilian accustomed only
to sober sights, this was a grand spectacle to see. For nearly three
hours the mighty palatial space filled and emptied itself again with
�SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN GERMANY.
323
close-packed glittering rows, now of the severe bine infantry, now of the
^bright mailed Cuirassiers gleaming in the sun, now of the rapid-trotting
Uhlans, with their black and white pennons fluttering on their long
lances. These last were not only the most picturesque, but the most
loudly cheered : cheers well merited, as anyone who has even hastily
gleaned the newspaper history of the war will understand. If in the
first decisive battles of the campaign the Germans knew what they were
about while the French did not, it was all owing, after Moltke’s admirable
geographic and strategic studies, to the dexterity and daring shown by
thefr reconnoitring horsemen. If this, thought I, be only some forty or
fifty thousand men, what a spectacle must the military array of a great
battle be,' such a battle as that at Leipzig in October, 1813, when Napo
leon, with 150,000 men, stood in an inner circle, with 400,000 Prussians,
Russians, Austrians, and Swedes in his front. Nevertheless, as a mere
spectacle, one could not but say that the Einzug was deficient in two
important respects—in colour and variety. I have seen not a few more
brilliant shows. But the real show, perhaps, was not the march of the
military, with their arms glittering in the sun, but the pomp of festal
decoration in the town, the endless rows of flag and banner and historic
picture, patriotic sculpture, significant device, and suggestive motto of
every kind. This really was a burst of vivid gaiety well calculated both
to please the eye and to satisfy the mind anywhere, but especially in the
grey and grave regions of the frosty North. Of the illuminations which
closed the great festive day I will say nothing; they were good, very
good, perhaps, of their kind; but I am Stoic enough to think there is
something childish in this cumbrous attempt to light up the night with
an artificial imitation of the day. But what chiefly moved me in this
affair of the Einzug, and will remain with me among the deepest and
most fruitful experiences of my life, was the moral and political signifi
cance of the display. Many shows are mere shows, with emptiness or
even hollow, false pretence behind; mere gilded lies, beneath which the
scratch of a pin will expose the depth of foulness and rottenness which
such rare varnish was necessary to conceal. But the Berlin show was
all reality, and the sign of a greater reality. The reality before me was
effective military strength; the reality of which it was the sign is the
solidity, firmness, and systematic consistency of the German people and
the Prussian Government. There rode the stout old soldier King, pre
ceded by his three mighty men, all dressed in the white livery of his
favourite Cuirassiers, Bismark, Moltke, and Roon, the one the eye of his
policy, the second the brain, and the third the arm of his soldiership.
What a reality was there! What a speaking commentary on the famous
words of Bismark (which some hasty people were forward to misunder
stand), that great social revolutions of a certain kind are not to be
R 2
�324
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN GERMANY
achieved by mere talking, but that the obstinacy of the tough old ma
terial can be moulded into a new shape only by the stern compulsion of
‘blood and iron.’ Now everybody admits that Bismark and the King,
or rather the King and Bismark (for if the King had been a weakling in
the ‘conflict of 62’ Bismark would have had no game to play), were
right in keeping up the strength of the army against the peddling eco
nomies of the Berlin Liberals; the success of the war, therefore, and the
glory of the triumphal entry, were the legitimate fruit of clear counsel,
firm will, and manly consistency of purpose on the part of those who
had the guidance of public affairs in Prussia. Whatever other excel
lencies the champions of the French in this country may see or imagine
in their petted friends, they must at least confess to two great faults—
their fretful irritability took high offence from no sufficient occasion, and
their hasty insolence_made war without adequate preparation. But no
faults of this kind can be laid to the charge of the Germans. They
knew they had an insolent and treacherous neighbour to contend with;
they had known him in this character for four hundred years; and they
were determined that, so soon as the real outbreak of his itching vanity
and imperious insolence should take place, it would not find them, as in
1806, unprepared and divided. The outbreak did come sooner than
even Bismark’s astuteness had anticipated; he was taken by surprise no
less than his European enemies, who accused him of complicity; but he
was surprised in the midst of his earnestness, as the French in their
insolence; and backed by the firm resolve of a serious, honest, and
laborious people, the whole character of the war on his side was as
satisfactory to the moralTas to the intellectual nature of the impartial
observer. The same attitude of reality and honesty was presented in
the person of the stout old King, a monarch in all points the antipodes
of the French Emperor, who was driven into an unequal war by the
necessity of a position which his own unscrupulous ambition and utter
want of political conscience had created. Only continued success could
seem to justify a rule which every one knew was founded on a crime;
and the dramatic necessity of getting up some glory, to titillate French
vanity and gratify French ambition, sent him with a light start and boast
ful parade into the midst of a struggle, of which the issue, even with
the most complete preparation and most thoughtful circumspection, was
extremely doubtful. How different the moral position of the King of
Prussia ! The hereditary holder of a throne firmly rooted in the loyal
allegiance of a sober-minded and intelligent people, who knew how to
value the strength derived from a firm central rule, even when it
pressed a little severely sometimes on individual liberty, he neither
needed to cater by unworthy means for a popularity which he already
possessed, nor if a storm of adverse fortune should seize the state, was
�SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN GERMANY.
325
he in danger of being thrown ont as a Jonah to propitiate the wrath
of the sea-god. He was known to be a soldier and a lover of soldiers ;
but he did not require to pander to a fretful appetite, either in his army
or his people, by aggressive acts upon the territories of his neighbours.
The wars in which he had been engaged were purely matters of
domestic arrangement between Germans and Germans ; the changes
which, by the instrumentality of ‘blood and iron,’ he had effected
within the limits of Fatherland, if violent, were absolutely necessary for
the restoration of that imperial unity the loss of which had been
historically identical with the humiliation of Germany beneath the
fraud and force of unscrupulous kingcraft in France. To this firm
political position King William added the wTeight of a personal character
such as the solid and sober-minded Germans knew how to respect. In
‘the conflict ’ with the Parliament in 1862 he showed a firmness of will
which, whatever else may be wanting, must ever be held as a prime
requisite in a ruler of men; in his habits, like his excellent father, he
was plain and unostentatious ; and, like his father also, he was sincerely
and unaffectedly religious. This element in his character I am, of
course, aware it has been the fashion in this country to deride; but
there is not a man in Germany, to what ever party he belongs, who
would insinuate that the devout expressions of thankfulness used by the
King in his despatches were anything else than the genuine utterance
of a natural and unaffected piety. It is indeed a vulgar habit of the
English mind to honour the expression of devout feeling only when it
appears in the stereotyped forms of the national Liturgy ; and beyond
the conventional homage of a Sunday forenoon service, or the question
able zeal for church paraded on the political platform at an election,
many an Englishman seems more than half ashamed of his religion, and
carries no more natural fragrance of piety about him than a cold tulip
does of warm vegetable aroma.
Hence the uncharitable judgments
passed upon good King William : judgments that only prove, if not the
absolute ungenerousness and ungentlemanliness, certainly the frigid
narrowness and formalism of the persons who made them. The real
fact of the matter is, both that there is a fundamental vein of devout
feeling (a portion of their characteristic Gemiitli) in the German mind,
and that the late war, in its motive and occasion essentially a repetition
of the great national struggle of 1813, was inspired by the same fine
combination of devout and patriotic feeling which distinguished its
prototype. The sure instinct of this led the King at the outbreak of
the struggle to re-establish the Order of the Iron Cross, a decoration
which symbolises in the most chaste and significant way that combina
tion of manly endurance, public spirit, and active piety by which the
campaigns of 1813 and 1870 have been so prominently characterised.
�326
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN GERMANY.
Sitting in the railway carriage one day, between Gottingen and Halle, I
had before me a young soldier decorated with this expressive symbol,
which, if widely distributed, is so only because, as Bismark said, it is
v’idely deserved ; and, as I am not a smoker, I amused the tedium of the
road by articulating the following lines :
Prussian, that iron cross upon thy breast,
Which thou with manhood’s modest pride dost wear,
I ask not by what deed above the rest,
Dashing or daring, it was planted there ;
I know that when the insolent heel of Gaul
Tramped on all rights to thee and Deutschland dear,
Thou rose regenerate from thy plunging fall
By vows devout and discipline severe.
Thus blazed thy bright noon from a tearful morn,
Blessing from bane sprang, and great gain from loss,
While in thy hand the avenging steel was borne,
And in thy heart was stamped the patient cross :
Thus Spartan pith and Christian grace were thine,
Born in one day, and bodied in one sign.
And now, what more have I to say ? I might tell Mr. Bull not only that
he ought to believe reverently in the moral grandeur of the Iron Cross,
whether as symbolical of the great struggle of 1813, in which himself
took a prominent part, or of the yet greater struggle of 1870, in which
he took no part ; but I would tell him also that the universal arming
of the people, however Lord Derby might call it a retrogression, is a
part of social organisation equally congruous with Spartan discipline,
Athenian freedom, Roman strength, and Christian grace ; that, in fact,
it is a grand nursery of national virtue and patriotic devotion, more
powerful than schools and churches, because it deals in deeds, and not in
words. But I know well that Mr. Bull would not listen to me in this
matter. If I had M.P. after my name, perhaps he might be willing to
lend me a respectful audience for an hour; as it is, I am silent.
�PRESERVATION OF THE NATIONAL HEALTH.
835
un cleanness of every kind, let us tear-down the fever-nests and open up
the pauper warrens to the free light and blithe air, let us sternly treat
as public crime the avarice that distributes poisoned water to swell divi
dends, and that "which refuses to drain villages lest the rates should rise.
Resolute war against dirt, waged under the conduct of scientific enemies
of disease, would soon make this a different country for the poor at least
to live in. If we decline to accept this issue how shall we justify our* solves to the helpless masses whom we are allowing to perish like rotten
sheep ?
Edward D. J. Wilson.
It is just to say here that though the common theory of cholera and its propaga
tion is popularly summarised above, it does not pass unchallenged. - Dr. Chapman, in
a very ingenious work, with the logic oj: which no fault can be found, but which may
be thought to rest on too narrow an induction, has endeavoured to show that cholera
is generated not by any morbid poison but by hyperasmia of the nervous centres dis
tributed along thej spine. He maintains that the disease can be controlled by modify
ing the temperature of these nervous centres, and cites some remarkable cases in which
he has recovered patients far gone in choleraic collapse by the application of ice to the
spine. The method may be useful, even though Dr. Chapman’s theory be unsound,,
and as medical science is confessedly powerless to cope with cholera when once it has
seized on a patient, it will be worth while to give the proposed treatment a fair trial/'
in the public hospitals in case of another cholera epidemic.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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Sketches of travels in Germany. Part 3
Creator
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Blackie, John Stuart
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 320-326 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2 (November, 1871). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
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{s.n.]
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[1871]
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G5338
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Germany
Literature
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English
Conway Tracts
Germany
Travels
-
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193
pKETCHES
OF
J" RAVEL
IN
pERyViANY,
By Professor Blackie.
An hour and a half’s pleasant swing in the Hanoverian train brought
me to Göttingen. I had been introduced here to German things and
German thoughts forty years ago, when Blumenbach and Heeren and
Ottfried Müller, and other mighty names now departed, were the great
ornaments of the Georgia Augusta. As to external appearance, I found
everything pretty much as I had left it; only the Professors, who in my
Burschen days used to lecture in their own private houses, have now
been provided with lecture-rooms in a university building of im
posing and tasteful exterior. The town itself is lightsome, clean,
and pleasant; the architecture exhibiting that quaint combination of a
Certain clumsy unwieldiness in the mass with a light and painted
gaiety in the detail, so characteristic of all those German towns that
have maintained their original mediaeval character in the face of
modern encroachments and transformations. Of course there is a
gross incongruity in this, but there is a pleasant variety also ; and
anything certainly is preferable to those long monotonous rows of
stone or brick walls, with square holes cut in them, which constitute
some of the most prominent streets in certain parts of Edinburgh and
London. The town is surrounded by a vallum (wall) or rampart,
which forms a breezy walk all round, shaded with green trees, outside
of which the old fosse has now been turned into gardens—public and
private—where the nightingales keep up their lively nocturnal concert,
quite close to the screaming whistle of the Hanoverian railway. As to
the University, there can be no doubt that it will suffer to some extent
from the provincial character which must now belong to it, in com
parison with the great central University of Berlin. The division of
the Fatherland into so many petty independent states, which Bismark,
by two great strokes, has put an end to, carried with it at least this
great advantage, that Germany contained more centres of independent
and original culture than any country in Europe, and had its intellec
tual equilibrium less disturbed by the overgrowth of centralisation.
But these minor German universities still present, and will no doubt
�194
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN GERMANY.
continue to present, a strong well-orderecl phalanx of teaching power
which our proudest British universities may not look on without
blushing. In the single University of Gottingen, which does not contain
more than 800 students, there are eighty persons officially employed in
the work of teaching, arranged in the three grades of ordinary professors,
extraordinary professors, and privatim docentes—that is, in our language,
licensed graduates—the consequence of which rich provision is, that
instead of the rigid routine of traditional classes which we have in
Scotland, there is scarcely a subject of any conceivable human interest
which may not find its niche in the scheme of teaching for a German
winter and summer session. During the week I spent in Gottingen I
attended four lectures from different professors, each of which was of
a kind that it would have been impossible to have heard in any
university of Scotland. The two first were on special periods of
history : on the political relations of Northern Europe during the second
half of the seventeenth century, by Dr. Pauli, and on the history of
Germany, from the year 1806 downwards, by Professoi* Waitz. Our
professors of history—and it is only exceptionally that in Scotland they
exist at all—could not lightly indulge in various specialties of this kind,
as, like most public teachers in Scotland, they are tied down to some
prescribed scheme, which they must exhaust, and from which they
cannot depart. This mechanical arrangement of university work is a
public proclamation of poverty and meanness which requires no
comment. The other two lectures which I heard were equally signi
ficant of the variety, richness, and flexibility of the German academical
scheme. The one was by Professor Hermann Lotze, ‘On the Philosophy
of Religion,’ a subject that might possibly find a place in a course of
lectures on moral philosophy such as we have in Scotland, but which
certainly could not be taken up by the Professor of Logic and Meta
physics without raising grave discussions in the church courts, and
being productive of very perilous consequences to the University. The
other lecture was by Professor Sauppe ; or rather’ it was a lecture by
the students, over which the Professor presided, pretty much in the
fashion of the tutorial classes in England, or the general style of the
Greek and Latin classes in the Scottish universities. Only, so far as
Scotland is concerned, the sad contrast must be fairly stated: that
whereas in our universities the Professor superintends the drill of
young men as ip. a school, that they may acquire a mastery of the two
learned languages, in Gottingen the Professor trains those who have
already acquired a mastery of those languages in the scientific princi
ples of interpretation and criticism. A notable thing also was that the
whole performances took place through the medium of the Latin
language ; a practice which should never have been allowed to fall
into academical disuse, as it has altogether in Edinburgh (the natural
consequence of the inherent weakness of our classical training), and as I
suspect in Oxford also, for which there can be no excuse. Whatever
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languages are taught at school or college ought not only to be read
and written, but to be spoken ; for the ear is the great natural avenue
through which sounds are received into the familiar citizenship of the
brain ; and it is not, of course, the dead rule of a gray book, but the
living power of a human voice, that can convey to the ear, at once,
most easily, and most effectively, the impressions which, in the acquisi
tion of language, it has a natural claim to expect.
B The most remarkable thing that I saw in Gottingen was a professor
of geology who had been forty-one times on Mount Etna, and, as the
fruit of his various visits, had constructed a map of its lava streams,
as accurate and detailed as any of Graf Moltke’s strategic schemes.
This is German thoroughness in the grand style. Whatever a German
does he does with system and calculation ; and Deutschland certainly has
a better claim than France to boast that she is la patrie de VorganisaEW». For the rest, I have only to note that in Gottingen living is
cheap, that it is thoroughly German in all its ways and habits, and
that it has not suffered any elegant corruption—like Heidelberg and
Bonn—from the presence of a regular English colony. I therefore
think it a most advisable place for young Scotsmen who may wish to
take a taste of German language and learning for a sewiesire or two.
As for Englishmen, they will naturally go where living is more expen
sive, and where they will meet with more of their own countrymen.
The plain Scot fraternises more easily with the homely German.
From Gottingen, being bent for Berlin, I took the route which led
through the two famous sites hallowed by the names of Luther and
Melancthon, viz., Eisleben and Wittenberg. The former town lies on
the railway line betwixt Gottingen and Halle, between twenty and
thirty English miles to the west of the latter town. Of the country
betwixt Gottingen and Eisleben there is little to be said. As we
approached Eisleben, dark heaps of ashes and débris, and smoking
vents on the slopes of the long monotonous ridges of elevated ground,
indicated clearly enough the miners’ country which the well-known
history of Luther’s parentage leads one to expect here. The town of
Eisleben lies in the low ground to the south of the gradual ascent that
leads northward and eastward to the Harz mountains ; it is a place of
small size and pretensions. The market-place presents the usual
strange mixture of the quaint and the unwieldy already mentioned as
so characteristic of old German architecture ; but the great attraction,
of course, is the little lange gasse, or ‘long-gate,’ in which stands the
house in which the great doctor of the Reformation was born. An
effigy of the venerable Martin—as well known as Henry VIII.—stands
Oa the wall, with the superscription :
Luther's Wort ist Gottes Lehr',
Durum stirbt sie nimmermehr.
Luther’s word is gospel lore :
Therefore it lives for evermore.
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The house is now inhabited in the upper story by one of the school
masters belonging to the Normal Seminary adjacent; but the room in
which the prophet greeted the light is, of course, kept sacred, and left
in all the barrenness of desolation which naturally belongs to a mouldy
old memorial. There is nothing particularly worthy of seeing in this
old house, and yet one could not be in Eisleben without visiting it |
such consideration belongs to the bones, and even the nail-parings, of
the saints.
Thou, too, art great among Germania’s towns,
Little Eisleben ! for from thee came forth
The free-mouthed prophet of the thoughtful North,
Whose word of power with mitres and with crowns
Waged glorious war, and lamed the strength of lies:
As when a bird long time in cage confined
First flaps free vans, and on the roaming wind
Floats jubilant and revels in the skies,
So did thy word, thou strong-souled Saxon man,
Lift up our wings of prisoned thought, and give
New scope of venture to our human clan,
While we did learn from thy great work to live
Erect, and make no league with juggling lies,
Looking right forward with unflinching eyes.
Another stage brought me to Halle, and thence a journey of two
hours to Wittenberg, about half-way between Halle and Berlin. Here
I stayed a night, that the scenery of the greatest drama of modern times
might have time to paint itself leisurely on my imagination. I had not
far to go, however, before the most prominent witnesses of the sacred
traditions of the place stood before me ; the bronze statues of Luther
and Melancthon, on pedestals of granite, after a model which I after
wards found universal in Berlin. This granite, I was informed, came
from no quarry, but is the product of those huge boulders which are
found in various places of the vast flats of North Germany, dropt no
doubt from the floating icebergs of the great pre-Adamitic Sea that
once covered the whole of Brandenburg, Pomerania, and the adjacent
districts. Everywhere in Wittenberg, where Luther appears, as here in
the market-place, Melancthon appears with him. Never were two
contrasts more useful or more necessary to one another.
Two prophets stand forth in the market-place
At Wittenberg to draw the wise regard,
Both broad-browed thinkers of the Teuton race,
Both crowned with Fame’s unbought, unsought reward.
Two prophets like, yet how unlike ! the same
In work, but not in function ; he to fan
The strength more apt of the long smothered flame,
To temper he, and guide with chastened plan.
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Tlius fiery Peter, erst at gospel call,
Drew in one yoke with gentle-thoughted John ;
Thus toiled beneath, one battle’s sulphurous pall
Hot-blooded Bliicher and cool Wellington;
And they are wise who read this text in all—
Man’s ways are many, but God’s work is one.
The market-place in Wittenberg, independently of these two bronze
preachers, is really an imposing combination; on one side the city church,
ia the middle the Town Hall, with hotels, and other buildings with a
definite well-marked German character all round.
The great historical monument, however, at Wittenberg, unquestion
ably is the Schlosskirche, to the door of which the famous ninety-five
theses were affixed that shook the foundation of the most gigantic
Spiritual despotism that ever exercised authority over the free soul of
fiiaa. The church stands quite close to the north wall of the town
(for Wittenberg is a regular fortress), a remarkably plain and almost
ttgly building, beside the two round towers of the old castle, in no
respect more remarkable for architectural effect. But, however little
©an be said of the church, the door has received due honour. Frederick
Wilhelm IV., the predecessor of his present Majesty, who was a man of
great taste and religious sensibility, caused a new door to be cast in
bronze, with the whole ninety-five theses, word for word, in solid scrip
ture, to preach in the eye of day against the vile traffic in sacred things
as long as iron shall endure. In the inside of the church, on the floor,
the spots are shown where the bodies of Luther and Melancthon lie. To
gether in life, in death they should not be sundered ; and so the Elector
of Saxony in those days took care that the body of Luther, who had died
at his own birthplace, should be transported to the place where the
principal scene of his evangelic activity had been. The mass-book
[Which he used as a priest is also shown in the vestry. Having paid
my respects to this most notable of old churches, I had to retrace the
hvhole length of the town to the Elster Thor, which leads out to the
Halle and Berlin Railway. The name of this street, Collegien Strasse,
bears on its face the tradition of the University whose learning added
its authority to the moral weight of the great Reformer’s protest; and
at the end of it, just where it abuts on the fosse of the fortress, stand
the University buildings, still used for educational purposes. The
inscription Bibliotheca Académica, on the left, as you enter, declares
the identity of the spot. In the court behind, a building originally a
cloister, contains the room where Luther dwelt when Professor in the
University. It remains in its original condition, with antique panels,
worn old timber floor, and two pieces of furniture of rude strength and
antique simplicity. The one is the table at which so many sermons
and manifestoes were hammered with such Vulcanian fervour into
Shape: and the other a curious chair in which Martin and his Kate
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used to sit together and hold domestic chirrupings in the most
connubial and irreproachable way imaginable. The chair has two seats*
looking one another in the face, but made of one block of wood, so as
to present the perfect type of that union of man and wife which is
both one and two ; and it is so constructed that, foi- perfect ease and
comfort, it must be placed close to the window, otherwise there is no
proper resting-place for the arm. The window beside which it stands
looks out into the court-yard, so that the most vivid picture of the
fulminant doctor in his quiet ruminating moments is here presented in
rude significant literalness to the eye.
In the afternoon at Wittenberg, having nothing particular to do
(people dine here, and in the small towns of Germany generally, at
1 p.m.), I took a stroll beyond the Elster Thor, meaning to go a mile or
two into the country, to see if any object might present itself to relieve
the wide expanse of flat green monotony, which, to an English or
Scottish eye, in this part of the world, is apt to convey such an expression
of dreariness. Scarcely, however, had I passed the railway terminus,
when my steps were led into the churchyard ; and there, finding it
as pleasant as any other field of promenade in the cold weather—for
it was a chill May everywhere—I walked up and down for an hour.
The pious care which the Germans bestow on the resting-places of
the dear departed—shown in the frequently renewed flowers of
various kinds planted in the mould—is only one phase of the richer
vein of feeling and genuine human kindliness which distinguishes them,
not less from the lofty reserve of the Englishman and the unde
monstrative gravity of the Scot than from the finely and somewhat
affectedly cultivated mannerism of the French. Not a few pious
hands, even in this cold evening, were busied with these kindly
sepulchral decorations. But my attention was drawn from them to
some continuous beds of apparently recent graves —to the number
of above 150 —over which one stone stood, with the following
inscription :
Les Officiers français
A leurs
Compatriotes
Morts en captivité
A Wittemberg,
1870-1.
.
On enquiry in the town afterwards, I found that 7,000 of the French
prisoners, principally from Metz, had been quartered here ; and that,
partly from the extremes to which they had been reduced in the
fortress, partly from the general distastefulness of German captivity
to Frenchmen, they had died here, one or two every day, till the
number which I mentioned was summed up. Upon such a theme,
in such a place, at such an hour, just before sunset, one could scarcely
help moralising. How some of my Edinburgh German-haters and
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199
peace-gospellers would have burst out here in indignant blasts of
commercial or evaugelic wrath against that ‘ hoary blood-monger ’
the King of Prussia, whom, along with Mephistopheles Bismark, it
pleases them to regard as the cause of this effusion of Frankish blood!
But my vein was nothing indignant; it was only pitiful. I could not
help feeling infinite sorrow that such a highly gifted people as the
French should have allowed themselves so long to be deluded with
that Will o’ the Wisp called Glory, which after a short season of
flashing prosperity has led them into such swamps of national degra
dation and shame. Is man a reasonable animal ? Certainly, if in
all wars love is extinct, in not a few reason has either been absent
from home, or has rudely been kicked out at the back door. I have
seldom felt so humiliated in presence of frail human nature as in
contemplation of this war, which was the pure and unmingled product
of French jealousy, French vanity, French insolence, and French
ignorance, and should preach a lesson to that people for all time, if
Frenchmen are capable of being taught.
I laud them not; but I must weep for all,
Poor ’wildered Franks, beneath Heaven’s bright blue dome
Who might have reaped home-harvests, but the call
Of Glory, elfish idol, bade them roam,
And here they lie. 0 ! if there be in France
Wise for one hour to nurse a sober theme,
Let such come here, and from this tearful stance,
Spell the true meaning of their juggling dream.
What thing, from reason’s sway divorced, is man,
Vain man, whose epics swell the trump of Fame ?
A monkey gamboling on a larger plan,
A moth that, fluttering with a mightier name,
Drawn by the dear seduction of his eyes,
Bounces into the scorching flame and dies.
I suppose it is not possible to enter Brandenburg, the cradle of
Prussian greatness, from any quarter, without passing through barren
ness, long leagues of unfriendly barrenness and monotony. In fact,
Brandenburg is barrenness; a mere waste of sand deserted by the
primeval brine, and shaping itself by help of rain, vegetable remains,
and scientific skill, through the slow process of the ages, into a
human and habitable trim. But this harshness of the natural con
ditions with which Nature has surrounded him is precisely that which
has made the Brandenburger great; like the Scot, he works hard, be
cause to live at all he must work hard, and work is the price, as
wise old Epicharmus says, ‘ for which the gods sell all things to men.’
The best of us are apt at times to put up the foolish prayer that
the gods might perhaps have done a little more for us. Nay; but, my
good brother, the fact may rather be that they have done too much
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already. Certainly we can learn to be like to them, in a subordinate
way, only by doing as much as possible for ourselves, and creating, so
to speak, our own world ; making a Prussian monarchy out of a wilder
ness of Brandenburger sand wreaths.
Sand, sand, long leagues of heath and barren sand !
Long formal lines of dark unlovely pine !
Know thus the cradle of the mighty land
Whose lord now sways from Danube to the Rhine.
Blest in their barrenness full sure were they,
Lords of a harsh soil and a frosty clime,
Where thrift and virtue, and in frugal way
To live, sowed seeds of strength for ripening time.
Wise, if they keep the memory of their birth,
And grow, severely strong, as Frederick grew,
Not shaking wanton wings of sensual mirth
Rampant, but to the manful maxim true
That made men wonder at their mounting star—
Still strive for peace, but never flinch from war.
A pleasant rattle of two hours on the rail brought us through
this redeemed sea-bottom to the once little cradle of the Prussian
Electorate, and the now mighty metropolis of the regenerate German
Empire, Berlin. As we approached the town long lines of houses,
stretching towards the south-west, showed distinctly the direction
in which the recent great increase of the city has taken place. When
I was here as a student, some forty years ago—in the days when Boeckh,
Schleiermacher, and Neander were in the zenith of their academical
glory—the population of Berlin was generally stated at about 300,000 ;
it is now nearly triple that figure, and the increase latterly, they say,
has been to the amount of 30,000 annually. This is, to use the
favourite expression of the Germans, something quite ‘ colossal ’—
something quite analogous to the enormous growth of Manchester,
Glasgow, London, and other busy cities of Great Britain, during the
last century. What have been the causes of this phenomenon, which
even more than the needle-guns of Sadowa should have made such an
astute man as Louis Napoleon think twice before he plunged his
people, or allowed his people to plunge him, into a war with the
united strength of Germany ? Prussia alone in her present prosperous
condition, and with her well-organised military system, was quite
strong enough to have made a repetition of Jena and Auerstadt im
possible. The causes of this extraordinary stride made by Prussia, of
which Berlin is the greatest symbol, though not altogether on the
surface, do not certainly lie so deep as to have been beyond the ken of
a cool calculator like the ex-Emperor of France. Prussia, as a Protes
tant Power, was peculiarly marked out as destined to take the lead in
Protestant Germany. Austria might preside at the Diet while the
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Holy Alliance lasted, and while princes conld still continue to rule
without regard to the spirit of the times ; but, if government really
meant the effective hold and control of the public mind, such a
government in Germany could proceed only from Prussia. The other
Protestant States were too small either to originate or to maintain any
movement that could pass the bounds of their own particular province.
To Prussia, therefore, all who longed for the unity of the Patherland
instinctively turned; and this great instinct found its realisation in
the person of Prince Bismark, and in the bold stroke of policy that
prostrated Austria and annexed the recalcitrant minor States in the
1866. With the Protestantism of Prussia was intimately con
nected its intelligence, its comparative freedom of opinion, its patronage
of science, its nursing of speculation, its substructure of popular
education, its truly national and popular and democratic system of
military drill. All this had come tto glorious growth and blossom,
first, from the genius and character of the great Pritz, and then
from the social regeneration that, under the stimulant guidance of
Baron Stein, had followed the terrible prostration of Jena in 1806.
Moreover, the men of Brandenburg, as already mentioned, were a sturdy
race, forced by hard labour to subdue the obstinacy of a barren soil,
and from their poverty acquiring habits of wealth-producing industry.
Th® Northern Germans are characteristically a hard-working people ;
hence the manufacturing industry of the Rhine district, which,
by the aid of railways and their concentrating action, has recently
shown itself on a great scale also in Berlin. Rich merchants, full
cousins to those whose palatial homes fringe the banks of the Mersey
and the Clyde, now raise their high-tiered warehouses and pile their
pictured halls on the banks of the Spree. Berlin is no more a cold,
formal, anlic, and military residence, but a populous capital, full of
lusty pulsation, of fervid energy, and, especially since the grand stroke
of 1866, of vivid nationality. The manifest signs of this are not only
the extraordinary increase in magnitude, but, what is much more
significant, the great rise in prices, and especially the enormous mount
ing of house rents. With regard to this latter item, I learned details
from various quarters which convinced me that houses in Berlin are
even dearer than in London. One evil result of this, naturally, is, that
public servants who live on small salaries, and men of moderate
fortunes generally, find it difficult to live in Berlin and keep up their
natural position in society; an evil, no doubt, but which is balanced
by its consequence, that men of moderate fortunes expelled from the
metropolis will serve to maintain and to enrich the social centres of
the provinces. It is not desirable that Germany should be swallowed
Up in Berlin, and that Gottingen, Bonn, and Halle should assume the
same servile attitude to it that the provincial cities of France do to
Paris.
My object in coming to Berlin was not to see the town, but to see
'
VOL. IL—-NO. VIII.
L
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Bismark. The town, however, is well worth considering to those
whose eye has been trained to know the significance of places. No
doubt its situation as a dead flat is bad ; the river which waters it, or
rather tinctures with some humidity its immense sand-beds, is neither
large, nor beautiful, nor salubrious ; and the horizontal lines of its
streets draw themselves out, notwithstanding the stateliness of their
edifices, into a wearisome and oppressive monotony. Nevertheless
there is something of a grand imperial conception about it; the great
soul of the great Frederick seems to be typed in its plan; and in
impressing the idea of vastness it is second .only to St. Petersburg.
To me, however, it seems to possess a certain moral significance that
dominates over all gesthetical considerations; I think of Plato and
Pythagoras, and look upon it as the stone-impersonation of the principle
of law and order.
Look here, and ponder well, and know the land
That by the sword of crowned captains grew ;
In rank and file the streets well ordered stand,
And like a serried host stretch forth to view.
Here Order, primal Demiurge supreme,
Sways with firm will and uncontrolled command,
Nor fears, to lame the action of his scheme,
The lagging foot, or the rebellious hand.
Come here who love mad liberty, the dance
Of wanton wills divorced from sacred awe,
Come from your fiery maelstrom in hot France,
And learn how great, how strong a thing is Law.
Ye would be free—poor fools; be tigers, then,
Or monkeys, and forget that ye are men !
But, as I have said, I was eager’ to see Bismark; and as the Diet of
the Empire was then sitting (about the middle of May), there could
not be much difficulty about that. I attended the Diet regularly, both
at that time and afterwards, about the middle of June, on my return
from a short flight into Russia, and had the good luck to see and hear
the great Chancellor on several occasions. I did not, indeed, hear any
of his- great speeches, but, both from what I have read and from what
I heard from others, can form a good idea of his character as a speaker.
He is not an orator, in any sense, like Gladstone, Brougham, Bright,
Canning, and that class of men. He is specifically a man of action
and of business, who speaks, as Socrates says every man ought to speak,
without art, directly, and boldly, and emphatically, when he has got
anything to say. He will nevei- be found, like Cicero or Dr. Guthrie,
rolling out grand pictorial and sonorous periods; he only knows
what he is talking about, and hits hard; yes, hard, and directly in
the face, too, not at all concerned whether your nose purples or not at
the blow. He is sometimes found struggling for the proper word to
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203
clothe his thoughts, but that hesitation is the growling thunder, which
'preludes a flash. Whatever faults you may find with his oratory, you
must listen to what he says ; and you feel in every sentence that he is
A 'tame man, and no glittering sophist or astute pleader of a bad case.
If he thinks it necessary to pluck your beard, he comes right up and
does it; blatant democracy, with its thousand brazen throats, has no
terrors for him; he stands alone in front of a storm of babblers, and
overawes them by his cool display of intellectual fibre and iron volition.
There is nothing •of German subtlety or German ideality about him;
in this respect Gladstone is much more a German than Bismark;
and Bismark, as I have heard an intelligent German public man
remark, has something essentially English in his character and attitude.
He is pre-eminently a man of deeds ; a man of direct broad views, of
practical sagacity, of firm determination, of unflurried coolness, of
fearless audacity, of commanding survey, with a touch of hot im
periousness, no doubt, in his temper, and of occasional irritability
which in a great statesman is a great fault. But it is
not necessary to hear him speak in order to be impressed by the
feeling that you are in the presence of a great man. His personal
appearance at once stamps him as the leader of the congregation.
When I saw him first I was sitting in the gallery behind the Speaker,
directly opposite to the elevated bench on the side of the House where
the members of the Imperial Council or Senate (JReichsrath') sit. On
this bench the central seat belongs to the Chancellor, and it was empty
when I entered the gallery. I had not watched long, however, before
a tall, broad-browed, broad-chested, truly Neptunian man, in a military
dress, entered and took possession of the empty seat. I asked, Is that
Bismark ? and received the answer which I anticipated. I then set
myself to watch and study him with as much scientific observation as I
was capable of. I had read his life by Hezechiel, and thought I
understood something of the stuff of which he was made. He sat for
an hour, the image of concentrated business and energy, signing papers,
reading telegrams, giving intimations to attendants, now looking to
the right hand, now to the left; again crossing his arms before his
breast, as if buckling down his natural impatience of a sedentary posi
tion, altogether as if he preferred the rattling thunder-car of Jove to the
soft-padded chair of the Chancellor. Such a man certainly will never
fall asleep, nor allow any other person to fall asleep, wherever you
plant him. When he was a young man they called him der toile
Sismark (mad Bismark) : that means, at an age when he had energy
without regulation, and without a suitable field of action, he did many
Strange and, it may be, some very improper things; as young Clive,
they tell us, distinguished his boyhood by climbing up to the top of
Shrewsbury steeple. Such men are not made to do common things ;
for red tape, official grooves, and traditional shams of all kinds, they
testify a despotic impatience; they are intensely real, and can only
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work where working means a real growth and a ripe fruitage. Such
a man, the living image of such a man, its very proper type and embodi
ment, the great German Chancellor, now stood before me.
There stands he now, amid the flock the ram,
A visible king by natural right to reign,
Whose high commission, from the great I AM
Direct, makes other seals and sanctions vain.
He stands as one who hath a steadfast will,
He looks as one whose survey lords the field,
At whose sure-darted glance of practised skill
The doubtful waver and the feeble yield.
Even such I knew from Homer’s regal song,
Jove-born, broad-breasted, lofty-fronted kings,
Who like Jove’s bird careered both swift and strong,
And boldly soared with venture on their wings:
But he who boldly ventures grandly wins,
And earns a brilliant pardon for all sins.
Less prominent than Bismark, but very regular in his attendance
as a member of the Diet, was Von Moltke. I never heard him speak ;
I believe he speaks seldom ; and is even less than Bismark, naturally,
a speaking man. His handsome physiognomy is known to all Europe
from the windows of the printsellers; if Bismark has somewhat the
look of an English bull-dog, Von Moltke has certainly the look of
an English gentleman; tall, slender, somewhat stiff and formal to
appearance; not in manner, perhaps, to those who know him, but
merely in outward attitude. He does not look like a soldier (Bismark
has much more of that), but rather smacks of the student, the literary
man, the professor; he is the thoughtful strategist, not the stormy
combatant; the mathematician, not the engineer; the architect, not the
builder; not the woodman who fells the trees, but the master of the
forest, who, according to a well-calculated plan, marks out and numbers
the trees that are to be felled.
[To be continued.']
��
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Sketches of travel in Germany
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Blackie, John Stuart
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 193-204 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2 (October 1871). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
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[1871]
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G5319
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Literature
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Sketches of travel in Germany), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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English
Germany
Travels
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24
Ijfofre of fjre
Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving on the
outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day’s journey from
Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travel to Basle by
night. He courts the heat of the sun and the uninteresting monotony of
French plains,—then- sluggish streams and never-ending poplar-trees,—•
for the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach to the great
Alps which await him at the close of day. It is about Mulhausen that
he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into
rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams ; the green Swiss
thistle grows by river-side and cowshed ; pines begin to tuft the slopes of
gently rising hills ; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first
Hesper, then the troop of lesser fights ; and he feels,—yes, indeed, there
is now no mistake,—the well-known, well-loved, magical fresh air that
never fails to blow from snowy mountains and meadows watered by
perennial streams. The last hour is one of exquisite enjoyment, and when
he reaches Basle, he scarcely sleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine
beneath the balconies, and knowing that the moon is shining on its
waters, through the town, beneath the bridges, between pasture lands
and copses, up the still mountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where
the water springs. There is nothing in all experience of travelling like
this. We may greet the Mediterranean at Marseilles with enthusiasm;
on entering Rome by the Porta del Popolo, we may reflect with pride
that we have reached the goal of our pilgrimage, and are at last among
world-shaking memories. But neither Rome nor the Riviera wins our
hearts like Switzerland. We do not lie awake in London thinking of'
them; we do not long so intensely, as the year comes round, to
revisit them. Our affection is less a passion than that which we cherish
for Switzerland.
Why, then, is this ? What, after all, is the love of the Alps, and
when and where did it begin ? It is easier to ask these questions than to
answer them. The classic nations hated mountains. Greek and Roman
poets talk of them with disgust and dread. Nothing could have been more
depressing to a courtier of Augustus than residence at Aosta, even though
he found his theatres and triumphal arches there. "Wheiever classical
feeling has predominated, this has been the case. Cellini’s Memoir®,
written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well express the aversion which
a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitable wildernesses of Switzerland.
Dryden, in his dedication to The Indian Emperor,-says, “ High objects,
it is true, attract the sight; but it looks up with pain on craggy rocks and
�THE LOVE OE THE ALPS.
25
barren mountains, and continues not intent on any object which is wanting
in shades and green to entertain it.”
Addison and Gray had no better epithets than “rugged,” “horrid,”
and the like for Alpine landscape. The classic spirit was adverse to
ffittthnsiasm for mere nature. Humanity was too prominent, and city life
absorbed all interests,—not to speak of what perhaps is the weightiest
reason—that solitude, indifferent accommodation, and imperfect means of
travelling, rendered mountainous countries peculiarly disagreeable. It is
impossible to enjoy art or nature while suffering from fatigue and cold,
dreading the attacks of robbers, and wondering whether you will find food
and shelter at the end of your day’s journey. Nor was it different in the
Middle Ages. Then individuals had either no leisure from war or strife
with the elements, or else they devoted themselves to the salvation of
their souls. But when the ideas of the Middle Ages had decayed, when
improved arts of life had freed men from servile subjection to daily needs,
when the bondage of religious tyranny had been thrown off and political
liberty allowed the full development of tastes and instincts, when moreover
the classical traditions had lost their power, and courts and coteries became
too narrow for the activity of man; then suddenly it was discovered that
Nature in herself possessed transcendent charms. It may seem absurd
to class them all together ; yet there is no doubt that the French
devolution, the criticism of the Bible, Pantheistic forms of worship,
landscape-painting, Alpine travelling, and the poetry of Nature, are all
signs of the same movement—of a new Renaissance. Limitations of'
every sort have been shaken off during the last century, all forms have
been destroyed, all questions asked. The classical spirit loved to arrange,
model,, preserve traditions, obey laws. We are intolerant of everything
that is not simple, unbiassed by prescription, liberal as the wind, and
natural as the mountain crags. We go to feed this spirit of freedom
among the Alps. What the virgin forests of America are to the Americans
the Alps are to us. What there is in these huge blocks and walls of
granite crowned with ice that fascinates us it is hard to analyze. Why,
Seeing that we find them so attractive, they should have repelled our
ancestors of the fourth generation and all the world before them, is another
mystery. We cannot explain what rapport there is between our human
souls and these inequalities in the surface of the earth which we call
Alps. Tennyson speaks of—•
Some vague emotion of delight
In gazing up an Alpine height,—
and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physical science
has created for natural objects has something to do with it. Curiosity and
the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns, no cultivated
tracts of Europe, however beautiful, form such a contrast to our London
life as Switzerland. Then there is the health and joy that comes from
exercise in open air; the senses freshened by good sleep ; the blood
quickened by a lighter and rarer atmosphere. Our modes of life, the
�26
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
breaking down of class privileges, the extension of education, which con
tribute to make the individual greater and society less, render the solitude
of mountains refreshing. Facilities of travelling and improved accom
modation leave us free to enjoy the natural beauty which we seek. Our
minds, too, are prepared to sympathize with the inanimate world ; we
have learned to look on the universe as a whole, and ourselves as a part
of it, related by close ties of friendship to all its other members. Shelley’s,
Wordsworth’s, Goethe’s poetry has taught us this ; we are all more or
less Pantheists, worshippers of “ God in Nature,” convinced of the omni
presence of the informing mind.
Thus, when we admire the Alps we are after all but children of the
century. We follow its inspiration blindly ; and, while we think ourselves
spontaneous in our ecstasy, perform the part for which we have been
trained from childhood by the atmosphere in which we live. It is this
very unconsciousness and universality of the impulse we obey which
makes it hard to analyze. Contemporary history is difficult to write ; to
dp.fiup. the spirit of the age in which we live is still more difficult ; to
account for “impressions which owe all their force to their identity with
themselves ” is most difficult of all. We must be content to feel, and not
to analyze.
Rousseau has the credit of having invented the love of Nature.
Perhaps he first expressed, in literature, the pleasures of open life among the
mountains, of walking tours, of the “ école buissonnière,'” away from courts,
and schools, and cities, which it is the fashion now to love. His bourgeois
birth and tastes, his peculiar religious and social views, his intense self
engrossment, all favoured the development of Nature-worship. But
Rousseau was not alone, nor yet creative in this instance. He was but
one of the earliest to seize and express a new idea of growing humanity.
For those who seem to be the most original in their inauguration of
periods are only such as have been favourably placed by birth and educa
tion to imbibe the floating creeds of the whole race. They resemble the
first cases of an epidemic which become the centres of infection and pro
pagate disease. At the time of Rousseau’s greatness the French people
were initiative. In politics, in literature, in fashions, and in philosophy
they had for some time led the taste of Europe. But the sentiment which
first received a clear and powerful expression in the works of Rousseau
soon declared itself in the arts and literature of other nations. Goethe,
Wordsworth, and the earlier landscape-painters, proved that Germany
and England were not far behind the French. In England this love
of Nature for its own sake is indigenous, and has at all times been
peculiarly characteristic of our genius. Therefore it is not surprising that
our life, and literature, and art have been foremost in developing the sen
timent of which we are speaking. Our poets, painters, and prose writers
gave the tone to European thought in this respect. Our travellers in
search of the adventurous and picturesque, our Alpine Club, have made of
Switzerland an English playground.
�THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
27
The greatest period in our history was but a foreshadowing of this.
To return to Nature-worship was but to reassume the habits of the
Elizabethan age, altered indeed by all the changes of religion, politics,
society, and science, which the last three centuries have wrought, yet still
in its original love of free open life among the fields and woods, and on the
sea, the same. Now the French national genius is classical. It reverts
to the age of Louis XIV., and Rousseauism in their literature is as true
an innovation and parenthesis as Pope-and-Drydenism was in ours. Asin
the age of the Reformation, so in this, the German element of the modern
character predominates. During the two centuries from which we have
emerged, the Latin element had the upper hand. Our love of the Alps is
a Gothic, a Teutonic, instinct ; sympathetic with all that is vague, infinite,
and unsubordinate to rules, at war with all that is defined and systematic
in our genius. This we may perceive in individuals as well as in the broader
aspects of arts and literatures. The classically-minded man, the reader of
Latin poets, the lover of-brilliant conversation, the frequenter of clubs and
drawing-rooms, nice in his personal requirements, scrupulous in his choice
of words, averse to unnecessary physical exertion, preferring town to
country life, cannot deeply feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will
dislike German art, and, however much he may strive to be catholic in his
tastes, will find as he grows older, that his liking for Gothic architecture
and modern painting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing
admiration for Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect of
speculation all men are either Platonists, or Aristotelians, in respect of
taste, all men are either Greek or German.
At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands ; the
Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so much
about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our cultus,—a
strange reflection, proving how much greater man is than men ; the
common reason of the age in which we five than our own reasons, its
constituents and subjects.
Perhaps it is our modern tendency to “ individualism ” which makes
the Alps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point,—
no claims are made on human sympathies,—there is no need to toil in
yoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our own dreams,
and sound the depths of personality without the reproach of selfishness,
without a restless wish to join in action or money-making, or the pursuit
of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this absence of social
duties and advantages is of necessity barbarizing, even brutalizing. But
to men wearied with too much civilization, and deafened by the noise of
great cities, it is beyond measure refreshing. Then again among the
mountains history finds no place. The Alps have no past nor present nor
future. The human beings who live upon their sides are at odds with nature,
clinging on for bare existence to the soil, sheltering themselves beneath
protecting rocks from avalanches, damming up destructive streams, all but
annihilated every spring. Man who is all things in the plain is nothing
�28
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
here. His arts and sciences, and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty
works, and conquests and decays, demand our whole attention in Italy or
Egypt. But here the mountains, immemorially the same, which were,
which are, and which are to be, present a theatre on which the soul breathes
freely and feels herself alone. Around her on all sides is God and Nature,
who is here the face of God, and not the slave of man. The spirit of the
world hath here not yet grown old. She is as young as on the first day;
and the Alps are a symbol of the self-creating, self-sufficing, self-enjoying
universe which lives for its own ends. For why do the slopes gleam with
flowers, and the hillsides deck themselves with grass, and the inaccessible
ledges of black rock bear their tufts of crimson primroses, and flaunting
tiger-lilies ? Why, morning after morning, does the red dawn flush the
pinnacles of Monte Rosa above cloud and mist unheeded ? Why does
the torrent shout, the avalanche reply in thunder to the music of the sun,
the trees and rocks and meadows cry their “ Holy, Holy, Holy ? ” Surely
not for us. We are an accident here, and even the few men whose
eyes are fixed habitually upon these things are dead to them the peasants
do not even know the names of their own flowers, and sigh with envy
when you tell them of the plains of Lincolnshire or Russian steppes.
But indeed there is something awful in the Alpine elevation above
human things. We do not like Switzerland merely because we associate
its thought with recollections of holidays and health and joyfulness.
Some of the most solemn moments of life are spent high up above
among the mountains, on the barren tops of rocky passes, where the
soul has seemed to hear in solitude a low controlling voice. It is
almost, necessary for the development of our deepest affections that some
sad and sombre moments should be interchanged with hours of merri
ment and elasticity. It is this variety in the woof of daily life which
endears our home to us ; and, perhaps, none have fully loved the Alps
who have not spent some days of meditation, or it may be of sorrow,
among their solitudes. Splendid scenery, like music, has the power to
make “ of grief itself a fiery chariot for mounting above the sources of
grief,” to ennoble and refine our passions, and to teach us that our lives
are merely moments in the years of the eternal Being. There are many,
perhaps, who, within sight of some great scene among the Alps, upon the
height of the Stelvio, or the slopes of Murreu, or at night in the valley of
Cormayeur, have felt themselves raised above cares and doubts and miseries
by the mere recognition of unchangeable magnificence ; have found a deep
peace in the sense of their own nothingness. It is not granted to us every
day to stand upon these pinnacles of rest and faith above the world. But
having once stood there, how can we forget the station ? How can we
fail, amid the tumult of our common life, to feel at times the hush of that
far-off tranquillity ? When our life is most commonplace, when we are ill
or weary in London streets, we can remember the clouds upon the moun
tains we have seen, the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the scent of
countless flowers. A photograph of Bisson’s, the name of some well-
�THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
29
¡rnnwn valley, the picture of some Alpine plant, rouses the sacred hunger
in our souls, and stirs again the faith in beauty and in rest beyond our
selves which, no man can take from us. We owe a deep debt of gratitude
to everything which enables us to rise above depressing and enslaving
circumstances, which brings us nearer in some way or other to what is
eternal in the universe, and which makes us feel that, whether we live or
suffer or enjoy, life and gladness are still strong in the world. On
ihi« account, the proper attitude of the soul among the Alps is one of
reverential silence. It is almost impossible without a kind of impiety to
frame in words the feelings they inspire. Yet there are some sayings,
hallowed by long usage, which throng the mind through a whole summer s
day, and seem in harmony with its emotions—some portions of the Psalms
or lines of greatest poets, inai’ticulate hymns of Beethoven and Mendelssohn,
waifs and strays not always apposite, but linked by strong and subtle
chains of feeling with the grandeur of the mountains. This reverential
feeling for the Alps is connected with the Pantheistic form of our religious
sentiments to which we have before alluded. It is a trite remark, that
even devout men of the present generation prefer temples not made with
bands to churches, and worship God in the fields more contentedly than
in their pews. What Mr. Ruskin calls “ the instinctive sense of the divine
presence not formed into distinct belief ’ ’ lies at the root of our profound
veneration for the nobler aspects of mountain scenery. This instinctive sense
has been very variously expressed by Goethe in Faust’s celebrated Confes
sion of Faith, by Shelley in the stanzas of Adonais which begin, “He is made
one with nature,” and by Wordsworth in the lines on Tintern Abbey. It is
more or less strongly felt by all who have recognized the indubitable fact
that religious belief is undergoing a sure process of change from the
dogmatic distinctness of the past to some at present dimly descried creed
of the future. Such periods of transition are of necessity full of discomfort,
doubt, and anxiety, vague, variable, and unsatisfying. The men in whose
spirits the fermentation of the change is felt, who have abandoned their
old moorings, and have not yet reached the haven for which they are
steering, cannot but be indistinct and undecided in their faith. The
universe of which they form a part becomes important to them in its
infinite immensity ; the principles of beauty, goodness, order, and law, no
longer definitely connected in their minds with certain articles of faith, find
symbols in the outer world; they are glad to fly at certain moments from
mankind and its oppressive problems, for which religion no longer provides
a satisfactory solution, to Nature, where they vaguely localize the spirit that
broods over us controlling all our being. Connected with this transitional
condition of the modern mind is the double tendency to science and to
mysticism, to progress in knowledge of the world around us, and to
indistinct yearnings after something that has gone away from us or lies
in front of us. On the one side we see chemists and engineers conquering
&e brute powers of Nature, on the other jaded, anxious, irritable men
adrift upon an ocean of doubt and ennui. With regard to the former
�30
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
class there is no difficulty : they swim with the stream and are not
oppressed by any anxious yearnings : to them the Alps are a playground
for refreshment after toil—a field for the pursuit of physical experiment.
But the other class complain, “ Bo what we will, we suffer; it is now too
late to eat and drink and die obliviously ; the world has worn itself to old
age; a boundless hope has passed across the earth, and we must lift our
eyes to heaven.” The heaven to which they have to lift their eyes is very
shadowy, far off, and problematical. The temple of their worship is the
Alps; their oracles are voices of the winds and streams and avalanches ;
their Urim and Thummim are the gleams of light on ice or snow ; their
Shekinah is the sunrise and the sunset of the mountains.
Of the two tendencies here broadly indicated, the former is represented
by physical research—the science of our day; the latter by music and land
scape painting—the art of our day. There is a profound sympathy between
music and fine scenery: they both affect us in the same way, stirring
strong but undefined emotions, which express themselves in “ idle tears,”
or evoking thoughts “which lie,” as Wordsworth says, “ too deep fortears,”
beyond the reach of any words. How little we know what multitudes
of mingling reminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its
fancy with the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the senti
ments which music or which mountains stir. It is the very vagueness,
changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which cause
their charm ; they harmonize with the haziness of our beliefs and seem to
make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious that unre
strained indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery must destroy
habits of clear thinking, sentimentalize the mind, and render it more apt
to entertain embryonic ideas than to bring thoughts to definite perfection.
As illustrating the development of music in modem times, and the love
of Switzerland, it is not a little remarkable that the German style of music
has asserted an unquestionable ascendancy, that the greatest lovers of this
art prefer Beethoven’s symphonies to merely vocal music, and that harmony
is even more regarded than melody. That is to say, the vocal element of
music has been comparatively disregarded for the instrumental; and the art,
emancipated from its subordination to words, has become the most accurate
interpreter of all the vague and powerful emotions of yearning and reflec
tive and perturbed humanity. If some hours of thoughtfulness and
seclusion are necessary to the development of a true love for the Alps,
it is no less essential to a right understanding of their beauty that we
should pass some wet and gloomy days among the mountains. The
unclouded sunsets and sunrises which often follow one another in September
in the Alps have something terrible. They produce a satiety of splendour,
and oppress the mind with the sense of perpetuity. I remember spending
such a season in one of the Oberland valleys, high up above the pine-trees,
in a little chalet. Morning after morning I awoke to see the sunbeams
glittering on the Eiger and the Jungfrau ; noon after noon the snowfields
blazed beneath a steady fire; evening after evening they shone like beacons
�THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
31
in the red light of the setting sun. Then peak by peak they lost the glow;
the soul passed from them, and they stood pale and garish against the
darkened sky. The stars came out, the moon shone, but not a cloud
sailed over the untroubled heavens. Thus day after day for several weeks
there was no change, till I was seized with an overpowering horror of
unbroken calm. I left the valley for a time ; and when I returned to it in
wind and rain I found that the partial veiling of the mountain heights
restored the charm which I had lost and made me feel once more at home.
The landscape takes a graver tone beneath the mist that hides the higher
peaks, and comes drifting, creeping, feeling, through the pines »upon their
slopes—white, silent, blinding vapour wreaths around the sable spires.
Sometimes the cloud descends and blots out everything. Again it lifts a
little, showing cottages and distant Alps beneath its skirts. Then it sweeps
over the whole valley like a veil, just broken here and there, above a lonely
chalet, or a thread of distant dangling torrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath
the mist are more strange. The torrent seems to have a hoarser voice and
grinds the stones more passionately against its boulders. The cry of
shepherds through the fog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills.
The bleating of penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cow-bells, are
mysteriously distant in the dull dead air. Then again, how immeasurably
high above our heads appear the domes and peaks of snow revealed through
chasms in the drifting cloud; how desolate the glaciers and the avalanches
in gleams of light that struggle through the mist! There is a leaden glare
peculiar to clouds, which makes the snow and ice more lurid. Not far from
the house where I am writing, the avalanche that swept away the bridge
last winter is lying now, dripping away, dank and dirty, like a rotting
whale. I can see it from my window, green beech-boughs nodding over it,
forlorn larches bending their tattered branches by its side, splinters of
broken pine protruding from its muddy cayes, the boulders on its flank, and
the hoarse hungry torrent tossing up its tongues to lick the ragged edge of
snow. Close by the meadows, spangled with yellow flowers, and red and
blue, look even more brilliant than if the sun were shining on them.
Every cup and blade of grass is drinking. But the scene changes ; the
mist has turned into rain-clouds, and the steady rain drips down, incessant,
blotting out the view.
Then, too, what a joy it is if the clouds break towards evening with a
north wind, and a rainbow in the valley gives promise of a bright to-morrow.
We look up to the cliffs above our heads, and see that they have just been
.powdered with the snow that is a sign of better weather. Such rainy
days ought to be spent in places like Seelisberg and Miirreu, at the edge of
precipices, in front of mountains, or above a lake. The cloud-masses
crawl and tumble about the valleys like a brood of dragons ; now creeping
along the ledges of the rock with sinuous self-adjustment to its turns and
twists; now launching out into the deep, repelled by battling winds, or
driven onward in a coil of twisted and contorted serpent curls. In the
midst of summer these wet seasons often end in a heavy fall of snow.
�32
.THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
You wake some morning to see the meadows which last night were gay
with July flowers huddled up in snow a foot in depth. But fair weatherj
does not tarry long to reappear. You put on your thickest boots and
sally forth to find the great cups of the gentians full of snow, and to
watch the rising of the cloud-wreaths under the hot sun. Bad dreams
or sickly thoughts, dissipated by returning daylight or a friend’s face,
do not fly away more rapidly and pleasantly than those swift glory-coated
mists that lose themselves we know not where in the blue depths of
the sky.
In contrast with these rainy days nothing can be more perfect than
clear moonlight nights. There is a terrace upon the roof of the inn at
Cormayeur where one may spend hours in the silent watches when all the
world has gone to sleep beneath. The Mont Chétif and the Mont de la
Saxe form a gigantic portal not unworthy of the pile that lies beyond.
For Mont Blanc resembles a vast cathedral ; its countless spires are
scattered over a mass like that of the Duomo at Milan, rising into one
tower at the end. By night the glaciers glitter in the steady moon ;
domes, pinnacles, and buttresses stand clear of clouds. Needles of every
height and most fantastic shapes rise from the central ridge, some solitary
like sharp arrows shot against the sky, some clustering into sheaves. On
every horn of snow .and bank of grassy hill stars sparkle, rising, setting,
rolling round through the long silent night. Moonlight simplifies and
softens the landscape. Colours become scarcely distinguishable, and forms,
deprived of half their detail, gain in majesty and size. The mountains
seem greater far by night than day—higher heights and deepei' depths,
more snowy pyramids, more beetling crags, softer meadows, and darker
pines. The whole valley is hushed, but for the torrent and the chirping
grasshopper and the striking of the village clocks. The black tower and
the houses of Cormayeur in the foreground gleam beneath the moon until
she reaches the edge of the firmament, and then sinks quietly away, once
more to reappear among the pines, then finally to leave the valley dark
beneath the shadow of the mountain’s bulk. Meanwhile the heights of
snow still glitter in the steady light : they, too, will soon be dark, until
the dawn breaks, tingeing them with rose.
But it is not fair to dwell exclusively upon the mere sombre aspect of
Swiss beauty when there are so many lively scenes of which to speak.
The sunlight and the freshness and the flowers of Alpine meadows form
more than half the charm of Switzerland. The other day we walked to a
pasture called the Col de Checruit, high up the valley of Cormayeur, where
the spring was still in its first freshness. Gradually we climbed by dusty
roads, and through hot fields where the grass had just been mown, beneath
the fierce light of the morning sun. Not a breath of air was stirring, and
the heavy pines hung overhead upon their crags, as if to fence the gorge
from every wandering breeze. There is nothing more oppressive than
these scorching sides of narrow rifts, shut in by woods and precipices.
But suddenly the valley broadened, the pines and larches disappeared,
�THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
83
fond we found ourselves upon a wide green semicircle of the softest meadows.
Little rills of water went rushing through them, rippling over pebbles,
rustling under dockleaves, and eddying against their wooden barriers.
Far and wide 11 you scarce could see the grass for flowers,” while on every
side the tinkling of cow-bells, and the voices of shepherds calling to one
another from the Alps, or singing at then- work, were borne across the
fields. As we climbed we came into still fresher pastures where the snow
had scarcely melted. There the goats and cattle were collected, and the
shepherds sat among them, fondling the kids and calling them by name.
When they called, the creatures came, expecting salt and bread. It was
pretty to see them lying near their masters, playing and butting at them
with their horns, or bleating for the sweet rye-bread. The women knitted
st,oe,kings, laughing among themselves, and singing all the while. As soon
as we reached them they gathered round to talk. An old herdsman, who
was clearly the patriarch of this Arcadia, asked us many questions in a
slow deliberate voice. We told him who we were, and tried to interest
him in the cattle-plague, which he appeared to regard as an evil very
unreal and far away,—like the murrain upon Pharaoh’s herds which one
reads about in Exodus. But he was courteous and polite, doing the
honours of his pasture with simplicity and ease. He took us to his chalet
and gave us bowls of pure cold milk. It was a funny little wooden house,
clean and dark. The sky peeped through its tiles, and if shepherds were
not in the habit of sleeping soundly all night long they might count the
setting and rising stars without lifting their heads from the pillow. He
told us how far pleasanter they found the summer season than the long
cold winter which they have to spend in gloomy houses in Cormayeur.
This indeed is the true pastoral life which poets have described,—a happy
summer life among the flowers, well occupied with simple cares, and
harassed by “no enemy but winter and rough weather.”
Very much of the charm of Switzerland belongs to simple things, to
greetings from the herdsmen, the “ Gluten Morgen ” and “ Guten Abend,”
that are invariably given and taken upon mountain paths ; to the tame
creatures, with their large dark eyes, who raise their heads one moment
from the pasture while you pass; and to the plants that grow beneath
your feet. It is almost sacrilegious to speak of the great mountains in
this hasty way. Let us, before we finish, take one glance at the multitude
of Alpine flowers.
The latter end of May is the time when spring begins in the high Alps.
Wherever sunlight smiles away a patch of snow the brown turf soon becomes
green velvet, and the velvet stars itself with red and white and gold and
blue. You almost see the grass and lilies grow. First come pale crocuses
and lilac soldanellas. These break the last dissolving clods of snow, and
stand up on an island, with the cold wall they have thawed all round them.
It is the fate of these poor flowers to spring and flourish on the very skirts
of retreating winter ; they soon wither—the frilled chalice of the soldanella
shrivels up and the crocus fades away before the grass has grown; the
vol. xvi.—no. 91.
8.
�84
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
sun, which is bringing all the other plants to life, scorches their tender
petals. Often when summer has fairly come, you still may see their
pearly cups and lilac bells by the' side of avalanches, between the chill
snow and the fiery sun, blooming and fading hour by hour. They have,
as it were, but a Pisgah view of the promised land, of the spring which
they are foremost to proclaim. Next come the clumsy gentians and yellow
anemones, covered with soft down like fledgeling birds. These are among
the earliest and hardiest blossoms that embroider the high meadows with
a drift of blue and gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas
begin to tuft the dripping rocks, while frail white fleurs-de-lis, like flakes
of snow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled ranunculuses, join with
forget-me-nots and cranesbill in a never-ending dance upon the grassy
floor. Happy, too, is he who finds the likes of the valley clustering
about the chestnut boles upon the Colma, or in the beechwood by the stream
at Macugnaga, mixed with fragrant white narcissus, which the people of
the villages call “ Angiolini.” There, too, is Solomon’s seal, with waxen
bells and leaves expanded like the wings of hovering butterflies. But
these fists of flowers are tiresome and cold; it would be better to draw
the portrait of one which is particularly fascinating. I think that botanists
have called it saxífraga cotyledon; yet, in spite of its long name, it is a
simple and poetic flower. London pride is the commonest of all the
saxifrages ; but the one of which I speak is as different from London pride
as a Plantagenet upon his throne from that last Plantagenet who died
obscure and penniless some years ago. It is a great majestic flower, which
plumes the granite rocks of Monte Rosa in the spring. At other times of
the year you see a little tuft of fleshy leaves, set like a cushion on cold
ledges and dark places of dripping cliffs. You take it for a stone crop—
one of those weeds doomed to obscurity, and safe from being picked
because they are so uninviting—and you pass it by incuriously. But
about June it puts forth its power, and from the cushion of pale leaves
there springs a strong pink stem, which rises upward for a while, and then
comes down and breaks into a shower of snow-white blossoms. Far away
the splendour gleams, hanging, like a plume of ostrich-feathers, from the
roof of rock, waving to the wind, or stooping down to touch the water of
the mountain stream that dashes it with dew. The snow at evening,
glaring with a sunset flush, is not more rosy pure than this cascade of
pendent blossoms. It loves to be alone—inaccessible ledges, chasms
where winds combat, or moist caverns overarched near thundering falls,
are the places that it seeks. I will not compare it to a spirit of the
mountains or to a proud lovely soul, for such comparisons desecrate the
simplicity of nature, and no simile can add a glory to the flower. It
seems to have a conscious life of its own, so large and glorious it is, so
sensitive to every breath of air, so nobly placed upon its bending stem, so
gorgeous in its solitude. I first saw it years ago on the Simplon, feather
ing the drizzling crags above Isella. Then we found it near Baveno, in a
crack of sombre cliff beneath the mines. The other day we cut an armful
�
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Dublin Core
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Title
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The love of the alps
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 24-35 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From the Cornhill Magazine (Vol. 30, July 1874). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. Incomplete copy - text ends mid-sentence on p.34.
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[Smith, Elder & Co.]
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[1874]
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G5344
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[Unknown]
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Nature
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The love of the alps), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
Alps
Conway Tracts
Travels