TRAVEL IN NORWAY BY ALEC WAUGH.
IT is almost ended, the long rush of the London season. With its dust and heat and hurry ; its late nights and its innumerable conversations. And as in other years there rises now a sense of relief that it is over. It is not only that the sun has burnt so radiantly and in so blue a sky. For the weather does not really make much difference to a London summer. Ascot may be ruined and Lord's and Goodwood. But they are parts only of a whole, and whether the sky is blue or grey, whether the wind blows or the sun shines, there is the same rush of dances and theatres and receptions, the same ceaseless effort to leave no half hour of the day unfilled : the same ultimate lassitude and exhaustion. It is a pace -that- cannot be maintained for long. There are a few weeks of intense excitement ; then one begins to weary, to long for as complete a change as possible, an interval, a breathing space ; some placid spot where hours may drift into days and the days into weeks : casual unnumbered weeks, unfretted by the stress of tele- phones and a diary black with the ink of countless scrawled engagements.
As complete a change as possible. And it is doubtful whether any European country provides such a change as utterly as Norway does. It is doubtful whether there is any country within a few hours' reach of us where life is more differently ordered and arranged. Metropolitan life, whether it be in London, Paris, Brussels or New York, is an affair of surprises and innovations. The sensation of one hour is the Aunt Sally of the next. One restaurant is fashionable for a season, a night club for a month, a fox-trot for ten days. The changes must be rung on one another. The pace must never be allowed to slacken. But Norway is a country that for centuries has known no change. What it was, it is ; what it is, it will be.
Between a week of London and a week of Norway there is such difference as there is between a tale by Turgenev and a Dostoieffsky novel : between calm and turgid waters. To cruise through the Norwegian fjords, down the long receding many-coloured waterways, between the bleak heather-covered hills, and the huge towering rocks with their high-spilt waterfalls whose clouded foam is turned to a rainbow in the sunlight ; to cruise day after day through these cool stretches' of subdued and repeated harmonies is to be in touch with a beauty that does not depend upon surprise for its effects. You do not as you approach the corner of a rock catch your breath in wondering, excited anticipation of what may lie on the other side of it. For you know more or less on what sort of landscape your eyes will rest. They change, those smooth gleaming Surfaces, as the clouds that pass across a sky. There is always change but you cannot recall the incidents. At one moment it is lovelier perhaps than at another. But you cannot capture as it flies the significance of those merging shapes. You wait happy in the knowledge that the miracle will be reachieved.
There is no monotony. Only such monotony at least as there must always be in the seemingly effortless perfection of accomplished beauty. An innings by Hobbs has perhaps not the intoxicating quality of Jessop's hitting, but it has the compensating excellences of depth and certainty. Norway does not astonish ; it does not startle ; it woos the traveller to delight. It is content to spread unassumingly before him its tranquil and unmatched loveliness—a loveliness wholly independent of human ingenuity and enterprise. The things that Norway has for offering are natural things exclusively. The fjords, the waterfalls, and the glaciers, the fishing and the midnight sun : and in winter the snow-covered slopes of Finse. There could be no completer change from a world dependent entirely for its amusement on the fertility of its own invention. To travel there is a very adequate corrective for the jaded, whether man or woman, whether sick of the unsatisfying hunt for exeitement or with brain or body aired by honest work.
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