CORRESPONDENCE.
THOUGHTS BY THE WAY ON A BEATEN TRACK.—IL
rFaom ova SPECIAL COBRESPONDEliEj Lucerne.—If I had required demonstration, as it were, by analysis and synthesis alternately, that nationality is a something which, although it may be connected with race and language, may yet also be entirely independent of both, the transition from Alsace to Switzerland would have given it to me. In Alsace you have people of the same race, speaking virtually the same language, who are wholly foreign to each other in feeling ; those domineering conquerors, these conquered, and clinging to people of another speech and blood. In Switzerland you have people of different races, speaking different languages, but yet perfectly friendly to one another, and forming willingly and visibly one nation. Your German proper now avoids, if he can, speaking French,—will rather speak English, however badly. Your German-Swiss speaks either German or French with equal willingness, according to his or her knowledge. It is curious to think of the inexorable fate which, with advancing civilisation, transforms every spot linked with the heroic histories of mankind into a show-place and resort for recreation. There can be no doubt that Switzerland generally, and—putting the mythical William Tell out of the question—the neighbourhood of the Lake of the Four Cantons perhaps more especially, has been the scene of some of the most gallant struggles for freedom that the world has witnessed. Now an hotel, a pension, a restaurant at least, rises on or in close proximity to every spot thus hallowed, and tourists, idlers, flock to it. And it is the same all over Europe, so far as peace and good-order prevail. Yet it is perfectly natural. For all great and heroic struggles must take place bard by some coign of vantage which Nature has prepared for the brave,—in the narrow defile, on the steep hills, under cover of the wild wood. Hence the heroic spots of the earth must always be the picturesque ones, as soon as the taste for the picturesque shall have grown up.
This is, indeed, only a change of aspect. But the change from the warlike, unquiet Swiss of former days to the quiet, pre-eminently peaceful Swiss of the present day appears at first sight to be a change of nature. Is it so in reality ? I am inclined to think that it is at least less of a change than it seems ; that the Swiss have carried into the arts of peace much of the energy and spirit of adventure which formerly were only displayed in those of war. In no country has railway enterprise been bolder. Think of the natural difficulties of the country, and then look at the network of railways which penetrate almost into every valley, and have be- gun, with the two Rigi railways, to climb the mountains. Where have more splendid buildings been planted for the reception of travellers, in the most difficult situations, on heights sometimes inaccessible, except on foot—often provided with gas of their own making—and this perhaps on the chance of being open only for a few months in the year ? With what enterprise a little inland country, dependent on foreign nations for its coal, only able to obtain its raw material by transit through foreign custom-houses, has entered upon the field of manu- facturing industry, is known to all. It is, indeed, asserted by the contemporary novelist of German Switzerland, Gottfried Miiller, that a spirit of speculation, which he had originally described as characteristic of a particular town, has now spread through the whole country ; nor is it possible for me not to observe, even in a a place like Lucerne, the number of banks, credit agencies, " Platzkung bureaus," and other indications of this speculative spirit. Many of the large hotels, indeed, are notoriously failures, and some are insolvent, but this does not seem to prevent others from springing up.
German-Switzerland does not seem a literary country. I asked of a bookseller here—a whole side of whose shop was filled with Tauchnitz reprints of English books—whether there were any recent works of any mark in Swiss literature. He showed me one or two collections of poems, which seemed very dull ; a drama, by the son of Zschokke, which did not tempt me ; the only thing, he said, he could recommend was the third and cheaper edition of a work by the author whom I have named above, Mtiller'l "Leute von Seldwyla," itself published at Stuttgart. I asked the same question of another bookseller, who gave a similar answer, mentioning in addition the publications of the Swiss Historical Society and some reprinted Swiss chronicles. The booksellers' shop-windows are filled with English, French, German, even Russian books ; but except perhaps a guide-book, the German books came from Germany, and the French from France, not from German or French-Switzerland. In in the pension where I am, spent last winter in Mentone, and shops of less pretension, together with a large number of German means to spend the next in Nice. They do not apparently go translations from our railway literature, with the same sensational singly, but in parties of several together. This is, indeed, much covers, a few Swiss works appear,—a cookery-book from Berne, less curious than the Engadine custom of the school-teachers taking a Lucerne treatise on the manufacture of brandy, a manual of engagements as waiters during the brief summer season. It has military discipline, a popular jest-book, or perhaps some book of some resemblance to the travelling of the German or French poetry in dialect, such as the "Lieder van Alien Seff " (a priest who journeyman, a practice which appears to extend throughout lived 1745-1818, whose real name was Joseph Ineichen). Although Switzerland, except that the change of place is only for a few
I am told that the works of the only great original novelist of months at a time, and to a definite locality. J. M. L. German-Switzerland, Jeremias Gottlieb (Albeit Bitzius), sell, the only copy of one that I have seen is the English translation of
"The Soul and Money." LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
Of course Ziirich, not Lucerne, is the intellectual capital of Grernian-Switzerland. But Lucerne is a sufficiently important city to exhibit more than a merely exotic literature. It is curious,
when one thinks of it, that the small democracies of Greece ITO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR )
democracies of modern Europe should have contributed so much that is original to the world's Sin,—Lyme Regis is a precipitous place, and associated with pre- stock of literature, and the small cipitate people. Its principal street seems, as Miss Austen says, to hurry down into the water ; the cliffs in the neighbourhood —Switzerland and Holland—so little. It cannot be because the States in themselves are small. Florence in the middle-ages was are fertile in landslips ; indeed, much of the shore is now a lovely small, and yet what a literary history was hers ! Denmark is wilderness of crumbled cliff, overgrown with the finest sward, and small, yet she has a complete literature of her own, and two names ferns, and shrubs. It was at Lyme that Monmouth landed when at least of world-wide fame,—CEhlenschrager and Andersen. he hurried into his premature revolution ; and at Lyme that Romanism here is visibly much less Mariolatrous than in France Louisa Musgrove, in Miss Austen's novel, when intending to or Belgium. • The inscriptions on the tombstones in the quaint jump into the arms of Captain Wentworth, fell almost lifeless at the feet of Captain Benwick, and by consenting to console the latter cathedral churchyard speak almost invariably of Christ only. The way-side images are almost invariably crucifixes, not the Virgin for his recent grief, set the former free to return to his allegiance . and child. There was a time when nearly the whole literary to Anne Elliot. Macaulay speaks of the town as a "small knot of glory of Germany streamed forth from a petty Saxon duchy. The steep and narrow alleys, lying on a coast, wild, rocky, and beaten b case is the more remarkable as respects Holland and Switzerland, by a stormy sea,"—not, I think, a very happy description, for on that both have been the asylums of free thought for illustrious the whole, Lyme is contained in its single street, which, though exiles, and have been irradiated by foreign genius,—nay, have as steep as a street can be without spilling its inhabitants into through it exercised a powerful influence over other countries. the water, is wide, bright, and picturesque. I wonder where always be so in I do not, however, feel certain that it will exactly it was that Monmouth landed, drew his sword, and kneeled Switzerland. With the extraordinary advance which has been to thank God "for having preserved the friends of liberty and pure made in popular education, and the pride which the Swiss take religion from the perils of the sea," before "leading them over the in their schools, and—the Ziirichers at least—in their University, cliffs into the town." It can hardly have been on the side of Pinney,
it appears impossible that any Swiss village Milton can henceforth for the cliffs there are too steep. Can it have been in�SFlit lie_ remain mute and inglorious, and it is difficult to believe that a Charmouth, where the Char bends and wriggles about till it can find a channel through the shelving and mounded beach into the country so splendid should have no men of real genius to bring
forth. French-Switzerland, moreover, has already made its mark sea, and where a great break in the line of cliffs opens out the green uplands and wooded slopes of Wootton, through which the pretty in literature, out of which the name of Rousseau can never drop ; and in our own times, Vinet and Secretan, Topffer, Madame de stream bubbles away so pleasantly? I wonder why Monmouth did Gasparin, and Victor Cherbnliez have held a worthy place among not land at the Cobb itself, which, according to Macaulay, is as old
the writers of the day. as the Plantagenets, though since Monmouth's time, and even, I take it, since Miss Austen's, that picturesquely curving break- Rigi-StaffeL—This is really a pleasant little place, far prefer- water has been rendered considerably more solid and convenient. able, I should say, to either Rigi-Kulm or Rigi-Kaltbad for any Perhaps he wanted to marshal his men before he tried the temper lengthened stay. One gets tired after a time of a merely panoramic of the town, enthusiastic as it is said to have been in his cause. view, and the green valley and green hills in the foreground, For us, we did not turn a single thought on Monmouth and his ill- stretching up to the snow-mountains yonder, give a constant fated precipitateness; we were thinking too much of that other bit loveableness to the scene. of precipitateness, belonging to the realm of fiction, instead of that Although the Times and Daily News regularly scale these heights of history, and therefore so much easier to realise, invented by the during the season, we are here curiously indifferent to politics. skilful novelist, not only for the purpose of smoothing the way The great events of the day, in three languages, are the going up to her pleasantest heroine's happiness, but also in order to set off or coming down of the railway cars, empty or full, between the mild and pensive beauty of that heroine's certainly not too Vitznau or Arth and the 'Calm ; the comparative fullness of the impetuous character. Were we, perhaps, in the very room where Various Rigi hotels ; the reported bad fare of the Kaltbad ; the the Uppercross party's merriment attracted the envy of Mr. Elliot storm which last week blew in the windows at Fiist ; last, and I —the unknown and unknowing cousin—as be sat alone, wishing he am afraid, to almost all but the newest comers least, the sun. Poor
had any excuse for making their acquaintance? Here, at any rate, old Sun! we have all read in George Eliot of Mrs. Poyser's cock, as we turned the corner of the street to the beach, was the very spot who thought the sun rose on purpose to hear him crow. I fear where Mr. Elliot's glance of admiration at Anne, as she returned it must be very difficult for Rigi hotel-keepers not to play uncon- glowing from her windy November morning's walk, revived Captain sciously the part of that cock. The sun has become a regular Wentworth's old ardour of feeling, and prepared the way for his part of their stock-in-trade. Sunrises and sunsets are for them return to his senses. Here, too, were the Assembly Rooms, which -really, not metaphorically, golden. A few wet or dull days soon the Musgrove party naturally found lifeless in November, and which empty their houses ; the report of a particularly bright morning appeared, as far as we could see, equally lifeless in August also. fills them again, till September passes by, and the splendid hotels Here, again, it was that Captain Benwick came flying by to fetch have to be left empty till next May, in charge perhaps of a man the surgeon for the insensible Louisa. And here, surely, close on
and a dog. the Cobb, was that very minute house of Captain Harville's I think I observe that among the Swiss, French is considered which his ingenuity fitted with all sorts of contrivances to make the more polite of the national languages. A lady settled at up for the smallness of the space and the deficiencies of the Bienne, a borderland between French and German, is careful lodging-house furniture. Indeed, some of those contrivances here to speak French to her husband and family in public, though appeared to be extant still. We half-expected to meet the very evidently a perfect mistress of German, and speaking it party on the Cobb, forgetting that Anne Elliot,—I should say, ri privately with her husband, to whom it is evidently more Mrs. Wentworth, that "too good, too excellent creature," as she familiar. So the other day at Kiissnacht the waitress quite shrugged her shoulders over the waiter's ignorance of French. is called by her lover in the soberly passionate language of the beginning of the century,—must, if still living, be eighty-seven this Lucerne again. —A custom, I find, prevails among the servants year, and her husband well on into the nineties, while even at the hotels and pensions here of migrating like the birds with Louisa, now Mrs. Benwick, if indeed her constitution has survived the season, though not with the same regularity. A servant-maid so long that shock which, long after her convalescence, made her
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