CHAPTER VIII.
It was with a rare audacity that the devil pitched his tent in Baden! Perhaps, on the whole continent, another spot could not be found so fully combining, in a small circuit, as many charms of picturesque scenery; and it was a bold conception to set down vice, in all its varieties, in the very midst of—in open contrast as it were to—a scene of peaceful loveliness and beauty.
I do confess myself one of those who like living figures in a landscape. I like not only those groupings which artists seem to stereotype, so nearly alike they all are, of seated foreground figures, dark-shadowed observers of a setting sun, or coolly watering cattle beneath a gushing fountain. I like not merely the red-kirtled peasant knee-deep in the river, or the patient fisherman upon his rock; but I have a strong regard—I mean here, where the scene is Nature’s own, and not on canvass—a strong regard for those flitting glimpses of the gayer world, which, in the brightest tints that Fashion sanctions, are caught now, in some deep dell of the Tyrol, now, on some snow-peaked eminence of a Swiss glacier, beside the fast-rolling Danube or the sluggish Nile.
I have no sympathy for those who exclaim against the incongruity of pink parasols and blue reticules in scenes of mild and impressive grandeur. Methinks it bespeaks but scanty store of self-resources in those who thus complain, not knowing any thing of the feelings that have prompted their presence there. No one holds cheaper than I do the traveller who, under the guidance of his John Murray, sees what is set down for him through the eyes of the “Hand-book”—mingling up in his addled brain crude notions of history and antiquarianism with the names of inns and post-houses—counsels against damp sheets—cheating landlords—scraps of geology, and a verse of “Childe Harold.” This is detestable: but for otherwise is the meeting with those whose dress and demeanour tell of the world of fashion—the intertwined life of dissipation and excess in solitary unfrequented places. Far from being struck by their inaptitude and unfitness for such scenes, I willingly fall back upon the thought of how such people must be impressed by objects so far beyond the range of daily experience, of objects, whose wondrous meaning speaks to hearts the most cloyed and jaded, “as never man spoke.” I can luxuriate in fancying how long-forgotten feelings, old memories of the past, long buried beneath the load of daily cares, come back fresh and bright under the influence of associations that recall parer, happier hours. I can dwell in imagination on the sudden spring made from the stern ordinances of a world of forms and conventionalities, to that more beautiful and grander world, whose incense is the odour of wild flowers and whose music is the falling cataract.
I love to speculate how the statesman, the wily man of forecasting thought and deep devices, must feel in presence of agencies which make those of mere man’s contrivance seem poor and contemptible; and how the fine lady, whose foot knows no harder surface than a velvet carpet, and whose artificial existence palls by its own voluptuousness, contemplates a picture of grand and stern sublimity. Disguise it how they will, feign indifference how they may, such scenes always are felt, and deeply felt! The most accomplished lounger of St. James’s Street does not puff his cigar so coolly as he affects to do, nor is that heart all unmoved that throbs beneath the graceful folds of a rich Cashmere. Now and then some Brummagem spirit intrudes, who sees in the felling torrent but a wasted “water-power:” but even he has his own far-reaching thoughts imbued with a poetry of their own. He sees in these solitudes new cities arise, the busy haunts of acting heads and hands; he hears in imagination the heavy bang of the iron hammer, the roar of the furnace, the rush of steam, the many-voiced multitude called by active labour to new activity of mind; and perhaps he soars away, in thought, to those far-off wilds of the new world, whose people, clothed by these looms, are brought thus into brotherhood with their kindred men.
I, myself, have few sympathies in common with these; but I respect the feelings that I do not fathom. “Nihil humani a me alienum puto.”
What has suggested these thoughts? A little excursion that I made this evening from the village of Lichtenthal towards the Waterfall, a winding glen, narrowing as you advance; wilder too, but not less peopled; every sheltered spot having its own dwelling-place—the picturesque chalet, with its far-stretching eave, and its quaint galleries of carved wood, its brightly shining windows sparkling between the clustering vine-leaves, and its frieze of Indian corn hung up beneath the roof to dry. Leaving the carriage, I followed the bank of the stream—just such a river as in my boyish days I loved to linger by, and fancy I was fishing. It was no more than fancy: for although my rod and landing-net were in most fitting perfection, my hackles and orange bodies, my green drakes and may-flies, all that could be wished, I was too dreamy and destrait for “the gentle craft;” and liked Walton better in his rambling discursions than in his more practical teaching. What a glorious day for scenery, too! Not one of those scorching, blue sky, cloudless days, when a general hardness prevails, but a mingled light of sun and cloud shadow, with misty distances, and dark, deep foregrounds on the still water, where ever and anon a heavy plash, breaking in widening circles, told of the speckled trout: save that, no other sound was heard. All was calm and noiseless, as in some far-off valley of the Mississippi, a little surging of the water on the rocky shore—a faint melancholy plash—scarce heard even in the stillness.
I sat thinking, not sadly, but seriously, of the past, and of that present time that was so soon to add itself to the Past; for the Future, I felt, by sensations that never deceive, it must be brief! My malady gained rapidly on me; symptoms, I was told to guard against, had already shewn themselves, and I knew that the battle was fought and lost.
“It is sad to die at thirty,” saith Balzac, somewhere; and to the Frenchman of Paris, who feels that death is the cessation of a round of pleasures and dissipations, whose hold is hourly stronger; who thinks that life and self-indulgence are synonymous; whose ideal is the ceaseless round of exciting sensations that spring from every form of human passion nurtured to excess;—to him, the sleep of the grave is the solitude and not the repose of the tomb.
To me, almost alone in the world, to die suggests few sorrows or regrets; without family, without friends, save those the world’s complaisance calls such; with no direct object for exertion, nothing for hope or fear to cling to; no ambition that I could nourish, no dream of greatness or distinction to elevate me above the thought of daily suffering; life is a mere monotony—and the monotony of waiting.
While watching the progress of my malady, seeing day by day the advancing steps of the disease that never sleeps, I recognise in myself a strange adaptation in my mind and feelings to the more developed condition of my illness. At first, my cough irritated and fevered me. It awoke me if I slept—it worried me as I read; my fast and hurried breathing, too, exciting the heart’s action, rendered me impatient and discontented. Now, both these symptoms are in excess, and yet, by habit and some acquired power of conforming to them, I am scarcely aware of their existence. I have learned to look on them as my normal, natural condition. My cough on awaking in the morning—my hectic as night falls—only tell of the day’s dawn and decline. I fancy that this dreamy calm, this spirit of submissive waiting that I feel, is dependent on my infirmity; for how otherwise could I, if strong in mind and body, endure the thraldom of my present life? The watchful egotism of sickness demands the mind of sickness.
In the whole phenomena of malady, nothing is more striking than the accommodation of the mind to the condition of suffering. I remember once—I was then in all the strength and confidence of youth and health—discussing this point with a friend, a physician of skill and eminence, now no more, and was greatly struck by a theory which was new, at least to me. He regarded every species of disease, from the most simple to the most complicated, as a sanatory process, an effort—not always successful, of course—on the part of Nature to restore the system to its condition of health. He instanced maladies the most formidable, some of them attended by symptoms of terrible suffering; but in every case he assumed to shew that they were efforts to oppose the march of some other species of disorganisation. So far from there being any taint of Materialism in these views, he deduced from them a most devout and conscientious belief in a Supreme Power; and instead of resting upon Contrivance and Design as the great attributes of the Deity, he went further, and made the Forethought, the Providence of God for his creatures, the great object of his wonderment and praise. His argument, if I dare trust my memory, was briefly this: The presence of a superintending guardian spirit, ever watchful to avert evil from its charge, is the essential difference which separates every object of God’s creation from the mere work of man’s hand. The ingenuity that contrived the mechanism of a steam-engine or a clock, was yet unable to endow the machinery with latent powers of reparation; secret resources against accident or decay, treasured up for the hour of necessity, and not even detectable, if existent, before the emergency that evoked them. Not so with the objects of creation. They are each and all, according to various laws, provided with such powers; their operations, whether from deficient energy or misdirection, constituting what we call disease. What is dropsy, for instance, save the resolution of an inflammatory action that would almost inevitably prove fatal? Formidable as the malady is, it yet affords time for treatment; its march is comparatively slow and uniform, whereas the disease that originated it would have caused death, if effusion of fluid had not arrested the violence of the inflammation.
Take the most simple case—a wounded bloodvessel, a cut finger: by all the laws of hydraulics, the blood must escape from this small vessel, and the individual bleed to death as certainly, though not so speedily, as from the largest artery. But what ensues? after a slight loss of blood, the vessel contracts—a coagulum forms—the bleeding is arrested—the coagulum solidifies and forms a cicatrix; and the whole of these varied processes—a series of strange and wonderful results—will follow, without any interference of the Will, far less any aid from the individual himself, being powers inherent in the organisation, and providentially stored up for emergency.
The blood poured out upon the brain from an apoplectic stroke, must, and does, prove fatal, save when the vis medicatrix is able to interpose in time, by encircling the fluid, enclosing it with a sac, and subsequently by absorption removing the extraneous pressure. All these are vital processes, over which the sufferer has no control—of which he is not even conscious.
The approach of an abscess to the surface of the body, by a law similar to that which determines the approach of a plant to the surface of the earth—the reparation of a fractured bone, by the creation and disposition of elements not then existing in the body—and many similar cases, warranted him in assuming that all these processes were exactly analogous to what we call disease, being disturbances of the animal economy accompanied by pain; and that disease of every kind was only a curative effort, occasionally failing from sufficient energy—occasionally, from the presence of antagonistic agency,—and occasionally, from our ignorance of its tendency and object.
I feel I have been a lame expositor of my friend’s theory. I have omitted many of his proofs—some of them the best and strongest. I have, besides, not adverted to objections which he foresaw and refuted. Indeed, I fell into the digression without even knowing it, and I leave it here in the same fashion. I fancy a kind of comfort in the notion that my malady is, at least, an attempt at restoration. The idea of decay—of declining slowly away, leaf by leaf, branch by branch—is very sad; and even this “conceit” is not without its consolation.
And now to wander homewards. How houseless the man is who calls his inn his home! It was all very well for “Sir John” to say, “I like to take mine ease in mine inn;” and in his day the thing was practicable. The little parlour, with its wainscot of walnut-wood and its bright tiles, all shining in the tempered light through the diamond-paned window; the neatly spread table, where smoked the pasty of high-seasoned venison, beside the tall cup of sack or canary; and the buxom landlady herself, redolent of health, good spirits, and broad jest;—these were all accessories to that abandonment to repose and quiet so delightful to the weary-minded. But think of some “Cour de Russie,” some “Angelo d’ Oro,” or some “Schwarzen Adler,” all alive with dusty arrivals and frogged couriers—the very hall a fair, with fifty bells, all ringing; postboys blowing—whips cracking—champagne corks flying—and a Bable of every tongue in Europe, making a thorough-bass din that would sour a saint’s temper!...
I’ll leave at once—I’ll find some quiet little gasthaus in the Tyrol for a few weeks, till the weather moderates, and it becomes cool enough to cross the Alps—and die!