I.
Whether you feel sympathy, or not, with Calvin, the theologian, who gave us, at not more than twenty-eight years of age, the epoch-making Christian Institutes, or with Calvin, the inflexible governor, who helped to put to death poor Michael Servetus outside the city wall of Geneva, on the garden slopes of Champel, you can hardly fail to realize at least some transient flicker of interest when you contemplate, beneath its solitary fir-tree, and hard by a clump of box, the small, white, oblong stone—it is less than a foot long, and marked simply with the initials J. C.—that is supposed to mark the grave, in the old crowded cemetery near the Plaine du Plainpalais, of Jean Calvin, the politician and man. The cemetery itself is a little hard to find, for it lies hidden away in a commonplace back-quarter of the city, in a part that is far removed from all that is brightest, and most cosmopolitan, and therefore most familiar, in Geneva. Nor, even when you find it, is this grave of Calvin obvious, lost, as it is, amongst a thousand other tombs which rise in some disorder from amidst an inextricable tangle of daisies and long rank grass, of lady's-smock and dandelions. As happens almost always in old burial-grounds in Scotland, there is here an eloquent lack of Christian symbols: Catholics are buried here as well as Protestants, but the spirit of iconoclasm is none the less supreme—plenty of broken columns, of import purely Pagan, but never, I think, the Cross, lest it savour of superstition. This, too, was Wordsworth's experience in the burial-ground at Dumfries:
"'Mid crowded obelisks and urns
I sought the untimely grave of Burns."
Yet here, in this half-forgotten old graveyard, where Calvin was laid to rest when not quite fifty-five years of age, at least there is none of that nightmare horror that broods over Knox's cenotaph in the Necropolis at Glasgow. Calvin and Knox! We group the two in fancy when we stand here in this silent spot, on the edge of that same Geneva—how transfigured to-day in outward aspect not less than in mental outlook!—where Knox once ministered for more than a year in the little church of the Auditoire, and where Calvin once ruled with a rod of iron. At any rate this sombre old burial-ground, when so much else in the Geneva of to-day is almost aggressively gay and modern, is surely not unfitted for the last repose of a spirit so austere, and of logic so relentless. And this is what is written above the entrance: "Heureux ceux qui meurent au Seigneur. Ils reposent de leurs travaux et leurs œuvres les suivent."
Calvin, indeed, is inseparably connected with the greatest moment in Geneva's history. His rule for nearly a quarter of a century of this little city state is chosen by Lord Morley in his Romanes lecture at Oxford in 1897 as an outstanding illustration of what can be accomplished by moral forces in the absence of giant armies and big guns. It is impossible, in fact, to think of historical Geneva without thinking of Calvin, though Calvin himself was by birth a Frenchman, and hailed from the sleepy little city of Noyon (the German guns have spared it), in the department of the Aisne. Rousseau, on the other hand, though Genevese by birth, seems to belong more properly to the French Revolution, and to France. The tall, white tenement where the future author of the "Contrât Social" lived as a child may still be seen in the St. Gervais quarter, on the right bank of the river, at the junction, if I recollect rightly, of the present Rue Rousseau with the Place de Chevelu, in close proximity to a modiste's establishment and to a shop for the sale of fishing-tackle, and virtually, if not wholly, within sight and hearing of the music and blue swiftness of the Rhone. Actually, however, he was born in his maternal grandfather's house, which has since been pulled down, in the Grande Rue, towards the summit of the hill that is crowned by the Cathedral, in the high-town of Geneva. The old workman's quarter of St. Gervais is perhaps seldom visited by Englishmen, though everybody skirts it, perhaps half-a-dozen times a day, as they traverse the very modern Rue du Mont Blanc on their way to the main railway station, or to the splendid new Hôtel-des-Postes. Yet its eighteenth-century streets—this is possibly their date—are at least as full of interest, and are certainly far more typical, than the Parisian-like blocks of new houses that front the modern quays. If you want to realize the aspect of old Geneva properly, before the advent of the railway and the hordes of modern trippers, you should study the curious model now preserved in the splendid new Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, in the Rue des Casemates. Then it had no front, in the ordinary sense, towards the lake; and the islands in the Rhone were laden with quaint old tenements. Moreover, the whole city was then surrounded by a ring of many-angled fortifications in the familiar manner of Vauban.
THE JURA RANGE FROM THONON, HTE. SAVOIE.
If the actual birth-place of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Grande Rue has perished, no better piece of luck has befallen the house, at No. 11, Rue des Chanoines (now relabelled Rue Calvin), in which Calvin, as recorded by an existing tablet, resided from 1543 to his death in 1564. To find authentic associations with Calvin we must pass into the former Cathedral, now the Protestant Church of St. Pierre, where is still preserved a chair on which he is said to have sat to preach. The Cathedral itself, however, is his truest monument, for in this he constantly preached, and in this he delivered judgment. This last is a grand old Romanesque pile, with transeptal towers like those at Exeter; but sadly disfigured externally by an atrocious, Classical, eighteenth-century west front. This, with its Corinthian pillars, might be well enough elsewhere, but is quite out of keeping, like the west front at Fécamp, in Normandy, with the older work behind. It must also be acknowledged that here, as at Lausanne, the austere Calvinistic furniture is wholly out of keeping with an interior that was obviously intended for elaborate Catholic ritual. In a very odd position, at the south-west corner of the nave, is the striking fifteenth-century Chapel of the Maccabées that was built in 1406 by Cardinal Jean de Brogny, who was Bishop of Geneva between 1423 and 1426. The curious name is met with again as far away as Amiens, and may possibly derive from "macabre," the Chapel of the Dead: Brogny, indeed, is said to have built this chapel with a view to his own future interment. In the body of the church there are really several points to notice, though at first its general aspect is repellently cold and bare. In the chancel and south nave aisle remain a number of old stalls with misericordes, one of the last of which is unexpectedly carved with a frog. Other stalls have canopies, apparently much restored, the backs of which are sculptured with figures of Prophets and Apostles, greatly recalling those in the not far distant French cathedral of St. Claude. Included among the rest are David and the Sybil, who was credited with prescience of the coming birth of Christ:
"Teste David cum Sybilla."
In a chapel on the east of the south transept is the tomb, with a modern statue, of Duke Henri de Rohan, the Protestant leader, who was slain at the battle of Rheinfelden in 1638. The church has, of course, been stripped of its ancient coloured glass, for we can hardly suppose that Calvinistic Geneva of the sixteenth century lacked its local "Blue Dick" or its incorrigible William Dowsing; but luckily two splendid windows have somehow escaped, and are now in safe possession in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire. One is a large figure of St. John the Evangelist, and another of St. Julian or St. James-the-Less. Preserved in the same collection are two fifteenth-century bench-ends, and a fragment of broken stall canopy, that come also from the Cathedral.
Everyone should climb to the top gallery of the great south tower, for there, on a fine day, we are best in a position—it is the highest spot in the whole city save the adjoining leaden flèche—to study the topography of Geneva and the surrounding country. Geneva, we then see, though different from towns, such as Luxembourg, Richmond, or Le Puy, whose actual site and immediate environs in themselves are striking and beautiful, is none the less set in the heart of a general landscape which for varied splendour and loveliness is hardly to be rivalled by any other great city—and not at all in my experience—in the western half of Europe. Immediately to the east spread the waters of the lake, intensely and uniquely blue, and dotted perhaps with the graceful lateen sails that are only found here, on Lac Leman, and again on the Mediterranean. Owing to the direction at this point of the axis of the lake (more or less to the north-east), which points directly at the heart of the great central plain of Switzerland, between the Jura and the Alps, the distance is closed along the water by no lofty chain of hills, but merely dies away into flat and fruitful vale. To the left of the lake, however, appears the noble limestone escarpment that constitutes the eastern boundary of the Jura, stretching for nearly half-a-hundred miles, like a vast blue wall, from its commencement on the Rhone, below the city, in the neighbourhood of Bellegarde, far away to the north-east, in the direction of Neuchâtel. The position of Bellegarde itself is roughly fixed by the great fort at Ecluse, seen clearly on its hill above the narrow glen of the Rhone; for at Ecluse (well named, like Cluses, on the Avre, for the word means strait, or narrows) Jura and Alp come close together, and confront one another menacingly across the contracted gorge of the Rhone. The spot is almost exactly paralleled in England by the deep valley between Tebay and Lowgill, which is also threaded by a great trunk railway, though it happily needs no fort; and where the Lake mountains and Howgill Fells, which are out-liers of the so-called Pennine chain, similarly confront one another across the shallow stream of the Lune. Commencing then at Ecluse, where Jura challenges Alp, the line of the lower Alps may itself be slowly traced, as we slowly turn our faces, past the Grand and Petit Salève, which tower so immediately above Geneva itself, and so grandly, with their long, parallel belts of gleaming white limestone precipice, as we approach it from the lake; past the broad, rich valley of the lower Avre, which at this point opens deeply into the mountain bosom of Savoy; to the spot where the richly wooded Voirons sinks gently to the azure waters of the Lake. This, if the day be dull, or the distance indistinct, is roughly the view that the eye commands from the Cathedral tower across the old brown roofs, immediately below us, of the upper city of Geneva, and across the battalion of bright, white villas that gleam from suburban woods. Contrariwise, if the day be clear—and the number of such days in this sunny climate is astonishingly great—the whole landscape, at any time so beautiful, is embellished and transfigured by the presence of one grand object, that hangs so high in heaven, though forty miles distant in a bee-line, and that gleams so white and ætherial, that one almost hesitates for a moment whether to address it as cloud or mountain. For there, almost due south-east from Calvin's city, though one doubts whether Calvin's inward-brooding eye ever brightened at its prospect, or ever heeded it more than carelessly; there, in distant magnificence more supreme, and in majesty of height more completely realized than is experienced to my knowledge in the case of any other great hill in Europe (save only by Monte Rosa possibly, as seen between Milan and Pavia); there, with its glorious central dome enshrouded in deep masses of overwhelming snow, and even from this distance those snows are palpably deep and overwhelming, and not to be confounded for a moment with mere thin and transient sprinkling; there, towering above its immediate satellites with a complete and unquestioned supremacy that is never felt when we see it fore-shortened, as most people come to see it, in the naked valley of Chamonix; there, giving unity and perspective to the whole vast and varied panorama, is the dominating presence of Mont Blanc himself, even at this great distance still patently a king. There is a passage in Præterita, recalling one in Wordsworth, in which Ruskin describes his pure delight as a boy in the presence of the hills, without seeking further to read their lesson, as Wordsworth learnt to read it, and afterwards Ruskin himself, in the light of "the still sad music of humanity." "St. Bernard of La Fontaine," he tells us in the chapter headed "Schaffhausen and Milan," "looking out to Mont Blanc with his child's eyes, sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna; St. Bernard of Talloires, not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta. But for me the Alps and their people were alike beautiful in their snow and their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any spirits in heaven but the clouds."
Immediately round the Cathedral, on the crest of the old acropolis, clusters most of what is still left in Geneva of the ancient city state. City state, in truth, it was, rather than capital, like Sion or Berne, of a canton: the territory, in fact, of Geneva was always insignificant, and merely a civic adjunct—a hundred odd square miles, or so, of suburban orchard, or garden. The Canton of Geneva, in short, was subordinate to the city, and never the city to the canton. "Quand je secoue ma perruque," said Voltaire, "je poudre toute la République."
GENEVA FROM THE ARVE
Of ancient municipal buildings, perhaps the most interesting is the Hôtel-de-Ville, which exhibits a picturesque Renaissance staircase or inclined plane. Opposite is the old Arsenal, with its outside paintings—a feature that is typically Swiss. We have noticed already the sites of the old houses that were associated respectively with Rousseau and Calvin in the Grande Rue and the former Rue des Chanoines. At the foot of the latter thoroughfare, in the Rue de la Pélisserie, and also marked by a tablet, is the house in which George Eliot resided between October, 1849, and March, 1850. From near the apse of the Cathedral we may descend steeply to the low town along the shore of the lake, either directly, by the Rue de la Fontaine, or, more indirectly, by a network of little streets that cluster round the mediæval church of the Madelaine. The Rue de la Fontaine in itself is worth a visit, with its tall, old, shabby tenements, like those in the old town at Edinburgh. I forget from what fountain it gets its name; but Geneva, like other towns in Switzerland—like every village in fact—is full of them. None, that I know, has the character, or quaintness, of some of those at Berne; but the pretty Swiss custom of decorating them in summer with growing flowers may be noted here with gratitude and pleasure.
The modern splendour of Geneva, to which we descend almost reluctantly from the old, grey, upper city on the heights, if certainly very modern, is also certainly very splendid; and leaves us with the impression that the front towards the quays, with its gardens, and palatial hotels, and gigantic cafés, is one of the brightest, and gayest, and most animated scenes anywhere to be met with on the Continent. Moreover, it offers at least one point, where the Rhone, like an arrow from the string, suddenly discharges itself from the blue placidity of the lake, and storms in triumphant volume through the openings of the bridges to swirl past the little tree-shaded Ile-de-Rousseau and the other islands that lie behind it, where even the quiet lover of Nature, to whom gay throngs of all sorts are abhorrent, may feed his soul as completely with splendid, natural spectacle as anywhere among the torrents and glaciers of the remotest and most secluded valleys in which this magnificent stream has origin, and from which it descends in thunder, but never in purity like this, to traverse the whole Canton of the Valais from end to end, and to repose at length in quiet in the lake. To lean across the west parapet of the Pont-du-Mont Blanc at Geneva, and to gaze down into this deep volume of absolutely transparent and deep ultramarine water that shoots forward with Alpine strength and lightning-like rapidity, and is only broken into sheets of seething, delicately sky-blue foam at the point where its majestic impetuosity is arrested by the dams of the electric works, is to come face to face with just such a combination of natural force and loveliness as is nowhere, I think, to be found in Britain, and perhaps at few spots in the Alps. The extraordinarily deep-blue colour of the Lake of Geneva, and of the Rhone where it first emerges, and before it is polluted (alas! in half-a-mile or so) by the influx of the grey and glacier-stained Avre—till the last state of the Rhone, below Geneva, is no better than its first, above Villeneuve—has been the subject of comment and learned inquiry, but has never, unless I mistake, been satisfactorily explained. Most other Alpine lakes, whether in Switzerland or Italy, are deep, or emerald, green: and emerald, or deep green, are the strong rivers that discharge from them—the Linth from Zurich, or the Reuss at Lucerne, or the noble Aar that lends grace to Thun. Tennyson tells us how Guinevere and Lancelot rode together in the may-time woods
"Over sheets of hyacinth
That seem'd the heavens upbreaking thro' the earth;"
but to sail on a sunny day on the waters of Lake Leman is to sail on the perfect blue of heaven itself.
This exquisite phenomenon then, which has been compared with the tender, suffused blue that is seen when looking down into the depths of a crevasse, has never been accounted for, though theories are not lacking in profusion. And not only is this nascent river the most beautifully coloured and transparent thing on earth—every pebble at the bottom is visible through I dare not guess how many feet of depth—but its surface is also the most lustrous in the world. Even at night, when the moonlight glances on its water, or at least the electric lights on the promenade and bridges, this quality of lustre, and to some extent of colour, still remains proudly visible, when other rivers, if still lustrous, would be black. In daylight, too, this bridge is a pleasant spot to linger on, not merely for joy of the crystal depths below, but for joy of the scene above. Nowhere, I think, is Geneva seen to better purpose than hence: to the left the towers of its ancient Cathedral, high on their crowded hill above the stream; in the centre, the Ile-de-Rousseau, with its picturesque clump of trees; and to the right, above more old houses, the long blue wall of Jura, lofty enough and abrupt enough wholly to hold the eye, till, turning with an effort, we cease to sigh for Jura, because there, though at greater distance, are the altogether more dazzling splendours of the Alps.
Next to the ex-Cathedral the best object of artificial attraction in Geneva is undoubtedly the new Museum of Art and History. Few provincial collections exceed, or even rival, it in the interest of their specimens or their excellence of arrangement. Here, in addition to the remains of glass and wood-work, already mentioned, from St. Pierre, are several relics—ladders, helmets, a banner, etc.—of that famous Escalade by which the Duke of Savoy—always an uneasy neighbour to Geneva—attempted to take the city by stealth, and did in fact nearly succeed in taking it, during the night of December 11-12, 1602. Calvin had been already nearly forty years dead (in 1564), but his old friend and disciple, Theodore Beza, in whose arms he had expired, and who, like Calvin himself, was by birth a Frenchman, was still living in Geneva, though then eighty-three years old; and it was Beza who gave out the next day, in public thanksgiving in church, the one-hundred-and-twenty-fourth Psalm ("If the Lord Himself had not been on our side") that is said ever afterwards to have been sung on the anniversary of the Escalade. Stored with these relics in the basement are some important specimens of thirteenth-century glass, or even earlier. But perhaps the chief value of the museum is to be found in the cases upstairs, with examples, bronze and iron, of the pre-historic ages. Here, in addition to the usual celts, daggers, spear-heads, etc., that one finds in all collections of the sort, is a really wonderful assemblage of bronze bracelets, pins, knives, and razors from lake villages; whilst the Iron Age is represented by tridents, shears, safety-pins with spiral springs, choppers with hooked points, and reaping-hooks, many of which exactly resemble those still in use at the present day: the persistence of shape is really marvellous. Here too are long, deadly pins, with big bead heads, precisely like those that women still stick through their hats to-day, though the world is more than two thousand years older. Here too are human tibia bones, each with its four bronze anklets still in situ, and here is one end of a "dug-out" canoe that was found in the lake, at Morges, in 1878. Some museums of this sort are distinctly dismal; but this at Geneva is so rich in this particular direction, and so admirably marshalled, that even those who are little interested in origins will not regret an hour's loss of sunshine on lake and hill.
SUNSET ON MONT BLANC, FROM ABOVE GENEVA.