J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories, by His Wife

by Alice Vansittart Strettel Carr

“This place is beautiful, and makes one wonder little that the Italians thought of landscape as a thing of design before the Northerners found a new beauty in the empire of cloud and sky. Certainly these mountains have great enchantment of form, and the Southern light defines every detail.”

And this longer letter of varying interest also rings the same note.

From Wengen,

Bernese Oberland.

“My dear Doll,

Here is a line from me whom I daresay you thought hopeless in that matter. But such a little thing will sometimes provoke a sinner to virtue. Two strangely fashioned men share the room adjoining mine, divided from me only by a washed deal partition held together by French nails. They spend the day in moody silence and in grey frock coats which if they were well cut would suit the Cup Day at Ascot. But they return at nine and chatter unceasingly till 10.30. It is now only ten and it has occurred to me that instead of tossing about on the sea of their incoherent conversations I would write a line to you.

This is a beautiful place which I should admire even more if nobody else admired it. But it is made too fair to go scot free of praise, and so I must fain clap my hands with the rest. You see we are exclusive in our emotions as the society of a country town and do not wish to share them with our inferiors. That is a part of it, but I think my reluctance to hear nature applauded has a better reason too, though it is hard to give it words. I know I always feel a better right to enjoy its beauty when I am otherwise engaged, in killing a bird perhaps, in fishing a stream or I suppose best of all in some sort of labour that the needs of the world demand.

I went for an early walk the other day up to the Wengern Alp; all the mountain in shadow and the pines blacker than their own fallen image on the grass. I was alone and met no one on the path but the lads laden with their washed deal milk-pails as they came singing from every green hill. And as they passed I felt sort of shamefaced. I was out for beauty, a kind of dilettante wandering in search of impressions, and I knew deep down in me that they must one day and another have won impressions I could never gain. No one can be really intimate with a strange land, can ever really read the face of a hillside as it is read by those however simple who were born to see it coloured by the changing fortunes of their life from childhood to manhood. Nature is so shy, so reluctant to speak if she thinks she is overheard, but she will sing to herself when she thinks we are busy.

For us who are not artists I think beauty is only really captured in that way. It is trapped unawares, stolen in the silences of night or dawn, or burnt into the brain by the fire of some passionate moment to which it remains as an unforgotten background. Of course the artist, the poet or the painter, has other rights and other penalties. ‘He that would save his life must lose it,’ and the artist is always giving up for himself what he re-fashions for the joy of others. He is like the cuckoo that sojourns in every nest and is itself but a homeless voice. Even the beauty that he pursues is never really possessed; it flutters for a moment in his hand and then takes wing for others to inherit. It is bought so dearly and then sold for a mere song.

But this is a digression. We were talking of Switzerland, and I do believe this is one of the choicest spots in it, but of course we don’t discuss its merits all day. On the contrary, I think we talk most of the food, comparing the veal of yesterday with the mutton of to-day, wondering from what strange waters, remote or near, come those strange fish that masquerade under the titles of the dwellers in Northern seas. And then we pry into the lives of other lodgers, making up imaginary relationships among families that are as normally related as our own—taking a curious interest in characters in which we have really no concern, and exchanging cards warmly with parting guests, knowing that we shall see their faces again no more. And all the while the air is so good, when the weather is not so bad, that we feel well, which is a long way on the road to feeling happy, and we are sometimes pointed at as distinguished, and then vanity covers the rest of the road and we are very jolly.