He is, as he was meant to be,
Poor and virtuous, calm and free.”
The industry, thrift, helpfulness, and simple contentment of the Swiss peasants, next to the natural scenery, attract our attention. One must respect their laborious industry, frugality, and perseverance, and regret that so much toil, with such close and unfailing economy, should have such meagre results. Dwelling among the crags and clouds, their flats mostly water and their slopes mostly ice, they get out of their little holdings every farthing that they will yield, and squander nothing. There is a kind of manliness in their never-ending struggle against the niggardliness and severity of nature; out-braving and beating its hard opposition. Sharp-pressing need spurs them to wring a difficult and scant subsistence from the mountain-steeps. Secluded and poor, yet brave and cheerful, they recall the lines from the description of the old Corycian peasant:
“And wisely deem’d the wealth of monarchs less
Than little of his own, because his own did please.”
Every little scrap of ground is turned to the best account. If a few square yards can anywhere be made or reclaimed the requisite labor is not grudged. Many of these sturdy people compel an incredibly little spot of ground to yield them enough, and some to spare. This surprising product from a soil, much of it very poor, is due to the perfection of spade-work; each field, or rather patch, has the perfection of shape given to it to facilitate cultivation and drainage. This small cultivator, only with spade in hand, can fertilize the waste and perform prodigies which nothing but his love of the land could enable him to accomplish. These peasants have a proverb that “if the plough has a ploughshare of iron, the spade has a point of gold.” In the mountainous districts the land is reclaimed by this petite culture. In fact, the man makes the very soil. He builds terraces along steep inclines, lining them with blocks of stone, and then packs the earth to them, transforming the mountain and the rock into a little patch where he plants a vine or raises a little oats or maize. Up the heights of rocks which even goats cannot climb, on the very brow of the abyss, the peasant goes, clinging to the precipice with iron crampers on his feet in search of grass. He hangs on the sides of the rocks which imprison the valley and mows down a few tufts of grass from craggy shelves. The hay thus gathered is called wildheu, and the reaper wildheuer. This peasant mountain-mower is essentially sui generis. He is accustomed to all the perils of the mountain, and the day before the mowing season begins—a day fixed by communal decree—he bids farewell, perhaps for the last time, to his wife and children. His scythe on his shoulder, armed with his iron-shod stick, provided with his clamp-irons, a cloth or a net rolled up in his bag, he sets out at midnight, in order that the dawn may find him at his work. During the two months of hay-harvest he only goes down to the village three or four times to renew his supply of food or linen. By this hard and perilous occupation an Alpine mower makes from three to five francs a day, his food not included; and many times under some projecting rock he must seek a bed and pass the night. Once dried, this wild hay is carefully gathered into a cloth or net and carried down to the first little plain, where it can be made into a stack, which is loaded with large stones to prevent it being blown away. In winter, when everything is covered with snow, the mower climbs again the perpendicular sides of the mountain, carrying his little wooden sledge on his shoulders. He loads it with hay, seats himself on the front, and shoots down with the swiftness of an arrow. At times, the snow softened by the warm wind which blows upon the heights, is detached in an avalanche behind him, and swallows him up before he reaches the valley. This aromatic hay, composed of the nourishing flora of the high Alps, of delicate and succulent plants, of the wild chrysanthemum, the dwarf carline thistle, the red-flowered veronica, the Alpine milfoil with its black calyx, the clover with its great tufts, and the meum, an umbelliferous plant, gives a delicious milk, and is greatly sought after for the fattening of cattle. In these steep solitudes where the grass is found, the life of man is so exposed and accidents are so frequent that the law forbids there should be more than one mower in a family. With him it is a fight for life, not infrequently conducted to the death. At all times great charges of wrath hang over him,—a beetling crag, a stream of stones, a cataract of ice, a moving field of snow, the flash that rends his roof, the wind that strips his trees, the flood that drowns his land, against each of these messengers of ill he must hold a separate watch, and must learn to brave each danger when it comes, alike by flush of noon and in the dead of night. The little valley below lies at the mercy of these ice- and storm-engendering heights. Year by year the peasants fight against its being extorted from their dominion. Yet this feeble community in the valley, by their stout hearts and virtuous lives, continue to make it smile on the frowning mountains:
“Durum! sed levius fit patientia
Quicquid corrigere est nefas.”
It is a strange and savage reverence which the peasants feel for the mountains. They seem to grow like each other in spirits, even as a man and wife who live in peace grow like each other year by year. With no people is the love of home and the native soil so strongly developed. To return to his village in the midst of his beloved mountains is the constant dream of his life, and to realize it he will endure every privation and bind himself to the hardest and most painful toil. One hope possesses him,—to see again the snows, the glaciers, the lakes, the great oaks, and the familiar pines of his country. It is a sentiment so human—of home, of kindred, of the accustomed locality, of country—that has fostered itself on him and binds him to the spot with a chain he has no power to break. The Almighty himself has implanted in the human breast that passionate love of country which rivets with irresistible attraction the Esquimau to his eternal snows, the Arab to his sandy desert, and the Swiss to his rugged mountains:
“Cling to thy home: if there the meanest shed