An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

The view from the Scheidegg is interesting, but not at all in the same class as the Männlichen outlook.

We came home by way of the Grindel Alp pastures and encountered great herds of cattle, and wondered whether it was our duty to be afraid of them, but decided it wasn’t. We lost our path and tried to cut across the meadows without one. It looked very easy. We could see the roof of our own house plainly several miles distant, but the streams we had to cross, which ran often through deep ravines, made it hard and sometimes a little risky. There was one beautiful spot on a crag overhanging a stream where we fully intended to return some day to picnic, but we never could find it again!

That was the day we learned the wonderfully resting effect on tired and swollen feet of bathing them in the ice-cold water of a mountain stream.

In those early days, before the Transatlantics arrived, the Chronicler used to put in several hours a day in the polishing of her new novel, the Elder Babe used to have lessons, Belle Soeur had an attack of sewing and turned out wonderful confections for her wardrobe, and we all improved our minds with Swiss history. I say “improved our minds” advisedly, for it certainly did not amuse us. Why is it that, with all the dramatic material at hand, some one doesn’t write a history of Switzerland that the ordinary reader can peruse without going to sleep? Something must be allowed of course for the fact that we were not living in the history-hallowed part of Switzerland. Nothing ever happened in the Grindelwald Valley except a battle in 1191, between the Duke of Zaeringen and some recalcitrant nobles who did not like his populistic tendencies. The Duke won the battle and straightway founded Berne and endowed its burghers with all sorts of privileges, the more to annoy the nobles. Or perhaps his motives were really high and altruistic and he would have been glad if he could have foreseen that the Bernese burghers would eventually down nobles and sovereign too. But I really don’t think that we were so lacking in imagination that we could not have been interested in the doings of the Eidgenossen in the Forest Cantons, over the Brünig to the eastward, only a few miles after all, if the histories, French and English alike, had not been so deadly dull.

It is not only the histories either. There is something very unsatisfactory about all the literature concerning Switzerland. Much of it is painstakingly constructed out of guide-books like Rollo’s Adventures. Some of the things that are best as literature were written by men who got their impressions at second hand. Schiller wrote Tell and Scott wrote Anne of Geierstein without ever having set foot on Swiss soil. The Swissness of both reminds one of Dr. Johnson’s remark about women’s writing poetry and dogs walking on their hind legs. It is not to be expected that they should do it well, but the surprising thing is that they should be able to do it at all!

Now Byron did live up at Wengern Alp just over the Kleine Scheidegg while he was writing Manfred, and the other day I read it over, anticipating much. Time was when I thought Manfred one of the greatest dramatic poems ever written. It gave me all sort of thrills and creeps. But this rereading was a grievous disappointment. There are a few fine lines, but most of the descriptions are cheap, tawdry and conventional, fit accompaniments to a third-rate melodramatic attempt at clothing in false sentiment a theme essentially rotten.

Hyperion is another old-time favorite that I have just reread with a chill of disappointment. The dear poet was obviously bored by a solitary tramp he took to the Grimsel. He got the blues in Interlaken when it rained (which was not surprising), he saw the Jungfrau from the hotel piazza, took a drive to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and for the rest had no eyes for anything except that uninteresting girl, Mary Ashburton. The Swiss color of it all is distinctly thin.

The tales of high climbing are often thrilling as adventures, but are usually written by people who don’t know how to write. And one who has not been bitten by the Alpinist mania can not help feeling that so much daring and energy might have been better expended than in breaking records and necks. It is really a species of insanity, this high-climbing passion. The world and its standards must be curiously out of focus to its victims. They don’t even pay any attention to scenery. Much of their climbing is done in the dark (between two A. M. and day-break) and they are always too pressed for time to stop to look at a view, their brief rests being scientifically calculated to restore their exhausted mind and muscles. Tyndall’s books are extremely satisfactory in their way. He was an enthusiastic climber, without being a crank on the subject, had a scientific object in his trips and a considerable literary gift in describing them.

In general, I suppose it is true that where nature is so overpoweringly magnificent, art is dwarfed. Those who deeply feel the sublimity of it all hold their peace, and it is only the superficial who go home and slop over in printed twaddle. Of whose number the present Chronicler, thus self-confessedly, is one.