A month in Switzerland

by F. Barham Zincke

Let me not cast away;

For God is paid when man receives:

T’ enjoy is to obey.—Pope.

August 26.—We left London at 8.45 P.M., and reached Paris the next morning at 7 A.M. We found the Capua of the modern world looking much as it used to look in the days that preceded the siege and the Commune. The shops were decked, and the streets were peopled, much in the old style. If, as we are told, frivolity, somewhat tinctured with, or, at all events, tolerant of, vice, together with want of solidity and dignity of character, are as conspicuous as of yore in the Parisian, we may reply that if they were there before, they must be there still; for a people, can no more change on a sudden the complexion of their thoughts and feelings than they can the complexion of their faces. These matters are in the grain, and are traditional and hereditary. The severity of taxation France will have to submit to may, when it shall have made itself felt, have some sobering effect, whereas the bribery and corruption of the Imperial régime only acted in the contrary direction. But time is needed for enabling this to become a cause of change; and much may arise, at any moment, in the volcanic soil of France, to disturb its action. All that we can observe at present is, that the people seem still quite unconscious of the causes of their great catastrophe. Their talk, when it refers to late events, is of treason and of revenge; as if they had been betrayed by anything but their own ignorance, arrogance, and corruption; and as if revenge, to be secured, had only to be desired. In such talk, if it indicates what is really thought and felt, there is scant ground for hope.

August 27.—We left Paris this evening at eight o’clock, taking the route of Dijon and Pontarlier. The sun was up when we reached Switzerland at Verrieres. There was no gradation in the scenery: as soon as we were on Swiss ground it became Swiss in character—mountainous and rocky, with irrigated meadows of matchless green in the valley. We were sure that the good people in the châlets below could not be otherwise than satisfied with the price they were getting for their cheese; for its quantity, and perhaps quality, we were equally sure that the greenness of their meadows was a sufficient guarantee. By the wayside we saw women with baskets full of wormwood, for making absinthe which will be drunk in Paris.

We breakfasted at Lausanne, and dined and slept at Vevey. We had thus got to Switzerland, practically, in no time at all, and without any fatigue, for we had been on the way only at night, and both nights we had managed to get sleep enough.

We had come, as it were, on the magical bit of carpet of Eastern imagination; which must have been meant for a foreshadowing of that great magician, the locomotive, suggested by a yearning for the annihilation of long journeys, without roads, and with no conveyance better than a camel: though a friend of mine, whose fancy ranges freely and widely through things in heaven above, and on earth below, tells me he believes that that bit of carpet was a dim reminiscence of a very advanced state of things in an old by-gone world, out of some fragments of the wreck of which the existing order of things has slowly grown.

My last hours in London had been spent in dining at the club, with a friend, who is one of our greatest authorities on sanitary, educational, and social questions; and our talk had been on such subjects. It is well to pass as directly as possible, and without tarrying by the way, from London and Paris, where man, his works, and interests are everything, to Switzerland, where nature is so impressive. The completeness of the contrast heightens the interest felt in each.

Those who give themselves the trouble, and do you the honour, of looking through what you have written, become, in some degree, entitled to know all about the matter. They are in a sort partners in the concern. I will therefore at once communicate to all the members of the firm that I did not go on this little expedition because I felt any of that desire for change by which, in these days, all the world appears to be driven in Jehu-fashion. I have never felt any necessity for this modern nostrum. I do not find that either body or mind wears out because I remain in one place more than twelve months together. I am a great admirer of White of Selborne; and I hope our present Lord Chancellor’s new title will lead many people to ask what Selborne is famous for; which perhaps may be the means of bringing more of us to become acquainted with a book which gives so charming a picture of a most charming mind that it may be read with most soothing delight a score of times in one’s life (one never tires of a good picture); and which teaches for these days the very useful lesson of how much there is to observe, and interest, and to educate a mind, and to give employment to it, for a whole life, within the boundaries of one’s own parish, provided only it be a rural one.

It is true that I have been in every county of England, and in most counties of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; and some general acquaintance with his own country—which is undoubtedly the most interesting country in the world—ought to an Englishman, if only for the purpose of subsequent comparison, to be the first acquisition of travel; and also that I have made some long journeys beyond the four seas, having set foot on each of the four continents; but I can hardly tell how on any one occasion it happened that I went. It certainly never was from any wish for change. It was only from taking things as they came. And so it was with this little excursion. It was not in the least my idea, nor was it at all of my planning. My wife wished to spend the winter in a more genial climate than that of East Anglia; and it was thought desirable that her little boy should go to a Swiss school, for, at all events, a part of the year, until he should be old enough for an English public school. And so, having been invited to go, I went. My part of the business, with the single exception of a little episode we shall come to in its place, was to be ready to start and to stop when required, and to eat what was set before me; in short, to take the goods a present providence purveyed. I recollect a weather-beaten blue-jacket once telling me—on the roof of the York mail, so all that may be changed now—that the charm of a sailor’s life was that he had only to do what he was told, and nothing at all to think about. Of this perhaps obsolete nautical kind of happiness, we housekeeping, business-bound landsmen cannot have much; but a month of such travel comes very near it. And if a man really does want change for the body, together with rest for the mind, here he has them both in perfection. What a delightful oasis would many find such a month in their ordinary lives of inadequately discharged, and too inadequately appreciated, responsibility! This little confidence will, perhaps, while we are starting, convey to the reader a sense of the unreserved and friendly terms on which, I hope, we shall travel together. I regret that, from the nature of the case, in these confidences all the reciprocity must be on one side.