They also cultivated flax. Nets and lines made from it, together with the very scales of the fish the nets and lines caught, and the woven cloth, with the very fringes that decorated the dresses into which it had been formed, and even the weights used in working the looms, are all here, to teach us how widely spread, in very early times, were the most necessary of the useful arts. There has, then, been no solution in the continuity of man’s history. His wants were from the first substantially the same as they are at this day; and these wants were from the first supplied by the same contrivances as at this day, with the difference that, in every age, the contrivances were raised to the level of the knowledge, and consequent resources, of the times. The spinning-jenny, and the power-loom, in a few large cities, are now doing for millions what the wives and daughters of these old lake-dwellers, seated in summer on the wooden platform above the water, and in winter within the hut, did for each separate family. The wants of what appear to us as the primæval times, but which were in fact very far from that, have been enlarged and multiplied, in proportion as man’s means for meeting them became improved and enlarged; and this kind of growth in the old wants, consequent upon growth in our means for supplying them, constitutes what is generally meant by progress. And this material progress it is, which makes possible moral and intellectual progress, the glory, and privilege, and happiness of man.
One cannot help comparing these relics of the old lake-village with the copiously furnished stateliness of its modern neighbour, the city of Zurich. You set them, in thought, by the side of its handsome streets of stone houses, its rich shops, its large factories, especially of iron, in which labour is so skilfully organised, and so scientifically directed, its university, its general intelligence, its conscious efforts to cultivate, and turn to account, that intelligence, its accumulated wealth, its patriotism, its knowledge of, and connection with, every part of the world. But varied, complex, great, and interesting as all this is, still it is only the step now at length reached, by the labour of many generations, in the true and natural development of what was existing on the lake some thousands of years ago. Society, such as it was, in those old days, in the rude, wood-built, water-protected huts was the embryo of society, such as it now is in the proud, modern city. How natural, then, is the jealous care with which it guards these old relics; for if they do not speak to the Zurichers of their own actual ancestors they show them what were the germs out of which has grown their present condition.
I spoke of the large Swiss hotels exactly as they impressed me. I found in them nothing that was attractive to me. Why it was so I endeavoured to explain. I must, however, here note that what I then said is not applicable to Baur’s Hotel at Zurich. I said as much to the manager on leaving, though I was sure that he must often have received similar commendation from others. The house is as well ordered as you would wish to see your own home. The bedrooms are of a good size, and well furnished. The table is liberal. The cuisine good. A wholesome Rhenish wine is supplied at dinner. The attendants are clean and attentive. Everything you are likely to want is provided; nor are there any traps set, or any wish apparent that you should call, for extras. For meals at irregular hours there is an excellent restaurant in the house, distinct from the dining salon. This hotel, though large, has none of the cold, hard, obtrusive air of its monster brethren. In short, things are so managed that you feel that you are in a good, comfortable hotel, and not in a large factory, where bales of travellers, yourself a bale, are undergoing the process, like truck-loads of brute material, of scientific manipulation. I was at Baur en ville. Baur au lac, at a distance of three or four minutes’ walk, is, I suppose, managed in the same fashion, and is the same kind of thing.
But how about the note? I suppose wages, and the price of provisions, must be much the same in Zurich as in other Swiss towns, but the note did not lighten my purse as much as experience would have led me to have expected. A man, then, even an innkeeper, may sometimes be found, whose merits are obvious to the world, but who enhances them—and this is true virtue—by himself setting a low price upon them.
Hitherto the risings and settings of the sun had been, as I mentioned, almost achromatic. I suppose on account of the clearness of the atmosphere. But now a great change had taken place; there had been falls of rain, and even of snow, and the air had become full of moisture, and there was much cloud; in consequence, there were in the evenings some most glorious atmospheric fields of colour. I keep in mind one of these sunsets above the rest, because of the way in which it placed the murky, swart outline of the ridges and peaks of the Jura in contrast with the usual oranges and reds above, but which, though seen so often, one never tires of looking at. It is almost enough to condemn a country house, that the sunset cannot be seen from it.
I have another reason for recollecting this sunset. I was with several persons at the moment who were observing it together. Among these were two Swiss gentlemen. But in the change of weather which it indicated, they only saw a hint that this year’s récolte des voyageurs, as they phrased it, was drawing to a close: a true harvest, which costs Switzerland little, and is got in with not unthrifty husbandry, and which one is glad should benefit so many, both among those who do the harvesting, and among those who are harvested. A French gentleman, however, who happened to be present, and had been spending the summer on the banks of the Lake of Geneva—it might be inferred that his recollections of the way in which he had himself been harvested, were not in all respects pleasant—turned to me with the aside, C’est un pauvre pays.