Bewildering was the stir in the narrow street. There were many Germans, but the English including the Americans, or as they might put it, the Americans including the English, were largely in the majority. The peculiarity of the crowd was that it included many children, and almost as many ladies as gentlemen. What was it that had brought together this concourse of people from many nations, and even from the New World? It was simply to see glaciers. The glaciers had been there from time before history, from the time, it may be, that man had trod the soil of Europe: it is scarcely, however, a dozen years since such crowds began to assemble here to see them. This indicates new thoughts and new sentiments about the world we live in, as well as an increase of wealth and of facilities for locomotion. It was never so seen of old times. In our fathers’ times men and women flocked to London and Paris, as they had done in the old world to Rome, to see and to be seen. Society was the great attraction. For a little time a few had been attracted to Athens, because it was the centre of art, of culture, and of refinement, but that was a dawn of promise that was soon overcast. For some thousand years before that dawn so soon obscured, the greatest annual gatherings of men had been at Egyptian Thebes. The object, however, which had brought them together there had been the exchange of the commodities of Asia and of Africa. The attraction was first commerce, then social dissipation. Here men are brought together in a lofty Alpine valley, too cold to grow a potato, where there is no trade, and no society, to see mountains and glaciers. This is a higher, because a purely intellectual, purpose. In the first gatherings of the young world only one class of men took part, merchants and traders. In the next mainly those who had riches and nothing to do. Here we have, without excluding the rich, men of all professions, mostly not rich, and many of them with plenty to do. They come in multitudes; and the cry is still, ‘they come,’ that is in yearly increasing multitudes.
But the impulse that has carried the world to Pontresina, will not stop at Pontresina. At no distant day the children of these summer-tourists, when locomotion shall have been still further improved, will cross oceans for their summer excursions, and will climb the Andes, and the Himalaya, as their children may the Mountains of the Moon, going perhaps by the Soudan railway we now hear is in contemplation, and taking the sources of the Nile by the way. People will not for ever, now that they have begun to look out on the world, be content with the moderate altitudes, and the sombre, monotonous pine woods of central Europe. The appetite for seeing nature is one that grows with what it feeds on. Those who have found pleasurable emotions result from seeing Switzerland will wish to see something more of this glorious world. They will long to become acquainted with grander mountain ranges, with nobler and more diversified faunas and floras than those of our temperate zone, and with other conditions and forms of human life than those which obtain among a portion of our near kindred circumstanced not very dissimilarly from ourselves.
The history of the recent spread of the love now so widely felt for nature is interesting and instructive. Clearly it had its rise in that increase in the knowledge of nature which belongs to our times. It is, however, obvious that it is not confined to those who have this knowledge in the form and degree which would entitle it to be regarded as scientific. They are few, but the desire is felt by many, almost, indeed, by all who have received any culture worthy of the name. It seems, therefore, to have spread from the few to the many by a kind of infection, which shows that it is a natural taste, which former conditions kept in a state of repression. From what we see we may conclude that the acquisition and possession of the images and ideas, which the contemplation, or if that is too strong a word for the case of those who have been debarred from any scientific acquaintance with nature, then which the mere sight of the forms and phenomena of nature supplies to the mind, is a source of delight. Of course, the delight would be far greater, had the previous knowledge been wider and deeper, that is to say had the mind been better fitted for the reception of the images and ideas; but still it is felt, and so strongly as to give rise to a desire for more extended fields of observation. Even in old times there are indications of this pleasure having been felt. It was not absent from the awe and wonder which accompanied the observation of the starry firmament, and of the phenomena of the great deep, or from the attempt to co-ordinate the details of the natural scene as depicted in the hundred and fourth Psalm. Solomon’s collection of facts and observations about animals and plants—for his works on these subjects must have been something of this kind—was suggested by this pleasure. And as these emotions had such issues among the ancient Hebrews, we cannot suppose that their kindred neighbours were strangers to them. We know, too, that by the Greeks and Romans they were still more strongly felt. From these early observations and impressions, accompanied by pleasurable emotions, as from a small germ, but one that was full of vital power, has arisen the distinctly aimed effort to grasp in one intelligible whole all the phenomena and forces of nature, and all the forms of life the world has to show us. What was long ago dimly divined is now clearly understood that the world, and all it contains, are very good; that precisely it, and nothing else is the great external gift of God to man—man’s great inheritance; and that it is only by seeing it, and understanding it, that he can enter on the possession of it: for there is no other way in which he can make it his own.
But the picture which the world presents to us for contemplation is not composed merely of land and water, ranging through different zones, with their respective floras and faunas, and physical phenomena: the soul of the picture is the observer himself—man; not the individual observer, but the race. Man it is that imparts dramatic life and interest to the picture. Not that this globe is without a progress, that is a history, of its own. It has that, but its history is devoid of the highest element of interest, that is the moral element. It is by viewing the world in connexion with man that the picture becomes invested with this, the highest source of interest. And if an extended view of the world, inclusive of man’s place in it, and relation to it, be taken, whether the extension be in the direction of space, or of time, it will be seen in each view with equal clearness—and the inference from one view proves and confirms the inference from the other, for they are identical—that in the long drama of human history it is increase in the knowledge of nature which has led to increase in man’s dominion over nature, and it is increase in his dominion over nature which has led on to, and given rise to, those conditions which have resulted in a richer and higher moral life.
CHAPTER IX.
ROSEG GLACIER—PIZ LANGUARD—LA PISCHA—MORTERATSCH GLACIER—PONTRESINA.
Ah! that such beauty varying in the light
Of living nature, cannot be portrayed
By words, nor by the pencil’s silent skill;
But is the property of him alone,
Who hath beheld it, noted it with care,