Clear streams, smooth lakes, and overlooking towers.—Keats.
July 29.—My destination was the Grisons. I wished to see something of the aspects of nature and of the conditions of human life in that elevated region of central Europe. I arrived at Interlaken in the evening. It had been raining heavily all the afternoon. I found people complaining that the weather had of late been unusually cold and wet.
July 30.—Went to Meiringen to find a guide; or rather, as the excursion I was contemplating would not require a guide, one who might act as a light porter, and at the same time be in some sort a companion. On the recommendation of the manager of the Reichenbach Hotel, an acquaintance of the two last summers, to whom I had written requesting him to secure for me a good and true man possessed of these qualifications, I engaged Henri Leuthold, at a salary of 7 francs a day, which was to be raised by whatever amount I might think fair, when we had reached Pontresina, where living is dear, and guides are not fed and lodged by the hotel keepers, which is the practice at Meiringen, and many other places. This is a bad system, for, of course, the wine and bread and cheese given to the guide on arrival, and the dinner afterwards, are ultimately given by the traveller. It would be better for all parties in all respects, as we are now discovering at home, that all payments should be direct, instead of roundabout, and that they should be made in money only. Both the payers and the paid will, then, be making their calculations in one and the same denomination, and there will be no room for misunderstandings. It rained more or less all day.
July 31.—At 12 A.M. the rain ceased, and I at once started for Innertkirchen. Though so much rain had fallen, no sooner had it cleared up than, thanks to the natural underdrainage of the land which obtains throughout the greater part of Switzerland, the surface became clean and dry. In passing I looked into the structure of the Kirchet, that I might ascertain to what extent it is composed of old moraine rubbish and of rock in situ. As seen from the Innertkirchen side, it is clear that whatever there may be of the former can be only on its summit, for just below that you see the undisturbed stratification of the latter. I also looked at the existing deep and almost perpendicular-sided channel of the Aare to the right of the Kirchet, to judge whether it was due to a fissure of the mountain, or to the cutting action of the stream. I came to the conclusion that, though so deep and perpendicular, there is no evidence of any action but that of the latter cause. It is quite clear that the channel in its lower part, and for some way above the water, is entirely due to the recent erosion of the stream. This being undoubtedly the case so far, we have only to suppose that the cutting action of the water, which is now going on before our eyes at the bottom of the ravine, formerly in remote times had the same effect. What is now being done at the bottom was once being done at the top; and so throughout from top to bottom. The stream did not acquire its rock-excavating power recently. It would be illogical to ask for some other agent, when we find one quite adequate for the work that has been done, now doing precisely similar work on the same spot. Work, too, of a more or less similar kind, together with the presence of the same agent, is seen in every ravine in Switzerland. We may, therefore, be sufficiently certain that the whole of this deep perpendicular-sided channel was cut out by the existing stream. We need not postulate an earthquake, or rend the mountain by any other means. On the face of the ravine there are no ruggednesses and no projections, excepting where pieces of rock have been thrown off by the action of frost. You know that they have been thrown off because the face of the rock is in these places less weather-stained, or wholly unstained. Had the ravine been a rent, there would probably, in whatever way it had been caused, have been many projections, and much inequality of surface. On the other side, however, a question may be suggested at this spot. The face of the mountain on the west side of the bed of the old lake is cut down very precipitously. How was this done? It could hardly have been the work of running water, for it is continued from the top of the mountain down to considerably below what was the level of the old lake. This may be due somewhat to glacier action, somewhat to the action of frost, and somewhat to the wash of the lake as it was subsiding. But whatever might have been the way in which this was brought about, it does not affect the question of the channel.
In the afternoon made a call on an old acquaintance at Unter Urbach, one of the four villages in the old lake bed, which form the commune of Innertkirchen. I found him, though a porter, yet the proprietor of nearly four acres of good prairie. This land had been bought out of the savings of his earnings as porter. First one acre was purchased. That first acre was the great difficulty, for when it had been obtained, money could be raised upon it to buy another piece. When that been paid for partly by the good man’s earnings and partly by the produce of the first piece, a third piece could be looked out for, and so on up to the whole of the four acres, every subsequent purchase being more quickly cleared than its predecessors. I heard the same story of another acquaintance I had at Wrickel, the village in the north-west corner of the old lake bed. Indeed this effort to acquire land is the mainspring of the life of the peasants hereabouts. It is what sets in motion their whole life. The better sort of men are all making this effort, are all living for this purpose. It is the root of their industry, of their painstaking, frugal, saving lives. The opportunities there are under the Swiss system to acquire land give the land to those who deserve to have it. The system acts as a winnowing process. It sifts out the idle and profligate through the natural consequences of their idleness and profligacy; and rewards the thoughtful, the self-denying, and the hard-working through the natural consequences of their thoughtfulness, self-denial, and hard work. It is a self-acting case of social, moral, and intellectual selection.
It was very pleasing to contemplate how in the scene before me every little scrap of ground had been turned to the best account. If a few square yards could have been anywhere made or gained, the requisite labour had not been grudged. For this purpose everything had been done which ingenuity could have suggested, or hard work effected. We in very many places are allowing the sea to gain from us all it can. They gain from their lakes, and streams, and mountains all they can. Here every man’s heart is in the land; with us no man’s: not the landlord’s, who may never have seen it, except when he walked over it with his gun; not the tenant’s, who regards it with the feelings of a passing occupier; not the labourer’s, who thinks only of his wages, and regards the land merely as the scene of his daily toil. For the casual beholder, it has no suggestions but those of a food-factory. That it should be a food-factory is certainly the first and most necessary use of the land, and we should be glad to be assured that we were making the most of it in this respect. It would, however, be more interesting, and perhaps the better for us, if it had also some moral suggestions to make to us. Here you see that men are thinking of it when they are rising up, and when they are lying down, and while they are walking by the way, that it shapes their lives, that it makes them what they are. These facts and considerations are not a demonstration of the preferableness of peasant proprietorship, but they are, I think, a demonstration of one advantage, and that not an inconsiderable one, that is secured by making the land accessible to all, which it never can be while each generation is permitted so to settle and charge it as practically to take it out of the market of the generation that will follow.
Having got through my visits I went with Leuthold to see the valley of the Urbach. For this purpose we ascended the western mountain, and having reached what to us was the commencement, but in nature the end, of the valley, we had the upland village of Unterstock on the left. We advanced up the valley for about an hour with grand mountain scenery before us. Our object was not only to see the character of the valley, and of its mountain ranges, but also to look at its winter stabling for cows, that I might know how they are lodged and kept up here at that season. For this purpose we went into several. As the stalls are very low, and the cows closely packed, the temperature, whatever it may be outside, can never be very severe within. When the cows have been housed for the season, the men who have charge of them come up from below every evening to milk them. They sleep in the hayloft; and having again milked them in the morning, carry down the milk to the villages of Innertkirchen. Should the weather prove bad, these men remain in the high valley all day. To enable them to do this whenever requisite, fuel, potatoes, and cheese are stored in each byre. To the potatoes and cheese the cows add milk. As this is the arrangement adopted, it must, doubtless, be under existing circumstances the best, though one would have supposed that these daily journeys for and with the milk must require far more labour than would be necessary for bringing down the hay. What decides the question may be that labour is scarce and dear in summer, but abundant and cheap in winter. If, however, the existing mountain footpath could be made available for carts, the cows would then probably be made in the autumn to bring down themselves and their winter fodder.
I had had some reasons for looking forward to the little excursion upon which I am now about to enter, and so I dwell for a moment on these little incidents of my first afternoon, as one does on the first whiff of a cigar, or the first sip of a glass of wine. He wishes to taste to the full, and to assure himself of the good qualities of, what he had been for some time anticipating. It would be disappointing if he did not find, or imagine that he had found, the fruition equal to the anticipation.