Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

They have, too, imbibed, or affect to have imbibed, the foreign estimate of the ordinary travelling Englishman, which generally assumes the form of an accusation that our ideas are in some way or other narrow, insular, and uncosmopolitan; for example, that we are possessed with the idea that nature has constituted us the moral police of the race, that is to say, a police for enforcing on the race English ideas; and hence our frequent announcements that so much of what we see everywhere is ‘lamentable’ and ‘miserable;’ that every foreigner we fall in with is likely to be a rogue—honesty being supposed to be an exclusively English virtue; that people are everywhere dirty—cleanliness also being assumed to be exclusively English; that the rest of the world do not understand their own business—knowledge of this kind being peculiar to this island of ours; that all other people are in a conspiracy against the great English race, and have, to their own loss, wilfully blinded themselves to its merits, and general superiority to the rest of mankind. There is probably some ground for allegations of this kind too, and it would be better if there were not. But larger experience of the world will in such matters teach us what we ought to think, and what we ought, and ought not, to say. In the mean time it will do us no harm to hear how people talk about us: perhaps it may do us some good.

If, then, you are one of those who believe in these multifarious shortcomings and accusations, and are ruffled at what you take to be exhibitions of what is laid to our charge, you will do well to keep clear of such places as the Eggischhorn and Bell Alp Hotels, for in them you will be brought into closest contact with your travelling fellow countrymen. It may, however, be suggested, that if you did yourself possess the good qualities you think ought to be found in others, and were free from the failings you comment on in them, you probably would not notice, as a ground for annoyance, either the absence of the one or the presence of the other in those you meet with in your travels. You would take the world as it comes, and turn it to your own account. What prompts your objections is, perhaps unknown to yourself, the amount of negative electricity in your own system, for from this there are few Englishmen who are wholly exempt. If this be your case to any considerable degree, for your visit to the Great Aletsch glacier try for your head-quarters the Rieder Alp. If you find it dull, then go on to the Eggischhorn, or Bell Alp, taking with you the thought that friendliness and tolerance, like their opposites, are repaid in kind.

August 28.—At 9 A.M. we set out for the Bell Alp. Having passed my last night’s lodging, we were, a few minutes afterwards, on the crest of the ridge. Once on the top, we were soon in sight of the great glacier. To reach it we had to pass through a somewhat dilapidated wood of ancient pines. This is the Aletschwald. Most of the woods of the Valais are dilapidated; and in accordance with Valaisan practice we found here a flock of goats—of the black-jacketed strain—browsing on the undergrowth, and thus preventing a succession of young trees, to take, in their turn, the place of the old ones. As we were passing through the flock, I saw one, reaching over from a rock above, bite off the leader of a thrifty young birch. We were not long in descending to the glacier. As there might be some need of help on the ice, and certainly would be in the ascent on the other side, Ott had asked for an assistant porter. In crossing the ice there are no difficulties; the passage took us a short half-hour. You see no more of crevasses than just about enough to make you think that you had better not, through carelessness, slip into one of them. But as you look up the glacier, you see that half a mile or so above you it is composed entirely of narrow ridges with crevasses between, so that it would be quite impossible, I suppose, either to ascend it or to cross it thereabouts. On the path we took we saw crossing, at the same time, men, women, and children, a flock of goats, a herd of cows, and a horse. It is interesting to observe how unfailingly in travelling over such places, that is, where the way is difficult or dangerous, animals arrange themselves in Indian file. Few people will doubt that there is reasoning in this as well as reason. The motive in the quadruped is the same as in the Indian. Those behind understand that it is likely to be safer for them to go where one of their kind has just passed in safety, than to take the chances of what may lie on the right or left. This is an act of reasoning: it is so in the same sense in which is the choice, made in an instant by a cat, when attacked by a dog, of the best position for defence the locality offers. In both instances there is comparison, and selection for a purpose. That it is done always, instantly, and rightly, does not take the act out of the category of reasoning.

This leads one to ask whether there is any proof that the faculty of reason in man differs specifically from the faculty of reason in the lower animals? If there be no specific difference between the senses, and the vital functions of the two, that alone would, primâ facie, be some ground for supposing that there is no specific difference between them as respects the faculty of reason, and this would seem to throw the burden of proof on those who might be disposed to assert that there is such a difference. In reply, however, to their arguments it might be observed that reason in both appears to have the same purpose, and to act in the same way, that of adapting action by the way of deduction from observation and experience to useful ends. The differences in the results are obviously enormous, but perhaps those may be accounted for without supposing any difference in the faculty itself. For instance, the possession of language multiplies and enlarges the uses of reason almost indefinitely. And then, furthermore, the inequalities of condition that exist among mankind determine very largely the degree in which each individual shall use his reason. And, with respect to these inequalities, it is not impossible but that all that exist, and that ever have existed among mankind, may be traced up ultimately to the possession of tools. It may therefore be argued, perhaps with more than plausibility, that if mankind were deprived utterly of language and of tools, the members of any community of men would be reduced among themselves to the same uniformity of level as is seen among the members of a community of any kind of sociable animals; and that then it would be hard to imagine any way in which the reasoning powers exhibited by these dumb, toolless, and among themselves indistinguishable men, would differ from the reasoning powers exhibited by the community of sociable animals. This supposition, if it be well grounded, would not at all lower mankind nor at all elevate the lower animals. It would leave both just where they are. It would only be, as far as it went, a right way of regarding certain phenomena. Upon this subject it ought to be kept in mind that the endless inequalities of condition among mankind oblige every individual to live, more or less, in a way different from others, and that differences of this kind increase as civilization advances; and that this may account for the fact that civilized man has greater powers of adaptation, and is less the child of habit than the savage. If mankind, from want of tools and language, had to spend their lives, like the lower animals, in doing a few simple acts always in the same way, then their way of doing these few simple acts would probably, as is the case with the lower animals, become transmissive, that is, instinctive. Man may be supposed to have the same capacity for forming instincts as the bee and the beaver, but in him the tendency to form them may be counteracted by the consequences of the use of language and of tools, which are incessantly varying human life as respects both its wants and the ways in which they are supplied.

You see a great deal in passing, of the indescribable clear blue of glacier ice—a tender, ethereal blue. Just as pearly pink, fiery red, fresh green, and imperial purple give rise within us to correspondent emotions, almost ideas, so does this glacier-ice blue. You have been admitted to look upon what has in it no smirch, no grossness, no warmth of earth—a purity not of this world. The man who can pass by this blue translucency without emotion, as if he had only looked upon a piece of blue serge, is of a hard heart and of a dull brain. His blood is thick. He is a lumpish Bœotian, a one-eyed Cyclops, a mentally distorted Caliban.

At 11 A.M. we reached the Bell Alp Hotel. It is, I suppose, about 1,500 feet above the glacier, and about a mile back from it. From the seats on the north-east of the house you look up a long reach of it. But now you see no blue. Of that I have just endeavoured to give my impressions: I must now do the same for the glacier as seen from this point. For all the world it looks like a grand highway in a vast mountain cutting. So regular are its surface and its sides, that they appear to have been the engineering, we will not say of man, but of a race of giants that must have once been on the earth. It has, however, the appearance of being still used by their pigmy successors, who never could have constructed it for themselves. They have retained it for their great north road—not the great north road of an island of no very considerable dimensions, but the great north road of a great continent. And it is now winter—for so it appears to be on the road as you are looking upon it—and the great road has been buried for some weeks in snow. And over this snow there has been a great deal of traffic; for it is the mid continental road. And this traffic of a great continent has beaten the snow very hard and much besmudged it. And there had, too, been a previous deep fall of snow, which it had been necessary to heap up in the middle of the road. This heaped up snow shows as a long dirty ridge. This is the great central moraine.

After you have seen it at the Eggischhorn much nearer, and much cleaner, and in combination with the snow-fields that feed it, this view, which only gives you a mile or two of the lower part of the glacier, does not much interest you from what is actually before your eyes. It only becomes interesting from what the mind supplies—from the interpretation the mind puts upon the intelligence telegraphed to it through the eye. As to that dirt upon the surface, the mind sees how it came there, and that it is now being carried down before you to aid in forming fruitful valleys. As to the tender ethereal blue below the dirt, that is still visible to the searching mental eye which sees beneath the dirt. The mind asks how far down below the dirt does that blue reach? None can say. There are, however, superficially, twenty miles of it, all of it a mile at least wide, much of it a great deal more, stretching away beyond what the bodily eye is beholding; and all this mass of solid yet ethereal blue was compacted out of little aery-light flakes of snow, and that was constructed out of little globules of floating vapour, and that had been pumped up from the far Atlantic by the sun, acting from a distance of many tens of millions of miles. And as this river of ethereal blue, so solid, so long, so broad, so deep, gravitates from the region of perpetual snow, aided, perhaps, by the irresistible expansion of ever-recurring internal congelation, it will gradually pass into another form, and go to fill Lake Leman, and to feed the Rhine, on its way back to the Atlantic, only to go through again the same process. What a drama of nature passes before the mind as you sit on that bench alongside the hotel, and look upon that Titan-engineered, deep-sunk, snow-buried, traffic-beaten, dirt-streaked road!

And so it is with everything: the mountain, the plain, the city, the châlet, the flower, the grasshopper. At first, and to the mechanical bodily eye, they are but unintelligible symbols and figures. It is the mind that enables us to know what the symbols and figures stand for. If your thought has not made out, or endeavoured to make out, with respect to these objects, what they are in themselves, how they came to be what they are, what they do, what is stirring within them, what are their relations to each other and to the great whole, then they are to you so many nothings; no more than so many strokes and dashes and points in nature’s notation, not understood. And just so, too, with men and women, than whom there is, after all, nothing better in this world. If we cannot read them—and it is the right reading that enables us to sympathize with them—then they are to us only so much organized matter, consuming so much bread and meat, occupying so much space, and often in our way, standing where we wish to stand; in the eyes indeed of many, organized matter so heinously endowed as to call for only dislike, contempt, and hard words. It is the savant and right, and if savant and right, then kindly, if not always quite pleasing, reading, even when what we have to read is something no better than men and women, than interests, and is good for heart and head. But Worldly Wise, who understands men and women thoroughly, perhaps through what he is able to understand of himself, is of a different way of thinking. ‘What if the men and women are good for nothing? How then?

‘Flowers are sometimes aberrant: still they ought to have been, and might have been, things of beauty. Their aberrancy is their misfortune, not their fault; the result of causes in the soil, the atmosphere, the parent plant, or something or other not originally in the flower itself.’

‘But how when the aberrancy has obliterated the flower, and nothing remains but unsightly monstrosity? A plague on such monstrosity.’