Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

The history of these matters is instructive, and ought to be noted. Of course there must have been a time, before the advent of maize and potatoes, when wheat was largely cultivated in the Lower Valais. Doubtless the yield was not great, and what there was must have been of very inferior quality. Still home-grown wheat must then have been the mainstay of the people. Maize and potatoes, when time brought them, were found to be more productive, and more to be relied upon in such a locality: and so they have superseded wheat almost entirely. In some other districts, which, while they are more industrious, have also attained to the advantage of easy access to wheat markets, the culture of grass has superseded that of wheat. Their inhabitants, by converting their abundant grass crops into cheese and beef, have obtained the means, from the same extent of ground, and with less labour, for procuring a larger amount of wheat, and of far better quality, than they could have grown at home. This is precisely what was done in the case of the few vineyards which once were cultivated in the south of England. There was a time, when from their immature grapes was produced, at a great cost, very bad wine. It would then, from the deficiencies and uncertainties of transit, have been very difficult to have got wine from beyond sea. Besides, too, there was not much to be given in exchange for it. But the time came when it would cost little to convey from beyond sea what was better than the home produce; and when there were markets for the wheat, and meat, and wool that could be produced at home; and this gave also the means for purchasing the better produce of foreign vineyards. English vineyards, therefore, and their sour, costly, and uncertain produce disappeared. The power of the Rhone at present, like the unutilized powers of an uncultivated and unregulated intellect, not only goes to waste, but also does harm: when it shall have been turned to account it will—railway communication also by that time having come to be more fully carried out, and the principles of free trade more generally understood and acted on—give the millers and bakers of the Valais the means for making their purchases in the corn markets of Germany, France, and Italy: and the people of the Valais will be all the better for it.

In the Valais, as elsewhere, throughout our excursion, I noticed how great had been this year, in Switzerland, the failure of the fruit crop. This had been caused by a very severe late frost, the effect of which we had felt in the same way, almost to an equal extent, in many parts of England: though here, of course, a diminution of that crop is a matter of comparatively little moment. Except in the valley of the Tessin, on the south side of the Alps, I did not see any fruit on the walnut trees, though I looked for it whenever I passed one. As in Switzerland they are grown largely for the sake of the oil expressed from the nut—the produce of a fair-sized tree is, in average years, worth about six francs—the loss on this item alone of the fruit crop was very considerable. I observed that the foliage of the fruitless trees was unusually luxuriant, and that the foliage of those that had fruit in the valley of the Tessin was not by half so abundant, nor was what they had of so dark a green as that of the barren trees to the north. It was just the reverse with the cherry trees. They also had been smitten by the frost, and they had been hit so hard that many were dead, but nowhere, except on the Rigi, did I see any with healthy foliage. The crop, too, of apples and pears was sadly deficient. Most trees of these kinds were entirely without fruit. Those which had some fruit were, as it was generally easy to see, sheltered in some way or other, frequently by some lofty, partially overhanging walnut-tree. Fruit enters so largely into the total of Swiss industry, that we can readily suppose that the late frosts and snowfalls of 1873 must have cost the peasants some millions of francs.

We reached Lausanne late in the afternoon. Our first care was to get our heavy baggage from the Post Office. I had had mine with me for only so short a time at the commencement of the Month, and had made so little use of any part of it, that I was now almost disposed to think that it would have been as well had I not encumbered myself with it. As, however, one cannot tell what may occur in the way of weather, and of possible mishaps of many kinds, it is as well, to some extent, to be provided with duplicates and supernumeraries. The best limitation perhaps is that of what you can easily lift, and carry yourself, in and out of railway stations.

August 31.—Sunday.—We attended morning service in the chief church of the town. If anything can be inferred from a single sermon, one might suppose, from what we heard this morning, that the Swiss Reformed Church at Lausanne is in the stage in which we were when Blair’s Sermons were in high estimation and were passing through many editions. In the afternoon we formed part of an English congregation that was addressed by an English clergyman in the same church.

In the evening we went down to Ouchy to walk, on the margin of the lake, in the beautiful grounds of the Beaurivage Hotel. We saw in several places the water rising and subsiding through holes it had lately formed in the pavement of the marginal terrace walk. It had been able to effect this in consequence of the level of the lake being this year so much higher than usual that the wash of its waves was able to undermine what had hitherto been out of their reach. Was this elevation of the lake caused by the unusual amount of snow that fell late last spring, at the time when so much injury was done to the fruit trees? There is everywhere this year more snow on the mountains than usual. This must make the streams also, that descend from them, fuller than usual, which must therefore bring more water than usual into the lake. There are, however, in this lake some elevations and subsidences of its level, which cannot be accounted for by such causes as that to which I have just referred.

September 1.—In the forenoon we walked on the fine terrace to the west of the Hotel Gibbon. After a time I took a seat upon a bench on the gravel beneath the lofty elms. Before me was the lake. On the two or three acres of grass behind the trees were some English lads playing at football. I seated myself on the bench, I suppose because I was thinking of Gibbon, and wished to look upon the view he had often looked upon. I repeated, as he gives them in his autobiographical memoirs, two of the most interesting passages in literary history:[3] one being that in which he records that the idea of his great work ‘first started to his mind at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as he sat musing among the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter;’ and the other that in which he describes its completion, within a few months of twenty-three years afterwards, near the spot on which I was seated: ‘It was on the day, or rather night of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.’ It was a right instinct that led him to record both the conception of the idea, and the conclusion, of his great work. M. Guizot, no mean judge of such work, says that it is the only true book in the English language; the only book we have which contains a grand idea worthily worked out. Regarded in this light it almost stands in a class of its own, as the grandest piece of literary work the human mind has ever elaborated. It is great in its subject; human history supplies nothing greater. It is great in the vast amount of labour expended in preparing and shaping the materials requisite for its construction. It is great in its style. It is great in the breadth of view it takes, and in the philosophic spirit with which it is animated. Such a combination of the sources of literary greatness, and each element in so high a degree, are not to be found in any other book. Other books may be named which have given a greater amount of, and more intense pleasure. The Homeric poems doubtless did this, when they formed well-nigh all the intellectual food of the most sensitive-minded of all people. Others may have done more to enrich thought and to humanize hearts. This the dramas of Shakespeare have done: which show, too, the fertility and creative power of the human mind to a degree as far beyond Gibbon’s capacity as was the philosophic insight of Aristotle or Bacon. And other historians, as Thucydides, may have had more appreciative sagacity for dealing with the characters of those who cross the scene of their pages. Still there is in Gibbon’s book a comprehensiveness, a massiveness, a grandeur, alike of subject and of treatment, which make it one of the greatest of literary monuments. It is so great a work that the spot on which its last sentence was written, and of which Gibbon records that he penned it there, adding particulars that much enhance the interest of the record, will be regarded, so long as his ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ shall be read, as classical ground in literary history.

How strange that a mind of such capacity for labour, such farness of reach, such power of grasp, should have been encased in, and had to work with so uncouth a body. In my younger days I had an old friend who had known Gibbon well. I often asked him what he recollected of him: but I never got from him anything more than that he was fond of whist, though not a good player; very awkward in his movements; and shockingly ugly. One can imagine that this very ungainliness of form and feature was, in some respects, advantageous to him intellectually. Being physically excluded from those fields of ordinary rivalry in which strength and external beauty win, he was as it were obliged to turn to those in which intellect only can take a part. He almost, to some extent, belonged to that class of men of whom Bacon remarks that they are greatly daring, in order to show that in that respect, at all events, they are the equals of those whose bodily endowments are superior to their own. If he could have taken a part in such vigorous sports as those lads were engaged in who at the moment were struggling and shouting behind me, would his great work ever have been accomplished? Possibly not.

It belonged to Gibbon’s age to take a low view of man. But there is a peculiarity in the lowness of the view he took, which may in some degree have received its colouring from the cause I have just referred to. Had he been physically a better man, he would have read men and women with more sympathy and kindliness; and therefore with more sagacity. Some traces there are, I think, of Pope’s crooked back, and of Byron’s club-foot, in their poetry. So there are, I think, of Gibbon’s ugliness and ungainliness in his great history.

But the main point is, what effect has this history had in the world of thought? As its subject, its learning, its style, its length prevent its ever getting into the hands of the generality of readers, on them it can only act at second hand. It must come to them through the minds of the comparatively few who can think, to some extent, for themselves. Now I am disposed to hold that the effect it has on such minds, if at all of the first order, is far from being bad. In them it cannot but deepen the love of truth and virtue, and enlarge the estimate they would otherwise have been disposed to form of the value of comprehensiveness, thoroughness, and honesty in literary work. And may we not say something of the same kind of that other great literary worker also, who was in many respects not wholly unlike Gibbon: at all events in having lived and worked on the shores of this lake, and in this town of Lausanne. As I looked out from this terrace over the blue expanse below, with Gibbon and Voltaire in my mind, I thought it not improbable that the day might come when it will be seen that their faults belonged to their age, and to the conditions under which their work was done. Society, if its regeneration was to be attempted, required then, first of all, the clearance of many inveterate, strong, and poisonous overgrowths. This in a coarse age could hardly have been effected except by coarse means. These workers appeared to be aiming at the destruction both of the noxious overgrowths, and of the soil out of which they grew. Fortunately, however, that was impossible. The soil can support either a noxious or a wholesome growth, but cannot itself be destroyed. It ever remains, ready to support either growth, according to the degree of neglect or care, and the kind of culture applied to it. Under the evil conditions of those times the better culture could hardly have been the prominent idea. The clearance of what was noxious alone appeared either possible or desirable. At all events, in a coarse age those who coarsely assailed hypocrisy and injustice were worlds better than those who coarsely lived in and by hypocrisy and injustice. We must remember this when we shrink from their sneers and scoffs. They did what they could to clear the soil, which is more open now for us to cultivate rightly. Their hatred of hypocrisy and injustice has made it more easy for us to love honesty and justice. When the world shall have come to understand these points, the Lake of Geneva will not be regarded as, in human history, what many now hold it to be, the antithesis of the Sea of Tiberias.

At 1 P.M. I left Lausanne for London. At 4 I was at Neuchâtel. At 6 I crossed, at Verrières, from Switzerland into France. At 5 P.M. the next day I was in London. In these twenty-three hours from the Swiss border to London were included two and a half hours at Paris for breakfast and a bath. When we bring together the magnitude of the events that have recently occurred in the world, the import of the questions now in debate, the facility with which one may now visit whatever scenes of interest or instructiveness the world possesses, and remember that we are now coming to see that all it contains is capable of interesting and instructing, our conclusion I think must be, that there never were such times to live in as these of ours. Almost every object, and every day, has now its interest.