Lord Byron, an exile of his own free will, having succeeded, not without difficulty, in persuading the world of fashion in his own country that he was, if not the Devil in person, at least a living copy of Manfred or Lara, had settled for the summer in a charming house on the east bank of the Lake of Geneva. He was living with an Italian physician named Polidori, who imitated him to the best of his ability. It was there that he composed a good many of his little poems, and that he tried his hardest to inspire the good Genevans with the same horror and terror that his fellow-countrymen felt for him; but this was pure affectation on his part, and he only half succeeded with it. "My nephew," Louis XIV. used to say of the Duc d'Orleans, "is, in the matter of crime, only a boastful pretender"; Lord Byron was only a boastful pretender in the matter of vice.
As he flattered himself that he was a good swimmer and sailor, he was perpetually crossing the Lake in all directions, and used to come fairly often to Coppet. His appearance was agreeable, but not at all distinguished. His face was handsome, but without expression or originality; his figure was round and short; he did not manœuvre his lame legs with the same ease and nonchalance as M. de Talleyrand. His talk was heavy and tiresome, thanks to his paradoxes, seasoned with profane pleasantries out of date in the language of Voltaire, and the commonplaces of a vulgar Liberalism. Madame de Staël, who helped all her friends to make the best of themselves, did what she could to make him cut a dignified figure without success; and when the first movement of curiosity had passed, his society ceased to attract, and no one was glad to see him.
Omitting from this chapter Rousseau and Voltaire, as having closer kinship to political philosophy than to literature, a next famous name to be recalled of this epoch is the author of Obermann, Étienne Pivert de Senancour. Senancour was born in France in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood, and passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and passed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: Éternité, deviens mon asile! The influence of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Madame de Staël shows in Senancour. Obermann is a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of Nature and of the human soul. Senancour has been introduced to the English-speaking public by the lofty praise of Matthew Arnold, who apostrophises him in Obermann:
How often, where the slopes are green
On Jaman, hast thou sate
By some high chalet-door, and seen
The summer-day grow late;
And darkness steal o'er the wet grass
With the pale crocus starr'd,
And reach that shimmering sheet of glass
Beneath the piny sward,
Lake Leman's waters, far below!
And watch'd the rosy light
Fade from the distant peaks of snow;
And on the air of night
Heard accents of the eternal tongue
Through the pine branches play——
In a later time practically all the most famous writers of English had some relation to Switzerland. Trelawney (Shelley's friend) was led first to seek Shelley's acquaintance through his introduction to "Queen Mab" by a Lausanne bookseller. Before he retraced his way to Italy in the hope of meeting Shelley there, Trelawney records that he saw an Englishman breakfasting: "Evidently a denizen of the North, his accent harsh, his skin white, of an angular and bony build, and self-confident and dogmatic in his opinions. With him, two ladies, whom it would appear from the blisters and blotches on their cheeks, lips and noses, that they were pedestrian tourists, fresh from the snow-covered mountains. The party breakfasted well, while the man cursed the godless wretches who have removed Nature's landmarks by cutting roads through Alps and Apennines. 'They will be arraigned hereafter with the unjust,' he shouted." Trelawney asked Wordsworth (for it was he, with his wife and sister) what he thought of Shelley as a poet—to which he replied, "Nothing." A Scotch terrier followed the Wordsworths into their carriage; "This hairy fellow our flea-trap," the poet shouted out, as they went off.
Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Arnold—all had close associations with Switzerland, and there still continues to flow there a constant stream of the world's genius. It is everybody's playground, and seems to have the power to tempt the man of imagination to longer stay. One effect is to give to Swiss people of the better educated classes a curiously international knowledge. Many of them seem to know all languages and to study all contemporary literature.