[THE LAKE OF GENEVA]
I.
Whether you feel sympathy, or not, with Calvin, the theologian, who gave us, at not more than twenty-eight years of age, the epoch-making Christian Institutes, or with Calvin, the inflexible governor, who helped to put to death poor Michael Servetus outside the city wall of Geneva, on the garden slopes of Champel, you can hardly fail to realize at least some transient flicker of interest when you contemplate, beneath its solitary fir-tree, and hard by a clump of box, the small, white, oblong stone—it is less than a foot long, and marked simply with the initials J. C.—that is supposed to mark the grave, in the old crowded cemetery near the Plaine du Plainpalais, of Jean Calvin, the politician and man. The cemetery itself is a little hard to find, for it lies hidden away in a commonplace back-quarter of the city, in a part that is far removed from all that is brightest, and most cosmopolitan, and therefore most familiar, in Geneva. Nor, even when you find it, is this grave of Calvin obvious, lost, as it is, amongst a thousand other tombs which rise in some disorder from amidst an inextricable tangle of daisies and long rank grass, of lady's-smock and dandelions. As happens almost always in old burial-grounds in Scotland, there is here an eloquent lack of Christian symbols: Catholics are buried here as well as Protestants, but the spirit of iconoclasm is none the less supreme—plenty of broken columns, of import purely Pagan, but never, I think, the Cross, lest it savour of superstition. This, too, was Wordsworth's experience in the burial-ground at Dumfries:
"'Mid crowded obelisks and urns
I sought the untimely grave of Burns."
Yet here, in this half-forgotten old graveyard, where Calvin was laid to rest when not quite fifty-five years of age, at least there is none of that nightmare horror that broods over Knox's cenotaph in the Necropolis at Glasgow. Calvin and Knox! We group the two in fancy when we stand here in this silent spot, on the edge of that same Geneva—how transfigured to-day in outward aspect not less than in mental outlook!—where Knox once ministered for more than a year in the little church of the Auditoire, and where Calvin once ruled with a rod of iron. At any rate this sombre old burial-ground, when so much else in the Geneva of to-day is almost aggressively gay and modern, is surely not unfitted for the last repose of a spirit so austere, and of logic so relentless. And this is what is written above the entrance: "Heureux ceux qui meurent au Seigneur. Ils reposent de leurs travaux et leurs œuvres les suivent."
Calvin, indeed, is inseparably connected with the greatest moment in Geneva's history. His rule for nearly a quarter of a century of this little city state is chosen by Lord Morley in his Romanes lecture at Oxford in 1897 as an outstanding illustration of what can be accomplished by moral forces in the absence of giant armies and big guns. It is impossible, in fact, to think of historical Geneva without thinking of Calvin, though Calvin himself was by birth a Frenchman, and hailed from the sleepy little city of Noyon (the German guns have spared it), in the department of the Aisne. Rousseau, on the other hand, though Genevese by birth, seems to belong more properly to the French Revolution, and to France. The tall, white tenement where the future author of the "Contrât Social" lived as a child may still be seen in the St. Gervais quarter, on the right bank of the river, at the junction, if I recollect rightly, of the present Rue Rousseau with the Place de Chevelu, in close proximity to a modiste's establishment and to a shop for the sale of fishing-tackle, and virtually, if not wholly, within sight and hearing of the music and blue swiftness of the Rhone. Actually, however, he was born in his maternal grandfather's house, which has since been pulled down, in the Grande Rue, towards the summit of the hill that is crowned by the Cathedral, in the high-town of Geneva. The old workman's quarter of St. Gervais is perhaps seldom visited by Englishmen, though everybody skirts it, perhaps half-a-dozen times a day, as they traverse the very modern Rue du Mont Blanc on their way to the main railway station, or to the splendid new Hôtel-des-Postes. Yet its eighteenth-century streets—this is possibly their date—are at least as full of interest, and are certainly far more typical, than the Parisian-like blocks of new houses that front the modern quays. If you want to realize the aspect of old Geneva properly, before the advent of the railway and the hordes of modern trippers, you should study the curious model now preserved in the splendid new Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, in the Rue des Casemates. Then it had no front, in the ordinary sense, towards the lake; and the islands in the Rhone were laden with quaint old tenements. Moreover, the whole city was then surrounded by a ring of many-angled fortifications in the familiar manner of Vauban.
THE JURA RANGE FROM THONON, HTE. SAVOIE.