The Spell of Switzerland

by Nathan Haskell Dole

Ruth called my attention to what Lord Bacon said about travel. In his day “the grand tour” was the culmination of a young nobleman’s education, and Italy was the goal. Switzerland was merely an obstacle on the way, to be crossed with more or less discomfort and with little thought of its picturesqueness. Ruth took down a handsome edition of the “Essays” and turned to the one which treats of this subject and read it aloud to me.

It was not in accordance with his scheme to fill the mind with pictures of beautiful scenery, though he realized that for young men it is a part of education and for their elders a part of experience. He says:—“He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school and not to travel.” He would not object for young men to travel provided they take a tutor who knows languages and “may be able to tell them what things are worthy to be seen in the country where they go, what acquaintances they are to seek, what exercises or discipline the place yieldeth; for else young men shall go hooded and look abroad little.”

He believed in keeping diaries. He tells us that the things to be seen and observed are:—“the courts of princes, especially when they give audience to ambassadors; the courts of justice, while they sit and hear causes; and so of consistories ecclesiastic; the churches and monasteries, with the monuments which are therein extant; the walls and fortifications of cities and towns; and so the havens and harbors, antiquities and ruins, libraries, colleges, disputations and lectures where any are; shipping and navies; houses and gardens of state and pleasure, near great cities; armories, arsenals, magazines, exchanges, burses, warehouses, exercises of horsemanship, fencing, training of soldiers and the like; comedies, such whereunto the better sort of persons do resort; treasuries of jewels and robes; cabinets and rarities; and to conclude, whatsoever is memorable in the places where they go, after all which the tutors or servants ought to make diligent inquiry. As for triumphs, masks, feasts, weddings, funerals, capital executions and such shows, men need not to be put in mind of them; yet they are not to be neglected.”

He did not believe in staying long in any one city or town; but “more or less as the place deserveth, but not long,” nor staying in any one part of a town: “Let him change his lodging from one end and part of the town to another, which is a great adamant of acquaintance.” And he advised “sequestering himself from the company of his countrymen and diet in such places where there is good company of the nation where he travelleth.” Acquaintance was the thing to cultivate, especially secretaries and attachés or, as Bacon called them, “employed men of ambassadors,” and the reason for this was that he might “suck the experience of many.”

“When a traveller returneth home,” he says in conclusion, “let him not leave the countries where he hath travelled altogether behind him, but maintain a correspondence by letter with those of his acquaintance which are of most worth; and let his travel appear rather in his discourse than in his apparel or gesture, and in his discourse let him be rather advised in his answers than forward to tell stories, and let it appear that he doth not change his country manners for those of foreign parts but only prick in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his own country.”

I remarked that Ralph Waldo Emerson found to his disappointment on his first trip abroad that he could not rid himself of himself. It was the same Emerson in Rome, in Paris and in London, as in Boston. How much would travel do for such a man? The great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, never ventured more than sixty miles from Königsberg and he was lost if varied from the daily routine of shuttle-like attendance on his lectures—back and forth, back and forth.

“Yet,” said I, “Kant wrote remarkably accurate descriptions of Switzerland in his Physical Geography. He could never have seen the Alps except in his imagination.

“What better description can you find than in his ‘Comparison of the Beautiful with the Pleasant and the Good’ where he says:—‘Bold, overhanging and as it were threatening rocks; clouds up-piled in the heavens; moving along with flashes of lightning and peals of thunder; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; tornadoes with their swath of devastation; the limitless ocean in a state of uproar and similar spectacles exhibit our power of resistance as insignificantly puny compared to their might. But the spectacle of them is the more fascinating, the more terrible it is and we are prone to call these objects sublime, because they raise the powers of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a power of resistance of an entirely different sort—one which gives us the courage to pit ourselves against the apparently infinite power of Nature.’”

MONT BLANC AND THE VALLEY OF CHAMONIX.