One of the strangest things about Venice to me was the curious manner in which you could always track a great public square or market place of some kind by following some thin trickling of people you would find making their way in a given direction. Suddenly in some quite silent residence section, with all its lovely waterways about you, you would encounter a small thin stream of people going somewhere, perhaps five or six in a row, over bridges, up narrow alleys, over more bridges, through squares or triangles past churches or small stores and constantly swelling in volume until you found yourself in the midst of a small throng turning now right, now left, when suddenly you came out on the great open market place or piazza to which they were all tending. They always struck me as a sheep-like company, these Venetians, very mild, very soft, pattering here and there with vague, almost sad eyes. Here in Venice I saw no newspapers displayed at all, nor ever heard any called, nor saw any read. There was none of that morning vigor which characterizes an American city. It was always more like a quiet village scene to me than any aspect of a fair-sized city. Yet because I was comfortable in Venice and because all the while I was there it was so radiantly beautiful, I left it with real sorrow. To me it was perfect.
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The one remaining city of Italy that I was yet to see, Milan, because already I had seen so much of Italy and because I was eager to get into Switzerland and Germany, was of small interest to me. It was a long, tedious ride to Milan, and I spent my one day there rambling about without enthusiasm. Outside of a half-dozen early Christian basilicas, which I sedulously avoided (I employed a guide), there was only the cathedral, the now dismantled palace and fortress of the Sforzas masquerading as a museum and the local art gallery, an imposing affair crowded with that same religious art work of the Renaissance which, one might almost say in the language of the Milwaukee brewer, had made Italy famous. I was, however, about fed up on art. As a cathedral that of Milan seemed as imposing as any, great and wonderful. I was properly impressed with its immense stained-glass windows, said to be the largest in the world, its fifty-two columns supporting its great roof, its ninety-eight pinnacles and two thousand statues. Of a splendid edifice such as this there is really nothing to say—it is like Amiens, Rouen, and Canterbury—simply astounding. It would be useless to attempt to describe the emotions it provoked, as useless as to indicate the feelings some of the pictures in the local gallery aroused in me. It would be Amiens all over again, or some of the pictures in the Uffizi. It seemed to me the newest of all the Gothic cathedrals I saw, absolutely preserved in all its details and as recently erected as yesterday, yet it was begun in 1386.
The wonder of this and of every other cathedral like it that I saw, to me, was never their religious but their artistic significance. Some one with a splendid imagination must always have been behind each one—and I can never understand the character or the temper of an age or a people that will let anything happen to them.
But if I found little of thrilling artistic significance after Rome and the south I was strangely impressed with the modernity of Milan. Europe, to me, is not so old in its texture anywhere as one would suppose. Most European cities of large size are of recent growth, just as American cities are. So many of the great buildings that we think of as time-worn, such as the Ducal Palace at Venice, and elsewhere, are in an excellent state of preservation—quite new looking. Venice has many new buildings in the old style. Rome is largely composed of modern tenements and apartment houses. There are elevators in Perugia, and when you reach Milan you find it newer than St. Louis or Cleveland. If there is any medieval spirit anywhere remaining in Milan I could not find it. The shops are bright and attractive. There are large department stores, and the honk-honk of the automobile is quite as common here as anywhere. It has only five hundred thousand population, but, even so, it evidences great commercial force. If you ride out in the suburbs, as I did, you see new houses, new factories, new streets, new everything. Unlike the inhabitants of southern Italy, the people are large physically and I did not understand this until I learned that they are freely mingled with the Germans. The Germans are here in force, in control of the silk mills, the leather manufactories, the restaurants, the hotels, the book stores and printing establishments. It is a wonder to me that they are not in control of the Opera House and the musical activities, and I have no doubt that they influence it greatly. The director of La Scala ought to be a German, if he is not. I got a first suggestion of Paris in the tables set before the cafés in the Arcade of Vittorio Emanuele and had my first taste of Germany in the purely German beer-halls with their orchestras of men or women, where for a few cents expended for beer you can sit by the hour and listen to the music. In the hotel where I stopped the German precision of regulation was as marked as anywhere in Germany. It caused me to wonder whether the Germans would eventually sweep down and possess Italy and, if they did, what they would make of it or what Italy would make of them.
CHAPTER XLII
LUCERNE
I entered Switzerland at Chiasso, a little way from Lake Como in Italy, and left it at Basle near the German frontier, and all I saw was mountains—mountains—mountains—some capped with snow and some without, tall, sharp, craggy peaks, and rough, sharp declivities, with here and there a patch of grass, here and there a deep valley, here and there a lonely, wide-roofed, slab-built house with those immense projecting eaves first made familiar to me by the shabby adaptations which constitute our “L” stations in New York. The landscape hardens perceptibly a little way out of Milan. High slopes and deep lakes appear. At Chiasso, the first stop in Switzerland, I handed the guard a half-dozen letters I had written in Milan and stamped with Italian stamps. I did not know until I did this that we were out of Italy, had already changed guards and that a new crew—Swiss—was in charge of the train. “Monsieur,” he said, tapping the stamp significantly, “vous êtes en Suisse.” I do not understand French, but I did comprehend that, and I perceived also that I was talking to a Swiss. All the people on the platform were “Schweitzers” as the Germans call them, fair, chunky, stolid-looking souls without a touch of that fire or darkness so generally present a few miles south. Why should a distance of ten miles, five miles, make such an astonishing change? It is one of the strangest experiences of travel, to cross an imaginary boundary-line and find everything different; people, dress, architecture, landscape, often soil and foliage. It proves that countries are not merely soil and climatic conditions but that there is something more—a race stock which is not absolutely a product of the soil and which refuses to yield entirely to climate. Races like animals have an origin above soil and do hold their own in spite of changed or changing climatic conditions. Cross any boundary you like from one country into another and judge for yourself.
Now that I was started, really out of Italy, I was ready for any change, the more marked the better; and here was one. Switzerland is about as much like Italy as a rock is like a bouquet of flowers—a sharp-edged rock and a rich colorful, odorous bouquet. And yet, in spite of all its chill, bare bleakness, its high ridges and small shut-in valleys, it has beauty, cold but real. As the train sped on toward Lucerne I kept my face glued to the window-pane on one side or the other, standing most of the time in the corridor, and was rewarded constantly by a magnificent panorama. Such bleak, sharp crags as stood always above us, such cold, white fields of snow! Sometimes the latter stretched down toward us in long deep cañons or ravines until they disappeared as thin white streaks at the bottom. I saw no birds of any kind flying; no gardens nor patches of flowers anywhere, only brown or gray or white châlets with heavy overhanging eaves and an occasional stocky, pale-skinned citizen in a short jacket, knee trousers, small round hat and flamboyant waistcoat. I wondered whether I was really seeing the national costume. I was. I saw more of it at Lucerne, that most hotelly of cities, and in the mountains and valleys of the territory beyond it—toward Basle. Somebody once said of God that he might love all the creatures he had made but he certainly couldn’t admire them. I will reverse that for Switzerland. I might always admire its wonders but I could never love them.
And yet after hours and hours of just this twisting and turning up slope and down valley, when I reached Lucerne I thought it was utterly beautiful. Long before we reached there the lake appeared and we followed its shores, whirling in and out of tunnels and along splendid slopes. Arrived at Lucerne, I came out into the piazza which spreads before the station to the very edge of the lake. I was instantly glad that I had included Lucerne in my itinerary. It was evening and the lamps in the village (it is not a large city) were already sparkling and the water of the lake not only reflected the glow of the lamps along its shores but the pale pinks and mauves over the tops of the peaks in the west. There was snow on the upper stretches of the mountains but down here in this narrow valley filled with quaint houses, hotels, churches and modern apartments, all was balmy and pleasant,—not at all cold. My belongings were bundled into the attendant ’bus and I was rattled off to one of the best hotels I saw abroad—the National—of the Ritz-Carlton system; very quiet, very ornate, and with all those conveniences and comforts which the American has learned to expect, plus a European standard of service and politeness of which we can as yet know nothing in America.