A JOURNEY
BY
HUGH KINGSMILL LUNN
(New College)
IV. A JOURNEY
Every right-minded reader loves a few books in defiance of his own critical canons. One cannot be for ever brooding over the best that is known and thought in the world. Such an uncanonical book to me is Ouida’s Moths. It was in Dresden, towards the end of May 1908, that I read it for the first time. Summer was in the air, a German summer of blue skies and lazy white clouds drifting to the south. In April, when I arrived, I liked Dresden well enough, was prepared to stop there quietly till October, learning German. But as the cold weather passed, each day left me more restless, cramped by the monotonous, speckless streets, irked by a vision of the summer Alps, a shining mountain wall beyond the southern horizon. The spirit of romance was upon me, that heedless of realistic truth invests with ideal charm whatever is far off. To such a mood Ouida appealed strongly. For she was perhaps the last of those romantics who created out of the dust and dreariness of eighteenth-century Europe a fairyland of beauty. Germany to her was still the mystic land, dreaming of the Middle Ages; Italy still Mignon’s Italy, a place of orange groves and pillared palaces. In the ardour of her revolt against the naturalist school she often, no doubt, became grotesque. Her landscapes are as gloriously unreal as the heroes and heroines who move through them. But what of that? Unreality has its own charm, and even its own truth.
Certainly that May in Dresden I read with uncavilling love all that she had to tell of Ischl, in the Austrian Alps, on whose mountains you may shoot, if you will, the golden eagle and the vulture. And with envy and longing I read how Vere and Correze retreated from the world to an old house, simple yet noble, with terraces facing the Alps of the Valais. Here on the hills above Sion the air is pure and clear as crystal, strong as wine, the cattle maiden sings on the high grass slopes, and the fresh-water fisherman answers her from his boat on the lake below. In vain I reminded myself that one does not shoot golden eagles, and that the Valaisan peasants, bent by ceaseless labour almost out of human semblance, have neither the leisure nor the wish to carol songs to one another. The divine unreason of romance was too strong for me, quickening and giving colour to a prosaic discontent with a studious life in a too orderly German town.
And so it came about, exactly when and how I forget, that I decided to go to Switzerland: a simple decision, yet thrilling enough to me just free from ten years of school discipline. The German family with which I was staying had fixed on a Bavarian village, Oberkreuzberg by name, for their summer holidays. It seemed to me that this village would be a convenient base from which to make a hurried dash of two or three days to the Alps. Bavaria, however, was a bigger place than I had thought, and Oberkreuzberg, when I arrived there one evening in the middle of July, seemed desolatingly apart from the world. And though, as the days passed, I grew to love the place, this sense of detachment did not weaken. Oberkreuzberg was set on a spur of the highest mountain in the Bavarian Forest. From the church that crowned the hill the houses fell sharply away to the south on either side of the straggling main street. In all directions, except the north, the outlook was bounded only by the horizon. To the east were the low-lying Bohemian hills, to the south the Danube, and the plain beyond, where Munich lies, and farther still the mountains of Tyrol, visible to the naked eye, so the villagers said, on a clear winter day. And to the south-west, visible to me alone, hung the chain of the Swiss Alps. The wide prospect made the village seem not less but more obscure. To those locked in a narrow valley, however desolate, the world lies on the other side of the hills. But between Oberkreuzberg and the world lay expanses stretching away to dim horizons.
The villagers took a frank delight and interest in me that further strengthened my feeling of distance from ordinary life. Stray Germans from the north, burghers from Munich, came with each summer, but hitherto no Englishman had visited the village. My arrival was an event. Indeed, Herr Göckeritz, the genial old Saxon with whom I stayed in Dresden, told me that it had been mentioned in a sermon as a token of Oberkreuzberg’s spreading fame. I was a reversed Haroun-al-Raschid, important because unknown. The village children followed me about curiously, and when I shut myself in my room clamoured outside till appeased with largesse of pfennig pieces. On the grass in front of my window lay logs ready for building purposes, and the Annas, Marias, and Babettes of the village, small bare-legged girls, used to disport themselves there every afternoon, chasing each other from log to log with reckless agility. In the fields near by I could see their elders working, bent battered peasants.
Outside the village were scattered some large boulders, and on the flat top of one of these I would spend an hour or two each afternoon, reading and meditating. The blue distances troubled me with the vague longings which had stirred to song many a little German poet in the days before Bismarck. The melodies of their heart’s unrest are mere sentimental vapourings to the modern critic. What does it all mean, he asks, this talk of wandering, knapsack on back, into the wide world to seek the blue flower of romance on the blue hills of the horizon? In the same spirit Leslie Stephen, the high-priest of orthodox mountain-worship, found Byron’s Swiss poetry cheap and insincere. As a hard-headed agnostic, suspicious of emotion not founded on fact, he resented no doubt such verse as:—
‘The fish swam by the castle wall,
And they seemed joyous each and all.
The eagle rode the rising blast,
Methought he never flew so fast.’