LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE

 
 THE SENTIMENTAL 
 TRAVELLER
 
 THE SENTIMENTAL 
 TRAVELLER ^ & ^ 
 
 NOTES ON PLACES ^ 
 
 BY 
 
 VERNON LEE ^seo<d' 
 
 LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMVHI
 
 
 WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES
 
 DEDICATION
 
 To 
 
 Irene Forbes-Mosse 
 Geborene Grdfin 'v. Flemming 
 
 To whom should I dedicate this book, if not 
 to you, dear neighbour and fellow-traveller ? 
 Neighbour, not merely in a brick-and-mortar 
 (and, since I have built it, let us hope, not in- 
 commodious) dwelling, but in the closer vicinity 
 of thought and feelings. And fellow-traveller, 
 also, down the sloping twilit years, as well as 
 across the woods and vineyards and old gabled 
 market-places of this unmetaphorical world of 
 space. 
 
 It has always seemed to me that to know 
 a country one must have friends belonging to 
 it ; bodiless friends, perhaps, in book or music 
 score ; but better, friends of flesh and blood, 
 the colour of whose eyes and skin, the gesture 
 of whose hands and cadence of whose voice 
 bring direct and unreasoned experience of a 
 whole race's temper and gifts. Gifts in both 
 
 vii
 
 Dedication 
 
 meanings of the word ; for to those who will 
 receive, each country brings its spiritual riches : 
 wine and wheat, and milk and honey of life, 
 healing mountain herbs, lavender also to keep 
 our locked presses sweet, and incense gums, in 
 the wreathes of whose smoke there arise visions 
 and wonders. 
 
 Possessors and givers of gifts, that is what 
 all true friends are, according to their tempera- 
 ment and circumstances, more especially, even, 
 according to the country of their birth and 
 bringing up. Thus to have had friends of 
 various nationality has always seemed one of 
 the signal good fortunes of my life, adding a 
 meaning to that of books, even as books add 
 meaning to the landscape given us by the eye. 
 And to enlarge on this good fortune is not mere 
 gratitude or self-gratulation, but, in our times of 
 dog-in-the-manger and bluster-to-keep-up-your- 
 courage nationalism, a public duty one should 
 go out of the way to accomplish, lest the world 
 be built over with custom-houses and barracks. 
 
 How the soul of a nation can be felt through 
 that of an individual is illustrated by all that 
 my youth owed to Spain. I do not know the 
 language enough to spell through a chapter of 
 
 viii
 
 Dedication 
 
 Cervantes ; and I have been only a month in 
 the country, in the south, moreover, and coming 
 and going by sea without even passing Madrid, 
 Castile, and the Pyrenees. But Spain has helped 
 my whole life with its ironical paradox, its 
 hyperbolic, " all or nothing " Quixotry, its 
 cavalier aloofness from petty realities and futile 
 advantage, its preference, as in the painting of 
 Velasquez compared with that of Rubens, of the 
 black and white bony essentials of things to their 
 pink and juicy pulpiness. And all through a 
 random friendship, lopsided and unaccountable 
 as befits his country, with a retired Spanish 
 diplomatist, who, if still living, has utterly for- 
 gotten his young friend of near thirty years ago. 
 Matters have seemed more commonplace and 
 intelligible with my French and Italian friend- 
 ships. Yet I could never put in words what 
 I have learned from my French friends of // 
 friendship as such, of high-bred simplicity and 
 goodness, and lucid humane idealism. Nor 
 what deep-seated serene reasonableness, what 
 grace, and what genius I have met, like the 
 flower-grown walls and buried treasure of old, 
 old civilizations, in the everyday life of my 
 dear Italians. And may one not speak, as if 
 
 ix
 
 Dedication 
 
 from outside, of one's own compatriots ? How 
 often has there not been brought home to me 
 the chivalrous adventure and passionate poetry 
 of our race, quivering beneath the reserve and 
 the silence of some English friend ! 
 
 But of all the countries, the first to be good 
 to me was Germany, coming, in the shape of my 
 nurses and of my dear Bernese governess, fairy- 
 like to my christening or thereabouts. And 
 now, at the other end of my life, here is 
 Germany once more with her gifts in your dear 
 hands, my fellow-traveller, my neighbour. You 
 have lit up once more the Christmas-tree hung 
 round with dear childish splendours, but smell- 
 ing of all the moss and woodruff and centuries- 
 deep dead leaves of the rustling and sighing and 
 singing, the mysterious and musical German 
 forests. And who, better than you, could have 
 done it ; and were you not born for just such a 
 Bescheerung 9 For they were your great-uncles, 
 those Grimms and Brentanos, who wrote down 
 the Fairy Tales and the ballads of the Wunderhorriy 
 and made finer ones themselves, your uncle 
 Clemens actually giving the Rhine, in a freak 
 of literary forgery, her presiding Lorelei. Was 
 it not your grandfather, Achim von Arnim, 
 
 X
 
 Dedication 
 
 who wrote the masterpiece of German Romantik, 
 of gruesomeness and mystery and humour and 
 absurdity, the story of Isabella von Egypten f 
 Far more, in that portrait in your possession, 
 your grandmother is seated at the piano which 
 was chosen for her by Beethoven, and she 
 muses over the letters which Goethe had written 
 her when she was the Child^ the Bettina of the 
 immortal correspondence. Who, therefore, is 
 more fitting than you to light up once more 
 the magic tapers of the Christmas-tree ? 
 
 It is in return for this latest and greatest gift 
 of German friendship that I now give you, 
 absurdly disproportionate ! this little book of 
 mine. 
 
 For this reason, and also, dear neighbour and 
 fellow-traveller, because we have met at a stage 
 of life's journey when there remains little to 
 distract us from its sentimental and humorous 
 contemplation ; and we may, therefore, hope to 
 continue it together to the end of the volume, 
 the volume which is not written and printed, 
 but lived. 
 
 Vernon Lee. 
 
 Vallombrosa, 
 
 July, 1907. 
 
 xi
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Dedication 
 
 PAGE 
 V 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 GERMANY 
 
 II. Up the Rhine . 
 
 III. Stiftsdamen 
 
 IV. " Goslar, once Imperial " 
 V. Wernigerode 
 
 VI. Goethe at Weimar . 
 
 VII. The Brahms-fest at Meiningen 
 
 VIII. The Scottish Church at Ratisbon 
 
 IX. Prague and the Princess . 
 
 17 
 26 
 
 37 
 44 
 50 
 62 
 69 
 
 77 
 
 ITALY 
 
 X. Of Roads 87 
 
 XI. The Bead-Threader's Funeral and the 
 
 Church of the Greeks ... 94 
 
 XII. The River Temple of Cividale * , 103 
 xiii
 
 Contents 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 XIII. The Mountain of Portofino 
 
 XIV. Narni and Terni 
 
 XV. TlVOLI AND THE SiBYL . 
 
 XVI. The Hills of the Setting Sun 
 
 XVII. The Bishop's Villa . 
 
 XVIII. All Souls' Eve at Barbialla 
 
 PACK 
 
 122 
 132 
 
 140 
 
 H7 
 154 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 XIX. In Praise of Night Travelling . 
 
 XX. Montreuil 
 
 XXI. The Heart of France 
 
 XXII. Two French Abbeys . 
 
 XXIII. A Deserted Pavilion in Touraine 
 
 XXIV. The Petit Picpus 
 
 XXV. The Chapel of the Sick Children at 
 Berck ..... 
 
 XXVI. La Ferte-sous-Jouarre 
 
 163 
 171 
 
 179 
 
 187 
 
 201 
 
 208 
 218 
 
 SWITZERLAND 
 
 XXVII. Hackneyed Switzerland 
 XXVIII. Sackingen and the Trumpeter 
 XXI^. A Ride in the Alps . 
 xiv 
 
 233 
 
 239 
 247
 
 Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XXX. The Witches of Fribourg . . .253 
 
 XXXI. The "Beautiful Souls" of Schloss 
 
 Rapperswyl . . . . .259 
 
 XXXII. Gruyeres 267 
 
 XXXIII. THE KEEPSAKE . . . .273 
 
 XV
 
 ^* INTRODUCTION
 
 THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER 
 
 LAST week, during a visit to a seaside 
 place which has played a certain 
 J part in my life of reality and fancy, 
 in my humble " Wahrheit und 
 Dichtung," some questions asked made me 
 aware that my friends, even the nearest and 
 dearest, imagine me to have been born and 
 brought up in a gipsy-cart, at any rate meta- 
 phorically. A childhood of romantic roamings 
 would account in their eyes for my worship of 
 the Genius of Places, such as it is, and for my 
 being a Sentimental Traveller. Now all, this 
 happens not to be the case ; and having dis- 
 covered this agreeable myth, I want to dispel it, 
 not because it is erroneous (which most state- 
 ments about friends' lives are), but because 
 there might be deduced from it a view of things 
 in general the exact reverse of the one I have. 
 Since I believe that living in gipsy-carts (or 
 
 3 B 2
 
 J 
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 trains de luxe^ motors, and Cook's hotels) is of 
 all modes of life the most sacrilegious to the 
 Genius Loci ; and as regards myself, that I 
 have grown into a Sentimental Traveller because 
 I have travelled not more, but less, than most 
 folk — at all events, travelled a great deal less 
 than I have wanted. 
 
 For the passion for localities, the curious 
 emotions connected with lie of the land, shape 
 of buildings, history, and even quality of air 
 and soil, are born, like all intense and per- 
 meating feeling, less of outside things than of 
 our own soul. They are of the stuff of dreams, 
 and must be brooded over in quiet and void. 
 The places for which we feel such love are 
 fashioned, before we see them, by our wishes 
 and fancy ; we recognize rather than discover 
 them in the world of reality ; and this power of 
 shaping, or at least seeing, things to suit our 
 hearts' desire, comes not of facility and surfeit, 
 but of repression and short commons. 
 
 This is probably true about a great many 
 matters ; I know it by experience in that of the 
 feeling for places. Instances may indeed be 
 quoted which seem to go against me, but they 
 do not really ; instances, I mean, of the passion 
 
 4
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 for travel growing by what it feeds on. Thus 
 among our mothers and grandmothers there 
 arose a breed of Sentimental Travellers, in- 
 satiate, indefatigable, some of whom still survive 
 (and may they long do so !) to show our puny 
 generations what the passion for localities can 
 do at threescore and ten. Priestesses of the 
 Genius Loci, vestals often, urged by divine 
 frenzy across the picturesque globe, from 
 dangerous inn to even more formidable pension, 
 from caravanserai to mysterious Casa de Hues- 
 pedes, reputable maenads, bearing instead of 
 thyrsi and haunches of kid, campstools and old- 
 fashioned sunshades ; but sedate with nods and 
 becks and wreathed smiles under caps and 
 bonnets which seem fresh from the bandboxes 
 of " Cranford " ; venerable and exquisite priest- 
 esses of the Divinity of Places, sacred and 
 wonderful above all other old ladies. . . . They 
 seem, indeed, to have always travelled ; and we 
 wish, we pray, they may ever continue to do 
 so ; thus apparently reducing my theories to 
 nonsense. But it is not so. For consider 
 their parentage and upbringing. Their fathers 
 and mothers witnessed the first railways, and 
 were penned up very likely in our islands by 
 
 5
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the wars of Napoleon. They are born of in- 
 numerable stay-at-home generations ; and this 
 unimpaired zest for travel is but the accumulated 
 thwarted longing of all those sedentary lives. 
 
 As for myself, I cannot indeed pretend that 
 my immediate forebears were stay-at-homes, or 
 that my childhood should be described as 
 sedentary. We shifted our quarters invariably 
 every six months, and, by dint of shifting, 
 crossed Europe's length and breadth in several 
 directions. But this was ?noving, not travellings 
 and we contemned all travellers. That little 
 seaside place, which started these reflections, 
 has brought home the difference to me, and 
 made me grasp that if I am a Sentimental 
 Traveller 'tis because I was not brought up to 
 travel. To spend a month by the sea had been 
 a strange departure from immemorial custom ; 
 for did we not divide the year between two 
 places only, usually in the same country, six 
 months called " winter" in one, and six months 
 called " summer " in the other, deducting only 
 the days or hours materially necessary for the 
 transit, and marking each period by the cere- 
 mony of taking and giving up an inventory .? 
 Now, to spend a month in that bathing-place 
 
 6
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 of dim Napoleonic Grecian-pilaster-and-lyre- 
 backed-chair fashionableness (we had a pensive 
 preference for watering-places out of date or 
 out of season), thus to detach a month, meant 
 cutting down winter and summer to five months 
 and a half each : most manifest disorder ! Of 
 course the breach of family custom did not stop 
 here. It was from that seaside place, from a 
 house still unchanged, as all the ex-homes of 
 my family should be, that started my first 
 journey for journeying's sake, paid with my 
 earliest earnings and abetted by my reluctant 
 and horrified father. It lasted only a week, 
 and its raptures left in me a certain sense of 
 guilt. For, as already mentioned, I had been 
 brought up to despise persons who travelled in 
 order to " sight-see." We never saw any 
 sights. We moved ourselves and our luggage 
 regularly, as already stated, and, obeying some 
 mysterious financial or educational ebb and flow, 
 backwards and forwards between the same two 
 places, and every now and then between a new 
 couple of places in a different part of the globe. 
 But we were careful to see nothing on the way, 
 save the inns where we slept, the refreshment- 
 rooms where we ate, and the Custom-houses 
 
 7
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 where we opened our boxes, whose contents 
 must have been familiar to the officials. Neither 
 did we see anything at either end ; of such 
 things, at least, as are registered in guide-books. 
 The only guide-book I can recollect being used 
 in our family was one to Paris, which was read 
 out loud at a time when we had no intention of 
 visiting the French capital. And this matter 
 of the " Guide to Paris " sheds much light on 
 our life and our views of life. The members 
 of my family ate, drank, slept, made music, 
 constructed machines, fished, shot, read, and 
 walked, particularly walked, in one place and 
 one quarter of Europe exactly as in the other. 
 Taking walks would seem to introduce inevit- 
 able diversity, since one locality is hilly, another 
 flat ; one consists of streets, the other of woods ; 
 one is in the heart of Switzerland, the other by 
 the Mediterranean. But that is only the super- 
 ficial view of idle and gadabout persons ; and 
 we had the art of taking the same walk, or the 
 same sort of walk, in spite of all such differ- 
 ences. Much was achieved by daily resort to 
 some public promenade — Lichtenthaler AUee, 
 Promenade des Anglais, Cascine, Pincio — at 
 unfrequented hours. And where such aids to 
 
 8
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 monotony did not exist the same result could 
 be obtained by steady repetition of the same 
 turn by a given high-road and back across 
 certain meadows or woods. That wonderful 
 walk, the same all the world over ! For while 
 the feet pulverized the same amount of macadam 
 or displaced the equivalent gravel, how widely 
 and delightfully did not the mind, the inner 
 eye, disport themselves ! We never went out 
 without a book ; and, so long as my memory 
 reaches, my mother always read out loud while 
 walking, interrupting herself only to enlarge 
 upon the subject, to tell stories, and discuss 
 theories ; so that every turn of every prome- 
 nade in Europe, nay, every bench and bush 
 thereof, represents for my mind a host of 
 imaginary persons and places. To return, for 
 instance, to that guide to the sights and monu- 
 ments of Paris : there was Notre Dame, the 
 Pantheon, the Louvre whence Charles IX. fired 
 on the Protestants, the Place de la Concorde 
 (formerly Place Louis XV.) where people had 
 been guillotined ; well, what need was there 
 for us to go and see those things ? To do so 
 was necessary, doubtless, for some persons 
 without feeling or imagination. But as for us, 
 
 9
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the first year that inexplicable tides drifted us 
 to Rome, we cast a perfunctory glance at St. 
 Peter's, the Coliseum, and the tomb of Keats 
 (for, after all, we were not eccentric — only 
 wise !), and settled down forthwith to the 
 Pincian, the Villa Borghese, and an evening 
 stroll down the deserted Corso. Add to these 
 resorts Piale's Circulating Library (full of 
 Tauchnitz novels and memoirs and collections 
 of old plays), also Nazzari's, where on high 
 days we regaled on chocolate and repeated how 
 the spoon stuck upright in that of the Cardinals 
 — sum it all up, and you have, pretty nearly, what 
 Rome meant in our eyes during those five or 
 six winters of my childhood and adolescence. 
 
 Now, into this severely regulated reasonable 
 reality there burst, by the strangest of chances, 
 a brief but unforgotten vision of Rome as it 
 existed for other folk. I have alluded to a 
 generation of wondrous priestesses of the Genius 
 Loci, some of whom still delight and awe us 
 by the sacred fury of travel which impels them. 
 
 Well ! what should a contrast-loving Fate 
 decree but that my family — yes, mine, such as 
 1 have described its habits — should have made 
 friends with the high priestess of them all, the 
 
 lO
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 most favoured and inspired votary of the Spirit 
 of Localities, she who averred that the happiest 
 moment in life was in a hotel 'bus — no other, 
 in short, than the enchanting, indomitable, 
 
 incomparable Mrs. S . 
 
 And since I have mentioned her, let me, 
 before telling what I owed to her in my child- 
 hood — owed to her for all my life, whatever 
 its value — speak in the name of all those chance 
 fellow-travellers whose later journeys over the 
 globe, or over life's slopes and valleys, have been 
 dotted with light and colour by joyful meetings 
 with this most genially imperious, this most 
 wittily courteous, this most wisely fantastic of 
 Wandering Ladies. Alas ! we have missed her 
 already in her home, that very literally named 
 pied-a-terre whence she was for ever lifting the 
 other foot (so to speak) in the direction of distant 
 lands. But it is natural enough not to find her 
 there ; and what will it be when we begin 
 to understand that she is not elsewhere on our 
 earth, but journeying a longer way, making, 
 like Orpheus, Charon and Cerberus civil with 
 her courteous cheeriness ; and putting, what 
 that other great traveller De Stael called " un 
 air ecossais " — a coloured and variegated gaiety 
 
 II
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 — into the moonlight of the Elysian Regions ? 
 I have not been to Venice since the time we 
 were there together ; but what can the lagoon of 
 Murano, the canals of the Giudecca, be like 
 without that dear, venerable figure busily sketch- 
 ing through the gondola door ; without that 
 jocund voice admonishing one, in moments of 
 indifference and depression, that the journey of 
 life might be delightful to the last ? 
 
 Well, to return to myself, who owe her so 
 much. Such a coming together of opposites 
 does seem improbable ; but, happily, it is a fact : 
 we children, hers and I, had met and sailed 
 boats and bartered stamps in a lodging-house 
 garden. And then we met again in Rome, that 
 first year in the legendary reign of Pio Nono. 
 I do not think my family ever realized Mrs. 
 
 S 's high vocation, for they did not know 
 
 of the cultus of the Genius Loci, or even of 
 his existence. And it is certain that dear Mrs. 
 
 S never conceived the bare possibility of 
 
 people as stay-at-home as we ; so that when- 
 ever, in later years, I have expressed my in- 
 debtedness she has been unfeignedly incapable 
 of understanding a word of my discourse. For 
 all my grateful explanations, she could never 
 
 12
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 guess the kind of benefit bestowed on that 
 small prig who was her children's playfellow. 
 The benefit, in fact, was less a matter of deeds 
 and things definite and tangible than of subtle 
 influences ; although if I did see anything of 
 Rome in my early years, it was during the 
 months of strealing after her in and out of 
 churches, palaces, and ruins, in company with 
 Emily and John. For what I saw was less 
 potent than what I overheard at meals in the 
 hospitable little house (a sacred spot for me 
 now) which looked across to St. Peter's, and 
 during the evenings when we children cut out 
 lamp-shades and polished bits of marble in a 
 corner of the drawing-room, alongside the bust 
 of Washington. I heard of rides in the Cam- 
 pagna, where you met brigands occasionally, 
 and even the Serpent-in-Chief, about whom I 
 forthwith wrote a story ; I heard of excursions 
 — my family never made excursions — to Albano 
 and Frascati, and Horace's Sabine Farm — 
 enchanting name ! And beyond this Rome, 
 which seemed to exist for those unlike our- 
 selves, appeared dim outlines of other parts of 
 the world, with magic Alhambras and Temples 
 of Paestum and Alpine forests ; a Europe 
 
 ^3
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 occupying other dimensions than that network 
 of railways blobbed with hotels and custom- 
 houses across which I was periodically hurried 
 from inventory to inventory. Into this magic 
 
 world so separate from ours the S family 
 
 speedily vanished, as ghosts into the Fourth 
 Dimension ; only occasional juvenile epistles, 
 postmarked Prague or Seville or Bruges or 
 Chamonix, marking its unclutchable tracks. . . . 
 
 Meanwhile the gravel and the benches of the 
 Pincian, the carriage drive round Villa Bor- 
 ghese. Piazza di Spagna with Nazzari's cake- 
 shop and Piale's Circulating Library, all closed 
 once more round my childhood. But — O 
 wonder ! — as they tightened with every month 
 and year they squeezed into an intoxicating 
 philtre the love for the Rome hidden in my 
 imagination. And in the nostalgic longing for 
 that city, unknown though looked down on 
 during each daily walk, began my secret wor- 
 ship of the Genius Loci, of the spirit immanent 
 in those cupolas and towers and hilly pine- 
 groves which seemed as far beyond my reach 
 almost as the sun setting behind them. Thus 
 I became a Sentimental Traveller. 
 
 14
 
 BOOK I 
 GERMANY
 
 UP THE RHINE 
 
 THERE is nothing like a waterway 
 for penetrating into a country — 'tis 
 the natural road to its heart, its 
 mountains. And surely no water- 
 way can be more lovely and more solemn than 
 this Rhine, which we superfine moderns are 
 apt to treat as the holiday stream of Cockneys. 
 To such of us as have not looked at things 
 and read books all to no purpose, this mighty 
 mass of waters is also a flood of associations, 
 carrying in its swirls the thought of distant and 
 different places and times. The poetry of one- 
 half of the great Alps is in it ; the thought, as 
 well as the waters, of every turquoise glacier 
 runnel and baby trickle among moss and gen- 
 tians, of every torrent and waterfall and lake 
 and swift brimful river we have watched from 
 the covered lock bridges. Does it not carry 
 along a thread of water which is that little 
 
 17 c
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 stream of the Grisons we watched together 
 among the boulders and fallen trees, and listened 
 to, brawling far below, in the stillness of Alpine 
 nights ? And carry with that water the thought 
 of distant friends ? 
 
 Going up the Rhine, between Coblenz and 
 Bingen, as we were to-day, meeting that wide, 
 steady flood with the wind in one's face, there 
 comes the feeling also, with the reverence and 
 love which such things inspire, that one is going 
 into the depths of Germany and of the German 
 heart ; for it seems an accident that the Rhine 
 is a frontier river, and every nation save the 
 German-speaking ones seem immeasurably far 
 away. 
 
 As the river bends slowly to meet the 
 steamer labouring against the wind, every reach 
 discovers its little town or village. White- 
 beamed houses roofed with slate, round the 
 steeple, built, one would think, by Comacene 
 masons ; a row of little limes in front, orchards 
 and grass, sometimes widening to valleys, be- 
 hind ; and the rocks pale yellow with ripening 
 vines. Each of these river-bends plays at 
 being a lake (the screaming gulls confirming it) 
 closed in by hills dim in the sunshine, with 
 
 i8
 
 Up the Rhine 
 
 hogged fir-forest or poplared high-lying road 
 against the evening sky. 
 
 In all the poetry of the Rhine (the poetry 
 not made about it by men, but inspired, per- 
 haps unspoken, in men's souls) there is not 
 merely the wonder of the great waterway from 
 Alps to ocean, which measures the length of 
 German-speaking lands ; there is also the sense 
 of this great canon between baseless rocks 
 being a great walled garden which in this 
 inclement North yields the fruits and the joy- 
 ousness of the Southern lands. " Sonnig — 
 wonnig " are the recurrent rhymes in all praise 
 of the Rhine ; and to the poetry of great 
 waters is added the poetry of the vine and 
 the wine-cup, of heightened life and easier 
 speech. 
 
 I wrote these things on the steamer between 
 Coblenz and Bingen ; but, as a fact, it was not 
 with them that my mind was really busy. That 
 slow voyage inland was also, and mainly, a 
 journey into the past. Mine ^ In the sense 
 of possession, certainly. For there are few 
 things we possess more thoroughly than those 
 of which we have " heard tell " in our childish 
 years ; the child clinging in nostalgic fashion to 
 
 19
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the places and people it has made up for itself 
 out of the words of grown-up folk. Thus, while 
 the boat slowly made head against the wind 
 and current, among the steamers tugging huge 
 barges and the half-submerged rafts, there came 
 into my head (long before it appeared to my 
 eyes) the little town of Boppard. My mother 
 had spent some weeks there long before I was 
 born, and it had come to partake in her teUing 
 — or, at least, in my listening — of the romance 
 peculiar to the places where she had stayed in 
 her wandering days of young widowhood. At 
 Boppard one lodged (I say one^ for I too seemed 
 to have been of the party) in a former nunnery, 
 picking ripe grapes from a trellis overhead ; 
 and there were bones of nuns dug up in the 
 garden. I saw it, the bones as delicious as the 
 grapes ; perhaps I was vaguely influenced there- 
 in by the Nuns' Ballet in " Robert le Diable," 
 which I had heard played by military bands and 
 described, it also, by my elders as we walked 
 about. The steamer carried me upstream also 
 among prints and cheap oil-landscapes seen in 
 my childhood, views of the Rhine and its 
 villages and castles, the picture arising in my 
 memory as the original hove in sight. Chief 
 
 20
 
 Up the Rhine 
 
 of these was the Pfalz Castle at Kaub, sitting as 
 it does like a duck in the shallow middle of 
 the stream, or rather like the enchanted duck 
 for which children angle with a magnet ; par- 
 taking, moreover, of the pagoda on old screens, 
 and most certainly also of some wonderful 
 pudding (rather dreamed of than ever really- 
 seen) : cupola on cupola, stuck about with 
 atticks instead of almonds, and bristling with 
 flagstafiPs, where the stiff sticks of angelica 
 would have projected. 
 
 Into the stories of my nurse Franziska did 
 that Rhine steamer carry me, panting against 
 the yellow sunset curdles of the current. There 
 were her father's schoolhouse and her grand- 
 father's parsonage (not without Gargantuan 
 details) ; the grandfather who had given 
 Napoleon a piece of his mind, and who said : 
 " The hair of the head, the ornament of man- 
 kind, let it hang, let it hang," an oracular 
 remark which my friend Edmund Gosse has 
 identified as a hexameter of the idyllic poet 
 Voss. That Rheingau of Franziska's, I had 
 certainly never beheld it with the eyes of the 
 flesh ; and I do not know whether I ever really 
 saw that stout marbled volume of Rhineland 
 
 21
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 legends which Franzlska always promised to 
 bring back from her holidays. But what realities 
 they have remained for me 1 And how the 
 names of these Rhine villages and castles and 
 hills are steeped in the heady essence of my 
 childish emotions ! 
 
 But, oddly enough, there were mixed up in 
 it all, and as vivid as any personal impressions, 
 reminiscences of people who lived in this Rhine- 
 land just a hundred years ago (the earliest 
 letters to Goethe from the Child are of 1805), 
 of a book read, or at least re-read, by me in my 
 quite unimaginative middle-aged present. But 
 the book, the letters of Bettina Brentano, are the 
 most wonderful expression of a romantic time 
 and a romantic creature, as full of perfume and 
 pleasant intoxication as the wine which pours 
 out of some century-old cobwebbed-over bottle ; 
 and a curious personal good fortune (which I 
 shall perhaps some day narrate) has made Bettina 
 and her brothers and friends into ghosts more 
 familiar to me than those which haunt mere 
 printed books. Be this as it may, this Rhine- 
 land, yesterday, was full of her. These were 
 perchance the hills where, in the ruined chapel, 
 she buried Goethe's letters and planted a 
 
 22
 
 up the Rhine 
 
 vine upon them. I seemed to recognize the 
 riverside meadow, reedy and willowy, where her 
 friend the young canoness killed herself for 
 love. Was it not in this cheerful little 
 convent, rose-coloured, under the slate of its 
 roof and in the shadow of its pagoda belfry, 
 that a dear little nun had cultivated a certain 
 myrtle bush ? And, at every bend of the river, 
 I sought the white, old-fashioned town where 
 Bettina and her brothers had taken boat on the 
 Rhine. For me, at least, this volume of letters 
 has given the Rhineland its fitting inhabitants : 
 those wonderful housefuls of boys and girls of 
 genius, collecting fairy tales and ballads or 
 making up better ones themselves (was it not 
 Bettina's brother Clemens who gave the Rhine 
 its very goddess, the Lurlei, naming for ever 
 the nameless rock ?), young people free, without 
 parents or precedents, singing songs on hills 
 and water under the moonlight, climbing at 
 midnight into haunted towers, playing their 
 pranks while the cannon of Napoleon echoed 
 over the Rhine ; and through it all the little 
 letters of Goethe, enclosed in those of his 
 mother, coming ever and anon to flood that 
 little girl's great heart with passionate poetry.
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 This is the appropriate life of the Rhine ; and 
 to me at least it seems, in some very personal 
 manner, to continue ; Bettina seeming to describe 
 it all for me quite especially, and knowing what 
 I want to be told. 
 
 It had been cloudy when we left Coblenz, 
 and a few drops fell. But, as the afternoon 
 advanced, the wind down the Rhine, blowing 
 in our faces, swept the sky to a delicate autumn 
 sunniness ; the sun, descending, turning the 
 sallow mass of waters to pale curdled gold. 
 Besides the steamers and rafts and tugged 
 barges there were, every now and then, boats 
 and pontoons full of soldiers returning from 
 the manoeuvres. They cheered our steamer as 
 they passed, and the steamer cheered back ; and 
 they sang in parts as they steered their cumber- 
 some coupled craft towards the sunset. The 
 water and the vineclad rocks had the golden 
 pallor of Southern afternoons ; and I understood 
 how, in the days of Goethe and Bettina, those 
 Germans, of whom so few ever got outside 
 Germany, were forced to find in Germany itself 
 (and where better than in this Rhineland ?) the 
 realization of that majesty and loveliness of life 
 with which the classic revival of the eighteenth 
 
 24
 
 up the Rhine 
 
 century had filled their mind. The Rhineland 
 was to them their Greece and Italy, their 
 South, their Country of the Gods. And, for 
 their sake and its own, it should be so, a little, 
 to us. 
 
 25
 
 STIFTSDAMEN 
 
 THERE are things one loves before- 
 hand without rhyme or reason, 
 making them up out of a stray- 
 word or two to please the idle fancy. 
 Thus it had been with those Protestant nunneries 
 (Damenstifte, ladies foundations^ is the untrans- 
 latable German word) which are one of the 
 quaint and pleasant contradictions (like the 
 coloured Madonnas opposite the blackboards 
 with Psalm numbers) preserved by Lutheranism 
 for the delectation of the Teutonic soul. 
 
 I had read of the inmates of such places, 
 and occasionally heard about them ; nay, I had 
 once or twice met such a mature spinster 
 perambulating this dangerous world safe in 
 her metaphorical robes emblazoned over with 
 heraldry. Aurora von Konigsmark, beloved of 
 Polish King Augustus, and (very nearly, it is 
 said, of the woman-hater Charles of Sweden) 
 
 26
 
 Stiftsdamen 
 
 mother of heroic Marshal Saxe, grandmother 
 of romantic Aurore Dudevant, who signed her 
 books George Sand — Aurora von Konigsmark 
 had been a canoness, nay, provostess, nay, very 
 nearly abbess, of the IDamenstift of Quedlinburg. 
 The Giinderode, whose suicide for love of the 
 pedant Kreutzer was narrated to Goethe in that 
 marvellous letter of Bettina's, was a Stiftsdame 
 of the Rhineland. And so likewise, saving 
 
 mistake, Goethe's own Fraulein von , I 
 
 cannot recollect her name, who sat for the 
 ** Beautiful Soul" in Wilhelm Meister. Haunted 
 by such sentiment and romance, I set out for 
 Germany in hopes of seeing Damenstifte^ and, if 
 possible, Stiftsdamen, 
 
 My first impression of such places was at 
 Goslar, and accidental. Looking for a certain 
 Romanesque church, I asked my way of a kind 
 old lady at the door of a delightful eighteenth- 
 century house, its whitewash spaliered over with 
 pear-trees. She bade me ring a bell hard by, 
 and pass through whitewashed corridors with 
 views of laundry and kitchen ; the cook would 
 bring the key of the church. It was Kloster 
 Neuburg, a Damenstift ! " And is that lady a 
 canoness — a Stiftsdame ? " I asked, eagerly. 
 
 27
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 *'Yes, but not a noble one; Keine adelige^'' 
 answered the cook, leading me to the church 
 across the convent grass-plot, where the sheets 
 and fresh-washed clothes were waving on drying- 
 lines among the apple-trees. Keine adelige ; it 
 was a little disappointing. But I was consoled 
 for the canonesses' lack of quarterings by the 
 charm of that little church among the apple- 
 trees and full-berried elder bushes, with the 
 sweet white linen streaming in the cold autumn 
 sunshine. 
 
 At the next place of Damenstifts the ladies 
 were indeed noble, quite unapproachably high 
 well-born ; but they were dead, the last of them, 
 since a hundred years. It was at Quedlinburg, 
 Aurora von Konigsmark's Quedlinburg. "With 
 the old wooden houses clustered round its base, 
 the great Abbey — church, convent, fortress — 
 rises abrupt above the town, grows out of the 
 yellow rock. You pass some big yellowing 
 limes and climb up a steep road roughly paved 
 with granite, which twists round the hill and 
 passes under an archway ; overhead the curved 
 eaves and tall towers of the basilica ; and round 
 about it, like a village with its trees and gardens, 
 the houses of the Abbey : some of Nurnberg 
 
 28
 
 Stiftsdamen 
 
 seventeenth century or Dutch gabled fashion, 
 like poops of old three-deckers ; others made 
 French by addition of long windows and a 
 glazed gallery, a bulb-crowned turret holding 
 the principal stairs. A nice young girl took us 
 over part of the convent's eighteenth-century 
 rooms, bare, but with delicate stuccoed ceiling 
 and painted wall-papers and fine Louis XV. 
 stoves, and French windows ; and such a wide, 
 amusing view over the plum- and orange- 
 coloured roofs, and, wherever there were gaps 
 or squares, over the old houses, like farms, 
 painted sea-blue or sea-green ; the remaining 
 town gates and towers projecting, and the 
 coupled spires of several old churches, with 
 their look of being the tails of plunging 
 swallows. Immediately below, limes and great 
 lilac-trees sprouting out of the rock ; and 
 beyond, in the autumn mist, the low hills, 
 freshly ploughed, pale yellow and tan, and 
 furred at the top with their woods ; and, almost 
 invisible, the Harz. 
 
 The dismantled apartments are hung with 
 the portraits of the Abbesses since the Refor- 
 mation — seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 
 ladies with bare bosoms and jewelled hair, and 
 
 29
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 wonderful coats-of-arms alongside of them : 
 Holstein-Gottorp ; Saxony this, that, or the 
 other ; and the stags of the Harz potentates, 
 Stolberg-Wernigerode. One looks, instinctively, 
 for Aurora von Konigsmark ; and she, having 
 been only provostess, is missing. But her 
 memory is everywhere, and constitutes the 
 romance of the Abbey. The girl shows one 
 a flower-piece from her hand ; and there are 
 her rooms overlooking the lilac-bushes ; and 
 the great cojfFers with her arms and those of 
 Saxony. Perhaps some of the romance of this 
 woman, in our eyes, is due not merely to her 
 sway over Augustus of the three hundred and 
 sixty odd bastards, nor to her attempt upon 
 the chill ferocity of Charles XII., nor even to 
 her brother's tragedy ; but a little to her blood 
 having flowed in George Sand. One gets 
 almost to feel as if she had been the one beau- 
 tiful woman ever born in this Germany of 
 kindly feminine plainness. And certainly she 
 is the lady of Quedlinburg. The beadle of 
 the Abbey Church points out her insignificant 
 wooden coffin among: the bronze and embossed 
 leaden ones in the Abbesses' vault. It used to 
 be open, but had to be fastened down because 
 
 30
 
 Stiftsdamen 
 
 too many people cut off locks of her blond 
 hair. And to show how well the saltpetre of 
 the rock had preserved the mistress of Augustus 
 the Strong, the beadle suddenly took the lid 
 off a tiny baby's coffin. Turning away, I just 
 caught sight of something shrivelled and brown 
 among faded pink and white ribbons. Had 
 Aurora von Koni^smark also ended as such a 
 huge, moth-eaten doll ^ We had enough of 
 dead Stiftsdamen^ and hastened out on to the 
 terrace of the Abbey Church, to look down on 
 the roofs of Quedlinburg and its ploughed 
 hillocks, veiled in sun and mist. But I was 
 allowed to carry away from Germany kindlier 
 impressions of Damenstifts and their in- 
 habitants. 
 
 It was a day of veiled sunniness, most suit- 
 able to that flat Brunswick country which takes 
 its grace from curves of wood against field and 
 meadow, as other countries do from unevenness 
 of the land. We walked from the station 
 between yellowing poplars, through potato- 
 fields with their bitter-sweet trails of smoke, 
 on to a kind of village green set with immense 
 limes, raining down their leaves in the white 
 sunny air. And here appeared above the russet 
 
 31
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 of an orchard some high-pitched roofs of that 
 cocked-hat pattern of Louis XV. France which 
 gives the humblest buildings an aristocratic 
 grace not without jauntiness. It was the 
 Damenstift of Priiffening, no former convent, 
 but founded a hundred and twenty-five years 
 ago by a Wolfenbiittel princess as a hunting 
 gift from her father. Two corps de logis advance 
 slightly on either side of the classic gable filled 
 with the Wolfenbiittel arms ; and the low 
 flight of steps is guarded on either side by 
 Minerva and Apollo, each with just a little 
 eighteenth-century gallantry, as of china shep- 
 herds, grafted on the antique. Each also, 
 besides the added flying draperies, with a coat 
 of brown weather-stains and a fine green wig of 
 lichen. An ancient butler bade us wait in the 
 ground - floor apartments. Such beautiful 
 rooms ! The long French windows opening 
 on to the autumnal garden, the ceilings deli- 
 cately stuccoed, the straight - backed chairs 
 ranged against the wainscot or set round card- 
 tables, and the walls hung with smoky pictures. 
 I was struck by the gallant air of this Damen- 
 stift gallery ; nothing but concerts and boar- 
 hunts and loves of gods and goddesses buried 
 
 32
 
 Stiftsdamen 
 
 in flowers. . . . The very portraits of the 
 princesses of Brunswick and Wolfenbiittel 
 looked oddly pagan for a retreat of high-born 
 maiden ladies, with moons on their brows and 
 peacocks by their side, and fluttered round by 
 Cupids : Hampton Court beauties bursting 
 luxuriant out of their bodices. Besides this 
 gallery there were other reception-rooms, with 
 yellow gardens reflected in their time-dimmed 
 mirrors, and china shepherds and goddesses on 
 their mantelpieces. And in the Chapter Room, 
 hung with the full-length portrait of the wigged 
 and mustachioed Duke who founded Stift 
 Priifl^ening, was a fine musical clock, which the 
 butler wound up in our honour. As it struck 
 twelve a strange whirring began, which settled 
 itself into the faltering, jangling notes of a 
 spinet ; a spinet long out of tune and stam- 
 mering, you would say, under old, forgetful 
 fingers, long dapper shakes and solemn Han- 
 delian closes ; a tune tottering tinkling into the 
 grave. 
 
 When the clock had ceased its performance, 
 we were summoned to the presence of an 
 aged Stiftsfr'aukin upstairs. She rose from near 
 her stove in the wide-windowed room, and 
 
 33 D
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 held us long by the hand, with uncertainty 
 in her dear, weak, brown eyes. She was too 
 deaf to hear strangers, and almost too blind 
 to read what we wrote on slips of paper. But 
 on a few leading themes she became very 
 lively, and entertained us with pathetic humor- 
 ousness about the Stift when first she entered it. 
 There came in and out of her reminiscences the 
 name, gradually the personality, of a certain 
 abbess, deceased these sixty years and more, 
 who was spoken of familiarly as Die Glasenapp. 
 Die Glasenapp used to sit on a sofa in an 
 Empire dress, a turban on her head, where an 
 amethyst too huge to be real fastened a long 
 sweeping plume. Die Glasenapp spent the 
 summer days in a garden house called "Japan," 
 and there imagined and related all manner of 
 romances about her youth — the poet Platen 
 had wooed her ; and earlier even Salis, the 
 shepherd poet whom we learn from German 
 governesses as inevitably leashed to Mattison, 
 had been her betrothed ; a wonderful romance, 
 and not a word of truth in it. The Glasenapp 
 remained so passionately given to dancing that 
 here in the Damenstift^ having no other partner, 
 she would teach minuets and quadrilles to her 
 
 34
 
 Stiftsdamen 
 
 maid, until one day, having aristocratically- 
 chidden her for not copying her movements 
 with enough precision, she had occasion to 
 fling her shoe at the maid's head, and the maid 
 flung it back obediently at the exalted head of 
 the lady abbess. 
 
 While the old Stiftsfrdukin babbled out these 
 stories, a polite collation was ofi^ered us — 
 cups of chocolate, sweet, stiff", and mahogany 
 brown, as if it had simmered by the fire fifty 
 years ; pieces of cake, pears, and grapes piled 
 up like a Nature Morte ; and a bottle of sweet 
 Greek wine on the top of it all. When we 
 had partaken we were sent to see the garden, 
 the haunts of the Abbess Glasenapp. 
 
 Over the statues of the perron two venerable 
 horse-chestnuts were shedding their leaves and 
 fruit ; the high hedges of hornbeam were tinged 
 with orange ; people were picking the abundant 
 pears, which fell, some of them, into the tank 
 of gold-fish. And the orange-trees and myrtles 
 had been put away. We wandered a long time 
 in the garden, losing ourselves on purpose in 
 the hornbeam maze. All the windows of the 
 beautiful old house were closed, the curtains 
 drawn, and of the present abbess or the living
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Stiftsdamen not a trace ! The ghost of Die 
 Glasenapp reigned undisturbed, with her Empire 
 dress and her turban and amethyst. We 
 peeped through the windows of the summer- 
 house called " Japan," with its high-backed 
 chairs against the willow-pattern walls, and the 
 sofa on which she had been throned. And 
 we were shown the surviving one of two 
 big French poplars, whom she had called, after 
 her imaginary lovers. Platen and Salis. But 
 the poplar Salis had long since been blown 
 down ! 
 
 We came away not without many a glance 
 back at the high French attics, the stone vases 
 on the gate-posts between the autumnal trees. 
 And it is difficult to realize that I have not all 
 my life long known the Damenstift of Priiffen- 
 ing, and that Die Glasenapp has not always 
 been a household word. 
 
 36
 
 "GOSLAR, ONCE IMPERIAL" 
 
 (JVordszvorik) 
 
 jA LTHOUGH quite unprepared for 
 /^L such weather in the still early 
 
 / % autumn, and scolding a good deal 
 against it (perhaps merely to 
 heighten enjoyment), I confess that I did enjoy 
 the piercing cold which met us at Goslar. It 
 seemed quite fit and proper to be eingeheizt (for 
 Germany thinks of this as warming you, not as 
 lighting a fire) in those pagoda-atticks above the 
 corsleted and bearded Emperors of the inn-front, 
 with the autumn full moon shining ice-blue on 
 the high shingle-slate roofs, and the carved turrets 
 and gables, making their black-beam skeletons 
 plain as in daylight, polishing also the golden 
 eagle, barbaric, Byzantine, on the fountain of 
 the market-place — the fountain whose trickling 
 sounded so very cold in the still night ! It has 
 been good playing at winter a little in this dear 
 little old town out of a fairy-story : Goslar, 
 
 37
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 everything belonging to which seems made to be 
 hung on one of the Christmas-trees which are 
 the sole vegetation of its hillsides. 
 
 For instance, in the Gothic Rathhaus are two 
 great chandeliers consisting in the antlers of 
 huge stags, between whose horns are seated, 
 one in each, two bearded, robed, and sceptred 
 Emperors of coloured and gilded wood — the 
 fathers, let us say, of the poor drowned lovers 
 in the old German ballad of " The Two Kings' 
 Children." Also the great silver-gilt tankard 
 of the Guild of Miners (Bergmanner) is covered 
 with manikins making music and with metal- 
 working gnomes. And the sugarloaf-roofed 
 guildhouse of the weavers (called Brusttuch or 
 Neckerchief) is carved and gilded and painted 
 with grotesques of fat children dancing with 
 bears and learned pigs playing the hornpipe, and 
 such-like devices. The great ring chandeliers 
 also of this part of the world, one of which 
 must have hung in the destroyed and vanished 
 cathedral of this town of Goslar, look as if 
 suggested by the hoops of lights encircling the 
 skirts of a Christmas-tree. And as to that golden 
 eagle swelling his breast and flapping his jagged 
 wings and rearing his crown above the little 
 
 38
 
 cc 
 
 Goslar, once Imperial " 
 
 Byzantine spouting lions' heads of the fountain, 
 why, whence could they have taken him save 
 from a Christmas-tree's tip-top branch ? Even 
 the fine and well-preserved paintings of the 
 Wohlgemuth school, story of the Virgin on the 
 ceiling of that Imperial Council Chamber, and 
 Emperors and Sibyls, two and two, all round, 
 look, with their brilliant blues and reds, their 
 white and twisting scrolls and gold Gothic 
 framework, as if so many gigantic toy-books 
 had been placed open side by side. A spruce 
 fir, a Christmas-tree, is, it would seem, the 
 emblem of this Harz region, meeting one every- 
 where at Goslar ; and the first impression of 
 Goslar, as I have said, is Christmas-treeish and 
 fairy-bookish. 
 
 In the midst of this pleasant childishness one 
 becomes gradually aware of a different note. 
 There are the great, haggard figures of Christ, 
 with streaming wounds and real matted hair 
 and beard, in two strange almshouses, of which 
 more anon, and in the chapel surviving from 
 the cathedral ; things left over from pre-Lutheran 
 times, and forgotten in nooks and corners. 
 Figures tragic at once and bogy ; the Christ, 
 one might say, reviled, beaten, outraged, crucified 
 
 39
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 afresh, in the Black Mass of the Witches' Brocken 
 Worship. For that is borne in upon one, little 
 by little ; this childish fairy-tale town of Goslar 
 is the metropolis of the witch district, the city 
 where the Holy Roman Empire of the Othos 
 and Henrys marches with the dominions of 
 gnomes and dwarfs, of ghosts and warlocks. 
 Where have I read it ? In Faust, in Heine, or 
 in Keller's " Spiegel das Katzchen " ? Or have 
 I dreamed it ? That on Walpurgis Eve, and 
 certain other ill-omened nights, the sky over 
 this Harz town is black with whirring flights 
 of witches and warlocks, as of starlings or wild- 
 duck ; and that the burgesses pull their bed- 
 clothes over their heads and shudder at the 
 clamour of those unearthly birds. . . . 
 
 However this may be, I began to be haunted 
 by the thought of all the thousands of poor 
 women, moonstruck or slandered, whom the 
 German cities tortured and burned throughout 
 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ; and 
 how all had been believed, and perhaps believed 
 themselves, to have flown up these fir-clad 
 valleys on to these peaceful hills. This thought 
 has been lurking in my head and dodging me 
 most of the time at Goslar. And It jumped 
 
 40
 
 '' Goslar, once Imperial " 
 
 into distinctness when we went over the two 
 old almshouses, Sanct Annen Stift and Heili- 
 genkreuz, the first a walled and roofed-in bit of 
 cobbly street, a chapel and a hall at once, sur- 
 rounded by panelled stairs and balconies, on 
 which the old ladies looked like so many 
 Marthas ready for Mephistopheles ; the second 
 a sinister place on the outskirts of the town, 
 and near the site of that vanished cathedral, a 
 great barn railed off inside, with unwholesome 
 little cells all round, and great, grim, frightening 
 figures of Christ — the ones I have alluded to — 
 in damp, desecrated chapels ; and, besides these 
 terrifying images, tenanted not by gossiping 
 widows, but by oh ! such sad, poor, shivering 
 old beggarwomen. Seminaries of Brocken- 
 priestesses and broomstick-riders, crones and 
 paupers, Sanct Annen and Heiligenkreuz ! 
 
 Between it all, benign Christmas-tree and 
 toy-book creatures and these other Harz- 
 frequenters, Goslar is full of S)puk. But what 
 haunts it most, or haunted my mind most while 
 there, is that former cathedral. It got out of 
 repair some ninety years ago, was pulled down, 
 sold by auction, and had disappeared completely 
 already when Heine, in his Gottingen days, 
 
 41
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 made his " Harz Reise." A wide sanded place, 
 with a barracks on one side and a few old 
 houses on the other, is all the trace of it, 
 except, under some limes yellowing against the 
 background of high fir-trees, a tiny chapel with 
 sad Byzantine saints and kings in its gable, the 
 porch or narthex of that departed church where 
 the Saxon Emperors had come for coronation to 
 Goslar. There is somethins: that goes to the 
 imagination in this vanished cathedral, far more 
 than in any, however romantic, one still stand- 
 ing in other cities. An invisible sanctuary of 
 ghosts, a ghost itself, its presence unseen but 
 felt. 
 
 One of our last evenings, after an expedition 
 into the fir-woods, my friend took me across 
 the exercising-ground, to see Goslar from the 
 first grassy heights. The sun had set some 
 time — the sun which had shone without warning 
 through the clear, cold north-wind day. And 
 now it sent up a pale amber light into the pure 
 sky, deepening to a faint orange, against which 
 lay the mass of the little town, its towers and 
 steeples dark blue, as if covered not merely with 
 slate but with frozen mist. All around curved 
 the impalpable hills, purple, blue, the lace of the 
 
 42
 
 " Goslar, once Imperial " 
 
 firs clear on the pale sky, or the sudden comb 
 or hogged mane of a forest clearing, breaking 
 their conical curves. And opposite the after- 
 glow, warmer, more golden, with faint purple 
 and trails of brown smoke mixed with it, shone 
 the moon, pale yellow and cold like winter. 
 Like winter almost, also, the thinned leaves of 
 the little poplars and the willows delicately 
 pencilled against that amber sky. The grass 
 had become brown and golden with the sunset, 
 and vague darkness surrounded our steps as we 
 went, and rose slowly from the earth like a thin 
 brown mist. We seemed to be encompassed 
 gradually closer by the almost Italian lines of 
 these magic Harz hills, volcanic and mysterious 
 like the Euganeans, but fringed with firs and 
 filled with the grotesque and terrible creatures 
 of German wonderland. It was the hour of 
 Faust and Wagner's return from the fields, and 
 one expected the eerie poodle to appear and 
 circle closer and closer. . . , The pointed 
 towers and belfries of Goslar were still barely 
 visible.
 
 WERNIGERODE 
 
 SOME of the pleasantest episodes of 
 travel are surely what at first sight 
 I look like its failures. There is a 
 virtue in short-commons ; and we 
 extract finer pleasure from one indifferent good 
 thing, where such are scarce, than from pro- 
 fusion which so often chokes up the avenues to 
 our heart. And have we not, oftener than we 
 foolishly care to confess, lacked in Venice or 
 Siena the little pricking sense of picturesque- 
 ness elicited by the unexpected sight of some 
 square box of Queen Anne brickwork between 
 the cedars of a London suburb ? 
 
 The Genius Loci, as I have tried to hint 
 without incurring sacrilege, is an elusive and 
 capricious divinity, scared by elaborate ritual, 
 and delighting to flout self-righteous wor- 
 shippers ; moreover, slipping away and re- 
 appearing as variously metamorphosed as old 
 
 44
 
 Wernigerode 
 
 Proteus when indiscreetly invited to prophesy. 
 The Genius of Localities reappears occasionally 
 in the last shape one might expect : that of the 
 book, nay, of the friend you were equally able 
 to enjoy without coming to foreign parts at all. 
 And rightly. . . . But of this particular point 
 anon, and, for the moment, let me explain 
 where and what Wernigerode is. 
 
 Where it is may be summed up by the fact 
 that, witchcraft and broomsticks having been 
 abolished by the German Emperor, Wernige- 
 rode is the terminus of the funicular railway 
 which now conveys enlightened and practical 
 Teutons, of the sort described as Bath-guests, 
 up the Brocken. What it is constituted our 
 first disappointment on that autumn Harz 
 Reise : to wit, the Residenz of a mediatised 
 microscopic Serenity, who lives in a cardboard 
 feudal castle on a hill and once had over-lord- 
 ship over the Brocken region. By the way, 
 the witches and warlocks, coming regularly at 
 certain seasons, and certainly personally conducted 
 (though not by Mr. Cook), may be considered 
 after all as only a more antiquated kind of 
 Bath-guest. . . . There is also a Hof-Apotheke 
 at Wernigerode, with the Golden Stags of the 
 
 45
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Serene Harz-Princes Stollberg ; and a Hof- 
 Kirche, also with the Golden Stags of the 
 aforesaid Serenities ; and a few genteel little 
 cocked-hat houses, evidently of the Serenities' 
 ministers, generals, and mistresses- in -chief, 
 always before the present enlightened and 
 energetic German Empire had been dreamed of. 
 
 The rain (and perhaps a foolish final shrink- 
 ingness) having prevented our embarking for 
 the Brocken on the funicular railway, we spent 
 our morning taking stock of these various 
 rewarding see-worthinesses (lohnende Sehwiirdig- 
 keiten) of Wernigerode. In the afternoon we 
 turned our steps to the fir-woods, with on their 
 skirts, on the slopes of dewy grass, great isolated 
 trees with hanging branches. In the gaps of 
 the forest were misty views of hills, and of the 
 red town roofs, the red castle turrets filling the 
 valley. The cry of a jay or twitter of a finch, 
 sounds few and far between, made one feel but 
 the more the inconceivable silence and stillness 
 of the woods in the cold, pale autumn light. 
 *' Uber alle Gipfel is Ruh " — one kept repeat- 
 ing, and the rest of those divinely deep lines. 
 
 It was already late when we went up the 
 Arme Leute Berg — " Poor Folks' Hill," perhaps 
 
 46
 
 Wernigerode 
 
 in memory of some Franciscan settlement. 
 And dusk overtook us before we could get 
 very far, though we got, indeed, very soon to 
 places which felt very remote — woods upon 
 woods, and, in their gaps, misty hills, also 
 wood-clad. We came back down a high road 
 in the twilight ; the great fir-plantations on 
 either side, with the purple dusk beneath them. 
 Came down walking quickly in the air which 
 felt like distant snow, the road making great 
 bends in the darkness ; and suddenly, through 
 the firs, appeared the first lights of the town 
 below. Walked with the sense of romance, of 
 arrival after a journey, of something which 
 made us think of Prince Otto, how he too 
 walked through the forests. And found our- 
 selves suddenly in the lit streets, on the 
 relentless cobbles of the Residenz. The castle, 
 misty, half lit up, vaguely turreted and towered, 
 had suddenly loomed in a gap among the firs. 
 Our conversation had been, quite naturally, 
 of Stevenson and the romantic parts of Meredith. 
 And certainly this seemed, not afterwards only 
 but at the time, an adventure ; and therefore 
 was one. That evening it rained again, with 
 something in the rain telling of the first snowfall 
 
 47
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 on the Harz peaks. We had, as usual, venison 
 and cranberries for supper ; and, having lit the 
 porcelain stove, read the classic Walpurgis Night 
 and Faust's Death in the twopenny edition. 
 
 I have alluded to certain Protean disguises of 
 the Genius Loci ; some of the finest pleasures 
 of travel being found, as at Wernigerode, in 
 a place offering no interest whatever. Nor 
 is this all (and Wernigerode leads me to think 
 of it) : the Genius Loci, as already hinted, will 
 transform himself into the book we had brought 
 In our bag — nay, more astonishing still (and 
 apart from all the higher phantasmagoria of love 
 and first-flushing friendship), into our fellow- 
 traveller. Dost thou remember, dear old com- 
 panion on many journeys before the abortive 
 Brocken-gang, that evening in the little inn — 
 Deutsche Haus it was called — at Wernigerode ? 
 The fir splinters crackling and smelling of 
 resin, the rain against the windows, and us two 
 happy over the second part of " Faust," and 
 then, for comparison, the opening of "Hamlet" ^ 
 Or, a few evenings later, on that same North 
 German journey, another inn — Golden Purse 
 this time — at Dessau, where thou didst minister 
 to my chilled body and soul (a cold contracted, 
 
 48
 
 Wernigerode 
 
 as thou knowest, at Quedlinburg, and lasting 
 disgracefully through the whole Bach-feast at 
 Leipzig) — with temperate punch and the 
 " Letters of Goethe and Bettina " ? Was the 
 punch really as hot and as fragrant of lemon ? 
 Are those letters really so marvellous a brew 
 of finest lyrism, humour, and romance ? More- 
 over, which seems less certain, are we really as 
 delightful people, both of us, as young, fervid, 
 and yet mature with deepest wisdom, as much 
 partaking of all the finest qualities of Goethe and 
 Bettina turn about, as we seemed to ourselves 
 that evening in that dull hotel ? 
 
 Alas ! we are, habitually, none of us one- 
 half as interesting or appreciative, or wise, or 
 childish, as lovable and loving — in a word, as 
 happy — as we have it in us to be. And the 
 dear Spirit of Localities, taking our shape by 
 turns (as mocking elves were wont), did, after 
 all, perhaps merely reveal our real self to our- 
 selves and each other. And surely that is one 
 of the most interesting recollections we can 
 bring back from foreign travel. 
 
 49
 
 GOETHE AT WEIMAR 
 
 WHAT may I say of the Goethe- 
 house at Weimar? It is, very 
 evidently, haunted ; but to my 
 mind less by the effulgent spirit 
 of the Great One, than by the dismal ghost of 
 that cracky, lantern-jawed grandson, he of the 
 black plastered lock and strapped duck panta- 
 loons and general woebegone elegance of the 
 Musset and Heine period ; the grandson who, 
 after having had the unbearable honour of 
 playing the piano (as a picture shows him) with 
 the immortal grandsire at his elbow, and, far 
 worse ! of doing his lessons at a desk in the 
 study where God Wolfgang (as Heine called 
 him) sat writing and sorting his minerals, seems 
 to have pined away from sheer oppression ever 
 after, shrunk into the garret of that Olympian 
 house. He dwindled away there for seventy- 
 odd years, taking up less and less room, spending 
 
 50
 
 Goethe at Weimar 
 
 less and less money, until he devised a lantern 
 in the door between his two attics, and thus 
 reduced his claims on the world to one sinsfle 
 tallow-candle instead of two ! 
 
 And there is something about the big, stately 
 house, where the Immortal One had received all 
 the minor Olympians, or their homage, which 
 makes one feel why that grandson gradually left 
 it to the portraits of the Friends and the Sweet- 
 hearts, and to the Plaster-casts (gathering a 
 garment of sooty dust), which seem in some 
 hieratic relation to the busts and paintings and 
 prints and silhouettes of that Man-God, por- 
 trayed at every age, and with every unlikeliness 
 of smirk and frown, from the eye-flashing 
 aquiline youth with locks tied back in a bag, 
 half-Werther, half-Wilhelm Meister, through 
 every variety of Goethe travelling through life 
 with Roman ruins or grand ducal palaces as 
 background, to Goethe in all the different for- 
 biddingnesses of old age. Forbidding, but not 
 enough, alas ! for the sycophancies of Ecker- 
 mann, the theatricalities of Byron, the shakable 
 sentimental conceit of Jane Welsh Carlyle, who 
 sends him a copy of verses and (of all em- 
 barrassing untidy presents) a long tail of " a 
 
 51
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 woman's hair." (Faugh !) There he presides, 
 variously Olympian, over the dreary 1820 wall- 
 papers and sofas and card-tables, key-patterned 
 or sham Gothic, but all faded and dust-engrained; 
 among the dismal collections of ores and crystals 
 and skulls and stuffed birds : a pantalooned and 
 stocked and swallow-tailed Rentier Faust. And 
 round him that court of huge blackened casts, 
 Ludovisi Junos and Rondanini Joves, and 
 various decapitated Adorantes and Ilioneuses ; 
 that other company of faded ladies, stomachered 
 or short-waisted, Lottes and Lilis and Maxi- 
 milianes and Christianes, Suleikas, Gretchens, 
 and Ottilies, on whose love and love for him 
 (as on the succulent roast ox-thighs of Homeric 
 days) the god Wolfgang nourished and increased 
 his own divinity. 
 
 How could the poor, pomatum-locked, faintly 
 moustachioed, wasp-waisted grandson have done 
 otherwise than pine and dwindle when left alone 
 among all this .'' He, conscious of his chicken- 
 breasted coat and thin strap-pantalooned legs 
 and dejected, limp look, and of being nothing, 
 nothing, nothing in the whole world save the 
 bearer of an Olympian name, the miserable 
 remnant people turned round to stare at, saying, 
 
 52
 
 Goethe at Weimar 
 
 " the grandson of Goethe." One can fancy that 
 the only comfort may have come, the only sense 
 of sympathy, and (who knows ?) perhaps the 
 only sense of something to imitate, from the 
 washed-out pastel of baby-faced young Jeru- 
 salem — he who was told off by Fate to sit for 
 Werther and blow his poor brains out in order 
 to suggest a masterpiece. 
 
 O house of Goethe, wherein such mighty 
 things were thought and felt and written ; 
 Olympian residence two stories high, with back 
 garden and coachhouse — how hast thou become 
 the home of dust, of dreariness, and of that 
 grandson lighting his one dip in the lantern 
 between two g-arrets ! 
 
 In such a place the commonplace human 
 spirit (at least the spirit of this commonplace 
 human myself^ rebels, becomes incapable of 
 realizing one single item of Goethe's real great- 
 ness, incapable of recollecting one single chapter 
 or line which ever stirred or delighted, and falls 
 inevitably to summing up the various chances 
 and mechanisms by which such Olympian 
 positions have been achieved ; with correspond- 
 ing speculative deductions as : What would this 
 immortal Goethe have been, by how much the 
 
 53
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 less immortal if born in 1849 instead of 1749 — 
 if, if, if, &c., &c., &c. ? with strange and disquiet- 
 ing generalizations on the adventitious circum- 
 stances necessary for canonization, the royal roads to 
 apotheosis, and so forth. But stop ! such thoughts 
 are really too . . . Only let me record one 
 further reminiscence of the Goethe-house at 
 Weimar. Here it is. Among those naturalist's 
 collections which add so much to the dusty 
 and dismal grandeur of the place, there is, over 
 a door, a glass case with three stuffed birds of 
 uncertain species ; two of these — like all moth- 
 edible objects in that residence of the illustrious 
 dead — are largely moth-eaten. But one, the 
 middle one, is reduced to absolute bare bones, 
 and sits, with skeleton wings outspread and 
 skeleton breast blown out, triumphant on his 
 cardboard oak-tree. This ghostly volatile is 
 emblematic of the feelings inspiring and in- 
 spired by that Goethe-house, particularly after 
 you have taken note of the great new building, 
 like a bank, inscribed " Goethe-Archiv," where 
 " Goethe students " seek glory or emolument, 
 or " Doktoren These " in the love-letters and 
 account-books of the poet. Like that symbolic 
 bird, a genius was once a living, soaring, 
 
 54
 
 Goethe at Weimar 
 
 splendidly plumaged or fearfully taloned creature 
 — an eagle, or a nightingale, or a noble swan 
 dying in song ; and then, instead of allowing 
 the nimble ants and decorous beetles to make 
 an end of him — invisible, forgotten, under the 
 autumn leaves and the pine-needles — the Fates 
 decree that he shall be immortal, replace gizzard 
 and heart with sawdust and cotton-wool, and 
 set him up to catch the dust through the chinks 
 of a glass case, until, year by year for a hundred 
 years, the little patient, bloodless mites reduce 
 him to a preposterous skeleton, spreading bony 
 pinions and gazing with glass eyes out of a 
 fleshless skull. 
 
 Having spent the morning in seeing these 
 mournful things and thinking these painful 
 thoughts, we comforted ourselves with coffee 
 and apple-cake on the terrace of the dear rococo 
 Schlosschen of Belvedere. After a week of 
 rain and cold it was a radiant autumn day. 
 "When we descended, after walking about 
 among the orange-trees, and big myrtles in 
 tubs, and the yellowing hornbeam side-scenes 
 of the open-air theatre, the sunshine was lying 
 low and golden between the fan-like leaves of 
 the avenue of immense horse-chestnuts and on 
 
 55
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the stacked oats of the shimmerino; stubble be- 
 es 
 
 yond. It was all so enjoyable. But the fore- 
 noon's pilgrimage had left in our soul a gritty 
 sense of duty, as of the dust swallowed in that 
 sanctuary. " Do not forget Goethe's garden- 
 house," we said to the cabman, not without a 
 secret hope that we might already have left it 
 behind us in our drive across Weimar park. I 
 do not like parks ; but Weimar park is not 
 like one. There is marshy grass about the 
 stream, and a screen of poplars ; and quite a 
 nice common high-road separates the meadows 
 from a hillside, among whose trees you see 
 or guess an occasional pleasant, deep-roofed, 
 eighteenth-century country-house. And such 
 a house, only smaller, stands free from the 
 beeches, in a long strip of garden above the 
 road ; a square, white pavilion, espaliered with 
 vines. 
 
 " Goethe's Gartenhauschen," said the driver, 
 and bid us push open the wicket and enter 
 without more ado ; so we entered and went 
 upstairs. What a relief beyond all telling ! 
 No portraits, no plaster-casts, no inscriptions, 
 no glass-cases ; not a trace of that immortal the 
 effigies and thought of whom had overshadowed 
 
 56
 
 Goethe at Weimar 
 
 our morning. Save for the purity and pathos 
 of long emptiness, it might have been the house 
 of anybody. Any pleasant burgher or disabused 
 courtier of some hundred and odd years back 
 might have been its owner ; retiring thither for 
 week-ends to read and meditate, and prune the 
 roses, and train the vines, with but a single 
 servant to cook for him, or at the most a half- 
 dozen chosen friends, walked over from the 
 town on frosty sunny mornings, or on summer 
 nights, to share a meal. There would be trout 
 from that stream, a bit of game, vegetables and 
 fruit grown in the garden, a cold pie brought 
 as a present from Weimar perhaps, and a bottle 
 or two of hock out of the little cellar, discussed 
 along with philosophy and seasoned with classic 
 quotations, by the French fireplace, or under 
 the trellis, by the row of tall sweet sultan, when 
 the summer sun stood high. There would 
 be talk of art — the writings of Abbe Winckel- 
 mann perhaps — and of things of Italy. For the 
 hermit of the Gartenhauschen has travelled as 
 well as read. There on the walls are the big 
 prints of Rome, with its monuments com- 
 plete, St. Peter's dome, the Forum's clustered 
 columns, Caecilia Metella, and the pines of Villa 
 
 57
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Borghese, and Cardinal's coaches quite tiny, with 
 footmen hanging behind ; all bird's-eye, and 
 flourished round about with dedications to Emi- 
 nentissimi. Also a plan of how Rome once was, 
 antique Rome, where Horace and Virgil and 
 Ovid and Propertius had wandered, and he of 
 the Gartenhauschen, with his sweethearts dis- 
 guised under antique names, had followed them 
 in reality (or in elegiacs only) " frohlich ins 
 Leben hinein." 
 
 But, as those distiches rise to my lips, it 
 suddenly comes over me that those lines, the 
 whole Roman Elegies, may have been, not 
 read or repeated, but composed under these 
 hornbeam arbours, written at yonder spindle- 
 legged table, with the Capodimonte goddess 
 on the inkstand. . . . Roman Elegies ! Toys ! 
 Why, this desk has held the sheets of " Wilhelm 
 Meister" and "Faust;" and there, in the 
 garden, while stooping to weed away the grasses 
 which the meadows have sent up among the 
 mignonette and sweet sultan, there may have 
 come to him the tune, the initial lines of those 
 songs which are more passionate and deep than 
 all the music, even Schubert's, ever set to 
 them. 
 
 58
 
 Goethe at Weimar 
 
 Hero-worship is no mere vanity. A great 
 man — nay, merely a great man's name, his poor, 
 frail, or fatuous living reality, his letters, house, 
 or former belongings — can give us, like some 
 odd wizard's contrivance, the shock, the over- 
 whelming emotion, the superposed composite 
 images, the very essence of all that is most 
 potent in his creations. And we receive, close- 
 packed like our own brain-cells, distilled and 
 warm like our own heart's-blood, the value of 
 all Mozart's songs and quartets and symphonies 
 in one battered, tarnished button off his waist- 
 coat in the Salzburg Mozarteum ; and here the 
 poignancy and radiance of all Goethe's work, 
 his intellectual serenity, and splendid rhetoric, 
 and laconic lyric pathos, from the bare walls 
 and scanty furniture of the little garden- 
 house. 
 
 But, like all other divinities, the illustrious 
 spirits thus evoked in our own soul have 
 different boons for different worshippers. And 
 so it was with me in Goethe's garden-house. 
 What touched me most was not the table on 
 which he had written, nor the curtains em- 
 broidered for him by Frau von Stein. It was, 
 hanging over his little travelling bedstead, a 
 
 59
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 large flat basket of marsh-grass (the Italian 
 word for it is sporta)^ such as unsophisticated 
 cooks carry to market in the South. That he 
 should have brought back just this basket seems 
 so human and touching, opening vistas of the 
 kind of memories he, like some others among 
 us, would clutch at : mornings in Verona 
 market-place, and such-like. Or perhaps the 
 basket had held the last oranges he picked in 
 that South he would never revisit. Or humble 
 Italian provisions on some autumn jaunt 
 among the criss-cross vines, the clipped mul- 
 berry-trees of an osteria on the Aventine, where 
 fragments of carved marble and bits of fluted 
 column lay about in the artichokes ; that day 
 when, sipping the sweet, yellow wine, his soul 
 was steeped in the anguish of leaving Rome, 
 the anguish of that worse than any human 
 parting, for which he found no adequate words 
 of his own, but only those heartrending dis- 
 tiches of Ovid — 
 
 " Quum subit illiiis trlstissima noctis imago, 
 Quae mihi supremum tempus in urbe fult "— 
 
 and the rest. 
 
 That sforta ! It brought Goethe nearer my 
 60
 
 Goethe at Weimar 
 
 own heart than any thought of his human loves, 
 real or imaginary, which arose with the scent 
 of the autumn beech-leaves underfoot, and of 
 that long row of sweet sultan outside the garden- 
 house. 
 
 6i
 
 THE BRAHMS-FEST AT 
 
 MEININGEN 
 
 THOSE days at Meiningen, barely 
 over, yet already so distant (for I 
 am writing from Trent, with the 
 sense of return to Italy strong upon 
 me), have had, music apart, a very peculiar and 
 clinging kind of charm. 
 
 The notion of celebrating the unveiling of a 
 monument to Brahms by the most perfect per- 
 formance Germany could give, not merely of 
 his own chief works, but of a number of great 
 works by Brahms's greatest German prede- 
 cessors, was surely a delicate and noble one ; 
 and the realization thereof had a dignified, 
 intimate serenity of glad emotion, veiled and 
 restrained by the thought of death, which made 
 one think of the passage in Dante where Virgil 
 — whom in many ways Brahms seems to re- 
 semble — is welcomed into the company of the 
 other great dead poets. 
 
 62
 
 The Brahms-fest at Meiningen 
 
 Nor could a fitter place than Meiningen have 
 been invented, apart from the fact of its possess- 
 ing one of the finest orchestras in Germany, 
 and of its princes having been personal friends 
 of the dead composer. It is a tiny place, scarce 
 more than a big village, although the capital of a 
 Saxon duchy, in a narrow grassy valley, the steep 
 slopes of the Thuringian forest encroaching on 
 either side. The greater part of it was destroyed 
 early this century by fire (although we had the 
 signal good fortune to lodge in a beautiful seven- 
 teenth-century house, with plaster theological 
 virtues over the doorway) ; and yet, with its 
 high-pitched red roof and many-windowed house- 
 fronts, and its funny schloss, half Versailles and 
 half Niirnberg, it has an infinitely old-world 
 air. Bismarck and Karl Marx and Wagner 
 have lived for it apparently in vain ; and it 
 belongs to that dear Germany presided over 
 (under innumerable princelets) by Goethe and 
 Schiller — the Germany which has helped, thank 
 goodness ! to make us all a wee bit romantic. 
 As if to carry out this impression the place was 
 decorated for the festival, not with arches and 
 garlands and gas-jets, but, under the red and 
 black drooping flags, merely with small green 
 
 ^3
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Christmas-trees, stuck in the pavement, and 
 smelling of fairy tales. The right Germany 
 for Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, 
 and also, surely, for Brahms. 
 
 The commemoration began, after two days 
 of public rehearsals, by the performance in the 
 principal church of Brahms's German Requiem. 
 The church, rebuilt in days of Schlegel and 
 Tieck, with yellow tile spires in what they call 
 " Romantic style," stands in the market-place ; 
 and there was something pleasant and genuine 
 in the fact that while some thousand persons 
 collected all over Germany were slowly enter- 
 ing for the ceremony, the market women went 
 on selling their bread and cabbages and plums 
 under the lime-trees, and the long ladder wag- 
 gons drawn by yellow cows, rumbled along 
 with loads of hay and firewood. 
 
 I do not know any other Requiem with half 
 the solemn tenderness of this, which Brahms 
 wrote for his mother. The words, for one 
 thing, pieced together out of the Old and New 
 Testaments, by the composer himself, are of a 
 different character altogether from the terrible 
 and dramatic words of the Latin liturgy : there 
 is nothing about the Day of Judgment, or hell, 
 
 64
 
 The Brahms-fest at Meiningen 
 
 or terrors of individual souls. The only thing 
 one would wish for out of the Latin is the equiva- 
 lent of the initial verse : *' Requiem asternam 
 dona eis, domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis." 
 And by a curious coincidence, the whole of 
 Brahms's setting seems but the expression, the 
 varied expansion, of this thought. This music 
 asserts one constant consoling belief : that what 
 we love endures, and cannot perish. This Lux 
 Perpetua is broken up as in teeming constella- 
 tions and galaxies of love and glory, spreading 
 over all human experience like the soul-com- 
 posed stars of Dante's heaven. This Lux 
 Perpetua shines mild and clear in those wonder- 
 ful upward passages, those delicate wheels and 
 ladders of sounds ; above all, in those notes of 
 the treble solo, placed, as with steady hands ; 
 full, single notes, palpitating star-like, or rather 
 opening out slowly, as the planets do in the 
 evening, against the multifold restful darkness 
 of the other voices. 
 
 I confess that when the crowd streamed silently 
 out after the Requiem, I could not bring myself 
 to follow it, through the street set with Christmas- 
 trees, to the unveiling of the monument to 
 Brahms, although I felt sure that the sculptor 
 
 65 F
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Hildebrand would say noteworthy things, and 
 Dr. Joachim charming and dignified ones, and 
 that the whole little ceremony would be sincere 
 and kindly. But the chords of the Requiem, 
 that wonderful return, at the end, of the divine 
 opening phrase, " Selig sind die Todten," seemed 
 to isolate one from even the nicest living people ; 
 and I climbed up, alone, through the ducal park 
 to the woods above Meiningen. Woods, first 
 of every loveliest orange and russet and delicate 
 lilac sereness ; and then, on the hill-top, of 
 close-set pines, in the grass under which grow 
 tufts, wet with frost, of pure blue Alpine 
 gentian. On, up and down, along more woods 
 of pine and larch, and then of the real German 
 spruce fir, close and mysterious in the autumn 
 mists ; squirrels crossing the path and jays rising 
 screeching from the bushes ; a country without 
 much view, with no beauty of line, almost ugly, 
 but of infinite intimate romance. 
 
 The ceremony of the unveiling had been, I 
 was told by my friends, all that it should be. 
 The piece of poetry, by some local celebrity, 
 had a pleasant Schiller-like ring, and a Schiller- 
 like sentiment in the insistence, not so much on 
 the genius of the dead master, as on the fact 
 
 66
 
 The Brahms-fest at Meiningen 
 
 that but for premature death he might still have 
 been with his Meiningen friends, himself direct- 
 ing his music. And in Dr. Joachim's really 
 beautiful speech there was a characteristic German 
 allusion to Brahms's love of nature, to the 
 excursions on foot which he had ever loved to 
 make through the hilly and woodland districts 
 of his country. But it was not till two days 
 later, when public curiosity had a little subsided, 
 that I found my way, just before the Joachim 
 concert, to the Brahms monument in the 
 ducal park. Although long acquainted with 
 Adolf Hildebrand's genius, not merely for 
 plastic form, but for monumental, and, in a 
 way, suggestive fitness, I was surprised and 
 charmed by the work and the place. The 
 monument is a longish semicircular bench with 
 rounded back, of a model not uncommon in 
 Roman villa gardens, with a little low fountain 
 at either end, and the bust of the great com- 
 poser in the middle. And what it stands in, 
 under the trees, is a tiny churchyard, or rather 
 a part of the park which has blossomed out 
 into old, old tombs, with tender and romantic 
 eighteenth-century inscriptions. Broken pillars 
 and urns and flat tombs with cherub heads, 
 
 67
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the autumnal trees roofing them over, and the 
 yellow leaves raining continuously down, cover- 
 ing them as with blossom, where the tender 
 green moss had not covered already their alle- 
 gorical sculptures and escutcheons. 
 
 The park was empty in the frosty, sunny 
 morning ; and the monument of the Master — 
 a monument not merely to a great man, but to 
 a dear friend — seemed to have long taken its 
 place among the other tombstones in the grass, 
 among the inscriptions dating from that noble 
 and gentle time of Goethe and Schiller, of 
 Beethoven and Schubert. The sky was clear, 
 the frost still on the grass, the sunlight pale 
 yellow through the branches ; and, in the mood 
 awakened by the music of the preceding days, 
 this little bit of wood, with the theatre, full of 
 music and romance, at one end, and this senti- 
 mental, modest graveyard at the other, seemed 
 to sum up, in the autumn weather, the German, 
 half-Christian, half-classic feeling of immortality 
 — the immortality which Brahms has promised 
 mankind in his Requiem. 
 
 68
 
 THE SCOTTISH CHURCH AT 
 RATISBON 
 
 WE arrived at Regensburg, which 
 our fathers called Ratisbon, in 
 the late afternoon. The rain 
 had ceased, but it had not 
 properly cleared up. The wet roofs showed 
 the dark brown and yellow of their round tiles ; 
 the cobbles before the inn the same sad-coloured 
 mixture. The moist air was full of the smell 
 of breweries, and curls of smoke hung between 
 the church towers all round. When we walked 
 out after supper there was something oppressive 
 in the absolute darkness and silence, and the 
 perpetual churches and chapels at every opening 
 in those streets. 
 
 The next day there was High Mass at the 
 Cathedral ; gold altars blazing under splendid 
 green and scarlet mediaeval glass ; choirs of 
 solemn priests ; and, above all, Palestrina music 
 sung with a perfection unknown to the Sixtine 
 
 69
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Chapel. And Regensburg began to exercise 
 the fascination which, perhaps owing to my 
 childish years In Pio Nono's Rome, the ritual 
 of Catholicism always has for me. 
 
 I fear — indeed, I know ! — that this feeling is 
 by no means satisfactory to my dear Catholic 
 friends. But, then, theirs is not satisfactory to 
 me. And in their attempt to make it into 
 something modern and morally workaday, in 
 their contention of spiritual meaning and re- 
 vealed excellence, there seems to me a lack of 
 appreciation, irreverence almost, towards this 
 marvellous idol fashioned in the Imao-e of all 
 man's longings, carved and gilded and set with 
 jewels through successive ages, and kissed and 
 fingered as rocks are kissed and fingered by the 
 sea, by the strength and weakness of generations 
 of men. What can a priest know of this ? 
 Or, guessing, how can he preach it ? He may 
 never admit, even if he ^z€\^ the majesticalness 
 of this master-work of human genius and human 
 sorrows. 
 
 To such as share the feeling in question, 
 Ratisbon must have the same sort of charm 
 as parts of Rome ; with the advantage that 
 there is not here anything to disturb the 
 
 70
 
 The Scottish Church at Ratisbon 
 
 attention, nor any of that official indiscretion 
 which checks emotion in the capital of Latin 
 Christianity. The churches, size for size, are 
 even more numerous than in Rome. At every 
 corner, every crossing, sometimes two in one 
 little square, sometimes two back to back. And 
 when one thinks to have done with churches, 
 behold ! an open door in a house, and people 
 kneeling in an unsuspected chapel ! Churches 
 so familiar, so domestic, tucked away, only their 
 great rude Romanesque towers revealing them 
 (with the tall chimneys of ecclesiastical breweries 
 alongside) among the high-pitched many-atticked 
 roofs. Churches, in this most tortuous of towns, 
 here, there, and everywhere ; not to be found 
 again (or their doors become suddenly unopen- 
 able), like the lumber-rooms of some rambling 
 old house, or the chambers hidden in the belfries 
 and clerestories and apses of some huge, bar- 
 nacled-over church itself. Churches most often 
 shut and accessible only through back doors and 
 Messners keys, enclosing cubic yards of the air 
 of past centuries. Churches hoisted, like the 
 cathedral, on a footstool of their steep steps, or 
 sunk, like the Erhardtsgrube, below the level of 
 the street. Churches with inconceivably shaped 
 
 71
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 windows, round, triangular, bulbous, and with 
 towers varying from the fortress to the pagoda. 
 Churches of no ascertainable date, but in which 
 one guesses something immensely old. 
 
 There are some which have still their melan- 
 choly old rood-screen and nightmare Romanesque 
 sculptures ; but their basilical pillars are encased 
 in plaster, their narthex turned round into a con- 
 ventual choir, and the whole will be crammed 
 with the maddest seventeenth- and eighteenth- 
 century stucco and gilding. Of these the 
 Emerams-Kirche is the type ; Emeram, patron 
 saint of amateur firemen, for he holds a ladder 
 and bucket. It was the church of a great 
 Benedictine abbey, and has been, all through 
 the ages, the noblest church of Ratisbon. But 
 Bavarian dukes, emperors and empresses, and 
 knights in fifteenth-century armour, have been 
 poked away into damp corners, to let the place 
 flower out in rococo splendour. There are not 
 merely stucco coloured saints in Louis XIV. 
 stage costumes gesticulating overhead, and a 
 coloured stucco Madonna on a moon, a heavenly 
 Queen of Night singing roulades ; but also 
 stucco vases with stucco palms and stucco roses 
 flowering on the entablature ; with stucco 
 
 ^2
 
 The Scottish Church at Ratisbon 
 
 capitals bursting into flower-wreathed, smiling 
 ladies. I will not speak of Cupids, coloured 
 natural, floating among solid stucco vapours. 
 Surely such a gallant church was never seen 
 before ! And alongside of the high altar, at the 
 height of a first floor, two great white and gold 
 Louis XV. state pews, glazed in like Spanish 
 balconies to serenade under. But, to recall the 
 delighted soul to austere thoughts, behold ! 
 high up, by a window, a coloured figure of a 
 religious person praying devoutly, so naturally 
 as to make one jump back startled. Nor is 
 the Emerams-Kirche wanting for appropriate 
 relics. Indeed, of all the saints or portions of 
 saints (for saintliness causes you to be shredded 
 and kept in minute fragments among cotton- 
 wool and paper flowers) I have ever seen en- 
 joying posthumous elegance and splendour, St. 
 Maximilianus, here exposed to pious eyes, is 
 certainly the most splendidly elegant. He is 
 habited in gold and silver cloth, cut after the 
 Roman manner, but with a certain pastoral 
 grace, as in the bows at knees and shoulders ; 
 a delicate little skeleton saint, no bigger than 
 a child, reclining with easy dignity upon one 
 elbow, with bony hand outstretched. A 
 
 n
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 well-deserved crown adorns his refined skull ; 
 and where his eyes and lips have been are neat 
 little loops of pearls and diamonds. . . . 
 
 The dignitaries of the Holy Roman Empire, 
 what time the Diet sat at Ratisbon : Electors, 
 Princes, Archbishops, Mitred Abbots, Mar- 
 graves, Rhinegraves, Wildgraves, and the rest, 
 with their suite of aulic councillors, aulic 
 notaries, aulic apothecaries, dwarfs, fiddlers, and 
 negro lacqueys, must have held this relic of 
 St. Maximilian (if a whole skeleton can be 
 called a relic .'') in very great reverence. Nor 
 any less devout to St. Maximilian, I take it, 
 those Scots Lords and other adherents of the 
 Stuarts whose epitaphs we read in the Church 
 of St. James in this city. . . . 
 
 The Scottish nation had had their church at 
 Ratisbon, a rude basilical one, of any age of 
 barbarism, already in the sixteenth century. 
 The tombstones of the abbots of the adjoining 
 monastery date no further back (the Scotch 
 names begin with a Dominus Ninian, Professor 
 of Theology) ; so it seems likely that Ratisbon 
 became a centre of Scottish Popery, a litde 
 subsidiary Rome, halfway to the great one, 
 after the Reformation. Among the abbots 
 
 74
 
 The Scottish Church at Ratisbon 
 
 are a Stuart, a Galley Leigh, a Henderson, an 
 Arbuthnot. How far to come and die in odour 
 of sanctity from the Tweed to the Danube ! 
 
 I would not waste my sympathy on these 
 Northern Papists and Jacobites. The Scottish 
 soul has resources of self-complacence unknown 
 to feebler, though cognate, races. Also, as was 
 once pointed out to me by the descendant of 
 one of them, a Jacobite lord was perhaps less 
 to be pitied on going into exile, even exile at 
 Ratisbon, than (through the clemency of George 
 III.) on returning to his native pepper-pots by 
 the links or square stone box above the brown, 
 sad moorland stream, with no neighbour for 
 miles and not a lemon to make punch with. 
 All this is true. And yet those exiles now 
 buried in St. James's Church must have longed 
 for their country when banished from it, and 
 whistled ditties unknown to German organists 
 but meaning strangely much to them, as they 
 came from doing; honour to St. Maximilian of 
 the diamond eyes, and, passing under the city 
 gate, stopped upon the bridge to watch the 
 Danube, glacier green, flowing to countries 
 further and further away, like their own lives, 
 from Scotland. 
 
 75
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Such vague Scotch tunes, or the emotions 
 thereof, were in my memory, with this thought 
 of possible Masters of Ballantrae and Red- 
 gauntlets, as we also crossed that Danube 
 bridge. 
 
 It is presided over by some kind, bearded 
 Gothic emperor, perhaps Henry the Fowler, 
 holding a bird on his wrist, with that afternoon 
 a real bird perched on his blackened stone 
 shoulder ; and the country beyond seems under 
 his pleasant protection ; better, methinks, than 
 St. Maximilian's ! We followed the banks to 
 a ferry over a lovely little tributary of the 
 Danube. An old woman took us across its 
 deep glassy waters, brandishing a long green 
 paddle like that of Bernini's river-gods. Beyond 
 was a white church, Maria-hilf^ hung round 
 inside with wax arms and legs and votive 
 tablets : " Mary has helped." An old lime- 
 tree in flower made the sweet evening sweeter ; 
 the sunlight was broken among the sedge. 
 Down the dark Danube, black among mists, 
 rose the many church roofs and towers of 
 Ratisbon. 
 
 1^
 
 PRAGUE AND THE PRINCESS 
 
 WHEN the last organ chords of 
 High Mass had echoed out in 
 the gloomy magnificence of that 
 fortress and hill cathedral, the 
 sacristan unlocked the sanctuary of St. Wences- 
 laus, King of Bohemia. These three autumn 
 days at Prague have been, save for a few sunset 
 gleams, as black as London ; and when the 
 chapel doors of green Byzantine bronze were 
 opened it was at first difficult to perceive any- 
 thing beyond a vague shimmering splendour. 
 As our eyes grew accustomed to the twilight 
 those shining walls seemed to gather themselves, 
 to curdle into faint figures of saints, rigid and 
 mournful like Russian eikons. Only, instead 
 of being painted on mere gold, they loomed 
 among great tesserae of precious stone, irregular 
 nuggets of jasper, of root of amethyst and root 
 of garnet, and some kind of wonderful prase, 
 
 77
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 pale luminous grass-green ; lumps of gem-stufF 
 set into a cement of gold as flints are set into 
 the mortar of an English church. Upstairs 
 in the sacristy there were presses full of vest- 
 ments cut out of wedding dresses of German 
 Empresses and Bohemian Queens ; and no end 
 of jewels, from the antiques set as knobs on 
 Byzantine crosses and crowns to the rings of 
 eighteenth-century Cardinals. But what was 
 such Western magnificence compared with the 
 Aladdin-walls of that Wenzel Chapel, telling, it 
 seemed, of some Europe eastward of any I 
 knew before, of Muscovy — who knows ? — of 
 Samarkand and Bokhara. That was the one 
 bit of the Prague I had expected, of the 7'eal 
 Prague ; for did not the Kremlin towers and 
 cupolas of the citadel turn into mere modern 
 imitation when the fog had cleared away from 
 the river-banks and one had climbed the palace 
 hill .? 
 
 As regards Prague itself, I had not, indeed, 
 built it beforehand in my imagination, as I have 
 built other towns, quite solidly set down by their 
 river, or piled up, with clearly seen valleys and 
 viaducts, on their rows of hills. But ever since 
 my childhood the mere name of Prague had
 
 Prague and the Princess 
 
 awakened emotions of mystery and wonder, 
 only the more potent for being, so to speak, 
 a mere disembodied essence ; a shapeless per- 
 fume of romance. One has to pay, occasionally, 
 for such imaginary raptures ; and heaven knows 
 we have paid for them during these three dreary, 
 chilly autumn days in the Prague which exists 
 outside the fancy. 
 
 But, of course, even here (and because we 
 had utterly ceased to expect it) we have had an 
 adventure ; and, of course, as was proper, on 
 the eve of departure. This afternoon, having 
 disconsolately dragged our bicycles along muddy 
 tramlines crowded with drays, and gaunt, un- 
 finished streets and mangy playgrounds gar- 
 nished with dustheaps, we subsided to coffee 
 and sponge-cake on a promenade terrace over- 
 looking the town and the river. The gravel 
 was strewn with singed lime leaves, the coffee 
 was grounds, and the sponge-cake was sand. But 
 from that height, and in the reddened afternoon 
 mists, the city took an odd look, with its snaking 
 quays and its many domed churches, of Rome 
 seen from the Janiculum ; the Prague of our 
 fancy, the real Prague began to take body for 
 our eyes. And when we were refreshed and a 
 
 79
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 little comforted, we bicycled along the low, half- 
 built-over hills in the direction of the citadel. 
 The weather, as I have said, had been intoler- 
 ably gloomy, though not actually raining ; but 
 the sky opened at sunset, and the dust and 
 powdered brickbat of the unfinished roads 
 gathered in ambrosial halos round the trees, 
 round the towers and cupolas, the triumphal 
 eighteenth century gables of the palace, and the 
 cathedral spires and gargoyles and flying but- 
 tresses. 
 
 It was already dusk, the willows in the dried 
 moat a uniform dark silver, as we crossed the 
 former drawbridge of the Hradschin, and passed 
 under its gate-towers into the silent emptiness 
 of the immense, the more than Vatican-huge, 
 yards of the palace. 
 
 The thought of St. Wenzel's Chapel and how 
 its encrusted amethyst and chrysoprase might 
 look under flickering taper-lights, drew us to 
 the cathedral, and, with a faint hope of some 
 evening service, we tried the handle of the apse 
 door in vain. When, sudden, there appeared, 
 as if out of the pavement and the twilight, a 
 lady, dressed in grey, veiled (or at least wearing 
 a veil), who accosted us in English with a 
 
 80
 
 Prague and the Princess 
 
 courteous offer to get the cathedral opened for 
 us. . . . On my demurring that it was too late 
 to disturb the verger, she turned to my com- 
 panion, conversing in very good English, asking 
 whence we came. From Oxford — doubtless also 
 from London ^ And how did we like Prague ? 
 For her own part, she owned, she found it 
 melancholy, and very much preferred England. 
 . , . She had visited that country some years 
 ago, and stayed — did we know those cities ? — 
 at Birkenhead and Eastbourne. She seemed 
 reluctant to part from us, and, as old travellers 
 express it, offered us all manner of civilities. A 
 certain grave suavity in her manner, and also 
 her interest in England, had led my slow and 
 prosaic wits to hold her for a governess de bonne 
 maison. But my fellow-traveller, who did the 
 talking while I merely listened, and who is, 
 quite incontestably, possessed of deeper know- 
 ledge on all romantic matters, as befits a constant 
 student of Meredith and Stevenson, declares 
 that no such thing : that the lady evidently dis- 
 posed of great power in those palace precincts ; 
 one sentry, at all events, seemed to present 
 arms to her, so that it is probable she was some 
 distracted princess, some archduchess suspected 
 
 8i G
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 of mesalliance and confined within the walls of 
 that great, empty, half-sacerdotal fortress-palace. 
 Indeed, to one initiate in such cases, the mere 
 cut of her lace veil, long and unusually loose, 
 could leave no doubt of her high rank and 
 mysterious misfortunes. So my old friend 
 says, and said. And, as the last sunset-red 
 faded behind the triumphal stucco gables, the 
 Muscovite cupolas, and the gargoyles and pin- 
 nacles of the Hradschin, while the first lights of 
 the town and bridges pricked orange through 
 the lilac mist below, I felt the force of these 
 arguments, and admitted that the lady must be 
 some Serenity at the least, and certainly an ill- 
 used one. . . . 
 
 As we walked down the steep terraces, which, 
 together with those immense empty yards and 
 endless palaces, give the hill also of Prague an 
 odd Roman air, we met, in the crowded streets 
 near the bridge, a band of men handcuffed with 
 little chains and padlocks, and escorted by two 
 of those Austrian soldiers who, with their 
 narrow dressing-gown, spurs, and pointed cap, 
 look for all the world like Emperor Palasologus 
 on his medals. This sight evoked in my mind 
 the thought of what this decent, manufacturing 
 
 82
 
 Prague and the Princess 
 
 Austria had but so recently stood for : old 
 gentlemen who told of Spielberg and casemattes 
 at Mantua and carbonari hanged in gangs at 
 Venice ; also of an uncle of mine, seen to fall 
 before Cracow, and of whom, thirty years later, 
 after the amnesties, fellow-prisoners reported 
 the death in a Hungarian fortress. Bands of 
 prisoners, and not electric trams — these were 
 the things one might expect to get out of the 
 way of in Prague, at least as I had dreamed of 
 it. And as we pushed our bicycles along the 
 foggy, lighted streets, and over the bridge where 
 statues of woeful saints loomed like ill-omened 
 birds above the black water and its yellow 
 reflections, I felt quite satisfied that the lady 
 who had accosted us in the Hradschin-square 
 was not a Fraulein but some distracted Arch- 
 duchess. 
 
 83
 
 BOOK II 
 ITALY
 
 OF ROADS 
 
 WHAT strange things roads are ! 
 rivers made by human hands, 
 down which flow language, art, 
 customs, civihzation, and our 
 own fancy, if we have any ! 
 
 Opposite us, the only thing we ever clearly 
 saw among those highest Apennine peaks veiled 
 and unveiled by mists, was a road winding 
 most precipitously among the crags. 
 
 " The Bacciocca's road ; la strada della Bacci- 
 occa," said the guide. 
 
 She made it. Napoleon's sister Elisa (" the 
 Bacciocca," the old people call her here), as a 
 short cut from her little upstart Courts of Lucca 
 and Massa, to Modena, Lombardy, and Eugene 
 Beauharnais, governing for Napoleon, King of 
 Cisalpine Gaul, who stands at Milan in efiigy, 
 the naked Caesar, sceptred and laurel-crowned. 
 The Bacciocca's road is carried so high and 
 87
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 steep, and over such formidable precipices, that 
 after her downfall, being often impracticable in 
 winter, it was gradually forsaken ; landslips 
 allowed to interrupt its highest points, and 
 weeds to overgrow it, becoming at last only a 
 rough path for charcoal-carrying mules, and 
 barely that : vanishing like that Napoleonic 
 kingdom of Italy. The other day, driving 
 across the pass, I noticed its opening into the 
 main high-road from Florence to Modena ; 
 a strange, stony, weedy track, mysteriously dis- 
 appearing among the grass slopes. And when 
 the guide spoke of it, I suddenly brought to 
 mind the other end : that " old Modena road," 
 unexpectedly appearing, with its rough pave- 
 ment, out of the chestnut woods along the 
 lower Serchio ; a black wooden cross adding to 
 the mystery with which it drew my almost 
 childish eyes. The other end of the Bacciocca's 
 interrupted road emerging down in those distant, 
 distant valleys ; emerging also, in my own far- 
 off teens, with heaven knows what ups and 
 downs, and waste, untrodden memories between 
 them and this. . . . 
 
 What strange things roads are ! I repeated to 
 myself for the hundredth time (for the thought 
 
 88
 
 Of Roads 
 
 has come on that Roman road running straight 
 up and down the Northumbrian moors, and on 
 the wide white road issuing out of the Forest 
 of Fontainebleau, and marked " Route Nationale 
 pour Marseille et Antibes ") ; rivers made by 
 human hands, down which language, art, cus- 
 toms, civilization flow ! 
 
 For note these circumstances. Where I was 
 standing, high up on the mountain crest, v/hen 
 the guide pointed out the Bacciocca's road, I 
 was really far nearer to the Lucchese valleys, 
 the valleys where I spent so many early years, 
 than to this so familiar Florentine Apennine 
 crest, this neighbouring San Marcello, let alone 
 Pistoia. The sheep grazing around us belonged, 
 the shepherd told me, to the Lucchese village 
 of Montefegatesi, to which I climbed those long 
 years back. But the people up here speak the 
 same language as at San Marcello and Pistoia : 
 they look to Florence as the capital, although 
 this river Lima, falling into the Serchio, goes 
 straight to Lucca ; while Pistoia is separated 
 from us by a long range of highish hills, the 
 watershed of the Reno, going into the Adriatic. 
 But the road connects ; the road which winds 
 through San Marcello, up the Reno valley, 
 
 89
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 down to PIstoia, past that old bishop's villa, to 
 which it will add another charm by leading my 
 memory to these green beechwoods now sur- 
 rounding me. What an event is the making 
 of such a road ! How full of historical mean- 
 ing, past and future 1 Nay, the making of the 
 original mule-track. . . . And how full all 
 things, even the beaten, dull white macadam, 
 are of life and history ! 
 
 For the other road, which now enables you 
 to travel hence into Lucchese, that very logical 
 road following the course of the river Lima, 
 was made only about sixty years ago. Why ? 
 Because at that time the Duchy of Lucca fell to 
 the Grand Duke of Tuscany ; what had once 
 been the independent and hostile Lucchese 
 commonwealth became Florentine. It took the 
 death of an Archduchess (of Napoleon's widow, 
 Maria Louisa) handing over Parma to a 
 Ludovic of Lucca, to open this district up to 
 itself, uniting the two ends of the river valley. 
 But it was too late : the Lucchese were left 
 with another dialect, tinged already with Ligu- 
 rian, contemptible to the Pistoiese peasants. 
 Now, if the traitor Filippo Tedici, instead of 
 having his head cut off and hung (as it hangs 
 
 90
 
 Of Roads 
 
 in cffi-gy still) at the palace windows of Pistoia, 
 had but succeeded in handing over the castle 
 of Popiglio to Machiavel's hero Castruccio, the 
 road would have been made along the Valley 
 of the Lima ; these forests would have been 
 Lucchese ; their peasants would have imagined 
 the apparition who foretells the future dressed 
 in the robes of the Prince of the Republic of 
 Lucca ; and the pure Tuscan-speaking moun- 
 taineers would have been closed in between the 
 Reno and the Arno. 
 
 On the other hand, the Bacciocca's road, 
 Napoleonically soaring above the abysses, might 
 almost have united the hostile provinces (for 
 the convenience of her chariot and bandboxes) 
 but for the snows and the landslips. So that 
 elements and Archdukes, geography and history, 
 seemed to have played a droll game against 
 each other for the nationality and language 
 (even for the i^at^ language, since Florentines 
 are notorious blasphemers, and Lucchese mealy- 
 mouthed) of whole districts and populations. 
 And then journalists and school primers, and 
 persons desiring the exclusion of foreigners, 
 talk big about blood and race ! Why, the 
 possibility of walking dry-footed instead of 
 
 91
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 wading, will make one race of two, unite most 
 hostile civilizations ; the bridge, replacing the 
 ford — nay, the ferry — between the Janiculum 
 and Aventine, merging Rome and Etruria. 
 These little prosaic considerations, to those who 
 realize them, are full of tremendous poetry. 
 
 But it is not merely civilization, art, language, 
 which flow along roads, along those dusty rivers 
 made by human hands. Our thoughts and our 
 sympathies travel also along them, far quicker 
 than across the ploughed fields and the moun- 
 tain sides over which, as we say, the crow flies. 
 There is a charming passage in Madame de 
 Noailles's diary of her little religleuse pour rire^ 
 about the noise of the trains bringing with it, 
 as they hurtle past the convent, visions, almost 
 scents and the taste of the air, of distant 
 Southern places. And perhaps the sea seems 
 such a gulf of separation (though in all but 
 quite modern times it has been an element of 
 material union), because its highways are marked 
 only on charts, and our eye follows no tracks 
 along the indefinite waste of waters. 
 
 But our thoughts travel along roads rather 
 up-stream than down. The white riband before 
 me, twisting along the dull green and brown 
 
 92
 
 Of Roads 
 
 valley of the Apennlne stream which I hear 
 but cannot see, twists into my past. Into what 
 are, perhaps, the most important years of my 
 life, my youth, all gathered up, long as they 
 once seemed, into one small heap, of which ten 
 minutes would make the inventory. Nor into 
 my past only. Perhaps, if one may say so, 
 into my innermost self, the self which never 
 changes. For affections have altered and 
 interests ; people have come and gone, all so 
 essential at the moment, so negligible later. 
 But these places, these hills and rivers and 
 houses, possess me as before, their power un- 
 changed. And they beckon to my thoughts, 
 and draw them into the past along that moun- 
 tain road. 
 
 93
 
 THE BEAD-THREADER'S 
 
 FUNERAL AND THE CHURCH 
 
 OF THE GREEKS 
 
 I CHANCED this morning upon a funeral 
 at the Frari. After looking at Bellini's 
 music-making angels, and at the triumphal 
 arches and equestrian monuments, among 
 which stands out so grimly the wooden box, 
 painted with crosses and skulls — holding, for 
 our fancy at least, the headless corpse of Car- 
 magnola — I was stopped, in going away, by the 
 arrival of men in red smocks carrying heavy 
 gilt candlesticks and a coarse gilt Christ upon 
 a pole. After them came a priest and acolyte, 
 and a bier. 
 
 The bier was set down in the choir, opposite 
 the altar ; a coffin, covered with a magenta pall, 
 imitation silver crosses hooked to the sides, 
 and a tinsel crown on the top. And round 
 it gathered five or six young women, composed, 
 94
 
 The Bead-Threader's Funeral 
 
 correct in their best black dresses and black lace 
 veils ; prayer-book, handkerchief, and fan in 
 readiness. And with them, to show that the 
 contents of the little coffin had been, as an old 
 man told me, nubile — that is, unmarried though 
 of marriageable age — came four little girls, in 
 starched white frocks and veils, each with a 
 bouquet of artificial flowers. They stood round 
 the bier, while the young women knelt down, 
 trying to spill as little as possible of the thin 
 waxlight in their hands. Then the service 
 began, gabbled out at tremendous speed before 
 the tomb of Francesco Foscari. 
 
 A small congregation had meanwhile as- 
 sembled — I know not whether out of compli- 
 ment to the poor little marriageable dead, or 
 merely because church is a convenient nursery 
 on a hot morning ; for these faithful were 
 mainly children. They lolled and rolled about, 
 in groups of twos and threes, dear tiny girls 
 with curls and topknots, little moving bundles 
 of scarlet and pink and faded yellow among 
 the carved oak saints of the choir stalls ; the 
 mothers keeping one eye on them, the other 
 on the priest bobbing up and down before 
 the altar. When Mass had been despatched, 
 
 95
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the priest, his acolyte, and the men in their 
 red smocks took up their position before the 
 coffin. 
 
 " In saecula saeculorum, Amen," reads the 
 priest as fast as he can tear. "Amen," answers, 
 all in one syllable, the acolyte. The women 
 lean forward, the waxlights guttering over their 
 benches ; the little girls in white, superior, im- 
 perturbable, shift from one leg to the other, 
 pull up a loose white stocking, adjust the paper 
 bouquet. The children in the stalls grow weary 
 and unruly, open and shut their mothers' red 
 fans, drop them noisily, titter, take each other 
 by the hair ; the little ragged boys, meanwhile 
 running round the upper row of stalls, bend 
 over and catch at the heads below — such sweet, 
 clean-featured little heads, with knots and curls 
 of blond hair ; heads rolling from side to side, 
 elbows meanwhile pushing, legs kicking, feet 
 clacking. 
 
 " Et lux perpetua luceat ei, Domine," intones 
 the priest. 
 
 " Amen," answers the acolyte, in one syllable. 
 
 A rattle of money-boxes, and the service is 
 over. 
 
 In a minute the four fellows in red smocks 
 96
 
 The Bead-Threader's Funeral 
 
 had stripped off tinsel crosses and crown from 
 the rough deal coffin, and replaced the red pall 
 by a rusty black one ; the congregation had 
 dispersed, leaving only the priest talking to the 
 women in black and the little girls in white. 
 The four men raised the coffin on their shoulders 
 and walked down the nave, between the tombs 
 of Titian and Canova, the various triumphal 
 arrangements of admirals and captains, the great 
 spectacular monument where the Doge Valier 
 or Venier is going off to heaven in state — 
 (" Hie revixit " says the inscription) — among 
 his negro lackeys and attendant cherubs. I 
 asked a young sacristan in red who the dead 
 person was : A girl who made bead garlands 
 for cemeteries ; nineteen years old ; she had 
 died of consumption. 
 
 I left the church by the side door. In the 
 square, blazing with sunshine, I came upon the 
 funeral once more — -people crowding round, and 
 people on the wharf and staring from the bridge 
 over the canal. The black coffin was setded in 
 a long black boat, which made off with it, two 
 of the men in red sitting at the stern. The 
 priest and his acolyte, still in purple and lace, 
 stepped under the hood of a gondola, one of 
 
 97 H
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the bier-carriers pulling off his red smock over 
 his head and taking an oar — a stalwart and 
 keen-featured lad with shining teeth. Finally, 
 the young women in black, after many com- 
 pliments, also got into a covered gondola, 
 looking to their veils as they got under the 
 felze. And all shot under the bridge. 
 
 Very heartless } Surely not, if we strip away 
 the hypocrisy of people having at least five 
 hundred a year and a sitting-room. The poor 
 little consumptive maker of bead garlands for 
 cemeteries is indeed now — save, perhaps, for her 
 mother — as little important as the dead kitten 
 bobbing up and down, a sleek, grey ball, in the 
 green water of her native canal. But that just 
 answers to the truth. The poor (let us have 
 the courage to say it) leave no trace behind, and 
 are in this respect less of a fraud than the rich, 
 who possess ancestors with names, and for their 
 bones, inscriptions, and what the French call 
 concessions a perpetuiti — to wit, their measure of 
 earth properly paid for all eternity. There is 
 wonderfully little lux perpetua for any of us ; 
 and the poor are too busy and have too little 
 houseroom for each individual's addition to the 
 common fund of life, the crowd of living beings, 
 
 98
 
 The Bead-Threader's Funeral 
 
 the group of surviving thoughts and emotions, 
 to be labled with an individual memory. 
 
 This does not prevent little makers of glass- 
 bead garlands, even when they die of con- 
 sumption at nineteen, from having played their 
 part — perhaps been happy and made others 
 happy (some nice, clean young fellow like the 
 one who pulled off his red cassock to take an 
 oar) — and being glad that they too will have a 
 funeral service with married friends in black, 
 girl friends in white, wax dips, and fine Latin 
 words promising some vague glory which is, 
 after all, this. And it is all right that Latin and 
 Southern Catholicism, well-connected and long- 
 established enough to permit itself occasional 
 sincerity, should be as rough and ready as the 
 truth requires. The sanctuary, swept and 
 garnished — into which only the priests pene- 
 trate as in the Greek Church — is good, literally 
 and metaphorically, for keeping up a standard 
 of solemnity, offering a half-curtained glimpse 
 of unattainable splendours which shine through 
 the lives of those who cannot come near. But 
 it is good also to have hurried requiems which 
 neighbours can attend and bring unruly children 
 to without fear of boring them ; good that the 
 
 99
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 carrying off of a poor little consumptive's coffin 
 should mean a holiday in best veil and shawl, a 
 jaunt in a gondola across the lagoon, to the 
 other young women who continue cutting the 
 rods of coloured enamels, threading the heaps 
 of beads all day, and, if sufficiently gifted, 
 making them into imperishable black and mauve 
 wreaths for the more memorable dead. 
 
 It is part of the greatness of Catholicism — 
 its human, democratic, universal, and (through 
 inheritance of Paganism) virtually primaeval 
 character — that it should have broucrht an 
 
 o 
 
 element of abbreviation — nay, perfunctoriness 
 and sans gene in answer to the hurry and in- 
 attention of poor humankind. This thought 
 came home to me the other day in that Greek 
 church of Venice, which is a church (belonging 
 to a minority of rich merchants as well as to an 
 aristocratic ritual) of the swept-and-garnished 
 type, almost like an English cathedral. But its 
 doors stand open ; and as it happened, while the 
 perfect chants rolled on in stately endlessness 
 and the golden pope came out of the golden 
 sanctuary leisurely — nay, lengthily — reading the 
 Gospel, with unstinted clouds of real frankincense 
 around him — it happened that a tiny member 
 
 lOO
 
 The Bead-Threader's Funeral 
 
 of the Latin community strayed in by mistake. 
 A small girl, clattering in her clogs with the rapid 
 crossings and bob-genuflexions of her persuasion, 
 ran up to the chancel benches, plopped down to 
 a hasty prayer, clattered and bobbed and crossed 
 herself, head erect, unabashed — the incarnation 
 of the democratic human needs which have 
 made these splendid esoteric rites of mingled 
 Judaism and imperial Byzantium turn into the 
 shabby perfunctoriness of every-day Latin 
 Catholicism. 
 
 This Church of St. George of the Greeks is 
 one of Venice's most wonderful places. One 
 has the impression of a sanctuary which is at 
 the same time a treasure-house ; gold every- 
 where — furniture, eikons, lamps, embroideries — 
 not gilding, but real, heavy gold. The vest- 
 ments are stiff with it. The bearded golden 
 priest goes backwards and forwards, the gold- 
 embroidered curtains opening and shutting for 
 him, revealing and hiding a nimbus of tapers 
 and incense and shining encrusted walls ; while 
 the acolytes, in slender folded linen smocks, 
 with gold stoles crossed over their backs, kneel 
 before the rood-screen. There is a sense of the 
 departed splendours of Judaism, of a Solomon's 
 
 lOI
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Temple behind those half-drawn curtains ; and 
 every time that pope came forth a name rose 
 up in my mind — Melchizedek, he who was a 
 priest and also a king. After that service at St. 
 George's of the Greeks, we walked home through 
 St. Mark's, entering it by the sacristy. The hot 
 air, smoke of incense and dust, the shuffle of 
 human beings and snuffling of priests caught 
 one by the throat after that fair empty splendour 
 of the Greek church. Caught me at least, sub- 
 duing, crushing, perhaps rumpling my imagina- 
 tion and feelings, but making them humaner. 
 There is, in this magnificence, a share of shabbi- 
 ness ; in this venerable place the sense of the 
 deciduous, the perishable, which, in a way, is 
 also a sense of the eternal. There is room, in 
 St. Mark's solemnity, for such as that con- 
 sumptive girl who made bead garlands for 
 cemeteries. And St. Mark's is the greater for 
 her poor little presence. 
 
 I02
 
 THE RIVER TEMPLE OF 
 CIVIDALE 
 
 THERE is most often a special grace 
 attaching to first acquaintance with 
 a locality. The fancy leaps to take 
 possession of unfamiliar charms ; 
 or, rather, things will lay themselves out deli- 
 berately to conquer us. It is like love at first 
 sight, compared to which all else seems what the 
 French call a marriage of esteem. But there are 
 exceptions to this rule ; and it may happen that 
 the company of a genuine priest or priestess 
 of the Genius Loci initiates us to unguessed 
 wonders : the elusive divinity of the place, 
 obstinately hidden before, responding to the 
 words, sometimes to the mere quickened glance 
 and sudden gesture of the adept. Thus it has 
 been with Cividale this autumn. I knew the 
 place before (or thought I knew it), and brought 
 that old fellow-traveller of mine to see its temple 
 and river. But, as things turned out, my friend 
 103
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 has initiated me into their matchless romance. 
 That little temple, serving as chapel to the 
 adjoining nunnery, is certainly a place for such 
 initiation. I had bidden the sacristan return to 
 his dinner and leave us there alone, locking 
 only the gate of the river terrace, so that the 
 sound of the weir rose into the dusk of that 
 strange sanctuary. It is a coloured dusk, filled 
 with the faint scent of mouldering woodwork 
 and of the incense of long ago. The vaultings 
 are full of the smoky purples and yellows and 
 greens of rubbed-out frescoes ; and the brown 
 carving of the Gothic stalls (worm-eaten and 
 frayed almost into natural objects) is picked out 
 with orange and blue. But, facing you as you 
 enter, and making your heart stand still just a 
 fraction of a second, is the unearthly whiteness 
 of a row of life-size figures in an arch. Byzantine 
 ladies, side by side, isolated, straight and tall, in 
 stiff, plaited robes, already like the queens of the 
 portal of Chartres, and still like the tight-draped 
 goddesses of archaic Greek temples : Anastasia, 
 Agape, Chasonia, and the three other virgin- 
 martyrs of Aquileia. 
 
 Into their presence we had crowded on my 
 first visit to Cividale — an ex-Minister, some 
 104
 
 The River Temple of Cividale 
 
 American ladies, the young men of the Liberal 
 Monarchical Club, and myself; twelve of us, 
 without counting the town authorities, the police 
 force, and a due contingent of severely repri- 
 manded street boys, crowded into the presence 
 of the Byzantine virgins and martyrs, rigid and 
 unblemished and majestic above the tombs of 
 two Longobard Dukes. After that (I am still 
 recounting my first visit to Cividale in Friuli) 
 we had a very good dinner in the picturesque 
 inn, with its Venetian balcony, where, according 
 to the servant's information, one of the heads 
 serving as balustrade-knobs is that of the Beata 
 Benvenuta, who, on one single moonlight 
 night, embroidered a great veil for the Madonna. 
 ... I had, even at the moment, an odd feeling 
 that I knew more about that Beata Benvenuta 
 than the Goldonian Locanda waitress was ever 
 likely to know ; was the miraculous garment 
 really a veil for the Madonna, not rather some- 
 thing useful for the Christ Child, and had not 
 the Beata required some supernatural assistance 
 in her work ? " Who was the Beata Ben- 
 venuta ? " I asked my neighbour at dinner ; 
 and, as I spoke, remembered that one of the 
 Liberal Monarchical youths had just explained 
 105
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 that the Bridge of Cividale, like many other 
 bridges all the world over, was built by the 
 Devil. " Who was the Beata Benvenuta ? " 
 I repeated. " As a matter of fact," answered 
 the Count, eating his risotto, ** she was a kind 
 of great-great-grandaunt of mine, who died in 
 odour of sanctity early in the eighteenth 
 century." The rest was drowned in the clatter 
 of plates and glasses at our two tables and the 
 clatter also of tongues ; politics and municipal 
 .matters were being discussed with Southern 
 warmth, the Lace schools also, and Divorce 
 legislation ; the story of the fall of the Campanile 
 at Venice repeated for the hundredth time, with 
 appropriate recriminations ; the superstition of 
 Byzantine and Longobard worthies animadverted 
 upon, but quite tactfully, by the American ladies. 
 . . . Conversations which were continued after 
 dinner, only less noisily, at the Museum, over 
 the Missal of St. Elizabeth (Tannhauser's St. 
 Elizabeth), and the cases with Duke Gisulph's 
 bones and teeth, his mouldering spear and silver 
 spurs and gold cross, and the pathetic glass 
 bottle, still half full of water, which had been 
 found walled up in his tomb. Such had been 
 my first recollections of Cividale ; by no means 
 
 1 06
 
 The River Temple of Cividale 
 
 without picturesqueness and charm, with their 
 incongruities of American ladies having a lovely 
 time with Liberal Monarchical youths, of politics 
 and flirtation, and Longobard Dukes and Byzan- 
 tine Virgins ; let alone the Lion of St. Mark, 
 on the palace opposite, reduced to a mere out- 
 line of wings and mane and book by the stones 
 and the hammers of the politicians of 1796. 
 Picturesqueness and charm such as Anatole 
 France has taught us to perceive in our 
 Harlequin-civilization ; and which it is so 
 much to the good to appreciate. But, still, 
 not quite the same thing as the memories one 
 carries away when the Genius Loci has stirred 
 in a place or in one's heart. 
 
 I have had to wait for that till my second 
 visit to this tiny easternmost city of Venetia. 
 And sitting once more, but with silent leisure 
 this time, in the little temple above the river, 
 one began to suspect who the divinity of the 
 place might be, and that one was, at that 
 moment, in his sanctuary. For I have for- 
 gotten to explain that the nuns' chapel was 
 once a pagan temple. Enclosed in that brown 
 and purple and tarnished gold of Gothic carving 
 and frescoes are the temple columns of cipollino, 
 107
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the balustrade of delicate green Greek marble, 
 pale and slender like the stalks of water-plants, 
 and in the chapel-midst a strip of serpentine 
 flooring and the circular slab for sacrifices ; 
 while the nuns' lectern rests on the pillar which 
 served, so legends say, as altar. The altar of 
 whom ? one wonders and one guesses, as there 
 comes through the open chapel door the noise 
 of the weir and the mill-wheel, bringing the 
 vision of the rocky river-bed draped in clematis 
 and fig ; the vision of the pellucid pale-green 
 stream, white in the shallows, closed in by the 
 great mountains, where the moving clouds un- 
 veil patches of autumn snow. Whatever the 
 god in pagan times, the abbess of this convent 
 must surely have been the daughter of a line of 
 sibyls. 
 
 It has been bitterly cold, this second visit to 
 Cividale, although we are still in the first days 
 of October ; and while we were in the Museum 
 there came some claps of thunder and a deluge 
 of icy rain. But how we have been rewarded 
 for our discomfort by feeling that such premature 
 winter has made us understand the character 
 of this country ! The rain being over, we 
 clambered down into the bed of the river, 
 1 08
 
 The River Temple of Cividale 
 
 under the great mediasval bridge, built, it is 
 said, by the Devil. Despite the storm, the 
 water was still perfectly pure, transparent white 
 in the shallows, and in the current and pools an 
 indescribable green, as of some gem yet to be 
 discovered. But where it came from, where its 
 rocky trough and grassy sides must lead back 
 to, with their twistings, up there^ instead of sere 
 chestnut-clad hills and banks of highland cloud, 
 what should appear but a range of Alps bluer 
 for fields of thick fresh snow and moving 
 wreaths of snow-storm ! 
 
 We thought we had seen our last of the 
 river. But when we had lunched there re- 
 mained a bare half-hour before the rickety 
 omnibus conveyed us to the train. And, as 
 sometimes happens, this last half-hour of des- 
 perate scamper and snatched impressions gave 
 us, like the moment of parting of lovers (" Eyes, 
 look your last ; arms, take your last embrace ! "), 
 the consummate possession of the place ; and 
 Cividale is, so to speak, ours for evermore. 
 
 What we saw in that half-hour, what we 
 
 wanted to see again and more, was of course the 
 
 river ; which we followed up its course through 
 
 a suburb of farms and weavers' cottages (their 
 
 109
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 soaked plaster flaming incomparable carnation 
 and rose-coloured after the storm), and into the 
 fields beyond the city walls. We thought we 
 had seen that river at the bridge, and higher up, 
 where the weir and the mill are, and the temple, 
 half-hidden among gardens. But how far 
 purer, deeper, rapider, of more pellucid crystal 
 in the shallows, of more incredible gem-like 
 green in its main current and pools, this river 
 became as we followed it towards its rise ! The 
 rocks were of shining moraine stone, white like 
 marble or the bleached bones of animals ; the 
 sand and shingle white also, like a polished 
 floor ; the Alpine grass fitting close on those 
 boulders' tops, and tufted with sapling alders ; 
 while, wherever a little crystalline tributary 
 trickled in, the valley opened to disclose the 
 chestnut-clad knolls, the first autumn gold in 
 their green, and the vineyards and meadows 
 of the plain. Other rivers have more or less 
 bed of their own, are more or less set in 
 the adjacent country — at least, on one side. 
 But this Natisone — for such is the name of the 
 river of Cividale — cutting its way through the 
 limestone, has made itself a place all to itself; 
 a sort of sanctuary, one cannot help feeling it, 
 no
 
 The River Temple of Cividale 
 
 of rock and sand and overhanging bushes and 
 sloping lawns ; it has hollowed out caverns 
 also, similar to the one in which, in Bellini's 
 enigmatic picture of a river not quite unlike, 
 though far less beautiful, the Centaur is holding 
 converse with a Hermit. There might be such 
 a Centaur, let alone a Hermit, anywhere here 
 without surprising us. And that Centaur, as 
 in Greek mythology, would be some momentary 
 disguise of the swift secret stream, born beyond 
 the confines of Italy among Sclavonian hills. 
 Now, was he not the real divinity of the Pagan 
 temple in the nunnery, the Genius Loci therein 
 enshrined ? 
 
 As we waited very prosaically for the train 
 back to Udine, the clouds began to break up 
 and crimson fires to burst out in the West. 
 The Eastern Alps also partly unclouded them- 
 selves ; and those fields of fresh snow, those 
 suddenly revealed snowy peaks, grew an un- 
 earthly rose-colour, veined, as it faded, with 
 purple vapours of that sanguine puce which 
 shrouds the crucifixes during Lent. And, 
 above the long, serrated chain, the sky cleared — 
 pale, washed, blue and amber, of wintry purity. 
 Then, as the last crimson embers crumbled in 
 III
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the West, a great loose vapoury cloud, which 
 had brooded like a huge bird over the plain, 
 dissolved into thin violet showers. 
 
 We had seen Cividale, and its immanent 
 divinity. 
 
 112
 
 THE MOUNTAIN OF PORTOFINO 
 
 FOR people who have imagination, there 
 is no fufilment equalHng expectancy 
 or regret. Indeed, the poignancy of 
 the Faust-moment is due, after all, 
 not only to our passionate clinging, to our 
 " Abide, thou art fair ! " but also, very often, 
 to whatsoever of deferred craving there may 
 be in it. 
 
 For years one of the objects of my longing 
 had been that "Mountain" (in Italian phrase) 
 of Portofino. Winter after winter it used to 
 greet my visit ; a hazy violet dolphin outline, 
 between sky and sea, when I opened my 
 shutters on returning to that hospitable Genoese 
 villa. It summed up the delight that yearly 
 visit was to me, like the chink of the forge 
 over the way, the bells of the mules carrying 
 myrtle and arbutus faggots to the baker ; the 
 113 I
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 smell of the olive logs in my fire, which 
 glimmered absurd and charming in the sun- 
 shine ; and also (for such things enter into our 
 finest unwritten poetry) the excellent taste of 
 my coffee and toast ; and the quiet of that 
 hour of dawdling over a book, the hour so 
 precious when one stays with friends, which is 
 as yet virgin of talk. The point, the stab of 
 it all, the essence of all that violet and azure 
 winter loveliness, was the desire for the Moun- 
 tain of Portofino ; desire recurrent from 
 morning to morning of my stay in those parts, 
 and with year to year of my return to them. 
 And now I have at last been up, into, the 
 Mountain of Portofino. Has my longing for 
 it ceased ? 
 
 First I should say that its reality surpasses 
 all my imaginings. Partly from glimpses from 
 the train before it burrows into the long, cruel 
 tunnel, partly from inland walks along that 
 Ligurian coast, I knew what kind of thing it 
 must be : thick feather of olives on the lower 
 slopes, vivid green velvet of pines and glister 
 of aromatic brushwood overhanging the sea ; 
 and those northerly embosomings of rosy, 
 leafless trees, which among the evergreen 
 
 114
 
 The Mountain of Portofino 
 
 vegetation of the South are the most lovable 
 thing of all, meaning winter, and therefore 
 spring, in that land of unchanging summer. 
 All this I had known or guessed. But not 
 how much there was of it. Seeing the dolphin- 
 shaped peninsula (" Portus Delphini " the 
 ancients called it) lying between the pale-blue 
 morning sea and whitish Eastern sky, I had 
 not understood that it was, what every real 
 mountain must be, a range, a whole region 
 of valleys and peaks — nay, more, an island 
 almost, with its own bays and promontories 
 and precipitous inlets, full of different climates, 
 and with an island's separate history and cha- 
 racter. Particularly in this matter of being 
 wooded. For as you find the last tracts of 
 Italian fir-forests only among the Apennine 
 crests, so the woods of pine which doubtless 
 covered all the Ligurian mountains in former 
 times seem to have shrunk to this great 
 promontory. Shrunk and intensified. This 
 was another surprise, and the greatest : that 
 after the mule-track had climbed the terraced 
 olive-yards and left behind the pale- painted 
 houses and the trellises, we found — and could 
 have lost 1 — ourselves in real woods, the pines 
 
 115
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 fringing against the sky at every turn, and 
 covering the sheer rocks even to the sea with 
 their vivid green pile. And in the mountains 
 one has, so to speak, the worth of a forest. 
 On the flat there may be miles or only yards 
 of wood, for anything the eye knows ; while 
 here the trees crowd round from every side — ■ 
 above, below, crag above crag — against the sky 
 and sea, telling us that there are more, ever 
 more — as many as the heart desires. So much 
 may be said for the Portofino pines, and for 
 the deep scrub of heather, arbutus, myrtle, 
 lentisk, and all the herbs which mingle their 
 Southern aromatic scents with the sun-heated 
 resin on those rocks. But, brushing through 
 their fragrance as we walked, we came to a 
 sharp turn of the track ; and suddenly, before 
 us against the sky, instead of the blue summer 
 sea, were peaks and fields of snow ; and im- 
 mediately below us, enfoldings (for I cannot 
 call such gentle things ravines) and ridges of 
 wintry trees and grass — grass sere and matted 
 and tufted with violets and primroses among 
 the autumn leaves, a chill but hopeful world 
 which claims one's heart after that Southern 
 impassive radiance. 
 
 ii6
 
 The Mountain of Portoiino 
 
 I understood, up there, that Portofino Is not 
 a mountain merely, but a country ; more so 
 than most countries, for it faces other countries, 
 the Alps on one side, with valleys and peaks 
 complete when the storm-clouds shift ; and the 
 distant coasts curving away on two others. 
 And it looks down on to the nearer shores, 
 letting you count their towns and villages : 
 little places with white flower-like churches 
 among the olives, and windows, flaming in 
 the sunset, along the creeks and coves, to 
 where the harbour of Genoa Is revealed by the 
 smoke of unseen steamers. This is the regal 
 prerogative of high places, that you commune, 
 so to speak, get eye to eye, not merely with 
 sky and clouds, but with the rest of the world, 
 treat on an equality with the kingdoms of the 
 earth, instead of gossiping humbly within your 
 own horizon, hedged by your own garden-trees, 
 and walled in by the neighbour's summer-house. 
 Nor is this all. The " Mountain " of Porto- 
 fino is a country to itself, not merely by recog- 
 nition of alien geography but by display of its 
 own. It gives you from the top of itself the 
 odd delight of looking across valleys and ridges, 
 noting the whole movement thereof : how dry 
 117
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 woods and olive-yards are folded and strained 
 along the extended limbs of the hills ; how 
 the pines flock down and jut out and crane 
 over the sea. It gives you of all exhibitions of 
 the earth's surface the one which, by reason 
 of its fairy-tale upside-downness, is the most 
 enthralling and amusing : I mean those views 
 of lower-down things — peaks, pine-fringed capes, 
 and villaged bays, apparently erect against the 
 sea ; and the sea, with its foam and its distant 
 sails, apparently above the high-lying land beneath 
 us ; the sort of view only Besnard has dared to 
 paint, giving the eye the value of one's geo- 
 graphical thought, and making the world from 
 a mere idea into an actual spectacle displayed 
 for one. Indeed, I cannot better express the 
 fascination of that mountain than by saying how 
 often I thought of Besnard's pictures of the 
 Golden Age, of the fabulous past or the un- 
 certain future, while we walked down again 
 through the twilit olive-yards (with cherry- 
 blossom floating above the shadowy grass), 
 and watched the little harbour and the rose 
 and silvery houses of Portofino appear and 
 reappear below us, the castle hill blocking that 
 little bay into deep blue ponds of ever-shifting 
 
 ii8
 
 The Mountain of Portoiino 
 
 size and shape, but always encircled, embraced 
 by the azure open sea. 
 
 My wishes had been right, during all those 
 years, beckoning me to the promontory ; it was 
 all as I had hoped, only much, much more 
 marvellous and lovely, with the infinite resources 
 and surprises which reality commands. And 
 yet . . . And yet . . . 
 
 From the mountain-top I looked down 
 towards the little well-known Genoese towns 
 and villages, seeking, along that coast, the site 
 of the house whence I had looked out towards 
 this place I was now in and the window at 
 which I had longed for the Mountain of Porto- 
 fino. And, by an odd inversion, it seemed 
 that what I felt, what now meant Portofino — 
 the emotion, so to speak, of that name — was 
 localized, not here in the reality and the present, 
 but yonder in the past and the imagined, almost 
 in that eastern corner-room with its fire of olive- 
 wood. 
 
 That room of the villa ! There was amusing 
 Genoese eighteenth-century furniture in it, blue 
 and white ; and, outside my door, in the long 
 passage, hung the " Harbours of France," after 
 Vernet ; Claude-like prints which, they also, 
 119
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 seemed to mean the emotion of Fortofino. And 
 then, yonder, across not only space but years, 
 the morning book and the cup of coffee, and 
 the expectation of that hurried scramble among 
 the olive-yards and pistachio and peach-blossom- 
 coloured houses and chapels of the hillside. 
 There was never time to go far enough, I 
 recollect, because my hosts lunched so early and 
 I dawdled over my breakfast. And ... is 
 such a thing possible ? — in that straining and 
 chafing against return home in time, that re- 
 peated broken-off ramble, that snatched and 
 treasured brief impression, was my Faust- 
 moment — " Abide, thou art fair " — of this 
 Genoese coast. Nay if all this beauty now 
 around me, this real Mountain of Portofino, 
 had, besides a visible body, also a soul, why, 
 it almost seemed that this immortal essence of 
 the thing was my thwarted wish of all those 
 years ago. 
 
 Should this be matter for complaint, proof 
 of the unfitness of the human heart for any 
 thorough happiness ? I think not. And I have 
 written down this little secret episode of the 
 Portofino Mountain and myself, in thankful 
 recognition of all the ingredients, past and 
 1 20
 
 The Mountain of Portofino 
 
 present, real and imaginary, wishes and regrets 
 even more than satisfactions, which are needed, 
 like the bitter herbs as well as the honeyed, to 
 make up the full flavour of our enduring 
 joys. 
 
 121
 
 NARNI AND TERNI 
 
 I 
 
 MY impressions of Narni are coloured 
 by the fact that I travelled up 
 from the station to the town in 
 the company of a newly dis- 
 charged convict. He was my only fellow- 
 traveller in the rickety chaise which serves as 
 diligence, a long, lean, close-shaven old man, 
 in clean but tattered clothes and carrying a 
 small bag of striped linen. I was a consider- 
 able time before taking in the situation, even 
 after he had told me, with an outlandish pro- 
 nunciation made less intelligible still by his 
 toothlessness, that he would like to smoke, 
 because for forty weeks they had forbidden 
 him to. He was stiff, almost lame, with a bad 
 knee, and smelt of disinfectants ; circumstances 
 which, added to his sad, excited face, made 
 me imagine that the place where he had been 
 
 122
 
 Narni and Terni 
 
 forbidden smoking must have been the hospital. 
 He was a Calabrian from Cosenza, he told me ; 
 and that led me to ask how he had come to be 
 in hospital in Amelia, so far north already of 
 Rome. It was then that, with no reticence, but 
 rather a little impatience at my stupidity, he 
 explained that Amelia was a prison, and that he 
 had just finished his time there. At Amelia, 
 he said, they would allow no smoking, only 
 //z/j, taking out a snuff-box ; but now he was 
 going to throw it away because, he said, " it 
 was a dirty habit." 
 
 I don't know what I said — very likely nothing. 
 At all events the old man continued his con- 
 fidences. ''Ah, signora," he exclaimed, "if I 
 could tell you my whole story there would be 
 tears ! " And he did. The story came out in 
 short lumps, which seemed to choke him. I 
 gathered that there was one to whom he had 
 refused the hand of his daughter, and who had 
 accused him, in revenge, of participation in the 
 robbing of a farm, for which he had been con- 
 demned to forty weeks at Amelia. 
 
 To my surprise there was no abuse of his 
 enemy, and not a word about revenging him- 
 self; the old man's excitement venting itself 
 123
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 only in odd Southern invocations of the Virgin 
 and confused scraps of a speech he had made 
 at his trial. The man's whole appearance was 
 strange — prematurely old, dark, and shrunk, 
 with black, parched lips and wild eyes ; but his 
 head, when he removed his brigand's hat, was 
 very shapely, and there was not a trace of 
 meanness or violence about his poor, gaunt, 
 scared face. Indeed, he seemed very human. 
 He looked round him at the landscape with an 
 unusual interest. " It is forty weeks since I 
 have been out of doors," he said. And then, 
 with a word of pity for these arid rocks, he 
 began to praise his own country. " Wine ? 
 oil .? corn ?" he cried with a kind of passion ; 
 " you should see Calabria ! There is every 
 good thing of God's there." 
 
 " But you are going back there now," I 
 remarked, feeling that he spoke as if exiled for 
 ever. He said, * Yes.' But then explained, with 
 infinite sadness and difficulty, that his children 
 had never answered any of his letters ; he did 
 not know how to write himself, but his children 
 all did. And then I understood that he imagined 
 that his children thought of him as dead, and 
 that, in an undefinable, inarticulate way, he felt 
 
 124
 
 Narni and Terni 
 
 himself to be so — a dead man returning un- 
 expected and undesired. 
 
 He said no more about himself. But when 
 we got to the walls of Narni, growing out of 
 that pale rosy rock, with no vegetation besides 
 the thin olives and little stunted fig-trees and 
 the sombre background of ilex-clad mountains, 
 he turned to me again. " You should see the 
 orchards at Cosenza at this season," he said, 
 and there was infinite sadness in his voice, as if 
 he would never again see those orange and 
 lemon groves by the Southern sea. 
 
 We stopped in the little square behind the 
 apse of the cathedral, and I ventured to beg 
 him to get a few cigars to smoke in remem- 
 brance of me on his way home. We parted ; 
 he wished me a good journey, but without 
 thanking, for he looked surprised and as if he 
 did not understand the meaning of my gift. 1 
 took a wrong turning, and instead of entering 
 the town, which was in front of me, struck up 
 among the rocks and olives up the hill. At 
 the top was the Castle of Narni, built, I believe, 
 by Gattamelata, that otherwise obscure soldier 
 of fortune whose effigy by Donatello rides on a 
 great bronze charger far away at Padua. The 
 125
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 road wound round the rocky hill, above the 
 huddled town and its towers, above the deep 
 chasm of the Nera, dashing brimful and white 
 between the slopes of thin olives on one side 
 and the steep ilex woods on the other. When 
 I got to the castle, with fine, delicately cut 
 escutcheons of Renaissance popes, I found a 
 sentry, who refused to let me pass, and pointed 
 to another coat of arms I had not noticed, 
 round which ran the inscription, " Casa di 
 Coatti " — literally, *' Home for Coerced Ones." 
 I sat down among the olives under its towers, 
 and looked on the one side over the wide flat 
 valley with its great cloud-veiled Apennines, on 
 the other into that deep wild gorge, where the 
 river, after winding peacefully among poplars, 
 rushes and foams almost like a glacier stream ; 
 the little rough town, hewn out of the hillside, 
 just below me, with a monotonous bell-note 
 rising continually from it. When I got down 
 into the dark little cathedral, I found a cata- 
 falque with tapers being lighted, and the 
 members of a confraternity, with their white 
 hoods thrown back, coming in and gathering 
 one by one. As 1 waited for tlic hour of my 
 train, a tremendous hurricane burst against the 
 
 126
 
 Narni and Terni 
 
 cathedral windows ; and when I drove through 
 the gate a flood of rain rushed up across the 
 valley. The words written on the castle, 
 " Casa di Coatti," returned to my mind with 
 the insistence of that funeral bell. I left Narni 
 thinking of my poor old fellow-traveller ; and 
 the noble little rocky city seemed very sad and 
 solemn, dignified, like the old man, and thinking 
 itself dead. 
 
 II 
 
 Driving along between the rows of long sheds 
 with broken windows, the black yards and tanks 
 and refuse-heaps, the grim many-storied work- 
 men's dwellings a-flutter with drying rags, I 
 wondered in what, save in the movement and 
 change, which may bring us nearer to an endur- 
 able future, such a place as tariffs and bounties 
 has made of Terni can really be considered an 
 improvement upon its unchanged neighbour 
 city Narni, grave and stern among the olives 
 and rocks of its precipice. Is the mess which 
 seems the first step to the making of anything 
 in our days, is the investing capitalists' in- 
 difi^erence to filth and hideousnes a desirable 
 addition to the melancholy wretchedness of a 
 127
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 wild Italian valley, scarce touched by the 
 Middle Ages, barely civilized even by Antiquity ? 
 Be it as it may, the great factories, and a 
 tramline connected with them, crawl into the 
 very heart of these mountains, almost into the 
 awful presence of the waterfall, smoke of 
 chemical works imitating the smoke of its 
 spray. But there is a vigour of mountain 
 freedom about this scenery, a marvellous quality 
 of solemn remoteness, which keeps all intrusive 
 impressions at bay : gigantic walls of blackened 
 rock ; high distant peaks above the rain-clouds ; 
 great mountains bursting everywhere into 
 flowers and trees ; ilex and lentisk in the red- 
 dish rock ; heather and cytisus and every 
 manner of grasses and herbs ; while the 
 boulders among which the river whirls and 
 foams are alive with the green of great ilexes 
 and oaks in tender leaf, and draped with long 
 dry lianas, rooting in the midst of the furious 
 waters. One has a sense, quite unknown in 
 any other parts of the Apennines, of Alpine 
 possibilities ; one guesses that this water, white 
 as the Lutschina at Grindelwald, must issue 
 from almost eternal snows, nay, from some 
 kind of glacier ; one apprehends far, far above, 
 128
 
 Narni and Terni 
 
 beyond, in the heart of this mysterious wooded 
 country, the high valleys and table-lands, the 
 almost Alpine heights of the highest mountains 
 of Italy, the fastnesses of that great Sibylline 
 chain which is the centre, the hidden heart, of 
 the ancient peninsula. 
 
 At a turn of the gorge, where the road 
 squeezes alongside of the impetuous river — 
 all the water here, even the tiny streams, are 
 full, flush, and rushing — at a turn of the valley 
 of the Nera, a smoke, but lighter, more lumi- 
 nous than any real smoke, rises against the inky 
 hillside. It is the spray of the great fall. 
 From that high-lying land, valley, plain, lake, 
 whatever it is, so infinitely mysterious from 
 below, the river Velino leaps, one great wreath 
 of waters, into a vast basin among the rocks 
 and trees, thence to descend, after sending up 
 that cloud of spray, a wide-fringed cataract, 
 into the Nera, rushing impetuously in her 
 narrow bed below. 
 
 I sat for a long time on the stones, unmind- 
 ful of the watery mist, letting myself go to the 
 intoxication of those rapidly moving masses of 
 water : falling, rushing, weaving, whirling, and 
 flooding the rocks, overwhelming the other 
 129 K
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 river, like an ocean wave. The intoxication 
 also of the sound, the deep, overwhelming 
 complexity of hissing, hurtling, babbling, roar- 
 ing waters. 
 
 It had rained heavily in the night ; but one 
 had the illusion that it was the waterfall which 
 made the valley burst into bud and leaf and 
 flower, and filled the moisture with sweetness 
 of cytisus and hawthorn and wine-red cyclamen 
 among the rocks, and the still more delicious 
 aromatic bitterness of herbs and resinous bushes. 
 Together with that sense of the nearness of 
 great mountains I had the feeling, in this gorge, 
 and even where the Nera and its tributaries 
 race like mill-streams through exuberant fields 
 and orchards, that this was in a way the begin- 
 ning of a different climate, the threshold of a 
 South more potent, richer, wilder than any that 
 I know ; the vague conception of hidden coun- 
 tries and primitive civilizations. How chill 
 bare, stony, does not Umbria seem (Umbria 
 manifest as soon as you have crossed the hills 
 between Terni and Spoleto), with her austere 
 fields and barren mountains ! How sparse and 
 pensive even Tuscany ! Countries, one feels, 
 after this Nera valley, made for the Middle
 
 Narni and Terni 
 
 Ages, for the refinement of difficult, struggling, 
 civilizations, for delicate artists and saints. 
 This mountain region opening at Terni, region 
 of dumbness and barbarism in modern times, 
 belongs to Antiquity and its fierce and exuberant 
 civilizations. It is right and proper that the 
 great waterfall should be the handiwork of 
 Romans. One can fancy them with their lictors 
 and sacrificial pontiffs and trumpets and gar- 
 landed victims, opening the sluice, rolling the 
 last rock aside, letting one great mountain 
 stream leap fiercely upon the other, celebrating 
 the marriage feast of those divinities who have 
 pursued, embraced, and gone to their end 
 united ever since. 
 
 One thing is certain : that to me the Tiber, 
 with its dreary, muddy banks and its clayey 
 swirls, as it passes through Rome, will mean 
 more in future for the recollection of those 
 two white rivers, mingling in spray and roar 
 among the woods and rocks, before giving it 
 their waters. 
 
 131
 
 TIVOLI AND THE SIBYL 
 
 IN MEMORIAM 
 GASTON PARIS 
 
 I HAVE been only twice at Tivoli, but on 
 both occasions taken in the Sibyl's toils ; 
 the Sibyl, not the inn, I mean, but the 
 enchantress. 
 On the first occasion we had come over the 
 mountains of Subiaco and Olevano, along the 
 course of the Anio, the Sibyl's stream essen- 
 tially, to where it throws itself over the rocks 
 into the plain of Rome. And we had got to 
 Tivoli late in the afternoon, amidst the ringing 
 of bells, and with the dreaminess of a long 
 journey upon us. Sunset was over and the 
 tortuous mediaeval streets getting dark, when 
 we issued out of them into the huge yards and 
 grottocd rooms of the Villa d'Este, and the 
 terraces and cypress avenues vanishing towards 
 the grey, vague plain and cloudy mountains. 
 132
 
 Tivoli and the Sibyl 
 
 But the dominant impression had been of the 
 Sibyl, the few moments at the foot of her 
 temple ; nor did I understand the meaning and 
 the enchantment of those great palace gardens 
 till two years later, when it dawned upon me 
 that they, too, belonged to the Sibyl, were the 
 work of her enchantments, and built by the 
 spell of murmuring waters. 
 
 I said above that the Anio was the Sibyl's 
 stream ; and this may seem absurd to those 
 who think of it only as it winds slowly through 
 the Roman lowlands, sullen and muddy under 
 its willows, going to join the sullen, muddy 
 Tiber. But no nymph or Lurelei has ever 
 owned a more romantic river than is this Anio 
 in its upper course. We met it first coming 
 out of the narrow gorge under St. Benedict's 
 hermitage, with Nero's ruined palace opposite, 
 under a great hill, pale green with budding 
 chestnut and beech : a rushing torrent, foaming 
 and making emerald pools among the heaped- 
 up rocks. Below Subiaco, it flows impetuously 
 along the wide mountain valley, but smooth, 
 filling its narrow bed between pale green 
 willows ; and here and there slackening into 
 shallow reaches with delicately waving weeds ; 
 133
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 an unexpected and almost inexplicable sight 
 among these high and barren mountains. And 
 near Vicovaro, swirling suddenly round deep 
 below a little church embosomed in ilexes and 
 cypresses, it begins to suggest, and seems almost 
 to rehearse, what it will do anon at its mistress 
 the Sibyl's bidding at Tivoli. 
 
 It rushes glassy through its rocky trough, 
 races headlong into the abyss of the great fall, 
 only a cloud of spray revealing it among the 
 thick vegetation above. And it breaks into the 
 little delicate fountains, garden fountains, you 
 would think, among the ilex groves and the 
 grottoes under the little circular temple, in that 
 ravine filled with the song of nightingales. 
 There is no other temple, there can be none 
 in the world, as romantic as this one, with its 
 circle of austere mountains and glimpses of dim 
 plain, its high air and leaping, roaring, singing 
 waters, placed like an altar, a Delphic tripod, 
 ready for the Sibyl to prophesy. 
 
 That very first evening at Tivoli I felt the Sibyl 
 go to my head, and I knew she was going to 
 haunt me like the sound of her own waterfalls ; 
 the Sibyl, rather mediaeval than classic, dressed 
 in knotted veils and streamers, like the allegoric 
 134
 
 Tivoli and the Sibyl 
 
 nymphs of the Umbrian painters, and, like them, 
 moving on tiptoe with wide-open, dreamy eyes. 
 I identified her, of course, as soon as I heard of 
 the Sibyl of the Sibylline mountains, north of 
 the valley of the Anio in the fastnesses of the 
 Umbrian Apennine. But the Alpine-climbing 
 philologist, who accidentally told me of those 
 mountains, could not be brought to see the 
 connection. I turned therefore for sympathy to 
 my other neighbour at dinner, the learned Canon 
 of San Lorenzo. " The Church," answered 
 that ecclesiastic, with benign evasiveness, " has 
 never expressed herself dogmatically on the 
 subject of Sibyls ; they do not constitute an 
 article of faith, but only of opinion." 
 
 " The grotto near the summit of the principal 
 peak of the so-called Sibylline mountains," went 
 on the mountaineering philologist on the other 
 side of me, " is closed by a large boulder, 
 doubtless of glacial origin. Antoine de La 
 Salle, the reputed author of the romance of the 
 ' Petit Jehan de Saintre,' was probably improving 
 on a local legend, and not speaking from per- 
 sonal observation, when he affirmed, about the 
 middle of the fifteenth century, that there is an 
 inscription cut in the entrance of the cave, bearing 
 
 135
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the name of a knight who penetrated some 
 centuries before into the innermost recesses of 
 the mountain. And the peasantry, being ques- 
 tioned by a member of the Folklore Society, 
 stated their opinion that the boulder already 
 mentioned had been placed at the mouth of the 
 cave to guard the privacy of the fairy who in- 
 habited it. Personally, I incline to regard the 
 myth of the Sibyl as a remnant of some altogether 
 prehistoric Italiot cultus, and I must, there- 
 fore, reject the theory of my learned colleague, 
 Hector Tristan, who attempts to identify the 
 Sibyl of the Sibylline mountains with Venus, 
 and the German knight with Tannhauser. But 
 I shall, of course, be delighted to furnish him 
 with every possible assistance in the ascent he 
 proposes to make of the mountain, with the 
 intention, I believe, of himself penetrating into 
 the cave of the so-called Sibyl." 
 
 " Hector Tristan ! " I exclaimed. " Oh, 
 then, it's all right. Of course the Sibyl will 
 ... I mean the whole question will be settled." 
 
 "Remarkable instances of credulity may 
 
 occasionally be observed in men possessing a 
 
 high scientific reputation," said the Canon, 
 
 meekly, sipping his coffee. " For the rest, as 
 
 136
 
 Tivoli and the Sibyl 
 
 you are aware, the only authoritative reference 
 to the Sibyl is in a verse of the Liturgy : ' Teste 
 David cum Sibylla.' " 
 
 " I dislike that way of bracketing her with 
 David," I replied ; and, as the speech sounded 
 uncivil, I added quickly, " I am sure Monsieur 
 Hector Tristan wouldn't admit of it." And I 
 resumed my own thoughts. 
 
 It was quite natural that she should be ex- 
 pecting him. Ever since that old story with 
 Apollo, the Sibyl had shown a preference for 
 persons of imagination. She had been entangled 
 with Virgil, and doubtless with other poets 
 (letting alone King David, who, although a 
 Jew, was, after all, a writer of verse). Indeed, 
 that accounted for the little romance with the 
 German knight. It was bound to be very 
 short-lived, for we all know what Minnesingers 
 were — utterly illiterate, for all their poetic pre- 
 tensions, and unable to read their sweethearts' 
 letters when their secretary was off on a holi- 
 day. Now, the Sibyl was a lady of the highest 
 intellectual attainments, accustomed to the con- 
 versation of the finest scholars and most delicate 
 wits of Antiquity ; and her extensive knowledge 
 of the future would have long prepared her for 
 
 137
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the fact that, as M. Renan thought and proved 
 in his own person, the only satisfactory successor 
 of ancient sages and mediaeval poets and ancien 
 regime wits is your modern French savant. . . . 
 These thoughts crowded upon me as, for the 
 second time in two years, 1 wandered about the 
 Villa d'Este at Tivoli. The Sibyl must have 
 laid out these gardens at the time that she 
 anticipated much diversion (and was disap- 
 pointed) from the acquaintance of Ariosto and 
 Tasso. It was here that she had intended to 
 keep her poets captive among the labyrinthine 
 terraces and walks, moss-grown and deep- 
 shadowed by century-old cypresses and flower- 
 ing bays, lulling them with the murmur and 
 plash of the fountains, and fascinating with the 
 rush and shimmer of the waters. There are 
 some tanks, a whole chain of them, of deep, 
 opaque, turquoise-blue water, which are evi- 
 dently the very heart of the place's mystery, 
 the final repose after the water's song and dance. 
 They are guarded all round by colossal cypress 
 plumes, and screened by tall bay hedges in pale 
 honey flower. You see their enamel blue from 
 the terraces above, in rifts between the green, 
 and with the brilliant fruit of an orange-tree 
 
 138
 
 Tivoli and the Sibyl 
 
 against it. And you somehow feel sure that 
 the orange-tree and the tanks are the key to 
 the enchantments. Looking down towards the 
 plain, the sere vineyards stretch far away ; an 
 exquisite vagueness of pale yellow reeds upon 
 the brown earth, with here and there a sprinkle 
 of vivid pink peach-blossom. But nearer, close 
 under the steep villa walls, you distinguish the 
 trellises of reeds, spread like a gigantic net : the 
 net — who knows ^ — in which the Sibyl once 
 caught her captives, like birds, luring them 
 with the endless bubble and sparkle of her 
 waters, her cascades and fountains. But, of 
 course, nowadays things are changed, for French 
 savants are more wily. 
 
 The adventure of the Sibyl and the Savant 
 is not generally known, I find, and is exceed- 
 ingly strange ; and the strangest thing about it 
 is that it has not yet taken place. 
 
 139
 
 THE HILLS OF THE SETTING 
 
 SUN 
 
 IT became evident to my mind in those 
 recent days (now so woefully distant !) 
 that the Euganean Hills were a country 
 of spells, of magic. 
 I had for years guessed something of the 
 kind, every time I had watched them across 
 the Lagoon at Venice. Watched them ; for 
 they come and go like a vision, rarely appearing 
 before evening ; and their clustered cones, 
 resting on the waters, strike mystery and 
 longing into the heart, like the pale rose of 
 afterglow against which they stand sharp in 
 their blueness, like the haze of sunset gold in 
 which they have curdled and grown visible. 
 
 This mythological fact had become more and 
 more patent of late. And the eve, almost, of 
 leaving Venice, I was trying to explain to certain 
 friends that these Euganeans I was going to 
 had been at all times a little country of legend 
 
 140
 
 The Hills of the Setting Sun 
 
 and of wonder. We had rowed in the late 
 afternoon to the island of the Armenian con- 
 vent ; and above the crinkled bays of its kitchen 
 garden these hills arose, as we walked up and 
 down, very clear, blue, insulated, and mysterious. 
 It is near the Euganean Hills, I was telling my 
 friends, that Phaeton falls with the Sun's chariot 
 in the delta of Eridanus, where his sisters turn 
 to poplars on the banks. The feathers of 
 Icarus, when the wax melts, are scattered over 
 the Venetian seaboard. The oracles of Geryon, 
 that mysterious King of the West, decree that a 
 treasure and a marvellous ring should be cast 
 into the well of Abano, where the hot springs 
 still smoke in the little valley. The wizard 
 Peter is born at this same Abano, as if to assert, 
 two thousand years later, the truth of those old 
 tales of sorcery. The wonder-poet Petrarch 
 retires to those hills to meditate and die ; and 
 later Shelley comes, the mysterious Adonais 
 ravished by the storm-gods. The Euganeans 
 are volcanoes which burst, perhaps within man- 
 kind's memory, from under the sea. To the 
 earlier Greeks, navigating the dangerous 
 Adriatic, the sun sets visibly among the sea- 
 girt cones : hence Phaeton, Icarus, and Geryon, 
 141
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 who, if you remember, was in some manner 
 connected with the Hesperides. . . . 
 
 My friends walked up and down between the 
 bay hedges and cabbage rows of the Armenian 
 island, and paid but little attention to my 
 antique folklore. But when I got up into the 
 Euganeans, and during all the days I spent 
 there, the magic nature of those hills became, 
 for me, more and more an article of private 
 belief and a reason of secret superstition. 
 
 To begin with, there was something especial 
 in the pleasure of the mainland after the lagoon, 
 of the changing seasons after that unchanging 
 world of water and sky. The pleasure in the 
 russet and the orange and the pale gold and 
 the green made marvellous with sulphur 
 veinings, and the sparkle of the wet grass 
 sprinkled with cinnamon leaves, after those 
 changeless splendours, knowing no summer 
 nor autumn, of mere sky and water and 
 marble and brick of Venice. There was a 
 sense of the world's great age, and of its youth 
 too, in the unaccustomed rustle of falling leaves, 
 the twitter of gathering birds, the slow, soft 
 movement of the white calves browsing by the 
 ponds, the big bullocks ploughing : things 
 142
 
 The Hills of the Setting Sun 
 
 which had always been, thousands of years 
 before Venice ever was, life of the fields and 
 woods, of the husbandmen and the rustic gods, 
 idyllic, eternal. 
 
 The afternoon next my arrival, we walked 
 — my young hosts and the children — up the 
 second highest of the Euganean chain, the 
 Monte della Madonna ; a poor seventeen hun- 
 dred feet in reality, but, on that wooded cone 
 sheer above the sea and plain, seeming so very 
 high. At the top we walked into a cloud ; a 
 white fog veiling all except the few reddening 
 vines, and the white walls of a hermitage : a 
 pathetic little church of pilgrims, weather-worn 
 even inside, and with a vague look of a ship, 
 suggestive of the storms which churn around it 
 in winter. But at a lower point in returning, 
 the clouds broke, and we had a sudden view, not 
 over but into the whole miniature chain. Into 
 this little world of crater-shaped mountains and 
 sharp russet and yellow valleys, villages white 
 below ; roads twisting like the tail of Man- 
 tegna's dragon, exactly as they do, for the rest, 
 in Mantegna's backgrounds ; castled crags like 
 that of Pendice, the long fir-fringed crest 
 of Rua, and far off, against the beginning 
 
 143
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 of the plain, a town hanging on a rock, 
 Monselice. 
 
 This walk was unreasonably enchanting : the 
 pleasure of the little wood of very old chestnuts, 
 of the leaves and fallen fruit in the moss under- 
 foot, and the dear familiar mystery of the great 
 solemn trunks, a broken-off tower in their twi- 
 light. The delight of arduous walking between 
 the steep scrub of hornbeam and oak ; the smell 
 of the woods, sweet, summer-dried, autumn- 
 drenched ; the amusingness of the pink lime- 
 stone (like Verona marble) crumbling under- 
 foot, and the basalt gravel rolling. ... It was 
 all, as I say, unreasonably enchanting. And 
 so was everything that happened or that came 
 before my eyes during that week. Why ? 
 There seems no reasonable reason, save the one 
 already hinted at, that this had once been the 
 Orchard of the Hesperides. 
 
 Or are there perhaps in time, as well as in 
 space, enclosed places of the spirit, little regions 
 of tender memories and peaceful hopes, set with 
 wonder-trees bearing deathless blossom and 
 fruit ? A tiny now, safe embosomed in happy 
 yesterdays and to-morrows, which (like the 
 plains looked at from the hills, or the hills from 
 144
 
 The Hills of the Setting Sun 
 
 the sea) are of the mirage blue of dreams. All 
 of us, surely, have known such days of cause- 
 less and pervading joy ; have, by some spells 
 impossible to learn, found ourselves admitted 
 within those vanishing, longed-for isles, those 
 closed valleys, where the gold-dust of sunset lies 
 tangibly on all things, and our own thoughts 
 all wear an aureole. 
 
 When this happens, experienced or supersti- 
 tious folk feel just a little fear. The Greeks, 
 we know, with their Nemesis lurking every- 
 where, have always fabled shipwreck, disaster 
 (as Phaeton's and Icarus's), in connexion with 
 that world of the setting sun. The dark sea 
 engulfs beyond ; and there is the loadstone 
 mountain, making planks start. However that 
 may be, I tasted unreasonable happiness during 
 those autumn days of Euganean magic. I liked 
 to think of the chain of hills bubbling up, all 
 flame and steam, out of the River Oceanus to 
 mark its most Western shores : blue cones 
 which now rise, filling the heart with longing 
 upon the shining waters in the mellow sunset. 
 I liked to call them, to myself, the Hills of the 
 letting Sun. And, after all, the Sun most cer- 
 tainly did set there (was even upset hard by on 
 
 145 L
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 one occasion through Phaeton's bad coachman- 
 ship), until the Three Hesperides, disgusted by 
 the thefts of Herakles and the intrusiveness of 
 Odysseus, induced the God of Day to move his 
 tent to the Atlantic waves, near which these 
 rather exclusive ladies, Aegle and Arethusa and 
 Hesperia, having carefully shipped their precious 
 orangery and their faithful dragon, laid out the 
 second garden they are reported to have 
 possessed. 
 
 It was for other reasons, and with nothing 
 golden to replant save dreams, that I, too, took 
 my leave of the Euganeans, returning to Venice 
 in ill-omened autumn flood and storm. 
 
 And yesterday, in the sad journey south, my 
 dear Hills of the Setting Sun, as I passed by in 
 the train, seemed very distant and unfamiliar in 
 their disembodied autumn blue ; certainly no 
 place I ever walked or drove in. The yellow 
 plain of faded vines wrapped itself in vapours, 
 with faint precocious sunset flushings, lasting 
 till dark. By twilight we were crossing the 
 Po, brimful, the black bridge of boats spanning 
 it. A little lurid red still lingered in the clouds 
 and in the turbid water : the blood of Phaeton, 
 maybe, or Icarus's scattered feathers. 
 146
 
 THE BISHOP'S VILLA 
 
 SITTING on the moss at the root of a 
 chestnut- tree, the great, dark moun- 
 I tains, the grey cloud - wreaths all 
 round, there comes to me from the 
 vaUey, with the rustle of the torrent, a nasal 
 stave of song. It comes from one of the farms 
 below ; a chaunt telling of some vague pleasure 
 in life. Yesterday also, walking up the hill, I 
 heard the girls singing to the rhythmical clatter 
 of the handlooms. These sounds are familiar 
 and carry me years back — twenty or more. I 
 recognize, together with that familiarity, a 
 change in myself. These sounds, like so many 
 other details of things, used to delight me by 
 their picturesqueness, by a certain suggestion of 
 charm. They were so much of the world's 
 stage property. For I somehow knew at the 
 time, in more or less dim fashion, that all 
 similar things were only on the surface, or, 
 147
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 rather, that my observation and interest went 
 no deeper, and that I closed my ears and eyes 
 to suggestions of a different sort. 
 
 Nowadays — how express it ? — they have lost 
 that quality of picturesqueness and romance, 
 those distant chaunts and all they stand for ; 
 and I have no longer any illusions about them. 
 I see and guess — in a manner feel — all the 
 many accompaniments, brutal or sordid, the 
 squalor and meanness of those houses, those 
 people, whose voices and whose momentary 
 happiness thus rises up to me. But here comes 
 the gist of my discourse : this new sense in no 
 way diminishes my serenity — rather contrariwise. 
 Feeling as I now do life's realities, its organic, 
 inextricable muddles, that element of charm 
 gains the value of an exception in the present, 
 of a hope for the future. These people, ill-fed 
 and often brutish, can sing. These birds over- 
 head, starved and snared in winter, prowled 
 over by hawks in summer, can sing also. 
 Happiness, good^ and therefore likewise better^ 
 are part of the stuff life is made of, and must 
 develop with it. 
 
 Such thoughts belong to this place as much 
 as its site and aspect, as its quality of air, 
 
 148
 
 The Bishop's Villa 
 
 making my yearly visits different from the 
 rest of life, and always like themselves ; thoughts 
 serious, but never sad or fretful. This conse- 
 crated character of the days spent here is due, 
 of course, in part to familiarity which just stops 
 short, as with the friend to whom all can be 
 told, but with the wish of telling only good. 
 Moreover, there is a virtue in the tuunij the not 
 mine, as in the meum, in restraint and gratitude 
 — gratitude that this dear ease and fittingness 
 should be the expression of another's will, not 
 merely one's own effort to be suited ; still more so 
 when one recognizes that the great gods — Time, 
 Place, and all their satellites — have had a hand 
 in the making. Thus the blending of past and 
 present, the house built some three centuries 
 and altered just enough for modern con- 
 venience, corresponds (like the other fugue- 
 theme !) with a certain mixture of simplicity 
 and grandeur : bare floors, whitewash, scanty 
 old furniture, and frugal meals, in a house par- 
 taking of the palace, most noble of architecture, 
 telling of pomp and circumstance, like the 
 escutcheons and cardinal's hats carved on its 
 front and corner. "Nothing is finer," a witty 
 Frenchwoman once said to me, "than a fine 
 
 149
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 old house un peu pauvrement habitee " — a truth 
 which Italy bears out at every turn ; but no 
 place so much, to my mnid, as this particular 
 villa, once of the Bishops of Pistoia. 
 
 That satisfaction of two decorous cravings har- 
 monizes with the double character of the house's 
 surroundings. It stands high above the plain 
 and the cupola'd and towered town, but with a 
 greater height beyond it, the hillside, in which 
 it has been quarried and set four square, rising 
 into a great Apennine spur ; the chestnut 
 woods above and cultivated ground all round, 
 so that you walk down the great steps and 
 terrace straight into vine and olive yard. The 
 woods, as I have said, are close behind ; Italian 
 woods, open, airy — stone and heather lying 
 bare to the sun and winds. The air, perhaps 
 from that mixture of rock and the wealth of 
 running water, is wonderfully light ; scented at 
 noon with vine or beanflower, and fragrant at 
 dusk with briar and wild myrrh, the woods' 
 deliciousness. One goes to sleep to the plash 
 of the fountain where the cans are filled, and 
 wakes up to see the sun rising over the hillside, 
 the peasants raking their hay under the trellises. 
 The days up there seem spacious and sunny ; 
 150
 
 The Bishop's Villa 
 
 time for all needful things ; no self-indulgent 
 day-dreams, but thoughts, as I have said, grave 
 and serene, which sum up previous thinking 
 and are almost moods. 
 
 This morning I called upon the neighbouring 
 village priest. A very good kind of life his, in 
 his clean, empty house among the olives and 
 vines of the hillside ; the old mother, the young 
 sister doing all the housework ; the old, old 
 father reposing from his long peasant's labours 
 in cultivating a few flowers and vegetables at 
 the door. And the priest (who is his own 
 bellringer !) teaching folk the things which he 
 believes true and useful, coming out of his big 
 whitewashed study, away from his shelf-ful of 
 books and climbing up these hills to give the 
 last comforts to sick and dying folk, to bring 
 some grace and dignity into death, where there 
 has perhaps been little in life. . . . 
 
 Coming away, along the hillside path trellised 
 with flowering vines, I could not but feel that 
 this is the sort of life which, if really mankind 
 tend to betterment, must become more, not 
 less, common. But it is not the Priore, not the 
 Priore's fellow-priests, of whatsoever denomina- 
 tion, who will bring us to it ; nay, not their 
 151
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 docile, more or less idyllic, parishioners either. 
 Rather those rebellious, often violent-mouthed 
 workmen of the sooty towns, of whom I have 
 been reading in my friend Halevy's book 
 on trade unions and strikes ; ay, and the 
 learned men, pent up at present in libraries 
 and laboratories, and with some scorn for idylls, 
 certainly. 
 
 But peace and good will, green fields and 
 clean skies, and even some sort of Virgilian 
 reverence for the Powers of Good, must, sooner 
 or later, become the rule. And walking about 
 these cultivated terraces, round this old house 
 which, year by year, strikes me as more majestic 
 in its solid simplicity, I let my thoughts wander 
 to something that should fit it. Methinks this 
 house should shelter not mere idle folk like us, 
 seeking for change of air and scene after the 
 wear and tear of emptiness, and bringing nothing 
 in return to the place. Still less a mere 
 clever administrator, squeezing more produce 
 and more rent out of soil and labour. But 
 some learned man, studying the secret life of 
 things ; teaching the peasants to till their souls 
 as well as their fields ; and teaching the vines 
 and corn and olives to bear more, out of sheer 
 152
 
 The Bishop's Villa 
 
 love of them, peasants and plants, and of his 
 science ; a man willing to leave for birds and 
 beasts, for air, for beauty and reverence, and 
 for their own dear sake, corners of heath 
 and forest. Turn everything to bread and 
 wine and milk, and stuffs and fuel to keep us 
 warm ? Never ! When the learned man lives 
 in the old Bishop's villa, and looks up from his 
 books and his retorts to listen to the children 
 romping in the pillared court, to the sonata — 
 it should be Mozart's, of course — faint from 
 that distant window, then there will be food 
 for the body sufficient to leave space and time 
 for the bread and wine of the spirit. 
 
 153
 
 ALL SOULS' EVE AT BARBIALLA 
 
 THERE are days of which one knows 
 at the moment that, without any- 
 thing having, in the ordinary sense, 
 happened, they will remain distinct 
 from other ones in the secret memory. Thanks 
 to some accident of place or season, or — who 
 knows ? — of some less gross and stale condition 
 of the body and brain, one has been living, 
 however hidden, a life more decently meaningful 
 than usual ; and the knowledge has enhanced 
 those moments. 
 
 It has been so here at my friend's farm or 
 castle, between Volterra and Pisa. As I sit in 
 the woods this autumn morning, it rises with 
 its houses and cypresses and big pink tower 
 upon the bluff of olives above the valley of the 
 reedy-voiced little Evola. Not yet cruel, but 
 merely bracing, the north wind, in friendly con- 
 trast with the sunshine to make all things 
 
 154
 
 All Souls' Eve at Barbialla 
 
 wholesome, is rustling among the yellowing 
 trees and the big faggots stacked up all round. 
 Sunshine and north wind bring home the satisfy- 
 ing sense of a life where not man only but the 
 creatures of the woods, the woods themselves, 
 are allowed their chance and their meaning. 
 Not the oppression of the forest kept for its 
 own sake or for vain sport, nor the worse one 
 of mere tillage, turning all things to food and 
 money. These Italian woods for periodic cut- 
 ting, which we are apt to sneer at, have the 
 dignity of being no mere luxury, of owing their 
 life to what they give to man's use, even like 
 corn and olives. Nor should we grieve at them, 
 when, as here at Barbialla, large trees, pendulous 
 ilexes, for instance, are left here and there to 
 attest their power and origin, while, where the 
 wood has been cleared, the saplings sprout up 
 gaily, playing in the wind. And the faggots, 
 pale russet and lilac, made of ilex and oak, and 
 tall strands of heather, have the scent of all the 
 summers and springs and autumns. They will 
 end in the glory of embers by which friends 
 talk and muse of an evening ; in the magniificent 
 wheels and showers of sparks of the oven which 
 bakes folks' bread. 
 
 155
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Walking yesterday under the little yellowing 
 oaks and the stone-pines, my eye was suddenly 
 caught by what looked like an oyster-shell lying 
 in the loose sand. And, looking closer, I found 
 that the whole sandy path and banks were made 
 of shells and bits of shells and shining scales of 
 
 o 
 
 mother-of-pearl. There were little ammons' 
 horns, ribbed palmers' shells, conchs of micro- 
 scopic tritons, and bivalves filled with hardened 
 sand, like white pouting pigeons. So, with the 
 point of my stick, I began to hunt among the 
 heather and fallen leaves for unbroken specimens 
 to put upon my bookshelf with other similar- 
 looking shells which I had picked up just this 
 time five years ago, after a night of autumn 
 tide and storm, on the Scottish coast. And, as 
 I did so, that afternoon came back to me : the 
 mournful skies, the wet beach strewn with drift- 
 wood and innumerable shells, which we were 
 picking up, listless, abashed, before the mortal 
 anxiety of the woman, awaiting calamity, who 
 had brought us there, and who walked up and 
 down, silent, looking out at the sea, seeing 
 nothing. That melancholy sunset, the smell of 
 torn-up seaweed and wet sands, has always 
 remained in my mind as symbolical of a soul's 
 156
 
 All Souls' Eve at Barbialla 
 
 shipwreck. And with it the fact, trifling, but 
 which seemed in some deep way significant, 
 that these shells were, for the most part, not as 
 usual, empty, dead ; but that there oozed or 
 quivered out of them living fleshy things, red 
 and sleek like hidden organs, entrails which 
 never see the light and should never be seen. 
 As the creatures frothed backwards and forwards 
 from their shell they brought home to me, with 
 a faint sense of horror, the immense meaning 
 of life, its briefness and indomitableness, as no 
 land creatures could have done. Of such quiver- 
 ing slime we also are made up ; and our micro- 
 scopic realities steep in our living liquids as 
 these creatures in the sea. This thought, I 
 scarce know why, kept mingling with the sight 
 of this human sorrow : fibres, raw and red, of a 
 human soul exposed thus helplessly to one's 
 understanding. To-day, in the castle woods, 
 I seem to grasp the other half of this hidden 
 meaning, while digging what looks for all the 
 world like the same shells out of the sand- 
 banks, the aromatic herbs and fallen pine-needles 
 of these inland hills. They too were filled with 
 oozing, quivering red life, thousands, more 
 probably millions of years ago, in those silted 
 
 157
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 seas or upheaved slime-banks on which the 
 autumn sun and wind are now yellowing the 
 vines and oaks, and painting the olive fruit 
 purple. 
 
 I thought of it all day while strolling about 
 this wonderfully romantic little place, a farm 
 built on to some remnant of castle, to which 
 you climb up an avenue of pines and ilexes, and 
 big pale poplars shedding their yellow leaves on 
 to the brushwood ; and, as you turn, come 
 upon the old watch-tower, behind some sentinel 
 cypresses and a lattice of faded vines, which 
 are, in some way I cannot describe, incomparably 
 poetical and antique. 
 
 When I came down to tea the peasants in 
 the castle chapel were singing the psalm 
 " Magnificat '' in those tones which seem to 
 have grown hoarse and false even as other 
 things get chipped or stained in coming through 
 the centuries ; our perfect church-singing sound- 
 ing, by comparison, as if it had been renewed, 
 cleaned up but yesterday. I remembered it was 
 All Souls' Eve — the Vigil of the Dead, as the 
 Italians express it. The sun was setting behind 
 the wooded ridges ; curls of smoke hanging 
 heavy among the yellow poplars of the river 
 
 15S
 
 All Souls' Eve at Barbialla 
 
 below. From that paved yard one could see 
 into the church, see the lit tapers and the 
 illuminated faces of the women holding them. 
 In the middle of that former castle yard, now 
 open to the landscape, stands an ilex overhang- 
 ing the well, and a wine-stained cart and barrel 
 stood by it. 
 
 Death and Life seem equally simple and proper 
 in such a place. And at this hour one's thoughts, 
 as well as one's eyes, naturally seek less the 
 dimmed things of the earth than the hill out- 
 lines, dark against the pale pure heavens with 
 their first few stars. 
 
 159
 
 BOOK III 
 FRANCE
 
 IN PRAISE OF NIGHT 
 TRAVELLING 
 
 IN my heart at least, I have had occasion 
 before to praise night journeys, and fore- 
 see that I shall do so many times again, 
 on account of the charming bloom of 
 vagueness and mystery which they leave upon 
 our comings and goings. The wear and tear to 
 the body is more than compensated by the saving 
 to the spirit. Saving of useless and wearying 
 repetition of impressions, of the miles and miles 
 of landscape printed off on the unwilling brain 
 like words on the telegraph tape, and with the 
 same relentless evenness of tap-tap. Saving also 
 of that sense of being rushed along, a bit of 
 mere merchandise, through real countries which 
 have no reality for us. Now, the wisdom of 
 life consists very largely in being awake only 
 when waking avails, and letting sleep, or at least 
 dreams, lap us for the remainder of time ; sleep 
 and dreams which mean, as much as waking 
 163 M 3
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 experience, the reality without which there can 
 be no other — that of our individual self. In 
 this way a series of night journeys has selected 
 things according to their veritable importance, 
 margined my life and spaced its phrases during 
 this last month, leaving and accentuating its 
 meaning. 
 
 It began at end of August with the drive 
 down from that high Apennine village — the 
 passage from the wonderfulness of the fir and 
 beech woods to the dear familiarity of the big 
 chestnuts ; the ten-minutes' visit at dear Signora 
 Elena's at the meeting-point of the two vege- 
 tations ; the dinner with that kind old lady at 
 San Marcello, the odd feeling of Italy again, 
 sitting on her balcony in the warm busy night 
 after those weeks in the high, cold places ; the 
 drive under the full moon to the mountain 
 station ; and then darkness, vagueness, loss of 
 count of time and place. A few minutes' waking 
 in the train at Mestre, the impression of the 
 melancholy lagoon landscape in the morning 
 mists, the little deserted-looking, shuttered 
 Venetian casinos ; and later, after sunrise, the 
 sudden revelation of the Alps, the sense of 
 freshness and flowcriness of the uplands. 
 
 164
 
 In Praise of Night Travelling 
 
 Again, a few weeks later, the drive in pelting 
 rain down into Udine, and, before we all dined 
 at the inn, the walk in the arcades, the wet 
 having turned that little town, with its pillars 
 of St. Mark, into a kind of Venice. Then 
 darkness again, and the vague swishing of the 
 train through unseen landscapes. 
 
 It will be plain, however, that the excellence 
 of night travelling is closely connected in my 
 mind with a human and familiar element. I 
 should hate penetrating in darkness into an 
 unknown country and alighting out of the 
 black train at an inhospitable inn. Indeed, 
 I am not sure whether my praise of night 
 journeys is not in reality praise of going and 
 coming among friends. What gave the zest 
 to that descent from the high valleys into the 
 zone of the chestnut woods was surely the 
 greeting of old acquaintances come down to 
 my carriage from the lit-up rooms where they 
 had been dancing, so that the chilly moonlight 
 drive across the hills was companioned by 
 freshly seen, familiar faces, voices possessing 
 still the real timbre of the present. And the 
 wet evening at Udine, the rainy, black journey 
 beyond was lit up, when I closed my eyes, by 
 165
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the lights of the dinner-table — nay, by the 
 illumination a giorno of the theatre to which 
 my companions were going. 
 
 At Padua, moreover, where I spent a few 
 days in that long journey, there was an episode 
 which remained in my fancy like a dream, which 
 might fitly haunt my nocturnal travels. I was 
 taken to supper with cousins, Heaven knows 
 where in the country, driving through the 
 twilight. I remember the Brenta and its canals 
 and spectral villas ; a long white house in a great 
 old-fashioned landscape garden ; coffee on the 
 terrace among kind and courteous Venetian 
 folk, unknown a half-hour before ; fireworks let 
 off, and the moon rising over the immense lawn, 
 the round tree- tops. An impression, confused 
 with the autumn dewiness, and those white 
 heady scents. Oka fragrans and such-like, which 
 haunt the Italian autumn, of Portia's Villa, 
 Belmont, which may have been somewhere 
 here ; and her friends, surely, were very much 
 like these nice people — old dilettante senators 
 and young folk in white clothes. Then the 
 drive home towards midnight ; the Brenta, with 
 mills and dim barges ; little white villas half lit 
 among trees ; the moon, a red crescent, gradually 
 i66
 
 In Praise of Night Travelling 
 
 withering like an ember on the horizon, and 
 leaving the great blue vault hung with loose 
 stars. Padua, the jolty pavement, tortuous 
 porticoes, a palace, a dark garden here and 
 there ; and the occasional crossing of a canal 
 with gardens and lit balconies. 
 
 On to this dream-like episode another fastens, 
 through the dark void of my night journeys ; 
 and this episode is a song. It was the other 
 night on the boat. We had got out of the 
 shelter of the Corsican coast, past those white 
 bare rocks like the bird-picked horses' skulls 
 one finds in the Maremma, and were running 
 into rough waters, full in the eye of the wind. 
 Suddenly, out of the steerage, full of wretched 
 people, eating, sleeping, or being ill in the cold 
 night, there rose, with the smell of cheese and 
 of bilge, a rough boy's voice singing that charm- 
 ing air, " Che bella cosa una giornata al sole," 
 which has been the street-song of Italy this 
 summer. It had been running in my head for 
 days, ever since that last evening at Padua, 
 when, on the palace balcony, and in the scent 
 of the tuberose, my dear young friend had 
 sung it to teach her baby. The pleasure of 
 hearing it thus unexpectedly was so great, I 
 167
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 scarcely ventured at first to make quite sure, 
 lest my wishes were reading that melody into 
 some other. But there came the second verse, 
 attacked on that high note, and leaving no 
 doubt. It was roughly sung, and considerably 
 out of tune ; but with its lovely wide intervals, 
 it seemed to sum up everything that moonlight 
 and seas and noble coasts and a good climate 
 can inspire, the serene lyrism which Italy still 
 means to me. 
 
 Perhaps, however, at the bottom of all the 
 unlikely charm, the kindly mystery of that 
 long, gradual journey from north-easternmost 
 Italy to south-westernmost France, there has 
 been something besides that passing from friend's 
 house to friend's house — the brooding sense of 
 the meeting at the end. For instead of the 
 sharp and almost cruel impatience of youth, there 
 comes in later years a certain diffused expectancy, 
 sweetening the time of waiting, and making one 
 reluctant, shy almost, of reaching the goal. 
 The happy future serves merely to draw forth 
 whatever of pleasantness the present contains ; 
 and one avoids fixing one's thought on it, 
 savouring rather each idle day and hour as it 
 passes. Certain it is that this whole journey, 
 i68
 
 In Praise of Night Travelling 
 
 and most of all the two long days spent, 
 between my night's progress, in solitary and 
 unfamiliar places, Bastia and Marseilles, have 
 felt strangely companioned, unhurried, and rest- 
 ful, with that lingering patience which fills 
 us when a longed-for reality comes within 
 measurable distance. 
 
 After that followed last night, which has also 
 been the last night of my journey. A long 
 dark one, in the rushing express, awaking to 
 glimpses of the Rhone under the moonlight, 
 with the castles of Tarascon and Beaucaire at 
 either end of the bridge ; glimpses also of the 
 salt lakes of Cette. And a few names heard 
 through the darkness — Nimes, Montpelier, 
 Narbonne, Toulouse. 
 
 And at last, the early morning here, among 
 the aftermath of the Gascon fields, in the green- 
 shuttered pavilion by the big fig-tree, where the 
 turkeys are rustling ; all the details of the big 
 peaceful room, its furniture and prints, its over- 
 whelming, kindly familiarity, the sense of never 
 having left it at all. Thus the solitary hours 
 slip away, waiting for the midday meal, for 
 Honorine's knock and " Si Miss veut venir 
 chez Madame ; " for the moment to cross the 
 169
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 garden and pass through the long library, and, 
 as if no long months had ever separated us, to 
 give and take the morning greeting. 
 
 Thus by my travelling at night has a miracle 
 been accomplished ; and the mystery of time 
 and space been at once respected and abolished. 
 
 170
 
 MONTREUIL 
 
 I AM aware of just a little emotion in 
 writing this name at the head of my 
 page. For " Montreuil " stands simi- 
 larly at the head of five chapters of 
 the "Sentimental Journey." And it was, of 
 course, at Montreuil that Yorick met and 
 engaged La Fleur. The servants of imaginary 
 heroes are as important (in the long run, cer- 
 tainly) as many of our own domestics, brushing 
 our wits if not our clothes, and setting the 
 chambers of our fancy full of quaint and useful 
 things : clowns and waiting-maids of Shake- 
 speare ; judicious Sancho, tender-hearted Trim ; 
 but, above all. La Fleur ! Since, I would have 
 you note. La Fleur, shabby, elegant, courteous, 
 faithful, ex-drummer and spatterdash-maker, 
 eternal lady-killer, La Fleur, full of resource 
 and cheerfulness, and whistling but more blithely 
 for an empty stomach — La Fleur, I say, stands 
 171
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 not merely for a type of valet, but is the classic 
 incarnation of what was good in the poor French 
 people (still brothers of the Italians at that time) 
 of the Middle Ages and the Ancien Regime ; for 
 which reason the Jacobin reformers, coiffes a la 
 BrutuSy carefully chopped its head off, till it 
 appeared, so to speak, no more in public. 
 
 It was at Montreuil that Yorick engaged La 
 Fleur ; and very likely in the identical inn we 
 lunched at — an inn with posting-yard draped in 
 Virginia creeper, and a porte-cochere hung about 
 with sacrificial-looking poultry and game. It 
 adds so much significance to the place, now 
 that I think of it. But I did not think of it 
 (although the " Sentimental Journey " was in 
 my Gladstone bag at that self-same moment) 
 till very nearly three years after. Montreuil — 
 the name at the head of those five chapters — I 
 must have seen it a dozen times ; Montreuil, 
 between Calais and Amiens ; sure enough, there 
 it is on the old posting-map, with a tiny pos- 
 tilion's horn alongside. Only, I had never put 
 two and two together. . . . 
 
 Partly because places you are driven to, 
 across country, by friends, very often remain 
 in a fanciful geography of their own. Ten to 
 172
 
 Montreuil 
 
 one you were barely told the name on starting, 
 or in such manner as to send it out by the 
 other ear. It is not the abstract, averaged 
 thing which we learn in geography books or 
 (their substitute s in mature life) time-tables ; 
 but rather the place exists, before seeing it, as 
 one single fact, vastly magnified : Vauban forti- 
 fications to be seen, a particular saint's funny- 
 bone displayed in a silver arm-shaped reliquary ; 
 or, more simply still, the place where one will 
 eat in the middle of a long day's drive. That 
 is all 1 know beforehand, in most cases ; pleased 
 to be passive in kind friends' hands, and to let 
 the place, whatever it is, construct itself, become, 
 at the turn of the road, or in walking through 
 the tidy empty streets. 
 
 "There's Montreuil." And there it is, as 
 we approach with jingling harnesses. A 
 mediaeval vision, as you come upon it first 
 from the slopes of the opposite chalk-downs : 
 a crown of rounded towers, brick and stone, 
 and of grey and russet walls, overtopped by 
 trees and pressed down upon the brow of a 
 round hill. On three sides the downs lie in 
 long, sweeping bands of ploughed field, of 
 stubble and greenstuff, barely a set of steadings 
 
 ^73
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 or a haystack studding their delicate washes of 
 lilac and russet and straw-colour. And beyond, 
 visible at gaps, the faint green plain left by the 
 sea, and the crests of the livid, heaped-up 
 dunes which keep the sea out now. Driving 
 along, the impression of this country had been 
 English, making one realize the time when no 
 channel divided the chalk from the chalk, and 
 the Somme, if not the Seine, flowed into the 
 Thames. A bit of the same land, this Picardy, 
 as Kent beyond ; and yet how different ! The 
 sky, how high and clear ! the lines how im- 
 mense, befitting a, great continent 1 And, in 
 the grass and weeds under the wall, how the 
 summer has left a sense, not of drought, but 
 of wholesome, lovely ripeness ! and there, sud- 
 denly, you come upon Montreuil ; and that 
 name, insignificant a minute ago, spells chivalry, 
 Froissart, Shakespeare in this country, whose 
 'map and signposts show certain other names : 
 Crecy, beyond Conchel-le-Templc, and, yonside 
 of the river, Azincourt. 
 
 It is excusable to forget even La Fleur in such 
 
 connexion : Sterne, and the eighteenth century 
 
 in general, must pay the penalty of their serene 
 
 exclusion of all other periods of the world's 
 
 174
 
 Montreuil 
 
 existence ; they did not notice the walls and 
 towers of Montreuil ; and we, in turn, do not 
 notice their dapper ghosts promenading in those 
 empty streets or eyeing us behind the discreet 
 muslin and geraniums of the Louis XIV. 
 windows. Sterne might, indeed, have noticed 
 the occasional vine spaliered in the street, but 
 only as showing that, despite the shrewd chilli- 
 ness of Picard sunshine, this high-road through 
 Montreuil (with little postilions' bugles duly 
 spotted along it) does lead from Calais to Paris, 
 and thence direct, through more jocund climes 
 and over horrid Alps, to Rome and its antique 
 remains. Perhaps, as a notable work of the 
 famous Marshal Vauban, Sterne may have 
 followed the curves and juttings of the ram- 
 parts enclosed by those older and more gothick 
 walls and towers ; ramparts pleasantly set with 
 shady elms, and commanding from the benches 
 on the turf and the grassy sides of the escarp- 
 ments an agreeable view of well-to-do houses 
 standing each in its orchard. 
 
 Sterne (for I wish to make amends for having 
 so utterly forgotten his existence) — Sterne was 
 certainly taken to see the relics in the sacristy ; 
 and though he did not perceive that it was
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 ogival^ and had a glimpse of fruit-trees like a 
 Flemish picture, he would have noticed (had he 
 been there) the pathetic small wise boy who 
 unlocked the cupboards and allowed us to 
 handle the Byzantine reliquaries and that great 
 silver arm with the saint's funny-bone in it. 
 More curious still to realize : Sterne, most 
 consummate of literary artists, would not have 
 understood a word (at least a word's meaning) 
 of our conversation at table in his inn parlour : 
 realism, symbolism, the functions of the novel ; 
 the limits of literature and art, suggestiveness, 
 the metaphor, art for art's sake. . . . What, in 
 the name of sense, ladies and my dear sir, could 
 all this mean .'' Nay, now I have realized the 
 probable presence of this delightful ghost, how 
 glad I am we none of us perceived it ! Why, 
 common politeness would have kept the talk on 
 mileage and postilions, the partridge and the 
 omelette. For with regard to such observations 
 of character as Montreuil or any other village 
 afforded Sterne, not one of us superfine 
 moderns could have furnished half a page worth. 
 And yet some of us there — yes, there eating 
 the partridge and omelette at Montreuil — 
 were in their generation sentimental travellers. 
 176
 
 Montreuil 
 
 Sentiment remains, but, like wonder and belief, 
 changes its objects. For instance . . . But, 
 having only a few lines more to give to Mon- 
 treuil, let me tell you, less witty but more 
 understanding persons of our own day, what 
 my last impression of it was. 
 
 We had driven downhill into delicious river 
 land ; swampy grass under poplars, green dykes 
 and flowering ditches ; and a flush stream, long 
 weeds floating in its crystal, which we punted 
 across. I thought this was what we had come 
 to see ; surely enchanting enough. When at 
 the path's turn suddenly that vision again — I 
 must call it one — the circle of Montreuil on its 
 height ; and, plunging sharp down against a 
 hillside of sere grass, a great zigzag of russet 
 walls against a screen of trees, closing out all 
 other view and connecting that towered city 
 with the pellucid river between flowery banks. 
 These words convey no definite image, I fear. 
 Think, therefore, of those long landscapes which 
 bend sharp round a missal margin ; that mural 
 crown, that spur of mighty walls, and the fairy 
 river below. The margin of a missal .'' Nay, 
 of some book of chivalry — " Morte d'Arthur " 
 or " Quatre Fils Aymon." 
 
 177 N
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Sterne and his contemporaries were saved 
 much ineffectual fumbhng for words by not 
 seeing such things as this. But as for me, I 
 would rather have seen those walls of Montreuil 
 from the river (even at the price of the above 
 villainous description) than — well, than have 
 written those five chapters of the " Sentimental 
 Journey." But then, you see, I was not given 
 my choice. 
 
 178
 
 THE HEART OF FRANCE 
 
 
 IN MEMORIAM 
 EMILE DUCLAUX 
 
 HE heart of a country is its moun- 
 ■ tains. From their solemn meeting 
 
 B with sun and with cloud, stream 
 
 the great rivers, the purifying winds. 
 And not less, perhaps, the spiritual renovation 
 of the worn-out race below by the unimpaired 
 vigour of mountain men. It was fitting, me- 
 thinks, that it should have been among his high 
 native valleys that I got to know the man, of 
 all my dear French friends, who represented to 
 me the inner soul of his country. 
 
 I had met him a year before in Paris, at the 
 house of the lady who became his wife : a spare, 
 grizzled man, roughly dressed in grey, with a 
 head, just a little bowed, resembling that De- 
 mosthenes which is the noblest and most humane 
 of antique portraits. A silent man, at least 
 giving the impression that he spoke only when 
 179
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 he wanted to ; his conversation, that afternoon, 
 running on this country of Auvergne and on 
 the habits of hedgerow beasts and birds. I 
 did not catch his name, and, far from identify- 
 ing him as Pasteur's successor, I took him for 
 a country proprietor (he had a little mountain 
 accent), living most of the year between his 
 dogs and a few choice books, mainly of philo- 
 sophy. There seemed to hang about him air 
 more breathable than one meets, even at the 
 best, in a capital. He remained quite apart 
 and distinct in my memory, nothing tentative 
 in my thoughts about him ; and when I came, 
 a year after, to stay in his old home in Auvergne, 
 I knew all about him without having been told 
 anything. 
 
 It was like that country, which I did not 
 know (nor, indeed, anything precisely like it) 
 but immediately recognized. There was the 
 delight of being back in the hills ; the delight 
 even of mountain rains — heavy, fitful, sepa- 
 rating with their whiteness the valleys from 
 one another ; smoking from the hilltops of 
 rusty stone and rusty heather ; hanging to 
 the woods and the bright green sloping pas- 
 tures, and leaving everything mossy, drenched, 
 1 80
 
 The Heart of France 
 
 trickling, the white runnels bubbling along, 
 the noise of the swollen river rising up with 
 the sound of cowbells. In such fine air (the 
 remark recurs in all mountainous places) one 
 can dispense quite a while with sunshine. In 
 this valley of the Cere, the old district of Car- 
 lades, one rarely sees the high summits (just 
 a cap of rock appearing spectral through the 
 rain) ; and the long straight lines of basalt 
 hills, their sides barely shelving, do not suggest 
 the neighbourhood of a great watershed, the 
 central watershed of France. So one learns it 
 mainly from one's own feelings, from this special 
 quality of the air ; from nearness of rock to the 
 surface (mossy walls and stone fences every- 
 where) and the juicy green of the close grass, 
 on to which the walnut leaves are shedding. 
 Above all, from the life of the waters. 
 
 The Doctor, as the peasants called him, was 
 never weary of pointing out this wealth of 
 waters : the troughs of rough-hewn basalt grown 
 over with cress, and the minute runnels of 
 rippled white water coursing through the dairy 
 meadows. He felt the charm not merely of 
 this country's prosperity, but of these sturdy 
 peasants being helped by the good will of the 
 i8i
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 ancient divinities of rock and stream. Our 
 talk was about them both, the peasants, for 
 whom the Doctor was devising books and 
 almanacs, and the gods. Not the gods of 
 archaeologists (though there is something en- 
 dearing in the goggle stone Mercury Arvernus 
 at St. Germain), but those greater ones. Fire 
 and Water, who spread these hills and cut these 
 valleys. It was the first time that I satisfied 
 my old longing (ignorant, but not profane) for 
 walks with some one who should tell how a 
 country has come to be. The Doctor, in his 
 reserved way, rejoiced in the thought of that 
 making : fiery hills upheaving, flaming streams 
 descending, thickening into liquid embers, and 
 stopping, as they touched the sea-plain, cooled 
 into basalt. Think of those flames against the 
 sky ; of the sunsets thick and purple with that 
 volcano smoke 1 And here, where you scrape 
 the moss with your walking-stick, are Pluto's 
 chariot-tracks ; here the black, granulated dust 
 of his raising. Strangest thought of all, most 
 incredible of the earth's secrets, there were men 
 to see it all 1 Their poor tools, embedded inj 
 the lava, revealing Thought, Purpose, a tinyJ 
 humble thing as yet, but a new cosmic force, 
 182
 
 The Heart of France 
 
 to work greater changes than fire or water ! 
 The Doctor had, to the highest degree (and 
 the more that he restrained it), that passion 
 for the human element which makes French- 
 men poor metaphysicians no doubt, but such 
 adorable prose poets ; man's power of suffering 
 becoming, whatever they do, the central fact of 
 their universe, and all things wakening wrath 
 or pity. With the Doctor it was pity, wide 
 enough to transcend all possibility of hatred. 
 His sense of justice and habit of putting a 
 shoulder to the wheel had made him active 
 in the country's recent dissensions ; but no 
 Frenchman was ever freer from the vice of 
 political intolerance, which makes Jacobins and 
 retrogrades equivalent nuisances, with their 
 readiness to set all things right and purify the 
 earth of heresies and heretics. The Doctor 
 admitted purification only of one's own soul 
 and one's own body ; and he, chief authority 
 on public health, had no belief in making folk 
 healthy, let alone enlightened, by Act of Par- 
 liament. Intimacy with Nature's processes had 
 taught him infinite patience, even with the im- 
 patience and perfunctoriness of theorists, so 
 much inevitable waste and friction ! And he 
 
 183
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 was of the generous sort which gives the 
 greatest efforts for the smallest result, so long 
 as it be real. There was in this discoverer and 
 teacher and fighter something I can only de- 
 scribe as essentially private, saying his word 
 only when needed. Yet no one was a more 
 generous talker when he found, not an audience 
 (I am sure he would have hated that), but 
 another human creature carins: for the same 
 things as himself. It was this private character, 
 I suppose, which had made me take him for a 
 farmer, a sportsman, anything save a writer or 
 politician. And watching him going to and fro 
 hislaboratory, seeing his eye constantly busy with 
 every detail of soil, or stream, or wood, I under- 
 stood that I had not been so wrong after all. 
 
 The growing sense of what kind of man the 
 Doctor was, worked into the charm of his native 
 country. The soul — " where a soul can be dis- 
 cerned " — has, so to speak, cubic existence like 
 the body, requiring more than one dimension 
 for its comfort. And contemplative happiness 
 cannot be complete without the sense that, over 
 and above beauty and sweetness of landscape, 
 there is order and dignity also in human sur- 
 roundings. I have spent days in places far 
 184
 
 The Heart of France 
 
 more beautiful and picturesque than this obscure 
 valley of Central France ; but rarely, if ever, 
 days as happy in the sense of harmony between 
 outer and inner things. This feeling accumu- 
 lates, works deeper and deeper into one, and 
 begets it serenity, something almost like animal 
 spirits, very akin to the corroborating union of 
 fine light air to the lungs with delicate sunny 
 colours to the eye ; one's soul's needs are ful- 
 filled, and the world seems very right. 
 
 It was borne in upon me in one of my walks 
 above my friend's funny old half farm, half 
 chateau. The Doctor was not with me ; he 
 had put me upon my way, and accompanied 
 his wife home. But the sense of those two 
 people was there, and only the more because 
 no talk, no thought of other things, interfered. 
 And, as I climbed solitarily along, it grew ; //, 
 the indefinable sense of the stuff of which souls 
 are made, and the shape into which they have 
 been moulded ; until it filled me like music, 
 enveloped me like the landscape. The road 
 was cut in the hillside, basaltic, black with 
 recent rain, beneath banks of thickest, brightest 
 moss and wet boughs of beeches ; below, in the 
 tree gaps, the shining village roofs. There was 
 185
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 tinkle of cow-bells, twitter of birds ; the boom 
 of a distant threshing-machine ; the sound of 
 waters, the voice of the wet washed mountains. 
 At the top of the hill I came to a great expanse 
 of brilliant Alpine pasture, not a house or 
 tree, or only wind-warped, making one under- 
 stand that nothing save cloud and sky lay 
 beyond. I crossed a runnel of perfectly clear 
 water, and got in sight of a few cottages and 
 barns, grey and weather-beaten, with heart- 
 shaped slates. Long sheds, a pepper-pot turret, 
 a mossy stone with a black cross ; something 
 making the bell on the roof look like that of a 
 chapel ; an air of consecration, though not, 
 perhaps, by priests. And the ineffable fresh- 
 ness, coolness, breadth of a pass ; the grandeur 
 and mystery of the green slope lying close 
 against the sky, high, vast, filled with feathery 
 and melting clouds. I thought of those people 
 in the house in the valley ; and felt the kinship 
 between this man and his country. 
 
 The Doctor died last May. They brought 
 him back and buried him among his fathers at 
 Aurillac, in sight of those mountains. 
 
 This is what I can tell of the Heart ot 
 France. 
 
 i86 
 
 I 
 
 I
 
 TWO FRENCH ABBEYS 
 
 I SUPPOSE they have suppressed that 
 '*Abbaye Royale de Fontanelle " ; but 
 it Is sure to crop up again, as it did 
 after the Revolution, and perhaps at 
 other times, as certain other cryptic communi- 
 ties crop up for ever — I mean the congregations 
 of fat toadstools which hoe or spade suppresses 
 but for a few days. These are irreverent words ; 
 but Fontanelle inspired me with no kind of 
 reverence or tenderness — only with an odd 
 feeling of discomfort, as towards some creature 
 who is the born adversary of one's very brain 
 and marrow. 
 
 We went to it up a lovely green Norman 
 valley, secluded from the motor-haunted high- 
 way. You feel something clerical and queer 
 already in the village — timbered houses, nearly 
 all inns, round a little romanesque church with 
 a great Calvary : a place of pilgrimage. At 
 187
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the head of the village is a great stuccoed 
 Louis XV. gate, and behind it great Louis XV. 
 buildings, with stucco escutcheons and allegories. 
 Then an electric bell, and we entered a modern 
 country-house garden, empty in the twilight, 
 with, in the distance, a monk walking under 
 some ruined arches. Presently in the porter's 
 lodge appeared a sort of brown lay brother, 
 with very visible trousers under his robe and 
 a blue frotteurs apron. While my companion 
 asked permission to see the abbey, my eyes 
 were attracted, for ecclesiastical things always 
 attract them, by two cupboards full of images, 
 rosaries, and other devout properties. Among 
 these I was fascinated by the picture of a 
 railway train in a landscape, with the motto : 
 " Eternite Bienheureuse — Fete du Paradis — 
 Indicateur de la Ligne du Ciel." In this same 
 lodge, surrounded by plaster Bonnes Vierges and 
 horrid little real beggar children from the village, 
 a sewing-machine was buzzing over a pair of 
 trousers in process of restoration. 
 
 The reverend fathers were at Compline ; but 
 
 we were allowed to return the next morning, being 
 
 shown over by a suave monk in black, very dirty 
 
 and ragged, but very much a man of the world. 
 
 i88
 
 Two French Abbeys 
 
 He told us the Abbey had not been destroyed 
 by the Revolution, but sold to a manufacturer, 
 who pulled down as much of the stonework as 
 he wanted to build a mill in the neighbourhood. 
 Then it had been bought by a marquis of 
 Jacobite origin, from whom the reverend fathers 
 had bought it ; the family's arms still every- 
 where, and the panelling of their drawing-room 
 remaining in the chapel. The reverend father 
 who did the honours was eloquent about the 
 modern monasteries established in England and 
 Scotland, and elsewhere, by his Order ; some 
 had been founded with pious legacies, others 
 by pious persons who took the habit of the 
 Order, or, in some cases, cleared out and lived 
 in their own gate-lodge. I can scarcely say 
 why these stories, unctuously dwelt on for our 
 edification, suggested nothing so much as vague, 
 painful scenes of disappointed heirs, disputed 
 wills, and so forth ; the steady encroachments 
 of silent, subtle men feeling themselves in a 
 hostile world, and ready to make up for the 
 spoliation they have suffered by spoiling the 
 spoilers, and undermining this modern life which 
 disregards their centuries of tenure and service. 
 Certain it is that the whole time at Fontanelle 
 189
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 I had the sense of being in a book, in an 
 atmosphere I had never breathed, but only read 
 of. And it is a curious instance of the power 
 of literature, the power — -like that of music — 
 to force us and all things into step, to move 
 and feel and think in its modes, that what- 
 ever picturesqueness and romance I felt about 
 Fontanelle was traceable to Huysmans's " En 
 Route," a novel dealing with just such an 
 unpicturesque and unromantic modern abbey 
 as this. 
 
 After seeing all that the reverend father 
 would show, we had an opportunity of seeing 
 how suppressed monasteries avenge themselves ; 
 for higher up in the valley there stands in 
 exquisite hayfields, and on a clear, rapid trout 
 stream, a great gaunt, deserted, and ruinous 
 cotton-mill. And it is built, gates and sluices 
 and all, of cut and finely moulded Gothic stones 
 — the stones of the former abbey ! 
 
 The other abbey — Valloires, in Picardy — had 
 been turned into an agricultural school, kept by 
 brothers of St. Vincent of Paul ; but no one 
 wore the dress, and only one priest was visible. 
 Something difficult to define, besides the shaven 
 faces, told one that these were not laymen ; and 
 190
 
 Two French Abbeys 
 
 there was, in this well-kept, prosperous place, 
 the same funny secret, stealthy emptiness, as of 
 invisible hands, which is, I think, the mark of 
 much modern French clericalism : these are 
 people whom persecution has made only more 
 powerful, giving them, one might imagine, the 
 taste almost for hiding, for shamming death like 
 certain animals, or taking the colours of their 
 surroundings, becoming indistinguishable from 
 earth or wall. 
 
 But the place itself belongs to very different 
 times and to very different monks. It is one 
 of the most magnificent eighteenth-century 
 buildings I have ever seen, conventual white- 
 wash and dark woodwork only bringing out the 
 full exquisiteness of Louis XV. courtly archi- 
 tecture and decoration. The only mediaeval 
 vestige is in the church, the tomb of a beautiful 
 young Count William of Ponthieu, a perfect 
 Froissart figure, knightly, romantic. On to 
 him look down, but with no absurd incongruity, 
 two very lovely stucco or wooden angels, 
 floating from a white glory over the high 
 altar ; tunicked, long-locked shepherds, with 
 the sweetness of eighteenth-century music — of 
 some pastoral interlude, half hymn, half dance, 
 191
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 of Bach or Handel — strange and charming in 
 their delicate stucco-white and dust-grey against 
 the whitewashed vaultings of this dainty, aristo- 
 cratic sanctuary. The former Cistercian monas- 
 tery is Louis XV. also, of fine pale stone with 
 brick courses and atticked slate roof, and 
 white and silvery also in its main effect. And, 
 as if to make their very human magnificence 
 only more delicately human, the convent build- 
 ings and the great barns and steadings are all 
 patterned with the pale green and gold of 
 espaliered pear-trees. 
 
 All convents (save modern ones !) are full of 
 charmigg glimpses, the little which is discreetly 
 shown suggesting so much more ; but at Val- 
 loires it is the discretion not of austerity so 
 much as of leisurely refinement. I remember, 
 for instance, a wide staircase, with twisted 
 iron balustrade, leading to an open Louis XV. 
 window, a bit of green hillside. Then, again, 
 alongside of the church, and with its white 
 chalkstone Grecian facade and silvery slate roof 
 and belfry closing it in, there is the monks' 
 little graveyard. A big Calvary rises in a 
 square of grass and great clipped yews, and 
 over the white walls, espaliered with fruit-trees, 
 192
 
 Two French Abbeys 
 
 the hill looks down with its pale grass and 
 chalk seams and brown beech coppices. 
 
 One imagines Valloircs to have been built by 
 some great eighteenth-century prelate, tired of 
 courts and of love adventures, still young and 
 handsome, but caring only for philosophy and 
 agriculture, believing only in human per- 
 fectibility and some vague, democratic Utopia ; 
 but keeping up the rites of the past as necessary 
 to weaker brethren, and also from attachment 
 to their stately beauty. Botanists and econo- 
 mists — physiocrats of the school of Turgot and 
 Quesnel — would be called to Valloires ; philo- 
 sophers and pamphleteers evade the Bastille by 
 flying to its welcoming shelter ; great musicians, 
 passing from Italy and Germany to England, 
 would deflect from their way to sing or play the 
 organ in the beautiful white church ; and the 
 galloping postman, with horn and jack-boots, 
 would bring in the big escutcheoned bag letters 
 from encyclopaedists, from reforming ministers, 
 from beautiful women — vain and wanton and 
 high-minded and humanitarian — discussing ideal 
 liberty and gallant adventures. Thus would the 
 Abbey of Valloires live its Thelema life of noble 
 ease and gentle austerity, in white cells and 
 193 o
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 corridors, with pannelling just budding at the 
 rim into roses and vine-leaves ; among the apple 
 orchards and the great byres overtopped by the 
 feudal pigeon-cote. And every now and then 
 a white-robed, high-born Benedictine would be 
 carried down to the churchyard, where the seven 
 clipped yews stand out against the white walls, 
 with their green lattice-work of pear-trees. . . . 
 But the Abbot of Valloires would be buried not 
 there, nor in the white chapel, but thrown into 
 that quicklime pit near the Barriere du Trone, 
 after ascending the scaffold serene and simple, 
 white-haired, but still straight and beautiful, an 
 elder brother of Renan's Abbess of Jouarre. 
 
 194
 
 A DESERTED PAVILION IN 
 TOURAINE 
 
 yA FTER four years (and a good deal 
 / ^ of water, as the French saying has 
 
 / ^ it, has had time to run through 
 the water-gate of the big mill on 
 the Cher) I find myself back in Touraine ; and 
 once more I am subdued by the charm of this 
 country — the charm, quite apart from that of 
 its beautiful, delicate lines, of an approach to 
 the south : the sense of ripeness, the silvery 
 tone of vegetation which has had sufficient sun 
 without being sered by It. 
 
 The evening of my arrival, feeling tired and 
 ill from the long damp of an English summer, 
 I crept out across the high-road and up the low 
 slope which I see from that topmost Commanderie 
 window. I had a silly longing to see the ripening 
 grapes, although they hang only from low sticks, 
 almost sweeping the dry, slaty soil. The vine- 
 yard was surrounded by a little wood and a belt 
 
 195
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 of high flowering roadside plants — mullein and 
 borage and thyme — and a field of big pumpkins, 
 silvery and orange, interrupted the vineyard, 
 with an apple-tree or two. Returning home, 
 I was struck by the way in which things fall 
 into harmonies in this silvery country : the 
 dusty clematis and brambles, the white road, 
 some grey goats, and an old woman herding 
 them and dressed in various shades of blue. It 
 is a pleasure, from my bedroom window, to see 
 the peasants working in the vineyard. 
 
 I have fallen more and more under the spell of 
 this autumn of Touraine, of these high skies with 
 soft, feathery clouds. This is France, Europe ; 
 not like Picardy, whence I have come, a mere 
 piece of English chalk and pasture, Frenchified 
 by winds from Alps and distant Southern hills. 
 And there is a poignant pleasure also in finding 
 among this Northern vep:etation the humble- 
 scented things of Italy, the wild thyme and 
 balm, the fennel and peppermint ; or, rather, 
 finding these friendly herbs growing, Italian 
 fashion, on each wall and on each stone-heap. 
 
 One of my first thoughts on return has been 
 certain old farms above Savonnieres, and the 
 fear that they might have been pulled down 
 196
 
 A Deserted Pavilion in Touraine 
 
 since my last visit. But they were there still ; 
 delightful houses in the uphill part of this little 
 village on the Cher ; some with a castellated 
 mediaeval grace of mullions and turrets ; others 
 of Louis XIV. dignity made homely by humble 
 proportions and surroundings of orchard and 
 beehives, and the delightful litter of dairy and 
 farm. The sunset, as it has been ever since 
 my arrival here — indeed, as it oftenest seems to 
 be in this Loire country — was silvery, cool, as 
 if to chasten the opulence, the sensual cheerful- 
 ness of this dear country. For everything here 
 seems, in the most poetic way, for man's 
 pleasure and profit and ease — vineyards, and 
 cornfields (of pale stubble now), and orchards, 
 and flowery gardens, and dairy meadows vividly 
 green by the full river, and fields of vegetables 
 and piles of orange-and-silver gourds, and walnut- 
 trees shedding their aromatic leaves, and hedges 
 crowned with big sweet blackberries. The very 
 hills are sloped and flinty as if for growing wine, 
 and in their escarpments hollowed out for cellars ; 
 natural caves, "caves dans le roc," with wattled 
 entrances and wooden doors : made by Nature, 
 not for anchorites, like the tufo grottoes of the 
 volcanic plateaus of Italy, but destined to house 
 197
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 barrels and vats — nay, who knows ? some 
 mediaeval god Bacchus, hymned to by Goliard 
 scholars and fratres gaudentes. 
 
 Among all these things comes, with a certain 
 congruity o^ Memento mori^ the impression of a 
 splendid old house utterly dismantled and gone 
 to ruin. The great chateau faces the wide, 
 glassy river, an ample Louis XIII. palace, classic, 
 yet with a certain Gothic romanticalness of high 
 slate roofs and attics and finely carved heraldry. 
 It is built round an original donjon, said to 
 have been inhabited, like all similar places in 
 Touraine, by Coeur-de-Lion. Alongside are 
 the vast empty stables, monumental as in some 
 old print, with great grass-grown yards ; and 
 beyond spreads the park : unkempt fields of 
 coarse yellow grass, ponds and canals choked 
 with lilies, terraces overgrown by creepers. The 
 luxuriant life of an almost Southern summer, 
 magnificent, fruitful, burning, has taken back 
 the gardens and turned them mad, all gold and 
 green. I walked along a terraced walk of 
 arching church-like limes, and found at its 
 end, among empty greenhouses and deserted 
 nurseries, a little pavilion hedged by tall weeds 
 and nettles and so stifled by creepers that only 
 
 198
 
 A Deserted Pavilion in Touraine 
 
 one of the high, narrow windows remained un- 
 covered. The door stood open, showing the 
 charming octagon room littered with fallen 
 plaster and sacks and garden-tools. Such a 
 gallant pavilion ! Louis XV., with cocked-hat 
 roof, round attics, and over the entrance, the 
 carving fresh and sharp, an escutcheon of rustic 
 emblems — rake, basket, and watering-pot. Such 
 are the pavilions in Fragonard's pictures, and of 
 those " galant " prints where pert, full-bosomed 
 Chloes are knelt to or pursued by ribboned 
 Strephons with the curly pates and Roman 
 noses of sheep ; places the idea of whose 
 insipid and foppish little vices (described with 
 luscious vapidness by moderns like Henri de 
 Regnier) makes one's gorge rise to think on. 
 But in such forsakenness and ruin as this 
 how touching ! And peopled, as the yellow 
 leaves float down from the overarching: elms 
 and the warm wind stirs in the dusty clematis, 
 and the long, hot day dies slowly among the 
 tall burnt grasses, by what oddly appealing little 
 ghosts 1 
 
 Of all save these vague phantoms haunting 
 this garden pavilion Touraine seems oddly 
 empty. This is a recurrent impression. These 
 199
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 gentle slopes, these delicate curves of the well- 
 built sandy roads, these spreading vineyards 
 and sparse woods, the very colour, like mellow 
 wine, of the pale friable rock tufted with scented 
 herbs, the finely set white ashlar and silvery 
 steep roofs of the old houses, make Touraine 
 the country all of ease and grace, of kindly 
 nature and friendly time, more purely human 
 than any other I know. But, oddly enough, 
 the fitting mankind seems absent. There is 
 none of the sense of past habitation which, 
 gently or tragically or quaintly, I get from parts 
 of England, from Germany, from Italy even in 
 its most deserted parts. I have never felt as if 
 Touraine, this land of historic castles and palaces, 
 held any ghosts for me. At most, those patched 
 and powdered rustics of the Fragonard pavilion 
 in the deserted park. 
 
 200
 
 THE PETIT PICPUS 
 
 OUR last ramble through Paris to- 
 gether was oddly serious, almost 
 tragic. It was a stormy spring 
 day, the young leaves yellow against 
 an inky sky ; the high roofs shining like very 
 old silver in the hot, fitful sun. As always 
 happened in our expeditions, we had no notion 
 where we were going ; the Louvre, as usual, 
 had already closed, and without more ado we 
 got into the nearest tram, quite vague about its 
 destination. It set us down at last, after inter- 
 minable stoppages in the Faubourg St. Antoine, 
 at the Place du Trone. I had never been there, 
 and the name was to me synonymous with the 
 Reign of Terror. This reminded my com- 
 panion that in that neighbourhood was the 
 burial-place of the poor guillotined folk ; a 
 friend of hers, many of whose family rested 
 there, had told her of it, and she was taken 
 
 201
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 with a pious whim to see it. We were 
 setting out on this rather vague quest, when 
 the skies shrouded everything in crape, and we 
 took refufxe from the comino^ storm in a little 
 cafe of that humble and rather questionable 
 quarter. Being Ascension Day, whole families 
 were abroad ; and two of these crowded in the 
 same place, with stray workmen filling up the 
 other tables. We had some briny beer, and a 
 girl came round with queencakes, like small 
 bath sponges, in a white basket. Down battered 
 the rain, with claps and rumblings of thunder ; 
 people talked little or in undertones ; and even 
 the children running in and out among the 
 tables seemed unnaturally quiet. We fell to 
 talking, of course, of the Revolution ; of Grand- 
 father F having been in it as a child, and 
 
 never speaking of the country save as " Bloody 
 France." Those little Gascon nobles, even in 
 their remote South, had had a tricoloured Com- 
 missary and a perambulating guillotine among 
 them. What should we have felt if we had 
 been there — how behaved .'' I knew for a cer- 
 tainty the fine, smiling, serious politeness 
 with which my companion would have taken 
 it all ; as to myself . . . one hopes that such 
 
 202
 
 The Petit Picpus 
 
 circumstances bring forth their crop of appro- 
 priate good manners ! And, looking round us at 
 the little tables and beer-glasses, we realized also 
 that some of these nice, well-behaved workmen 
 would doubtless, if the opportunity came, send 
 us to the scaffold from motives of virtue ; or 
 should we be guillotined by some of our own 
 dear, refined, and philanthropic friends, those 
 most astonished if they could see us (while they 
 were having tea at the Bois) in that cafe of 
 Socialist purlieus ? 
 
 The rain abated, and after vague wanderings 
 we met a cab lost somehow in that neighbour- 
 hood. " To the Convent of the Petit Picpus," 
 said my friend. " Picpus ! Petit Picpus ! " I 
 exclaimed. Why did the name come as out of 
 my childhood ? Was this — was it not } — the 
 convent where Jean Valjean was gardener, and 
 where dear little Cosette said gravely to the 
 confessor, " Mon Pere, je m'accuse d'adultere ? " 
 The marvellous ragged heroes of barricades and 
 drains crowded into my head. 
 
 Meanwhile we had got out at the end of a 
 
 street which was one long blank wall ; and the 
 
 hard heart of a convent porter was melting 
 
 because my friend recognized his accent as ot 
 
 20^
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Gascony, and revealed herself as a country- 
 woman and half a neighbour. The talk of 
 that distant country of the Tarn and Garonne 
 and Lot put a little dab of landscape, of 
 gentle southern river and hillside, into the 
 stony emptiness of this Paris convent. 
 
 First we were taken across a tidy, arid yard, 
 into the chapel ; as Philistine, bare, stale, and 
 unprofitable as bourgeois French Catholicism 
 could make it. It was empty. Only before 
 the altar knelt two white figures draped in long 
 crimson scarfs. A moment later in came two 
 others to relieve these, for this is a convent of 
 the Perpetual Adoration. The nuns were oddly 
 dressed in white flounced gowns and little 
 goffered caps, the great crimson scarfs trailing 
 like inappropriate warlike banners about their 
 grandmotherly costume. The two new-comers 
 curtsied and bowed to each other ; the first 
 couple went, the second stayed ; as they saluted 
 one another, we realized that they seemed come 
 out of a family portrait by Ingres, and the 
 flaming scarf, symbolical of the blood shed for 
 men and by men, became the shawl with which 
 Corinne or Tolstoy's Natacha danced. 
 
 In this fashion, relaying each other day and 
 204
 
 The Petit Picpus 
 
 night, do the nuns of the Petit Picpus expiate 
 by constant prayer the blood-guilt of the 
 Revolution. 
 
 Of its victims, thirteen hundred guillotined 
 at the Barriere du Tr6ne from Prairial to 
 Thermidor — not three months ! — lie at the end 
 of the Nuns' Garden, under the rank grass 
 guarded by stunted arhor vita. Lie, all the 
 thirteen hundred, pell-mell, it would seem. 
 
 But the little common burial-place is preceded 
 by a gloomy yard of great stone and iron 
 mausoleums, escutcheoned and coroneted. The 
 descendants and relations of some of those 
 victims have come to rest in dreary pomp near 
 where they lie mixed irrecoverably with La 
 Roture in the common ditch. Not a plant, not 
 a blade of grass in this black aristocratic place. 
 So that the little dank field behind the grating 
 and the shabby cypresses look living and 
 cheerful by comparison. 
 
 And in the wall of this lamentable place, 
 sooty and rust-stained by the neighbouring 
 factory chimneys, is fastened a tablet of white 
 marble, with the name of Andre de Chenier, 
 and a poor little crown of green tinware. Even 
 in that grimy place the slab has kept the sparkle, 
 205
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the unmistakable salty purity of marble from 
 Greece ; something which symbolizes, far better 
 than any leaf or flower, the genius of that poor 
 lad, born of a Greek mother in Constantinople, 
 to perish some raw April dawn here at the 
 Barriere du Trone. 
 
 You get to these cemeteries, and back again 
 to the convent, by crossing the long garden, 
 beautifully cultivated, where, between the beds 
 of vegetables and the well-trimmed fruit-trees, 
 the nuns are taking the air ; quaint figures, like 
 Restoration great-aunts, with pink faces encircled 
 by goffered caps, and holding up their flounced 
 white skirts over well-starched petticoats. All 
 round are the gardens, seemingly, of other 
 convents ; and, at distances, gaunt stacks of 
 workmen's dwellings, and factory chimneys, 
 with heavy curls of black smoke. I picked, 
 for remembrance, the only flower about the 
 place, a little white candytuft. Its primness 
 suited those neat, prosaic nuns ; and, like them, 
 it was sprung from the blood of wholesale 
 fratricide. 
 
 It was still dripping as we left the Petit 
 Picpus behind us ; the air chill and grimy all 
 through those remote, dreary quarters. But 
 206
 
 The Petit Picpus 
 
 as we crossed the Isle St. Louis It suddenly 
 cleared. The narrow wet streets looked like 
 the golden ways of the Heavenly Jerusalem ; 
 and above the rustling, tender poplars of the 
 wharves the pinnacles and gargoyles of Notre 
 Dame were profiled against a sky of moist 
 Western gold. 
 
 It was our last ramble together through Paris, 
 very poignant and solemn. 
 
 207
 
 THE CHAPEL OF THE SICK 
 CHILDREN AT BERCK 
 
 SOME day — who knows ? — this is going 
 to be a place of pilgrimage for souls 
 seeking comfort and rest in the art 
 and the ideals of the Past. Just as 
 we, who happen to be living at present, make 
 expeditions up Umbrian hills for the sake of a 
 few patches of lilac and yellow and rose colour 
 which we construe into figures of Pax and 
 Mansuetudo on some palace wall, or across 
 malarious fields to a lonely basilica where the 
 carved peacocks and vine-wreaths and severe 
 blessing Saviours are picked out with the vivid 
 green of damp ; so also they^ the people who 
 will happen to be alive then, may make expedi- 
 tions to these sand-heaps of Berck. 
 
 The thought became familiar to me during 
 the week I passed in that prosaic little place. 
 It is a long row of jerry-built villas and Swiss 
 208
 
 The Chapel at Berck 
 
 cottages half-burled in sand-drifts by the per- 
 petual gales ; untidy streets of cheap shops and 
 tramways, appearing and disappearing among 
 the dunes and the sedgy land reclaimed from 
 the marsh. To the back is the old Picard 
 fishing village, with a weather-beaten church, 
 of poor seafaring folk ; but that is a mile 
 inland, and thirty years ago there was nothing 
 but a coastguard station nearer the sea. 
 
 The great stretch of sands, ample and flat, 
 with the little flotilla of herring-boats stranded 
 upon it, is all mapped out into tennis-courts 
 and croquet-grounds, where the young folk are 
 playing. They are the brothers and sisters ; it 
 is not for them that the crowd has come to 
 Berck. And all along the sands goes the pro- 
 cession of sad little donkey-carriages, vehicles 
 unnaturally long, shapeless, each with a poor 
 little scrofulous creature stretched full length 
 inside. 
 
 Those are the children of well-to-do folk 
 who hire the jerry-built cottages and the little 
 hutches on the sands, and buy the bathing- 
 clothes, and toys, and postcards, and lollipops 
 in the cheap shops by the tramway. Then 
 there are the others. An immense veranda'd 
 209 p
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 hospital is set — one scarcely understands how 
 — in the white sand and the bent grass ; the 
 gales burying its steps and choking its doors 
 with perpetual drift. And in it are nothing 
 but little sick children. In the verandas those 
 who are recovering, crawling on mattresses, 
 hobbling, playing about in all manner of gro- 
 tesque and pathetic rigidity of bandage and 
 apparatus. And in the rows and rows of cots, 
 what poor, poor little things ! many with tiny 
 hands too deformed, you would say, to clutch 
 the toys and picture-books on their coverlets. 
 
 The nuns, Franciscans of the Third Order,* 
 very kindly showed me all over the hospital : 
 the great kitchen, with brass cooking-range and 
 array of saucepans, where they were plunging 
 an immense iron basket of eggs into the 
 cauldron ; the refectory — long tables glazed 
 a lovely bluish-green, on which the plates, cups, 
 napkins, fruit, looked ready for a Robbia 
 frieze ; and also the operating-room, where I 
 was admitted to see the surgical dressing. A 
 white-glazed room, with glazed white tables and 
 rolls of delicate white bandages : pure, flower- 
 like, like a little sanctuary. Small children, 
 
 * Written in 1901. 
 210
 
 The Chapel at Berck 
 
 in wonderfully rapid succession, were brought 
 in on stretchers, deposited on the tables ; 
 old plaster cases broken up, cut away ; sad, 
 litde raw-red limbs washed, gently pulled, 
 straightened ; holes made, pumps pricked in, 
 evil humours sucked out, disinfectants put in ; 
 new bandages and plasters applied ; a fresh, 
 tiny partial mummy despatched. . . . All 
 quickly, certainly, with infinite, humorous kind- 
 ness to the poor little ones screaming with 
 weariness and fear. The crop-headed doctors 
 in their white smocks, the Sisters in their 
 white robes, moving with the quick, gentle 
 precision and solemnity of some religious rite. 
 The wards of the hospital open on to the 
 verandahs ; and wherever you stand, by one 
 of the white cots, you see the sea, the wonder- 
 ful periwinkle blue, heaving slowly between 
 the sparkling white sands and the shining grey 
 grass always shaking in the wind. 
 
 The poverty, brutality, overwork, and shame 
 of the great cities, which send out cargoes of 
 such poor little half-living refuse ; on the other 
 side the tender skill of hand, the disciplined 
 intuition, the impersonal motherly love, which 
 say No to all such horrors ; and the cleansing 
 
 21 I
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 sea-tides and winds, the quickening sunshine 
 among the sands, which add their steady ele- 
 mental No to the faltering human one : — these 
 are the forces of perdition and redemption 
 which one feels arrayed against each other at 
 Berck. Forces which, under the daily repeti- 
 tion of similar sights and emotions, fuse quite 
 naturally into visible symbols : the distorted 
 oudine of a sick baby, the smile of a nun, the 
 surgeon's instruments and rolls of bandages, 
 and the dazzling magnificence of the sands and 
 sea ; and unite in one's memory into vague 
 allegories of good and evil, not indeed as our 
 fathers conceived it, but as it is borne in more 
 and more upon our modern soul. 
 
 Now, it happened that one of the four or 
 five great painters of our day, the painter of 
 the Paris Hotel de Ville ballroom, of the 
 chemical lecture-room of the Sorbonne, and, 
 above all, of the vestibule of the Ecole de 
 Pharmacie, M. Albert Besnard, came to Berck 
 two or three years ago ; and understood the 
 meaning of the place in the stress and the joy 
 of his own child's sickness and recovery. 
 
 All evil is disease, begotten of ignorance and 
 indifference ; and the double holiness of heart 
 
 212
 
 The Chapel at Berck 
 
 and mind shall rise up and cast it forth from 
 the world of mortal men. 
 
 This is what the painter understood as the 
 lesson of Berck, and what he has tried to express 
 in the series of paintings intended as a token of 
 gratitude to the place which had revealed this 
 belief while curing his little son. 
 
 The place which M. Besnard has chosen to 
 decorate in this manner is the chapel attached 
 to the Children's Hospital, and belonging, like 
 it, to those Franciscan Sisters. And the conse- 
 quence has been that he has had to embody his 
 scientific and humanitarian beliefs no longer in 
 the modern and secular symbolism he had 
 invented on other occasions, but in the sym- 
 bolism of Christianity. The series of canvases 
 on either side of the roughly carpentered little 
 chapel are the story of the sufferings, the 
 labours, the triumph of Christ. Not of the 
 Man Jesus, but of the incarnation of pity and 
 justice on earth. To Christ resigned and 
 seemingly helpless on His big rough cross, the 
 poor modern workman, by his wife's sick-bed, 
 lifts up the newly born child already conse- 
 crated to suffering. In that same poor little 
 room, where the man breaks down by the side 
 213
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 of his dead wife, Christ leans with His cross 
 towards the women who are taking charge of 
 the motherless child. It is to Christ that the 
 child is brought in its terrible sheath of 
 bandages and plaster. For it is Christ who has 
 suffered the misery of mankind in order to 
 redeem it, who has felt in order to help. On 
 the opposite wall, the cross is gone ; and Christ 
 stands, no longer in resignation of suffering, 
 by the operating-table on which a sick child is 
 stretched, infusing love and strength into the 
 surgeon and the nurse who bend over it. 
 And in the next composition Christ touches 
 with compassion the heart of the well-to-do 
 young workman and his wife taking their ease 
 on their doorstep in the evening, indifferent 
 to their less fortunate fellow-creatures around 
 them. These are the sufferings and labours of 
 Christ. But there are two more compositions, 
 richer in figures, deeper in meaning, and which 
 face one another as the first and the last of the 
 series : Christ's crucifixion, and Christ's final 
 triumph — the beginning of evil and its end. 
 
 The first of these paintings represents the 
 polluted suburb of a great town : against the 
 outline of its factories, veiled in smoke, and 
 214
 
 The Chapel at Berck 
 
 the flare of its furnaces, the great cross stands 
 athwart, with the Saviour freshly nailed upon 
 it. At its foot are the terrible company of 
 those He has come to redeem, the gaol-birds 
 fighting, the starving woman about to give 
 birth to another starving child, the growing 
 girl distorted under an over-heavy burden, the 
 drunkard, the lunatic ; and Christ, in their 
 midst, writhes, nailed to His cross, and sends 
 forth the great cry of despair. Venio tterum 
 crucifigi is the Saviour's legendary answer to 
 Peter ; and this is the representation of that 
 eternally renewed crucifixion. 
 
 On the opposite wall is a composition of cor- 
 responding intricacy and significance. Nearest 
 the spectator a great roan horse is being driven 
 by a ploughman across the fruitful upturned 
 earth, while a stately young mother looks on, 
 her child at her breast. Through the solemn 
 green country workmen are returning in the 
 evening light, and among them a pair of lovers, 
 reading out of the same book as they go. A 
 broad river, embosomed in trees, winds into 
 that peaceful country, against whose sunset sky 
 a town is being built, scaffoldings and ladders 
 against the opal and the pale rose. On the 
 215
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 smooth green stream a boat is descending, 
 propelled like the one seen by Dante, by 
 the outspread wings of a great angel ; and 
 there are angels, it seems, hovering above 
 the unfinished town in the distance. Whither 
 is the boat and its heavenly pilot carrying 
 those souls in the decline of the serene day of 
 work and of leisure ? To the City of the Just, 
 which they have helped to build in their dreams, 
 or to eternal rest in the ocean which receives 
 that river of life ? Each one of us will give 
 his own answer. But one thing is certain : 
 erect in middle of the picture, transfigured, 
 triumphant, the great figure of Christ stands 
 and blesses His work with His radiance. 
 
 They have built many fine imitation mediaeval 
 churches in our day — Early Christian, Roman- 
 esque, Gothic, and what not — at tremendous 
 expense of stonework and gilding, and have 
 covered their walls with paintings and mosaics 
 betokening the deepest and most reverent study 
 of the faith of the Past. But what will the 
 people of the future find to feel about all that .'' 
 Here atBerck is a chapel of iron and pitch-pine, 
 little better than a shanty ; and here a man, of 
 an age of religious unbelief, has painted a series 
 216
 
 The Chapel at Berck 
 
 of pictures quite regardless of authorized sym- 
 bolism and dogma. But the dear, devout little 
 nuns are satisfied, and the materialistic doctors 
 and surgeons equally. And, on the whole, I 
 should not be surprised if the people of the 
 future came in pilgrimage to the Chapel of the 
 Sick Children of Berck, to know and feel what 
 manner of Christianity was really vital in the 
 year 1900. 
 
 Those vague thoughts became quite clear to 
 me that last evening at the little bathing-place. 
 The sun was setting between the sand-hillocks 
 with their thin grey-green grass ; a crimson 
 ball above a strip of moonstone-coloured water. 
 The sea, at high-tide, broke into two long deep 
 lines, darker but not less luminous, like the 
 cleft in a cat's eye. A pale, pale orange band 
 of mist lay on the water's lip, with the black 
 boats at anchor swaying against it. And a last 
 boat, all canvas spread, came in, gliding slowly 
 like a young swan. I thought of the boat 
 sailed by the angel's wings in the painting in 
 the chapel ; and it struck me that this was the 
 colour of those pictures : a solemn evening, 
 foretelling a radiant day. 
 
 217
 
 LA FERTE-SOUS-JOUARRE 
 
 IN MEMORIAM 
 TH. BENTZON, ob. ^th Feb., 1907 
 
 I AM out of all proportion glad now to have 
 made that extra little journey inside my 
 homeward journey ten years ago ; and to 
 possess round the figure of dear Madame 
 Blanc the background of that home, hers for too 
 short a time, on the banks of the Marne, beyond 
 Meaux. We walked, I remember, along the 
 towing-path, tufted with mint and borage, past 
 the white bridge where the old Rohan house 
 stands with an aristocratic grace, although 
 turned into a school. The usual patient French 
 gudgeon-fisherman was sitting on his punt in 
 mid-stream, making the bottle-green water into 
 great circles as he pulled the line out at regular 
 intervals with his fingers. The sky was cloudy 
 and bright by turns and patches ; and the first 
 yellow leaves fluttered down from the poplars. 
 218
 
 La Ferte-sous-Jouarre 
 
 Across the wide river was the big, covered 
 lavoir ; and from it came, tempered by distance 
 into mere workaday cheerfulness, a rhythmic 
 beating of linen and a clatter of shrill gossip. 
 On that autumn morning everything seemed 
 wonderfully fresh, serene, and good. 
 
 La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, where she had wanted 
 to end her days, proved too remote for Madame 
 Blanc-Bentzon's literary work, and for the even 
 more exacting, but never shirked, claims of 
 friendship upon a woman who, however cosmo- 
 politan in many things, was typically French in 
 her way of conceiving what in France comes 
 next to maternity, and far above love — the 
 manifold relation which I think of in its own 
 language — ramit'iL 
 
 So she returned to Paris, where I had already 
 known her in various temporary abodes on the 
 old left bank ; and she died, alas ! not even 
 among her own books and souvenirs, but in a 
 boarding-house at Meudon. These moves 
 from one modest little flat to another, ever 
 accompanied by certain cherished properties 
 (her likeness by Henri Regnault, among 
 others), always struck me as symbolical of all 
 I knew and guessed of my dear friend's life, of 
 219
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the constant interference of circumstances with 
 her wishes, or at least (for her own wishes 
 seemed somehow to embody themselves cheer- 
 fully in her duties) with the wishes which our 
 love and admiration made for her. 
 
 Therese de Solms, as she was called for the 
 first sixteen or seventeen years of her life, ought 
 to have been, and in the eighteenth century 
 would somehow have been, not a woman of 
 letters, a reviewer and journalist living high up 
 in one of those Faubourg St. Germain houses, 
 but the mistress thereof, receiving in the shining 
 big-windowed rooms, entre cour et jardin, the 
 noble folk of a hundred and fifty years ago ; 
 encouraging D'Alembert, restraining Diderot, 
 smoothing down Rousseau's vanity, drying the 
 passionate tears of Mdlle. de Lespinasse. Her 
 whole nature, appearance, manner, and even 
 history fitted her into such a framework, and I 
 always thought of it around her. Her cosmo- 
 politan birth, to begin with, would have been 
 so right in that eighteenth century which, 
 because it was so French, knew nothing of 
 national limitations and jealousies. The Solms 
 were cadets of the great German family ; and 
 ancestors of Therese Blanc-Bentzon had, I 
 220
 
 La Ferte-sous-Jouarre 
 
 believe, been in command of the regiment 
 called Royale Allemagne. There was also, I 
 forget how, a streak of Scandinavian or Dutch 
 in her, almost Anglo-Saxon, through a grand- 
 mother called Bentzon, whose name Theresa 
 Blanc took to sign her articles and stories when, 
 scarcely more than a girl, left alone with a 
 widowed mother and a baby, she took Madame 
 Sand's advice and began to write for her bread. 
 There was also, I don't quite remember how, 
 some connexion with Martinique ; and I always 
 had the sense that what made my friend in a 
 way old-world was partly that Creole blood, that 
 tie with the older France of the Colonies. One 
 feels that closer influence of the past, that 
 identification with the old France still lasting 
 beyond the seas, in her delightful descriptions of 
 French Canada and its old-fashioned homes and 
 convents. I think I was not alone in feeling 
 that, modern as were her ideas, and despite her 
 American visitors, her Russian Nihilist friends, 
 Madame Blanc reached back into the past much 
 farther than most women of sixty. 
 
 And it was about her past, when I could 
 get her to speak of herself at all (for she 
 made one speak mainly of oneself and took 
 
 221
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 away all sense of egotism and intrusion by 
 her passionate interest), that I preferred to 
 make her talk ; at least when it was not about 
 the Utopian future. One of the last times 
 we were together in her sitting-room over- 
 looking the Archbishop's garden and the cocked- 
 hat attics of the Invalides, the conversation fell 
 upon George Sand. Madame Blanc's stepfather, 
 the Comte d'Aure, had been one of Madame 
 Sand's greatest friends ; Therese herself, when 
 she returned, barely married, a mother but still 
 herself a child, to live under her mother's roof, 
 was a frequent guest at Nohant. And from 
 Madame Blanc's conversations George Sand 
 emerged very human, generous, and selfish, a 
 creature much larger than ordinary life, fitting 
 into the company of the wonderful grandmother 
 and mother of the " Histoire de ma Vie." What 
 an"Histoire de ma Vie" Madame Blanc herself 
 could have written had she not been too much 
 interested in those younger than herself and 
 too self-forgetful and generous ! I imagine the 
 book would have had a Sandian picturesqueness 
 and romanticalness ; for one of dear Madame 
 Blanc's great charms was that she never saw 
 people in a dull, everyday light, but rather with 
 
 222
 
 La Ferte-sous-Jouarre 
 
 the colouring of their hidden possibilities. The 
 book, had she written it (I am sure she has not, 
 alas !), would have had, I feel certain, vistas 
 leading into old feudal and planter days ; corners, 
 or rather perspectives, with the beckoning quality 
 of all receding things, of white-washed convent 
 corridors, crucifix at end ; and half-neglected 
 garden avenues of old country houses. I seem 
 really to have stayed, only in some finer, intenser 
 manner, in that chateau among the forests of the 
 Nivernais to which she wanted me to accompany 
 her ; the chateau of which she said, summing 
 up the whole fascination of such places, " Rien 
 n'est attachant comme une belle vieille maison 
 un peu pauvrement habitee.'' But in dear 
 Madame Blanc's thoughts there were other 
 likings than these autumnal ones, as of yellow 
 leaves shed on old terrace-steps and frost- 
 reddened geraniums against a time-stained wall. 
 She felt the attraction of the Paris garret over- 
 looking roofs and steeples, where, lighting her 
 stove in the dawn, the Russian doctoress or 
 student dreams of a world without poverty and 
 disease. And Madame Blanc, even at sixty, would 
 have preferred the garret to the chateau, and 
 chosen revolt rather than sleepy acquiescence. 
 223
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 It was this mixture, perhaps this contradic- 
 tion, in her of a vanished past with a future still 
 existing only in dreams, which gave Madame 
 Blanc-Bentzon her influence both as a woman 
 and as a writer. Sitting by her fire, or walking 
 rather slowly by her side under the first green 
 of the Invalides limes, one felt that there was 
 no romance too high-flown and passionate for 
 her flaming-up sympathy ; yet that, in some 
 inexplicable manner, her wisdom had the depth 
 and purity of springs which have wandered for 
 ages underground, filtered and cooled in the 
 deep rock. 
 
 I have alluded to her influence as a writer. 
 Madame Blanc-Bentzon, who lived a whole 
 lifetime by the work of her pen, was not what 
 you would call a literary talent, still less a 
 genius ; and much of the dignity, the fine 
 great-lady quality of her, depended upon her 
 thorough understanding of this fact. She 
 competed with no one, and was therefore 
 superior to all the specially gifted but lop-sided 
 creatures who compete, and so rarely have eyes 
 for anything save their own talent and what 
 feeds or rewards it. Madame Blanc-Bentzon 
 loved literature as she loved human beings, 
 224
 
 La Fert^-sous-Jouarre 
 
 with passion and discrimination ; most of all 
 for whatever human qualities and ideas, personal 
 or racial, literature contained ; and, having to 
 write for her living, she was, fortunately, led 
 to tell others the things that interested herself 
 
 o 
 
 in her immense cosmopolitan reading ; just as 
 she told others about the people, the places, the 
 habits, and movements which interested her 
 on her constant journeyings. In this way, and 
 almost accidentally, she gave to the immense 
 cosmopolitan circle of readers of the Revue des 
 Deux Mondes and of Calmann Levy's collection 
 the equivalent of those wonderful talks about 
 things she had seen, read, heard, guessed, in 
 England, in America, or in Russia ; making, 
 for instance. Whitman or Dostoievsky, Shaker 
 Communities or Russian peasant mystics, intelli- 
 gible to the average Western European by first 
 passing these strange manifestations through 
 the admirably lucid sympathy of a traditional 
 French woman's mind. It was a mere accident, 
 the trials and courage of her earliest youth, 
 which set Therese Blanc-Bentzon writing. But 
 those years of literary activity of hers, of which 
 she spoke with the business-like modesty of 
 one who does her best but is better than any 
 225 Q
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 profession, and that endless series of reviews 
 and essays, probably meant more for the civili- 
 zation of the Continental middle classes, and 
 for the good will of country to country, than 
 all the work of literary genius, splendid but 
 irresponsible, and so often cruel, of the same 
 number of years. I knew this. And a sense 
 of my dear friend's real importance in the 
 world's welfare always accompanied my deep 
 personal and, if I may say so, almost filial 
 reverence for her life and opinions. But to 
 me, in the eighteen years of our intercourse, 
 Madame Blanc-Bentzon was, rather than the 
 writer and critic, the incomparable friend, such 
 as perhaps only France can give, in whose 
 gentle, firm hands, and under whose benign, 
 clear eyes, one feels one's life safe and at 
 peace. 
 
 I began this paper by saying how glad I am 
 now to have seen dear Madame Blanc-Bentzon 
 in that house, which was hers for so short a 
 time, on the banks of the Marne, beyond 
 Meaux ; and I wrote the name of the little 
 + place — La Fert^-sous-Jouarre — at the head of 
 my page. 
 
 For it stands, in my recollection, as a perfect 
 226
 
 La Fert^-sous-Jouarre 
 
 example of the sunny grace and prosperous 
 simplicity, the slightness also and absence of 
 picturesque emphasis, which constitute for me 
 the charm of the French country. I had just 
 returned from a month of rain and cold in the 
 black and green bleakness of the West ; and 
 I seemed back in real France among the scanty 
 woods, the vineyards of the low hills, the rivers 
 between banks of whispering poplars, and pale 
 reaped corn-slopes. La Ferte proved to be a 
 tiny town of whitewashed houses, with gardens 
 overhanging the river, or creeping uphill into 
 the vineyards. And dear Madame Blanc's house 
 was the very one I had always longed for when 
 passing similar places In the train ; the realiza- 
 tion of the house one wishes to be one's hospit- 
 able friend's ; the white maison de notaire, diapered 
 with green fruit espaliers ; small yet roomy, 
 exquisitely clean and sweet ; with frugal meals 
 of excellent game, fruit, and wine, quietly served 
 by the discreet white-capped bonne. During the 
 hot autumn noon I sat in the shuttered room 
 smelling of roses, and lazily opened a book, 
 from the shelves all round ; and, in the green 
 dimness, spelt out the pictures and photographs : 
 Tolstoy maned and leonine, and Madame Sand, 
 227
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 with her bandeaux ; also less-known friends, but 
 dearer to me ; and Regnault's sketch of my 
 hostess herself, her dear eighteenth-century face 
 still childish. There was a little long picture 
 also, which had attracted me in all Madame 
 Blanc's successive abodes, telling of the house of 
 Solms in its ancien regime glory : a procession of 
 liveried coaches, going to some Royal hunt down 
 the green glades of Fontainebleau or Compiegne, 
 and reminding me, by a confusion of associations, 
 that M. d'Aure had been the Emperor's Master 
 of the Horse, and that his stepdaughter Therese 
 had seen Courts in her girlhood. 
 
 Madame Blanc would emerge from her 
 writing-room, lined with Revues des Deux 
 Mondes, at tea-time ; and, after having goute'd 
 on exquisite fruit and little galettes, we went 
 out together in the low yellow light. 
 
 I have spoken of the walk along the towing- 
 path. Another day we drove on to the high- 
 lying plateau above the Marne, to the little 
 town, or, as they called it, Bourg^ of Jouarre, its 
 steeple and square tower marking the long low 
 ridge of wine-growing coteaux. Here, among 
 the stubble-fields, the thin green coppices, 
 and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 
 228
 
 La Ferte-sous Jouarre 
 
 deep-roofed houses, one is quite astonished to 
 find, behind some Louis XV. convent buildings 
 (suggestive, at most, of M. Renan's imaginary- 
 abbess) a crypt, a sunken bit of Byzantine 
 basilica, with reticulated walls and delicately 
 carved columns and sarcophagi, green with 
 damp — in fact, a little corner of Ravenna. And 
 in this crypt is the carved figure of a lady, 
 of smooth and tender mediaeval workmanship, 
 crowned, recumbent, with her dog at her feet. 
 And I remember noticing round her arm a dirty 
 white tape, put there, as the sabot-maker 
 sacristan explained, by a pilgrim who will 
 fetch it away — a poor little possession left 
 pathetically from one year to another to steep 
 in holiness. 
 
 Walking home by the cornfields and tiny 
 woods, to the vineyard behind Madame Blanc's 
 own house, we talked of many and various 
 things, principally of Russia and certain revolu- 
 tionary friends of my friend's. And I remember 
 how she enlarged, with that level wisdom which 
 went with her fine old-world courtesy, on the 
 folly of trying, as some of her countrymen try, 
 to reduce mankind and life to a few regular 
 types ; pointing out that, with human souls as 
 229
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 with plants and animals, improvement could be 
 attained only by selection and crossing among 
 as many varieties as possible. No one was 
 more modern than she in all her tendencies 
 and judgments. Yet I felt that, deep down, 
 she sympathized with the piece of tape tied 
 round the arm of the stone saint ; and that, 
 beneath the sunny reasonableness of her nature, 
 there were hidden chapels dating from distant 
 centuries, even as in that abbey of Jouarre. 
 And I loved her only the more because of such 
 places in her soul, outside which I should have 
 to wait, respectful and wondering. 
 
 Those days at La Ferte belong to the past. 
 But I cannot at all realize that when next in 
 Paris I shall not go at once to look for her and 
 find her. And, instead of sadness at the loss, 
 the news of her death has merely, for the 
 moment, brought home very vividly the blessing 
 and the privilege of having had, of having, her 
 friendship. 
 
 2^0
 
 BOOK IV 
 SWITZERLAND
 
 HACKNEYED SWITZERLAND 
 
 HAVE had occasion to write about parts 
 of Switzerland, and indeed of other 
 countries, which are as yet untrodden by 
 the tourist ; but I should not wish you to 
 think that such districts are necessarily preferred 
 by the votary of the Genius Loci. If places 
 are hackneyed, it is only in our own eyes and 
 soul, because we see their commonplace side 
 and the rubbish of everyday detail which we 
 bring with us. And as to tourists, it is my 
 scientific opinion that they lurk reading last 
 year's illustrated papers or exchanging intelli- 
 gence with each other, or at all events disappear 
 into appropriate holes and corners of the real 
 universe as soon as the Sentimental Traveller is 
 abroad. Or is it, perhaps, that the true Senti- 
 mental Traveller wanders about in places existing 
 only in his own fancy, and safe, therefore, from 
 all profane intrusion ?
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Whatever the nature of this curious and con- 
 soling mystery, it is certain that my companion 
 and I have been unmolested by all tourists 
 during the two days of poignant summer sweet- 
 ness we have just spent at a no more recondite 
 place than Lucerne. There was the walk in 
 the blazing July morning to the church, full of 
 coolness, of fresh breath of incense and last 
 organ chords, cool like thunder themselves. 
 Then the stroll round the churchyard, and 
 among the fine, deep-eaved houses, each with 
 its tubs of pomegranate and oleander at its 
 steps. The walk, also, the first hot late after- 
 noon, along the deep green racing flood of the 
 Reuss, cold like a glacier crevasse to look at, 
 and among those inconceivably green meadows 
 and orchards behind the city towers ; and down 
 again by steep lanes, between gardens and end- 
 less flights of steps, into the old town with its 
 inn-signs and its pillared fountains. And, last 
 of all, there was that supper on the terrace of a 
 little lake-pension, with coolness and night rising 
 out of the lime-trees ; and the row back home, 
 over the water paved with palest rose and violet, 
 to the orange lights of the town. There might 
 have been tourists about, but we did not see, 
 
 234
 
 Hackneyed Switzerland 
 
 nor need any one see, them, who is not a tourist 
 himself. 
 
 And, talking of hackneyed Switzerland, what 
 spectacle could be less unexpected, more utterly 
 foreseen, than that of the river Aar ? Yet, 
 when I came upon it a week ago, it filled me 
 with astonishment and rapture. One cannot 
 carry in one's memory the full and amazing 
 wealth and swiftness of such a river, even if it 
 have accompanied years of one's childhood. 
 And this mighty water-god is no terror like 
 the great rivers, Rhone and Po and Adige, of 
 other countries. He lives his deep swift life 
 alongside of that of men, hurtling past the lock 
 under the cathedral, yet lip to lip with the kerb 
 of the old suburb, debonair^ trustworthy, so that 
 the children, over the few inches of parapet, can 
 wet their hands and play with him. What 
 purity and strength, bringing air fresh from the 
 furthest uplands in his steady, impetuous course ; 
 a moment ago, you would say, among the short 
 Alpine grass and the larches on the rocks ; now 
 under the old town-terraces and balconies ; and 
 a few minutes hence, ocean-bound, in the 
 Rhine ! From my mention of the cathedral 
 you infer rightly that all this happened 
 
 235
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 in the most tourist-haunted of places on earth, 
 at Bern. 
 
 At Bern, where the tourists see only the 
 Bears. . . . But do they see the Bears ? There 
 were no tourists about when I went to see the 
 Bears. Perhaps I was myself a tourist, aged 
 seven or eight, when I was last taken to feed 
 them — or was it (as usual in my childhood) 
 merely that I was told that other people fed 
 them .'' Certainly I had no recollection (just 
 as with the river Aar) that they were half as nice. 
 For, with their huge coats of fine brown fur 
 tipped with delicate cinnamon, and their lumber- 
 ing playfulness, full of seeming guilelessness, 
 they are emblems not of a race of savages but 
 of just such nobles as those of Bern must have 
 been : well-to-do, kindly, a little gauche ^ fed 
 with all mediaeval Europe's buns and carrots 
 (freely lavished on the mercenary troopers, 
 enveloped in beards and plumes, as in bear's 
 gorgeous fur), but keeping the habit of fear- 
 ful play, of terrible huggings, learnt in the 
 mountains. 
 
 Coming back from the Bdren-Graben, a young 
 fellow got into the Bern city tram in the 
 arcaded street of patricians' houses, where there 
 236
 
 Hackneyed Switzerland 
 
 is an old escutcheoned nobles' club inscribed 
 " Distelzwang, Gentilshommes." He was a 
 well-built dark boy, with budding moustache, 
 clad in a white sweater, crossed by an em- 
 broidered baldrick, and on his straw hat he 
 wore a big civic wreath of paper oak leaves. 
 Two long silk streamers depending from it set 
 forth, in gold letters, that he had been crowned 
 as a successful athlete. The garland was much 
 too big, overflowing his small straw hat and his 
 whole person ! He got out of the tram near 
 the clock-tower, and walked away with a light 
 step, as of an English schoolboy ; or, compared 
 with the clodhoppers around, of a Greek god. 
 
 Perhaps all this — River Aar, Bears, and 
 Crowned Athlete — is very hackneyed, and has 
 been seen by legions of tourists. Perhaps even 
 the Philosophers of Philosophers' Walk are 
 hackneyed. But I must explain that close to 
 the dreary litde private hospital, with its ether 
 breath (for I have not even been holiday-making 
 this time at Bern), there runs alongside of the 
 jerry-built houses a little canal of pale rapid 
 water, and a signpost tells one the name of the 
 accompanying dusty path : Pkilosophen Weg. 
 How a word can change things ! In my daily, 
 
 237
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 three, four times daily, trudge along the suburban 
 road, where the tram-car crashes and jangles 
 between Philistine villas, there was a relief, a 
 refreshment, more than from that channel of 
 water, every time my eye caught that name. 
 For I thought of those Philosophers, shoe- 
 buckled or gaitered, cocked hat doubtless askew, 
 disputing by twos, or walking in solitary thought, 
 along that brook meandering through the 
 meadow-sweet of the great fields, with Bern, a 
 tiny walled town, still a mile off on its hillock. 
 The tourists may have seen the River Aar ; it 
 is possible they may have come across the 
 Crowned Athlete ; and they may even have 
 gone forth to throw carrots to the Bears. But 
 have they seen the Philosophers walking along 
 Philosophers' Walk ? I scarcely think it. 
 
 238
 
 SACKINGEN AND THE 
 TRUMPETER 
 
 BEFORE that three days' plunge into 
 my childhood — delightful or dis- 
 astrous or merely funny as it might 
 prove — it happened that I should 
 make a fitting excursion into one of the realms 
 of my childish fancy : Sackingen, the town of 
 Scheffel's " Trompeter." For, having a couple 
 of days to waste still before that visit which 
 had waited nine-and-twenty years, the recollec- 
 tion of an illustration in " Modern Painters " 
 led me to Rheinfelden ; and disappointment in 
 Rheinfelden — the town walls built into by 
 electric works, the meadows between the towers 
 filled with factory refuse — drove me for conso- 
 lation to a neighbouring town I had seen from 
 the train, and in which I thought I recognized 
 the subject of another of Ruskin's Black Forest 
 drawings : a straggling line of high-pitched 
 roofs, a tower, two pointed steeples, and a long 
 
 239
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 covered timber bridge over the Rhine. On a 
 steaming autumn morning I walked there from 
 the opposite station of Stein, on the Swiss 
 bank ; along a flat road between apple-trees, and 
 lingeringly across the bridge, deliciously brown 
 and cool, with the young Rhine rushing green 
 beneath its planks. Then into Germany and 
 the little town. It had a few houses with old- 
 fashioned turret windows — Ercker is the word ; 
 some nice wrought-iron signs of inns, a gaunt 
 Jesuit church with St. Fridolin conversing 
 with a skeleton over the porch ; and a ^Mnnyy 
 pagoda-like seventeenth-century castle. And 
 of course a Scheffel-house, duly inscribed with 
 the birth and death and general glories of the 
 poet of the " Trompeter." For the town was 
 Siickingen. I entered the only stationer's, and 
 piously bought the poem, in Teutonic embossed 
 binding, with Wernher Kirchhof trumpeting 
 away in gold and crimson. Shall I ever 
 read it ? 
 
 I had not done so since my childhood. Or, 
 speaking more correctly, I had never read it 
 even then. It was doled out to me, quotations 
 and precis, where it grew long-winded, in the 
 little Swiss schoolroom twenty-nine years ago, 
 240
 
 Sackingen and the Trumpeter 
 
 over the copybooks and inkstands and the 
 cups of coffee, by that dear, long-lost friend ; 
 the very one I was about to seek, plunging 
 rather rashly into that gulf of Time. She used 
 to bring the volume — ^just such a binding, only 
 its gold and crimson embossings a little the 
 worse for wear — to my daily lesson ; and, if 
 my sums and grammar and my theme were not 
 too utterly disgraceful, she would reward me, 
 and also her dear self, with the tale of how the 
 roving musician (Germans have a way of roving 
 for no visible reason, and it is so dear of them) 
 fell in love with the daughter of the Baron of 
 Sackingen, and how he made songs, and was 
 counselled and consoled by the magic tomcat 
 Hiddigeigei ; and every one lived happy ever 
 after. . . . 
 
 O dear German childhood in that schoolroom 
 panelled with a porcelain stove where we baked 
 apples ! Dear German things never seen since : 
 books heavily embossed or girt with orange 
 labels — Konversations-Lexikons, bound years of 
 Gartenlaube, stray volumes of Schiller and 
 Goethe with their inspired curly heads in relief 
 on the cover, and golden lyres and laurels ; 
 Mozart's Letters also ; but, best of all, the 
 241 R
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 things unwritten — scraps of poetry, legends, 
 tales of mystery, stored away behind the 
 wide, candid brows, the kind young earnest 
 eyes of my dear teacher : all summed up, 
 symbolized for me in Scheffel's " Trompeter," 
 and this little town of Sackingen. 
 
 There was not much to see there, it is true ; 
 in fact, less than at Rheinfelden, where there 
 had seemed to be nothing ! But there were lots 
 to think, to feel about. For how much of what 
 seems to us the Genius Loci is, after all a Genius 
 Vitae, a kind of Lares and Penates of one's own, 
 a pocket idol like the toys children put under 
 their pillows to dream about ; and — who knows ? 
 — a humble relation of the Genius of Death ? 
 
 So, with the feel of Sackingen in my soul and 
 the red embossed volume of the "Trompeter" 
 in my bag, I set forth the following morning 
 on my sentimental journey ; got into the local 
 train which was to carry me, by leisurely stages, 
 through orchards and fir woods and past trim 
 wooden toy-box cottages into my own past. 
 
 The past ? Well, of course it wasn't there. 
 But why regret it .'' It had not been better, 
 certainly, than this delightful present of delicate 
 cordiality and fine workadayness ; and as a 
 
 242
 
 Sackingen and the Trumpeter 
 
 matter of fact in two hours I got to know these 
 dear new friends better than I had really known 
 that dear old friend in many years of childish 
 intercourse, for a child knows very little of the 
 reality of those it loves. And if she I had 
 come to see again eluded me — refused, in a way, 
 to let me see and feel her presence — why, there 
 was the charm of rediscovering her looks, 
 thoughts, ways, of long ago in her two 
 daughters, each a living half of her old self, 
 the dainty, reserved young housewife and the 
 ardent student fresh from the university. And 
 yet ... It was unreasonable ; but I went on 
 feeling I had not found what I had come for ; 
 I had come, absurdly enough, to see two people 
 of long, long ago : her and myself. 
 
 Perhaps the daughters guessed it. Be that 
 as it may, they so arranged that, on my last day 
 there, we two should be left together alone. It 
 was unexpected ; and I found myself, without 
 any preface, going to the neighbouring town 
 alone with my old friend. We got out of the 
 train and wandered about the picturesque Swiss 
 city, with overhanging roofs and turrets and 
 fountains with knights upon them. We looked 
 at the shady bastions, the great Jesuit church, 
 243
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the big clock, where, even as at Sackingen, a 
 knight in armour converses with Der Tod, and 
 dragon gargoyles of twisted iron spout from 
 above. We got a rickety Einsp'dnner and drove 
 into the hilly country, noticing old country 
 houses, turreted and hedged, of the rural 
 patricians of former days. We even went to 
 a little extinguisher-shaped chapel, against 
 whose white-washed walls, under some beech- 
 trees, Kosciusko lies buried. Finis Polonia ; and 
 we said all the things proper under the cir- 
 cumstances. 
 
 But of the past we never talked ; never 
 alluded to those twenty-nine years ago ; never, 
 in fact, found each other or ourselves. It seemed 
 hopeless. At last the time for returning home 
 approached. We went back to the station and 
 prepared to go back exactly as we had come. 
 But we had mistaken the train, and had to wait 
 an hour hard by, on a bench under big trees by 
 the river. The river was the Aar — wide, swift, 
 and green — with the cocked-hat roofs, the striped 
 shutters of a great tithe barn beyond, and the 
 towers of the town. It made me think of Bern ; 
 and a story came vaguely into my head in which 
 that same Aar at Bern somehow played a part. 
 244
 
 Sackingen and the Trumpeter 
 
 "Do you remember," I asked shyly, " the story 
 you used to tell me about some wonderful 
 ladies — sisters — who lived, I don't quite know 
 when, down by the river at Bern ? It was 
 very mysterious and strange, and it was 
 called ' The Light in the Corridor.' Do you 
 remember ? " 
 
 "Yes," she answered gravely. "But you are 
 mixing up two different stories. The * Light in 
 the Corridor ' was about a wicked stepmother 
 — don't you recollect ? — but it had nothing to do 
 with the Aar. The one you are thinking ot 
 was the story of the five mysterious English 
 sisters who lived at Bern." 
 
 " Of course ! And there was one who was 
 called . . . could it have been Zenobia } " 
 
 "Palmyra," she corrected. "There was 
 Apollonia, Polydora, Palmyra ! " She pro- 
 nounced the y German fashion, as a diphthong 
 u ; and that name thus pronounced was the 
 Open, sesame of my childhood. 
 
 I recognized her earnest, dramatic voice, and 
 recognized my own breathless listening. We 
 sat there for an hour, waiting for the train, on 
 the bench beneath the big trees, with the green, 
 rushing river and the fantastic, sentimental old 
 
 245
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Swiss town in front of us, she telling stones 
 and I listening. 
 
 " And when did it all happen ? " I asked, at 
 the conclusion of one of those well-known 
 tales ; and I remembered that I had always 
 ended with that question. 
 
 " I suppose about a hundred years ago," she 
 answered. 
 
 " Surely," I demurred, " not anything as 
 long ago ? I thought only . . . well, sixty or 
 seventy .'' " 
 
 My friend turned round with her good, 
 grave smile. 
 
 " Yes — then ; but it is thirty years since last 
 I told it you." 
 
 Then she drew out her watch. 
 
 " The train is almost due ; we must go," 
 she said, grasping her umbrella. 
 
 We rose and walked silently to the station. 
 Our afternoon together was over. But we had 
 found each other, ourselves, again. 
 
 So ended my excursion into my childhood, 
 into the realms of the " Trompeter von 
 Sackingen." 
 
 246
 
 A RIDE IN THE ALPS 
 
 MOUNTAINS exist for our imagi- 
 nation only seen distant from 
 the plain and the widening valley, 
 where the eye scales them ; or 
 else in the reality of their highest regions. For 
 nothing is less like the feeling mountains can 
 give, their freedom and added sweep of eye 
 and fancy, than the valleys which they enclose 
 in their hopeless steepness of flank ; valleys 
 baffling and caging our wishes, multiplying 
 distance, districts of exile where the very 
 stream, twisting round corners and dashing 
 among rocks, seems, despite all haste and 
 struggle, to get no nearer to the countries 
 of its unhemmed and visible progress. Once 
 in the heart of the mountains, high or low as 
 they may be, Alps or humble Apennines, one 
 feels imprisoned until one has been at the top 
 and brought down the knowledge of the 
 kingdoms of the earth which they reveal. 
 247
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 We had ridden up the little Weisshorn, 
 leaving our horses where the rock emerges 
 out of the soft grass. The valleys had closed 
 behind us ; and the great mountains sat round ; 
 not discontinuous as seen from further down, 
 but an unbroken circuit of walls, towered and 
 battlemented circuit within circuit, as of some 
 mediaeval citadel, with flat places and hollows, 
 landings and ledges unexpected, like what one 
 sees from a roof. And as from a roof or 
 balcony, so from this rocky little turret of 
 the Weisshorn peak, one saw all those things 
 which are unseen from below : the world 
 no longer shut out, but expanded to the eye 
 and fancy in peak beyond peak, chain beyond 
 chain, in the suddenly revealed vicinity of 
 great Alps familiar in other places ; the shining 
 Bernina range ; the seven rocky pinnacles above 
 Wallenstadt ; and massed together and fore- 
 shortened distant mountains of Lucerne and 
 Bern, the Tyrol, Valtellina ; who knows ? 
 Perhaps the mountains above Lake Garda and 
 the Adige ; faint whitenesses one can barely 
 tell from clouds ; and, as the sun sinks, blue 
 washes of unsubstantial Alps, unmodelled, 
 serrated, jagged, and turreted against the sky. 
 248
 
 A Ride in the Alps 
 
 But what takes closest hold of my heart, on 
 the tops of mountains and of those highest 
 passes which afford a real view, is not the distant 
 prospect, but those last embosomings, under 
 the topmost peaks, where the river, still a 
 baby, flows flush of the stones or embedded 
 in moss and minute flowers, without strength 
 or need to cut itself a deeper channel. I 
 imagine every real mountain to have, just 
 under its summit, flattenings and widenings, 
 hollows like amphitheatres beneath sloping 
 crags ; smooth landings also where it meets 
 its neighbours, each mountain leaning towards 
 its fellow, or withdrawing from him ; and low 
 hillocks, billowings of grass which mimic the 
 moors and downs of older, more blunted parts 
 of the globe. 
 
 Those little baby streams (I remember 
 quite similar ones in the highest Apennines), 
 oozing, soaking, emerging, pure white runnels 
 among the flowers and mosses, or trickling over 
 the stones between the big buttercups, where 
 the cows drink chiming . . . One understands 
 these infant streams, without mystery of spring 
 or well-head, when one sees the brown snow 
 still clinging to the hollows, and watches the 
 249
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 light clouds licking the rocks, melting on their 
 wet surface. The mountain-tops, like the sea 
 (one feels it watching the thin summer fogs off 
 the channel and crossing high over the houses 
 into furthest trees), are the great places of 
 evaporation and congealing, the chief of Nature's 
 laboratories, the origin and end of all living 
 things. The polluted rivers go to be washed 
 in the ocean ; the soiled vapours of the plain 
 rise to be cleansed on the rocks and glaciers ; 
 pure vigour and fertile corruption coming and 
 returning in endless circles. 
 
 And the high places show, moreover, what 
 the sea does not (since all the sea's works seem 
 dead or nascent creatures), things quite new, 
 quite undefiled, quite free from the horridness 
 of animal life : the untrodden grass, the crystal- 
 line waters, the great trees which have never 
 been planted, and will never be felled, save by 
 the wind's hand. 
 
 And as, on the seashore, surrounded by half- 
 living creatures and dead plants and driftwood, 
 one feels oneself to be in the midst of Nature's 
 seeds and manures and composts, her hus- 
 bandry, horrid and mysterious ; so here in the 
 mountains the very avalanches running to 
 250
 
 A Ride in the Alps 
 
 deposit the sterile shale, and the boulders 
 rounded by the ice and rolled on by the 
 streams, make one realize that one is in 
 Nature's mason's-yard, among the litter of her 
 carving and building, among the secrets of her 
 architecture. 
 
 To these places poor mankind brings its 
 refuse, the wretched hopes of sick folk and 
 the disguised despair of those who watch them. 
 
 In this valley-head every one nearly — the very 
 tradesfolk, the very servants, are people flying 
 from death, or, at best, exiled for a time from 
 other men's life. The evening of my arrival at 
 the sanatorium, after the weary journey up, and 
 with the faintness on me which comes with 
 sudden transition from the plain to the high 
 mountains, I realized the sense of being exiled, 
 shoved into a corner to die unnoticed, which 
 must overwhelm the new-comers here. In the 
 chill late afternoon the blankets and cushions 
 and rugs on the verandas, and the ghastly 
 necessaries of this particular illness grouped 
 about the wicker sofas, seemed to stand for so 
 many slowly dying men and women. The 
 few yellow lights came out in the deep 
 valley ; and the great black forest, the grim 
 
 251
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 stony peaks closed it all in under the wintry 
 starlight. But in the night there came the 
 sound of the torrent and the waterfall ; and the 
 chimes, various, combined, of the cows, telling 
 consoling and hopeful tales of living waters and 
 rich, peaceful pastures. 
 
 We walked down from the Weisshorn, 
 letting the horses be led in front, and stopping 
 to pick the gentians and pansies clustering in 
 the soft, bright, short grass ; and the lilac- 
 scented daphne on the projecting ledges of 
 rock ; green, flowery places, fields of Enna ; 
 the grass and gentians and pansies filled with 
 coloured light like the windows of fifteenth- 
 century French churches. And when the sun 
 had set behind the peaks, these tiny fields and 
 dells seemed to fill with even more vivid and 
 unlikely colour as they were separated from the 
 world by gathering, thin folds of darkness ; 
 each existing for itself only in its solitude. 
 Are they still there, or do they disappear when 
 you and I are gone, and when only the chimes 
 of the wandering cows and the sound of the 
 torrent rise up towards the peaks and the starry 
 skies ? 
 
 252
 
 THE WITCHES OF FRIBOURG 
 
 THE Genius of Places is no immoral 
 divinity; and whatever the depraved 
 complacency shown by certain of its 
 votaries towards squalor and decay, 
 the true high priests of this cultus have kept it 
 immaculate. Pater's local descriptions are full 
 of the purity of sunny orchards and running 
 waters ; Stevenson's " Cevennes " have no dis- 
 order save of rocky wildernesses. Ruskin's 
 hatred of Popery is largely due to the neglect 
 and degradation which horrified him in parts of 
 Italy and Switzerland. And there is in his 
 diary an entry about the slums of Amiens 
 which expresses, even more personally than the 
 description of the ruined windmill in " Modern 
 Painters," a positive remorse for any sins of 
 complacency towards picturesque squalor of 
 which he may have been guilty. Such 
 sins and backslidings I too have doubtless 
 
 253
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 committed. And the Genius Loci — which, as 
 I have just said, is no immoral divinity — has 
 sometimes devised the means of smiting and 
 humbling the selfish dilettanteism with which I 
 had profaned its worship. 
 
 The lower city of Fribourg — the Basse Ville 
 by the river's edge — has been a stumbling- 
 block to my poor traveller's virtue, and it is 
 here, accordingly, that punishment has sought 
 me out, and that I have had my lesson of what 
 " picturesqueness " may mean. The thing has 
 happened on my fourth visit here, and in this 
 manner. I must remind the reader that the 
 river of Fribourg winds between giant walls of 
 rock, lovely with trees and lawns and towers at 
 the top, but at whose base squats the oldest 
 part of the town, huddled in the ooze of that 
 twisting sunless valley. My Fribourg friends 
 have often told me that it is a nest of pauperism 
 and sickness, and have wondered a little at my 
 hankerings after it. But so it is : the place is 
 matchlessly picturesque, and for all the grace of 
 the upper town and the sweetness of the high- 
 lying lime-walks and pastures, down to that 
 Basse Ville of Fribourg my feet and my thoughts 
 have invariably descended. 
 
 254
 
 The Witches of Fribourg 
 
 And now for my warning. Yesterday after- 
 noon, after three days' stifling heat, the purify- 
 ing storm overtook Mademoiselle de D 
 
 and me down there in the river ravine, where 
 I had, of course, insisted on being taken. 
 Whirlwinds of dust arose even while we 
 descended ; and the first fat drops fell as we 
 stood on the wonderful little square closed in 
 by climbing walls and rocks and firs and 
 chapels, where the Knight Banneret stands out 
 rusty black on his fountain-pillar against the 
 background of tumble-down chalets. A minute 
 or two after the clouds all streamed together, 
 and we had to take refuge in the covered 
 wooden bridge over the Sarine. We stayed 
 there a good half-hour, climbing into the rafter- 
 ing, and there we witnessed a most extraordinary 
 spectacle. Just at that bridge the river makes 
 a sudden bend, and forms a smooth pool 
 between the straight rocks and the last scattered 
 houses of the old town. This lower town of 
 Fribourg has seemed to me, ever since my 
 second visit, an odd, ill-omened place, the 
 Middle Ages oozing away among its convents 
 and chapels. The very river is evil-looking ; 
 no alpine green or crystalline white, but soiled 
 
 255
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 with the scum of that soft corroded stone ; and 
 sullying, rather than washing, the town on its 
 sunless banks. We were looking down, where 
 we sat under the bridge's timber roof, on to 
 that pool in the rock's bend, unable to dis- 
 tinguish which way the sluggish stream flowed. 
 Suddenly the storm-wind shivered it into cat's- 
 paws and circles, like devil's ducks and drakes. 
 A second later white things arose from the oozy 
 bank, from among a litter of broken wood and 
 rubbish : all the foul old paper of the town, 
 turning into birds, taking flight, rustling on to 
 the ruffled water and swimming with twisted 
 necks and draggled wings. Then more and 
 more took life on the bank, a creepy life, 
 extending now one wing, now the other, in the 
 mud ; quivered, pruned themselves, arose, fell 
 back into quaking heaps before taking to the 
 water one by one ; flocks of accursed, magic 
 curlews along that slimy shore. It was (I 
 understood at once) the witches of the place 
 gathering for some sabbath — a sabbath of con- 
 tagion, of diphtheria and phthisis. That is the 
 way — thus, and not cleanly from some roof into 
 a clean sky — that the witches fly ofi^ to their 
 meetings ! There is at the corner of that bridge, 
 256
 
 The Witches of Fribourg 
 
 and steeping Its walls in the livid water, a queer 
 old house which has stood for years empty ; its 
 delicate Gothic stone windows bunged up by 
 the last inhabitant with bits of rusty tin. And 
 if that house is not the house of the Town- 
 Witch-Finder (of whom Gottfried Keller has 
 told us in his story of " Spiegel das Katzchen "), 
 then my name is not Vernon Lee ! 
 
 But to return to those infamous volatiks, as 
 the old poets say of their cousins-german the 
 Harpies. The storm went on raging in that 
 twisting gorge as if, once in, it could get out no 
 longer. And at last there came a great clap of 
 thunder and wind ; and the whole wet, shivering, 
 fluttering flock of rags arose and whirled up 
 across the stream, so that we dropped down 
 among the bridge rafters lest one of the odious 
 things should strike us in the face. After that 
 they alighted, and, passing beneath the bridge, 
 floated like draggled white corpses out of sight 
 under the beating rain and echoing thunder. 
 
 I am safe back in the friendly eighteenth- 
 century chalet, latticed with green and espaliered 
 with apricots, on the slopes above the city. The 
 smell of lime, of hay, of farmyard, the tinkle of 
 cow-bells and fountain rise up and seem to cool 
 257 s
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 the summer evening. As I sit writing I can 
 see the wide summer lightning play over the 
 high-lying meadows, among which the cathedral 
 belfry, the brown-capped towers of Fribourg 
 emerge unaccountably like those of the Heavenly 
 Jerusalem in some fifteenth-century Flemish 
 picture. But I am frightened of that invisible 
 sunken town and its twisting river-gorge ; of 
 the things, seen and unseen, which happen in 
 its poverty-stricken picturesqueness. I have 
 had a warning ! And, as the dusk fills my 
 attic papered with green lilac-branches, I am 
 glad to feel the eyes of gentle 1820 great-aunts 
 looking down from their black silhouette minia- 
 tures and protecting me, unworthy, against the 
 witches. 
 
 258
 
 THE "BEAUTIFUL SOULS" OF 
 SCHLOSS RAPPERSWYL 
 
 ANIGHT in the train, despite its 
 squalor and discomfort, is kinder 
 to the fancy than one of those long 
 days of wearied waking travel, when 
 eye and mind are outraged by the amount forced 
 on their notice, and respond to it by mere irritated 
 boredom. For a night journey blurs all wretched 
 details with darkness, and makes them unreal 
 with snatches of sleep, so that one issues out of 
 it, tired indeed, but unconscious of profanation, 
 and with only a vague remembrance of blindfold 
 hurtling through space, as explanation of the 
 miracle (to me, at least, it is one) of change of 
 place. 
 
 Moreover, a night journey, in summer, at all 
 events, often allows you to enjoy that miracle 
 in its accomplishment : the unfamiliar landscape 
 emerges from dawn darkness ; the sun rises 
 
 259
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 with fiery veinings, perchance, above a different 
 lie of the land ; and the new scene makes a 
 poignant appeal to senses and imagination, 
 refreshed, yet just tired enough for willing 
 surrender to dreamy contemplation. 
 
 No country, I have always felt, is better 
 suited to such moods than the peaceful swept 
 and garnished lowlands through which the train 
 rushes (nearly always in the early morning) 
 between Lucerne and Basle. My drowsy wishes 
 have always clung to it, as to the details in a 
 dream, like the mists clinging to its shallow 
 green valleys and soft fir-clad hills ; but I have 
 never contemplated the possibility of stopping, 
 of actually living, in this region of unreal 
 romantic peacefulness. 
 
 I arrived, as I said before, very early in the 
 morning ; the mists were turning into peaceful 
 autumn rain. The road wound steep between 
 grass slopes whitened as if with frost, and 
 among big apple trees weighed down with 
 crimson fruit and dripping with chilly dew ; the 
 yellow leaves of the walnuts descended slowly 
 through the moist air. The castle had issued 
 out of the mists : the towers and turrets, the 
 gables and weather vane, the long wooden 
 260
 
 Schloss Rapperswyl 
 
 balconies and high-roofed tithe barns, with 
 shutters striped heraldically and eagles of Haps- 
 burg and bears of Berne frescoed upon their 
 walls, spread out above the pasture slopes and 
 vineyards. But as we mounted, all folded itself 
 together, withdrew amongst the tree tufts, until 
 only a sheer wall of rock and masonry remained 
 visible above : turreted, gabled with the rowan 
 bushes growing erect out of its fissures, an 
 inaccessible piece of romance out of a Diirer 
 woodcut. 
 
 But that romance all turns to idyl once you 
 have crossed the creaking drawbridge, and passed 
 inside the walls. The great keep, with its 
 Rittersaal, has been for centuries a barn ; the 
 castle-yard is planted with fruit-trees ; and the 
 loopholed walls connect towers and chalets and 
 gabled dwelling-house. The Austrian knights, 
 with mace and battle-axe, the plumed and purfled 
 handvogts from Bern, have left no trace except 
 their fine Teutonic names and great coats-of-arms 
 on gateway and on drawbridge. Their dignified 
 and disagreeable spectres have long departed ; 
 and quite a different race of shades has come to 
 haunt the lime walk on the battlements, to 
 which the smell of hay and distant sound of 
 261
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 cow-bells rise up from the misty valley on these 
 autumn evenings. 
 
 I felt the presence of those peaceful ghosts 
 from the very first walk I took upon that 
 terrace. And to-day I know the names of two 
 of them. They are Hans von Rapperswyl 
 (born January 25, 1776 ; died, December 30, 
 1802) and Dorothea Biintzli (born April 22, 
 1765; died, October i, 1 804) ; and we spelt them 
 out, that dear clergyman's wife and I, on a sort 
 of antique altar, overhung by weeping willows, 
 which some sentimental hand (theirs, perchance ?) 
 had planted some hundred years ago, by the little 
 lake of Rapperswyl in the valley close by. The 
 place is not a churchyard (there is a small dis- 
 mantled schloss and a busy saw-mill hard by), 
 and the imitation altar has no appearance of 
 marking graves. The clump of trees, the shady 
 shrubberies, the little channels and pools of 
 water are evidently parts of an " English 
 garden " which some former owner had had the 
 fancy of laying out round his deserted ancestral 
 home long after the fogs and rheumatism of 
 the little lake had driven the Von Rapperswyls 
 to shelter in the handsome gabled house upon 
 a neighbouring hill. 
 
 262
 
 Schloss Rapperswyl 
 
 We stooped among the fallen leaves, rubbing 
 the lichen off the inscription ; and making 
 conjectures about the persons commemorated 
 in that inscription. They had been wont to 
 take, not mere dull British walksy but leisurely 
 Germanic Spaziergange {disporting-oneself goings) 
 for the pleasure of eye and fancy, down to 
 the lake and the old schloss ; perhaps to punt 
 about under the alders on the former moat, 
 and very probably to drink coffee across the 
 road at the saw-mill ; bringing with them 
 sundry chosen spirits to enjoy the evening 
 freshness among the rushes and the fresh-mown 
 meadows, and all the general romanticalness 
 and elegiac sentiment of the place. And then, 
 when they were dead, and buried somewhere 
 else (it doesn't matter where), those chosen 
 spirits, former companions of their spaziergange^ 
 set up this altar to their memory. For, on the 
 two sides of the monument, the clergyman's 
 wife and I succeeded in deciphering an additional 
 inscription, which I translate as faithfully as 
 possible : " O eternally beloved ones gone to 
 sleep ! even in death ye are active for good, 
 since ye awaken in us the wish to be noble as 
 ye were. O tender souls, whom only your 
 263
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 friends' happiness could render happy, our 
 longing hearts bring you our thanks." The 
 German wording is a halting mixture of the 
 homely and the high-flown. And when my 
 friend and I had spelt it all out, and got on to 
 
 our feet, our eyes met, and we I was 
 
 going to write smiled. But the real truth of the 
 matter is that we laughed. It was very gentle 
 and quiet laughter, so why hesitate to say it } 
 The hesitation merely shows how hard our 
 modern heart has grown, and how far less kind 
 and natural we are than those dear beautiful 
 souls of a hundred years ago. For they had 
 laughter and tears ready at shortest notice ; 
 enjoying both equally, bless them, with a dim 
 recognition, perhaps, that there must always be 
 a tiny spice of funniness, like a liberal dash of 
 pathos, in everything we love best ; and they 
 took life, those readers of Jean Paul's novels, 
 like Mozart symphonies, fine alternations of 
 melting adagios and stately tripping minuets 
 and prestissimos of divine childish mirth. 
 
 But to return to the altar under the hanging 
 branches, and to us wondering about it all. 
 Who had they been — those two " tender souls, 
 whom only their friends' happiness could make 
 
 264
 
 Schloss Rapperswyl 
 
 happy ; and who those others, in whose breasts 
 their memory kindled a desire for virtue ? " 
 
 She was already thirty-nine ; while he, had he 
 lived till her death even, would have been only 
 twenty-eight. He must have been a noble ; 
 the Rapperswyls had once owned this castle, 
 and had left a great plumed coat-of-arms and a 
 hatchment with all their titles. Counts of the 
 Holy Roman Empire among others. Instead 
 of which she was plain Dorothea Biintzli ; and I 
 remembered having seen that name over shops. 
 
 " Do you think they can have been husband 
 and wife ? " I remarked rather hypocritically, 
 deeming it needless to submit eighteenth-century 
 doubts to a companion not called on to stand 
 examination in the Elective Affinities and Jean- 
 Jacques' Confessions. 
 
 " Married ? Those two ? " pronounced the 
 little clergyman's wife, at once radiant and con- 
 temptuous. *' There never would have been all 
 that talk about friendship and virtue and noble 
 souls if they had been married. And then, 
 wasn't she eleven years older than he, and 
 didn't she die eighteen months after his death } 
 Depend upon it, there must have been some 
 
 romance " 
 
 265
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 My Philistinism stood rebuked. 
 
 "Yes, of course, some romance," I answered. 
 But when my host offered to consult the learned 
 keeper of the cantonal archives on the subject 
 of Hans von Rapperswyl and Dorothea Biintzli, 
 I changed the conversation. 
 
 This has been a country of dreams to me and 
 of idyls, reached I do not know how in that 
 long night's journey. The castle, although I 
 am living in it, belongs less to reality than to 
 those hillside places, towered and tufted with 
 trees, of which one knows they are two-thirds 
 trickery of perspective and imagination, turning 
 to nothing on approach. And yet it is a real 
 castle ; that's the odd part of it. And perhaps 
 the romance of the Beautiful Souls may have 
 been a real romance. 
 
 266
 
 GRUYERES 
 
 LIKE other forms of devotion, the 
 cultus of the spirit of locaHties has 
 J its moments of estrangement — of 
 aridity, as it would be called in the 
 language of the mystics. One carries one's 
 divinities, like one's loves, in oneself ; and there 
 are states of mind, nay of body, which seem to 
 suspend their existence. One falls to wonder 
 if everything is changed or whether anything 
 was ever different. Have circumstances been 
 too many for me ? Am I not merely chilly^ 
 like the poet, but grown old? Or has the 
 North in dull July no power to revive spirits 
 flagging after a Tuscan midsummer ? Certain 
 it is that all through this journey, save during 
 the sunset moments in those kind old ladies' 
 garden among the lime-trees, 1 have not felt 
 once the full, ineffable presence of the Genius 
 Loci. 
 
 267
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 And of course there is always ready to 
 mingle in all impressions of travel an element 
 of sadness. There is lack of humanity in our 
 attitude of mere spectators of the show of 
 things, indifferent and useless passers-by. We 
 feel excluded by what we do not share, this 
 hidden present of localities being gathered, so 
 much living and dying, to its hidden past. 
 There is something spectacular in travel for its 
 own sake ; a holiday attitude in every genuine 
 traveller. And one must be very young, 
 methinks, or very old, not to be vexed after a 
 while by a show which is only a show ; not to 
 be just a trifle abashed by continued holiday- 
 making. For the healthy and fortunate soul 
 is accustomed to a richness and depth of 
 experience ; pleasure and duty ; give and take, 
 closely interwoven ; and we must therefore 
 suffer from such diminished significance. Spend 
 whole days at the play or reading novels ? 
 Out upon it ! we are born and bred (if we 
 have any breeding) to plant and prune as well 
 as to suck fruits ; born to cultivate, as Voltaire 
 said, our garden. Now, when we shift our 
 quarters every day, we have no garden. Hence 
 the melancholy thoughts which lie in wait for the 
 268
 
 Gruyeres 
 
 traveller. There is the briefness of sojourn, the 
 improbability of seeing most of these places 
 again, or the certainty of not seeing them in the 
 same mood. To this may be added a feeling, 
 difficult to define, of the isolation of places and 
 districts, of so many lives — nay, of all lives — 
 bound to their small valley or hillside horizon. 
 And the briefness, the fragmentariness of life 
 brought home with the sight of those towns 
 we leave behind, those villages disappearing, 
 folded up in the receding lines of the land- 
 scape ; those ever-shifting points of view and 
 uninterchangeable horizons. The soul suffers 
 from all this parting. One clings to any 
 familiar name — a river, for instance, however 
 different in its upper and lower course ; or, 
 again, to a real similarity of lie of land or 
 vegetation, or architecture ; above all, to a 
 mountain chain visible in other places one has 
 been at, and which connects the present moment 
 with the past. 
 
 Such wistful efforts to live with the heart, 
 and not with the eye only, are humane already, 
 pious in a sense, and a beginning of better 
 things. They mean that the traveller feels and 
 thinks ; and very soon that mist of fancy and 
 269
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 emotion will take shape, and become — what ? 
 Why, the Genius Loci who has been refusing 
 his presence. For, in such humble matters, as 
 in far greater ones, our finest experiences are 
 those due, two-thirds at least, to our wish how 
 things should be — to a certain odd, hidden 
 craving for significance and fitness. 
 
 The thing was shown by what broke through 
 that state of indifference, aridity^ of which I have 
 just spoken. How indifferent, how arid I felt 
 at that moment is shown by my insisting on 
 taking, for a trifle of convenience, that night 
 train from Fribourg. It is a downright shame, 
 scolded our acquaintances, to lose the impres- 
 sion of arriving at that most singular little 
 place, Gruyeres. 
 
 Lose it 1 Did we lose it } 
 
 It became quite dark soon after we started ; 
 only the outlines of the trees, or here and there 
 a church, visible quite solidly black against the 
 perfectly pure, pale sky. The train was climb- 
 ing slightly ; but the country looked flat ; 
 some great high plateau one guessed, wider 
 and wider, the lowness of the horizon marked 
 by the low-hanging stars, and fitfully revealed 
 (and with it the gentle undulation of its line) 
 270
 
 Gruy^res 
 
 by broad flashes of summer lightning. We were 
 travelling between meadows, the freshness and 
 sweetness of the grass and hemlock penetrating 
 to us, and the song of crickets and the sound 
 of cow-bells. When we got out at Bulle and 
 began to drive it seemed darker still ; and 
 distant shapes of hills loomed uncertain. We 
 drove, surrounded, so to speak, by that great 
 sky close-hung with stars ; and felt we were 
 driving between deep pastures, fragrant and 
 ineffably cool after those hot days in the town. 
 And every now and then the sound of the 
 cow-bells, their enchanting little broken chime- 
 clashing, was mysteriously on either side of us. 
 Entering the village street of high mediaeval 
 houses, the light of the one electric lamp by 
 the washing-trough was thrown up against 
 the white walls, showing the scarlet and rose 
 of the geraniums ; thrown up also into the 
 immensely projecting roofs. Not a creature or 
 a sound ! The scent of grass, the sound of 
 cow-bells seemed to have followed us ; and, 
 between the houses, the heavens were hung: 
 
 CD 
 
 close with stars. Were those mountains oppo- 
 site, or roofs .? Impossible to say, mere dark 
 masses in the darkness. Only one had a sense 
 271
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 of being high, high up. This was Gruyeres ; 
 and shall be. 
 
 Of what we foolish mortals call reality, of 
 the disturbance in my small private self, which, 
 it seems, occurred in that place, what remains .? 
 A few unintelligible facts, and the knowledge, 
 third-hand it would seem, that there was bitter- 
 ness. While that sky, that village street in the 
 electric flare, the sense of freshness, fragrance, 
 peace, remains with me : nay, who knows ? 
 I may give it, with good luck, to my reader. 
 
 Next morning, looking out of my window, 
 I had another impression, equally delightful, of 
 being in a small mediaeval town. There were 
 tall whitewashed houses with delicately carved 
 muUions and flamboyant doorways ; a tower, 
 turrets ; and at the street's turning a pathetic 
 wooden chapel, shingle-roofed. And the great 
 blue-green mountain-sides, pasture and forest 
 and rock, close at hand, rising sheer above it 
 all. This impression, also, did not tally with 
 the Things-in-Themselves, and I was very soon 
 busied with painful thoughts. But, as I said, 
 the Gruyeres that matters is the one which has 
 remained. 
 
 272
 
 THE KEEPSAKE 
 
 (CONCLUSION) 
 
 I HAVE had occasion to speak of the stay- 
 at-home life which, by repression of all 
 longings fct travel, made me a Sentimental 
 Traveller. Those years of refusal taught 
 me what I most cared for, and no doubt about 
 it. Taught me also to make what I wanted in 
 my imagination, out of whatever lay nearest at 
 hand. The passionate feeling for places de- 
 pends very largely on a habit of craving for the 
 beyond: beyond the plain which intervenes between 
 us and the mountain range ; beyond the hill, the 
 pass between us and the seashore. And it is 
 my experience that the Genius Loci is sure to 
 haunt the turn of the road where our daily walk 
 comes to an end ; or the place where the rocks, 
 growing too steep, close in the mystery of the 
 stream ; we feel him immanent in every valley 
 273 T
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 which opens and closes again as the train or the 
 motor rushes by. All our finest pleasures require 
 forestalling in wish and fancy ; and it is doubt- 
 ful whether nine-tenths of them are not due to 
 such forestalling. This does not mean that the 
 finest happiness exists in anticipation only, but 
 that when it really comes in the present its most 
 exquisite essence is but the remnant of expecta- 
 tion and longing. 
 
 And this is fit and decent, surely, that into 
 the best we receive from Fate there should 
 enter somewhat of our own making ; that the 
 perfect sweetness of any sort of love, for places 
 as for creatures, be due to faithful wishing : 
 Rachel growing in grace during the years of 
 Jacob's service. 
 
 I like this thought. It has been shaping 
 itself in my mind ever since my last stay, two 
 or three years ago, at Padua. During the 
 autumn days in that dear old town I chanced 
 to notice that what gave me greatest pleasure 
 was the market-place ; and not so much 
 by its realities, as because the big-domed 
 palace, sentinelled with towers and clustered 
 round with booths and awnings, had been 
 familiar to me in an 1825 Keepsake, whose 
 
 274
 
 The Keepsake 
 
 prints I pored over while convalescing from a 
 childish illness. I had had malarious fever ; 
 and in the weakness it left many things were 
 blurred and their relations altered. Solidity 
 and duration seemed to have gone out of every- 
 thing, and all that depends on them ; but certain 
 other qualities — the volatile and intangible ones, 
 the imaginative colour and perfume — had grown 
 most curiously intense : reality was dreamlike 
 and dreams were real. The books I read or 
 merely turned the pages of were what I really 
 dwelt in ; the shuttered room had become a 
 distant outside. I lay in an armchair, fed on 
 toast and lemonade, and read Gray's Letters, I 
 recollect ; and a volume of " Tales from Black- 
 wood. '' But the chief resource was that Keepsake 
 or Annual. It was bound in brown morocco, 
 with gilt edges, and had quantities of loose 
 tissue paper which fluttered when you turned 
 the pages. The prints were of that soft and 
 vaporous style which made you feel (like 
 Turner's illustrations, for the rest) that the 
 scenes depicted, Italy and the East and even 
 the cathedral towns of France and the Rhine 
 castles, were reserved for persons of most 
 sensitive nerves and refined manners : Lady 
 
 275
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 Blessingtons and Ennuyees with their Diaries. 
 . . . The volume I got hold of was all North 
 Italian cities ; and among these I rambled with 
 a delight such as no real places (I had seen but few 
 interesting ones) had as yet given me, and indeed, 
 perhaps, have given me since. " Rambling " is 
 the wrong word ; it was no active living, but a 
 sort of brooding sense of the existence of those 
 places. Anyhow, it was a slow, beneficent 
 rapture, spread through the hours, days, and 
 weeks, the timeless time of convalescence. 
 And something of it lasted. I was aware, all 
 through my youth (I have before me a note to 
 the effect, written twenty-three years ago), that 
 to this must be due an undercurrent of delicious, 
 faint excitement, independent of the pleasure of 
 the actual moment, and filling me whenever I 
 realized that I was in Verona, Bologna, or any 
 characteristic North Italian city. And during 
 that last visit to Padua I could detect the 
 undying virtue of those Keepsake prints as I 
 strolled amongr the awnings and baskets of the 
 Piazza dell' Erbe. I had loved it all, like 
 Rudel the Lady of Tripoli, before seeing it ; 
 and the faint thrill of that imaginative love still 
 made the place, of a kind so familiar and almost 
 276
 
 The Keepsake 
 
 hackneyed to me nowadays, delightful and in a 
 way wonderful. 
 
 There are moments in all our lives — most 
 often, alas ! during our childhood — when we 
 possess the mystic gift of consecration, of steep- 
 ing things in our soul's essences, and making 
 them thereby different from all others, for ever 
 sovereign and sacred to us. It is largely con- 
 nected, I think, and like to think, with our 
 poverty of experience in those early years ; for 
 it is remarkable how experience — meaning 
 thereby the repetition of all sorts of impres- 
 sions — makes us incapable of getting any good 
 out of itself, and wastes our time in putting to 
 rights and wondering how so much has been 
 mislaid or moth-eaten. . . . Whereas child- 
 hood, owning little in this as in other ways, 
 has to be inventive and make the most of 
 whatever it has got. Slight resemblances, 
 trifling fragments, must stand for whole im- 
 pressions. I can remember the importance of 
 the first old portrait — just a white face and 
 rufF and sword-hilt in a mass of black — which 
 I ever saw ; it hung on a staircase in a house 
 whither we had gone to hire a piano. That 
 was a romantic picture ! And I only wish I 
 277
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 had seen a few million less others to efface its 
 remembrance. In cases where subsequent too 
 much (or even enough !) is fortunately kept at 
 bay, the imaginative episode may, so to speak, 
 spread over years, and leave our feeling per- 
 manently the richer. Thus, a little white- 
 washed colonnade among trees, seen on the 
 daily walk, did service for cloisters, monasteries, 
 Lombard certosas. As a crass fact, it was a part 
 of nothing more poetic than a bathing-estab- 
 lishment ; but I owe to it, I firmly believe, 
 much of the special charm which whitewashed 
 and pillared monastic interiors still have 
 for me. 
 
 With all this is connected the efficacy of 
 certain quotations of prose or verse. Two 
 lines of the Allegro, almost the least pregnant 
 of that string of terse suggestions, became part 
 of my life — I mean, were perpetually lived 
 over and over again — when I was sixteen or 
 seventeen : 
 
 " Towers and battlements it sees 
 Bosomed high in tufted trees." 
 
 They had been mixed up, in some way, with 
 
 my first sight of the ramparts and belfries of 
 
 278
 
 The Keepsake 
 
 L ; and had got to mean a lot of other 
 
 places besides, most of which never existed for 
 the bodily eye. 
 
 Speaking of the essence of future emotion 
 which we distil out of mere written matter, 
 reminds me that besides that Keepsake (whose 
 letterpress, by the way, went for little or 
 nothing) there was another volume which 
 helped to make me a Sentimental Traveller, 
 supplying fata morgana places to shimmer and 
 shift across the dulness of my daily life. It 
 was not even a book, but only a series of 
 articles, written by a roving clergyman of our 
 acquaintance, in a bound volume of some 
 Chambers's Journal or thereabouts. I read them 
 years before the coming of that Keepsake. They 
 described the author's tramps up the side- valleys 
 of the Rhineland. I can remember the name 
 " Wetzlar-on-the-Lahn " ; but so little of the 
 contents that I cannot tell whether there was 
 any mention of Goethe and the Werther episode. 
 That is of no importance ; what remained of 
 those close-printed pages which I pored over 
 for hours between my lessons and my daily 
 unchanging walks, was not a fact, not even a 
 blurred image, but an emotion. I never went 
 279
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 so far as to wish that I might ever wander 
 up river-valleys, among old towns and castles 
 (for I presume, though I d(5 not recollect, 
 that it was all about old towns and castles) ; 
 the feeling awakened by those pages was 
 far more humble and concentrated than 
 desire or hope. Indeed, I do not know 
 what to call it except just love. It was the 
 first stirring of the worship of the Genius 
 Loci in the penumbra of a child's small 
 soul : the divinity would inhabit that wor- 
 shipper. 
 
 I have no idea whether those papers, 
 " Wetzlar-on-the-Lahn " and the rest of them, 
 were good or bad literature, or even attractive 
 or boring reading ; but this much I am con- 
 vinced of — that the author, that pedestrian 
 ex-parson who looms in my memory as a 
 dullish person, loved what he wrote about. 
 He must have been a Sentimental Traveller^ 
 probably without guessing it ; and, by some- 
 thing like an imposition of hands^ must have 
 ordained that small reader of his into being 
 another. 
 
 And this belief is of great comfort whenever, 
 as often happens, it is borne in upon me that no 
 280
 
 The Keepsake 
 
 description can. make you see things unless you 
 have seen them before ; and that, of all vain 
 dilettanteish writings, these essays of mine must 
 therefore be the most dilettanteish and futile, 
 particularly to the very readers with whom 1 
 wish to share my impressions, those, namely, 
 who have but litde opportunity of seeing the 
 countries, or at least the places I have written 
 about. It is lamentably certain that I cannot 
 make them see what I describe ; and yet the 
 impulse, the long habit, of writing about each 
 thing which gives me pleasure may not be mere 
 delusion. There is creative virtue in all decent 
 feeling, in all happiness, when tinged with 
 respect and gratitude. The emotion which has 
 been stirred in me by localities may be trans- 
 mitted, though the images cannot ; and those 
 whose feelings have been heightened by the 
 transmission of mine will find in what they do 
 see, and make in what they do not see, places 
 and things to delight their hearts. I shall, in 
 my turn, have initiated or consecrated neophytes 
 to the worship of the Genius Loci ; and helped 
 others to journey through the world, or through 
 their lives, less as bagmen than as Sentimental 
 Travellers. 
 
 281
 
 The Sentimental Traveller 
 
 At least, this is my consolation, when I 
 recollect my childish readings in those bound 
 magazines ; and also that volume of the 
 Keepsake.
 
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