Nathan Haskell Dole

WHILE I was reading about Madame de Genlis after breakfast one morning, Ruth came into the library and we talked about the advantage of foreign travel. Does the broadening effect come from seeing new scenes or does it proceed from the intercourse which it favours with men and women of entirely different habits and modes of thought?

I said that my belief was that a person living in an isolated country town, by reading books of travel, especially those furnished with illustrations, and by attending “moving-picture shows,” might attain to as complete a knowledge of any given foreign country as he would by merely travelling through it armed with a Baedecker. The generality of travellers carry with them the individual aura of their own conceit which is quite impermeable to new ideas, and what they have seen does not soak into their inner consciousness at all. But for the average person, if there be such a person, stay-at-home travel is more advantageous than actual peregrinations. Rushing from one country to another or from one place to another is not seeing a country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONT BLANC AND THE VALLEY OF CHAMONIX.

“That is fine,” said Ruth, “I had forgotten, indeed I never knew that Kant was such a poet.”

“Speaking of poetry,” said I, “did you know that Coleridge, who wrote the ‘Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni,’ had never seen Chamonix or Mont Blanc in his life? Being a poet, he did not need to see with his actual eyes. Moreover he had a model in Frederika Brunn’s ‘Chamouni at Sunrise,’ which runs with a rhythm reminding me of some of Richard Wagner’s verses. Do you remember her poem?”

“No, but it is in a note to Coleridge’s.”

“Please read it.”

“I think that expression, ‘Scheitel der Ewigkeit’ is ludicrous,” said Ruth.

“Coleridge always improved on his originals when he translated, but it looked rather odd for him to have discussed the elements of the scenery in the Alps when he had never been in Savoy. It looks as if he tried to throw dust in people’s eyes. But tell me, Ruth, which do you like best the Coleridge ‘Hymn’ or Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc,’ which also claims to have been written in the Vale of Chamonix? First you read the lines you like best in Coleridge and then I will read a few passages from Shelley.”

Ruth took the volume of Coleridge and began. “I like the first twelve lines,” she said:—

“Yes,” I said, “that ‘bald awful head’ is better than ‘Scheitel der Ewigkeit,’ but I don’t like the immediate repetition of ‘awful’ two lines below; ‘as with a wedge,’ too, is weak. But go on!”

Again I interrupted:—“I think it is far-fetched to call the mountain ‘Earth’s rosy star,’ and again he uses the word ‘rosy’ just below: ‘who filled thy countenance with rosy light?’ That is a weak line, don’t you think? ‘Visited all night by troops of stars’ however is masterly. But go on.”

“I think it ends pretty feebly,” said I. “He compares Mont Blanc first with a vapoury cloud, then to a cloud of incense; then calls it a kingly Spirit throned, then a dread ambassador and then a Great Hierarch. What could be more mixed in its metaphors? But now let us take Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc.’”

“I think it begins with a curious mixture,” said Ruth. “He says the everlasting universe of things flows through the mind, where from secret springs the source of human thought brings its tribute of waters with a sound but half its own such as a feeble brook assumes in the wild woods. How can the eternal universe of things rolling rapid waves diminish itself to a feeble brook? But it goes on:—

“It seems to me a hopeless mixture. The description of the Vale is better:—

“Oh stop, stop! Uncle, I can’t follow it!”

“Very good, I will skip to where he tells how he is gazing on the naked countenance of earth. Listen:—

“What are rolling on, snakes, avalanches or far fountains?”

“Oh, what a rhyme—ruin and strewin’. Do you suppose Shelley dropped his ‘g’’s?”

“Don’t be irreverent. Listen:—

“I will omit about a dozen rather blind lines about man and his puniness and begin:—

“Now he comes to Mont Blanc itself:—

“Well, what do you say? Which is the truer poetry?” I asked.

“I think that Shelley would have done better if he had not tried to rhyme his verses,” said Ruth. “The attempt to find rhymes led him on and on into meanings that he didn’t mean. But there are fine lines in both. By the way,” she added with an abrupt dislocation of our literary talk, and yet it was suggested by it, “Will and I propose to take you to Chamonix. Would you like that?”

“Of course I would.”

“We will get an early start to-morrow—that is, if the weather prove propitious.”

The weather could not have been more kindly disposed. We started early in the morning and reached Villeneuve in less than an hour. Thence we rode up the at first broad and then ever narrowing valley of the mystic RhÔne. I wished that I might see some of the strange things that it is said to conceal. Juste Olivier tells of its sandy nonchalant banks, its marshes and creeks of almost stagnant waters, the little bridges carrying fascinating paths, which later, glittering with silvery dust, suddenly plunge under long vaults where the light scarcely penetrates the green cool arches.

“Here and there,” he says, “there are fantastic clearings. Old trunks of ancient willows, oddly wrapt around and still more oddly crowned now with creepers, now with young bushes which have climbed to their tops, and now with their own branches contorted and interlaced. Immense oaks loved by adventurous pairs of the wild pigeons which fill the solitude with their plaintive notes. Young alders countless in number and growing so closely the heifers can with difficulty force a way through between their smooth even trunks. In a word, a forest variegated by marshes, by patches of sand, by yellowish fields where the water contributes its murmur, the desert its solemnity, the infinite its mystery, the unknown its charm.

“This is what you find in these shores of the RhÔne called Les Isles. Sometimes strange noises come to the inhabited chÂlets and the reedy plain and startle the passer-by and are lost in the neighboring fields; it is the voice of la Fennetta-des-Isles who sometimes bellows like the bise in the trees, sometimes like the calves in the pastures, and seems to run over the wrinkled waters of the canal. If the clamor approach the fisherman pulls in his line and turns his head away, for he knows that any person who has caught sight under any form whatever of the fantastic being who thus howls in the gloomy woods has little more to expect from life.”

We heard no bellowing Lady-of-the-Isles nor did we see her under any form. Probably electric trams, and corrective dykes, and the skeptical boldness of modern science has scared the Little Lady away. She will never come back.

We had a glance at the big chÂteau of Aigle and looked to see if we could recognize any of the fair black-eyed, plump-figured women for which that place is famous. We saw the waterfalls on the Grande Eau. We passed through “the smiling village of Bex” and Will asked me if I would like to take the time to visit the remarkable salt-works at Bex the Old—BÉvieux—but I told him that I preferred Attic salt. Then we discussed the question how salt should have been deposited so high up among the mountains. Was it the relic of the vast ocean that once covered all Europe? This presence of salt-laden anhydrite and the occasional sulphur springs with high temperatures are extremely interesting. There is evidently heat enough under the Alps to start a volcano some day.

The sight of the mountains gathering about us menacingly made me again remember Juste Olivier’s poetic description of the names of these Savoyan Alps. He advised his pupils to climb them, his word, as the word of every true Alpinist, is “conquer”—conquer them:—

“What marvellous treasures! What fragrant valleys! What flower-adorned slopes! What dazzling crystals! What depths of shade! What fountains! Happy son of the Alps who has succeeded in taming the Genius of them. From the highest summits like a cascade in the eternal chant, by a thousand brooks, by a thousand murmurs, over slate and granite down to the depths of staggering abysses, across mist-hung crags, by the side of mournful lakes, amid green and smiling hiding-places, along pasture-grounds spread with a network of light and shade, in fir-forests which roar like the sea, beds of thyme under beach-trees and laburnum, Poesy descends into the valleys and with the sunset turns back in jets of flame toward the skies.

“Go forth, young hearts! Go quench your thirst at this unknown spring. Follow up the torrents and lose yourselves in the plaintive forests. The Genius of the Alps is waiting for you, and there also is the secret home of the Genius of the Fatherland.”

Rogers took this same route and wrote about it, almost a hundred years ago, at this very same Saint-Maurice where we now arrived:—

There was much to interest us at Saint-Maurice, which traces its ancestry to an old Keltic town called Acaunum or Agaunum (as the Latins spelled it). Here once occurred an event which would have pleased Count TolstoÏ. A manuscript of the Ninth Century, discovered by Professor Emil Egli at ZÜrich, relates it as follows:—

“In the army of the Roman Emperor Maximilian who reigned from 286 until 306 a. d. was enrolled a legion brought from the east and called the ThebÆan Legion. They hesitated about fighting brother-Christians. The Emperor learned in the neighboring town of Octodurum that the legion was mutinous in the narrow pass of Agaunum. He ordered every tenth man to be beheaded. But when the legion persisted in its obstinacy he repeated the punishment. Those left mutually exhorted one another to persist and their leader Mauricius with two officers, Exuperius and Candidus advised them rather to perish than to fight against Christians.

“So they threw down their arms and were hacked to pieces.”

The legion consisted of sixty-six hundred men. According to other legends—for this is only a legend which arose in the Fifth Century—some of the legion were subjected to a martyr’s death elsewhere—Ursus, Victor and Verena at Solothurn, Felix and Regula at ZÜrich. However the story may be regarded, the town is supposed to have received its name from the leader of the Eastern legion. The abbey now occupied by Augustine canons who take pride (for a fee) in showing their treasures—a Saracen vase, a gold crozier and a silver ewer presented by Charlemagne, and other relics—is said to date back to the Fourth Century and was founded by Saint Theodore, one of Licinius’ Greek officers, who was converted and put to death.

Next we arrived at Martigny, the ancient Roman town of Octodurus, near the junction of the Dranse with the RhÔne. Octodurus signified the Castle in the Narrows. It was the capital of the Veragri who with the Seduni held possession of the pass of the Great Saint-Bernard. CÆsar makes mention of it in the Third Book of the Gallic War.

Investigations have shown that the Wallisi had the right bank of the Dranse and the Romans the left. Suddenly Galba discovered that all the inhabitants had deserted their houses in one night and that a great body of the Seduni and Veragri were occupying the heights. They knew that the legion was not complete, that two cohorts were at Acaunum and that a good many had gone over the Alps to get provisions and that the fortifications were not finished.

“Galba held a council of war. Some of the men were in favor of fighting their way back; but the majority voted to defend the camp. In the meantime, at a given signal, the Wallisi began to storm down from the heights and fling stones and lances. The Romans defended themselves and every shot told. Wherever there was a rush of the enemy the Romans met them. But the Wallisi had constant reinforcements. After fighting six hours ammunition began to fail. Breaches were made in the walls; the ditches were filled up and the Romans were in desperate plight. Then Galba had his men rest a while, and at a sudden signal having armed themselves with the lances of the enemy, they made a sudden sortie. The Wallisi were surprised and took to flight. Out of thirty thousand at least a third were killed and the rest threw down their arms. Although the whole country was cleared of the enemy Galba decided to winter elsewhere, and having burnt the town, he led his troops undisturbed down the RhÔne through the Nantuati along the lake into that of the Allobrigi.”

In the years thirty-seven, thirty-six and thirty-four b. c. the Wallisi defeated the Romans, but under Augustus, in the year seven b. c., they were conquered in turn. Augustus treated them humanely and left them to govern themselves though procurators were sent among them to collect tribute. In twenty-two a. d. Octodurus was given the rights of a free city and had the protection of the Roman law: this was a great incentive to trade and it became the capital and flourished. Claudius made it an imperial market-town and gave it the name of Forum Claudi Vallensium. In forty-seven the pass over the Great Saint-Bernard was made into a highway and provided with mile-stones clear down to Vevey. Relics of this can still be seen here and there, now high above the pass, now following the Dranse, and the natives call it still la route romaine.

Back of Martigny-ville along the Dranse is a broad field with morasses; it belonged to the Abbey of the Great Saint-Bernard. It had little value even as pasturage as its surface was covered with all sorts of rubbish and scattered stones. In 1874 the artist, Raphael Ritz, was making excavations near the so-called trÉsor de la Deleyse. There was found the relics of a small amphitheatre with bones and teeth of wild animals which had been slaughtered there “to make a Roman holiday.” “Aux Morasses” gave up the remains of a colossal bronze statue with gilded garment, a huge oxhead, a laurel wreath with fine bronze leaves, smashed with blows from an ax and then sunk into the thick miry soil. It is supposed that early Christians may have treated these objects in such a manner because they regarded them as idols.

In 1895 systematic excavations were instituted and a wall sixty-three by thirty-one meters was discovered. It was the remains of a basilica which served as a trading-station or custom-house, while in front of it was the forum where once mingled Roman merchants, citizens, soldiers, officials, priests and natives. It was supported by thirteen large columns. On both sides of the square or piazza were narrow wings, each furnished with stalls for merchants and smiths. In front ran the Roman road, meant to last for all time; it is still here and there visible running up the valley. It was paved with large irregular stones. Along the southwest wing were a row of columns with enormous pedestals. The great building was divided into three halls. One ending in a semicircle, like the letter D, had a place for the statue of a god. In the north central wall were eight pilasters and in the niches skeletons were found.

Next to this was still another large building and beyond it was a private dwelling with marble floor, marble dado and painted walls. Any number of coins dating from the year one till three hundred and fifty a. d. were picked up. These buildings were covered with hollow tiles; and the hewn stones for the columns, the door-sills, the curb-stones, were all brought from the Jura. Some of the marble came from Italy, some from Greece; there was even porphyry from Egypt. All about Martigny were found these wonderful remains of Roman occupation. One capital of a temple was of colossal dimensions. They had drinking-water piped to the city.

At La Batiaz, where stands the old castle that belonged to the Bishop of Sion, but was dismantled nearly four hundred years ago, stood a Roman watch-tower and not far away the graveyard was found among the vineyards of Ravoire. We saw an inscription which was intensely interesting:—

SALVTI.SACRVM
FOROCLAVDIEN
SES.VALLENSES
CVM
T.POMPONIO
VICTORE
PROC.AVGVSTO
RVM

This signified that Titus Pomponius had, with the aid of the inhabitants, erected an altar to the Goddess of Safety. It dated back to the time of Marcus Aurelius, the good emperor. At that day Wallis (which it must be remembered is still preserved in the very name Vaud) was united under the same government with the Graian Alps. The same Titus Pomponius, together with his family, is found mentioned on an altar to the god Sylvanus as a thank-offering for the conclusion of his term of service, and it preserves a poem addressing the god as hiding in the foliage of the sacred ash-tree, as the protector of the lofty green luxuriant forest. It thanks him for having brought them from a far land and over the immovable mountains of the Alps amid the sweet perfumes of the bushes; it says:—“I performed the duties of the office conferred upon me. Lead me and mine back to Rome, and let us under thy protection cultivate Italian fields. I vow that I will plant a thousand mighty trees to thee.”

The Bishop Theodorus lived here in 381 a. d. The ThÉodule pass is named for him. He built a Christian basilica on the site of the heathen temple. But the Dranse overflowed it and covered it deep with mud and stones. Fire finished it, and now all that is left of it is ashes, broken tiles, melted glass and bits of metal.

Martigny is another of the towns in which I should like to spend a month. There are so many excursions to be taken from it as a centre—up the Arpille, up to the Pierre À Voir from which one looks down into two river valleys and across to the Bernese and Valaisian Alps—a splendid view; to La Dent de Morcles, the Pissevache cascade and dozens of other trips for pleasant days.

The geology here also is particularly interesting. Here the RhÔne once more proved that might made right. He turned at almost right angles and stole into the valley belonging to the Dranse. Here the glaciers of the ice-age polished the rock wall—“the most remarkable example of ice-action in the Alps.”

Above Martigny we find the real and only genuine valley of the RhÔne: elsewhere it is a robber.

Still ascending the RhÔne valley we reached Saxon with its picturesque ruined castle, and then crossing the Ardon and the Morge beyond Riddes reached the medieval city of Sion just at sunset. Approaching the famous old city it was like a dream—the castles on the hills so kindly left by the river; high up, the ChÂteau de Tourbillon, where for five hundred years the princely bishops used to luxuriate, looking down on a world of beauty.

Across a valley on a hill only twenty meters lower stands the old castle of Valeria taking the place of an earlier Roman fort; its towers glittered in the sunlight’s last rays. We went to it in the morning, and, on paying a fee, were admitted to the Thirteenth-Century church of Notre Dame, with its quaint Romanesque capitals, and Seventeenth-Century choir-stalls elaborately carved. And, of course, being devoted to antiquities, we looked into the cantonal museum next door. We went also into the Fifteenth-Century Gothic cathedral with its tower six hundred years older; and admired the carved ceiling in the splendid hall of the Super-saxo mansion.