I ENTERED Switzerland at Chiasso, a little way from Lake Como in Italy, and left it at Basle near the German frontier, and all I saw was mountains—mountains—mountains—some capped with snow and some without, tall, sharp, craggy peaks, and rough, sharp declivities, with here and there a patch of grass, here and there a deep valley, here and there a lonely, wide-roofed, slab-built house with those immense projecting eaves first made familiar to me by the shabby adaptations which constitute our “L” stations in New York. The landscape hardens perceptibly a little way out of Milan. High slopes and deep lakes appear. At Chiasso, the first stop in Switzerland, I handed the guard a half-dozen letters I had written in Milan and stamped with Italian stamps. I did not know until I did this that we were out of Italy, had already changed guards and that a new crew—Swiss—was in charge of the train. “Monsieur,” he said, tapping the stamp significantly, “vous êtes en Suisse.” I do not understand French, but I did comprehend that, and I perceived also that I was talking to a Swiss. All the people on the platform were “Schweitzers” as the Germans call them, fair, chunky, stolid-looking souls without a touch of that fire or darkness so generally present a few miles south. Why should a distance of ten miles, five miles, make such an astonishing change? It is one of the strangest experiences of travel, to cross an imaginary boundary-line and find everything different; people, dress, architecture, landscape, often soil and foliage. It proves that countries are not merely soil and climatic conditions but that there is something more—a race stock which is not absolutely a product of the soil and which refuses to yield entirely to climate. Races like animals have an origin above soil and do hold their own in spite of changed or changing climatic conditions. Cross any boundary you like from one country into another and judge for yourself.
Now that I was started, really out of Italy, I was ready for any change, the more marked the better; and here was one. Switzerland is about as much like Italy as a rock is like a bouquet of flowers—a sharp-edged rock and a rich colorful, odorous bouquet. And yet, in spite of all its chill, bare bleakness, its high ridges and small shut-in valleys, it has beauty, cold but real. As the train sped on toward Lucerne I kept my face glued to the window-pane on one side or the other, standing most of the time in the corridor, and was rewarded constantly by a magnificent panorama. Such bleak, sharp crags as stood always above us, such cold, white fields of snow! Sometimes the latter stretched down toward us in long deep cañons or ravines until they disappeared as thin white streaks at the bottom. I saw no birds of any kind flying; no gardens nor patches of flowers anywhere, only brown or gray or white châlets with heavy overhanging eaves and an occasional stocky, pale-skinned citizen in a short jacket, knee trousers, small round hat and flamboyant waistcoat. I wondered whether I was really seeing the national costume. I was. I saw more of it at Lucerne, that most hotelly of cities, and in the mountains and valleys of the territory beyond it—toward Basle. Somebody once said of God that he might love all the creatures he had made but he certainly couldn’t admire them. I will reverse that for Switzerland. I might always admire its wonders but I could never love them.
And yet after hours and hours of just this twisting and turning up slope and down valley, when I reached Lucerne I thought it was utterly beautiful. Long before we reached there the lake appeared and we followed its shores, whirling in and out of tunnels and along splendid slopes. Arrived at Lucerne, I came out into the piazza which spreads before the station to the very edge of the lake. I was instantly glad that I had included Lucerne in my itinerary. It was evening and the lamps in the village (it is not a large city) were already sparkling and the water of the lake not only reflected the glow of the lamps along its shores but the pale pinks and mauves over the tops of the peaks in the west. There was snow on the upper stretches of the mountains but down here in this narrow valley filled with quaint houses, hotels, churches and modern apartments, all was balmy and pleasant,—not at all cold. My belongings were bundled into the attendant ’bus and I was rattled off to one of the best hotels I saw abroad—the National—of the Ritz-Carlton system; very quiet, very ornate, and with all those conveniences and comforts which the American has learned to expect, plus a European standard of service and politeness of which we can as yet know nothing in America.
I am afraid I have an insatiable appetite for natural beauty. I am entertained by character, thrilled by art, but of all the enlarging spiritual influences the natural panorama is to me the most important. This night, after my first day of rambling about Lucerne, I sat out on my hotel balcony, overlooking the lake and studied the dim moonlit outlines of the peaks crowding about it, the star-shine reflected in the water, the still distances and the moon sinking over the peaks to the west of the quaint city. Art has no method of including, or suggesting even, these vast sidereal spaces. The wonder of the night and moonlight is scarcely for the painter’s brush. It belongs in verse, the drama, great literary pageants such as those of Balzac, Turgenieff and Flaubert, but not in pictures. The human eye can see so much and the human heart responds so swiftly that it is only by suggestion that anything is achieved in art. Art cannot give you the night in all its fullness save as, by suggestion, it brings back the wonder of the reality which you have already felt and seen.
I think perhaps of the two impressions that I retained most distinctly of Lucerne, that of the evening and of the morning, the morning was best. I came out on my balcony at dawn, the first morning after I arrived, when the lake was lying below me in glassy, olive-black stillness. Up the bank to my left were trees, granite slopes, a small châlet built out over the water, its spiles standing in the still lake in a soothing, restful way. To my right, at the foot of the lake, lay Lucerne, its quaint outlines but vaguely apparent in the shadow. Across the lake only a little space were small boats, a dock, a church, and beyond them, in a circle, gray-black peaks. At their extreme summits along a rough, horny skyline were the suggestions of an electric dawn, a pale, steely gray brightening from dark into light.
It was not cold at Lucerne, though it was as yet only early March. The air was as soft and balmy as at Venice. As I sat there the mountain skyline brightened first to a faint pink, the snow on the ridges took on a lavender and bluish hue as at evening, the green of the lower slopes became softly visible and the water began to reflect the light of the sky, the shadow of the banks, the little boats, and even some wild ducks flying over its surface,—ducks coming from what bleak, drear spaces I could only guess. Presently I saw a man come out from a hotel, enter a small canoe and paddle away in the direction of the upper lake. No other living thing appeared until the sky had changed from pink to blue, the water to a rich silvery gray, the green to a translucent green and the rays of the sun came finally glistering over the peaks. Then the rough notches and gaps of the mountains—gray where blown clear of snow, or white where filled with it—took on a sharp, brilliant roughness. You could see the cold peaks outlined clearly in the water, and the little steeples of the churches. My wild ducks were still paddling briskly about. I noticed that a particular pair found great difficulty in finding the exact spot to suit them. With a restless quank, quank, quank, they would rise and fly a space only to light with a soft splatter and quack cheerfully. When they saw the lone rower returning they followed him, coming up close to the hotel dock and paddling smartly in his vicinity. I watched him fasten his boat and contemplate the ducks. After he had gone away I wondered if they were pets of his. Then the day having clearly come, I went inside.
By ten o’clock all Lucerne seemed to have come out to promenade along the smooth walks that border the shore. Pretty church-bells in severe, conical towers began to ring and students in small, dark, tambourine-like hats, jackets, tight trousers, and carrying little canes about the size of batons, began to walk smartly up and down. There were a few travelers present, wintering here, no doubt,—English and Americans presenting their usual severe, intellectual, inquiring and self-protective dispositions. They stood out in sharp contrast to the native Swiss,—a fair, stolid, quiescent people. The town itself by day I found to be as clean, spruce and orderly as a private pine forest. I never saw a more spick and span place, not even in ge-washed and ge-brushed Germany.
This being Sunday and wonderfully fair, I decided to take the trip up the lake on one of the two small steamers that I saw anchored at apparently rival docks. They may have served boats plying on different arms of the lake. On this trip I fell in with a certain “Major Y. Myata, M.D., Surgeon, Imperial Japanese Army” as his card read, who, I soon learned, was doing Europe much as I was, only entirely alone. I first saw him as he bought his ticket on board the steamer at Lucerne,—a small, quiet, wiry man, very keen and observant, who addressed the purser in English first and later in German. He came on the top deck into the first-class section, a fair-sized camera slung over his shoulder, a notebook sticking out of the pocket, and finding a seat, very carefully dusted his small feet with the extreme corners of his military overcoat, and rubbed his thin, horse-hairy mustache with a small, claw-like hand. He looked about in a quiet way and began after the boat started to take pictures and make copious notes. He had small, piercing, bird-like eyes and a strangely unconscious-seeming manner which was in reality anything but unconscious. We fell to talking of Switzerland, Germany and Italy, where he had been, and by degrees I learned the route of his trip, or what he chose to tell me of it, and his opinions concerning Europe and the Far East—as much as he chose to communicate.
It appeared that before coming to Europe this time he had made but one other trip out of Japan, namely to California, where he had spent a year. He had left Japan in October, sailed direct for London and reached it in November; had already been through Holland and Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and was bound for Munich and Hungary and, not strange to relate, Russia. He was coming to America—New York particularly, and was eager to know of a good hotel. I mentioned twenty. He spoke English, French, Italian and German, although he had never before been anywhere except to California. I knew he spoke German, for I talked to him in that language and after finding that he could speak it better than I could I took his word for the rest. We lunched together. I mentioned the little I knew of the Japanese in New York. He brightened considerably. We compared travel notes—Italy, France, England. “I do not like the Italians,” he observed in one place. “I think they are tricky. They do not tell the truth.”
“They probably held up your baggage at the station.”
“They did more than that to me. I could never depend on them.”
“How do you like the Germans?” I asked him.
“A very wonderful people. Very civil I thought. The Rhine is beautiful.”
I had to smile when I learned that he had done the night cafés of Paris, had contrasted English and French farce as represented by the Empire and the Folies-Bergère, and knew all about the Post Impressionists and the Futurists or Cubists. The latter he did not understand. “It is possible,” he said in his strange, sing-songy way, “that they represent some motives of constructive subconscious mind with which we are not any of us familiar yet. Electricity came to man in some such way as that. I do not know. I do not pretend to understand it.”
At the extreme upper end of Lucerne where the boat stopped, we decided to get out and take the train back. He was curious to see the shrine or tomb of William Tell which was listed as being near here, but when he learned that it was two or three miles and that we would miss a fast train, he was willing to give it up. With a strange, old-world wisdom he commented on the political organization of Switzerland, saying that it struck him as strange that these Alpine fastnesses should ever have achieved an identity of their own. “They have always been separate communities until quite recently,” he said, “and I think that perhaps only railroads, tunnels, telegraph and telephone have made their complete union satisfactory now.”
I marveled at the wisdom of this Oriental as I do at so many of them. They are so intensely matter-of-fact and practical. Their industry is uncanny. This man talked to me of Alpine botany as contrasted with that of some of the mountain regions of Japan and then we talked of Lincoln, Grant, Washington, Li Hung Chang and Richard Wagner. He suggested quite simply that it was probable that Germany’s only artistic outlet was music.
I was glad to have the company of Major Myata for dinner that same evening, for nothing could have been duller than the very charming Louis Quinze dining-room filled with utterly conventional American and English visitors. Small, soldierly, erect, he made quite an impression as he entered with me. The Major had been in two battles of the Russian-Japanese War and had witnessed an attack somewhere one night after midnight in a snowstorm. Here at table as he proceeded to explain in his quiet way, by means of knives and forks, the arrangement of the lines and means of caring for the wounded, I saw the various diners studying him. He was a very forceful-looking person. Very. He told me of the manner in which the sanitary and surgical equipment and control of the Japanese army had been completely revolutionized since the date of the Japanese-Russian War and that now all the present equipment was new. “The great things in our army to-day,” he observed very quietly at one point, “are artillery and sanitation.” A fine combination! He left me at midnight, after several hours in various cafés.