A Month in Switzerland

The legitimate use of a Preface, like that of a Prologue, is merely to give explanations that will be necessary, and to save from expectations that would be delusive. I will, therefore, at once say to those who may have read my ‘Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Kedivé,’ that this little book belongs to the same family. The cast of thought and the aims of the two are kindred, and both endeavour to do their work by similar methods. They are, alike, efforts to attain to a right reading, and a right interpretation of nature, and of man. The differences between them are, perhaps, such as must result from the differences in the matter itself they had, respectively, to take account of. The field, in which the younger sister here makes some studies, is small in extent; its physical conditions, too, are those of our own part of the world, and its human issues those of our own times. It ought, therefore, to be looked at from very near points of view, and to be exhibited in pictures of much detail and minuteness. The field, however, which the elder sister surveyed, was wide in area, and rich with scenes of singularly varied character. Its place, indeed, in the panorama of nature possesses an interest which is exclusively its own; and its history includes a chapter in the construction of thought and of society, of which—while again its own with almost equal exclusiveness—the right appreciation is necessary for the right understanding of some contemporary and subsequent chapters in general history, and not least of the one that is at this day unfolding itself, with ourselves for the actors, we being, also, at the same time, the material dealt with, and fashioned. So it presented itself to my own mind, and so I attempted to set it before the reader’s mind.

To those, however, who are unacquainted with the book I have just referred to in explanation of the character and aims of its successor, I would describe the impulse under which both of them were written in the familiar words, ‘My heart was hot within me; and, while I was thus musing, the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue.’ I had been much stirred by a month spent among the Swiss mountains, not only by what might have been their effect upon me had I been alone, but also by what I had seen of their effect upon others—to one of whom, a child who was with me throughout the excursion (if mention of so small a matter, as it may appear to some, can be allowed), a little space has been given in the following pages; and this it was that first made me wish to fix in words the scenes I had passed through, the impressions I had received from them, and the thoughts that had grown out of them. But how unlike was the landscape, and those who peopled it, to what had come before the eye, and the mind’s eye, in Egypt! Instead of the long life-giving river and the broad life-repelling desert, both so replete with history, the import of which is not yet dead, as well as with natural phenomena of an unwonted character to eyes familiarised with the aspects of our little sea-girt sanctuary, as we fondly deem it, Switzerland offered for contemplation, in the order of nature, the ice and snow world of its cloud-piercing mountains; and, in the order of what is of existing human concern, unflagging industry, patient frugality, intelligently-adapted education, a natural form of land-tenure, and popular government; and invited the spectator of its scenery, as well as of the social and intellectual fermentation of portions of its people, in strong contrast to the immobility of other portions, to meditate on some of the new elements, which modern knowledge, and modern conditions of society, may have contributed for the enlargement and rectification of some of our religious ideas, inclusive, and, perhaps, above all, of our idea of God; for these ideas have at every epoch of man’s history been, more or less, modified by contemporary knowledge, and the contemporary conditions of society. These were the materials for thought Switzerland supplied. Upon all of those, however, which belong to the order of human concern, Egypt, too, in its sense and fashion, had had something to tell us.