The Adventure of Living Part 31

Another chapter which I believed I was going to write in this book was to be devoted to inscriptions. I have always loved the art of the epigraphists, and I wanted to quote some examples, including (1) an inscription for a sun-dial, (2) an inscription for a memorial to Lord Halifax, the trimmer, the greatest of Whig statesmen, (3) another to William Pitt, and (4) an inscription to the Quakers who fought and died in the War,--men whose n.o.ble combination of patriotism and self- abnegation impressed me profoundly.

Their ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest, Their names a great example stand to show How strangely high endeavour may be blest When Piety and Valour jointly go.

Another Surrey chapter might have dealt with my activities as Sheriff and my conceptions of that office.

Still another chapter ought to have centred in my personal life at Newlands. It was at Newlands that my health broke down and I saw, or thought I saw, as did my doctors, the advance of the penumbra, the shadow of eclipse which was to engulf my life. I wanted very much, when I began this book, to put on record a description of how utterly different than is commonly supposed are the feelings of the occupant of the condemned cell. I should also like to have recorded certain reflections upon how a serious illness becomes a kind of work of art, a drama or film in real life, in which the patient, the doctors, the nurses, the friends, and the relations all play their appropriate parts, and contribute each in his order to the central theme. But this and "The Adventure of Dying," a theme which has never yet been adequately treated, but ought some day to be, must await not, of course, the actual coming of the Gondolier, for that is too late, but that interval between life and death which the Emperor Diocletian boasted that he had created for himself.

Another unwritten chapter on a subject which may sound dull, but which might very well have been one of the best, was to be called "The Consolations of the Cla.s.sics." It would have told how in his later years new stars had risen for the adventurer in the voyage of life, while many of the planets that were in their zenith in his youth have suffered decline.

As a boy, and even in the prime of life, I knew nothing of Racine. I now bend my head in adoration. Again, I knew little or nothing of Balzac. I now think of him as one of the greatest of the a.n.a.lysts of human conduct,--not as great as Shakespeare, but, all the same, very great, and almost as terrible as he is great. If ever a man fascinates and is intolerable, it is Balzac.

I should have liked, but that is not a thing which can be compressed or sandwiched into any chapter, to have written quite frankly and fully about my religious beliefs. Here, indeed, I had planned with some care.

I wanted to say not what I thought other men ought to believe, nor what I thought I ought to believe myself, or, again, what I ought not to believe in order to make my _credo_ look reasonable and "according to plan." What I wanted to do was to say frankly, fairly, and truthfully what I do believe as a matter of fact and not as a matter of ought or ought not. I wanted to record an existing set of actualities, not to write a piece of philosophy or metaphysics. _I wanted, in fact, to photograph my soul._ But this, again, must wait, though I hope it will not wait very long.

If I write such a paper I shall certainly take for my motto Lord Halifax's words to Bishop Burnet: "I believe as much as I can: and G.o.d Almighty will, I am sure, pardon me if I have not the digestion of an ostrich."

I will neither be put off on the one side by making an effort to express belief in more than I can believe, nor, again, refuse to record my honest belief in some "fact of religion" because it will not be thought creditable for me, or because certain people will think me superst.i.tious and unreasonable, just as other people will think me too rationalistic.

I will yield nothing to the demand, "You cannot possibly believe _this_, when you have just said that you don't believe _that_.

The two things must hang together. You cannot pick and choose like this at your fancy."

My answer is, I can, I do, and I will. My endeavour is not an attempt to reconcile beliefs, but to say for good or for evil what I do believe. I believe that London lies to the Northeast of the place at which I am dictating these words. Faith is a fact, not a fragment of reasoning, and I mean to put down the said fact for what it is worth.

How I wish I could write my chapter on the odd things that have happened to me in life, and record the strange and inexplicable things that I have heard of from other people. I don't mean by this that I have a number of second-hand ghost-stories to tell. All the same I could t-ell of certain things much more impressive because they are so much less sensational. It was my habit as a young man, a habit which I wish I had not abandoned, to ask everybody I came across, who was worth interrogating, what was the oddest thing that had happened in their lives. One would have supposed that I should often have got for my impertinence a surly answer, or, at any rate, an elegant rapier-thrust, or some other form of snub. Strangely enough, I never found anyone "shy"

at my question, but I did get many curious answers, and some of these I have a perfect right to record. A section of this chapter should deal with accidental conversations and accidental confessions. It has been my good luck once or twice to listen to the most strange talk in trains and other public places, and again, by straight questions I have sometimes elicited very crooked answers.

For example, when I was a young man I once heard an old gentleman in a third-cla.s.s railway carriage remark vaguely and yet impressively to the company at large, as follows: "I once saw six men hanged in a very rustic manner." That, I think everyone will agree with me, was an excellent conversational opening. The full story, though I cannot tell it here, was quite as good. So was the story of William Harvey, "_the girt big Somersetshire man_" and what he did in a fight with Spanish Pilots in the Bilbao River. Of this story, told to me in the broadest Somersetshire dialect by a Somersetshire boatman who was present at the fight, I cannot resist quoting one pa.s.sage: "They were all dressed in white and fighting with their long knives. But William Harvey, who was six feet six high, got hold of the axe we always kept on deck for cutting away the mast if it went in a storm, and he knocked them over with that. And as fast as he did knock them over, we did chuck the bodies into the water."

Another of my accidental conversations opened with these words: "And she never knew till she followed her to her grave that she was her own mother." The personal p.r.o.nouns are slightly mixed, but the story might well develop like a Greek play.

Again, I planned a chapter to describe the four most beautiful human beings seen by me in the course of my life. Strangest of all, and perhaps most beautiful of all, using beauty in rather a strained sense, was the man alluded to in my dedication,--the man my wife and I saw in the Jews' Garden at Jahoni. We were resting in the garden after a very long ride in very hot weather, when there entered a young man in a white tunic, with bare feet and legs. On his head was a wide hat of rough straw, and across his shoulder a mattock. His face and form could only be described in the famous words, "Beauty that shocks you." Why his beauty shocked us, and must have shocked any other seers possessed of any sensibility, I cannot say. Thinking he was a gardener, we asked our Dragoman to ask him some simple question but he could not, or did not, obtain any information. The creature was like the figures of Faunus or Vertumnus, or one of those half-deities or quarter-deities that one sees among the marbles in public collections. "Graeco-Roman School, of the late Antonine Period; probably representing a Rural Deity, or G.o.d of Spring or Agriculture in the Latin mythology." Certainly the more decadent side of late Greek or Roman art seemed in some strange way to be living again in this amazing being.

Far more really beautiful, far more interesting, and far more impressive was a woman whom I and my younger brother met with in a tram-car outside the Porta del Popolo in Rome. Up till then I had spent much time in wondering why the Italian population had declined in the matter of good- looks and why one never saw anyone like a Bellini or a Raphael Madonna.

And then I looked up after having my ticket clipped and saw the perfect youthful mother of the Cinquecento painters sitting opposite me. A more exquisitely harmonious face and expression were never vouchsafed to my eyes. She was a countrywoman of the richer peasant cla.s.s, and was apparently making her first visit to the city accompanied by her husband. One would gladly have taken oath at first sight that she was the perfect wife and mother, and yet there was no sentimental pose about her--only the most naive and innocent delight told in smiles, laughter, and blushes. The things she saw from the tram window seemed to make her whole being ripple with pleasure. Happily I cannot here be judged as a sentimental visionary for my companion will avouch the facts.

Curiously enough, though I think English women, as a whole, far surpa.s.s the Italians in their looks, the other perfectly beautiful woman whom I have seen was also an Italian. I was taking an early walk, with my younger brother, from Baveno to the summit, or at any rate, to the shoulder of the Monte Moteroni. The time was between five and six o'clock in the morning, and the place a small peasant's farm just at the fringe of the land between the open mountain and the cultivated slopes.

I looked over the hedge or wall, I forget which, and there was a bare- legged girl of some seventeen or eighteen working in the field with her father and her brothers, hoeing potatoes. Here, indeed, was something worth writing home about--a figure like the Lombard girl in Browning's "Italian in England, "--a face gentle, simple, kind, but, above all, beautiful, and a figure worthy of the face.

The fourth figure in my gallery of the visions that the turn of the road took from my eyes and "swept into my dreams for ever" was seen during a purely prosaic walk in South Kensington. Unsuspecting, unperturbed, I was bent on a const.i.tutional, or maybe a shopping expedition, when there suddenly arose before my astonished eyes, out of a man-hole in the middle of the street--I honestly believe it was the Cromwell Road--a young workman with flaxen hair and a short beard,--a man with something of the face and figure which the Italian painters gradually came to attribute to the Christ. But here again, as in the case of the Madonna of the tram-car, the man evidently had never been told of, or thought of, the resemblance. He seemed perfectly unconscious and natural. Though the trained eye might notice a resemblance in the outline of the face, the happy smile and negligent air showed nothing of the Man of Sorrows.

He was just an ordinary Englishman.

When I think of those four figures of resplendent beauty--and especially of the two women, for the Syrian had something sinister and uncanny about him and the young Englishman was too prosaic in essentials--I recall the pa.s.sage which I know is somewhere in Sir Thomas Browne, though I am quite unable to find it, in which the Physician Philosopher declares that when he sees specially beautiful persons he desires to say a grace or thanksgiving to Heaven for the joy that has been vouchsafed him.

As to the strange stories and strange things told me, I should have liked particularly to chronicle two at length. One is the story of a tiny Indian spindle that spun by itself in the dust, and the other, though it had no marvel in it, except the marvel of maternal feeling, is the story of a chamois and her young one on a glacier-pa.s.s. The English mountaineer who told it me, was on a difficult climb. Suddenly he saw to his astonishment a chamois, the shyest of all animals, standing stock- still on a steep glacier. She actually let him come so close to her that he could have touched her with his hand, and then he saw the reason. The chamois stood at the very edge of a deep creva.s.se, and up from its cold, blue depths came the cry of a terrified and agonised creature--cries that were answered by the mother chamois. The little chamois had fallen through the ice-bridge and lay some hundred feet or so below and beyond all recovery. The narrator was an ordinary table-d'hote Smoking-Room tourist, but he could hardly recount the story without tears. He tried, but it was impossible to effect a rescue, and he had to leave the wretched mother where she was. As he said, "Considering what chamois are, it sounds absolutely incredible that the mother should have been able to overcome her shyness of mankind and stay by the young one. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. She took no more notice of me and my guide than if we had been rocks. Poor brute!"

Another chapter would have recorded the influence upon my life of great writers, great poets, great painters, great sculptors, and great musicians. Next, I should have loved to give in detail accounts of my travels, not in strange or dangerous parts of the earth, but through some of the most beautiful scenery of Europe and in the fringes of Africa and Asia. As a young man, I journeyed in sledges over most of the Alpine pa.s.ses in the winter, for, owing to my uncle John Symonds being one of the discoverers of the High Alps in winter, I was early, so to speak, in the snow-field. To this day nothing attracts me more than the thought of a long day or night spent in a sledge.

I crossed the Splugen by day in the winter, and by moon-light in the summer. I crossed the St. Gothard (before the tunnel was made) in a Vetturino carriage. I have crossed the Simplon, and I have many times crossed the Bernina and all the other pa.s.ses of the Orisons in the snow in mid-winter. For those who like, as I do, sharp cold, and ardent sunlight, there is nothing more delightful, and if as sometimes happens, one can see or hear an avalanche really close, without getting into it, a pleasant spice of danger is added. But I did not love the Alps merely in the winter. Though no expert climber, I was fond of the mountains to the point of fanaticism, and though I never got higher than 11,000 feet, or a little over, I had the extremely interesting experience of falling into a creva.s.se. Fortunately I was well held by the rope against the white grey edge of the blue abyss, while my legs kicked freely in the illimitable inane.

Is there anything in the world like being aroused in the grey of dawn by the man with the axe and the rope? Can anything equal that succession of scenes, the Alpine village in sleepy silence, the pastures and the cultivated land, the inevitable little bridge on the inevitable stream, then the belt of pines, then the zone of rocks and flowers, best and gayest of all gardens, and last the star gentians and the eternal snows?

A holiday heart, twenty years of age, a friend, a book of poetry, and a packet of food in one's pocket!--Truly, "If there is a Paradise, it is here, it is here!"

Horses that I have known and liked, and on whose backs I have felt supremely happy--rides on mules in Spanish or African mountains, rides in the Syrian or Libyan Deserts on true Arabs, or, perhaps most thrilling of all, night rides on the Downs, would make a tale, whether delightful to read by others I know not, but certainly delightful to be recorded by me.

"Projects Fulfilled and Unfulfilled" would have made a good chapter, as would also "Quotations and the Effects of Poetry on Everyday Existence."

Another chapter which I have not written, but should like to have written, would have been "Some Uncles"--I use the word "some" in both the common and the slang sense--for I may be said to have been specially rich in this relationship. Two of my Indian uncles were well known to the public. One was Sir John Strachey, for six months acting Viceroy of India, owing to Lord Mayo's a.s.sa.s.sination and the delay in his successor taking up the post. The other was Sir Richard Strachey, who began his Indian life as a subaltern in the Hon. East India Company's Corps of Sappers and Miners. He had a horse killed under him at the Battle of Sobraon, and afterwards became one of the greatest of Indian Civil Engineers, a Member of Council (Public Works Department), and one of the greatest of ca.n.a.l and railway constructors. Henry Strachey, another uncle, commanded a battalion of Gourkhas, and died over ninety years of age. Though little known to the world, he was a man of memorable character and in his youth accidentally and temporarily the talk of London as a Thibetan explorer. William Strachey, a fourth uncle, was the strangest of men. Like the "Snark," he breakfasted at afternoon tea and lived by candlelight instead of sunlight,--a wholly fantastic man, though one of great ability. At one time he was what our forefathers called "a man about town,"--a member of Brook's Club during the Fifties and Sixties, a friend of Thackeray and of "Flemming, the Flea," and a clerk in the Colonial office. He was often selected by Lord Palmerston for special work. Later, however, he developed such strangely nocturnal, though by no means noisy habits, that he almost disappeared from the ken of his family. He, by the way, once spoke to me of Lady William Russell, of whom I have already written, describing her as one of the most beautiful and in later years one of the most delightful people he had ever seen, and the best of all hostesses--"You used to look up at the fanlight over the door of her house in South Audley Street, and if you saw the gas-jet burning you knew that she was at home, expecting the company of her friends, and needed no further invitation. Whatever the hour was, if the light was burning you could go in and finish your evening in talk with her and her other guests." She was thus at home almost every evening to the people favoured enough to have the entry of her house.

Another uncle was Mr. George Strachey, a diplomat, and for some thirty years Her Britannic Majesty's representative at Dresden,--a man of great ability, but with a nature better fitted to a man of letters than to an official. Of Strachey great-uncles I could tell many a curious and entertaining tale, and especially of the man whom my father succeeded,-- the man we called "the second Sir Henry." It has been said of him that he was "odd even for a Strachey," and I could prove that up to the hilt.

Almost as odd, from many points of view, though much more human, was his brother, Richard Strachey, one of the prize figures of the Military and Diplomatic Service of the East India Company. He is still commemorated in Persia on the leaden water-pipes of Ispahan, but how and why is too long a story for a chapter of apology.

Dearly should I have loved to write a chapter on "The Art of Living,"

for unquestionably "life demands art,"--an aphorism, by the way, not, as most people think, of Pope but of Wordsworth. (Wordsworth, remember, had a great deal of the Eighteenth Century in him.) That chapter, however, would easily become a book or a serpent, as says the Italian proverb.

Last of all, how many are the men and women, now dead, whom I should like to have mentioned and of whom I have something worth saying. They are included in a rough list which I drew up when I first thought of writing my autobiography. I give these names written down just as they occurred to me. Some of them have been referred to in the body of this book, but most of them are not even mentioned. Lord Roberts; Watts the painter; Sir John Millais; Sir William Harcourt; Lord Houghton; Walter Bagehot; Lord Carlingford; Lord Goschen; the Duke of Argyll of Gladstone's Cabinets; Mr. Macmillan, the publisher; Mr. George Smith; Lady Stanley of Alderley; Lord Carlisle; Lord Morpeth; Sir Edward Cook; Lord Kitchener; the late Duke of Northumberland; Admiral Dewey; Mr.

William Arnold; Lord Burghclere; Sir William Jenner; Miss Mary Kingsley; Lord Glenesk; the late Lord Grey; the late Lord Astor; Sir William White, the naval constructor; the late Lord Sligo; Dean Beeching; Bishop Perceval; Archbishop Temple; my uncle, Professor T. H. Green; Professor Dicey; Professor Freeman; Bishop Stubbs; Mr. Lecky; Mrs. Humphry Ward; Lord Bowen; Mr. Baugh Allen, the last of the Special Pleaders; Professor Henry Smith, the mathematician; Lord Justice Fry, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh.

There was another man, too little and too lately known, with whom I wanted to deal at length, for he exercised a distinct and special influence on my life. I mean Donald Hankey, "The Student in Arms." I had, indeed, designed to speak of him in a special chapter on the effect of the War on my life, but that chapter did not get written, or, rather, remains over to be written when the perspective is easier and better, and the world has given up its last, and to me very futile and foolish, mode of talking as if we ought to be ashamed of the War, or, at any rate, as if we ought to treat it as an utterly tiresome subject.

Here, then, I shall say only that the essential thing about Hankey was that he was one of the true saints of the world, or, rather, one of the saints who matter. Yet never was there a less saintly saint. He was a man you could talk to rationally on any subject. I, who really knew him, would not have called him a man of the world, because it would have been in essence misleading; but I should have quite understood someone else saying it and should have known exactly what he meant. Not only had he not the temper of the zealot or the fanatic, but he was a kindly man, with no fierceness about him. Yet somehow, and this was the miracle, he contrived to have none of the easy unction of the pushing man of holiness who realises that if he is to succeed in accomplishing what he wants accomplished, he must a.s.sume a certain cunning suavity of manner which is really foreign to his character. Hankey had no pose. He was at bottom what Walt Whitman calls a "natural and nonchalant" person, who happened to be made all through of sweetness and light, though never the superior person, and never, as it were, too good for this world. Not for one moment did you find in him the chill of sanct.i.ty. In the phrase of John Silver, "he kept company very easy."

I should imagine that confession was the very last thing that Hankey would ever have encouraged in anyone, for it is the most debilitating of the virtues. All the same, a penitent would have found him an extraordinarily easy occupant of the box. He was warm-hearted, sympathetic, and full of the victorious spirit. One felt with Hankey that he was born for whatever was arduous. In truth he was "G.o.d's soldier." What gives the extreme characteristic impression of Hankey is that last vision of him set forth in a letter by the soldier who, happening to look into a trench, saw him kneeling in prayer with his company gathered round him, just before they went over the parapet.

If he had lived, he would, I am sure, have talked about the scene. I never saw a man so natural and so little embarra.s.sed in discussing such matters as prayer or other spiritual experiences. He had in a marked degree that absence of _mauvaise honte_ which marks the good man at all times, in all places, in all religions, and in all races.

There is a man, now dead, who told me something which I want to record in this very convenient chapter. His words impressed me out of all proportion to their intrinsic importance. I feel indeed that there must be something in them which I cannot a.n.a.lyse, but which makes them worth preserving. The vitamines of food, we know, are not strictly a.n.a.lysable, though their presence can be detected. No one knows of what they consist, but, nevertheless, we know two things about them. They exist, and they have a great influence upon metabolism. So in the food of the mind there are vitamines which we can recognise, but not a.n.a.lyse, and, therefore, cannot wholly understand. My readers, if they will look into their own memories, will, I am sure, recall experiences of these mental vitamines, trivial or ordinary in themselves, and yet holding a place so clear and often indeed so vehement as to suggest that they contain some quickening quality of their own.

The man with whom I connect certain of these vitamines of the mind was Sir George Grove, the compiler of the _Dictionary of Music_. I did not know him well; but, as a boy, he did me a kindly service. He accepted the first poem of any length that I ever published. When I was seventeen, that is a year before I went to Oxford, I sent him a poem, alluded to in another chapter of this book, called "Love's Arrows." He liked it and published it in _Macmillan's Magazine_, of which he was then Editor. Macmillan's was a magazine given up to good literature, and to get a place in it was considered no small honour.

Grove possessed a keen sense of literature, and he had known many of the famous people of the Victorian era. True to my plan of asking questions, I asked him whether he had ever seen Cardinal Newman. He replied by a story which was revealing as to a certain fierceness in Newman's character and mental configuration. In any case, it had both rhetorically and intellectually a considerable influence on my mind.

Here is a _precis_ of our conversation.

"Did you ever see Newman?"

"Only once, and then I heard him preach."

"Was he in a big sense eloquent?"

"Yes. Though he had none of the airs and graces of the orator, he had somehow in a high degree the power of thrilling you. I heard him in Lent preaching in a small Roman Catholic chapel in London. He was a gaunt figure, extremely emaciated and hollow-cheeked, with a very bad cough, and as he stood in the pulpit, coughing hoa.r.s.ely, he beat his breast with his hand and forearm, till it sounded like the reverberation of a huge cavernous drum." Grove went on to describe how the time was one of great spiritual excitement in the Church of England and in the Roman Church,--a time when people thought that Rome was going to rea.s.sert her ascendancy over English minds. During the very week or month in which the sermon was preached, Stanley's _Life of Arnold_ had appeared.

"At the end of that book Stanley describes how when Arnold lay dying, he had, one evening, a very long talk with him about the Sacraments and the part they played in the religious life. He records that conversation and the Broad Church view of Arnold, and then tells how he rose next morning and went to enquire as to Arnold, and how he found that Arnold had died in the night. Newman was preaching on the old, old maxim, '_Nulla salus extra ecclesiam_,' and dwelt, as a preacher with his views naturally would, on the contrast between the covenanted and uncovenanted mercies of G.o.d. Those who were in the Church were absolutely safe. For those who could trust only to the uncovenanted mercies of G.o.d there could be no such safety. 'But,' he went on, 'it is not for me to deal with them and their prospects of salvation and of life eternal.' And then, with great feeling and emotion, 'Nor shall I presume to canva.s.s the fate of that man who, at night, doubted the efficacy of sacramental wine, and died in the morning.'"

Though the words, of course, had no spiritual effect on Grove, he dwelt upon the difficulty he had in conveying the profound emotional force of these phrases when they were spoken by this strange figure in the pulpit. Grove need not have made any apology. He amply managed, and this was a proof of the preacher's power, to transfer the emotion of the moment to me. The words in the spiritual sense mean nothing to me.

Indeed, they disgust, nay, horrify me as utterly irreligious. Yet I am bound to say that I feel, and always have felt, their emotional appeal urgently and deeply. Here, if anywhere, are the vitamines of oratory.

Again, I should like to have had a chapter on the links of the past, because I have been fortunate in that respect. Some of these I have recorded in other chapters, but I should like to put on record the fact that I actually knew and spent several days in a country house with a lady who actually received a wedding-present from Keats and also one from Sh.e.l.ley. That lady was Mrs. Proctor, the widow of Barry Cornwall, the poet. When I first saw Mrs. Proctor, who, by the way, was well known to my wife and Mrs. Simpson, she was a fellow-guest with me and my wife at a house-party at the Grant-Duffs'. Though, I suppose, nearly ninety years old at that time (it was three or four years before her death), there was not a trace of extreme old age in her talk. She was neither deaf nor blind, but enjoyed life to the full. She did not seem even to suffer from physical weakness, but was capable of hours of sustained talk. She had known everybody worth knowing in the literary world and had vivid recollections of them. For example, besides mentioning the wedding-presents from Keats and Sh.e.l.ley, she was also proud to remember that she had received a present from the murderer, Wainwright, Lamb's friend,--who wrote under the name of Ja.n.u.s Weatherc.o.c.k--the man who insured his step-daughter's life and then poisoned her. Owing to the extraordinary way in which things were arranged in those days, the murderer, though found guilty, had his sentence commuted to transportation--apparently as a kind of recognition of his literary ability.

Oddly enough, this was not the only time that accident put me in touch with this singular and sinister figure,--the man too who first talked about the psychological interest of colours and cared, as Mrs. Proctor said, for strange-looking pots and pieces of china. My friend Willie Arnold told me that when his mother was a girl, or a young married woman, I forgot which, in Tasmania, she had her picture drawn by a convict, and that convict was the celebrated Wainwright. According to Willie Arnold, his character was not supposed to be of the best even in those days, and great care was taken that during the sittings someone else should always be in the room!

Another link with the past, which is worth recording, is that I knew well a man, Sir Charles Murray, who told me that he had seen Byron. When I cross-questioned him, he told me something that I think must have been an error of memory. He said it was at a ball in Paris that he saw the poet. Now, I feel pretty sure that Byron never was in Paris. In the earlier part of his life he could not have got there because of the war, and after the peace, as we all know, he began his travels at Antwerp, and journeyed up the Rhine into Switzerland and then crossed the Alps by the Simplon into Italy.