Besides I Do Not Think He Will Like The St.
Gothard Scenery Very Much.
It is a pity there is no mental microscope to show us our likes and
dislikes while they are yet too vague to be made out easily.
We
are so apt to let imaginary likings run away with us, as a person
at the far end of Cannon Street railway platform, if he expects a
friend to join him, will see that friend in half the impossible
people who are coming through the wicket. I once began an essay on
"The Art of Knowing what gives one Pleasure," but soon found myself
out of the diatonic with it, in all manner of strange keys, amid a
maze of metaphysical accidentals and double and treble flats, so I
left it alone as a question not worth the trouble it seemed likely
to take in answering. It is like everything else, if we much want
to know our own mind on any particular point, we may be trusted to
develop the faculty which will reveal it to us, and if we do not
greatly care about knowing, it does not much matter if we remain in
ignorance. But in few cases can we get at our permanent liking
without at least as much experience as a fishmonger must have had
before he can choose at once the best bloater out of twenty which,
to inexperienced eyes, seem one as good as the other. Lord
Beaconsfield was a thorough Erasmus Darwinian when he said so well
in "Endymion": "There is nothing like will; everybody can do
exactly what they like in this world, provided they really like it.
Sometimes they think they do, but in general it's a mistake." {1}
If this is as true as I believe it to be, "the longing after
immortality," though not indeed much of an argument in favour of
our being immortal at the present moment, is perfectly sound as a
reason for concluding that we shall one day develop immortality, if
our desire is deep enough and lasting enough. As for knowing
whether or not one likes a picture, which under the present
aesthetic reign of terror is de rigueur, I once heard a man say the
only test was to ask one's self whether one would care to look at
it if one was quite sure that one was alone; I have never been able
to get beyond this test with the St. Gothard scenery, and applying
it to the Devil's Bridge, I should say a stay of about thirty
seconds would be enough for me. I daresay Mendelssohn would have
stayed at least two hours at the Devil's Bridge, but then he did
stay such a long while before things.
The coming out from the short tunnel on to the plain of Andermatt
does certainly give the pleasure of a surprise. I shall never
forget coming out of this tunnel one day late in November, and
finding the whole Andermatt valley in brilliant sunshine, though
from Fluelen up to the Devil's Bridge the clouds had hung heavy and
low.
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