But Few
People Have Sufficient Taste To Discern, That The Art Of
Embellishing Consists In Interesting, Not In Astonishing.
Christiania is certainly very pleasantly situated, and the environs
I passed through, during this ride, afforded many fine and
cultivated prospects; but, excepting the first view approaching to
it, rarely present any combination of objects so strikingly new, or
picturesque, as to command remembrance.
Adieu!
LETTER XIV.
Christiania is a clean, neat city; but it has none of the graces of
architecture, which ought to keep pace with the refining manners of
a people - or the outside of the house will disgrace the inside,
giving the beholder an idea of overgrown wealth devoid of taste.
Large square wooden houses offend the eye, displaying more than
Gothic barbarism. Huge Gothic piles, indeed, exhibit a
characteristic sublimity, and a wildness of fancy peculiar to the
period when they were erected; but size, without grandeur or
elegance, has an emphatical stamp of meanness, of poverty of
conception, which only a commercial spirit could give.
The same thought has struck me, when I have entered the meeting-
house of my respected friend, Dr. Price. I am surprised that the
dissenters, who have not laid aside all the pomps and vanities of
life, should imagine a noble pillar, or arch, unhallowed. Whilst
men have senses, whatever soothes them lends wings to devotion; else
why do the beauties of nature, where all that charm them are spread
around with a lavish hand, force even the sorrowing heart to
acknowledge that existence is a blessing? and this acknowledgment is
the most sublime homage we can pay to the Deity.
The argument of convenience is absurd. Who would labour for wealth,
if it were to procure nothing but conveniences. If we wish to
render mankind moral from principle, we must, I am persuaded, give a
greater scope to the enjoyments of the senses by blending taste with
them. This has frequently occurred to me since I have been in the
north, and observed that there sanguine characters always take
refuge in drunkenness after the fire of youth is spent.
But I have flown from Norway. To go back to the wooden houses;
farms constructed with logs, and even little villages, here erected
in the same simple manner, have appeared to me very picturesque. In
the more remote parts I had been particularly pleased with many
cottages situated close to a brook, or bordering on a lake, with the
whole farm contiguous. As the family increases, a little more land
is cultivated; thus the country is obviously enriched by population.
Formerly the farmers might more justly have been termed woodcutters.
But now they find it necessary to spare the woods a little, and this
change will be universally beneficial; for whilst they lived
entirely by selling the trees they felled, they did not pay
sufficient attention to husbandry; consequently, advanced very
slowly in agricultural knowledge. Necessity will in future more and
more spur them on; for the ground, cleared of wood, must be
cultivated, or the farm loses its value; there is no waiting for
food till another generation of pines be grown to maturity.
The people of property are very careful of their timber; and,
rambling through a forest near Tonsberg, belonging to the Count, I
have stopped to admire the appearance of some of the cottages
inhabited by a woodman's family - a man employed to cut down the wood
necessary for the household and the estate. A little lawn was
cleared, on which several lofty trees were left which nature had
grouped, whilst the encircling firs sported with wild grace. The
dwelling was sheltered by the forest, noble pines spreading their
branches over the roof; and before the door a cow, goat, nag, and
children, seemed equally content with their lot; and if contentment
be all we can attain, it is, perhaps, best secured by ignorance.
As I have been most delighted with the country parts of Norway, I
was sorry to leave Christiania without going farther to the north,
though the advancing season admonished me to depart, as well as the
calls of business and affection.
June and July are the months to make a tour through Norway; for then
the evenings and nights are the finest I have ever seen; but towards
the middle or latter end of August the clouds begin to gather, and
summer disappears almost before it has ripened the fruit of autumn -
even, as it were, slips from your embraces, whilst the satisfied
senses seem to rest in enjoyment.
You will ask, perhaps, why I wished to go farther northward. Why?
not only because the country, from all I can gather, is most
romantic, abounding in forests and lakes, and the air pure, but I
have heard much of the intelligence of the inhabitants, substantial
farmers, who have none of that cunning to contaminate their
simplicity, which displeased me so much in the conduct of the people
on the sea coast. A man who has been detected in any dishonest act
can no longer live among them. He is universally shunned, and shame
becomes the severest punishment.
Such a contempt have they, in fact, for every species of fraud, that
they will not allow the people on the western coast to be their
countrymen; so much do they despise the arts for which those traders
who live on the rocks are notorious.
The description I received of them carried me back to the fables of
the golden age: independence and virtue; affluence without vice;
cultivation of mind, without depravity of heart; with "ever smiling
Liberty;" the nymph of the mountain. I want faith!
My imagination hurries me forward to seek an asylum in such a
retreat from all the disappointments I am threatened with; but
reason drags me back, whispering that the world is still the world,
and man the same compound of weakness and folly, who must
occasionally excite love and disgust, admiration and contempt. But
this description, though it seems to have been sketched by a fairy
pencil, was given me by a man of sound understanding, whose fancy
seldom appears to run away with him.
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