The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lake of Lucerne, by Joseph E. Morris
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Title: The Lake of Lucerne
Author: Joseph E. Morris
Release Date: May 14, 2014 [EBook #45642]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAKE OF LUCERNE ***
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[Illustration: FLÜELEN AND THE ST. GOTHARD VALLEY.]
_Beautiful Europe_
_The Lake of Lucerne_
_By
Joseph E Morris_
[Illustration]
_A. & C. Black, Limited,
Soho Square London W
1919_
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FLÜELEN AND ST. GOTHARD VALLEY _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
PILATUS ABOVE A SEA OF CLOUDS, FROM THE BASE OF THE RIGI 9
THE OLD BRIDGE, WITH SHRINE, LUCERNE 16
THE GUTSCH FROM LUCERNE 19
OLD HOUSES AND BRIDGE AT LUCERNE 22
THE SEVEN TOWERS LOOKING OVER LUCERNE FROM THE GUTSCH 25
LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE 32
PILATUS FROM STANSTAD 43
LOOKING UP THE LAKE FROM BECKENRIED 46
BECKENRIED 51
LAKE URI FROM BRUNNEN 54
WILLIAM TELL'S CHAPEL (FROM A SKETCH IN 1895) _On the cover_
THE LAKE OF LUCERNE
I
If Lucerne is the most widely advertised lake in the world--if its
name, in recent years, has come to be associated, less with ancient
gallant exploits of half-legendary William Tells than with cheap
Polytechnic Tours and hordes of personally conducted trippers, it has
luckily forfeited singularly little of its ancient charm and character,
and remains, if you visit it at the right moment--or at any moment, if
you are not too fastidious in your claims for solitude and æsthetic
exclusiveness--possibly the most beautiful and unquestionably the most
dramatic and striking of all the half-dozen or so greater lakes, Swiss
or Italian, that cluster round the outskirts of the great central knot
of Alps. "Cluster round the outskirts," for it is characteristic of
all these lakes, just as it is characteristic of most of our greater
English meres at home--of Windermere, for example, or Bassenthwaite,
or Ullswater--that, though their upper ends penetrate more or less
deeply (and Lucerne and Ullswater more deeply than any) among the
bases of the hills, yet their lower reaches, whence discharge the
mighty rivers, invariably trail away into open plain, or terminate
among mere gentle undulations. Of all this class of lake, then--lakes
of the transition--Lucerne is at once the most complex in shape, the
least comprehensible in bulk, and the most immediately mountainous
in character. The most complex in shape, because, though it is usual
to describe this as a cross, yet the cross is so distorted in its
lower and major member as practically to lose all really cross-like
character, and to remind one rather of a wriggling viper. The least
comprehensible in bulk, because there is actually no point on its
surface, or on its immediate margin, or perhaps indeed anywhere,
whence it is possible to grasp its basin as a whole, as it is
possible, for example, in a rough kind of way, to grasp the shape and
dimension of such a much larger lake as Geneva from the vineyards in
the neighbourhood of Aubonne. The most immediately mountainous in
character, because no other big Swiss lake, as already intimated,
extends itself so deeply into the heart of giant hills, or is bordered
so immediately by steep and rugged mountains. Thus Lucerne gains in
surprise and mystery what it loses in simple graciousness; is dramatic
and startling where other lakes are tranquil and merely soothing; and
is certainly, to sum up, the most splendid and magnificent lake in the
Alps, if not the most dignified and beautiful.
II
Those who approach Lucerne directly by the railway fitly approach
the most dramatic of lakes by the most dramatic of vestibules. For
those who use their eyes, indeed, there are abundant distant hints of
the coming splendour; the Alps are first visible, in tolerably clear
weather, as we descend the long wall of Jura on to the Aar at Aarberg;
and further on, beyond the peaty flats round the Mauensee, and as we
quit the lake of Sempach, Pilatus and Rigi, like two tall sentinels--
"Mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land"--
come suddenly into view as the railway describes a giant curve, whilst
between them, at greater distance, is glimpsed the enchanted land
itself, made substantial in the Alps of Unterwalden. Such, too, or
something similar, was the young Ruskin's first view of the distant
Alps on the Sunday afternoon from the city promenade at Schaffhausen.
"Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought or dreamed--the seen
walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful to us; not more
awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death." Yet in spite of these
reiterated hints, previsions, and premonitions, when we step finally
from the noise, and bustle, and subdued light of the railway-station at
Lucerne into the brilliant morning light of the river quays outside,
the great vision that then breaks upon us for the first time in its
entirety--levels of shining lake, and long, horizontal precipices of
wooded Rigi, and beyond, in splendid background, white confusion of
shattered Alps,
"A thousand shadowy pencilled valleys,
And snowy dells in a golden air"--
startles and almost shocks us with the same sense of unearthly wonder
as when for the first time in childhood the green baize curtain rolls
up suddenly, and we gaze, with child's eyes, straight into the green
mysteries of fairyland.
[Illustration: PILATUS ABOVE A SEA OF CLOUDS.]
This first view, then, of the Vierwaldstättersee from the quays at
Lucerne--far more than the first view of Lake Leman from the bridges
of Geneva, or of Zurich from the quays of Zurich city--is dramatic in
its complete and abrupt transformation, in its turning upside-down,
and twisting inside-out, of all our previous conceptions of our
commonplace, workaday world! The thing in a way is sensational, but
sensational within the modesty of nature, and certainly to be enjoyed
at least once in a lifetime, and especially if one happen to be young.
If one happen to be older, or has seen the thing before, there is
reason good enough to quit the train at Sursee, fifteen miles short of
Lucerne, and approach Lucerne thence gradually, on bicycle or foot, by
a zig-zag route of gradual introduction that is pursued, I suppose,
by hardly anyone, and certainly not by Cook's tourist or Polytechnic
student, each of whom has borrowed Atalanta's heels. Sursee itself,
though entered by a medieval gateway, has little else to show in the
way of particular antiquities. Yet the town itself, in every lane
and corner of it, is antiquity itself, and altogether delightful in
possession of local colour. This is German Switzerland, and proclaims
its Teutonic stamp at every turn: the very gate by which we enter
still bears above its arch the double-headed eagle of the Holy Roman
Empire. From Sursee inquire your way by the long ascent to the little
upland town of Beromünster, where a college for secular canons was
founded in the eleventh century. In Murray's invaluable handbook, worth
half a dozen Baedekers, it is stated that "the church is eleventh
to twelfth century, though much altered in the eighteenth century."
The description is misleading, for, though the core may be really
old, it is overlaid with later classical work till most traces of
medievalism are entirely obscured--the very piers of the nave arcades
are monolithic shafts of pink marble. None the less it is well worth
visiting, for the sake of its grand Renaissance choir stalls and sunny,
silent cloister. Hence to Sempach you may find a pleasant, unfenced
lane, through the open pastures and apple-orchards, that falls by
easy gradients along the north shore of the placid lake. Sempach is
one of the sacred political sites of Switzerland--like Morat, like
Morgarten--for here was fought, in 1386, one of those great battles
that vindicated her freedom, and linked her name for ever with
England's as a synonym for liberty:
"Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains."
The legend of Arnold von Winkelried, like that of Tell, has been
questioned of recent years; it first appears, more than half a century
after the supposed event, "in an interpolated notice in a Zurich
chronicle (1438 or later), and a popular song of the latter half of
the same century." True or false it will bear retelling, and indicates
correctly enough the national spirit, even though it err in narration
of historical fact. After all, most children know it by heart: how
Arnold von Winkelried, finding it impossible by any other means to
break the serried Austrian ranks,
"For victory shaped an open space,
By gath'ring, with a wide embrace,
Into his single heart, a sheaf
Of fatal Austrian spears."
Arnold is said to have come from Stans, where his statue still stands
in the market-place; where his armour is still preserved in the
Rathhaus; and where it is certain at least that a family of the same
name was resident in the neighbourhood at the time of the great fight.
His house is also shown on the skirts of the little town--or, more
correctly, may be found by those who seek it with much diligence; for
though the victory itself is not forgotten in Switzerland, and was,
indeed, celebrated with much pomp at its quincentenary in 1886, it is
hard to get lucid instructions in Stans itself as to the whereabouts of
the national hero's birthplace, or even to authenticate its continued
existence. I found it at last--a little old farm in the suburb, "of
which one portion, including a low archway with groined entrance and
low pillars, may be as old as the time of Winkelried."
Sempach itself, like Sursee, is a picturesque old town, with another
quaint old gateway. The lake, though five miles long, is quite outside
the mountains, though the splintered crags of Pilatus give a distant
hint of Alpine splendour. The remaining nine miles or so to Lucerne
are perhaps a trifle dull, and the entrance to the city is through the
usual straggling suburb--out of all reasonable proportion to the place
itself--that conducts us too frequently to a town in Switzerland.
III
In France I always reckon that a town of less than fifty thousand
people is likely to retain untouched its medieval character, or at any
rate its atmosphere of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Exceptions
of course occur--I make one in the case of Aix-en-Provence, which seems
to have been mostly rebuilt, though in very delightful fashion, as late
as the eighteenth century. Mere modern watering-place growths, again,
like Biarritz or Vichy, must also be eliminated--they had obviously
no character to lose. But apart from towns like these, my general
proposition will be acceptable, I think, to anyone who dwells, on the
one hand, on places like Beauvais, or Cambrai, or Chartres, or, on
the other, on bigger cities, such as Angers, or Orleans, or Tours. In
Switzerland, which appears to me, much more than France, to be bursting
with prosperity and redundant population, it seems on the whole harder
to suggest a general rule. Neuchâtel, for example, with twenty-five
thousand people, is virtually a handsome modern town. Berne, on the
contrary, with a population of over ninety thousand, preserves its
ancient aspect in remarkable degree. Luckily Lucerne, in a middle
position, with a population of forty-one-odd thousand souls, leans more
to the example of Berne than to that of Neuchâtel or Lausanne. The
immediate front to the lake, of course, just as at Geneva, is blatantly
new of mode--it is largely, in fact, a conglomerate of palatial modern
hotels. But immediately behind--immediately you quit the broad sweep
of quays and promenades, and plunge almost anywhere at random into the
network of ancient streets--you are able to forget at once, whether you
linger in the shadow of the fifteenth-century church of the Bare-foot
Friars (the Barfüsserkirche, or Church of the Franciscans); or bask in
open sunlight on the narrow quay, at the back of the sixteenth-century
Rathhaus, by the side of the green and rushing Reuss; or climb the
steep pitch of hill behind the town to the line of ancient walls, with
their long line of stately watch-towers (like those at Fribourg and
Morat) that stretches with so much picturesque dignity across the base
of the blunt angle--so blunt as scarcely to be an angle at all--between
the river and the lake; or seek shelter from the glare in the long
galleries of the two old wooden bridges, with their mellow red-tiled
roofs, that manage to survive across the river--plunge, I repeat,
where you will into this labyrinth of old thoroughfares, with their
plastered and painted house-fronts, and gaily splashing fountains in
courts and corners, and broad eaves that project far across the street,
and you are reminded at every step, not of the modern tourist resort
of world-wide reputation that is visited by hundreds of thousands of
tourists every year, but of that old Lucerne that grew up gradually
round the Benedictine monastery that was founded here in the year 750,
or thereabouts, by the abbots of Murbach in Alsace, and that gets its
name from that St. Leodegar, or Leger, who was patron of the monastery.
The monks gave way to a college of secular canons in 1455. Unhappily,
of the old collegiate church there are virtually no remains. The twin
west spires, indeed, date from the beginning of the sixteenth century,
and are good Flamboyant Gothic; but the body of the existing building
was erected after a fire in 1633--the date is on the west doorway--and
is purely Classical, though quite a good example of its particular
style and date. Correspondingly late is the woodwork inside, including
the fine stalls in the choir. Other points of interest will be found
by those who seek for them: the panels of old glass (one is dated
1650); the ironwork and carving of the great west door; and the two
richly sculptured reredoses at the ends of the two aisles, one of
which has a Pietà, and one a Death of the Virgin. Even more remarkable
is the stately, classical cloister that encompasses the whole church
like an Italian Santo Campo. All is very splendid, yet all would be
gladly surrendered in exchange for what the relentless flames devoured
in 1633. The one is a work of the completed Renaissance--learned,
correct, and conscious, but perhaps a trifle cold. The other, we may be
certain, though it may have presented to the critic a thousand faults
of detail, whispered at least from its dim aisles and chapels "the
last enchantments of the Middle Age." The one is the laborious product
of the textbook and the studio; the other the inevitable offspring
of a vigorous and vital art. The one is the clever expression of an
individual talent; the other the collective offering of a people's
enthusiasm and faith.
[Illustration: THE OLD BRIDGE WITH SHRINE, LUCERNE.]
The Hofkirche, then, may be entered casually, examined
superficially, and quitted without regret. Time will be better spent in
lingering on the old wooden foot-bridges that still span the green and
insurgent Reuss at some little distance below its exit from the lake.
Formerly there were three; but the longest--the old Hof-brücke--was
sacrificed in 1852 to the passion for spurious improvement. Of the
two that survive, the Kapell-Brücke is by far the most important, and
apparently gets its name from the old St. Peter's Chapel on the north
shore of the river, to which it leads diagonally across the clear and
voluminous stream. In actual touch with this, but nearer the southern
shore, rises the picturesque old Wasserturm, which is said once to
have served as a lighthouse (_lucerna_), and to have given Lucerne its
name. The Premonstratensian Abbey of La Lucerne, near Avranches, in
Normandy, is stated in Joanne's handbook to have got its title from
the same source; but the Swiss Lucerne is perhaps better derived (I
do not profess to understand by what strange process of corruption)
from the name of its patron, Leodegar. Anyhow, this old Water-Tower
is a decidedly striking object, and conspicuous in most photographs
and pictures of Lucerne, with its typical octagonal cap. Both the two
old wooden bridges, as is common in Switzerland, are protected from
the weather by open timber roofs; and inserted in the framing of these
last is a series of eighteenth-century paintings, representing, in
the case of the Kapell-Brücke, scenes from the history of the city,
and from the lives of its patronal saints, St. Mauritius and St.
Leodegar; and in the case of the lesser Spreuer, or Mühlen, Brücke
a late, post-medieval representation of the grim, medieval humours
of the ghastly Dance of Death. This strange _memento mori_ was a
favourite morality of the Middle Time; Death in the form of a skeleton
(Wordsworth's "Death the Skeleton") presents himself in turn to all
kinds and conditions of men--in the great series at the old abbey
church of La Chaise-Dieu (Haute-Loire) in France to actually not less
than thirty-five, now setting his foot with timid determination on the
trailing robe of a sacrosanct Pope; now greeting with mocking glance
a Cardinal, who averts his head with hasty terror; now dancing with
insolent familiarity in front of an aged man; now laying his bony grasp
on a troubadour, who lets his mandoline clatter to the ground in access
of sudden fear. These are subjects depicted at La Chaise-Dieu; but
just the same spirit of gruesome raillery inspires the _danse macabre_
wherever found:
"Le pauvre en sa chaumière où le chaume le courve
Est sujet à ses lois;
Et la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre
N'en défend pas nos rois."
At Hexham there are still four paintings on panel, representing Death
with a Pope, an Emperor, a King, and a Cardinal. Browning tells us in
connection with the old revellers of Venice how
"Death stepp'd tacitly and took them
Where men never see the sun";
but the Death of the _danse macabre_ at Hexham, as perhaps always, so
far from stepping tacitly, is a grinning and grisly contortionist,
writhing his repulsive anatomy into a dozen different shapes of
derision. The victims alone have dignity, whilst Death is merely the
jester or buffoon. Different, indeed, is the shadowy Death of the
Apocrypha--"And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and he that sat upon
him, his name was Death"; or the mysterious, shrouded, blood-sprinkled
figure (to couple small images with great) of the Masque of the Red
Death. These particular paintings at Lucerne are necessarily small in
scale, and perhaps not very legible in the dim recesses of the roof.
I have never had the patience to decipher them, nor do they perhaps
conform, since so unusually late in date, to the stereotyped convention
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
[Illustration: THE GUTSCH, FROM LUCERNE.]
There is just one other spot in Lucerne which ought not to be
neglected, and this, though sufficiently far removed from Death in
his merely antic aspect--from the Death of "graves, of worms, and
epitaphs"--has also to do with Death in his nobler guise, for it is
the monument of the twenty-six Swiss officers, and seven hundred and
sixty Swiss Guards, who fell in defending the Tuileries and their
King on August 10, 1792. "Honour to you, brave men," writes Carlyle,
"honourable pity, through long times! Not martyrs were ye; and yet
almost more. He was no King of yours, this Louis; and he forsook you
like a King of shreds and patches; ye were but sold to him for some
poor sixpence a day; yet would ye work for your wages, keep your
plighted word. The work now was to die; and ye did it." The monument
is fitly a lion, and was hewn out by Lukas Ahorn of Constance, after
the model of Thorwaldsen, from a face of living rock; he is pierced by
a broken lance and already at point of death, one paw hangs forward
limp and helpless, but the other, with claws outstretched, still
clutches and guards the Bourbon lilies--a monument of faithfulness
to death. The attitude and face of the great lion, "having the most
touching expression of broken strength, subdued pain, and courageous
self-surrender," are both very grandly conceived. It is sad indeed
that the rock itself, though the sculpture is boarded up to protect
it from winter frosts, is badly cracked in more than one direction.
Closely adjacent to this fine monument, and certainly worth a visit, is
the very curious Gletscher Garten, with its wonderful "pot-holes," or
"glacier-mills," some of which retain their "mill-stones" still in situ.
IV
Looking eastward from the quays or the lake at Lucerne across the
shining expanses of water to the great background of snow-clad
Alps--visualizing those Alps in memory as we sit later on at home,
by the side of a winter fire--most of us have probably an impression
only of a very lovely, and very magnificent, but also very vague and
inchoate, huddle of confused and indefinite hills. The highest peak
seen at Lucerne from the Schweizerhof Quay is apparently the Tödi
(11,887 feet), supreme at the point, or very nearly at the point, where
Uri, Glarus, and the Grisons meet, and next to this in actual dignity
is perhaps the snowy Titlis (10,627 feet), which rises above Engelberg,
and also belongs, like the Tödi, to a bunch of three converging
cantons--in this case Uri, Unterwalden, and Berne. Yet these two
giants, with their groups of attendant satellites, are so remote from
the margin of the lake itself, and so lost amidst the company of their
hardly less magnificent peers, that they strike one on the whole with
less impress of overwhelming individuality--associate themselves on
the whole less easily with our necessarily blurred and imperfect
recollections of the Vierwaldstättersee when the lake itself is no
longer seen--than two other striking hills of far less elevation, and
in one case of far less noble outline, that yet rear themselves more
immediately from the exact levels of the lake, and that stand more
or less aloof, in conspicuous isolation, not merely from one another,
but from the general confraternity of hills. Wordsworth reminds us in
an admirable sonnet how
"Pelion and Ossa flourished side by side,
Together in immortal books enrolled"--
yet surely not Pelion and Ossa (I have never seen them) dominate
Thessaly more insistently, or confront one another with more marked and
divergent character across the intervening valley, than Swiss Rigi and
Pilatus confront one another across the blue spaces of the Lake of the
Four Forest Cantons, or dominate its waters from the exact margin of
its shores!
[Illustration: OLD HOUSES AND BRIDGE AT LUCERNE]
Of these mountain twins of central Switzerland, Pilatus is by far the
more imposing, not merely in point of elevation--the Rigi is less
by a thousand feet--and immeasurably in grace of peaked and rocky
outline, but also in wealth of legendary lore, and even of actual
historical significance. Of legend, because Pontius Pilate, according
to one account, smitten with remorse after the crucifixion of Our
Saviour, ascended these lonely summits in the course of his miserable
wanderings, and drowned himself here in the little pool (which is
now dried up) on the Bründlen Alp, which lies on the less well-known
slopes of the hill descending from the highest peak, or Tomlishorn
(6,995 feet), in the direction of the Rumligbach. According, however,
to another version, which first appears in the pages of Eusebius,
Pontius Pilate committed suicide at Rome; and it was only after a
series of strange vicissitudes and wanderings, recalling, though less
hallowed than, those of the body of St. Cuthbert, that his corpse was
flung at last, like so much carrion, into this little mountain tarn.
First it was thrown into the Tiber, but the evil spirit could not rest,
and storms and floods that fell upon Rome necessitated its removal to
Vienne, near Lyons, where again it found watery burial in the Rhone.
Vienne, however, was now visited in turn by commotions like those at
Rome; the Lake of Geneva, the next place of interment, proved equally
infelicitous; and it was only finally in untrodden solitudes, beneath
the grey limestone peaks of the Frackmünd (or _Fractus Mons_), that the
hateful body, which earth refused to receive in peace, was suffered at
last to hide itself in uneasy but permanent sepulchre. For "even
here the wicked spirit could not rest from evil-doing. Storm and rain
enveloped the mountain, the lake burst its banks, Alps were ruined, and
herds swept away. At last a travelling scholar confronted the ghost,
and by his magic forced him to accept a pact by which, on condition of
one day's freedom, he was to remain at rest for the remainder of the
year. The bargain was kept. The land was at peace, but yearly on Good
Friday any shepherd who approached the haunted tarn saw, seated on a
throne of rock above the water, a terrible figure clad in the red robes
of magistracy." One would hasten to suppose that the story had been
invented in explanation of the name; but the name Pilatus (perhaps from
_pileatus_, the capped mountain, from its well-known cloud-compelling
qualities) is said to date only from the eighteenth century, whilst the
story is at least as old as the fourteenth.
[Illustration: THE SEVEN TOWERS, LOOKING OVER LUCERNE FROM THE GUTSCH.]
So far the realm of legend. The realm of actual history is scarcely
less astonishing, and attaches itself to legend by imperceptible ties.
It is history that the city of Lucerne in the Middle Ages did actually
prohibit the ascent of the mysterious hill: it is history that six
priests in 1307 were condemned to several months of imprisonment for
daring to visit the forbidden lake. The legend of the pact with the
travelling scholar had at least one important variant, for it was
believed that by throwing a stone into the pool the spirit could be
at any time provoked, and his evil influence set free to work havoc
on lake and fell. It was to avert this constant menace at the hands
of audacity, or scepticism, that the city fathers promulgated the
law by which access to the hill was prohibited. It was only with the
Renaissance, and with the birth of the new spirit of rationalism,
that the old beliefs became untenable, and that the old terrors were
rendered empty--as Gareth cleaves the helm of the silent terror that
"Names himself the Night and oftener Death,"
and reveals inside "the bright face of a blooming boy." The terrors
were already grown more than a little threadbare when Conrad Gesner,
the naturalist, ascended the mountain in 1555; they must nearly
have vanished altogether in another thirty years, when the Curé of
Lucerne, "before a crowd of witnesses, flung stones and rubbish into
the lake without raising anything more than a ripple." At the bottom,
however, of all these wild stories there is a substratum of truth, for
Pilatus is really a great brewer of storms, and the peasants of the
neighbourhood still prognosticate the weather from the disposition of
the clouds upon its summit. Thus Roseberry Topping, in Cleveland, or
what greedy iron-masters have left of it, was supposed as long ago as
the time of Camden to foretell the coming storm:
"If Roseberry Topping wears a cap
Let Cleveland then beware of a clap."
Roseberry and Pilatus are in other respects curiously analogous; each
is of a typically peaked appearance; and each is situated on the
extreme edge of the hill group to which it belongs. Pilatus, it may be
noted, is now ascended by a railway, and thus heaps of "unappreciative
trippers" are now lightly conveyed every fine summer day to the once
weirdly mysterious summit, to which the medieval climber won only
surreptitiously, and perhaps in awe and terror. It is surely the
anti-climax of unromantic common sense.
The Rigi, which confronts Pilatus across the lake in such startling
dissimilarity, is perhaps the most popular hill in Europe, and is
certainly in a sense the most vulgar. It is bad enough that a hill
should be desecrated by a single mountain railway: it is intolerable
that it should be degraded by three! How many people ascend to the
Rigi Kulm on a day of tolerable weather in August from either Vitznau
or Arth-Goldau one would hardly dare to guess; how many are housed at
night in one or other of the monster hotels--at Rigi Kulm, at Rigi
Kaltbad, at Rigi Staffel, at Rigi Scheidegg--that oppress and burden
its weary summits is a matter not to be dwelt on. This is not the place
to attempt a dissertation on the _quæstio vexata_ of mountain railways.
To the writer (who is prejudiced) the thing seems axiomatic: all that
goes to make up mountain grandeur, all that is of the spirit,
"Of eye and ear--both what they half create,
And what perceive"--
all that renders a mountain a mountain, as opposed to a mere elevated
mass of matter--
"Of stratified rock
Inclined at an angle of xty degrees"--
is gone in a moment when you thus strip a hill of its proper
attributes--of its mystery, of its remoteness, of its difficulty of
access; and there remains nothing save bulk, which you get in the
Great Pyramid; and prospect, which you get from the Eiffel Tower;
and a clever bit of engineering (diabolically clever), which is just
as well got in the Great Wheel at Kensington. Yet frankly it must
be confessed that if something had to be sacrificed to gratify the
sensation-mongers, and the lazy, and the impotent, the Rigi might best
be immolated. Just this one hill, perhaps, might be spared: but was it
necessary to bind to the horns of the altar every other hill of medium
size in Switzerland--the Niesen, and the Brienzer, Rothhorn, and the
Schynige Platte, and the Beatenberg; to say nothing, on the shores
of Lake Lucerne itself, in addition to the Rigi, of the Burgenstock,
and Pilatus, and the Stanserhorn; and elsewhere in Switzerland of the
deeper crime of the Jungfrau, and in Savoy of the crowning infamy of
Mont Blanc?
The Rigi, in fact, owing to its peculiar configuration and structure,
is less hurt by this eruption of mountain railways than any other
mountain in the Alps. The hill is really a whole agglomeration of
hills--of which the Rigi Kulm (5,905 feet) is merely the culminating
summit--which occupy very roughly the rectangular area that lies
between the lakes of Lucerne, Zug, and Lowerz, and are formed largely
of horizontal layers of red conglomerate, or pudding-stone, rock. The
hill is thus distinctly of the lumpy type of mountain, as opposed to
its rival, Pilatus, which belongs to the vertical, or peaked; and owes
what beauty it possesses to its long bands of ruddy precipice, down
which dangle short spouts of more or less exiguous cascade, and to the
solemn masses of dark wood that gird its middle flanks. The towering
crags of Pilatus, like tongues of shivering flame, have here no rival
in these long, parallel belts of forest, rock, and open lawn, that rise
above the lake in stately tier above tier, and are hardly wilder at
their summits than along the margin of the lake:
"And as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre
Of stateliest view."
It is not difficult among glades like these for a mountain railway
to worm its way obscurely, and to hide its ugly presence beneath the
garment of thick woods.
[Illustration: LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE.]
It is the fashion to spend the night on the Rigi, and to witness the
sunrise next day. The writer has done it once, but the experience was
disappointing: it was already broad daylight, and the whole landscape
was already coldly visible, when the little group of shivering
penitents was marshalled on the summit to watch the up-burst of a sun
that itself seemed cold and grey. It may be better worth the trouble
if one rises for actual daybreak, or when the sun issues forth more
royally from his chamber in the east. On the whole, perhaps, it is
better to avoid the Rigi in its stereotyped sensational aspects,
and to investigate its secret--for secret to yield it assuredly
has--unconventionally, and out of the season. I have crossed its saddle
from Goldau to Weggis, between the Rigi Rotstock and the Schild, during
the later days of March, when the track by which I climbed was still
white with virgin snow. This was, in fact, the old pilgrim path by
which devotees once ascended--may possibly still ascend--to worship at
the little upland chapel (rebuilt in 1715-21) of Our Lady of the Snow
("Maria zum Schnee"). This shrine is the centre of a little colony,
the oldest and quaintest of all that have developed on the Rigi; and
just because it lies in a hollow of the summit peaks, and commands no
distant views, has escaped the bitter ravages of modern exploitation.
The spot is called Rigi Klösterli, because inhabited all the year round
by a little group of Capuchin friars from the community at Arth,
who dwell in the little hospice and serve the little chapel. This
was an old centre for goat-whey cure, and the inns are delightfully
old-fashioned of aspect; the whole appearance of the spot, indeed, is
full of local character, whereas most other settlements on the Rigi are
cosmopolitan and commonplace. The salvation of the place is its utter
lack of view: you must scramble up steep grass slopes, towards the
south, to the summit of the saddle, to enlarge your horizon in a few
steps from a barrier of green hill-side to a prospect so vast that you
seem suddenly to have before you all the kingdoms of the earth and the
glory thereof. I do not know, indeed, that the actual range of view is
greater than that commanded in France from the top of the Puy-de Dôme--
"Si Dôme était sur Dôme
On verra les portes de Rome"--
and certainly it is not so majestic as many more restricted views of
particular groups of Alps, seen--as mountain views are almost always
seen to best advantage--from the slopes, or from the summits, of lesser
hills. But except from the marble roofs of Milan Cathedral there is
perhaps no other generally recognized and easily accessible point of
view from which it is possible, merely by turning the head, to command
so long a line of crowding Alpine summits, extending from the Sentis,
in the extreme east, to Pilatus in the west, for a distance of roughly
one hundred and twenty miles--
"Hill peers o'er hill, and Alps o'er Alps arise."
Yet here, when we stand on the crest in unaccustomed solitude in the
first stirrings of the spring, when the giant hotels are still mostly
shut and empty, and when the high-level railway between the Kaltbad
and the Scheidegg is happily obscured beneath icicle and snowdrift,
there is yet no intimate revelation of the true inward spirit of Alpine
scenery:
"The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,
Where the birds dare not build nor insect's wing
Flit o'er the herbless granite."
The Land of Promise lies fair before us; but here, on the saddle of
the Rigi, we still linger on the threshold, though the biting morning
breeze come, pine-scented, through the forest, and though the musical
cow-bells tinkle for ever on the "high mountain pastures, where day
first appears."
V
Of the five great primary divisions of the Vierwaldstättersee--and one
is driven, however anxious to preserve the configuration of the cross,
to recognize a fifth, and separate, division in the Bay, or Lake, of
Uri--of the five great divisions of the Lake of Lucerne, that which
extends to the quays of Lucerne itself is the most placid and domestic
in respect of actual shore-line. True, there is always a background
of lofty mountain, sufficiently magnificent and sufficiently near
at hand to impress itself on the landscape as a component, and even
dominant, feature; but the actual littoral in this compartment of the
lake--and Lucerne, unlike Zurich or Geneva, but to some extent like
Como, is literally partitioned into compartments--is softly arcadian
in character, with low, gently swelling hills of slight, inconclusive
contour, knee-deep with hay and flowers, and shoulder-deep with
apple-blossom and orchard. Next, I think, in ascending scale is the Bay
of Küsnacht, so called from the big village at its head. The north-west
shore of this is again of mildly pastoral character; but directly from
its south-east margin rise the deep, dark woods of the Rigi, supplying
that hint of real Alpine sublimity--it is still merely a hint--that
is wholly absent from the immediate shores of the little Lucernersee
strictly so-called. The road from Lucerne to Küsnacht, where it skirts
this bay beyond the big, scrambling village of Meggen, is one of the
pleasantest view-points within easy touch of Lucerne whence to enjoy
across the water the noble mountain background that screens the south
shore of the main lake. On a mild spring evening, when this splendid
landscape is an ætherialized study in black and white; when the
snowflakes and cowslips are pushing up in thousands through the quickly
growing grass; when the host of margent rushes scarcely quivers in the
stillness; and when the opposite mountains are reflected without a
ripple in the calm and silent lake, it is hard to believe that all this
exquisite beauty, which seems so unearthly and unexplored, is really
the much boasted, much advertised, much visited "Lovely Lucerne"--it
is difficult to realize that the paddle of a steamer ever churns this
unruffled mirror, or that the harsh whistle of the ascending locomotive
ever wakes the echoes on steadfast Rigi. Those who visit Lucerne only
in the deadly oppression of the high season, when every lake-side quay
swarms like an ant-hill, and every village rings like Babel, are apt to
carry away wrong impressions of this still absolutely unimpaired lake.
The playground at seasons is densely packed, but the place has received
no permanent wrong; those who can reconcile Nature and a crowd will be
happy here even in August, when
"All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out;"
those, on the other hand, who seek the mountains, not exactly perhaps
in the spirit of Manfred, but at any rate in Manfred's happier mood--
"No eyes
But mine now drink this sight of loveliness;
I should be sole in this sweet solitude"--
will easily find solace here in early spring, or late autumn, when the
place is like a desert. No one has done the place a permanent wrong.
Who can claim as much for the holly steeps of Windermere--for the
distorted Clarens shore of Lake Geneva?
Küssnacht itself is a large, typically Swiss, village, at the foot
of the low pass--yet altogether too low to be dignified by the name
of pass--that at this point intervenes between the basins of Zug and
Lucerne. The place has this significance, that here for the first time,
as we perambulate the lake, we encounter spots associated with the
legend of William Tell. I suppose one must call it legend, and concede
so much to the "higher critics," though Ruskin's clarion anger rings
loud and clear. "A sort of triumphant shriek, like all the railway
whistles going off at once at Clapham Junction, has gone up from the
Fooldom of Europe at the destruction of the myth of William Tell. To
us, every word of it was true--but mythically luminous with more than
mortal truth.... The myth of William Tell is destroyed forsooth? and
you have tunnelled Gothard and filled, maybe, the Bay of Uri--and it
was all for you and your sake that the grapes dropped blood from the
press of St. Jacob, and the pine-club struck down horse and helm in
Morgarten glen?" If the history of William Tell itself is unauthentic,
we must not demand authenticity for its visible memorials and sites.
Gesler's Castle above Küssnacht--or the fragments that remain of
it--certainly never belonged to Gesler; whilst the chapel at the head
of the Hohle Gasse, or Hollow Way, was certainly rebuilt in 1644,
and did not exist at all at the end of the fifteenth century. This
is the traditional spot where Tell, after escaping from the boat at
the Tellsplatte, and running by way of Schwyz and the back of the
Rigi, waited for Gesler on his return from Altdorf, and shot him dead
with his terrible cross-bow before he could reach his castle-gate
at Küssnacht. It is worth the traveller's while to press on a mile
or two further in the direction of Arth, though this is to exchange
the basin of the lake of Lucerne for that of the lake of Zug. The
Zugersee lies almost at once beneath us, at a slightly lower level
(roughly sixty feet) than the Vierwaldstättersee, and altogether of
more placid and softer character--a pleasant thing to look at in the
tender evening light, with its shore line embowered amidst orchards
and deep rich meadows, and dotted in every direction with peaceful
farms, but destitute of mountain grandeur, save immediately towards
its head, where the dark forests of the Rigi, towards the west, and
of the Rossberg, towards the east, open a gloomy "Gate of the hills,"
beyond which, though really above Schwyz and the little lake of Lowerz,
the tall, bare rock pyramids of the Great and Little Mitre (Gross and
Kleine Mythen) tower up in cleft magnificence above the cradle of Swiss
freedom.
As to the story of William Tell, this, alas! has gone the way of our
own tales of Robin Hood (whom Mr. Sydney Lee dismisses as a "mythical
forest elf") and his Merry Men of Sherwood Forest. The legend first
appears in the manuscript "Weisses Buch," so-called from its white
binding, that is still preserved at Sarnen, and which was written
between 1467 and 1476; and in the poem called the "Tellenlied," which
dates from about 1474. Tell, however, is supposed to have lived at
about the commencement of the fourteenth century. There are certainly
some scraps of evidence that suggest in combination that the later Tell
myth (as, for that matter, are presumably most myths) is based on some
substratum of solid historical fact. Thus, there is said to be evidence
that a religious observance of some kind was instituted in connection
with Tell in the place where he lived in 1387; and it is stated, though
not earlier than 1504, that a chapel was erected on the Tellsplatte, as
the country people believed in commemoration of the landing there of
William Tell, in 1388. The story as now commonly reported--that Tell
refused to do obeisance to the Austrian Arch-duke's cap at Altdorf;
that he shot the apple off his son's head at the brutal bidding of
Gesler in the market-place of the same town; that he afterwards escaped
from Austrian custody by springing from the boat to the shore at the
Tellsplatte during the onset of a sudden squall; and that he shot
the tyrant through the heart as the latter neared his castle hall
at Küssnacht--first assumed its present form, in which it has been
dramatized by Schiller, at the hands of Tschudi of Glarus, in the
first half of the sixteenth century. Even as early, however, as the
close of this same century the very existence of William Tell had been
questioned by Guilmann in his _De Rebus Helveticis_. Voltaire was duly
sceptical as to the story of the boy and the apple ("l'histoire de la
pomme est bien suspecte"); but the patriotic faith of Canton Uri was
still sufficiently strong at the close of the eighteenth century to
consign to the flames at the hand of the public hangman the sceptical
"Guillaume Tell; fable danoise." The result, however, as expressed
curtly in Murray's handbook, is that Tell has been banished from
authentic history. Exactly similar legends or sagas of the tenth
century are found in Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Holstein, and on the
Rhine; and our Clym of the Clough shoots at an apple on his son's head--
"But Cloudesle cleft the apple in two,
His son he did not nee'."
Thus William Tell, like Arnold von Winkelried, recedes into the dim
borderland of legend and history. After all, it is no irreparable
loss. The individual Arnold, the individual Tell, were units merely of
the great company of authentic, unnamed heroes who smote the Austrian
tyrant at Sempach and Morgarten, who triumphed against the Burgundian
at Grandson, Morat, and Nancy.
The third division, in still ascending scale of mountain grandeur,
of the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons is that which extends
south-westward from the intersection of the cross, and is
known--certainly towards its extremity, and perhaps throughout its
length--from the little village at its head as the Lake of Alpnach.
Here the general effect is more definitely mountainous than that which
has awaited us in sailing the two previous compartments: Rigi is now
exchanged for Pilatus as the presiding genius and dominant monarch of
the scene; whilst the Alps of Unterwalden, and, beyond the low pass of
the Brünig, the greater Alps of the Berner Oberland--the triple Maiden,
Monk, and Giant--the Peak of Storms, and the Peak of Shrieking--at last
supply that mountain background which everyone must have missed when
looking up the water towards Küssnacht or Lucerne. The Oberland giants,
it is true, are set at too great distance to impress the eye, however
much they may affect the imagination, with the same sense of impending
mountain majesty as we find in the Bay of Uri; but Pilatus and the
Stanserhorn are both immediate and splendid objects; whilst even the
dark, pine-clad crags of the little Bürgenstock, which is literally,
like Catullus' Sermio, "all-but-island"--for it needs but the raising
of the lake a very few feet, and the consequent flooding of the low
isthmus between Stans and Buochs, to complete its insulation--push out
into the lake with an assertive individuality that is wholly out of
keeping with their relatively insignificant height (actually less than
four thousand feet). Roughly half-way up, at a point where the lake is
narrowed to the dimensions of a river by the sudden, sharp intrusion of
the tall black cliffs of the Lopperberg (a footstool of Pilatus), the
strait thus strangely created is spanned across to Stanstad by an
ugly iron bridge. The crass utilitarianism, in fact, that mars, though
it cannot wholly disfigure, so much that is beautiful in Switzerland,
and that contributes so little to the honour of the modern Switzer
(however well it may fill his purse), is altogether painfully too
evident along the shores of this division of the Lake of Lucerne. The
hideous lines of electric wires along the margin of the lake are only
less detestable than those that degrade the Pass of Llanberis; this
bridge across the narrows is as ugly as may be; whilst Baedeker (with
his usual businesslike lack of romanticism) duly chronicles in a single
breath the presence of "water-falls and Portland cement factories" in
the neighbouring glen of the Rotzloch.
[Illustration: PILATUS FROM STANSTAD.]
The visitor is now fairly landed in the state of Unterwalden, the
second most mountainous and romantic of the Four Forest Cantons. The
Swiss have solved to perfection the problem of Home Rule: here is a
little territory of less than two hundred square miles, and with a
population in 1900 of less than thirty thousand people (less than that
of Peterborough), which is yet, for all domestic intents and purposes,
an independent sovereign state. Nay, not content with this, since
these thirty thousand odd people, on their odd two hundred miles of
mountain-land, were ill-content to dwell together in amity, the state
is actually sub-divided, like Bâle and Appenzell, into two independent
halves. Each of these is confined mostly to a single big valley, with
its tributaries; and each has a capital that would hardly pass muster
in the mill districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire for a fair-sized
village. The half-canton of Obwalden is thus roughly conterminous
with the valley of the Obwalden Aa, and has Sarnen, on the great
highroad from Lucerne to Meiringen across the Brünig, for its rustic
metropolis, whilst Nidwalden comprises most of the valley of the
Nidwalden Aa, and finds its seat of government at Stans. Both these
valleys, though largely sub-Alpine (the head of the Nidwalden Aa alone
pierces deep into the heart of the greater hills, in the neighbourhood
of Engelberg), are full of lovely scenery, though perhaps apt to be
neglected by the too impatient tourist in his eagerness for the greater
glories of Uri and the Bernese Highlands. It is pleasant, again, after
so much destructive historical criticism, to encounter traces in these
valleys of a less widely recognized Swiss hero, whose services to his
country, if less dramatic than those of Tell and von Winkelried, are
at any rate more authentic, and perhaps of wider import. Nicolas von
der Flüe has found no niche in popular school histories, has evoked
no "Battle of the Books," and has inspired no great national drama.
None the less his mild personality appears with high significance at a
tremulously critical period in the evolution of Swiss unity and Swiss
independence. Whether or not we accept the story of the famous meeting
on the Rütli, it is certain that the foundations of free Switzerland
were laid in August, 1291, by the perpetual alliance, for the
maintenance of their ancient rights and liberties, of the three Cantons
of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz.
[Illustration: LOOKING UP THE LAKE, FROM BECKENRIED.]
This is the stock whence has sprung the present Confederation of
twenty-two free states; but the stock nearly perished at the root from
a little worm of discord in 1481, when the Confederates quarrelled at
Stans over the admission to the Union (which then already numbered
eight members) of the towns of Fribourg and Neuchâtel, and perhaps
also over the division of the spoil that they had lately wrung from
Charles the Bold. The Diet had already debated for three days, and had
broken up on the evening of the third with what seemed little chance
of peace: the morrow threatened secession, and most likely civil war.
Nicolas von der Flüe (often called affectionately Bruder Klaus; his
real name was Löwenbrugger) was born at Flühli, where the Melch Thal
joins the Aa valley, in 1417; and after many years of active life,
including some experience of war, retired, in about his fiftieth
year, to a hermitage in the gorge of the river a few minutes' walk
distant from his native village, where he is said to have subsisted
solely on the Sacramental Wafer, of which he partook once a month.
He died in 1487, and was afterwards beatified, and in the course of
last century, sainted. It so happened that his Confessor in 1481 was
the head parish priest of Stans, a certain Heini Ingrund; who, early
in the morning of the day succeeding the break-up of the Diet, sought
out Nicolas in his hermitage, and obtained from him a message to the
deputies urging reconciliation and peace. Armed with this exhortation
he then hastened back to Stans, where he arrived, as we are told, all
wet with perspiration, and hurriedly made the round of the inns where
the deputies were still lodged, and prevailed on them, by his tears
and entreaties, to meet yet once again in consultation to hear the
secret message of Brother Klaus. The words of this are not reported,
but its effect was immediate and startling; in less than an hour
the irreconcilables were reconciled; and the morning, which rose so
gloomily with presage of disaster and dissolution, finally resulted in
greater strength and union, as ratified in the Convention of Stans. A
picture was painted by command of the government of Nidwalden, and may
still be seen in a passage in the Rathhaus at Stans. It is curiously
unhistorical in character, for Nicolas is here represented as appearing
before the Diet in person, whereas nothing is better attested than that
he merely sent a messenger of peace. Stans itself has other points
of interest; the house of Arnold von Winkelried has been already
alluded to; and there is a statue of the hero in the middle of the
market-place, and another, with a fountain, near the church. Like
most little towns in this part of Switzerland--like Sarnen, Arth, and
Altdorf--the place is delightfully quaint and old-fashioned, with its
often painted houses, and its wide-projecting eaves. Above it towers
the Stanserhorn, with perhaps more bulk than shape; whilst a mile or
two down the valley, on the opposite shore of the lake, the graceful
peaks of Pilatus give a welcome note of contrast. The church has a
Romanesque tower; but the body, like most of those in the Alps, is
Classical rebuilding. In the graveyard, however, stands the medieval
bone-house, which, like others in the neighbourhood, is a separate
and complete little church. The bones have been removed, and perhaps
decently interred; but a tablet on the exterior still testifies to
the appalling slaughter here of the people of Nidwalden--women and
children, as well as men--to the number of more than four hundred, by
the savage French Republicans in 1798. This frightful massacre at the
hands of a brutal soldiery, infuriated by long resistance, lacked no
circumstance of horror--
"Wasting fire and dying groan,
And priests slain on the altar-stone"--
that, after the lapse of another century, may rival the German triumphs
in Belgium. The visitor will find himself repaid by prolonging his
adventure up the valley of the Nidwalden Aa to the upland vale of
Engelberg, where still stands the famous Benedictine monastery that
was founded circa 1120, and that received its present name ("Mons
Angelorum," or Hill of Angels) at the hands of Pope Calixtus II., from
the tradition, celebrated by Wordsworth in some feeble lines in 1820,
that the site was pointed out by angel songs. Roughly half-way up the
valley is the village of Wolfenschiessen, hard by whose parish church
is the little wooden house, or hermitage, that was inhabited by the
hermit, Conrad Scheuber (1480-1559), a grandson of Nicolas von der
Flüe. This was built on the mountain pastures of the Bettelirüt, high
above Wolfenschiessen, in 1547; and was transplanted to its present
site in 1867. On the hermitage, or church--I foolishly seem to have
made no note on the spot, and my recollection is misty--is a series
of naïve paintings, representing scenes from the life of the hermit,
and showing him engaged (unless I mistake) in the congenial medieval
hermit-task of outwitting, or otherwise discomforting, a very material
devil, or devils.
[Illustration: BECKENRIED.]
Sarnen, the capital of Obwalden, is situated at the north end of
its lake of the same name, and is as interesting in its way as its
rival Stans; but the green pastoral valley of the Obwalden Aa, though
everywhere bordered by lofty hills, is altogether more open and less
rugged than its Nidwalden namesake, and terminates, unlike the latter,
in the gentle pass of the Brünig, instead of the lofty, snow-clad
summits of the Spannörter and Titlis. High above the little mountain
town, on a green pedestal of hill, is the stately, Classical parish
church, commanding sweeping views across the wide sub-Alpine vale.
Here, in the crowded burial-ground, I searched in vain in the early
months of 1914 for memorials of any age--almost every cross or stone
had been erected since I had last passed along this valley, in driving
in the diligence from Meiringen to Lucerne, not quite a quarter of
a century earlier. The old bone-houses stand nowadays mostly empty;
but the Swiss dead, I suspect, are still frequently deposited in
graves that hold them only in temporary tenancy. Here, as elsewhere
in Switzerland, you will note the local custom of often letting a
photograph of the deceased into his head-stone, beneath a protecting
sheet of glass. A mile or two to the south-west of Sarnen, by the shore
of the placid lake, is the little village of Sachseln, the church of
which (Classical again) is lucky in its possession of the bones of
Bruder Klaus. I remember in 1887, on the occasion of the drive already
mentioned, passing somewhere in this neighbourhood a long procession
of pilgrims, who were doubtless making their way to the shrine of the
patriot-saint. "His bones," says Murray, "lie in a glass case above
the high altar, the shutters of which are opened for travellers, and
are also withdrawn at stated seasons, in order to exhibit the relics
to crowds of pilgrims.... There is a wooden figure in the transept,
clothed with the saint's veritable robes." I could not, however,
discover this aerial place of sepulchre when I explored this church
in 1914, nor do I remember the wooden figure, though I found statues
of the saint, and of his grandson, Conrad Scheuber, in the parish
church of Stans. The same two statements appear substantially in an old
edition in my possession of 1872, and have perhaps escaped revision; or
perhaps my own memory and observation are at fault. I turn with little
hope to the last edition of the egregious Baedeker (1913), and find
that the burial of the saint at Sachseln is there entirely ignored. I
find, however, as I expected, the number of bedrooms, and the rate of
pension, at the Kreuz, the Engel, the Löwe, and the Rössli--at none of
which doubtless excellent hotels I have ever stopped, or am ever likely
to want to stay!
VI
The big central division of the Lake of Lucerne, extending from the
intersection of the cross to the great right angle (it is practically
a right angle) at Brunnen that marks the commencement of the Urner
See, or Bay of Uri, is considerably the largest, and probably in
some respects the most beautiful, but otherwise perhaps the least
interesting, of all five reaches of the lake. It lacks, indeed, the
superlative grandeur of the Bay of Uri, which corresponds, in English
Lakeland, to the head of Ullswater, or Wastwater--curiously so, since
in all three cases we have, not merely a climax of severe and even
savage sterility, but in all the vista up the water is closed chiefly
by a single, great, pyramidal hill: at Wastwater by Great Gable, at
Ullswater by Caudale Moor, and here, at the Bay of Uri, by the dark
outline of the Bristenstock. The Urner See, then, is the grandest and
most imposing, and in some lights gloomiest, lake in Switzerland,
though the Walenstadtsee, in Glarus and Gallen, will in these respects
by some be thought a rival; but the mid-reaches of Lucerne, to the
south of the red cliffs and dark woods of Rigi, and contained towards
the west by Pilatus, and towards the east by the twin Mythen--the last
three nobly peaked--excel, I think, in open sunny beauty. Contrariwise,
these reaches have but small historical interest, with the single
exception of Gersau, as compared with the other four members: the Tell
traditions, as we have seen, or shall see presently, are confined to
the Bay of Küssnacht and to the lake of Uri; Arnold von Winkelried and
Nicolas von der Flüe belong to Stans, and Stans, though actually set
back a couple of miles or so from the margin of the lake, essentially
belongs to the Bay of Alpnach; whilst even the little Lucernersee,
though so humble in scenic splendour, leads at any rate to the quays of
Lucerne itself, with its girdle of towers and ancient bridges, and with
the banners in its Rathhaus that were wrested from the Austrian on the
field of Sempach, and the armour there stripped from the dead body of
Duke Leopold. Of most of the villages on this central reach, or reaches
(for the division is sub-divided by the narrow strait between the
Nasen)--whether Weggis, Vitznau, Buochs, or Beckenried--there is little
to be said, save that all are quaint and characteristic, and that all
are delightfully situated on the margin of the lake. Each, of course,
is not without its page in history--Buochs, for example, was burnt by
the French in 1798; whilst Weggis was only finally incorporated into
the Canton of Lucerne, after years of struggling independence, in
1535. Gersau, however, of all this group of littoral settlements, is
in some respects by far the most significant. This is a mere village,
at the foot of the wooded Hochfluh--the last big point to the cast of
the strangely isolated Rigi massif, and apparently the loftiest (5,574
feet), with the exception of Rigi Kulm. Hardly bigger than Küssnacht,
and decidedly smaller than Brunnen, this town--if town it may be
called--of less than fifteen hundred souls, with its neighbouring strip
of lake-side territory, maintained for more than four long centuries
its status as the smallest independent sovereign state in Europe. The
place once belonged to the Dukes of Hapsburgh, who "levied duties on
lambs, goatskins, fish, and grey cloth," and by them it was mortgaged
to the barons of Ramstein, who parted with its possession to the house
of Von Moos, of Lucerne. From the latter Gersau bought its freedom in
1390 for the sum of 690 pfennigs, which it had painfully "scraped
together after ten years of hard toil." "They had already, thirty-one
years before, concluded a league with the Four Forest Cantons, and had
even rendered assistance to the Confederates in the battle of Sempach;
where a native of the town captured the banner of Hohenzollern and
brought it home and placed it in the church of Gersau, which even in
its present form bears witness to the pride of the little territory."
Thus Gersau freed herself in the Middle Ages from the house of
Hapsburgh, and triumphed against the house of Hohenzollern, just as
civilized Europe, more than five hundred years later, agonised and
struggled only yesterday:
"Haud aliter puppesque tuæ pubesque tuorum
Aut portum tenet aut pleno subit ostia velo,
Perge modo, et, qua te ducit via, dirige gressum."
[Illustration: LAKE URI FROM BRUNNEN.]
This central compartment of the lake is closed towards the east, as
already stated, by the bare rock peaks of the Great and Little Mythen.
These have been compared, unless I mistake, to the twin Langdale
Pikes, in Westmoreland, as seen from the head of Windermere; and
probably the comparison has just as much validity as comparisons of
the sort are ever capable of asserting. Nature, who is studious never
to reproduce herself with complete and meticulous accuracy, is fond
enough of teasing us with suggestion and reminiscence, and often enough
finds pleasure in moulding "two lovely berries" on a single stem. The
Mythen are removed, again like Wordsworth's "lusty twins," to a quite
appreciable distance from the margin of the lake; but here, whereas
in Westmoreland the intervening country is the sweetest confusion
imaginable of undulating pasture and coppice along the broken course
of the Brathay, the broad plinth that rises up in slow but persistent
gradient from Brunnen to the foot of the Mythen is, to the writer's
way of thinking (and he knows of no support from the judgment of other
critics), the weakest bit of composition along the whole basin of
Lucerne, and a tract of country--it is luckily very small--as dull
and profitless as any to be found among the Alps. Yet this, in fact,
as part and parcel of the Canton of Schwyz, is in a sense the very
heart and core of Switzerland, and the veritable holy cradle of Swiss
freedom. It has given its name to the whole Confederation, and the
little town of Schwyz itself, which is visible rather too obviously
as the land slopes up in the distance, though with less than eight
thousand inhabitants, might very justly complain of Berne that the
latter has usurped its proper dignity in attracting to itself the
Swiss seat of federal government. Brunnen, which is called the port of
Schwyz, and from which it is distant about three miles, is singularly
crushed and over-weighted by the great hotels on the Seelisberg and the
Axenfels, and has suffered perhaps more severely by the exploitation
of its neighbourhood than any other single station on the lake. The
attraction here, of course, is the majestic Bay of Uri, which comes
into view with startling suddenness, in a few revolutions of the
paddles, as the steamer approaches the quay at Brunnen; and whose
splendour, luckily, neither monster hotel, nor monster crowd, nor the
presence of the great St. Gothard railway (here first insistently
apparent on the margin of the lake),
"nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy."
One would have preferred, no doubt, to have approached this inner
shrine of the hills--which is also the inner shrine of the great
traditions of Swiss liberty--with somewhat less obtrusive parade of the
engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century. One remembers for the
moment how William and Dorothy Wordsworth came hither, and on foot, in
1820. "We descended," writes Dorothy in one of her journals, "by a long
flight of steps, into the Vale, and, after about half a mile's walking,
we arrived at _Brunnen_. Espied Wm. and M. [her brother, William, and
his wife] upon a crag above the village, and they directed us to the
Eagle Inn, where I instantly seated myself before a window, with a
long reach of the Lake of Uri before me, the magnificent commencement
to our regular approach to the St. Gothard Pass of the Alps. [Hitherto
their approach from Calais had been devious, by way of the Rhine and
the Oberland.] My first feeling was of extreme delight in the excessive
_beauty_ of the scene--I had expected something of a more awful
impression from the Lake of Uri; but nothing so _beautiful_." There was
then no St. Gothard railway; no over-weening hotels; not even, perhaps,
a steamboat on the lake!
It is singular, perhaps, that neither this superlative Bay of Uri, nor
all its varied traditions of the Tellsplatte or the Rütli, should have
succeeded in evoking a single verse from the poet whose inspiration had
been kindled to such splendid effort in Scotland, less than twenty
years previously, by the vision of a sweet-voiced girl by the spray of
a Highland waterfall, by the careless evening greeting of a woman by
a lake. The magic period of plenary inspiration was passed, indeed,
for Wordsworth at the time of this continental tour in 1820; and yet
it was after his return to England that he composed the great sonnet
on King's College Chapel. The Rütli lies across the lake scarcely half
an hour's row from Brunnen, yet it does not appear from Dorothy's
journal that her brother even visited it. Here, on a green shelf of
meadow by the side of the greener lake, and over-topped towards the
west by the dark woods and cliffs of the Sonnenberg, are the few square
yards of sacred soil where the three founders of Swiss freedom met
together and conspired, if fables do not lie, for the rooting out of
the Austrian tyrant in 1307. Their actual names are given, and the
very day of meeting--November 7, in "the dead vast and middle of the
night"--yet the imp of modern criticism, which has spared neither Tell
nor Arnold von Winkelried, is clamorous again to rob us of this famous
drama of conjuration on the Rütli. On the opposite shore of the lake,
but considerably further to the south--to the south, in fact, of the
little village of Sisikon, which itself may be reckoned as roughly the
centre of the Bay of Uri--on the immediate margin of the water, and
below the great, vertical, twisted precipices of the dark and towering
Axenberg, is the little ledge of the Tellsplatte, where Tell is said to
have sprung ashore from the boat, and from the custody of his warders,
during the onslaught of a sudden squall, when on his way as a prisoner
from Altdorf to Küssnacht. The chapel was rebuilt towards the close of
last century, and is visible as we pass from the steamer. Behind it
runs the great St. Gothard railway, on its way from Bâle to Milan; and
higher up the cliff is the famous highroad of the Axenstrasse, which
was driven along the face of these sheer and impracticable precipices,
in alternate cutting, embankment and tunnel, by the zeal of the Federal
Government in 1863-64, in order to better the communication between
Canton Ticino and the rest of Switzerland. Ticino, or Tessin, the fifth
largest of the states in acreage but the seventh in population, lies to
the south of Uri, across the wild pass of the St. Gothard, on the sunny
Italian side of the Alps, and was only admitted to the Confederation in
1803, though earlier by a dozen years than units of such importance as
Neuchâtel, Geneva, and the Valais. One is rather apt to forget that the
Switzerland of the days before the French Revolution--the Switzerland
whose name is a synonym for liberty; the Switzerland of Sempach,
Morat, and Morgarten--consisted only of the thirteen German-speaking
states that are clustered mostly to the north and west of the original
mountain nucleus of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz.
With Flüelen, exactly at the head of the lake, we conclude our
perambulation of the Vierwaldstättersee. I do not know that this little
village has much of particular interest; but a couple of miles beyond
it is the small mountain capital of Uri, where Tell is reported in the
immortal legend to have shot the apple from off his boy's head, and
where his statue still stands in the diminutive market-place. The vale
of the Reuss at Altdorf, and indeed as far south as Amsteg, where it
is blocked, as it were, by the huge pyramid of the Bristenstock, and
where the floor of the valley first begins to rise in earnest towards
the far-away _col_ of the St. Gothard, is merely a prolongation of the
mountain basin of the Urnersee, with the substitution of flat green
pasture for a pavement of crystal lake. Of the Bay of Uri itself I feel
that I have said little, yet feel, with some sincerity, that there
is little to be said. Its elements, though majestic, are exceedingly
downright and simple, whereas those of the rest of the Lake of Lucerne
are multiform, subtle, and complex. Whatever be the impression that
it effects on the spectator, it is likely to accomplish this at once;
it is no finer at the head than at the foot; and all that it has of
grandeur (and nothing of the kind in the Alps is grander) is flashed
upon us in a moment, in complete and final revelation, when first it
comes into vision between the piers at Trieb and Brunnen. It varies, of
course, in splendour as the day is bright or dull; but less, I imagine,
than the lower reaches of the lake, which depend more for their effect
on screens of mountain more remote, and are capable of assuming softer
and lovelier colouring exactly because their atmospheric distances are
greater. In gloom, or rain, or heat-haze, it is the one division of
the lake that will fail to disappoint us, but perhaps it is also the
one division that responds less readily to the vivifying influences
of sunshine and blue sky. Nor is it really wild, if one may say so
without paradox, in the sense in which Ennerdale is wild, or Wastdale
Head, or Langstrath, among the familiar fells of Cumberland. The cliffs
that drop directly to its eastern shore are indeed tremendous and
unapproachable, but above them, as we know, are gentle Alpine pastures
that are musical with cow-bells, and meadows that are fragrant with hay
and flowers. The tops of distant snow-clad mountains, again, though
visible from its waters, are really removed to immense distances,
above it and beyond it, and though they ring it round in insuperable
barrier, almost belong to another world. Land where you can, or will,
and you find your immediate environment scarcely wilder, if wilder at
all, than the lower slopes of Pilatus or Rigi. It is only, in fact, in
the upland vales of Switzerland--at spots like the Grimsel Hospice, or
towards the summits of passes like the Simplon or the Splügen--that the
ordinary wanderer, who is not a climber, will realize that _abandon_
of wild and savage sterility that delights him in a hundred glens
among the mountains of Scotland or Carnarvonshire, in Glen Sannox, or
Glen Sligachan, in Llanberis, or Cwm Llydaw. The Bay of Uri is indeed
majestic, and its framework of distant summits is indeed magnificently
wild, yet not here, I think, shall we taste with Shelley the strange
"Pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be."
INDEX
[The principal reference is given first.]
Ahorn, Lukas, 21
Alpnach, Lake of, 41
Altdorf, 61, 40
Axenberg, the, 60
Axenfels, the, 57
Axenstrasse, the, 60
Beckenried, 53
Beromünster, 10
Bettelirüt, the, 49
Bone-houses, 48, 50
Bristenstock, the, 52, 61
Brünig Pass, 50
Brunnen, 57, 52
Bruder Klaus (see Flüe, Nicolas von der)
Buochs, 53, 54
Bürgenstock, the, 42
Capuchin Friars, 32
Carlyle (quoted), 20
"Dance of Death," the, 18
Engelberg, 48, 44
Flüe, Nicolas von der, 46, 45, 49, 50
Flüelen, 61
Flühli, 46
Frackmünd, the, 24
Gersau, 54
Gesler, 37, 38, 40
Gesler's Castle, 37
Gesner, Conrad, 26
Goat-whey cure, 32
Hapsburgh, Dukes of, 54, 55
Hochfluh, the, 54
Hohenzollern, House of, 55
Hohle Gasse, the, 37
Ingrund, Heini, 46
Küsnacht, 36, 40
Küsnacht, Bay of, 34
Leopold, Duke, 53
Lopperberg, the, 42
Lowerz, Lake of, 38
Lucerne, 14-21, 53
Barfüsserkirche, 14
City Walls, 14
Gletscher Garten, 21
Hof-Brücke, 17
Hofkirche, 15, 16
Kapell-Brücke, 17, 18
Lion Monument, 20
Mühlen Brücke, 18
Quays, view from, 8, 21
Rathhaus, 14, 53
St. Peter's Kapel, 17
Spreuerbrücke, 18
Wasserturm, 17
Lucernersee, 53
Meggen, 35
Mountain railways, 33
Mythen, the, 55, 38, 53
Nasen, the, 53
Nidwalden, 44, 47
Nidwalden Aa, the, 44
Oberland, Berner, 42
Obwalden, 44
Obwalden Aa, the, 44
"Our Lady of the Snow," 31
Pilate, Pontius, 23
Pilatus, Mount, 23, 25, 30, 42, 53
Ramstein, Barons of, 54
Reuss, River, 17, 61
Rigi, 27, 23, 32, 38, 53
Rigi Klösterli, 31
Rigi, view from, 32
Rossberg, the, 38
Rotzloch, the, 43
Rumligbach, the, 24
Ruskin (quoted), 8, 37
Rütli, the, 59
Sachseln, 50
St. Gothard Pass, 60, 61
St. Gothard Railway, 57, 60
St. Leodegar, 15, 17, 18
Sarnen, 44, 49
Sarnen, Lake of, 50
Scheuber, Conrad, 49, 51
Schwyz, 38, 56
Schwyz, Canton, 56, 61
Sempach, 12, 10, 41, 53, 55
Sempach, Lake of, 7, 10
Seelisberg, the, 57
Sisikon, 60
Sonnenberg, the, 59
Spannörter, the, 50
Stans, 47, 11, 44, 45, 46, 51
Stans, Convention of, 47
Stanserhorn, the, 42, 47
Stanstad, 43
Sursee, 9
Tell, William, 37, 39, 53, 60
Tellsplatte, the, 60, 38, 39
Thorwaldsen, 21
Ticino, Canton, 60
Titlis, the, 22, 50
Tödi, the, 22
Tomlishorn, 24
Unterwalden, 43, 8, 41, 61
Uri, Bay of, 61, 34, 52, 57, 58
Uri, Canton, 61
Vierwaldstättersee, 5, 9, 34, 35
Vitznau, 53
Von Moos, House of, 54
Weggis, 53, 54
"Weisses Buch," the, 39
Winkelried, Arnold von, 11
Wolfenschiessen, 49
Wordsworth, William, 58
Wordsworth, Dorothy (quoted), 58
Zugersee, the, 38
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD
Transcribers' Notes:
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
This book does not have a Table of Contents.
Text uses both "Küsnacht" and "Küssnacht"; both retained.
Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.
Frontispiece: "FLÜELEN" was printed as "FLUELLEN" and "FLUELEN" but
changed here for consistency with all other occurrences of the name.
Page 9: "Vierwaldstättersee" was printed as "Vierwaldstattersee" but
changed here for consistency with all other occurrences of the name.
Page 19: "courve" probably is a misspelling for "couvre".
Page 48: "Engelberg" was printed as "Engelburg" but changed here for
consistency with all other occurrences of the name.
Index: "Tellsplatte" was printed as "Tellplatte" but changed here for
consistency with all other occurrences of that name. "Axenstrasse"
was printed as "Axentrasse" but changed here to match the [correct]
spelling on page 60. "Lopperberg" was printed as "Loffenberg" but
changed here to match the spelling on page 42. "Spreuerbrücke" is
printed as two words on page 18.
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