The Spell of Switzerland

CHAPTER XXIV

ON THE SHORES OF LAKE LUCERNE

MY

 classmate, Ned Allen, was always a dilettante; if he had been obliged to work, he might have accomplished great things; but, though he may have had ambitions, the days of his young manhood slipped away while he travelled all over the world. Then he became disgusted with what he considered unjust taxation, and, converting all his property into income-bearing bonds, so that he had no care or worry, he came to Europe and lived part of the time in his villa on the Lake of the Four Cantons and part of the time in a lovely palazzo near Palermo in Sicily.

He had everything to make him happy, and, yet, like most of the rich men whom I have ever known, he was not happy. Happiness comes only in forgetting one’s self, and that he had no time to do, because he had all the time there was.

It did him good, I think, to be obliged to exert himself a little to show me the sights. Like myself, he was very fond of music, and he followed the example of a good many wealthy men in Switzerland – he had a string quartet play every Sunday afternoon and also two or three evenings a week. One day he took me to the house of a friend of his who supported a large orchestra and gave concerts to a few invited guests or to himself alone according to circumstances. He had been to Paderewski’s villa on the Lake of Constance and to the Count von Hesse-Wartegg’s, where his wife, Madame Minnie Hauk, after retiring from the stage, has lived for a number of years. As I knew them all, I wished that I might pay my respects, but I had no chance – there were so many other things to do.

One of my first objects of pilgrimage at Lucerne was the Peace and War Museum, founded by that remarkable Austrian Jew, Von Bloch. My classmate was inclined to scoff at the notion of Universal Peace. I found he had not read or even thought very deeply on the subject, and I really think that my enthusiasm communicated itself somewhat to him. He had never thought, before I suggested it to him, that the small stature of the present-day French and Italians was probably due to the fact that the best and strongest of the youth of those two nations were killed off in the Napoleonic and subsequent wars. War does not ensure the survival of the fittest. The old and weaklings are left to perpetuate the race.

One would hardly believe it, but Ned had never been to the top of Pilatus; I found he was not especially interested in scenery, he who lived in the midst of the most splendid scenery in Switzerland. But he went with me to Pilatus. As we started I quoted the rhymed proverb: —

“Hat der Pilatus einen Hut

Dann wird das Wetter gut;

Hat er einen Degen

So giebt es sicher Regen.”

He had heard that and said it was quite true; if the mountain was adorned with a little cloudy cap it meant that there would be fair weather; fortunately the peak wore his hat and not his dagger, so we had bright sunshine and not rain.

But Ned did not know the legend which connects Pilate with the mountain. Of course it should be

Mons Pileatus

– the capt mountain; but the story became widespread that after Christ was put to death, Pilate was recalled to Rome. He wore Christ’s robe. He was found guilty of malfeasance and was put to death. His body was thrown into the Tiber which refused it and angry storms arose. It was sent to Vienna: the Danube refused it; it was brought to the Rhône; again storms; the lake refused it; new disasters came upon Lausanne. Then it was brought to the Frankmünt – that is what the rough upper part of the mountain is called; the

mons fractus

– where Pilate’s ghost fought with the spectre of King Herod – the red of the conflict was seen then and afterwards at sunset on the mountain-top. Up came a necromancer and laid a terrible spell. In the days that followed nothing would grow there, and on Good Friday the disgraced procurator was doomed to appear on a black mule with a white spot – like a Roman knight – and show himself.

So great was the fear of Pilatus that until comparatively modern times no one dared to go up to it. Now there is a railway, and the ghost of Pilate is laid. Sir Edwin Arnold speaks of the legend in his lilting poem: —

“He riseth alone, – alone and proud

From the shore of an emerald sea;

His crest hath a shroud of the crimson cloud,

For a king of the Alps is he;

Standing alone as a king should stand,

With his foot on the fields of his own broad lands.

“And never a storm from the stores of the North

Comes sweeping along the sky

But it emptieth forth the first of its wrath

On the crags on that mountain high;

And the voice of those crags has a tale to tell

That the heart of the hearer shall treasure well.

“A tale of a brow that was bound with gold,

And a heart that was bowed with sin;

Of a fierce deed told of the days of old

That might never sweet mercy win,

Of legions in steel that were waiting by

For the death of the God that could never die.

“Of a dear kind face that its kindness kept

Dabbled with blood of its own;

Of a lady who leapt from the sleep she slept

To plead at a judgment-throne.

Of a cross and a cry and a night at noon

And the sun and the earth at a sickly swoon.

“But climb the crags when the storm has rule

And the spirit that rides the blast,

And hark to his howl as he sweeps the pool

Where the Roman groaned his last;

And to thee shall the tongue of the tempest tell

A record too sad for the poet’s shell.”

Whatever may have been the bareness of its sides in consequence of necromancer’s spells it is now filled with beautiful plant life – hundreds of varieties. If I had been as much of a botanist as I am a collector for my mental picture-gallery I might fill a page with the names and descriptions of the Alpine flowers, which I noticed as merely blue or pink or yellow and cared little for distinguishing them apart. Once during one of my trips I did see the edelweiss growing, but it is not very pretty; but the fields of gentians and the forget-me-nots – those acres of blue sky fallen to earth and growing up again – those would or might inspire and extract a poem from the most prosaic.

We went together also to the top of the Rigi, which is easily attainable by railway.

Töpfer, in his story entitled “Les Deux Scheidegg,” gives a most enthusiastic description of an avalanche. I think I like the view from Pilatus better than from Rigi; but from both the mountains look like a colossal ocean in a storm and suddenly stricken by the sight of Medusa’s face!

Ned took me in his motor-boat on several trips around the lake which has so many names. I was not really so much interested in the William Tell region as I suppose I should have been. Suppose it were proved as decisively as Tell, as Eindridi with King Olaf, as Hemingr with King Harald, or as Geyti, son of Alask, have been proved to be mere sun myths, that Napoleon and Apollo were really the same, and that George Washington was only a sun myth! His axe corresponds to the bow and arrow; it cuts down the cherry-tree of darkness with its glittering edge and brings liberty to his fellow-man. Who would then care, for any sentimental reasons, to go to Mount Vernon? Why, Schiller, himself, never saw the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons any more than Coleridge ever saw Chamonix; he got all his local colour from Goethe’s descriptions. To go to the Tell Chapel is to participate in a fraud! Yet the natives each year take part in a sort of folk-play, which has all the solemnity of a semi-religious celebration. I did not care to stop as we passed by; still less when we took passage in a big Zeppelin dirigible and looked down upon the big sprawling lake winding among its mountains!

Ned actually waked up enough to walk with me about Lucerne; like one who always has the opportunity, he had never before been through the two covered bridges past the imposing water tower or scrutinized the quaint wall paintings. He went with me to see the famous Lion of Lucerne – one of the few memorial monsters that do not pall on acquaintance. The little pool in front adds immensely to the effect.

I had to tear myself away from the pleasant and luxurious home of my friend. I went back to Lausanne by a somewhat different route, taking in Sarnen, Meyringen and Brienz, and then going by steamboat from end to end of the Brienzersee, not failing to spend a few hours at the Giessbach. They illuminate it at night, but there is something immodest about such an exhibition; it is like catching sight of a wood-nymph or a water-fairy. I remember once seeing a great fire at Niagara Falls and the river actually turned red with shame. But, by moonlight, without artificial streams of light, it must be enchanting.

I made a little stay at Interlaken, and from there I ran over to Lauterbrunnen, where the Staubbach falls over its frowning suicidal cliffs and dies before it reaches the valley. It is weird and ghostlike – the

spirit

 of a waterfall. I walked far up into the valley, and, coming back to the hotel once more, saw that delicate blush on the Jungfrau. I don’t wonder Thomas Gray declares that “the mountains are ecstatic and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year.” I would go farther and say that as one grew older, one should live among them or in sight of them.

CHAPTER XXV

LAUSANNE AGAIN

IN

 going back I walked part of the way, taking in inverse order Byron’s route, which is interesting because he worked his reminiscences of it into “Manfred.” This is what Byron says, and it shows how poems crystallize: “The music of the cows’ bells (for their wealth, like the Patriarchs’, is cattle) in the pastures (which reach to a height far above any mountains in Britain) and the shepherds, shouting to us from crag to crag, and playing on their reeds where the steeps appeared almost inaccessible, with the surrounding scenery, realized all that I ever heard or imagined of a pastoral existence – much more so than Greece or Asia Minor, for there we are a little too much of the saber and musquet order; and if there is a crook in one hand, you are sure to see a gun in the other – but this was pure and unmixed – solitary, savage and patriarchal: the effect I cannot describe. As we went, they played the ‘Ranz des Vaches’ and other airs by way of farewell.”

The pipes of the shepherds he later introduced into “Manfred:”

“Hark! the note,

The natural music of the mountain reed —

For here the patriarchal days are not

A pastoral fable – pipes in the liberal air,

Mix with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd.”

Still in the high lands he describes threading the long, narrow valley of the Sarine then little traversed by travellers. He describes the bed of the river as very low and deep, “rapid as anger.” He thought the people looked free and happy and rich: “the cows superb; a bull nearly leaped into the

charaban

– agreeable companion in a post chaise – goats and sheep very thriving. A mountain with enormous glaciers to the right – the Kletsgerberg; further on, the Hockthorn – nice names – so soft! – Hockthorn, I believe, very lofty and craggy, patched with snow only; no glaciers on it, but some good epaulettes of clouds.”

As he travelled from the Canton Vaud into the Canton of Bern he crossed between the Château d’Oex and the village of Saanen, so I reversed the order. The valley then, as now, was famous for its cheese. Byron says it was famous for cheese, liberty, property and no taxes, also bad German. They passed along the valley of Simmenthal and came into the plain of Thun by its narrow entrance with high precipices wooded to the top. He crossed the river in a boat rowed by women, which caused him to remark: “Women went right for the first time in my recollection.” He visited the modern castle of Schadau at the western end of the Lake of Thun, near the mouth of the Aar. A boat took them in three hours from Castle Schadau to Neuhaus: “The lake small, but the banks fine: rocks down to the water’s edge.”

He was carried away by the splendour of the scenery beyond Interlaken. The glaciers and torrents from the Jungfrau charmed him. He lodged at the house of the curate, which stood immediately opposite the Staubbach – “nine hundred feet in height of visible descent.” He heard an avalanche fall like thunder. “A storm came on – thunder, lightning, hail; all in perfection and beautiful.” He would not let the guide carry his cane because it had a sword concealed in it and he was afraid it might attract the lightning.

He thus describes the fall: – “The torrent is in shape curving over the rock, like the

tail

 of a white horse streaking in the wind, such as might be conceived would be that of the ‘pale horse’ on which

Death

 is mounted in the Apocalypse. It is neither mist nor water but a something between both; its immense height (nine hundred feet) gives it a wave, a curve, a spreading here, a condensation there, wonderful and indescribable.”

Here, again, he got aliment for “Manfred:”

“It is not noon – the sunbow’s rays still arch

The torrent with the many hues of heaven,

And roll the sheeted silver’s waving column,

O’er the crag’s headlong perpendicular,

And flings its lines of foaming light along

And to and fro, like the pale courser’s tail,

The giant steed, to be bestrode by Death

As told in the Apocalypse.”

The rainbow was suggested by the sun shining on the lower part of the torrent, “of all colors but principally purple and gold, the bow moving as you move.”

A day later he climbed to the top of the Wengern Mountain, five thousand feet above the valley, the view comprising the whole of the Jungfrau with all her glacier, then the Dent d’Argent, “shining like truth,” the two Eigers and the Wetterhorn. He says: “I heard the avalanches falling every five minutes nearly – as if God was pelting the Devil down from Heaven with snowballs. From where we stood, on the Wengern Alp, we had all these in view on one side: on the other, the clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the Ocean of Hell during a Springtide – it was white and sulphury and immeasurably deep in appearance.” From the summit they “looked down upon a boiling sea of cloud, dashing against the crags on which we stood.”

The avalanches and sulphurous clouds of course became part of the

décor

 of “Manfred:”

“Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down

In mountainous overwhelming, come and crush me!

I hear ye momently above, beneath,

Crash with a frequent conflict; but ye pass,

And only fall on things which still would live.

“The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds

Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury,

Like foam from the roused ocean of deep Hell.”

He saw the Grindelwald Glacier distinct, though it was twilight, and he compared it to a frozen hurricane, a figure which he put unchanged in his poem:

“O’er the savage sea,

The glassy ocean of the mountain ice,

We skim its rugged breakers, which put on

The aspect of a tumbling tempest’s foam,

Frozen in a moment.”

Passing over the Great Scheideck, Rosenlaui, the Falls of the Reichenbach (“two hundred feet high”), the Valley of Oberhasli, he reached Brienz, where four of the peasant girls of Oberhasli sang the airs of their country – “wild and original and at the same time of great sweetness.”

The summer was drawing to an end. I had got somewhat tired of excursions, and was content to settle down to a regular course of reading. I suppose if it had not been for my beloved relatives I might have been tempted to plan for a winter in Rome, which had for years seemed to me a desirable place to visit. If it had not been for these same dear ones, there were a dozen places in Switzerland which would have attracted me. I detest the cold, and Montreux, which has been called the Riviera of Helvetia, offered a climate tempered against the pernicious

bise

. We ran up to the Tour d’Aï one afternoon and I was fascinated with the place.

Will and I made a walking trip through the Bernese Oberland and we both liked Thun. He suggested that it was because we, or I, happened to be musical. I vowed that I would, in some way, get possession of the Twelfth-Century Castle of Zähringen-Kyburg, have it refitted with all American conveniences and live there the rest of my days – provided I could find the right kind of a housekeeper. Seriously, is there any more magnificent view in all Switzerland than from the environs of Thun and from the lake? I trow not. But perhaps one would weary of too grandiose views; after all, for human nature’s daily food, human society is preferable to mountains, and the fact that the tamer lakes, such as Leman and Constance, seem to attract for regular residence more congenial personages than I could find dwelt at Thun might make one pause in one’s plan to oust the museum and turn public property into a selfish private possession. I could not follow Voltaire’s example and buy every château I saw and liked!

So I was contented enough with Lausanne as a home. I do not propose to inflict on my friends an account of every excursion that I took. That through the Oberland perhaps more than any other made me realize how completely I was subjected to that peculiar hypnotic influence which we agree to call a spell.

It is a curious thing that in many of the high mountain passes, where desolation of barrenness reigns, there is a lake said to have been formed by the tears of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. For instance, when he first came to the Grimsel pass, between Bern and Valais, it was radiant with fertile beauty; the climate was warm; it supported a happy population; but he passed like a desolating breath, and when, years later, he came again, in that never-ceasing round, all was changed. He wept and his tears formed “The Lake of the Dead” – Der Totensee. In it lie the bones of those who perished in that terrible struggle between the Austrians and the French in 1799. There are all sorts of wonderful legends which one might collect. For instance, how came the Grindelwald to be so wide? – not that it is so wide, – but still it is wider than it once was! Well, Saint Martin came there and was not satisfied with its appearance, so he pried the valley walls apart. The prints of his feet are visible. On the way to the Grimsel we spent a long time at the Handeck Fall, which is regarded as the finest in Europe; the Aar with considerable volume of water falls into an abyss about twenty-three meters higher than Niagara.

I followed Byron’s footsteps in following Rousseau’s – only much more deliberately. It is rather difficult now, for many of the houses which sheltered Rousseau and his fair mistress have been destroyed; that one which belonged to Madame de Warens’s father, J. B. de la Tour, “Baron de l’Empire,” was taken down in 1889. The daughter was educated at Lausanne and married Noble Sebastien-Isaac de Loys, son of the Seigneur de Villardin, and a soldier who had fought in the Swedish service. As M. de Loys possessed a seigneurie in a neighbouring village he took the name of it and called himself Vuarens, which the Bernese made into Warens. I sympathized with poor M. de Warens. He tells the story of his marital troubles in a letter which is a volume and breathes sincerity. But there is a good deal of comedy about the whole affair, and only Madame de Warens’s pathetic ending, in poverty and neglect, makes one feel sorry for her.

In 1762 the Comte d’Escheray – a young man of twenty-nine – happened to be living in a little house at Motiers-Travers, in a delightful valley, spending his time in the cultivation of literature and music, in walking and in hunting. Rousseau was there also, and the count gives a lively narrative of his acquaintance with the philosopher; his dinners, his conversations, his evening walks in the woods, singing duets. One day he and Rousseau walked from Colombier to Les Brenets – six leagues – stopping every little while to study the wild places. The count says: “I consider this little portion of the Jura, enclosed in the boundaries of Neuchâtel, as one of the most curious countries in the world for the philosopher, the physician, the geologist, the artist and the mechanician to study.” They finally came to the residence of M. du Peyron, a rich, charitable American. Rousseau took kindly to him and they botanized together.

It was a pleasant excursion to pick out Rousseau’s tracks in this expedition.

I also made a study of Voltaire’s life, and read a great deal of his writings. I prepared an article on his theatrical ventures. One of his châteaux was Monrion (which means

mons rotundus

) on the crest between Lausanne and the lake. It was a square two-story building with high attic and L-shaped wings. It had twenty-four rooms with superb views. He did not live in it long, and it passed into the hands of Dr. Tissot. Voltaire moved into a house in Lausanne, 6, Rue du Grand Chêne, and here he gave theatrical entertainments. He also organized them at Monrepos, a château then owned by the Marquis de Langalérie. The stage was in the barn but the spectators were in the house. He wrote his friends about the success of them: “I play the old man, Lusignan… I assure you, without vanity, that I am the best old fool to be found in any company.” To his friend Thiriot: “I wish that you had passed the winter with me at Lausanne. You would have seen new pieces performed by excellent actors, strangers coming from thirty leagues around, and my beautiful shores of Lake Leman become the home of art, of pleasure, and of taste.” To his niece, Madame de Fontaine: “The idlers of Paris think that Switzerland is a savage country; they would be very much astonished if they saw ‘Zaire’ better played at Lausanne than it is played at Paris; they would be still more surprised to see two hundred spectators as good judges as there are in Europe… I have made tears flow from all the Swiss eyes.” When he moved to Geneva, and especially when he bought the château of Ferney, so that he might be a thorn in the flesh of Genevese sanctimoniousness, he was older, but still played his parts.

In 176 °Catherine de Chandieu, then a girl of nineteen, was at Geneva and saw Voltaire’s play “Fanime,” given extremely well by Madame Denis, Madame Constant-Pictet, Mademoiselle de Basincourt and Voltaire himself. She describes him thus: “Voltaire was dressed in a way which was enough to make one choke with amusement; he wore huge culottes which came down to his ankles, a little vest of red silk embroidered with gold; over this vest a very large vest of magnificent material, white embroidered in gold and silver; it was open at one side so as to show the undervest and on the other it came down below the knee; his culottes were of satin cramoisi; over his great vest he wore a kind of coat of satin with sil