As you go from Lucerne in a decorous little steamboat down the pleasant
Vierwaldstättersee, or Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, with the sloping
hills on either side, and the green meadow-patches and occasional house
among the trees, you come to a sudden turn where the scenery changes
swiftly, and pass between steep and shaggy rocks rising perpendicularly
out of the blue water, which seems to get bluer there, into the frowning
Bay of Uri, guarded, as if it were the last home of freedom, by great
granite hills, lying like sleepy giants with outstretched arms, while
the heavy clouds rest black and broken on their summits, and the white
vapors float below. Just where the lake makes this turn is the hamlet of
Brunnen, which you will not hurry by, if you are wise, but tarry with
the kind little hostess of the Golden Eagle by the pleasant shore, and
learn, if you will, as nowhere else, what the spirit of the Swiss was in
the ancient time, as in this.
As you walk across the little valley which stretches down from the hills
to the lake where Brunnen is, you remember that it is the town of Schwyz
you come to, where dwelt once the hardy, valorous little colony
which gave its name to Switzerland,--famous in the annals of this
stout-hearted mountain-land for the "peculiar fire" with which they have
always fought for their ancient freedom,--worthy to leave their name, in
lasting token of the service they did to their fellows and to mankind.
Schwyz lies at the foot of the Hacken Mountain, which rises with double
peaks known as the Mythen, (Murray and the tourists, with dubious
etymological right, translate _Mitres_,)--with the dark forests above it
on the slopes, and the green openings sparkling in the sunlight,
where men and their herds of cattle breathe a purer air. Behind these
everlasting walls the spirit of freedom has found a resting-place
through the turbulent centuries, during which, on rough Northern soil,
the new civilization was taking root, hereafter to overshadow the earth.
Touching the origin of these men of Schwyz, there is a tradition, handed
down from father to son, which runs in this wise.
"Toward the North; in the land of the Swedes and Frisians, there was
an ancient kingdom, and hunger came upon the people, and they gathered
together, and it was resolved that every tenth man should depart. And
so they went forth from among their friends, in three bands under three
leaders, six thousand fighting men, great like unto giants, with their
wives and children and all their worldly goods. And they swore never
to desert one another, and smote with victorious arm Graf Peter of the
Franks, who would obstruct their progress. They besought of God a land
like that of their ancestors, where they might pasture their cattle in
peace; and God led them into the country of Brochenburg, and they built
there Schwyz; and the people increased, and there was no more room for
them in the valley. Some went forth, therefore, into the country round
about, even as far as the Weissland; and it is still in the memory of
old men how the people went from mountain to mountain, from valley to
valley, to Frutigen, Obersibenthal, Sanen, Afflentsch, and Jaun;--and
beyond Jaun dwell other races."
The time and circumstance of this wandering are unknown, and we may
make what we will of it; but to the men of Schwyz the tradition is an
affirmation of their original primal independence. And of old time,
also, the Emperors have admitted that these people of their own free
will sought and obtained the protection of the Empire,--a privilege by
no means extended to all the dwellers of the Waldstätte, (or Forest
Cantons,) but confined to the men of Schwyz.
As the Emperors were often absent, engaged in great wars, and the times
were very troublous, and there was need of some commanding character
among them, for the administration of the criminal law touching the
shedding of blood, they often made the Count of Lenzburg Bailiff. But no
matter of any moment could be acted upon without the sense of the people
being taken, of the serf as well as the freeman: for these two classes
existed not less among these primitive people than elsewhere, in the
feudal times; and this community of counsel of freeman and serf is
related to have worked harmoniously, "for equality existed of itself, by
nature, there." They chose a _Landammann_, or chief magistrate,--a man
free by birth, of an honorable name and some substance; and for judges
also they were careful to select men of substance, "for he careth most
for freedom and order who hath most to lose"; and for the greater peace
of the land there was a Street-Council, consisting of seven reputable
men, who went through the streets administering justice in small causes
here and there, as in the East the judges sat at the city-gate or at the
door of the palace.
As the people increased, the valleys of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden
were separated and grew to be independent in their own domestic matters,
while united with respect to external affairs, as in the league made in
1251 between Zurich, Schwyz, and Uri;--they were like the Five Nations
of Canada, says the historian, but more human through Christianity.
Their religious belief was simple and fervent; the Goths, as Arians, had
rejected the supremacy of the Pope; and now there came secretly teachers
from the East, through Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Hungary, even into Rhaetia,
and thence to these fastnesses of the Alps. The mind of men, thus left
free, developed itself according to the different character of the
races. The people of Schwyz were strengthened in their adherence to the
authentic Word of God, as it was with the Apostles, without the use of
pictures or the bones of saints; this Word they learned by heart, and
made little of the additions of men; hence they got to be heretics, and
were called Manicheans; but Catholicism conquered them at last.
Thus simple and unknown lived this ancient people,--destined to restore
in the end the Confederacy of Helvetia, lost since the days of Caesar's
victory, thirteen hundred years before,--till Gerhard, Abbot of
Einsiedeln, complained of them to the Emperor Henry V. for pasturing
their cattle upon the slopes which belonged to the convent: for,
forgetful of the people who dwelt in these parts, whose existence,
indeed, was concealed from him by the monks, the Emperor Henry II., in
1018, had bestowed upon the convent the neighboring _desert_; and the
Abbot, of course, did not fail to make the most of the gift. Thus there
occurred a collision. The Abbot pursued these poor peasants with the
spiritual power, which was not light in those days, and summoned them
before the Diet of Nobles of Swabia; but they rejected that tribunal,
for they acknowledged only the authority of the Emperor. Whereupon the
Abbot laid his complaint before Henry V. at Basel, where Graf Rudolph of
Lenzburg, Bailiff of Schwyz, spoke for them. A simple people, innocent
of human learning, they could urge against the patent of the Emperor
only the tradition of their fathers, and judgment went against them
touching the matter, and no question was made in it as to the validity
of the Emperor's patent. It was an unexpected blow to the Schwyzers.
Tradition among people living solitary grows into a religious right,
which they fight for readily. For eleven years their turbulence went
unpunished; for Henry V. had other matters on his hands, and his two
successors conferred other privileges upon the convent. Thirty years
afterwards, however, in 1142 or thereabouts, at the solicitation of the
monks, obedience was commanded by the Emperor Conrad III., then on the
point of departing with his Crusaders to Palestine. But the people
answered,--"If the Emperor, to our injury, contemning the traditions of
our fathers, will give our land to unrighteous priests, the protection
of the Empire is worthless to us." Thereupon the Emperor waxed wroth;
the ban was laid upon them by Hermann, Bishop of Constance; but they
withdrew, nevertheless, from the protection of the Empire, and Uri and
Unterwalden with them,--fearing neither the Emperor nor the ban, for
they could not conceive how it was a sin to maintain the right, and so
they pastured their cattle without fear.
When Friedrich I. came to the throne and wanted soldiers, he sent Graf
Ulrich of Lenzburg, Bailiff of the Waldstätte, into the valleys to speak
to the men of Schwyz. "The heart of the people is in the hands of noble
heroes," says the historian;--gladly did the youths, six hundred strong,
seize their arms and go forth under Graf Ulrich, whom they loved, to
fight for the Emperor his friend, beyond the mountains, in Italy. And
now it came the Emperor's turn for the ban; the whole Imperial House of
Hohenstaufen fell into spiritual disgrace; Friedrich II. was cursed at
Lyons as a blasphemer; but these things did not turn away the hearts of
the men of Schwyz from his House.
Long after the time of this Ulrich, the last reigning Graf of Lenzburg,
shortly after the Swiss Union had been renewed, at the instance of
Walther of Attinghausen, in 1206, Unterwalden chose Rudolph, Count of
Hapsburg, for Bailiff. He endeavored to extend his authority over the
other two Cantons, in which he was aided by the Emperor Otho IV., of the
House of Brunswick, who had been raised to the throne in opposition to
the House of Swabia, and who, for the purpose of conciliating him, made
him Imperial Bailiff of the Waldstätte. An active, vigorous man this
Rudolph, grandfather of the Rudolph who was afterwards called to be King
of the Germans, whom the Swiss, scattered in their hamlets, were little
prepared to make head against, and therefore recognized him with what
grace they might, after an assurance that their freedom and rights
should be maintained; and he smoothed for them their old controversy
with the monks of Einsiedeln, and got a comfortable division of the
property made in 1217. But he was hateful to them, nevertheless; and
although we know nothing of the way in which he administered his office,
we conjecture that it was partly because the Emperor who appointed him
was not of the House of Hohenstaufen, to which they were attached, and
partly because he claimed that the office of Bailiff was hereditary in
his family, whereas the men of Schwyz preferred to offer it of their own
free will to whom they would. They made it a condition of assistance to
the Emperor Friedrich in 1231, when he went down into Italy to fight the
Guelphs, that he should deprive this Rudolph of the office of Imperial
Bailiff; and then they went forth, six hundred strong, and did famous
work against the Guelphs, with such fire in them that the Emperor not
only knighted Struthan von Winkelried of Unterwalden, but gave that
valley a patent of freedom, according to which the Schwyzers voluntarily
chose the protection of the Empire.
And now Rudolph, Count of Hapsburg, founder of the Austrian monarchy,
strides into the history of the men of Schwyz. A tall, slender man this
Rudolph, bald and pale; with much seriousness in his features, but
winning confidence the moment one spoke with him by his friendliness,
loving simplicity; a restless, stirring man, with more wisdom in him
than his companions had, equal or superior to him in birth or power,
working his way by device when he could, by the strong arm when that was
needed. He took the part of the peasants against the nobles, and used
the one to put down the other. In the midst of the turmoils in which he
got involved with Sanct Gallen and Basel, and while encamped before the
walls of the latter city, he was wakened in his tent at midnight by
Friedrich of Hohenzollern, Burgrave of Nürnberg; for there had come from
Frankfort on the Main Heinrich von Pappenheim, Hereditary Marshal of
the Empire, with the news, that, "in the name of the Electors, with
unanimous consent, in consideration of his great virtue and wisdom,
Lewis Count Palatine of the Rhine and Duke of Bavaria had named Count
Rudolph of Hapsburg King of the Roman Empire of the Germans": at which
Rudolph was more astonished than those who knew him, it is recorded. Not
because of his genealogy, nor his marriage with Gertrude Anne, daughter
of Burcard, Count of Hohenburg and Hagenlock, did he win this great
fortune, but, as the Elector Engelbrecht of Cologne said, "because he
was just and wise and loved of God and men." And now the world learned
what was in him; and how for eighteen years he kept the throne, which
no king for three-and-twenty years before him had been able to hold,
history will relate to the curious.
Switzerland was divided at this period into small sovereignties and
baronial fiefs; and there were, besides, also the Imperial cities of
Bern and Basel and Zürich. The nobles were warlike and restless. Rudolph
checked their depredations and composed their dissensions. Upon that
seething age of violence and rapine he laid, as it were, the forming
hand, as if in the darkness the coming time was dimly visible to him;--a
man to be remembered, in the vexed and disheartening history of Austria,
as one of her few heroes. The people of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden,
notwithstanding the dislike they had shown to his ancestor, voluntarily
appointed him their protector; and he gave them, in 1274, the firm
assurance that he would treat them as worthy sons of the Empire in
inalienable independence; and to that assurance he remained true till
his death, which happened in 1291, in the seventy-fourth year of his
age.
It is related in the Rhymed Chronicle of Ottocar, how he had been kept
alive for a whole year by the skill of his physicians, but that they
told him at last, as he sat playing at draughts, that death was upon
him, and that he could live but five days. "Well, then," he said, "on
to Spires!" that he might lay him in the Imperial vault in the great
Cathedral there,--where many Emperors slept their long sleep, till, in
the Orléans Succession War in the time of Louis XIV., as afterwards in
1794, under the revolutionary commander Custine, French soldiers rudely
disturbed it, with every circumstance of outrage which Frenchmen only
could devise. Rudolph went forth thither, but fell by the way, and died
at Germersheim, a dirty little village which he had founded. And in the
Cathedral at Spires, where he rested from his activities, you may see
this day a monumental statue of him, executed by that great artist, the
late Ludwig Schwanthaler of Munich, for his art-loving patron, Ludwig
I., King of Bavaria.
Rudolph was succeeded by his son Albrecht, then forty-three years old,
likewise a vigorous man, whose restless spirit of aggrandizement gave
the Swiss much uneasiness. His purpose seems to have been to acquire the
sovereignty of the ecclesiastical and baronial fiefs, and, having thus
encompassed the free cities and the Three Cantons, to compel submission
to his authority. In the seventh week after Rudolph's death, they
met together to renew the ancient bond with the people of Uri and
Unterwalden; and they swore, in or out of their valleys, to stand by one
another, if harm should be done to any of them. "In this we are as one
man," ran their oath, among other things, "in that we will receive no
judge who is not a countryman and an inhabitant, or who has bought his
office."
After several years of troubles and frights among them, the Emperor sent
to the Forest Cantons to say, that it would be well for them and their
posterity, if they submitted to the protection of the Royal House, as
all neighboring cities and counties had done; he wished them to be his
dear children; he was the descendant of their Bailiff of Lenzburg, son
of their Emperor Rudolph; if he offered them the protection of his
glorious line, it was not that he lusted after their flocks or would
make merchandise of their poverty, but because he knew from his father
and from history what brave men they were, whom he would lead to victory
and knighthood and plunder.
Then spake the nobles and the freemen of the Forest Cantons: "They know
very well, and will ever remember, how his father of blessed memory was
a good leader and Bailiff to them; but they love the condition of their
ancestors, and will abide by it. If the King would but confirm it!"
And thereupon they sent Werner, Baron of Attinghausen, Landammann of
Uri, like his fathers before him and his posterity after him, to the
Imperial Court. But the King was quarrelling with his Electors, and was
in bad humor, and sent to Uri to forbid them from assessing land-rates
on a convent there. Whereupon the men of Schwyz, being without
protection, made a league for ten years with Werner, Count of Honburg;
and that their submission to the Austrian power might not be construed
into a duty, they sent to the King for an Imperial Bailiff. Albrecht
appointed Hermann Gessler of Brunek, and Beringer of Landenberg, whose
cousin Hermann was in much favor with him. Beringer's manners were rough
even at the Court; and to get rid of him, they sent him to tame the
Waldstätte. He appointed Bailiffs whose poverty and avarice were the
cause of much oppression, emboldened as they were by the ill-feeling of
the King towards the men of Schwyz, whose freedom the King had refused
to confirm, and waited only for opportunity to annihilate their ancient
rights, after the example he had already set in Vienna and Styria.
The Imperial Bailiffs resolved to take up their abode in the Forest
Cantons,--Landenberg in Unterwalden, near Sarnen, in a castle of the
King's, while Gessler built a prison-castle by Altorf in Uri; for within
the memory of men no lord had dwelt in Schwyz. They used their power
wantonly;--unjust and weary imprisonments for slightest faults; haughty
manners, and all the stings of insolent authority;--and no redress to
be had at the King's hands. The peace and happy security of the men of
Schwyz were gone, and they looked in one another's faces for the thing
that was to be done. The honored families of their race were despised
and called peasant-nobles;--there was Werner Stauffacher, a well-to-do
and well-meaning man; and the Lord of Attinghausen above all, of an
ancient house, in years, with much experience, and true to his country;
there was Rudolph Redings of Biberek, whose descendants live to this
day in Schwyz, supporting still the honor of their name; and the
Winkelrieds, mindful of the spirit of their ancestor who slew the
dragon. In such persons the people _believed_; they knew them and their
fathers before them; and when they were made light of, there was hatred
between the people and the Bailiffs. As Gessler passed Stauffacher's
house in Steinen, one day, where the little chapel now stands, and saw
how the house was well built, with many windows, and painted over with
mottoes, after the manner of rich farmers' houses, he cried to his face,
"Can one endure that these peasants should live in such houses?"
It came at last to insulting their wives and daughters; and the first
man that attempted this, one Wolfenschiess, was struck dead by an angry
husband; and when the brave wife of Stauffacher reflected how her turn
might come next, she persuaded her husband to anticipate the danger.
Werner Stauffacher at once crossed the lake to Uri, to consult with his
friend Walther, Prince of Attinghausen, with whom he found concealed a
young man of courage and understanding. "He is an Unterwaldner from the
Melchthal," said Walther; "his name is Erni an der Halden, and he is
a relation of mine; for a trifling matter Landenberg has fined him
a couple of oxen; his father Henry complained bitterly of the loss,
whereupon a servant of the Bailiff said, 'If the peasants want to eat
bread, they can draw their own plough'; at which Erni took fire, and
broke one of the fellow's fingers with his stick, and then took refuge
here; meanwhile the Bailiff has caused his father's eyes to be put out."
And then the two friends took counsel together; and Walther bore witness
how the venerable Lord of Attinghausen had said that these Bailiffs were
no longer to be endured. What desolating wrath resistance would bring
upon the Waldstätte they knew and measured, and swore that death was
better than an unrighteous yoke. And they parted, each to sound his
friends,--appointing as a place of conference the Rütli. It is a little
patch of meadow, which the precipices seem to recede expressly to form,
on the Bay of Uri, sloping down to the water's edge,--so called from the
trees being rooted out (_ausgereutet_) there,--not far from the boundary
between Unterwalden and Uri, where the Mytenstein rises solitary like an
obelisk out of the water. There, in the stillness of night, they often
met together for council touching the work which was to be done; thither
by lonely paths came Fürst and Melchthal, Stauffacher in his boat,
and from Unterwalden his sister's son, Edelknecht of Rudenz. The more
dangerous the deed, the more solemn the bond which bound them.
On the night of Wednesday before Martinmas, on the 10th of November,
1307, Fürst, Melchthal, and Stauffacher brought each from his own Canton
ten upright men to the Rütli, to deliberate honestly together. And when
they came there and remembered their inherited freedom, and the eternal
brotherly bond between them, consecrated by the danger of the times,
they feared neither Albrecht nor the power of Austria; and they took
each other by the hand, and said, that "in these matters no one was
to act after his own fancy; no one was to desert another; that in
friendship they would live and die; each was so to strive to preserve
the ancient rights of the people that the Swiss through all time might
taste of this friendship; neither should the property or the rights of
the Count of Hapsburg be molested, nor the Bailiffs or their servants
lose one drop of blood; but the freedom which their fathers gave them
they would bequeath to their children": and then, when remembering that
upon what they did now the fate of their posterity depended, each looked
upon his friend, consoled. And Walther Fürst, Werner Stauffacher, and
Arnold an der Halden of Melchthal lifted their hands to heaven, and, in
the name of God, who created emperor and peasant with the inalienable
rights of man, swore to maintain their freedom; and when the thirty
heard this, each one raised his hand and swore the same by God and the
Saints;--and then each went his way to his hut, and was silent, and
wintered his cattle.
In the mean while it happened that the Bailiff Hermann Gessler was
shot dead by Wilhelm Tell, who was of Bürglen, at the entrance of the
Schächenthal, a half-hour from Altorf, in Uri,--son-in-law of Walther
Fürst, and a man of some substance, for he had the steward-ship in
fee in Bürglen of the Frauenmüster Abbey in Zürich,--one of the
conspirators. Out of wanton tyranny, or suspicious of the breaking out
of disturbances, Gessler determined to discover who bore the joke most
impatiently; and, after the symbolical way of the times and the people,
set up a hat, (it was on the 18th of November,) to represent the dignity
of the Duke Albrecht of Austria, and commanded all to do it homage. The
story of Tell's refusal, and of the apple placed on the head of his son
to be shot at, the world knows far and wide. Convinced by his success
that God was with him, Tell confessed, that, if the matter had gone
wrong, he would have had his revenge upon the Bailiff. Gessler did
not dare to detain him in Uri, on account of Tell's many friends and
relations, but took him up the lake, contrary to the traditions of the
people, which forbade foreign imprisonment. They had not got far beyond
the Rütli, when the föhn-wind, breaking loose from the gulfs of the
Gothard, threw the waves into a rage, and the rocks echoed with its
angry cries. In this moment of deadly danger, Gessler commanded them to
unbind Tell, who, he knew, was an excellent boatman; and as they passed
by the foot of the Axen Mountain, to the right as you come out of the
Bay of Uri, Tell grasped his bow and leaped upon a flat rock there,
climbed up the mountain while the boat tossed to and fro against the
rocks, and fled through the land of the men of Schwyz. But the Bailiff
escaped the storm also, and landed by Küssnacht, where he fell with
Tell's arrow through him.
It should be remembered that this was Tell's deed alone: the hour which
the people had agreed upon for their deliverance had not come; they had
no part in the death of Gessler. Carlyle has remarked this as appearing
also in Schiller's drama, in the construction of which, he says, "there
is no connection, or a very slight one, between the enterprise of Tell
and that of the men of Rütli." It was not a deed conformable to law
or the highest ethics, yet it was one which mankind is ever ready to
forgive and applaud; and the echo of it through the ages will die away
only when hatred of tyranny and wrathful impatience under hopeless
oppression die away also from the hearts of men. Tell was an outlaw, and
he took an outlaw's vengeance: it was life against life. And yet it is a
curious fact, that the historian of Switzerland (that wonderful genius,
Johannes Müller, who is reported to have read more books than any man in
Europe, in proof of which they point you to his fifty folio volumes of
excerpts in the Town Library at Schaffhausen) suggests as a reason why
there were only one hundred and fourteen persons, who had known Tell,
to gather together in 1388, not much more than thirty years after his
death, at the erection of a chapel dedicated to his memory on the rock
where he leaped ashore, that Tell did not often leave Bürglen, where he
dwelt, and that, according to the ethics of that period, the deed was
not one likely to attract inquisitive wonderers to him.
There is hardly an event or character in history which is not to
somebody a myth or a phantom; and so Tell has not escaped the skepticism
of men. But those who doubt his existence have little experience of
history, says Müller. Grasser was the first to remark the resemblance
between the adventures of Tell and those of a certain Tocco, or Toke, or
Palnatoke, of Denmark, which are related by Saxo Grammaticus, a learned
historian who flourished in Denmark in the twelfth century, of which
kingdom and its dependencies he compiled an elaborate history, first
printed at Paris in 1486; but the Danish Tocco, who is supposed to have
existed in the latter half of the tenth century, was wholly unknown
to the Swiss, who, if ever, came to the Alps before that time. The
Icelanders, also, have a similar story about another hero, which appears
in the "Vilkinasaga" of the fourteenth century. It is more likely that
the Danes and other Northern people got their tradition from the Swiss,
by way of the Hanse Towns perhaps, if we are to be permitted to believe
in but one original tradition, which is not less arbitrary than
unphilosophic.
Moreover, for what did these one hundred and fourteen people dedicate a
chapel to him thirty years and a little more after his death? And there
is the Chronicle of Klingenberg, which covers the end of the fourteenth
century, which tells his story; and Melchior Russ, of Lucerne, who, in
compiling his book, about the year 1480, had before him a Tell-song, and
the Chronicle of Eglof Etterlins, Town-Clerk of Lucerne in the first
half of the fifteenth century; and since 1387, too, there has been
solemn service by the people of Uri to commemorate him. So that the
"Fable Danoise" of Uriel Freudenberger of Bern (1760) becomes a mere
absurdity, and the indignant Canton of Uri had no less right to burn it
(although to burn was not to answer it, suggests the critic,) than to
honor the "Defence" by Balthasar with two medals of gold. And what
has been written to establish him may be read in Zurlauben, (whose
approbation is almost proof, says Müller, reverentially,) and elsewhere
as undernoted.[A]
[Footnote A: In Balthasar, _Déf. de Guill. Tell_ (Lucerne, 1760); Gottl.
Eman. von Haller, _Vorlesung über Wilh. Tell_, etc. (Bern, 1772);
Hisely, _Guill. Tell et la Révolution de_ 1307 (Delft, 1826); Ideler,
_Die Sage vom Schüsse des Tell_ (Berlin, 1836); Häusser, _Die Sage vom
Tell_ (Heidelberg, 1840); Schoenhuth, _Wilh. Tell, Geschichte aus der
Vorzeit_ (Reutlingen, 1836); Henning, _Wilh. Tell_ (Nürnberg, 1836); and
_Histoire de Guill. Tell, Libérateur de la Suisse_ (Paris, 1843).]
Tell's posterity in the male line is reported to have died out with
Johann Martin, in 1684; the female, with Verena, in 1720. Yet it is
certainly a little surprising that the elder Swiss chroniclers, John of
Winterthur, and Justinger of Bern, for instance, who were almost Tell's
contemporaries, make no mention of him in relating the Revolution in the
Waldstätte, and that it should be left to Tschudi and others, almost two
hundred years afterwards, in the sixteenth century, to give his story
that dramatic importance upon which Schiller has set the seal forever.
It can be explained, perhaps, on the ground that it did not at the time
possess that importance which we have been taught to give it; though
roughly, thus, we do away with the poetry of it, to be sure. Let
Voltaire, whose function it was to deny, enjoy his feeble sneer, that
"the difficulty of pronouncing those respectable names"--to wit,
_Melchtad_, and _Stauffager_, and _Valtherfurst_, to say nothing of
_Grisler_--"injures their celebrity." Neither are we to conceal the
fact, that it is doubted, if not denied, that there ever was any Gessler
in Uri to perform all the wicked things ascribed to him, and to get that
arrow through him in such dramatic and effective manner in the Hollow
Way; for has not Kopp published, with edifying explanation, "Documents
for the History of the Confederation," (Lucerne, 1835,) in which, in the
list of Bailiffs (_Landvoigte_) at Küssnacht, we do not find the name of
Gessler? Perhaps there was a mistake in the name, the critic suggests.
The Revolution thus begun at the Rütli, and by Tell, went forward
swiftly in January, 1308; and, true to their oath, it was consummated
by the men of Schwyz without harm to the property of the Bailiffs, also
without the spilling of a single drop of blood. The prison at Uri was
captured, and Landenberg also, as he descended to hear mass, by twenty
men from Unterwalden; but, escaping, he fled across the meadows from
Sarnen to Alpnach, where he was overtaken and made to swear that he
would never set foot again in the Waldstätte, and then suffered to
depart safely to the King. And the peasants breathed again; and
Stauffacher's wife opened her house to all who had been at the Rütli;
and there was joy in the land.
And how in that same year Duke Albrecht met with a bloody end, such as
befell no King or Emperor of the Germans before or after him, at the
hands of Duke John, his nephew, whose inheritance he had kept back, and
other conspirators; and what vengeance overtook the murderers; and how
Duke John, escaping in the habit of a monk into Italy, was no more heard
of, but became a shadow forever, like the rest of them;--and how, eight
years afterwards, came the expedition of Duke Leopold of Austria against
the Waldstätte, and the fight at Morgarten, where the Swiss, thirteen
hundred mountaineers in all, Wilhelm Tell among them, routed twenty
thousand of the well-armed chivalry of Austria,--dating from that heroic
Thermopylae of theirs the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy, as,
larger and perhaps not less resolute, we see it to-day, ready to
defy, if need be, single-handed, the greatest military nation of the
earth;--and how, thirty years afterwards, the men of Schwyz and Uri go
forth, nine hundred strong,--among them Tell, and Werner Stauffacher,
now bent with years,--to the aid of Bern, threatened by the nobles
roundabout;--and how, in 1332, was formed the league with Lucerne,
whereby the beautiful lake gets its name as the Lake of the _Four_
Forest Cantons;--and how, one sultry July day in 1386, the men of Schwyz
and Uri and Unterwalden, together with other Swiss,--some of them armed
with the very halberds with which their fathers defended the pass at
Morgarten,--fought again their hereditary enemy, Austria, by the clear
waters of the little Lake of Sempach; how, when they saw the enemy, they
fell upon their knees, according to their ancient custom, and prayed to
God, and then with loud war-cry dashed at full run upon the Austrian
host, whose shields were like a dazzling wall, and their spears like a
forest, and the Mayor of Lucerne with sixty of his followers went down
in the shock, but not a single one of the Austrians recoiled; and how at
that critical, dreadful moment,--for the flanks of the enemy's phalanx
were advancing to encompass them,--there suddenly strode forth the
Knight Arnold Strutthan von Winkelried, crying, "I will make a path
for you! care for my wife and children!" and, rushing forward, grasped
several spears and buried them in his breast,--a large, strong man, he
bore the soldiers down with him as he fell, and his companions pushed
forward over his dead body into the midst of the host, and the victory
was won, and another book was added to the epic story of the men of
Schwyz and Uri and Unterwalden;--and how Duke Leopold fell fighting
bravely, as became his house, and six hundred and fifty nobles with him,
so that there was mourning at the Court of Austria for many a year, and
men said it was a judgment upon the reckless spirit of the nobles; and
how Martin Malterer, standard-bearer, of Freyburg in the Breisgau,
happening to come upon Leopold as he was dying, was as one petrified,
and the banner fell from his hands, and he threw himself across the body
of Leopold to save it from further outrage, waiting for and finding his
own death there;--and how this ruinous contest between Switzerland and
Austria was not finally closed till the time of Maximilian, in 1499,
when first the right of private war was abolished in Germany;--and how,
through the various fortunes of the succeeding centuries, the character
of the Swiss has remained for the most part the same as in the earlier
time:--these things one may read at large elsewhere; but we hasten to
the conclusion.
The story of Tell has been the subject of several dramas. Lemierre, a
popular French dramatist of his day, (though J. J. Rousseau affects to
call him a _scribe_ whom the French Academy once crowned,) produced
a play founded upon it, in Paris, in 1766; but the language of Swiss
freemen on a French stage was little to the taste of those days, and
it was a failure. Voltaire, when asked what he thought of it,
replied,--"_Il n'y a rien à dire; il est écrit en langue du pays._" But
twenty years afterwards it was revived with prodigious success; for the
truth which was in it flashed out then, forerunner of the storm which
was soon to break over France. Again, when Florian, whom we are to
remember always for his "Fables," banished in 1793 by the decree which
forbade nobles to remain in Paris, taking refuge at Sceaux, was arrested
and thrown into prison, he consoled his captivity by composing his drama
of "Guillaume Tell,"--the worst of his productions, it is recorded.
Lastly, it has been consecrated for all time by the genius of Friedrich
Schiller. The legend was first brought to Schiller's notice, doubtless,
by Goethe, who writes to him concerning it from Switzerland in 1797.
Goethe himself thought of founding an epic on it. It was not, however,
till 1801, before his journey to Dresden, that Schiller's attention was
permanently directed to it. Completed on the 18th of February, it
was brought out at Weimar on the 17th of March, 1804, with the most
extraordinary success: the fifth act, however, was suppressed, in
deference to the intended court alliance with the daughter of a murdered
Russian emperor; it not being considered good taste to represent the
assassination of an autocrat upon such an occasion.
Schiller's drama has been translated into French by Merle d'Aubigné and
others, and many times into English,--among us by the Rev. C. T. Brooks.
It follows the tradition substantially. Carlyle declares, indeed, that
"the incidents of the Swiss Revolution, as detailed in Tschudi or
Müller, are here faithfully preserved, even to their minutest branches."
We tarried once for several days at Brunnen, and read the play upon the
spot in sight of the Rütli, in the little balcony of the _pension_ of
the Golden Eagle, with the deep, calm, blue lake at our feet, and the
Hacken and Axen mountains and the Selisberg shutting out the world for
a time; and as we look at the play now, it recalls with the utmost
minuteness the scenery and the coloring of it all: yet Schiller never
was there. It was the last startling effulgence of his comet-like
genius; for when the spring-flowers came again, he was gone from our
earth.
In the last act of the great drama, as Tell sits at his cottage-door
in Bürglen in Uri, surrounded by his wife and children, after the
consummation of the deed, there approaches a monk begging alms;--it is
the parricide Duke John, flying the sight and presence of men. In the
contrast of the feelings of these two persons, then and there, one reads
Schiller's justification of his hero. As if to complete by contrast the
moral of the drama of "Tell," it is related also in the tradition, that
in 1354, when the stream of the Schächen was swollen, Tell, then bowing
under the snowy years, seeing a child fall into it, as he passed that
way, plunged in, and lost his life. Uhland has indicated this in his
"Death of Tell," as only Uhland could:--
"Die Kraft derselben Liebe,
Die du dem Knaben trugst,
Ward einst in dir zum Triebe,
Dass du den Zwingherrn schlugst."
Some liken life to a book to be read in. To us it is rather an unwritten
poem which each age repeats to the next,--melodious sometimes, as when
the blind old mythic bard of Chios sang it under the olive-trees, by the
blue Aegean, to the listening Greeks, thirsty for beauty, drinking it
ever with their eyes, and with their lips lisping it,--or rough and
more full of meaning, as when, with the men of Schwyz and Uri and
Unterwalden, the great idea of freedom, majestic as their mountains,
utters itself, composed and stern, in deeds which for all time make
Switzerland honored and free.
On the 10th of November, 1859, the heart of Germany beat with gladness,
if touched also with a certain sorrow, as in every hamlet, on every
hill-side, from the German Ocean to the Tyrolese Alps, from the Vosges
to the Carpathians and the Slavic border, the people met to celebrate
with simple rites the hundredth birthday of its great poet Schiller,
in whom they recognize not more what he did than what he sought after,
whose striving is their striving, from highest to lowest,--the ideal
man, burning to gather them together, and fold them as one flock under
one shepherd, that, no longer divided, they may face the world and the
future with one heart, with one great trembling hope, to lead the new
civilization to its lasting triumphs.
Schiller had sung of Wilhelm Tell; and the men of Schwyz remembered
him on that occasion, too, on the Rütli, with their confederates from
Oberwalden and Niederwalden. On the afternoon of the 11th of November,
they met at Brunnen,--on the lake, as we have said,--the men of Schwyz
embarking in one great boat, amidst peals of music, while numberless
little canoes received the others. The wind, blowing strong from the
north, filled the sail, and, as they floated down the Bay of Uri, they
remembered Stauffacher and his friends, who had glided over the same
dark waters at dead of night, past the Mytenstein to the Rütli, and
the old time lived again; and the little chapel on the spot where Tell
sprang ashore, erected by the Canton Uri, where once a year, since 1388,
mass is said, and a sermon preached to the people, who go up in solemn
procession of little boats, looked friendly over to them; and the
countrymen of Schiller, present for the first time from Stuttgart and
Munich, wondered at the solemn beauty of the snowpeaks reflected in the
waters below. A chorus of many voices broke upon the mountain-stillness,
as the little fleet approached the Rütli; the men of Uri, already there,
"the first on the spot," and with them the men of Gersau, a valiant
band, answered in a song of welcome; and they shook each other by the
hand, and made a little circle, three hundred in all, upon the Rütli;
and Lusser of Uri thanked the men of Schwyz for the invitation to
remember their fathers here on the five hundred and fifty-second
anniversary of the deeds which Schiller has so gloriously sung. We best
remember the poet by repeating and upholding his words:--
"Wir wollen seyn ein einzig Volk von Brüdern,
In keiner Noth uns trennen und Gefahr.
Wir wollen frey seyn, wie die Väter waren,
Eher den Tod als in der Knechtschaft leben.
Wir wollen trauen auf den höchsten Gott,
Und uns nicht fürchten vor der Macht der
Menschen."
"One people will we be,--a band of brothers;
No danger, no distress shall sunder us.
We will be freemen as our fathers were,
And sooner welcome death than live as slaves.
We will rely on God's almighty arm,
And never quail before the power of man." [B]
[Footnote B: Rev. C. T. Brooks's translation, p. 53.]
Then they read the scene of the Rütli Oath from Schiller's play, and
sing the Swiss national song, "Callest thou, my Fatherland?" And the
pastor Tschümperlin admonishes them that they best cultivate the spirit
of Schiller and Tell by worthy training of their children. As they are
about to break up at last, the Landammann Styger of Schwyz suggests a
beautiful thing to them:--"As we came from Brunnen, and looked up at the
Mytenstein as we passed it,--the great pyramid rising up there out of
the water as if meant by Nature for a monument,--it seemed to us that a
memorial tablet should be placed there, simple like the column itself,
with words like these: 'To Him who wrote "Tell," on his One Hundredth
Birthday, the Original Cantons.'" And the proposition was received
with unanimous shout of assent. "This was the worthy ending of the
Schiller-Festival on the Rütli," says the contemporary chronicle.
On the 10th day of November, 1859, also, there was put into the hands
of the Central Committee of the Society of the Swiss Union the deed of
purchase of the Rütli. It is in the handwriting of Franz Lusser of Uri,
Clerk of the Court, and dated the 10th of November, the birthday of
Schiller. Thus Switzerland owns its sacred places, and the title-deeds
long laid up in its heart are written out at last.
On the 21st of October of last year, on a brilliant afternoon, the
men of Schwyz and Uri went forth again from Brunnen, with the chief
magistracy of the land. From Treib came the Unterwaldners, all in richly
decorated boats, and the inhabitants of Lucerne in two steamboats with
much music, meeting in front of the Mytenstein, which lifts its colossal
front eighty feet above the water there. The top of it was covered with
a large boat-sail, with the arms of the original Cantons and Swiss
mottoes on it; in a wreath of evergreen, the arms of the other Cantons;
in the middle of it, in token of the twenty-two Cantons, a white cross
upon red ground; above all, the flag of the Confederacy spread to the
Föhn. At the foot was a little stand made of twigs for the speaker,
about which the little fleet was grouped, under the charge of the
Landammann Aufdermauer of Brunnen, a gallant gentleman, host of the
Golden Eagle, with his kind little sister, of whom we spoke at the
beginning.
When all was still, Uri opens the musical trilogy,--the words by P.
Gall. Morell, monk of Einsiedeln, the music by Baumgartner of Zürich;
Unterwalden takes up the burden; then Schwyz; then all three in
chorus;--and the echo of the fresh voices among the rocks there was as
in a cathedral. Then Landammann Styger climbs to the stand, and makes a
little speech, and reads a letter from Schiller's daughter, (of which
presently,) while the curious shepherd-boys stretch out their necks over
the craggy tops of the Selisberg to look down upon the lively scene
below.
At the end of his speech, Styger lets fall the sail amid the beating of
the drums and the shouts of the multitude; and on the flat sides of the
rock appear the gilded metal letters, a foot high,--"To the Singer of
Tell, Fr. Schiller, the Original Cantons, 1859." And there were other
little speeches,--one by Lusser, who exclaims with much truth, "The
rocks of our mountains can be broken, but not _bent_"; and then followed
the Swiss psalm by Zwysig. And afterwards, in the evening, a feast in
the Golden Eagle in Brunnen, at which, with the ancient sobriety, they
remember the dangers of the present, and affirm their neutrality, which
should not hang upon the caprice of a neighbor, but be grounded in their
own will, for there is no Lord in Christendom for them except Him who is
above all.