tableaux. The people come and go, and linger there around the great
water-tanks as at a sort of Bethesda, sunk to profaner uses of
every-day cleansing. The commonest labors become picturesque performed
in open air, with a background of mountains, by men and women with
bare heads and bare legs and feet. Whenever I looked out of my windows
I saw a picture worth painting. For instance, a woman washing her
windows in the tanks, holding each window under the running stream,
tipping it and turning it so quickly in the sunshine that the waters
gliding off it took millions of prismatic hues, till she seemed to be
scrubbing with rainbows; another with two tubs full of clothes, which
she had brought there to wash, her petticoat tucked up to her knees,
her arms bare to the shoulder, a bright red handkerchief knotted round
her head, and her eyes flashing as she beat and lifted, wringing and
tossing the clothes, and flinging out a sharp or a laughing word to
every passer; another coming home at night with a big bundle of green
grass under one arm, her rake over her shoulder, a free, open glance,
and a smile and a bow to a gay postilion watering his horses; another
who had brought, apparently, her whole stock of kitchen utensils
there to be made clean,--jugs and crocks, and brass pans. How they
glittered as she splashed them in and out! She did not wipe them, only
set them down on the ground to dry, which seemed likely to leave them
but half clean, after all. Then there came a dashing young fellow from
the Tyrol, with three kinds of feathers in his green hat, short brown
breeches, bare knees, gray yarn stockings with a pattern of green
wreath knit in at the top, a happy-go-lucky look on his face, stooping
down to take a mouthful of the swift-running water from the spout, and
getting well splashed by missing aim with his mouth, to the uproarious
delight of two women just coming in from their hay-making in the
meadows, one of them balancing a hay-rake and pitchfork on her
shoulder with one hand, and with the other holding her dark-blue
petticoat carefully gathered up in front, full of hay; the other
drawing behind her (not wheeling it) a low, scoop-shaped wheelbarrow
full of green grass and clover,--these are a few of any day's
pictures. And thither came every day Issa Kattan, from Bethlehem of
Judæa,--a brown-skinned, deer-eyed Syrian, who had come all the way
from the Holy Land to offer to the Passion Play pilgrims
mother-of-pearl trinkets wrought in Jerusalem; rosaries of pearl, of
olive-wood, of seeds, scarlet, yellow, and black, wonderfully smooth,
hard, and shining. He wore a brilliant red fez, and told his gentle
lies in a voice as soft as the murmuring of wind in pines. He carried
his wares in a small tray, hung, like a muff, by a cord round his
neck, the rosaries and some strips of bright stuffs hanging down at
each side and swinging back and forth in time to his slow tread. Issa
paced the streets patiently from morn till night, but took good care
to be at this watering-place many times in the course of the day,
chiefly at the morning, and when the laborers were coming home at
sunset.
Another vender, as industrious as he, but less picturesque, also
haunted the spot: a man who, knowing how dusty the Passion Play
pilgrims would be, had brought brushes to sell,--brushes big, little,
round, square, thick, thin, long, short, cheap, dear, good, bad, and
indifferent; no brush ever made that was not to be found hanging on
that man's body, if you turned him round times enough. That was the
way he carried his wares,--in tiers, strings, strata, all tied
together and on himself in some inexplicable way. One would think he
must have slipped himself into a dozen "cat's-cradles" of twine to
begin with, and then had the brushes netted in and out on this
foundation. All that remained to be seen of him was his head, above
this bristling ball, and his feet shuffling below. To cap the climax
of his grotesqueness, he wore on his back a wooden box, shaped like an
Indian pappoose frame; and in this stood three or four lofty
long-handled brushes for sweeping, which rose far above his head.
Another peasant woman--a hay-maker--I remember, who came one night;
never again, though I watched longingly for her, or one like her. She
wore a petticoat of umber-brown, a white blouse, a blue apron, a
pink-and-white handkerchief over her head, pinned under her chin;
under one arm she carried a big bunch of tall green grasses, with the
tasselled heads hanging loose far behind her. On the other shoulder
rested her pitchfork, and in the hand that poised the pitchfork she
held a bunch of dahlias, red, white, and yellow.
But the daintiest and most memorable figure of all that flitted or
tarried here, was a little brown-eyed, golden-haired maiden, not more
than three years old. She lived near by, and often ran away from home.
I saw her sometimes led by the hand, but oftenest without guide or
protector,--never alone, however; for, rain or shine, early or late,
she carried always in her arms a huge puppet, with a face bigger than
her own. It wore a shawl and a knit hood, the child herself being
always bareheaded. It was some time before I could fathom the mystery
of this doll, which seemed shapeless yet bulky, and heavier than the
child could well lift, though she tugged at it faithfully and with an
expression of care, as we often see poor babies in cities lugging
about babies a little younger than themselves. At last I caught the
puppet out one day without its shawl, and the mystery was revealed. It
was a milliner's bonnet-block, on which a face had been painted. No
wonder it seemed heavy and shapeless; below the face was nothing but a
rough base of wood. It appeared that as soon as the thing was given to
the child, she conceived for it a most inconvenient and unmanageable
affection,--would go nowhere without it, would not go to sleep
without it, could hardly be induced to put it for one moment out of
her tired little arms, which could hardly clasp it round. It seemed
but a fitting reward to perpetuate some token of such faithfulness;
and after a good deal of pleading I induced the child's aunt, in whose
charge she lived, to bring her to be photographed with her doll in her
arms. It was not an easy thing to compass this; for the only
photographer of the town, being one of the singers in the chorus, had
small leisure for the practice of his trade in the Passion Play year;
but, won over by the novelty of the subject, he found an odd hour for
us, and made the picture. The little thing was so frightened at the
sight of the strange room and instruments that she utterly refused to
stand alone for a second, which was not so much of a misfortune as I
thought at first, for it gave me the aunt's face also; and a very
characteristic Oberammergau face it is.
At the same time I also secured a photograph of the good Frau Rutz. It
was an illustration of the inborn dramatic sense in the Oberammergau
people, that when I explained to Frau Rutz that I wished her to sit
for a picture of an Oberammergau woman at her carving, she took the
idea instantly, and appeared prompt to the minute, with a vase of her
own carving, her glue-pot, and all her tools, to lay on the table by
her side. "Do you not think it would be better with these?" she said
simply; then she took up her vase and tool, as if to work, seated
herself at the table in a pose which could not be improved, and looked
up with, "Is this right?" The photographer nodded his head, and,
presto! in five seconds it was done; and Frau Rutz had really been
artist of her own picture. The likeness did her less than justice. Her
face is even more like an old Memling portrait than is the picture.
Weather-beaten, wrinkled, thin,--as old at forty-five as it should be
by rights at sixty,--hers is still a noble and beautiful countenance.
Nothing would so surprise Frau Rutz as to be told this. She laughed
and shook her head when, on giving her one of the photographs, I said
how much I liked it. "If it had another head on it, it might be very
good," she said. She is one of the few women in Oberammergau who do
delicate carving. In the previous winter she had made thirty vases of
this pattern, besides doing much other work.
Very well I came to know Frau Rutz's chiselled and expressive old face
before I left Oberammergau. The front door of her house stood always
open; and in a tiny kitchen opposite it,--a sort of closet in the
middle of the house, lighted only by one small window opening into the
hall, and by its door, which was never shut,--she was generally to be
seen stirring or skimming, or scouring her bright saucepans. Whenever
she saw us, she ran out with a smile, and the inquiry if there was
anything she could do for us. On the day before the Passion Play she
opened her little shop. It was about the size of a steamboat
stateroom, built over a bit of the sidewalk,--Oberammergau
fashion,--and joined at a slant to the house; it was a set of shelves
roofed over, and with a door to lock at night, not much more: eight
people crowded it tight; but it was packed from sill to roof with
carvings, a large part of which had been made by herself, her husband
and sons, or workmen in their employ, and most of which, I think, were
sold by virtue of the Frau's smile, if it proved as potent a lure to
other buyers as to me. If I drove or walked past her house without
seeing it, I felt as if I had left something behind for which I ought
to go back; and when she waved her hand to us, and stood looking after
us as our horses dashed round the corner, I felt that good luck was
invoked on the drive and the day.
Driving out of Oberammergau, there are two roads to choose from,--one
up the Ammer, by way of a higher valley, and into closer knots of
mountains, and so on into the Tyrol; the other down the Ammer, through
meadows, doubling and climbing some of the outpost mountains of the
range, and so on out to the plains. On the first road lies Ettal, and
on the other Unterammergau, both within so short a distance of
Oberammergau that they are to be counted in among its pleasures.
Ettal is one of the twelve beautiful houses which the ecclesiastics
formerly owned in this part of Bavaria. These old monks had a quick
eye for beauty of landscape, as well as a shrewd one for all other
advantages of locality; and in the days of their power and prosperity
they so crowded into these South Bavarian highlands that the region
came to be called "Pfaffenwinkel," or "The Priest's Corner." Abbeys,
priories, and convents--a dozen of them, all rich and powerful--stood
within a day's journey of one another. Of these, Ettal was pre-eminent
for beauty and splendor. It was founded early in the fourteenth
century by a German emperor, who, being ill, was ready to promise
anything to be well again, and being approached at this moment by a
crafty Benedictine, promised to found a Benedictine monastery in the
valley of the Ammer, if the Holy Virgin would restore him to health.
An old tradition says that as the emperor came riding up the steep
Ettaler Berg, at the summit of which the monastery stands, his horse
fell three times on his knees, and refused to go farther. This was
construed to be a sign from heaven to point out the site of the
monastery. But to all unforewarned travellers who have approached
Oberammergau by way of Ettal, and been compelled to walk up the
Ettaler Berg, there will seem small occasion for any suggestion of a
supernatural cause for the emperor's horse tumbling on his knees. A
more unmitigated two miles of severe climb was never built into a
road; the marvel is that it should have occurred to mortal man to do
it, and that there is as yet but one votive tablet by the roadside in
commemoration of death by apoplexy in the attempt to walk up. It was
Alois Pfaurler who did thus die in July, 1866,--and before he was
half-way up, too. Therefore this tablet on the spot of his death has a
depressing effect on people for the latter half of their struggle, and
no doubt makes them go slower.
How much the Benedictines of Ettal had to do with the Passion Play
which has made Oberammergau so famous, it is now not possible to know.
Those who know most about it disagree. In 1634, the year in which the
play was first performed, it is certain that the Oberammergau
community must have been under the pastoral charge of some one of the
great ecclesiastical establishments in that region; and it is more
than probable that the monks, who were themselves much in the way of
writing and performing in religious plays, first suggested to the
villagers this mode of working for the glory and profit of the Church.
Their venerable pastor, Daisenberger, to whom they owe the present
version of the Passion Play, was an Ettal monk; and one of the many
plays which he has arranged or written for their dramatic training is
"The Founding of the Monastery of Ettal." The closing stanzas of this
well express the feeling of the Oberammergauer to-day, and no doubt of
the Ettal monk centuries ago, in regard to the incomparable Ammer Thal
region:--
"Let God be praised! He hath this vale created
To show to man the glory of his name!
And these wide hills the Lord hath consecrated
Where he his love incessant may proclaim.
"Ne'er shall decay the valley's greatest treasure,
Madonna, thou the pledge of Heaven's grace!
Her blessings will the Queen of Heaven outmeasure
To her quiet Ettal and Bavaria's race."
Most travellers who visit Oberammergau know nothing of Unterammergau,
except that the white and brown lines of its roofs and spires make a
charming dotted picture on the Ammer meadows, as seen from the higher
seats in the Passion Play theatre. The little hamlet is not talked
about, not even in guide-books. It sits, a sort of Cinderella, and
meekly does its best to take care of the strangers who come grumbling
to sleep there, once in ten years, only because beds are not to be had
in its more favored sister village farther up the stream. Yet it is no
less picturesque, and a good deal cleaner, than is Oberammergau; gets
hours more of sunshine, a freer sweep of wind, and has compassing it
about a fine stretch of meadow-lands, beautiful to look at, and rich
to reap.
Its houses are, like those in Oberammergau, chiefly white stucco over
stone, or else dark and painted wood, often the lower story of white
stucco and the upper one of dark wood, with a fringe of balconies,
dried herbs, and wood-piles where the two stories join. Many of the
stuccoed houses are gay with Scripture frescos, more than one hundred
years old, and not faded yet. There are also many of the curious
ancient windows, made of tiny round panes set in lead. When these are
broken, square panes have to be set in. Nobody can make the round ones
any more. On the inside of the brown wooden shutters are paintings of
bright flowers; over the windows, and above the doors, are also
Scripture frescos. One old house is covered with them. One scene is
Saint Francis lying on his back, with his cross by his side; and
another, the coronation of the Virgin Mary, in which God the Father
is represented as a venerable man wrapped in a red and yellow robe,
with a long white beard, resting his hand on the round globe, while
Christ, in a red mantle, is putting the crown on the head of Mary, who
is resplendent in bright blue and red. On another wall is Saint
Joseph, holding the infant Christ on his knee. There must have been a
marvellous secret in the coloring of these old frescos, that they have
so long withstood the snows, rains, and winds of the Ammer valley. The
greater part of them were painted by one Franz Zwink, in the middle of
the last century. The peasants called him the "wind painter," because
he worked with such preternatural rapidity. Many legends attest this;
among others, a droll one of his finding a woman at her churning one
day and asking her for some butter. She refused. "If you'll give me
that butter," said Zwink, "I'll paint a Mother of God for you above
your door." "Very well; it is a bargain," said the woman, "provided
the picture is done as soon as the butter," whereupon Zwink mounted to
the wall, and, his brushes flying as fast as her churn dasher, lo!
when the butter was done, there shone out the fresh Madonna over the
door, and the butter had been fairly earned. Zwink was an athletic
fellow, and walked as swiftly as he painted; gay, moreover, for there
is a tradition of his having run all the way to Munich once for a
dance. Being too poor to hire a horse, he ran thither in one day,
danced all night, and the next day ran back to Oberammergau, fresh and
merry. He was originally only a color-rubber in the studio of one of
the old rococo painters; but certain it is that he either stole or
invented a most triumphant system of coloring, whose secret is unknown
to-day. It is said that in 1790 every house in both Ober and Unter
Ammergau was painted in this way. But repeated fires have destroyed
many of the most valuable frescos, and many others have been
ruthlessly covered up by whitewash. An old history of the valley says
that when the inhabitants saw flames consuming these sacred images,
they wept aloud in terror and grief, not so much for the loss of their
dwellings as for the irreparable loss of the guardian pictures. The
effect of these on a race for three generations,--one after another
growing up in the habit, from earliest infancy, of gazing on the
visible representations of God and Christ and the Mother of God,
placed as if in token of perpetual presence and protection on the very
walls and roofs of their homes--must be incalculably great. Such a
people would be religious by nature, as inherently and organically as
they were hardy of frame by reason of the stern necessities of their
existence. It is a poor proof of the superiority of enlightened,
emancipated, and cultivated intellect, with all its fine analyses of
what God is not, if it tends to hold in scorn or dares to hold in pity
the ignorance which is yet so full of spirituality that it believes it
can even see what God is, and feels safer by night and day with a
cross at each gable of the roof.
One of the Unterammergau women, seeing me closely studying the frescos
on her house, asked me to come in, and with half-shy hospitality, and
a sort of childlike glee at my interest, showed me every room. The
house is one of some note, as note is reckoned in Unterammergau: it
was built in 1700, is well covered with Zwink's frescos, and bears an
inscription stating that it was the birthplace of one "Max Anrich,
canon of St. Zeno." It is the dwelling now of only humble people, but
has traces of better days in the square-blocked wooden ceilings and
curious old gayly-painted cupboards. Around three sides of the
living-room ran a wooden bench, which made chairs a superfluous
luxury. In one corner, on a raised stone platform, stood a square
stove, surrounded by a broad bench; two steps led up to this bench,
and from the bench, two steps more to the lower round of a ladder-like
stair leading to the chamber overhead. The kitchen had a brick floor,
worn and sunken in hollows; the stove was raised up on a high stone
platform, with a similar bench around it, and the woman explained that
to sit on this bench with your back to the fire was a very good thing
to do in winter. Every nook, every utensil, was shining clean. In one
corner stood a great box full of whetstones, scythe-sharpeners; the
making of these was the industry by which the brothers earned the most
of their money, she said; surely very little money, then, must come
into the house. There were four brothers, three sisters, and the old
mother, who sat at a window smiling foolishly all the time, aged,
imbecile, but very happy. As we drove away, one of the sisters came
running with a few little blossoms she had picked from her balcony;
she halted, disappointed, and too shy to offer them, but her whole
face lighted up with pleasure as I ordered the driver to halt that I
might take her gift. She little knew that I was thinking how much the
hospitality of her people shamed the cold indifference of so-called
finer breeding.
A few rods on, we came to a barn, in whose open doorway stood two
women threshing wheat with ringing flails. Red handkerchiefs twisted
tight round their heads and down to their eyebrows, barefooted,
bare-legged, bare-armed to the shoulders, swinging their flails
lustily, and laughing as they saw me stop my horses to have a better
look at them; they made one of the vividest pictures I saw in the
Ammer valley. Women often are hired there for this work of threshing,
and they are expected to swing flails with that lusty stroke all day
long for one mark.
THE PASSION PLAY AT OBERAMMERGAU.
The stir the Passion Play brings does not begin in Oberammergau till
the Friday afternoon before the Sabbath of the play. Then, gradually,
as a hum begins and swells in a disturbed hive of bees, begins and
swells the bustle of the incoming of strangers into the little place.
By sunset the crooked lanes and streets are swarming with people who
have all fancied they were coming in good season before the crowd. The
open space in front of George Lang's house was a scene for a painter
as the sun went down on Friday, Sept. 5, 1880. The village herd of
cows was straggling past on its easy homeward way, the fifty bells
tinkling even more sleepily than in the morning; a little goat-herd,
with bright brown eyes, and bright brown partridge feathers in his
hat, was worrying his little flock of goats along in the jam; vehicles
of all sorts,--einspanners, diligences, landaus,--all pulling,
twisting, turning, despairing, were trying to go the drivers did not
know where, and were asking the way helplessly of each other. To
heighten the confusion, a load of hay upset in the middle of the
crowd. Twenty shoulders were under it in a twinkling, and the cart was
rolled on, limping, on three wheels, friendly hands holding up the
corner. Thirty-four vehicles, one after another, halted in front of
George Lang's door. Out of many of them the occupants jumped
confidently, looking much satisfied at sight of so comfortable a
house, and presenting little slips of white paper consigning them to
Mr. Lang's care. Much crestfallen, they re-entered their vehicles, to
be driven to the quarters reserved for them elsewhere. Some argued;
some grumbled; some entreated: all in vain. The decrees of the house
of Lang are like those of the Medes and Persians.
It was long after midnight before the sound of wheels and voices and
the cracks of postilions' whips ceased under my windows; and it began
again before daylight the next morning. All was hurry and
stir,--crowds going to the early mass; still greater crowds, with
anxious faces, besieging the doors of the building where were to be
issued the numbered tickets for seats at the Play; more crowds coming
in, chiefly pedestrians; peasant men and women in all varieties and
colors of costume; Englishmen in natty travelling-clothes, with white
veils streaming from their hats; Roman Catholic priests in squads,
their square-brimmed hats and high black coats white with dust. Eager,
intent, swift, by hundreds and hundreds they poured in. Without seeing
it, one can never realize what a spectacle is produced by this rushing
in of six thousand people into a little town in the space of
thirty-six hours. There can be nothing like it except in the movements
of armies. Being in the streets was like being in a chorus or
village-fair scene on an opera stage a mile big, and crowded full from
corner to corner. The only thing to do was to abandon one's self to
currents, like a ship afloat, and drift, now down this street and now
down that, now whirl into an eddy and come to a stop, and now hurry
purposelessly on, just as the preponderating push might determine.
Mingled up in it all, in everybody's way and under all the horses'
feet, were dozens of little mites of Oberammergauers, looking five,
six, seven years of age, like lost children, offering for sale "books
of the Passion Play." Every creature above the age of an infant is
busy at this time in other ways in Oberammergau; so it is left for the
babies to hawk the librettos round the streets, and very shrewdly they
do it. Little tots that are trusted with only one book at a time,--all
they can carry,--as soon as it is sold, grab the pennies in chubby
hands and toddle home after another.