second most mountainous and romantic of the Four Forest Cantons. The
Swiss have solved to perfection the problem of Home Rule: here is a
little territory of less than two hundred square miles, and with a
population in 1900 of less than thirty thousand people (less than that
of Peterborough), which is yet, for all domestic intents and purposes,
an independent sovereign state. Nay, not content with this, since
these thirty thousand odd people, on their odd two hundred miles of
mountain-land, were ill-content to dwell together in amity, the state
is actually sub-divided, like Bâle and Appenzell, into two independent
halves. Each of these is confined mostly to a single big valley, with
its tributaries; and each has a capital that would hardly pass muster
in the mill districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire for a fair-sized
village. The half-canton of Obwalden is thus roughly conterminous
with the valley of the Obwalden Aa, and has Sarnen, on the great
highroad from Lucerne to Meiringen across the Brünig, for its rustic
metropolis, whilst Nidwalden comprises most of the valley of the
Nidwalden Aa, and finds its seat of government at Stans. Both these
valleys, though largely sub-Alpine (the head of the Nidwalden Aa alone
pierces deep into the heart of the greater hills, in the neighbourhood
of Engelberg), are full of lovely scenery, though perhaps apt to be
neglected by the too impatient tourist in his eagerness for the greater
glories of Uri and the Bernese Highlands. It is pleasant, again, after
so much destructive historical criticism, to encounter traces in these
valleys of a less widely recognized Swiss hero, whose services to his
country, if less dramatic than those of Tell and von Winkelried, are
at any rate more authentic, and perhaps of wider import. Nicolas von
der Flüe has found no niche in popular school histories, has evoked
no "Battle of the Books," and has inspired no great national drama.
None the less his mild personality appears with high significance at a
tremulously critical period in the evolution of Swiss unity and Swiss
independence. Whether or not we accept the story of the famous meeting
on the Rütli, it is certain that the foundations of free Switzerland
were laid in August, 1291, by the perpetual alliance, for the
maintenance of their ancient rights and liberties, of the three Cantons
of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz.
[Illustration: LOOKING UP THE LAKE, FROM BECKENRIED.]
This is the stock whence has sprung the present Confederation of
twenty-two free states; but the stock nearly perished at the root from
a little worm of discord in 1481, when the Confederates quarrelled at
Stans over the admission to the Union (which then already numbered
eight members) of the towns of Fribourg and Neuchâtel, and perhaps
also over the division of the spoil that they had lately wrung from
Charles the Bold. The Diet had already debated for three days, and had
broken up on the evening of the third with what seemed little chance
of peace: the morrow threatened secession, and most likely civil war.
Nicolas von der Flüe (often called affectionately Bruder Klaus; his
real name was Löwenbrugger) was born at Flühli, where the Melch Thal
joins the Aa valley, in 1417; and after many years of active life,
including some experience of war, retired, in about his fiftieth
year, to a hermitage in the gorge of the river a few minutes' walk
distant from his native village, where he is said to have subsisted
solely on the Sacramental Wafer, of which he partook once a month.
He died in 1487, and was afterwards beatified, and in the course of
last century, sainted. It so happened that his Confessor in 1481 was
the head parish priest of Stans, a certain Heini Ingrund; who, early
in the morning of the day succeeding the break-up of the Diet, sought
out Nicolas in his hermitage, and obtained from him a message to the
deputies urging reconciliation and peace. Armed with this exhortation
he then hastened back to Stans, where he arrived, as we are told, all
wet with perspiration, and hurriedly made the round of the inns where
the deputies were still lodged, and prevailed on them, by his tears
and entreaties, to meet yet once again in consultation to hear the
secret message of Brother Klaus. The words of this are not reported,
but its effect was immediate and startling; in less than an hour
the irreconcilables were reconciled; and the morning, which rose so
gloomily with presage of disaster and dissolution, finally resulted in
greater strength and union, as ratified in the Convention of Stans. A
picture was painted by command of the government of Nidwalden, and may
still be seen in a passage in the Rathhaus at Stans. It is curiously
unhistorical in character, for Nicolas is here represented as appearing
before the Diet in person, whereas nothing is better attested than that
he merely sent a messenger of peace. Stans itself has other points
of interest; the house of Arnold von Winkelried has been already
alluded to; and there is a statue of the hero in the middle of the
market-place, and another, with a fountain, near the church. Like
most little towns in this part of Switzerland--like Sarnen, Arth, and
Altdorf--the place is delightfully quaint and old-fashioned, with its
often painted houses, and its wide-projecting eaves. Above it towers
the Stanserhorn, with perhaps more bulk than shape; whilst a mile or
two down the valley, on the opposite shore of the lake, the graceful
peaks of Pilatus give a welcome note of contrast. The church has a
Romanesque tower; but the body, like most of those in the Alps, is
Classical rebuilding. In the graveyard, however, stands the medieval
bone-house, which, like others in the neighbourhood, is a separate
and complete little church. The bones have been removed, and perhaps
decently interred; but a tablet on the exterior still testifies to
the appalling slaughter here of the people of Nidwalden--women and
children, as well as men--to the number of more than four hundred, by
the savage French Republicans in 1798. This frightful massacre at the
hands of a brutal soldiery, infuriated by long resistance, lacked no
circumstance of horror--
"Wasting fire and dying groan,
And priests slain on the altar-stone"--
that, after the lapse of another century, may rival the German triumphs
in Belgium. The visitor will find himself repaid by prolonging his
adventure up the valley of the Nidwalden Aa to the upland vale of
Engelberg, where still stands the famous Benedictine monastery that
was founded circa 1120, and that received its present name ("Mons
Angelorum," or Hill of Angels) at the hands of Pope Calixtus II., from
the tradition, celebrated by Wordsworth in some feeble lines in 1820,
that the site was pointed out by angel songs. Roughly half-way up the
valley is the village of Wolfenschiessen, hard by whose parish church
is the little wooden house, or hermitage, that was inhabited by the
hermit, Conrad Scheuber (1480-1559), a grandson of Nicolas von der
Flüe. This was built on the mountain pastures of the Bettelirüt, high
above Wolfenschiessen, in 1547; and was transplanted to its present
site in 1867. On the hermitage, or church--I foolishly seem to have
made no note on the spot, and my recollection is misty--is a series
of naïve paintings, representing scenes from the life of the hermit,
and showing him engaged (unless I mistake) in the congenial medieval
hermit-task of outwitting, or otherwise discomforting, a very material
devil, or devils.
[Illustration: BECKENRIED.]
Sarnen, the capital of Obwalden, is situated at the north end of
its lake of the same name, and is as interesting in its way as its
rival Stans; but the green pastoral valley of the Obwalden Aa, though
everywhere bordered by lofty hills, is altogether more open and less
rugged than its Nidwalden namesake, and terminates, unlike the latter,
in the gentle pass of the Brünig, instead of the lofty, snow-clad
summits of the Spannörter and Titlis. High above the little mountain
town, on a green pedestal of hill, is the stately, Classical parish
church, commanding sweeping views across the wide sub-Alpine vale.
Here, in the crowded burial-ground, I searched in vain in the early
months of 1914 for memorials of any age--almost every cross or stone
had been erected since I had last passed along this valley, in driving
in the diligence from Meiringen to Lucerne, not quite a quarter of
a century earlier. The old bone-houses stand nowadays mostly empty;
but the Swiss dead, I suspect, are still frequently deposited in
graves that hold them only in temporary tenancy. Here, as elsewhere
in Switzerland, you will note the local custom of often letting a
photograph of the deceased into his head-stone, beneath a protecting
sheet of glass. A mile or two to the south-west of Sarnen, by the shore
of the placid lake, is the little village of Sachseln, the church of
which (Classical again) is lucky in its possession of the bones of
Bruder Klaus. I remember in 1887, on the occasion of the drive already
mentioned, passing somewhere in this neighbourhood a long procession
of pilgrims, who were doubtless making their way to the shrine of the
patriot-saint. "His bones," says Murray, "lie in a glass case above
the high altar, the shutters of which are opened for travellers, and
are also withdrawn at stated seasons, in order to exhibit the relics
to crowds of pilgrims.... There is a wooden figure in the transept,
clothed with the saint's veritable robes." I could not, however,
discover this aerial place of sepulchre when I explored this church
in 1914, nor do I remember the wooden figure, though I found statues
of the saint, and of his grandson, Conrad Scheuber, in the parish
church of Stans. The same two statements appear substantially in an old
edition in my possession of 1872, and have perhaps escaped revision; or
perhaps my own memory and observation are at fault. I turn with little
hope to the last edition of the egregious Baedeker (1913), and find
that the burial of the saint at Sachseln is there entirely ignored. I
find, however, as I expected, the number of bedrooms, and the rate of
pension, at the Kreuz, the Engel, the Löwe, and the Rössli--at none of
which doubtless excellent hotels I have ever stopped, or am ever likely
to want to stay!
VI
The big central division of the Lake of Lucerne, extending from the
intersection of the cross to the great right angle (it is practically
a right angle) at Brunnen that marks the commencement of the Urner
See, or Bay of Uri, is considerably the largest, and probably in
some respects the most beautiful, but otherwise perhaps the least
interesting, of all five reaches of the lake. It lacks, indeed, the
superlative grandeur of the Bay of Uri, which corresponds, in English
Lakeland, to the head of Ullswater, or Wastwater--curiously so, since
in all three cases we have, not merely a climax of severe and even
savage sterility, but in all the vista up the water is closed chiefly
by a single, great, pyramidal hill: at Wastwater by Great Gable, at
Ullswater by Caudale Moor, and here, at the Bay of Uri, by the dark
outline of the Bristenstock. The Urner See, then, is the grandest and
most imposing, and in some lights gloomiest, lake in Switzerland,
though the Walenstadtsee, in Glarus and Gallen, will in these respects
by some be thought a rival; but the mid-reaches of Lucerne, to the
south of the red cliffs and dark woods of Rigi, and contained towards
the west by Pilatus, and towards the east by the twin Mythen--the last
three nobly peaked--excel, I think, in open sunny beauty. Contrariwise,
these reaches have but small historical interest, with the single
exception of Gersau, as compared with the other four members: the Tell
traditions, as we have seen, or shall see presently, are confined to
the Bay of Küssnacht and to the lake of Uri; Arnold von Winkelried and
Nicolas von der Flüe belong to Stans, and Stans, though actually set
back a couple of miles or so from the margin of the lake, essentially
belongs to the Bay of Alpnach; whilst even the little Lucernersee,
though so humble in scenic splendour, leads at any rate to the quays of
Lucerne itself, with its girdle of towers and ancient bridges, and with
the banners in its Rathhaus that were wrested from the Austrian on the
field of Sempach, and the armour there stripped from the dead body of
Duke Leopold. Of most of the villages on this central reach, or reaches
(for the division is sub-divided by the narrow strait between the
Nasen)--whether Weggis, Vitznau, Buochs, or Beckenried--there is little
to be said, save that all are quaint and characteristic, and that all
are delightfully situated on the margin of the lake. Each, of course,
is not without its page in history--Buochs, for example, was burnt by
the French in 1798; whilst Weggis was only finally incorporated into
the Canton of Lucerne, after years of struggling independence, in
1535. Gersau, however, of all this group of littoral settlements, is
in some respects by far the most significant. This is a mere village,
at the foot of the wooded Hochfluh--the last big point to the cast of
the strangely isolated Rigi massif, and apparently the loftiest (5,574
feet), with the exception of Rigi Kulm. Hardly bigger than Küssnacht,
and decidedly smaller than Brunnen, this town--if town it may be
called--of less than fifteen hundred souls, with its neighbouring strip
of lake-side territory, maintained for more than four long centuries
its status as the smallest independent sovereign state in Europe. The
place once belonged to the Dukes of Hapsburgh, who "levied duties on
lambs, goatskins, fish, and grey cloth," and by them it was mortgaged
to the barons of Ramstein, who parted with its possession to the house
of Von Moos, of Lucerne. From the latter Gersau bought its freedom in
1390 for the sum of 690 pfennigs, which it had painfully "scraped
together after ten years of hard toil." "They had already, thirty-one
years before, concluded a league with the Four Forest Cantons, and had
even rendered assistance to the Confederates in the battle of Sempach;
where a native of the town captured the banner of Hohenzollern and
brought it home and placed it in the church of Gersau, which even in
its present form bears witness to the pride of the little territory."
Thus Gersau freed herself in the Middle Ages from the house of
Hapsburgh, and triumphed against the house of Hohenzollern, just as
civilized Europe, more than five hundred years later, agonised and
struggled only yesterday:
"Haud aliter puppesque tuæ pubesque tuorum
Aut portum tenet aut pleno subit ostia velo,
Perge modo, et, qua te ducit via, dirige gressum."
[Illustration: LAKE URI FROM BRUNNEN.]
This central compartment of the lake is closed towards the east, as
already stated, by the bare rock peaks of the Great and Little Mythen.
These have been compared, unless I mistake, to the twin Langdale
Pikes, in Westmoreland, as seen from the head of Windermere; and
probably the comparison has just as much validity as comparisons of
the sort are ever capable of asserting. Nature, who is studious never
to reproduce herself with complete and meticulous accuracy, is fond
enough of teasing us with suggestion and reminiscence, and often enough
finds pleasure in moulding "two lovely berries" on a single stem. The
Mythen are removed, again like Wordsworth's "lusty twins," to a quite
appreciable distance from the margin of the lake; but here, whereas
in Westmoreland the intervening country is the sweetest confusion
imaginable of undulating pasture and coppice along the broken course
of the Brathay, the broad plinth that rises up in slow but persistent
gradient from Brunnen to the foot of the Mythen is, to the writer's
way of thinking (and he knows of no support from the judgment of other
critics), the weakest bit of composition along the whole basin of
Lucerne, and a tract of country--it is luckily very small--as dull
and profitless as any to be found among the Alps. Yet this, in fact,
as part and parcel of the Canton of Schwyz, is in a sense the very
heart and core of Switzerland, and the veritable holy cradle of Swiss
freedom. It has given its name to the whole Confederation, and the
little town of Schwyz itself, which is visible rather too obviously
as the land slopes up in the distance, though with less than eight
thousand inhabitants, might very justly complain of Berne that the
latter has usurped its proper dignity in attracting to itself the
Swiss seat of federal government. Brunnen, which is called the port of
Schwyz, and from which it is distant about three miles, is singularly
crushed and over-weighted by the great hotels on the Seelisberg and the
Axenfels, and has suffered perhaps more severely by the exploitation
of its neighbourhood than any other single station on the lake. The
attraction here, of course, is the majestic Bay of Uri, which comes
into view with startling suddenness, in a few revolutions of the
paddles, as the steamer approaches the quay at Brunnen; and whose
splendour, luckily, neither monster hotel, nor monster crowd, nor the
presence of the great St. Gothard railway (here first insistently
apparent on the margin of the lake),
"nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy."
One would have preferred, no doubt, to have approached this inner
shrine of the hills--which is also the inner shrine of the great
traditions of Swiss liberty--with somewhat less obtrusive parade of the
engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century. One remembers for the
moment how William and Dorothy Wordsworth came hither, and on foot, in
1820. "We descended," writes Dorothy in one of her journals, "by a long
flight of steps, into the Vale, and, after about half a mile's walking,
we arrived at _Brunnen_. Espied Wm. and M. [her brother, William, and
his wife] upon a crag above the village, and they directed us to the
Eagle Inn, where I instantly seated myself before a window, with a
long reach of the Lake of Uri before me, the magnificent commencement
to our regular approach to the St. Gothard Pass of the Alps. [Hitherto
their approach from Calais had been devious, by way of the Rhine and
the Oberland.] My first feeling was of extreme delight in the excessive
_beauty_ of the scene--I had expected something of a more awful
impression from the Lake of Uri; but nothing so _beautiful_." There was
then no St. Gothard railway; no over-weening hotels; not even, perhaps,
a steamboat on the lake!
It is singular, perhaps, that neither this superlative Bay of Uri, nor
all its varied traditions of the Tellsplatte or the Rütli, should have
succeeded in evoking a single verse from the poet whose inspiration had
been kindled to such splendid effort in Scotland, less than twenty
years previously, by the vision of a sweet-voiced girl by the spray of
a Highland waterfall, by the careless evening greeting of a woman by
a lake. The magic period of plenary inspiration was passed, indeed,
for Wordsworth at the time of this continental tour in 1820; and yet
it was after his return to England that he composed the great sonnet
on King's College Chapel. The Rütli lies across the lake scarcely half
an hour's row from Brunnen, yet it does not appear from Dorothy's
journal that her brother even visited it. Here, on a green shelf of
meadow by the side of the greener lake, and over-topped towards the
west by the dark woods and cliffs of the Sonnenberg, are the few square
yards of sacred soil where the three founders of Swiss freedom met
together and conspired, if fables do not lie, for the rooting out of
the Austrian tyrant in 1307. Their actual names are given, and the
very day of meeting--November 7, in "the dead vast and middle of the
night"--yet the imp of modern criticism, which has spared neither Tell
nor Arnold von Winkelried, is clamorous again to rob us of this famous
drama of conjuration on the Rütli. On the opposite shore of the lake,
but considerably further to the south--to the south, in fact, of the
little village of Sisikon, which itself may be reckoned as roughly the
centre of the Bay of Uri--on the immediate margin of the water, and
below the great, vertical, twisted precipices of the dark and towering
Axenberg, is the little ledge of the Tellsplatte, where Tell is said to
have sprung ashore from the boat, and from the custody of his warders,
during the onslaught of a sudden squall, when on his way as a prisoner
from Altdorf to Küssnacht. The chapel was rebuilt towards the close of
last century, and is visible as we pass from the steamer. Behind it
runs the great St. Gothard railway, on its way from Bâle to Milan; and
higher up the cliff is the famous highroad of the Axenstrasse, which
was driven along the face of these sheer and impracticable precipices,
in alternate cutting, embankment and tunnel, by the zeal of the Federal
Government in 1863-64, in order to better the communication between
Canton Ticino and the rest of Switzerland. Ticino, or Tessin, the fifth
largest of the states in acreage but the seventh in population, lies to
the south of Uri, across the wild pass of the St. Gothard, on the sunny
Italian side of the Alps, and was only admitted to the Confederation in
1803, though earlier by a dozen years than units of such importance as
Neuchâtel, Geneva, and the Valais. One is rather apt to forget that the
Switzerland of the days before the French Revolution--the Switzerland
whose name is a synonym for liberty; the Switzerland of Sempach,
Morat, and Morgarten--consisted only of the thirteen German-speaking
states that are clustered mostly to the north and west of the original
mountain nucleus of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz.
With Flüelen, exactly at the head of the lake, we conclude our
perambulation of the Vierwaldstättersee. I do not know that this little
village has much of particular interest; but a couple of miles beyond
it is the small mountain capital of Uri, where Tell is reported in the
immortal legend to have shot the apple from off his boy's head, and
where his statue still stands in the diminutive market-place. The vale
of the Reuss at Altdorf, and indeed as far south as Amsteg, where it
is blocked, as it were, by the huge pyramid of the Bristenstock, and
where the floor of the valley first begins to rise in earnest towards
the far-away _col_ of the St. Gothard, is merely a prolongation of the
mountain basin of the Urnersee, with the substitution of flat green
pasture for a pavement of crystal lake. Of the Bay of Uri itself I feel
that I have said little, yet feel, with some sincerity, that there
is little to be said. Its elements, though majestic, are exceedingly
downright and simple, whereas those of the rest of the Lake of Lucerne
are multiform, subtle, and complex. Whatever be the impression that
it effects on the spectator, it is likely to accomplish this at once;
it is no finer at the head than at the foot; and all that it has of
grandeur (and nothing of the kind in the Alps is grander) is flashed
upon us in a moment, in complete and final revelation, when first it
comes into vision between the piers at Trieb and Brunnen. It varies, of
course, in splendour as the day is bright or dull; but less, I imagine,
than the lower reaches of the lake, which depend more for their effect
on screens of mountain more remote, and are capable of assuming softer
and lovelier colouring exactly because their atmospheric distances are
greater. In gloom, or rain, or heat-haze, it is the one division of
the lake that will fail to disappoint us, but perhaps it is also the
one division that responds less readily to the vivifying influences
of sunshine and blue sky. Nor is it really wild, if one may say so
without paradox, in the sense in which Ennerdale is wild, or Wastdale
Head, or Langstrath, among the familiar fells of Cumberland. The cliffs
that drop directly to its eastern shore are indeed tremendous and
unapproachable, but above them, as we know, are gentle Alpine pastures
that are musical with cow-bells, and meadows that are fragrant with hay
and flowers. The tops of distant snow-clad mountains, again, though
visible from its waters, are really removed to immense distances,
above it and beyond it, and though they ring it round in insuperable
barrier, almost belong to another world. Land where you can, or will,
and you find your immediate environment scarcely wilder, if wilder at
all, than the lower slopes of Pilatus or Rigi. It is only, in fact, in
the upland vales of Switzerland--at spots like the Grimsel Hospice, or
towards the summits of passes like the Simplon or the Splügen--that the
ordinary wanderer, who is not a climber, will realize that _abandon_
of wild and savage sterility that delights him in a hundred glens
among the mountains of Scotland or Carnarvonshire, in Glen Sannox, or
Glen Sligachan, in Llanberis, or Cwm Llydaw. The Bay of Uri is indeed
majestic, and its framework of distant summits is indeed magnificently
wild, yet not here, I think, shall we taste with Shelley the strange
"Pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be."
INDEX
[The principal reference is given first.]
Ahorn, Lukas, 21
Alpnach, Lake of, 41
Altdorf, 61, 40
Axenberg, the, 60
Axenfels, the, 57
Axenstrasse, the, 60
Beckenried, 53
Beromünster, 10
Bettelirüt, the, 49
Bone-houses, 48, 50
Bristenstock, the, 52, 61
Brünig Pass, 50
Brunnen, 57, 52
Bruder Klaus (see Flüe, Nicolas von der)
Buochs, 53, 54
Bürgenstock, the, 42
Capuchin Friars, 32
Carlyle (quoted), 20
"Dance of Death," the, 18
Engelberg, 48, 44
Flüe, Nicolas von der, 46, 45, 49, 50
Flüelen, 61
Flühli, 46
Frackmünd, the, 24
Gersau, 54
Gesler, 37, 38, 40
Gesler's Castle, 37
Gesner, Conrad, 26
Goat-whey cure, 32
Hapsburgh, Dukes of, 54, 55
Hochfluh, the, 54
Hohenzollern, House of, 55
Hohle Gasse, the, 37
Ingrund, Heini, 46
Küsnacht, 36, 40
Küsnacht, Bay of, 34
Leopold, Duke, 53
Lopperberg, the, 42
Lowerz, Lake of, 38
Lucerne, 14-21, 53
Barfüsserkirche, 14
City Walls, 14
Gletscher Garten, 21
Hof-Brücke, 17
Hofkirche, 15, 16
Kapell-Brücke, 17, 18
Lion Monument, 20
Mühlen Brücke, 18
Quays, view from, 8, 21
Rathhaus, 14, 53
St. Peter's Kapel, 17
Spreuerbrücke, 18
Wasserturm, 17
Lucernersee, 53
Meggen, 35
Mountain railways, 33
Mythen, the, 55, 38, 53