vagrant puffs of heat; the sky, shortly before sunrise, had been flaring
red, copper-colored, from end to end. This is the ardent and wayward but
caressing wind under whose touch everything grows brittle and
inflammable; when in olden days all cooking had to be suspended and
fires extinguished; when whole villages, for some trifling reason, were
burnt to the ground; it was during Fön weather that Tiefis and Nüziders,
and several in the Rhine valley, were annihilated within the memory of
our fathers.[8] The peasants, unfamiliar with real heat, go about
gasping....
While crossing our cemetery to revisit the grave of a little brother of
my father’s, an infant, and the Catholics were kind enough to make room
for him here--it struck me how poetic are the German designations for
such sad spots, _Friedhof_ and _Gottesacker_, when contrasted with our
soul-withering “churchyard” or “graveyard” or “burial-ground.” The
people hereabouts contrive to invest with a halo of romance even that
most unromantic of objects, the common potato, by calling it _Erdapfel_,
or _Grundbirne_. And the names of the ruined castles that strew this
region, Schattenburg, Sonnenberg, Rosenegg, and so forth, were surely
invented by a race that had a fine feeling for such things.
Or Blumenegg--which happens to be nothing but a translation of
Florimont, the Rhaeto-Roman name of this locality.
If you follow the main road to Ludesch, you will pass through a fir wood
and then come to the Lutz bridge. Do not cross the stream; keep on this
side, and walk along the water. After a few hundred yards you will
arrive at the “Schlosstobel” (the old “Falster”; also called
“Storrbach”) which rushes past the foot of Blumenegg castle. Not many
years ago it descended in a wild flood, uprooting trees and covering the
ground with a hideous irruption of shingle, which will remain for some
little time. On the Schlosstobel’s other side you enter a forest called
Gstinswald; part of it used to belong to our family. Here, at the
entrance of this wood, stood a landmark; a picture attached to a tree,
in memory of a man who was drowned at this spot while endeavoring to
cross the rivulet during some spate of olden days. It was a realistic
work of art, depicting both Heaven and earth. This was the subject: down
below, a watery chaos, a black thundercloud out of which buckets of
rain descended upon the victim whom you beheld struggling in the
whirlpool of waves, while his open umbrella floated disconsolately in
the neighborhood; overhead, on the other side of the thundercloud (it
had taken on a golden tinge of sunshine half way through) the Mother of
God with a saint or two, gazing down upon the scene with an air of
detachment which bordered on indifference. The picture is no longer
there; and nothing remains of its tree save a moldy stump.
From this point you can climb direct to the castle. We preferred to
wander awhile up the Gstinswald which clothes the right flank of the
Lutz river, in order to see what has happened to that mysterious and
solitary peasant-house which lay on a grassy slope in the forest. It is
still there, but those skulls of foxes and badgers and other beasts,
nailed by its occupant to a certain wooden door--skulls that held a
fascination for us children--are gone. And what of the snowdrops? This,
and a little hillock near Ludesch, were the only places where they could
be found; tiger-lilies grew elsewhere; _primula auricula_ only at the
Hanging Stone; cyclamen only at Feldkirch (where they were discovered in
the middle of the sixteenth century by Hieronymus Bock); the cypripedium
orchid (_calceolus Divæ Virginis_), the lady’s slipper, at two other
places; stag’s horn moss, _vulgo_ “Fuchsschwanz,” at four or five: we
knew them all! but flowers were dropped, when butterflies began. From
this farmhouse you have an unexpected view upon the summit of the
Scesaplana, and by far the best time to come here is after a summer
shower, when a procession of white mists comes trailing out of the
narrow valley, one after the other, like a troop of ghosts. Now ascend
through the field and the tract of woodland immediately behind this
farm, and you will reach a broad meadow which bears the old name of
Quadera or Quadern; against the huge barn which used to stand there, all
by itself, they have erected a modern house full of people. The castle
is not far off; you must look for it, since the little path that once
led up is half obliterated. And therein lies a great part of its charm;
you must look for it....
When all is said and done, when you have scoured Europe and other
regions in search of the picturesque and admired landscapes and ruins
innumerable, that shattered old fastness of Blumenegg, up there, still
remains one of the fairest places on earth. It is desolation itself, a
harmonious desolation, among its dreamy firs and beeches; firs within,
firs and beeches without. The roof is gone, and so are nearly all the
internal partitions; nothing but the shell survives. This shell, this
massive outer wall of blocks partly hewn and partly in the
rough--water-worn bowlders, dragged up from the Lutz-bed below--is
encrusted with moss wherever moss can grow; out of that moss sprout
little firs and little beeches, drawing what nourishment they can from
the old stones. They garnish the ruin. So Blumenegg is invaded by
nature; and nature, here, has been left untouched. A castle in a tale!
Elsewhere you see bare stretches of this wall, that tower up sadly in
ever-crumbling pinnacles. All is green within the shell; its firs are so
cunningly distributed that you can just see through them from one end to
the other of the ruin and realize, with pleasure, that you are within
some ancient enclosure. They rise out of an uneven floor whereunder, one
suspects, lie buried the roof and interior walls. This floor is thickly
carpeted with moss in every part. No brambles or inconvenient shrubs
grow here; nothing but firs and moss, and creeping ivy, and hepatica,
and daphne and the tender _Waldmeister_ plant, that calls up memories of
May. Once inside that green _enceinte_, a suggestion of remoteness
overcomes you; the world and its jargon are left behind. There is
silence save for the rushing torrent with its waterfall, three hundred
feet below. In former days, this castle must have towered grandly over
Ludesch and the whole valley. Viewed from down there, it now resembles
an agglomeration of spiky gray crags, peering upward through the firs.
Doubtless they have written about this place and, if one took the
trouble, one could learn something of its past either from archives or
out of the histories published by local antiquarians. There has never
been a want of such people hereabouts; the province is rich in
literature of this class. A rather valuable book which has remained in
my possession by a miracle and was printed in “dem Gräfflichem Marckt
Embs” in 1616[9] gives some account of it; but though I know little
enough, I know more than its old author could possibly have recorded,
since Blumenegg “flourished” long after he did. Eight different
dynasties have ruled here; the last being the Austrian Crown, to whom
its rights devolved at the beginning of last century. The castle was
probably built in the twelfth; it is known to have stood in 1265 and is
described as a “Veste” in 1288; its lords had power over the three
neighboring villages and some of the Valentschina (the old name of the
Walserthal). They were answerable for their acts to no township, to no
civil or religious authority whatever; to none save the Emperor himself.
That is the way to live, for it was an undertaking of questionable
profit to complain of such people to the Emperor. They claimed the right
over life and death of their lieges and exercised it freely,
“_because_”--as one of them observed in 1397--“_we possess both stocks
and gallows_”: an adequate reason. That is the way to talk.[10] They
also executed robbers with the sword. Then, together with nearly all our
feudal strongholds, this castle was sacked by the Appenzell people of
Switzerland in 1405. Its outer wall is down, on the east. From this
flank, presumably, the invaders entered for their work of destruction. A
spot is still pointed out by the driving road, on the other side of the
wild torrent, where, during some siege, the horses of a noble coach took
fright at the sound of cannon-shots and threw themselves down the
precipice, carriage and all.
Blumenegg revived. It was rebuilt and, during the Thirty Years’ War,
contained fifty Swedish prisoners in its “Keuthe,” a dungeon which was
pretty full even on ordinary occasions. Then, in 1650, the place was
burnt down with all it contained--priceless treasures among them, such
as the long-hidden manuscript of the _Chronicon Hirsaugiense_ in the
handwriting of its famous author, the Abbot Tritheim, of which,
fortunately, a copy had been taken a little earlier at St. Gallen. The
building was reduced to ashes a second time in 1774, and thereafter
allowed to fall into ruin, for ever. Why, I cannot say. Who would live
at Blumenegg if he could, particularly in that earlier period? The south
part of the castle, facing the valley, bears traces of a clumsy
reconstruction. It lacks the dreaminess of the remaining part; a harsher
element of stones dominates in this quadrangle, and you can discover an
old fire-place with blackened chimney and a few projecting wooden beams.
For the rest, it must have looked well, blazing up there; I can picture
the villagers of Ludesch down below, watching the conflagration and
dancing with joy!
It did not take us long to make ourselves comfortable within the
enclosure, on that soft carpet. The sun was still fairly high; it
percolated through the fir-branches, etching lively patterns all around
us; it drew luscious tints, of unearthly brightness, out of the deep
green moss. And here we stayed, and stayed. We had fallen under the
spell of the place and neither felt inclined to move; some drowsy genius
hovered in our neighborhood. It was so warm and green; so remote. How
one changes! I used to find it irksome to be obliged to show this castle
to friends or relatives. Left to my own devices, I avoided the place;
there were no butterflies, no fossils, no snakes, no birds, worth
mentioning. Ten to one, not even a squirrel....
Since then, castle-ruins galore have been inspected. Europe is studded
with them. I think of those absurd places in England or on the Rhine,
possibly restored and in every case sullied by tourists and their
traces; out of them, the spirit of romance has been driven beyond
recall. The frowning rock-fortresses of the Bavarian Palatinate--Dahn,
Weglenburg, Trifels, Madenburg, Lindelbronn, Fleckenstein: how one used
to know them!--are in better case, or were, thirty odd years ago; even
they have not escaped contamination. Certain southern ruins are no doubt
imposing; but bleak. Bleak! Mere piles of masonry, they have not been
hallowed by lapse of years; they lack the refinement which verdure alone
can give; their ravages will show for all time. Those ravages are healed
here; trees and moss have done their work so well that an exquisite
_tonalité_ pervades the spot. Blumenegg is all in one key. Men have left
it to crumble alone; and alone it crumbles, slowly and graciously, to
earth. Nothing and nobody intrudes, save the wild things of nature; you
must look for it. A much-frequented path--short cut from the Walserthal
to the railway-station--runs close by; who ever steps aside? Resting in
that enchanted penumbra, one gains the impression that Blumenegg is
neither sad nor smiling; a little wistful, a little sleepy, like old
Barbarossa in his cave.
What of the intimate, domestic life of its former occupants? On a night,
say, of December, 1402--of whom did the family consist, what was their
costume, their dinner menu, the sound of their dialect, their theme of
conversation? Does it help us much to know that Count Wolfart,
familiarly termed “the wolflet”--it probably suited him--could bring
five thousand men into battle? (An enormous number; can they have meant
five hundred?) Poke our noses, as we please, into chronicles, and pore
over books like Freytag’s “Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit,”
these men remain crepuscular, elusive shapes. The Romans of the Empire,
the pyramid builders of Egypt, move in comparative daylight before our
eyes....
Meanwhile the mossy floor has ceased to glow. Slanting sunbeams come
filtered, lemon-tinted, through the beech-leaves out there; they spatter
the fir-trunks with moon-like discs and crescents. And still we refuse
to budge. A soft tinkle of cow-bells, inaudible by day, floats up from
the valley; even as we look on, those silvery patches begin to fade from
the trees, and everything trembles in the witchery of dusk. Interplay of
light and shade is ended. We feel no change, while darkness creeps up
stealthily; only the voice of the torrent has grown louder and hoarser.
A flock of crows suddenly arrives, with the evident intention of
roosting above our heads. Something apparently is not in order to-night,
for they rise again with discontented croakings. No wonder. Mr. R. has
been lying flat on his back for the last half hour immediately below
them, playing tunes on that mouth-organ--that talisman which I, in a
moment of inspiration, presented to him. On such occasions he is lost to
the world and in a kind of trance; one arm beats time in the air. The
birds cannot possibly see him, but they can hear the music, and no crow
on earth, not the wisest old raven, could guess the names of the
“morceaux” which have just been performed.
“What were you playing, all this time?” I enquire, during a pause.
“Well, there was the _marche des escargots_, which you must be sick of,
by now--a fine piece, all the same; and the old _vache enragée_----”
“I know. Rather noisy, the old _vache_.”
“What do you expect? Do you want her to go mad in her sleep. Then the
_fantaisie_ of last week, and _pluie dans les bois_, and the duet
between two sea-nymphs, and _rêve d’un papillon_ and a new one, a little
caprice or something, which has not yet got a name. I am thinking of
calling it _coin des fleurs_ (Blumenegg[11]).”
Strange! This instrument appeals, as I expected, to certain primitive
and childlike streaks in his nature. At first, needless to say, it was
thrown aside with contempt; then shyly picked up from time to time. Now
the two are inseparable; it accompanies him everywhere in a specially
built leather case, and I should not be surprised to learn that he takes
it to bed with him. As to these “morceaux”--they have a real interest,
seeing that Mr. R. knows nothing whatever of music, cannot remember a
tune, never whistles or sings, and has only a feeble ear for rhythm in
poetry. None the less, each of these _melodies_ possesses a character of
its own and, once invented, never varies by a note. Their names, I
understand, are recorded in his diary. They are worth it.
Night; and dark night, under these trees. The Fön is over, a chill dew
has fallen. We rise at last, rather stiff, and proceed cautiously
downwards till we reach the path; then across the bridge and into the
open meadow, the so-called fox-meadow, when--our match-box, our only
match-box: where is it gone? Forgotten inside the castle, on the moss.
Back again, to crawl about on hands and knees till the precious object
has been found; then once more to the fox-meadow. So we wander homeward,
in full content. The dew-drenched field sends a pleasant shiver up
through our boots, and a chorus of crickets is chirping lustily in its
damp earth. Stars are out; the Tschallenga hill, confronting us, has
become pitch-black; those Rhætian peaks are like steel, and their
snow-patches have a dead look at this hour. Tawny exhalations, as of
lingering day, flit about the Swiss mountains on our west. Some grass
has been mown up here, during the hot afternoon; the air is full of its
fragrance.
* * * * *
Blumenegg and such places--these are the surroundings in which children
ought to grow up. At home, domestic beasts of every kind, and gardens
and orchards; further afield, flowery meadows and forests; the
glittering snow of winter and cloudless summer skies; rock and rivulet;
a smiling patriarchal peasantry all about; these are the surroundings.
Keep them off the street-pavement.
Impermanent things, like pavements and what they stand for, stimulate
the adult; they overstimulate children, who should be in contact with
eternities. In a town you may watch the progress of their warping; how
they grow up precocious and partially atrophied; defrauded of their full
heritage as human beings. Indeed all town-bred persons, with the rarest
exceptions, are incomplete, in a certain small sense of that word. They
show a gap which, unlike other gaps (deficient learning or manners) can
never be filled up in later years. The intelligent countryman does not
take long to appreciate the most complex wonders of civilization,
because his life began at the right end of things; your citizen will
only stare at those other wonders with more or less impatience: he began
at the wrong end. One can tell after five minutes’ conversation whether
a man has been brought up in city or country, for no townsman, be he of
what class he pleases, can hide his native imperfection.
Or go to literature, the surest test, since _scripta manent_. It
happened to be my fate for some years to peruse daily a considerable
mass of the latest so-called lyric poetry, and a melancholy task it was
following these youngsters as they floundered about in a vain search
after new gods, unaware of the fact that the lyrical temper demands a
peculiar environment for its nurture, that gods are shy, and not to be
encountered in music-halls and restaurants, or even during a week-end at
the seaside. There were no eternities for these people, and consequently
no true joy, no true grief; no heights, no depths; they fell into two
categories: the hectic and the drab. The lyrical temper.... One uses
such expressions, without perhaps being clear as to their meaning. What
is the lyrical temper? A capacity to warble about buttercups? I should
describe it as a sympathetic feeling for the myriad processes of nature,
and the application of this gift towards interpreting human phenomena
with concision and poignancy; the sense, in short, of being borne along,
together with all else on earth, in a soft pantheistic commotion.
That is a view of life which generates both tears and smiles, and one
which you will vainly seek in any town-bred writer. Compare Milton, not
with Theocritus or Shakespeare, but with a poet of the caliber of Ovid,
and you will realize how much more individual and authoritative his
utterance would be, had he enjoyed Ovid’s advantages in childhood. He
saw nature through books, say Mr. Tuckwell and Mr. Cotterill and all the
rest of them;[12] his scenery is charmingly manufactured according to
the renaissance prescription, and if you know your Italian poets you can
tell beforehand what Milton will have to say; a master of landscape
arrangement, without a doubt, but--he lacked what Ovid possessed, an
æsthetic personality; he was a moralist, as every one grows to be, who
takes his fellow-creatures at their own estimate. And how avoid doing
this, if you are always among them? For there they live clustered
together, and involuntarily disposed to attach undue significance to
themselves and their works, to lose their sense of proportion, until
some little interference from that despised exterior makes itself felt,
an earthquake or such-like, which gives these posturing ephemerals an
opportunity to straighten out their values again.
Charles Lamb is another street-walker, and one whose relish of man and
his ways, to my taste, never cloys, inasmuch as it remains firm-fixed on
the hither side of lachrymosity. Yet is there not a certain shallowness
in his preoccupation with fellow-creatures? Shallowness suggests want of
depth; want of breadth is what I wish to imply. Zest, temperamental
zest, should be a fountain, scattering playfully in all directions;
Lamb’s comfortable variety is unilateral--a fountain gushing from a
wall. How many avenues of delight are closed to the mere moralist or
immoralist who knows nothing of things extra-human; who remains
absorbed in mankind and its half-dozen motives of conduct, so unstable
and yet forever the same, which we all fathomed before we were twenty!
Well, their permutations and combinations afford a little material for
playwrights and others, and there is no harm in going to the theater now
and then, or reading a novel, provided you have nothing better to do.
FATHER BRUHIN
_Father Bruhin_
This was a pious pilgrimage.
Ages ago there used to come to our house a visitor, a friend of my
father’s, a Benedictine monk of the name of Bruhin. Of him I have, or
till yesterday thought to have, dim, childish memories. He lived in the
neighboring convent of St. Gerold--offshoot of the famous
Einsiedeln--and was a naturalist, a _rara avis_ hereabouts. I still
possess seven of his papers, mostly on the fauna and flora of this
particular province: thoroughly good work. He was a loving and accurate
student both of animals and plants, and of their literature. St. Gerold
is the second of various hamlets and villages in the long verdant
Walserthal on our east, up which now runs a convenient carriage road
ending (the road; not the valley) at the distant Buchboden, five hours’
march away. We went there, because I was anxious to learn, if possible,
a few details of Bruhin’s life and to see whether their library
contained any other works by him.
It is a pleasant, easy walk to St. Gerold, but the pilgrimage proved a
disappointment. In the Prior’s absence, the archives could not be
consulted; a young monk, a stranger who was undergoing a kind of
rest-cure here--he looked a little haggard--accompanied us up to the
library at the top of the building. It was well stored with books such
as one might expect to find there, but contained not a scrap by Bruhin.
At the library our guide left us in charge of that old woman who has
haunted the premises from time immemorial; her hair has grown whiter
since last we met, her eyes are black as ever. She showed the way
through some of those comfortably furnished bedrooms with their fine
seventeenth century wood-carvings; into the church, which has been
tastefully redecorated and where the recent governmental brigandage has
not spared even the greater of the tin organ-pipes; finally down to the
kitchen which, like the organ, is worked by electricity. There she fed
Mr. R. on cider and cheese, saying she hoped they would soon be able to
receive guests again and keep them overnight, if necessary; at present,
everything was upside down, everything!
Had the Prior been visible, our search might have led to something; he
was away on the mountains. Whether he resembles him of olden days? That
one, I remember, used to come down and see us, and could generally be
induced to stay for luncheon or dinner. It was his habit, while eating,
to produce a formidable smacking noise--Germans call it
_Schmatzen_--with his lips, a noise which we were strictly forbidden to
make. One day at mealtime I gave a splendid imitation of the Prior over
his soup, thinking that what was good enough for him would surely be
good enough for me, and hoping, at all events, to gain some little
applause. Instead of that, I was told: “Only His Reverence the Prior may
make that noise. When you are Prior, you shall make it too. Meanwhile,
try to eat like everybody else, unless you want to be sent out of the
room.” A damper....
So much for Bruhin. All we gleaned at St. Gerold was that he served as
“Co-operator” there from 1865 to 1868 and after that, presumably, left
the convent. If so, the monk whom I hazily recall must have been a
different one, unless Bruhin continued his visits to us from some other
quarter after 1868. The Bregenz libraries might contain more of his
writings; I shall look for them, if we go there.[13]