The Lake of Lucerne

by Joseph E. Morris

V

Of the five great primary divisions of the Vierwaldstättersee—and one is driven, however anxious to preserve the configuration of the cross, to recognize a fifth, and separate, division in the Bay, or Lake, of Uri—of the five great divisions of the Lake of Lucerne, that which extends to the quays of Lucerne itself is the most placid and domestic in respect of actual shore-line. True, there is always a background of lofty mountain, sufficiently magnificent and sufficiently near at hand to impress itself on the landscape as a component, and even dominant, feature; but the actual littoral in this compartment of the lake—and Lucerne, unlike Zurich or Geneva, but to some extent like Como, is literally partitioned into compartments—is softly arcadian in character, with low, gently swelling hills of slight, inconclusive contour, knee-deep with hay and flowers, and shoulder-deep with apple-blossom and orchard. Next, I think, in ascending scale is the Bay of Küsnacht, so called from the big village at its head. The north-west shore of this is again of mildly pastoral character; but directly from its south-east margin rise the deep, dark woods of the Rigi, supplying that hint of real Alpine sublimity—it is still merely a hint—that is wholly absent from the immediate shores of the little Lucernersee strictly so-called. The road from Lucerne to Küsnacht, where it skirts this bay beyond the big, scrambling village of Meggen, is one of the pleasantest view-points within easy touch of Lucerne whence to enjoy across the water the noble mountain background that screens the south shore of the main lake. On a mild spring evening, when this splendid landscape is an ætherialized study in black and white; when the snowflakes and cowslips are pushing up in thousands through the quickly growing grass; when the host of margent rushes scarcely quivers in the stillness; and when the opposite mountains are reflected without a ripple in the calm and silent lake, it is hard to believe that all this exquisite beauty, which seems so unearthly and unexplored, is really the much boasted, much advertised, much visited "Lovely Lucerne"—it is difficult to realize that the paddle of a steamer ever churns this unruffled mirror, or that the harsh whistle of the ascending locomotive ever wakes the echoes on steadfast Rigi. Those who visit Lucerne only in the deadly oppression of the high season, when every lake-side quay swarms like an ant-hill, and every village rings like Babel, are apt to carry away wrong impressions of this still absolutely unimpaired lake. The playground at seasons is densely packed, but the place has received no permanent wrong; those who can reconcile Nature and a crowd will be happy here even in August, when

"All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out;"

those, on the other hand, who seek the mountains, not exactly perhaps in the spirit of Manfred, but at any rate in Manfred's happier mood—

"No eyes
But mine now drink this sight of loveliness;
I should be sole in this sweet solitude"—

will easily find solace here in early spring, or late autumn, when the place is like a desert. No one has done the place a permanent wrong. Who can claim as much for the holly steeps of Windermere—for the distorted Clarens shore of Lake Geneva?

Küssnacht itself is a large, typically Swiss, village, at the foot of the low pass—yet altogether too low to be dignified by the name of pass—that at this point intervenes between the basins of Zug and Lucerne. The place has this significance, that here for the first time, as we perambulate the lake, we encounter spots associated with the legend of William Tell. I suppose one must call it legend, and concede so much to the "higher critics," though Ruskin's clarion anger rings loud and clear. "A sort of triumphant shriek, like all the railway whistles going off at once at Clapham Junction, has gone up from the Fooldom of Europe at the destruction of the myth of William Tell. To us, every word of it was true—but mythically luminous with more than mortal truth.... The myth of William Tell is destroyed forsooth? and you have tunnelled Gothard and filled, maybe, the Bay of Uri—and it was all for you and your sake that the grapes dropped blood from the press of St. Jacob, and the pine-club struck down horse and helm in Morgarten glen?" If the history of William Tell itself is unauthentic, we must not demand authenticity for its visible memorials and sites. Gesler's Castle above Küssnacht—or the fragments that remain of it—certainly never belonged to Gesler; whilst the chapel at the head of the Hohle Gasse, or Hollow Way, was certainly rebuilt in 1644, and did not exist at all at the end of the fifteenth century. This is the traditional spot where Tell, after escaping from the boat at the Tellsplatte, and running by way of Schwyz and the back of the Rigi, waited for Gesler on his return from Altdorf, and shot him dead with his terrible cross-bow before he could reach his castle-gate at Küssnacht. It is worth the traveller's while to press on a mile or two further in the direction of Arth, though this is to exchange the basin of the lake of Lucerne for that of the lake of Zug. The Zugersee lies almost at once beneath us, at a slightly lower level (roughly sixty feet) than the Vierwaldstättersee, and altogether of more placid and softer character—a pleasant thing to look at in the tender evening light, with its shore line embowered amidst orchards and deep rich meadows, and dotted in every direction with peaceful farms, but destitute of mountain grandeur, save immediately towards its head, where the dark forests of the Rigi, towards the west, and of the Rossberg, towards the east, open a gloomy "Gate of the hills," beyond which, though really above Schwyz and the little lake of Lowerz, the tall, bare rock pyramids of the Great and Little Mitre (Gross and Kleine Mythen) tower up in cleft magnificence above the cradle of Swiss freedom.

As to the story of William Tell, this, alas! has gone the way of our own tales of Robin Hood (whom Mr. Sydney Lee dismisses as a "mythical forest elf") and his Merry Men of Sherwood Forest. The legend first appears in the manuscript "Weisses Buch," so-called from its white binding, that is still preserved at Sarnen, and which was written between 1467 and 1476; and in the poem called the "Tellenlied," which dates from about 1474. Tell, however, is supposed to have lived at about the commencement of the fourteenth century. There are certainly some scraps of evidence that suggest in combination that the later Tell myth (as, for that matter, are presumably most myths) is based on some substratum of solid historical fact. Thus, there is said to be evidence that a religious observance of some kind was instituted in connection with Tell in the place where he lived in 1387; and it is stated, though not earlier than 1504, that a chapel was erected on the Tellsplatte, as the country people believed in commemoration of the landing there of William Tell, in 1388. The story as now commonly reported—that Tell refused to do obeisance to the Austrian Arch-duke's cap at Altdorf; that he shot the apple off his son's head at the brutal bidding of Gesler in the market-place of the same town; that he afterwards escaped from Austrian custody by springing from the boat to the shore at the Tellsplatte during the onset of a sudden squall; and that he shot the tyrant through the heart as the latter neared his castle hall at Küssnacht—first assumed its present form, in which it has been dramatized by Schiller, at the hands of Tschudi of Glarus, in the first half of the sixteenth century. Even as early, however, as the close of this same century the very existence of William Tell had been questioned by Guilmann in his De Rebus Helveticis. Voltaire was duly sceptical as to the story of the boy and the apple ("l'histoire de la pomme est bien suspecte"); but the patriotic faith of Canton Uri was still sufficiently strong at the close of the eighteenth century to consign to the flames at the hand of the public hangman the sceptical "Guillaume Tell; fable danoise." The result, however, as expressed curtly in Murray's handbook, is that Tell has been banished from authentic history. Exactly similar legends or sagas of the tenth century are found in Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Holstein, and on the Rhine; and our Clym of the Clough shoots at an apple on his son's head—

"But Cloudesle cleft the apple in two,
His son he did not nee'."

Thus William Tell, like Arnold von Winkelried, recedes into the dim borderland of legend and history. After all, it is no irreparable loss. The individual Arnold, the individual Tell, were units merely of the great company of authentic, unnamed heroes who smote the Austrian tyrant at Sempach and Morgarten, who triumphed against the Burgundian at Grandson, Morat, and Nancy.

The third division, in still ascending scale of mountain grandeur, of the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons is that which extends south-westward from the intersection of the cross, and is known—certainly towards its extremity, and perhaps throughout its length—from the little village at its head as the Lake of Alpnach. Here the general effect is more definitely mountainous than that which has awaited us in sailing the two previous compartments: Rigi is now exchanged for Pilatus as the presiding genius and dominant monarch of the scene; whilst the Alps of Unterwalden, and, beyond the low pass of the Brünig, the greater Alps of the Berner Oberland—the triple Maiden, Monk, and Giant—the Peak of Storms, and the Peak of Shrieking—at last supply that mountain background which everyone must have missed when looking up the water towards Küssnacht or Lucerne. The Oberland giants, it is true, are set at too great distance to impress the eye, however much they may affect the imagination, with the same sense of impending mountain majesty as we find in the Bay of Uri; but Pilatus and the Stanserhorn are both immediate and splendid objects; whilst even the dark, pine-clad crags of the little Bürgenstock, which is literally, like Catullus' Sermio, "all-but-island"—for it needs but the raising of the lake a very few feet, and the consequent flooding of the low isthmus between Stans and Buochs, to complete its insulation—push out into the lake with an assertive individuality that is wholly out of keeping with their relatively insignificant height (actually less than four thousand feet). Roughly half-way up, at a point where the lake is narrowed to the dimensions of a river by the sudden, sharp intrusion of the tall black cliffs of the Lopperberg (a footstool of Pilatus), the strait thus strangely created is spanned across to Stanstad by an ugly iron bridge. The crass utilitarianism, in fact, that mars, though it cannot wholly disfigure, so much that is beautiful in Switzerland, and that contributes so little to the honour of the modern Switzer (however well it may fill his purse), is altogether painfully too evident along the shores of this division of the Lake of Lucerne. The hideous lines of electric wires along the margin of the lake are only less detestable than those that degrade the Pass of Llanberis; this bridge across the narrows is as ugly as may be; whilst Baedeker (with his usual businesslike lack of romanticism) duly chronicles in a single breath the presence of "water-falls and Portland cement factories" in the neighbouring glen of the Rotzloch.

PILATUS FROM STANSTAD.

The visitor is now fairly landed in the state of Unterwalden, the 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.

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.

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!