Turfy mountain slopes, and cattle, are not much to go to see. You may find at home, in Wales, or Scotland, just as good combinations of these objects as at Andermatt; possibly even better, for the actually subaerial mountains here are no great height above the elevated plateau from which they spring. But, then, these turfy slopes, and these cattle, belong to the peasants of Andermatt; and that to the thought, whatever may be the case with respect to the eye, makes a world of difference. The peasants of Andermatt are a very old community. They are as little changed from what their fathers were many centuries ago, as the mountains that stand round about Andermatt. While the outside world, north, south, east, west, has been changing from century to century, they, from century to century, have continued the same. They have had neither a governing class, nor a destitute class. All the while they have, themselves, managed their own affairs. Among them there have been neither governors, nor governed; neither rich, nor poor. These alpes, as far back as their history goes, have been held in common; and by the line of ancestors of those who hold them now. They have been held, generation after generation, down to the generation whose cattle are now upon them, in precisely the same fashion. Land, elsewhere, has ever been changing hands; been held by different tenures; been turned to account in different ways; and given rise to different political constitutions. Here it has never changed hands. It has passed from the father’s to the son’s by an unbroken lineal succession. It has all along been held by the same tenure; been turned to account in the same way; and maintained the same political constitution. This is what gives to the sight its interest.
And now a change is coming over their little world. The great world, and its influences, are encroaching upon them. The causes, which have brought about changes elsewhere, are beginning to bring about changes among them. Some are getting rich, and some are getting poor. Some are amassing capital; some are working for wages. Oberalp alpe is already let, that is to say, its proprietors pay for sending their cows on to their own property; and the rent is wanted to defray the growing expenses of the old village, which has now become a modern town. If they did not turn it to account in this way, they would have to pay road-rates, and fountain-rates, and antiavalanche-rates. Perhaps the day is not very distant, when this alpe will be sold to a joint-stock company, who will supply with milk, butter, and cheese the two railway towns that are now springing up at Göschenen and Airolo, and the town in the high vale of Urseren, to which the pleasure-worn and business-beaten inhabitants of the cities of the plains will come to summer. And then the long communal history of the Oberalp will have ended; and those who walk through it will no longer be able to read in it the life of the past: for that will be found then only in books. This enhances the interest, with which the beholder now contemplates it. It is one of the last pictures, and a fading one, of a form of human life that will soon have completely vanished for ever. But for the present there it stands, exactly where it ought to stand. It has, as it were, taken refuge; and been able down to our own times to maintain itself, in this lofty, inaccessible, central nucleus of our Continent. But the flood of change has at last come near to it, has risen high upon its sides, is still rising rapidly, and must soon sweep over it.
CHAPTER VII
AM STAG—KLUS—THE SURENEN—ENGELBERG.
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows, and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear—both what they half create,
And what perceive: well pleased to recognize