The Lake of Geneva

by Joseph E. Morris

LAUSANNE CATHEDRAL FROM MONTBENON.

Morges is another quaint old town, with yet another quaint old castle, and with a glorious view of Mont Blanc, seen in this case in long perspective up the valley of the Dranse, which opens deeply through the heart of the Savoyard mountains on the opposite shore of the lake. It is worth while landing here for a few hours, if only to mount the slopes behind the town, deep with wood and orchard, to the noble old castle of Vufflens, which is perhaps the best of its class in Switzerland. Seen from the surface of the lake—and it is seen thence conspicuously—this has a very modern look, and suggests that the whole building has been grossly over-restored. You never doubt, in fact, that the place is still inhabited, and most likely furbished up to the point of loss of interest. You approach with heavy heart, but are pleasantly surprised to find only part of the pile still occupied, apparently as a farm, whilst the whole is quite unspoilt. The plan is widely different from that of Nyon or Chillon (themselves not really similar), and absolutely unparalleled by anything in Britain. Tower-houses were still built in England as late as the fifteenth century—Tattershall in Lincolnshire is a prominent example—but these were not really keeps; and they were primarily meant, not for places of refuge in the last resort, but principally for residence and comfort. The great fourteenth-century donjon at Vufflens, on the contrary, is plainly intended for defence not less than the Tower of London in the eleventh century, or than Rochester keep in the twelfth. Moreover, this enormous tower—it is one hundred and sixty feet high, and thus again without equal or rival in England, though formerly surpassed by the great cylinder at Coucy-le-Château in France, which was actually about two hundred feet—is girt about its base with four lower towers, or satellites, as though for extra strength: the whole is very grim and menacing. It is built of yellow brick, and everywhere heavily machicolated. The vaulted kitchen, towards the basement, has a very striking fireplace, with a vine pattern running round in a deeply hollowed moulding. A vice, or spiral stair, ascends in the thickness of the south wall, which is thickened out to hold it in the form of a circular turret. Most of the roof is modern; but the visitor should notice the heavy wooden shutters that close the big, segmental-headed openings for hurling stones or shooting arrows, and that run on wheels in wooden troughs, so that a man might discharge his missile and immediately close the aperture ere the enemy could reply. The view, of course, is magnificent, and would alone repay the climb, unless the visitor happens to be giddy-headed. To the south of this great tower lies an open courtyard, and to the south of this, again, is the dwelling-house, or palace. This planning, in my experience, is unique; but there seems to be something like it (I speak only from distant view) at the great country castle of the Bishops of Lausanne at Lucens, which forms so conspicuous and delightful a feature on the hill on the west side of the valley of the Broye between Moudon and Payerne, in that delightful central vale of Switzerland that is perhaps so seldom visited, yet combines such unexpected charm of pleasantly pastoral landscape with such wealth of old-world interest as we find at Avenches (the Roman Aventicum), Morat, and Estavayer.

I mention these places with less reluctance, though certainly not on the shores of Lac Leman, because they may all be easily visited from Lausanne, and to some degree may even be thought connected with it—Lucens, because the Bishop-Princes of Lausanne (who, like the Bishop-Princes of Coire, were also Electors of the Holy Roman Empire) had here a noble hunting-seat; Moudon, because its lovely thirteenth-century church is supposed to exhibit close analogies to Lausanne Cathedral; and Avenches, because this was actually the seat of the Bishop's stool before this was translated to Lausanne by Bishop Marius in 590. Lausanne itself is now a city of very modern aspect, stretching with its villas in the usual straggling Helvetic fashion—in contrast with the neat compactness of France: Neuchâtel and Bienne are other bad examples—for a distance of nearly eight miles along the gentle slopes of Mont Jorat that impend above the lake, and presenting, as seen from the water, a long line of clustered white houses (not unpicturesque in distant view), crowned by the lofty tower of its beautiful cathedral of Notre Dame. This is a purely residential city, and gives one the same impression as Milan of superabundant prosperity and wealth. These factors, indeed, have proved its ruin—I mean, of course, æsthetically—for the Swiss (they are great iconoclasts) have of recent years remodelled it so drastically that soon, one is afraid, there will be nothing ancient left save here and there a church, preserved like flies in amber. In every direction are fine new streets, with splendid new houses and blocks of tenements. The result, no doubt, will be very magnificent; but Morat is more to my taste, or Payerne. Certain old quarters of Bâle have thus recently been levelled, and Neuchâtel is now almost wholly of modern aspect. A city, no doubt, belongs primarily to the people who inhabit it; they have to live their lives in it, and consult their own convenience; but at least one may be permitted to hope that this sort of civic madness will not hastily lay criminal hands on Geneva, or Berne, or Fribourg.

Lausanne itself is built at some little height above the lake, and visitors land from the steamer at Ouchy, which at once is port and suburb. Here, "at a small inn" (then the Ancre, but now the Hôtel d'Angleterre: everything at Lausanne expands to over-maturity), Byron wrote his "Prisoner of Chillon," perhaps the best of his poems in irregular metre, in the short space of two days, whilst detained "by stress of weather," "thereby adding one more deathless association to the already immortalized localities of the Lake." From Ouchy ascend at once by cable tramway, unless you have a particular fancy for perambulating miles of new streets, to the old "cité" on the height; and climb at once to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Here, standing at the entrance to the great south porch, with its noble Romanesque statuary, and with its glorious views across the water to the splendidly rocky summits of Savoy, you can easily forget the gay swarms of pacing idlers, and even a great bun-shop that for vastness and magnificence (and Lausanne has less than fifty thousand souls!) would strike you with astonishment in Piccadilly or Regent Street. This Cathedral of Notre Dame is of about the same length as Beverley Minster, or King's College Chapel at Cambridge; and is not only a splendid example of thirteenth-century architecture (the classic moment of Gothic), but far and away the finest monument of ecclesiastical art in Switzerland. Protestant since 1536, when its Bishop was deposed—he has now his throne at Fribourg—the interior suffers, of course, from the usual cold and bare austerity that characterizes a Calvinistic place of worship hardly less in Switzerland than Holland. Of recent years, however, it has been lovingly restored, and the lack of Catholic furniture and ritual—I write always from the æsthetic point of view, and never from that of divinity—is perhaps felt no worse at Lausanne, or, for the matter of that, at Geneva, than it is felt in Dunblane or Glasgow Cathedral. Remarkable externally is the north-west tower, with its curious open-work buttresses like those at Bamberg and Laon: remarkable inside are the early sixteenth-century stalls, now misplaced in the south nave aisle; the extravagant complication of the vaulting system in the nave (it is different in almost every bay); the exquisite beauty of the south end of the south transept; and the four or five recumbent effigies, or monuments, of mediæval Bishops that are still allowed on sufferance in this abode of rigid presbyterianism. One of these is said in Murray (but Baedeker ignores it) to be that of Pope Felix V., previously Duke of Savoy and Bishop of Geneva, who retired from the Papal throne to end his days as a mere monk at Ripaille, near Thonon, and died there in the monastery in 1451.

MONTREUX FROM THE LAKE—AUTUMN.

Eastward from Lausanne, the hills, now foot-stools of the Alps, drop more immediately to the actual margin of the lake than any yet encountered from Geneva to Lausanne. From top to bottom they are richly dotted with vineyards, with hardly a green field in between; and everywhere among these vineyards, on the slope of the hillside, are innumerable little white villages, with their mellow red-brown roofs, clustered at frequent intervals round a central parish church. Opposite, as we advance, the prospect of distant Alps grows more and more magnificent, as the view opens deeper and deeper, beyond the head of the lake, into the great valley of the Rhone. So we come at last to Vevey, the second town of Vaud, from whose pleasant quay, with its lines of young chestnuts and planes, in the neighbourhood of the Marché pier, is got what is perhaps the last good littoral view, as we journey in this direction, of the glorious head of the lake, without base suburban admixture to disguise and disfigure the foreground. The Marché itself is open to the lake, but enclosed on its other three sides by old-fashioned brown-roofed houses, among which stand out prominent the picturesque open arcades of the Market House, and above which, on the hill, though backed itself by charmingly wooded lines of higher hill, rises the tower of the old town church. To the left, as we look eastward, is the prettily timbered promontory of the Tour de Peilz (the tower itself is visible), which luckily shuts out the long line of villas past Clarens and Montreux; and beyond this, again, the gaping valley of the Rhone opens in unrivalled magnificence deep into the bosom of now considerable Alps, guarded on the left by the sharp, horn-like precipices of the noble Dent-de-Morcles (9,775 feet), and on the right by the still nobler, boldly cut, square summit of the Dent-du-Midi (10,695 feet). The view is one of simple magnificence, not of such involved and complicated hill forms as we contemplate with a different kind of pleasure from the quays at Lucerne, but compounded only of a few grand elements. The lights are always changing on this stupendous mountain range; now the distant hills are intensely blue, now purple, or red, in the sunset; now their summits stand up sharply in an unbroken summer sky, now their edges are blurred by fleecy white clouds, or obscured by golden mists,

"curling with unconfirm'd intent,"

but never static for a moment, or less than unearthly and beautiful.

I have spoken deliberately of this grand view from the quays at Vevey as the last good littoral view (and I put the stress on "littoral") that one gets of the lake as one continues on one's journey eastward from Lausanne, or Ouchy, to Chillon. The littoral, in fact, from Vevey as far as Chillon is now virtually a continuous line of huge, flaunting hotels, restaurants, villas, and tea-rooms: not even the French Riviera between Cannes and Mentone, which I take to be the second vulgarest spot in Europe, has forfeited so entirely its original character, or, from the scenic point of view, been so utterly ruined. The line of devastation, it is true, is luckily very thin; and though the hills above Montreux and Territet are themselves loaded at frequent intervals with monster hotels, and laced in every direction with a perplexing network of lifts and mountain railways, it must frankly be confessed that to look at this five-mile-long string of pleasure towns from a distance—as, for instance, from those windows of Chillon Castle that project farthest into the lake—is a much less trying test of temper than to contemplate the glories of the head of the lake with Territet or Montreux for foreground. The destruction of these odd five miles of natural loveliness—and such natural loveliness—forms part of a fierce denunciation by the late Mr. Ruskin, which those who hardly think at all will probably think extravagant, but which seems to others entirely just: "You have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva." Clarens, indeed, was formerly a place of such exquisite loveliness that Rousseau chose it as the ideal dwelling-place for the heroine of his "Nouvelle Héloïse." "Allez à Vevey," he says in the fourth book of his "Confessions," "visitez le pays, examinez les sites, promenez-vous sur le lac, et dites si la Nature n'a pas fait ce beau pays pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un St. Preux; mais ne les y cherchez pas." Nor was Byron, coming here in 1816, any less enthusiastic. "I have traversed," he writes in a letter of June 27 of that year to Mr. Murray—"I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with the 'Héloïse' before me, and am struck to a degree that I cannot express with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty of their reality. Meillerie, Clarens, and Vevey, and the Château de Chillon, are places of which I shall say little, because all I could say must fall short of the impressions they stamp." And Byron himself, with the "Héloïse" in recollection, addresses Clarens in the third canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," in the stanzas beginning—