The Lake of Lucerne

by Joseph E. Morris

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!

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."