The Lake of Lucerne

by Joseph E. Morris

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.