And yet——
And yet these lords of Jagdberg and other men of the past may not have been altogether the simpletons one used to think them. When they risked their lives, they did it in their own interests and on their own responsibility; not, like our warriors of to-day, for the sake of enriching people of whom they had never even heard. When they robbed, they robbed to some purpose that was at least seemingly sane and seemingly profitable. They had not much use for the brotherhood of all men: “God save us from such brothers!” we can hear them saying. And so much one may observe without bitterness, that if one dream can be called more absurd than another, this of universal brotherhood is surely the absurdest that ever sat in our poor deluded brain, and the present state of the world a luminous commentary on it. I imagine it would have puzzled those old feudals—our Oriental preoccupation with other folk, our craving to lean up against each other for mutual support and betterment. Flabbiness, they might have called it. We call it “solidarity.”... A little trick of ours.... We invent such words to shadow forth a desire more or less vague, more or less reasonable; and forthwith flatter ourselves that we have succeeded in creating a thing. Solidarity! Mankind is a jellyfish. How comes a jellyfish to want a backbone?
Such individualistic ideals may come into fashion again. Meanwhile, they are out of date. The castles lie in ruins and their occupants, the human wolves, have been hunted out of the land. Let us be sheep. The loves and hatreds of these wolfish creatures must have been narrow and limited in their range. On the other hand, they were doubtless personal, fervent. They were kept clean. Our loves and hatreds are no longer kept clean. They have ceased to be personal; we love and hate in the herd, the mass. Endeavoring to identify our most intimate aspirations with those of other men, we produce that incongruity of feeling and outlook, that haziness of moral contour, which is a feature of modern life—to what end? Solidarity! By all means adopt a fellow-creature’s greatcoat, or lend him your own. Why adopt his character? Is a bundle of self-contradictory inhibitions worth adopting? Love your neighbor as yourself. Now what has that gentleman done, to deserve our love?
Philanthropic musings, engendered by the spectacle of Jagdberg and its Josefinum....[28]
ROSENEGG
Rosenegg
ANOTHER of these castle-ruins is the massive old tower of Rosenegg near Bürs (Rhæto-Roman Puire), opposite Bludenz. It also dates from the twelfth century; like the others, it was sacked by the Appenzellers in 1405; unlike them, it was never rebuilt—not till the other day. For six long centuries it stood desolate and forlorn. Then, quite lately, somebody bought the place and converted it into a residence; with good taste, so far as one can judge from the outside. All the same, it is annoying to see that he has planted a few exotic conifers in the grounds; they will doubtless prosper there, but they are out of harmony with their Alpine surroundings. I must come and pull them out, one of these nights.
The Rosenegg I knew was a truly “somber pile,” decaying alone up there, far from the habitations of men, on its sunless hillock under the shadow of those mighty Rhætian peaks. Nobody ever seemed to go near the place. There was a shattered window at a good height on the eastern flank, and you could get in here by climbing a wild cherry tree and then jumping on to its ledge. The interior was a moldering chaos of stones. Round about we used to find certain favorite plants: the rose-and-white immortelles with silvery leaves, and “fox-tail” moss, and the globular amber-hued ranunculus of spring, deliciously fragrant. Then flowers were dropped in favor of butterflies; after that, the stone-period began and Rosenegg was again frequented, for the whole neighborhood happened to be strewn with crystalline erratics great and small, and in some of them you might find brown garnets, but not in all; far from it! You had to look for them pretty closely.