“I use it in the winter,” he said, “to take me down to the village, to buy necessaries every week; and, when there is plenty of snow to cover the inequalities of the path, it works very well. Coming back, however, I have to load my purchases on it, and drag it up after me. It is good exercise,” he added, with a good-humored laugh, “and keeps me warm.”
He led us into the church, and told us the story of the apparition. This image was not so old as that of Absam, although it could boast of three centuries’ antiquity at least. It had been found by a woodman while chopping a tree on the mountain very near the spot where the church now stands. The figure suddenly appeared, surrounded by a marvellous light, in the cleft made by his axe in the wood. Years of suspense followed, during which authentications of this wonderful occurrence were severely tested, the devotion of the villagers preceding, however, the permission of the church to venerate the image as miraculous. During this time it was housed in the hamlet at the foot of the mountain, where crowds flocked to visit it. When it was removed to the Servite church and monastery, built expressly for its reception, on the spot where it had first appeared, its translation was a cause of grief as well as joy, those who had guarded it till then loudly lamenting their loss. The monastery, we believe, was reduced to its present condition through the decrees against monastic orders issued during the unhappy reign of the infidel Emperor Joseph. The church was never, however, without its chaplain. It is a plain, whitewashed building, with a flat frontage, irregularly pierced with a great many windows, while to the back rises one of those extraordinary steeples so often seen in the Tyrol, suggestive of a farm-house rather than a church. Often and often have we come upon such, sometimes of red tiles and not unfrequently of green, so that we were forcibly reminded of St. George and his scaly dragon. The interior of Waldrast church corresponds to the exterior, and is very plain and inartistic. The image itself is of wood, and peculiarly German in its cut. Our Lady is covered with a stiff, heavy mantle, and bears her Divine Son, also robed in the same kind of garment, absolutely shapeless except where his hand comes forth. The Virgin bears a globe in her hand, and both she and the Divine Infant are crowned. The crowns, however, and the chains and ornaments on the figures, are due to the devotion of the faithful.
The Servite father who kindly showed us over the church was still a young man, and seemed very quiet and refined. His ten years’ solitude had not taken any of the grace of civilization—ought we not rather to say of charity?—from his manner, nor given him in any way the air of a Nabuchodonosor. He wore his black habit and a long black beard. We were sorry to be able to see so little of him, for we had a long journey home before us, and the greater part had to be performed on foot. We left Waldrast at midday, feeling that in these out-of-the-way nooks more can be learnt of the inner life of a people than in larger centres of bustle and activity.
The way down the other side of the mountain led through sparse forests of pine, where workmen were felling the trees and piling them in heaps as high as houses along the path. Glimpses might be caught now and then of far-off precipices, walls of rock or of snow with the intense golden white of the noonday sun glorifying their stern beauty, and reminding one of those still more difficult ascents to virtue, seemingly so inaccessible, yet so gloriously transfigured in the light of God’s help and God’s promises. Wild flowers abounded through the wood, and mosses and ferns grew in great tangles of greenery by the brooks which their growth overshadowed. It was a delightful expedition, and one that we should very much like to repeat. But nothing in this world ever duplicates itself; the places we once visited with such confident hopes of returning to enjoy them the next year, have we ever seen them again, or if we have, has it ever been with the same feelings, the same hopes, the same companions, nay, even the same self? In this law of change lies, to our mind, the sad side of travel. We go to a place, we learn to admire it, we remember it with pleasure, we almost begin to have associations with it and its surroundings, it grows in fact into our soul’s history, and makes itself a place in our life. We leave it, and never see it again. We have the regret of having seen and felt beauty that is not for us, we have longed for what we could not have, we have dreamed of utopias that were never to be realized, and we have prepared for ourselves a nest of disappointments for the future. Is not this so much time and energy lost? so much vitality taken out of our life which might have been usefully employed at home? But if the place we have visited once becomes a frequent resort, if we go back to it again and again and find ties and duties to bind us there, the charm of life is doubled, and the happiness of home reproduced under a different set of circumstances. No one knows a place if he have not lived there in all seasons and spent quiet months in finding out its hidden beauties. Places, like people, grow upon you; and what once seemed bare will, by long acquaintance, appear as full of interest as it was once devoid of it. It happened thus to ourselves in a seaside town in England, where the coast is rather bare of trees, and the country mostly flat and divided without hedges into com and hay fields. Again, the country round Milan, which is always conventionally styled “the fertile plain of Lombardy,” is of this nature. Wide fields of rice, half-flooded, and a network of roads fringed by pollard willows or low hedges, with here and there a neat little farm-house, do not at first sight constitute a beautiful country. But after three or four weeks’ constant driving through these lanes, you discover the loveliest bits of “Pre-Raphaelite” nature, small triangular patches of luxuriant grass, with flowers of brilliant hue and starry shape; tiny brooks running through meadows with fire-flies making movable illuminations on their banks by night, and many more beautiful and minute details that naturally enough escape the first glance. The Roman Campagna, even with its desolate, Niobe-like grandeur, is susceptible of this alchemy of habit. To the unaccustomed eye of a stranger it may look grand, but scarcely beautiful; to one who has walked, ridden, and driven through it in all directions, it reveals secrets of pastoral beauty, soft vales hidden by groves of ilex or cork, with violets growing plentifully in their recesses, and rivulets trickling through their rocky crevices. Even cities are better known when seen gradually, after the manner of a peaceable resident rather than that of a hurrying tourist. What do we know, to take our own case, of the Campo Santo of Pisa, which we visited between the arrival and departure of the two trains from Leghorn, compared to what we learnt of St. Mark’s at Venice, where we heard Mass every day for five months? And this feeling is surely enough to breed a weariness of mere travel, however instructive it may be. The only places we should care to revisit are those where we stayed long enough to make them feel like home. Innsbruck is certainly one that recalls many touching domestic scenes, many of those little memories which, like a daisy-chain, bind life together, childhood and youth, sickness and health, trouble and joy—frail links, but so fair, begun in early childhood and winding themselves round the heart, through the vicissitudes of many years, the wanderings in many lands, and, above all, through the intangible changes of a restless mind and soul.
For the general reader, this sketch may perhaps have no further interest than to make him acquainted with some of the local traits of a country not so well known as other European fields of travel; for the Catholic, it ought to possess the additional interest of an effort meant to show how thoroughly this country is still imbued with the faith. Its patriotism, too, ever closely bound to faith, was conspicuous in the wars against Napoleon and in the Tyrol. The first decade of this century is noted chiefly for the name, not of the resistless invader Bonaparte, but of the stubborn defender of mountain freedom, Andreas Hofer. Here and there are his relics—his gun, or his cap, or the cup out of which he drank. Every other inn has his figure for a sign, and every other child bears his name in memory of his gallantry. His descendants, poor and simple peasants as he was himself, are as proud of their ancestry as the haughtiest Montmorency or the oldest Colonna; and no Tyrolese mountaineer can talk for half an hour without mentioning some of Hofer’s exploits against the French.
We cannot conclude without again speaking of that weird jödel or herd-song peculiar to the Tyrol. We have never heard it as performed by the hired companies of “minstrels” so often advertised in large towns, but we had the opportunity of listening to it under very pleasant circumstances at Innsbruck. In the beginning of September, just before our pilgrimage to Waldrast, a rural fête was given in honor of one of our party whose birthday it was. The open court-yard behind our house served as an al fresco dining-hall, a band was engaged, and fireworks and illuminations prepared. In this primitive assemblage, speeches were actually made, and, as it was not easy for the English and Tyrolese to understand each other, an interpreter was found in the bright and quick-witted courier who had superintended the whole thing. After this cordial display of mutual friendship, and a few songs and pieces, the people were left to their private enjoyments, the priest from the nearest parish being present among them. About an hour afterwards, and before the party of mountaineers dispersed, they begged leave to sing us their jödel, thinking it was the most interesting thing for strangers to hear well done. Thirty men in rugged costumes, whose ornamentation chiefly consisted in silver buttons, were then brought into the great Saal, and the chorus began. Suddenly a single voice broke in with the marvellous jödel; all the others dropping into silence, and then again joining in the national song. It was indeed strange and weird-like, the echoes seemed to break again and again in renewed bursts of plaintive sound; it was not like the cry of a bird or of any animal, nor yet was it suggestive of a human voice; it had in it something of what, were we Pantheists, we might call the “voice of nature.” The effect was indescribable, and, because so beautiful, saddening. We should not wish to hear it again on the stage or in the concert-room; the effect would be lost, and merged into a dramatic trick. Sung by those thirty strong voices, used to no concert hall but the open air and the mountain passes, the jödel was one of those things that one likes to look back upon and place among the fresh, healthy remembrances of the past. Sung before those who have always been at our side through weal or woe, this Tyrolese song becomes more than a mere remembrance, and remains a sacred memory, shared with the dead and the absent, the ever beloved and unforgotten ones of our heart. So true is it that a thing unconnected with love, however brilliant it may be in the field of art or literature, is a failure as far as our individual appreciation of it is concerned—that this simple mountain song, vigorously but hardly skilfully performed, is far dearer to our remembrance than the perfect strains heard at other times from the lips of finished artists.
The Tyrol, no doubt, is fast putting off its early garb of faith and simple honesty; with Manchester prints and chignons, the free grace of its peasant women will vanish, and with the poisonous teaching of the International, the frankness and charm of its men will go. Already we have heard of the earnest workers of the Jesuit church being annoyed and insulted, and it may not be long before the cupidity of public officials will rob the shrines of many of their votive treasures. In these days of ruthless destruction, even the Tyrol may be dechristianized and made over to a worse barbarism than that of its savage bands of early settlers, and a worse slavery than that against which Andreas Hofer so ably and successfully fought. Still, it will always be a pleasure to us to think that we visited it in the days of its Catholic prosperity, and saw there the remains of that state of peace and public safety which everywhere characterizes a truly Christian land.