The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLucerne

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLucerneThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: LucerneAuthor: G. FlemwellRelease date: July 2, 2018 [eBook #57435]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LUCERNE ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: LucerneAuthor: G. FlemwellRelease date: July 2, 2018 [eBook #57435]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)

Title: Lucerne

Author: G. Flemwell

Release date: July 2, 2018 [eBook #57435]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LUCERNE ***

THE TEUFELSMÜNSTER FROM TELLSPLATTE

Pictured and described by G. FLEMWELLAuthor of “Alpine Flowers and Gardens”“The Flower Fields of Alpine Switzerland”&c.

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY

There is good warrant for turning directly to Lucerne and to the lake which lies in the midst of the four Forest Cantons when making, or renewing, acquaintance with Switzerland; and there should be no question of thereby slighting other famed districts of this favoured land. Almost invariably it is best to go straight to the heart of things, and the Vierwaldstätter-See, or Lake of the Four Forest Cantons—commonly known to us as the Lake of Lucerne—is held to be, both geographically and historically, at the very heart of Switzerland. There is, too, the additional assurance that no other district in the whole of thetwenty-two Cantons which go to the making of the Confederation can offer a more admirable, a more ideal introduction to the fascinating wonders and delights of Swiss scenery. In spite of our being in the heart of the country, we are, as it were, upon the frontier of a Promised Land, one flowing as literally as may be with milk and honey—and glaciers; we are, that is to say, at the portal by which we may as lief best enter the domain of the Swiss Alps. For if we except Pilatus, that gaunt, tormented rock-mass standing in severe isolation upon the threshold of the city, Lucerne is relatively modest and restrained as regards its immediate scenery; but away on the horizon which bounds the waters of the Lake is the long snowy array of majestic Alps, and we may soon reach by boat and rail the giants of Schwyz, Uri, Unterwalden and the Bernese Oberland. The steamboats alone will transport us, through graduated scenic grandeur, to the great cliffs and snow-covered crags of Uri, romantic birthplace of the Swiss Republic.

However, there is no occasion to become restive at the prospect; Lucerne itself is the most charming of preludes andpoints d’appuifor all that lies afield. Particularly is this so if opportunity allows us to be here in the spring of the year, with the fruit trees all a-flower and the grey-towered Musegg ramparts deep set in a rosy-white haze; and with the fields all a-wave with blue, white, and gold, and the lakesidepromenade laden with the myriad flower-spikes of the horse-chestnut trees. Spring is earlier here—some ten days earlier in May—than away at the very feet of the Alps. We may well be content, then, to remain awhile amid such vernal freshness, studying the life and history of the town of the “wooden storks’ nests”, and revelling on the quay in the Alpine panorama framed by the soft blue sky and blue-green waters—a panorama which is never more delightful than at this season of the year, never even in autumn when October clears the atmosphere, robes the near hills in fire, deepens the blue colouring of distant rock and forest, and spreads a new white drapery upon the higher peaks.

To those who knew this town, say, five-and-twenty years ago, and who have not revisited it until to-day, how many are the changes which they will meet, and with what mixed feelings will they meet these changes! The past twenty-five years have meant astonishing developments for almost every quarter of Switzerland. Cities have burst their bounds and have spread far along the countryside; villages have grown into towns, and from nothing, or perhaps from a single old-time chalet, great groups of hotels and their dependencies have sprung up upon the mountains. And Lucerne certainly has been no laggard in this movement. Twenty-five years ago the sign and symbol of thecity was a stolid, stunted tower set in water beside a long, roofed, wooden bridge running slantwise across a river, with tapering twin steeples beyond. But nowadays the place would be unrecognizable without an airship floating above vast Palace hotels which all but obscure the twin steeples and cause the aged Kapell-Brücke and its faithful companion, the Wasserturm, to look as two quaint old country folk come into town to see the sights, and who remain coyly by the See-Brücke on the outskirts, so to speak, of all the splendid modern hustle—two dear, simple, reticent old things in their old-world garb, despite the efforts of the authorities to bring them abreast of the times by festooning them about with many strings of electric lights. We have to be thankful that these and other intensely individual relics of the past weathered the rage for demolition that appears to have reigned in the town during the middle of the nineteenth century. Something of what this rage was like can be gathered from Professor Weingartner’s pictures which line the walls of Muth’s Beer Restaurant in the Alpen-Strasse. Here, whilst sampling theSchweinswürstl, a speciality of the house, we can study the presentment of at least a dozen old gates and towers which were pulled down between the years 1832 and 1870. That the remaining nine Musegg towers, the two wooden bridges

LUCERNE: SPRINGTIME ON THE MUSEGG

and the Water Tower escaped this onslaught would seem to have been a miracle of good luck. At any rate, the townspeople of to-day must surely look upon it in some such light. For a new spirit now rules in this direction—a spirit of conservatism, even of rehabilitation—and what of the antique past remains is dear and safe, and what can be done to reinstate or reconstruct that which was lost, or in danger of being lost, in the fresco and iron-work decorated house-fronts is rapidly being done. Art is in the ascendancy to-day in Lucerne, and Hans Holbein’s heart would be rejoiced could he but return to the quarters he frequented in 1516 before he journeyed, in 1526, to the Court of England. I do not think that the townspeople would go so far as Rodin, the great French sculptor, and say, “Une seule chose est utile au monde: l’Art!” (for there is the hotel business, and however artistically inclined the Lucerneois may be, they are eminently practical); but it is quite evident that to-day they would never accept without amendment Plato’s scheme for a republic in which Art was ignored.

In some of its aspects Lucerne is reminiscent of both Nuremberg and Venice: of the former in its ancient towers, its beaten ironwork and its frescoed houses; and of the latter in its river and lakeside life and architecture, especially looking from the Schweizerhof Quay to the finely domed railway station across the water, or again at night-time when many-tinted reflected lights dance upon the flood, and row-boats, with the oarsmen poised much as in Venetian gondolas, move stealthily athwart the velvet shadows. All this, however, is merely reminiscent; Lucerne is substantially herself—“Lucerna, the Shining One”, quick with an individual beauty in which orderliness, dignity, and self-respect are prominent qualities. And because these traits in her character are so manifest, certain lapses in good taste and the fitness of things are apt to be the more keenly regretted. Go down along the right side of the Reuss river, past the Kapell-Brücke with its 154 paintings of ancient local history and legend filling the beam-spaces beneath the roof, past the befrescoed Gasthaus zu Pfistern, past the Flower and Fruit Market in the old Rathaus arcades, past the Hotel Balances and its history-tellingfaçade, across the Wine Market containing a fifteenth-century fountain dedicated to St. Maurice—who, with St. Leodegar, is co-patron of the town—down to the Mühlen-Platz, and there you will find stark modernism, in the shape of ramshackle baths and uncompromising factory workshops, right beside one of the chief and most picturesque relics of Old Lucerne—the fourteenth-century wooden Spreuer-Brücke, with its quaint shrine and paintings of theDance of Death, sung of by the poet Longfellow. But perhaps a more brazen example of this intrusiveness is to be seen by passing over the bridge and standing at the nearest corner of the Zeughaus. From this point there is what is probably the most perfectensembleof varied mediaeval architecture to be found in the town—the old bridge and its quaint, rosy-red shrine in the foreground, spanning the green and rapidly flowing Reuss, and backed by the Musegg towers and ramparts and the bulky monastic building whose deep roof is pierced by a triple line of windows. It is a nearly perfect glimpse of the past, and that it is not entirely perfect is due to a bald modern villa set high against the rampart walls. This brazen-faced building is wellnigh as incongruous, perched up there beneath the unique and precious Mannlithurm, whose warrior sentinel, hand upon sword, watches over the town, as is the Alhambra Labyrinth, with its “interesting Oriental groups and palm-groves”, in the Glacier Garden.

However, it will not do to be too critical. Rather should we give thanks for the strong directing hand which in the main the town now holds upon Progress, that arch-egoist with no eyes but for itself. There are times when it is no easy matter to reconcile the old with the new: to say where antiquity shall rule for art and sentiment’s sake, and where it shallgive way, tears or no tears, before the utilities of the present. Nor is it less difficult to give an unprejudiced and far-sighted judgment upon the actual truth, and, therefore, upon the actual merit and value of beauty and ugliness. It is such a personal matter—personal so largely to the time being. We must not imagine that the chimney-pot hat will be for all time cherished as respectable, though we may expect some wailing and remonstrance when its call to go arrives. So, possibly, even probably, here in this town the old inhabitants of 400 years ago, when every house was of wood, were heard to carp and grumble—may even have risen in protest—when Jacob von Hertenstein built for himself the first stone dwelling and had it painted gaily with pictures by young Hans Holbein, thus setting a fashion which eventually not only ousted the “storks’ nests”, but set up something for whose preservation we now clamour, although at the same time we incline to rave against some of its recent offspring, the Palace hotels. Thus, if we are not careful, do we find ourselves caught in a tangle of inconsistencies. Apt to think, like the cicerone of Chichester Cathedral, that “nothing later than the fourteenth century is of much value”, we should be wary lest posterity has cause to deride us. We are enthusiastic children where temporary custom and passing bias are concerned,and what to us is horrible to-day is often splendid to-morrow.

On the other hand, there is a strong tendency, perhaps a kind of bravado, which aims at showing that we are no longer overawed by the past as were our ancestors; that we live very much in the present, with one eye on the immediate future, and that we do not so much say “Let the dead bury their dead” as “Let us at once bury all that is moribund”. In short, an egotistical irreverence stalks abroad with regard to the past, as well as an exorbitant sentimentality, and our pressing necessity is to beware of both and to keep in the middle of the road. Now this is just the happy and wise position which Lucerne seems to occupy at present. The merest feather will show which way the wind is blowing, and in the current edition of the Official Guidebook there is no trace of the phrase employed in an earlier edition: “In a town where the present is so beautiful, we may well let the past be forgotten”. Beautiful most certainly the town is to-day, and that is partly because the beauty of its past isnotforgotten.

History is boiled down and compressed into tabloid form in another guidebook. “In olden times,” it hurriedly tells us, “there stood upon the banks of the Reuss a little village of fishermen, for which the founding of the convent of St. Leodegar, about theyear 735, became the first event of importance. The little place grew up by and by into a town, and the time came when it was strong enough to lay its hands upon the trade of the lake. Later on, when the peasantry of the inner cantons concluded that alliance, out of which in time the Swiss confederacy was to rise, Lucerne did not hesitate to join them, so that from the year 1332 the history of the Confederacy has been also that of Lucerne.” That is all very true as far as it goes; food in the form of a tabloid is never quite satisfactory. But probably the majority of visitors will be content with this high essence, not caring to dive deeper into antecedent waters to fish up Lacustrians, Alemanni, King Pepin, the Abbot of Murbach, or the Dukes of Hapsburg. There are, however, certain tit-bits of history—or are they of legend?—which are always palatable, and among these is a story meriting a place by the side of that recounted of Tell and his son. It dates from 1362, from the time, that is to say, when the hold of Austria upon Lucerne was weakening under the contagious example set the townspeople by their neighbours of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden. Things had reached such a pass that the partisans of Austria had had to leave the town, and the Bailiff of Rothenbourg, Governor of the district, was vowing vengeance and plotting with certain traitors among the Swiss

THE RIGI FROM THE MUSEGG; LUCERNE

to retake the town by night and put the townspeople to the sword. After dark, on 29th June, a little boy, Pierre Hohdorf, who had been bathing in the lake and had fallen asleep on the shore, was awakened by the stealthy tread of armed men creeping warily towards a cave beneath the Abbey of the Tailors. Recognizing the Governor among the number, and knowing well the bad blood existing between the Austrians and the townspeople, Pierre Hohdorf, under cover of the reeds, followed these men to their meeting-place, but was surprised by a newcomer, taken by this latter into the cave, denounced as a spy, and threatened with instant death. The boy could only confess that he had fallen asleep after his bath, had been awakened by footsteps, and had become curious to know what was the matter. This was not considered a satisfactory explanation by his captors; a dagger was already uplifted above his breast, when the Governor intervened, caused little Pierre to swear that he would never reveal to a living soul anything of what he had seen or heard, and then allowed him to go free. The boy made his way in all haste to the town and to the Abbey of the Butchers, where he saw that lights were still burning. Entering the building and going to the hall where numbers of citizens were talking and drinking, Pierre went straight up to the big stove and thus addressed it:—“O stove, you are not a living soul; I may therefore tell you what I have just seen and heard without breaking the oath which the Austrians have forced me to take”. He then went on to tell the stove the whole of his adventure. At first the men thought it was just a child’s prank; but they soon pricked up their ears, realized the seriousness of what they were hearing, buckled on their swords, shouldered their battle-axes, hurried out into the streets, and awaited the coming of the Austrians and traitors. As one o’clock struck, the enemy stole out from the Abbey of the Tailors, were quickly confronted and after a fierce struggle were either killed or routed, the arch-traitor, Jean de Malters, together with the Governor, saving their lives in flight.

But Lucerne suffers somewhat from the brilliant history of her near neighbours, her precursors in Swiss freedom. William Tell and his famous companions monopolize so much of the atmosphere that the average visitor is probably satisfied if he supplements a knowledge of their exploits with what he can pick up casually in his strolls around the town.[1]In this way, if he finds himself in the Pfistergasse and notices the ancient three-storied building known as “von Moos’s Haus”, he will come into contact with Ruskin,who made of it one of his exquisitely careful drawings; in this way, at the Gütsch, he will learn how Queen Victoria loved the alleys midst the stately pines; in this way he will hear of Richard Wagner’s erstwhile residence for some six prolific years at Tribschen, the country house nestling among Teutonic-looking poplar trees on the promontory not far beyond the airship station, and of how the great man was wont to wend his way of an afternoon to Dubeli’s Café in the Fürren Gasse, where he smoked his pipe and in all probability sought inspiration forDie Meistersinger, theSiegfried Götterdämmerung, and theSiegfried-Idyll, and perhaps discussed philosophy with Nietzche, who was a frequent visitor to Tribschen in those friendly days before he discovered that the great composer was merely a “clever rattlesnake”. In this way, too, the visitor will hear of the droll doings of Fridli an der Halden, popularly known as Bruder Fritschi, who flourished in the fifteenth century and founded a merry festival which, in the shape of the Fritschi Procession, is still kept up at carnival-time. Many tales are told of this worthy. He seems to have been a prime favourite, not only in Lucerne, but far afield, being on several occasions held captive in some distant town.

“The news reached Lucerne”, we are told, “that Fritschi was being detained at Basle, whereupon the burgomaster and councilof the former town at once declared war, announcing that within eight days they would appear in force before Basle and demand the release of the prisoner. They received the reply that their appearance was eagerly looked for, and that the greater the number of the enemy, the better pleased the Basle folk would be. The expedition really took place. Several hundred of the men of Lucerne, with the two burgomasters and eighteen councillors at their head, marched to Basle, where they were received by the burgomaster and council and a host of citizens in martial attire. Brother Fritschi welcomed his fellow-townsmen from a window of one of the best houses, and several days were spent in feasting and revelry.”

The lighter side of warfare, this, and without doubt a welcome interlude in what were seriously stirring times. Frivolous history, do you call it? Is, then, serious history a record only of long faces, and a reserve

“For heathen heart that puts his trustIn reeking tube and iron shard”?

Is not a merry smile a thing of great gravity in the world’s economy, and may not a hearty laugh be as potent as a bloody battle? Why, at a time when kings and their peoples slept booted and spurred, jesters were paid to break the horrid spell with laughter. True, the world called, and still calls, these merrymakers “fools”, but the sooner a foolish world recasts its mode of thinking in these matters, the sooner will it realize how low and odious is its recognized god ofwar. Lucerne holds excellent and moving proof of this in the Museggstrasse, where stands the International Museum of War and Peace, founded by the Russian, Johann von Bloch. In this Museum there are things which, although they represent what have long been looked upon as among the noblest elements in serious history, come as a dreadful and a useful shock to such as pin their faith to the vaunted advance in intellectuality, humanity, and civilization of this present age.

In Lucerne there is much excuse for pensiveness upon this subject. I know no town where the problem of Peace and War presents itself more suggestively. Not that Lucerne is a hotbed of that militarism which is apt to think of Peace as “sweet poison for the age’s tooth”; for excepting a subdued rattle of arms from the barracks near the Spreuer-Brücke, and an occasional drilling of recruits in the recesses of the Gütsch woods, little or nothing is seen here of the actual cult of warfare. Peace pervades Lucerne, and War is evident upon all hands as an irresistibly suggestive reminiscence. There could be no more appropriate home for the Bloch Museum. Fritschi is the town’s hero, not for the part he played in the Burgundian Wars, but for his drolleries; a sham castle-fortress stands picturesquely by the steamboat quay; the Glacier Garden, witness of neolithic man’s grim struggles as far back, possibly, as 700,000 years, isnow a sylvan resort of pleasure-seeking tourists; and the soft-blue distant Alps of Uri and Unterwalden send to the town subdued echoes of past tyranny and revolt. On every hand is all that could be wished for from peace; and warfare, in the form of battlements and towers, sits crumbling upon the Musegg slopes—swords turned into ploughshares, the past’s frowning exigencies left to serve the present’s decorative sense and purpose. Truly the Bloch Museum has found a fitting home, and for long years may this fitness endure, spreading wide its virtues to the four corners of the globe and inspiring men to live up to that high level which, in their quiet moments, they so persistently claim for modern civilization.

And yet, because something finer is expected of the present than of the past there is no right rhyme or reason for heaping wholesale abuse upon the latter’s crudely drastic ways. We may quite well admit how much of actual beauty arises from previous horrors. As, surely, few can visit Lucerne’s unique Glacier Garden without being impressed with the fact of how much the loveliness and grandeur of the town’s surrounding scenery is indebted to that dismal and terrific epoch, of which these giants’ cauldrons, mills and mill-stones are the witnesses, so, surely, few can stroll up to the Drei Linden, or through the cathedral-like pine woods of the Gütsch to Sonnenberg, and survey

THE BÜRGENSTOCK FROM VITZNAU

the lovely reaches of the Lake and the blue borderline of the Alps beyond without feeling the enormous and quiet benefits which to-day are enjoyed because of the sanguinary struggles of a bygone age. Nor, surely, can many stand by the shady water pool and gaze at the rock-cliff wherein is sculptured Thorwaldsen’s famous masterpiece and not be sensible of how large a debt is laid upon to-day’s tranquillity by such past incidents which in a sense were so ugly and so vicious. “Honour to you, brave men”, says Carlyle with stirring eloquence, referring to this same monument in honour of the 800 officers and men of the Swiss Guard, slain at the Tuileries in defending Louis XVI, very many of whom were natives of Lucerne and district (which was noted for its so-called mercenaries)—

“Honour to you, brave men; honourable pity, through long times! Not martyrs were ye; and yet almost more. He was no King of yours, this Louis; and he forsook you like a King of shreds and patches; ye were but sold to him for some poor sixpence a-day; yet would ye work for your wages, keep your plighted word. The work now was to die; and ye did it. Honour to you, O Kinsmen; and may the old DeutschBiederkeitandTapferkeit, and valour which isWorthandTruth, be they Swiss, be they Saxon, fail in no age! Not bastards; true-born were these men: sons of the men of Sempach, of Murten, who knelt, but not to thee, O Burgundy! Let the traveller, as he passes through Lucerne, turn aside to look at their monumental Lion; not for Thorwaldsen’s sake alone. Hewn out of living rock, the Figure rests there, by the still Lake-waters, in lullaby ofdistant-tinklingrance-des-vaches, the granite Mountains dumbly keeping watch all round; and, though inanimate, speaks.”

Yes, it speaks. Aye, and the mountains speak, the Lake speaks, the whole wide landscape speaks—speaks of all we owe to the violent deaths of such as these. And if to-day this land breathes freedom throughout every pore; if to-day she attracts all wanderers by her beauty, how shall we deny that it is due to a convulsed and tortured past?

But in admitting this, our deep sense of gratitude to bygone men and days, is such gratitude to bespeak our resolve to follow closely their example? Are we to despair of freedom and beauty being maintained, even accentuated, by other and more refined methods? Why should we? Why should not this very freedom, this very beauty be the instrument of our secure regeneration? In view of the hundreds of thousands of travellers who come to Switzerland (it is deputed that 300,000 yearly visit Lucerne alone), who fall under the beneficent spell of her life and landscape, and who return to their hearths and homes with ineffaceable souvenirs—in view of all this precious and increasing influence, it seems impossible that history can so far repeat itself as to soil afresh the Alps with battle-carnage. Walk along the lake-front amid the gathering shades of night, when the gulls have gone to slumber, leaving the duck and coot alone to seektheir supper from the passer-by, and when the lights flash out from the great hotels on the heights of Pilatus, the Stanserhorn, the Bürgenstock and the Rigi. Can you help believing, when you gaze over at those far-off constellations of electric lights, that men are now living in closer and truer communion with all that is ennobling in Nature? can you help believing that, although men may drag luxury with them to the summits of the Alps—although they there must have their billiard and their music room, and eat their evening’s dinner in full dress, yet are they inevitably influenced for good in their ideals, and in the practical assertion of their ideals, by the air, the flowers, the snow-capped peaks and rolling glaciers around them, and the wondrous lake-land panorama spread out low about their feet?

To call the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons the Lake of Lucerne is as correct locally as to call Lac Leman the Lake of Geneva; and it meets with as much sympathy among the inhabitants. The Lake of Lucerne is really but a modest portion of the whole, and the whole is so delightfully irregular in form as almost to be three lakes, if not four. The form of the Lake is sometimes likened to that of a cross, but this, as any map will show, is a reckless definition, and has far less warrant than the profile of Pilate’s face which some find in the outline of Mount Pilatus, or the lioncouchantwhich some see in the combined outline of the two Mythen when viewed from Brunnen. As a matter of fact, the Lake’s form is too eccentric to resemble anything but what it is—a series of bays. And, speaking strictly, the Lake of Lucerne is just one of these bays.

Where fascination and charm are so great and abundant, where places of historical and natural interest are so many and famous, it is not easy to decide what to see first; and yet, I suppose, comparativelyfew visitors hesitate to make a bee-line for the Rigi. By right of conquest the Rigi holds a prime place among the attractions of the district. Thanks to sunrise, thanks to Mark Twain, to Tartarin, and a host of others, thanks also to the fact of the railway to its summit being the first of its kind in the field, the Rigi’s fame is as great as, if not greater than, that of Tell’s Chapel on the Bay of Uri. Certainly it is greater than that of Pilatus—though whether it is deservedly so is another matter. So famous is it, that writers, carried far upon the wave-crest of enthusiasm, have not shrunk from acclaiming it “Queen of the Mountains”—a valuation which gives one furiously to think how uncommonly crowded with royalties is this stanch republic. But whatever may be thought of the Rigi as a monarch among mountains, it is, in any case, a Mecca among mountains. Its summit, the Kulm, is deservedly popular, not only for the intrinsic beauty of the vast panorama of Alp, valley, lake, and plain, but also because it is an eminently suitable spot from which to comprehend something of the rugged, tumbled country whose stern exigencies upon life have bred that simple, direct, and nobly independent spirit which broke the might of Austria and of Burgundy and wrung—indeed, still wrings—respect from all enemies of Freedom.

However, with all due respect for Her Majesty,I see no reason why her illustrious presence, though it dominate the Bay of Küssnacht, should so overwhelm the rights and reputation of that Bay. In course of sequence, and moving, as is seemly, with the orbit of the sun, the Bay of Küssnacht should come first upon the programme. But there stands the Rigi, clothed in such bright repute that the Bay which laves its northern base is, as far as tourists are concerned, comparatively neglected. Little else do many see of its beauty-spots than the tiny gleaming-white shrine to St. Nicholas, the fishermen’s patron saint, set picturesquely upon one of the isolated rocks of Meggen; and this only as the steamer passes on its way across to the royal presence at Vitznau. And yet this Bay possesses a very charming individuality. There is little that is wild and rugged about it, if the bold escarpments of the Rigi be excepted. Handsome châteaux—particularly Neu-Habsburg, standing by the ruins of an ancient seat of the Dukes of Hapsburg—and country houses, orchards, and rich farm-pastures claim its shores. The verdure of field and tree touches the water’s edge and merges in a velvet-rich reflection of itself. Happy prosperity is the keynote of this Bay: “Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest”—welcome complement to the wild, weird shores of Uri. Moreover, at the end of the Bay is Küssnacht,

RUINS OF GESSLER’S STRONGHOLD AT KÜSSNACHT

as quaint and picturesque a town as there is in the Lake’s whole district (despite the bold intrusion of “Auto Benzin” and “Afternoontea” by the side of ancient heraldic decorations). Here Goethe stopped in 1797, at the Gasthaus zum Engel, containing the ancient Rathsaal, dating from 1424; here, too, a little way back from the town, is the Hollow Way, which figures so prominently in Schiller’sWilliam Tell; and here, crowning a steep wooded knoll near by, are the last remnants of Gessler’s sinister stronghold in whose dungeon Tell was to have been incarcerated—

“There, where no beam of sun or moon finds entrance”.

The ruins of this castle, composed largely of the Rigi’s pudding-stone, are not in themselves impressive to-day, except in their associations with the tragic past—associations strikingly symbolized by the bold erect clumps of Atropa, the venomous Belladonna, so suggestively established amid the crumbling debris. But the site is a fascinating and beautiful one with the shady stream, the old water-mill and farmsteads below, and glimpses of the Lake between the trees. It is especially lovely in autumn when the beeches are a-fire, and one wonders then if Longfellow, who knew Lucerne and neighbourhood, was here or hereabouts inspired to write—

“Magnificent Autumn! He comes not like a pilgrim, clad in russet weeds. He comes not like a hermit, clad in gray. But he comes like a warrior, with the stain of blood upon his brazen mail.”

For the Bay of Küssnacht is a revelation of what the dying year can achieve in colour-splendour.

The peculiar geography of the Lake has happily done much to guard natural beauties and rural simplicities against certain of man’s customary attacks. Only at four points upon its shores has the Federal Railway found it convenient to break the peace. Communication is thus in large part by the more fitting and picturesque service of steamboats. Unless, therefore, we go round, via Küssnacht, to Arth-Goldau on the eastern side of the Rigi and thence take the mountain-line to the summit, it is by steamboat that we must reach Weggis or Vitznau, from whence to make the ascent of the Monarch. Weggis, with its big old chocolate-coloured chalets seated upon full-green slopes, and its luxuriance of fig trees sweeping the water-line, was, before the mountain-railway at Vitznau came into existence in 1871, the starting-point for reaching the Rigi’s heights; even to-day the many who prefer pedestrianism use this route, though Vitznau has become the crowded centre. In whatever else she may have suffered from this change, Weggis has lost nothing in beauty and repose by Vitznau being the dumping-ground for some 120,000tourists annually. But let it not be thought that Vitznau has no charming moments, particularly in the spring and autumn, when the ruddy conglomerate crags of the Rigi soar above woods and orchards radiant with colour, and thin mists lend increasing fascination to the “Pearl of the Lake”—the abrupt, cliff-like mass of the Bürgenstock rising from the opposite shore, at all times an arresting feature of the lake-side scenery despite its comparatively modest proportions.

As for the Rigi and the ascent thereof, what more can be said than countless pens have told already? Enthusiasm—easily and plentifully acquired in such splendid surroundings—has dubbed it “without a rival on the face of the earth”. Can I say more? Less, perhaps; but surely never more! However, an abundant rapture is excusable. Language is poor to explain the lavish beauty that Nature has assembled in the panorama which unfolds itself as the train moves upwards; superlative exclamation is wellnigh bound to creep into the expression of even the coldest of temperaments. When, beyond a foreground in which trees and chalets are so out of the perpendicular as to appear as though toppling over into the abyss below, the giant Alps of the Bernese Oberland slowly rise above the peaks of Unterwalden, and the distant Jura mountains come into view upon the horizon far beyond Lucerne, lying map-like by the softly iridescent Lake, whose complex contours gradually reveal themselves from Alpnachstad to Küssnacht and from Buochs to Kehrsiten—when this wide-flung landscape, bathed in slight blue-purple haze, is steadily disclosed before the eager gaze of the tourist, whose imagination has been already whipped into liveliness by all that he has read and heard, small wonder if language is driven to hyperbole. And as the train creeps up and up, over steep slopes covered with bracken-fern and stately yellow Gentian; up and up, over rocky chasm and flower-filled pasture, till at last, at some 6000 feet, the summit-station of the Kulm is reached and the tourist steps out, and finds himself dominating an Alpine landscape over which his eye can roam for miles in all directions, then certainly may he be excused if his emotion runs riot with his gift of weighty utterance.

“There are some descriptions”, wrote Alexandre Dumas, the elder, about this very prospect, “which the pen cannot give, some pictures which the brush cannot render; one has to appeal to those who have seen them and content oneself with saying that there is no more magnificent spectacle in the world than this panorama of which one is the centre, and which embraces 3 mountain chains, 22 lakes, 17 towns, 40 villages, and 70 glaciers spread over a circumference of 250 miles. It is not merely a magnificent view, a splendid panorama, it is a phantasmagoria.”

Here, at all events, distance lends enchantment to the view. Details are blurred for the time being, forthe brain at first has no use for them. Large, unified impressions monopolize the senses; inquisitiveness and criticism are swamped by acute though vague emotion, and we are content to gaze at the vast expanse of lovely shaded colour rather than at any formal object. But after a while, when the senses have drunk deeply of these first impressions, enquiry, that dream-destroying faculty, asserts itself; out come sundry maps and guidebooks, topography is to the front, history is probed, and away to Memory’s secret treasury flies our unambitious entrancement, only to invade us afresh in later quiet moments at home. George Borrow, in the very characteristic Introduction to hisWild Wales, considers that “scenery soon palls unless it is associated with remarkable events, and the names of remarkable men”. Possibly this opinion is upon all-fours with that other expressed by Mason, one of Horace Walpole’s friends:—

“For what is Nature? Ring her changes round.Her three flat notes are water, plants, and ground.Prolong the strain and, spite of all your chatter,The tiresome theme is still ground, plants, and water.”

Be this as it may—and both opinions are at least debatable—the scenery here, around the Rigi, is so bound up with remarkable events and remarkable men that, willy-nilly, some sort of acquaintance has to be made with them.

Among the twenty-two lakes which go to the making of this wondrous panorama are at least two that we shall hear of when we come into closer contact with William Tell and his momentous age. Away to the left of the Rossberg, and beyond and above the Lake of Zug, is the little Aegeri-See, upon whose shores the epoch-marking battle of Morgarten was fought in 1315, some seven years after the secret banding together of the men of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden to throw off the tyrannic yoke of Austria. The trouble, which had been brewing through many years of oppression, came to a head when the men of Schwyz attacked and pillaged the Abbey of Einsiedeln (to the east of the Lake of Aegeri, and still a famous place of pilgrimage), taking the monks prisoners, because the Abbot, under a deed of gift from the Austrian Emperor, claimed the mountain pastures of Schwyz for his cattle. Austria determined to crush this revolt, and on November 15, 1315, the Duke Leopold I raised an army 20,000 strong and marched upon Schwyz.

Back to Index Next