Part 3

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.

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.

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."

This central compartment of the lake is closed towards the east, as already stated, by the bare rock peaks of the Great and Little Mythen. These have been compared, unless I mistake, to the twin Langdale Pikes, in Westmoreland, as seen from the head of Windermere; and probably the comparison has just as much validity as comparisons of the sort are ever capable of asserting. Nature, who is studious never to reproduce herself with complete and meticulous accuracy, is fond enough of teasing us with suggestion and reminiscence, and often enough finds pleasure in moulding "two lovely berries" on a single stem. The Mythen are removed, again like Wordsworth's "lusty twins," to a quite appreciable distance from the margin of the lake; but here, whereas in Westmoreland the intervening country is the sweetest confusion imaginable of undulating pasture and coppice along the broken course of the Brathay, the broad plinth that rises up in slow but persistent gradient from Brunnen to the foot of the Mythen is, to the writer's way of thinking (and he knows of no support from the judgment of other critics), the weakest bit of composition along the whole basin of Lucerne, and a tract of country--it is luckily very small--as dull and profitless as any to be found among the Alps. Yet this, in fact, as part and parcel of the Canton of Schwyz, is in a sense the very heart and core of Switzerland, and the veritable holy cradle of Swiss freedom. It has given its name to the whole Confederation, and the little town of Schwyz itself, which is visible rather too obviously as the land slopes up in the distance, though with less than eight thousand inhabitants, might very justly complain of Berne that the latter has usurped its proper dignity in attracting to itself the Swiss seat of federal government. Brunnen, which is called the port of Schwyz, and from which it is distant about three miles, is singularly crushed and over-weighted by the great hotels on the Seelisberg and the Axenfels, and has suffered perhaps more severely by the exploitation of its neighbourhood than any other single station on the lake. The attraction here, of course, is the majestic Bay of Uri, which comes into view with startling suddenness, in a few revolutions of the paddles, as the steamer approaches the quay at Brunnen; and whose splendour, luckily, neither monster hotel, nor monster crowd, nor the presence of the great St. Gothard railway (here first insistently apparent on the margin of the lake),

"nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy."

One would have preferred, no doubt, to have approached this inner shrine of the hills--which is also the inner shrine of the great traditions of Swiss liberty--with somewhat less obtrusive parade of the engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century. One remembers for the moment how William and Dorothy Wordsworth came hither, and on foot, in 1820. "We descended," writes Dorothy in one of her journals, "by a long flight of steps, into the Vale, and, after about half a mile's walking, we arrived at _Brunnen_. Espied Wm. and M. [her brother, William, and his wife] upon a crag above the village, and they directed us to the Eagle Inn, where I instantly seated myself before a window, with a long reach of the Lake of Uri before me, the magnificent commencement to our regular approach to the St. Gothard Pass of the Alps. [Hitherto their approach from Calais had been devious, by way of the Rhine and the Oberland.] My first feeling was of extreme delight in the excessive _beauty_ of the scene--I had expected something of a more awful impression from the Lake of Uri; but nothing so _beautiful_." There was then no St. Gothard railway; no over-weening hotels; not even, perhaps, a steamboat on the lake!

It is singular, perhaps, that neither this superlative Bay of Uri, nor all its varied traditions of the Tellsplatte or the Rütli, should have succeeded in evoking a single verse from the poet whose inspiration had been kindled to such splendid effort in Scotland, less than twenty years previously, by the vision of a sweet-voiced girl by the spray of a Highland waterfall, by the careless evening greeting of a woman by a lake. The magic period of plenary inspiration was passed, indeed, for Wordsworth at the time of this continental tour in 1820; and yet it was after his return to England that he composed the great sonnet on King's College Chapel. The Rütli lies across the lake scarcely half an hour's row from Brunnen, yet it does not appear from Dorothy's journal that her brother even visited it. Here, on a green shelf of meadow by the side of the greener lake, and over-topped towards the west by the dark woods and cliffs of the Sonnenberg, are the few square yards of sacred soil where the three founders of Swiss freedom met together and conspired, if fables do not lie, for the rooting out of the Austrian tyrant in 1307. Their actual names are given, and the very day of meeting--November 7, in "the dead vast and middle of the night"--yet the imp of modern criticism, which has spared neither Tell nor Arnold von Winkelried, is clamorous again to rob us of this famous drama of conjuration on the Rütli. On the opposite shore of the lake, but considerably further to the south--to the south, in fact, of the little village of Sisikon, which itself may be reckoned as roughly the centre of the Bay of Uri--on the immediate margin of the water, and below the great, vertical, twisted precipices of the dark and towering Axenberg, is the little ledge of the Tellsplatte, where Tell is said to have sprung ashore from the boat, and from the custody of his warders, during the onslaught of a sudden squall, when on his way as a prisoner from Altdorf to Küssnacht. The chapel was rebuilt towards the close of last century, and is visible as we pass from the steamer. Behind it runs the great St. Gothard railway, on its way from Bâle to Milan; and higher up the cliff is the famous highroad of the Axenstrasse, which was driven along the face of these sheer and impracticable precipices, in alternate cutting, embankment and tunnel, by the zeal of the Federal Government in 1863-64, in order to better the communication between Canton Ticino and the rest of Switzerland. Ticino, or Tessin, the fifth largest of the states in acreage but the seventh in population, lies to the south of Uri, across the wild pass of the St. Gothard, on the sunny Italian side of the Alps, and was only admitted to the Confederation in 1803, though earlier by a dozen years than units of such importance as Neuchâtel, Geneva, and the Valais. One is rather apt to forget that the Switzerland of the days before the French Revolution--the Switzerland whose name is a synonym for liberty; the Switzerland of Sempach, Morat, and Morgarten--consisted only of the thirteen German-speaking states that are clustered mostly to the north and west of the original mountain nucleus of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz.