The Spell of Switzerland

PREFACE

The present book is cast in the guise of fiction. The vague and flitting forms of my niece and her three children are wholly figments of the imagination. No such person as “Will Allerton” enters my doorway. The “Moto,” which does such magical service in transporting “Emile” and his admirers from place to place is as unreal as Solomon’s Carpet.

After Lord Sheffield and his family had started back from a visit to Gibbon at Lausanne, his daughter, Maria T. Holroyd, wrote the historian: “I do not know what strange charm there is in Switzerland that makes everybody desirous of returning there.” It is the aim of this book to express that charm. It lies not merely in heaped-up masses of mountains, in wonderfully beautiful lakes, in mysterious glaciers, in rainbow-adorned waterfalls; it is largely due to the association with human beings.

The spell of Switzerland can be best expressed not in the limited observations of a single person but rather by a concensus of descriptions. The casual traveller plans, perhaps, to ascend the Matterhorn or Mount Pilatus; but day after day may prove unpropitious; clouds and storms are the enemy of vision. One must therefore take the word of those more fortunate. Poets and other keen-eyed observers help to intensify the spell. These few words will explain the author’s plan. It is purposely desultory; it is not meant for a guide-book; it is not intended to be taken as a perfectly balanced treatise covering the history in part or in whole of the twenty-four cantons; it has biographical episodes but they are merely hints at the richness of possibilities, and if Gibbon and Tissot and Rousseau stand forth prominently, it is not because Voltaire, Juste Olivier, Hebel, Töpfer, Amiel, Frau Spyri, and a dozen others are not just as worthy of selection. One might write a quarto volume on the charms of the Lake of Constance or the Lake of Zürich or the Lake of Lucerne. Scores of castles teem with historic and romantic associations. It is all a matter of selection, a matter of taste. It is not for the author to claim that he has succeeded in conveying his ideas, but whatever effect his work may produce on the reader, he, himself, may, without boasting, claim that he is completely under the spell of Switzerland.

Boston, October 1, 1913.

CHAPTER I

UNCLE AND NIECE

I MUST confess, I did not approve of my niece and her husband’s plan of expatriating themselves for the sake of giving their only son and heir, and their twin girls, a correct accent in speaking French. But I had the grace to hold my tongue. I wonder if my wife would have been equally discreet – supposing I possessed such a helpmeet. Probably she would not have done so, even if I had; and probably also I should not, if she had. For the very fact of my having a wife would prove that I should be different from what I am.

There is an implication in this slight exhibition of boastfulness; but it is not subtle. Any one would see it instantly – namely, that I am a bachelor. A bachelor uncle whose niece takes it into her head to marry and raise a family, is as deeply bereaved as he would be were he her father. More so, indeed, for a father has his wife left to him…

The relationship between uncle and niece has never been sufficiently celebrated in poetry. It deserves to be sung. Besides the high, noble friendship which it implies, there is also about it a touch of almost lover-like sentiment. The right-hearted uncle loves to lavish all kinds of luxuries on his niece and feels sufficiently repaid by the look of frank affection in her eyes, the unabashed kiss which is the envy of young men who happen to witness it.

Here are the facts in my case. After my brother’s wife died, he urged me to make my home at his house. I suppose I might have done so long before; but I had been afraid of my sister-in-law. She was a tall imperious woman; she did not approve of me at all. She could not see my jokes, or, if she did, she frowned on them. I suppose she thought me frivolous. She was one of those women who make you appear at your worst. She was sincere and genuine and good, but our wireless apparatus was not tuned in harmony. As long as she was at the helm of my brother’s establishment I preferred to enjoy less comfortable quarters elsewhere.

But when, as the Wordsworth line has it, “Ruth was left half desolate” (though her father did not “take another mate”), and they showed me how delightfully I could dispose of my library and have an open fire on cold winter evenings, and what a perfect position was, as it were, destined for my baby grand – for I am devoted to music —en amateur, of course, – I yielded, and for ten happy years, saw Ruth grow from a young girl into the woman “nobly planned, to warn, to comfort and command.”

Command? What woman does not?

At my advice she took up the violin, and I shall never forget the hours and hours when we practised and really played mighty well – if I do say it, who shouldn’t – through the whole range of duets, beginning with simple pieces for her immature fingers and ending with the strange and sometimes – to me – incomprehensible fantaisies of the super-modernists.

But all these simple home-joys came to their inevitable end. The right man appeared and did as the right men always have done and will do. Uncles are as prone to jealousy as any other class of bipeds; but here again the philosophy of life which I trust I have made evident I cherish, and which, as one good turn deserves another, cherishes me, enabled me to preserve a front of discreet neutrality. I may have been over-zealous to look up the young man’s record; but there was nothing to which the most scrupulous could take exception. He was a clean, straight, manly youth with excellent prospects.

Will Allerton lived in Chicago; that was a second count against him, but equally futile as a valid argument for dissuasion. After their wedding-journey, they went to a delightful little house in East Elm Street in Chicago. Business called me to that city two or three times, and I visited them. So many of my friends had been unhappily married that I was more or less pessimistic about that kind of life-partnership; but my niece’s happy home was an excellent cure for my bachelor cynicism. The coming of their first child, – they did me the honour of making me his godfather, though I do not much believe in such formalities; and they also named him for me, – the coming of this little mortal made no change other than a decided increase in the bliss of that loving home.

When little Lawrence was four years old, and the twins were two, his grandfather died suddenly. It was a tremendous change to have my good brother removed from my side. My niece and her husband came on from Chicago. They were pathetically solicitous for my welfare. Most insistently they urged me to come and live with them. There was plenty of room in the house, they said.

I was greatly touched by their generous kindness, but I set my face sternly against any uprooting of the sort. I said I much preferred to stay on where I was. I had consulted with my Lares and Penates and found that they opposed any such bouleversement. The old housekeeper who had looked after our comfort was still capable of doing all that was necessary for me. My wants were few; I lived the simple life and its cares and pleasures amply satisfied my ambition. I had a small circle of congenial friends, particularly among my books. I did not know what it meant to be lonely. If I needed company, I could always fortify myself with the presence of college classmates. I had organized a quartet of fairly capable musicians who came once or twice a week to play chamber-music with me, and for me. I had several protégés studying music at the conservatory and my Sunday afternoon musicales were a factor in my satisfaction. So it was arranged that I should make no radical change for the present, at least. I would spend my vacations with them at the seashore, where we had a comfortable little datcha, and at least once during the winter I would make them a visit in Chicago.

Thus passed two more years. Then out of a clear sky came the report that my niece and her husband were going to take their young hopeful and his sisters to Switzerland, so that he might learn to speak French with a perfect accent! Will had a rich old aunt – a queer, misanthropic personage, who lived the life of a hermit. She, too, took the long journey into the Unknown and, as she could not carry her possessions with her, they fell to her nephew.

I saw them off, and the last word my niece said, as we parted tenderly, was, “You must run over and make us a visit.”

I shook my head: “I am afflicted with a fatal illness. I am afraid of the voyage.”

Her sweet face expressed such concern that I quickly added: “It is nothing serious; but there is no hope for it – it is only old age.”

“That’s just like you,” she exclaimed, “and I know you do not dread the ocean.”

“Well, we’ll see,” I tergiversated. “I don’t believe you’ll stay. You’ll miss all the American conveniences and you’ll get so tired of hearing nothing but French.”

“Nonsense!” she exclaimed. “Of course we shall stay, and of course you’ll come.”

CHAPTER II

JUST A COMMON VOYAGE

IT was inevitable. I, who had always jestingly compared myself to a brachypod, fastened by Fate to my native reef, and getting contact with visitors from abroad only as they were brought by tides and currents, began to feel the irresistible impulse to grow wings and fly away. How could I detach my clinging tentacles?

Every letter from Lausanne, where my dear ones had established themselves, urged me to “run over” and make them a long visit. My room was waiting for me. They depicted the view from its windows; splendid sweeps of mountains, snow-clad, tinged rose-flesh tints by the marvellous, magical kiss of the hidden sun; the lake glittering in the breeze, or dazzlingly azure in the afternoon calm; the desk; the comfortable, old, carved bedstead; the quaint, tiled stove which any museum would be glad to possess. There were excursions on foot or by automobile; mountains to climb; the Dolomites to visit. Each time new drawings, new seductions. With each week’s mail I felt the insidious, impalpable lure.

I have many friends who put faith in astrology. One of my acquaintances is making a large income from constructing horoscopes. She is sincere; she has a real faith. She acts on the hypothesis that from even the most distant of the planets radiate baleful or beneficent influences which move those mortals who are, as it were, keyed or tuned to them. Saturn, whose density is less than alcohol, a billion miles away; Neptune, almost three billion miles away, infinitesimal specks in the ocean of space, make men and women happy or miserable. How much more then is it possible that the heaped-up masses of mighty mountains may work their spell on men half-way around this globe of ours? I began to be conscious of the Spell of Switzerland.

A half-crazy friend of mine, a painter, who loved mountains and depicted them on his canvases, once broached a theory of his, as we stood on top of Mount Adams: —

“The time will come,” he said with the conviction of a prophet, “when we shall be able to take advantage of the electric current flowing from this mountain-mass to Mount Washington, yonder, and commit ourselves safely and boldly to its control. Then we shall be able to practise levitation. It will be perfectly easy, perfectly feasible to leap from one peak to another.”

I am sure I felt stirring within me the impulse to leap into the air with the certainty that I should land on top of the Jungfrau or of Mont Blanc. It was a cumulative attraction. Every day it grew more intense. I got from the library every book I could find about Switzerland. I soaked myself in Swiss history. I began to know Switzerland as familiarly as if I had already been there.

Then came the decisive letter. My niece absolutely took it for granted that I was coming. She said: “We will meet you at Cherbourg with the motor. Cable.”

This time I was obedient. I wound up my affairs for an indefinite absence.

I took passage on a slow steamer, for I was in no hurry, and I wanted to have time enough to finish some more reading. I wanted to know Switzerland before I actually met her. I knew that I was destined to love her.

Theoretically one may understand psychology, even the psychology of woman —may, I say, not insisting too categorically upon this point, especially since the recent discovery that woman has, to her advantage over man, a superfluous and accessory chromosome to every cell in her dear body – one may know anatomy and physiology; but, when one falls in love with her, all this knowledge is as nought; she becomes, in the words of Heine, die eine, die feine, die reine. In this spirit, I studied the geology of Switzerland, realizing in advance that, as soon as I saw the Alpenglow on the peak of the Wetterhorn or of Die Jungfrau, I should not care a snap of my finger for the scientific constitution of the vast rock-masses, or for the theories that explain how they are doubled over on themselves and piled up like the folds of a rubber blanket.

On the first day out, as I sat on the deck as far forward as possible, I became in imagination the prehistoric ancestor of the frigate-bird, spreading my broad wings, tireless, above the waste of that Jurassic Sea which, only a brief geologic age ago, swept above what is now the highest land of Europe, with its south-most boundary far away in Africa. By the same power of the imagination I saw mighty islands emerge from the face of those raging waters. To the imagination a thousand or a million years is but as a wink; it can see in the corrugated skin of a parched apple all the vast cataclysms of a continent. Through the ages these seas deposited their strata to be pressed into rock; those strata were upheaved and, as they became dry land, the torrential rains, the mighty rivers, gnawed them away and spread them out over the central plain of what is now Switzerland, and filled the valleys of the Rhine and the Rhône and the Reuss, the Po and the Inn and the Danube, making the plains of Lombardy and Germany, of Belgium, of Holland and southeastern France. Almost three solid miles, it is estimated, have been eroded and carried away from the mountain-tops – sedimentary rocks and crystalline schists and even the tough granite.

As Sir John Lubbock well says, “true mountain ranges, that is to say, the elevated portions of the earth’s surface, are the continents themselves, on which most mountain-chains are mere wrinkles.” Under enormous pressure, and as the interior of the earth gradually cooled and shrank, the crust remaining at the same temperature, through the force of gravity great plaques of the crust sank in and perhaps, as in the case of mesas, left great mountain-masses, which the streams and rivers immediately began to carve into secondary hills and valleys. Sometimes these mountain-masses resisted pressure; “these,” says Sir John, “form buttresses, as it were, against which surrounding areas have been pressed by later movements. Such areas have been named by Suess ‘Horsts,’ a term which it may be useful to adopt, as we have no English equivalent. In some cases where compressed rocks have encountered the resistance of such a ‘Horst,’ as in the northwest of Scotland and in Switzerland, they have been thrown into the most extraordinary folds, and even thrust over one another for several miles.”

Sir John, whose book, “The Scenery of Switzerland,” I had with me as I sat in my cozy nook in the bow, asserts boldly that Switzerland was not formed, as people used to think, by upheaving forces acting vertically from below. “The Alps,” he says, “have been thrown into folds by lateral pressure, giving every gradation from the simple undulations of the Jura to the complicated folds of the Alps.”

Thus the strata between Bâle and Milan, a distance of one hundred and thirty miles, would, if horizontal, occupy two hundred miles. In some cases the most ancient portions are thrown up over more recent ones. The higher the mountain is, however, the more likely it is to be young; whereas low ranges are like the worn-out teeth of some ancient dame. “The hills of Wales,” says Sir John, “though comparatively so small, are venerable from their immense antiquity, being far older, for instance, than the Vosges themselves, which, however, were in existence while the strata now forming the Alps were still being deposited at the bottom of the ocean. But though the Alps are from this point of view so recent, it is probable that the amount which has been removed is almost as great as that which still remains. They will, however, if no fresh elevation takes place, be still further reduced, until nothing but the mere stumps remain.”

Now I read geology as if I understood all about it; but, five minutes after I have put the book down, I get the ages inextricably mixed; Eocene and Pleiocene and pre-Carboniferous and Cambrian and Silurian are all one to me. Jurassic sounds as if it were an acid and I can not possibly remember in which era fossils lived and impressed themselves into the soft clay like seals on wax.

It is tremendously interesting. When I am reading about those old days, I have no difficulty in picturing before my mental vision a great jungle filled with eohippuses and megatheriums and ichthyosauruses and other monstrous creatures. When I get to Oeningen I mean to make a study of fossils: I am told it has the richest collection in the world.

That night I dreamed that I stood on the highest peak of the primitive Alps and a great earthquake shook off colossal blocks of gneiss; vast rivers went rushing down the valleys. I awoke suddenly with a sort of involuntary terror. It was nothing but the tail-end of a gale which tossed the ship like a cockle-shell. The rivers were the streams of water rushing down the deck as the ship plunged her nose into the smothering spume of the angry sea. I slipped on my storm-coat and, clinging to the jamb of my stateroom, gazed out on the wild scene. The sky was clearing, and a moon, which must have been in its second childhood – it looked so slim and young – was riding low in what I supposed was the east; the morning star was darting among scurrying clouds; great phosphorescent splashes of foam were flying high; the ship was staggering like the conventional, or perhaps I should say unconventional, drunken man. A splash of spray in my face counselled me to retire behind my door, and I made a frantic dash for my berth, and slept the sleep of the just the rest of the night.

To a man free of care, without any reason for worry, in excellent health, capable of long hours of invigorating sleep, an ocean voyage is an excellent preparation for a season of sightseeing, of mountain-climbing, of new experiences.

I considered myself quite fortunate to discover on board two Swiss gentlemen. One was a professor from the University of Zürich; the other was an electrical engineer from Geneva. I had many interesting talks with them about Helvetic politics and history.

Professor Heinrich Landoldt was a tall, blond-haired, middle-aged man, with bright blue eyes and a vivid eloquence of gesticulation. He was greatly interested in archaeology and had been down to Venezuela to study the lake dwellings, still inhabited, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo. Here, in our own day, are primitive tribes living exactly as lived the unknown inhabitants of the Swiss lakes, whose remains still pique the curiosity of students. Painters, like M. H. Coutau, have drawn upon their imagination to depict the kind of huts once occupied on the innumerable piles found, for instance, at Auvergnier. But Dr. Landoldt had actually seen half-naked savages conducting all the affairs of life on platforms built out over the shallow waters of their lake. Their pottery, their ornaments, their weapons, their weavings of coarse cloth, belong to the same relative age, which, in Switzerland, antedated history. Probably Venice began in the same way; not without reason did the discoverer, Alonzo de Ojeda, in 1499, call the region of Lake Maracaibo Venezuela – Little Venice.

The same conditions bring about the same results since human nature is everywhere the same. One need not follow the worthy Brasseur de Bourbourg and try to make out that the Aztecs of Mexico were the same as the ancient Egyptians simply because they built pyramids and laid out their towns in the same hieroglyphic way.

The presence of enemies, and the abundance of growing timber along the shores, sufficed to suggest the plan of sinking piles into the mud and covering them over with a flooring on which to construct the thatched hovels. The danger of fire must have been a perpetual nightmare to these primitive peoples, the abundance of water right at hand only being a mockery to them. The unremitting, patient energy of those savages, whether then or now, in working with stone implements, fills one with admiration. Professor Landoldt had many specimens which he intended to compare with the workmanship of the lacustrians of Neuchâtel, Bienne and Pfäffikersee, antedating his by thousands of years.

He has invited me to make him a visit in Zürich and I mean to do so. He tells me that the museum there is exceedingly rich in relics of prehistoric peoples. Perhaps we can go together and pay our respects to the shades of the lake-dwellers. I always like to pay these delicate attentions to the departed. So I would gladly burn some incense to Etruscan or Kelt, whoever first ventured out into the placid waters of the lake – any lake, it matters not which – there are dozens of them – and pray for the repose of their souls; they must have had souls and who knows, possibly some such pious act might give pleasure to them, if perchance they are cognizant of things terrestrial.

My electrical friend, M. Pierre Criant, was also very polite and, when he learned that I was bound for Switzerland to spend some months – Heaven alone knows how many – he urged me to look him up, whenever I should reach Geneva. He would be glad to show me the great plans that were formulating for utilizing the tremendous energy of the Rhône. This was particularly alluring to my imagination for I have a high respect for electrical energy. M. Criant seemed to carry it around with him in his compact, muscular form.

We three happened to be together one morning and I had the curiosity to ask them, as intelligent men, what they thought of the “initiative and referendum,” which I understood was a characteristic Swiss institution, and which a good many Americans believed ought to be introduced into our American system of conducting affairs, as being more truly democratic than entrusting the settlement of great questions to our Representatives in Congress or in Legislature assembled. I remarked that some good Americans looked to it as a cure for all existing political evils. We adopted the Australian ballot and it immediately worked like a charm; undoubtedly its success prepared the way for receiving with greater alacrity a novelty which promised to be a universal panacea. “How does it really work in Switzerland?” I demanded.

“In our country,” replied M. Criant, “a certain number of persons have the right to require the legislature to consider any given question and to formulate a bill concerning it; this must be submitted to the whole people; it is called the indirect initiative. They may also draft their own bill and have this submitted to the whole people. This is of course the direct initiative. Some laws cannot become enforceable without receiving the popular sanction. This is called the compulsory referendum. Other bills are submitted to the people only when the petition of a certain number of citizens demand it. This is the optional referendum. This right may apply to the whole country, or to a Canton, or only to a municipality: the principle is everywhere the same. Suppose an amendment to the Federal Constitution is desired. At least fifty thousand voters must express their desire; then the question is submitted to all the people. Again, if thirty thousand voters, or eight of the Cantons, consider it advisable to support any federal law or federal resolution, they must be submitted to the popular vote; but this demand must be made within three months after the Federal Assembly has passed upon them. Of course this does not apply to special legislation or to acts which are urgent.”