Switzerland Part 3

Byron was one of the famous men who visited the _salon_ of Madame de Stael. He was drawn to Switzerland in the course of his "parade of the pageant of his bleeding heart," and found much prompting in Swiss scenery to proclaim his sorrows:

Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake, With the wild world I dwelt in is a thing Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.

To Madame de Stael he presented a copy of _Glenarvon_, an English novel in which his "devilish" character had been exposed. It was an effective introduction; and was aided in its theatrical effect by the fact that an English lady fainted in Madame de Stael's drawing-room when Byron's name was announced as a visitor. But evidently Byron failed sadly to live up to his wicked reputation. Whether it was his famous hostess who was disappointed or some one else, he made no fame at Coppet. The de Staels' son-in-law, Duke Victor de Broglie, writes with palpable sourness of the visit of this ineffectual Satan:

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHaTEAU DE PRANGINS.]

Lord Byron, an exile of his own free will, having succeeded, not without difficulty, in persuading the world of fashion in his own country that he was, if not the Devil in person, at least a living copy of Manfred or Lara, had settled for the summer in a charming house on the east bank of the Lake of Geneva. He was living with an Italian physician named Polidori, who imitated him to the best of his ability. It was there that he composed a good many of his little poems, and that he tried his hardest to inspire the good Genevans with the same horror and terror that his fellow-countrymen felt for him; but this was pure affectation on his part, and he only half succeeded with it. "My nephew," Louis XIV. used to say of the Duc d'Orleans, "is, in the matter of crime, only a boastful pretender"; Lord Byron was only a boastful pretender in the matter of vice.

As he flattered himself that he was a good swimmer and sailor, he was perpetually crossing the Lake in all directions, and used to come fairly often to Coppet. His appearance was agreeable, but not at all distinguished. His face was handsome, but without expression or originality; his figure was round and short; he did not manoeuvre his lame legs with the same ease and nonchalance as M. de Talleyrand. His talk was heavy and tiresome, thanks to his paradoxes, seasoned with profane pleasantries out of date in the language of Voltaire, and the commonplaces of a vulgar Liberalism. Madame de Stael, who helped all her friends to make the best of themselves, did what she could to make him cut a dignified figure without success; and when the first movement of curiosity had pa.s.sed, his society ceased to attract, and no one was glad to see him.

Omitting from this chapter Rousseau and Voltaire, as having closer kinship to political philosophy than to literature, a next famous name to be recalled of this epoch is the author of _Obermann_, etienne Pivert de Senancour. Senancour was born in France in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood, and pa.s.sed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and pa.s.sed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: _eternite, deviens mon asile!_ The influence of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Madame de Stael shows in Senancour. _Obermann_ is a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of Nature and of the human soul. Senancour has been introduced to the English-speaking public by the lofty praise of Matthew Arnold, who apostrophises him in _Obermann_:

How often, where the slopes are green On Jaman, hast thou sate By some high chalet-door, and seen The summer-day grow late;

And darkness steal o'er the wet gra.s.s With the pale crocus starr'd, And reach that shimmering sheet of gla.s.s Beneath the piny sward,

Lake Leman's waters, far below!

And watch'd the rosy light Fade from the distant peaks of snow; And on the air of night

Heard accents of the eternal tongue Through the pine branches play----

In a later time practically all the most famous writers of English had some relation to Switzerland. Trelawney (Sh.e.l.ley's friend) was led first to seek Sh.e.l.ley's acquaintance through his introduction to "Queen Mab" by a Lausanne bookseller. Before he retraced his way to Italy in the hope of meeting Sh.e.l.ley there, Trelawney records that he saw an Englishman breakfasting: "Evidently a denizen of the North, his accent harsh, his skin white, of an angular and bony build, and self-confident and dogmatic in his opinions. With him, two ladies, whom it would appear from the blisters and blotches on their cheeks, lips and noses, that they were pedestrian tourists, fresh from the snow-covered mountains. The party breakfasted well, while the man cursed the G.o.dless wretches who have removed Nature's landmarks by cutting roads through Alps and Apennines. 'They will be arraigned hereafter with the unjust,' he shouted." Trelawney asked Wordsworth (for it was he, with his wife and sister) what he thought of Sh.e.l.ley as a poet--to which he replied, "Nothing." A Scotch terrier followed the Wordsworths into their carriage; "This hairy fellow our flea-trap," the poet shouted out, as they went off.

Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Arnold--all had close a.s.sociations with Switzerland, and there still continues to flow there a constant stream of the world's genius. It is everybody's playground, and seems to have the power to tempt the man of imagination to longer stay. One effect is to give to Swiss people of the better educated cla.s.ses a curiously international knowledge. Many of them seem to know all languages and to study all contemporary literature.

CHAPTER VI

THE SWISS AND HUMAN THOUGHT

The Swiss have had always a natural bent towards the heterodox. They have the spirit of that exile from Erin who, landing in New York and being asked as to the state of his political soul, demanded: "Is there a government here? If so I am agin it." Some of the minor Swiss heterodoxies have been of great value in urging the world to think.

Was it not a Swiss doctor (Tronchin) who first preached the gospel of fresh air, preached it so successfully that he managed to open the windows of the Palace of Versailles itself? And another Swiss doctor (Tissot) who dared to tell well-to-do people that their chief cause of ill-health was overfeeding? The open window and the sparing platter are part of the commonplaces of hygiene to-day. When first suggested in Switzerland they had an almost impious novelty.

As far back as the fifteenth century the Council of Basel set up an opposition Pope, Duke Amadeus VIII. of Savoy (which cannot be separated in history from Switzerland in those days). He was crowned Pope at Basel in 1440. After nine years he gave up being an opposition Pope. His was a mild note of dissent to that which was to come later, when Switzerland provided the most startlingly new theological ideas of the Reformation and of the Revolution. Zwingli and Calvin: Rousseau and Voltaire--those are four names of men intimately a.s.sociated with Switzerland who were destined to have a vast effect on the thought of the world, in regard both to moral and social ideas. Two of them were Swiss born, two Swiss by adoption.

Ulrich Zwingli was born at Wildhaus in the Canton St. Gall, which had before sheltered that stormy saint, Columban, and his disciple Gall.

Zwingli was educated at Basel and Vienna, and was, while at Basel, a friend of Erasmus. In 1506, having taken holy orders, he became pastor of Glarus and at once began to show a reforming spirit. His indignation was aroused first at the mercenary wars in which Swiss soldiers engaged--he had accompanied Swiss forces into Italy as chaplain on two occasions--and so sternly did he inveigh against partic.i.p.ation in such wars that he had to give up his pastorate at Glarus and take refuge at Einsiedeln Abbey. There he turned his attention to the abuses of the Church, and his reforming sermons soon attracted wide attention. Rome seems to have viewed his outbreaks against her discipline more with sorrow than with anger, and he was frequently tempted with offers to accept high office in the Church in Italy. He refused, and in 1518 became pastor of Zurich and began definitely his career as a Church reformer. He was not a follower of Luther. Still less was he a follower of Calvin, who settled in Geneva in 1538. Zwingli was a moral and social as well as a religious reformer, and his system of thought was at once more advanced in idea than that of Luther and less narrow in method than that of Calvin. At Zurich he set up a theocratic Republic of austere simplicity, but not of the savage gloom of the later Calvinist regime at Geneva.

Earnestness of religious opinion smothered national patriotism in the mind of Zwingli. He organised a "Christian League" of the Protestants of Switzerland and some of the German Protestant cities. The Roman Catholics then formed a defensive alliance with Ferdinand of Austria, an ally of the Vatican. Zurich declared war on the Catholic Forest Cantons. The Swiss were obviously reluctant, however, to engage in this fratricidal religious war. At Kappel, where the Roman Catholic and Protestant armies lay facing each other, a band of the Catholics got hold of a large bowl of milk, and, lacking bread, they placed it on the boundary line between Zug and Zurich. At once a group of Zurich Protestant men came up with some loaves, and both parties ate cheerily together the _Milchsuppe_, forgetting the duty to slaughter one another for the love of G.o.d urgently impressed upon them by their Christian pastors. At Solothurn, again, a religious war was breaking out, and indeed the first shot had actually been fired, when Schultheiss Nicolas von Wengi, a Roman Catholic, threw himself before the mouth of a cannon, and exclaimed, "If the blood of the burghers is to be spent, let mine be the first!" Wengi's party at once desisted, and matters were settled peacefully.

At a later period, alas, religious fervour waxed stronger, and Swiss Protestant and Swiss Catholic killed one another with almost as much savagery as modern Balkan Peninsula Christians, wrangling as to whether the path to Heaven runs through an Exarchate or a Patriarchate Church.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENEVA FROM THE ARVE.]

Zwingli attempted to reconcile the differences between the Lutheran Protestants and his own followers; and there was a famous Conference between the two reformers at Marburg at the invitation of the Landgrave Phillip of Hesse. The attempt was a vain one. But Zwingli went on with a plan he had formed to unite in diplomacy, if not in the exactness of religious belief, all the Protestant States of Europe. In the development of this plan civil war within Switzerland was fomented, and Zwingli was killed in 1531 fighting with the Protestant forces of Zurich against the Roman Catholics of the Forest Cantons.

Zurich was badly defeated in the battle, and militant Protestantism received for a while a check. Bullinger, who succeeded Zwingli, did not concern himself with politics to any great extent, but perfected the Zwinglian system of religious thought. Bullinger will be best remembered to English-speaking people as the friend and correspondent of that Lady Jane Grey who was sacrificed on the scaffold by Queen Mary of England. Three letters from Lady Jane Grey to him are still treasured at Zurich. Of Bullinger's treatise on "Christian Marriage"

dedicated to her, she translated a portion into Greek, and presented it as a Christmas present to her father. Bullinger's sermons and letters were to her, she wrote once, "as most precious flowers from a garden." She asked his advice as to the best method of learning Hebrew, and regarded him as "particularly favoured by the grace of G.o.d." At the block she took off her gloves and desired that they should be sent on to her Swiss friends.

Calvin was not Swiss-born, but reached Basel in 1535 as an exile from France. He had been destined for the Roman Catholic priesthood, changed his plans and became a lawyer, and at Paris was drawn into the orbit of the French Reformation. Persecuted in France, he retired to Switzerland, and in 1535 published his _Christianae Religionis Inst.i.tutio_, which set forth his gloomy system of religious faith with, as its most startling belief, the idea that G.o.d predestined certain people for eternal salvation and certain others for eternal d.a.m.nation. In 1536, at the invitation of a local Reformer named Farel, Calvin settled in Geneva. It was at the time the head of "French" Switzerland, as Zurich was the head of "German" Switzerland, and was a gay pleasure-loving city. The attempt to impose upon the Genevan citizens the gloomy austerities of Calvinism led to frequent riots, and at last the civil government banished both the apostles of sadness, Calvin going to Strasburg. In 1541 he was back at Geneva with an understood commission to reframe the religious and social life of the city. He set to work with grim fanaticism, aiming at a "Kingdom of G.o.d on Earth" framed on the lines of the old Judaic theocracies, with himself as the prophet and autocrat.

Very terrible was the tyranny of this gloomy presbyter, though the state he set up won the unqualified admiration of John Knox, that kindred soul who carried to Scotland the tenets of Calvinism and set up there a similar theocracy. "They liked a preacher who could weep and howl well in the pulpit," records Buckle, describing the reign of Calvinism in Scotland. In Geneva there was, according to John Knox, "the most perfect School of Christ that was ever in the earth since the days of the Apostles." The whole populace was expected to weep and howl in abas.e.m.e.nt before a terrible G.o.d. No human pleasure was too paltry to escape the ban of these ministers of gloom. Some of the statutes of Geneva at the time are humorous to read nowadays, mournful as was the spirit they showed at the time. A few examples of the prohibitions current in Calvin's time:

That no Citizen, Burger, or Inhabitant of this City dareth be so hardy to go from henceforth to eat or drink in any Tavern.

That none be so hardy to walk by night in the Town after nine of the clock, without candlelight and also a lawful cause.

That no manner of person, of what estate, quality or condition soever they be, shall wear any chains of gold or silver, but those which have been accustomed to wear them shall put them off, and wear them no more upon pain of three score shillings for every time.

That no women, of what quality or condition soever they be, shall wear any verdingales, gold upon her head, quoises of gold, billiments or such like, neither any manner of embroidery upon her sleeves.

That no manner of person, whatsoever they be, making bride-ales, banquets, or feasts shall have above three courses or services to the said feasts, and to every course or service not above four dishes, and yet not excessive, upon pain of three score shillings for every time, fruit excepted.

Theatres, the dressing of the hair, music, games, skating, dancing, were all forbidden; so were pictures and statues. A governing body called the _Consistoire_, with Calvin at its head, had the right to send its spies into every home to detect unG.o.dliness. When the plague came to the city to match with a physical ill this moral blight, Geneva became a very h.e.l.l upon earth. Torture was used to extort confessions from the accused. Whilst the plague was at its worst the sword, the gallows, the stake were always busy. The jailor a.s.serted that his prisons were filled to excess, and the executioner complained that his arms were wearied. Within a period of three years there were pa.s.sed fifty-eight sentences of death, seventy-six of banishment, and eight to nine thousand of imprisonment, on those whose crime was infringement of the Church statutes. Offences against himself personally Calvin treated as blasphemy, and blasphemy was punishable with death.

Upon the death of Calvin the government of Geneva fell into the hands of Beza, a man of more human feeling, and Calvinism modified a little of its savage gloom. Later the influence of the Zwinglians exercised a further moderating influence, and the Swiss Reformed Church began to get a little of the spirit of the New Testament.

After the fame of the Reformers had waned Switzerland drew the attention of all Europe to her cities again by the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire, the chief makers, I should say, of the French Revolution. Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker of Geneva and was born in 1712. He was a turbulent child and ran away from home to France at the age of sixteen. He returned to his native city a quarter of a century later. Rousseau was a revolutionary critic of society, and his _Origin of Inequality_, _emile_, and _The Social Contract_ attacked all the foundations of the then existing society. The last named formed the basis of the Const.i.tution of 1793. In _La Nouvelle Helose_, a romance the scenery of which is laid at Vevey and Montreux, Rousseau argued for a return to more natural methods of living. That romance gave the stimulus to the romantic works of Goethe and Schiller.

Voltaire was a Swiss by adoption and not by birth. He did not settle down at Ferney near Geneva until he was sixty years of age (1751): but that left him twenty-four years of life to spend there. Fear of the French Court sent him out of France. He seemed to have carried no fear with him. He braved the Consistory of Geneva--then still upholding much of the Calvinist tradition--and actually established a theatre in the gloomy city. Apart from the crowds of distinguished visitors whom Voltaire's reputation brought to Geneva, he was a useful citizen. He was the sponsor of two important local industries. On his estate at Ferney he bred silkworms, and presently he had weavers from Geneva to weave stockings of silk. The first pair was sent to the d.u.c.h.esse de Choiseul. His correspondence with the d.u.c.h.esse would turn a modern advertiser green with envy. Voltaire also started a watch manufactory, and again he advertised his watches in cunning letters and circulars to such people as Catherine the Great. In a short time the Ferney watchmaker's export trade spread everywhere, even to China and to North Africa.

Voltaire, Rousseau--these two names kept all eyes on Switzerland for a generation, and brought to Switzerland practically all the serious thinkers of the day. There was one notable exception. Boswell records a vain pilgrimage that he made to Ferney. His mission was to reconcile Voltaire and Johnson. Voltaire described Johnson as a "superst.i.tious dog." Johnson, asked by Boswell if he thought Rousseau as bad a man as Voltaire, said, "Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them." Dr. Johnson never went to Geneva. He would have paid as little homage to Calvinism as to Voltairism.

[Ill.u.s.tration: L'eGLISE DE LA MADELEINE, GENEVA.]

CHAPTER VII

THE SWISS PEOPLE TO-DAY

The Swiss people to-day preserve that element of the paradoxical which in the Middle Ages produced an Arnold Winkelried, courageous to gather the spears of a foe into his bosom for the sake of his country, and thousands of other heroes willing to give almost as great service to any cause for the sake of steady pay. The Switzer of the twentieth century is intensely patriotic, and to keep his country secure makes cheerful joys of the tasks of universal training for military service.

But he is a willing exile wherever there is money to be made. He cherishes a deep national pride: but he has no objection to servile occupation in a foreign land if it is profitable. Often he shows himself greedy and rapacious. Yet he is markedly hospitable and charitable. He is eager for liberty, but surrounds his life with a host of petty tyrannies of regulation, being more under the shadow of the official _verboten_ than even the German. He loves the wild natural beauty of his mountains, but will spoil any Alp with a staring hotel and a funicular railway for the sake of tourist gold.

A nation of heroes and hotel-keepers, of patriots and mercenaries, a nation that produced the Swiss Guard which defended the Tuileries, and the _suisse_ who will carry anybody's bag anywhere in Europe for a tip--the Swiss mingle in a curious way the sublime and the paltry.

Two characteristics the Swiss has clear-cut--thrift and industry. I have never heard of a prodigal Swiss. Their industry is almost as invariable. Very noticeable is it in the Swiss abroad. I can recall two typical Swiss colonists in Australia. The one arrived without other resources than a willing back for a burden and took a porter's post in a hotel. He soon had something better than that in view, and went hawking ingenious coat and trouser hangers which he twisted from fencing wire. Next I encountered him selling eggs and fruit: he had bought up a little farm out of the profits of his coat-hangers. His next step was a hotel of his own, and thenceforward he became steadily rich. The other Swiss was not of so much resource. He was a printer by trade and earned from 4:10s. to 5 a week by that calling. He had saved and saved and had bought three acres of land some five miles out of the city. This farm he and his wife cultivated, providing for themselves (and for sale to neighbours) fruit, milk, wine, b.u.t.ter, cheese, vegetables, poultry. He never spent a penny on a railway or tramway fare, walking always to and from his work. Nor did he ever enter a restaurant or a hotel. When he had paid for his land and his house out of his earnings, the weekly budget of the household never called for more than ten shillings for food, clothing, taxes, etc.

In the Appenzeller district, true, one may encounter apparently lazy men. But in most cases it will be found that these men have put in a very hard-working youth abroad to save money for the little household; that they spend the summer laboriously as guides, and only idle around the porcelain stoves of their cottages in the winter (whilst their wives work at lace-making and the household tasks) because there is nothing in particular they can do with any direct profit. Certainly, they could help the women. But what the use, or the justice of it?

That would only leave idle time on the women's hands, and if any one deserves a rest, they would argue, it is the man who has perhaps spent years of his early life in absolute slavery to save up enough for a home.

Mr. John Addington Symonds in his _Life in the Swiss Highlands_ (A. & C. Black) has given a detailed and a very sympathetic picture of the life of the Swiss peasantry, the cla.s.s from which stream out all over Europe big, hungry, slowwitted, st.u.r.dy hotel porters and waiters. In some cases it is a very harsh life these peasants have. He tells:

Some families subsisted on almost nothing but potatoes and weak coffee. One poor fellow, who has now developed into a hearty man, told me that before he left home he hardly ever tasted bread or cheese or meat, and that he was a mere hungry skeleton with skin upon it. At school he had so little flesh and blood that when he cut his finger to the bone it did not bleed. This man also told me a strange tale, which I will relate. There was a family in the same village, as indigent as his own, but reckless and wild. The long, gaunt, lanky sons grew up like beasts of prey, stealing eggs, climbing into stables and sucking the cows' udders. One of them, more frantically famished than his brethren, confessed to having hacked with his knife a large slice out of the quarters of a richer neighbour's live pig. Whether the young brigand cooked this Abyssinian beefsteak or ate the delicious morsel raw, I forgot to ask.