Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861




The story of Tell has been the subject of several dramas. Lemierre, a
popular French dramatist of his day, (though J. J. Rousseau affects to
call him a _scribe_ whom the French Academy once crowned,) produced
a play founded upon it, in Paris, in 1766; but the language of Swiss
freemen on a French stage was little to the taste of those days, and
it was a failure. Voltaire, when asked what he thought of it,
replied,--"_Il n'y a rien a dire; il est ecrit en langue du pays._" But
twenty years afterwards it was revived with prodigious success; for the
truth which was in it flashed out then, forerunner of the storm which
was soon to break over France. Again, when Florian, whom we are to
remember always for his "Fables," banished in 1793 by the decree which
forbade nobles to remain in Paris, taking refuge at Sceaux, was arrested
and thrown into prison, he consoled his captivity by composing his drama
of "Guillaume Tell,"--the worst of his productions, it is recorded.
Lastly, it has been consecrated for all time by the genius of Friedrich
Schiller. The legend was first brought to Schiller's notice, doubtless,
by Goethe, who writes to him concerning it from Switzerland in 1797.
Goethe himself thought of founding an epic on it. It was not, however,
till 1801, before his journey to Dresden, that Schiller's attention was
permanently directed to it. Completed on the 18th of February, it
was brought out at Weimar on the 17th of March, 1804, with the most
extraordinary success: the fifth act, however, was suppressed, in
deference to the intended court alliance with the daughter of a murdered
Russian emperor; it not being considered good taste to represent the
assassination of an autocrat upon such an occasion.

Schiller's drama has been translated into French by Merle d'Aubigne and
others, and many times into English,--among us by the Rev. C. T. Brooks.
It follows the tradition substantially. Carlyle declares, indeed, that
"the incidents of the Swiss Revolution, as detailed in Tschudi or
Mueller, are here faithfully preserved, even to their minutest branches."
We tarried once for several days at Brunnen, and read the play upon the
spot in sight of the Ruetli, in the little balcony of the _pension_ of
the Golden Eagle, with the deep, calm, blue lake at our feet, and the
Hacken and Axen mountains and the Selisberg shutting out the world for
a time; and as we look at the play now, it recalls with the utmost
minuteness the scenery and the coloring of it all: yet Schiller never
was there. It was the last startling effulgence of his comet-like
genius; for when the spring-flowers came again, he was gone from our
earth.

In the last act of the great drama, as Tell sits at his cottage-door
in Buerglen in Uri, surrounded by his wife and children, after the
consummation of the deed, there approaches a monk begging alms;--it is
the parricide Duke John, flying the sight and presence of men. In the
contrast of the feelings of these two persons, then and there, one reads
Schiller's justification of his hero. As if to complete by contrast the
moral of the drama of "Tell," it is related also in the tradition, that
in 1354, when the stream of the Schaechen was swollen, Tell, then bowing
under the snowy years, seeing a child fall into it, as he passed that
way, plunged in, and lost his life. Uhland has indicated this in his
"Death of Tell," as only Uhland could:--

"Die Kraft derselben Liebe,
Die du dem Knaben trugst,
Ward einst in dir zum Triebe,
Dass du den Zwingherrn schlugst."

Some liken life to a book to be read in. To us it is rather an unwritten
poem which each age repeats to the next,--melodious sometimes, as when
the blind old mythic bard of Chios sang it under the olive-trees, by the
blue Aegean, to the listening Greeks, thirsty for beauty, drinking it
ever with their eyes, and with their lips lisping it,--or rough and
more full of meaning, as when, with the men of Schwyz and Uri and
Unterwalden, the great idea of freedom, majestic as their mountains,
utters itself, composed and stern, in deeds which for all time make
Switzerland honored and free.

On the 10th of November, 1859, the heart of Germany beat with gladness,
if touched also with a certain sorrow, as in every hamlet, on every
hill-side, from the German Ocean to the Tyrolese Alps, from the Vosges
to the Carpathians and the Slavic border, the people met to celebrate
with simple rites the hundredth birthday of its great poet Schiller,
in whom they recognize not more what he did than what he sought after,
whose striving is their striving, from highest to lowest,--the ideal
man, burning to gather them together, and fold them as one flock under
one shepherd, that, no longer divided, they may face the world and the
future with one heart, with one great trembling hope, to lead the new
civilization to its lasting triumphs.

Schiller had sung of Wilhelm Tell; and the men of Schwyz remembered
him on that occasion, too, on the Ruetli, with their confederates from
Oberwalden and Niederwalden. On the afternoon of the 11th of November,
they met at Brunnen,--on the lake, as we have said,--the men of Schwyz
embarking in one great boat, amidst peals of music, while numberless
little canoes received the others. The wind, blowing strong from the
north, filled the sail, and, as they floated down the Bay of Uri, they
remembered Stauffacher and his friends, who had glided over the same
dark waters at dead of night, past the Mytenstein to the Ruetli, and
the old time lived again; and the little chapel on the spot where Tell
sprang ashore, erected by the Canton Uri, where once a year, since 1388,
mass is said, and a sermon preached to the people, who go up in solemn
procession of little boats, looked friendly over to them; and the
countrymen of Schiller, present for the first time from Stuttgart and
Munich, wondered at the solemn beauty of the snowpeaks reflected in the
waters below. A chorus of many voices broke upon the mountain-stillness,
as the little fleet approached the Ruetli; the men of Uri, already there,
"the first on the spot," and with them the men of Gersau, a valiant
band, answered in a song of welcome; and they shook each other by the
hand, and made a little circle, three hundred in all, upon the Ruetli;
and Lusser of Uri thanked the men of Schwyz for the invitation to
remember their fathers here on the five hundred and fifty-second
anniversary of the deeds which Schiller has so gloriously sung. We best
remember the poet by repeating and upholding his words:--

"Wir wollen seyn ein einzig Volk von Bruedern,
In keiner Noth uns trennen und Gefahr.
Wir wollen frey seyn, wie die Vaeter waren,
Eher den Tod als in der Knechtschaft leben.
Wir wollen trauen auf den hoechsten Gott,
Und uns nicht fuerchten vor der Macht der
Menschen."

"One people will we be,--a band of brothers;
No danger, no distress shall sunder us.
We will be freemen as our fathers were,
And sooner welcome death than live as slaves.
We will rely on God's almighty arm,
And never quail before the power of man." [B]

[Footnote B: Rev. C. T. Brooks's translation, p. 53.]

Then they read the scene of the Ruetli Oath from Schiller's play, and
sing the Swiss national song, "Callest thou, my Fatherland?" And the
pastor Tschuemperlin admonishes them that they best cultivate the spirit
of Schiller and Tell by worthy training of their children. As they are
about to break up at last, the Landammann Styger of Schwyz suggests a
beautiful thing to them:--"As we came from Brunnen, and looked up at the
Mytenstein as we passed it,--the great pyramid rising up there out of
the water as if meant by Nature for a monument,--it seemed to us that a
memorial tablet should be placed there, simple like the column itself,
with words like these: 'To Him who wrote "Tell," on his One Hundredth
Birthday, the Original Cantons.'" And the proposition was received
with unanimous shout of assent. "This was the worthy ending of the
Schiller-Festival on the Ruetli," says the contemporary chronicle.

On the 10th day of November, 1859, also, there was put into the hands
of the Central Committee of the Society of the Swiss Union the deed of
purchase of the Ruetli. It is in the handwriting of Franz Lusser of Uri,
Clerk of the Court, and dated the 10th of November, the birthday of
Schiller. Thus Switzerland owns its sacred places, and the title-deeds
long laid up in its heart are written out at last.

On the 21st of October of last year, on a brilliant afternoon, the
men of Schwyz and Uri went forth again from Brunnen, with the chief
magistracy of the land. From Treib came the Unterwaldners, all in richly
decorated boats, and the inhabitants of Lucerne in two steamboats with
much music, meeting in front of the Mytenstein, which lifts its colossal
front eighty feet above the water there. The top of it was covered with
a large boat-sail, with the arms of the original Cantons and Swiss
mottoes on it; in a wreath of evergreen, the arms of the other Cantons;
in the middle of it, in token of the twenty-two Cantons, a white cross
upon red ground; above all, the flag of the Confederacy spread to the
Foehn. At the foot was a little stand made of twigs for the speaker,
about which the little fleet was grouped, under the charge of the
Landammann Aufdermauer of Brunnen, a gallant gentleman, host of the
Golden Eagle, with his kind little sister, of whom we spoke at the
beginning.

When all was still, Uri opens the musical trilogy,--the words by P.
Gall. Morell, monk of Einsiedeln, the music by Baumgartner of Zuerich;
Unterwalden takes up the burden; then Schwyz; then all three in
chorus;--and the echo of the fresh voices among the rocks there was as
in a cathedral. Then Landammann Styger climbs to the stand, and makes a
little speech, and reads a letter from Schiller's daughter, (of which
presently,) while the curious shepherd-boys stretch out their necks over
the craggy tops of the Selisberg to look down upon the lively scene
below.

At the end of his speech, Styger lets fall the sail amid the beating of
the drums and the shouts of the multitude; and on the flat sides of the
rock appear the gilded metal letters, a foot high,--"To the Singer of
Tell, Fr. Schiller, the Original Cantons, 1859." And there were other
little speeches,--one by Lusser, who exclaims with much truth, "The
rocks of our mountains can be broken, but not _bent_"; and then followed
the Swiss psalm by Zwysig. And afterwards, in the evening, a feast in
the Golden Eagle in Brunnen, at which, with the ancient sobriety, they
remember the dangers of the present, and affirm their neutrality, which
should not hang upon the caprice of a neighbor, but be grounded in their
own will, for there is no Lord in Christendom for them except Him who is
above all.

Thus wrote Schiller's daughter:--

_"Gentlemen of the Committee of the Schiller Memorial on the
Mytenstein:_--

"Your friendly words have truly delighted and deeply moved my heart;--
not less the engraving of the Mytenstein, which shall stand as the very
worthy and noble memorial of the Singer of Wilhelm Tell in the land of
the Swiss for all time forever,--a token of recognition of the genius
which, struggling for the highest good of mankind, has found its home in
the hearts of all noble men and women. With infinite joy I greeted the
beautiful idea, so wholly worthy of the land as of the poet,--there,
where magnificent Nature, grown friendly, offers its hand on the very
ground where one of the noblest, most finished creations of Schiller
takes root, to consecrate to him a memorial which, defying time and
storms, shall illumine afar off every heart which turns to it.

"In memory also of my beloved mother, Charlotte, Schiller's earthly
angel, I rejoice in this memorial. She it was who, with deepest love
for Switzerland, which she calls the land of her affections, where she
passed happy youthful days from 1783 to 1784, led Schiller to it, and by
her fresh, lively descriptions made him partake of it; and so prepared
the way for the genius which could embrace and penetrate all things for
the masterly representation of the country, which, unfortunately, his
feet never trod. If, unhappily, I am not able to be present at the
festival on the 21st of October, I am not the less thankful for your
kind invitation; and in that sacred hour I will be with you in spirit,
deeply sympathizing with all that the noble _idea_ brought into life.

"A little memorial of the 10th of November, 1859, representing Schiller
and Charlotte, I pray you, Gentlemen, to accept of me, and, when you
recall the parents, to remember also the daughter.

"Respectfully yours,

"EMILIE v. GLEICHEN-RUSSWURM, geb. v. SCHILLER.

"_Greiffenstein ob Bonnland. 12 October, 1860._"

In the churchyard of Cleversulzbach lies buried, since the 2d of May,
1802, the mother of Schiller. Prof. Dr. E. Moerika, when he was preacher
there, erected a simple stone cross over the grave, and with his own
hands engraved upon it the words, "Schiller's Mother." On the famous
10th of November, 1859, woman's hand decorated the grave with flowers,
and put a laurel wreath upon the cross; and in the hour when great
cities with festal processions and banquets and oratory and jubilant
song offered their homage to the son, a few persons gathered around the
grave of the mother, and in the silence there planted a linden-tree;
for in stillness thus, while she lived, had his mother done her part,
lovingly and with faith, to unfold and consecrate the genius of
Friedrich Schiller.

* * * * *


A NOOK OF THE NORTH.


Adventurous travellers, who penetrated into Canada during the late visit
of the Sovereign-Apparent of that colony, have furnished the public,
through the daily press, with minute and more or less faithful
descriptions of places upon the grand routes, Quebec and Montreal have
been done by them to a hair; Kingston and another wicked place made
notorious for bad manners; Toronto, Hamilton, and London of the West
photographed with a camera of maximum dimensions. Upon the two great
railroad-lines by which Canada is now traversed,--the Grand Trunk
and the Great Western,--there is hardly a station which has not been
mentioned by the reporters, either for the loyal manner in which it
was decorated to do honor to the youthful Prince, or for the rather
inhospitable display of certain objectionable symbols by the people
around.

But neither in Canada nor elsewhere is it upon the grand routes that
glimpses can be had of interior life and character. Primitive simplicity
is altogether incompatible with railroads. The boy who resides near a
station is quite an old man, compared with any average boy taken from
the sequestered clearings ten miles back: he may be a worse kind of boy,
or he may be a better, but he isn't the same kind, at any rate. Of
girls it is more difficult to speak with confidence in the present
era,--hooped skirts having pretty nearly assimilated them everywhere;
but I have noticed that they are less ingenuous along railroads than in
secluded districts, and their parents more suspicious,--a fact which
makes railroad-vicinities inferior places to dwell in, compared to those
that are rural and remote from the demoralizing influences of up and
down trains.

I do not aver that the railroad is devoid of a kind of poetry of its
own,--the same kind of sentiment, nearly, that resides about anvils
and smelting-furnaces in the Hartz Mountains and in the great
coal-districts: an infernal kind of sentiment, for the most part, being
inseparable from burning fiery furnaces and grime; as in "Fridolin," and
in the "Song of the Bell," and in the "Forging of the Anchor." Once,
particularly, in travelling by rail, did I experience the mysterious
glamour that seems to hang round iron more than about any other metal.
It was past midnight; and on waking up after a sleep of some hours, I
found myself alone in the long car, which had come to a stand-still
while I slept. The stillness of the night was broken at intervals by a
short, loud boom, as of an iron bell ringing up some terrible domestic
from the incomprehensible unseen. On looking out of the window, I saw by
some dim lamp-light that we were alone in an immense iron hall; _we_, I
say, for there was a ponderous, grimy being darkly visible to me, whose
gigantic shadow made terrible gestures upon the walls and among the
great iron girders of the roof, as he moved slowly along the train,
striking the wheels with a heavy sledge-hammer as he went. Of course
there was nothing unusual in such a proceeding, the object of which was,
probably, to ascertain something connected with the condition of the
rolling stock; but there was a kind of awful poetry in the toll of the
iron bell, which ran, and reverberated, and tingled among the iron ribs
in the building, making them all sing as if they were things of flesh
and blood, with plenty of iron in the latter, which is reckoned to be
conducive to robust health.

But the romance of rolling stock has yet to be disengaged, and the
inspired conductor or bardic baggage-master destined to do that is yet
in the shell. May he long remain there!

Off the track some ten or twenty miles, though, almost anywhere, some of
the materials, at least, for good, regular poetry of the old-fashioned
kind are to be found. A mill, for instance, with a wooden wheel,--no
demoralizing iron about it, in fact, except what cannot well be
dispensed with, in view of wear and tear. A white cottage, where
the miller dwells serene; mossy roof, red brick chimney, and no
lightning-rod or any other iron, being the principal features of the
serene miller's abode. Cherries, in that tranquil person's garden, that
are nearly ripe, and roses of a delicate red,--but none so ripe or so
red as the lips and cheeks of the serene miller's daughter, who trips
across the little wooden foot-bridge over the mill-stream, singing a
birdy kind of song as she goes. She is clad in a black velvet bodice
and russet skirt, and has no iron about her of any description, unless,
indeed, it is in her blood,--where it ought to be. The breath of kine
waiting to be relieved of their honest milk, which is a good, solid kind
of fluid in such places, and meanders about the land with great freedom
in company with honey. All these things will be very scarce in the world
by-and-by, on which account it seems to be a judicious thing to go off
the track a little, now and then, if only to "say that we have seen
them."

In following the graphic narratives of the Prince of Wales's tour, the
mind naturally wandered away to places _not_ visited by him, although
within easy distance of his fore-ordered course. It is well that there
are places left to talk about! Let us conjure up a few old reminiscences
of one,--a silent, primitive little nook of the North, within an hour's
ride of Quebec, but too insignificant a spot for the coveted distinction
of a royal visit. Crowned heads, then, will have the goodness to
transfer their attention, and skip to the next article.

The nook to which I refer is Lorette, in Lower or French Canada, where
it is commonly called _Jeune Lorette_, to distinguish it from _Ancienne
Lorette_,--a less interesting place, distant from it about four miles.

Jeune Lorette is situated about eight miles north-west of Quebec, upon
the beautiful, romantic stream called the St. Charles, which rushes down
many a picturesque gorge, and winds through many pleasant meadows, in
its course of some twenty miles from Lake St. Charles away up in the
hills to the St. Roch suburb of Quebec. Here it assumes the character of
a deep, tortuous dock, incumbered with the _debris_ of many ship-yards,
and reflecting the skeleton shapes of big-ribbed merchantmen on the
stocks. Here, too, it is generally called the Little River; probably to
distinguish it from the great River St. Lawrence, into which it oozes at
this point.

But higher up, as I have said, the St. Charles is romantic and rushes
on its fate. At Lorette, it divides the village in twain: a western
section, for the most part peopled by French-Canadian _habitans_; an
eastern one, inhabited by half-breed Indians, a remnant of the once
powerful Hurons of old.

These Canadian Hurons are not, in their present condition, corroborative
of the Cooper specifications of Indian life: rather the contrary, in
fact. There is a wing of them--a wing without feathers, indeed--settled
down at Amherstburgh, on the far western marge of Lake Erie, in Canada,
quite six hundred miles away from their brethren of Lorette. When
shooting woodcock once in that district, I entered the comfortable log
farm-house of the chief of the settlement, whose name was Martin. He
was a fat, rather Dutch-looking Indian, but still active and
industrious,--for a man who is an Indian and fat. I asked Mr. Martin if
he hunted much; to which he replied, No, he did not,--adding, that he
never was far into the woods but once in his life, and that was on
his own lot of a hundred acres of bush, in which he was lost, on that
occasion, for two days.

Among the Hurons of Lorette there are a few young men who hunt moose and
caribou in the proper season; but the men, generally speaking, as
well as the women, are engaged in the manufacture of snow-shoes and
moccasons,--articles for which there is a great demand in Lower Canada.
Philippe Vincent, a chieftain and shoemaker of the tribe, told me that
he had disposed of twelve hundred dollars' worth of these articles, on
a trip to Montreal, from which he had just returned. Many articles of
Indian fancy-work are also manufactured by them: beaded pouches for
tobacco, bark-work knick-knacks, and curious racks made of the hoofs of
the moose, and hung upon the wall to stick small articles into.

On the profits of this work many of them live in comfort,--nay, in
luxury. Paul Vincent, a cousin of Philippe mentioned above, and, like
him, a chief of the tribe and a renowned builder of snow-shoes, paid two
hundred and seventy-five dollars for a piano for his daughter, when I
was at Quebec, five or six years ago. Whenever I visited Philippe, that
stately man of the Hurons would usher me into a little parlor with a
sofa in it and a carpet on the floor; he would produce brandy in a cut
decanter, and cake upon a good porcelain plate, and would be merry in
French and expansive on the subject of trade.

Most of these hybrid Hurons are quite as white as their Canadian
neighbors; but they generally have the horse-tail hair, and black, beady
eye of the aborigines. The ordinary dress of the men, in winter, is a
blue blanket-coat, made with a _capuchon_, or hood, which latter is
generally trimmed with bright-colored ribbon and ornamented with beads.
Epaulettes, fashioned out of pieces of red and blue cloth, somewhat
after the pattern of a pen-wiper, impart a distinguished appearance
to the shoulders of these garments, which are rendered still more
picturesque by being tucked round the body with heavy woollen sashes,
variegated in red, blue, and yellow. Some of these sashes are heavily
beaded, and worth from five to ten dollars each; and they, as well
as the Indian blanket-coats, are to be had at the furriers' shops in
Quebec, where there is a considerable demand for them by members of
snow-shoe clubs, and others whose occupations or amusements render that
style of costume appropriate for their wear. The older women dress
in the ordinary squaw costume, with short, narrow petticoats, and
embroidered _metasses_, or leggings. When going out, they fold a blue
blanket over all, and put on a regular, unpicturesque, stove-pipe hat,
with a band of tin-foil around it,--which makes them look like one of
those mulatto coachmen one sees now and then on the box of a _bonton_
barouche, with his silver-mounted hat and double-caped blue box-coat.
The young girls are disposed to innovations upon the petticoats, and
modifications of the _metasses_. Once I saw one standing on a great gray
crag at the foot of the fall. She looked extremely picturesque at a
little distance, giving a nice bit of local color to the scene with her
scarlet legs; but on a nearer approach, much of the value of the color
disappeared before the unromantic facts of a pale-face petticoat and
patent-leather gaiter-boots. I have noticed several of the younger
people here with brown hair and blue or gray eyes, significant that the
aboriginal blood is being gradually diluted. In another generation or
two, there will be little of it left among them. But the correspondents
of the press, who described some of these Indians seen by them at
Quebec, are mistaken in attributing to them an admixture of Irish blood.
Until within eight years past, there were few, if any, Irish to be found
in the neighborhood of Lorette. Since that time, the construction of the
Quebec water-works, which are supplied from Lake St. Charles, has given
employment to hundreds of the Hibernian stock in that neighborhood;
and I know not whether their influence as regards race may not be now
discernible in the features of many pugnacious Huronites of tender
years: but the white element traceable in the lineaments of the present
and passing generations of the settlement is distinctly attributable to
the proximity of the French-Canadian, whose language has been transfused
into them with the blood.

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