Part 3 (1/2)
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 fas.h.i.+on 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 His talk was heavy and tiresome, thanks to his paradoxes, seasoned with profane pleasantries out of date in the language of Voltaire, and the commonplaces of a vulgar Liberalism.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 kins.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+mmering 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”