Blumenegg
Afternoon, and warmer than usual. Fön shifts about in irresolute, vagrant puffs of heat; the sky, shortly before sunrise, had been flaring red, copper-colored, from end to end. This is the ardent and wayward but caressing wind under whose touch everything grows brittle and inflammable; when in olden days all cooking had to be suspended and fires extinguished; when whole villages, for some trifling reason, were burnt to the ground; it was during Fön weather that Tiefis and Nüziders, and several in the Rhine valley, were annihilated within the memory of our fathers.8 The peasants, unfamiliar with real heat, go about gasping....
While crossing our cemetery to revisit the grave of a little brother of my father’s, an infant, and the Catholics were kind enough to make room for him here—it struck me how poetic are the German designations for such sad spots, Friedhof and Gottesacker, when contrasted with our soul-withering “churchyard” or “graveyard” or “burial-ground.” The people hereabouts contrive to invest with a halo of romance even that most unromantic of objects, the common potato, by calling it Erdapfel, or Grundbirne. And the names of the ruined castles that strew this region, Schattenburg, Sonnenberg, Rosenegg, and so forth, were surely invented by a race that had a fine feeling for such things.
Or Blumenegg—which happens to be nothing but a translation of Florimont, the Rhaeto-Roman name of this locality.
If you follow the main road to Ludesch, you will pass through a fir wood and then come to the Lutz bridge. Do not cross the stream; keep on this side, and walk along the water. After a few hundred yards you will arrive at the “Schlosstobel” (the old “Falster”; also called “Storrbach”) which rushes past the foot of Blumenegg castle. Not many years ago it descended in a wild flood, uprooting trees and covering the ground with a hideous irruption of shingle, which will remain for some little time. On the Schlosstobel’s other side you enter a forest called Gstinswald; part of it used to belong to our family. Here, at the entrance of this wood, stood a landmark; a picture attached to a tree, in memory of a man who was drowned at this spot while endeavoring to cross the rivulet during some spate of olden days. It was a realistic work of art, depicting both Heaven and earth. This was the subject: down below, a watery chaos, a black thundercloud out of which buckets of rain descended upon the victim whom you beheld struggling in the whirlpool of waves, while his open umbrella floated disconsolately in the neighborhood; overhead, on the other side of the thundercloud (it had taken on a golden tinge of sunshine half way through) the Mother of God with a saint or two, gazing down upon the scene with an air of detachment which bordered on indifference. The picture is no longer there; and nothing remains of its tree save a moldy stump.
From this point you can climb direct to the castle. We preferred to wander awhile up the Gstinswald which clothes the right flank of the Lutz river, in order to see what has happened to that mysterious and solitary peasant-house which lay on a grassy slope in the forest. It is still there, but those skulls of foxes and badgers and other beasts, nailed by its occupant to a certain wooden door—skulls that held a fascination for us children—are gone. And what of the snowdrops? This, and a little hillock near Ludesch, were the only places where they could be found; tiger-lilies grew elsewhere; primula auricula only at the Hanging Stone; cyclamen only at Feldkirch (where they were discovered in the middle of the sixteenth century by Hieronymus Bock); the cypripedium orchid (calceolus Divæ Virginis), the lady’s slipper, at two other places; stag’s horn moss, vulgo “Fuchsschwanz,” at four or five: we knew them all! but flowers were dropped, when butterflies began. From this farmhouse you have an unexpected view upon the summit of the Scesaplana, and by far the best time to come here is after a summer shower, when a procession of white mists comes trailing out of the narrow valley, one after the other, like a troop of ghosts. Now ascend through the field and the tract of woodland immediately behind this farm, and you will reach a broad meadow which bears the old name of Quadera or Quadern; against the huge barn which used to stand there, all by itself, they have erected a modern house full of people. The castle is not far off; you must look for it, since the little path that once led up is half obliterated. And therein lies a great part of its charm; you must look for it....
When all is said and done, when you have scoured Europe and other regions in search of the picturesque and admired landscapes and ruins innumerable, that shattered old fastness of Blumenegg, up there, still remains one of the fairest places on earth. It is desolation itself, a harmonious desolation, among its dreamy firs and beeches; firs within, firs and beeches without. The roof is gone, and so are nearly all the internal partitions; nothing but the shell survives. This shell, this massive outer wall of blocks partly hewn and partly in the rough—water-worn bowlders, dragged up from the Lutz-bed below—is encrusted with moss wherever moss can grow; out of that moss sprout little firs and little beeches, drawing what nourishment they can from the old stones. They garnish the ruin. So Blumenegg is invaded by nature; and nature, here, has been left untouched. A castle in a tale! Elsewhere you see bare stretches of this wall, that tower up sadly in ever-crumbling pinnacles. All is green within the shell; its firs are so cunningly distributed that you can just see through them from one end to the other of the ruin and realize, with pleasure, that you are within some ancient enclosure. They rise out of an uneven floor whereunder, one suspects, lie buried the roof and interior walls. This floor is thickly carpeted with moss in every part. No brambles or inconvenient shrubs grow here; nothing but firs and moss, and creeping ivy, and hepatica, and daphne and the tender Waldmeister plant, that calls up memories of May. Once inside that green enceinte, a suggestion of remoteness overcomes you; the world and its jargon are left behind. There is silence save for the rushing torrent with its waterfall, three hundred feet below. In former days, this castle must have towered grandly over Ludesch and the whole valley. Viewed from down there, it now resembles an agglomeration of spiky gray crags, peering upward through the firs.
Doubtless they have written about this place and, if one took the trouble, one could learn something of its past either from archives or out of the histories published by local antiquarians. There has never been a want of such people hereabouts; the province is rich in literature of this class. A rather valuable book which has remained in my possession by a miracle and was printed in “dem Gräfflichem Marckt Embs” in 16169 gives some account of it; but though I know little enough, I know more than its old author could possibly have recorded, since Blumenegg “flourished” long after he did. Eight different dynasties have ruled here; the last being the Austrian Crown, to whom its rights devolved at the beginning of last century. The castle was probably built in the twelfth; it is known to have stood in 1265 and is described as a “Veste” in 1288; its lords had power over the three neighboring villages and some of the Valentschina (the old name of the Walserthal). They were answerable for their acts to no township, to no civil or religious authority whatever; to none save the Emperor himself. That is the way to live, for it was an undertaking of questionable profit to complain of such people to the Emperor. They claimed the right over life and death of their lieges and exercised it freely, “because”—as one of them observed in 1397—“we possess both stocks and gallows”: an adequate reason. That is the way to talk.10 They also executed robbers with the sword. Then, together with nearly all our feudal strongholds, this castle was sacked by the Appenzell people of Switzerland in 1405. Its outer wall is down, on the east. From this flank, presumably, the invaders entered for their work of destruction. A spot is still pointed out by the driving road, on the other side of the wild torrent, where, during some siege, the horses of a noble coach took fright at the sound of cannon-shots and threw themselves down the precipice, carriage and all.
Blumenegg revived. It was rebuilt and, during the Thirty Years’ War, contained fifty Swedish prisoners in its “Keuthe,” a dungeon which was pretty full even on ordinary occasions. Then, in 1650, the place was burnt down with all it contained—priceless treasures among them, such as the long-hidden manuscript of the Chronicon Hirsaugiense in the handwriting of its famous author, the Abbot Tritheim, of which, fortunately, a copy had been taken a little earlier at St. Gallen. The building was reduced to ashes a second time in 1774, and thereafter allowed to fall into ruin, for ever. Why, I cannot say. Who would live at Blumenegg if he could, particularly in that earlier period? The south part of the castle, facing the valley, bears traces of a clumsy reconstruction. It lacks the dreaminess of the remaining part; a harsher element of stones dominates in this quadrangle, and you can discover an old fire-place with blackened chimney and a few projecting wooden beams. For the rest, it must have looked well, blazing up there; I can picture the villagers of Ludesch down below, watching the conflagration and dancing with joy!
It did not take us long to make ourselves comfortable within the enclosure, on that soft carpet. The sun was still fairly high; it percolated through the fir-branches, etching lively patterns all around us; it drew luscious tints, of unearthly brightness, out of the deep green moss. And here we stayed, and stayed. We had fallen under the spell of the place and neither felt inclined to move; some drowsy genius hovered in our neighborhood. It was so warm and green; so remote. How one changes! I used to find it irksome to be obliged to show this castle to friends or relatives. Left to my own devices, I avoided the place; there were no butterflies, no fossils, no snakes, no birds, worth mentioning. Ten to one, not even a squirrel....
Since then, castle-ruins galore have been inspected. Europe is studded with them. I think of those absurd places in England or on the Rhine, possibly restored and in every case sullied by tourists and their traces; out of them, the spirit of romance has been driven beyond recall. The frowning rock-fortresses of the Bavarian Palatinate—Dahn, Weglenburg, Trifels, Madenburg, Lindelbronn, Fleckenstein: how one used to know them!—are in better case, or were, thirty odd years ago; even they have not escaped contamination. Certain southern ruins are no doubt imposing; but bleak. Bleak! Mere piles of masonry, they have not been hallowed by lapse of years; they lack the refinement which verdure alone can give; their ravages will show for all time. Those ravages are healed here; trees and moss have done their work so well that an exquisite tonalité pervades the spot. Blumenegg is all in one key. Men have left it to crumble alone; and alone it crumbles, slowly and graciously, to earth. Nothing and nobody intrudes, save the wild things of nature; you must look for it. A much-frequented path—short cut from the Walserthal to the railway-station—runs close by; who ever steps aside? Resting in that enchanted penumbra, one gains the impression that Blumenegg is neither sad nor smiling; a little wistful, a little sleepy, like old Barbarossa in his cave.
What of the intimate, domestic life of its former occupants? On a night, say, of December, 1402—of whom did the family consist, what was their costume, their dinner menu, the sound of their dialect, their theme of conversation? Does it help us much to know that Count Wolfart, familiarly termed “the wolflet”—it probably suited him—could bring five thousand men into battle? (An enormous number; can they have meant five hundred?) Poke our noses, as we please, into chronicles, and pore over books like Freytag’s “Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit,” these men remain crepuscular, elusive shapes. The Romans of the Empire, the pyramid builders of Egypt, move in comparative daylight before our eyes....
Meanwhile the mossy floor has ceased to glow. Slanting sunbeams come filtered, lemon-tinted, through the beech-leaves out there; they spatter the fir-trunks with moon-like discs and crescents. And still we refuse to budge. A soft tinkle of cow-bells, inaudible by day, floats up from the valley; even as we look on, those silvery patches begin to fade from the trees, and everything trembles in the witchery of dusk. Interplay of light and shade is ended. We feel no change, while darkness creeps up stealthily; only the voice of the torrent has grown louder and hoarser. A flock of crows suddenly arrives, with the evident intention of roosting above our heads. Something apparently is not in order to-night, for they rise again with discontented croakings. No wonder. Mr. R. has been lying flat on his back for the last half hour immediately below them, playing tunes on that mouth-organ—that talisman which I, in a moment of inspiration, presented to him. On such occasions he is lost to the world and in a kind of trance; one arm beats time in the air. The birds cannot possibly see him, but they can hear the music, and no crow on earth, not the wisest old raven, could guess the names of the “morceaux” which have just been performed.
“What were you playing, all this time?” I enquire, during a pause.
“Well, there was the marche des escargots, which you must be sick of, by now—a fine piece, all the same; and the old vache enragée——”
“I know. Rather noisy, the old vache.”
“What do you expect? Do you want her to go mad in her sleep. Then the fantaisie of last week, and pluie dans les bois, and the duet between two sea-nymphs, and rêve d’un papillon and a new one, a little caprice or something, which has not yet got a name. I am thinking of calling it coin des fleurs (Blumenegg11).”
Strange! This instrument appeals, as I expected, to certain primitive and childlike streaks in his nature. At first, needless to say, it was thrown aside with contempt; then shyly picked up from time to time. Now the two are inseparable; it accompanies him everywhere in a specially built leather case, and I should not be surprised to learn that he takes it to bed with him. As to these “morceaux”—they have a real interest, seeing that Mr. R. knows nothing whatever of music, cannot remember a tune, never whistles or sings, and has only a feeble ear for rhythm in poetry. None the less, each of these melodies possesses a character of its own and, once invented, never varies by a note. Their names, I understand, are recorded in his diary. They are worth it.
Night; and dark night, under these trees. The Fön is over, a chill dew has fallen. We rise at last, rather stiff, and proceed cautiously downwards till we reach the path; then across the bridge and into the open meadow, the so-called fox-meadow, when—our match-box, our only match-box: where is it gone? Forgotten inside the castle, on the moss. Back again, to crawl about on hands and knees till the precious object has been found; then once more to the fox-meadow. So we wander homeward, in full content. The dew-drenched field sends a pleasant shiver up through our boots, and a chorus of crickets is chirping lustily in its damp earth. Stars are out; the Tschallenga hill, confronting us, has become pitch-black; those Rhætian peaks are like steel, and their snow-patches have a dead look at this hour. Tawny exhalations, as of lingering day, flit about the Swiss mountains on our west. Some grass has been mown up here, during the hot afternoon; the air is full of its fragrance.
Blumenegg and such places—these are the surroundings in which children ought to grow up. At home, domestic beasts of every kind, and gardens and orchards; further afield, flowery meadows and forests; the glittering snow of winter and cloudless summer skies; rock and rivulet; a smiling patriarchal peasantry all about; these are the surroundings. Keep them off the street-pavement.
Impermanent things, like pavements and what they stand for, stimulate the adult; they overstimulate children, who should be in contact with eternities. In a town you may watch the progress of their warping; how they grow up precocious and partially atrophied; defrauded of their full heritage as human beings. Indeed all town-bred persons, with the rarest exceptions, are incomplete, in a certain small sense of that word. They show a gap which, unlike other gaps (deficient learning or manners) can never be filled up in later years. The intelligent countryman does not take long to appreciate the most complex wonders of civilization, because his life began at the right end of things; your citizen will only stare at those other wonders with more or less impatience: he began at the wrong end. One can tell after five minutes’ conversation whether a man has been brought up in city or country, for no townsman, be he of what class he pleases, can hide his native imperfection.
Or go to literature, the surest test, since scripta manent. It happened to be my fate for some years to peruse daily a considerable mass of the latest so-called lyric poetry, and a melancholy task it was following these youngsters as they floundered about in a vain search after new gods, unaware of the fact that the lyrical temper demands a peculiar environment for its nurture, that gods are shy, and not to be encountered in music-halls and restaurants, or even during a week-end at the seaside. There were no eternities for these people, and consequently no true joy, no true grief; no heights, no depths; they fell into two categories: the hectic and the drab. The lyrical temper.... One uses such expressions, without perhaps being clear as to their meaning. What is the lyrical temper? A capacity to warble about buttercups? I should describe it as a sympathetic feeling for the myriad processes of nature, and the application of this gift towards interpreting human phenomena with concision and poignancy; the sense, in short, of being borne along, together with all else on earth, in a soft pantheistic commotion.
That is a view of life which generates both tears and smiles, and one which you will vainly seek in any town-bred writer. Compare Milton, not with Theocritus or Shakespeare, but with a poet of the caliber of Ovid, and you will realize how much more individual and authoritative his utterance would be, had he enjoyed Ovid’s advantages in childhood. He saw nature through books, say Mr. Tuckwell and Mr. Cotterill and all the rest of them;12 his scenery is charmingly manufactured according to the renaissance prescription, and if you know your Italian poets you can tell beforehand what Milton will have to say; a master of landscape arrangement, without a doubt, but—he lacked what Ovid possessed, an æsthetic personality; he was a moralist, as every one grows to be, who takes his fellow-creatures at their own estimate. And how avoid doing this, if you are always among them? For there they live clustered together, and involuntarily disposed to attach undue significance to themselves and their works, to lose their sense of proportion, until some little interference from that despised exterior makes itself felt, an earthquake or such-like, which gives these posturing ephemerals an opportunity to straighten out their values again.
Charles Lamb is another street-walker, and one whose relish of man and his ways, to my taste, never cloys, inasmuch as it remains firm-fixed on the hither side of lachrymosity. Yet is there not a certain shallowness in his preoccupation with fellow-creatures? Shallowness suggests want of depth; want of breadth is what I wish to imply. Zest, temperamental zest, should be a fountain, scattering playfully in all directions; Lamb’s comfortable variety is unilateral—a fountain gushing from a wall. How many avenues of delight are closed to the mere moralist or immoralist who knows nothing of things extra-human; who remains absorbed in mankind and its half-dozen motives of conduct, so unstable and yet forever the same, which we all fathomed before we were twenty! Well, their permutations and combinations afford a little material for playwrights and others, and there is no harm in going to the theater now and then, or reading a novel, provided you have nothing better to do.