IN SWITZERLAND.
OF all the thousands that go every summer and winter to Switzerland, how many bother about the Swiss ? The Swiss conform ; they stand aside ; they recognize that what people want is to see the skin and bare bones of their country—and the harm: the bones the better : so Swiss mechanical ingenuity, is applied to enable tourists who visit Switzerland to visit the desired objects without undue physical exertion. Amazing little railways will lug almost anyone up almost anywhere, and will bring them back again to a comfortable hotel provided with tennis courts and the like. There are, of course, the real travellers in Switzerland, walkers and climbers who have always been in love with the exhilara- tion of the air, the lone spaces, the effort and the danger. But what proportion do they make, and what figure do they cut in the normal Swiss hotel of to-day? A score of people in evening dress, emerging from the elaborate dining-room after an elaborate meal, flooded about a couple of men just back from some thirty-nine hours, out of which thirty-two had been ,walking and climbing. Unshaven, burnt black with the sun, they looked exceed- ingly embarrassed as they waited for the lift to deliver them. One was a Swiss—a young captain of infantry. He had convoyed the two Americans—for there was a young girl there also in her climbing kit ; but since she had removed the protecting greases from her face, she was in a position to face the world—and extraordinarily pretty she was, a little languid, but full of a great pride in her conquest of the Uri Rothstock. These two, now, would have learnt something more than the mere climb could teach them : they would realize how that tall, straight, stiff, hard-bitten young man was accustomed to take his company on such ground as perhaps no other European soldiers cover. But then they were guests and friends of the Swis4 hotel proprietor. It amazed me to find how many intelligent people spent long periods in the Grand Hotel at Brunnen without realizing in the least' the light -which the personality of its owner threw on Swiss life.
We talk about the Swiss as a nation of hotel-keepers ; and it is just as true as Napoleon's phrase about another nation of shopkeepers. Surely nowhere out of Switzer- land would you find a big hotel established and managed by a successful artist. There is no indiscretion in writing down the facts about M. Auguste Benziger's life, because they are all printed in a big volume that has been pub- lished in English as well as in German to illustrate his work. It illustrated also, for me anyhow, the nature of this intensely practical people among whom there is no leisured class. Yet there is everywhere a studiously guarded record of descent. Long ago when I lived for some months in the Canton de Vaud a Swiss pointed out to me one of the domestics whose work was the most menial in the house, and told me that he belonged to one of the best families in Lausanne. He ought with his opportunities to have been doing something better paid. But he was admittedly not very good at anything, and he was none the less of good family because he cleaned boots. The importance of your work seemed rated by its salary. But even in menial work there was no loss of caste. Naturally, then, it seemed to M. Benziger .the most natural thing in life that he should invest in hotel enterprise the very large sum which he had earned by portrait painting, mostly in America. I gather that his Swiss friends took that view also. What they thought fantastic was that he should buy land, because nobody could avoid losing money by it. But there was evidently an hereditary bent in him which insisted on being gratified. His fore- fathers had been in the Middle Ages tenants holding land under the Prince Abbots of Einsiedeln, they had freed their tenure by a service to the abbey hundreds of years ago ; and M. Benziger's father owned land. But land was not his main business. He was head of a great Catholic publishing firm, and this son of his was told to study drawing so that he could be of use in supervising book illustration. He was to correct other people's drawing,' so he learnt to draw like one of the old Dutch- men, and soon it was evident that the young man wanted to be an artist. But he never contemplated disobeying his father's orders, and his father never weakened in his purpose until the most practical evidence was submitted that portrait painting might be a very profitable career for a man so gifted. That also was Swiss. So was the spirit in which the young man went about his business. A portrait painter meant to him a likeness taker. His function, as he conceived it, was to produce documents ; to get the person on record. It was essential from his standpoint to satisfy, not other artists, but the sitter and the sitter's family. There was no question of the artist's temperament, but merely of the accuracy of his observa- • Lion and the craft of his hand to set down the observed. I wonder if the old Dutchmen had any different view on this subject. I wonder if Holbein would not have agreed. And though very few modern artists would accept these standards, none of them could take his work more seriously. A little over twenty years ago some financier in Paris who had commissioned a portrait refused to pay the stipulated price on the ground that the picture was not worth the money. The artist took the case to court but until it should be settled he determined to drop his work. M. Benziger was content to leave to the lawyer the appraisement of a work of art, but he was not content to go on selling work of whose value in terms of cash there could be any question. There was long litigation before the financier had to pay in full with all the costs ; and the artist occupied these years in building his hotel.
I am not pretending that I wish to own one of his pictures ; they are harder than the hardest Herkomers, and they have the colour sense which you may see dis- played in any modern Swiss church. But whether one disliked the pictures or no, there was no doubt about the documents. There were the people—Roosevelt, M`Kinley, Schwab, a heap of men and women : anybody could swear to them, and, what is more, I have no doubt on earth that that is how Roosevelt looked to Roosevelt. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and to M. Ben- ziger the proof of his success was that he had been privi- leged to paint scores of the most outstanding people, and .
had earned more than almost any other painter of his time. Indeed, what other artist has created with his ten fingers a hotel of two hundred and fifty rooms ? If this point of view is very Swiss it seems vastly more modest than the ordinary artist's.
There is this trait to add. A true Swiss has the pride in his hotel which an English landlord has in his pedigree stock. At my first meal there I ordered the cheapest wine on the list, and to my surprise the half-bottle of Beaujolais came up all cobwebby and something adorable.
I asked why wine of that age was being sold at such prices, and the answer was that the hotel had been shut up since the year 1914 till this year—cellar and all. Later, M. Benziger told me that other hotel-keepers had pressed him to part with some of his wines, and he had agreed on condition that he could replace them. But the wine merchants only told him that if he had these vintages nobody else had, and so he kept them for his guests. On his indication—which I must not diselose—I permitted myself to drink a red wine of 1899. It cost ten francs. I do not know where you could get the like of it for any money. The artist seemed to me prouder of his cellar than of his pictures.
Yet the hotel, standing where it does by his choice so that it commands a view at once along the bend of lake which leads to the Bugersdorp and past it to Lucerne, and along the other bend towards Fluelen, beyond which rises the Uri Rothstock, his favourite mountain, is a.posses- sion which might well realize the ideals of an artist who was Swiss. And, cosmopolitan though M, Benziger is, having lived five and twenty years in America and married a charming American lady, and having painted in half the European capitals, one felt absolutely that this very distinguished and companionable gentleman was entirely in his element and entirely at home in Schwyz ; as much in love with his country as the most fervid patriot else- where. Is it not true that the Swiss are of all European . peoples at once the most cosmopolitan and the most intensely national ? Anyhow, I should not like to be the European statesman that meddled with this nation
Previous page
