Four and Twenty Minds/Chapter 19
XIX
WILLIAM TELL
I
Four apples mark the four great epochs of human history—the apple of Eve (the Biblical epoch); the apple of Paris (the Hellenic epoch); the apple of Tell (the mediæval epoch); the apple of Newton (the scientific epoch). The one of the four whose fate I most regret—for apples, unlike the women of Nicea, have souls—is the one the Swiss bowman with the cock’s feather transfixed on his son’s head.
The first of the four, as we all know, was eaten by our first parents, with consequences that have made us what we are. The second went as award to the fairest creature in all mythology, who bit into it, I hope, in honor of the charming herdsman. The last, though somewhat injured in its fall, gave us the law of universal gravitation, and a great improvement in celestial mechanics.
But the apple of Tell—alas!—gave us the Swiss nation. And what the Swiss nation has given us I refrain from saying. II
In the history of famous fools—which ought to find a place in the library of every intelligent man—a conspicuous chapter is reserved for that wild cross-bowman who bears the name of William Tell. Much may be forgiven him for the single but valid reason that he is perhaps nothing more than a fiction of the chroniclers, clumsy even in their inventions. But myths are the unconscious revelation of peoples; and this Tell—I can see his green hat set on the bony cube of a head impermeable to thought—gives me the impression of a county-fair hero and a shooting-gallery champion: surely that bow of his never failed to win the goose. ’Twas but a gross and sluggish spirit that could so miss the profound irony of a bailiff content to receive a bow. When a monarch has become but a hat on top of a pole, what more can a free people ask or expect? Was it not indeed an honor that the imperial heir of the Cæsars should deign to govern those tribes of mountainous boors who, now that they are left to themselves, have come to the point of submitting, through the referendum, to the plebiscite of incompetence?
Even in the drama of his greatest champion, Tell cuts but a poor figure. When his more daring friends urge him to conspire for the liberation of his country, he will have none of it, and puts them off with vague promises. In the famous scene of the shooting, when he might have transfixed the bailiff’s heart and escaped (for those around him were his friends), he is content to put the life of his son in jeopardy. He does not attend the night assembly on the Rütli, the true beginning and foundation of Helvetian liberty. His only achievements are the treacherous murder of the bailiff and the expulsion of the assassin of the emperor who was the enemy of his land. It took nothing less than the inflated democracy of the retired military surgeon, inventor of the moralizing brigand, of the Marquis of Posa, and of other poseurs, to make that rustic booby of a Tell the hero of a tragedy.
III
Neither the feeble poetry of Schiller nor the vigorous music of Rossini has ever succeeded in making me admire the ill-starred churl. Whenever I see his face, in awkward lithographs scarce worthy of his own awkwardness, I wish intensely that another archer, more ancient and infinitely more modern—the divine Odysseus—might rise before him, draw bow, and split in two the wooden pumpkin that served him for a head.
I intend no offense to free Switzerland, who calls herself free precisely because she has always sent her children to be the armed servants of the most reactionary kings of Europe, from the Bourbons of Paris to the Bourbons of Naples. And there can be no offense to any one in the statement of this historic truth: that since Switzerland (thanks to the apple of Tell) withdrew from European civilization, she has contributed little or nothing to that civilization. Not one great writer, not one great artist, not one great philosopher. The most glorious Reformed church of Switzerland was founded by a Frenchman. Her writers are a Toepffer or a Keller, her scientists a Lavater or a Haller, her artists a Boecklin or a Hodler—none of them men who have risen above the mediocrity of the valleys.
The one universal man sprung from this land is Jean Jacques Rousseau—who was ashamed of his country, which in turn was ashamed of him, and condemned his books. Rousseau, indeed, was himself a sort of William Tell: but he shot the arrows of paradox not at apples, but at tyranny. And after his death the bloody mushroom growth of the Jacobin tyrants and the Terror grew from the mire of his excesses.