The Hofkirche is celebrated for its organ concerts.
All summer long the tourists flock to that church about six
o'clock in the evening, and pay their franc, and listen
to the noise. They don't stay to hear all of it, but get up
and tramp out over the sounding stone floor, meeting late
comers who tramp in in a sounding and vigorous way.
This tramping back and forth is kept up nearly all the time,
and is accented by the continuous slamming of the door,
and the coughing and barking and sneezing of the crowd.
Meantime, the big organ is booming and crashing and
thundering away, doing its best to prove that it is
the biggest and best organ in Europe, and that a tight
little box of a church is the most favorable place
to average and appreciate its powers in. It is true,
there were some soft and merciful passages occasionally,
but the tramp-tramp of the tourists only allowed one to get
fitful glimpses of them, so to speak. Then right away
the organist would let go another avalanche.
The commerce of Lucerne consists mainly in gimcrackery of the
souvenir sort; the shops are packed with Alpine crystals,
photographs of scenery, and wooden and ivory carvings.
I will not conceal the fact that miniature figures of the
Lion of Lucerne are to be had in them. Millions of them.
But they are libels upon him, every one of them.
There is a subtle something about the majestic pathos
of the original which the copyist cannot get. Even the sun
fails to get it; both the photographer and the carver give
you a dying lion, and that is all. The shape is right,
the attitude is right, the proportions are right, but that
indescribable something which makes the Lion of Lucerne
the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world,
is wanting.
The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low
cliff - for he is carved from the living rock of the cliff.
His size is colossal, his attitude is noble. How head
is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder,
his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France.
Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear
stream trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base,
and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored,
among the water-lilies.
Around about are green trees and grass. The place is
a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise
and stir and confusion - and all this is fitting, for lions
do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals
in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings.
The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere,
but nowhere so impressive as where he is.
Martyrdom is the luckiest fate that can befall some people.
Louis XVI did not die in his bed, consequently history is
very gentle with him; she is charitable toward his failings,
and she finds in him high virtues which are not usually
considered to be virtues when they are lodged in kings.
She makes him out to be a person with a meek and modest
spirit, the heart of a female saint, and a wrong head.
None of these qualities are kingly but the last.
Taken together they make a character which would have fared
harshly at the hands of history if its owner had had the ill
luck to miss martyrdom.
