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Swiss Athletic Sports
Selection copyright © 1997 by Rictor Norton. All
rights reserved. This edition may not be reproduced or
redistributed to third parties without permission of the
editor.
[From Our Life in the Swiss Highlands,
1892; first published in The Fortnightly
Review, September 1891. Symonds began going to the
Swiss Turnfests in 1884, and helped to found the gymnasium at
Davos Platz in 1889. Symonds genuinely fraternized with the
common man in Whitman's best democratic sense, from erotic rather
than political motivation (as probably was also the case with
Whitman).]
The Federal Athletic sports of Switzerland, which are celebrated
triennially, under the name of Turnfest, or
Fête de Gymnastique, or Festa Ginnastica
(for this Republic always has to use three languages), may be
called the Olympic Games of the Helvetian Fatherland. Great towns
compete for the expensive honour of holding them in turns,
regarding this in the light of what the Greeks would have termed
a Leitourgia. In July 1891 it fell to the lot of Geneva to
perform the patriotic duty. No city of the Confederation can view
with Geneva in local and material advantages, whereby a spectacle
of national importance may be presented on an adequate scale.
Fagged out by writing six successive chapters of a
Life of
Michelangelo, I resolved to take the
opportunity of brain-rest offered by this festival. So I joined
a group of five contending athletes from the Gymnastic Club which
I have helped to found and house at Davos. In the company of these
good fellows, who never even heard the name of Michelangelo, I
knew that I should pass six days without the tyrannous
preoccupation of my subject.
The journey from Davos to Geneva carries one right across
Switzerland, from the extreme frontier of Tyrol to the verge of
French territory. It can only be done with great difficulty in
one day. We broke it into two days, sleeping the first night at
Baden.
Early next morning our little band joined a special train
for gymnasts, composed entirely of third-class carriages, and
freighted with about six hundred men. We found ourselves int he
midst of a club from Basel, who had on board three drums, upon
which they drummed the whole day through, one fellow taking up
the sticks when his neighbour put them down. What with this
drumming, and the singing of patriotic songs ("O, mein
Heimathland; O, mein Vaterland," etc.), and occasional
interludes of bally-ragging, the journey proved lively enough.
I could not, however, in spite of the noise, refrain from
admiring the conduct of these hundreds of young men out for a
holiday, without guide or governor to curb their spirits, yet all
behaving well. No unseemly action did I notice, and no word was
heard which might have brought a blush to a boy's cheek. Then
they were so comradely, so brotherly, so ready to make friends;
albeit some spoke French and others German, and both found it
difficult to fraternise, except by the exchange of tobacco, wine,
and so forth. The Swiss people are, in a true sense of the term,
a law unto themselves. This their centuries of freedom, equal
political rights, and gradually enlarged democracy have wrought,
establishing a liberty which is not license, and fostering
republican tendencies which remain conservative. Much, too, may
be ascribed to that mild form of compulsory service in the army,
which stamps habits of discipline upon the youth without
destroying domestic or industrial virtues.
Among a mass of Swiss gymnasts you cannot say what social
elements compose each club. The nation is so radically democratic
that the same section may contain sons of bankers and landowners
of ancient blood, mixing on an equal footing with clerks and
artisans. Such a club would belong to one of the great towns. At
festivals they compete with other clubs composed of peasants and
Alpine herdsmen, or with lads from the Cantonal schools, or
undergraduates at the universities studying to be doctors,
clergymen, professors, lawyers. When they come together it is
only strength, courage, dexterity, personal beauty, pleasant
manners, or some other quality peculiar to the individual, which
gives superiority to one man over the other. Even the
undistinguished and the stupid are kindly accepted by their
brotherhood. Of wealth, birth, position in the world, there is
no question. What brings them together as athletes is love of
sport, just as what brings them together int eh barrack is duty
to the country.
There were gymnasts of all sorts, sizes, and ages in our
special train, from Verlaine's Pierrot —
Corps fluet et non pas maigre,
Voix de fille et non pas aigre —
up to bruisers like Milo of Croton, brawny, thick-set men, of
bone and muscle, able to fell oxen with a fist-blow on the
forehead. Most people think the Swiss an ugly, ill-developed
race. They have not travelled with 600 of these men on a summer
day, as lightly, tightly clad as decency and comfort allow. It
is true that one rarely sees a perfectly handsome face, and that
the Swiss complexion is apt to be muddy. But the men are never
deficient in character; and when denuded of the ill-made clothes
they usually wear, they offer singular varieties of strength,
agility, and grace. The nation is so mixed of Celtic, Teutonic,
and Latin elements — Helvetian, Burgundian, Alemannic,
Italian, Rhaetian — and these elements have been so little
fused and worn down by intermarriage, owing to the maintenance
of the Canton and the Commune, that when some thousands
congregate on these occasions, strongly contrasted types of
physique are presented upon every hand. The artist's glance may
range from the willowy, white-skinned, gray-eyed dwellers on the
Bodensee to the wiry, swarthy herdsmen of Ticino; from the tall
gaunt peasant of the Vorder Rheinthal to the lithe and mobile
Vaudois; from the bulls of Uri and the bears of Berne to the roe
of Jura and the steinbock of the Upper Engadine. Of course, a
train full of gymnasts, picked young men from all the Cantons,
highly developed by athletics and airily attired in the costume
suited to their sports, offered particularly favourable
opportunities for this study of types.
* * *
At last we reached Geneva. The young men marched off to the
barracks provided for them by the town, while I retired to my
inn-room overlooking the swift outflowing of the Rhone. We were
not separated for long, however. I came as a member of a Swiss
gymnastic club, and enjoyed the privileges appertaining to that
quality. That is to say, I was free to go whither I liked upon
the exercising grounds, to mingle with the athletes at their
sports, to sit in the circles formed by men around the wrestling
spaces, and to eat and drink at their tables. Every club had its
own riband, metal clasp, and other distinguishing points of
costume. Wearing these, one ceased to be an individual from the
common herd; and there were men with grayer heads than mine who
appeared upon the field in a like capacity. The clubs carry
banners also, which are set up above the common boards in the
dining-hall; and round their flag the members gather, as a
rallying-point in the enormous crowd. Four thousand active
gymnasts are said to have been present at Geneva. To these must
be added their friends, and the public of spectators.
* * *
I do not propose to attempt a detailed account of the athletic
sports. They include, of course, those general exercises in which
every gymnast is bound to qualify, and for special excellence in
which prizes may be won by the competing sections. After these
the gymnastics divide themselves in Switzerland into two distinct
branches. The one, called "National," embraces stone-
lifting and stone-putting, wrestling of two kinds, and leaping.
The other, called "Artistic," has principally to do
with the parallel bars, the trapeze, and the suspended rings.
Specialities, like running, boxing, fencing, swimming etc., are
provided for; individuals present feats of strength or agility,
studied apart from the customary course; whole sections exhibit
elaborate dances, exercises with clubs or iron bars or balls,
pyramids bringing masses of men into strangest combinations. Most
of these latter shows, being eminently scenic, were given after
supper while the band was playing. Under the electric light and
effect was something superb, and the vociferous applause elicited
seemed well deserved. It will be readily conceived, with so many
men in competition, and such a variety of sports, that a little
army of umpires were required and kept in almost continual
activity.
For my own part I took the greatest interest in the
wrestling. In Switzerland wrestling is of two kinds. The one
which is called "Ringen" does not differ in any
essential respect from that practised by us English. The point
about the other is that the combatants wear loosely-fitting
drawers of canvas over their ordinary breeches, with a powerful
clasped leather belt. Grip is got by each man grasping the girdle
behind his antagonist's back with the left hand, while the other
takes firm hold of the loose end of the canvas drawers above the
left knee. This is called "Schwingen," because it often
happens, with the grip described, that one of the wrestlers lifts
the other in the air and whirls him round. In the course of the
struggle the grip changes, and every conceivable form of clasp
or grasp may be observed. When two vigorous fellows of equal
build and strength are paired, say a couple of herdsmen from the
Bernese Emmen-Thal or rustic Appenzell, wrestling of both sorts
is extremely exciting and not without an element of danger. It
is in some respects even more interesting when a young giant,
without much practice in the sport, happens to be mated with a
dexterous opponent þ brute force and weight matched against
nimbleness and science. Victory not unfrequently crowns him who
looked but mean and contemptible beside the heroic form of his
rival. Though very rough handling has to be expected in the
wrestling-ring, nothing like bad blood or resentment ever came
beneath my notice. The victor and vanquished shake hands and
drink a cup of wine together; and after a desperate encounter,
in which blood has been drawn and each lies panting on the ground
for minutes, you will see the two men rise together, link arms
round waists, and walk across the field to take their rest. I
asked a friend of mine — a staglike youth from
Graubüuden, tall and sinewy, like young Achilles on a fresco
at Pompeii — how all the gymnasts in this country came to
be so brotherly. "Oh," he replied, "that is
because we come into physical contact with one another. You only
learn to love men whose bodies you have touched and
handled." True as I believe this remark to be, and wide-
reaching in its possibilities of application, I somehow did not
expect it from the lips of an Alpine peasant.
As this young fellow is a good specimen of the Swiss
gymnast, I will try to describe him. Twenty-one years of age, he
stands six feet two in his stockings. He has the legs of the
Apoxyomenos, the breast and arms of an Apollo. Poised above his
strong full throat and broad square shoulders rises a head which
might be carved upon a gem or stamped upon a medal. It is a head
of noticeable beauty; small in proportion to the stature of the
man, crisped over with dark massive curls, the features finely
cut in profile down from a low white forehead to the firm round
chin and full curved lips. It would be a head for a sculptor,
were it not that it owes much of its grace to an ever-laughing
light of gladness in the black eyes, a smile in the friendly
mouth, and a warmth of colour which only Giorgione could do
justice to. His clothing was a pair of tight-fitting flannel
drawers, black woven stockings clasping the calves, a thin jersey
leaving the arms bare, and a girdle of broad red silk wound
firmly about the loins. Thus clad, the young Achilles moved
unconscious of his charm across the stage, against the screen of
distant trees, under the flooding sunlight; detaching his
triumphant manhood from the atmosphere and breadth and verdure
of the plain, which seemed to fall into their proper place as
framework for the noble form and godlike presence of the youth.
Saturated with Michelangelo, I roamed these fields in search of
his characteristic type. I wished to detect in some forms there
— not David; that was sufficiently rendered for me by the
young Achilles — but those Genii of the Sistine and that
Bound Captive of the Louvre: the peculiar shape of male, in
short, which stands for seal and signature of Buonarroti's sense
of beauty, and yields the keynote of his temperament. This type
I did not discover in the brawny Bernese wrestlers, with their
gently-sloping shoulders and bossy muscles on the thorax, fore
and aft. I did not find it in iron-thewed, uncouth herdsmen from
Glarus and Uri; nor in supple Italians, where hip and thigh
outbalanced the masses of the torso; nor yet again in those
dying-gladiator kind of men, who come from Thurgau, flexible and
dreamy, like captives on the Arch of Constantine. Everywhere I
sought; and in the search I became aware how singular and
beautiful the type must be. At last I ran it down in one young
fellow from the Jura. There was the small head, rising from a
thick and sinewy neck, extending into ample shoulders; the lines
of the body giving wide girth for chest and flexible back,
descending to narrow flanks, extending into length of thigh-bone,
and contracting to find articulations in the knees and ankles.
Large hands and powerful feet for the extremities. Here, then,
I caught my master's scheme of the male form, the note preferred
by him from all the symphony of living human beings. Then I
compared nature with the uses to which my master's art turned
what nature gave him, for the production of vast decorative
architectural effects: Titanic forms, suspended for ever as
symbols of human energy and loveliness upon aerial ceilings or
in works of sculptured marble. The young man from the Jura seemed
more simply beautiful; and I thought how Raphael would have
seized the vigorous grace of him, just as he lounged there. At
the same time the conviction pressed upon my brain that, so
seized, so taken au vif, this model might have passed
almost unnoticed in the crowd of Saints and Popes, Sibyls and
Prophets. It was necessary to accentuate the broader aspects of
the type. This Michelangelo did by adding weight to the shoulders
and the thorax, increasing the volume of the arms and thighs,
exaggerating the leg in its proportion to the torso, while
keeping the relations of head, throat, hands, and feet. The
beauty of life, alive there in a man,m was felt by him acutely.
But when it came to decorative work, he enforced the rhythm of
that beauty, and maintaining relative form-values, converted them
to monumental and abiding visions of the truth he had perceived.
Thus comparing the living men before me with Michelangelo's
superhuman race of Titans, I began to learn much which has an
important bearing on his preference for complicated attitudes.
It is not probable that he would have derived instruction from
the Turnfest at Geneva. He knew everything which nature has to
teach and science to discover in the region of design. But his
disciple learned, by watching all those models in vehement action
or in indolent repose (especially the straining wrestlers and the
ring of recumbent athletes round them), how truly the boldest
violences of Michelangelo are justified as possibilities of
transitional or momentary pose. Whether we ought to regard them
as justified, when translated into the stationary fact of marble,
is another matter. Nevertheless I am certain that not one of his
most questionable postures could not have been verified upon the
wrestling-ground. For arriving at this critical conclusion it was
an immense advantage to have so many hundreds of unconscious
models always posing together in groups, and without
premeditation. From the habit I acquired of fixing on my mental
retina some movement which illustrated a corresponding problem
of the master's design, I became sure that he possessed an eye
as rapid and a memory as retentive as the lens and film of a
detective camera for arresting and recording transitory phases
of corporeal action. It might be argued that he worked out these
strained attitudes schematically, from his knowledge of bony and
muscular structure in the human frame. But, even if he did so,
it is certain that in many most difficult cases he could only
have verified the product of his science by referring to the
model in a posture lasting but a fraction of a second.
The crowning event of the Festival, for an aesthetical
spectator, was when the thousands of the gymnasts stood drawn up
in ranks and sections to perform their general exercises. These
consist of various movements, bringing each limb by turns into
activity, and displaying the whole muscular resources of the
body. The wide field was covered with men, every one of whom
moved in concert with the mighty mass, rhythmically, to the sound
of music. The show lasted for half an hour, and finer drill was
never seen. It had not the overwhelming effect produced by the
marching past of an army, or the wheeling of columns and forming
of squares on a review day. But for plastic beauty, for variety
of posture, for melodic cadence in the lithely swaying figures,
it surpassed anything which I have known. A German, who had come
from Munich for the Festival, happened to stand beside me on the
platform, whence we surveyed the spectacle. He burst into tears,
exclaiming: "Ach, wie rührend!" [How
moving! How stirring!] I confess to having shared his
sentiment; and when the whole elastic multitude dispersed, a
shadowy vision of the life of men swept through my soul,
obscuring thought. "Creatures of a day; what is a man, and
what is a man not?" The mysteries of the universe and the
eternities are prisoned in a single man; and here there were men
by thousands rejoicing in their health and strength. Yet man is
but a dream about a shadow, a flower that perisheth, a blade of
grass that falls beneath the scythe. And all those thousands with
their souls mysterious, their bodies beautiful and vigorous, must
pass away. After but half a century, how few of them, decrepit
gray-beards, will be crawling on the earth they now so lightly
spurn with heels like those of feathered Hermes?
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