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
