RESULTING FORMS:--FIRST, AIGUILLES.
Sec. 1. I have endeavored in the preceding chapters always to keep the
glance of the reader on the broad aspect of things, and to separate for
him the mountain masses into the most distinctly comprehensible forms.
We must now consent to take more pains, and observe more closely.
Sec. 2. I begin with the Aiguilles. In Fig. 24, p. 170, at _a_, it was
assumed that the mass was raised highest merely where the elevating
force was greatest, being of one substance with the bank or cliff below.
But it hardly ever _is_ of the same substance. Almost always it is of
compact crystallines, and the bank of slaty crystallines; or if it be of
slaty crystallines the bank is of slaty coherents. The bank is almost
always the softer of the two.[57]
Is not this very marvellous? Is it not exactly as if the substance had
been prepared soft or hard with a sculpturesque view to what had to be
done with it; soft, for the glacier to mould, and the torrent to divide;
hard, to stand for ever, central in mountain majesty.
[Illustration: FIG. 25.]
Sec. 3. Next, then, comes the question, How do these compact crystallines
and slaty crystallines join each other? It has long been a well
recognized fact in the science of geology, that the most important
mountain ranges lift up and sustain upon their sides the beds of rock
which form the inferior groups of hills around them in the manner
roughly shown in the section Fig. 25, where the dark mass stands for the
hard rock of the great mountains (crystallines), and the lighter lines
at the side of it indicate the prevalent direction of the beds in the
neighboring hills (coherents), while the spotted portions represent the
gravel and sand of which the great plains are usually composed. But it
has not been so universally recognized, though long ago pointed out by
De Saussure, that the great central groups are often themselves composed
of beds lying in a precisely opposite direction; so that if we analyze
carefully the structure of the dark mass in the centre of Fig. 25, we
shall find it arranged in lines which slope downwards to the centre; the
flanks of it being of slaty crystalline rock, and the summit of compact
crystallines, as at _a_, Fig. 26.
[Illustration: FIG. 26.]
In speaking of the sculpture of the central peaks in the last chapter, I
made no reference to the _nature_ of the rocks in the banks on which
they stood. The diagram at _a_, Fig. 27, as representative of the
original condition, and _b_, of the resultant condition will, compared
with Fig. 24, p. 170, more completely illustrate the change.[58]
[Illustration: FIG. 27.]
[Illustration: FIG. 28.]
Sec. 4. By what secondary laws this structure may ultimately be discovered
to have been produced is of no consequence to us at present; all that it
is needful for us to note is the beneficence which appointed it for the
mountains destined to assume the boldest forms. For into whatever
outline they may be sculptured by violence or time, it is evident at a
glance that their stability and security must always be the greatest
possible under the given circumstances. Suppose, for instance, that the
peak is in such a form as _a_ in Fig. 26, then, however steep the slope
may be on either side, there is still no chance of one piece of rock
sliding off another; but if the same outline were given to beds disposed
as at _b_, the unsupported masses might slide off those beneath them at
any moment, unless prevented by the inequalities of the surfaces.
Farther, in the minor divisions of the outline, the tendency of the peak
at _a_ will be always to assume contours like those at _a_ in Fig. 28,
which are, of course, perfectly safe; but the tendency of the beds at
_b_ in Fig. 27 will be to break into contours such as at _b_ here, which
are all perilous, not only in the chance of each several portion giving
way, but in the manner in which they would _deliver_, from one to the
other, the fragments which fell. A stone detached from any portion of
the peak at _a_ would be caught and stopped on the ledge beneath it; but
a fragment loosened from _b_ would not stay till it reached the valley
by a series of accelerating bounds.
Sec. 5. While, however, the secure and noble form represented at _a_ in
Figs. 26 and 28 is for the most part ordained to be that of the highest
mountains, the contours at _b_, in each figure, are of perpetual
occurrence among the secondary ranges, in which, on a smaller scale,
they produce some of the most terrific and fantastic forms of precipice;
not altogether without danger, as has been fearfully demonstrated by
many a "bergfall" among the limestone groups of the Alps; but with far
less danger than would have resulted from the permission of such forms
among the higher hills; and with collateral advantages which we shall
have presently to consider. In the meantime, we return to the
examination of the superior groups.
[Illustration: FIG. 29.]
Sec. 6. The reader is, no doubt, already aware that the chain of the Mont
Blanc is bordered by two great valleys, running parallel to each other,
and seemingly excavated on purpose that travellers might be able to
pass, foot by foot, along each side of the Mont Blanc and its aiguilles,
and thus examine every peak in succession. One of these valleys is that
of Chamouni, the other that of which one half is called the Allee
Blanche, and the other the Val Ferret, the town of Cormayeur being near
its centre, where it opens to the Val d'Aosta. Now, cutting the chain of
Mont Blanc right across, from valley to valley, through the double range
of aiguilles, the section would be[59] as Fig. 29 here, in which _a_ is
the valley of Chamouni, _b_ the range of aiguilles of Chamouni, _c_ the
range of the Geant, _d_ the valley of Cormayeur.
[Illustration: 30. The Aiguille Charmoz.]
Ideal. Actual.
The little projection under M is intended to mark approximately the
position of the so well-known "Montanvert." It is a great weakness, not
to say worse than weakness, on the part of travellers, to extol
always chiefly what they think fewest people have seen or can see. I
have climbed much, and wandered much, in the heart of the high Alps, but
I have never yet seen anything which equalled the view from the cabin of
the Montanvert; and as the spot is visited every year by increasing
numbers of tourists, I have thought it best to take the mountains which
surround it for the principal subjects of our inquiry.
Sec. 7. The little eminence left under M truly marks the height of the
Montanvert on the flanks of the Aiguilles, but not accurately its
position, which is somewhat behind the mass of mountain supposed to be
cut through by the section. But the top of the Montanvert is actually
formed, as shown at M, by the crests of the oblique beds of slaty
crystallines. Every traveller must remember the steep and smooth beds of
rock like sloping walls, down which, and over the ledges of which, the
path descends from the cabin to the edge of the glacier. These sloping
walls are formed by the inner sides of the crystalline beds,[60] as
exposed in the notch behind the letter M.
Sec. 8. To these beds we shall return presently, our object just now being
to examine the aiguille, which, on the Montanvert, forms the most
conspicuous mass of mountain on the right of the spectator. It is known
in Chamouni as the Aiguille des Charmoz, and is distinguished by a very
sharp horn or projection on its side, which usually attracts the
traveller's attention as one of the most singular minor features in the
view from the Montanvert. The larger masses of the whole aiguille, and
true contour of this horn, are carefully given in plate +30+, Fig. 2, as
they are seen in morning sunshine. The _impression_ which travellers
usually carry away with them is, I presume, to be gathered from Fig. 1,
a fac simile of one of the lithographs purchased with avidity by English
travellers, in the shops of Chamouni and Geneva, as giving a faithful
representation of this aiguille seen from the Montanvert. It is worth
while to perpetuate this example of the ideal landscape of the
nineteenth century, popular at the time when the works of Turner were
declared by the public to be extravagant and unnatural.
Sec. 9. This example of the common ideal of aiguilles is, however, useful
in another respect. It shows the strong impression which these Chamouni
mountains leave, of their being above all others sharp-peaked and
splintery, dividing more or less into arrowy spires; and it marks the
sense of another and very curious character in them, that these spires
are apt to be somewhat bent or curved.
Both these impressions are partially true, and need to be insisted upon,
and cleared of their indistinctness, or exaggeration.
First, then, this strong impression of their peakedness and spiry
separateness is always produced with the least possible _danger_ to the
travelling and admiring public; for if in reality these granite
mountains were ever separated into true spires or points, in the least
resembling this popular ideal in Plate +30+, the Montanvert and Mer de
Glace would be as inaccessible, except at the risk of life, as the
trenches of a besieged city; and the continual fall of the splintering
fragments would turn even the valley of Chamouni itself into a stony
desolation.
Sec. 10. Perhaps in describing mountains with any effort to give some idea
of their sublime forms, no expression comes oftener to the lips than the
word "peak." And yet it is curious how rarely, even among the grandest
ranges, an instance can be found of a mountain ascertainably peaked in
the true sense of the word,--pointed at the top, and sloping steeply on
all sides; perhaps not more than five summits in the chain of the Alps,
the Finster-Aarhorn, Wetterhorn, Bietschhorn, Weisshorn, and Monte Viso
presenting approximations to such a structure. Even in the case of not
very steep pyramids, presenting themselves in the distance under some
such outline as that at the top of Fig. 30, it almost invariably
happens, when we approach and examine them, that they do not slope
equally on all their sides, but are nothing more than steep ends of
ridges, supported by far-extended masses of comparatively level rock,
which, seen in perspective, give the impression of a steep slope, though
in reality disposed in a horizonal, or nearly horizontal, line.
Sec. 11. Supposing the central diagram in Fig. 30 to be the apparent
contour of a distant mountain, then its slopes may indeed, by singular
chance, be as steep as they appear; but, in all probability, several of
them are perspective descents of its retiring lines; and supposing it
were formed as the gable roof of the old French house below, and seen
under the same angle, it is evident that the part of the outline _a b_
(in lettered reference line below) would be perfectly horizontal; _b c_
an angle slope, in retiring perspective, much less steep than it
appears; _c d_, perfectly, horizontal; _d e_, an advancing or
foreshortened angle slope, less steep than it appears; and _e f_,
perfectly horizontal.
[Illustration: FIG. 30.]
But if the pyramid presents itself under a more formidable aspect, and
with steeper sides than those of the central diagram, then it may be
assumed (as far as I know mountains) for next to a certainty, that it is
not a pointed obelisk, but the end of a ridge more or less prolonged, of
which we see the narrow edge or section turned towards us.
[Illustration: FIG. 31.]
[Illustration: FIG. 32.
Angles with the horizon _x y_.
Of the line _a b_ 17 deg.
" _b c_ 201/2
" _d y_ (general slope, exclusive of inequalities) 353/4
" _a x_ (ditto, ditto, to point of cliff above _x_) 231/2 ]
For instance, no mountain in the Alps produces a more vigorous
impression of peakedness than the Matterhorn. In Professor Forbes's
work on the Alps, it is spoken of as an "obelisk" of rock, and
represented with little exaggeration in his seventh plate under the
outline Fig. 31. Naturally, in glancing, whether at the plate or the
mountain, we assume the mass to be a peak, and suppose the line _a b_ to
be the steep slope of its side. But that line is a perspective line. It
is in reality _perfectly horizontal_, corresponding to _e f_ in the
penthouse roof, Fig. 30.
[Illustration: FIG. 33.
Angles with the horizon _x y_.
_a f_ 56 deg.
_a e_ 123/4
_e b_ (from point to point) 441/2
_b c_ ( ditto, ditto ) 671/4
_c d_ (overhanging) 79 deg.
_a x_ (irrespective of irregularities) 56
_a y_ 383/4 ]
Sec. 12. I say "perfectly horizontal," meaning, of course, in general
tendency. It is more or less irregular and broken, but so nearly
horizontal that, after some prolonged examination of the data I have
collected about the Matterhorn, I am at this moment in doubt _which is
its top_. For as, in order to examine the beds on its flanks, I walked
up the Zmutt glacier, I saw that the line _a b_ in Fig. 31 gradually
lost its steepness; and about half-way up the glacier, the conjectural
summit _a_ then bearing nearly S. E. (forty degrees east of south), I
found the contour was as in Fig. 32. In Fig. 33, I have given the
contour as seen from Zermatt; and in all three, the same letters
indicate the same points. In the Figures 32 and 33 I measured the angles
with the greatest care,[61] from the base lines _x y_, which are
accurately horizontal; and their general truth, irrespective of mere
ruggedness, may be depended upon. Now in this flank view, Fig. 32, what
_was_ the summit at Zermatt, _a_, becomes quite subordinate, and the
point _b_, far down the flank in Forbes's view taken from the
Riffelhorn, is here the apparent summit. I was for some time in
considerable doubt which of the appearances was most trustworthy; and
believe now that they are _both_ deceptive; for I found, on ascending
the flank of the hills on the other side of the Valais, to a height of
about five thousand feet above Brieg, between the Aletsch glacier and
Bietschhorn; being thus high enough to get a view of the Matterhorn on
something like distant terms of equality, up the St. Nicholas valley, it
presented itself under the outline Fig. 34, which seems to be conclusive
for the supremacy of the point _e_, between _a_ and _b_ in Fig. 33. But
the impossibility of determining, at the foot of it, without a
trigonometrical observation, _which is the top_ of such an apparent peak
as the Matterhorn, may serve to show the reader how little the eye is to
be trusted for the verification of peaked outline.
[Illustration: FIG. 34.]
Sec. 13. In like manner, the aiguilles of Chamouni, which present
themselves to the traveller, as he looks up to them from the village,
under an outline approximating to that rudely indicated at C in the next
figure, are in reality buttresses projecting from an intermediate ridge.
Let A be supposed to be a castle wall, with slightly elevated masses of
square-built buttresses at intervals. Then, by a process of
dilapidation, these buttresses might easily be brought to assume in
their perspective of ruin the forms indicated at B, which, with certain
modifications, is the actual shape of the Chamouni aiguilles. The top of
the Aiguille Charmoz is not the point under _d_, but that under _e_.
The deception is much increased by the elevation of the whole castle
wall on the green bank before spoken of, which raises its foundation
several thousand feet above the eye, and thus, giving amazing steepness
to all the perspective lines, produces an impression of the utmost
possible isolation of peaks, where, in reality, there is a
well-supported, and more or less continuous, though sharply jagged, pile
of solid walls.
[Illustration: FIG. 35.]
Sec. 14. There is, however, this great difference between the castle wall
and aiguilles, that the dilapidation in the one would take place by the
fall of _horizontal_ bricks or stones; in the aiguilles it takes place
in quite an opposite manner by the flaking away of nearly _vertical_
ones.
This is the next point of great interest respecting them. Observe, the
object of their construction appears to be the attainment of the utmost
possible peakedness in aspect, with the least possible danger to the
inhabitants of the valleys. As, therefore, they are first thrown into
transverse ridges, which take, in perspective, a more or less peaked
outline, so, in their dilapidation, they split into narrow flakes,
which, if seen edgeways, look as sharp as a lance-point, but are
nevertheless still strong; being each of them, in reality, not a
lance-point or needle, but a hatchet edge.
Sec. 15. And since if these sharp flakes broke _straight_ across the masses
of mountain, when once the fissure took place, all hold would be lost
between flake and flake, it is ordered (and herein is the most notable
thing in the whole matter) that they shall not break straight, but _in
curves, round the body_ of the aiguilles, somewhat in the manner of the
coats of an onion; so that, even after fissure has taken place, the
detached film or flake clings to and leans upon the central mass, and
will not fall from it till centuries of piercing frost have wedged it
utterly from its hold; and, even then, will not fall all at once, but
drop to pieces slowly, and flake by flake. Consider a little the
beneficence of this ordinance;[62] supposing the cliffs had been built
like the castle wall, the mouldering away of a few bricks, more or less,
at the bottom would have brought down huge masses above, as it
constantly does in ruins, and in the mouldering cliffs of the slaty
coherents; while yet the top of the mountain would have been always
blunt and rounded, as at _a_, Fig. 36, when seen against the sky. But
the aiguille being built in these nearly vertical curved flakes, the
worst that the frost can do to it is to push its undermost rocks asunder
into forms such as at _b_, of which, when many of the edges have fallen,
the lower ones are more or less supported by the very debris accumulated
at their feet; and yet all the while the tops sustain themselves in the
most fantastic and incredible fineness of peak against the sky.
[Illustration: J. Ruskin. J. C. Armytage.
31. The Aiguille Blaitiere.]
[Illustration: FIG. 36.]
Sec. 16. I have drawn the flakes in Fig. 36, for illustration's sake, under
a caricatured form. Their real aspect will be understood in a moment by
a glance at the opposite plate, +31+, which represents the central
aiguille in the woodcut outline Fig. 35 (Aiguille Blaitiere, called by
Forbes Greppond), as seen from within about half a mile of its actual
base. The white shell-like mass beneath it is a small glacier, which in
its beautifully curved outline[63] appears to sympathize with the sweep
of the rocks beneath, rising and breaking like a wave at the feet of the
remarkable horn or spur which supports it on the right. The base of the
aiguille itself is, as it were, washed by this glacier, or by the snow
which covers it, till late in the season, as a cliff is by the sea;
except that a narrow chasm, of some twenty or thirty feet in depth and
two or three feet wide, usually separates the rock from the ice, which
is melted away by the heat reflected from the southern face of the
aiguille. The rock all along this base line is of the most magnificent
compactness and hardness, and rings under the hammer like a bell; yet,
when regarded from a little distance, it is seen to be distinctly
inclined to separate into grand curved flakes or sheets, of which the
dark edges are well marked in the plate. The pyramidal form of the
aiguille, as seen from this point, is, however, entirely deceptive; the
square rock which forms its apparent summit is not the real top, but
much in advance of it, and the slope on the right against the sky is a
perspective line; while, on the other hand, the precipice in light,
above the three small horns at the narrowest part of the glacier, is
considerably steeper than it appears to be, the cleavage of the flakes
crossing it somewhat obliquely. But I show the aiguille from this spot
that the reader may more distinctly note the fellowship between its
curved precipice and the little dark horn or spur which bounds the
glacier; a spur the more remarkable because there is just such another,
jutting in like manner from the corresponding angle of the next aiguille
(Charmoz), both of them looking like remnants or foundations of the
vaster ancient pyramids, of which the greater part has been by ages
carried away.
[Illustration: FIG. 37.]
Sec. 17. The more I examined the range of the aiguilles the more I was
struck by this curved cleavage as their principal character. It is quite
true that they have other straighter cleavages (noticed in the Appendix,
as the investigation of them would be tiresome to the general reader);
but it is this to which they owe the whole picturesqueness of their
contours; curved as it is, not simply, but often into the most strange
shell-like undulations, as will be understood by a glance at Fig. 37,
which shows the mere _governing_ lines at the base of this Aiguille
Blaitiere, seen, with its spur, from a station some quarter of a mile
nearer it, and more to the east than that chosen in Plate +31+. These
leading lines are rarely well shown in fine weather, the important
contour from _a_ downwards being hardly relieved clearly from the
precipice beyond (_b_), unless a cloud intervenes, as it did when I made
this memorandum; while, again, the leading lines of the Aiguille du
Plan, as seen from the foot of it, close to the rocks, are as at Fig.
38, the generally pyramidal outline being nearly similar to that of
Blaitiere, and a spur being thrown out to the right, under _a_, composed
in exactly the same manner of curved folia of rock laid one against the
other. The hollow in the heart of the aiguille is as smooth and sweeping
in curve as the cavity of a vast bivalve shell.
[Illustration: FIG. 38.]
Sec. 18. I call these the governing or leading lines, not because they are
the first which strike the eye, but because, like those of the grain of
the wood in a tree-trunk, they rule the swell and fall and change of all
the mass. In Nature, or in a photograph, a careless observer will by no
means be struck by them, any more than he would by the curves of the
tree; and an ordinary artist would draw rather the cragginess and
granulation of the surfaces, just as he would rather draw the bark and
moss of the trunk. Nor can any one be more steadfastly adverse than I to
every substitution of anatomical knowledge for outward and apparent
fact; but so it is, that as an artist increases in acuteness of
perception, the facts which _become_ outward and apparent to him are
those which bear upon the growth or make of the thing. And, just as in
looking at any woodcut of trees after Titian or Albert Durer, as
compared with a modern water-color sketch, we shall always be struck by
the writhing and rounding of the tree trunks in the one, and the
stiffness, and merely blotted or granulated surfaces of the other; so,
in looking at these rocks, the keenness of the artist's eye may almost
precisely be tested by the degree in which he perceives the curves that
give them their strength and grace, and in harmony with which the flakes
of granite are bound together, like the bones of the jaw of a saurian.
Thus the ten years of study which I have given to these mountains since
I described them in the first volume as "traversed sometimes by graceful
curvilinear fissures, sometimes by straight fissures," have enabled me
to ascertain, and now generally at a glance to see, that the curvilinear
ones are _dominant_, and that even the fissures or edges which appear
perfectly straight have _almost_ always some delicate sympathy with the
curves. Occasionally, however, as in the separate beds which form the
spur or horn of the Aiguille Blaitiere, seen in true profile in Plate
+29+, Fig. 3, the straightness is so accurate that, not having brought a
rule with me up the glacier, I was obliged to write under my sketch,
"Not possible to draw it straight enough." Compare also the lines
sloping to the left in Fig. 38.
Sec. 19. "But why not give everything just as it is; without caring what is
dominant and what subordinate?"
You cannot. Of all the various impossibilities which torment and
humiliate the painter, none are more vexatious than that of drawing a
mountain form. It is indeed impossible enough to draw, by resolute care,
the foam on a wave, or the outline of the foliage of a large tree; but
in these cases, when care is at fault, carelessness will help, and the
dash of the brush will in some measure give wildness to the churning of
the foam, and infinitude to the shaking of the leaves. But chance will
not help us with the mountain. Its fine and faintly organized edge seems
to be definitely traced against the sky; yet let us set ourselves
honestly to follow it, and we find, on the instant, it has disappeared:
and that for two reasons. The first, that if the mountain be lofty, and
in light, it is so faint in color that the eye literally cannot trace
its separation from the hues next to it. The other day I wanted the
contour of a limestone mountain in the Valais, distant about seven
miles, and as many thousand feet above me; it was barren limestone; the
morning sun fell upon it, so as to make it almost vermilion color, and
the sky behind it a bluish green. Two tints could hardly have been more
opposed, but both were so subtle, that I found it impossible to see
accurately the line that separated the vermilion from the green. The
second, that if the contour be observed from a nearer point, or looked
at when it is dark against the sky, it will be found composed of
millions of minor angles, crags, points, and fissures, which no human
sight or hand can draw finely enough, and yet all of which have effect
upon the mind.
Sec. 20. The outline shown as dark against the sky in Plate +29+, Fig. 2 is
about a hundred, or a hundred and twenty, yards of the top of the ridge
of Charmoz, running from the base of the aiguille down to the
Montanvert, and seen from the moraine of the Charmoz glacier, a quarter
of a mile distant to the south-west.[64] It is formed of decomposing
granite, thrown down in blocks entirely detached, but wedged together,
so as to stand continually in these seemingly perilous contours (being a
portion of such a base of aiguille as that in _b_, Fig. 36, p. 185).[65]
The block forming the summit on the left is fifteen or eighteen feet
long; and the upper edge of it, which is the dominant point of the
Charmoz ridge, is the best spot in the Chamouni district for giving a
thorough command of the relations of the aiguilles on each side of the
Mer de Glace. Now put the book, with that page open, upright, at three
yards distance from you, and try to draw this contour, which I have made
as dark and distinct as it ever could be in reality, and you will
immediately understand why it is impossible to draw mountain outlines
rightly.
Sec. 21. And if not outlines, _a fortiori_ not details of mass, which have
all the complexity of the outline multiplied a thousand fold, and drawn
in fainter colors. Nothing is more curious than the state of
embarrassment into which the unfortunate artist must soon be cast when
he endeavors honestly to draw the face of the simplest mountain
cliff--say a thousand feet high, and two or three miles distant. It is
full of exquisite details, all seemingly decisive and clear; but when he
tries to arrest one of them, he cannot see it,--cannot find where it
begins or ends,--and presently it runs into another; and then he tries
to draw that, but that will not be drawn, neither, until it has
conducted him to a third, which, somehow or another, made part of the
first; presently he finds that, instead of three, there are in reality
four, and then he loses his place altogether. He tries to draw clear
lines, to make his work look craggy, but finds that then it is too hard;
he tries to draw soft lines, and it is immediately too soft; he draws a
curved line, and instantly sees it should have been straight; a straight
one, and finds when he looks up again, that it has got curved while he
was drawing it. There is nothing for him but despair, or some sort of
abstraction and shorthand for cliff. Then the only question is, what is
the wisest abstraction; and out of the multitude of lines that cannot
altogether be interpreted, which are the really dominant ones; so that
if we cannot give the whole, we may at least give what will convey the
most important facts about the cliff.
[Illustration: 32. Aiguille Drawing.
1. Old Ideal. 2. Turnerian.]
Sec. 22. Recurring then to our "public opinion" of the Aiguille Charmoz, we
find the greatest exaggeration of, and therefore I suppose the greatest
interest in, the narrow and spiry point on its left side. That is in
reality a point at all but a hatchet edge; a flake of rock, which is
enabled to maintain itself in this sharp-edged state by its writhing
folds of sinewy granite. Its structure, on a larger scale, and seen
"edge on," is shown in Fig. 41. The whole aiguille is composed of a
series of such flakes, liable, indeed, to all kinds of fissure in other
directions, but holding, by their modes of vertical association, the
strongest authority over the form of the whole mountain. It is not in
all lights that they are seen plainly: for instance, in the morning
effect in Plate +30+ they are hardly traceable: but the longer we watch,
the more they are perceived; and their power of sustaining themselves
vertically is so great, that at the foot of the aiguille on the right a
few of them form a detached mass, known as the _Petit_ Charmoz, between
E and _c_ in Fig. 60, p. 210, of which the height of the uttermost
flake, between _c_ and _d_, is about five hundred feet.
[Illustration: FIG. 41.]
Important, however, as this curved cleavage is, it is so confused among
others, that it has taken me, as I said, ten years of almost successive
labor to develope, in any degree of completeness, its relations among
the aiguilles of Chamouni; and even of professed geologists, the only
person who has described it properly is De Saussure, whose _continual_
sojourn among the Alps enabled him justly to discern the constant from
the inconstant phenomena. And yet, in his very first journey to Savoy,
Turner saw it at a glance, and fastened on it as the main thing to be
expressed in those mountains.
In the opposite Plate (+32+), the darkest division, on the right, is a
tolerably accurate copy of Turner's rendering of the Aiguille Charmoz
(etched and engraved by himself), in the plate called the "Mer de
Glace," in the Liber Studiorum. Its outline is in local respects
inaccurate enough, being modified by Turnerian topography; but the flaky
character is so definite, that it looks as if it had been prepared for
an illustrative diagram of the points at present under discussion.
Sec. 23. And do not let it be supposed that this was by chance, or that the
modes of mountain drawing at the period would in any wise have helped
Turner to discover these lines. The aiguilles had been drawn before this
time, and the figure on the left in Plate +32+ will show how. It is a
facsimile of a piece of an engraving of the Mer de Glace, by Woollett,
after William Pars, published in 1783, and founded on the general
Wilsonian and Claudesque principles of landscape common at the time.
There are, in the rest of the plate, some good arrangements of shadow
and true aerial perspective; and the piece I have copied, which is an
attempt to represent the Aiguille Dru, opposite the Charmoz, will serve,
not unfairly, to show how totally inadequate the draughtsmen of the time
were to perceive the character of mountains, and, also, how unable the
human mind is by itself to conceive anything like the variety of natural
form. The workman had not looked at the thing,--trusted to his "Ideal,"
supposed that broken and rugged rocks might be shaped better out of his
own head than by Nature's laws,--and we see what comes of it.
Sec. 24. And now, lastly, observe, in the laws by which this strange
curvilinear structure is given to the aiguilles, how the provision for
beauty of form is made in the first landscape materials we have to
study. We have permitted ourselves, according to that unsystematic mode
of proceeding pleaded for in the opening of our present task, to wander
hither and thither as this or that question rose before us, and
demanded, or tempted, our pursuit. But the reader must yet remember that
our special business in this section of the work is the observance of
the nature of _beauty_, and of the degrees in which the aspect of any
object fulfils the laws of beauty stated in the second volume. Now in
the fifteenth paragraph of the chapter on infinity, it was stated that
curvature was essential to all beauty, and that what we should "need
more especially to prove, was the constancy of curvature in all natural
forms whatsoever." And these aiguilles, which are the first objects we
have had definitely to consider, appeared as little likely to fulfil the
condition as anything we could have come upon. I am well assured that
the majority of spectators see no curves in them at all, but an
intensely upright, stern, spiry ruggedness and angularity. And we might
even beforehand have been led to expect, and to be contented in
expecting, nothing else from them than this; for since, as we have said
often, they are part of the earth's skeleton, being created to sustain
and strengthen everything else, and yet differ from a skeleton in this,
that the earth is not only supported by their strength, but fed by their
ruin; so that they are first composed of the hardest and least tractable
substance, and then exposed to such storm and violence as shall beat
large parts of them to powder;--under these desperate conditions of
being, I say, we might have anticipated some correspondent ruggedness
and terribleness of aspect, some such refusal to comply with ordinary
laws of beauty, as we often see in other things and creatures put to
hard work, and sustaining distress or violence.
Sec. 25. And truly, at first sight, there is such refusal in their look,
and their shattered walls and crests seem to rise in a gloomy contrast
with the soft waves of bank and wood beneath; nor do I mean to press the
mere fact, that, as we look longer at them, other lines become
perceptible, because it might be thought no proof of their beauty that
they needed long attention in order to be discerned. But I think this
much at least is deserving of our notice, as confirmatory of foregone
conclusions, that the forms which in other things are produced by slow
increase, or gradual abrasion of surface, _are here produced by rough
fracture_, when rough fracture is to be the law of existence. A rose is
rounded by its own soft ways of growth, a reed is bowed into tender
curvature by the pressure of the breeze; but we could not, from these,
have proved any resolved preference, by Nature, of curved lines to
others, inasmuch as it might always have been answered that the curves
were produced, not for beauty's sake, but infallibly, by the laws of
vegetable existence; and, looking at broken flints or rugged banks
afterwards, we might have thought that we only liked the curved lines
because associated with life and organism, and disliked the angular
ones, because associated with inaction and disorder. But Nature gives us
in these mountains a more clear demonstration of her will. She is here
driven to make fracture the law of being. She cannot tuft the rock-edges
with moss, or round them by water, or hide them with leaves and roots.
She is bound to produce a form, admirable to human beings, by continual
breaking away of substance. And behold--so soon as she is compelled to
do this--she changes the law of fracture itself. "Growth," she seems to
say, "is not essential to my work, nor concealment, nor softness; but
curvature is: and if I must produce my forms by breaking them, the
fracture itself shall be in curves. If, instead of dew and sunshine, the
only instruments I am to use are the lightning and the frost, then their
forked tongues and crystal wedges shall still work out my laws of tender
line. Devastation instead of nurture may be the task of all my elements,
and age after age may only prolong the unrenovated ruin; but the
appointments of typical beauty which have been made over all creatures
shall not therefore be abandoned; and the rocks shall be ruled, in their
perpetual perishing, by the same ordinances that direct the bending of
the reed and the blush of the rose."
FOOTNOTES
[57] See, for explanatory statements, Appendix 2.
[58] I have been able to examine these conditions with much care in
the chain of Mont Blanc only, which I chose for the subject of
investigation both as being the most interesting to the general
traveller, and as being the only range of the central mountains
which had been much painted by Turner. But I believe the singular
arrangements of beds which take place in this chain have been found
by the German geologists to prevail also in the highest peaks of the
Western Alps; and there are a peculiar beauty and providence in them
which induce me to expect that farther inquiries may justify our
attributing them to some very extensive law of the earth's
structure. See the notes from De Saussure in Appendix 2.
[59] That is to say, as it appears to me. There are some points of
the following statements which are disputed among geologists; the
reader will find them hereafter discussed at greater length.
[60] Running, at that point very nearly, N. E. and S. W., and
dipping under the ice at an angle of about seventy degrees.
[61] It was often of great importance to me to ascertain these
_apparent_ slopes with some degree of correctness. In order to do so
without the trouble of carrying any instrument (except my compass
and spirit-level), I had my Alpine pole made as even as a round rule
for about a foot in the middle of its length. Taking the bearing of
the mountain, placing the pole at right angles to the bearing, and
adjusting it by the spirit-level, I brought the edge of a piece of
finely cut pasteboard parallel, in a vertical plane (plumbed), with
the apparent slope of the hillside. A pencil line drawn by the pole
then gave me a horizon, with which the angle could be easily
measured at home. The measurements thus obtained are given under the
figures.
[62] That is to say, in a cliff intended to _owe its outline to
dilapidation_. Where no dilapidation is to be permitted, the bedded
structure, well knit, is always used. Of this we shall see various
examples in the 16th chapter.
[63] Given already as an example of curvature in the Stones of
Venice, vol. 1, plate 7.
[64] The top of the aiguille of the Little Charmoz bearing, from the
point whence this sketch was made, about six degrees east of north.
[65] The _summits_ of the aiguilles are often more fantastically
rent still. Fig. 39 is the profile of a portion of the upper edge of
the Aiguille du Moine, seen from the crest of Charmoz; Fig. 40 shows
the three lateral fragments, drawn to a larger scale. The height of
each of the upright masses must be from twenty to twenty-five feet.
I do not know if their rude resemblance to two figures, on opposite
sides of a table or altar, has had anything to do with the name of
the aiguille.
[Illustration: FIG. 39.]
[Illustration: FIG. 40.]