RESULTING FORMS:--THIRDLY, PRECIPICES.
Sec. 1. The reader was, perhaps, surprised by the smallness of the number
to which our foregoing analysis reduced Alpine summits bearing an
ascertainedly peaked or pyramidal form. He might not be less so if I
were to number the very few occasions on which I have seen a true
precipice of any considerable height. I mean by a true precipice, one by
which a plumb-line will swing clear, or without touching the face of it,
if suspended from a point a foot or two beyond the brow. Not only are
perfect precipices of this kind very rare, but even imperfect
precipices, which often produce upon the eye as majestic an impression
as if they were vertical, are nearly always curiously low in proportion
to the general mass of the hills to which they belong. They are for the
most part small steps or rents in large surfaces of mountain, and
mingled by Nature among her softer forms, as cautiously and sparingly as
the utmost exertion of his voice is, by a great speaker, with his tones
of gentleness.
[Illustration: FIG. 73.]
Sec. 2. Precipices, in the large plurality of cases, consist of the edge of
a bed of rock, sharply fractured, in the manner already explained in
Chap. XII., and are represented, in their connection with aiguilles and
crests, by _c_, in Fig. 42, p. 195. When the bed of rock slopes
backwards from the edge, as _a_, Fig. 73, a condition of precipice is
obtained more or less peaked, very safe, and very grand.[80] When the
beds are horizontal, _b_, the precipice is steeper, more dangerous, but
much less impressive. When the beds slope towards the precipice, the
front of it overhangs, and the noblest effect is obtained which is
possible in mountain forms of this kind.
Sec. 3. Singularly enough, the type _b_ is in actual nature nearly always
the most dangerous of the three, and _c_ the safest, for horizontal beds
are usually of the softest rocks, and their cliffs are caused by some
violent agency in constant operation, as chalk cliffs by the wearing
power of the sea, so that such rocks are continually falling, in one
place or another. The form _a_ may also be assumed by very soft rocks.
But _c_ cannot exist at all on the large scale, unless it is built of
good materials, and it will then frequently stay in its fixed frown for
ages.
Sec. 4. It occasionally happens that a precipice is formed among the higher
crests by the _sides_ of vertical beds of slaty crystallines. Such rocks
are rare, and never very high, but always beautiful in their smoothness
of surface and general trenchant and firm expression. One of the most
interesting I know is that of the summit of the Breven, on the north of
the valley of Chamouni. The mountain is formed by vertical sheets of
slaty crystallines, rather soft at the bottom, and getting harder and
harder towards the top, until at the very summit it is hard and compact
as the granite of Waterloo Bridge, though much finer in the grain, and
breaking into perpendicular faces of rock so perfectly cut as to feel
smooth to the hand. Fig. 4, p. 107, represents, of the real size, a bit
which I broke from the edge of the cliff, the shaded part underneath
being the surface which forms the precipice. The plumb-line from the
brow of this cliff hangs clear 124 English feet; it is then caught by a
ledge about three feet wide, from which another precipice falls to about
twice the height of the first; but I had not line enough to measure it
with from the top, and could not get down to the ledge. When I say the
line hangs _clear_, I mean when once it is off the actual brow of the
cliff, which is a little rounded for about fourteen or fifteen feet,
from _a_ to _b_, in the section, Fig. 75. Then the rock recedes in an
almost unbroken concave sweep, detaching itself from the plumb-line
about two feet at the point _c_ (the lateral dimensions are exaggerated
to show the curve), and approaching it again at the ledge _d_, which is
124 feet below _a_. The plumb-line, fortunately, can be seen throughout
its whole extent from a sharp bastion of the precipice farther on, for
the face of the cliff runs, in horizontal plan, very nearly to the
magnetic north and south, as shown in Fig. 74, the plumb-line swinging
at _a_, and seen from the advanced point P. It would give a similar
result at any other part of the cliff face, but may be most conveniently
cast from the point _a_, a little below, and to the north of the summit.
[Illustration: FIG. 74.]
[Illustration: FIG. 75.]
Sec. 5. But although the other divisions of this precipice, below the ledge
which stops the plummet, give it altogether a height of about five
hundred feet,[81] the whole looks a mere step on the huge slope of the
Breven; and it only deserves mention among Alpine cliffs as one of
singular beauty and decision, yet perfectly approachable and examinable
even by the worst climbers; which is very rarely the case with cliffs of
the same boldness. I suppose that this is the reason for its having been
often stated in scientific works that no cliff could be found in the
Alps from which a plumb-line would swing two hundred feet. This can
_possibly_ be true (and even with this limitation I doubt it) of cliffs
conveniently approachable by experimental philosophers. For, indeed, one
way or another, it is curious how Nature fences out, as it were, the
brows of her boldest precipices. Wherever a plumb-line will swing, the
precipice is, almost without exception, of the type _c_, in Fig. 73, the
brow of it rounding towards the edge for, perhaps, fifty or a hundred
yards above, rendering it unsafe in the highest degree for any
inexperienced person to attempt approach. But it is often possible to
ascertain from a distance, if the cliff can be got relieved against the
sky, the approximate degree of its precipitousness.
Sec. 6. It may, I think, be assumed, almost with certainty, that whenever a
precipice is very bold and very high, it is formed by beds more or less
approaching horizontally, out of which it has been cut, like the side of
a haystack from which part has been removed. The wonderfulness of this
operation I have before insisted upon; here we have to examine the best
examples of it.
As, in forms of central rock, the Aiguilles of Chamouni, so in
notableness of lateral precipice, the Matterhorn, or Mont Cervin,
stands, on the whole, unrivalled among the Alps, being terminated, on
two of its sides, by precipices which produce on the imagination nearly
the effect of verticality. There is, however, only one point at which
they reach anything approaching such a condition; and that point is
wholly inaccessible either from below or above, but sufficiently
measurable by a series of observations.
[Illustration: Fig. 77.]
Sec. 7. From the slope of the hill above, and to the west of, the village
of Zermatt, the Matterhorn presents itself under the figure shown on the
right hand in the opposite plate (+38+). The whole height of the mass,
from the glacier out of which it rises, is about 4000 feet; and
although, as before noticed, the first slope from the top towards the
right is merely a perspective line, the part of the contour _c d_, Fig.
33, p. 181, which literally overhangs,[82] cannot be. An apparent slope,
however steep, so that it does not overpass the vertical, _may_ be a
horizontal line; but the moment it can be shown literally to overhang,
it _must_ be one of two things,--either an actually pendant _face_ of
rock, as at _a_, Fig. 77, or the under edge of an overhanging _cornice_
of rock, _b_. Of course the latter condition, on such a scale as this of
the Matterhorn, would be the more wonderful of the two; but I was
anxious to determine which of these it really was.
[Illustration: 38. The Cervin, from the East and North-east.]
Sec. 8. My first object was to reach some spot commanding, as nearly as
might be, the lateral profile of the Mont Cervin. The most available
point for this purpose was the top of the Riffelhorn; which, however,
first attempting to climb by its deceitful western side, and being
stopped, for the moment, by the singular moat and wall which defend its
Malakhoff-like summit, fearing that I might not be able ultimately to
reach the top, I made the drawing of the Cervin, on the left hand in
Plate +38+, from the edge of the moat; and found afterwards the
difference in aspect, as it was seen from the true summit, so slight as
not to necessitate the trouble of making another drawing.[83]
[Illustration: FIG. 78.]
[Illustration: FIG. 79.]
Sec. 9. It may be noted in passing, that this wall which with its regular
fosse defends the Riffelhorn on its western side, and a similar one on
its eastern side, though neither of them of any considerable height, are
curious instances of trenchant precipice, formed, I suppose, by slight
slips or faults of the serpentine rock. The summit of the horn, _a_,
Fig. 78, seems to have been pushed up in a mass beyond the rest of the
ridge, or else the rest of the ridge to have dropped from it on each
side, at _b c_, leaving the two troublesome faces of cliff right across
the crag, hard, green as a sea wave, and polished like the inside of a
seashell, where the weather has not effaced the surface produced by the
slip. It is only by getting past the eastern cliff that the summit can
be reached at all, for on its two lateral escarpments the mountain seems
quite inaccessible, being in its whole mass nothing else than the top of
a narrow wall with a raised battlement, as rudely shown in perspective
at _e d_; the flanks of the wall falling towards the glacier on one
side, and to the lower Riffel on the other, four or five hundred feet,
not, indeed, in unbroken precipice, but in a form quite incapable of
being scaled.[84]
[Illustration: FIG. 79.]
Sec. 10. To return to the Cervin. The view of it given on the left hand in
Plate +38+ shows the ridge in about its narrowest profile; and shows
also that this ridge is composed of beds of rock shelving across it,
apparently horizontal, or nearly so, at the top, and sloping
considerably southwards (to the spectator's left), at the bottom. How
far this slope is a consequence of the advance of the nearest angle
giving a steep perspective to the beds, I cannot say; my own belief
would have been that a great deal of it is thus deceptive, the beds
lying as the tiles do in the somewhat anomalous, but perfectly
conceivable house-roof, Fig. 79. Saussure, however, attributes to the
beds themselves a very considerable slope. But be this as it may, the
main facts of the thinness of the beds, their comparative horizontality,
and the daring swordsweep by which the whole mountain has been hewn out
of them, are from this spot comprehensible at a glance. Visible, I
_should_ have said; but eternally, and to the uttermost,
_in_comprehensible. Every geologist who speaks of this mountain seems
to be struck by the wonderfulness of its calm sculpture--the absence of
all aspect of convulsion, and yet the stern chiselling of so vast a mass
into its precipitous isolation leaving no ruin nor debris near it.
"Quelle force n'a-t-il pas fallu," exclaims M. Saussure, "pour rompre,
et pour _balayer_ tout ce qui manque a cette pyramide!" "What an
overturn of all ancient ideas in Geology," says Professor Forbes, "to
find a pinnacle of 15,000 feet high [above the sea] sharp as a pyramid,
and with perpendicular precipices of thousands of feet on every hand, to
be a representative of the older chalk formation; and what a difficulty
to conceive the nature of a convulsion (even with unlimited power),
which could produce a configuration like the Mont Cervin rising from the
glacier of Zmutt!"
[Illustration: FIG 80.]
Sec. 11. The term "perpendicular" is of course applied by the Professor in
the "poetical" temper of Reynolds,--that is to say, in one "inattentive
to minute exactness in details;" but the effect of this strange
Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great, that even the
gravest philosophers cannot resist it; and Professor Forbes's drawing of
the peak, outlined at page 180, has evidently been made under the
influence of considerable excitement. For fear of being deceived by
enthusiasm also, I daguerreotyped the Cervin from the edge of the little
lake under the crag of the Riffelhorn, with the somewhat amazing result
shown in Fig. 80. So cautious is Nature, even in her boldest work, so
broadly does she extend the foundations, and strengthen the buttresses,
of masses which produce so striking an _impression_ as to be described,
even by the most careful writers, as perpendicular.
Sec. 12. The only portion of the Matterhorn which approaches such a
condition is the shoulder, before alluded to, forming a step of about
one twelfth the height of the whole peak, shown by light on its snowy
side, or upper surface, in the right-hand figure of Plate +38+. Allowing
4000 feet for the height of the peak, this step or shoulder will be
between 300 and 400 feet in absolute height; and as it is not only
perpendicular, but assuredly overhangs, both at this snow-lighted angle
and at the other corner of the mountain (seen against the sky in the
same figure), I have not the slightest doubt that a plumb-line would
swing from the brow of either of these bastions, between 600 and 800
feet, without touching rock. The intermediate portion of the cliff which
joins them is, however, not more than vertical. I was therefore anxious
chiefly to observe the structure of the two angles, and, to that end, to
see the mountain close on that side, from the Zmutt glacier.
Sec. 13. I am afraid my dislike to the nomenclatures invented by the German
philosophers has been unreasonably, though involuntarily, complicated
with that which, crossing out of Italy, one necessarily feels for those
invented by the German peasantry. As travellers now every day more
frequently visit the neighborhood of the Monte Rosa, it would surely be
a permissible, because convenient, poetical license, to invent some
other name for this noble glacier, whose present title, certainly not
euphonious, has the additional disadvantage of being easily confounded
with that of the _Zermatt_ glacier, properly so called. I mean myself,
henceforward, to call it the Red glacier, because, for two or three
miles above its lower extremity, the whole surface of it is covered with
blocks of reddish gneiss, or other slaty crystalline rocks,--some fallen
from the Cervin, some from the Weisshorn, some brought from the Stockhi
and Dent d'Erin, but little rolled or ground down in the transit, and
covering the ice, often four or five feet deep, with a species of
macadamization on a large scale (each stone being usually some foot or
foot and a half in diameter), anything but convenient to a traveller in
haste. Higher up, the ice opens into broad white fields and furrows,
hard and dry, scarcely fissured at all, except just under the Cervin,
and forming a silent and solemn causeway, paved, as it seems, with white
marble from side to side; broad enough for the march of an army in line
of battle, but quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city, and bordered
on each hand by ghostly cliffs of that faint granite purple which seems,
in its far-away height, as unsubstantial as the dark blue that bounds
it;--the whole scene so changeless and soundless; so removed, not merely
from the presence of men, but even from their thoughts; so destitute of
all life of tree or herb, and so immeasurable in its lonely brightness
of majestic death, that it looks like a world from which not only the
human, but the spiritual, presences had perished, and the last of its
archangels, building the great mountains for their monuments, had laid
themselves down in the sunlight to an eternal rest, each in his white
shroud.
Sec. 14. The first point from which the Matterhorn precipices, which I came
to examine, show their structure distinctly, is about half-way up the
valley, before reaching the glacier. The most convenient path, and
access to the ice, are on the south; but it is best, in order to watch
the changes of the Matterhorn, to keep on the north side of the valley;
and, at the point just named, the shoulder marked _e_ in Fig. 33, p.
181, is seen, in the morning sunlight, to be composed of zigzag beds,
apparently of eddied sand. (Fig. 81.)
[Illustration: FIG. 81.]
I have no doubt they once _were_ eddied sand; that is to say, sea or
torrent drift, hardened by fire into crystalline rock; but whether they
ever were or not, the certain fact is, that here we have a precipice,
trenchant, overhanging, and 500 feet in height, cut across the thin beds
which compose it as smoothly as a piece of fine-grained wood is cut with
a chisel.
Sec. 15. From this point, also, the nature of the corresponding bastion, _c
d_, Fig 33, is also discernible. It is the edge of a great concave
precipice, cut out of the mountain, as the smooth hollows are out of the
rocks at the foot of a waterfall, and across which the variously colored
beds, thrown by perspective into corresponding curvatures, run exactly
like the seams of canvas in a Venetian felucca's sail.
Seen from this spot, it seems impossible that the mountain should long
support itself in such a form, but the impression is only caused by the
concealment of the vast proportions of the mass behind, whose poise is
quite unaffected by this hollowing at one point. Thenceforward, as we
ascend the glacier, the Matterhorn every moment expands in apparent
width; and having reached the foot of the Stockhi (about a four hours'
walk from Zermatt), and getting the Cervin summit to bear S. 111/2 deg. E., I
made the drawing of it engraved opposite, which gives a true idea of the
relations between it and the masses of its foundation. The bearing
stated is that of the apparent summit only, as from this point the true
summit is not visible; the rocks which seem to form the greatest part of
the mountain being in reality nothing but its foundations, while the
little white jagged peak, relieved against the dark hollow just below
the seeming summit, is the rock marked _g_ in Fig. 33. But the structure
of the mass, and the long ranges of horizontal, or nearly horizontal,
beds which form its crest, showing in black points like arrow-heads
through the snow, where their ridges are left projecting by the
avalanche channels, are better seen than at any other point I reached,
together with the sweeping and thin zones of sandy gneiss below, bending
apparently like a coach-spring; and the notable point about the whole
is, that this under-bed, of seemingly the most delicate substance, is
that prepared by Nature to build her boldest precipice with, it being
this bed which emerges at the two bastions or shoulders before noticed,
and which by that projection causes the strange oblique distortion of
the whole mountain mass, as it is seen from Zermatt.
[Illustration: J. Ruskin. J. C. Armytage.
39. The Cervin, from the North-West.]
Sec. 16. And our surprise will still be increased as we farther examine the
materials of which the whole mountain is composed. In many places its
crystalline slates, where their horizontal surfaces are exposed along
the projecting beds of their foundations, break into ruin so total that
the foot dashes through their loose red flakes as through heaps of
autumn leaves; and yet, just where their structure seems most delicate,
just where they seem to have been swept before the eddies of the streams
that first accumulated them, in the most passive whirls, there the after
ages have knit them into the most massive strength, and there have hewn
out of them those firm grey bastions of the Cervin,--overhanging,
smooth, flawless, unconquerable! For, unlike the Chamouni aiguilles,
there is no aspect of destruction about the Matterhorn cliffs. They are
not torn remnants of separating spires, yielding flake by flake, and
band by band, to the continual process of decay. They are, on the
contrary, an unaltered monument, seemingly sculptured long ago, the huge
walls retaining yet the forms into which they were first engraven,
and standing like an Egyptian temple,--delicate-fronted, softly colored,
the suns of uncounted ages rising and falling upon it continually, but
still casting the same line of shadows from east to west, still, century
after century, touching the same purple stains on the lotus pillars;
while the desert sand ebbs and flows about their feet, as those autumn
leaves of rock lie heaped and weak about the base of the Cervin.
Sec. 17. Is not this a strange type, in the very heart and height of these
mysterious Alps--these wrinkled hills in their snowy, cold, grey-haired
old age, at first so silent, then, as we keep quiet at their feet,
muttering and whispering to us garrulously, in broken and dreaming fits,
as it were, about their childhood--is it not a strange type of the
things which "out of weakness are made strong?" If one of those little
flakes of mica-sand, hurried in tremulous spangling along the bottom of
the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to float, almost too
small for sight, could have had a mind given to it as it was at last
borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of the stream, and
laid, (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity, in the dark
ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth's atoms;
incapable of any use or change; not fit, down there in the diluvial
darkness, so much as to help an earth-wasp to build its nest, or feed
the first fibre of a lichen;--what would it have thought, had it been
told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron,
rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it,
with its fellows, the axe of God should hew that Alpine tower; that
against _it_--poor, helpless, mica flake!--the wild north winds should
rage in vain; beneath _it_--low-fallen mica flake!--the snowy hills
should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth
fade away in unregarded blue; and around it--weak, wave-drifted mica
flake!--the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet
stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall
blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven
should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of
snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire?
Sec. 18. I have thought it worth while, for the sake of these lessons, and
the other interests connected with them, to lead the reader thus far
into the examination of the principal precipices among the Alps,
although, so far as our immediate purposes are concerned, the inquiry
cannot be very fruitful or helpful to us. For rocks of this kind, being
found only in the midst of the higher snow fields, are not only out of
the general track of the landscape painter, but are for the most part
quite beyond his power--even beyond Turner's. The waves of snow, when it
becomes a principal element in mountain form, are at once so subtle in
tone, and so complicated in curve and fold, that no skill will express
them, so as to keep the whole luminous mass in anything like a true
relation to the rock darkness. For the distant rocks of the upper peaks
are themselves, when in light, paler than white paper, and their true
size and relation to near objects cannot be exhibited unless they are
painted in the palest tones. Yet, as compared with their snow, they are
so dark that a daguerreotype taken for the proper number of seconds to
draw the snow shadows rightly, will always represent the rocks as
_coal-black_. In order, therefore, to paint a snowy mountain properly,
we should need a light as much brighter than white paper as white paper
is brighter than charcoal. So that although it is possible, with deep
blue sky, and purple rocks, and blue shadows, to obtain a very
interesting resemblance of snow effect, and a true one up to a certain
point (as in the best examples of the body-color drawings sold so
extensively in Switzerland) it is not possible to obtain any of those
refinements of form and gradation which a great artist's eye requires.
Turner felt that, among these highest hills, no serious or perfect work
could be done; and although in one or two of his vignettes (already
referred to in the first volume) he showed his knowledge of them, his
practice, in larger works, was always to treat the snowy mountains
merely as a far-away white cloud, concentrating the interest of his
picture on nearer and more tractable objects.
Sec. 19. One circumstance, however, bearing upon art, we may note before
leaving these upper precipices, namely, the way in which they illustrate
the favorite expression of Homer and Dante--_cut_ rocks. However little
satisfied we had reason to be with the degree of affection shown towards
mountain scenery by either poet, we may now perceive, with some respect
and surprise, that they had got at one character which was in the
essence of the noblest rocks, just as the early illuminators got at the
principles which lie at the heart of vegetation. As distinguished from
all other natural forms,--from fibres which are torn, crystals which are
broken, stones which are rounded or worn, animal and vegetable forms
which are grown or moulded,--the true hard rock or precipice is notably
a thing _cut_, its inner _grain_ or structure seeming to have less to do
with its form than is seen in any other object or substance whatsoever;
and the aspect of subjection to some external sculpturing instrument
being distinct in almost exact proportion to the size and stability of
the mass.
Sec. 20. It is not so, however, with the next groups of mountain which we
have to examine--those formed by the softer slaty coherents, when their
perishable and frail substance has been raised into cliffs in the manner
illustrated by Fig. 12 at p. 146,--cliffs whose front every frost
disorganizes into filmy shale, and of which every thunder-shower
dissolves tons in the swoln blackness of torrents. If this takes place
from the top downwards, the cliff is gradually effaced, and a more or
less rounded eminence is soon all that remains of it; but if the lower
beds only decompose, or if the whole structure is strengthened here and
there by courses of harder rock, the precipice is undermined, and
remains hanging in perilous ledges and projections until, the process
having reached the limit of its strength, vast portions of it fall at
once, leaving new fronts of equal ruggedness, to be ruined and cast down
in their turn.
The whole district of the northern inferior Alps, from the mountains of
the Reposoir to the Gemmi, is full of precipices of this kind; the well
known crests of the Mont Doron, and of the Aiguille de Varens, above
Sallenches, being connected by the great cliffs of the valley of Sixt,
the dark mass of the Buet, the Dent du Midi de Bex, and the Diablerets,
with the great amphitheatre of rock in whose securest recess the path of
the Gemmi hides its winding. But the most frightful and most
characteristic cliff in the whole group is the range of the Rochers des
Fys, above the Col d'Anterne. It happens to have a bed of harder
limestone at the top than in any other part of its mass; and this bed,
protecting its summit, enables it to form itself into the most ghastly
ranges of pinnacle which I know among mountains. In one spot the upper
edge of limestone has formed a complete cornice, or rather bracket--for
it is not extended enough to constitute a cornice, which projects far
into the air over the wall of ashy rock, and is seen against the clouds,
when they pass into the chasm beyond, like the nodding coping-stone of a
castle--only the wall below is not less than 2500 feet in height,--not
vertical, but steep enough to seem so to the imagination.
Sec. 21. Such precipices are among the most impressive as well as the most
really dangerous of mountain ranges; in many spots inaccessible with
safety either from below or from above; dark in color, robed with
everlasting mourning, for ever tottering like a great fortress shaken by
war, fearful as much in their weakness as in their strength, and yet
gathered after every fall into darker frowns and unhumiliated
threatening; for ever incapable of comfort or of healing from herb or
flower, nourishing no root in their crevices, touched by no hue of life
on buttress or ledge, but, to the utmost, desolate; knowing no shaking
of leaves in the wind, nor of grass beside the stream,--no motion but
their own mortal shivering, the deathful crumbling of atom from atom in
their corrupting stones; knowing no sound of living voice or living
tread, cheered neither by the kid's bleat nor the marmot's cry; haunted
only by uninterrupted echoes from far off, wandering hither and thither
among their walls, unable to escape, and by the hiss of angry torrents,
and sometimes the shriek of a bird that flits near the face of them, and
sweeps frightened back from under their shadow into the gulf of air:
and, sometimes, when the echo has fainted, and the wind has carried the
sound of the torrent away, and the bird has vanished; and the mouldering
stones are still for a little time,--a brown moth, opening and shutting
its wings upon a grain of dust, may be the only thing that moves, or
feels, in all the waste of weary precipice, darkening five thousand feet
of the blue depth of heaven.
Sec. 22. It will not be thought that there is nothing in a scene such as
this deserving our contemplation, or capable of conveying useful
lessons, if it were fitly rendered by art. I cannot myself conceive any
picture more impressive than a faithful rendering of such a cliff would
be, supposing the aim of the artist to be the utmost tone of sad
sublime. I am, nevertheless, aware of no instance in which the slightest
attempt has been made to express their character; the reason being,
partly, the extreme difficulty of the task, partly the want of
temptation in specious color or form. For the majesty of this kind of
cliff depends entirely on its size: a low range of such rock is as
uninteresting as it is ugly; and it is only by making the spectator
understand the enormous scale of their desolation, and the space which
the shadow of their danger oppresses, that any impression can be made
upon his mind. And this scale cannot be expressed by any artifice; the
mountain cannot be made to look large by painting it blue or faint,
otherwise it loses all its ghastliness. It must be painted in its own
near and solemn colors, black and ashen grey; and its size must be
expressed by thorough drawing of its innumerable details--pure
_quantity_,--with certain points of comparison explanatory of the whole.
This is no light task; and, attempted by any man of ordinary genius,
would need steady and careful painting for three or four months; while,
to such a man, there would appear to be nothing worth his toil in the
gloom of the subject, unrelieved as it is even by variety of form; for
the soft rock of which these cliffs are composed rarely breaks into bold
masses; and the gloom of their effect partly depends on its not doing
so.
Sec. 23. Yet, while painters thus reject the natural, and large sublime,
which is ready to their hand, how strangely do they seek after a false
and small sublime. It is not that they reprobate gloom, but they will
only have a gloom of their own making; just as half the world will not
see the terrible and sad truths which the universe is full of, but
surrounds itself with little clouds of sulky and unnecessary fog for its
own special breathing. A portrait is not thought grand unless it has a
thundercloud behind it (as if a hero could not be brave in sunshine); a
ruin is not melancholy enough till it is seen by moonlight or twilight;
and every condition of theatrical pensiveness or of the theatrical
terrific is exhausted in setting forth scenes or persons which in
themselves are, perhaps, very quiet scenes and homely persons; while
that which, without any accessories at all, is everlastingly melancholy
and terrific, we refuse to paint,--nay, we refuse even to observe it in
its reality, while we seek for the excitement of the very feelings it
was meant to address, in every conceivable form of our false ideal.
For instance: there have been few pictures more praised for their
sublimity than the "Deluge" of Nicolas Poussin; of which, nevertheless,
the sublimity, such as it is, consists wholly in the painting of
everything grey or brown,--not the grey and brown of great painters,
full of mysterious and unconfessed colors, dim blue, and shadowy purple,
and veiled gold,--but the stony grey and dismal brown of the
conventionalist. Madame de Genlis, whose general criticisms on painting
are full of good sense--singularly so, considering the age in which she
lived[85]--has the following passage on this picture:--
"'I remember to have seen the painting you mention; but I own I found
nothing in it very beautiful.'
"'You have seen it rain often enough?'
"'Certainly.'
"'Have you ever at such times observed the color of the clouds
attentively?--how the dusky atmosphere obscures all objects, makes them,
if distant, disappear, or be seen with difficulty? Had you paid a proper
attention to these effects of rain, you would have been amazed by the
exactitude with which they are painted by Poussin.'"[86]
Sec. 24. Madame de Genlis is just in her appeal to nature, but had not
herself looked carefully enough to make her appeal accurate. She had
noticed one of the principal effects of rain, but not the other. It is
true that the dusky atmosphere "obscures all objects," but it is also
true that Nature, never intending the eye of man to be without delight,
has provided a rich compensation for this shading of the tints with
_darkness_, in their brightening by _moisture_. Every color, wet, is
twice as brilliant as it is when dry; and when distances are obscured by
mist, and bright colors vanish from the sky, and gleams of sunshine from
the earth, the foreground assumes all its loveliest hues, the grass and
foliage revive into their perfect green, and every sunburnt rock glows
into an agate. The colors of mountain foregrounds can never be seen in
perfection unless they _are_ wet; nor _can moisture be entirely
expressed except by fulness of color_. So that Poussin, in search of a
false sublimity, painting every object in his picture, vegetation and
all, of one dull grey and brown, has actually rendered it impossible for
an educated eye to conceive it as representing rain at all; it is a dry,
volcanic darkness. It may be said that had he painted the effect of rain
truly, the picture, composed of the objects he has introduced, would
have become too pretty for his purpose. But his error, and the error of
landscapists in general, is in seeking to express terror by false
treatment, instead of going to Nature herself to ask her what she has
appointed to be everlastingly terrible. The greatest genius would be
shown by taking the scene in its plainest and most probable facts; not
seeking to change pity into fear, by denying the beauty of the world
that was passing away. But if it were determined to excite fear, and
fear only, it ought to have been done by imagining the true ghastliness
of the tottering cliffs of Ararat or Caucasus, as the heavy waves first
smote against the promontories that until then had only known the thin
fanning of the upper air of heaven;--not by painting leaves and grass
slate-grey. And a new world of sublimity might be opened to us, if any
painter of power and feeling would devote himself, for a few months, to
these solemn cliffs of the dark limestone Alps, and would only paint one
of them, as it truly stands, not in rain nor storm, but in its own
eternal sadness: perhaps best on some fair summer evening, when its
fearful veil of immeasurable rock is breathed upon by warm air, and
touched with fading rays of purple; and all that it has of the
melancholy of ruin, mingled with the might of endurance, and the
foreboding of danger, rises in its grey gloom against the gentle sky;
the soft wreaths of the evening clouds expiring along its ridges one by
one, and leaving it, at last, with no light but that of its own
cascades, standing like white pillars here and there along its sides,
motionless and soundless in their distance.
Sec. 25. Here, however, we must leave these more formidable examples of the
Alpine precipice, to examine those which, by Turner or by artists in
general, have been regarded as properly within the sphere of their art.
Turner had in this respect some peculiar views induced by early
association. It has already been noticed, in my pamphlet on
Pre-Raphaelitism, that his first conceptions of mountain scenery seem to
have been taken from Yorkshire; and its rounded hills, far winding
rivers, and broken limestone scars, to have formed a type in his mind to
which he sought, as far as might be, to obtain some correspondent
imagery in all other landscape. Hence, he almost always preferred to
have a precipice _low down_ on the hillside, rather than near the top;
liked an extent of rounded slope above, and the vertical cliff to the
water or valley, better than the slope at the bottom and wall at the top
(compare Fig. 13, p. 148); and had his attention early directed to those
horizontal, or comparatively horizontal, beds of rock which usually form
the faces of precipices in the Yorkshire dales; not, as in the
Matterhorn, merely indicated by veined coloring on the surface of the
smooth cliff, but projecting, or mouldering away, in definite
successions of ledges, cornices, or steps.
[Illustration: J. Ruskin. J. H. Le Keux.
40. The Mountains of Villeneuve.]
Sec. 26. This decided love of the slope, or bank above the wall, rather
than below it, is one of Turner's most marked idiosyncrasies, and gives
a character to his composition, as distinguished from that of other men,
perhaps more marked than any which are traceable in other features of it
(except, perhaps, in his pear-shaped ideal of trees, of which more
hereafter). For when mountains are striking to the general eye, they
almost always have the high crest or wall of cliff on the _top_ of their
slopes, rising from the plain first in mounds of meadow-land, and bosses
of rock, and studded softness of forest; the brown cottages peeping
through grove above grove, until just where the deep shade of the pines
becomes blue or purple in the haze of height, a red wall of upper
precipice rises from the pasture land, and frets the sky with glowing
serration. Plate +40+, opposite, represents a mass of mountain just
above Villeneuve, at the head of the Lake of Geneva, in which the type
of the structure is shown with singular clearness. Much of the scenery
of western Switzerland, and characteristically the whole of that of
Savoy, is composed of mountains of this kind; the isolated group between
Chambery and Grenoble, which holds the Grande Chartreuse in the heart
of it, is constructed entirely of such masses; and the Montagne de
Vergi, which in like manner encloses the narrow meadows and traceried
cloisters of the Convent of the Reposoir, forms the most striking
feature among all the mountains that border the valley of the Arve
between Cluse and Geneva; while ranges of cliffs presenting precisely
the same typical characters frown above the bridge and fortress of
Mont-Meillan, and enclose, in light blue calm, the waters of the Lake of
Annecy.
[Illustration: FIG. 82.]
Sec. 27. Now, although in many of his drawings Turner acknowledges this
structure, it seems always to be with some degree of reluctance; whereas
he seizes with instant eagerness, and every appearance of contentment,
on forms of mountain which are rounded into banks above, and cut into
precipices below, as is the case in most elevated table-lands; in the
chalk coteaux of the Seine, the basalt borders of the Rhine, and the
lower gorges of the Alps; so that while the most striking pieces of
natural mountain scenery usually rise from the plain under some such
outline as that at _a_, Fig. 82, Turner always formed his composition,
if possible, on such an arrangement as that at _b_.
One reason for this is clearly the greater simplicity of the line. The
simpler a line is, so that it be cunningly varied _within_ its
simplicities, the grander it is; and Turner likes to enclose all his
broken crags by such a line as that at _b_, just as we saw the classical
composer, in our first plate, enclose the griffin's beak with breadth of
wing. Nevertheless, I cannot but attribute his somewhat wilful and
marked rejection of what sublimity there is in the other form, to the
influence of early affections; and sincerely regret that the fascination
exercised over him by memory should have led him to pass so much of his
life in putting a sublimity not properly belonging to them into the
coteaux of Clairmont and Meauves, and the vine terraces of Bingen and
Oberwesel; leaving almost unrecorded the natural sublimity, which he
could never have exaggerated, of the pine-fringed mountains of the
Iscre, and the cloudy diadem of the Mont Vergi.
Sec. 28. In all cases of this kind, it is difficult to say how far harm and
how far good have resulted from what unquestionably has in it something
of both. It is to be regretted that Turner's studies should have been
warped, by early affection, from the Alps to the Rhine; but the fact of
his _feeling_ this early affection, and being thus strongly influenced
by it through his life, is indicative of that sensibility which was at
the root of all his greatness. Other artists are led away by foreign
sublimities and distant interests; delighting always in that which is
most markedly strange, and quaintly contrary to the scenery of their
homes. But Turner evidently felt that the claims upon his regard
possessed by those places which first had opened to him the joy, and the
labor, of his life, could never be superseded; no Alpine cloud could
efface, no Italian sunbeam outshine, the memory of the pleasant dales
and days of Rokeby and Bolton; and many a simple promontory, dim with
southern olive,--many a low cliff that stooped unnoticed over some alien
wave, was recorded by him with a love, and delicate care, that were the
shadows of old thoughts and long-lost delights, whose charm yet hung
like morning mist above the chanting waves of Wharfe and Greta.
Sec. 29. The first instance, therefore, of Turner's mountain drawing which
I endeavored to give accurately, in this book, was from those shores of
Wharfe which, I believe, he never could revisit without tears; nay,
which for all the latter part of his life, he never could even speak of,
but his voice faltered. We will now examine this instance with greater
care.
It is first to be remembered that in every one of his English or French
drawings, Turner's mind was, in two great instincts, at variance with
itself. The _affections_ of it clung, as we have just seen, to humble
scenery, and gentle wildness of pastoral life. But the _admiration_ of
it was, more than any other artist's whatsoever, fastened on largeness
of scale. With all his heart, he was attached to the narrow meadows and
rounded knolls of England; by all his imagination he was urged to the
reverence of endless vales and measureless hills; nor could any scene be
too contracted for his love, or too vast for his ambition. Hence, when
he returned to English scenery after his first studies in Savoy and
Dauphine, he was continually endeavoring to reconcile old fondnesses
with new sublimities; and, as in Switzerland he chose rounded Alps for
the love of Yorkshire, so in Yorkshire he exaggerated scale, in memory
of Switzerland, and gave to Ingleborough, seen from Hornby Castle, in
great part the expression of cloudy majesty and height which he had seen
in the Alps from Grenoble. We must continually remember these two
opposite instincts as we examine the Turnerian topography of his subject
of Bolton Abbey.
Sec. 30. The Abbey is placed, as most lovers of our English scenery know
well, on a little promontory of level park land, enclosed by one of the
sweeps of the Wharfe. On the other side of the river, the flank of the
dale rises in a pretty wooded brow, which the river, leaning against,
has cut into two or three somewhat bold masses of rock, steep to the
water's edge, but feathered above with copse of ash and oak. Above these
rocks, the hills are rounded softly upwards to the moorland; the entire
height of the brow towards the river being perhaps two hundred feet, and
the rocky parts of it not above forty or fifty, so that the general
impression upon the eye is that the hill is little more than twice the
height of the ruins, or of the groups of noble ash trees which encircle
them. One of these groups is conspicuous above the rest, growing on the
very shore of the tongue of land which projects into the river, whose
clear brown water, stealing first in mere threads between the separate
pebbles of shingle, and eddying in soft golden lines towards its central
currents, flows out of amber into ebony, and glides calm and deep below
the rock on the opposite shore.
Sec. 31. Except in this stony bed of the stream, the scene possesses very
little more aspect of mountain character than belongs to some of the
park and meadow land under the chalk hills near Henley and Maidenhead;
and if it were faithfully drawn in all points, and on its true scale,
would hardly more affect the imagination of the spectator, unless he
traced, with such care as is never from any spectator to be hoped, the
evidence of nobler character in the pebbled shore and unconspicuous
rock. But the scene in reality does affect the imagination strongly, and
in a way wholly different from lowland hill scenery. A little farther up
the valley the limestone summits rise, and that steeply, to a height of
twelve hundred feet above the river, which foams between them in the
narrow and dangerous channel of the Strid. Noble moorlands extend above,
purple with heath, and broken into scars and glens, and around every
soft tuft of wood, and gentle extent of meadow, throughout the dale,
there floats a feeling of this mountain power, and an instinctive
apprehension of the strength and greatness of the wild northern land.
Sec. 32. It is to the association of this power and border sternness with
the sweet peace and tender decay of Bolton Priory, that the scene owes
its distinctive charm. The feelings excited by both characters are
definitely connected by the melancholy tradition of the circumstances to
which the Abbey owes its origin; and yet farther darkened by the nearer
memory of the death, in the same spot which betrayed the boy of
Egremont, of another, as young, as thoughtless, and as beloved.
"The stately priory was reared,
And Wharfe, as he moved along,
To matins joined a mournful voice,
Nor failed at evensong."
All this association of various awe, and noble mingling of mountain
strength with religious fear, Turner had to suggest, or he would not
have drawn Bolton Abbey. He goes down to the shingly shore; for the
Abbey is but the child of the Wharfe;--it is the river, the great cause
of the Abbey, which shall be his main subject; only the extremity of the
ruin itself is seen between the stems of the ash tree; but the waves of
the Wharfe are studied with a care which renders this drawing unique
among Turner's works, for its expression of the eddies of a slow
mountain stream, and of their pausing in treacherous depth beneath the
hollowed rocks.
[Illustration: 12. The Shores of Wharfe.]
On the opposite shore is a singular jutting angle of the shales, forming
the principal feature of the low cliffs at the water's edge. Turner
fastens on it as the only available mass; draws it with notable care,
and then magnifies it, by diminishing the trees on its top to one fifth
of their real size, so that what would else have been little more than a
stony bank becomes a true precipice, on a scale completely suggestive of
the heights behind. The hill beyond is in like manner lifted into a more
rounded, but still precipitous, eminence, reaching the utmost admissible
elevation of ten or twelve hundred feet (measurable by the trees upon
it). I have engraved this entire portion of the drawing of the real
size, on the opposite page; the engraving of the whole drawing,
published in the England Series, is also easily accessible.
[Illustration: FIG. 83.]
Sec. 33. Not knowing accurately to what group of the Yorkshire limestones
the rocks opposite the Abbey belonged, or their relation to the
sandstones at the Strid, I wrote to ask my kind friend Professor
Phillips, who instantly sent me a little geological sketch of the
position of these "Yoredale Shales," adding this interesting note: "The
black shales opposite the Abbey are curiously tinted at the surface, and
are contorted. Most artists give them the appearance of solid massive
rocks; nor is this altogether wrong, especially when the natural joints
of the shale appear prominent after particular accidents; they should,
however, never be made to resemble [i.e. in solidity] limestone or
gritstone."
Now the Yoredale shales are members of the group of rocks which I have
called slaty coherents, and correspond very closely to those portions of
the Alpine slates described in Chap. X. Sec. 4; their main character is
continual separation into fine flakes, more or less of Dante's
"iron-colored grain;" which, however, on a large scale, form those
somewhat solid-looking masses to which Mr. Phillips alludes in his
letter, and which he describes, in his recently published Geology, in
the following general terms: "The shales of this tract are usually dark,
close, and fissile, and traversed by extremely long straight joints,
dividing the rock into rhomboidal prisms" (i.e. prisms of the shape
_c_, Fig. 83, in the section).
Sec. 34. Turner had, therefore, these four things to show:--1. Flaky
division horizontally; 2. Division by rhomboidal joints; 3. Massy
appearance occasionally, somewhat concealing the structure; 4. Local
contortion of the beds. (See passage quoted of Mr. Phillips's letter).
[Illustration: FIG. 84.]
Examine, then, the plate just given (12 A). The cleavage of the shales
runs diagonally up from left to right; note especially how delicately it
runs up through the foreground rock, and is insisted upon, just at the
brow of it, in the angular step-like fragments; compare also the etching
in the first volume. Then note the upright pillars in the distance,
marked especially as rhomboidal by being drawn with the cleavage still
sloping up on the returning side, as at _a_, Fig. 83, not as at _b_,
which would be their aspect if they were square; and then the indication
of interruption in the structure at the brow of the main cliff, where,
as well as on the nearer mass, exposure to the weather has rounded away
the cleavages.
This projection, as before mentioned, does exist at the spot; and I
believe is partly an indication of the contortion in the beds alluded to
by Mr. Phillips; but no one but Turner would have fastened on it, as in
anywise deserving special attention.
For the rest, no words are of any use to explain the subtle fidelity
with which the minor roundings and cleavages have been expressed by him.
Fidelity of this kind can only be estimated by workers: if the reader
can himself draw a bit of natural precipice in Yoredale shale, and then
copy a bit of the etching, he will find some measure of the difference
between Turner's work and other people's, and not otherwise; although,
without any such labor, he may at once perceive that there is a
difference, and a wide one,--so wide, that I have literally nothing to
compare the Turnerian work with in previous art. Here, however, Fig. 84,
is a rock of Claude's (Liber Veritatis, No. 91, on the left hand), which
is something of the shape of Turner's, and professes to be crested in
like manner with copse-wood. The reader may "compare" as much as he
likes, or can, of it.
[Illustration: FIG. 85.]
Sec. 35. In fact, as I said some time ago, the whole landscape of Claude
was nothing but a more or less softened continuance of the old
traditions of missal-painting, of which I gave examples in the previous
volume. The general notion of rock which may be traced in the earliest
work, as Figs. 1 and 2 in Plate +10+ Vol. III. is of an upright mass cut
out with an adze; as art advances, the painters begin to perceive
horizontal stratification, and, as in all the four other examples of
that plate, show something like true rendering of the fracture of rocks
in vertical joints with superimposed projecting masses. They insist on
this type, thinking it frowning or picturesque, and usually exhibit it
to more advantage by putting a convent, hermitage, or castle on the
projection of the crag. In the blue backgrounds of the missals the
projection is often wildly extravagant; for instance, the MS.
Additional, 11,696 Brit. Mus., has all its backgrounds composed of blue
rocks with towers upon them, of which Fig. 85 is a characteristic
example (magnified in scale about one-third; but, I think, rather
diminished in extravagance of projection). It is infinitely better drawn
than Claude's rocks ever are, in the expression of cleavage; but
certainly somewhat too bold in standing. Then, in more elaborate work,
we get conditions of precipice like Fig. 3 in Plate +10+, which, indeed,
is not ill-drawn in many respects; and the book from which it is taken
shows other evidences of a love of nature sufficiently rare at the
period, though joined quaintly with love of the grotesque: for instance,
the writer, giving an account of the natural productions of Saxony,
illustrates his chapter with a view of the salt mines; he represents
the brine-spring, conducted by a wooden trough from the rock into an
evaporating-house where it is received in a pan, under which he has
painted scarlet flames of fire with singular skill; and the rock out of
which the brine flows is in its general cleavages the best I ever saw
drawn by mediaeval art. But it is carefully wrought to the resemblance of
a grotesque human head.
[Illustration: FIG. 86.]
Sec. 36. This bolder quaintness of the missals is very slightly modified in
religious paintings of the period. Fig. 86, by Cima da Conegliano, a
Venetian, No. 173 in the Louvre, compared with Fig. 3 of Plate +10+
(Flemish), will show the kind of received tradition about rocks current
throughout Europe. Claude takes up this tradition, and, merely making
the rocks a little clumsier, and more weedy, produces such conditions as
Fig. 87 (Liber Veritatis, No. 91, with Fig. 84 above); while the
orthodox door or archway at the bottom is developed into the Homeric
cave, shaded with laurels, and some ships are put underneath it, or seen
through it, at impossible anchorages.
[Illustration: J. Ruskin. J. H. Le Keux
41. The Rocks of Arona.]
Sec. 37. Fig. 87 is generally characteristic, not only of Claude, but of
the other painters of the Renaissance period, because they were all
equally fond of representing this overhanging of rocks with buildings on
the top, and weeds drooping into the air over the edge, always thinking
to get sublimity by exaggerating the projection, and never able to feel
or understand the simplicity of real rock lines; not that they were in
want of examples around them: on the contrary, though the main idea was
traditional, the modifications of it are always traceable to the lower
masses of limestone and tufa which skirt the Alps and Apennines, and
which have, in reality, long contracted habits of nodding over their
bases; being, both by Virgil and Homer, spoken of always as "hanging" or
"over-roofed" rocks. But then they have a way of doing it rather
different from the Renaissance ideas of them. Here, for instance (Plate
+41+), is a real hanging rock, with a castle on the top of it, and
([Greek: katerephes]) laurel, all plain fact, from Arona, on the Lago
Maggiore; and, I believe, the reader, though we have not as yet said
anything about lines, will at once, on comparing it with Fig. 87,
recognize the difference between the true parabolic flow of the
rock-lines and the humpbacked deformity of Claude; and, still more, the
difference between the delicate overhanging of the natural cliff,
cautiously diminished as it gets higher[87], and the ideal danger of the
Liber Veritatis.
[Illustration: FIG. 87.]
Sec. 38. And the fact is, generally, that natural cliffs are very cautious
how they overhang, and that the artist who represents them as doing so
in any extravagant degree entirely destroys the sublimity which he hoped
to increase, for the simple reason that he takes away the whole
rock-nature, or at least that part of it which depends upon weight. The
instinct of the observer refuses to believe that the rock is ponderous
when it overhangs so far, and it has no more real effect upon him than
the imagined rocks of a fairy tale.
[Illustration: FIG. 88.]
Though, therefore, the subject sketched on this page is sufficiently
trifling in itself, it is important as a perfect general type of the
overhanging of that kind of precipices, and of the mode in which they
are connected with the banks above. Fig. 88 shows its abstract leading
lines, consisting of one great parabolic line _x y_ falling to the brow,
curved aqueous lines down the precipice face, and the springing lines of
its vegetation, opposed by contrary curves on the farther cliff. Such an
arrangement, with or without vegetation, may take place on a small or
large scale; but a bolder projection than this, except by rare accident,
and on a small scale, cannot. If the reader will glance back to Plate
+37+, and observe the arrangement of the precipices on the right hand,
he will now better understand what Turner means by them. But the whole
question of the beauty of this form, or mode of its development, rests
on the nature of the bank above the cliffs, and of the aqueous forces
that carved it; and this discussion of the nature of banks, as it will
take some time, had better be referred to next chapter. One or two more
points are, however, to be stated here.
Sec. 39. For the reader has probably been already considering how it is
that these overhanging cliffs are formed at all, and why they appear
thus to be consumed away at the bottom. Sometimes if of soft material
they actually _are_ so consumed by the quicker trickling of streamlets
at the base than at the summit, or by the general action of damp in
decomposing the rock. But in the noblest instances, such cliffs are
constructed as at c in Fig. 73, above, and the inward retirement of the
precipice is the result of their tendency to break at right angles to
the beds, modified according to the power of the rock to support itself,
and the aqueous action from above or below.
I have before alluded (in p. 157) to this somewhat perilous arrangement
permitted in the secondary strata. The danger, be it observed, is not of
the fall of the _brow_ of the precipice, which never takes place on a
large scale in rocks of this kind (compare Sec. 3 of this chapter), but of
the sliding of one bed completely away from another, and the whole mass
coming down together. But even this, though it has several times
occurred in Switzerland, is not a whit more likely to happen when the
precipice is terrific than when it is insignificant. The danger results
from the imperfect adhesion of the mountain beds; not at all from the
external form of them. A cliff, which is in aspect absolutely awful, may
hardly, in the part of it that overhangs, add one thousandth part to the
gravitating power of the entire mass of the rocks above; and, for the
comfort of nervous travellers, they may be assured that they are often
in more danger under the gentle slopes of a pleasantly wooded hill, than
under the most terrific cliffs of the Eiger or Jungfrau.
[Illustration: FIG. 89.]
Sec. 40. The most interesting examples of these cliffs are usually to be
seen impendent above strong torrents, which, if forced originally to run
in a valley, such as _a_ in Fig. 89, bearing the relation there shown to
the inclination of beds on each side, will not, if the cleavage is
across the beds, cut their channel straight down, but in an inclined
direction, correspondent to the cleavage, as at _b_. If the operation be
carried far, so as to undermine one side of the ravine too seriously,
the undermined masses fall, partially choke the torrent, and give it a
new direction of force, or diminish its sawing power by breaking it
among the fallen masses, so that the cliff never becomes very high in
such an impendent form; but the trench is hewn downwards in a direction
irregularly vertical. Among the limestones on the north side of the
Valles, they being just soft enough to yield easily to the water, and
yet so hard as to maintain themselves in massy precipices, when once
hewn to the shape, there are defiles of whose depth and proportions I am
almost afraid to state what I believe to be the measurements, so much do
they differ from any which I have seen assigned by scientific men as the
limits of precipitous formation. I can only say that my deliberate
impression of the great ravine cut by the torrent which descends from
the Aletsch glacier, about half way between the glacier and Brieg, was,
that its depth is between a _thousand and fifteen hundred_ feet, by a
breadth of between _forty and a hundred_.
But I could not get to the edge of its cliffs, for the tops rounded away
into the chasm, and, of course, all actual measurement was impossible.
There are other similar clefts between the Bietschhorn and the Gemmi;
and the one before spoken of at Ardon, about five miles below Sion,
though quite unimportant in comparison, presents some boldly overhanging
precipices easily observed by the passing traveller, as they are close
to the road. The glen through which the torrent of the Trient descends
into the valley of the Rhone, near Martigny, though not above three or
four hundred feet deep, is also notable for its narrowness, and for the
magnificent hardness of the rock through which it is cut,--a gneiss
twisted with quartz into undulations like those of a Damascus sabre, and
as compact as its steel.
Sec. 41. It is not possible to get the complete expression of these
ravines, any more than of the apse of a Gothic cathedral, into a
picture, as their elevation cannot be drawn on a vertical plane in front
of the eye, the head needing to be thrown back, in order to measure
their height, or stooped to penetrate their depth. But the structure and
expression of the entrance to one of them have been made by Turner the
theme of his sublime mountain-study (Mill near the Grande Chartreuse) in
the Liber Studiorum; nor does he seem ever to have been weary of
recurring for various precipice-subject, to the ravines of the Via Mala
and St. Gothard. I will not injure any of these--his noblest works--by
giving imperfect copies of them; the reader has now data enough whereby
to judge, when he meets with them, whether they are well done or ill;
and, indeed, all that I am endeavoring to do here, as often aforesaid,
is only to get some laws of the simplest kind understood and accepted,
so as to enable people who care at all for justice to make a stand at
once beside the modern mountain-drawing, as distinguished from
Salvator's, or Claude's, or any other spurious work. Take, for instance,
such a law as this of the general oblique inclination of a torrent's
sides, Fig. 89, and compare the Turnerian gorge in the distance of Plate
+21+ here, or of the Grande Chartreuse subject in the Liber Studiorum,
and consider whether anywhere else in art you can find similar
expressions of the law.
"Well; but you have come to no conclusions in this chapter respecting
the Beauty of Precipices; and that was your professed business with
them."
I am not sure that the idea of beauty was meant in general to be very
strictly connected with such mountain forms: one does not,
instinctively, speak or think of a "Beautiful Precipice." They have,
however, their beauty, and it is infinite; yet so dependent on help or
change from other things, on the way the pines crest them, or the
waterfalls color them, or the clouds isolate them, that I do not choose
to dwell here on any of their perfect aspects, as they cannot be
reasoned of by anticipating inquiries into other materials of landscape.
Thus, I have much to say of the cliffs of Grindelwald and the
Chartreuse, but all so dependent upon certain facts belonging to pine
vegetation, that I am compelled to defer it to the next volume; nor do I
much regret this; because it seems to me that, without any setting
forth, or rather beyond all setting forth, the Alpine precipices have a
fascination about them which is sufficiently felt by the spectator in
general, and even by the artist; only they have not been properly drawn,
because people do not usually attribute the magnificence of their effect
to the trifling details which really are its elements; and, therefore,
in common drawings of Swiss scenery we see all kinds of efforts at
sublimity by exaggeration of the projection of the mass, or by
obscurity, or blueness or aerial tint,--by everything, in fact, except
the one needful thing,--plain drawing of the rock. Therefore in this
chapter I have endeavored to direct the reader to a severe mathematical
estimate of precipice outline, and to make him dwell, not on the
immediately pathetic or impressive aspect of cliffs, which all men feel
readily enough, but on their internal structure. For he may rest assured
that, as the Matterhorn is built of mica flakes, so every great
pictorial impression in scenery of this kind is to be reached by little
and little; the cliff must be built in the picture as it was probably in
reality--inch by inch; and the work will, in the end, have most power
which was begun with most patience. No man is fit to paint Swiss scenery
until he can place himself front to front with one of those mighty
crags, in broad daylight, with no "effect" to aid him, and work it out,
boss by boss, only with such conventionality as its infinitude renders
unavoidable. We have seen that a literal facsimile is impossible, just
as a literal facsimile of the carving of an entire cathedral front is
impossible. But it is as vain to endeavor to give any conception of an
Alpine cliff without minuteness of detail, and by mere breadth of
effect, as it would be to give a conception of the facades of Rouen or
Rheims, without indicating any statues or foliation. When the statues
and foliation are once got, as much blue mist and thundercloud as you
choose, but not before.
Sec. 43. I commend, therefore, in conclusion, the precipice to the artist's
_patience_; to which there is this farther and final encouragement,
that, though one of the most difficult of subjects, it is one of the
kindest of sitters. A group of trees changes the color of its leafage
from week to week, and its position from day to day; it is sometimes
languid with heat, and sometimes heavy with rain; the torrent swells or
falls in shower or sun; the best leaves of the foreground may be dined
upon by cattle, or trampled by unwelcome investigators of the chosen
scene. But the cliff can neither be eaten nor trampled down; neither
bowed by the shower nor withered by the heat: it is always ready for us
when we are inclined to labor; will always wait for us when we would
rest; and, what is best of all, will always talk to us when we are
inclined to converse. With its own patient and victorious presence,
cleaving daily through cloud after cloud, and reappearing still through
the tempest drift, lofty and serene amidst the passing rents of blue, it
seems partly to rebuke, and partly to guard, and partly to calm and
chasten, the agitations of the feeble human soul that watches it; and
that must be indeed a dark perplexity, or a grievous pain, which will
not be in some degree enlightened or relieved by the vision of it, when
the evening shadows are blue on its foundation, and the last rays of the
sunset resting in the fair height of its golden Fortitude.
FOOTNOTES
[80] Distinguished from a _crest_ by being the _face_ of a large
contiguous bed of rock, not the end of a ridge.
[81] The contour of the whole cliff, seen from near its foot as it
rises above the shoulder of the Breven, is as at Fig. 76 opposite.
The part measured is _a d_; but the precipice recedes to the summit
_b_, on which a human figure is discernible to the naked eye merely
as a point. The bank from which the cliff rises, _c_, _recedes_ as
it falls to the left; so that five hundred feet may perhaps be an
under-estimate of the height below the summit. The straight sloping
lines are cleavages, across the beds. Finally, Fig. 4, Plate 25,
gives the look of the whole summit as seen from the village of
Chamouni beneath it, at a distance of about two miles, and some four
or five thousand feet above the spectator. It appears, then, like a
not very formidable projection of crag overhanging the great slopes
of the mountain's foundation.
[Illustration: FIG. 76.]
[82] At an angle of 79 deg. with the horizon. See the Table of angles,
p. 181. The line _a e_ in Fig. 33, is too steep, as well as in the
plate here; but the other slopes are approximately accurate. I would
have made them quite so, but did not like to alter the sketch made
on the spot.
[83] Professor Forbes gives the bearing of the Cervin from the top
of the Riffelhorn as 351 deg., or N. 9 deg. W., supposing local attraction
to have caused an error of 65 deg. to the northward, which would make
the true bearing N. 74 deg. W. From the point just under the Riffelhorn
summit, _e_, in Fig. 78, at which my drawing was made, I found the
Cervin bear N. 79 deg. W. without any allowance for attraction; the
disturbing influence would seem therefore confined, or nearly so, to
the summit _a_. I did not know at the time that there was any such
influence traceable, and took no bearing from the summit. For the
rest, I cannot vouch for bearings as I can for angles, as their
accuracy was of no importance to my work, and I merely noted them
with a common pocket compass and in the sailor's way (S. by W. and 1/2
W. & C.), which involves the probability of error of from two to
three degrees on either side of the true bearing. The other drawing
in Plate +38+ was made from a point only a degree or two to the
westward of the village of Zermatt. I have no note of the bearing;
but it must be about S. 60 deg. or 65 deg. W.
[84] Independent travellers may perhaps be glad to know the way to
the top of the Riffelhorn. I believe there is only one path; which
ascends (from the ridge of the Riffel) on its eastern slope, until,
near the summit, the low but perfectly smooth cliff, extending from
side to side of the ridge, seems, as on the western slope, to bar
all farther advance. This cliff may, however, by a good climber, be
mastered even at the southern extremity; but it is dangerous there:
at the opposite or northern side of it, just at its base, is a
little cornice, about a foot broad, which does not look promising at
first, but widens presently; and when once it is past, there is no
more difficulty in reaching the summit.
[85] I ought before to have mentioned Madame de Genlis as one of the
few writers whose influence was always exerted to restore to
truthful feelings, and persuade to simple enjoyments and pursuits,
the persons accessible to reason in the frivolous world of her
times.
[86] Veillees du Chateau, vol. ii.
[87] The actual extent of the projection remaining the same
throughout, the angle of suspended slope, for that reason,
diminishes as the cliff increases in height.