THE MOUNTAIN GLOOM.
Sec. 1. We have now cursorily glanced over those conditions of mountain
structure which appear constant in duration, and universal in extent;
and we have found them, invariably, calculated for the delight, the
advantage, or the teaching of men; prepared, it seems, so as to contain,
alike in fortitude or feebleness, in timeliness or in terror, some
beneficence of gift, or profoundness of counsel. We have found that
where at first all seemed disturbed and accidental, the most tender laws
were appointed to produce forms of perpetual beauty; and that where to
the careless or cold observer it seemed severe or purposeless, the
well-being of man has been chiefly consulted, and his rightly directed
powers, and sincerely awakened intelligence, may find wealth in every
falling rock, and wisdom in every talking wave.
It remains for us to consider what actual effect upon the human race has
been produced by the generosity, or the instruction of the hills; how
far, in past ages, they have been thanked, or listened to; how far, in
coming ages, it may be well for us to accept them for tutors, or
acknowledge them for friends.
Sec. 2. What they have already taught us may, one would think, be best
discerned in the midst of them,--in some place where they have had their
own way with the human soul; where no veil has been drawn between it and
them, no contradicting voice has confused their ministries of sound, or
broken their pathos of silence: where war has never streaked their
streams with bloody foam, nor ambition sought for other throne than
their cloud-courtiered pinnacles, nor avarice for other treasure than,
year by year, is given to their unlaborious rocks, in budded jewels, and
mossy gold.
Sec. 3. I do not know any district possessing more pure or uninterrupted
fulness of mountain character (and that of the highest order), or which
appears to have been less disturbed by foreign agencies, than that which
borders the course of the Trient between Valorsine and Martigny. The
paths which lead to it out of the valley of the Rhone, rising at first
in steep circles among the walnut trees, like winding stairs among the
pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over the shoulders of the hills into a
valley almost unknown, but thickly inhabited by an industrious and
patient population. Along the ridges of the rocks, smoothed by old
glaciers into long, dark, billowy swellings, like the backs of plunging
dolphins, the peasant watches the slow coloring of the tufts of moss and
roots of herb which, little by little, gather a feeble soil over the
iron substance; then, supporting the narrow strip of clinging ground
with a few stones, he subdues it to the spade; and in a year or two a
little crest of corn is seen waving upon the rocky casque. The irregular
meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among these harvested rocks,
sweet with perpetual streamlets, that seem always to have chosen the
steepest places to come down, for the sake of the leaps, scattering
their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as the wind takes them,
with all the grace, but with none of the formalism, of fountains;
dividing into fanciful change of dash and spring, yet with the seal of
their granite channels upon them, as the lightest play of human speech
may bear the seal of past toil, and closing back out of their spray to
lave the rigid angles, and brighten with silver fringes and glassy films
each lower and lower step of sable stone; until at last, gathered
altogether again,--except, perhaps, some chance drops caught on the
apple-blossom, where it has budded a little nearer the cascade than it
did last spring,--they find their way down to the turf, and lose
themselves in that silently; with quiet depth of clear water furrowing
among the grass blades, and looking only like their shadow, but
presently emerging again in little startled gushes and laughing hurries,
as if they had remembered suddenly that the day was too short for them
to get down the hill.
Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing streamlet, all slope
together in the sunshine towards the brows of the ravines, where the
pines take up their own dominion of saddened shade; and with everlasting
roar in the twilight, the stronger torrents thunder down pale from the
glaciers, filling all their chasms with enchanted cold, beating
themselves to pieces against the great rocks that they have themselves
cast down, and forcing fierce way beneath their ghastly poise.
The mountain paths stoop to these glens in forky zigzags, leading to
some grey and narrow arch, all fringed under its shuddering curve with
the ferns that fear the light; a cross of rough-hewn pine, iron-bound to
its parapet, standing dark against the lurid fury of the foam. Far up
the glen, as we pause beside the cross, the sky is seen through the
openings in the pines, thin with excess of light; and, in its clear,
consuming flame of white space, the summits of the rocky mountains are
gathered into solemn crowns and circlets, all flushed in that strange,
faint silence of possession by the sunshine which has in it so deep a
melancholy; full of power, yet as frail as shadows; lifeless, like the
walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in tender fall of crimson folds,
like the veil of some sea spirit, that lives and dies as the foam
flashes; fixed on a perpetual throne, stern against all strength, lifted
above all sorrow, and yet effaced and melted utterly into the air by
that last sunbeam that has crossed to them from between the two golden
clouds.
Sec. 4. High above all sorrow: yes; but not unwitnessing to it. The
traveller on his happy journey, as his foot springs from the deep turf
and strikes the pebbles gayly over the edge of the mountain road, sees
with a glance of delight the clusters of nut-brown cottages that nestle
among those sloping orchards, and glow beneath the boughs of the pines.
Here, it may well seem to him, if there be sometimes hardship, there
must be at least innocence and peace, and fellowship of the human soul
with nature. It is not so. The wild goats that leap along those rocks
have as much passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men that
toil among them. Perhaps more. Enter the street of one of those
villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy foulness that is
suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here, it is torpor--not
absolute suffering,--not starvation or disease, but darkness of calm
enduring; the spring known only as the time of the scythe, and the
autumn as the time of the sickle, and the sun only as a warmth, the wind
as a chill, and the mountains as a danger. They do not understand so
much as the name of beauty, or of knowledge. They understand dimly that
of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality, faith,--these things they know.
To glean their meadows side by side, so happier; to bear the burden up
the breathless mountain flank, unmurmuringly; to bid the stranger drink
from their vessel of milk; to see at the foot of their low deathbeds a
pale figure upon a cross, dying also, patiently;--in this they are
different from the cattle and from the stones, but in all this
unrewarded as far as concerns the present life. For them, there is
neither hope nor passion of spirit; for them neither advance nor
exultation. Black bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious day, weary arm
at sunset; and life ebbs away. No books, no thoughts, no attainments, no
rest; except only sometimes a little sitting in the sun under the church
wall, as the bell tolls thin and far in the mountain air; a pattering of
a few prayers, not understood, by the altar rails of the dimly gilded
chapel, and so back to the sombre home, with the cloud upon them still
unbroken--that cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the wild torrents and
ruinous stones, and unlightened, even in their religion, except by the
vague promise of some better thing unknown, mingled with threatening,
and obscured by an unspeakable horror,--a smoke, as it were, of
martyrdom, coiling up with the incense, and, amidst the images of
tortured bodies and lamenting spirits in hurtling flames, the very
cross, for them, dashed more deeply than for others, with gouts of
blood.
Sec. 5. Do not let this be thought a darkened picture of the life of these
mountaineers. It is literal fact. No contrast can be more painful than
that between the dwelling of any well-conducted English cottager, and
that of the equally honest Savoyard. The one, set in the midst of its
dull flat fields and uninteresting hedgerows, shows in itself the love
of brightness and beauty; its daisy-studded garden beds, its smoothly
swept brick path to the threshold, its freshly sanded floor and orderly
shelves of household furniture, all testify to energy of heart, and
happiness in the simple course and simple possessions of daily life. The
other cottage, in the midst of an inconceivable, inexpressible beauty,
set on some sloping bank of golden sward, with clear fountains flowing
beside it, and wild flowers, and noble trees, and goodly rocks gathered
round into a perfection as of Paradise, is itself a dark and plague-like
stain in the midst of the gentle landscape. Within a certain distance
of its threshold the ground is foul and cattle-trampled; its timbers are
black with smoke, its garden choked with weeds and nameless refuse, its
chambers empty and joyless, the light and wind gleaming and filtering
through the crannies of their stones. All testifies that to its
inhabitant the world is labor and vanity; that for him neither flowers
bloom, nor birds sing, nor fountains glisten; and that his soul hardly
differs from the grey cloud that coils and dies upon his hills; except
in having no fold of it touched by the sunbeams.
Sec. 6. Is it not strange to reflect, that hardly an evening passes in
London or Paris but one of those cottages is painted for the better
amusement of the fair and idle, and shaded with pasteboard pines by the
scene-shifter; and that good and kind people,--poetically
minded,--delight themselves in imagining the happy life led by peasants
who dwell by Alpine fountains, and kneel to crosses upon peaks of rock?
that nightly we lay down our gold to fashion forth simulacra of
peasants, in gay ribands and white bodices, singing sweet songs, and
bowing gracefully to the picturesque crosses; and all the while the
veritable peasants are kneeling, songlessly, to veritable crosses, in
another temper than the kind and fair audiences dream of, and assuredly
with another kind of answer than is got out of the opera catastrophe; an
answer having reference, it may be, in dim futurity, to those very
audiences themselves? If all the gold that has gone to paint the
simulacra of the cottages, and to put new songs in the mouths of the
simulacra of the peasants, had gone to brighten the existent cottages,
and to put new songs into the mouths of the existent peasants, it might
in the end, perhaps, have turned out better so, not only for the
peasants, but for even the audience. For that form of the False Ideal
has also its correspondent True Ideal,--consisting not in the naked
beauty of statues, nor in the gauze flowers and crackling tinsel of
theatres, but in the clothed and fed beauty of living men, and in the
lights and laughs of happy homes. Night after night, the desire of such
an ideal springs up in every idle human heart; and night after night, as
far as idleness can, we work out this desire in costly lies. We paint
the faded actress, build the lath landscape, feed our benevolence with
fallacies of felicity, and satisfy our righteousness with poetry of
justice. The time will come when, as the heavy-folded curtain falls upon
our own stage of life, we shall begin to comprehend that the justice we
loved was intended to have been done in fact, and not in poetry, and the
felicity we sympathized in, to have been bestowed and not feigned. We
talk much of money's worth, yet perhaps may one day be surprised to find
that what the wise and charitable European public gave to one night's
rehearsal of hypocrisy,--to one hour's pleasant warbling of Linda or
Lucia,--would have filled a whole Alpine Valley with happiness, and
poured the waves of harvest over the famine of many a Lammermoor.[101]
Sec. 7. "Nay," perhaps the reader answers, "it is vain to hope that this
could ever be. The perfect beauty of the ideal must always be
fictitious. It is rational to amuse ourselves with the fair imagination;
but it would be madness to endeavor to put it into practice, in the face
of the ordinances of Nature. Real shepherdesses must always be rude, and
real peasants miserable; suffer us to turn away our gentle eyes from
their coarseness and their pain, and to seek comfort in cultivated
voices and purchased smiles. We cannot hew down the rocks, nor turn the
sands of the torrent into gold."
Sec. 8. This is no answer. Be assured of the great truth--that what is
impossible in reality is ridiculous in fancy. If it is not in the nature
of things that peasants should be gentle and happy, then the
imagination of such peasantry is ridiculous, and to delight in such
imagination wrong; as delight in any kind of falsehood is always. But if
in the nature of things it be possible that among the wildness of hills
the human heart should be refined, and if the comfort of dress, and the
gentleness of language, and the joy of progress in knowledge, and of
variety in thought, are possible to the mountaineer in his true
existence, let us strive to write this true poetry upon the rocks before
we indulge it in our visions, and try whether, among all the fine arts,
one of the finest be not that of painting cheeks with health rather than
rouge.
Sec. 9. "But is such refinement possible? Do not the conditions of the
mountain peasant's life, in the plurality of instances, necessarily
forbid it?"
As bearing sternly on this question, it is necessary to examine one
peculiarity of feeling which manifests itself among the European
nations, so far as I have noticed, irregularly,--appearing sometimes to
be the characteristic of a particular time, sometimes of a particular
race, sometimes of a particular locality, and to involve at once much
that is to be blamed and much that is praiseworthy. I mean the
capability of enduring, or even delighting in, the contemplation of
objects of terror--a sentiment which especially influences the temper of
some groups of mountaineers, and of which it is necessary to examine the
causes, before we can form any conjecture whatever as to the real effect
of mountains on human character.
Sec. 10. For instance, the unhappy alterations which have lately taken
place in the town of Lucerne have still spared two of its ancient
bridges; both of which, being long covered walks, appear, in past times,
to have been to the population of the town what the Mall was to London,
or the Gardens of the Tuileries are to Paris. For the continual
contemplation of those who sauntered from pier to pier, pictures were
painted on the woodwork of the roof. These pictures, in the one bridge,
represent all the important Swiss battles and victories; in the other
they are the well-known series of which Longfellow has made so beautiful
a use in the Golden Legend, the _Dance of Death_.
Imagine the countenances with which a committee, appointed for the
establishment of a new "promenade" in some flourishing modern town,
would receive a proposal to adorn such promenade with pictures of the
Dance of Death.
Sec. 11. Now just so far as the old bridge at Lucerne, with the pure, deep,
and blue water of the Reuss eddying down between its piers, and with the
sweet darkness of green hills, and far-away gleaming of lake and Alps
alternating upon the eye on either side; and the gloomy lesson frowning
in the shadow, as if the deep tone of a passing-bell, overhead, were
mingling for ever with the plashing of the river as it glides by
beneath; just so far, I say, as this differs from the straight and
smooth strip of level dust, between two rows of round-topped acacia
trees, wherein the inhabitants of an English watering-place or French
fortified town take their delight,--so far I believe the life of the old
Lucernois, with all its happy waves of light, and mountain strength of
will, and solemn expectation of eternity, to have differed from the
generality of the lives of those who saunter for their habitual hour up
and down the modern promenade. But the gloom is not always of this noble
kind. As we penetrate farther among the hills we shall find it becoming
very painful. We are walking, perhaps, in a summer afternoon, up the
valley of Zermatt (a German valley), the sun shining brightly on grassy
knolls and through fringes of pines, the goats leaping happily, and the
cattle bells ringing sweetly, and the snowy mountains shining like
heavenly castles far above. We see, a little way off, a small white
chapel, sheltered behind one of the flowery hillocks of mountain turf;
and we approach its little window, thinking to look through it into some
quiet home of prayer; but the window is grated with iron, and open to
the winds, and when we look through it, behold--a heap of white human
bones mouldering into whiter dust!
So also in that same sweet valley, of which I have just been speaking,
between Chamouni and the Valais, at every turn of the pleasant pathway,
where the scent of the thyme lies richest upon its rocks, we shall see a
little cross and shrine set under one of them; and go up to it, hoping
to receive some happy thought of the Redeemer, by whom all these lovely
things were made, and still consist. But when we come near--behold,
beneath the cross, a rude picture of souls tormented in red tongues of
hell fire, and pierced by demons.
Sec. 12. As we pass towards Italy the appearance of this gloom deepens; and
when we descend the southern slope of the Alps we shall find this
bringing forward of the image of Death associated with an endurance of
the most painful aspects of disease, so that conditions of human
suffering, which in any other country would be confined in hospitals,
are permitted to be openly exhibited by the wayside; and with this
exposure of the degraded human form is farther connected an
insensibility to ugliness and imperfection in other things; so that the
ruined wall, neglected garden, and uncleansed chamber, seem to unite in
expressing a gloom of spirit possessing the inhabitants of the whole
land. It does not appear to arise from poverty, nor careless contentment
with little: there is here nothing of Irish recklessness or humor; but
there seems a settled obscurity in the soul,--a chill and plague, as if
risen out of a sepulchre, which partly deadens, partly darkens, the eyes
and hearts of men, and breathes a leprosy of decay through every breeze
and every stone. "Instead of well-set hair, baldness, and burning
instead of beauty."
Nor are definite proofs wanting that the feeling is independent of mere
poverty or indolence. In the most gorgeous and costly palace garden the
statues will be found green with moss, the terraces defaced or broken;
the palace itself partly coated with marble, is left in other places
rough with cementless and jagged brick, its iron balconies bent and
rusted, its pavements overgrown with grass. The more energetic the
effort has been to recover from this state, and to shake off all
appearance of poverty, the more assuredly the curse seems to fasten on
the scene, and the unslaked mortar, and unfinished wall, and ghastly
desolation of incompleteness entangled in decay, strike a deeper
despondency into the beholder.
Sec. 13. The feeling would be also more easily accounted for if it appeared
consistent in its regardlessness of beauty,--if what was _done_ were
altogether as inefficient as what was deserted. But the balcony, though
rusty and broken, is delicate in design, and supported on a nobly carved
slab of marble; the window, though a mere black rent in ragged plaster,
is encircled by a garland of vine and fronted by a thicket of the sharp
leaves and aurora-colored flowers of the oleander; the courtyard,
overgrown by mournful grass, is terminated by a bright fresco of
gardens and fountains; the corpse, borne with the bare face to heaven,
is strewn with flowers; beauty is continually mingled with the shadow of
death.
Sec. 14. So also is a kind of merriment,--not true cheerfulness, neither
careless nor idle jesting, but a determined effort at gaiety, a resolute
laughter, mixed with much satire, grossness, and practical buffoonery,
and, it always seemed to me, void of all comfort or hope,--with this
eminent character in it also, that it is capable of touching with its
bitterness even the most fearful subjects, so that as the love of beauty
retains its tenderness in the presence of death, this love of jest also
retains its boldness, and the skeleton becomes one of the standard
masques of the Italian comedy. When I was in Venice, in 1850, the most
popular piece of the _comic_ opera was "Death and the Cobbler," in which
the point of the plot was the success of a village cobbler as a
physician, in consequence of the appearance of Death to him beside the
bed of every patient who was not to recover; and the most applauded
scene in it was one in which the physician, insolent in success, and
swollen with luxury, was himself taken down into the abode of Death, and
thrown into an agony of terror by being shown lives of men, under the
form of wasting lamps, and his own ready to expire.
Sec. 15. I have also not the smallest doubt that this endurance or
affronting of fearful images is partly associated with indecency, partly
with general fatuity and weakness of mind. The men who applauded loudest
when the actress put on, in an instant, her mask representing a skull,
and when her sharp and clear "Sono la Morte" rang through the theatre,
were just those whose disgusting habits rendered it impossible for women
to pass through some of the principal streets in Venice,--just those who
formed the gaping audience, when a mountebank offered a new quack
medicine on the Riva dei Schiavoni. And, as fearful imagery is
associated with the weakness of fever, so it seems to me that imbecility
and love of terror are connected by a mysterious link throughout the
whole life of man. There is a most touching instance of this in the last
days of Sir Walter Scott, the publication of whose latter works, deeply
to be regretted on many accounts, was yet, perhaps, on the whole,
right, as affording a means of studying the conditions of the decay of
overwrought human intellect in one of the most noble of minds. Among the
many signs of this decay at its uttermost, in Castle Dangerous, not one
of the least notable was the introduction of the knight who bears on his
black armor the likeness of a skeleton.
Sec. 16. The love of horror which is in this manner connected with
feebleness of intellect, is not, however, to be confounded with that
shown by the vulgar in general. The feeling which is calculated upon in
the preparation of pieces full of terror and crime, at our lower
theatres, and which is fed with greater art and elegance in the darker
scenery of the popular French novelists, however morally unhealthy, is
not _unnatural_; it is not the result of an apathy to such horror, but
of a strong desire for excitement in minds coarse and dull, but not
necessarily feeble. The scene of the murder of the jeweller in the
"Count of Monte Cristo," or those with the Squelette in the "Mysteres de
Paris," appeal to instincts which are as common to all mankind as those
of thirst and hunger, and which are only debasing in the exaggerated
condition consequent upon the dulness of other instincts higher than
they. And the persons who, at one period of their life, might take chief
pleasure in such narrations, at another may be brought into a temper of
high tone and acute sensibility. But the love of horror respecting which
we are now inquiring appears to be an unnatural and feeble feeling; it
is not that the person needs excitement, or has any such strong
perceptions as would cause excitement, but he is dead to the horror, and
a strange evil influence guides his feebleness of mind rather to fearful
images than to beautiful ones,--as our disturbed dreams are sometimes
filled with ghastliness which seem not to arise out of any conceivable
association of our waking ideas, but to be a vapor out of the very
chambers of the tomb, to which the mind, in its palsy, has approached.
Sec. 17. But even this imbecile revelling in terror is more comprehensible,
more apparently natural, than the instinct which is found frequently
connected with it, of absolute joy in _ugliness_. In some conditions of
old German art we find the most singular insisting upon what is in all
respects ugly and abortive, or frightful; not with any sense of
sublimity in it, neither in mere foolishness, but with a resolute
choice, such as I can completely account for on no acknowledged
principle of human nature. For in the worst conditions of sensuality
there is yet some perception of the beautiful, so that men utterly
depraved in principle and habits of thought will yet admire beautiful
things and fair faces. But in the temper of which I am now speaking
there is no preference even of the lower forms of loveliness; no effort
at painting fair limbs or passionate faces, no evidence of any human or
natural sensation,--a mere feeding on decay and rolling in slime, not
apparently or conceivably with any pleasure in it, but under some
fearful possession of an evil spirit.
Sec. 18. The most wonderful instance of this feeling at its uttermost which
I remember, is the missal in the British Museum, Harl. MSS. 1892. The
drawings of the principal subjects in it appear to have been made first
in black, by Martin Schoengauer (at all events by some copyist of his
designs), and then another workman has been employed to paint these
drawings over. No words can describe the intensity of the "plague of the
heart" in this man; the reader should examine the manuscript carefully
if he desires to see how low human nature can sink. I had written a
description of one or two of the drawings in order to give some
conception of them to persons not able to refer to the book; but the
mere description so saddened and polluted my pages that I could not
retain it. I will only, therefore, name the principal characteristics
which belong to the workman's mind.
Sec. 19. First, perpetual tampering with death, whether there be occasion
to allude to it or not,--especially insisting upon its associations with
corruption. I do not pain the reader by dwelling on the details
illustrative of this feeling.
Secondly, Delight in dismemberment, dislocation, and distortion of
attitude. Distortion, to some extent, is a universal characteristic of
the German fifteenth and sixteenth century art; that is to say, there is
a general aptitude for painting legs across, or feet twisted round, or
bodies awkwardly bent, rather than anything in a natural position; and
Martin Schoengauer himself exhibits this defect in no small degree. But
here the finishing workman has dislocated nearly every joint which he
has exposed, besides knitting and twisting the muscles into mere knots
of cordage.
[Illustration: FIG. 113.]
What, however, only amounts to dislocation in the limbs of the human
figures, becomes actual dismemberment in the animals. Fig. 113 is a
faithful copy of a tree with two _birds_, one on its bough, and one
above it, seen in the background, behind a soldier's mace, in the
drawing of the Betrayal. In the engraving of this subject, by Schoengauer
himself, the mace does not occur; it has been put in by the finishing
workman, in order to give greater expression of savageness to the boughs
of the tree, which, joined with the spikes of the mace, form one mass of
disorganized angles and thorns, while the birds look partly as if being
torn to pieces, and partly like black spiders.
In the painting itself the sky also is covered with little detached and
bent white strokes, by way of clouds, and the hair of the figures torn
into ragged locks, like wood rent by a cannon shot.
[Illustration: FIG. 114.]
This tendency to dismember and separate everything is one of the eminent
conditions of a mind leaning to vice and ugliness; just as to connect
and harmonize everything is that of a mind leaning to virtue and beauty.
It is shown down to the smallest details; as, for instance, in the
spotted backgrounds, which, instead of being chequered with connected
patterns, as in the noble manuscripts (see Vol. III. Plate 7), are
covered with disorderly dashes and circles executed with a blunt pen or
brush, Fig. 114. And one of the borders is composed of various detached
heads cut off at the neck or shoulders without the slightest endeavor to
conceal or decorate the truncation. All this, of course, is associated
with choice of the most abominable features in the countenance.
Sec. 20. Thirdly, Pure ignorance. Necessarily such a mind as this must be
incapable of perceiving the truth of any form; and therefore together
with the distortion of all studied form is associated the utter negation
or imperfection of that which is less studied.
Fourthly, Delight in blood. I cannot use the words which would be
necessary to describe the second[102] painting of the Scourging, in this
missal. But I may generally notice that the degree in which the peculiar
feeling we are endeavoring to analyze is present in any district of
Roman Catholic countries, may be almost accurately measured by the
quantity of blood represented on the crucifixes.
The person employed to repaint, in the Campo Santo of Pisa, the portion
of Orcagna's pictures representing the Inferno, has furnished a very
notable example of the same feeling; and it must be familiar to all
travellers in countries thoroughly subjected to _modern_ Romanism, a
thing as different from thirteenth-century Romanism as a prison from a
prince's chamber.
Lastly, Utter absence of inventive power. The only ghastliness which
this workman is capable of is that of distortion. In ghastly
_combination_ he is impotent; he cannot even understand it or copy it
when set before him, continually destroying any that exists in the
drawing of Schoengauer.
Sec. 21. Such appear to be the principal component elements in the mind of
the painter of this missal, and it possesses these in complete
abstraction from nearly all others, showing, in deadly purity, the
nature of the venom which in ordinary cases is tempered by counteracting
elements. There are even certain feelings, evil enough themselves, but
more _natural_ than these, of which the slightest mingling would here be
a sort of redemption. Vanity, for instance, would lead to a more
finished execution, and more careful copying from nature, and of course
subdue the ugliness by fidelity; love of pleasure would introduce
occasionally a graceful or sensual form; malice would give some point
and meaning to the bordering grotesques, nay, even insanity might have
given them some inventive horror. But the pure mortiferousness of this
mind, capable neither of patience, fidelity, grace, or wit, in any
place, or from any motive,--this horrible apathy of brain, which cannot
ascend so high as insanity, but is capable only of putrefaction, save us
the task of all analysis, and leave us only that of examining how this
black aqua Tophana mingles with other conditions of mind.
Sec. 22. For I have led the reader over this dark ground, because it was
essential to our determination of the influence of mountains that we
should get what data we could as to the extent in other districts, and
derivation from other causes, of the horror which at first we might have
been led to connect too arbitrarily with hill scenery. And I wish that
my knowledge permitted me to trace it over wider ground, for the
observations hitherto stated leave the question still one of great
difficulty. It might appear to a traveller crossing and recrossing the
Alps between Switzerland and Italy, that the main strength of the evil
lay on the south of the chain, and was attributable to the peculiar
circumstances and character of the Italian nation at this period. But as
he examined the matter farther he would note that in the districts of
Italy generally supposed to be _healthy_, the evidence of it was less,
and that it seemed to gain ground in places exposed to malaria,
centralizing itself in the Val d'Aosta. He would then, perhaps, think it
inconsistent with justice to lay the blame on the mountains, and
transfer his accusation to the marshes, yet would be compelled to admit
that the evil manifested itself most where these marshes were surrounded
by hills. He would next, probably, suppose it produced by the united
effect of hardships, solitude, and unhealthy air; and be disposed to
find fault with the mountains, at least so far as they required painful
climbing and laborious agriculture;--but would again be thrown into
doubt by remembering that one main branch of the feeling,--the love of
ugliness, seemed to belong in a peculiar manner to Northern Germany. If
at all familiar with the art of the North and South, he would perceive
that the _endurance_ of ugliness, which in Italy resulted from languor
or depression (while the mind yet retained some apprehension of the
difference between fairness and deformity, as above noted in Sec. 12), was
not to be confounded with that absence of perception of the Beautiful,
which introduced a general hard-featuredness of figure into all German
and Flemish early art, even when Germany and Flanders were in their
brightest national health and power. And as he followed out in detail
the comparison of all the purest ideals north and south of the Alps, and
perceived the perpetual contrast existing between the angular and bony
sanctities of the one latitude, and the drooping graces and pensive
pieties of the other, he would no longer attribute to the ruggedness, or
miasma, of the mountains the origin of a feeling which showed itself so
strongly in the comfortable streets of Antwerp and Nuremberg, and in the
unweakened and active intellects of Van Eyck and Albert Durer.
Conditions which produce the Mountain gloom.
Sec. 23. As I think over these various difficulties, the following
conclusions seem to me deducible from the data I at present possess. I
am in no wise confident of their accuracy, but they may assist the
reader in pursuing the inquiry farther.
General power of intellect.
I. It seems to me, first, that a fair degree of intellect and
imagination is necessary before this kind of disease is possible. It
does not seize on merely stupid peasantries, but on those which belong
to intellectual races, and in whom the faculties of imagination and the
sensibilities of heart were originally strong and tender. In flat land,
with fresh air, the peasantry may be almost mindless, but not infected
with this gloom.
Romanism.
II. In the second place, I think it is closely connected with the
Romanist religion, and that for several causes.
A. The habitual use of bad art (ill-made dolls and bad pictures), in the
services of religion, naturally blunts the delicacy of the senses, by
requiring reverence to be paid to ugliness, and familiarizing the eye to
it in moments of strong and pure feeling; I do not think we can overrate
the probable evil results of this enforced discordance between the sight
and imagination.
B. The habitually dwelling on the penances, tortures, and martyrdoms of
the Saints, as subjects of admiration and sympathy, together with much
meditation on Purgatorial suffering; rendered almost impossible to
Protestants by the greater fearfulness of such reflections, when the
punishment is supposed eternal.
C. Idleness, and neglect of the proper duties of daily life, during the
large number of holidays in the year, together with want of proper
cleanliness, induced by the idea that comfort and happy purity are less
pleasing to God than discomfort and self-degradation. This insolence
induces much despondency, a larger measure of real misery than is
necessary under the given circumstances of life, and many forms of crime
and disease besides.
D. Superstitious indignation. I do not know if it is as a result of the
combination of these several causes, or if under a separate head, that I
should class a certain strange awe which seems to attach itself to
Romanism like its shadow, differing from the coarser gloom which we have
been examining, in that it can attach itself to minds of the highest
purity and keenness, and, indeed, does so to these more than to inferior
ones. It is an undefinable pensiveness, leading to great severity of
precept, mercilessness in punishment, and dark or discouraging thoughts
of God and man.[103]
It is connected partly with a greater belief in the daily presence and
power of evil spirits than is common in Protestants (except the more
enthusiastic, and _also gloomy_, sects of Puritans), connected also with
a sternness of belief in the condemnatory power and duty of the Church,
leading to persecution, and to less tempered indignation at oppositions
of opinion than characterizes the Protestant mind ordinarily, which,
though waspish and bitter enough, is not liable to the peculiar
heart-burning caused in a Papist by any insult to his Church, or by the
aspect of what he believes to be heresy.
Sec. 24. For all these reasons, I think Romanism is very definitely
connected with the gloom we are examining, so as without fail to produce
some measure of it in all persons who sincerely hold that faith; and if
such effect is ever not to be traced, it is because the Romanism is
checked by infidelity. The atheism or dissipation of a large portion of
the population in crowded capitals prevents this gloom from being felt
in full force; but it resumes its power, in mountain solitudes, over the
minds of the comparatively ignorant and more suffering peasantry; so
that it is not an evil inherent in the hills themselves, but one result
of the continuance in them of that old religious voice of warning,
which, encouraging sacred feeling in general, encourages also whatever
evil may essentially belong to the form of doctrine preached among them.
[Illustration: FIG. 115.]
Disease of body.
Sec. 25. III. It is assuredly connected also with a diseased state of
health. Cheerfulness is just as natural to the heart of a man in strong
health as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom,
there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor,
or erring habits of life. Among mountains, all these various causes are
frequently found in combination. The air is either too bleak, or it is
impure; generally the peasants are exposed to alternations of both.
Great hardship is sustained in various ways, severe labor undergone
during summer, and a sedentary and confined life led during winter.
Where the gloom exists in less elevated districts, as in Germany, I do
not doubt, though I have not historical knowledge enough to prove this,
that it is partly connected with habits of sedentary life, protracted
study, and general derangement of the bodily system in consequence; when
it exists in the gross form exhibited in the manuscript above examined,
I have no doubt it has been fostered by habits of general vice, cruelty,
and dissipation.
[Illustration: FIG. 116.]
Rudeness of life.
Sec. 26. IV. Considered as a natural insensibility to beauty, it is, I
imagine, indicative of a certain want of cultivation in the race among
whom it is found, perhaps without corporal or mental weakness, but
produced by rudeness of life, absence of examples of beautiful art,
defects in the mould of the national features, and such other
adversities, generally belonging to northern nations as opposed to
southern. Here, however, again my historical knowledge is at fault, and
I must leave the reader to follow out the question for himself, if it
interests him. A single example maybe useful to those who have not time
for investigation, in order to show the kind of difference I mean.
Fig. 115 is a St. Peter, from a German fifteenth-century MS., of good
average execution; and Fig. 116 a Madonna, either of the best English,
or second-rate French, work, from a service-book executed in 1290. The
reader will, I doubt not, perceive at once the general grace and
tenderness of sentiment in the lines of the drapery of the last, and
the comparatively delicate type of features. The hardnesses of line,
gesture, and feature in the German example, though two centuries at
least later, are, I think, equally notable. They are accompanied in the
rest of the MS. by an excessive coarseness in choice of ornamental
subject: beneath a female figure typical of the Church, for instance,
there is painted a carcass, just butchered, and hung up with skewers
through the legs.
Sec. 27. V. In many high mountain districts, not only are the inhabitants
likely to be hurt by hardship of life, and retarded by roughness of
manners, but their eyes are familiarized with certain conditions of
ugliness and disorder, produced by the violence of the elements around
them. Once accustomed to look upon these conditions as inevitable in
nature, they may easily transfer the idea of inevitableness and fitness
to the same appearances in their own houses. I said that mountains seem
to have been created to show us the perfection of beauty; but we saw in
the tenth chapter that they also show sometimes the extreme of ugliness:
and to the inhabitants of districts of this kind it is almost necessary
to their daily comfort that they should view without dislike aspects of
desolation which would to others be frightful. And can we blame them,
if, when the rivers are continually loading their fields with heaps of
black slime, and rolling, in time of flood, over the thickets on their
islets, leaving, when the flood is past, every leaf and bough dim with
granite-dust,--never more to be green through all the parching of
summer; when the landslip leaves a ghastly scar among the grassy mounds
of the hill side;--the rocks above are torn by their glaciers into rifts
and wounds that are never healed; and the ice itself blackened league
after league with loose ruin cast upon it as if out of some long and
foul excavation;--can we blame, I say, the peasant, if, beholding these
things daily as necessary appointments in the strong nature around him,
he is careless that the same disorders should appear in his household or
his farm; nor feels discomforted, though his walls should be full of
fissures like the rocks, his furniture covered with dust like the trees,
and his garden like the glacier in unsightliness of trench and
desolation of mound?
Sec. 28. Under these five heads are embraced, as far as I am able to trace
them, the causes of the temper which we are examining; and it will be
seen that only the last is quite peculiar to mountain and marsh
districts, although there is a somewhat greater probability that the
others also may be developed among hills more than in plains. When, by
untoward accident, all are associated, and the conditions described
under the fifth head are very distinct, the result is even sublime in
its painfulness. Of places subjected to such evil influence, none are
quite so characteristic as the town of Sion in the Valais. In the first
place (see Sec. 23), the material on which it works is good; the race of
peasantry being there both handsome and intelligent, as far as they
escape the adverse influences around them; so that on a fete-day or a
Sunday, when the families come down from the hill chalets, where the air
is healthier, many very pretty faces may be seen among the younger
women, set off by somewhat more pains in adjustment of the singular
Valaisan costume than is now usual in other cantons of Switzerland.
Sec. 29. Secondly, it is a bishopric, and quite the centre of Romanism in
Switzerland, all the most definite Romanist doctrines being evidently
believed sincerely, and by a majority of the population; Protestantism
having no hold upon them at all; and republican infidelity, though
active in the councils of the commune, having as yet, so far as I could
see, little influence in the hearts of households. The prominence of the
Valais among Roman Catholic states has always been considerable. The
Cardinal of Sion was, of old, one of the personages most troublesome to
the Venetian ambassadors at the English Court.[104]
Sec. 30. Thirdly, it is in the midst of a marshy valley, pregnant with
various disease; the water either stagnant, or disgorged in wild
torrents charged with earth; the air, in the morning, stagnant also,
hot, close, and infected; in the afternoon, rushing up from the outlet
at Martigny in fitful and fierce whirlwind; one side of the valley in
almost continual shade, the other (it running east and west) scorched by
the southern sun, and sending streams of heat into the air all night
long from its torrid limestones; while less traceable plagues than any
of these bring on the inhabitants, at a certain time of life, violent
affections of goitre, and often, in infancy, cretinism. Agriculture is
attended with the greatest difficulties and despondencies; the land
which the labor of a life has just rendered fruitful is often buried in
an hour; and the carriage of materials, as well as the traversing of
land on the steep hill sides, attended with extraordinary fatigue.
Sec. 31. Owing to these various influences, Sion, the capital of the
district, presents one of the most remarkable scenes for the study of
the particular condition of human feeling at present under consideration
that I know among mountains. It consists of little more than one main
street, winding round the roots of two ridges of crag, and branching, on
the sides towards the rocks, into a few narrow lanes, on the other, into
spaces of waste ground, of which part serve for military exercises, part
are enclosed in an uncertain and vague way; a ditch half-filled up, or
wall half-broken down, seeming to indicate their belonging, or having
been intended to belong, to some of the unfinished houses which are
springing up amidst their weeds. But it is difficult to say, in any part
of the town, what is garden-ground or what is waste; still more, what is
new building and what old. The houses have been for the most part built
roughly of the coarse limestone of the neighboring hills, then coated
with plaster, and painted, in imitation of Palladian palaces, with grey
architraves and pilasters, having draperies from capital to capital.
With this false decoration is curiously contrasted a great deal of
graceful, honest, and original ironwork, in bulging balconies, and
floreted gratings of huge windows, and branching sprays, for any and
every purpose of support or guard. The plaster, with its fresco, has in
most instances dropped away, leaving the houses peeled and scarred;
daubed into uncertain restoration with new mortar, and in the best cases
thus left; but commonly fallen also, more or less, into ruin, and either
roofed over at the first story when the second has fallen, or hopelessly
abandoned;--not pulled down, but left in white and ghastly shells to
crumble into heaps of limestone and dust, a pauper or two still
inhabiting where inhabitation is possible. The lanes wind among these
ruins; the blue sky and mountain grass are seen through the windows of
their rooms and over their partitions, on which old gaudy papers flaunt
in rags: the weeds gather, and the dogs scratch about their
foundations; yet there are no luxuriant weeds, for their ragged leaves
are blanched with lime, crushed under perpetually falling fragments, and
worn away by listless standing of idle feet. There is always mason's
work doing, always some fresh patching and whitening; a dull smell of
mortar, mixed with that of stale foulness of every kind, rises with the
dust, and defiles every current of air; the corners are filled with
accumulations of stones, partly broken, with crusts of cement sticking
to them, and blotches of nitre oozing out of their pores. The lichenous
rocks and sunburnt slopes of grass stretch themselves hither and thither
among the wreck, curiously traversed by stairs and walls and half-cut
paths, that disappear below starkly black arches, and cannot be
followed, or rise in windings round the angles, and in unfenced slopes
along the fronts, of the two masses of rock which bear, one the dark
castle, the other the old church and convent of Sion; beneath, in a
rudely inclosed square at the outskirts of the town, a still more
ancient Lombardic church raises its grey tower, a kind of esplanade
extending between it and the Episcopal palace, and laid out as a plot of
grass, intersected by gravel walks; but the grass, in strange sympathy
with the inhabitants, will not grow _as_ grass, but chokes itself with a
network of grey weeds, quite wonderful in its various expression of
thorny discontent and savageness; the blue flower of the borage, which
mingles with it in quantities, hardly interrupting its character, for
the violent black spots in the centre of its blue takes away the
tenderness of the flower, and it seems to have grown there in some
supernatural mockery of its old renown of being good against melancholy.
The rest of the herbage is chiefly composed of the dwarf mallow, the
wild succory, the wall-rocket, goose-foot, and milfoil;[105] plants,
nearly all of them, jagged in the leaf, broken and dimly clustered in
flower, haunters of waste ground and places of outcast refuse.
Beyond this plot of ground the Episcopal palace, a half-deserted,
barrack-like building, overlooks a _neglected vineyard_, of which the
clusters, black on the under side, snow-white on the other with
lime-dust, gather around them a melancholy hum of flies. Through the
arches of its trelliswork the avenue of the great valley is seen in
descending distance, enlarged with line beyond line of tufted foliage,
languid and rich, degenerating at last into leagues of grey Maremma,
wild with the thorn and the willow; on each side of it, sustaining
themselves in mighty slopes and unbroken reaches of colossal promontory,
the great mountains secede into supremacy through rosy depths of burning
air, and the crescents of snow gleam over their dim summits as--if there
could be Mourning, as once there was War, in Heaven--a line of waning
moons might be set for lamps along the sides of some sepulchral chamber
in the Infinite.
Sec. 32. I know not how far this universal grasp of the sorrowful spirit
might be relaxed if sincere energy were directed to amend the ways of
life of the Valaisan. But it has always appeared to me that there was,
even in more healthy mountain districts, a certain degree of inevitable
melancholy; nor could I ever escape from the feeling that here, where
chiefly the beauty of God's working was manifested to men, warning was
also given, and that to the full, of the enduring of His indignation
against sin.
It seems one of the most cunning and frequent of self-deceptions to turn
the heart away from this warning and refuse to acknowledge anything in
the fair scenes of the natural creation but beneficence. Men in general
lean towards the light, so far as they contemplate such things at all,
most of them passing "by on the other side," either in mere plodding
pursuit of their own work, irrespective of what good or evil is around
them, or else in selfish gloom, or selfish delight, resulting from their
own circumstances at the moment. Of those who give themselves to any
true contemplation, the plurality, being humble, gentle, and kindly
hearted, look only in nature for what is lovely and kind; partly, also,
God gives the disposition to every healthy human mind in some degree to
pass over or even harden itself against evil things, else the suffering
would be too great to be borne; and humble people, with a quiet trust
that everything is for the best, do not fairly represent the facts to
themselves, thinking them none of their business. So, what between
hard-hearted people, thoughtless people, busy people, humble people, and
cheerfully minded people,--giddiness of youth, and preoccupations of
age,--philosophies of faith, and cruelties of folly,--priest and Levite,
masquer and merchantman, all agreeing to keep their own side of the
way,--the evil that God sends to warn us gets to be forgotten, and the
evil that He sends to be mended by us gets left unmended. And then,
because people shut their eyes to the dark indisputableness of the facts
in front of them, their Faith, such as it is, is shaken or uprooted by
every darkness in what is revealed to them. In the present day it is not
easy to find a well-meaning man among our more earnest thinkers, who
will not take upon himself to dispute the whole system of redemption,
because he cannot unravel the mystery of the punishment of sin. But can
he unravel the mystery of the punishment of NO sin? Can he entirely
account for all that happens to a cab-horse? Has he ever looked fairly
at the fate of one of those beasts as it is dying,--measured the work it
has done, and the reward it has got,--put his hand upon the bloody
wounds through which its bones are piercing, and so looked up to Heaven
with an entire understanding of Heaven's ways about the horse? Yet the
horse is a fact--no dream--no revelation among the myrtle trees by
night; and the dust it dies upon, and the dogs that eat it, are
facts;--and yonder happy person, whose the horse was till its knees were
broken over the hurdles, who had an immortal soul to begin with, and
wealth and peace to help forward his immortality; who has also devoted
the powers of his soul, and body, and wealth, and peace, to the spoiling
of houses, the corruption of the innocent, and the oppression of the
poor; and has, at this actual moment of his prosperous life, as many
curses waiting round about him in calm shadow, with their death's eyes
fixed upon him, biding their time, as ever the poor cab-horse had
launched at him in meaningless blasphemies, when his failing feet
stumbled at the stones,--this happy person shall have no stripes,--shall
have only the horse's fate of annihilation; or, if other things are
indeed reserved for him, Heaven's kindness or omnipotence is to be
doubted therefore.
Sec. 33. We cannot reason of these things. But this I know--and this may by
all men be known--that no good or lovely thing exists in this world
without its correspondent darkness; and that the universe presents
itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of
choice, the good and the evil set on the right hand and the left.
And in this mountain gloom, which weighs so strongly upon the human
heart that in all time hitherto, as we have seen, the hill defiles have
been either avoided in terror or inhabited in penance, there is but the
fulfilment of the universal law, that where the beauty and wisdom of the
Divine working are most manifested, there also are manifested most
clearly the terror of God's wrath, and inevitableness of His power.
Nor is this gloom less wonderful so far as it bears witness to the error
of human choice, even when the nature of good and evil is most
definitely set before it. The trees of Paradise were fair; but our first
parents hid themselves from God "in medio ligni Paradisi," in the midst
of the trees of the garden. The hills were ordained for the help of man;
but, instead of raising his eyes to the hills, from whence cometh his
help, he does his idol sacrifice "upon every high hill and under every
green tree." The mountain of the Lord's house is established above the
hills; but Nadab and Abihu shall see under His feet the body of heaven
in his clearness, yet go down to kindle the censer against their own
souls. And so to the end of time it will be; to the end, that cry will
still be heard along the Alpine winds, "Hear, oh ye mountains, the
Lord's controversy!" Still, their gulfs of thawless ice, and unretarded
roar of tormented waves, and deathful falls of fruitless waste, and
unredeemed decay, must be the image of the souls of those who have
chosen the darkness, and whose cry shall be to the mountains to fall on
them, and to the hills to cover them; and still, to the end of time, the
clear waters of the unfailing springs, and the white pasture-lilies in
their clothed multitude, and the abiding of the burning peaks in their
nearness to the opened heaven, shall be the types, and the blessings, of
those who have chosen light, and of whom it is written, "The mountains
shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, righteousness."
FOOTNOTES
[101] As I was correcting this sheet for press, the morning paper
containing the account of the burning of Covent Garden theatre
furnished the following financial statements, bearing somewhat on
the matter in hand; namely,
L
That the interior fittings of the theatre, in 1846, cost 40,000
That it was opened on the 6th of April, 1847; and }
that in 1848 the loss upon it was } 34,756
in 1849 " " 25,455
------
100,211
------
L
And that in one year the vocal department cost 33,349
the ballet " " 8,105
the orchestra " " 10,048
------
51,502
------
Mr. Albano afterwards corrected this statement, substituting 27,000
for 40,000: and perhaps the other sums may also have been
exaggerated, but I leave the reader to consider what an annual
expenditure of from 30,000_l._ to 50,000_l._ might effect in
practical idealism in general, whether in Swiss valleys or
elsewhere. I am not one of those who regard all theatrical
entertainment as wrong or harmful. I only regret to see our theatres
so conducted as to involve an expense which is worse than useless,
in leading our audiences to look for mere stage effect, instead of
good acting, good singing, or good sense. If we really loved music,
or the drama, we should be content to hear well-managed voices, and
see finished acting, without paying five or six thousand pounds to
dress the songsters or decorate the stage. Simple but well-chosen
dresses, and quiet landscape exquisitely painted, would have far
more effect on the feelings of any sensible audience than the tinsel
and extravagance of our common scenery; and our actors and actresses
must have little respect for their own powers, if they think that
dignity of gesture is dependent on the flash of jewellery, or the
pathos of accents connected with the costliness of silk. Perfect
execution of music by a limited orchestra is far more delightful,
and far less fatiguing, than the irregular roar and hum of
multitudinous mediocrity; and finished instrumentation by an
adequate number of performers, exquisite acting, and sweetest
singing, might be secured for the public at a fourth part of the
cost now spent on operatic absurdities. There is no occasion
whatever for decoration of the house: it is, on the contrary, the
extreme of vulgarity. No person of good taste ever goes to a theatre
to look at the fronts of the boxes. Comfortable and roomy seats,
perfect cleanliness, decent and fitting curtains and other
furniture, of good stuff, but neither costly nor tawdry, and
convenient, but not dazzling, light, are the proper requirements in
the furnishing of an opera-house. As for the persons who go there to
look at each other--to show their dresses--to yawn away waste
hours--to obtain a maximum of momentary excitement--or to say they
were there, at next day's three-o'clock breakfast (and it is only
for such persons that glare, cost, and noise are necessary), I
commend to their consideration, or at least to such consideration as
is possible to their capacities, the suggestions in the text. But to
the true lovers of the drama I would submit, as another subject of
inquiry, whether they ought not to separate themselves from the mob,
and provide, for their own modest, quiet, and guiltless
entertainment, the truth of heartfelt impersonation, and the melody
of the unforced and delicate voice, without extravagance of adjunct,
unhealthy lateness of hours, or appeal to degraded passions. Such
entertainment might be obtained at infinitely smaller cost, and yet
at a price which would secure honorable and permanent remuneration
to every performer; and I am mistaken in my notion of the best
actors, if they would not rather play at a house where people went
to hear and to feel, than weary themselves, even for four times the
pay, before an audience insulting in its listlessness and ignorant
in its applause.
[102] There are, unusually, two paintings of this subject, the first
representing the preparations for the scourging, the second its
close.
[103] This character has, I think, been traced in the various
writings of Mrs. Sherwood better than in any others; she has a
peculiar art of making it felt and of striking the deep tone of it
as from a passing-bell, contrasting it with the most cheerful,
lovely, and sincere conditions of Protestantism.
[104] See "Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII." (Dispatches of
the Venetian ambassador Giustinian, translated by Mr. Rawdon Brown,)
1854.
[105] Malva rotundifolia, Cichorium Intybus, Sisymbrium tenuifolium,
Chenopodium urbicum, Achillea Millefolium.