THE MOUNTAIN GLORY.
Sec. 1. I have dwelt, in the foregoing chapter, on the sadness of the hills
with the greater insistance that I feared my own excessive love for them
might lead me into too favorable interpretation of their influences over
the human heart; or, at least, that the reader might accuse me of fond
prejudice, in the conclusions to which, finally, I desire to lead him
concerning them. For, to myself, mountains are the beginning and the end
of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape
that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up; and though I can
look with happy admiration at the lowland flowers, and woods, and open
skies, the happiness is tranquil and cold, like that of examining
detached flowers in a conservatory, or reading a pleasant book; and if
the scenery be resolutely level, insisting upon the declaration of its
own flatness in all the detail of it, as in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or
Central Lombardy, it appears to me like a prison, and I cannot long
endure it. But the slightest rise and fall in the road,--a mossy bank at
the side of a crag of chalk, with brambles at its brow, overhanging
it,--a ripple over three or four stones in the stream by the
bridge,--above all, a wild bit of ferny ground under a fir or two,
looking as if, possibly, one might see a hill if one got to the other
side of the trees, will instantly give me intense delight, because the
shadow, or the hope, of the hills is in them.
Sec. 2. And thus, although there are few districts of Northern Europe,
however apparently dull or tame, in which I cannot find pleasure, though
the whole of Northern France (except Champagne), dull as it seems to
most travellers, is to me a perpetual Paradise; and, putting
Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, and one or two such other perfectly flat
districts aside, there is not an English county which I should not find
entertainment in exploring the cross-roads of, foot by foot; yet all my
best enjoyment would be owing to the imagination of the hills, coloring,
with their far-away memories, every lowland stone and herb. The pleasant
French coteau, green in the sunshine, delights me, either by what real
mountain character it has in itself (for in extent and succession of
promontory the flanks of the French valleys have quite the sublimity of
true mountain distances), or by its broken ground and rugged steps among
the vines, and rise of the leafage above, against the blue sky, as it
might rise at Vevay or Como. There is not a wave of the Seine but is
associated in my mind with the first rise of the sandstones and forest
pines of Fontainebleau; and with the hope of the Alps, as one leaves
Paris with the horses' heads to the south-west, the morning sun,
flashing on the bright waves at Charenton. If there be _no_ hope or
association of this kind, and if I cannot deceive myself into fancying
that perhaps at the next rise of the road there may be seen the film of
a blue hill in the gleam of sky at the horizon, the landscape, however
beautiful, produces in me even a kind of sickness and pain; and the
whole view from Richmond Hill or Windsor Terrace,--nay, the gardens of
Alcinous, with their perpetual summer,--or of the Hesperides (if they
were flat, and not close to Atlas), golden apples and all--I would give
away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two
leaves of lady-fern.[106]
Sec. 3. I know that this is in great part idiosyncrasy; and that I must not
trust to my own feelings, in this respect, as representative of the
modern landscape instinct; yet I know it is not idiosyncrasy, in so far
as there may be proved to be indeed an increase of the absolute beauty
of all scenery in exact proportion to its mountainous character,
providing that character be _healthily_ mountainous. I do not mean to
take the Col de Bon Homme as representative of hills, any more than I
would take Romney Marsh as representative of plains; but putting
Leicestershire or Staffordshire fairly beside Westmoreland, and Lombardy
or Champagne fairly beside the Pays de Vaud or the Canton Berne, I find
the increase in the calculable sum of elements of beauty to be steadily
in proportion to the increase of mountainous character; and that the
best image which the world can give of Paradise is in the slope of the
meadows, orchards, and corn-fields on the sides of a great Alp, with its
purple rocks and eternal snows above; this excellence not being in any
wise a matter referable to feeling, or individual preferences, but
demonstrable by calm enumeration of the number of lovely colors on the
rocks, the varied grouping of the trees, and quantity of noble incidents
in stream, crag, or cloud, presented to the eye at any given moment.
Sec. 4. For consider, first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape color by the introductions of purple, violet, and deep
ultramarine blue, which we owe to mountains. In an ordinary lowland
landscape we have the blue of the sky; the green of grass, which I will
suppose (and this is an unnecessary concession to the lowlands) entirely
fresh and bright; the green of trees; and certain elements of purple,
far more rich and beautiful than we generally should think, in their
bark and shadows (bare hedges and thickets, or tops of trees, in subdued
afternoon sunshine, are nearly perfect purple, and of an exquisite
tone), as well as in ploughed fields, and dark ground in general. But
among mountains, in _addition_ to all this, large unbroken spaces of
pure violet and purple are introduced in their distances; and even near,
by films of cloud passing over the darkness of ravines or forests, blues
are produced of the most subtle tenderness; these azures and
purples[107] passing into rose-color of otherwise wholly unattainable
delicacy among the upper summits, the blue of the sky being at the same
time purer and deeper than in the plains. Nay, in some sense, a person
who has never seen the rose-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue
mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what
_tenderness_ in color means at all; _bright_ tenderness he may, indeed,
see in the sky or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the far-away
hill-purples he cannot conceive.
Sec. 5. Together with this great source of preeminence in _mass_ of color,
we have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and
enamel-work of the color-jewellery on every stone; and that of the
continual variety in species of flower; most of the mountain flowers
being, besides, separately lovelier than the lowland ones. The wood
hyacinth and wild rose are, indeed, the only _supreme_ flowers that the
lowlands can generally show; and the wild rose is also a mountaineer,
and more fragrant in the hills, while the wood hyacinth, or grape
hyacinth, at its best cannot match even the dark bell-gentian, leaving
the light-blue star-gentian in its uncontested queenliness, and the
Alpine rose and Highland heather wholly without similitude. The violet,
lily of the valley, crocus, and wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable
partly by the plains as well as the hills; but the large orange lily and
narcissus I have never seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite
oxalis is preeminently a mountaineer.[108]
Sec. 6. To this supremacy in mosses and flowers we have next to add an
inestimable gain in the continual presence and power of water. Neither
in its clearness, its color, its fantasy of motion, its calmness of
space, depth, and reflection, or its wrath, can water be conceived by a
lowlander, out of sight of sea. A sea wave is far grander than any
torrent--but of the sea and its influences we are not now speaking; and
the sea itself, though it _can_ be clear, is never calm, among our
shores, in the sense that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea seems
only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep, and to dream. Out of sight of
the ocean, a lowlander cannot be considered ever to have seen water at
all. The mantling of the pools in the rock shadows, with the golden
flakes of light sinking down through them like falling leaves, the
ringing of the thin currents among the shallows, the flash and the cloud
of the cascade, the earthquake and foam-fire of the cataract, the long
lines of alternate mirror and mist that lull the imagery of the hills
reversed in the blue of morning,--all these things belong to those hills
as their undivided inheritance.
Sec. 7. To this supremacy in wave and stream is joined a no less manifest
preeminence in the character of trees. It is possible among plains, in
the species of trees which properly belong to them, the poplars of
Amiens, for instance, to obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which, as
I said, is a better help to the study of gracefulness, as such, than any
of the wilder groupings of the hills; so also, there are certain
conditions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in the park and avenue,
rarely rivalled in their way among mountains; and yet the mountain
superiority in foliage is, on the whole, nearly as complete as it is in
water; for exactly as there are some expressions in the broad reaches of
a navigable lowland river, such as the Loire or Thames, not, in their
way, to be matched among the rock rivers, and yet for all that a
lowlander cannot be said to have truly seen the element of water at all;
so even in his richest parks and avenues he cannot be said to have truly
seen trees. For the resources of trees are not developed until they have
difficulty to contend with; neither their tenderness of brotherly love
and harmony, till they are forced to choose their ways of various life
where there is contracted room for them, talking to each other with
their restrained branches. The various action of trees rooting
themselves in inhospitable rocks, stooping to look into ravines, hiding
from the search of glacier winds, reaching forth to the rays of rare
sunshine, crowding down together to drink at sweetest streams, climbing
hand in hand among the difficult slopes, opening in sudden dances round
the mossy knolls, gathering into companies at rest among the fragrant
fields, gliding in grave procession over the heavenward
ridges,--nothing of this can be conceived among the unvexed and unvaried
felicities of the lowland forest: while to all these direct sources of
greater beauty are added, first the power of redundance,--the mere
quantity of foliage visible in the folds and on the promontories of a
single Alp being greater than that of an entire lowland landscape
(unless a view from some cathedral tower); and to this charm of
redundance, that of clearer _visibility_,--tree after tree being
constantly shown in successive height, one behind another, instead of
the mere tops and flanks of masses, as in the plains; and the forms of
multitudes of them continually defined against the clear sky, near and
above, or against white clouds entangled among their branches, instead
of being confused in dimness of distance.
Sec. 8. Finally, to this supremacy in foliage we have to add the still less
questionable supremacy in clouds. There is no effect of sky possible in
the lowlands which may not in equal perfection be seen among the hills;
but there are effects by tens of thousands, for ever invisible and
inconceivable to the inhabitant of the plains, manifested among the
hills in the course of one day. The mere power of familiarity with the
clouds, of walking with them and above them, alters and renders clear
our whole conception of the baseless architecture of the sky; and for
the beauty of it, there is more in a single wreath of early cloud,
pacing its way up an avenue of pines, or pausing among the points of
their fringes, than in all the white heaps that fill the arched sky of
the plains from one horizon to the other. And of the nobler cloud
manifestations,--the breaking of their troublous seas against the crags,
their black spray sparkling with lightning; or the going forth of the
morning along their pavements of moving marble, level-laid between dome
and dome of snow;--of these things there can be as little imagination or
understanding in an inhabitant of the plains as of the scenery of
another planet than his own.
Sec. 9. And, observe, all these superiorities are matters plainly
measurable and calculable, not in any wise to be referred to estimate of
_sensation_. Of the grandeur or expression of the hills I have not
spoken; how far they are great, or strong, or terrible, I do not for the
moment consider, because vastness, and strength, and terror, are not to
all minds subjects of desired contemplation. It may make no difference
to some men whether a natural object be large or small, whether it be
strong or feeble. But loveliness of color, perfectness of form,
endlessness of change, wonderfulness of structure, are precious to all
undiseased human minds; and the superiority of the mountains in all
these things to the lowland is, I repeat, as measurable as the richness
of a painted window matched with a white one, or the wealth of a museum
compared with that of a simply furnished chamber. They seem to have been
built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full
of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple
lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious
in holiness for the worshipper. And of these great cathedrals of the
earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of stream
and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the
continual stars,--of these, as we have seen, it was written, nor long
ago, by one of the best of the poor human race for whom they were built,
wondering in himself for whom their Creator _could_ have made them, and
thinking to have entirely discerned the Divine intent in them--"They are
inhabited by the Beasts."
Sec. 10. Was it then indeed thus with us, and so lately? Had mankind
offered no worship in their mountain churches? Was all that granite
sculpture and floral painting done by the angels in vain?
Not so. It will need no prolonged thought to convince us that in the
hills the purposes of their Maker have indeed been accomplished in such
measure as, through the sin or folly of men, He ever permits them to be
accomplished. It may not seem, from the general language held concerning
them, or from any directly traceable results, that mountains have had
serious influence on human intellect; but it will not, I think, be
difficult to show that their occult influence has been both constant and
essential to the progress of the race.
Sec. 11. Consider, first, whether we can justly refuse to attribute to
their mountain scenery some share in giving the Greeks and Italians
their intellectual lead among the nations of Europe.
There is not a single spot of land in either of these countries from
which mountains are not discernible; almost always they form the
principal feature of the scenery. The mountain outlines seen from
Sparta, Corinth, Athens, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Verona, are of consummate
beauty; and whatever dislike or contempt may be traceable in the mind of
the Greeks for mountain ruggedness, their placing the shrine of Apollo
under the cliffs of Delphi, and his throne upon Parnassus, was a
testimony to all succeeding time that they themselves attributed the
best part of their intellectual inspiration to the power of the hills.
Nor would it be difficult to show that every great writer of either of
those nations, however little definite regard he might manifest for the
landscape of his country, had been mentally formed and disciplined by
it, so that even such enjoyment as Homer's of the ploughed ground and
poplar groves owes its intensity and delicacy to the excitement of the
imagination produced, without his own consciousness, by other and
grander features of the scenery to which he had been accustomed from a
child; and differs in every respect from the tranquil, vegetative, and
prosaic affection with which the same ploughed land and poplars would be
regarded by a native of the Netherlands.
The vague expression which I have just used--"intellectual lead," may be
expanded into four great heads; lead in Religion, Art and Literature,
War, and Social Economy.
Sec. 12. It will be right to examine our subject eventually under these
four heads; but I shall limit myself, for the present, to some
consideration of the first two, for a reason presently to be stated.
1st. Influence of mountains on religious temperament.
I. We have before had occasion to note the peculiar awe with which
mountains were regarded in the middle ages, as bearing continual witness
against the frivolity or luxury of the world. Though the sense of this
influence of theirs is perhaps more clearly expressed by the mediaeval
Christians than by any other sect of religionists, the influence itself
has been constant in all time. Mountains have always possessed the
power, first, of exciting religious enthusiasm; secondly, of purifying
religious faith. These two operations are partly contrary to one
another: for the faith of enthusiasm is apt to be _im_pure, and the
mountains, by exciting morbid conditions of the imagination, have
caused in great part the legendary and romantic forms of belief; on the
other hand, by fostering simplicity of life and dignity of morals, they
have purified by action what they falsified by imagination. But, even in
their first and most dangerous influence, it is not the mountains that
are to blame, but the human heart. While we mourn over the fictitious
shape given to the religious visions of the anchorite, we may envy the
sincerity and the depth of the emotion from which they spring: in the
deep feeling, we have to acknowledge the solemn influences of the hills;
but for the erring modes or forms of thought, it is human wilfulness,
sin, and false teaching, that are answerable. We are not to deny the
nobleness of the imagination because its direction is illegitimate, nor
the pathos of the legend because its circumstances are groundless; the
ardor and abstraction of the spiritual life are to be honored in
themselves, though the one may be misguided and the other deceived; and
the deserts of Osma, Assisi, and Monte Viso are still to be thanked for
the zeal they gave, or guarded, whether we find it in St. Francis and
St. Dominic, or in those whom God's hand hid from them in the clefts of
the rocks.
Sec. 13. And, in fact, much of the apparently harmful influence of hills on
the religion of the world is nothing else than their general gift of
exciting the poetical and inventive faculties, in peculiarly solemn
tones of mind. Their terror leads into devotional casts of thought;
their beauty and wildness prompt the invention at the same time; and
where the mind is not gifted with stern reasoning powers, or protected
by purity of teaching, it is sure to mingle the invention with its
creed, and the vision with its prayer. Strictly speaking, we ought to
consider the superstitions of the hills, universally, as a form of
poetry; regretting only that men have not yet learned how to distinguish
poetry from well-founded faith.
And if we do this, and enable ourselves thus to review, without carping
or sneering, the shapes of solemn imagination which have arisen among
the inhabitants of Europe, we shall find, on the one hand, the mountains
of Greece and Italy forming all the loveliest dreams, first of the
Pagan, then of the Christian mythology; on the other, those of
Scandinavia to be the first sources of whatever mental (as well as
military) power was brought by the Normans into Southern Europe.
Normandy itself is to all intents and purposes a hill country; composed,
over large extents, of granite and basalt, often rugged and covered with
heather on the summits, and traversed by beautiful and singular dells,
at once soft and secluded, fruitful and wild. We have thus one branch of
the Northern religious imagination rising among the Scandinavian fiords,
tempered in France by various encounters with elements of Arabian,
Italian, Provencal, or other Southern poetry, and then reacting upon
Southern England; while other forms of the same rude religious
imagination, resting like clouds upon the mountains of Scotland and
Wales, met and mingled with the Norman Christianity, retaining even to
the latest times some dark color of superstition, but giving all its
poetical and military pathos to Scottish poetry, and a peculiar
sternness and wildness of tone to the Reformed faith, in its
manifestations among the Scottish hills.
Sec. 14. It is on less disputable ground that I may claim the reader's
gratitude to the mountains, as having been the centres not only of
imaginative energy, but of purity both in doctrine and practice. The
enthusiasm of the persecuted Covenanter, and his variously modified
claims to miraculous protection or prophetic inspiration, hold exactly
the same relation to the smooth proprieties of lowland Protestantism,
that the demon-combats, fastings, visions, and miracles of the mountain
monk or anchorite hold to the wealth and worldliness of the Vatican. It
might indeed happen, whether at Canterbury, Rheims, or Rome, that a good
bishop should occasionally grasp the crozier; and a vast amount of
prudent, educated, and admirable piety is to be found among the ranks of
the lowland clergy. But still the large aspect of the matter is always,
among Protestants, that formalism, respectability, orthodoxy, caution,
and propriety, live by the slow stream that encircles the lowland abbey
or cathedral; and that enthusiasm, poverty, vital faith, and audacity of
conduct, characterize the pastor dwelling by the torrent side. In like
manner, taking the large aspects of Romanism, we see that its worst
corruptions, its cunning, its worldliness, and its permission of crime,
are traceable for the most part to lowland prelacy; but its
self-denials, its obediences, humilities, sincere claims to miraculous
power, and faithful discharges of pastoral duty, are traceable chiefly
to its anchorites and mountain clergy.
Sec. 15. It is true that the "Lady Poverty" of St. Francis may share the
influence of the hills in the formation of character; and that, since
the clergy who have little interest at court or conclave are those who
in general will be driven to undertake the hill services, we must often
attribute to enforced simplicity of life, or natural bitterness of
feeling, some of the tones of thought which we might otherwise have
ascribed to the influence of mountain scenery. Such causes, however,
affect the lowland as much as the highland religious character in all
districts far from cities; but they do not produce the same effects. The
curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life, or
painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor
or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance,
rarely the prophetic vision or the martyr's passion. Among the fair
arable lands of England and Belgium extends an orthodox Protestantism or
Catholicism; prosperous, creditable, and drowsy; but it is among the
purple moors of the highland border, the ravines of Mont Genevre, and
the crags of the Tyrol, that we shall find the simplest Evangelical
faith, and the purest Romanist practice.
Sec. 16. Of course the inquiry into this branch of the hill influence is
partly complicated with that into its operation on domestic habits and
personal character, of which hereafter: but there is one curious witness
borne to the general truth of the foregone conclusions, by an apparently
slight, yet very significant circumstance in art. We have seen, in the
preceding volume, how difficult it was sometimes to distinguish between
honest painters, who truly chose to paint sacred subjects because they
loved them, and the affected painters, who took sacred subjects for
their own pride's sake, or for merely artistical delight. Amongst other
means of arriving at a conclusion in this matter, there is one helpful
test which may be applied to their various works, almost as easily and
certainly as a foot-rule could be used to measure their size; and which
remains an available test down to the date of the rise of the Claudesque
landscape schools. Nearly all the genuine religious painters use _steep
mountain distances_. All the merely artistical ones, or those of
intermediate temper, in proportion as they lose the religious element,
use flat or simply architectural distances. Of course the law is liable
to many exceptions, chiefly dependent on the place of birth and early
associations of painters; but its force is, I think, strongly shown in
this;--that, though the Flemish painters never showed any disposition to
paint, _for its own sake_, other scenery than of their own land (compare
Vol. III. Chap. XIII. Sec. 20), the sincerely religious ones continually
used Alpine distances, bright with snow. In like manner Giotto,
Perugino, Angelico, the young Raphael, and John Bellini, always, if,
with any fitness to their subject, they can introduce them, use craggy
or blue mountain distances, and this with definite expression of love
towards them; Leonardo, conventionally, as feeling they were necessary
for his sacred subjects, while yet his science and idealism had
destroyed his mountain sincerity; Michael Angelo, wholly an artist, and
Raphael in later years, show no love of mountains whatever, while the
relative depths of feeling in Tintoret, Titian, and Veronese, are
precisely measurable by their affection to mountains. Tintoret, though
born in Venice, yet, because capable of the greatest reaches of feeling,
is the first of the old painters who ever drew mountain detail
rightly:[109] Titian, though born in Cadore, and recurring to it
constantly, yet being more worldly-minded, uses his hills somewhat more
conventionally, though, still in his most deeply felt pictures, such as
the St. Jerome, in the Brera, giving to the rocks and forests a
consummate nobleness; and Veronese, in his gay grasp of the outside
aspects of the world, contentedly includes his philosophy within
porticos and pillars, or at the best overshadows it with a few sprays of
laurel.
Sec. 17. The test fails, however, utterly, when applied to the later or
transitional landscape schools, mountains being there introduced in mere
wanton savageness by Salvator, or vague conventionalism by Claude,
Berghem, and hundreds more. This need not, however, in the least
invalidate our general conclusions: we surely know already that it is
possible to misuse the best gifts, and pervert the purest feelings; nor
need we doubt the real purpose, or, on honest hearts, the real effect,
of mountains, because various institutions have been founded among them
by the banditti of Calabria, as well as by St. Bruno.
Sec. 18. I cannot leave this part of my subject without recording a slight
incident which happened to myself, singularly illustrative of the
religious character of the Alpine peasant when under favorable
circumstances of teaching. I was coming down one evening from the
Rochers de Naye, above Montreux, having been at work among the limestone
rocks, where I could get no water, and both weary and thirsty. Coming to
a spring at a turn of the path, conducted, as usual, by the herdsmen
into a hollowed pine-trunk I stooped to it and drank deeply: as I raised
my head, drawing breath heavily, some one behind me said, "Celui qui
boira de cette eau-ci, aura encore soif." I turned, not understanding
for the moment what was meant; and saw one of the hill-peasants,
probably returning to his chalet from the market-place at Vevay or
Villeneuve. As I looked at him with an uncomprehending expression, he
went on with the verse:--"Mais celui qui boira de l'eau que je lui
donnerai, n'aura jamais soif."
I doubt if this would have been thought of, or said, by even the most
intelligent lowland peasant. The thought might have occurred to him, but
the frankness of address, and expectation of being at once understood
without a word of preparative explanation, as if the language of the
Bible were familiar to all men, mark, I think, the mountaineer.
2nd. Influence of mountain on artistical power.
Sec. 19. We were next to examine the influence of hills on the artistical
power of the human race. Which power, so far as it depends on the
imagination, must evidently be fostered by the same influences which
give vitality to religious vision. But, so far as artistical
productiveness and skill are concerned, it is evident that the
mountaineer is at a radical and insurmountable disadvantage. The
strength of his character depends upon the absence of luxury; but it is
eminently by luxury that art is supported. We are not, therefore, to
deny the mountain influence, because we do not find finished frescoes on
the timbers of chalets or delicate bas-reliefs on the bastion which
protects the mountain church from the avalanche; but to consider how far
the tone of mind shown by the artists laboring in the lowland is
dependent for its intensity on the distant influences of the hills,
whether during the childhood of those born among them, or under the
casual contemplation of men advanced in life.
Sec. 20. Glancing broadly over the strength of the mediaeval--that is to
say, of the peculiar and energetic--art of Europe, so as to discern,
through the clear flowing of its waves over France, Italy, and England,
the places in the pool where the fountain-heads are, and where the sand
dances, I should first point to Normandy and Tuscany. From the cathedral
of Pisa, and the sculpture of the Pisans, the course is straight to
Giotto, Angelico, and Raphael,--to Orcagna and Michael Angelo;--the
Venetian school, in many respects mightier, being, nevertheless,
subsequent and derivative. From the cathedrals of Caen and Coutances the
course is straight to the Gothic of Chartres and Notre Dame of Paris,
and thence forward to all French and English noble art, whether
ecclesiastical or domestic. Now the mountain scenery about Pisa is
precisely the most beautiful that surrounds any great Italian city,
owing to the wonderful outlines of the peaks of Carrara. Milan and
Verona have indeed fine ranges in sight, but rising farther in the
distance, and therefore not so directly affecting the popular mind. The
Norman imagination, as already noticed, is Scandinavian in origin, and
fostered by the lovely granite scenery of Normandy itself. But there is,
nevertheless, this great difference between French art and Italian, that
the French paused strangely at a certain point, as the Norman hills are
truncated at the summits, while the Italian rose steadily to a vertex,
as the Carrara hills to their crests. Let us observe this a little more
in detail.
Sec. 21. The sculpture of the Pisans was taken up and carried into various
perfection by the Lucchese, Pistojans, Sienese, and Florentines. All
these are inhabitants of truly mountain cities, Florence being as
completely among the hills as Inspruck is, only the hills have softer
outlines. Those around Pistoja and Lucca are in a high degree majestic.
Giotto was born and bred among these hills. Angelico lived upon their
slope. The mountain towns of Perugia and Urbino furnish the only
important branches of correlative art; for Leonardo, however
individually great, originated no new school; he only carried the
_executive_ delicacy of landscape detail so far beyond other painters
as to necessitate my naming the fifteenth-century manner of landscape
after him, though he did not invent it; and although the school of Milan
is distinguished by several peculiarities, and definitely enough
separable from the other schools of Italy, all its peculiarities are
mannerisms, not inventions.
Correggio, indeed, created a new school, though he himself is almost its
only master. I have given in the preceding volume the mountain outline
seen from Parma. But the only entirely great group of painters after the
Tuscans are the Venetians, and they are headed by Titian and Tintoret,
on whom we have noticed the influence of hills already; and although we
cannot trace it in Paul Veronese, I will not quit the mountain claim
upon him; for I believe all that gay and gladdening strength of his was
fed by the breezes of the hills of Garda, and brightened by the swift
glancing of the waves of the Adige.[110]
Sec. 22. Observe, however, before going farther, of all the painters we
have named, the one who obtains most executive perfection is Leonardo,
who on the whole lived at the greatest distance from the hills. The two
who have most feeling are Giotto and Angelico, both hill-bred. And
generally, I believe, we shall find that the hill country gives its
inventive depths of feeling to art, as in the work of Orcagna, Perugino,
and Angelico, and the plain country executive neatness. The executive
precision is joined with feeling in Leonardo, who saw the Alps in the
distance; it is totally unaccompanied by feeling in the pure Dutch
schools, or schools of the dead flats.
Sec. 23. I do not know if any writer on art, or on the development of
national mind, has given his attention to what seems to me one of the
most singular phenomena in the history of Europe,--the pause of the
English and French in pictorial art after the fourteenth century. From
the days of Henry III. to those of Elizabeth, and of Louis IX. to those
of Louis XIV., the general intellect of the two nations was steadily on
the increase. But their art intellect was as steadily retrograde. The
only art work that France and England have done nobly is that which is
centralized by the Cathedral of Lincoln, and the Sainte Chapelle. We
had at that time (_we_--French and English--but the French first) the
incontestable lead among European nations; no thirteenth-century work in
Italy is comparable for majesty of conception, or wealth of imaginative
detail, to the cathedrals of Chartres, Rheims, Rouen, Amiens, Lincoln,
Peterborough, Wells, or Lichfield. But every hour of the fourteenth
century saw French and English art in precipitate decline, Italian in
steady ascent; and by the time that painting and sculpture had developed
themselves in an approximated perfection, in the work of Ghirlandajo and
Mino of Fesole, we had in France and England no workman, in any art,
deserving a workman's name; nothing but skilful masons, with more or
less love of the picturesque, and redundance of undisciplined
imagination, flaming itself away in wild and rich traceries, and crowded
bosses of grotesque figure sculpture, and expiring at last in barbarous
imitation of the perfected skill and erring choice of Renaissance Italy.
Painting could not decline, for it had not reached any eminence; the
exquisite arts of illumination and glass design had led to no effective
results in other materials; they themselves, incapable of any higher
perfection than they had reached in the thirteenth century, perished in
the vain endeavor to emulate pictorial excellence, bad _drawing_ being
substituted, in books, for lovely _writing_, and opaque precision, in
glass, for transparent power; nor in any single department of exertion
did artists arise of such calibre or class as any of the great Italians;
and yet all the while, in literature, _we_ were gradually and steadily
advancing in power up to the time of Shakespere; the Italians, on the
contrary, not advancing after the time of Dante.
Sec. 24. Of course I have no space here to pursue a question such as this;
but I may state my belief that _one_ of the conditions involved in it
was the mountain influence of Italian scenery, inducing a disposition to
such indolent or enthusiastic reverie, as could only express itself in
the visions of art; while the comparatively flat scenery and severer
climate of England and France, fostering less enthusiasm, and urging to
more exertion, brought about a practical and rational temperament,
progressive in policy, science, and literature, but wholly retrograde in
art; that is to say (for great art may be properly so defined), in the
Art of _Dreaming_.
3rd. Influence of mountains on literary power.
Sec. 25. III. In admitting this, we seem to involve the supposition that
mountain influence is either unfavorable or inessential to literary
power; but for this also the mountain influence is still necessary, only
in a subordinate degree. It is true, indeed, that the Avon is no
mountain torrent, and that the hills round the vale of Stratford are not
sublime; true, moreover, that the cantons Berne or Uri have never yet,
so far as I know, produced a great poet; but neither, on the other hand,
has Antwerp or Amsterdam. And, I believe, the natural scenery which will
be found, on the whole, productive of most literary intellect is that
mingled of hill and plain, as all available light is of flame and
darkness; the flame being the active element, and the darkness the
tempering one.
Sec. 26. In noting such evidence as bears upon this subject, the reader
must always remember that the mountains are at an unfair disadvantage,
in being much _out of the way_ of the masses of men employed in
intellectual pursuits. The position of a city is dictated by military
necessity or commercial convenience; it rises, flourishes, and absorbs
into its activity whatever leading intellect is in the surrounding
population. The persons who are able and desirous to give their children
education naturally resort to it; the best schools, the best society,
and the strongest motives assist and excite those born within its walls;
and youth after youth rises to distinction out of its streets, while
among the blue mountains, twenty miles away, the goatherds live and die
in unregarded lowliness. And yet this is no proof that the mountains
have little effect upon the mind, or that the streets have a helpful
one. The men who are formed by the schools, and polished by the society
of the capital, may yet in many ways have their powers shortened by the
absence of natural scenery; and the mountaineer, neglected, ignorant,
and unambitious, may have been taught things by the clouds and streams
which he could not have learned in a college, or a coterie.
Sec. 27. And in reasoning about the effect of mountains we are therefore
under a difficulty like that which would occur to us if we had to
determine the good or bad effect of light on the human constitution, in
some place where all corporal exercise was necessarily in partial
darkness, and only idle people lived in the light. The exercise might
give an advantage to the occupants of the gloom, but we should neither
be justified in therefore denying the preciousness of light in general,
nor the necessity to the workers of the few rays they possessed; and
thus I suppose the hills around Stratford, and such glimpses as
Shakespere had of sandstone and pines in Warwickshire, or of chalk
cliffs in Kent, to have been essential to the development of his genius.
This supposition can only be proved false by the rising of a Shakespere
at Rotterdam or Bergen-op-Zoom, which I think not probable; whereas, on
the other hand, it is confirmed by myriads of collateral evidences. The
matter could only be _tested_ by placing for half a century the British
universities at Keswick, and Beddgelert, and making Grenoble the capital
of France; but if, throughout the history of Britain and France, we
contrast the general invention and pathetic power, in ballads or
legends, of the inhabitants of the Scottish Border with those manifested
in Suffolk or Essex; and similarly the inventive power of Normandy,
Provence, and the Bearnois with that of Champagne or Picardy, we shall
obtain some convincing evidence respecting the operation of hills on the
masses of mankind, and be disposed to admit, with less hesitation, that
the apparent inconsistencies in the effect of scenery on greater minds
proceed in each case from specialities of education, accident, and
original temper, which it would be impossible to follow out in detail.
Sometimes only, when the original resemblance in character of intellect
is very marked in two individuals, and they are submitted to definitely
contrary circumstances of education, an approximation to evidence may be
obtained. Thus Bacon and Pascal appear to be men naturally very similar
in their temper and powers of mind. One, born in York House, Strand, of
courtly parents, educated in court atmosphere, and replying, almost as
soon as he could speak, to the queen asking how old he was--"Two years
younger than Your Majesty's happy reign!"--has the world's meanness and
cunning engrafted into his intellect, and remains smooth, serene,
unenthusiastic, and in some degree base, even with all his sincere
devotion and universal wisdom; bearing, to the end of life, the likeness
of a marble palace in the street of a great city, fairly furnished
within, and bright in wall and battlement, yet noisome in places about
the foundations. The other, born at Clermont, in Auvergne, under the
shadow of the Puy de Dome, though taken to Paris at eight years old,
retains for ever the impress of his birthplace; pursuing natural
philosophy with the same zeal as Bacon, he returns to his own mountains
to put himself under their tutelage, and by their help first discovers
the great relations of the earth and the air: struck at last with mortal
disease; gloomy, enthusiastic, and superstitious, with a conscience
burning like lava, and inflexible like iron, the clouds gather about the
majesty of him, fold after fold; and, with his spirit buried in ashes,
and rent by earthquake, yet fruitful of true thought and faithful
affection, he stands like that mound of desolate scoria that crowns the
hill ranges of his native land, with its sable summit far in heaven, and
its foundations green with the ordered garden and the trellised vine.
Sec. 28. When, however, our inquiry thus branches into the successive
analysis of individual characters, it is time for us to leave it; noting
only one or two points respecting Shakespere, whom, I doubt not, the
reader was surprised to find left out of all our comparisons in the
preceding volume. He seems to have been sent essentially to take
universal and equal grasp of the _human_ nature; and to have been
removed, therefore, from all influences which could in the least warp or
bias his thoughts. It was necessary that he should lean _no_ way; that
he should contemplate, with absolute equality of judgment, the life of
the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathize so completely
with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal
identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts.
He must be able to enter into the soul of Falstaff or Shylock with no
more sense of contempt or horror than Falstaff or Shylock themselves
feel for or in themselves; otherwise his own conscience and indignation
would make him unjust to them; he would turn aside from something, miss
some good, or overlook some essential palliation. He must be utterly
without anger, utterly without purpose; for if a man has any serious
purpose in life, that which runs counter to it, or is foreign to it,
will be looked at frowningly or carelessly by him. Shakespere was
forbidden of Heaven to have any _plans_. To _do_ any good or _get_ any
good, in the common sense of good, was not to be within his permitted
range of work. Not, for him, the founding of institutions, the
preaching of doctrines, or the repression of abuses. Neither he, nor the
sun, did on any morning that they rose together, receive charge from
their Maker concerning such things. They were both of them to shine on
the evil and good; both to behold unoffendedly all that was upon the
earth, to burn unappalled upon the spears of kings, and undisdaining,
upon the reeds of the river.
Sec. 29. Therefore, so far as nature had influence over the early training
of this man, it was essential to his perfectness that the nature should
be quiet. No mountain passions were to be allowed in him. Inflict upon
him but one pang of the monastic conscience; cast upon him but one cloud
of the mountain gloom; and his serenity had been gone for ever--his
equity--his infinity. You would have made another Dante of him; and all
that he would have ever uttered about poor, soiled, and frail humanity
would have been the quarrel between Sinon and Adam of Brescia,--speedily
retired from, as not worthy a man's hearing, nay, not to be heard
without heavy fault. All your Falstaffs, Slenders, Quicklys, Sir Tobys,
Lances, Touchstones, and Quinces would have been lost in that.
Shakespere could be allowed no mountains; nay, not even any supreme
natural beauty. He had to be left with his kingcups and
clover;--pansies--the passing clouds--the Avon's flow--and the
undulating hills and woods of Warwick; nay, he was not to love even
these in any exceeding measure, lest it might make him in the least
overrate their power upon the strong, full-fledged minds of men. He
makes the quarrelling fairies concerned about them; poor lost Ophelia
find some comfort in them; fearful, fair, wise-hearted Perdita trust the
speaking of her good will and good hostess-ship to them; and one of the
brothers of Imogen confide his sorrow to them,--rebuked instantly by his
brother for "wench-like words;[111]" but any thought of them in his
mighty men I do not find: it is not usually in the nature of such men;
and if he had loved the flowers the _least_ better himself, he would
assuredly have been offended at this, and given a botanical turn of mind
to Caesar, or Othello.
Sec. 30. And it is even among the most curious proofs of the necessity to
all high imagination that it should paint straight from the life, that
he has _not_ given such a turn of mind to some of his great men;--Henry
the Fifth, for instance. Doubtless some of my readers, having been
accustomed to hear it repeated thoughtlessly from mouth to mouth that
Shakespere conceived the spirit of all ages, were as much offended as
surprised at my saying that he only painted human nature as he saw it in
his own time. They will find, if they look into his work closely, as
much antiquarianism as they do geography, and no more. The commonly
received notions about the things that had been, Shakespere took as he
found them, animating them with pure human nature, of any time and all
time; but inquiries into the minor detail of temporary feeling, he
despised as utterly as he did maps; and wheresoever the temporary
feeling was in anywise contrary to that of his own day, he errs frankly,
and paints from his own time. For instance in this matter of love of
flowers; we have traced already, far enough for our general purposes,
the mediaeval interest in them, whether to be enjoyed in the fields, or
to be used for types of ornamentation in dress. If Shakespere had cared
to enter into the spirit even of the early fifteenth century, he would
assuredly have marked this affection in some of his knights, and
indicated, even then, in heroic tempers, the peculiar respect for
loveliness of _dress_ which we find constantly in Dante. But he could
not do this; he had not seen it in real life. In his time dress had
become an affectation and absurdity. Only fools, or wise men in their
weak moments, showed much concern about it; and the facts of human
nature which appeared to him general in the matter were the soldier's
disdain, and the coxcomb's care of it. Hence Shakespere's good soldier
is almost always in plain or battered armor; even the speech of Vernon
in Henry the Fourth, which, as far as I remember, is the only one that
bears fully upon the beauty of armor, leans more upon the spirit and
hearts of men--"bated, like eagles having lately bathed;" and has an
under-current of slight contempt running through the following line,
"Glittering in golden coats, _like images_;" while the beauty of the
young Harry is essentially the beauty of fiery and perfect youth,
answering as much to the Greek, or Roman, or Elizabethan knight as to
the mediaeval one; whereas the definite interest in armor and dress is
opposed by Shakespere in the French (meaning to depreciate them), to the
English rude soldierliness:
"_Con._ Tut, I have the best armor in the world. Would it were day!
_Orl._ You have an excellent armor, but let my horse have his due."
And again:
"My lord constable, the armor that I saw in your tent to-night, are
those stars, or suns, upon it?"
while Henry, half proud of his poorness of array, speaks of armorial
splendor scornfully; the main idea being still of its being a gilded
show and vanity--
"Our gayness and our _gilt_ are all besmirched."
This is essentially Elizabethan. The quarterings on a knight's shield,
or the inlaying of his armor, would never have been thought of by him as
mere "gayness or gilt" in earlier days.[112] In like manner, throughout
every scale of rank or feeling, from that of the French knights down to
Falstaff's "I looked he should have sent me two-and-twenty yards of
satin, as I am true knight, and he sends me security!" care for dress is
always considered by Shakespere as contemptible; and Mrs. Quickly
distinguishes herself from a true fairy by her solicitude to scour the
_chairs of order_--and "each fair instalment, coat, and several crest;"
and the association in her mind of the flowers in the fairy rings with
the
"Sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,
Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee;"
while the true fairies, in field simplicity, are only anxious to "sweep
the dust behind the door;" and
"With this field dew consecrate,
Every several chamber bless
Through this palace with sweet peace."
Note the expression "Field dew consecrate." Shakespere loved courts and
camps; but he felt that sacredness and peace were in the dew of the
Fields only.
Sec. 31. There is another respect in which he was wholly incapable of
entering into the spirit of the middle ages. He had no great art of any
kind around him in his own country, and was, consequently, just as
powerless to conceive the general influence of former art, as a man of
the most inferior calibre. Therefore it was, that I did not care to
quote his authority respecting the power of imitation, in the second
chapter of the preceding volume. If it had been needful to add his
testimony to that of Dante (given in Sec. 5), I might have quoted
multitudes of passages wholly concurring with that, of which the "fair
Portia's counterfeit," with the following lines, and the implied ideal
of sculpture in the Winter's Tale, are wholly unanswerable instances.
But Shakespere's evidence in matters of art is as narrow as the range of
Elizabethan art in England, and resolves itself wholly into admiration
of two things,--mockery of life (as in this instance of Hermione as a
statue), or absolute splendor, as in the close of Romeo and Juliet,
where the notion of _gold_ as the chief source of dignity of aspect,
coming down to Shakespere from the times of the Field of the Cloth of
Gold, and, as I said before, strictly Elizabethan, would interfere
seriously with the pathos of the whole passage, but for the sense of
sacrifice implied in it:
"As _rich_ shall Romeo by his lady lie
Poor sacrifices of our enmity."
Sec. 32. And observe, I am not giving these examples as proof of any
smallness in Shakespere, but of his greatness; that is to say, of his
contentment, like every other great man who ever breathed, to paint
nothing but _what he saw_; and therefore giving perpetual evidence that
his sight was of the sixteenth, and not of the thirteenth century,
beneath all the broad and eternal humanity of his imagination. How far
in these modern days, emptied of splendor, it may be necessary for great
men having certain sympathies for those earlier ages, to act in this
differently from all their predecessors; and how far they may succeed in
the resuscitation of the past by habitually dwelling in all their
thoughts among vanished generations, are questions, of all practical and
present ones concerning art, the most difficult to decide; for already
in poetry several of our truest men have set themselves to this task,
and have indeed put more vitality into the shadows of the dead than most
others can give the presences of the living. Thus Longfellow, in the
Golden Legend, has entered more closely into the temper of the Monk, for
good and for evil, than ever yet theological writer or historian, though
they may have given their life's labor to the analysis: and, again,
Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle
Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art,
with which we have been specially concerned, there is hardly a principle
connected with the mediaeval temper, that he has not struck upon in those
seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious
instance, by the way, in a short poem referring to this very subject of
tomb and image sculpture; and illustrating just one of those phases of
local human character which, though belonging to Shakespere's own age,
he never noticed, because it was specially Italian and un-English;
connected also closely with the influence of mountains on the heart, and
therefore with our immediate inquiries. I mean the kind of admiration
with which a southern artist regarded the _stone_ he worked in; and the
pride which populace or priest took in the possession of precious
mountain substance, worked into the pavements of their cathedrals, and
the shafts of their tombs.
Sec. 33. Observe, Shakespere, in the midst of architecture and tombs of
wood, or freestone, or brass, naturally thinks of _gold_ as the best
enriching and ennobling substance for them;--in the midst also of the
fever of the Renaissance he writes, as every one else did, in praise of
precisely the most vicious master of that school--Giulio Romano; but the
modern poet, living much in Italy, and quit of the Renaissance
influence, is able fully to enter into the Italian feeling, and to see
the evil of the Renaissance tendency, not because he is greater than
Shakespere, but because he is in another element, and has _seen_ other
things. I miss fragments here and there not needed for my purpose in the
passage quoted, without putting asterisks, for I weaken the poem enough
by the omissions, without spoiling it also by breaks.
"_The Bishop orders his tomb in St. Praxed's Church._
"As here I lie
In this state chamber, dying by degrees,
Hours, and long hours, in the dead night, I ask,
Do I live--am I dead? Peace, peace, seems all;
St. Praxed's ever was the church for peace.
And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know;
Old Gandolf[113] cozened me, despite my care.
Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner south
He graced his carrion with.
Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
One sees the pulpit o' the epistle side,
And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats;
And up into the aery dome where live
The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk.
And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest,
With those nine columns round me, two and two,
The odd one at my feet, where Anselm[114] stands;
Peach-blossom marble all.
Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black--
'Twas ever antique-black[115] I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan,
And Moses with the tables ... but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp,
Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine,
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then!
There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world--
And have I not St. Praxed's ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts.
That's if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line--
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves _his_ need."
Sec. 34. I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which
there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance
spirit,--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of
itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that
I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the "Stones of
Venice" put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent
work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so
much _solution_ before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that
people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble;
though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like
Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but
making the element medicinal.
Sec. 35. It is interesting, by the way, with respect to this love of
stones in the Italian mind, to consider the difference necessitated in
the English temper merely by the general domestic use of wood instead of
marble. In that old Shakesperian England, men must have rendered a
grateful homage to their oak forests, in the sense of all that they owed
to their goodly timbers in the wainscot and furniture of the rooms they
loved best, when the blue of the frosty midnight was contrasted, in the
dark diamonds of the lattice, with the glowing brown of the warm,
fire-lighted, crimson-tapestried walls. Not less would an Italian look
with a grateful regard on the hill summits, to which he owed, in the
scorching of his summer noonday, escape into the marble corridor or
crypt palpitating only with cold and smooth variegation of the unfevered
mountain veins. In some sort, as, both in our stubbornness and our
comfort, we not unfitly describe ourselves typically as Hearts of Oak,
the Italians might in their strange and variegated mingling of passion,
like purple color, with a cruel sternness, like white rock, truly
describe themselves as Hearts of Stone.
Sec. 36. Into this feeling about marble in domestic use, Shakespere, having
seen it even in northern luxury, could partly enter, and marks it in
several passages of his Italian plays. But if the reader still doubts
his limitation to his own experience in all subjects of imagination, let
him consider how the removal from mountain influence in his youth, so
necessary for the perfection of his lower human sympathy, prevented him
from ever rendering with any force the feelings of the mountain
anchorite, or indicating in any of his monks the deep spirit of
monasticism. Worldly cardinals or nuncios he can fathom to the
uttermost; but where, in all his thoughts, do we find St. Francis, or
Abbot Samson? The "Friar" of Shakespere's plays is almost the only stage
conventionalism which he admitted; generally nothing more than a weak
old man who lives in a cell, and has a rope about his waist.
Sec. 37. While, finally, in such slight allusions as he makes to mountain
scenery itself, it is very curious to observe the accurate limitation of
his sympathies to such things as he had known in his youth; and his
entire preference of human interest, and of courtly and kingly dignities
to the nobleness of the hills. This is most marked in Cymbeline, where
the term "mountaineer" is, as with Dante, always one of reproach; and
the noble birth of Arviragus and Guiderius is shown by their holding
their mountain cave as
"A cell of ignorance; travelling abed.
A prison for a debtor;"
and themselves, educated among hills, as in all things contemptible:
"We are beastly; subtle as the fox, for prey;
Like warlike as the wolf, for what we eat:
Our valor is to chase what flies; our cage
We make our choir, as doth the prisoned bird."
A few phrases occur here and there which might justify the supposition
that he had seen high mountains, but never implying awe or admiration.
Thus Demetrius:
"These things seem _small_ and _indistinguishable_,
_Like far-off mountains, turned into clouds_."
"Taurus snow," and the "frosty Caucasus," are used merely as types of
purity or cold; and though the avalanche is once spoken of as an image
of power, it is with instantly following depreciation:
"Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow
Upon the valleys, whose low vassal seat
The Alps doth spit and void his rheum upon."
Sec. 38. There was only one thing belonging to hills that Shakespere seemed
to feel as noble--the pine tree, and that was because he had seen it in
Warwickshire, clumps of pine occasionally rising on little sandstone
mounds, as at the place of execution of Piers Gaveston, above the
lowland woods. He touches on this tree fondly again and again.
"As rough,
Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud'st wind,
That by his top doth take the mountain pine,
And make him stoop to the vale."
"The strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar."
Where note his observance of the peculiar horizontal roots of the pine,
spurred as it is by them like the claw of a bird, and partly propped, as
the aiguilles by those rock promontories at their bases which I have
always called their spurs, this observance of the pine's strength and
animal-like grasp being the chief reason for his choosing it, above all
other trees, for Ariel's prison. Again:
"You may as well forbid the mountain pines
To wag their high tops, and to make no noise
When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven."
And yet again:
"But when, from under this terrestrial ball,
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines."
We may judge, by the impression which this single feature of hill
scenery seems to have made on Shakespere's mind, because he had seen it
in his youth, how his whole temper would have been changed if he had
lived in a more sublime country, and how essential it was to his power
of contemplation of mankind that he should be removed from the sterner
influences of nature. For the rest, so far as Shakespere's work has
imperfections of any kind,--the trivialness of many of his adopted
plots, for instance, and the comparative rarity with which he admits the
ideal of an enthusiastic virtue arising out of principle; virtue being
with him for the most part founded simply on the affections joined with
inherent purity in his women or on mere manly pride and honor in his
men;[116]--in a word, whatever difference, involving inferiority, there
exists between him and Dante, in his conceptions of the relation between
this world and the next, we may partly trace as we did the difference
between Bacon and Pascal, to the less noble character of the scenes
around him in his youth; and admit that, though it was necessary for his
special work that he should be put, as it were, on a level with his
race, on those plains of Stratford, we should see in this a proof,
instead of a negation, of the mountain power over human intellect. For
breadth and perfectness of condescending sight, the Shakesperian mind
stands alone; but in _ascending_ sight it is limited. The breadth of
grasp is innate; the stoop and slightness of it was given by the
circumstances of scene; and the difference between those careless
masques of heathen gods, or unbelieved though mightily conceived visions
of fairy, witch, or risen spirit, and the earnest faith of Dante's
vision of Paradise, is the true measure of the difference in influence
between the willowy banks of Avon, and the purple hills of Arno.
Sec. 39. Our third inquiry, into the influence of mountains on domestic and
military character, was, we said, to be deferred; for this reason, that
it is too much involved with the consideration of the influence of
simple rural life in unmountainous districts, to be entered upon with
advantage until we have examined the general beauty of vegetation,
whether lowland or mountainous. I hope to pursue this inquiry,
therefore, at the close of the next volume; only desiring, in the
meantime, to bring one or two points connected with it under the
consideration of our English travellers.
Sec. 40. For, it will be remembered, we first entered on this subject in
order to obtain some data as to the possibility of a Practical Ideal in
Swiss life, correspondent, in some measure, to the poetical ideal of the
same, which so largely entertains the European public. Of which
possibility, I do not think, after what we have even already seen of the
true effect of mountains on the human mind, there is any reason to
doubt, even if that ideal had not been presented to us already in some
measure, in the older life of the Swiss republics. But of its
possibility, _under present circumstances_, there is, I grieve to say,
the deepest reason to doubt; and that the more, because the question is
not whether the mountaineer can be raised into a happier life by the
help of the active nations of the plains; but whether he can yet be
protected from the infection of the folly and vanity of those nations. I
urged, in the preceding chapter, some consideration of what might be
accomplished, if we chose to devote to the help what we now devote to
the mockery of the Swiss. But I would that the enlightened population of
Paris and London were content with doing nothing;--that they were
satisfied with expenditure upon their idle pleasures, in their idle way;
and would leave the Swiss to their own mountain gloom of unadvancing
independence. I believe that every franc now spent by travellers among
the Alps tends more or less to the undermining of whatever special
greatness there is in the Swiss character; and the persons I met in
Switzerland, whose position and modes of life rendered them best able to
give me true information respecting the present state of their country,
among many causes of national deterioration, spoke with chief fear of
the influx of English wealth, gradually connecting all industry with the
wants and ways of strangers, and inviting all idleness to depend upon
their casual help; thus gradually resolving the ancient consistency and
pastoral simplicity of the mountain life into the two irregular trades
of innkeeper[117] and mendicant.
Sec. 41. I could say much on this subject if I had any hope of doing good
by saying anything. But I have none. The influx of foreigners into
Switzerland must necessarily be greater every year, and the greater it
is, the larger, in the crowd, will be the majority of persons whose
objects in travelling will be, first, to get as fast as possible from
place to place, and, secondly, at every place where they arrive, to
obtain the kind of accommodation and amusement to which they are
accustomed in Paris, London, Brighton, or Baden. Railroads are already
projected round the head of the Lake of Geneva, and through the town of
Fribourg; the head of the Lake of Geneva being precisely and accurately
the one spot of Europe whose character, and influence on human mind, are
special; and unreplaceable if destroyed, no other spot resembling, or
being in any wise comparable to it, in its peculiar way: while the town
of Fribourg is in like manner the only mediaeval mountain town of
importance left to us; Inspruck and such others being wholly modern,
while Fribourg yet retains much of the aspect it had in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The valley of Chamouni, another spot also
unique in its way, is rapidly being turned into a kind of Cremorne
Gardens; and I can see, within the perspective of but few years, the
town of Lucerne consisting of a row of symmetrical hotels round the foot
of the lake, its old bridges destroyed, an iron one built over the
Reuss, and an acacia promenade carried along the lake-shore, with a
German band playing under a Chinese temple at the end of it, and the
enlightened travellers, representatives of European civilization,
performing before the Alps, in each afternoon summer sunlight, in their
modern manner, the Dance of Death.
Sec. 42. All this is inevitable; and it has its good as well as its evil
side. I can imagine the zealous modernist replying to me that when all
this is happily accomplished, my melancholy peasants of the valley of
Trient will be turned into thriving shopkeepers, the desolate streets of
Sion into glittering thoroughfares, and the marshes of the Valais into
prosperous market-gardens. I hope so; and indeed am striving every day
to conceive more accurately, and regulate all my efforts by the
expectation of, the state of society, not now, I suppose, much more
than twenty years in advance of us, when Europe, having satisfactorily
effaced all memorials of the past, and reduced itself to the likeness of
America, or of any other new country (only with less room for exertion),
shall begin to consider what is next to be done, and to what newness of
arts and interests may best be devoted the wealth of its marts, and the
strength of its multitudes. Which anticipations and estimates, however,
I have never been able, as yet, to carry out with any clearness, being
always arrested by the confused notion of a necessity for solitude,
disdain of buying and selling, and other elements of that old mediaeval
and mountain gloom, as in some way connected with the efforts of nearly
all men who have either seen far into the destiny, or been much helpful
to the souls, of their race. And the grounds of this feeling, whether
right or wrong, I hope to analyze more fully in the next volume; only
noting, finally, in this, one or two points for the consideration of
those among us with whom it may sometimes become a question, whether
they will help forward, or not, the turning of a sweet mountain valley
into an abyss of factory-stench and toil, or the carrying of a line of
traffic through some green place of shepherd solitude.