I have dwelt, in the foregoing chapter, on the sadness of the hills
with the greater insistence that I feared my own excessive love for
them might lead me into too favourable 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.
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,
colouring, 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 Fontaine-bleau; 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.[24]
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 Bonhomme 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 colours 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.
For consider, first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape colour 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[25] passing into rose-colour 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-colour of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or
fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what _tenderness_ in
colour 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.
Together with this great source of pre-eminence in _mass_ of colour,
we have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and
enamel-work of the colour-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 oxalisis pre-eminently a mountaineer.[26]
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 colour, 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.
To this supremacy in wave and stream is joined a no less manifest
pre-eminence 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 the 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.
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[27] 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.
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 colour, 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,[28] 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."[29]
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.
[24] In tracing the _whole_ of the deep enjoyment to mountain
association, I of course except whatever feelings are connected with
the observance of rural life, or with that of architecture. None of
these feelings arise out of the landscape properly so called: the
pleasure with which we see a peasant's garden fairly kept, or a
ploughman doing his work well, or a group of children playing at a
cottage door, being wholly separate from that which we find in the
fields or commons around them; and the beauty of architecture, or the
associations connected with it, in like manner often ennobling the
most tame scenery;--yet not so but that we may always distinguish
between the abstract character of the unassisted landscape, and the
charm which it derives from the architecture. Much of the majesty of
French landscape consists in its grand and grey village churches and
turreted farmhouses, not to speak of its cathedrals, castles, and
beautifully placed cities. [Ruskin.]
[25] One of the principal reasons for the false supposition that
Switzerland is not picturesque, is the error of most sketchers and
painters in representing pine forest in middle distance as dark green,
or grey green, whereas its true colour is always purple, at distances
of even two or three miles. Let any traveller coming down the
Montanvert look for an aperture, three or four inches wide, between
the near pine branches, through which, standing eight or ten feet
from it, he can see the opposite forests on the Breven or Flegère.
Those forests are not above two or two and a half miles from him;
but he will find the aperture is filled by a tint of nearly pure
azure or purple, not by green. [Ruskin.]
[26] The Savoyard's name for its flower, "Pain du Bon Dieu," is very
beautiful; from, I believe, the supposed resemblance of its white
and scattered blossom to the fallen manna, [Ruskin.]
[27] _Ezekiel_ vii, 10; _Hosea_ vi, 3.
[28] In "The Mountain Gloom," the chapter immediately preceding.
[29] Ruskin refers to _The Fulfilling of the Scripture_, a book by
Robert Fleming [1630-94].