1857.
Expedition to the Highlands in 1857.--Kindness of the Marquis of
Breadalbane and others.--Camp life, its strong and peculiar
attraction.--My servant.--Young Helliwell.--Scant supplies in the
camp.--Nature of the camp.--Necessity for wooden floors in a bad
climate.--Double-hulled boats.--Practice of landscape-painting.--Changes
of effect.--Influences that governed my way of study in those
days.--Attractive character of the Scottish Highlands.--Their scenery
not well adapted for beginners.--My intense love of it.
In the year 1857 I made the expedition to the Highlands which afterwards
became well known in consequence of my book about it.
The Marquis of Breadalbane (the first Marquis) granted me in the kindest
way permission to pitch my camp wherever I liked on his extensive
estate, and at the same time gave me an invitation to Taymouth Castle.
The Duke of Argyll gave me leave to encamp on an island in Loch Awe that
belonged to him, and Mr. Campbell of Monzie granted leave to encamp on
his property on the Cladich side of the lake. I ought to have gone to
Taymouth to thank Lord Breadalbane and accept the hospitality he had
offered, but it happened that he had not fixed a date, so I avoided
Taymouth. This was wrong, but young men are generally either forward or
backward. The Marquis afterwards expressed himself, to a third person,
as rather hurt that I had not been to see him.
My advice to any young man who reads this book is always to _show_ that
he appreciates kindness when it is offered. There is not very much of it
in the world, but there is some, and it is not enough merely to feel
grateful; we ought to accept kindness with visible satisfaction. One of
my regrets now is to have sometimes failed in this, usually out of mere
shyness, particularly where great people were concerned. Here is another
instance. When going to Inverary on the steamer, I made the acquaintance
of a very pleasant Scotchman, who turned out to be the Laird of Lamont,
on Loch Fyne side. He took an interest in my artistic projects, and very
kindly invited me to go and see him. Nothing would have been easier,--I
was as free as a fish, and might have sailed down Loch Fyne any day on
my own boat,--yet I never went.
The book called "A Painter's Camp" gave a sufficient account of my first
summer in the Highlands, which was not distinguished by much variety, as
I remained almost exclusively at Loch Awe; but the novelty of camp life
_by choice_ seems to have interested many readers, though they must have
been already perfectly familiar with camp life _by necessity_ in the
practice of armies and the experience of African travellers. The true
explanation of my proceedings is the intense and peculiar charm that
there is about encamping in a wild and picturesque country. I had tasted
this on the Lancashire moors, and I wanted to taste it again. Just now,
whilst writing, I have on my table a letter from an English official in
Africa, who tells me of his camp life. He says: "The wagon was generally
my sleeping quarter. I had two tents and a riding horse, and very seldom
slept in a house or put the horse in a stable. _Such a life was ever,
and is now, to me the acme of bliss. No man can be said to have really
lived who has not camped out in some such way, and I know well that you
especially will say Amen! to this sentiment._ Since 1848, I have lived
altogether for about six years in the open, and have never caught a
cold. Only, through imprudent uncovering of the head, once in 1855,
whilst drawing the topography of a mountain, I was struck down by
sunstroke."
The reasons for this intense attraction in camp life are probably
complex. One certainly is that it brings us nearer to nature, but a
still deeper reason may be that _it revives obscure associations that
belong to the memory of the race, and not to that of the individual_.
Camping is in the same category with yachting, fishing, and the
chase,--a thing practised by civilized man for his amusement, because it
permits him to resume the habits of less civilized generations. The
delight of encamping, for a young man in vigorous health, is the
enforced activity in the open air that is inseparably connected with it.
I had only one servant, a young man from the moorland country on the
borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, perfectly well adapted to life in
the Highlands. He had excellent health, and was physically a good
specimen of our north-English race. It was a pleasure to see his tall
straight figure going over the roughest ground with no appearance of
hurry, but in fact with such unostentatious swiftness that few sportsmen
could follow him. I was myself active enough then, and accustomed to
wild places, but he always restrained himself when we did any mountain
work together. He afterwards became well known as the "Thursday" of the
"Painter's Camp," but I may give his real name here, which was Young
Helliwell. Temperate, hardy, and extremely prudent, not to be caught by
any allurements of vulgar pleasure, he lived wisely in youth, and will
probably have fewer regrets than most people in his old age.
Young had studied the art of simple cookery at Hollins, so he was able
to keep me tolerably well when we happened to have anything to eat,
which was not always. There were no provision shops on Lochaweside;
Inverary was at some distance in one direction and Oban in the other,
and as I had never given a thought to feeding before, I was an utterly
incompetent provider. The consequence was that we fasted like monks,
except that our abstinence was not on any regular principle; in fact,
sometimes we had so little to eat for days together that we began to
feel quite weak. This gave us no anxiety, and we only laughed at it,
undereating being always more conducive to good spirits than its
opposite, provided that it is not carried too far.
The camp consisted of three structures,--my hut, which was made of
wooden panels with plate-glass windows; a tent for Young, with a wooden
floor, and wooden sides to the height of three feet; lastly, a military
bell-tent that served for storing things. My hut was both painting-room
and habitation, but it would have been better to have had a separate
painting-room on rather a larger scale. Mr. Herkomer afterwards imitated
the hut for painting from nature in Wales, and he introduced a clever
improvement by erecting his hut on a circular platform with a ring-rail,
so that it could be turned at will to any point of the compass. Young's
tent was, in fact, also a kind of hut with a square tent for a roof.
In a climate like that of the West Highlands, wooden floors at least are
almost indispensable; but a camp so arranged ceases to be a travelling
camp unless you have men and horses in your daily service like a Shah of
Persia. It may be moved two or three times in a summer.
I have always had a fancy for double-hulled boats (now generally called
catamarans), and had two of them on Loch Awe. This eccentricity was
perhaps fortunate, as my boats were extremely safe, each hull being
decked from stem to stern and divided internally into water-tight
compartments. They could therefore ship a sea with perfect impunity, and
although often exposed to sudden and violent squalls, we were never in
any real danger. One of my catamarans would beat to windward tolerably
well, but she did not tack quickly, and occasionally missed stays.
However, these defects were of slight importance in a boat not intended
for racing, and small enough to be always quite manageable with oars.
Since those days I have much improved the construction of catamarans, so
that their evolutions are now quicker and more certain. They are
absolutely the only sailing-boats that combine lightness with safety and
speed.
As to the practice of landscape-painting, I very soon found that the
West Highlands were not favorable to painting from nature on account of
the rapid changes of effect. Those changes are so revolutionary that
they often metamorphose all the oppositions in a natural picture in the
course of a single minute. I began by planting my hut on the island
called Inishail, in the middle of Loch Awe, with the intention of
painting Ben Cruachan from nature, but soon discovered that there were
fifty Cruachans a day, each effacing its predecessor, so my picture got
on badly. If I painted what was before me, the result was like playing
successfully a bar or two from each of several different musical
compositions in the vain hope of harmonizing them into one. If I tried
to paint my first impression, it became increasingly difficult to do
that when the mountain itself presented novel and striking aspects.
Every artist who reads this will now consider the above remarks no
better than a commonplace, but in the year 1857 English
landscape-painting was going through a peculiar phase. There was, in
some of the younger artists, a feeling of dissatisfaction with the
slight and superficial work too often produced from hasty water-color
sketches, and there was an honest desire for more substantial truth
coupled with the hope of attaining it by working directly from nature.
My critical master, Mr. Ruskin, saw in working from nature the only hope
for the regeneration of art, and my practical master, Mr. Pettitt,
considered it the height of artistic virtue to sit down before nature
and work on the details of a large picture for eight or ten weeks
together. I was eagerly anxious to do what was considered most right,
and quite willing to undergo any degree of inconvenience. The truth is,
perhaps, that (like other devotees) I rather enjoyed the sacrifice of
convenience for what seemed to me, at that time, the sacred cause of
veracity in art.
The Highlands of Scotland were intensely attractive to me, as being a
kind of sublimation of the wild northern landscape that I had already
loved in my native Lancashire; but the Highlands were not well chosen as
a field for self-improvement in the art of painting. A student ought not
to choose the most changeful of landscapes, but the least changeful; not
the Highlands or the English Lake District, but the dullest landscape he
can find in the south or the east of England. Norfolk would have been a
better country for me, as a student, than Argyllshire. If, however, any
prudent adviser had told me to go to dull scenery in those days, it
would have been like telling a passionate lover of great capitals to go
and live in a narrow little provincial town. I hated dull, unromantic
scenery, and at the same time had the passion for mountains, lakes, wild
moorland, and everything that was rough and uncultivated,--a passion so
predominant that it resembled rather the natural instinct of an animal
for its own habitat than the choice of a reasonable being. I loved
everything in the Highlands, even the bad weather; I delighted in clouds
and storms, and have never experienced any natural influences more in
harmony with the inmost feelings of my own nature than those of a great
lake's dark waters when they dashed in spray on the rocks of some lonely
islet and my boat flew past in the gray and dreary gloaming.
"Le paysage," says a French critic, "est un état d'âme." He meant that
_what we seek_ in nature is that which answers to the state of our own
souls. What is called dreary, wild, and melancholy scenery afforded me,
at that time, a kind of satisfaction more profound than that which is
given by any of the human arts. I loved painting, but all the
collections in Europe attracted me less than the barren northern end of
our own island, in which there are no pictures; I loved architecture,
and chose a country that is utterly destitute of it; I delighted in
music, and pitched my tent where there was no music but that of the
winds and the waves.
The Loch Awe of those days was not the Loch Awe of the present. There
was no railway; there was not a steamer on the lake, either public or
private; there was no hotel by the waterside, only one or two small
inns, imperceptible in the vastness of the almost uninhabited landscape.
The lake was therefore almost a solitude, and this, added to the
wildness of the climate and the peculiarly simple and temporary
character of my habitation, made nature much more profoundly impressive
than it ever is amidst the powerful rivalry of the works of man. The
effect on my mind was, on the whole, saddening, but not in the least
depressing. It was a kind of poetic sadness that had nothing to do with
low spirits. I have never been either merry or melancholy, but have kept
an equable cheerfulness that maintains itself serenely enough even in
solitude and amidst the desolate aspects of stony and barren lands. As
life advances, it is wise, however, to seek the more cheering influences
of the external world, and those are rather to be found in the brightest
and sunniest landscape, with abundant evidence of happy human
habitation; some southern land of the vine where the chestnut grows high
on the hills, and the peach and the pear ripen richly in innumerable
gardens.