Mountains, more than any other of the features of nature, are
fundamental, synthetic. They present, untrammelled and without
elaboration, the great basic principles on which they are built;
their structure has absolute unity, their monumental architecture is
simple. Their moods are the moods of primitive humanity, their spirit,
like their form, is unmodified, above and below civilisation. Every
climber must, at one time or another, have shuddered before the hatred
of an Alpine peak, the hatred of all that is primeval in nature for
all that is artificially progressive in man. I remember one evening
sitting above the Col de Vosa and watching the glow of the sunset on
Mont Blanc. The entire range of peaks from the Dôme du Goûter to the
Aiguille Verte blazed with colour down to a point a little above where
the ragged fringe of the moraines slide into the grassy upland. There
a hard line of shadow reflected the contour of the hill on which I
sat. As the sun sank, this line of shadow crept up the mountain-side
with almost visible speed, till only the topmost pinnacles kept their
colour, like a row of beacon-lights flaming above the darkened valley.
Gradually they in their turn paled and died.
But it is now, when most onlookers turn away, that the mountains begin
to live. When the fire has left the snow, when the rock ridges leap out
cold and black, when the fissures of the ice cliffs yawn pitilessly
once again, the real character of the place is shown. The mountains
are cruel and angry. Traffic with them is not friendship, but war. All
the mountaineer’s thrill of conquest is the thrill of victory over
an enemy, an enemy who hates as men hate, as the ancient hates the
upstart or the lonely giant, the puny multitude, but whose resources
are endless and whose ally is the storm.
Snow mountains are seldom friendly. Sometimes they seem to smile, but
their welcome, for all its glitter, is treacherous and cruel. With
lower hills the case is rather different. The rock precipices and
windy fells of Cumberland, the spaces of the Yorkshire moors, have an
individuality as complete as Mont Blanc, but less overwhelming. Their
anger is sullen, their moods more passive. At times they are almost
gracious, but the difference is one of degree only. The quality of
their emotion sees no variant in glacier and heather.
It would seem that any normal sensibility could in some measure
appreciate these mountain moods, and, where the observer is an artist,
reproduce them in line and colour.... And yet it is only in our own day
that a painter has appeared with a proper understanding of their true
existence. In art the coming of landscape was slow, but the mountain,
as a mountain, has come more slowly still. Why this neglect? Why,
until long after the landscape picture had become a commonplace, was
the mountain not disentangled from the myriad aspects of nature and
made the object of artistic interpretation?
Several reasons may be suggested. In the first place, for true
appreciation more than a mere acquaintance is necessary. Mountains are
reserved. They extend no real welcome even when they do not actively
resent familiarity. Only patient perseverance can gauge their real
significance. The men of old hated them. Perhaps as they watched from
afar the towering army of the Alps, there came to them on the breeze
some breath of mountain anger, and they trembled, hardly knowing
why. To them the hills were just so many hideous obstacles to war or
commerce. To make a way through them was a task to be dreaded. It needs
a rare vision to see beauty beyond danger, to recognise the sublime in
the menace of death.
But, apart from this, it is doubtful whether the mediæval mind could
have grasped the essentials of mountain scenery had it striven to do
so--and this is the second reason for delay. The synthetic vision,
the subordination of part to a whole, is not really primitive. The
savage sees individual objects in strong unhampered outline, but he
cannot relate them. His decorative sense lacks cohesion. This very
lack is the weakness of Egyptian wall-painting, where harmony of line
and movement reaches a point seldom achieved since those early days,
but where the feeling of a procession is rarely lost owing to the
failure to relate the figures and objects to each other. It needs a
new hypercivilised primitivism--to use what appears a contradiction in
terms--extraordinarily subtle, backed by a store of imagination and
detailed knowledge, which can by its very wisdom select and discard,
keeping the chain of essentials, disregarding the rest. And no one has
greater need of this than the mountain artist. It is equally useless
for him to reproduce, however skilfully, every glacier, every gully on
the mountain-side, and to daub vague, unrelated lumps of paint one
beside another. The important artistic fact in a mountain scene is
the intricate rhythm of line and slope, the true relation of curve to
curve, and this is obscured and lost in photographic realism, as it
is never realised in the scribblings of a child. The mountain artist
must grasp every detail, but distinguish what he requires and discard
all else. That is why in the early days of landscape-painting the
excitement of new beauties inevitably caused overcrowded pictures.
There was no attempt at selection, because the selective point of view
had, as yet, no appeal. The last thirty years have brought it to the
front.
The third reason for the tardy recognition of mountains is expressed
by the man with whom this discussion is really concerned, by Professor
C. J. Holmes in his monograph on Constable.[1] ‘Mountains have
returned with the desire for design.’ The most significant feature of
recent painting is the renaissance of decoration. The easel picture
as Corot knew it has been eclipsed by the art of the fresco. Design
has replaced light as the central study, just as light replaced the
twilit realism of the first ‘plein-airists.’ The primitive Italians
knew no landscape-painting in our modern sense. The value of mountains
in design could not, therefore, appeal to them; and so it is left to
the present day to employ for the first time the mountains with their
rhythm and their feeling.
But such generalisation, unsuggested by fact, can have little weight,
and confirmation of these statements must be found in an outlined
indication of the growth of the landscape tradition, and, springing
from it, the treatment of mountains.’
* * * * *
When European art began to elaborate the religious conceptions
with which it was in early times mainly concerned, landscapes were
introduced as part of the Bible stories. But they were purely
subordinate. Duccio and Giotto use conventionalised trees and strange
bare rocks which, while evidence of wonderful vision, show no sense
of the value of landscape for itself. The delicate distances of the
Flemish primitives, the backgrounds of Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes, the
settings of Cinquecento Madonnas, are merely so much design to fill a
space, so many accessories to the figures in the foreground. One would
like to except Patinir’s ‘Flight into Egypt,’[2] where the thicket
behind the Virgin has more than a merely decorative significance,
and shows a loving study of trees and rocks, were not the vistas to
left and right pure design. There are also rare landscape studies of
Dürer--one particularly, an unfinished study of hills in the Ashmolean
Museum at Oxford--which are strikingly ahead of their time in their
sole preoccupation with nature as distinct from humanity.
But it is really with Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century art that
landscape for landscape’s sake makes its appearance, with Rubens,
Rembrandt, Koninck, van Goyen. However, to them mountains are as
accessory as was nature generally for their predecessors. To give
composition, to round off a landscape, to frame a vista, Rubens and the
great Dutchmen used hills and crags. There are probably many exceptions
to this generalisation. To mention one only, there is a picture by the
Flemish Millet (1642-1679) at Munich in which a mountain occupies the
centre of the canvas. This mountain, though tree-covered, forms the
main element in the painting, and despite the presence of allegorical
figures in the foreground, is proof of a curiously modern interest in
hill-formation. In the main, however, the contention is true that the
mountain in art does not appear in the seventeenth century.
The landscape tradition passed to Claude, and then forked. One branch,
the English, produced Wilson, Crome, Constable, Turner, and the
water-colourists. To the other belongs Poussin, and through him the
Barbizon school in France. (It should here be noticed, at the risk of
anticipating, that this last-named group derived from Bonington a large
share of Constable’s influence, and owe perhaps the greater part of
their inspiration to English sources.)
Traces now begin to appear of a love of mountains for themselves.
Crome’s ‘Slate Quarries,’ some of Wilson’s Welsh pictures, many of
Turner’s sketches, show rocks and hills painted for their own grandeur
and beauty. Similarly, in much of Corot’s early work--before 1830--bare
mountain-sides and wastes of rock stand unadorned by trees or other
counter-interests.
Of Constable we are told that ‘the grandeur of hills weighed on him. He
wanted meadows,’[3] but Plate III. in the book from which this
quotation is taken shows that he possessed a very real understanding of
mountains.
The recognition proved only momentary, and was soon lost in
conventional trickery. In England the water-colourists began once more
to use mountains merely to break the level of a landscape, to give
a pleasing variety. The idea of depicting them solely for themselves
becomes actually abhorrent. An extract from William Gilpin’s _Essays on
Landscape-painting_ will show the attitude which became general to the
early English school:--
‘In landscape-painting smooth objects would produce no composition
at all. In a mountain scene what composition could arise from one
smooth knoll coming forward on one side, intersected by a smooth
knoll on the other, with a smooth plain perhaps in the middle and a
smooth mountain in the distance? The very idea is disgusting.’[4]
To prove the awful result he reproduces a drawing in his book done on
these very lines, a drawing so superior to all the other illustrations
in the volume as to show how utterly tastes have changed and advanced
since his time.