‘The beauty of a distant mountain depends on the line it traces
along the sky.... Such forms as suggest the idea of lumpish
heaviness are disgusting--round, swelling forms without any break to
disencumber them of their weight.
‘Mountains in composition are considered as single objects and
follow the same rules;--if they join heavily together in lumpish
shapes, if they fall into each other at right angles, or if their
lines run parallel--in all these cases the combination will be more
or less disgusting.’[5]
Barbizon painting underwent a change somewhat similar to that just
described in England. Corot altered his manner and evolved the graceful
greenery and scenes of trees and water for which he is admired to-day.
It is perhaps to be regretted that he exchanged his strong renderings
of mountain and rock for twilight fantasies which, for all their
lyrical charm, slide frequently into sentimentality and prettiness. His
fellow-landscape-painters, Rousseau, Daubigny, Dupré, and the veteran
Harpignies, used mountains either not at all or merely as incidents
in a panorama. Courbet alone, the greatest of them all, continued to
the last his rugged studies of cliff and slope, blending the romantic
tradition with the realist, supplying, as the first real painter of
rocks, a noble and fearless link between the ideal and the selective.
In true modern landscape the influence of Courbet appears again and
again, strengthening and vigorous.
With the coming of Impressionist painting no marked advance is
noticeable. Monet and his followers are concerned with light and
colour, not with form. Dutch Impressionism--the Hague school With
its curious mixture of seventeenth-century genre tradition and
modern French landscape methods--keeps to trees and sky. It would be
unreasonable indeed to look for the birth of the mountain in art to
take place in Holland!
* * * * *
Before passing on to the latest phase of European painting, some
attention must be given to the art of the Far East. China, Japan,
India, loom large in the history of the landscape tradition, and
especially in its newest development, where their influence, as will be
seen, has been very great.
In the art of the Far East, whether theoretical or practical, there
are traces from the earliest times of a conception of landscape and of
its bearing on art somewhat similar to that of Wordsworth. The early
Chinese in their aphorisms and paintings loved to express the majesty
of mountains. ‘Rhythmic vitality, anatomical structure, conformity
with nature, suitability of colouring, artistic composition and finish
are the six canons of art,’ wrote Hsieh-Ho in the sixth century
A.D., and no subject could be more suitable than a mountain
for the application of those canons. Through the later periods of
Chinese art, and during the history of the painting of Japan, recurring
cases appear of the same inclination.
But there are differences of opinion among the Eastern theorists. Here
is Kuo Hsi, who seems to be an early Chinese incarnation of William
Gilpin:--
‘Hills without clouds look bare; without water they are wanting in
fascination; without paths they are wanting in life; without trees
they are dead; without depth-distance they are shallow; without
level-distance they are near; and without height-distance they are
low.’
Indian art provides such a striking parallel to the ideas of modern
European painting that it will be useful to return to it when
discussing the new movement. It is sufficient here to say that an
examination of Indian landscape drawings will reveal an interest in
mountains similar to and no less vivid than that of the Japanese.
The interest in Eastern art began to spread over Europe during the
last half of the nineteenth century. The de Goncourt brothers and
Whistler by adopting some of the Japanese methods familiarised their
countrymen with the ideas and practices of a hitherto little-known art.
The researches and writings of Edmond de Goncourt, the flat, roomy
arrangements of Whistler, struck a note so new that a wild outcry
greeted their efforts. But the strangeness has worn off. Whistler
is accepted as a master; Japanese prints are everywhere; and, like
the Spanish influence introduced by Manet in the face of general
execration, the Eastern ideas have gone to produce a new art.[6]
It was near the end of last century that first appeared what has
so misleadingly been called Post-Impressionism, an art with a new
synthetic vision which saw beyond realism, which repudiated illusion,
which tried to get deep down to where life and beauty touch and so
externalise that indefinite something which makes things what they
always seem to us to be. This art which has recreated decoration,
which is going to revolutionise stage-craft, house furniture and even
building, while it deals unhesitatingly with any subject, is perhaps
chiefly significant in its bearing on landscape.
In this department appears that extraordinary parallel with Indian
ideas which has already been mentioned. No Indian artist ever aimed
at a mere representation of nature. He drew from his store of
imagination and memory a revisualised landscape which suggests the
idea behind nature and not her seeming reality. To him natural forms
were merely incarnations of ideas, and the effort to complete the
expression necessitated a repudiation of illusion. It follows that the
representative science displayed appears inept, if judged by ordinary
outward standards. But when one considers that accuracy is purely
relative, and that the synthetic vision naturally subordinates certain
features in its preoccupation with others, to condemn Indian drawing as
bad, or Byzantine either, for the case is analogous, shows a faulty
standard of judgment.[7]
As in Indian, so in modern European art, an understanding of the
peculiar ideas which have inspired is necessary for appreciation.
Keeping, therefore, this fact in view, that the aim is not for illusion
but for the subtler and truer realism which lies in all natural
phenomena, we can pass to the consideration of an artist who stands
at the head of ‘Post-Impressionist’--or, as I prefer to call it,
‘Fauvist’--landscape tradition, and who really marks the beginning of
the new appreciation of mountains.
Paul Cézanne has waited longer than any of his contemporaries for
sympathy and fame, but now that his time has come he bids fair easily
to outstrip Manet and the Impressionists in importance. As is often
the case, the same reason accounts for his being neglected and for
his later popularity, and that reason is the complete newness of his
outlook. His vision was a much stranger and newer one than had been
that of the Impressionists, and yet but for a fortunate failing of
his own it might never have been expressed at all. Cézanne was a very
great artist and a very bad painter. One may go further and say that
had he not been such a bad painter he might never have shown himself
to be a great artist. His whole being was clumsy and blundering, and
his attempts to emulate the brilliant Manet in his light effects
were constantly balked by this very clumsiness. In despair, he gave
up the task and lumped down what he saw, and, being a great artist,
he saw something quite new.[8] He saw line and decorative grouping
where Impressionism saw only a shimmer of sunlight. His tactless,
outspoken nature is reproduced in his paintings, be they still-life,
figure-pieces, portraits, or landscapes. Mr. Sickert, comparing his
work with the ‘gentle painter-like art of Pissarro,’ describes his
pictures as ‘ninety per cent. monstrous, tragic failures,’ and from
this standpoint the statement seems just enough.[9] But ‘brilliant and
sane efficiency’ is not the highest attribute in an artist, and Cézanne
by his genius redeems and almost glorifies his clumsiness. To landscape
he gave structure and rhythm. In his pictures of Ste. Victoire, of
steep fields and hillsides, the strong architecture of the landscape is
the framework of the whole.
This originality of Cézanne has been developed and perfected by an
artist working in England to-day, whose work is more in sympathy with
the moods and structure of mountains than even that of his great
predecessor, and the artist is Professor C. J. Holmes, whom I have
already quoted (see above).
Mr. Holmes is very modern, and he is an Englishman; that is to say, he
is part of a movement which has a deep feeling for synthesis and the
subtlety of rhythm--and this is important with a view to what has been
said about the synthetic nature of mountains--and also he is a member
of the race which has always shown more understanding for nature than
any other in Europe or, perhaps, in the world.
France, the leader in matters artistic, has never had any real grasp of
nature since the days of Ronsard. The French are too intelligent, too
pitilessly logical, to accept the moods of nature without reasoning.
From such a generalisation one should, perhaps, except Rousseau.
Although in much of his teaching it is difficult to escape the idea
that the nature he preached has been touched up by civilisation, in
comparison with many of his disciples he had a genuine desire to escape
the works of men. In his political theory, in his morality, in his
conception of the beautiful, he turned always to nature for his ideal.
From his home in Geneva he learnt to love the mountains, to love
the great calm and dignity of them, their aloofness from man and his
pettiness:--
‘En effet, c’est une impression générale qu’éprouvent tous les
hommes ... que sur les hautes montagnes ... les plaisirs sont moins
ardents, les passions plus modérées. Il semble qu’en s’élevant
au-dessus du séjour des hommes, on y laisse tous les sentiments bas
et terrestres.’[10]
But even here one suspects that Rousseau is rather contrasting the
worries of a race cursed with powers of emotion, with the sublime
peace of unfeeling nature, than admitting the passion of the hills,
which differs only from that of men in its loftiness and nobility. And
this last belief is not only held by the England of to-day, but was a
prominent conviction of William Wordsworth’s, and he lies behind the
English fondness for nature throughout the nineteenth century.
Of the group of great poets who make up the English Romantic Revival,
who voiced during the first half of the nineteenth century the ferment
of new ideas, the greatest is Wordsworth. Stirred, as were the rest,
by the teaching of Rousseau--and it is here perhaps that Rousseau’s
chief importance lies--he expressed in his poetry the aspirations
which in France found vent in an orgy of political philosophy and the
eager, endless search for liberty. His poetry and his sister’s journals
foretell that art which was to supersede maudlin subjectivism and, in
its turn, Parnassian coldness. Coleridge may have more mystery, Shelley
more fire, Keats more music, but it was Wordsworth who really felt the
common soul in nature, the fusion of the human and the natural into one
scale of moods and longings. He realised that mountains can hate, that
they can resent intrusion, as can human beings.
‘I dipped my oars into the silent lake
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizons bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me.’[11]
--which shows how mountains can be understood even by man who was no
climber, who, indeed, made a point of always walking round rather than
over any hill on his way. His belief is the same with every aspect
of nature. She has her moods, and they are the same as ours. We can
realise them because of
‘A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
Wordsworth’s power of expression, and even more his power of selection,
lag far behind his power of feeling. But what may detract from
the pleasure of actual perusal cannot lessen ultimate historical
importance. Modern art must find in Wordsworth its greatest forerunner
in the department of nature. From him, as has been hinted, springs the
tendency which permeated French literature at the end of last century.
The pantheist art of Symbolism which came to influence England in the
nineties is, at bottom, a half-English movement.
A love of nature, therefore, is in Mr. Holmes’ blood, and with this
great tradition behind him he is working to give mountains the artistic
interpretation which has so long been denied them. In his pictures
and drawings of the English lakeland he has externalised an aspect
of mountain scenery which is quite new. Some one has well expressed
it by saying that he paints mountains not so much as they actually
look but as one remembers them to be; and this is the same as saying
that repudiation of illusion or naturalism enables him to suggest the
‘mountainness’ of the mountain, the vague, essential something which
tells one it is a mountain.
In his heritage from Cézanne, Mr. Holmes has at any rate acquired no
clumsiness, but greater skill has not tempted him to too much detail.
He has carried to still greater lengths synthesis and simplification.
In economy of line he can hold his own with any of the new school
of painters. With a few bold strokes he gives the massive strength
of hills and rocks. It is now possible to realise how simple is the
structure of mountains, but at the same time how clear must be the
discrimination between the essential and the superfluous. By adopting
the black border with which many of the Fauves surround the objects in
their pictures, Mr. Holmes is able to dispense with chiaroscuro--almost
with perspective. He paints in flat washes of colour, admirably toned,
and separates one plane from another by a band of black. The distance
springs into being, and perspective is achieved without elaboration,
without destruction of essential outline.
Besides this ‘realism of effect’ as opposed to ‘realism of fact,’ Mr.
Holmes has another definite aim, which attaches his art still more
closely to Fauvism. He has a keen sense of the decorative importance of
a picture. He has said himself: ‘The first function of a picture is
architectural--it has to be a beautiful part of the wall surface.’[12]
This aim is certainly fulfilled in his work. The lines of the hills
run in subtle rhythms, and the whole lies gracefully on the wall and
becomes a part of it. As ever, Mr. Holmes is his own best critic. He
has summed up this double ideal--synthesis and decorative value--as
follows:--
‘At the very birth of art we find the necessity of selection and
omission, with a view to emphatic statement, recognised more
generally perhaps than it has ever been recognised since. And with
this necessity we may note another characteristic of primitive
art--the love of rhythm and pattern.’[13]
It has been seen that, with the exception of Cézanne, Mr. Holmes has
no direct ancestor in European art. But, nevertheless, he is the ready
pupil of centuries. His art is not merely, as in the case of several
other prominent Fauves, a slavish return to the primitive. It is
founded on a thorough knowledge of the past. A further extract from his
book[14] will show that he gives a modern expression to centuries of
ideals:--
‘Painting succeeds in virtue of the things it omits, almost as much
as by the assistance of the things it expresses.... In Egyptian
art the figures might have been less stiffly uniform, in Crete
they sometimes verge on caricature; in Byzantine work they assume
too much the rigid character of architecture; with the Italians
of the Irecento too much of the Byzantine temper may survive; in
China forms may be contorted through the connection of painting
with calligraphy. Yet with all their defects, these various phases
of painting serve their destined purpose, and serve it much better
than the painting of more sophisticated ages has succeeded in
doing.... Contours may be as nobly drawn as human skill can draw
them, but they must be firm and definite throughout. The colour may
be as brilliant or as quiet as circumstances demand, but it must be
applied in masses that are flat or nearly flat. Details, forcible
suggestion of relief and strong shadows must be avoided. In our own
day these limitations have been observed and respected only by a
single painter--Puvis de Chavannes--but in virtue of that restraint
he has taken his place among the great masters.’
And so the art of Mr. Holmes is a direct practice of his preaching.
To the tradition of simplified vision he has brought a conception of
his own--the conception of mountains, of their formation; and their
rhythm.[15] Not Puvis de Chavannes, whom he has mentioned, nor
Daumier, whom perhaps he should have mentioned, felt the character
of landscape as deeply as Mr. Holmes has done. In his elimination he
is not arbitrary, but natural and very just. His mountains remain
synthetic, uncivilised, individual, as they are in nature.
But besides his debt to the centuries of European art, he is greatly
helped by his knowledge and love of the art of China and Japan. Like so
many modern Europeans, he has been profoundly moved by the marvellous
achievements of Eastern painting, but, beyond an admission of general
influence, no very clear artistic lineage can be made out.
Mr. Binyon has traced the influence of Hokusai in Mr. Holmes’ work,[16]
and the suggestion seems justified. Mr. Holmes has an avowed admiration
for the work of the Japanese artist, and apart from this, the folding
lines of the hills and the flat, green washes of his water-colours show
a distinct affinity.
‘In Japanese painting form and colour are represented without any
attempt at relief, but in European methods relief and illusion are
sought for.’
This is Hokusai himself, and Mr. Holmes has profited by the comparison
to fuse both systems into one.
And so, while, in the matter of Eastern as well as of Western art,
his great store of knowledge of the painting of the past is the
foundation of his genius, the genius itself--the message and its
expression--remains his own.
Before closing it would be well to mention one criticism which has
been levelled at Mr. Holmes, and which, if it is true, constitutes a
serious charge. He has been accused of being scientific to the point
of having a formula on which he works. Perhaps the title of his book
is partly responsible for the accusation, and it might certainly have
been better chosen. But beyond this no trace of justification is
visible. Order and inspiration are not necessarily incompatible. The
extravagant lengths reached by the æsthetic movement proved the result
of art ignoring science. Eccentricity had become a fetish, and Mr.
Holmes is working with his fellow Fauves to restore reason and sanity.
There is too much variety in his work to allow of a suspicion of any
formula. A series of mountain studies naturally have some affinity,
and this affinity has been exaggerated into a definite method. Such a
charge cannot be further disproved than by assertion of its falsity. If
that is insufficient, let the unsatisfied critic carefully study all
Mr. Holmes’ work, and draw a new conclusion. Continued belief in the
formula must stay uncombated; but even should the charge be generally
accepted as true, the admiration of one at least for Mr. Holmes and his
work will remain unshaken.