SWITZERLAND
Though my "Bed of Ferns" was sent back from the Academy, one of my
large studies was exhibited at the British Society, and the result of
the year's work was, on the whole, satisfactory. Ruskin invited me
to go to Switzerland with him for the summer, finding in some of my
studies and drawings the possibility of getting from me some of the
Alpine work he wanted done. Unfortunately for both of us I could not
draw well in traces, and he did not quite well know how to drive, and
the summer ended in disappointment, and finally in disaster. I was
too undisciplined to work except when the mood suited, and our moods
rarely agreed: he wanted things which were to me of no interest, and
I could not interest myself vicariously enough to do them to his
satisfaction. He preceded me some weeks, and it was arranged that I
should come to meet him at Geneva early in June. Certainly I owe
to him my earliest and most delightful memories of the Alps and of
Switzerland. More princely hospitality than his no man ever received,
or more kindly companionship; but, as might have been expected, we
agreed neither in temperament nor in method, if indeed the mainly
self-taught way in which I worked and thought could be called method.
He met me with a carriage at Culoz, to give and enjoy my first
impressions of the distant Alps, and for the ten days we stopped at
Geneva I stayed with him at the Hotel des Bergues. We climbed the
Saleve, and I saw what gave me more pleasure, I confess, than the
distant view of Mont Blanc, which he expected me to be enthusiastic
over,--the soldanella and gentians. The great accidents of
nature,--Niagara and the high Alps,--though they awe me, have always
left me cold; and all that summer I should have been more fruitfully
employed in some nook of English scenery, where nature went
undisturbed by catastrophes and cataclysms.
Our first sketching excursion was to the Perte du Rhone, and, while
Ruskin was drawing some mountain forms beyond the river, he asked me
to draw some huts near by,--not picturesque cottages, thatched roofs
and lichen-stained walls, but shanties, such as the Irish laborers on
our railways build by the roadside, of deal boards on end, irregular
and careless without being picturesque, and too closely associated
with pigsty construction, in my mind, to be worth drawing. When Ruskin
came back I had made a careless and slipshod five minutes' sketch, not
worth the paper it was on, as to me were not the originals. Ruskin was
angry, and he had a right to be; for at least I should have found it
enough that he wanted it done, to make me do my best on it, but I
did not think of it in that light. We drove back towards Geneva in
silence,--he moody and I sullen,--and halfway there he broke out,
saying that the fact that he wanted the drawing done ought to have
been enough to make me do it. I replied that I could see no interest
in the subject, which to me only suggested fever and discomfort, and
wretched habitations for human beings. We relapsed into silence, and
for another mile nothing was said, when Ruskin broke out with, "You
were right, Stillman, about those cottages; your way of looking at
them was nobler than mine, and now, for the first time in my life, I
understand how anybody can live in America."
We went to Bonneville to hunt out the point of view of a Turner
drawing which Ruskin liked, but, needless to say, though we ransacked
the neighborhood for views, we never found Turner's; and then we went
on to St. Martin, the little village opposite Sallanches, on the Arve.
For a subalpine landscape with Mont Blanc in the distance, this is the
most attractive bit of the Alpine country I know, with picturesque
detail and pleasant climbing up to 7000 feet. The view of Mont Blanc,
too, is certainly the finest from below which can be found. In fine
weather the mountain is hidden to the summit by clouds which clear
away at sunset, and from the little and picturesque bridge over the
Arve we saw the huge dome come out, and glow in the sunlight, when we
were all in shadow. It was to me new and startling, this huge rosy
orb, which at its first appearance suggests a huger moon rising
above the clouds, until, slowly, the clouds below melt away, and the
mountain stands disclosed to its base. If anything in the Alps can be
called truly picturesque, it is the view of the Aiguille de Varens
which overhangs the village of St. Martin, with the quaint and
lichenous church and cemetery in the foreground, and I made a large
drawing of it from the bridge, intending to return and work it up
after Ruskin had left me. The little inn of the village was the most
comfortable _auberge_ I was ever in, and its landlord the kindest
and most hospitable of hosts. Twenty years later I went back to the
locality, hoping to find something of the old time; but there was
only a deserted hostel, the weeds growing over the courtyard, and the
sealed and mouldy doors and windows witnessing ancient desertion.
Hardly had I become interested in my drawing when Ruskin decided to
move on to Chamounix, where we might hope to get really to work. When
the first sublime and overpowering impression of Chamounix and the
majesty and gloom of its narrow valley wore off, it began to oppress
me, and long before we got away I felt as if I were in a huge grave.
The geological interest was great, and the sublimity overpowering.
But to my mind sublimity does not suffice for art; the beautiful must
predominate, and of the beautiful there is little in the valley. The
sublime rendered on a small scale is not satisfactory; the beautiful
loses nothing by reduction.
I was disappointed in the High Alps,--they left me cold; and after
visiting the points of view Turner had taken drawings from, we went up
to the Montanvert, where Ruskin wished me to paint for him a wreath
of Alpine rose. We found the rose growing luxuriantly against a huge
granite boulder, a pretty natural composition, and I set to work on it
with great satisfaction, for botanical painting always interested
me. Ruskin sat and watched me work, and expressed his surprise at my
facility of execution of details and texture, saying that, of the
painters he knew, only Millais had so great facility of execution.
We were living at the little hotel of the Montanvert, and he was
impatient to get back to the better accommodation of the valley
hotels; so that when the roses and the rocks were done we went back,
the completion of the picture being left for later study. From Paris,
in the ensuing winter, I sent it to Ruskin, the distance being made of
the actual view down the valley of Chamounix; and he wrote me a bitter
condemnation of it, as a disappointment; for he said that he "had
expected to see the Alpine roses overhanging an awful chasm," etc. (an
expectation he should have given expression to earlier), and found it
very commonplace and uninteresting. So it was, and I burnt it after
the fashion of the "Bed of Ferns." As Rowse said of him later, "he
wanted me to hold the brush while he painted." But our ideas clashed
continually, and what he wanted was impossible,--to make me see with
his eyes; and so we came to great disappointment in the end.
I was very much interested in his old guide, Coutet, with whom I had
many climbs. He liked to go with me, he said, because I was
very sure-footed and could go wherever he did. He was a famous
crystal-hunter, and many of the rarest specimens in the museum of
Geneva were of his finding. There was one locality of which only he
knew, where the rock was pitted with small turquoises like a plum
pudding, and I begged him to tell me where it was. There is a
superstition amongst the crystal-hunters that to tell where the
crystals are found brings bad luck, and he would never tell me in so
many words; but one day, after my importunity, I saw him leveling his
alpenstock on the ground in a very curious way, sighting along it and
correcting the direction, and when he had finished he said, as he
walked past me, "Look where it points," and went away. It was pointing
to a stratum halfway up to the summit of one of the aiguilles to the
west of the Mer de Glace, a chamois climb. He told me later that he
found the crystals in the couloir that brought them down from that
stratum. A dear old man was Coutet, and fully deserving the affection
and confidence of Ruskin. Connected with him was a story which Ruskin
told me there of a locality in the valley of Chamounix, of which the
guides had told him, haunted by a ghost which could be seen only by
children. It was a figure of a woman who raked the dead leaves, and
when she looked up at them the children said they saw only a skull in
place of a face. Ruskin sent to a neighboring valley for a child who
could know nothing of the legend, and went with him to the locality
which the ghost haunted. Arrived there he said to the boy, "What a
lonely place! There is nobody here but ourselves." "No," said the
child, "there is a woman there raking the leaves," pointing in a
certain direction. "Let us go nearer to her," said Ruskin; and they
walked that way, when the boy stopped, saying that he did not want to
go nearer, for the woman looked up, and he said that she had no eyes
in her head,--"only holes."
The valley of Chamounix finally became to me the most gloomy and
depressing place I was ever in. We made excursions and a few sketches;
but I had little sympathy with it, though I tried to do what Ruskin
wanted, and to get a faithful study of some characteristic subject in
the valley. Every fine day we climbed some secondary peak, five or six
thousand feet, and in the evenings we discussed art or played chess,
mainly in rehearsing problems, until midnight. Sundays no work was
done, but we used to climb some easy hilltop; and there he spent the
afternoon in writing a sermon for a girls' school in which he was much
interested, but not a hue of drawing would he do. To me, brought up in
the severity of Sabbatarianism, the sanctity of the first day of the
week had always been a theological fiction, and the result of the
contact with the larger world of thinkers and the widening of my range
of thought by the study of philosophy had also made me see that the
observances of "new moons and fast-days" had nothing to do with true
religion, and that the Eden repose of the Creator was too large
a matter to be fenced into a day of the week. This slavery to a
formality in which Ruskin was held by his terrible conscience provoked
me, therefore, to the discussion of the subject.
I showed him that there was no authority for the transference of the
Christian weekly rest from the seventh to the first day of the week,
and we went over the texts together, in which study my Sabbatarian
education gave me an advantage in argument; for he had never given the
matter a thought. Of course he took refuge in the celebration of the
weekly return of the day of Christ's resurrection; but I showed him
that the text does not support the claim that Christ rose on the first
day of the week, and that the early fathers, who arranged that portion
of the ritual, did not understand the tradition of the resurrection.
"Three days and three nights," according to the gospel, Christ was to
lie in the tomb,--not parts of three times twenty-four hours. But the
women went to the tomb "in the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn
toward the first day of the week," and they found that he had already
risen and was gone. Now, as by the Jewish ritual the day began at
sunset, the first day of the week began with the going down of the sun
on Saturday, and, therefore, as Christ had already risen, he must have
risen on the seventh day. And the reason of this twilight visit was in
the prohibition to touch a dead body on the Sabbath, and the zeal of
the disciples sent them to the sepulchre at the earliest possible
moment. And I showed him how careless or ignorant of the record the
redisposition of the sacred time had been, in the fact of the total
disregard of the words of Christ, that he should lie in the earth
three days and three nights; for they assumed him to have been
crucified on Friday, while he must have lain buried Thursday, Friday,
and Saturday, and was therefore buried on Wednesday, just before
sunset. And this is confirmed by the text which says that the
disciples hastened to bury Christ on the day of crucifixion, because
the next day was the day of preparation for one of the high Sabbaths,
which the early church, which instituted the observance of the first
day, confounded with the weekly Sabbath, not knowing that a high
Sabbath could not fall on the weekly Sabbath.
To this demonstration Ruskin, always deferent to the literal
interpretation of the gospel, could not make a defense; the creed had
so bound him to the letter that the least enlargement of the stricture
broke it, and he rejected the whole tradition,--not only the Sunday
Sabbath, but the authority of the ecclesiastical interpretation of the
texts. He said, "If they have deceived me in this, they have probably
deceived me in all," and he came to the conclusion of rejecting all.
This I had not conceived as a possible consequence of the criticism of
his creed, and it gave me great pain; for I was not a skeptic, as he,
I have since learned, for a time became. It was useless to argue
with him for the spirit of the gospel; he had always held to its
infallibility and the exactitude of doctrine, and his indignation was
too strong to be pacified. He returned somewhat, I have heard, to his
old beliefs in later years, as old men will to the beliefs of their
youth, and his Christianity was too sincere and profound for a matter
of mistaken credence in mere formalities ever to affect its substance,
and the years which followed showed that in no essential trait had the
religious foundations of his character been moved. For myself, I was
still a sincere believer in the substantial accuracy of the body of
Christian doctrine, and the revolt of Ruskin from it gave me great
pain. My own entire liberation from the burdens of futile beliefs had
yet to come, and at that time he went further than I could go with
him. But we never discussed theological matters any more.
I finally found a subject which interested me in a view of the foot of
the Mer de Glace from the opposite side of the river, looking up the
glacier, with the bridge under the Brevent, and a cottage in the
foreground, and set to work on it energetically. Ruskin used to sit
behind me and comment on my work. My methods of painting were my own,
for I had never painted under any one except the few months with
Church, whose method had taught me nothing; and I had a way of
painting scud clouds, such as always hang around the Alpine peaks, by
brushing the sky in thinly with the sky-blue, and then working into
that, with the brush, the melting clouds, producing the grays I wanted
on the canvas. It imitated the effect of nature logically, as the
pigment imitated the mingling of the vapor with the blue sky; but
Ruskin said this was incorrect, and that the colors must be laid like
mosaic, side by side, in the true tint. Another discouragement! I
used to lay in the whole subject, beginning with the sky, rapidly
and broadly, and, when it was dry, returning to the foreground and
finishing towards the distance; and Buskin was delighted with the
foreground painting, insisting on my doing nothing further to it. In
the distance was the Montanvert and the Aiguille du Dru; but where the
lines of the glacier and the slopes of the mountain at the right met,
five nearly straight lines converged at a point far from the centre,
and I did not see how to get rid of them without violating the
topography. I pointed it out to Ruskin, and he immediately exclaimed:
"Oh, nothing can he done with a subject like that, with five lines
radiating from an unimportant point! I will not stay here to see you
finish that study." And the next day we packed up and left for Geneva.
At Lausanne I made some careful architectural drawings, which he
praised,--some pencil sketches on the lake; and then we drove across
country to Freiburg, and finally to Neuchâtel, where I found a
magnificent subject in the view from the hill behind the city, looking
over the lake towards the Alps, with Mont Blanc and the Bernese Alps
in the extreme distance. In the near distance rise the castle and
its old church, which Ruskin drew for me in pencil with exquisite
refinement of detail, for in this kind of drawing he was most
admirable. As we should stay only a few days, I could not paint
anything, and spent all my time, working nine hours a day, hard, on
the one subject in pencil. We still spent our evenings till late in
discussions and arguments, with a little chess, rarely going to bed
before midnight; and the steady strain, with my anxiety to lose none
of my time and opportunities, finally told on my eyes. One day, while
working hard on the view of Neuchâtel, I felt something snap behind
my eyes, and in a few minutes I could no longer see my drawing;
the slightest attempt to fix my vision on anything caused such
indistinctness that I could see neither my work nor the landscape, and
I was obliged to suspend work altogether. In a few days we went to
Basle, and, after a rest, my vision came back partially, and we went
to Laufenburg, where Turner had found the subject for one of his
Liber Studiorum engravings. Here the subjects were entirely after my
feeling, and, as my eyes had ceased to trouble me, I set to work on a
large drawing of the town and fall from below. In the midst of it the
snapping behind my eyes came back, worse than ever, and that time not
to leave me for a long time. It was followed by an incessant headache,
which made life a burden, with obstinate indigestion. Here Ruskin
suddenly found that he must go back to England, and I returned with
him as far as Geneva, and thence went to St. Martin, where I spent the
rest of the autumn, as helpless for all work as a blind man.
My summer with Ruskin, to which I had looked for so much profit to my
art, had ended in a catastrophe of which I did not then even measure
the extent. It was nearly two years before I recovered from the attack
at Neuchâtel enough to work regularly, and these circumstances threw
me still further from my chosen career. More exciting and absorbing
occupation called me, and I obeyed, whether for better or worse it now
matters not. When I was free to return with undivided attention to my
painting my enthusiasm had cooled, and human interests claimed and
kept me. Ruskin had dragged me from my old methods, and given me none
to replace them. I lost my faith in myself, and in him as a guide to
art, and we separated definitely, years later, on a personal question
in which he utterly misunderstood me; but, apart from questions of
art, he always remains to me one of the largest and noblest of all the
men I have known, liberal and generous beyond limit, with a fineness
of sympathy in certain directions and delicacy of organization quite
womanly. Nothing could shake my admiration for his moral character or
abate my reverence for him as a humanist. That art should have been
anything more than a side interest with him, and that he should
have thrown the whole energy of his most energetic nature into the
reforming of it, was a misfortune to him and to the world, but
especially to me.
At St. Martin I waited the return of my vision. I climbed, and tried
chamois-hunting with no success so far as game was concerned, though I
saw the beautiful creatures in their homes, and now rejoice that I did
not kill any, though I fear I wounded one mortally, where we could not
retrieve him. One of my excursions was to the summit of the Aiguille
de Varens, by a path, in one place cut in the face of a precipice,
only wide enough for one's feet, with sheer cliff above and below, and
nothing to hold by. I have a good head, but to follow my guide on that
path was something which only _mauvaise honte_ brought me to. I was
ashamed to hesitate where he walked along so cheerily. We arranged to
spend the night at a chalet where a milkmaid with the figure of the
Venus of Milo tended a remnant of the herd, most of which had already
descended to the valleys below. As the sun was setting I walked out to
the brow of the aiguille, which from below seemed a point, but was in
reality only the perpendicular face of a mass of mountain which in the
other direction sloped away towards Switzerland for miles. The view of
Mont Blanc, directly opposite, then bare of clouds from the base to
the summit, with the red sunset light falling full on the great fields
of snow, of which I had never realized the extent from any other
point, was by far the most imposing view of the great mountain I have
ever found. I stood at an elevation of about 7000 feet, halfway to
the summit of Mont Blanc, with the whole broad expanse of glacier and
snowfield glowing in the rosy twilight; and, while I watched the
sun set, at my feet lay the valley of the Arve, with the town of
Sallanches and its attendant villages in the blue distance of
gathering night, thousands of feet below me. As I looked, enchanted,
the chimes of the convent below rang out a Gregorian air, which came
up to my heights like a solemn monition from the world of dreams, for
nothing could be distinguished of its source. We started a chamois,
and saw him race across the broad field of snow like the wind, while
I could only follow, laboring knee-deep in the snow, like a tortoise
after a hare. We slept that night buried in the hay. I am glad to
say that the hunt in the morning was without other result than a
delightful walk, for my guide was a better climber than huntsman.
A few days later, I made, with another guide, an excursion to the
Col des Fours, on the other side of the valley. The guide was an old
professional hunter, and knew the habits of the chamois well. We
climbed up leisurely in the afternoon, and slept in the hay of a
deserted chalet; for from there the cattle had already been all driven
down. While the guide prepared the supper, I walked out to the edge of
the cliffs to get the view. The landscape had become a sea of mist,--a
river, rather; for the whole valley was filled with a moving, billowy
flood of fog flowing from Mont Blanc, and enveloping mountain and
valley alike in a veil of changing vapor, melting, forming, and
flowing beneath my feet, hiding every object in the landscape below
the cliffs I stood on. It made me dizzy, for I seemed to be in the
clouds. And while I waited there came a transfiguration of the
scene,--the mist began to grow rosy, and deeper and deeper, till it
was almost like a sea of blood. No source of light was visible from
my point of view, but, of course, the phenomenon, though seemingly
mysterious, was evident. The sun, in setting, illuminated the fields
of snow at the summit of the mountain beyond, which reverberated its
flaming light into the vapor below, penetrating it down to my feet,
but the mountain itself was, from my elevation, invisible. It passed
like all glories, and quicker than most.
The next morning we went to take our posts for a chamois drive. A
friend of the guide, whom he had picked up to profit by my coming,
took one side of the valley, and I the other, while a boy with an
umbrella went down the valley to drive the chamois up to us. Having
posted me, the stupid guide crossed the line of the drive between me
and the meadow where the chamois would come to feed, and took his
post, hiding nearer the peaks where they had passed the night. Soon
after sunrise they made their appearance on a field of snow which
sloped down into the Val,--nine, young and old. I shall never see
anything prettier than the play of those young chamois on the snow.
They butted and chased each other over the snow, frolicked like
kittens, standing on their hind legs and pushing each other, until,
probably, they grew hungry, and then came down to the grass to feed.
This was the moment for the driver to come in, and he came up the
valley waving his arms and umbrella and shouting. The chamois came in
my direction till they crossed the track of the old hunter, scenting
which they halted, sniffed the air, and then broke in panic, the
majority running back past the driver and within a few yards of him,
so that if he had had a gun he could easily have killed one, and went
down the valley out of sight; three came up the valley, taking the
flank of the almost perpendicular rocks, within shot of me, but at
full gallop, and I fired at the middle one of the group. They passed
behind a mass of rock as I fired, and two came out on the other side.
If I hit one I could not know, for the place was inaccessible, but I
hope that I missed. I have often thought of the possibility that I
might have hit the poor beast, and sent him mortally wounded amongst
the rocks to die, and I never recur to the incident without pain. It
becomes incomprehensible to me, as my own life wanes, how I could ever
have found pleasure in taking the lives of other creatures filling
their stations in the world better than I ever did. The late educated
soul pays the penalty of earlier ignorance, but there is no atonement
to the victims.
I stayed at St. Martin while the plebiscite and annexation to France
took place. It was a hollow affair, the voting being a mockery, but
the Sardinian government had never made itself seriously felt in
Savoy, for either good or ill; the people were a quiet and law-abiding
race, and while I was in the country I never heard of a crime or a
prosecution. The regiments of Savoyard troops went into the French
army with ill will, and there was a bloody fight between them and the
French soldiers at Lyons when the former went into the barracks there.
I was at St. Martin when the Emperor and Empress made their tour
through the new possession. The state carriages had to be left at
Sallanches when the sovereigns went up to the great ball offered them
at Chamounix, and, when they returned, the little mountain carriages
which brought them down halted under the windows of the _auberge_ of
St. Martin, in which I lived, to wait for the state carriages to come
across the river. They had to wait about half an hour, and as they
walked up and down in the road under my window, beside which stood
my loaded rifle, I thought how easily I could change the course of
European politics, for I could have hit any button on the Emperor's
clothes, and I hated him enough to have killed him cheerfully, as
an enemy of mankind; but regicide has always seemed to me a great
mistake, as it would have been in that case, for it would only have
placed the young Prince Imperial on the throne, under the regency of
the Empress. I was then a radical republican, with all the sympathies
of a Parisian Red, for I had not learned that it is less the form of
the government than the character of the governed which makes the
difference between governments. I did not spare the life of the
Emperor from any apprehension of consequences to me, for I had none.
I knew the paths up the mountain at the back of the hotel, and before
the confusion should have been overcome, and a pursuit organized, I
could have been beyond danger, on my way to the Swiss frontier, for
the pine woods came to the back door of the hotel; and beyond that, I
never had the habit of thinking of the consequences of what I proposed
to do. When I returned to Paris, after the autumn had passed, I told
the story to an artist friend, an ultraradical, how I stood at my
window with a loaded rifle by my side, and the Emperor twenty feet
below, and he shouted with fury, "And you didn't kill him?" Time and
fate have punished him more fitly than I should have done, and wise
men leave these things to time and fate.