HOW TO SEE MOUNTAINS
I have borrowed the title of this chapter from that of an excellent
book, recently published, called _How to Look at Pictures_. The natural
man might suppose that such were questions on which there is nothing to
say. The picture is before you, and all you have to do is to open your
eyes and let the image of it fall on your retina. What can be more
simple? Yet that is not all, because the eye only sees that which it
brings with it the power of seeing. How much more one sees in the face
of a friend than in that of a stranger! It is similar with all objects.
In order to see aright and to see fully, the power of seeing must be
acquired. Some learn more easily than others, but all must learn. It is
admittedly so with music. The most self-satisfied person cannot refuse
to admit that even a short tune is better grasped, better _heard_, on a
second hearing than the first time. What is true of a simple tune is
more obviously true of a complicated work. The most accomplished
musician does not grasp a Wagner opera at a first hearing. Man is a
creature with faculties that need training. He is not born with
faculties fully trained by instinct.
To perceive beauty in a scene implies a power of selection. There is
beauty in every view if you know how to find it, but the eye has to sift
it out. Open your eyes at random. They are saluted by an infinite
multitude of details. You can pass from one to another, but you cannot
see them all at once. Looking at a tree, you can see a few leaves and
twigs surrounded by a green spludge, which experience has taught you is
made up of leaves or twigs, but you do not see all the leaves at once;
so with blades of grass, flowers in a field, strata edges on a cliff, or
crevasses in a glacier. In a broad effect of sunset you cannot be
simultaneously conscious of more than a few forms and colours, and, of
those you are simultaneously conscious of, one will be more important
than the rest--one will give the key-note. Nor can you be equally
conscious at one moment of forms and colours, or of colours and light
and shade. If a view strikes you at all, it strikes you by some effect
in it which you perceive, even though you may not be able to state in
words what that effect is. It is clear, however, that any effect is the
result of selection by the eye. The effect upon the eye would be
unchanged if a quantity of details were blotted out, so long as none of
those details formed part of the effect. Thus if you were attracted by
the bright effulgence of a snow slope seen against a clear sky (to take
a simple instance), and if your mind were concentrated upon that
contrast, you would not notice the sudden obliteration of a crevasse in
the slope. That detail would form no part of the effect.
As you gaze at any scene you may be continually and rapidly changing
the effects you are observing, and that without altering the direction
of the eye. Such, in fact, is what every view-gazer is always doing. He
is searching for a satisfying effect of beauty out of the multitude of
possible effects that could be found, such possible effects being always
practically infinite in number. Ultimately it is probable that some one
effect will obtain the mastery within him, an effect that his eye is
specially capable of seeing and his mind of comprehending. He passes on
his way, and a day afterwards recalls yesterday's view. What rises in
his memory is not the whole scene with all its details, but the special
effect that ultimately impressed him, the result of a kind of survival
of the fittest within him of a multitude of competing effects that he
saw or almost saw.
[Illustration: 10. THE JUNGFRAU FROM INTERLAKEN. First ascended 1811.]
Take, for example, a very simple instance, the view of the Jungfrau
from Interlaken on a clear day. What most people see is a roughly
triangular white mass below a blue sky, and limited on either hand and
below by green slopes and foreground. Suppose the looker to be a
meteorologist whose special study is the atmosphere and its clouds.
Probably the first thing he will notice will be the quality of the
blueness of the sky and the tone of the lower atmosphere between him and
the white mountain and green hills. He will, in fact, observe the
air-tones, and consciously or unconsciously they will be the key-note of
his impression. Next comes an East Londoner with a Toynbee Hall party,
let us say. What strikes him is the novelty of the white mountain. Its
whiteness is his main impression, the blue and the green being perceived
as mere contrasts to that, and the forms of mountain and hills being
unimportant shapes of the colour limits. The size of the mountain may be
a subsidiary impression, but it will depend still upon the white colour,
the wonder being that so large a natural object should be of snow. Anon
comes a lover of woods and trees and of the green world. The white
mountain for him will merely emphasise and dignify the pine woods and
the grassy swards. He will note the draping of the hills by the
pine-trees, and the character of the woods. The white peak will have
value in the view to him, but only a value subordinate to that of the
forest. After him comes a climber, trained, let us say, in the Canadian
Rockies, and now for the first time visiting the classic land of
climbers. When, on a clear day, the Jungfrau bursts upon his vision, he
will give all his eyes to her and her only. He will not observe the
greater or lesser blueness of the sky, nor the forms and features of the
foreground hills--that is to say, they will not be the first object of
his attention, the key-note of the effect he perceives. No! he will
notice the form of the snow peak, the modelling of the glacier surface,
the striping of the avalanche tracks, the character of the outlining
ridges and minor buttresses. He will be subtly conscious of what is snow
and what ice, of how and why rocks emerge from the snowy envelope. Where
the ignorant will conceive the peak to be a great mound of snow, the
newly-arrived climber will feel it to be a mass of rock draped in snow
and ice, and his attention will be caught and held by that drapery, its
forms and foldings.
Finally there comes an artist, who knows nothing about mountains or
forests and cares nothing, but who loves above all else (let us say)
colour. What he will see will be some colour effect, some special
harmony of tints in sky and snow and forest, some unifying effect that
will make white, blue, and green all qualities of a single glory. If he
paint the view, that is the effect he will strive to render, and in so
doing he will care little about forms and details, little about
modellings of glacier drapery and rocky skeleton. The colour-chord will
be his aim, and all the power of his vision and the skill of his hand
will be concentrated upon that. Or perhaps the artist will not come
alone but in company with another of different character. This one cares
less about colour than form. What will strike him will be the graceful
architecture of the view, the delicate outlines, the intricate rareness
of surface modelling in the snow, the strongly relieved emphasis of the
limiting lines of the framing hills. Whether the sky be blue of a
special tone and the foreground embellished with every shade and
combination of greens will be immaterial to him for the time. He will
feast his eyes upon form, and form will be the real subject of whatever
representation of the scene he may endeavour to set down.
Any one can multiply instances for himself and carry further to any
extent the analysis of possible simultaneous varieties of effect in a
single view. If to that he add the changes of effect that nature makes
by variations of the weather, time of day, and season of the year, it
will be evident enough how a single scene may be beheld with infinite
variety by the eye of man; and the suspicion will arise that all
conceptions, all appreciations, may not be equally fine or equally easy
to grasp, and that, where one man may see little, another may be able to
see an effect of singular beauty.
It is the true and proper function of a landscape painter to find
effects in views, but it does not follow that the effects he sees are
those seen by any man in the street. "I never saw a sunset look like
that," said a man to Turner when looking at one of his pictures. "No!"
was the reply, "but don't you wish you could?" It should be the business
of a painter to inspire such envy in those who see his works. If he
merely shows us things as we see them for ourselves, he is of little
service. At best he does but revive our memories. He should do more. He
should stimulate our imaginations to a higher activity, or provide us
with something to look for in the future even more than to revive in the
past.
To return to our two painters of a previous paragraph: if their
drawings of the Jungfrau were shown to the meteorologist, he might be
prompt to observe that the atmospheric effect was not rendered, and that
the colour of the sky was incorrect. The Toynbee Hall excursionist would
find the snow lacking in the radiance that had dazzled him. The
forest-lover would declare that he could not identify the character of
the trees and that the various greens of the foreground were untrue to
nature. Whilst the climber would regard the colourist's Jungfrau as a
daub in which all the character of the peak was missed. He would fail to
recognise any possible route up its painted image or the signs of the
difficulties and dangers of the way. Finally, each artist might regard
the other's picture as a more or less mistaken effort.
Yet if all these gentry were animated by a proper spirit they would
recognise that their own view was not the only way of seeing the peak,
but that any of the others was equally truthful, perhaps equally worthy,
nay, that some other effect than those they respectively felt might be
superior. Each might learn from the drawings another kind of effect to
look for, and raising his eyes from the paper to the peak might then and
there see the pictured effect for himself, and thenceforward be able to
discover the like again in other places. It is difficult to estimate how
far the effective sight of any man has been thus educated, either by
pictured scenes, or by a word in season from some companion who shared
with him this or the other splendid view. Each of us starts but poorly
equipped; each may discover something for himself and to some extent
develop his faculties by his own unaided efforts; but ultimately each,
even the most naturally gifted, learns far more from others than he
originates. The most efficient teachers of how to look are painters--of
how to look at scenery, landscape painters. It is unfortunate that the
snowy ranges have not been studied by a larger number of the great
landscape artists. Turner handled them in their broader aspects and from
relatively low and distant points of view; by so doing he greatly helped
to spread and deepen a knowledge of mountain beauty. No inconsiderable
number of later artists, mostly, however, admittedly of the second rank,
have devoted at least a part of their time to mountain-landscape art,
some pursuing it to the higher and inner recesses of the snowy region.
Yet it must be admitted that the great mountain pictures are yet to be
painted. Stott seemed on the verge of a higher success. Segantini almost
touched the goal, and would doubtless have come nearer if he had lived
longer. Such men amongst the dead, and many living artists, whose names
I do not venture to set down lest by inadvertent omission I were to be
unjust, have earned our thankfulness by the lessons they have taught;
yet plenty more remains to be accomplished. The hills have not inspired
landscape painters with all the fulness of their charm.
[Illustration: 11. FIESCHERHORN AND LOWER GRINDELWALD GLACIER]
It is often forgotten that mountains and even snowy mountains found
their way into pictures at a very early date. Even the father of modern
landscape painting, Hubert Van Eyck, introduced admirable renderings of
lines of snowy peaks into the backgrounds of some of his pictures, as,
for instance, in the "Three Maries at the Sepulchre," belonging to Sir
Frederick Cook, where the effect of a distant range is beautifully
suggested. Albrecht Duerer again, about a century later, made a series of
the carefullest studies of mountain scenes in the neighbourhood of the
Brenner road, and thenceforward he was fond of introducing
excellently-drawn peaks into the backgrounds of his engravings and
woodcuts. He possessed a remarkable knowledge of the essential facts of
mountain form, so that even a modern mountaineer can learn from his
works some of the elements of "how to see." Well-drawn mountains are of
frequent occurrence in sixteenth century woodcuts and drawings by the
prolific masters of sixteenth century south German and Venetian schools.
The fact is one of many proofs of the vitality of that first modern
outburst of mountain enthusiasm which gradually faded as the sixteenth
century advanced.
It is the commonplace of seventeenth and eighteenth century writers,
who chance to refer to mountain scenery, to describe it as of monstrous,
horrible, or even hideous character. Contemporary artists gave it
corresponding expression. We are wrong to assume that their pictures and
prints manifest any incapacity to draw, because we do not recognise in
them the peaks and landscapes we know. The fact was that those artists
gave quite truthful expression to the impression produced upon them by
mountain scenery. Most Alpine lovers have seen prints professing to
depict such objects as the Grindelwald glaciers and the surrounding
heights, and have wondered how any one with the view before him can have
so libelled it. But the artist intended no libel. All snowy peaks to him
were inaccessible altitudes; in imagination he doubled their steepness.
I myself, when a boy, approached the Matterhorn with a belief that it
was built of precipices. I had always heard it so spoken of. With the
thing itself before me I sat down to draw it, and quite unintentionally
and unconsciously exaggerated its steepness and sharpness in a way that
now seems difficult to account for. If such was the effect of
preconception upon a modern lad who had already climbed several
relatively high Alpine mountains, how easy it must have been for a
seventeenth-century artist to be misled, who never thought of climbing
at all, and to whose mind the notion of any individual interest
attaching to a particular peak was altogether foreign. He merely felt a
general awe, or horror, of his surroundings, and in depicting mountain
scenery very properly made the rendering of either emotion his chief
aim. Pictures painted at that time under those influences are not to be
regarded as valueless and ridiculous. They are of great value as
enabling us to see with our own eyes what mountain scenery actually
looked like to the people of those days, and thus to account for the
extraordinary language employed by travellers going _the grand tour_ who
attempted to describe the scenery through which they passed when
crossing the Alps.
[Illustration: 12. THE CASTLE OF CHILLON
Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls:
A thousand feet in depth below
Its massy waters meet and flow.
BYRON.
]
I have thus far only spoken of the educative effect of mountain
paintings in teaching us how to see mountain scenery, but there are
other forms of art equally efficient. As a matter of history, it was the
writers, and especially the poets, who induced the intelligent public to
change their attitude towards mountains. I do not know who was the
initiator of the movement or in what country it was first apparent.
Rousseau deserves to be remembered in this connection. Sir Walter Scott
and Byron carried on the work, and were supported by the poets of the
Lake School. Goethe and Schiller were widely influential in the same
direction. At first it was the vague romanticism of the hills and of the
supposed simple life of mountain peasants that attracted sympathetic
notice and description. Gradually mountains came to be looked at in
greater detail and for their own sake. Finally, in our own day, Ruskin
for the first time attempted to analyse mountain beauty, and not only
produced in the fourth volume of _Modern Painters_ a most suggestive and
illuminating work, but by the magic of his language and the charm and
aptness of his illustrative drawings attracted to it the attention of
all that was best in English society. Whether what followed was directly
due to his initiative, I do not know. The next important step was the
publication of Mr. Edward Whymper's _Scrambles amongst the Alps_, which
rapidly attained popularity of the best kind. It is difficult nowadays
to put one's self in the place of mountain lovers who met with that book
when it first appeared. To us it is still full of freshness and charm,
but to them it was far more significant. They compared its illustrations
with those in _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_, published twelve years
before, and they were smitten with admiration. "Look at the poor old
chromo-lithographs," wrote Leslie Stephen, "which then professed to
represent the mountains, and compare them with Mr. Whymper's admirable
woodcuts. The difference is really remarkable. Though some of these old
illustrations, copied from photographs, suggest the general outlines
with tolerable fidelity, most of them utterly fail to represent a
mountain at all to an educated eye.... The old daubs are mere random
indications of certain obtrusive features which could not well be
overlooked. Mr. Whymper's woodcuts seem to bring the genuine Alps before
us in all their marvellous beauty and variety of architecture." Ruskin
and Whymper, in fact, took up mountain-drawing where Duerer had left it
three hundred and fifty years before. They looked at the mountains
themselves with the humility that belongs to men who love the truth, and
they taught others so to look. Alpine climbing taught men for the first
time what mountains actually are. The power so to see them was
simultaneously developed, and photography has helped.
The question of mountain-photography is a thorny one, but it must be
faced. The reader can scarcely deny that if mountains really looked like
the ordinary run of commercial photographs of them, they would be ugly
or at least unattractive objects. A volume of such photographs would
scarcely lead a man, who had never left his home, eagerly to desire a
close acquaintance with snowy peaks. That, however, was actually what
Mr. Whymper's woodcuts did. Hundreds of readers of his book were thereby
led to become mountaineers. Wherein does this different efficiency
consist? A photograph, in theory, repeats every detail of the view it
contains. Such details as drop out are either too small or too faint to
be visible in the print. A camera does not select. It takes all. In this
respect it differs altogether from the human eye. If you look fixedly in
a definite direction and regard carefully what it is that you actually
see, you will discover it to be a few central details only, and that
they are surrounded not merely by vaguely defined objects but by objects
duplicated. Thus the sight of the eye and the sight of a camera are not
alike, either in what is beheld or what is selected. The sense of beauty
depends upon what the eye selects. It would seem then that the beauty of
a view could not possibly be reproduced by photography, and such was the
crude conclusion once held by artists of the capacities of this modern
process. Photographers, however, have proved that such is not
necessarily the case.
In the infinite effects, all of them beautiful, that a single
landscape is capable of yielding, and yielding simultaneously, most are
beyond the reach of photography; but the same is likewise true of any
one art-process. Pen-and-ink drawing, for example, is as incapable of
reproducing colour effects as photography. Each art has its own limited
area of possible effect. Photography, in so far as it is an art, is
subject to its own definite and rather narrow limitations. A
photographer can choose his subject and determine its exact limitations.
As he can deal only with forms and tones, he must choose a subject so
arranged by nature that its forms are in themselves beautiful, and its
tones a harmonious distribution of light and shade. But light and shade
varies with the hour of the day and season of the year, and forms vary
with the drift of clouds over the hills, so that the selection of moment
becomes for the photographer as important as the choice of point of
view, direction, and area of subject. Again, by choice of length of
exposure and by methods of development, the photographer can alter the
quality of light and shade in his negative and the amount of detail he
renders. These three factors are entirely under the photographer's
control, and in so far as he avails himself of them, not merely to
reproduce a view but to reproduce the picturesque effect in a view, he
becomes and deserves to be regarded as an artist.
[Illustration: 13. THE CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION TO THE HOFKIRCHE OF ST.
LEODEGAR. The Principal Catholic Church of Lucerne.]
In our own days, as the photograph exhibitions of the Alpine Club have
demonstrated, there are no inconsiderable number of mountain
artist-photographers. It has been proved that snow mountains are a
specially suitable subject for such art. Views in the high regions of
ice and rock seldom depend for their chief beauty upon colour. He whose
eye is sensitive to colour-effects can, indeed, find such in profusion
in the regions of snow, but they are not the effects to which experience
shows mountain lovers are as a rule most sensitive. What most of us love
in mountains is primarily their form. Grand forms are profusely supplied
by frost-riven rocks and cloven glaciers. In great snow-fields and
slopes, the surface modelling is often of transcendent beauty, and that
modelling can be rendered to perfection by photography, if the right
moment be chosen. Photographers who have known what to look for and what
to reject, have perhaps done more even than any other kind of artists in
revealing the mountains. But the right moment comes comparatively seldom
and has to be seized. A climber may pass for hours through gorgeous
scenery, full of subjects for a painter, yet there may not be offered to
him one photographable effect. He may expose plate after plate, and
carry away with him the most interesting topographical and geographical
records, but among them all there will not be a single picture that will
render a picturesque effect and be worthy to rank as a work of art. The
artist-photographer is a man who can snatch the right moment for the
right effect. He must be able to recognise immediately and
instinctively, when it comes before his vision, an effect of beauty that
can be reproduced. He must see in the complexity of every view what the
camera will make of it, knowing for a certainty what it can be made to
reflect and what to exclude. In fact he must possess the same qualities
as any other kind of landscape artist, the eye that recognises an effect
suited to his art and the skill to render that effect in his resulting
work of art.
Such photographers, as I have said, there are and have been. Their works
have opened the eyes of many a climber to effects of beauty in mountains
of which they had before been unconscious. Returning to the regions of
snow, they have been thus enabled to look for them and to find them.
Their own sensibility to beauty has thus been enriched and their power
of enjoyment correspondingly increased.
In consequence of the work of poets, writers, painters, photographers,
indeed all kinds of artists, and of the stimulus exerted by them upon
mountain travellers of all sorts, men have learned in the last
half-century to see mountains far better, more truly, and more
beautifully than was possible before. We find in them complexities and
refinements of beauty the very existence of which was previously
unsuspected. We do not merely wonder at their size or shudder at their
savagery. We can do that when the mood is on us, but the mood seldom
comes. Our forefathers generally looked at them from a distance and
thought of them as a whole, seldom doing more than to identify here and
there a single individual from the mass. We, on the contrary, have
learnt to know them from nearer at hand. We have made friends with them;
we can call them all by their names. We know the aspect of each from
many points of view, and their features are as familiar to us as were
the features of woodside and stream to the mediaeval villager. This
intimacy with the mountains has taught us that all the snowy ranges of
the world are, as it were, of a single race, and that he who knows one
knows something about all.
The Alpine climber, who knows the Alps, can be interested in mere
description of mountain ascents elsewhere. Knowing what Alpine peaks
look like and how they appear in picture and photograph, he can, by aid
of pictures and photographs, attain a tolerably complete idea of the
aspect of other mountain ranges. Hence the explorers of such ranges, of
the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the peaks of Central Africa, South America,
and New Zealand, have been called upon to describe the peaks they have
climbed, the valleys and glaciers they have traversed, and the scenery
of the regions and ranges they have explored, in a way that would have
been unintelligible two generations ago. What we now demand of a
mountain explorer is not merely to tell us the adventures of his route,
but to explain to us wherein the quality of the mountain scenery differs
from that which is familiar nearer home. He must be prepared to answer
many questions which would not have been asked till recently. Has he
been to the Himalayas or the Andes? We want to know whether those great
mountains look their size, and, if so, wherein the effect is manifested
of a scale greater than the Alps. Is he returning from Sikhim? We shall
ask him to tell us what the great peaks there look like when seen from
the beautiful forest below. What are the atmospheric effects peculiar to
the region? And, with yet more persistence, what is the quality of
mountain form which distinguishes the great peaks there, so that, beheld
merely through the medium of photographs, they so impress their
individuality upon us?
Knowing, as we do, the great variety of mountain scenery that can be
found in the Alps, between the Dolomites of Tirol at one end and the
crags of Dauphiny at the other, we expect to be told whether, in the
case of the long Andes range, corresponding varieties are discoverable,
and what and where they are. Such questions and multitudes more arise
within us. It is much if a traveller can answer a few of them. At best
he leaves us hungry. It is this hunger that impels us to travel afar
ourselves, if fortune permit. Some indeed travel and explore for merely
scientific reasons. They desire to add to knowledge and to diminish the
area of the unknown. Some perhaps believe that they go merely in search
of sport. The normal man is more complex. He has these ends in view to a
greater or less extent perhaps; but, if he be a normal mountaineer, deep
down within him there assuredly resides a true and hearty attachment to
mountains and mountain scenery for the sake of their beauty. He may be
too dumb to express it or too shy to admit, but we soon discover that
the feeling is there, and that it is a dominant fact in his nature. He
may not have analysed it. He may never speak of it, never perhaps even
state it to himself, yet when we stand beside him on a mountain height,
gazing abroad on the undefiled world of snow spread abroad at our feet,
we find that we share with him a common feeling and embrace a common
joy. After all, it is the beauty of the snows that takes us all back to
them, and again back. Were that beauty blotted out, how many of us would
be climbers? We are like anglers in this respect. We set an aim before
us and pursue it with vigour and seem to be wholly intent upon it, but
it is the beautiful, natural surroundings of our sport to which it owes
its charm. Only the artist can make the realisation of that beauty his
active aim, and activity is a necessity to most of us, so we employ
ourselves actively in the world of beauty, and take her for the
exceeding great reward of our seemingly needless and unprofitable toil.
[Illustration: 14. CLOUD-BURST OVER LUCERNE.]
NOTE.--As to the historical question referred to at the foot of
page 34, see Coolidge's _Swiss Travel_, pp. 24 and 128, and the
references there given to A. von Haller's _Die Alpen_ of 1732.