Italian Alps

The Pelmo and Civetta naturally engross the attention of the traveller on his first visit to Val di Zoldo; but the splendid walls of dolomite which fence in the valley on the south-east and south-west invite a second visit and further exploration. Passes may be found through the western range to Agordo; through the eastern, presided over by the strange block of the Sasso di Bosco Nero, the 'unknown mountains' of Miss Edwards, to the valley of the Piave. They have been already traversed by Mr. M. Holzmann, one of the most indefatigable explorers of this region.70

I cannot bring myself to conclude this imperfect notice without paying a tribute to the Italians of the southern dolomites, rendered, as it seems to me, the more due and necessary by the frequent praise which the Bœotian simplicity of their German-speaking neighbours has received from English writers. A mountaineer may well have a good word for the population of Val di Zoldo. Where else in the Alps will he find a valley the natives of which, alone and unincited by foreign gold, have found their way to the tops of the highest peaks? And let it not be thought that this success was an easy one. The Civetta, from whatever side it is seen, is of formidable steepness, and, as I have said before, the Pelmo is to the eye of a mountaineer one of the most perplexing peaks in the Alps. Yet the men of Val di Zoldo, by following their game day after day, and learning that the ledge which offered the chamois a means of escape was also for the hunter a means of pursuit, found out at last the secret of the circuitous access to the upper rocks, which had been for centuries a true 'Gemsen-Freiheit.'

I do not doubt that Mr. Ball was the first man to stand on the highest crest of the Pelmo. Its attainment was probably not an object of sufficient value to the hunters to induce them to cross the upper glacier and brave the peril of being swallowed up alive by some hidden chasm, a risk which weighs heavily on the mind of the peasant who has yet to learn the saving grace of a rope. But the real difficulty lies below, and amateur climbers with foreign guides might have sought long and vainly for the passage which the spirit of the neighbouring villagers had found ready for them.

But it is not alone on the narrow ground of venturesomeness that the people of Val di Zoldo recommend themselves to an English traveller. They possess in a high degree the intelligence and quick courtesy we are accustomed to meet with in Northern Italy. No peasant will pass the stranger as he sits to rest or sketch beside the path without a few bright words of greeting and enquiry, showing often a feeling for natural beauty and a quickness of apprehension rare amongst a secluded population. The slowness alike of mind and of action, the refusal to grasp anything outside their own daily experiences, so common among the peasantry of the Pusterthal, is here unknown. To quote a shrewd observer, 'the men are such gentlemen and the women such ladies, that every chance meeting becomes an interchange of courtesies;' and the traveller, turning northwards, will often have occasion to join in Dickens's regret for what he has left behind, 'the beautiful Italian manners, the sweet language, the quick recognition of a pleasant look or cheerful word, the captivating expression of a desire to oblige in everything.'

CHAPTER XIV.

MEN AND MOUNTAINS

What, I pray you, is more pleasant, more delectable and more acceptable unto a man than to behold the height of hills as if they were the very Atlantes themselves of heaven?

Art thou in nature, and yet hast not known nature?

Hermann Kirchner, circa A.D. 1600.MEN AND MOUNTAINS – MOUNTAIN-HATERS – A LITERARY EXAMPLE – POETS AND PAINTERS – THE PLACE OF ART – ALPINE SCENERY AND ART – THE VARIETY OF THE ALPS – THE SNOW WORLD – MONS. LOPPÉ'S PICTURES – CONCLUSION

Switzerland, from a distance practically beyond that of the Caucasus at the present day, has in the last thirty years been brought within a few hours of our homes. Increased facilities of travel and of residence in Alpine regions, acting in unison with many less obvious but equally real influences, have extended human sympathy to Nature in her wildest forms and created a new sentiment, the Love of the Alps.

The indifference of men to mountains in past ages has perhaps been exaggerated. The prevalence throughout the world of mountain-worship in different forms seems to show that the great peaks and the eternal snows have before now had power to stir men's minds and to mix with their lives. But the image which has been adored as a god is for a time cast aside, and it is only to distant generations that it becomes valuable for its intrinsic beauty of design and workmanship. In the case of the great ranges the period of neglect had been a long one. In the Europe of the Middle Ages all hilly regions became surrounded by associations of fear and danger. The plan of the universe was indeed held to have been originally divine; but the devil had somehow become clerk of the works, and managed to put in a good deal not in the original specification. Earthquakes, tempests, venomous reptiles and mountains were all accepted as productions of the evil principle.

From this disfavour the mountains have been during the last century slowly emerging. Better acquaintance has led to the discovery of all the beauties and benefits the Alps offer to those who seek them in a proper mood. We have learnt thoroughly to appreciate the variety imparted to all nature by the accidents of hill scenery, to know and love the thousand forms of peaks, the changing charm of lakes and forests, the rush of the grey Swiss torrent under the upright pines, and the blue repose of the Italian stream under the beech shadows. Moreover, Alpine climbing has revealed the wonders of the kingdom of frost and snow. The imprisoned colours of glacier ice, the ruin of its fantastic towers and tottering minarets, the splendour of its fretted and icicle-hung caves are no longer familiar only to Arctic travellers. The overpowering height of some peak soaring majestically heavenwards can never have been felt as it is by those who understand through experience the dimensions and meaning of each rock and patch of snow on its ridges.

The flow of human sympathy towards the mountains has, however, been too recent not to have left many traces of the deep ebb of antipathy which had preceded it. 'Survivals' of the old and narrower tone of thought of a hundred years ago are constantly to be met with in English society. They even penetrate occasionally to the tables-d'hôte of Swiss inns, where they may be recognised by the air of calm superiority generally assumed by the unappreciative, whether in the presence of music, a picture, or a peak.

These representatives of mediæval sentiment are often mediævalists also in their practice. Where their opinions are based on anything besides hereditary prejudice it is very often found if you examine them tenderly that their experience has been coloured, or more correctly speaking obscured, by bodily torture. They have climbed with unboiled peas in their shoes, and without the excuse of their forefathers. For they have deadened their natural senses by bodily discomfort without any hope of prospective gain for their souls. They have literally repeated the old penance by setting out to walk with new boots and cotton socks and a ponderous knapsack. They have rushed over passes and up peaks in bad weather; or overtaxed their powers in a first tour: or they have perhaps never persevered long enough to be able to tread with ease a mountain-path, where the novice dares not lift his eyes from the ground, while his companion, some days or weeks more experienced, can enjoy at once the scenery and motion. No wonder that what is a delight to the wise is to them foolishness, and that they speedily renounce the mountains.

Such mountain-haters still find champions both in English and foreign modern literature. I shall not be tempted to take the late Canon Kingsley as an example, for his amusing attack on mountains71 is in truth only a plea for flats, and in that light I heartily sympathise with it. Moreover Mr. Kingsley loved all nature so well that his cursing is of the most superficial and Balaamitic character, and the argument he puts in the mouth of his 'peevish friend' would invite mercy by its very feebleness.

A distinguished French critic will furnish us with a far more genuine example of the old school. M. Taine, travelling in the Pyrenees to write a book, experiences a difficulty the reverse of Mr. Kingsley's. Feeling that he ought, as a man of his time, to bless, he yet cannot refrain from cursing altogether. The antique modes of expression flow naturally from his pen; he is constantly reminding us of the once favourite theological view that the mountains are a disease of nature. His language at times resembles that of a medical student fresh from the hospitals and the dissecting-room. He sums up his impressions of the Pyrenees in the reflection that they are 'monstrous protuberances.' Here is a picture from Luchon! 'The slopes hang one over the other notched, dislocated, bleeding; the sharp ridges and fractures are yellow with miserable mosses, vegetable ulcers which defile the nakedness of the rocks with their leprous spots.'72 This loathsome simile for mountain mosses pleases M. Taine so much that he never mentions them without repeating it. Take now a more general sketch.

'How grotesque are these jagged heads, these bodies bruised and heaped together, these distorted shoulders! What unknown monsters, what a deformed and gloomy race, outside humanity! Par quel horrible accouchement la terre les a-t-elle soulevés hors de ses entrailles?' It would be easy to fill a page or two with such 'elegant extracts.'

Mountaineers may sometimes feel disposed to resent such unworthy treatment of mountain beauty. But the true lover of the Alps is not necessarily disposed to be arrogant in his faith or to wish all the world of the same mind. While he knows that to him the mountains are sympathetic, he admits that they have also an unsympathetic side which is the first to present itself to many. He recognises in the hill country a type of nature, free, vigorous and healthy, and is glad that others should share the enjoyment of it. But as the affection of a sailor for the sea does not blunt him to the pleasures of dry land, so his feeling for the Alps does not make him less susceptible to milder scenes. He does not assert that mountains are the most beautiful objects in creation, but only that they are beautiful. He does not claim for them undivided worship, but a share of admiration.

Little disposed however as we may generally be to proselytise, we must feel that there is one class of our fellow-countrymen amongst whom we like to make converts. We too often find blind to mountain beauty those who, as we think, ought to be its priests and interpreters. For the painter, like the poet, can feel 'harmonies of the mountains and the skies' invisible to the general eye; it is his gift by a higher or more developed sense to recognise and reveal to others the beauties of the visible world. By his happy power of fixing on canvas the vision of a moment, he extends the appreciation of nature of all who intelligently look at his work. Paul Potter and Hobbema have taught us the charm which lurks in the flat and at first sight monotonous landscapes of Holland. Looking through their eyes we see the beauty of the moist sun-suffused atmosphere, of the sudden alternations of shadow and gleam which chequer and gild the abundant verdure and peaceful homesteads. Corot and Daubigny lead us better to appreciate the unfamiliar spirit of French river-sides in the dewy morning hours or the red gloaming, a beauty indistinct in form yet vivid in impression as that of a dream. When we exclaim as we rush past in the steamer or the express, 'What a Cuyp!' or 'How like Corot!' we pay a just tribute to the artist through whose works the essential features of the scene before us have been made so readily recognisable.

In the same way those who have already studied the beautiful Titian (No. 635) in our National Gallery, or the landscape lately exhibited at Burlington House, will find a deeper and subtler pleasure in their first view of the great Belluno valley. But this unfortunately is a rare example. As a rule the Alpine traveller must depend entirely on his own powers of observation and selection, or must sharpen his appreciative faculty by the aid of poets.

For at least the word-painters of our generation have not been false to their mission of expressing and carrying on the best feelings of their age. The works of our living poets abound with sketches of mountain scenery the precision of which may satisfy even a literal-minded enthusiast. In the exquisite Alpine idyll in the 'Princess' we have brought before us one after another the scenes of the Bernese Oberland; Grindelwald with its firths of ice, Lauterbrunnen with its monstrous ledges and 'thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,' or the gentler beauties of the vale of Frutigen and the Lake of Brienz. Beside this finished picture might be placed a gallery of sketches familiar to every reader of contemporary poetry. Mr. Browning draws with sharp, firm strokes the paths over the foothills of Lombardy, where the high arched bridge leaps the blue brook, and at each sudden turn the faded frescoes of a chapel gleam from between the chestnut-trees over whose tops 'the silver spearheads charge.' Mr. Matthew Arnold prefers the more solemn mood of the inner Alps, where above the hillside, 'thin sprinkled with snow,' 'the pines slope, the cloudstrips hung soft in their heads.'

Across the Atlantic, among the other great English-speaking people, the poets have not any more than our own treated mountains as 'outside humanity.' Emerson has dwelt more fully than any of his forerunners on the appeal they make to our intellectual faculty; Joaquin Miller reflects the fascination exerted over the senses by the great Californian ranges.

Art, like poetry, ought surely to be the expression of the strongest and clearest feelings of its day, and thus the interpreter and instructor of weaker or more confused minds. The types of beauty are eternal, but painters are human beings, and a man can successfully paint or describe only what he has seen and felt for himself. The most vivid impressions of each age and individual are necessarily derived from the forms of life around them, and these are therefore the best suited to inspire their art-faculty. The sculptors of the Parthenon did not carve Egyptian dances but Attic festivals; the great Italian masters painted, whether as Virgin, God, or Saint, their own countrymen or women in the scenery of their own homes. In the dulness of our outer lives, the deadness of our souls to natural enjoyments, lies assuredly one of the chief causes of the artistic barrenness of our century. Can we then afford to throw away lightly, as material for art, any form of nature which seems really capable of stirring our minds into some sort of enthusiasm?

Neglect of to us familiar scenes and contemporary subjects is, however, often excused on the ground that these things were unknown to the painters of the Renaissance. In point of fact this amounts to a protestation of our incapacity or unwillingness to discover beauty where it has not been already pointed out, to a confession that amongst us art is dead. For to be able to choose out, harmonise, and idealise the elements of beauty in the world as it goes on around us is the essential quality of living art. It is one, it is true, which is too often missed on the walls of Burlington House.

Many of the most cultivated living artists show their veneration for the old masters by endeavouring to reproduce the results they arrived at, rather than by studying nature at first-hand and in their spirit. Consequently in one half of modern painting we see, in the place of free and spontaneous accomplishment, an abundance of tentative and over-conscious reproduction. And unfortunately this half finds its best justification in the character of the other. To put it simply, our school may – of course with some illustrious exceptions – be divided into those who think too much and feel too little, and those who neither think nor feel at all.

Some of our friends are sitting all the day long watching seriously in dim galleries if perchance they may yet catch the mantle fallen from the prophets of old. There are others who, going straight to daily life and nature, are often too idle or dull-eyed to penetrate beneath the surface. In place of selecting and combining for us elements of beauty, they attempt to tickle our senses with vulgar tricks of imitation. For one 'Chill October' we have had twenty river scenes crowded with smart people in boats; for one sketch of Leighton, Walker, or Mason half a hundred showy trivialities.

From both schools, the Retrospective and the Commonplace, any invitation to the Alps will receive the same answer. The mountains, begins one voice, are harsh, violent, and unmanageable in outline, crude and monotonous in colour, and devoid of atmosphere. The great masters of the Renaissance never painted the Alps, continues the other, with, remembering Titian, doubtful accuracy. In short, we are given to understand, as politely as may be, that the hill-country may be good for those dull souls which, incapable naturally of appreciating more delicate or subtle charms, require to be strongly stirred; but that to the artist's eye the Alps are the chromolithography of nature – that, in fact, a taste for mountain scenery is bad taste.

Yet the majesty and poetry of the great ranges are not incapable of representation. One mountain sketch of Turner is enough to prove this. But if such an example is thought too exceptional let us take another. I have before me pictures in brown, twelve inches by ten, showing above the mossy roofs of a Tyrolese homestead and the broad sunny downs of Botzen the tusked and horned ramparts which guard King Laurin's rose-garden; the Orteler, its vast precipices of crowning ice-pyramid half seen through belts of cloud; the soaring curve of the Wetterhorn as it sweeps up like an aspiring thought from the calm level life of the pasturages at its feet; the Matterhorn, an Alpine Prometheus chained down on its icy pedestal, yet challenging the skies with dauntless front. Is mind powerless where mere reflection can succeed not once but repeatedly? Can it be impossible to put on canvas subjects which readily adapt themselves to modest-sized photographs? So long as form as well as colour is a source of pleasure, the Alps will offer a store of the most valuable material for art.

Nevertheless, a certain amount of truth underlies all the current criticisms on Alpine scenery. In 'the blue unclouded weather' which sometimes, to the joy of mountaineers and sightseers who reckon what they see by quantity rather than quality, extends through a Swiss August, the air is deficient in tone and gradation. In the central Cantons the prevailing colours are two tints of green. The vivid hue of pasturages and broad-leaved trees is belted by the heavier shade of pine-woods, and both are capped by a dazzling snow-crown, producing an effect to a painter's eye crude and unmanageable. The Alps have, in common with most great natures, rough and rugged places, such as are not found in more everyday lives or landscapes. Their outlines are often wanting in grace, and of a character which does not readily fall into a harmonious composition.

But to allow all this is only to show that here as elsewhere there is need for selection before imitation. Those who, ignoring the essential qualities of the mountains, insist only on their blemishes remind me of the foreigner who sees in English landscapes nothing but a monotony of heavy green earth overshadowed by a sunless sky. Their disparagement is like most erroneous criticism, the honest expression of the little knowledge described in the proverb.

Familiarity with what he represents is essential to the painter's success. Men paint best as a rule the scenery of their own homes. Perugino gives us Umbrian hills and the lake of Thrasimene; Cima and Titian Venetian landscapes and colours; Turner loves most English seas and mists. It is useless, except for a rare genius, to go once to Switzerland and paint one or two pictures, for in the mountains knowledge is especially needed. The first view of the Alps is in most cases a disappointment. Our expectations have been unconsciously based on the great mounds of cumulus cloud which roll up against lowland skies. We expect something comparable to them, and we find only a thin white line which the smallest cloud-belt altogether effaces. First impressions require to be corrected by patient study of detail before any adequate comprehension can be formed of the true scale. The stories of our countryman who proposed to spend a quiet day in strolling along the crest of the chain from the St. Theodule to Monte Rosa, of the New Yorker who thought he saw one of the mules of a party descending the Matterhorn, have become proverbs. I suppose no season passes without the Grands Mulets being mistaken for a company of mountaineers by some new arrivals at Chamonix. And too often Alpine pictures betray a similar confusion of mind in their painters. I have seen the Schreckhorn through utter ignorance of rock-drawing converted into a slender pyramid which might have stood comfortably beside the Mammoth Tree under the roof of the Crystal Palace. Not long ago there was a picture in the Academy of the Lake of Lucerne, where the mountain-tops looked scarcely so high above the water as the frame was above the ground. The hangers had done their best, but nothing could give those mountains height.

Moreover it is well to know something of the substance as well as the size of your subject. Some painters, it is true, have had a conventional mode of expressing all foliage; but their example is not one to be imitated. The different forms and texture of granite and limestone must be carefully attended to. Again, before it is possible properly to paint the golden lights and pearl-grey shadows on the face of the Jungfrau some knowledge must be gained of the meaning of the lines and furrows which seam the upper snows.

A sense for colour is doubtless a born gift. Nevertheless it will take many days of watching before even the keenest apprehension seizes upon all the subtleties of distance and light and shade in the mountains. A dark green pine, a brown châlet, and a white peak may do very well in a German chromolithograph. But the artist and the mountain-lover ask for something better than the clever landscapes of Bierstadt and the Munich school, faithful it may be, but faithful in a dry and narrow manner, and giving us every detail without the spirit of the scene. The forms are there exactly enough, but local colour and sentiment are wanting. We have a catalogue instead of a poem. One of Turner's noble pictures of the gorge of Göschenen is worth a gallery of such compositions.

Those who are seeking to understand mountains will do well not to confine themselves to the round of the tourist. Convenience and health, not love of beauty, have been the chief influences in determining the orbits of our fellow-countrymen. Nothing compels the painter to linger on the bleak uplands round the sources of the Inn, where a shallow uniform trench does duty for the valley which has never yet been dug out, and where the minor and most conspicuous peaks have a mean and ruinous aspect.73

If he wishes to paint the central snowy range as portions of the landscape rather than to study them for themselves, he should begin with the further side of the Alps. There, even in the clear summer weather, when the Swiss crags seem most hard and near, and the pine-trees crude and stiff, all the hollows of the hills are filled with waves of iridescent air, as if a rainbow had been diffused through the sky. The distances, purple and blue, float before the eye with a soft outline like that of the young horns of a stag. Even the snows are never a cold white; after the red flush of dawn has left them they pass through gradations of golden brightness until, when the sun is gone, they sink into a soft spectral grey. And in the foreground woods of chestnuts and beeches spread their broad branches over wayside chapels bright with colour, and mossy banks the home of delicate ferns and purple-hearted cyclamens. To those who know them the names of Val Rendena, Val Sesia, Val Anzasca, and Val Maggia call up visions of the sweetest beauty. But the whole Italian slope is free at all times from the alleged defects of Swiss scenery. Further east lies the Trentino, where the mountains stand apart and the valleys spread out to an ampler width, where nature is rich and open-handed, and the landscapes unite Alpine nobility of form to the sunny spaciousness and deep colour of Italy. And close at hand, beyond the Adige, is the country of Titian, where the new school may find a precedent and an example in the great painter of Cadore.