fragments.

§ 27. But this form is much modified by the special direction of the
descending force as it escapes from confinement. For a stream coming
down a ravine is kept by the steep sides of its channel in concentrated
force: but it no sooner reaches the bottom, and escapes from its ravine,
than it spreads in all directions, or at least tries to choose a new
channel at every flood. Let _a b c_, Fig. 104, be three ridges of
mountain. The two torrents coming down the ravine between them meet, at
_d_ and _e_, with the heaps of ground formerly thrown down by their own
agency. These heaps being more or less in the form of cones, the torrent
has a tendency to divide upon their apex, like water poured on the top
of a sugar-loaf, and branch into the radiating channels _e x_, _e y_,
&c. The stronger it is, the more it is disposed to rush straightforward,
or with little curvature, as in the line _e x_, with the impetus it has
received in coming down the ravine; the weaker it is, the more readily
it will lean to one side or the other, and fall away in the lines of
escape, _e y_, or _e h_; but of course at times of highest flood it
fills all its possible channels, and invents a few new ones, of which
afterwards the straightest will be kept by the main stream, and the
lateral curves occupied by smaller branches; the whole system
corresponding precisely to the action of the ribs of the young leaf, as
shown in Plate +8+ of Vol. III., especially in Fig. 6,--the main
torrent, like the main rib, making the largest fortune, i. e. raising
the highest heap of gravel and dust.

[Illustration: FIG. 104.]

§ 28. It may easily be imagined that when the operation takes place on a
large scale, the mass of earth thus deposited in a gentle slope at the
mountain's foot becomes available for agricultural purposes, and that
then it is of the greatest importance to prevent the stream from
branching into various channels at its will, and pouring fresh sand over
the cultivated fields. Accordingly, at the mouth of every large ravine
in the Alps, where the peasants know how to live and how to work, the
stream is artificially embanked, and compelled as far as possible to
follow the central line down the cone. Hence, when the traveller passes
along any great valley,--as that of the Rhone or Arve,--into which
minor torrents are poured by lateral ravines, he will find himself every
now and then ascending a hill of moderate slope, at the _top_ of which
he will cross a torrent, or its bed, and descend by another gradual
slope to the usual level of the valley. In every such case, his road has
ascended a tongue of débris, and has crossed the embanked torrent
carried by force along its centre.

Under such circumstances, the entire tongue or heap of land ceases of
course to increase, until the bed of the confined torrent is partially
choked by its perpetual deposit. Then in some day of violent rain the
waves burst their fetters, branch at their own will, cover the fields of
some unfortunate farmer with stones and slime, according to the
torrent's own idea of the new form which it has become time to give to
the great tongue of land, carry away the road and the bridge together,
and arrange everything to their own liking. But the road is again
painfully traced among the newly fallen débris; the embankment and
bridge again built for the stream, now satisfied with its outbreak; and
the tongue of land submitted to new processes of cultivation for a
certain series of years. When, however, the torrent is exceedingly
savage, and generally of a republican temper, the outbreaks are too
frequent and too violent to admit of any cultivation of the tongue of
land. A few straggling alder or thorn bushes, their roots buried in
shingle, and their lower branches fouled with slime, alone relieve with
ragged spots of green the broad waste of stones and dust. The utmost
that can be done is to keep the furious stream from choosing a new
channel in every one of its fits of passion, and remaining in it
afterwards, thus extending its devastation in entirely unforeseen
directions. The land which it has brought down must be left a perpetual
sacrifice to its rage; but in the moment of its lassitude it is brought
back to its central course, and compelled to forego for a few weeks or
months the luxury of deviation.

§ 29. On the other hand, when, owing to the nature of the valley above,
the stream is gentle, and the sediment which it brings down small in
quantity, it may be retained for long years in its constant path, while
the sides of the bank of earth it has borne down are clothed with
pasture and forest, seen in the distance of the great valley as a
promontory of sweet verdure, along which the central stream passes with
an influence of blessing, submitting itself to the will of the
husbandman for irrigation, and of the mechanist for toil; now nourishing
the pasture, and now grinding the corn, of the land which it has first
formed, and now waters.

§ 30. I have etched above, Plate +35+, a portion of the flank of the
valley of Chamouni, which presents nearly every class of line under
discussion, and will enable the reader to understand their relations at
once. It represents, as was before stated, the crests of the Montagnes
de la Côte and Taconay, shown from base to summit, with the Glacier des
Bossons and its moraine. The reference figure given at p. 212 will
enable the reader to distinguish its several orders of curves, as
follows:

_h r_. Aqueous curves of fall, at the base of the Tapia; very
       characteristic. Similar curves are seen in multitude on the two
       crests beyond as _b c_, _c_ B.

_d e_. First lines of projection. The débris falling from the glacier
       and the heights above.

_k_, _l_, _n_.Three lines of escape. A considerable torrent (one of whose
       falls is the well-known Cascade des Pélerins[91]) descends from
       behind the promontory _h_: its natural or proper course would be
       to dash straight forward down the line _f g_, and part of it does
       so; but erratic branches of it slide away round the promontory,
       in the lines of escape, _k_, _l_, &c. Each row of trees marks,
       therefore, an old torrent bed, for the torrent always throws
       heaps of stones up along its banks, on which the pines, growing
       higher than on the neighboring ground, indicate its course by
       their supremacy. When the escaped stream is feeble, it steals
       quietly away down the steepest part of the slope; that is to say,
       close under the promontory, at _i_. If it is stronger, the
       impetus from the hill above shoots it farther out, in the line
       _k_; if stronger still, at _l_; in each case it curves gradually
       round as it loses its onward force, and falls more and more
       languidly to leeward, down the slope of the débris.

_r s_. A line which, perhaps, would be more properly termed of
       limitation than of escape, being that of the base or termination
       of the heap of torrent débris, which in shape corresponds exactly
       to the curved lip of a wave, after it has broken, as it slowly
       stops upon a shallow shore. Within this line the ground is
       entirely composed of heaps of stones, cemented by granite dust
       and cushioned with moss, while outside of it, all is smooth
       pasture. The pines enjoy the stony ground particularly, and hold
       large meetings upon it, but the alders are shy of it; and, when
       it has come to an end, form a triumphal procession all round its
       edge, following the concave line. The correspondent curves above
       are caused by similar lines in which the débris has formerly
       stopped.

[Illustration: 45. Débris Curvature.]

§ 31. I found it a matter of the greatest difficulty to investigate the
picturesque characters of these lines of projection and escape, because,
as presented to the eye, they are always modified by perspective; and
it is almost a physical impossibility to get a true profile of any of
the slopes, they round and melt so constantly into one another. Many of
them, roughly measured, are nearly circular in tendency;[92] but I
believe they are all portions of infinite curves either modified by the
concealment or destruction of the lower lips of débris, or by their
junction with straight lines of slope above, throwing the longest limb
of the curve upwards. Fig. 1, in Plate +45+ opposite, is a simple but
complete example from Chamouni; the various overlapping and concave
lines at the bottom being the limits of the mass at various periods,
more or less broken afterwards by the peasants, either by removing
stones for building, or throwing them back at the edges here and there,
out of the way of the plough; but even with all these breaks, their
natural unity is so sweet and perfect, that, if the reader will turn the
plate upside down, he will see I have no difficulty (merely adding a
quill or two) in turning them into a bird's wing (Fig. 2), a little
ruffled indeed, but still graceful, and not of such a form as one would
have supposed likely to be designed and drawn, as indeed it was, by the
rage of a torrent.

But we saw in Chap. VII. § 10 that this very rage was, in fact, a
beneficent power,--creative, not destructive; and as all its apparent
cruelty is overruled by the law of love, so all its apparent disorder is
overruled by the law of loveliness: the hand of God, leading the wrath
of the torrent to minister to the life of mankind, guides also its grim
surges by the laws of their delight; and bridles the bounding rocks, and
appeases the flying foam, till they lie down in the same lines that lead
forth the fibres of the down on a cygnet's breast.

§ 32. The straight slopes with which these curves unite themselves
below, in Plate +33+ (_f g_ in reference figure), are those spoken of
in the outset as lines of rest. But I defer to the next chapter the
examination of these, which are a separate family of lines (not curves
at all), in order to reassemble the conclusions we have now obtained
respecting _curvature_ in mountains, and apply them to questions of art.

And, first, it is of course not to be supposed that these symmetrical
laws are so manifest in their operation as to force themselves on the
observance of men in general. They are interrupted, necessarily, by
every fantastic accident in the original conformation of the hills,
which, according to the hardness of their rocks, more or less accept or
refuse the authority of general law. Still, the farther we extend our
observance of hills, the more we shall be struck by the continual
roundness and softness which it seems the object of nature to give to
every form; so that, when crags look sharp and distorted, it is not so
much that they are unrounded, as that the various curves are more subtly
accommodated to the angles, and that, instead of being worn into one
sweeping and smooth descent, like the surface of a knoll or down, the
rock is wrought into innumerable minor undulations, its own fine anatomy
showing through all.

[Illustration: J. Ruskin.     J. H. Le Keux.
               46. The Buttresses of an Alp.]

§ 33. Perhaps the mountain which I have drawn on the opposite page
(Plate +46+[93]) is, in its original sternness of mass, and in the
complexity of lines into which it has been chiselled, as characteristic
an instance as could be given by way of general type. It is one of no
name or popular interest, but of singular importance in the geography of
Switzerland, being the angle buttress of the great northern chain of the
Alps (the chain of the Jungfrau and Gemmi), and forming the promontory
round which the Rhone turns to the north-west, at Martigny. It is
composed of an intensely hard gneiss (slaty crystalline), in which the
plates of mica are set for the most part against the angle, running
nearly north and south, as in Fig. 105, and giving the point, therefore,
the utmost possible strength, which, however, cannot prevent it from
being rent gradually by enormous curved fissures, and separated into
huge vertical flakes and chasms, just at the lower promontory, as seen
in Plate +46+, and (in plan) in Fig. 105. The whole of the upper
surface of the promontory is wrought by the old glaciers into furrows
and striæ more notable than any I ever saw in the Alps.

§ 34. Now observe, we have here a piece of Nature's work which she has
assuredly been long in executing, and which is in peculiarly firm and
stable material. It is in her best rock (slaty crystalline), at a point
important for all her geographical purposes, and at the degree of
mountain elevation especially adapted to the observation of mankind. We
shall therefore probably ascertain as much of Nature's mind about these
things in this piece of work as she usually allows us to see all at
once.

[Illustration: FIG. 105.]

§ 35. If the reader will take a pencil, and, laying tracing paper over
the plate, follow a few of its lines, he will (unless before accustomed
to accurate mountain-drawing) be soon amazed by the complexity,
endlessness, and harmony of the curvatures. He will find that there is
not one line in all that rock which is not an infinite curve, and united
in some intricate way with others, and suggesting others unseen; and if
it were the reality, instead of my drawing, which he had to deal with,
he would find the infinity, in a little while, altogether overwhelm him.
But even in this imperfect sketch, as he traces the multitudinous
involution of flowing line, passing from swift to slight curvature, or
slight to swift, at every instant, he will, I think, find enough to
convince him of the truth of what has been advanced respecting the
natural appointment of curvature as the first element of all loveliness
in form.

§ 36. "Nay, but there are hard and straight lines mingled with those
curves continually." True, as we have said so often, just as shade is
mixed with light. Angles and undulations may rise and flow continually,
one through or over the other; but the opposition is in quantity nearly
always the same, if the mass is to be pleasant to the eye. In the
example previously given (Plate +40+), the limestone bank above
Villeneuve, it is managed in a different way, but is equal in degree;
the lower portion of the hill is of soft rock in thin laminæ; the upper
mass is a solid and firm bed, yet not so hard as to stand all weathers.
The lower portion, therefore, is rounded into almost unbroken softness
of bank; the upper surmounts it as a rugged wall, and the opposition of
the curve and angle is just as complete as in the first example, in
which one was continually mingled with the other.

§ 37. Next, note the _quantity_ in these hills. It is an element on
which I shall have to insist more in speaking of vegetation; but I must
not pass it by, here, since, in fact, it constitutes one of the
essential differences between hills of first-rate magnificence, and
inferior ones. Not that there is want of quantity even in the lower
ranges, but it is a quantity of inferior things, and therefore more
easily represented or suggested. On a Highland hill side are
multitudinous clusters of fern and heather; on an Alpine one,
multitudinous groves of chestnut and pine. The number of the things may
be the same, but the sense of infinity is in the latter case far
greater, because the number is of nobler things. Indeed, so far as mere
magnitude of space occupied on the field of the horizon is the measure
of objects, a bank of earth ten feet high may, if we stoop to the foot
of it, be made to occupy just as much of the sky as that bank of
mountain at Villeneuve; nay, in many respects its little ravines and
escarpments, watched with some help of imagination, may become very
sufficiently representative to us of those of the great mountain; and in
classing all water-worn mountain-ground under the general and humble
term of Banks, I mean to imply this relationship of structure between
the smallest eminences and the highest. But in this matter of
superimposed _quantity_ the distinctions of rank are at once fixed. The
heap of earth bears its few tufts of moss or knots of grass; the
Highland or Cumberland mountain its honeyed heathers or scented ferns;
but the mass of the bank at Martigny or Villeneuve has a vineyard in
every cranny of its rocks, and a chestnut grove on every crest of them.

§ 38. This is no poetical exaggeration. Look close into that plate
(+46+). Every little circular stroke in it among the rocks means, not a
clump of copse nor wreath of fern, but a walnut tree, or a Spanish
chestnut, fifty or sixty feet high. Nor are the little curves, thus
significative of trees, laid on at random. They are not indeed counted,
tree by tree, but they are most carefully distributed in the true
proportion and quantity; or if I have erred at all, it was, from mere
fatigue, on the side of sparingness. The minute mounds and furrows
scattered up the side of that great promontory, when they are actually
approached, after three or four hours' climbing, turn into independent
hills with true _parks_ of lovely pasture land enclosed among them, and
avenue after avenue of chestnuts, walnuts, and pines bending round their
bases; while in the deeper dingles, unseen in the drawing, nestle
populous villages, literally bound down to the rock by enormous trunks
of vine, which, first trained lightly over the loose stone roofs, have
in process of years cast their fruitful net over the whole village, and
fastened it to the ground under their purple weight and wayward coils,
as securely as ever human heart was fastened to earth by the net of the
Flatterer.

§ 39. And it is this very richness of incident and detail which renders
Switzerland so little attractive in its subjects to the ordinary artist.
Observe, this study of mine in Plate +46+ does not profess to be a
_picture_ at all. It is a mere sketch or catalogue of all that there is
on the mountain side, faithfully written out, but no more than should be
put down by any conscientious painter for mere guidance, before he
begins his work, properly so called; and in finishing such a subject no
trickery nor shorthand is of any avail whatsoever; there are a certain
number of trees to be drawn; and drawn they must be, or the place will
not bear its proper character. They are not misty wreaths of soft wood
suggestible by a sweep or two of the brush; but arranged and lovely
clusters of trees, clear in the mountain sunlight, each specially
grouped and as little admitting any carelessness of treatment, though
five miles distant, as if they were within a few yards of us; the whole
meaning and power of the scene being involved in that one fact of
quantity. It is not large merely by multitudes of tons of rock,--the
number of tons is not measurable; it is not large by elevation of angle
on the horizon,--a house-roof near us rises higher; it is not large by
faintness of aerial perspective,--in a clear day it often looks as if we
could touch the summit with the hand. But it is large by this one
unescapable fact that, from the summit to the base of it, there are of
timber trees so many countable thousands. The scene differs from
subjects not Swiss by including hundreds of other scenes within itself,
and is mighty, not by scale, but by aggregation.

§ 40. And this is more especially and humiliatingly true of pine forest.
Nearly all other kinds of wood may be reduced, over large spaces, to
undetailed masses; but there is nothing but patience for pines; and this
has been one of the principal reasons why artists call Switzerland
"unpicturesque." There may perhaps be, in the space of a Swiss valley
which comes into a picture, from five to ten millions of well grown
pines.[94] Every one of these pines must be drawn before the scene can
be. And a pine cannot be represented by a round stroke, nor by an
upright one, nor even by an angular one; no conventionalism will express
a pine; it must be legitimately drawn, with a light side and a dark
side, and a soft gradation from the top downwards, or it does not look
like a pine at all. Most artists think it not desirable to choose a
subject which involves the drawing of ten millions of trees; because,
supposing they could even do four or five in a minute, and worked for
ten hours a day, their picture would still take them ten years before
they had finished its pine forests. For this, and other similar reasons,
it is declared usually that Switzerland is ugly and unpicturesque; but
that is not so; it is only that _we_ cannot paint it. If we could, it
would be as interesting on the canvas as it is in reality; and a painter
of fruit and flowers might just as well call a human figure
unpicturesque, because it was to him unmanageable, as the ordinary
landscape-effect painter speak in depreciation of the Alps.

§ 41. It is not probable that any subjects such as we have just been
describing, involving a necessity of ten years' labor, will be executed
by the modern landscape school,--at least, until its Pre-Raphaelitic
tendencies become much more developed than they are yet; nor was it
desirable that they should have been by Turner, whose fruitful invention
would have been unwisely arrested for a length of time on any single
subject, however beautiful. But with his usual certainty of perception,
he fastened at once on this character of "quantity," as the thing to be
expressed, in one way or another, in all grand mountain-drawing; and the
subjects of his on which I have chiefly dwelt in the First Volume
(chapter on the Inferior Mountains, § 16, &c.) are distinguished from
the work of other painters in nothing so much as in this redundance.
Beautiful as they are in color, graceful in fancy, powerful in
execution,--in none of these things do they stand so much alone as in
plain, calculable quantity; he having always on the average twenty trees
or rocks where other people have only one, and winning his victories not
more by skill of generalship than by overwhelming numerical superiority.

§ 42. I say his works are distinguished in this more than in anything
else, not because this is their highest quality, but because it is
peculiar to them. Invention, color, grace of arrangement, we may find in
Tintoret and Veronese in various manifestation; but the expression of
the infinite redundance of natural landscape had never been attempted
until Turner's time; and the treatment of the masses of mountain in the
Daphne and Leucippus, Golden Bough, and Modern Italy, is wholly without
precursorship in art.

Nor, observe, do I insist upon this quantity _merely_ as arithmetical,
or as if it were producible by repetition of similar things. It would be
easy to be redundant, if multiplication of the same idea constituted
fulness; and since Turner first introduced these types of landscape,
myriads of vulgar imitations of them have been produced, whose
perpetrators have supposed themselves disciples or rivals of Turner, in
covering their hills with white dots for forest, and their foregrounds
with yellow sparklings for herbage. But the Turnerian redundance is
never monotonous. Of the thousands of groups of touches which, with him,
are necessary to constitute a single bank of hill, not one but has some
special character, and is as much a separate invention as the whole plan
of the picture. Perhaps this may be sufficiently understood by an
attentive examination of the detail introduced by him in his St. Gothard
subject, as shown in Plate +37+.

§ 43. I do not, indeed, know if the examples I have given from natural
scenes, though they are as characteristic as I could well choose, are
enough to accustom the reader to the character of true mountain lines,
and to enable him to recognize such lines in other instances; but if
not, at all events they may serve to elucidate the main points, and
guide to more complete examination of the subject, if it interests him,
among the hills themselves. And if, after he has pursued the inquiry
long enough to feel the certitude of the laws which I have been
endeavoring to illustrate, he turns back again to art, I am well assured
it will be with a strange recognition of unconceived excellence, and a
newly quickened pleasure in the unforeseen fidelity, that he will trace
the pencilling of Turner upon his hill drawings. I do not choose to
spend, in this work, the labor and time which would be necessary to
analyze, as I have done the drawing of the St. Gothard, any other of
Turner's important mountain designs; for the reader must feel the
disadvantage they are under in being either reduced in scale, or divided
into fragments: and therefore these chapters are always to be considered
merely as memoranda for reference before the pictures which the reader
may have it in his power to examine. But this one drawing of the St.
Gothard, as it has already elucidated for us Turner's knowledge of crest
structure, will be found no less wonderful in the fulness with which it
illustrates his perception of the lower aqueous and other curvatures. If
the reader will look back to the etching of the entire subject, Plate
+21+, he will now discern, I believe, without the necessity of my
lettering them for him, the lines of fall, rounded down from the crests
until they plunge into the overhanging precipices; the lines of
projection, where the fallen stones extend the long concave sweep from
the couloir, pushing the torrent against the bank on the other side; in
the opening of the ravine he will perceive the oblique and parallel
inclination of its sides, following the cleavage of the beds in the
diagonal line A B of the reference figure; and, finally, in the great
slope and precipice on the right of it, he will recognize one of the
grandest types of the peculiar mountain mass which Turner always chose
by preference to illustrate, the "slope above wall" of _d_ in Fig. 13,
p. 148; compare also the last chapter, §§ 26, 27. It will be seen, by
reference to my sketch of the spot, Plate +20+, that this conformation
does actually exist there with great definiteness: Turner has only
enlarged and thrown it into more numerous alternations of light and
shade. As these could not be shown in the etching, I have given, in the
frontispiece, this passage nearly of its real size: the exquisite greys
and blues by which Turner has rounded and thrown it back are necessarily
lost in the plate; but the grandeur of his simple cliff and soft curves
of sloping bank above is in some degree rendered.

We must yet dwell for a moment on the detail of the rocks on the left in
Plate +37+, as they approach nearer the eye, turning at the same time
from the light. It cost me trouble to etch this passage, and yet half
its refinements are still missed; for Turner has put his whole strength
into it, and wrought out the curving of the gneiss beds with a subtlety
which could not be at all approached in the time I had to spare for this
plate. Enough, however, is expressed to illustrate the points in
question.

§ 44. We have first, observe, a rounded bank, broken, at its edges, into
cleavages by inclined beds. I thought it would be well, lest the reader
should think I dwelt too much on this particular scene, to give an
instance of similar structure from another spot; and therefore I
daguerreotyped the cleavages of a slope of gneiss just above the Cascade
des Pélerins, Chamouni, corresponding in position to this bank of
Turner's. Plate +48+ (facing p. 303), copied by Mr. Armytage from the
daguerreotype, represents, necessarily in a quite unprejudiced and
impartial way, the structure at present in question; and the reader may
form a sufficient idea, from this plate, of the complexity of descending
curve and foliated rent, in even a small piece of mountain
foreground,[95] where the gneiss beds are tolerably continuous. But
Turner had to add to such general complexity the expression of a more
than ordinary undulation in the beds of the St. Gothard gneiss.

§ 45. If the reader will look back to Chapter II. § 13, he will find it
stated that this scene is approached out of the defile of Dazio Grande,
of which the impression was still strong on Turner's mind, and where
only he could see, close at hand, the nature of the rocks in a good
section. It most luckily happens that De Saussure was interested by the
rocks at the same spot, and has given the following account of them,
Voyages, §§ 1801, 1802:--

"À une lieue de Faïdo, l'on passe le Tésin pour le repasser bientôt
après [see the old bridge in Turner's view, carried away in mine], et
l'on trouve sur sa rive droite des couches d'une roche feuilletée, qui
montent du Côté du Nord.

"On voit clairement que depuis que les granits veinés ont été remplacés
par des pierres moins solides, tantôt les rochers se sont éboulés et ont
été recouverts par la terre végétale, tantôt leur situation primitive a
subi des changements irréguliers.

"§ 1802. Mais bientôt après, _on monte par un chemin en corniche au
dessus du Tésin, qui se précipite entre des rochers avec la plus grande
violence_. Ces rochers sont là si serrés, qu'il n'y a de place que pour
la rivière et pour le chemin, et même en quelques endroits, celui-ci est
entièrement pris sur le roc. Je fis à pied cette montée, pour examiner
avec soin ces beaux rochers, _dignes de toute l'attention d'un amateur_.

"Les veinés de ce granit forment en plusieurs endroits des _zigzags
redoublés_, précisément comme ces anciennes tapisseries, connues sous le
nom de points d'Hongrie; et là, on ne peut pas prononcer, si les veinés
de la pierre, sont ou ne sont pas parallèles à ses couches. Cependant
ces veinés reprennent aussi dans quelques places, une direction
constante, et cette direction est bien la même que celle des couches. Il
paroît même qu'en divers endroits, où ces veinés ont la forme d'un
_sigma_ ou d'une M couchée M, ce sont les grandes jambes du _sigma_, qui
ont la direction des couches. Enfin, j'observai plusieurs couches, qui
dans le milieu de leur épaisseur paroissoient remplies de ces veinés en
zigzag, tandis qu'auprès de leurs bords, on les voyoit toutes en lignes
droites."

§ 46. If the reader will now examine Turner's work at the point _x_ in
the reference figure, and again on the stones in the foreground,
comparing it finally with the fragment of the rocks which happened
fortunately to come into my foreground in Plate +20+, rising towards the
left, and of which I have etched the structure with some care, though at
the time I had quite forgotten Saussure's notice of the peculiar
M-shaped zigzags of the gneiss at the spot, I believe he will have
enough evidence before him, taken all in all, to convince him of
Turner's inevitable perception, and of the entire supremacy of his
mountain drawing over all that had previously existed. And if he is able
to refer, even to the engravings (though I desire always that what I
state should be _tested_ by the drawings only) of any others of his
elaborate hill-subjects, and will examine their details with careful
reference to the laws explained in this chapter, he will find that the
Turnerian promontories and banks are always simply _right_, and that in
all respects; that their gradated curvatures, and nodding cliffs, and
redundant sequence of folded glen and feathery glade, are, in all their
seemingly fanciful beauty, literally the most downright plain speaking
that has as yet been uttered about hills; and differ from all antecedent
work, not in being ideal, but in being, so to speak, pictorial _casts_
of the ground. Such a drawing as that of the Yorkshire Richmond, looking
down the river, in the England Series, is even better than a model of
the ground, because it gives the aerial perspective, and is better than
a photograph of the ground, because it exaggerates no shadows, while it
unites the veracities both of model and photograph.

§ 47. Nor let it be thought that it was an easy or creditable thing to
treat mountain ground with this faithfulness in the days when Turner
executed those drawings. In the Encyclopædia Britannica (Edinburgh,
1797), under article "Drawing," the following are the directions given
for the production of a landscape:--

"If he is to draw a landscape from nature, let him take his station on a
rising ground, where he will have a large horizon, and mark his tablet
into three divisions, downwards from top to the bottom; and divide in
his own mind the landscape he is to take into three divisions also. Then
let him turn his face directly opposite to the midst of the horizon,
keeping his body fixed, and draw what is directly before his eyes upon
the middle division of the tablet: then _turn his head, but not his
body_,[96] to the left hand and delineate what he views there, joining
it properly to what he had done before; and, lastly, do the same by
what is to be seen upon his right hand, laying down everything exactly,
both with respect to distance and proportion. One example is given in
plate clxviii.

"The best artists of late, in drawing their landscapes, make them shoot
away, one part lower than another. Those who make their landscapes mount
up higher and higher, as if they stood at the bottom of a hill to take
the prospect, commit a great error; the best way is to get upon a rising
ground, make the nearest objects in the piece the highest, and those
that are farther off to shoot away lower and lower till they come almost
level with the line of the horizon, lessening everything proportionably
to its distance, and observing also to make the objects fainter and less
distinct the farther they are removed from the eye. He must make all his
lights and shades fall one way, and let every thing have its proper
motion: as trees shaken by the wind, the small boughs bending more and
the large ones less; water agitated by the wind, and dashing against
ships or boats, or falling from a precipice upon rocks and stones, and
spirting up again into the air, and sprinkling all about; clouds also in
the air now gathered with the winds; now violently condensed into hail,
rain, and the like,--always remembering, that whatever motions are
caused by the wind must be made all to move the same way, because the
wind can blow but one way at once."

Such was the state of the public mind, and of public instruction, at the
time when Claude, Poussin, and Salvator were in the zenith of their
reputation; such were the precepts which, even to the close of the
century, it was necessary for a young painter to comply with during the
best part of the years he gave to study. Take up one of Turner's views
of our Yorkshire dells, seen from about a hawk's height of pause above
the sweep of its river, and with it in your hand, side by side with the
old Encyclopædia paragraph, consider what must have been the man's
strength, who, on a sudden, passed from such precept to such practice.

§ 48. On a sudden it was; for, even yet a youth, and retaining profound
respect for all older artist's ways of _work_, he followed his own will
fearlessly in choice of _scene_; and already in the earliest of his
coast drawings there are as daring and strange decisions touching the
site of the spectator as in his latest works; lookings down and up into
coves and clouds, as defiant of all former theories touching possible
perspective, or graceful componence of subject, as, a few years later,
his system of color was of the theory of the brown tree. Nor was the
step remarkable merely for its magnitude,--for the amount of progress
made in a few years. It was much more notable by its direction. The
discovery of the true structure of hill banks had to be made by Turner,
not merely in _advance_ of the men of his day, but in _contradiction_ to
them. Examine the works of contemporary and preceding landscapists, and
it will be found that the universal practice is to make the tops of all
cliffs broken and rugged, their bases smooth and soft, or concealed with
wood. No one had ever observed the contrary structure, the bank rounded
at the top, and broken on the flank. And yet all the hills of any
importance which are met with throughout Lowland Europe are, properly
speaking, high banks, for the most part following the courses of rivers,
and forming a step from the high ground, of which the country generally
consists, to the river level. Thus almost the whole of France, though,
on the face of it, flat, is raised from 300 to 500 feet above the level
of the sea, and is traversed by valleys either formed by, or directing,
the course of its great rivers. In these valleys lie all its principal
towns, surrounded, almost without exception, by ranges of hills covered
with wood or vineyard. Ascending these hills, we find ourselves at once
in an elevated plain, covered with corn and lines of apple trees,
extending to the next river side, where we come to the brow of another
hill, and descend to the city and valley beneath it. Our own valleys in
Northumberland, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Devonshire, are cut in the
same manner through vast extents of elevated land; the scenery which
interests the traveller chiefly, as he passes through even the most
broken parts of those counties, being simply that of the high _banks_
which rise from the shores of the Dart or the Derwent, the Wharfe or the
Tees. In all cases, when these banks are surmounted, the sensation is
one of disappointment, as the adventurer finds himself, the moment he
has left the edge of the ravine, in a waste of softly undulating moor or
arable land, hardly deserving the title of hill country. As we advance
into the upper districts the fact remains still the same, although the
banks to be climbed are higher, the ravines grander, and the
intermediate land more broken. The majesty of an isolated peak is still
comparatively rare, and nearly all the most interesting pieces of
scenery are glens or passes, which, if seen from a height great enough
to command them in all their relations, would be found in reality little
more than trenches excavated through broad masses of elevated land, and
expanding at intervals into the wide basins which are occupied by the
glittering lake or smiling plain.

[Illustration: FIG. 106.]

[Illustration: J. Ruskin.    J. H. Le Keux.
               47. The Quarries of Carrara.]

§ 49. All these facts had been entirely ignored by artists; nay, almost
by geologists, before Turner's time. He saw them at once; fathomed them
to the uttermost, and, partly owing to early association, partly,
perhaps, to the natural pleasure of working a new mine discovered by
himself, devoted his best powers to their illustration, passing by with
somewhat less attention the conditions of broken-summited rock, which
had previously been the only ones known. And if we now look back to his
treatment of the crest of Mont Pilate, in the figure given at the close
of the last chapter, we shall understand better the nature and strength
of the instinct which compelled him to sacrifice the peaked summit, and
to bring the whole mountain within a lower enclosing line. In that
figure, however, the dotted peak interferes with the perception of the
form finally determined upon, which therefore I repeat here (Fig. 106),
as Turner gave it in color. The eye may not at first detect the law of
ascent in the peaks, but if the height of any one of them were altered,
the general form would instantly be perceived to be less agreeable. Fig.
107 shows that they are disposed within an infinite curve, A _c_, from
which the last crag falls a little to conceal the law, while the
terminal line at the other extremity, A _b_, is a minor echo of the
whole contour.

[Illustration: FIG. 107.]

§ 50. I must pause to make one exception to my general statement that
this structure had been entirely ignored. The reader was, perhaps,
surprised by the importance I attached to the fragment of mountain
background by Masaccio, given in Plate +13+ of the third volume. If he
looks back to it now, his surprise will be less. It was a complete
recognition of the laws of the lines of aqueous sculpture, asserted as
Turner's was, in the boldest opposition to the principles of rock
drawing of the time. It presents even smoother and broader masses than
any which I have shown as types of hill form; but it must be remembered
that Masaccio had seen only the softer contours of the Apennine
limestone. I have no memorandum by me of the hill lines near Florence;
but Plate +47+ shows the development of limestone structure, at a spot
which has, I think, the best right to be given as an example of the
Italian hills, the head of the valley of Carrara. The white scar on the
hill side is the principal quarry; and the peaks above deserve
observation, not so much for anything in their forms, as for the
singular barrenness which was noted in the fifteenth chapter of the last
volume (§ 8) as too often occurring in the Apennines. Compare this plate
with the previous one. The peak drawn in Plate +46+ rises at least 7500
feet above the sea,--yet is wooded to its top; this Carrara crag not
above 5000,[97]--yet it is wholly barren.

§ 51. Masaccio, however, as we saw, was taken away by death before he
could give any one of his thoughts complete expression. Turner was
spared to do _his_ work, in this respect at least, completely. It might
be thought that, having had such adverse influence to struggle with, he
would prevail against it but in part; and, though showing the way to
much that was new, retain of necessity some old prejudices, and leave
his successors to pursue in purer liberty, and with happier power, the
path he had pointed out. But it was not so: he did the work so
completely on the ground which he chose to illustrate, that nothing is
left for future artists to accomplish in that kind. Some classes of
scenery, as often pointed out in the preceding pages, he was unfamiliar
with, or held in little affection, and out of that scenery, untouched by
him, new motives may be obtained; but of such landscape as his favorite
Yorkshire Wolds, and banks of Rhenish and French hill, and rocky
mountains of Switzerland, like the St. Gothard, already so long dwelt
upon, he has expressed the power in what I believe to be for ever a
central and unmatchable way. I do not say this with positiveness,
because it is not demonstrable. Turner may be beaten on his own
ground--so may Tintoret, so may Shakespeare, Dante, or Homer: but my
_belief_ is that all these first-rate men are lonely men; that the
particular work they did was by them done for ever in the best way; and
that this work done by Turner among the hills, joining the most intense
appreciation of all tenderness with delight in all magnitude, and memory
for all detail, is never to be rivalled, or looked upon in similitude
again.


FOOTNOTES

  [88] _Quantity_ of curvature is as measurable as quantity of
    anything else; only observe that it depends on the nature of the
    line, not on its magnitude; thus, in simple circular curvature, _a
    b_, Fig. 96, being the fourth of a large circle, and _b c_ the half
    of a smaller one, the quantity of the element of circular curvature
    in the entire line _a c_ is three fourths of that in _any_
    circle,--the the same as the quantity in the line _e f_.

    [Illustration: FIG 96.]

  [89] The catenary is not properly a curve capable of infinity, if
    its direction does not alter with its length; but it is capable of
    infinity, implying such alteration by the infinite removal of the
    points of suspension. It entirely corresponds in its effect on the
    eye and mind to the infinite curves. I do not know the exact nature
    of the apparent curves of suspension formed by a high and weighty
    waterfall; they are dependent on the gain in rapidity of descent by
    the central current, where its greater body is less arrested by the
    air; and I apprehend, are catenary in character, though not in
    cause.

  [90] I am afraid of becoming tiresome by going too far into the
    intricacies of this most difficult subject; but I say "_towards_ the
    bottom of the hill," because, when a certain degree of verticality
    is reached, a counter protective influence begins to establish
    itself, the stones and waterfalls bounding away from the brow of the
    precipice into the air, and wearing it at the top only. Also it is
    evident that when the curvature falls into a vertical cliff, as
    often happens, the maximum of curvature must be somewhere _above_
    the brow of the cliff, as in the cliff itself it has again died into
    a straight line.

  [91] The following extract from my private diary, giving an account
    of the destruction of the beauty of this waterfall in the year 1849,
    which I happened to witness, may be interesting to those travellers
    who remember it before that period. The house spoken of as
    "Joseph's," is that of the guide Joseph Coutet, in a village about a
    mile below the cascade, between it and the Arve: that noticed as of
    the "old avalanche" is a hollow in the forest, cleft by a great
    avalanche which fell from the Aiguille du Midi in the spring of
    1844. It struck down about a thousand full-grown pines, and left an
    open track in the midst of the wood, from the cascade nearly down to
    the village.

    "Evening, Thursday, June 28th. I set out for the Cascade des
    Pélerins as usual; when we reached Joseph's house, we heard a sound
    from the torrent like low thunder, or like that of a more distant
    and heavier fall. A peasant said something to Joseph, who stopped to
    listen, then nodded, and said to me, 'La cascade vient de se
    déborder.' Thinking there would be time enough afterwards to ask for
    explanations, I pushed up the hill almost without asking a question.
    When we reached the place of the old avalanche, Joseph called to me
    to stop and see the torrent increase. There was at this time a dark
    cloud on the Aiguille du Midi, down to its base; the upper part of
    the torrent was brown, the lower white, not larger than usual. The
    brown part came down, I thought, with exceeding slowness, reaching
    the cascade gradually; as it did so, the fall rose to about once and
    a half its usual height, and in the five minutes' time that I paused
    (it could not be more) turned to the color of slate. I then pushed
    on as hard as I could. When I reached the last ascent I was obliged
    to stop for breath, but got up before the fall could sensibly have
    diminished in body of water. It was then nearly twice as far cast
    out from the rock as last night, and the water nearly black in
    color; and it had the appearance, as it broke and separated at the
    outer part of the fall, of a shower of fragments of flat slate. The
    reason of this appearance I could not comprehend, unless the water
    was so mixed with mud that it drew out flat and unctuously when it
    broke; but so it was: instead of spray it looked like a shower of
    dirty flat bits of slate--only with a lustre, as if they had been
    wet first. This, however, was the least of it, for the torrent
    carried with it nearly as much weight of stone as water; the stones
    varying in size, the average being, I suppose, about that of a hen's
    egg; but I do not suppose that at any instant the arch of water was
    without four or five as large as a man's fist, and often came larger
    ones,--all vomited forth with the explosive power of a small
    volcano, and falling in a continual shower as thick, constant, and,
    had it not been mixed with the crash of the fall, as loud as a heavy
    fire of infantry; they bounded and leaped in the basin of the fall
    like hailstones in a thunder-shower. As we watched the fall it
    seemed convulsively to diminish, and suddenly showed, as it
    shortened, the rock underneath it, which I could hardly see
    yesterday: as I cried out to Joseph it rose again, higher than ever,
    and continued to rise, till it all but reached the snow on the rock
    opposite. It then became very fantastic and variable, increasing and
    diminishing in the space of two or three seconds, and partially
    changing its direction. After watching it for half an hour or so, I
    determined to try and make some memoranda. Coutet brought me up a
    jug of water: I stooped to dip my brush, when Coutet caught my arm,
    saying, 'Tenez;' at the same instant I heard a blow, like the going
    off of a heavy gun, two or three miles away; I looked up, and as I
    did, the cascade sank before my eyes, and fell back to the rock.
    Neither of us spoke for an instant or two; then Coutet said, 'C'est
    une pierre, qui est logée dans le creux,' or words to that effect:
    in fact, he had seen the stone come down as he called to me. I
    thought also that nothing more had happened, and watched the
    destroyed fall only with interest, until, as suddenly as it had
    fallen, it rose again, though not to its former height; and Coutet,
    stooping down, exclaimed, 'Ce n'est pas ça, le roc est percé;' in
    effect, a hole was now distinctly visible in the cup which turned
    the stream, through which the water whizzed as from a burst pipe.
    The cascade, however, continued to increase, until this new channel
    was concealed, and I was maintaining to Coutet that he must have
    been mistaken (and that the water only _struck_ on the outer rock,
    having changed its mode of fall above), when again it fell; and the
    two girls, who had come up from the châlet, expressed their opinion
    at once, that the 'cascade est finie.' This time all was plain; the
    water gushed in a violent jet d'eau through the new aperture, hardly
    any of it escaping above. It rose again gradually, as the hole was
    choked with stones, and again fell; but presently sprang out almost
    to its first elevation (the water being by this time in much less
    body), and retained very nearly the form it had yesterday, until I
    got tired of looking at it, and went down to the little châlet, and
    sat down before its door. I had not been there five minutes before
    the cascade fell, and rose no more."

  [92] It might be thought at first that the line to which such curves
    would approximate would be the cycloid, as the line of quickest
    descent. But in reality the contour is modified by perpetual sliding
    of the débris under the influence of rain; and by the bounding of
    detached fragments with continually increased momentum. I was quite
    unable to get at anything like the expression of a constant law
    among the examples I studied in the Alps, except only the great laws
    of delicacy and changefulness in all curves whatsoever.

  [93] I owe Mr. Le Keux sincere thanks, and not a little admiration,
    for the care and skill with which he has followed, on a much reduced
    scale, the detail of this drawing.

  [94] Allow ten feet square for average space to each pine; suppose
    the valley seen only for five miles of its length, and the pine
    district two miles broad on each side--a low estimate of breadth
    also: this would give five millions.

  [95] The white spots on the brow of the little cliff are lichens,
    only four or five inches broad.

  [96] What a _comfortable_, as well as intelligent, operation,
    sketching from nature must have been in those days!

  [97] It is not one of the highest points of the Carrara chain. The
    chief summits are much more jagged, and very noble. See Chap. XX. §
    20.




CHAPTER XVIII.

RESULTING FORMS:--FIFTHLY, STONES.


§ 1. It is somewhat singular that the indistinctness of treatment which
has been so often noticed as characteristic of our present art shows
itself always most when there is least apparent reason for it. Modern
artists, having some true sympathy with what is vague in nature, draw
all that is uncertain and evasive without evasion, and render faithfully
whatever can be discerned in faithless mist or mocking vapors; but
having no sympathy with what is solid and serene, they seem to become
uncertain themselves in proportion to the certainty of what they see;
and while they render flakes of far-away cloud, or fringes of
inextricable forest, with something like patience and fidelity, give
nothing but the hastiest indication of the ground they can tread upon or
touch. It is only in modern art that we find any complete representation
of clouds, and only in ancient art that, generally speaking, we find any
careful realization of Stones.

§ 2. This is all the more strange, because, as we saw some time back,
the _ruggedness_ of the stone is more pleasing to the modern than the
mediæval, and he rarely completes any picture satisfactorily to himself
unless large spaces of it are filled with irregular masonry, rocky
banks, or shingly shores: whereas the mediæval could conceive no
desirableness in the loose and unhewn masses; associated them generally
in his mind with wicked men, and the Martyrdom of St. Stephen; and
always threw them out of his road, or garden, to the best of his power.

Yet with all this difference in predilection, such was the honesty of
the mediæval, and so firm his acknowledgment of the necessity to paint
completely whatever was to be painted at all, that there is hardly a
strip of earth under the feet of a saint, in any finished work of the
early painters, but more, and better painted, stones are to be found
upon it than in an entire exhibition full of modern mountain scenery.

§ 3. Not better painted in every respect. In those interesting and
popular treatises on the art of drawing, which tell the public that
their colors should neither be too warm nor too cold, and that their
touches should always be characteristic of the object they are intended
to represent, the directions given for the manufacture of stones usually
enforce "crispness of outline" and "roughness of texture." And,
accordingly, in certain expressions of frangibility, irregular
accumulation, and easy resting of one block upon another, together with
some conditions of lichenous or mossy texture, modern stone-painting is
far beyond the ancient; for these are just the characters which first
strike the eye, and enable the foreground to maintain its picturesque
influence, without inviting careful examination. The mediæval painter,
on the other hand, not caring for this picturesque general effect, nor
being in anywise familiar with mountain scenery, perceived in stones,
when he was forced to paint them, eminently the characters which they
had in common with figures; that is to say, their curved outlines,
rounded surfaces, and varieties of delicate color, and, accordingly, was
somewhat too apt to lose their angular and fragmentary character in a
series of muscular lines resembling those of an anatomical preparation;
for, although in large rocks the cleavable or frangible nature was the
thing that necessarily struck him most, the pebbles under his feet were
apt to be oval or rounded in the localities of almost all the important
schools of Italy. In Lombardy, the mass of the ground is composed of
nothing but Alpine gravel, consisting of rolled oval pebbles, on the
average about six inches long by four wide--awkward building materials,
yet used in ingenious alternation with the bricks in all the lowland
Italian fortresses. Besides this universal rotundity, the qualities of
stones which rendered them valuable to the lapidary were forced on the
painter's attention by the familiar arts of inlaying and mosaic. Hence,
in looking at a pebble, his mind was divided between its roundness and
its veins; and Leonardo covers the shelves of rock under the feet of St.
Anne with variegated agates; while Mantegna often strews the small
stones about his mountain caves in a polished profusion, as if some
repentant martyr princess had been just scattering her caskets of
pearls into the dust.

§ 4. Some years ago, as I was talking of the curvilinear forms in a
piece of rock to one of our academicians, he said to me, in a somewhat
despondent accent, "If you look for curves, you will see curves; if you
look for angles, you will see angles."

The saying appeared to me an infinitely sad one. It was the utterance of
an experienced man; and in many ways true, for one of the most singular
gifts, or, if abused, most singular weaknesses, of the human mind is its
power of persuading itself to see whatever it chooses;--a great gift, if
directed to the discernment of the things needful and pertinent to its
own work and being; a great weakness, if directed to the discovery of
things profitless or discouraging. In all things throughout the world,
the men who look for the crooked will see the crooked, and the men who
look for the straight will see the straight. But yet the saying was a
notably sad one; for it came of the conviction in the speaker's mind
that there was in reality _no_ crooked and _no_ straight; that all so
called discernment was fancy, and that men might, with equal rectitude
of judgment, and good-deserving of their fellow-men, perceive and paint
whatever was convenient to them.

§ 5. Whereas things may always be seen truly by candid people, though
never _completely_. No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing;
but we may see more and more of it the longer we look. Every individual
temper will see something different in it: but supposing the tempers
honest, all the differences are there. Every advance in our acuteness of
perception will show us something new; but the old and first discerned
thing will still be there, not falsified, only modified and enriched by
the new perceptions, becoming continually more beautiful in its harmony
with them and more approved as a part of the Infinite truth.

§ 6. There are no natural objects out of which more can be thus learned
than out of stones. They seem to have been created especially to reward
a patient observer. Nearly all other objects in nature can be seen, to
some extent, without patience, and are pleasant even in being half seen.
Trees, clouds, and rivers are enjoyable even by the careless; but the
stone under his foot has for carelessness nothing in it but stumbling;
no pleasure is languidly to be had out of it, nor food, nor good of any
kind; nothing but symbolism of the hard heart and the unfatherly gift.
And yet, do but give it some reverence and watchfulness, and there is
bread of thought in it, more than in any other lowly feature of all the
landscape.

§ 7. For a stone, when it is examined, will be found a mountain in
miniature. The fineness of Nature's work is so great, that, into a
single block, a foot or two in diameter, she can compress as many
changes of form and structure, on a small scale, as she needs for her
mountains on a large one; and, taking moss for forests, and grains of
crystal for crags, the surface of a stone, in by far the plurality of
instances, is more interesting than the surface of an ordinary hill;
more fantastic in form and incomparably richer in color,--the last
quality being, in fact, so noble in most stones of good birth (that is
to say, fallen from the crystalline mountain-ranges), that I shall be
less able to illustrate this part of my subject satisfactorily by means
of engraving than perhaps any other, except the color of skies. I say,
_shall_ be less able, because the beauty of stone surface is in so great
a degree dependent on the mosses and lichens which root themselves upon
it, that I must place my richest examples in the section on vegetation.
For instance, in the plate opposite, though the mass of rock is large
and somewhat distant, the effect of it is as much owing to the white
spots of silvery lichen in the centre and left, and to the flowing lines
in which the darker mosses, growing in the cranny, have arranged
themselves beyond, as to the character of the rock itself; nor could the
beauty of the whole mass be explained, if we were to approach the least
nearer, without more detailed drawing of this vegetation. For the
present I shall only give a few examples of the drawing of stones
roughly broken, or worn so as not to be materially affected by
vegetation.

[Illustration: 48. Bank of Slaty Crystallines.]

§ 8. We have already seen an example of Titian's treatment of mountain
crests as compared with Turner's; here is a parallel instance, from
Titian, of stones in the bed of a torrent (Fig. 108), in many ways good
and right, and expressing in its writhed and variously broken lines far
more of real stone structure than the common water-color dash of the
moderns. Observe, especially, how Titian has understood that the
fracture of the stone more or less depends on the undulating grain of
its crystalline structure, following the cavity of the largest stone in
the middle of the figure, with concentric lines; and compare in Plate
+21+ the top of Turner's largest stones on the left.

[Illustration: FIG. 108.]

§ 9. If the reader sees nothing in this drawing (Fig. 108) that he can
like,--although, indeed, I would have him prefer the work of
Turner,--let him be assured that he does not yet understand on what
Titian's reputation is founded. No painter's name is oftener in the
mouth of the ordinary connoisseur, and no painter was ever less
understood. His power of color is indeed perfect, but so is
Bonifazio's. Titian's _supremacy_ above all the other Venetians, except
Tintoret and Veronese, consists in the firm truth of his portraiture,
and more or less masterly understanding of the nature of stones, trees,
men, or whatever else he took in hand to paint; so that, without some
correlative understanding in the spectator, Titian's work, in its
highest qualities, must be utterly dead and unappealing to him.

[Illustration: FIG. 109.]

[Illustration: FIG. 110.]

[Illustration: FIG. 111.]

[Illustration: FIG. 112.]

§ 10. I give one more example from the lower part of the same print
(Fig. 109), in which a stone, with an eddy round it, is nearly as well
drawn as it can be in the simple method of the early wood-engraving.
Perhaps the reader will feel its truth better by contrast with a
fragment or two of modern Idealism. Here, for instance (Fig. 110), is a
group of stones, highly entertaining in their variety of form, out of
the subject of "Christian vanquishing Apollyon," in the outlines to the
Pilgrim's Progress, published by the Art-Union, the idealism being here
wrought to a pitch of extraordinary brilliancy by the exciting nature
of the subject. Next (Fig. 111) is another poetical conception, one of
Flaxman's, representing the eddies and stones of the Pool of Envy
(Flaxman's Dante), which may be conveniently compared with the
Titianesque stones and streams. And, finally, Fig. 112 represents, also
on Flaxman's authority, those stones of an "Alpine" character, of which
Dante says that he

  "Climbed with heart of proof the adverse steep."

It seems at first curious that every one of the forms that Flaxman has
chanced upon should be an impossible one--a form which a stone never
could assume: but this is the Nemesis of false idealism, and the
inevitable one.

§ 11. The chief incapacity in the modern work is not, however, so much
in its outline, though that is wrong enough, as in the total absence of
any effort to mark the surface roundings. It is not the _outline_ of a
stone, however true, that will make it solid or heavy; it is the
interior markings, and thoroughly understood perspectives of its sides.
In the opposite plate the upper two subjects are by Turner, foregrounds
out of the Liber Studiorum (Source of Arveron, and Ben Arthur); the
lower by Claude, Liber Veritatis, No. 5. I think the reader cannot but
feel that the blocks in the upper two subjects are massy and ponderous;
in the lower, wholly without weight. If he examine their several
treatment, he will find that Turner has perfect imaginative conception
of every recess and projection over the whole surface, and _feels_ the
stone as he works over it; every touch, moreover, being full of tender
gradation. But Claude, as he is obliged to hold to his outline in hills,
so also clings to it in the stones,--cannot round them in the least,
leaves their light surfaces wholly blank, and puts a few patches of dark
here and there about their edges, as chance will have it.

[Illustration: 49. Truth and Untruth of Stones.]

§ 12. Turner's way of wedging the stones of the glacier moraine together
in strength of disorder, in the upper subject, and his indication of the
springing of the wild stems and leafage out of the rents in the boulders
of the lower one, will hardly be appreciated unless the reader is
_fondly_ acquainted with the kind of scenery in question; and I cannot
calculate on this being often the case, for few persons ever look at any
near detail closely, and perhaps least of all at the heaps of débris
which so often seem to encumber and disfigure mountain ground. But for
the various reasons just stated (§ 7), Turner found more material for
his power, and more excitement to his invention, among the fallen stones
than in the highest summits of mountains; and his early designs, among
their thousand excellences and singularities, as opposed to all that had
preceded them, count for not one of the least the elaborate care given
to the drawing of torrent beds, shaly slopes, and other conditions of
stony ground which all canons of art at the period pronounced
inconsistent with dignity of composition; a convenient principle, since,
of all foregrounds, one of loose stones is beyond comparison the most
difficult to draw with any approach to realization. The Turnerian
subjects, "Junction of the Greta and Tees" (Yorkshire Series, and
illustrations to Scott); "Wycliffe, near Rokeby" (Yorkshire); "Hardraw
Fall" (Yorkshire); "Ben Arthur" (Liber Studiorum); "Ulleswater" and the
magnificent drawing of the "Upper Fall of the Tees" (England Series),
are sufficiently illustrative of what I mean.

§ 13. It is not, however, only, in their separate condition, as
materials of foreground, that we have to examine the effect of stones;
they form a curiously important element of distant landscape in their
aggregation on a large scale.

It will be remembered that in the course of the last chapter we wholly
left out of our account of mountain lines that group which was called
"Lines of Rest." One reason for doing so was that, as these lines are
produced by débris in a state of temporary repose, their beauty, or
deformity, or whatever character they may possess, is properly to be
considered as belonging to stones rather than to rocks.

§ 14. Whenever heaps of loose stones or sand are increased by the
continual fall of fresh fragments from above, or diminished by their
removal from below, yet not in such mass or with such momentum as
entirely to disturb those already accumulated, the materials on the
surface arrange themselves in an equable slope, producing a straight
line of profile in the bank or cone.

The heap formed by the sand falling in an hour-glass presents, in its
straight sides, the simplest result of such a condition; and any heap
of sand thrown up by the spade will show the slopes here and there,
interrupted only by knotty portions, held together by moisture, or
agglutinated by pressure,--interruptions which cannot occur to the same
extent on a large scale, unless the soil is really hardened nearly to
the nature of rock. As long as it remains incoherent, every removal of
substance at the bottom of the heap, or addition of it at the top,
occasions a sliding disturbance of the whole slope, which smooths it
into rectitude of line; and there is hardly any great mountain mass
among the Alps which does not show towards its foundation perfectly
regular descents of this nature, often two or three miles long without a
break. Several of considerable extent are seen on the left of Plate
+46+.

§ 15. I call these lines of rest, because, though the bulk of the mass
may be continually increasing or diminishing, the line of the profile
does not change, being fixed at a certain angle by the nature of the
earth. It is usually stated carelessly as an angle of about 45 degrees,
but it never really reaches such a slope. I measured carefully the
angles of a very large number of slopes of mountain in various parts of
the Mont Blanc district. The few examples given in the note below are
enough to exhibit the general fact that loose débris lies at various
angles up to about 30° or 32°; débris protected by grass or pines may
reach 35°, and rocky slopes 40° or 41°, but in continuous lines of rest
I never found a steeper angle.[98]

§ 16. I speak of some rocky slopes as lines of rest, because, whenever
a mountain side is composed of soft stone which splits and decomposes
fast, it has a tendency to choke itself up with the ruins, and gradually
to get abraded or ground down towards the débris slope; so that vast
masses of the sides of Alpine valleys are formed by ascents of nearly
uniform inclination, partly loose, partly of jagged rocks, which break,
but do not materially alter the general line of ground. In such cases
the fragments usually have accumulated without disturbance at the foot
of the slope, and the pine forests fasten the soil and prevent it from
being carried down in large masses. But numerous instances occur in
which the mountain is consumed away gradually by its own torrents, not
having strength enough to form clefts or precipices, but falling on each
side of the ravines into even banks, which slide down from above as they
are wasted below.

§ 17. By all these various expedients, Nature secures, in the midst of
her mountain curvatures, vast series of perfectly straight lines
opposing and relieving them; lines, however, which artists have almost
universally agreed to alter or ignore, partly disliking them
intrinsically, on account of their formality, and partly because the
mind instantly associates them with the idea of mountain decay. Turner,
however, saw that this very decay having its use and nobleness, the
contours which were significative of it ought no more to be omitted
than, in the portrait of an aged man, the furrows on his hand or brow;
besides, he liked the lines themselves, for their contrast with the
mountain wildness, just as he liked the straightness of sunbeams
penetrating the soft waywardness of clouds. He introduced them
constantly into his noblest compositions; but in order to the full
understanding of their employment in the instance I am about to give,
one or two more points yet need to be noticed.

§ 18. Generally speaking, the curved lines of convex, _fall_ belong to
mountains of hard rock, over whose surfaces the fragments _bound_ to the
valley, and which are worn by wrath of avalanches and wildness of
torrents, like that of the Cascade des Pélerins, described in the note
above. Generally speaking, the straight lines of _rest_ belong to softer
mountains, or softer surfaces and places of mountains, which, exposed to
no violent wearing from external force, nevertheless keep slipping and
mouldering down spontaneously or receiving gradual accession of material
from incoherent masses above them.

§ 19. It follows, rather, that where the gigantic wearing forces are in
operation, the stones or fragments of rock brought down by the torrents
and avalanches are likely, however hard, to be rounded on all their
edges; but where the straight shaly slopes are found, the stones which
glide or totter down their surfaces frequently retain all their angles,
and form jagged and flaky heaps at the bottom.

And farther, it is to be supposed that the rocks which are habitually
subjected to these colossal forces of destruction are in their own mass
firm and secure, otherwise they would long ago have given way; but that
where the gliding and crumbling surfaces are found without much external
violence, it is very possible that the whole framework of the mountain
may be full of flaws; and a danger exist of vast portions of its mass
giving way, or slipping down in heaps, as the sand suddenly yields in an
hour-glass after some moments of accumulation.

§ 20. Hence, generally, in the mind of any one familiar with mountains,
the conditions will be associated, on the one hand, of the curved,
convex, and overhanging bank or cliff, the roaring torrent, and the
rounded boulder of massive stone; and, on the other, of the straight and
even slope of bank, the comparatively quiet and peaceful lapse of
streams, and the sharp-edged and unworn look of the fallen stones,
together with a sense of danger greater, though more occult, than in the
wilder scenery.

[Illustration: J. M. W. Turner   J. Cousen.
               50. Goldau.]

The drawing of the St. Gothard, which we have so laboriously analyzed,
was designed, as before mentioned, from a sketch taken in the year 1843.
But with it was made another drawing. Turner brought home in that year a
series of sketches taken in the neighborhood of the pass; among others,
one of the Valley of Goldau, covered as it is by the ruins of the
Rossberg. Knowing his fondness for fallen stones, I chose this Goldau
subject as a companion to the St. Gothard. The plate opposite will give
some idea of the resultant drawing.

§ 21. _Some_ idea only. It is a subject which, like the St. Gothard, is
far too full of detail to admit of reduction; and I hope, therefore,
soon to engrave it properly of its real size. It is, besides, more than
usually difficult to translate this drawing into black and white,
because much of the light on the clouds is distinguished merely by
orange or purple color from the green greys, which, though not darker
than the warm hues, have the effect of shade from their coldness, but
cannot be marked as shade in the engraving without too great increase of
depth. Enough, however, has been done to give some idea of the elements
of Turner's design.

§ 22. Detailed accounts of the Rossberg Fall may be found in any
ordinary Swiss Guide; the only points we have to notice respecting it
are, that the mountain was composed of an indurated gravel, disposed in
oblique beds sloping _towards_ the valley. A portion of one of these
beds gave way, and half filled the valley beneath, burying five
villages, together with the principal one of Goldau, and partially
choking up a little lake, the streamlets which supplied it now forming
irregular pools among the fallen fragments. I call the rock, and
accurately, indurated gravel; but the induration is so complete that the
mass breaks _through_ the rolled pebbles chiefly composing it, and may
be considered as a true rock, only always in its blocks rugged and
formless when compared with the crystalline formations. Turner has
chosen his position on some of the higher heaps of ruin, looking down
towards the Lake of Zug, which is seen under the sunset, the spire of
the tower of Aart on its shore just relieved against the light of the
waves.

The Rossberg itself, never steep, and still more reduced in terror by
the fall of a portion of it, was not available to him as a form
_explanatory_ of the catastrophe; and even the slopes of the Righi on
the left are not, in reality, as uninterrupted in their slope as he has
drawn them; but he felt the connection of this structure with the ruin
amidst which he stood, and brought the long lines of danger clear
against the sunset, and as straight as its own retiring rays.

§ 23. If the reader will now glance back to the St. Gothard subject, as
illustrated in the two Plates +21+ and +37+, and compare it with this of
Goldau, keeping in mind the general conclusions about the two great
classes of mountain scenery which I have just stated, he will, I hope,
at last cease to charge me with enthusiasm in anything that I have said
of Turner's imagination, as always instinctively possessive of those
truths which lie deepest, and are most essentially linked together, in
the expression of a scene. I have only taken two drawings (though these
of his best period) for the illustration of all the structures of the
Alps which, in the course of half a volume, it has been possible for me
to explain; and all my half-volume is abstracted in these two drawings,
and that in the most consistent and complete way, as if they had been
made on purpose to contain a perfect summary of Alpine truth.

§ 24. There are one or two points connected with them of yet more
touching interest. They are the last drawings which Turner ever made
with unabated power. The one of the St. Gothard, speaking with strict
accuracy, is _the_ last drawing; for that of Goldau, though majestic to
the utmost in conception, is less carefully finished, and shows, in the
execution of parts of the sky, signs of impatience, caused by the first
feeling of decline of strength. Therefore I called the St. Gothard (Vol.
III. Ch. XV. § 5) the last mountain drawing he ever executed with
perfect power. But the Goldau is still a noble companion to it--more
solemn in thought, more sublime in color, and, in certain points of
poetical treatment, especially characteristic of the master's mind in
earlier days. He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the
association of any subject with circumstances of death, especially the
death of multitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply
_crimsoned_ sunset skies. The color of blood is this plainly taken for
the leading tone in the storm-clouds above the "Slave-ship." It occurs
with similar distinctness in the much earlier picture of Ulysses and
Polypheme, in that of Napoleon at St. Helena, and, subdued by softer
hues, in the Old Témeraire. The sky of this Goldau is, in its scarlet
and crimson, the deepest in tone of all that I know in Turner's
drawings. Another feeling traceable in several of its former works, is
an acute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idle
pleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time for labor, or
knowledge, or delight is passed for ever. There is evidence of this
feeling in the introduction of the boys at play in the churchyard of
Kirkby Lonsdale, and the boy climbing for his kite among the thickets
above the little mountain churchyard of Brignal-banks; it is in the same
tone of thought that he has placed here the two figures fishing, leaning
against these shattered flanks of rock,--the sepulchral stones of the
great mountain Field of Death.

§ 25. Another character of these two drawings, which gives them especial
interest as connected with our inquiries into mediæval landscape, is,
that they are precisely and accurately illustrative of the two principal
ideas of Dante about the Alps. I have already explained the rise of the
first drawing out of Turner's early study of the "Male Bolge" of the
Splugen and St. Gothard. The Goldau, on the other hand, might have been
drawn in purposeful illustration of the lines before referred to (Vol.
III. Ch. XV. § 13) as descriptive of a "loco _Alpestro_." I give now
Dante's own words:

  "Qual' è quella ruina, che nel fianco
   Di quà da Trento l'Adice percosse,
     O per tremuoto, o per sostegni manco,
     Che da cima del monte, onde si mosse,
   Al piano è sì la roccia discoscesa
     Che alcuna via darebbe a chi su fosse;
     Cotal di quel burrato era la scesa."

  "As is that landslip, ere you come to Trent,
     That smote the flank of Adige, through some stay
   Sinking beneath it, or by earthquake rent;
   For from the summit, where of old it lay,
     Plainwards the broken rock unto the feet
   Of one above it might afford some way;
   Such path adown this precipice we meet."

                                           CAYLEY.

§ 26. Finally, there are two lessons to be gathered from the opposite
conditions of mountain decay, represented in these designs, of perhaps a
wider range of meaning than any which were suggested even by the states
of mountain strength. In the first, we find the unyielding rock,
undergoing no sudden danger, and capable of no total fall, yet, in its
hardness of heart, worn away by perpetual trampling of torrent waves,
and stress of wandering storm. Its fragments, fruitless and restless,
are tossed into ever-changing heaps: no labor of man can subdue them to
his service, nor can his utmost patience secure any dwelling-place among
them. In this they are the type of all that humanity which, suffering
under no sudden punishment or sorrow, remains "stony ground," afflicted,
indeed, continually by minor and vexing cares, but only broken by them
into fruitless ruin of fatigued life. Of this ground not
"corn-giving,"--this "rough valley, neither eared nor sown,"[99] of the
common world, it is said, to those who have set up their idols in the
wreck of it--

  "Among the smooth stones of the stream is thy portion. They, they
  are thy lot."[100]

But, as we pass beneath the hills which have been shaken by earthquake
and torn by convulsion, we find that periods of perfect repose succeeded
those of destruction. The pools of calm water lie clear beneath their
fallen rocks, the water-lilies gleam, and the reeds whisper among their
shadows; the village rises again over the forgotten graves, and its
church-tower, white through the storm-twilight, proclaims a renewed
appeal to His protection in whose hand "are all the corners of the
earth, and the strength of the hills is His also." There is no
loveliness of Alpine valley that does not teach the same lesson. It is
just where "the mountain falling cometh to naught, and the rock is
removed out of his place," that, in process of years, the fairest
meadows bloom between the fragments, the clearest rivulets murmur from
their crevices among the flowers, and the clustered cottages, each
sheltered beneath some strength of mossy stone, now to be removed no
more, and with their pastured flocks around them, safe from the eagle's
stoop and the wolf's ravin, have written upon their fronts, in simple
words, the mountaineer's faith in the ancient promise--

  "Neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh;

  "For thou shalt be in league with the Stones of the Field; and the
  beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee."


FOOTNOTES

  [98]

    Small fragments of limestone, five or six inches across, and
       flattish, sharp, angular on edges, and quite loose; slope      °
       near fountain of Maglans                                      31½
    Somewhat larger stones, nearer Maglans; quite loose              31¾
    Similar débris, slightly touched with vegetation                 35
    Débris on southern side of Maglans                               33½
    Slope of Montagne de la Côte, at the bottom, as seen from the
       village of Chamouni                                           40¾
    Average slope of Montagne de Taconay, seen from Chamouni         38
    Maximum slope of side of Breven                                  41
    Slope of débris from ravine of Breven down to the village
       of Chamouni                                                   14
    Slopes of débris set with pines under Aiguille Verte, seen
       from Argentière                                               36
    General slope of Tapia, from Argentière                          34
    Slopes of La Côte and Taconay, from Argentière                   27¾
    Profile of Breven, from near the Chapeau (a point commanding the
       valley of Chamouni in its truest longitude)                   32½
    Average slope of Montanvert, from same point                     39½
    Slope of La Côte, same point                                     36½
    Eastern slope of Pain de Sucre, seen from Vevay                  33
    Western        "         "         "                             36½
    Slope of foot of Dent de Morcles, seen from Vevay                38½
             "        "      Midi,    "          "                   40

  [99] Deut. xxi. 4. So Amos, vi. 12: "Shall horses run upon the rock;
    will one plow here with oxen?"

  [100] Is. lvii. 5, 6.




CHAPTER XIX.

THE MOUNTAIN GLOOM.


§ 1. We have now cursorily glanced over those conditions of mountain
structure which appear constant in duration, and universal in extent;
and we have found them, invariably, calculated for the delight, the
advantage, or the teaching of men; prepared, it seems, so as to contain,
alike in fortitude or feebleness, in timeliness or in terror, some
beneficence of gift, or profoundness of counsel. We have found that
where at first all seemed disturbed and accidental, the most tender laws
were appointed to produce forms of perpetual beauty; and that where to
the careless or cold observer it seemed severe or purposeless, the
well-being of man has been chiefly consulted, and his rightly directed
powers, and sincerely awakened intelligence, may find wealth in every
falling rock, and wisdom in every talking wave.

It remains for us to consider what actual effect upon the human race has
been produced by the generosity, or the instruction of the hills; how
far, in past ages, they have been thanked, or listened to; how far, in
coming ages, it may be well for us to accept them for tutors, or
acknowledge them for friends.

§ 2. What they have already taught us may, one would think, be best
discerned in the midst of them,--in some place where they have had their
own way with the human soul; where no veil has been drawn between it and
them, no contradicting voice has confused their ministries of sound, or
broken their pathos of silence: where war has never streaked their
streams with bloody foam, nor ambition sought for other throne than
their cloud-courtiered pinnacles, nor avarice for other treasure than,
year by year, is given to their unlaborious rocks, in budded jewels, and
mossy gold.

§ 3. I do not know any district possessing more pure or uninterrupted
fulness of mountain character (and that of the highest order), or which
appears to have been less disturbed by foreign agencies, than that which
borders the course of the Trient between Valorsine and Martigny. The
paths which lead to it out of the valley of the Rhone, rising at first
in steep circles among the walnut trees, like winding stairs among the
pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over the shoulders of the hills into a
valley almost unknown, but thickly inhabited by an industrious and
patient population. Along the ridges of the rocks, smoothed by old
glaciers into long, dark, billowy swellings, like the backs of plunging
dolphins, the peasant watches the slow coloring of the tufts of moss and
roots of herb which, little by little, gather a feeble soil over the
iron substance; then, supporting the narrow strip of clinging ground
with a few stones, he subdues it to the spade; and in a year or two a
little crest of corn is seen waving upon the rocky casque. The irregular
meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among these harvested rocks,
sweet with perpetual streamlets, that seem always to have chosen the
steepest places to come down, for the sake of the leaps, scattering
their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as the wind takes them,
with all the grace, but with none of the formalism, of fountains;
dividing into fanciful change of dash and spring, yet with the seal of
their granite channels upon them, as the lightest play of human speech
may bear the seal of past toil, and closing back out of their spray to
lave the rigid angles, and brighten with silver fringes and glassy films
each lower and lower step of sable stone; until at last, gathered
altogether again,--except, perhaps, some chance drops caught on the
apple-blossom, where it has budded a little nearer the cascade than it
did last spring,--they find their way down to the turf, and lose
themselves in that silently; with quiet depth of clear water furrowing
among the grass blades, and looking only like their shadow, but
presently emerging again in little startled gushes and laughing hurries,
as if they had remembered suddenly that the day was too short for them
to get down the hill.

Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing streamlet, all slope
together in the sunshine towards the brows of the ravines, where the
pines take up their own dominion of saddened shade; and with everlasting
roar in the twilight, the stronger torrents thunder down pale from the
glaciers, filling all their chasms with enchanted cold, beating
themselves to pieces against the great rocks that they have themselves
cast down, and forcing fierce way beneath their ghastly poise.

The mountain paths stoop to these glens in forky zigzags, leading to
some grey and narrow arch, all fringed under its shuddering curve with
the ferns that fear the light; a cross of rough-hewn pine, iron-bound to
its parapet, standing dark against the lurid fury of the foam. Far up
the glen, as we pause beside the cross, the sky is seen through the
openings in the pines, thin with excess of light; and, in its clear,
consuming flame of white space, the summits of the rocky mountains are
gathered into solemn crowns and circlets, all flushed in that strange,
faint silence of possession by the sunshine which has in it so deep a
melancholy; full of power, yet as frail as shadows; lifeless, like the
walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in tender fall of crimson folds,
like the veil of some sea spirit, that lives and dies as the foam
flashes; fixed on a perpetual throne, stern against all strength, lifted
above all sorrow, and yet effaced and melted utterly into the air by
that last sunbeam that has crossed to them from between the two golden
clouds.

§ 4. High above all sorrow: yes; but not unwitnessing to it. The
traveller on his happy journey, as his foot springs from the deep turf
and strikes the pebbles gayly over the edge of the mountain road, sees
with a glance of delight the clusters of nut-brown cottages that nestle
among those sloping orchards, and glow beneath the boughs of the pines.
Here, it may well seem to him, if there be sometimes hardship, there
must be at least innocence and peace, and fellowship of the human soul
with nature. It is not so. The wild goats that leap along those rocks
have as much passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men that
toil among them. Perhaps more. Enter the street of one of those
villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy foulness that is
suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here, it is torpor--not
absolute suffering,--not starvation or disease, but darkness of calm
enduring; the spring known only as the time of the scythe, and the
autumn as the time of the sickle, and the sun only as a warmth, the wind
as a chill, and the mountains as a danger. They do not understand so
much as the name of beauty, or of knowledge. They understand dimly that
of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality, faith,--these things they know.
To glean their meadows side by side, so happier; to bear the burden up
the breathless mountain flank, unmurmuringly; to bid the stranger drink
from their vessel of milk; to see at the foot of their low deathbeds a
pale figure upon a cross, dying also, patiently;--in this they are
different from the cattle and from the stones, but in all this
unrewarded as far as concerns the present life. For them, there is
neither hope nor passion of spirit; for them neither advance nor
exultation. Black bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious day, weary arm
at sunset; and life ebbs away. No books, no thoughts, no attainments, no
rest; except only sometimes a little sitting in the sun under the church
wall, as the bell tolls thin and far in the mountain air; a pattering of
a few prayers, not understood, by the altar rails of the dimly gilded
chapel, and so back to the sombre home, with the cloud upon them still
unbroken--that cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the wild torrents and
ruinous stones, and unlightened, even in their religion, except by the
vague promise of some better thing unknown, mingled with threatening,
and obscured by an unspeakable horror,--a smoke, as it were, of
martyrdom, coiling up with the incense, and, amidst the images of
tortured bodies and lamenting spirits in hurtling flames, the very
cross, for them, dashed more deeply than for others, with gouts of
blood.

§ 5. Do not let this be thought a darkened picture of the life of these
mountaineers. It is literal fact. No contrast can be more painful than
that between the dwelling of any well-conducted English cottager, and
that of the equally honest Savoyard. The one, set in the midst of its
dull flat fields and uninteresting hedgerows, shows in itself the love
of brightness and beauty; its daisy-studded garden beds, its smoothly
swept brick path to the threshold, its freshly sanded floor and orderly
shelves of household furniture, all testify to energy of heart, and
happiness in the simple course and simple possessions of daily life. The
other cottage, in the midst of an inconceivable, inexpressible beauty,
set on some sloping bank of golden sward, with clear fountains flowing
beside it, and wild flowers, and noble trees, and goodly rocks gathered
round into a perfection as of Paradise, is itself a dark and plague-like
stain in the midst of the gentle landscape. Within a certain distance
of its threshold the ground is foul and cattle-trampled; its timbers are
black with smoke, its garden choked with weeds and nameless refuse, its
chambers empty and joyless, the light and wind gleaming and filtering
through the crannies of their stones. All testifies that to its
inhabitant the world is labor and vanity; that for him neither flowers
bloom, nor birds sing, nor fountains glisten; and that his soul hardly
differs from the grey cloud that coils and dies upon his hills; except
in having no fold of it touched by the sunbeams.

§ 6. Is it not strange to reflect, that hardly an evening passes in
London or Paris but one of those cottages is painted for the better
amusement of the fair and idle, and shaded with pasteboard pines by the
scene-shifter; and that good and kind people,--poetically
minded,--delight themselves in imagining the happy life led by peasants
who dwell by Alpine fountains, and kneel to crosses upon peaks of rock?
that nightly we lay down our gold to fashion forth simulacra of
peasants, in gay ribands and white bodices, singing sweet songs, and
bowing gracefully to the picturesque crosses; and all the while the
veritable peasants are kneeling, songlessly, to veritable crosses, in
another temper than the kind and fair audiences dream of, and assuredly
with another kind of answer than is got out of the opera catastrophe; an
answer having reference, it may be, in dim futurity, to those very
audiences themselves? If all the gold that has gone to paint the
simulacra of the cottages, and to put new songs in the mouths of the
simulacra of the peasants, had gone to brighten the existent cottages,
and to put new songs into the mouths of the existent peasants, it might
in the end, perhaps, have turned out better so, not only for the
peasants, but for even the audience. For that form of the False Ideal
has also its correspondent True Ideal,--consisting not in the naked
beauty of statues, nor in the gauze flowers and crackling tinsel of
theatres, but in the clothed and fed beauty of living men, and in the
lights and laughs of happy homes. Night after night, the desire of such
an ideal springs up in every idle human heart; and night after night, as
far as idleness can, we work out this desire in costly lies. We paint
the faded actress, build the lath landscape, feed our benevolence with
fallacies of felicity, and satisfy our righteousness with poetry of
justice. The time will come when, as the heavy-folded curtain falls upon
our own stage of life, we shall begin to comprehend that the justice we
loved was intended to have been done in fact, and not in poetry, and the
felicity we sympathized in, to have been bestowed and not feigned. We
talk much of money's worth, yet perhaps may one day be surprised to find
that what the wise and charitable European public gave to one night's
rehearsal of hypocrisy,--to one hour's pleasant warbling of Linda or
Lucia,--would have filled a whole Alpine Valley with happiness, and
poured the waves of harvest over the famine of many a Lammermoor.[101]

§ 7. "Nay," perhaps the reader answers, "it is vain to hope that this
could ever be. The perfect beauty of the ideal must always be
fictitious. It is rational to amuse ourselves with the fair imagination;
but it would be madness to endeavor to put it into practice, in the face
of the ordinances of Nature. Real shepherdesses must always be rude, and
real peasants miserable; suffer us to turn away our gentle eyes from
their coarseness and their pain, and to seek comfort in cultivated
voices and purchased smiles. We cannot hew down the rocks, nor turn the
sands of the torrent into gold."

§ 8. This is no answer. Be assured of the great truth--that what is
impossible in reality is ridiculous in fancy. If it is not in the nature
of things that peasants should be gentle and happy, then the
imagination of such peasantry is ridiculous, and to delight in such
imagination wrong; as delight in any kind of falsehood is always. But if
in the nature of things it be possible that among the wildness of hills
the human heart should be refined, and if the comfort of dress, and the
gentleness of language, and the joy of progress in knowledge, and of
variety in thought, are possible to the mountaineer in his true
existence, let us strive to write this true poetry upon the rocks before
we indulge it in our visions, and try whether, among all the fine arts,
one of the finest be not that of painting cheeks with health rather than
rouge.

§ 9. "But is such refinement possible? Do not the conditions of the
mountain peasant's life, in the plurality of instances, necessarily
forbid it?"

As bearing sternly on this question, it is necessary to examine one
peculiarity of feeling which manifests itself among the European
nations, so far as I have noticed, irregularly,--appearing sometimes to
be the characteristic of a particular time, sometimes of a particular
race, sometimes of a particular locality, and to involve at once much
that is to be blamed and much that is praiseworthy. I mean the
capability of enduring, or even delighting in, the contemplation of
objects of terror--a sentiment which especially influences the temper of
some groups of mountaineers, and of which it is necessary to examine the
causes, before we can form any conjecture whatever as to the real effect
of mountains on human character.

§ 10. For instance, the unhappy alterations which have lately taken
place in the town of Lucerne have still spared two of its ancient
bridges; both of which, being long covered walks, appear, in past times,
to have been to the population of the town what the Mall was to London,
or the Gardens of the Tuileries are to Paris. For the continual
contemplation of those who sauntered from pier to pier, pictures were
painted on the woodwork of the roof. These pictures, in the one bridge,
represent all the important Swiss battles and victories; in the other
they are the well-known series of which Longfellow has made so beautiful
a use in the Golden Legend, the _Dance of Death_.

Imagine the countenances with which a committee, appointed for the
establishment of a new "promenade" in some flourishing modern town,
would receive a proposal to adorn such promenade with pictures of the
Dance of Death.

§ 11. Now just so far as the old bridge at Lucerne, with the pure, deep,
and blue water of the Reuss eddying down between its piers, and with the
sweet darkness of green hills, and far-away gleaming of lake and Alps
alternating upon the eye on either side; and the gloomy lesson frowning
in the shadow, as if the deep tone of a passing-bell, overhead, were
mingling for ever with the plashing of the river as it glides by
beneath; just so far, I say, as this differs from the straight and
smooth strip of level dust, between two rows of round-topped acacia
trees, wherein the inhabitants of an English watering-place or French
fortified town take their delight,--so far I believe the life of the old
Lucernois, with all its happy waves of light, and mountain strength of
will, and solemn expectation of eternity, to have differed from the
generality of the lives of those who saunter for their habitual hour up
and down the modern promenade. But the gloom is not always of this noble
kind. As we penetrate farther among the hills we shall find it becoming
very painful. We are walking, perhaps, in a summer afternoon, up the
valley of Zermatt (a German valley), the sun shining brightly on grassy
knolls and through fringes of pines, the goats leaping happily, and the
cattle bells ringing sweetly, and the snowy mountains shining like
heavenly castles far above. We see, a little way off, a small white
chapel, sheltered behind one of the flowery hillocks of mountain turf;
and we approach its little window, thinking to look through it into some
quiet home of prayer; but the window is grated with iron, and open to
the winds, and when we look through it, behold--a heap of white human
bones mouldering into whiter dust!

So also in that same sweet valley, of which I have just been speaking,
between Chamouni and the Valais, at every turn of the pleasant pathway,
where the scent of the thyme lies richest upon its rocks, we shall see a
little cross and shrine set under one of them; and go up to it, hoping
to receive some happy thought of the Redeemer, by whom all these lovely
things were made, and still consist. But when we come near--behold,
beneath the cross, a rude picture of souls tormented in red tongues of
hell fire, and pierced by demons.

§ 12. As we pass towards Italy the appearance of this gloom deepens; and
when we descend the southern slope of the Alps we shall find this
bringing forward of the image of Death associated with an endurance of
the most painful aspects of disease, so that conditions of human
suffering, which in any other country would be confined in hospitals,
are permitted to be openly exhibited by the wayside; and with this
exposure of the degraded human form is farther connected an
insensibility to ugliness and imperfection in other things; so that the
ruined wall, neglected garden, and uncleansed chamber, seem to unite in
expressing a gloom of spirit possessing the inhabitants of the whole
land. It does not appear to arise from poverty, nor careless contentment
with little: there is here nothing of Irish recklessness or humor; but
there seems a settled obscurity in the soul,--a chill and plague, as if
risen out of a sepulchre, which partly deadens, partly darkens, the eyes
and hearts of men, and breathes a leprosy of decay through every breeze
and every stone. "Instead of well-set hair, baldness, and burning
instead of beauty."

Nor are definite proofs wanting that the feeling is independent of mere
poverty or indolence. In the most gorgeous and costly palace garden the
statues will be found green with moss, the terraces defaced or broken;
the palace itself partly coated with marble, is left in other places
rough with cementless and jagged brick, its iron balconies bent and
rusted, its pavements overgrown with grass. The more energetic the
effort has been to recover from this state, and to shake off all
appearance of poverty, the more assuredly the curse seems to fasten on
the scene, and the unslaked mortar, and unfinished wall, and ghastly
desolation of incompleteness entangled in decay, strike a deeper
despondency into the beholder.

§ 13. The feeling would be also more easily accounted for if it appeared
consistent in its regardlessness of beauty,--if what was _done_ were
altogether as inefficient as what was deserted. But the balcony, though
rusty and broken, is delicate in design, and supported on a nobly carved
slab of marble; the window, though a mere black rent in ragged plaster,
is encircled by a garland of vine and fronted by a thicket of the sharp
leaves and aurora-colored flowers of the oleander; the courtyard,
overgrown by mournful grass, is terminated by a bright fresco of
gardens and fountains; the corpse, borne with the bare face to heaven,
is strewn with flowers; beauty is continually mingled with the shadow of
death.

§ 14. So also is a kind of merriment,--not true cheerfulness, neither
careless nor idle jesting, but a determined effort at gaiety, a resolute
laughter, mixed with much satire, grossness, and practical buffoonery,
and, it always seemed to me, void of all comfort or hope,--with this
eminent character in it also, that it is capable of touching with its
bitterness even the most fearful subjects, so that as the love of beauty
retains its tenderness in the presence of death, this love of jest also
retains its boldness, and the skeleton becomes one of the standard
masques of the Italian comedy. When I was in Venice, in 1850, the most
popular piece of the _comic_ opera was "Death and the Cobbler," in which
the point of the plot was the success of a village cobbler as a
physician, in consequence of the appearance of Death to him beside the
bed of every patient who was not to recover; and the most applauded
scene in it was one in which the physician, insolent in success, and
swollen with luxury, was himself taken down into the abode of Death, and
thrown into an agony of terror by being shown lives of men, under the
form of wasting lamps, and his own ready to expire.

§ 15. I have also not the smallest doubt that this endurance or
affronting of fearful images is partly associated with indecency, partly
with general fatuity and weakness of mind. The men who applauded loudest
when the actress put on, in an instant, her mask representing a skull,
and when her sharp and clear "Sono la Morte" rang through the theatre,
were just those whose disgusting habits rendered it impossible for women
to pass through some of the principal streets in Venice,--just those who
formed the gaping audience, when a mountebank offered a new quack
medicine on the Riva dei Schiavoni. And, as fearful imagery is
associated with the weakness of fever, so it seems to me that imbecility
and love of terror are connected by a mysterious link throughout the
whole life of man. There is a most touching instance of this in the last
days of Sir Walter Scott, the publication of whose latter works, deeply
to be regretted on many accounts, was yet, perhaps, on the whole,
right, as affording a means of studying the conditions of the decay of
overwrought human intellect in one of the most noble of minds. Among the
many signs of this decay at its uttermost, in Castle Dangerous, not one
of the least notable was the introduction of the knight who bears on his
black armor the likeness of a skeleton.

§ 16. The love of horror which is in this manner connected with
feebleness of intellect, is not, however, to be confounded with that
shown by the vulgar in general. The feeling which is calculated upon in
the preparation of pieces full of terror and crime, at our lower
theatres, and which is fed with greater art and elegance in the darker
scenery of the popular French novelists, however morally unhealthy, is
not _unnatural_; it is not the result of an apathy to such horror, but
of a strong desire for excitement in minds coarse and dull, but not
necessarily feeble. The scene of the murder of the jeweller in the
"Count of Monte Cristo," or those with the Squelette in the "Mystères de
Paris," appeal to instincts which are as common to all mankind as those
of thirst and hunger, and which are only debasing in the exaggerated
condition consequent upon the dulness of other instincts higher than
they. And the persons who, at one period of their life, might take chief
pleasure in such narrations, at another may be brought into a temper of
high tone and acute sensibility. But the love of horror respecting which
we are now inquiring appears to be an unnatural and feeble feeling; it
is not that the person needs excitement, or has any such strong
perceptions as would cause excitement, but he is dead to the horror, and
a strange evil influence guides his feebleness of mind rather to fearful
images than to beautiful ones,--as our disturbed dreams are sometimes
filled with ghastliness which seem not to arise out of any conceivable
association of our waking ideas, but to be a vapor out of the very
chambers of the tomb, to which the mind, in its palsy, has approached.

§ 17. But even this imbecile revelling in terror is more comprehensible,
more apparently natural, than the instinct which is found frequently
connected with it, of absolute joy in _ugliness_. In some conditions of
old German art we find the most singular insisting upon what is in all
respects ugly and abortive, or frightful; not with any sense of
sublimity in it, neither in mere foolishness, but with a resolute
choice, such as I can completely account for on no acknowledged
principle of human nature. For in the worst conditions of sensuality
there is yet some perception of the beautiful, so that men utterly
depraved in principle and habits of thought will yet admire beautiful
things and fair faces. But in the temper of which I am now speaking
there is no preference even of the lower forms of loveliness; no effort
at painting fair limbs or passionate faces, no evidence of any human or
natural sensation,--a mere feeding on decay and rolling in slime, not
apparently or conceivably with any pleasure in it, but under some
fearful possession of an evil spirit.

§ 18. The most wonderful instance of this feeling at its uttermost which
I remember, is the missal in the British Museum, Harl. MSS. 1892. The
drawings of the principal subjects in it appear to have been made first
in black, by Martin Schöngauer (at all events by some copyist of his
designs), and then another workman has been employed to paint these
drawings over. No words can describe the intensity of the "plague of the
heart" in this man; the reader should examine the manuscript carefully
if he desires to see how low human nature can sink. I had written a
description of one or two of the drawings in order to give some
conception of them to persons not able to refer to the book; but the
mere description so saddened and polluted my pages that I could not
retain it. I will only, therefore, name the principal characteristics
which belong to the workman's mind.

§ 19. First, perpetual tampering with death, whether there be occasion
to allude to it or not,--especially insisting upon its associations with
corruption. I do not pain the reader by dwelling on the details
illustrative of this feeling.

Secondly, Delight in dismemberment, dislocation, and distortion of
attitude. Distortion, to some extent, is a universal characteristic of
the German fifteenth and sixteenth century art; that is to say, there is
a general aptitude for painting legs across, or feet twisted round, or
bodies awkwardly bent, rather than anything in a natural position; and
Martin Schöngauer himself exhibits this defect in no small degree. But
here the finishing workman has dislocated nearly every joint which he
has exposed, besides knitting and twisting the muscles into mere knots
of cordage.

[Illustration: FIG. 113.]

What, however, only amounts to dislocation in the limbs of the human
figures, becomes actual dismemberment in the animals. Fig. 113 is a
faithful copy of a tree with two _birds_, one on its bough, and one
above it, seen in the background, behind a soldier's mace, in the
drawing of the Betrayal. In the engraving of this subject, by Schöngauer
himself, the mace does not occur; it has been put in by the finishing
workman, in order to give greater expression of savageness to the boughs
of the tree, which, joined with the spikes of the mace, form one mass of
disorganized angles and thorns, while the birds look partly as if being
torn to pieces, and partly like black spiders.

In the painting itself the sky also is covered with little detached and
bent white strokes, by way of clouds, and the hair of the figures torn
into ragged locks, like wood rent by a cannon shot.

[Illustration: FIG. 114.]

This tendency to dismember and separate everything is one of the eminent
conditions of a mind leaning to vice and ugliness; just as to connect
and harmonize everything is that of a mind leaning to virtue and beauty.
It is shown down to the smallest details; as, for instance, in the
spotted backgrounds, which, instead of being chequered with connected
patterns, as in the noble manuscripts (see Vol. III. Plate 7), are
covered with disorderly dashes and circles executed with a blunt pen or
brush, Fig. 114. And one of the borders is composed of various detached
heads cut off at the neck or shoulders without the slightest endeavor to
conceal or decorate the truncation. All this, of course, is associated
with choice of the most abominable features in the countenance.

§ 20. Thirdly, Pure ignorance. Necessarily such a mind as this must be
incapable of perceiving the truth of any form; and therefore together
with the distortion of all studied form is associated the utter negation
or imperfection of that which is less studied.

Fourthly, Delight in blood. I cannot use the words which would be
necessary to describe the second[102] painting of the Scourging, in this
missal. But I may generally notice that the degree in which the peculiar
feeling we are endeavoring to analyze is present in any district of
Roman Catholic countries, may be almost accurately measured by the
quantity of blood represented on the crucifixes.

The person employed to repaint, in the Campo Santo of Pisa, the portion
of Orcagna's pictures representing the Inferno, has furnished a very
notable example of the same feeling; and it must be familiar to all
travellers in countries thoroughly subjected to _modern_ Romanism, a
thing as different from thirteenth-century Romanism as a prison from a
prince's chamber.

Lastly, Utter absence of inventive power. The only ghastliness which
this workman is capable of is that of distortion. In ghastly
_combination_ he is impotent; he cannot even understand it or copy it
when set before him, continually destroying any that exists in the
drawing of Schöngauer.

§ 21. Such appear to be the principal component elements in the mind of
the painter of this missal, and it possesses these in complete
abstraction from nearly all others, showing, in deadly purity, the
nature of the venom which in ordinary cases is tempered by counteracting
elements. There are even certain feelings, evil enough themselves, but
more _natural_ than these, of which the slightest mingling would here be
a sort of redemption. Vanity, for instance, would lead to a more
finished execution, and more careful copying from nature, and of course
subdue the ugliness by fidelity; love of pleasure would introduce
occasionally a graceful or sensual form; malice would give some point
and meaning to the bordering grotesques, nay, even insanity might have
given them some inventive horror. But the pure mortiferousness of this
mind, capable neither of patience, fidelity, grace, or wit, in any
place, or from any motive,--this horrible apathy of brain, which cannot
ascend so high as insanity, but is capable only of putrefaction, save us
the task of all analysis, and leave us only that of examining how this
black aqua Tophana mingles with other conditions of mind.

§ 22. For I have led the reader over this dark ground, because it was
essential to our determination of the influence of mountains that we
should get what data we could as to the extent in other districts, and
derivation from other causes, of the horror which at first we might have
been led to connect too arbitrarily with hill scenery. And I wish that
my knowledge permitted me to trace it over wider ground, for the
observations hitherto stated leave the question still one of great
difficulty. It might appear to a traveller crossing and recrossing the
Alps between Switzerland and Italy, that the main strength of the evil
lay on the south of the chain, and was attributable to the peculiar
circumstances and character of the Italian nation at this period. But as
he examined the matter farther he would note that in the districts of
Italy generally supposed to be _healthy_, the evidence of it was less,
and that it seemed to gain ground in places exposed to malaria,
centralizing itself in the Val d'Aosta. He would then, perhaps, think it
inconsistent with justice to lay the blame on the mountains, and
transfer his accusation to the marshes, yet would be compelled to admit
that the evil manifested itself most where these marshes were surrounded
by hills. He would next, probably, suppose it produced by the united
effect of hardships, solitude, and unhealthy air; and be disposed to
find fault with the mountains, at least so far as they required painful
climbing and laborious agriculture;--but would again be thrown into
doubt by remembering that one main branch of the feeling,--the love of
ugliness, seemed to belong in a peculiar manner to Northern Germany. If
at all familiar with the art of the North and South, he would perceive
that the _endurance_ of ugliness, which in Italy resulted from languor
or depression (while the mind yet retained some apprehension of the
difference between fairness and deformity, as above noted in § 12), was
not to be confounded with that absence of perception of the Beautiful,
which introduced a general hard-featuredness of figure into all German
and Flemish early art, even when Germany and Flanders were in their
brightest national health and power. And as he followed out in detail
the comparison of all the purest ideals north and south of the Alps, and
perceived the perpetual contrast existing between the angular and bony
sanctities of the one latitude, and the drooping graces and pensive
pieties of the other, he would no longer attribute to the ruggedness, or
miasma, of the mountains the origin of a feeling which showed itself so
strongly in the comfortable streets of Antwerp and Nuremberg, and in the
unweakened and active intellects of Van Eyck and Albert Durer.


  Conditions which produce the Mountain gloom.

§ 23. As I think over these various difficulties, the following
conclusions seem to me deducible from the data I at present possess. I
am in no wise confident of their accuracy, but they may assist the
reader in pursuing the inquiry farther.


  General power of intellect.

I. It seems to me, first, that a fair degree of intellect and
imagination is necessary before this kind of disease is possible. It
does not seize on merely stupid peasantries, but on those which belong
to intellectual races, and in whom the faculties of imagination and the
sensibilities of heart were originally strong and tender. In flat land,
with fresh air, the peasantry may be almost mindless, but not infected
with this gloom.


  Romanism.

II. In the second place, I think it is closely connected with the
Romanist religion, and that for several causes.

A. The habitual use of bad art (ill-made dolls and bad pictures), in the
services of religion, naturally blunts the delicacy of the senses, by
requiring reverence to be paid to ugliness, and familiarizing the eye to
it in moments of strong and pure feeling; I do not think we can overrate
the probable evil results of this enforced discordance between the sight
and imagination.

B. The habitually dwelling on the penances, tortures, and martyrdoms of
the Saints, as subjects of admiration and sympathy, together with much
meditation on Purgatorial suffering; rendered almost impossible to
Protestants by the greater fearfulness of such reflections, when the
punishment is supposed eternal.

C. Idleness, and neglect of the proper duties of daily life, during the
large number of holidays in the year, together with want of proper
cleanliness, induced by the idea that comfort and happy purity are less
pleasing to God than discomfort and self-degradation. This insolence
induces much despondency, a larger measure of real misery than is
necessary under the given circumstances of life, and many forms of crime
and disease besides.

D. Superstitious indignation. I do not know if it is as a result of the
combination of these several causes, or if under a separate head, that I
should class a certain strange awe which seems to attach itself to
Romanism like its shadow, differing from the coarser gloom which we have
been examining, in that it can attach itself to minds of the highest
purity and keenness, and, indeed, does so to these more than to inferior
ones. It is an undefinable pensiveness, leading to great severity of
precept, mercilessness in punishment, and dark or discouraging thoughts
of God and man.[103]

It is connected partly with a greater belief in the daily presence and
power of evil spirits than is common in Protestants (except the more
enthusiastic, and _also gloomy_, sects of Puritans), connected also with
a sternness of belief in the condemnatory power and duty of the Church,
leading to persecution, and to less tempered indignation at oppositions
of opinion than characterizes the Protestant mind ordinarily, which,
though waspish and bitter enough, is not liable to the peculiar
heart-burning caused in a Papist by any insult to his Church, or by the
aspect of what he believes to be heresy.

§ 24. For all these reasons, I think Romanism is very definitely
connected with the gloom we are examining, so as without fail to produce
some measure of it in all persons who sincerely hold that faith; and if
such effect is ever not to be traced, it is because the Romanism is
checked by infidelity. The atheism or dissipation of a large portion of
the population in crowded capitals prevents this gloom from being felt
in full force; but it resumes its power, in mountain solitudes, over the
minds of the comparatively ignorant and more suffering peasantry; so
that it is not an evil inherent in the hills themselves, but one result
of the continuance in them of that old religious voice of warning,
which, encouraging sacred feeling in general, encourages also whatever
evil may essentially belong to the form of doctrine preached among them.

[Illustration: FIG. 115.]


  Disease of body.

§ 25. III. It is assuredly connected also with a diseased state of
health. Cheerfulness is just as natural to the heart of a man in strong
health as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom,
there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor,
or erring habits of life. Among mountains, all these various causes are
frequently found in combination. The air is either too bleak, or it is
impure; generally the peasants are exposed to alternations of both.
Great hardship is sustained in various ways, severe labor undergone
during summer, and a sedentary and confined life led during winter.
Where the gloom exists in less elevated districts, as in Germany, I do
not doubt, though I have not historical knowledge enough to prove this,
that it is partly connected with habits of sedentary life, protracted
study, and general derangement of the bodily system in consequence; when
it exists in the gross form exhibited in the manuscript above examined,
I have no doubt it has been fostered by habits of general vice, cruelty,
and dissipation.

[Illustration: FIG. 116.]


  Rudeness of life.

§ 26. IV. Considered as a natural insensibility to beauty, it is, I
imagine, indicative of a certain want of cultivation in the race among
whom it is found, perhaps without corporal or mental weakness, but
produced by rudeness of life, absence of examples of beautiful art,
defects in the mould of the national features, and such other
adversities, generally belonging to northern nations as opposed to
southern. Here, however, again my historical knowledge is at fault, and
I must leave the reader to follow out the question for himself, if it
interests him. A single example maybe useful to those who have not time
for investigation, in order to show the kind of difference I mean.

Fig. 115 is a St. Peter, from a German fifteenth-century MS., of good
average execution; and Fig. 116 a Madonna, either of the best English,
or second-rate French, work, from a service-book executed in 1290. The
reader will, I doubt not, perceive at once the general grace and
tenderness of sentiment in the lines of the drapery of the last, and
the comparatively delicate type of features. The hardnesses of line,
gesture, and feature in the German example, though two centuries at
least later, are, I think, equally notable. They are accompanied in the
rest of the MS. by an excessive coarseness in choice of ornamental
subject: beneath a female figure typical of the Church, for instance,
there is painted a carcass, just butchered, and hung up with skewers
through the legs.

§ 27. V. In many high mountain districts, not only are the inhabitants
likely to be hurt by hardship of life, and retarded by roughness of
manners, but their eyes are familiarized with certain conditions of
ugliness and disorder, produced by the violence of the elements around
them. Once accustomed to look upon these conditions as inevitable in
nature, they may easily transfer the idea of inevitableness and fitness
to the same appearances in their own houses. I said that mountains seem
to have been created to show us the perfection of beauty; but we saw in
the tenth chapter that they also show sometimes the extreme of ugliness:
and to the inhabitants of districts of this kind it is almost necessary
to their daily comfort that they should view without dislike aspects of
desolation which would to others be frightful. And can we blame them,
if, when the rivers are continually loading their fields with heaps of
black slime, and rolling, in time of flood, over the thickets on their
islets, leaving, when the flood is past, every leaf and bough dim with
granite-dust,--never more to be green through all the parching of
summer; when the landslip leaves a ghastly scar among the grassy mounds
of the hill side;--the rocks above are torn by their glaciers into rifts
and wounds that are never healed; and the ice itself blackened league
after league with loose ruin cast upon it as if out of some long and
foul excavation;--can we blame, I say, the peasant, if, beholding these
things daily as necessary appointments in the strong nature around him,
he is careless that the same disorders should appear in his household or
his farm; nor feels discomforted, though his walls should be full of
fissures like the rocks, his furniture covered with dust like the trees,
and his garden like the glacier in unsightliness of trench and
desolation of mound?

§ 28. Under these five heads are embraced, as far as I am able to trace
them, the causes of the temper which we are examining; and it will be
seen that only the last is quite peculiar to mountain and marsh
districts, although there is a somewhat greater probability that the
others also may be developed among hills more than in plains. When, by
untoward accident, all are associated, and the conditions described
under the fifth head are very distinct, the result is even sublime in
its painfulness. Of places subjected to such evil influence, none are
quite so characteristic as the town of Sion in the Valais. In the first
place (see § 23), the material on which it works is good; the race of
peasantry being there both handsome and intelligent, as far as they
escape the adverse influences around them; so that on a fête-day or a
Sunday, when the families come down from the hill châlets, where the air
is healthier, many very pretty faces may be seen among the younger
women, set off by somewhat more pains in adjustment of the singular
Valaisan costume than is now usual in other cantons of Switzerland.

§ 29. Secondly, it is a bishopric, and quite the centre of Romanism in
Switzerland, all the most definite Romanist doctrines being evidently
believed sincerely, and by a majority of the population; Protestantism
having no hold upon them at all; and republican infidelity, though
active in the councils of the commune, having as yet, so far as I could
see, little influence in the hearts of households. The prominence of the
Valais among Roman Catholic states has always been considerable. The
Cardinal of Sion was, of old, one of the personages most troublesome to
the Venetian ambassadors at the English Court.[104]

§ 30. Thirdly, it is in the midst of a marshy valley, pregnant with
various disease; the water either stagnant, or disgorged in wild
torrents charged with earth; the air, in the morning, stagnant also,
hot, close, and infected; in the afternoon, rushing up from the outlet
at Martigny in fitful and fierce whirlwind; one side of the valley in
almost continual shade, the other (it running east and west) scorched by
the southern sun, and sending streams of heat into the air all night
long from its torrid limestones; while less traceable plagues than any
of these bring on the inhabitants, at a certain time of life, violent
affections of goître, and often, in infancy, cretinism. Agriculture is
attended with the greatest difficulties and despondencies; the land
which the labor of a life has just rendered fruitful is often buried in
an hour; and the carriage of materials, as well as the traversing of
land on the steep hill sides, attended with extraordinary fatigue.

§ 31. Owing to these various influences, Sion, the capital of the
district, presents one of the most remarkable scenes for the study of
the particular condition of human feeling at present under consideration
that I know among mountains. It consists of little more than one main
street, winding round the roots of two ridges of crag, and branching, on
the sides towards the rocks, into a few narrow lanes, on the other, into
spaces of waste ground, of which part serve for military exercises, part
are enclosed in an uncertain and vague way; a ditch half-filled up, or
wall half-broken down, seeming to indicate their belonging, or having
been intended to belong, to some of the unfinished houses which are
springing up amidst their weeds. But it is difficult to say, in any part
of the town, what is garden-ground or what is waste; still more, what is
new building and what old. The houses have been for the most part built
roughly of the coarse limestone of the neighboring hills, then coated
with plaster, and painted, in imitation of Palladian palaces, with grey
architraves and pilasters, having draperies from capital to capital.
With this false decoration is curiously contrasted a great deal of
graceful, honest, and original ironwork, in bulging balconies, and
floreted gratings of huge windows, and branching sprays, for any and
every purpose of support or guard. The plaster, with its fresco, has in
most instances dropped away, leaving the houses peeled and scarred;
daubed into uncertain restoration with new mortar, and in the best cases
thus left; but commonly fallen also, more or less, into ruin, and either
roofed over at the first story when the second has fallen, or hopelessly
abandoned;--not pulled down, but left in white and ghastly shells to
crumble into heaps of limestone and dust, a pauper or two still
inhabiting where inhabitation is possible. The lanes wind among these
ruins; the blue sky and mountain grass are seen through the windows of
their rooms and over their partitions, on which old gaudy papers flaunt
in rags: the weeds gather, and the dogs scratch about their
foundations; yet there are no luxuriant weeds, for their ragged leaves
are blanched with lime, crushed under perpetually falling fragments, and
worn away by listless standing of idle feet. There is always mason's
work doing, always some fresh patching and whitening; a dull smell of
mortar, mixed with that of stale foulness of every kind, rises with the
dust, and defiles every current of air; the corners are filled with
accumulations of stones, partly broken, with crusts of cement sticking
to them, and blotches of nitre oozing out of their pores. The lichenous
rocks and sunburnt slopes of grass stretch themselves hither and thither
among the wreck, curiously traversed by stairs and walls and half-cut
paths, that disappear below starkly black arches, and cannot be
followed, or rise in windings round the angles, and in unfenced slopes
along the fronts, of the two masses of rock which bear, one the dark
castle, the other the old church and convent of Sion; beneath, in a
rudely inclosed square at the outskirts of the town, a still more
ancient Lombardic church raises its grey tower, a kind of esplanade
extending between it and the Episcopal palace, and laid out as a plot of
grass, intersected by gravel walks; but the grass, in strange sympathy
with the inhabitants, will not grow _as_ grass, but chokes itself with a
network of grey weeds, quite wonderful in its various expression of
thorny discontent and savageness; the blue flower of the borage, which
mingles with it in quantities, hardly interrupting its character, for
the violent black spots in the centre of its blue takes away the
tenderness of the flower, and it seems to have grown there in some
supernatural mockery of its old renown of being good against melancholy.
The rest of the herbage is chiefly composed of the dwarf mallow, the
wild succory, the wall-rocket, goose-foot, and milfoil;[105] plants,
nearly all of them, jagged in the leaf, broken and dimly clustered in
flower, haunters of waste ground and places of outcast refuse.

Beyond this plot of ground the Episcopal palace, a half-deserted,
barrack-like building, overlooks a _neglected vineyard_, of which the
clusters, black on the under side, snow-white on the other with
lime-dust, gather around them a melancholy hum of flies. Through the
arches of its trelliswork the avenue of the great valley is seen in
descending distance, enlarged with line beyond line of tufted foliage,
languid and rich, degenerating at last into leagues of grey Maremma,
wild with the thorn and the willow; on each side of it, sustaining
themselves in mighty slopes and unbroken reaches of colossal promontory,
the great mountains secede into supremacy through rosy depths of burning
air, and the crescents of snow gleam over their dim summits as--if there
could be Mourning, as once there was War, in Heaven--a line of waning
moons might be set for lamps along the sides of some sepulchral chamber
in the Infinite.

§ 32. I know not how far this universal grasp of the sorrowful spirit
might be relaxed if sincere energy were directed to amend the ways of
life of the Valaisan. But it has always appeared to me that there was,
even in more healthy mountain districts, a certain degree of inevitable
melancholy; nor could I ever escape from the feeling that here, where
chiefly the beauty of God's working was manifested to men, warning was
also given, and that to the full, of the enduring of His indignation
against sin.

It seems one of the most cunning and frequent of self-deceptions to turn
the heart away from this warning and refuse to acknowledge anything in
the fair scenes of the natural creation but beneficence. Men in general
lean towards the light, so far as they contemplate such things at all,
most of them passing "by on the other side," either in mere plodding
pursuit of their own work, irrespective of what good or evil is around
them, or else in selfish gloom, or selfish delight, resulting from their
own circumstances at the moment. Of those who give themselves to any
true contemplation, the plurality, being humble, gentle, and kindly
hearted, look only in nature for what is lovely and kind; partly, also,
God gives the disposition to every healthy human mind in some degree to
pass over or even harden itself against evil things, else the suffering
would be too great to be borne; and humble people, with a quiet trust
that everything is for the best, do not fairly represent the facts to
themselves, thinking them none of their business. So, what between
hard-hearted people, thoughtless people, busy people, humble people, and
cheerfully minded people,--giddiness of youth, and preoccupations of
age,--philosophies of faith, and cruelties of folly,--priest and Levite,
masquer and merchantman, all agreeing to keep their own side of the
way,--the evil that God sends to warn us gets to be forgotten, and the
evil that He sends to be mended by us gets left unmended. And then,
because people shut their eyes to the dark indisputableness of the facts
in front of them, their Faith, such as it is, is shaken or uprooted by
every darkness in what is revealed to them. In the present day it is not
easy to find a well-meaning man among our more earnest thinkers, who
will not take upon himself to dispute the whole system of redemption,
because he cannot unravel the mystery of the punishment of sin. But can
he unravel the mystery of the punishment of NO sin? Can he entirely
account for all that happens to a cab-horse? Has he ever looked fairly
at the fate of one of those beasts as it is dying,--measured the work it
has done, and the reward it has got,--put his hand upon the bloody
wounds through which its bones are piercing, and so looked up to Heaven
with an entire understanding of Heaven's ways about the horse? Yet the
horse is a fact--no dream--no revelation among the myrtle trees by
night; and the dust it dies upon, and the dogs that eat it, are
facts;--and yonder happy person, whose the horse was till its knees were
broken over the hurdles, who had an immortal soul to begin with, and
wealth and peace to help forward his immortality; who has also devoted
the powers of his soul, and body, and wealth, and peace, to the spoiling
of houses, the corruption of the innocent, and the oppression of the
poor; and has, at this actual moment of his prosperous life, as many
curses waiting round about him in calm shadow, with their death's eyes
fixed upon him, biding their time, as ever the poor cab-horse had
launched at him in meaningless blasphemies, when his failing feet
stumbled at the stones,--this happy person shall have no stripes,--shall
have only the horse's fate of annihilation; or, if other things are
indeed reserved for him, Heaven's kindness or omnipotence is to be
doubted therefore.

§ 33. We cannot reason of these things. But this I know--and this may by
all men be known--that no good or lovely thing exists in this world
without its correspondent darkness; and that the universe presents
itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of
choice, the good and the evil set on the right hand and the left.

And in this mountain gloom, which weighs so strongly upon the human
heart that in all time hitherto, as we have seen, the hill defiles have
been either avoided in terror or inhabited in penance, there is but the
fulfilment of the universal law, that where the beauty and wisdom of the
Divine working are most manifested, there also are manifested most
clearly the terror of God's wrath, and inevitableness of His power.

Nor is this gloom less wonderful so far as it bears witness to the error
of human choice, even when the nature of good and evil is most
definitely set before it. The trees of Paradise were fair; but our first
parents hid themselves from God "in medio ligni Paradisi," in the midst
of the trees of the garden. The hills were ordained for the help of man;
but, instead of raising his eyes to the hills, from whence cometh his
help, he does his idol sacrifice "upon every high hill and under every
green tree." The mountain of the Lord's house is established above the
hills; but Nadab and Abihu shall see under His feet the body of heaven
in his clearness, yet go down to kindle the censer against their own
souls. And so to the end of time it will be; to the end, that cry will
still be heard along the Alpine winds, "Hear, oh ye mountains, the
Lord's controversy!" Still, their gulfs of thawless ice, and unretarded
roar of tormented waves, and deathful falls of fruitless waste, and
unredeemed decay, must be the image of the souls of those who have
chosen the darkness, and whose cry shall be to the mountains to fall on
them, and to the hills to cover them; and still, to the end of time, the
clear waters of the unfailing springs, and the white pasture-lilies in
their clothed multitude, and the abiding of the burning peaks in their
nearness to the opened heaven, shall be the types, and the blessings, of
those who have chosen light, and of whom it is written, "The mountains
shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, righteousness."


FOOTNOTES

  [101] As I was correcting this sheet for press, the morning paper
    containing the account of the burning of Covent Garden theatre
    furnished the following financial statements, bearing somewhat on
    the matter in hand; namely,

                                                                     £
      That the interior fittings of the theatre, in 1846, cost    40,000

      That it was opened on the 6th of April, 1847; and }
        that in 1848 the loss upon it was               }         34,756
             in 1849    "        "                                25,455
                                                                  ------
                                                                 100,211
                                                                  ------
                                                            £
      And that in one year the vocal department cost      33,349
                           the ballet     "      "         8,105
                           the orchestra  "      "        10,048
                                                          ------
                                                          51,502
                                                          ------

    Mr. Albano afterwards corrected this statement, substituting 27,000
    for 40,000: and perhaps the other sums may also have been
    exaggerated, but I leave the reader to consider what an annual
    expenditure of from 30,000_l._ to 50,000_l._ might effect in
    practical idealism in general, whether in Swiss valleys or
    elsewhere. I am not one of those who regard all theatrical
    entertainment as wrong or harmful. I only regret to see our theatres
    so conducted as to involve an expense which is worse than useless,
    in leading our audiences to look for mere stage effect, instead of
    good acting, good singing, or good sense. If we really loved music,
    or the drama, we should be content to hear well-managed voices, and
    see finished acting, without paying five or six thousand pounds to
    dress the songsters or decorate the stage. Simple but well-chosen
    dresses, and quiet landscape exquisitely painted, would have far
    more effect on the feelings of any sensible audience than the tinsel
    and extravagance of our common scenery; and our actors and actresses
    must have little respect for their own powers, if they think that
    dignity of gesture is dependent on the flash of jewellery, or the
    pathos of accents connected with the costliness of silk. Perfect
    execution of music by a limited orchestra is far more delightful,
    and far less fatiguing, than the irregular roar and hum of
    multitudinous mediocrity; and finished instrumentation by an
    adequate number of performers, exquisite acting, and sweetest
    singing, might be secured for the public at a fourth part of the
    cost now spent on operatic absurdities. There is no occasion
    whatever for decoration of the house: it is, on the contrary, the
    extreme of vulgarity. No person of good taste ever goes to a theatre
    to look at the fronts of the boxes. Comfortable and roomy seats,
    perfect cleanliness, decent and fitting curtains and other
    furniture, of good stuff, but neither costly nor tawdry, and
    convenient, but not dazzling, light, are the proper requirements in
    the furnishing of an opera-house. As for the persons who go there to
    look at each other--to show their dresses--to yawn away waste
    hours--to obtain a maximum of momentary excitement--or to say they
    were there, at next day's three-o'clock breakfast (and it is only
    for such persons that glare, cost, and noise are necessary), I
    commend to their consideration, or at least to such consideration as
    is possible to their capacities, the suggestions in the text. But to
    the true lovers of the drama I would submit, as another subject of
    inquiry, whether they ought not to separate themselves from the mob,
    and provide, for their own modest, quiet, and guiltless
    entertainment, the truth of heartfelt impersonation, and the melody
    of the unforced and delicate voice, without extravagance of adjunct,
    unhealthy lateness of hours, or appeal to degraded passions. Such
    entertainment might be obtained at infinitely smaller cost, and yet
    at a price which would secure honorable and permanent remuneration
    to every performer; and I am mistaken in my notion of the best
    actors, if they would not rather play at a house where people went
    to hear and to feel, than weary themselves, even for four times the
    pay, before an audience insulting in its listlessness and ignorant
    in its applause.

  [102] There are, unusually, two paintings of this subject, the first
    representing the preparations for the scourging, the second its
    close.

  [103] This character has, I think, been traced in the various
    writings of Mrs. Sherwood better than in any others; she has a
    peculiar art of making it felt and of striking the deep tone of it
    as from a passing-bell, contrasting it with the most cheerful,
    lovely, and sincere conditions of Protestantism.

  [104] See "Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII." (Dispatches of
    the Venetian ambassador Giustinian, translated by Mr. Rawdon Brown,)
    1854.

  [105] Malva rotundifolia, Cichorium Intybus, Sisymbrium tenuifolium,
    Chenopodium urbicum, Achillea Millefolium.




CHAPTER XX.

THE MOUNTAIN GLORY.


§ 1. I have dwelt, in the foregoing chapter, on the sadness of the hills
with the greater insistance that I feared my own excessive love for them
might lead me into too favorable interpretation of their influences over
the human heart; or, at least, that the reader might accuse me of fond
prejudice, in the conclusions to which, finally, I desire to lead him
concerning them. For, to myself, mountains are the beginning and the end
of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape
that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up; and though I can
look with happy admiration at the lowland flowers, and woods, and open
skies, the happiness is tranquil and cold, like that of examining
detached flowers in a conservatory, or reading a pleasant book; and if
the scenery be resolutely level, insisting upon the declaration of its
own flatness in all the detail of it, as in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or
Central Lombardy, it appears to me like a prison, and I cannot long
endure it. But the slightest rise and fall in the road,--a mossy bank at
the side of a crag of chalk, with brambles at its brow, overhanging
it,--a ripple over three or four stones in the stream by the
bridge,--above all, a wild bit of ferny ground under a fir or two,
looking as if, possibly, one might see a hill if one got to the other
side of the trees, will instantly give me intense delight, because the
shadow, or the hope, of the hills is in them.

§ 2. And thus, although there are few districts of Northern Europe,
however apparently dull or tame, in which I cannot find pleasure, though
the whole of Northern France (except Champagne), dull as it seems to
most travellers, is to me a perpetual Paradise; and, putting
Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, and one or two such other perfectly flat
districts aside, there is not an English county which I should not find
entertainment in exploring the cross-roads of, foot by foot; yet all my
best enjoyment would be owing to the imagination of the hills, coloring,
with their far-away memories, every lowland stone and herb. The pleasant
French coteau, green in the sunshine, delights me, either by what real
mountain character it has in itself (for in extent and succession of
promontory the flanks of the French valleys have quite the sublimity of
true mountain distances), or by its broken ground and rugged steps among
the vines, and rise of the leafage above, against the blue sky, as it
might rise at Vevay or Como. There is not a wave of the Seine but is
associated in my mind with the first rise of the sandstones and forest
pines of Fontainebleau; and with the hope of the Alps, as one leaves
Paris with the horses' heads to the south-west, the morning sun,
flashing on the bright waves at Charenton. If there be _no_ hope or
association of this kind, and if I cannot deceive myself into fancying
that perhaps at the next rise of the road there may be seen the film of
a blue hill in the gleam of sky at the horizon, the landscape, however
beautiful, produces in me even a kind of sickness and pain; and the
whole view from Richmond Hill or Windsor Terrace,--nay, the gardens of
Alcinous, with their perpetual summer,--or of the Hesperides (if they
were flat, and not close to Atlas), golden apples and all--I would give
away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two
leaves of lady-fern.[106]

§ 3. I know that this is in great part idiosyncrasy; and that I must not
trust to my own feelings, in this respect, as representative of the
modern landscape instinct; yet I know it is not idiosyncrasy, in so far
as there may be proved to be indeed an increase of the absolute beauty
of all scenery in exact proportion to its mountainous character,
providing that character be _healthily_ mountainous. I do not mean to
take the Col de Bon Homme as representative of hills, any more than I
would take Romney Marsh as representative of plains; but putting
Leicestershire or Staffordshire fairly beside Westmoreland, and Lombardy
or Champagne fairly beside the Pays de Vaud or the Canton Berne, I find
the increase in the calculable sum of elements of beauty to be steadily
in proportion to the increase of mountainous character; and that the
best image which the world can give of Paradise is in the slope of the
meadows, orchards, and corn-fields on the sides of a great Alp, with its
purple rocks and eternal snows above; this excellence not being in any
wise a matter referable to feeling, or individual preferences, but
demonstrable by calm enumeration of the number of lovely colors on the
rocks, the varied grouping of the trees, and quantity of noble incidents
in stream, crag, or cloud, presented to the eye at any given moment.

§ 4. For consider, first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape color by the introductions of purple, violet, and deep
ultramarine blue, which we owe to mountains. In an ordinary lowland
landscape we have the blue of the sky; the green of grass, which I will
suppose (and this is an unnecessary concession to the lowlands) entirely
fresh and bright; the green of trees; and certain elements of purple,
far more rich and beautiful than we generally should think, in their
bark and shadows (bare hedges and thickets, or tops of trees, in subdued
afternoon sunshine, are nearly perfect purple, and of an exquisite
tone), as well as in ploughed fields, and dark ground in general. But
among mountains, in _addition_ to all this, large unbroken spaces of
pure violet and purple are introduced in their distances; and even near,
by films of cloud passing over the darkness of ravines or forests, blues
are produced of the most subtle tenderness; these azures and
purples[107] passing into rose-color of otherwise wholly unattainable
delicacy among the upper summits, the blue of the sky being at the same
time purer and deeper than in the plains. Nay, in some sense, a person
who has never seen the rose-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue
mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what
_tenderness_ in color means at all; _bright_ tenderness he may, indeed,
see in the sky or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the far-away
hill-purples he cannot conceive.

§ 5. Together with this great source of preeminence in _mass_ of color,
we have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and
enamel-work of the color-jewellery on every stone; and that of the
continual variety in species of flower; most of the mountain flowers
being, besides, separately lovelier than the lowland ones. The wood
hyacinth and wild rose are, indeed, the only _supreme_ flowers that the
lowlands can generally show; and the wild rose is also a mountaineer,
and more fragrant in the hills, while the wood hyacinth, or grape
hyacinth, at its best cannot match even the dark bell-gentian, leaving
the light-blue star-gentian in its uncontested queenliness, and the
Alpine rose and Highland heather wholly without similitude. The violet,
lily of the valley, crocus, and wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable
partly by the plains as well as the hills; but the large orange lily and
narcissus I have never seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite
oxalis is preeminently a mountaineer.[108]

§ 6. To this supremacy in mosses and flowers we have next to add an
inestimable gain in the continual presence and power of water. Neither
in its clearness, its color, its fantasy of motion, its calmness of
space, depth, and reflection, or its wrath, can water be conceived by a
lowlander, out of sight of sea. A sea wave is far grander than any
torrent--but of the sea and its influences we are not now speaking; and
the sea itself, though it _can_ be clear, is never calm, among our
shores, in the sense that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea seems
only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep, and to dream. Out of sight of
the ocean, a lowlander cannot be considered ever to have seen water at
all. The mantling of the pools in the rock shadows, with the golden
flakes of light sinking down through them like falling leaves, the
ringing of the thin currents among the shallows, the flash and the cloud
of the cascade, the earthquake and foam-fire of the cataract, the long
lines of alternate mirror and mist that lull the imagery of the hills
reversed in the blue of morning,--all these things belong to those hills
as their undivided inheritance.

§ 7. To this supremacy in wave and stream is joined a no less manifest
preeminence in the character of trees. It is possible among plains, in
the species of trees which properly belong to them, the poplars of
Amiens, for instance, to obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which, as
I said, is a better help to the study of gracefulness, as such, than any
of the wilder groupings of the hills; so also, there are certain
conditions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in the park and avenue,
rarely rivalled in their way among mountains; and yet the mountain
superiority in foliage is, on the whole, nearly as complete as it is in
water; for exactly as there are some expressions in the broad reaches of
a navigable lowland river, such as the Loire or Thames, not, in their
way, to be matched among the rock rivers, and yet for all that a
lowlander cannot be said to have truly seen the element of water at all;
so even in his richest parks and avenues he cannot be said to have truly
seen trees. For the resources of trees are not developed until they have
difficulty to contend with; neither their tenderness of brotherly love
and harmony, till they are forced to choose their ways of various life
where there is contracted room for them, talking to each other with
their restrained branches. The various action of trees rooting
themselves in inhospitable rocks, stooping to look into ravines, hiding
from the search of glacier winds, reaching forth to the rays of rare
sunshine, crowding down together to drink at sweetest streams, climbing
hand in hand among the difficult slopes, opening in sudden dances round
the mossy knolls, gathering into companies at rest among the fragrant
fields, gliding in grave procession over the heavenward
ridges,--nothing of this can be conceived among the unvexed and unvaried
felicities of the lowland forest: while to all these direct sources of
greater beauty are added, first the power of redundance,--the mere
quantity of foliage visible in the folds and on the promontories of a
single Alp being greater than that of an entire lowland landscape
(unless a view from some cathedral tower); and to this charm of
redundance, that of clearer _visibility_,--tree after tree being
constantly shown in successive height, one behind another, instead of
the mere tops and flanks of masses, as in the plains; and the forms of
multitudes of them continually defined against the clear sky, near and
above, or against white clouds entangled among their branches, instead
of being confused in dimness of distance.

§ 8. Finally, to this supremacy in foliage we have to add the still less
questionable supremacy in clouds. There is no effect of sky possible in
the lowlands which may not in equal perfection be seen among the hills;
but there are effects by tens of thousands, for ever invisible and
inconceivable to the inhabitant of the plains, manifested among the
hills in the course of one day. The mere power of familiarity with the
clouds, of walking with them and above them, alters and renders clear
our whole conception of the baseless architecture of the sky; and for
the beauty of it, there is more in a single wreath of early cloud,
pacing its way up an avenue of pines, or pausing among the points of
their fringes, than in all the white heaps that fill the arched sky of
the plains from one horizon to the other. And of the nobler cloud
manifestations,--the breaking of their troublous seas against the crags,
their black spray sparkling with lightning; or the going forth of the
morning along their pavements of moving marble, level-laid between dome
and dome of snow;--of these things there can be as little imagination or
understanding in an inhabitant of the plains as of the scenery of
another planet than his own.

§ 9. And, observe, all these superiorities are matters plainly
measurable and calculable, not in any wise to be referred to estimate of
_sensation_. Of the grandeur or expression of the hills I have not
spoken; how far they are great, or strong, or terrible, I do not for the
moment consider, because vastness, and strength, and terror, are not to
all minds subjects of desired contemplation. It may make no difference
to some men whether a natural object be large or small, whether it be
strong or feeble. But loveliness of color, perfectness of form,
endlessness of change, wonderfulness of structure, are precious to all
undiseased human minds; and the superiority of the mountains in all
these things to the lowland is, I repeat, as measurable as the richness
of a painted window matched with a white one, or the wealth of a museum
compared with that of a simply furnished chamber. They seem to have been
built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full
of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple
lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious
in holiness for the worshipper. And of these great cathedrals of the
earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of stream
and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the
continual stars,--of these, as we have seen, it was written, nor long
ago, by one of the best of the poor human race for whom they were built,
wondering in himself for whom their Creator _could_ have made them, and
thinking to have entirely discerned the Divine intent in them--"They are
inhabited by the Beasts."

§ 10. Was it then indeed thus with us, and so lately? Had mankind
offered no worship in their mountain churches? Was all that granite
sculpture and floral painting done by the angels in vain?

Not so. It will need no prolonged thought to convince us that in the
hills the purposes of their Maker have indeed been accomplished in such
measure as, through the sin or folly of men, He ever permits them to be
accomplished. It may not seem, from the general language held concerning
them, or from any directly traceable results, that mountains have had
serious influence on human intellect; but it will not, I think, be
difficult to show that their occult influence has been both constant and
essential to the progress of the race.

§ 11. Consider, first, whether we can justly refuse to attribute to
their mountain scenery some share in giving the Greeks and Italians
their intellectual lead among the nations of Europe.

There is not a single spot of land in either of these countries from
which mountains are not discernible; almost always they form the
principal feature of the scenery. The mountain outlines seen from
Sparta, Corinth, Athens, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Verona, are of consummate
beauty; and whatever dislike or contempt may be traceable in the mind of
the Greeks for mountain ruggedness, their placing the shrine of Apollo
under the cliffs of Delphi, and his throne upon Parnassus, was a
testimony to all succeeding time that they themselves attributed the
best part of their intellectual inspiration to the power of the hills.
Nor would it be difficult to show that every great writer of either of
those nations, however little definite regard he might manifest for the
landscape of his country, had been mentally formed and disciplined by
it, so that even such enjoyment as Homer's of the ploughed ground and
poplar groves owes its intensity and delicacy to the excitement of the
imagination produced, without his own consciousness, by other and
grander features of the scenery to which he had been accustomed from a
child; and differs in every respect from the tranquil, vegetative, and
prosaic affection with which the same ploughed land and poplars would be
regarded by a native of the Netherlands.

The vague expression which I have just used--"intellectual lead," may be
expanded into four great heads; lead in Religion, Art and Literature,
War, and Social Economy.

§ 12. It will be right to examine our subject eventually under these
four heads; but I shall limit myself, for the present, to some
consideration of the first two, for a reason presently to be stated.


  1st. Influence of mountains on religious temperament.

I. We have before had occasion to note the peculiar awe with which
mountains were regarded in the middle ages, as bearing continual witness
against the frivolity or luxury of the world. Though the sense of this
influence of theirs is perhaps more clearly expressed by the mediæval
Christians than by any other sect of religionists, the influence itself
has been constant in all time. Mountains have always possessed the
power, first, of exciting religious enthusiasm; secondly, of purifying
religious faith. These two operations are partly contrary to one
another: for the faith of enthusiasm is apt to be _im_pure, and the
mountains, by exciting morbid conditions of the imagination, have
caused in great part the legendary and romantic forms of belief; on the
other hand, by fostering simplicity of life and dignity of morals, they
have purified by action what they falsified by imagination. But, even in
their first and most dangerous influence, it is not the mountains that
are to blame, but the human heart. While we mourn over the fictitious
shape given to the religious visions of the anchorite, we may envy the
sincerity and the depth of the emotion from which they spring: in the
deep feeling, we have to acknowledge the solemn influences of the hills;
but for the erring modes or forms of thought, it is human wilfulness,
sin, and false teaching, that are answerable. We are not to deny the
nobleness of the imagination because its direction is illegitimate, nor
the pathos of the legend because its circumstances are groundless; the
ardor and abstraction of the spiritual life are to be honored in
themselves, though the one may be misguided and the other deceived; and
the deserts of Osma, Assisi, and Monte Viso are still to be thanked for
the zeal they gave, or guarded, whether we find it in St. Francis and
St. Dominic, or in those whom God's hand hid from them in the clefts of
the rocks.

§ 13. And, in fact, much of the apparently harmful influence of hills on
the religion of the world is nothing else than their general gift of
exciting the poetical and inventive faculties, in peculiarly solemn
tones of mind. Their terror leads into devotional casts of thought;
their beauty and wildness prompt the invention at the same time; and
where the mind is not gifted with stern reasoning powers, or protected
by purity of teaching, it is sure to mingle the invention with its
creed, and the vision with its prayer. Strictly speaking, we ought to
consider the superstitions of the hills, universally, as a form of
poetry; regretting only that men have not yet learned how to distinguish
poetry from well-founded faith.

And if we do this, and enable ourselves thus to review, without carping
or sneering, the shapes of solemn imagination which have arisen among
the inhabitants of Europe, we shall find, on the one hand, the mountains
of Greece and Italy forming all the loveliest dreams, first of the
Pagan, then of the Christian mythology; on the other, those of
Scandinavia to be the first sources of whatever mental (as well as
military) power was brought by the Normans into Southern Europe.
Normandy itself is to all intents and purposes a hill country; composed,
over large extents, of granite and basalt, often rugged and covered with
heather on the summits, and traversed by beautiful and singular dells,
at once soft and secluded, fruitful and wild. We have thus one branch of
the Northern religious imagination rising among the Scandinavian fiords,
tempered in France by various encounters with elements of Arabian,
Italian, Provençal, or other Southern poetry, and then reacting upon
Southern England; while other forms of the same rude religious
imagination, resting like clouds upon the mountains of Scotland and
Wales, met and mingled with the Norman Christianity, retaining even to
the latest times some dark color of superstition, but giving all its
poetical and military pathos to Scottish poetry, and a peculiar
sternness and wildness of tone to the Reformed faith, in its
manifestations among the Scottish hills.

§ 14. It is on less disputable ground that I may claim the reader's
gratitude to the mountains, as having been the centres not only of
imaginative energy, but of purity both in doctrine and practice. The
enthusiasm of the persecuted Covenanter, and his variously modified
claims to miraculous protection or prophetic inspiration, hold exactly
the same relation to the smooth proprieties of lowland Protestantism,
that the demon-combats, fastings, visions, and miracles of the mountain
monk or anchorite hold to the wealth and worldliness of the Vatican. It
might indeed happen, whether at Canterbury, Rheims, or Rome, that a good
bishop should occasionally grasp the crozier; and a vast amount of
prudent, educated, and admirable piety is to be found among the ranks of
the lowland clergy. But still the large aspect of the matter is always,
among Protestants, that formalism, respectability, orthodoxy, caution,
and propriety, live by the slow stream that encircles the lowland abbey
or cathedral; and that enthusiasm, poverty, vital faith, and audacity of
conduct, characterize the pastor dwelling by the torrent side. In like
manner, taking the large aspects of Romanism, we see that its worst
corruptions, its cunning, its worldliness, and its permission of crime,
are traceable for the most part to lowland prelacy; but its
self-denials, its obediences, humilities, sincere claims to miraculous
power, and faithful discharges of pastoral duty, are traceable chiefly
to its anchorites and mountain clergy.

§ 15. It is true that the "Lady Poverty" of St. Francis may share the
influence of the hills in the formation of character; and that, since
the clergy who have little interest at court or conclave are those who
in general will be driven to undertake the hill services, we must often
attribute to enforced simplicity of life, or natural bitterness of
feeling, some of the tones of thought which we might otherwise have
ascribed to the influence of mountain scenery. Such causes, however,
affect the lowland as much as the highland religious character in all
districts far from cities; but they do not produce the same effects. The
curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life, or
painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor
or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance,
rarely the prophetic vision or the martyr's passion. Among the fair
arable lands of England and Belgium extends an orthodox Protestantism or
Catholicism; prosperous, creditable, and drowsy; but it is among the
purple moors of the highland border, the ravines of Mont Genèvre, and
the crags of the Tyrol, that we shall find the simplest Evangelical
faith, and the purest Romanist practice.

§ 16. Of course the inquiry into this branch of the hill influence is
partly complicated with that into its operation on domestic habits and
personal character, of which hereafter: but there is one curious witness
borne to the general truth of the foregone conclusions, by an apparently
slight, yet very significant circumstance in art. We have seen, in the
preceding volume, how difficult it was sometimes to distinguish between
honest painters, who truly chose to paint sacred subjects because they
loved them, and the affected painters, who took sacred subjects for
their own pride's sake, or for merely artistical delight. Amongst other
means of arriving at a conclusion in this matter, there is one helpful
test which may be applied to their various works, almost as easily and
certainly as a foot-rule could be used to measure their size; and which
remains an available test down to the date of the rise of the Claudesque
landscape schools. Nearly all the genuine religious painters use _steep
mountain distances_. All the merely artistical ones, or those of
intermediate temper, in proportion as they lose the religious element,
use flat or simply architectural distances. Of course the law is liable
to many exceptions, chiefly dependent on the place of birth and early
associations of painters; but its force is, I think, strongly shown in
this;--that, though the Flemish painters never showed any disposition to
paint, _for its own sake_, other scenery than of their own land (compare
Vol. III. Chap. XIII. § 20), the sincerely religious ones continually
used Alpine distances, bright with snow. In like manner Giotto,
Perugino, Angelico, the young Raphael, and John Bellini, always, if,
with any fitness to their subject, they can introduce them, use craggy
or blue mountain distances, and this with definite expression of love
towards them; Leonardo, conventionally, as feeling they were necessary
for his sacred subjects, while yet his science and idealism had
destroyed his mountain sincerity; Michael Angelo, wholly an artist, and
Raphael in later years, show no love of mountains whatever, while the
relative depths of feeling in Tintoret, Titian, and Veronese, are
precisely measurable by their affection to mountains. Tintoret, though
born in Venice, yet, because capable of the greatest reaches of feeling,
is the first of the old painters who ever drew mountain detail
rightly:[109] Titian, though born in Cadore, and recurring to it
constantly, yet being more worldly-minded, uses his hills somewhat more
conventionally, though, still in his most deeply felt pictures, such as
the St. Jerome, in the Brera, giving to the rocks and forests a
consummate nobleness; and Veronese, in his gay grasp of the outside
aspects of the world, contentedly includes his philosophy within
porticos and pillars, or at the best overshadows it with a few sprays of
laurel.

§ 17. The test fails, however, utterly, when applied to the later or
transitional landscape schools, mountains being there introduced in mere
wanton savageness by Salvator, or vague conventionalism by Claude,
Berghem, and hundreds more. This need not, however, in the least
invalidate our general conclusions: we surely know already that it is
possible to misuse the best gifts, and pervert the purest feelings; nor
need we doubt the real purpose, or, on honest hearts, the real effect,
of mountains, because various institutions have been founded among them
by the banditti of Calabria, as well as by St. Bruno.

§ 18. I cannot leave this part of my subject without recording a slight
incident which happened to myself, singularly illustrative of the
religious character of the Alpine peasant when under favorable
circumstances of teaching. I was coming down one evening from the
Rochers de Naye, above Montreux, having been at work among the limestone
rocks, where I could get no water, and both weary and thirsty. Coming to
a spring at a turn of the path, conducted, as usual, by the herdsmen
into a hollowed pine-trunk I stooped to it and drank deeply: as I raised
my head, drawing breath heavily, some one behind me said, "Celui qui
boira de cette eau-ci, aura encore soif." I turned, not understanding
for the moment what was meant; and saw one of the hill-peasants,
probably returning to his châlet from the market-place at Vevay or
Villeneuve. As I looked at him with an uncomprehending expression, he
went on with the verse:--"Mais celui qui boira de l'eau que je lui
donnerai, n'aura jamais soif."

I doubt if this would have been thought of, or said, by even the most
intelligent lowland peasant. The thought might have occurred to him, but
the frankness of address, and expectation of being at once understood
without a word of preparative explanation, as if the language of the
Bible were familiar to all men, mark, I think, the mountaineer.


  2nd. Influence of mountain on artistical power.

§ 19. We were next to examine the influence of hills on the artistical
power of the human race. Which power, so far as it depends on the
imagination, must evidently be fostered by the same influences which
give vitality to religious vision. But, so far as artistical
productiveness and skill are concerned, it is evident that the
mountaineer is at a radical and insurmountable disadvantage. The
strength of his character depends upon the absence of luxury; but it is
eminently by luxury that art is supported. We are not, therefore, to
deny the mountain influence, because we do not find finished frescoes on
the timbers of châlets or delicate bas-reliefs on the bastion which
protects the mountain church from the avalanche; but to consider how far
the tone of mind shown by the artists laboring in the lowland is
dependent for its intensity on the distant influences of the hills,
whether during the childhood of those born among them, or under the
casual contemplation of men advanced in life.

§ 20. Glancing broadly over the strength of the mediæval--that is to
say, of the peculiar and energetic--art of Europe, so as to discern,
through the clear flowing of its waves over France, Italy, and England,
the places in the pool where the fountain-heads are, and where the sand
dances, I should first point to Normandy and Tuscany. From the cathedral
of Pisa, and the sculpture of the Pisans, the course is straight to
Giotto, Angelico, and Raphael,--to Orcagna and Michael Angelo;--the
Venetian school, in many respects mightier, being, nevertheless,
subsequent and derivative. From the cathedrals of Caen and Coutances the
course is straight to the Gothic of Chartres and Notre Dame of Paris,
and thence forward to all French and English noble art, whether
ecclesiastical or domestic. Now the mountain scenery about Pisa is
precisely the most beautiful that surrounds any great Italian city,
owing to the wonderful outlines of the peaks of Carrara. Milan and
Verona have indeed fine ranges in sight, but rising farther in the
distance, and therefore not so directly affecting the popular mind. The
Norman imagination, as already noticed, is Scandinavian in origin, and
fostered by the lovely granite scenery of Normandy itself. But there is,
nevertheless, this great difference between French art and Italian, that
the French paused strangely at a certain point, as the Norman hills are
truncated at the summits, while the Italian rose steadily to a vertex,
as the Carrara hills to their crests. Let us observe this a little more
in detail.

§ 21. The sculpture of the Pisans was taken up and carried into various
perfection by the Lucchese, Pistojans, Sienese, and Florentines. All
these are inhabitants of truly mountain cities, Florence being as
completely among the hills as Inspruck is, only the hills have softer
outlines. Those around Pistoja and Lucca are in a high degree majestic.
Giotto was born and bred among these hills. Angelico lived upon their
slope. The mountain towns of Perugia and Urbino furnish the only
important branches of correlative art; for Leonardo, however
individually great, originated no new school; he only carried the
_executive_ delicacy of landscape detail so far beyond other painters
as to necessitate my naming the fifteenth-century manner of landscape
after him, though he did not invent it; and although the school of Milan
is distinguished by several peculiarities, and definitely enough
separable from the other schools of Italy, all its peculiarities are
mannerisms, not inventions.

Correggio, indeed, created a new school, though he himself is almost its
only master. I have given in the preceding volume the mountain outline
seen from Parma. But the only entirely great group of painters after the
Tuscans are the Venetians, and they are headed by Titian and Tintoret,
on whom we have noticed the influence of hills already; and although we
cannot trace it in Paul Veronese, I will not quit the mountain claim
upon him; for I believe all that gay and gladdening strength of his was
fed by the breezes of the hills of Garda, and brightened by the swift
glancing of the waves of the Adige.[110]

§ 22. Observe, however, before going farther, of all the painters we
have named, the one who obtains most executive perfection is Leonardo,
who on the whole lived at the greatest distance from the hills. The two
who have most feeling are Giotto and Angelico, both hill-bred. And
generally, I believe, we shall find that the hill country gives its
inventive depths of feeling to art, as in the work of Orcagna, Perugino,
and Angelico, and the plain country executive neatness. The executive
precision is joined with feeling in Leonardo, who saw the Alps in the
distance; it is totally unaccompanied by feeling in the pure Dutch
schools, or schools of the dead flats.

§ 23. I do not know if any writer on art, or on the development of
national mind, has given his attention to what seems to me one of the
most singular phenomena in the history of Europe,--the pause of the
English and French in pictorial art after the fourteenth century. From
the days of Henry III. to those of Elizabeth, and of Louis IX. to those
of Louis XIV., the general intellect of the two nations was steadily on
the increase. But their art intellect was as steadily retrograde. The
only art work that France and England have done nobly is that which is
centralized by the Cathedral of Lincoln, and the Sainte Chapelle. We
had at that time (_we_--French and English--but the French first) the
incontestable lead among European nations; no thirteenth-century work in
Italy is comparable for majesty of conception, or wealth of imaginative
detail, to the cathedrals of Chartres, Rheims, Rouen, Amiens, Lincoln,
Peterborough, Wells, or Lichfield. But every hour of the fourteenth
century saw French and English art in precipitate decline, Italian in
steady ascent; and by the time that painting and sculpture had developed
themselves in an approximated perfection, in the work of Ghirlandajo and
Mino of Fésole, we had in France and England no workman, in any art,
deserving a workman's name; nothing but skilful masons, with more or
less love of the picturesque, and redundance of undisciplined
imagination, flaming itself away in wild and rich traceries, and crowded
bosses of grotesque figure sculpture, and expiring at last in barbarous
imitation of the perfected skill and erring choice of Renaissance Italy.
Painting could not decline, for it had not reached any eminence; the
exquisite arts of illumination and glass design had led to no effective
results in other materials; they themselves, incapable of any higher
perfection than they had reached in the thirteenth century, perished in
the vain endeavor to emulate pictorial excellence, bad _drawing_ being
substituted, in books, for lovely _writing_, and opaque precision, in
glass, for transparent power; nor in any single department of exertion
did artists arise of such calibre or class as any of the great Italians;
and yet all the while, in literature, _we_ were gradually and steadily
advancing in power up to the time of Shakespere; the Italians, on the
contrary, not advancing after the time of Dante.

§ 24. Of course I have no space here to pursue a question such as this;
but I may state my belief that _one_ of the conditions involved in it
was the mountain influence of Italian scenery, inducing a disposition to
such indolent or enthusiastic reverie, as could only express itself in
the visions of art; while the comparatively flat scenery and severer
climate of England and France, fostering less enthusiasm, and urging to
more exertion, brought about a practical and rational temperament,
progressive in policy, science, and literature, but wholly retrograde in
art; that is to say (for great art may be properly so defined), in the
Art of _Dreaming_.


  3rd. Influence of mountains on literary power.

§ 25. III. In admitting this, we seem to involve the supposition that
mountain influence is either unfavorable or inessential to literary
power; but for this also the mountain influence is still necessary, only
in a subordinate degree. It is true, indeed, that the Avon is no
mountain torrent, and that the hills round the vale of Stratford are not
sublime; true, moreover, that the cantons Berne or Uri have never yet,
so far as I know, produced a great poet; but neither, on the other hand,
has Antwerp or Amsterdam. And, I believe, the natural scenery which will
be found, on the whole, productive of most literary intellect is that
mingled of hill and plain, as all available light is of flame and
darkness; the flame being the active element, and the darkness the
tempering one.

§ 26. In noting such evidence as bears upon this subject, the reader
must always remember that the mountains are at an unfair disadvantage,
in being much _out of the way_ of the masses of men employed in
intellectual pursuits. The position of a city is dictated by military
necessity or commercial convenience; it rises, flourishes, and absorbs
into its activity whatever leading intellect is in the surrounding
population. The persons who are able and desirous to give their children
education naturally resort to it; the best schools, the best society,
and the strongest motives assist and excite those born within its walls;
and youth after youth rises to distinction out of its streets, while
among the blue mountains, twenty miles away, the goatherds live and die
in unregarded lowliness. And yet this is no proof that the mountains
have little effect upon the mind, or that the streets have a helpful
one. The men who are formed by the schools, and polished by the society
of the capital, may yet in many ways have their powers shortened by the
absence of natural scenery; and the mountaineer, neglected, ignorant,
and unambitious, may have been taught things by the clouds and streams
which he could not have learned in a college, or a coterie.

§ 27. And in reasoning about the effect of mountains we are therefore
under a difficulty like that which would occur to us if we had to
determine the good or bad effect of light on the human constitution, in
some place where all corporal exercise was necessarily in partial
darkness, and only idle people lived in the light. The exercise might
give an advantage to the occupants of the gloom, but we should neither
be justified in therefore denying the preciousness of light in general,
nor the necessity to the workers of the few rays they possessed; and
thus I suppose the hills around Stratford, and such glimpses as
Shakespere had of sandstone and pines in Warwickshire, or of chalk
cliffs in Kent, to have been essential to the development of his genius.
This supposition can only be proved false by the rising of a Shakespere
at Rotterdam or Bergen-op-Zoom, which I think not probable; whereas, on
the other hand, it is confirmed by myriads of collateral evidences. The
matter could only be _tested_ by placing for half a century the British
universities at Keswick, and Beddgelert, and making Grenoble the capital
of France; but if, throughout the history of Britain and France, we
contrast the general invention and pathetic power, in ballads or
legends, of the inhabitants of the Scottish Border with those manifested
in Suffolk or Essex; and similarly the inventive power of Normandy,
Provence, and the Bearnois with that of Champagne or Picardy, we shall
obtain some convincing evidence respecting the operation of hills on the
masses of mankind, and be disposed to admit, with less hesitation, that
the apparent inconsistencies in the effect of scenery on greater minds
proceed in each case from specialities of education, accident, and
original temper, which it would be impossible to follow out in detail.
Sometimes only, when the original resemblance in character of intellect
is very marked in two individuals, and they are submitted to definitely
contrary circumstances of education, an approximation to evidence may be
obtained. Thus Bacon and Pascal appear to be men naturally very similar
in their temper and powers of mind. One, born in York House, Strand, of
courtly parents, educated in court atmosphere, and replying, almost as
soon as he could speak, to the queen asking how old he was--"Two years
younger than Your Majesty's happy reign!"--has the world's meanness and
cunning engrafted into his intellect, and remains smooth, serene,
unenthusiastic, and in some degree base, even with all his sincere
devotion and universal wisdom; bearing, to the end of life, the likeness
of a marble palace in the street of a great city, fairly furnished
within, and bright in wall and battlement, yet noisome in places about
the foundations. The other, born at Clermont, in Auvergne, under the
shadow of the Puy de Dôme, though taken to Paris at eight years old,
retains for ever the impress of his birthplace; pursuing natural
philosophy with the same zeal as Bacon, he returns to his own mountains
to put himself under their tutelage, and by their help first discovers
the great relations of the earth and the air: struck at last with mortal
disease; gloomy, enthusiastic, and superstitious, with a conscience
burning like lava, and inflexible like iron, the clouds gather about the
majesty of him, fold after fold; and, with his spirit buried in ashes,
and rent by earthquake, yet fruitful of true thought and faithful
affection, he stands like that mound of desolate scoria that crowns the
hill ranges of his native land, with its sable summit far in heaven, and
its foundations green with the ordered garden and the trellised vine.

§ 28. When, however, our inquiry thus branches into the successive
analysis of individual characters, it is time for us to leave it; noting
only one or two points respecting Shakespere, whom, I doubt not, the
reader was surprised to find left out of all our comparisons in the
preceding volume. He seems to have been sent essentially to take
universal and equal grasp of the _human_ nature; and to have been
removed, therefore, from all influences which could in the least warp or
bias his thoughts. It was necessary that he should lean _no_ way; that
he should contemplate, with absolute equality of judgment, the life of
the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathize so completely
with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal
identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts.
He must be able to enter into the soul of Falstaff or Shylock with no
more sense of contempt or horror than Falstaff or Shylock themselves
feel for or in themselves; otherwise his own conscience and indignation
would make him unjust to them; he would turn aside from something, miss
some good, or overlook some essential palliation. He must be utterly
without anger, utterly without purpose; for if a man has any serious
purpose in life, that which runs counter to it, or is foreign to it,
will be looked at frowningly or carelessly by him. Shakespere was
forbidden of Heaven to have any _plans_. To _do_ any good or _get_ any
good, in the common sense of good, was not to be within his permitted
range of work. Not, for him, the founding of institutions, the
preaching of doctrines, or the repression of abuses. Neither he, nor the
sun, did on any morning that they rose together, receive charge from
their Maker concerning such things. They were both of them to shine on
the evil and good; both to behold unoffendedly all that was upon the
earth, to burn unappalled upon the spears of kings, and undisdaining,
upon the reeds of the river.

§ 29. Therefore, so far as nature had influence over the early training
of this man, it was essential to his perfectness that the nature should
be quiet. No mountain passions were to be allowed in him. Inflict upon
him but one pang of the monastic conscience; cast upon him but one cloud
of the mountain gloom; and his serenity had been gone for ever--his
equity--his infinity. You would have made another Dante of him; and all
that he would have ever uttered about poor, soiled, and frail humanity
would have been the quarrel between Sinon and Adam of Brescia,--speedily
retired from, as not worthy a man's hearing, nay, not to be heard
without heavy fault. All your Falstaffs, Slenders, Quicklys, Sir Tobys,
Lances, Touchstones, and Quinces would have been lost in that.
Shakespere could be allowed no mountains; nay, not even any supreme
natural beauty. He had to be left with his kingcups and
clover;--pansies--the passing clouds--the Avon's flow--and the
undulating hills and woods of Warwick; nay, he was not to love even
these in any exceeding measure, lest it might make him in the least
overrate their power upon the strong, full-fledged minds of men. He
makes the quarrelling fairies concerned about them; poor lost Ophelia
find some comfort in them; fearful, fair, wise-hearted Perdita trust the
speaking of her good will and good hostess-ship to them; and one of the
brothers of Imogen confide his sorrow to them,--rebuked instantly by his
brother for "wench-like words;[111]" but any thought of them in his
mighty men I do not find: it is not usually in the nature of such men;
and if he had loved the flowers the _least_ better himself, he would
assuredly have been offended at this, and given a botanical turn of mind
to Cæsar, or Othello.

§ 30. And it is even among the most curious proofs of the necessity to
all high imagination that it should paint straight from the life, that
he has _not_ given such a turn of mind to some of his great men;--Henry
the Fifth, for instance. Doubtless some of my readers, having been
accustomed to hear it repeated thoughtlessly from mouth to mouth that
Shakespere conceived the spirit of all ages, were as much offended as
surprised at my saying that he only painted human nature as he saw it in
his own time. They will find, if they look into his work closely, as
much antiquarianism as they do geography, and no more. The commonly
received notions about the things that had been, Shakespere took as he
found them, animating them with pure human nature, of any time and all
time; but inquiries into the minor detail of temporary feeling, he
despised as utterly as he did maps; and wheresoever the temporary
feeling was in anywise contrary to that of his own day, he errs frankly,
and paints from his own time. For instance in this matter of love of
flowers; we have traced already, far enough for our general purposes,
the mediæval interest in them, whether to be enjoyed in the fields, or
to be used for types of ornamentation in dress. If Shakespere had cared
to enter into the spirit even of the early fifteenth century, he would
assuredly have marked this affection in some of his knights, and
indicated, even then, in heroic tempers, the peculiar respect for
loveliness of _dress_ which we find constantly in Dante. But he could
not do this; he had not seen it in real life. In his time dress had
become an affectation and absurdity. Only fools, or wise men in their
weak moments, showed much concern about it; and the facts of human
nature which appeared to him general in the matter were the soldier's
disdain, and the coxcomb's care of it. Hence Shakespere's good soldier
is almost always in plain or battered armor; even the speech of Vernon
in Henry the Fourth, which, as far as I remember, is the only one that
bears fully upon the beauty of armor, leans more upon the spirit and
hearts of men--"bated, like eagles having lately bathed;" and has an
under-current of slight contempt running through the following line,
"Glittering in golden coats, _like images_;" while the beauty of the
young Harry is essentially the beauty of fiery and perfect youth,
answering as much to the Greek, or Roman, or Elizabethan knight as to
the mediæval one; whereas the definite interest in armor and dress is
opposed by Shakespere in the French (meaning to depreciate them), to the
English rude soldierliness:

  "_Con._ Tut, I have the best armor in the world. Would it were day!
   _Orl._ You have an excellent armor, but let my horse have his due."

And again:

  "My lord constable, the armor that I saw in your tent to-night, are
   those stars, or suns, upon it?"

while Henry, half proud of his poorness of array, speaks of armorial
splendor scornfully; the main idea being still of its being a gilded
show and vanity--

  "Our gayness and our _gilt_ are all besmirched."

This is essentially Elizabethan. The quarterings on a knight's shield,
or the inlaying of his armor, would never have been thought of by him as
mere "gayness or gilt" in earlier days.[112] In like manner, throughout
every scale of rank or feeling, from that of the French knights down to
Falstaff's "I looked he should have sent me two-and-twenty yards of
satin, as I am true knight, and he sends me security!" care for dress is
always considered by Shakespere as contemptible; and Mrs. Quickly
distinguishes herself from a true fairy by her solicitude to scour the
_chairs of order_--and "each fair instalment, coat, and several crest;"
and the association in her mind of the flowers in the fairy rings with
the

  "Sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,
   Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee;"

while the true fairies, in field simplicity, are only anxious to "sweep
the dust behind the door;" and

  "With this field dew consecrate,
   Every several chamber bless
   Through this palace with sweet peace."

Note the expression "Field dew consecrate." Shakespere loved courts and
camps; but he felt that sacredness and peace were in the dew of the
Fields only.

§ 31. There is another respect in which he was wholly incapable of
entering into the spirit of the middle ages. He had no great art of any
kind around him in his own country, and was, consequently, just as
powerless to conceive the general influence of former art, as a man of
the most inferior calibre. Therefore it was, that I did not care to
quote his authority respecting the power of imitation, in the second
chapter of the preceding volume. If it had been needful to add his
testimony to that of Dante (given in § 5), I might have quoted
multitudes of passages wholly concurring with that, of which the "fair
Portia's counterfeit," with the following lines, and the implied ideal
of sculpture in the Winter's Tale, are wholly unanswerable instances.
But Shakespere's evidence in matters of art is as narrow as the range of
Elizabethan art in England, and resolves itself wholly into admiration
of two things,--mockery of life (as in this instance of Hermione as a
statue), or absolute splendor, as in the close of Romeo and Juliet,
where the notion of _gold_ as the chief source of dignity of aspect,
coming down to Shakespere from the times of the Field of the Cloth of
Gold, and, as I said before, strictly Elizabethan, would interfere
seriously with the pathos of the whole passage, but for the sense of
sacrifice implied in it:

  "As _rich_ shall Romeo by his lady lie
   Poor sacrifices of our enmity."

§ 32. And observe, I am not giving these examples as proof of any
smallness in Shakespere, but of his greatness; that is to say, of his
contentment, like every other great man who ever breathed, to paint
nothing but _what he saw_; and therefore giving perpetual evidence that
his sight was of the sixteenth, and not of the thirteenth century,
beneath all the broad and eternal humanity of his imagination. How far
in these modern days, emptied of splendor, it may be necessary for great
men having certain sympathies for those earlier ages, to act in this
differently from all their predecessors; and how far they may succeed in
the resuscitation of the past by habitually dwelling in all their
thoughts among vanished generations, are questions, of all practical and
present ones concerning art, the most difficult to decide; for already
in poetry several of our truest men have set themselves to this task,
and have indeed put more vitality into the shadows of the dead than most
others can give the presences of the living. Thus Longfellow, in the
Golden Legend, has entered more closely into the temper of the Monk, for
good and for evil, than ever yet theological writer or historian, though
they may have given their life's labor to the analysis: and, again,
Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle
Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art,
with which we have been specially concerned, there is hardly a principle
connected with the mediæval temper, that he has not struck upon in those
seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious
instance, by the way, in a short poem referring to this very subject of
tomb and image sculpture; and illustrating just one of those phases of
local human character which, though belonging to Shakespere's own age,
he never noticed, because it was specially Italian and un-English;
connected also closely with the influence of mountains on the heart, and
therefore with our immediate inquiries. I mean the kind of admiration
with which a southern artist regarded the _stone_ he worked in; and the
pride which populace or priest took in the possession of precious
mountain substance, worked into the pavements of their cathedrals, and
the shafts of their tombs.

§ 33. Observe, Shakespere, in the midst of architecture and tombs of
wood, or freestone, or brass, naturally thinks of _gold_ as the best
enriching and ennobling substance for them;--in the midst also of the
fever of the Renaissance he writes, as every one else did, in praise of
precisely the most vicious master of that school--Giulio Romano; but the
modern poet, living much in Italy, and quit of the Renaissance
influence, is able fully to enter into the Italian feeling, and to see
the evil of the Renaissance tendency, not because he is greater than
Shakespere, but because he is in another element, and has _seen_ other
things. I miss fragments here and there not needed for my purpose in the
passage quoted, without putting asterisks, for I weaken the poem enough
by the omissions, without spoiling it also by breaks.

  "_The Bishop orders his tomb in St. Praxed's Church._

                         "As here I lie
  In this state chamber, dying by degrees,
  Hours, and long hours, in the dead night, I ask,
  Do I live--am I dead? Peace, peace, seems all;
  St. Praxed's ever was the church for peace.
  And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
  With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know;
  Old Gandolf[113] cozened me, despite my care.
  Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner south
  He graced his carrion with.
  Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
  One sees the pulpit o' the epistle side,
  And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats;
  And up into the aery dome where live
  The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk.
  And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
  And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest,
  With those nine columns round me, two and two,
  The odd one at my feet, where Anselm[114] stands;
  Peach-blossom marble all.
  Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years:
  Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
  Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black--
  'Twas ever antique-black[115] I meant! How else
  Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
  The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
  Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
  Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
  The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
  St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan,
  And Moses with the tables ... but I know
  Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
  Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
  To revel down my villas while I gasp,
  Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine,
  Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
  Nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then!
  There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world--
  And have I not St. Praxed's ear to pray
  Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts.
  That's if ye carve my epitaph aright,
  Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word,
  No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line--
  Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves _his_ need."

§ 34. I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which
there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance
spirit,--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of
itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that
I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the "Stones of
Venice" put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent
work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so
much _solution_ before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that
people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble;
though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like
Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but
making the element medicinal.

§ 35. It is interesting, by the way, with respect to this love of
stones in the Italian mind, to consider the difference necessitated in
the English temper merely by the general domestic use of wood instead of
marble. In that old Shakesperian England, men must have rendered a
grateful homage to their oak forests, in the sense of all that they owed
to their goodly timbers in the wainscot and furniture of the rooms they
loved best, when the blue of the frosty midnight was contrasted, in the
dark diamonds of the lattice, with the glowing brown of the warm,
fire-lighted, crimson-tapestried walls. Not less would an Italian look
with a grateful regard on the hill summits, to which he owed, in the
scorching of his summer noonday, escape into the marble corridor or
crypt palpitating only with cold and smooth variegation of the unfevered
mountain veins. In some sort, as, both in our stubbornness and our
comfort, we not unfitly describe ourselves typically as Hearts of Oak,
the Italians might in their strange and variegated mingling of passion,
like purple color, with a cruel sternness, like white rock, truly
describe themselves as Hearts of Stone.

§ 36. Into this feeling about marble in domestic use, Shakespere, having
seen it even in northern luxury, could partly enter, and marks it in
several passages of his Italian plays. But if the reader still doubts
his limitation to his own experience in all subjects of imagination, let
him consider how the removal from mountain influence in his youth, so
necessary for the perfection of his lower human sympathy, prevented him
from ever rendering with any force the feelings of the mountain
anchorite, or indicating in any of his monks the deep spirit of
monasticism. Worldly cardinals or nuncios he can fathom to the
uttermost; but where, in all his thoughts, do we find St. Francis, or
Abbot Samson? The "Friar" of Shakespere's plays is almost the only stage
conventionalism which he admitted; generally nothing more than a weak
old man who lives in a cell, and has a rope about his waist.

§ 37. While, finally, in such slight allusions as he makes to mountain
scenery itself, it is very curious to observe the accurate limitation of
his sympathies to such things as he had known in his youth; and his
entire preference of human interest, and of courtly and kingly dignities
to the nobleness of the hills. This is most marked in Cymbeline, where
the term "mountaineer" is, as with Dante, always one of reproach; and
the noble birth of Arviragus and Guiderius is shown by their holding
their mountain cave as

  "A cell of ignorance; travelling abed.
   A prison for a debtor;"

and themselves, educated among hills, as in all things contemptible:

  "We are beastly; subtle as the fox, for prey;
   Like warlike as the wolf, for what we eat:
   Our valor is to chase what flies; our cage
   We make our choir, as doth the prisoned bird."

A few phrases occur here and there which might justify the supposition
that he had seen high mountains, but never implying awe or admiration.
Thus Demetrius:

  "These things seem _small_ and _indistinguishable_,
   _Like far-off mountains, turned into clouds_."

"Taurus snow," and the "frosty Caucasus," are used merely as types of
purity or cold; and though the avalanche is once spoken of as an image
of power, it is with instantly following depreciation:

  "Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow
   Upon the valleys, whose low vassal seat
   The Alps doth spit and void his rheum upon."

§ 38. There was only one thing belonging to hills that Shakespere seemed
to feel as noble--the pine tree, and that was because he had seen it in
Warwickshire, clumps of pine occasionally rising on little sandstone
mounds, as at the place of execution of Piers Gaveston, above the
lowland woods. He touches on this tree fondly again and again.

                                 "As rough,
  Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud'st wind,
  That by his top doth take the mountain pine,
  And make him stoop to the vale."

                 "The strong-based promontory
  Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
  The pine and cedar."

Where note his observance of the peculiar horizontal roots of the pine,
spurred as it is by them like the claw of a bird, and partly propped, as
the aiguilles by those rock promontories at their bases which I have
always called their spurs, this observance of the pine's strength and
animal-like grasp being the chief reason for his choosing it, above all
other trees, for Ariel's prison. Again:

  "You may as well forbid the mountain pines
   To wag their high tops, and to make no noise
   When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven."

And yet again:

  "But when, from under this terrestrial ball,
   He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines."

We may judge, by the impression which this single feature of hill
scenery seems to have made on Shakespere's mind, because he had seen it
in his youth, how his whole temper would have been changed if he had
lived in a more sublime country, and how essential it was to his power
of contemplation of mankind that he should be removed from the sterner
influences of nature. For the rest, so far as Shakespere's work has
imperfections of any kind,--the trivialness of many of his adopted
plots, for instance, and the comparative rarity with which he admits the
ideal of an enthusiastic virtue arising out of principle; virtue being
with him for the most part founded simply on the affections joined with
inherent purity in his women or on mere manly pride and honor in his
men;[116]--in a word, whatever difference, involving inferiority, there
exists between him and Dante, in his conceptions of the relation between
this world and the next, we may partly trace as we did the difference
between Bacon and Pascal, to the less noble character of the scenes
around him in his youth; and admit that, though it was necessary for his
special work that he should be put, as it were, on a level with his
race, on those plains of Stratford, we should see in this a proof,
instead of a negation, of the mountain power over human intellect. For
breadth and perfectness of condescending sight, the Shakesperian mind
stands alone; but in _ascending_ sight it is limited. The breadth of
grasp is innate; the stoop and slightness of it was given by the
circumstances of scene; and the difference between those careless
masques of heathen gods, or unbelieved though mightily conceived visions
of fairy, witch, or risen spirit, and the earnest faith of Dante's
vision of Paradise, is the true measure of the difference in influence
between the willowy banks of Avon, and the purple hills of Arno.

§ 39. Our third inquiry, into the influence of mountains on domestic and
military character, was, we said, to be deferred; for this reason, that
it is too much involved with the consideration of the influence of
simple rural life in unmountainous districts, to be entered upon with
advantage until we have examined the general beauty of vegetation,
whether lowland or mountainous. I hope to pursue this inquiry,
therefore, at the close of the next volume; only desiring, in the
meantime, to bring one or two points connected with it under the
consideration of our English travellers.

§ 40. For, it will be remembered, we first entered on this subject in
order to obtain some data as to the possibility of a Practical Ideal in
Swiss life, correspondent, in some measure, to the poetical ideal of the
same, which so largely entertains the European public. Of which
possibility, I do not think, after what we have even already seen of the
true effect of mountains on the human mind, there is any reason to
doubt, even if that ideal had not been presented to us already in some
measure, in the older life of the Swiss republics. But of its
possibility, _under present circumstances_, there is, I grieve to say,
the deepest reason to doubt; and that the more, because the question is
not whether the mountaineer can be raised into a happier life by the
help of the active nations of the plains; but whether he can yet be
protected from the infection of the folly and vanity of those nations. I
urged, in the preceding chapter, some consideration of what might be
accomplished, if we chose to devote to the help what we now devote to
the mockery of the Swiss. But I would that the enlightened population of
Paris and London were content with doing nothing;--that they were
satisfied with expenditure upon their idle pleasures, in their idle way;
and would leave the Swiss to their own mountain gloom of unadvancing
independence. I believe that every franc now spent by travellers among
the Alps tends more or less to the undermining of whatever special
greatness there is in the Swiss character; and the persons I met in
Switzerland, whose position and modes of life rendered them best able to
give me true information respecting the present state of their country,
among many causes of national deterioration, spoke with chief fear of
the influx of English wealth, gradually connecting all industry with the
wants and ways of strangers, and inviting all idleness to depend upon
their casual help; thus gradually resolving the ancient consistency and
pastoral simplicity of the mountain life into the two irregular trades
of innkeeper[117] and mendicant.

§ 41. I could say much on this subject if I had any hope of doing good
by saying anything. But I have none. The influx of foreigners into
Switzerland must necessarily be greater every year, and the greater it
is, the larger, in the crowd, will be the majority of persons whose
objects in travelling will be, first, to get as fast as possible from
place to place, and, secondly, at every place where they arrive, to
obtain the kind of accommodation and amusement to which they are
accustomed in Paris, London, Brighton, or Baden. Railroads are already
projected round the head of the Lake of Geneva, and through the town of
Fribourg; the head of the Lake of Geneva being precisely and accurately
the one spot of Europe whose character, and influence on human mind, are
special; and unreplaceable if destroyed, no other spot resembling, or
being in any wise comparable to it, in its peculiar way: while the town
of Fribourg is in like manner the only mediæval mountain town of
importance left to us; Inspruck and such others being wholly modern,
while Fribourg yet retains much of the aspect it had in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The valley of Chamouni, another spot also
unique in its way, is rapidly being turned into a kind of Cremorne
Gardens; and I can see, within the perspective of but few years, the
town of Lucerne consisting of a row of symmetrical hotels round the foot
of the lake, its old bridges destroyed, an iron one built over the
Reuss, and an acacia promenade carried along the lake-shore, with a
German band playing under a Chinese temple at the end of it, and the
enlightened travellers, representatives of European civilization,
performing before the Alps, in each afternoon summer sunlight, in their
modern manner, the Dance of Death.

§ 42. All this is inevitable; and it has its good as well as its evil
side. I can imagine the zealous modernist replying to me that when all
this is happily accomplished, my melancholy peasants of the valley of
Trient will be turned into thriving shopkeepers, the desolate streets of
Sion into glittering thoroughfares, and the marshes of the Valais into
prosperous market-gardens. I hope so; and indeed am striving every day
to conceive more accurately, and regulate all my efforts by the
expectation of, the state of society, not now, I suppose, much more
than twenty years in advance of us, when Europe, having satisfactorily
effaced all memorials of the past, and reduced itself to the likeness of
America, or of any other new country (only with less room for exertion),
shall begin to consider what is next to be done, and to what newness of
arts and interests may best be devoted the wealth of its marts, and the
strength of its multitudes. Which anticipations and estimates, however,
I have never been able, as yet, to carry out with any clearness, being
always arrested by the confused notion of a necessity for solitude,
disdain of buying and selling, and other elements of that old mediæval
and mountain gloom, as in some way connected with the efforts of nearly
all men who have either seen far into the destiny, or been much helpful
to the souls, of their race. And the grounds of this feeling, whether
right or wrong, I hope to analyze more fully in the next volume; only
noting, finally, in this, one or two points for the consideration of
those among us with whom it may sometimes become a question, whether
they will help forward, or not, the turning of a sweet mountain valley
into an abyss of factory-stench and toil, or the carrying of a line of
traffic through some green place of shepherd solitude.

§ 43. For, if there be any truth in the impression which I have always
felt, and just now endeavored to enforce, that the mountains of the
earth are its natural cathedrals, or natural altars, overlaid with gold,
and bright with broidered work of flowers, and with their clouds resting
on them as the smoke of a continual sacrifice, it may surely be a
question with some of us, whether the tables of the moneychanger,
however fit and commendable they may be as furniture in other places,
are precisely the thing which it is the whole duty of man to get well
set up in the mountain temple.

§ 44. And perhaps it may help to the better determination of this
question, if we endeavor, for a few patient moments, to bear with that
weakness of our forefathers in feeling an awe for the hills; and,
divesting ourselves, as far as may be, of our modern experimental or
exploring activity, and habit of regarding mountains chiefly as places
for gymnastic exercise, try to understand the temper, not indeed
altogether exemplary, but yet having certain truths and dignities in
it, to which we owe the founding of the Benedictine and Carthusian
cloisters in the thin Alpine air. And this monkish temper we may, I
suppose, best understand by considering the aspect under which mountains
are represented in the Monk's book. I found that in my late lectures, at
Edinburgh, I gave great offence by supposing, or implying, that
scriptural expressions could have any force as bearing upon modern
practical questions; so that I do not now, nor shall I any more, allude
to such expressions as in any wise necessarily bearing on the worldly
business of the practical Protestant, but only as necessary to be
glanced at in order to understand the temper of those old monks, who had
the awkward habit of understanding the Bible literally; and to get any
little good which momentary sympathy with the hearts of a large and
earnest class of men may surely bring to us.

§ 45. The monkish view of mountains, then, already alluded to,[118] was
derived wholly from that Latin Vulgate of theirs; and, speaking as a
monk, it may perhaps be permitted me to mark the significance of the
earliest mention of mountains in the Mosaic books; at least, of those in
which some Divine appointment or command is stated respecting them. They
are first brought before us as refuges for God's people from the two
judgments of water and fire. The ark _rests_ upon the "mountains of
Ararat;" and man, having passed through that great baptism unto death,
kneels upon the earth first where it is nearest heaven, and mingles with
the mountain clouds the smoke of his sacrifice of thanksgiving. Again:
from the midst of the first judgment by fire, the command of the Deity
to His servant is, "Escape to the mountain;" and the morbid fear of the
hills, which fills any human mind after long stay in places of luxury
and sin, is strangely marked in Lot's complaining reply: "I cannot
escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me." The third mention, in
way of ordinance, is a far more solemn one: "Abraham lifted up his eyes,
and saw the place afar off." "The Place," the Mountain of Myrrh, or of
bitterness, chosen to fulfil to all the seed of Abraham, far off and
near, the inner meaning of promise regarded in that vow: "I will lift up
mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh mine help."

And the fourth is the delivery of the law on Sinai.

§ 46. It seemed, then, to the monks, that the mountains were appointed
by their Maker to be to man, refuges from Judgment, signs of Redemption,
and altars of Sanctification and obedience; and they saw them afterwards
connected, in the manner the most touching and gracious, with the death,
after his task had been accomplished, of the first anointed Priest; the
death, in like manner, of the first inspired Lawgiver; and, lastly, with
the assumption of his office by the Eternal Priest, Lawgiver, and
Saviour.

Observe the connection of these three events. Although the _time_ of the
deaths of Aaron and Moses was hastened by God's displeasure, we have
not, it seems to me, the slightest warrant for concluding that the
_manner_ of their deaths was intended to be grievous or dishonorable to
them. Far from this: it cannot, I think, be doubted that in the denial
of the permission to enter the Promised Land, the whole punishment of
their sin was included; and that as far as regarded the manner of their
deaths, it must have been appointed for them by their Master in all
tenderness and love; and with full purpose of ennobling the close of
their service upon the earth. It might have seemed to us more honorable
that both should have been permitted to die beneath the shadow of the
Tabernacle, the congregation of Israel watching by their side; and all
whom they loved gathered together to receive the last message from the
lips of the meek lawgiver, and the last blessing from the prayer of the
anointed priest. But it was not thus they were permitted to die. Try to
realize that going forth of Aaron from the midst of the congregation. He
who had so often done sacrifice for their sin, going forth now to offer
up his own spirit. He who had stood, among them, between the dead and
the living, and had seen the eyes of all that great multitude turned to
him, that by his intercession their breath might yet be drawn a moment
more, going forth now to meet the Angel of Death face to face, and
deliver himself into his hand. Try if you cannot walk, in thought, with
those two brothers, and the son, as they passed the outmost tents of
Israel, and turned, while yet the dew lay round about the camp, towards
the slopes of Mount Hor; talking together for the last time, as step by
step, they felt the steeper rising of the rocks, and hour after hour,
beneath the ascending sun, the horizon grew broader as they climbed, and
all the folded hills of Idumea, one by one subdued, showed amidst their
hollows in the haze of noon, the windings of that long desert journey,
now at last to close. But who shall enter into the thoughts of the High
Priest, as his eye followed those paths of ancient pilgrimage; and,
through the silence of the arid and endless hills, stretching even to
the dim peak of Sinai, the whole history of those forty years was
unfolded before him, and the mystery of his own ministries revealed to
him; and that other Holy of Holies, of which the mountain peaks were the
altars, and the mountain clouds the veil, the firmament of his Father's
dwelling, opened to him still more brightly and infinitely as he drew
nearer his death; until at last, on the shadeless summit,--from him on
whom sin was to be laid no more--from him, on whose heart the names of
sinful nations were to press their graven fire no longer,--the brother
and the son took breastplate and ephod, and left him to his rest.

§ 47. There is indeed a secretness in this calm faith and deep restraint
of sorrow, into which it is difficult for us to enter; but the death of
Moses himself is more easily to be conceived, and had in it
circumstances still more touching, as far as regards the influence of
the external scene. For forty years Moses had not been alone. The care
and burden of all the people, the weight of their woe, and guilt, and
death, had been upon him continually. The multitude had been laid upon
him as if he had conceived them; their tears had been his meat, night
and day, until he had felt as if God had withdrawn His favor from him,
and he had prayed that he might be slain, and not see his
wretchedness.[119] And now, at last, the command came, "Get thee up into
this mountain." The weary hands that had been so long stayed up against
the enemies of Israel, might lean again upon the shepherd's staff, and
fold themselves for the shepherd's prayer--for the shepherd's slumber.
Not strange to his feet, though forty years unknown, the roughness of
the bare mountain-path, as he climbed from ledge to ledge of Abarim; not
strange to his aged eyes the scattered clusters of the mountain
herbage, and the broken shadows of the cliffs, indented far across the
silence of uninhabited ravines; scenes such as those among which, with
none, as now, beside him but God, he had led his flocks so often; and
which he had left, how painfully! taking upon him the appointed power,
to make of the fenced city a wilderness, and to fill the desert with
songs of deliverance. It was not to embitter the last hours of his life
that God restored to him, for a day, the beloved solitudes he had lost;
and breathed the peace of the perpetual hills around him, and cast the
world in which he had labored and sinned far beneath his feet, in that
mist of dying blue;--all sin, all wandering, soon to be forgotten for
ever; the Dead Sea--a type of God's anger understood by him, of all men,
most clearly, who had seen the earth open her mouth, and the sea his
depth, to overwhelm the companies of those who contended with his
Master--laid waveless beneath him; and beyond it, the fair hills of
Judah, and the soft plains and banks of Jordan, purple in the evening
light as with the blood of redemption, and fading in their distant
fulness into mysteries of promise and of love. There, with his unabated
strength, his undimmed glance, lying down upon the utmost rocks, with
angels waiting near to contend for the spoils of his spirit, he put off
his earthly armor. We do deep reverence to his companion prophet, for
whom the chariot of fire came down from heaven; but was his death less
noble, whom his Lord Himself buried in the vales of Moab, keeping, in
the secrets of the eternal counsels, the knowledge of a sepulchre, from
which he was to be called, in the fulness of time, to talk with that
Lord, upon Hermon, of the death that He should accomplish at Jerusalem?

And lastly, let us turn our thoughts for a few moments to the cause of
the resurrection of these two prophets. We are all of us too much in the
habit of passing it by, as a thing mystical and inconceivable, taking
place in the life of Christ for some purpose not by us to be understood,
or, at the best, merely as a manifestation of His divinity by brightness
of heavenly light, and the ministering of the spirits of the dead,
intended to strengthen the faith of His three chosen apostles. And in
this, as in many other events recorded by the Evangelists, we lose half
the meaning and evade the practical power upon ourselves, by never
accepting in its fulness the idea that our Lord was "perfect man,"
"tempted in all things like as we are." Our preachers are continually
trying, in all manner of subtle ways, to explain the union of the
Divinity with the Manhood, an explanation which certainly involves first
their being able to describe the nature of Deity itself, or, in plain
words, to comprehend God. They never can explain, in any one particular,
the union of the natures; they only succeed in weakening the faith of
their hearers as to the entireness of either. The thing they have to do
is precisely the contrary of this--to insist upon the _entireness_ of
both. We never think of Christ enough as God, never enough as Man; the
instinctive habit of our minds being always to miss of the Divinity, and
the reasoning and enforced habit to miss of the Humanity. We are afraid
to harbor in our own hearts, or to utter in the hearing of others, any
thought of our Lord, as hungering, tired, sorrowful, having a human
soul, a human will, and affected by events of human life as a finite
creature is; and yet one half of the efficiency of His atonement, and
the whole of the efficiency of His example, depend on His having been
this to the full.

§ 48. Consider, therefore, the Transfiguration as it relates to the
human feelings of our Lord. It was the first definite preparation for
His death. He had foretold it to His disciples six days before; then
takes with Him the three chosen ones into "an high mountain apart." From
an exceeding high mountain, at the first taking on Him the ministry of
life, He had beheld, and rejected the kingdoms of the earth, and their
glory: now, on a high mountain, He takes upon Him the ministry of death.
Peter and they that were with him, as in Gethsemane, were heavy with
sleep. Christ's work had to be done alone.

The tradition is, that the Mount of Transfiguration was the summit of
Tabor; but Tabor is neither a high mountain, nor was it in any sense a
mountain "_apart_;" being in those years both inhabited and fortified.
All the immediately preceding ministries of Christ had been at Cesarea
Philippi. There is no mention of travel southward in the six days that
intervened between the warning given to His disciples, and the going up
into the hill. What other hill could it be than the southward slope of
that goodly mountain, Hermon, which is indeed the centre of all the
Promised Land, from the entering in of Hamath unto the river of Egypt;
the mount of fruitfulness, from which the springs of Jordan descended to
the valleys of Israel. Along its mighty forest avenues, until the grass
grew fair with the mountain lilies, His feet dashed in the dew of
Hermon, He must have gone to pray His first recorded prayer about death;
and from the steep of it, before He knelt, could see to the south all
the dwelling-place of the people that had sat in darkness, and seen the
great light, the land of Zabulon and of Naphtali, Galilee of the
nations;--could see, even with His human sight, the gleam of that lake
by Capernaum and Chorazin, and many a place loved by Him, and vainly
ministered to, whose house was now left unto them desolate; and, chief
of all, far in the utmost blue, the hills above Nazareth, sloping down
to His old home: hills on which yet the stones lay loose, that had been
taken up to cast at Him, when He left them for ever.

§ 49. "And as he prayed, two men stood by him." Among the many ways in
which we miss the help and hold of Scripture, none is more subtle than
our habit of supposing that, even as man, Christ was free from the Fear
of Death. How could He then have been tempted as we are? since among all
the trials of the earth, none spring from the dust more terrible than
that Fear. It had to be borne by Him, indeed, in a unity, which we can
never comprehend, with the foreknowledge of victory,--as His sorrow for
Lazarus, with the consciousness of the power to restore him; but it
_had_ to be borne, and that in its full earthly terror; and the presence
of it is surely marked for us enough by the rising of those two at His
side. When, in the desert, He was girding Himself for the work of life,
angels of life came and ministered unto Him; now, in the fair world,
when He is girding Himself for the work of death, the ministrants come
to Him from the grave.

But from the grave conquered. One, from that tomb under Abarim, which
His own hand had sealed so long ago; the other from the rest into which
he had entered, without seeing corruption. There stood by Him Moses and
Elias, and spake of His decease.

Then, when the prayer is ended, the task accepted, first, since the
star paused over Him at Bethlehem, the full glory falls upon Him from
heaven, and the testimony is borne to his everlasting Sonship and power.
"Hear ye him."

If, in their remembrance of these things, and in their endeavor to
follow in the footsteps of their Master, religious men of by-gone days,
closing themselves in the hill solitudes, forgot sometimes, and
sometimes feared, the duties they owed to the active world, we may
perhaps pardon them more easily than we ought to pardon ourselves, if we
neither seek any influence for good nor submit to it unsought, in scenes
to which thus all the men whose writings we receive as inspired,
together with their Lord, retired whenever they had any task or trial
laid upon them needing more than their usual strength of spirit. Nor,
perhaps, should we have unprofitably entered into the mind of the
earlier ages, if among our other thoughts, as we watch the chains of the
snowy mountains rise on the horizon, we should sometimes admit the
memory of the hour in which their Creator, among their solitudes,
entered on His travail for the salvation of our race; and indulge the
dream, that as the flaming and trembling mountains of the earth seem to
be the monuments of the manifesting of His terror on Sinai,--these pure
and white hills, near to the heaven, and sources of all good to the
earth, are the appointed memorials of that Light of His Mercy, that
fell, snow-like, on the Mount of Transfiguration.


FOOTNOTES

  [106] In tracing the _whole_ of the deep enjoyment to mountain
    association, I of course except whatever feelings are connected with
    the observance of rural life, or with that of architecture. None of
    these feelings arise out of the landscape, properly so-called: the
    pleasure with which we see a peasant's garden fairly kept, or a
    ploughman doing his work well, or a group of children playing at a
    cottage door, being wholly separate from that which we find in the
    fields or commons around them; and the beauty of architecture, or
    the associations connected with it, in like manner often ennobling
    the most tame scenery;--yet not so but that we may always
    distinguish between the abstract character of the unassisted
    landscape, and the charm which it derives from the architecture.
    Much of the majesty of French landscape consists in its grand and
    grey village churches and turreted farmhouses, not to speak of its
    cathedrals, castles, and beautifully placed cities.

  [107] One of the principal reasons for the false supposition that
    Switzerland is not picturesque, is the error of most sketchers and
    painters in representing pine forest in middle distance as dark
    _green_, or grey green, whereas its true color is always purple, at
    distances of even two or three miles. Let any traveller coming down
    the Montanvert look for an aperture, three or four inches wide,
    between the near pine branches, through which, standing eight or ten
    feet from it, he can see the opposite forests on the Breven or
    Flegère. Those forests are not above two or two and a half miles
    from him; but he will find the aperture is filled by a tint of
    nearly pure azure or purple, not by green.

  [108] The Savoyard's name for its flower, "Pain du Bon Dieu," is
    very beautiful; from, I believe, the supposed resemblance of its
    white and scattered blossom to the fallen manna.

  [109] See reference to his painting of stones in the last note to §
    28 of the chapter on Imagination Penetrative, Vol. II.

  [110] In saying this I do not, of course, forget the influence of
    the sea on the Pisans and Venetians; but that is a separate subject,
    and must be examined in the next volume.

  [111]                          "With fairest flowers
        While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
        I'll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack
        The flower that's like thy face--pale primrose, nor
        The azured harebell--like thy veins; no, nor
        The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
        Outsweetened not thy breath. The ruddock would
        With charitable bill bring thee all this;
        Yea, and furred moss besides, when flowers are none,
        To winter-ground thy corse.
     _Gui._                      Prithee, have done,
        And do not play in wench-like words with that
        Which is so serious."

    Imogen herself, afterwards in deeper passion, will give weeds--not
    flowers--and something more:

                                       "And when
        With wildwood leaves, and weeds, I have strewed his grave,
        And on it said a century of prayers,
        Such as I can, twice o'er, I'll weep, and sigh,
        And, leaving so his service, follow you."

  [112] If the reader thinks that in Henry the Fifth's time the
    Elizabethan temper might already have been manifesting itself, let
    him compare the English herald's speech, act 2, scene 2, of King
    John; and by way of specimen of Shakespere's historical care, or
    regard of mediæval character, the large use of _artillery_ in the
    previous scene.

  [113] The last bishop.

  [114] His favorite son; nominally his nephew.

  [115] "Nero Antico" is more familiar to our ears; but Browning does
    right in translating it; as afterwards "cipollino" into
    "onion-stone." Our stupid habit of using foreign words without
    translation is continually losing us half the force of the foreign
    language. How many travellers hearing the term "cipollino" recognize
    the intended sense of a stone splitting into concentric coats, like
    an onion?

  [116] I mean that Shakespere almost always implies a total
    difference in _nature_ between one human being and another; one
    being from the birth, pure and affectionate, another base and cruel;
    and he displays each, in its sphere, as having the nature of dove,
    wolf, or lion, never much implying the government or change of
    nature by any external principle. There can be no question that in
    the main he is right in this view of human nature; still, the other
    form of virtue does exist occasionally, and was never, as far as I
    recollect, taken much note of by him. And with this stern view of
    humanity, Shakespere joined a sorrowful view of Fate, closely
    resembling that of the ancients. He is distinguished from Dante
    eminently by his always dwelling on last causes instead of first
    causes. Dante invariably points to the moment of the soul's choice
    which fixed its fate, to the instant of the day when it read no
    farther, or determined to give bad advice about Penestrino. But
    Shakespere always leans on the force of Fate, as it urges the final
    evil; and dwells with infinite bitterness on the power of the
    wicked, and the infinitude of result dependent seemingly on little
    things. A fool brings the last piece of news from Verona, and the
    dearest lives of its noble houses are lost; they might have been
    saved if the sacristan had not stumbled as he walked. Othello
    mislays his handkerchief, and there remains nothing for him but
    death. Hamlet gets hold of the wrong foil, and the rest is silence.
    Edmund's runner is a moment too late at the prison, and the feather
    will not move at Cordelia's lips. Salisbury a moment too late at the
    tower, and Arthur lies on the stones dead. Goneril and Iago have on
    the whole, in this world, Shakespere sees, much of their own way,
    though they come to a bad end. It is a pin that Death pierces the
    king's fortress wall with; and Carelessness and Folly sit sceptred
    and dreadful, side by side with the pin-armed skeleton.

  [117] Not the old hospitable innkeeper, who honored his guests and
    was honored by them, than whom I do not know a more useful or worthy
    character; but the modern innkeeper, proprietor of a building in the
    shape of a factory, making up three hundred beds; who necessarily
    regards his guests in the light of Numbers 1, 2, 3-300, and is too
    often felt or apprehended by them only as a presiding influence of
    extortion.

  [118] Vol III. Chap. XIV. § 10.

  [119] Numbers, xi. 12, 15.




APPENDIX.


I. MODERN GROTESQUE.

The reader may perhaps be somewhat confused by the different tone with
which, in various passages of these volumes, I have spoken of the
dignity of Expression. He must remember that there are three distinct
schools of expression, and that it is impossible, on every occasion when
the term is used, to repeat the definition of the three, and distinguish
the school spoken of.

There is, first, the Great Expressional School, consisting of the
sincerely thoughtful and affectionate painters of early times, masters
of their art, as far as it was known in their days. Orcagna, John
Bellini, Perugino, and Angelico, are its leading masters. All the men
who compose it are, without exception, _colorists_. The modern
Pre-Raphaelites belong to it.

Secondly, the Pseudo-Expressional School, wholly of modern development,
consisting of men who have never mastered their art, and are probably
incapable of mastering it, but who hope to substitute sentiment for good
painting. It is eminently characterized by its contempt of color, and
may be most definitely distinguished as the School of Clay.

Thirdly, the Grotesque Expressional School, consisting of men who,
having peculiar powers of observation for the stronger signs of
character in anything, and sincerely delighting in them, lose sight of
the associated refinements or beauties. This school is apt, more or
less, to catch at faults or strangenesses; and, associating its powers
of observation with wit or malice, produces the wild, gay, or satirical
grotesque in early sculpture, and in modern times, our rich and various
popular caricature.

I took no note of this branch of art in the chapter on the Grotesque
Ideal; partly because I did not wish to disturb the reader's mind in our
examination of the great imaginative grotesque, and also because I did
not feel able to give a distinct account of this branch, having never
thoroughly considered the powers of eye and hand involved in its finer
examples. But assuredly men of strong intellect and fine sense are found
among the caricaturists, and it is to them that I allude in saying that
the most subtle expression is often attained by "slight studies;" while
it is of the pseudo-expressionalist, or "high art" school that I am
speaking, when I say that expression may "sometimes be elaborated by the
toil of the dull;" in neither case meaning to depreciate the work,
wholly different in every way, of the great expressional schools.

I regret that I have not been able, as yet, to examine with care the
powers of mind involved in modern caricature. They are, however, always
partial and imperfect; for the very habit of looking for the leading
lines by the smallest possible number of which the expression may be
attained, warps the power of _general_ attention, and blunts the
perception of the delicacies of the entire form and color. Not that
caricature, or exaggeration of points of character, may not be
occasionally indulged in by the greatest men--as constantly by Leonardo;
but then it will be found that the caricature consists, not in imperfect
or violent _drawing_, but in delicate and perfect drawing of strange and
exaggerated forms quaintly combined: and even thus, I believe, the habit
of looking for such conditions will be found injurious; I strongly
suspect its operation on Leonardo to have been the increase of his
non-natural tendencies in his higher works. A certain acknowledgment of
the ludicrous element is admitted in corners of the pictures of
Veronese--in dwarfs or monkeys; but it is _never_ caricatured or
exaggerated. Tintoret and Titian hardly admit the element at all. They
admit the noble grotesque to the full, in all its quaintness,
brilliancy, and awe; but never any form of it depending on exaggeration,
partiality, or fallacy.[120]

I believe, therefore, whatever wit, delicate appreciation of ordinary
character, or other intellectual power may belong to the modern masters
of caricature, their method of study for ever incapacitates them from
passing beyond a certain point, and either reaching any of the perfect
forms of art themselves, or understanding them in others. Generally
speaking, their power is limited to the use of the pen or pencil--they
cannot touch color without discomfiture; and even those whose work is of
higher aim, and wrought habitually in color, are prevented by their
pursuit of _piquant_ expression from understanding noble expression.
Leslie furnishes several curious examples of this defect of perception
in his late work on Art;--talking, for instance, of the "insipid faces
of Francia."

On the other hand, all the real masters of caricature deserve honor in
this respect, that their gift is peculiarly their own--innate and
incommunicable. No teaching, no hard study, will ever enable other
people to equal, in their several ways, the works of Leech or
Cruikshank; whereas, the power of pure drawing is communicable, within
certain limits, to every one who has good sight and industry. I do not,
indeed, know how far, by devoting the attention to points of character,
caricaturist skill may be laboriously attained; but certainly the power
is, in the masters of the school, innate from their childhood.

Farther. It is evident that many subjects of thought may be dealt with
by this kind of art which are inapproachable by any other, and that its
influence over the popular mind must always be great; hence it may often
happen that men of strong purpose may rather express themselves in this
way (and continue to make such expression a matter of earnest study),
than turn to any less influential, though more dignified, or even more
intrinsically meritorious, branch of art. And when the powers of quaint
fancy are associated (as is frequently the case) with stern
understanding of the nature of evil, and tender human sympathy, there
results a bitter, or pathetic spirit of grotesque, to which mankind at
the present day owe more thorough moral teaching than to any branch of
art whatsoever.

In poetry, the temper is seen, in perfect manifestation, in the works of
Thomas Hood; in art, it is found both in various works of the
Germans,--their finest, and their least thought of; and more or less in
the works of George Cruikshank,[121] and in many of the illustrations
of our popular journals. On the whole, the most impressive examples of
it, in poetry and in art, which I remember, are the Song of the Shirt,
and the woodcuts of Alfred Rethel, before spoken of. A correspondent,
though coarser work appeared some little time back in Punch, namely, the
"General Février turned Traitor."

The reception of the woodcut last named was in several respects a
curious test of modern feeling. For the sake of the general reader, it
may be well to state the occasion and character of it. It will be
remembered by all that early in the winter of 1854-5, so fatal by its
inclemency, and by our own improvidence, to our army in the Crimea, the
late Emperor of Russia said, or was reported to have said, that "his
best commanders, General January and General February, were not yet
come." The word, if ever spoken, was at once base, cruel, and
blasphemous; base, in precisely reversing the temper of all true
soldiers, so nobly instanced by the son of Saladin, when he sent, at the
very instant of the discomfiture of his own army, two horses to Coeur
de Lion, whose horse had been killed under him in the mêlée; cruel,
inasmuch as he ought not to have exulted in the thought of the death, by
slow suffering, of brave men; blasphemous, inasmuch as it contained an
appeal to Heaven of which he knew the hypocrisy. He himself died in
February; and the woodcut of which I speak represented a skeleton in
soldier's armor, entering his chamber, the driven sleet white on its
cloak and crest; laying its hand on his heart as he lay dead.

There were some points to be regretted in the execution of the design,
but the thought was a grand one; the memory of the word spoken, and of
its answer, could hardly in any more impressive way have been recorded
for the people; and I believe that to all persons accustomed to the
earnest forms of art, it contained a profound and touching lesson. The
notable thing was, however, that it offended all persons _not_ in
earnest, and was loudly cried out against by the polite formalism of
society. This fate is, I believe, the almost inevitable one of
thoroughly genuine work, in these days, whether poetry or painting; but
what added to the singularity in this ease was that _coarse_
heartlessness was even more offended than polite heartlessness. Thus,
Blackwood's Magazine,--which from the time that, with grace, judgment,
and tenderness peculiarly its own, it bid the dying Keats "back to his
gallipots,"[122] to that in which it partly arrested the last efforts,
and shortened the life of Turner, had with an infallible instinct for
the wrong, given what pain it could, and withered what strength it
could, in every great mind that was in anywise within its reach; and had
made itself, to the utmost of its power, frost and disease of the heart
to the most noble spirits of England,--took upon itself to be generously
offended at this triumphing over the death of England's enemy, because,
"by proving that he is obliged to undergo the common lot of all, his
brotherhood is at once reasserted."[123] He was not, then, a brother
while he was alive? or is our brother's blood in general not to be
acknowledged by us till it rushes up against us from the ground? I know
that this is a common creed, whether a peculiarly wise or Christian one
may be doubted. It may not, indeed, be well to triumph over the dead,
but perhaps it is less well that the world so often tries to triumph
over the living. And as for exultation over a fallen foe (though there
was _none_ in the mind of the man who drew that monarch dead), it may be
remembered that there have been worthy persons, before now, guilty of
this great wickedness,--nay, who have even fitted the words of their
exultation to timbrels, and gone forth to sing them in dances. There
have even been those--women, too,--who could make a mock at the agony of
a mother weeping over her lost son, when that son had been the enemy of
their country; and their mock has been preserved, as worthy to be read
by human eyes. "The mother of Sisera looked out at a window. 'Hath he
not sped?'" I do not say this was right, still less that it was wrong;
but only that it would be well for us if we could quit our habit of
thinking that what we say of the dead is of more weight than what we say
of the living. The dead either know nothing, or know enough to despise
both us and our insults, or adulation.

"Well, but," it is answered, "there will always be this weakness in our
human nature; we shall for ever, in spite of reason, take pleasure in
doing funereal honor to the corpse, and writing sacredness to memory
upon marble." Then, if you are to do this,--if you are to put off your
kindness until death,--why not, in God's name, put off also your enmity?
and if you choose to write your lingering affections upon stones, wreak
also your delayed anger upon clay. This would be just, and, in the last
case, little as you think it, generous. The true baseness is in the
bitter reverse--the strange iniquity of our folly. Is a man to be
praised, honored, pleaded for? It might do harm to praise or plead for
him while he lived. Wait till he is dead. Is he to be maligned,
dishonored, and discomforted? See that you do it while he is alive. It
would be too ungenerous to slander him when he could feel malice no
more; too contemptible to try to hurt him when he was past anguish. Make
yourselves busy, ye unjust, ye lying, ye hungry for pain! Death is near.
This is your hour, and the power of darkness. Wait, ye just, ye
merciful, ye faithful in love! Wait but for a little while, for this is
not your rest.

"Well, but," it is still answered, "is it not, indeed, ungenerous to
speak ill of the dead, since they cannot defend themselves?"

Why should they? If you speak ill of them falsely, it concerns you, not
them. Those lies of thine will "hurt a man as thou art," assuredly they
will hurt thyself; but that clay, or the delivered soul of it, in no
wise. Ajacean shield, seven-folded, never stayed lance-thrust as that
turf will, with daisies pied. What you say of those quiet ones is wholly
and utterly the world's affair and yours. The lie will, indeed, cost its
proper price and work its appointed work; you may ruin living myriads by
it,--you may stop the progress of centuries by it,--you may have to pay
your own soul for it,--but as for ruffling one corner of the folded
shroud by it, think it not. The dead have none to defend them! Nay, they
have two defenders, strong enough for the need--God, and the worm.


II. ROCK CLEAVAGE.

I am well aware how insufficient, and, in some measure, how disputable,
the account given in the preceding chapters of the cleavages of the
slaty crystallines must appear to geologists. But I had several reasons,
good or bad as they may be, for treating the subject in such a manner.
The first was, that considering the science of the artist as eminently
the science of _aspects_ (see Vol. III. Chap. XVII. § 43), I kept myself
in all my investigations of natural objects as much as possible in the
state of an uninformed spectator of the outside of things, receiving
simply what impressions the external phenomena first induce. For the
natural tendency of accurate science is to make the possessor of it look
for, and eminently see, the things connected with his special pieces of
knowledge; and as all accurate science must be sternly limited, his
sight of nature gets limited accordingly. I observed that all our young
figure-painters were rendered, to all intents and purposes, _blind_ by
their knowledge of anatomy. They saw only certain muscles and bones, of
which they had learned the positions by rote, but could not, on account
of the very prominence in their minds of these bits of fragmentary
knowledge, see the real movement, color, rounding, or any other subtle
quality of the human form. And I was quite sure that if I examined the
mountain anatomy scientifically, I should go wrong, in like manner,
touching the external aspects. Therefore in beginning the inquiries of
which the results are given in the preceding pages, I closed all
geological books, and set myself, as far as I could, to see the Alps in
a simple, thoughtless, and untheorizing manner; but to _see_ them, if it
might be, thoroughly. If I am wrong in any of the statements made after
this kind of examination, the very fact of this error is an interesting
one, as showing the kind of deception which the external aspects of
hills are calculated to induce in an unprejudiced observer; but, whether
wrong or right, I believe the results I have given are those which
naturally would strike an artist, and _ought_ to strike him, just as the
apparently domical form of the sky, and radiation of the sun's light,
ought to be marked by him as pictorial phenomena, though the sky is not
domical, and though the radiation of sunbeams is a perspective
deception. There are, however, one or two points on which my opinions
might seem more adverse to the usual positions of geologists than they
really are, owing to my having left out many _qualifying_ statements for
fear of confusing the reader. These I must here briefly touch upon. And,
first, I know that I shall be questioned for not having sufficiently
dwelt upon slaty cleavages running transversely across series of beds,
and for generally speaking as if the slaty crystalline rocks were merely
dried beds of micaceous sand, in which the flakes of mica naturally lay
parallel with the beds, or only at such an angle to them as is
constantly assumed by particles of drift. Now the reason of this is
simply that my own mountain experience has led me _always_ among rocks
which induced such an impression; that, in general, artists seeking for
the noblest hill scenery, will also get among such rocks, and that
therefore I judged it best to explain their structure completely, merely
alluding (in Chap. X. § 7) to the curious results of cross cleavage
among the softer slates, and leaving the reader to pursue the inquiry,
if he cared to do so; although, in reality, it matters very little to
the artist whether the slaty cleavage be across the beds or not, for to
him the cleavage itself is always the important matter, and the
stratification, if contrary to it, is usually so obscure as to be
naturally, and therefore properly, lost sight of. And touching the
disputed question whether the micaceous arrangements of metamorphic
rocks are the results of subsequent crystallization, or of aqueous
deposition, I had no special call to speak: the whole subject appeared
to me only more mysterious the more I examined it; but my own
impressions were always strongly for the aqueous deposition; nor in such
cases as that of the beds of the Matterhorn (drawn in Plate +39+),
respecting which, somewhat exceptionally, I have allowed myself to
theorize a little, does the matter appear to me disputable.

And I was confirmed in this feeling by De Saussure; the only writer
whose help I did not refuse in the course of these inquiries. _His_ I
received for this reason,--all other geological writers whose works I
had examined were engaged in the maintenance of some theory or other,
and always gathering materials to support it. But I found Saussure had
gone to the Alps as I desired to go myself, only to _look_ at them, and
describe them as they were, loving them heartily--loving them, the
positive Alps, more than himself, or than science, or than any theories
of science; and I found his descriptions, therefore, clear, and
trustworthy; and that when I had not visited any place myself,
Saussure's report upon it might always be received without question.

Not but that Saussure himself has a pet theory, like other human beings;
only it is quite subordinate to his love of the Alps: He is a steady
advocate of the aqueous crystallization of rocks, and never loses a fair
opportunity of a blow at the Huttonians; but his opportunities are
always _fair_, his description of what he sees is wholly impartial; it
is only when he gets home and arranges his papers that he puts in the
little aqueously inclined paragraphs, and never a paragraph without just
cause. He may, perhaps, overlook the evidence on the opposite side; but
in the Alps the igneous alteration of the rocks, and the modes of their
upheaval, seem to me subjects of intense difficulty and mystery, and as
such Saussure always treats them; the evidence for the original
_deposition_ by water of the slaty crystallines appears to him, as it
does to me, often perfectly distinct.

Now, Saussure's universal principle was exactly the one on which I have
founded my account of the slaty crystallines:--"Fidèle à mon principle,
de ne regarder comme des couches, dans les montagnes schisteuses, que
les divisions parallèles aux feuillets des schistes dont elles sont
composées."--_Voyages_, § 1747. I know that this is an arbitrary, and in
some cases an assuredly false, principle; but the assumption of it by De
Saussure proves all that I want to prove,--namely, that the beds of the
slaty crystallines are in the Alps in so large a plurality of instances
correspondent in direction to their folia, as to induce even a cautious
reasoner to assume such correspondence to be universal.

The next point, however, on which I shall be opposed, is one on which I
speak with far less confidence, for in this Saussure himself is against
me,--namely, the parallelism of the beds sloping under the Mont Blanc.
Saussure states twice, §§ 656, 677, that they are arranged in the form
of a fan. I can only repeat that every measurement and every drawing I
made in Chamouni led me to the conclusions stated in the text, and so I
leave the subject to better investigators; this one fact being
indisputable, and the only one on which for my purpose it is necessary
to insist, that, whether in Chamouni the beds be radiant or not, to an
artist's eye they are usually parallel; and throughout the Alps no
phenomenon is more constant than the rounding of surfaces across the
extremities of beds sloping outwards, as seen in my plates +37+, +40+,
and +48+, and this especially in the most majestic mountain masses.
Compare De Saussure of the Grimsel, § 1712: "Toujours il est bien
remarquable que ces feuillets, verticaux au sommet, s'inclinent ensuite,
comme à Chamouni, contre le dehors de la montagne:" and again of the
granite at Guttannen, § 1679: "Ces couches ne sont pas tout-a-fait
verticales; elles s'appuyent un peu contre le Nord-Est, ou, comme à
Chamouni, contre le dehors de la montagne." Again, of the "quartz
micacé" of Zumloch, § 1723: "Ces rochers sont en couches à peu près
verticales, dont les plans courent du Nord-Est au Sud-Ouest, en
s'appuyant, _suivant l'usage_, contre l'extérieur de la montagne, ou
contre la vallée." Again, on the Pass of the Griés, § 1738: "Le rocher
présente des couches d'un schiste micacé rayé comme une étoffe; comme de
l'autre côté ils surplombent vers le dehors de la montagne." Without
referring to other passages I think Saussure's simple words, "suivant
l'usage," are enough to justify my statement in Chap. XIV. § 3; only
the reader must of course always remember that every conceivable
position of beds takes place in the Alps, and all I mean to assert
generally is, that where the masses are most enormous and impressive,
and formed of slaty crystalline rocks, there the run of the beds up, as
it were, from within the mountain to its surface, will, in all
probability, become a notable feature in the scene as regarded by an
artist. One somewhat unusual form assumed by horizontal beds of slaty
crystallines, or of granite, is described by Saussure with unusual
admiration; and the passage is worth extracting, as bearing on the
terraced ideal of rocks in the middle ages. The scene is in the Val
Formazza.

"Indépendamment de l'intérêt que ces couches présentent au géologiste
sous un nombre de rapports qu'il seroit trop long et peut-être inutile
de détailler, elles présentent même pour le peintre, un superbe tableau.
Je n'ai jamais vu de plus beaux rochers et distribués en plus grandes
masses; ici, blancs; là, noircis par les lichens; là, peints de ces
belles couleurs variées, que nous admirions au Grimsel, et entremêlés
d'arbres, dont les uns couronnent le faîte de la montagne, et d'autres
sont inégalement jetés sur les corniches qui en séparent les couches.
Vers le bas de la montagne l'oeil se repose sur de beaux vergers, dans
des prairies dont le terrein est inégal et varié, et sur de magnifiques
chàtaigniers, dont les branches étendues ombragent les rochers contre
lesquels ils croissent. En général, ces granits en couches horizontals
redent ce pays charmant; car, quoiqu'il y ait, comme je l'ai dit, des
couches qui forment des saillies, cependant elles sont pour l'ordinaire
arrangées en gradins, ou en grandes assises posées en reculement les
unes derrière les autres, et les bords de ces gradins sont couverts de
la plus belle verdure, et d'arbres distribués de la manière la plus
pittoresque. On voit è mme des montagnes très-élevées, qui out la forme
de pain de sucre, et qui sont entourées et couronnées jusqu'à leur
sommet, de guirlandes d'arbres assis sur les intervalles des couches, et
qui forment l'effet du monde le plus singulier."-_Voyages_, § 1758.

Another statement, which I made generally, referring, for those
qualifications which it is so difficult to give without confusing the
reader, to this appendix, was that of the usually greater hardness of
the tops of mountains as compared with their flanks. My own experience
among the Alps has furnished me with few exceptions to this law; but
there is a very interesting one, according to Saussure, in the range of
the Furca del Bosco. (Voyages, § 1779.)

Lastly, at page 186 of this volume, I have alluded to the various
cleavages of the aiguilles, out of which one only has been explained and
illustrated. I had not intended to treat the subject so partially; and
had actually prepared a long chapter, explaining the relations of five
different and important systems of cleavage in the Chamouni aiguilles.
When it was written, however, I found it looked so repulsive to readers
in general, and proved so little that was of interest even to readers in
particular, that I cancelled it, leaving only the account of what I
might, perhaps, not unjustifiably (from the first representation of it
in the Liber Studiorum) call Turner's cleavage. The following passage,
which was the introduction to the chapter, may serve to show that I have
not ignored the others, though I found, after long examination, that
Turner's was the principal one:--

"One of the principal distinctions between these crystalline masses and
stratified rocks, with respect to their outwardly apparent structure, is
the subtle complexity and number of _ranks_ in their crystalline
cleavages. The stratified masses have always a simple intelligible
organization; their beds lie in one direction, and certain fissures and
fractures of those beds lie in other clearly ascertainable directions;
seldom more than two or three _distinct_ directions of these fractures
being admitted. But if the traveller will set himself deliberately to
watch the shadows on the aiguilles of Chamouni as the sun moves round
them, he will find that nearly every quarter of an hour a new _set_ of
cleavages becomes visible, not confused and orderless, but a series of
lines inclining in some one definite direction, and that so positively,
that if he had only seen the aiguille at that moment, he would assuredly
have supposed its internal structure to be altogether regulated by the
lines of bed or cleavage then in sight. Let him, however, wait for
another quarter of an hour, and he will see those lines fade entirely
away as the sun rounds them; and another set, perhaps quite adverse to
them and assuredly lying in another direction, will as gradually become
visible, to die away in their turn, and be succeeded by a third scheme
of structure.

"These 'dissolving views' of the geology of the aiguilles have often
thrown me into despair of ever being able to give any account of their
formation; but just in proportion as I became aware of the infinite
complexity of their framework, the one great fact rose into more
prominent and wonderful relief,--that through this inextricable
complexity there was always manifested _some_ authoritative principle.
It mattered not at what hour of the day the aiguilles were examined, at
that hour they had a system of structure belonging to the moment. No
confusion nor anarchy ever appeared amidst their strength, but an
ineffable order, only the more perfect because incomprehensible. They
differed from lower mountains, not merely in being more compact, but in
being more disciplined.

"For, observe, the lines which cause these far-away effects of shadow,
are not, as often in less noble rocks, caused by real cracks through the
body of the mountain; for, were this so, it would follow, from what has
just been stated, that these aiguilles were cracked through and through
in every direction, and therefore actually weaker, instead of stronger,
than other rocks. But the appearance of fracture is entirely external,
and the sympathy or parallelism of the lines indicates, not an actual
splitting through the rock, but a mere disposition in the rock to split
harmoniously when it is compelled to do so. Thus, in the shell-like
fractures on the flank of the Aiguille Blaitière, the rock is not
actually divided, as it appears to be, into successive hollow plates. Go
up close to the inner angle between one bed of rock and the next, and
the whole mass will be found as firmly united as a piece of glass. There
is absolutely no crack between the beds,--no, not so much as would allow
the blade of a penknife to enter for a quarter of an inch;[124] but such
a subtle disposition to symmetry of fracture in the heart of the solid
rock, that the next thunderbolt which strikes on that edge of it will
rend away a shell-shaped fragment or series of fragments; and will
either break it so as to continue the line of one of the existing sides,
or in some other line parallel to that. And yet this resolvedness to
break into shell-shaped fragments running north and south is only
characteristic of the rock at this spot, and at certain other spots
where similar circumstances have brought out this peculiar humor. Forty
yards farther on it will be equally determined to break in another
direction, and nothing will persuade it to the contrary. Forty yards
farther it will change its mind again, and face its beds round to
another quarter of the compass; and yet all these alternating caprices
are each parts of one mighty continuous caprice, which is only masked
for a time, as threads of one color are in a patterned stuff by threads
of another; and thus from a distance, precisely the same cleavage is
seen repeated again and again in different places, forming a systematic
structure; while other groups of cleavages will become visible in their
turn, either as we change our place of observation, or as the sunlight
changes the direction of its fall."

One part of these rocks, I think, no geologist interested in this
subject should pass without examination; viz., the little spur of
Blaitière drawn in Plate +29+, Fig. 3. It is seen, as there shown, from
the moraine of the Charmoz glacier, its summit bearing S. 40° W.; and
its cleavage bed leaning to the left or S.E., against the aiguille
Blaitière. If, however, we go down to the extremity of the rocks
themselves, on the right, we shall find that all those thick beams of
rock are actually _sawn into vertical timbers_ by other cleavage,
sometimes so fine as to look almost slaty, directed straight S.E.,
against the aiguille, as if, continued, it would saw it through and
through; finally, cross the spur and go down to the glacier below,
between it and the Aiguille du Plan, and the bottom of the spur will be
found presenting the most splendid mossy surfaces, through which the
true gneissitic cleavage is faintly traceable, dipping _at right angles_
to the beds in Fig. 3, or under the Aiguille Blaitière, thus concurring
with the beds of La Côte.

I forgot to note that the view of this Aiguille Blaitière, given in
Plate +39+, was taken from the station marked _q_ in the reference
figure, p. 163; and the sketch of the Aiguille du Plan at p. 187, from
the station marked _r_ in the same figure, a highly interesting point of
observation in many respects; while the course of transition from the
protogine into gneiss presents more remarkable phenomena on the descents
from that point _r_ to the Tapia, T, than at any other easily accessible
spot.

Various interesting descriptions of granite cleavage will be found in De
Saussure, chiefly in his accounts of the Grimsel and St. Gothard. The
following summary of his observations on their positions of beds (1774),
may serve to show the reader how long I should have detained him if I
had endeavored to give a description of all the attendant phenomena:--
"Il est aussi bien curieux de voir ces gneiss, et ces granits veinés, en
couches verticales à Guttannen; mélangées d'horizontals et de verticales
au Lauteraar; toutes verticales au Grimsel et au Griés; toutes
horizontales dans le Val Formazza, et enfin pour la troisième fois
verticales à la sortie des Alpes à l'entrée du Lac Majeur."


III. LOGICAL EDUCATION.

In the Preface to the third volume I alluded to the conviction, daily
gaining ground upon me, of the need of a more accurately logical
education of our youth. Truly among the most pitiable and practically
hurtful weaknesses of the modern English mind, its usual inability to
grasp the connection between any two ideas which have elements of
opposition in them, as well as of connection, is perhaps the chief. It
is shown with singular fatality in the vague efforts made by our divines
to meet the objections raised by free-thinkers, bearing on the nature
and origin of evil; but there is hardly a sentence written on any matter
requiring careful analysis, by writers who have not yet begun to
perceive the influence of their own vanity (and there are too many such
among divines), which will not involve some half-lamentable,
half-ludicrous, logical flaw,--such flaws being the invariable
consequence of a man's straining to say anything in a learned instead of
an intelligible manner.

Take a sentence, for example, from J. A. James's "Anxious
Inquirer:"--"It is a great principle that _subjective religion_, _or in
other words_, religion _in us_, is produced and sustained by fixing the
mind on _objective religion_, _or_ the facts and doctrines of the Word
of God."

Cut entirely out the words I have put in italics, and the sentence has a
meaning (though not by any means an important one). But by its
verbosities it is extended into pure nonsense; for "facts" are neither
"objective" nor "subjective"[125] religion; they are not religion at
all. The belief of them, attended with certain feelings, is religion;
and it must always be religion "in us," for in whom else should it be
(unless in angels; which would not make it less "subjective"). It is
just as rational to call doctrines "objective religion," as to call
entreaties "objective compassion;" and the only real fact of any
notability deducible from the sentence is, that the writer desired
earnestly to say something profound, and had nothing profound to say.

To this same defect of intellect must, in charity, be attributed many of
the wretched cases of special pleading which we continually hear from
the pulpit. In the year 1853, I heard, in Edinburgh, a sermon from a
leading and excellent Presbyterian clergyman, on a subject generally
grateful to Protestant audiences, namely the impropriety and wickedness
of fasting. The preacher entirely denied that there was any authority
for fasting in the New Testament; declared that there were many feasts
appointed, but no fasts; insisted with great energy on the words
"forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats," &c., as
descriptive of Romanism, and _never once_, throughout a long sermon,
ventured so much as a single syllable that might recall to his
audience's recollection the existence of such texts as Matthew iv. 2 and
vi. 16, or Mark ix. 29. I have heard many sermons from Roman Catholic
priests, but I never yet heard, in the strongest holds of Romanism, any
so monstrous an instance of special pleading; in fact, it never could
have occurred in a sermon by any respectable Roman Catholic divine; for
the Romanists are trained to argument from their youth, and are always
to some extent plausible.

It is of course impossible to determine, in such cases, how far the
preacher, having conscientiously made up his mind on the subject by
foregoing thought, and honestly desiring to impress his conclusion on
his congregation, may think his object will be best, and even
justifiably attained, by insisting on all that is in favor of his
position, and trusting to the weak heads of his hearers not to find out
the arguments for the contrary; fearing that if he stated, in any
proportionate measure, the considerations on the other side, he might
not be able, in the time allotted to him, to bring out his conclusion
fairly. This, though I hold it an entirely false view, is nevertheless a
comprehensible and pardonable one, especially in a man familiar with the
reasoning capacities of the public; though those capacities themselves
owe half their shortcomings to being so unworthily treated. But, on the
whole, and looking broadly at the way the speakers and teachers of the
nation set about their business, there is an almost fathomless failure
in the results, owing to the general admission of special pleading as an
_art to be taught_ to youth. The main thing which we ought to teach our
youth is to _see_ something,--all that the eyes which God has given them
are capable of seeing. The sum of what we _do_ teach them is to _say_
something. As far as I have experience of instruction, no man ever
dreams of teaching a boy to get to the root of a matter; to think it
out; to get quit of passion and desire in the process of thinking; or to
fear no face of man in plainly asserting the ascertained result. But to
_say_ anything in a glib and graceful manner,--to give an epigrammatic
turn to nothing,--to quench the dim perceptions of a feeble adversary,
and parry cunningly the home thrusts of a strong one,--to invent
blanknesses in speech for breathing time, and slipperinesses in speech
for hiding time,--to polish malice to the deadliest edge, shape
profession to the seemliest shadow, and mask self-interest under the
fairest pretext,--all these skills we teach definitely, as the main arts
of business and life. There is a strange significance in the admission
of Aristotle's Rhetoric at our universities as a class-book. Cheating at
cards is a base profession enough, but truly it would be wiser to print
a code of gambler's legerdemain, and give _that_ for a class-book, than
to make the legerdemain of human speech, and the clever shuffling of the
black spots in the human heart, the first study of our politic youth.
Again, the Ethics of Aristotle, though containing some shrewd talk,
interesting for an _old_ reader, are yet so absurdly illogical and
sophistical, that if a young man has once read them with any faith, it
must take years before he recovers from the induced confusions of
thought and false habits of argument. If there were the slightest
dexterity or ingenuity in maintaining the false theory, there might be
some excuse for retaining the Ethics as a school-book, provided only the
tutor were careful to point out, on first opening it, that the Christian
virtues,--namely, to love with all the heart, soul, and strength; to
fight, not as one that beateth the air; and to do with _might_
whatsoever the hand findeth to do,--could not in anywise be defined as
"habits of choice in moderation." But the Aristotelian quibbles are so
shallow, that I look upon the retention of the book as a confession by
our universities that they consider practice in shallow quibbling one of
the essential disciplines of youth. Take, for instance, the distinction
made between "Envy" and "Rejoicing at Evil" ([Greek: phthonos] and
[Greek: epichairekakia]), in the second book of the Ethics, viz., that
envy is grieved when any one meets with good-fortune; but "the rejoicer
at evil so far misses of grieving, as even to rejoice" (the distinction
between the _good_ and _evil_, as subjects of the emotion, being thus
omitted, and merely the verbal opposition of grief and joy caught at);
and conceive the result, in the minds of most youths, of being forced to
take tricks of words such as this (and there are too many of them in
even the best Greek writers) for subjects of daily study and
admiration; the theory of the Ethics being, besides, so hopelessly
untenable, that even quibbling will not always face it out,--nay, will
not help it in exactly the first and most important example of virtue
which Aristotle has to give, and the very one which we might have
thought his theory would have fitted most neatly; for defining
"temperance" as a mean, and intemperance as one relative extreme, not
being able to find an opposite extreme, he escapes with the apology that
the kind of person who sins in the other extreme "has no precise name;
because, on the whole, he does not exist!"

I know well the common censure by which objections to such futilities of
so-called education are met, by the men who have been ruined by
them,--the common plea that anything does to "exercise the mind upon."
It is an utterly false one. The human soul, in youth, is _not_ a machine
of which you can polish the cogs with any kelp or brickdust near at
hand; and, having got it into working order, and good, empty, and oiled
serviceableness, start your immortal locomotive at twenty-five years old
or thirty, express from the Strait Gate, on the Narrow Road. The whole
period of youth is one essentially of formation, edification,
instruction, I use the words with their weight in them; intaking of
stores, establishment in vital habits, hopes and faiths. There is not an
hour of it but is trembling with destinies,--not a moment of which, once
past, the appointed work can ever be done again, or the neglected blow
struck on the cold iron. Take your vase of Venice glass out of the
furnace, and strew chaff over it in its transparent heat, and recover
_that_ to its clearness and rubied glory when the north wind has blown
upon it; but do not think to strew chaff over the child fresh from God's
presence, and to bring the heavenly colors back to him--at least in this
world.


FOOTNOTES

  [120] Compare Stones of Venice, vol. iii. chap. iii. § 74.

  [121] Taken all in all, the works of Cruikshank have the most
    sterling value of any belonging to this class, produced in England.

  [122] "The notice in Blackwood is still more scurrilous; the
    circumstance of Keats having been brought up a surgeon is the staple
    of the jokes of the piece. He is told 'it is a better and wiser
    thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet.'"--_Milnes'
    Life of Keats_, vol. i. p. 200, and compare pp. 193, 194. It may
    perhaps be said that I attach too much importance to the evil of
    base criticism; but those who think so have never rightly understood
    its scope, nor the reach of that stern saying of Johnson's (Idler,
    No. 3, April 29, 1758): "Little does he (who assumes the character
    of a critic) think how many harmless men he involves in his own
    guilt, by teaching them to be noxious without malignity, and to
    repeat objections which they do not understand." And truly, not in
    this kind only, but in all things whatsoever, there is not, to my
    mind, a more woful or wonderful matter of thought than the power of
    a fool. In the world's affairs there is no design so great or good
    but it will take twenty wise men to help it forward a few inches,
    and a single fool can stop it; there is no evil so great or so
    terrible but that, after a multitude of counsellors have taken means
    to avert it, a single fool will bring it down. Pestilence, famine,
    and the sword, are given into the fool's hand as the arrows into the
    hand of the giant: and if he were fairly set forth in the right
    motley, the web of it should be sackcloth and sable; the bells on
    his cap, passing balls; his badge, a bear robbed of her whelps; and
    his bauble, a sexton's spade.

  [123] By the way, this doubt of the possibility of an emperor's
    death till he _proves_ it, is a curious fact in the history of
    Scottish metaphysics in the nineteenth century.

  [124] The following extract from my diary refers to the only
    instance in which I remember any appearance of a spring, or welling
    of water through inner fissures, in the aiguilles.

    "20th August. Ascended the moraine till I reached the base of
    Blaitière; the upper part of the moraine excessively loose and edgy;
    covered with fresh snow: the rocks were wreathed in mist, and a
    light sleet, composed of small grains of kneaded snow, kept beating
    in my face; it was bitter cold too, though the thermometer was at
    43°, but the wind was like that of an English December thaw. I got
    to the base of the aiguille, however, one of the most grand and
    sweeping bits of granite I have ever seen; a small gurgling
    streamlet, escaping from a fissure not wide enough to let in my
    hand, made a strange hollow ringing in the compact rock, and came
    welling out over its ledges with the sound, and successive wave, of
    water out of a narrow-necked bottle, covering the rock with ice
    (which must have been frozen there last night) two inches thick. I
    levelled the Breven top, and found it a little beneath me; the
    Charmoz glacier on the left, sank from the moraine in broken
    fragments of nevè, and swept back under the dark walls of the
    Charmoz, lost in cloud."

  [125] If these two unlucky words get much more hold in the language,
    we shall soon have our philosophers refusing to call their dinner
    "dinner," but speaking of it always as their "objective appetite."


END OF THE FOURTH VOLUME.

       *       *       *       *       *

CORRECTIONS MADE TO THE ORIGINAL TEXT.

Page 31: 'his insistence upon this' corrected from 'insistance.'

Page 45: 'for in utter darkness the distinction is not visible' changed
         from 'darknes.'

Page 52: 'sharks, slugs, bones, fungi, frogs' originally 'fogs.'

Page 60: 'sitting about three yards from a bookcase' changed from 'yard.'

Page 89: 'We imagine the Deity in like manner' originally 'maner.'

Page 143: 'whatever their material may be,--tilted slightly up' changed
          from 'tited.'

Page 155: 'action actually taking place' corrected from 'palce.'

Page 185: 'which in its beautifully curved outline)' extra ')' removed.

Page 261: 'it seems partly to rebuke, and partly to guard'corrected from
          'and party.'

Page 279: 'partly of their own own gravity' removed duplicate 'own.'

Page 284: (footnote [91]) 'Ce n'est pas c'a' changed to 'Ce n'est pas
          ça.'

Page 291: 'are distinguished from the work of other painters' from
          'distingushd.'
Page 300: 'Shakespere' changed to 'Shakespeare.'

Page 317: CHAPTER XIX start added '1' after the §.

Page 352: 'its direction is illegitimate' from 'illegitmate.'

Page 356: 'Celui qui boira' corrected from 'doira.'

Page 358: 'all its peculiarities are mannerisms' changed from
          'peculiarites.'