The Alps. Sir William Martin Conway
with every shade and combination of greens will be immaterial to him for the time. He will feast his eyes upon form, and form will be the real subject of whatever representation of the scene he may endeavour to set down.
Any one can multiply instances for himself and carry further to any extent the analysis of possible simultaneous varieties of effect in a single view. If to that he add the changes of effect that nature makes by variations of the weather, time of day, and season of the year, it will be evident enough how a single scene may be beheld with infinite variety by the eye of man; and the suspicion will arise that all conceptions, all appreciations, may not be equally fine or equally easy to grasp, and that, where one man may see little, another may be able to see an effect of singular beauty.
It is the true and proper function of a landscape painter to find effects in views, but it does not follow that the effects he sees are those seen by any man in the street. "I never saw a sunset look like that," said a man to Turner when looking at one of his pictures. "No!" was the reply, "but don't you wish you could?" It should be the business of a painter to inspire such envy in those who see his works. If he merely shows us things as we see them for ourselves, he is of little service. At best he does but revive our memories. He should do more. He should stimulate our imaginations to a higher activity, or provide us with something to look for in the future even more than to revive in the past.
To return to our two painters of a previous paragraph: if their drawings of the Jungfrau were shown to the meteorologist, he might be prompt to observe that the atmospheric effect was not rendered, and that the colour of the sky was incorrect. The Toynbee Hall excursionist would find the snow lacking in the radiance that had dazzled him. The forest-lover would declare that he could not identify the character of the trees and that the various greens of the foreground were untrue to nature. Whilst the climber would regard the colourist's Jungfrau as a daub in which all the character of the peak was missed. He would fail to recognise any possible route up its painted image or the signs of the difficulties and dangers of the way. Finally, each artist might regard the other's picture as a more or less mistaken effort.
Yet if all these gentry were animated by a proper spirit they would recognise that their own view was not the only way of seeing the peak, but that any of the others was equally truthful, perhaps equally worthy, nay, that some other effect than those they respectively felt might be superior. Each might learn from the drawings another kind of effect to look for, and raising his eyes from the paper to the peak might then and there see the pictured effect for himself, and thenceforward be able to discover the like again in other places. It is difficult to estimate how far the effective sight of any man has been thus educated, either by pictured scenes, or by a word in season from some companion who shared with him this or the other splendid view. Each of us starts but poorly equipped; each may discover something for himself and to some extent develop his faculties by his own unaided efforts; but ultimately each, even the most naturally gifted, learns far more from others than he originates. The most efficient teachers of how to look are painters—of how to look at scenery, landscape painters. It is unfortunate that the snowy ranges have not been studied by a larger number of the great landscape artists. Turner handled them in their broader aspects and from relatively low and distant points of view; by so doing he greatly helped to spread and deepen a knowledge of mountain beauty. No inconsiderable number of later artists, mostly, however, admittedly of the second rank, have devoted at least a part of their time to mountain-landscape art, some pursuing it to the higher and inner recesses of the snowy region. Yet it must be admitted that the great mountain pictures are yet to be painted. Stott seemed on the verge of a higher success. Segantini almost touched the goal, and would doubtless have come nearer if he had lived longer. Such men amongst the dead, and many living artists, whose names I do not venture to set down lest by inadvertent omission I were to be unjust, have earned our thankfulness by the lessons they have taught; yet plenty more remains to be accomplished. The hills have not inspired landscape painters with all the fulness of their charm.
FIESCHERHORN AND LOWER GRINDELWALD GLACIER
It is often forgotten that mountains and even snowy mountains found their way into pictures at a very early date. Even the father of modern landscape painting, Hubert Van Eyck, introduced admirable renderings of lines of snowy peaks into the backgrounds of some of his pictures, as, for instance, in the "Three Maries at the Sepulchre," belonging to Sir Frederick Cook, where the effect of a distant range is beautifully suggested. Albrecht Dürer again, about a century later, made a series of the carefullest studies of mountain scenes in the neighbourhood of the Brenner road, and thenceforward he was fond of introducing excellently-drawn peaks into the backgrounds of his engravings and woodcuts. He possessed a remarkable knowledge of the essential facts of mountain form, so that even a modern mountaineer can learn from his works some of the elements of "how to see." Well-drawn mountains are of frequent occurrence in sixteenth century woodcuts and drawings by the prolific masters of sixteenth century south German and Venetian schools. The fact is one of many proofs of the vitality of that first modern outburst of mountain enthusiasm which gradually faded as the sixteenth century advanced.
It is the commonplace of seventeenth and eighteenth century writers, who chance to refer to mountain scenery, to describe it as of monstrous, horrible, or even hideous character. Contemporary artists gave it corresponding expression. We are wrong to assume that their pictures and prints manifest any incapacity to draw, because we do not recognise in them the peaks and landscapes we know. The fact was that those artists gave quite truthful expression to the impression produced upon them by mountain scenery. Most Alpine lovers have seen prints professing to depict such objects as the Grindelwald glaciers and the surrounding heights, and have wondered how any one with the view before him can have so libelled it. But the artist intended no libel. All snowy peaks to him were inaccessible altitudes; in imagination he doubled their steepness. I myself, when a boy, approached the Matterhorn with a belief that it was built of precipices. I had always heard it so spoken of. With the thing itself before me I sat down to draw it, and quite unintentionally and unconsciously exaggerated its steepness and sharpness in a way that now seems difficult to account for. If such was the effect of preconception upon a modern lad who had already climbed several relatively high Alpine mountains, how easy it must have been for a seventeenth-century artist to be misled, who never thought of climbing at all, and to whose mind the notion of any individual interest attaching to a particular peak was altogether foreign. He merely felt a general awe, or horror, of his surroundings, and in depicting mountain scenery very properly made the rendering of either emotion his chief aim. Pictures painted at that time under those influences are not to be regarded as valueless and ridiculous. They are of great value as enabling us to see with our own eyes what mountain scenery actually looked like to the people of those days, and thus to account for the extraordinary language employed by travellers going the grand tour who attempted to describe the scenery through which they passed when crossing the Alps.
THE CASTLE OF CHILLON
Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls:
A thousand feet in depth below
Its massy waters meet and flow.
BYRON.
I have thus far only spoken of the educative effect of mountain paintings in teaching us how to see mountain scenery, but there are other forms of art equally efficient. As a matter ofhistory, it was the writers,[1] and especially the poets, who induced the intelligent public to change their attitude towards mountains. I do not know who was the initiator of the movement or in what country it was first apparent. Rousseau deserves to be remembered in this connection. Sir Walter Scott and Byron carried on the work, and were supported by the poets of the Lake School. Goethe and Schiller were widely influential in the same direction. At first it was the vague romanticism of the hills and of the supposed simple life of mountain peasants that attracted sympathetic notice and description. Gradually mountains came to be looked at in greater detail and for their own sake. Finally, in our own day, Ruskin for the first time attempted to analyse mountain beauty, and