V.
The view from Mount Gourzy is much admired; the traveller is informed that he will see the whole plain of Beam as far as Pau. I am obliged to take the word of the guide-book for it; I found clouds at the summit and saw nothing but the fog. At the end of the forest that covers the first slope lay some enormous trees, half rotten, and already whitened with moss. Some mummies of pine trees were left standing; but their pyramids of branches showed a shattered side. Old oaks split open as high up as a man’s head, crowned their wound with mushrooms and red strawberries. From the manner in which the ground is strewn it might be called a battle-field laid waste by bullets; it is the herdsmen who, for mere amusement, set fire to the trees.
My neighbor, the tourist, told me next day that I had not lost much, and gave me a dissertation against the views from mountain-tops. He is a resolute traveller, a great lover of painting, very odd, however, and accustomed to believing nothing but himself, enthusiastic reasoner, violent in his opinions and fruitful in paradox. He is a singular man; at fifty, he is as active as if he were but twenty. He is dry, nervous, always well and alert, his legs forever in motion, his head fermenting with some idea which has just sprung up in his brain and which during two days will appear to him the finest in the world. He is always under way and a hundred paces ahead of others, seeking truth with rash boldness, even to loving danger, finding pleasure in contradicting and being contradicted, and now and then deceived by his militant and adventurous spirit. He has nothing to hamper him; neither wife, children, place nor ambition. I like him, notwithstanding his want of moderation, because he is sincere; bit by bit he has told me his life, and I have found out his tastes; his name is Paul, and he was left, at the age of twenty, without parents and with an income of twelve thousand francs.
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From experience of himself and of the world, he judged that an occupation, an office or a household would weary him, and he has remained free. He found that amusements failed to amuse, and he gave up pleasures; he says that suppers give him the headache, that play makes him nervous, that a respectable mistress ties a man down, and a hired mistress disgusts him. So he has turned his attention to travelling and reading. “It is only water, if you will,” said he, “but that is better than your doctored wine: at least, it is better for my stomach.” Besides, he finds himself comfortable under his system, and maintains that tastes such as his grow with age, that, in short, the most sensible of senses, the most capable of new and various pleasures is the brain. He confesses that he is dainty in respect of ideas, slightly selfish, and that he looks upon the world merely as a spectator, as if it were a theatre of marionettes. I grant that he is a thoroughly good fellow at heart, usually good-humored, careful not to step on the toes of others, at times calculated to cheer them up, and that, at least, he has the habit of remaining modestly and quietly in his corner. We have philosophized beyond measure between ourselves, or rather against one another; you may skip the following pages if you are not fond of dissertations.
He could not bear to have people go up a mountain in order to look down on the plain.
“They don’t know what they are doing,” said he. “It is an absurdity of perspective. It is destroying a landscape for the better enjoyment of it. At such a distance there are neither forms nor colors. The heights are mere molehills, the villages are spots, the rivers are lines drawn by a pen. The objects are all lost in one grayish tint; the contrast of lights and shades is blotted out; everything is diminished; you make out a multitude of imperceptible objects,—a mere Liliputian world. And thereupon you cry out at the magnificence! Does a painter ever take it into his head to scale a height in order to copy the score of leagues of ground that may be seen from thence?”
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“That is good only for a land-surveyor. The basins, highways, tillage, are all seen as in an atlas. Do you go then in search of a map? A landscape is a picture; you should put yourself at the point of sight. But no; the beauty is all ciphered mathematically; it is calculated that an elevation of a thousand feet makes it a thousand times more beautiful. The operation is admirable, and its only fault is that it is absurd, and that it leads through a great deal of fatigue to immeasurable boredom.” But the tourists, when once at the summit, are carried away with enthusiasm.
“Pure cowardice—they are afraid of being accused of dryness, and of being thought prosy; everybody now-a-days has a sublime soul, and a sublime soul is condemned to notes of admiration. There are still sheep-like minds, who take their admirations on trust and get excited out of mere imitation. My neighbor says that this is fine, the book thinks so too; I have paid to come up, I ought to be charmed; accordingly I am. I was one day on a mountain with a family to whom the guide pointed out an indistinct bluish line, saying, ‘There is Toulouse!’ The father, with sparkling eyes, repeated to the son, ‘There is Toulouse!’ And he, at sight of so much joy, cried with transport, ‘There is Toulouse!’ They learned to feel the beautiful, as any one learns to bow, through family tradition. It is so that artists are formed, and that the great aspects of Nature imprint forever upon the soul solemn emotions.”
Then an ascent is an error of taste?
“Not at all; if the plain is ugly, seen from above, the mountains themselves are beautiful; and indeed they are beautiful only from above. When you are in the valley they overwhelm you; you cannot take them in, you see only one side of them, you cannot appreciate their height nor their size. One thousand feet and ten thousand are all the same to you; the spectator is like an ant in a well; at one moment distance blots out the beauty; the next, it is proximity does away with the grandeur.”
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“From the top of a peak, on the other hand, the mountains proportion themselves to our organs, the eye wanders over the ridges and takes in their whole; our mind comprehends them, because our body dominates them. Go to Saint-Sauveur, to Bareges; you will see that those monstrous masses have as expressive a physiognomy, and represent as well-defined an idea as a tree or an animal. Here you have found nothing but pretty details; the ensemble is tiresome.”
You talk of this country as a sick man of his doctor. What have you to say then against these mountains?
“That they have no marked character; they have neither the austerity of bald peaks nor the lovely roundings of wooded hills. These fragments of grayish verdure, this poor mantle of stunted box pierced by the projecting bones of the rock, those scattered patches of yellowish moss, resemble rags; I like to have a person either naked or clothed, and do not like your tatterdemalion. The very forms are wanting in grandeur, the valleys are neither abrupt nor smiling. I do not find the perpendicular walls, the broad glaciers, the heaps of bald and jagged summits which are seen further on. The country does not amount to much either as plain or mountain; it should either be put forward or held back.”
You give advice to Nature.
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“Why not? She has her uncertainties and incongruities like any one else. She is not a god, but an artist whose genius inspires him to-day and to-morrow lets him down again. A landscape in
order to be beautiful must have all its parts stamped with the common idea and contributing to produce a single sensation. If it gives the lie here to what it says yonder, it destroys itself, and the spectator is in the presence of nothing but a mass of senseless objects. What though these objects be coarse, dirty, vulgar? provided they make up a whole by their harmony, and that they agree in giving us a single impression, we are pleased.”
So that a court-yard, a worm-eaten hut, a parched and melancholy plain, may be as beautiful as the sublimest mountain.
“Certainly. You know the fields of the Flemish painters, how flat they are; you are never tired of looking at them. Take something that is still more trivial, an interior of Van Ostade; an old peasant is sharpening a chopping-knife in the corner, the mother is swaddling her nursling, three or four brats are rolling about among the tools, the kettles and benches; a row of hams is ranged in the chimney, and the great old bed is displayed in the background under its red curtains. What could be more common! But all these good people have an air of peaceful contentment; the babies are warm and easy in the over-wide breeches, glossy antiques transmitted from generation to generation. There must have been habits of security and abundance, for a scattered household to lie pellmell on the ground in this fashion; this comfort must have lasted from father to son, for the furniture to have assumed that sombre color and all the hues to harmonize. There is not an object here that does not point to the unconstraint of an easygoing life and uniform good-nature. If this mutual fitness of the parts is the mark of fine painting, why not of fine nature? Real or fancied, the object is the same; I praise or I blame one with as good right as the other, because the practice or the violation of the same rules produces in me the same enjoyment or the same displeasure.”
