The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

CHAPTER XVII

SWITZERLAND

Though my "Bed of Ferns" was sent back from the Academy, one of my large studies was exhibited at the British Society, and the result of the year's work was, on the whole, satisfactory. Ruskin invited me to go to Switzerland with him for the summer, finding in some of my studies and drawings the possibility of getting from me some of the Alpine work he wanted done. Unfortunately for both of us I could not draw well in traces, and he did not quite well know how to drive, and the summer ended in disappointment, and finally in disaster. I was too undisciplined to work except when the mood suited, and our moods rarely agreed: he wanted things which were to me of no interest, and I could not interest myself vicariously enough to do them to his satisfaction. He preceded me some weeks, and it was arranged that I should come to meet him at Geneva early in June. Certainly I owe to him my earliest and most delightful memories of the Alps and of Switzerland. More princely hospitality than his no man ever received, or more kindly companionship; but, as might have been expected, we agreed neither in temperament nor in method, if indeed the mainly self-taught way in which I worked and thought could be called method.

He met me with a carriage at Culoz, to give and enjoy my first impressions of the distant Alps, and for the ten days we stopped at Geneva I stayed with him at the Hotel des Bergues. We climbed the Saleve, and I saw what gave me more pleasure, I confess, than the distant view of Mont Blanc, which he expected me to be enthusiastic over,—the soldanella and gentians. The great accidents of nature,—Niagara and the high Alps,—though they awe me, have always left me cold; and all that summer I should have been more fruitfully employed in some nook of English scenery, where nature went undisturbed by catastrophes and cataclysms.

Our first sketching excursion was to the Perte du Rhone, and, while Ruskin was drawing some mountain forms beyond the river, he asked me to draw some huts near by,—not picturesque cottages, thatched roofs and lichen-stained walls, but shanties, such as the Irish laborers on our railways build by the roadside, of deal boards on end, irregular and careless without being picturesque, and too closely associated with pigsty construction, in my mind, to be worth drawing. When Ruskin came back I had made a careless and slipshod five minutes' sketch, not worth the paper it was on, as to me were not the originals. Ruskin was angry, and he had a right to be; for at least I should have found it enough that he wanted it done, to make me do my best on it, but I did not think of it in that light. We drove back towards Geneva in silence,—he moody and I sullen,—and halfway there he broke out, saying that the fact that he wanted the drawing done ought to have been enough to make me do it. I replied that I could see no interest in the subject, which to me only suggested fever and discomfort, and wretched habitations for human beings. We relapsed into silence, and for another mile nothing was said, when Ruskin broke out with, "You were right, Stillman, about those cottages; your way of looking at them was nobler than mine, and now, for the first time in my life, I understand how anybody can live in America."

We went to Bonneville to hunt out the point of view of a Turner drawing which Ruskin liked, but, needless to say, though we ransacked the neighborhood for views, we never found Turner's; and then we went on to St. Martin, the little village opposite Sallanches, on the Arve. For a subalpine landscape with Mont Blanc in the distance, this is the most attractive bit of the Alpine country I know, with picturesque detail and pleasant climbing up to 7000 feet. The view of Mont Blanc, too, is certainly the finest from below which can be found. In fine weather the mountain is hidden to the summit by clouds which clear away at sunset, and from the little and picturesque bridge over the Arve we saw the huge dome come out, and glow in the sunlight, when we were all in shadow. It was to me new and startling, this huge rosy orb, which at its first appearance suggests a huger moon rising above the clouds, until, slowly, the clouds below melt away, and the mountain stands disclosed to its base. If anything in the Alps can be called truly picturesque, it is the view of the Aiguille de Varens which overhangs the village of St. Martin, with the quaint and lichenous church and cemetery in the foreground, and I made a large drawing of it from the bridge, intending to return and work it up after Ruskin had left me. The little inn of the village was the most comfortable auberge I was ever in, and its landlord the kindest and most hospitable of hosts. Twenty years later I went back to the locality, hoping to find something of the old time; but there was only a deserted hostel, the weeds growing over the courtyard, and the sealed and mouldy doors and windows witnessing ancient desertion.

Hardly had I become interested in my drawing when Ruskin decided to move on to Chamounix, where we might hope to get really to work. When the first sublime and overpowering impression of Chamounix and the majesty and gloom of its narrow valley wore off, it began to oppress me, and long before we got away I felt as if I were in a huge grave. The geological interest was great, and the sublimity overpowering. But to my mind sublimity does not suffice for art; the beautiful must predominate, and of the beautiful there is little in the valley. The sublime rendered on a small scale is not satisfactory; the beautiful loses nothing by reduction.

I was disappointed in the High Alps,—they left me cold; and after visiting the points of view Turner had taken drawings from, we went up to the Montanvert, where Ruskin wished me to paint for him a wreath of Alpine rose. We found the rose growing luxuriantly against a huge granite boulder, a pretty natural composition, and I set to work on it with great satisfaction, for botanical painting always interested me. Ruskin sat and watched me work, and expressed his surprise at my facility of execution of details and texture, saying that, of the painters he knew, only Millais had so great facility of execution. We were living at the little hotel of the Montanvert, and he was impatient to get back to the better accommodation of the valley hotels; so that when the roses and the rocks were done we went back, the completion of the picture being left for later study. From Paris, in the ensuing winter, I sent it to Ruskin, the distance being made of the actual view down the valley of Chamounix; and he wrote me a bitter condemnation of it, as a disappointment; for he said that he "had expected to see the Alpine roses overhanging an awful chasm," etc. (an expectation he should have given expression to earlier), and found it very commonplace and uninteresting. So it was, and I burnt it after the fashion of the "Bed of Ferns." As Rowse said of him later, "he wanted me to hold the brush while he painted." But our ideas clashed continually, and what he wanted was impossible,—to make me see with his eyes; and so we came to great disappointment in the end.

I was very much interested in his old guide, Coutet, with whom I had many climbs. He liked to go with me, he said, because I was very sure-footed and could go wherever he did. He was a famous crystal-hunter, and many of the rarest specimens in the museum of Geneva were of his finding. There was one locality of which only he knew, where the rock was pitted with small turquoises like a plum pudding, and I begged him to tell me where it was. There is a superstition amongst the crystal-hunters that to tell where the crystals are found brings bad luck, and he would never tell me in so many words; but one day, after my importunity, I saw him leveling his alpenstock on the ground in a very curious way, sighting along it and correcting the direction, and when he had finished he said, as he walked past me, "Look where it points," and went away. It was pointing to a stratum halfway up to the summit of one of the aiguilles to the west of the Mer de Glace, a chamois climb. He told me later that he found the crystals in the couloir that brought them down from that stratum. A dear old man was Coutet, and fully deserving the affection and confidence of Ruskin. Connected with him was a story which Ruskin told me there of a locality in the valley of Chamounix, of which the guides had told him, haunted by a ghost which could be seen only by children. It was a figure of a woman who raked the dead leaves, and when she looked up at them the children said they saw only a skull in place of a face. Ruskin sent to a neighboring valley for a child who could know nothing of the legend, and went with him to the locality which the ghost haunted. Arrived there he said to the boy, "What a lonely place! There is nobody here but ourselves." "No," said the child, "there is a woman there raking the leaves," pointing in a certain direction. "Let us go nearer to her," said Ruskin; and they walked that way, when the boy stopped, saying that he did not want to go nearer, for the woman looked up, and he said that she had no eyes in her head,—"only holes."

The valley of Chamounix finally became to me the most gloomy and depressing place I was ever in. We made excursions and a few sketches; but I had little sympathy with it, though I tried to do what Ruskin wanted, and to get a faithful study of some characteristic subject in the valley. Every fine day we climbed some secondary peak, five or six thousand feet, and in the evenings we discussed art or played chess, mainly in rehearsing problems, until midnight. Sundays no work was done, but we used to climb some easy hilltop; and there he spent the afternoon in writing a sermon for a girls' school in which he was much interested, but not a hue of drawing would he do. To me, brought up in the severity of Sabbatarianism, the sanctity of the first day of the week had always been a theological fiction, and the result of the contact with the larger world of thinkers and the widening of my range of thought by the study of philosophy had also made me see that the observances of "new moons and fast-days" had nothing to do with true religion, and that the Eden repose of the Creator was too large a matter to be fenced into a day of the week. This slavery to a formality in which Ruskin was held by his terrible conscience provoked me, therefore, to the discussion of the subject.

I showed him that there was no authority for the transference of the Christian weekly rest from the seventh to the first day of the week, and we went over the texts together, in which study my Sabbatarian education gave me an advantage in argument; for he had never given the matter a thought. Of course he took refuge in the celebration of the weekly return of the day of Christ's resurrection; but I showed him that the text does not support the claim that Christ rose on the first day of the week, and that the early fathers, who arranged that portion of the ritual, did not understand the tradition of the resurrection. "Three days and three nights," according to the gospel, Christ was to lie in the tomb,—not parts of three times twenty-four hours. But the women went to the tomb "in the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week," and they found that he had already risen and was gone. Now, as by the Jewish ritual the day began at sunset, the first day of the week began with the going down of the sun on Saturday, and, therefore, as Christ had already risen, he must have risen on the seventh day. And the reason of this twilight visit was in the prohibition to touch a dead body on the Sabbath, and the zeal of the disciples sent them to the sepulchre at the earliest possible moment. And I showed him how careless or ignorant of the record the redisposition of the sacred time had been, in the fact of the total disregard of the words of Christ, that he should lie in the earth three days and three nights; for they assumed him to have been crucified on Friday, while he must have lain buried Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and was therefore buried on Wednesday, just before sunset. And this is confirmed by the text which says that the disciples hastened to bury Christ on the day of crucifixion, because the next day was the day of preparation for one of the high Sabbaths, which the early church, which instituted the observance of the first day, confounded with the weekly Sabbath, not knowing that a high Sabbath could not fall on the weekly Sabbath.

To this demonstration Ruskin, always deferent to the literal interpretation of the gospel, could not make a defense; the creed had so bound him to the letter that the least enlargement of the stricture broke it, and he rejected the whole tradition,—not only the Sunday Sabbath, but the authority of the ecclesiastical interpretation of the texts. He said, "If they have deceived me in this, they have probably deceived me in all," and he came to the conclusion of rejecting all. This I had not conceived as a possible consequence of the criticism of his creed, and it gave me great pain; for I was not a skeptic, as he, I have since learned, for a time became. It was useless to argue with him for the spirit of the gospel; he had always held to its infallibility and the exactitude of doctrine, and his indignation was too strong to be pacified. He returned somewhat, I have heard, to his old beliefs in later years, as old men will to the beliefs of their youth, and his Christianity was too sincere and profound for a matter of mistaken credence in mere formalities ever to affect its substance, and the years which followed showed that in no essential trait had the religious foundations of his character been moved. For myself, I was still a sincere believer in the substantial accuracy of the body of Christian doctrine, and the revolt of Ruskin from it gave me great pain. My own entire liberation from the burdens of futile beliefs had yet to come, and at that time he went further than I could go with him. But we never discussed theological matters any more.

I finally found a subject which interested me in a view of the foot of the Mer de Glace from the opposite side of the river, looking up the glacier, with the bridge under the Brevent, and a cottage in the foreground, and set to work on it energetically. Ruskin used to sit behind me and comment on my work. My methods of painting were my own, for I had never painted under any one except the few months with Church, whose method had taught me nothing; and I had a way of painting scud clouds, such as always hang around the Alpine peaks, by brushing the sky in thinly with the sky-blue, and then working into that, with the brush, the melting clouds, producing the grays I wanted on the canvas. It imitated the effect of nature logically, as the pigment imitated the mingling of the vapor with the blue sky; but Ruskin said this was incorrect, and that the colors must be laid like mosaic, side by side, in the true tint. Another discouragement! I used to lay in the whole subject, beginning with the sky, rapidly and broadly, and, when it was dry, returning to the foreground and finishing towards the distance; and Buskin was delighted with the foreground painting, insisting on my doing nothing further to it. In the distance was the Montanvert and the Aiguille du Dru; but where the lines of the glacier and the slopes of the mountain at the right met, five nearly straight lines converged at a point far from the centre, and I did not see how to get rid of them without violating the topography. I pointed it out to Ruskin, and he immediately exclaimed: "Oh, nothing can he done with a subject like that, with five lines radiating from an unimportant point! I will not stay here to see you finish that study." And the next day we packed up and left for Geneva.

At Lausanne I made some careful architectural drawings, which he praised,—some pencil sketches on the lake; and then we drove across country to Freiburg, and finally to Neuchâtel, where I found a magnificent subject in the view from the hill behind the city, looking over the lake towards the Alps, with Mont Blanc and the Bernese Alps in the extreme distance. In the near distance rise the castle and its old church, which Ruskin drew for me in pencil with exquisite refinement of detail, for in this kind of drawing he was most admirable. As we should stay only a few days, I could not paint anything, and spent all my time, working nine hours a day, hard, on the one subject in pencil. We still spent our evenings till late in discussions and arguments, with a little chess, rarely going to bed before midnight; and the steady strain, with my anxiety to lose none of my time and opportunities, finally told on my eyes. One day, while working hard on the view of Neuchâtel, I felt something snap behind my eyes, and in a few minutes I could no longer see my drawing; the slightest attempt to fix my vision on anything caused such indistinctness that I could see neither my work nor the landscape, and I was obliged to suspend work altogether. In a few days we went to Basle, and, after a rest, my vision came back partially, and we went to Laufenburg, where Turner had found the subject for one of his Liber Studiorum engravings. Here the subjects were entirely after my feeling, and, as my eyes had ceased to trouble me, I set to work on a large drawing of the town and fall from below. In the midst of it the snapping behind my eyes came back, worse than ever, and that time not to leave me for a long time. It was followed by an incessant headache, which made life a burden, with obstinate indigestion. Here Ruskin suddenly found that he must go back to England, and I returned with him as far as Geneva, and thence went to St. Martin, where I spent the rest of the autumn, as helpless for all work as a blind man.

My summer with Ruskin, to which I had looked for so much profit to my art, had ended in a catastrophe of which I did not then even measure the extent. It was nearly two years before I recovered from the attack at Neuchâtel enough to work regularly, and these circumstances threw me still further from my chosen career. More exciting and absorbing occupation called me, and I obeyed, whether for better or worse it now matters not. When I was free to return with undivided attention to my painting my enthusiasm had cooled, and human interests claimed and kept me. Ruskin had dragged me from my old methods, and given me none to replace them. I lost my faith in myself, and in him as a guide to art, and we separated definitely, years later, on a personal question in which he utterly misunderstood me; but, apart from questions of art, he always remains to me one of the largest and noblest of all the men I have known, liberal and generous beyond limit, with a fineness of sympathy in certain directions and delicacy of organization quite womanly. Nothing could shake my admiration for his moral character or abate my reverence for him as a humanist. That art should have been anything more than a side interest with him, and that he should have thrown the whole energy of his most energetic nature into the reforming of it, was a misfortune to him and to the world, but especially to me.

At St. Martin I waited the return of my vision. I climbed, and tried chamois-hunting with no success so far as game was concerned, though I saw the beautiful creatures in their homes, and now rejoice that I did not kill any, though I fear I wounded one mortally, where we could not retrieve him. One of my excursions was to the summit of the Aiguille de Varens, by a path, in one place cut in the face of a precipice, only wide enough for one's feet, with sheer cliff above and below, and nothing to hold by. I have a good head, but to follow my guide on that path was something which only mauvaise honte brought me to. I was ashamed to hesitate where he walked along so cheerily. We arranged to spend the night at a chalet where a milkmaid with the figure of the Venus of Milo tended a remnant of the herd, most of which had already descended to the valleys below. As the sun was setting I walked out to the brow of the aiguille, which from below seemed a point, but was in reality only the perpendicular face of a mass of mountain which in the other direction sloped away towards Switzerland for miles. The view of Mont Blanc, directly opposite, then bare of clouds from the base to the summit, with the red sunset light falling full on the great fields of snow, of which I had never realized the extent from any other point, was by far the most imposing view of the great mountain I have ever found. I stood at an elevation of about 7000 feet, halfway to the summit of Mont Blanc, with the whole broad expanse of glacier and snowfield glowing in the rosy twilight; and, while I watched the sun set, at my feet lay the valley of the Arve, with the town of Sallanches and its attendant villages in the blue distance of gathering night, thousands of feet below me. As I looked, enchanted, the chimes of the convent below rang out a Gregorian air, which came up to my heights like a solemn monition from the world of dreams, for nothing could be distinguished of its source. We started a chamois, and saw him race across the broad field of snow like the wind, while I could only follow, laboring knee-deep in the snow, like a tortoise after a hare. We slept that night buried in the hay. I am glad to say that the hunt in the morning was without other result than a delightful walk, for my guide was a better climber than huntsman.

A few days later, I made, with another guide, an excursion to the Col des Fours, on the other side of the valley. The guide was an old professional hunter, and knew the habits of the chamois well. We climbed up leisurely in the afternoon, and slept in the hay of a deserted chalet; for from there the cattle had already been all driven down. While the guide prepared the supper, I walked out to the edge of the cliffs to get the view. The landscape had become a sea of mist,—a river, rather; for the whole valley was filled with a moving, billowy flood of fog flowing from Mont Blanc, and enveloping mountain and valley alike in a veil of changing vapor, melting, forming, and flowing beneath my feet, hiding every object in the landscape below the cliffs I stood on. It made me dizzy, for I seemed to be in the clouds. And while I waited there came a transfiguration of the scene,—the mist began to grow rosy, and deeper and deeper, till it was almost like a sea of blood. No source of light was visible from my point of view, but, of course, the phenomenon, though seemingly mysterious, was evident. The sun, in setting, illuminated the fields of snow at the summit of the mountain beyond, which reverberated its flaming light into the vapor below, penetrating it down to my feet, but the mountain itself was, from my elevation, invisible. It passed like all glories, and quicker than most.

The next morning we went to take our posts for a chamois drive. A friend of the guide, whom he had picked up to profit by my coming, took one side of the valley, and I the other, while a boy with an umbrella went down the valley to drive the chamois up to us. Having posted me, the stupid guide crossed the line of the drive between me and the meadow where the chamois would come to feed, and took his post, hiding nearer the peaks where they had passed the night. Soon after sunrise they made their appearance on a field of snow which sloped down into the Val,—nine, young and old. I shall never see anything prettier than the play of those young chamois on the snow. They butted and chased each other over the snow, frolicked like kittens, standing on their hind legs and pushing each other, until, probably, they grew hungry, and then came down to the grass to feed. This was the moment for the driver to come in, and he came up the valley waving his arms and umbrella and shouting. The chamois came in my direction till they crossed the track of the old hunter, scenting which they halted, sniffed the air, and then broke in panic, the majority running back past the driver and within a few yards of him, so that if he had had a gun he could easily have killed one, and went down the valley out of sight; three came up the valley, taking the flank of the almost perpendicular rocks, within shot of me, but at full gallop, and I fired at the middle one of the group. They passed behind a mass of rock as I fired, and two came out on the other side. If I hit one I could not know, for the place was inaccessible, but I hope that I missed. I have often thought of the possibility that I might have hit the poor beast, and sent him mortally wounded amongst the rocks to die, and I never recur to the incident without pain. It becomes incomprehensible to me, as my own life wanes, how I could ever have found pleasure in taking the lives of other creatures filling their stations in the world better than I ever did. The late educated soul pays the penalty of earlier ignorance, but there is no atonement to the victims.

I stayed at St. Martin while the plebiscite and annexation to France took place. It was a hollow affair, the voting being a mockery, but the Sardinian government had never made itself seriously felt in Savoy, for either good or ill; the people were a quiet and law-abiding race, and while I was in the country I never heard of a crime or a prosecution. The regiments of Savoyard troops went into the French army with ill will, and there was a bloody fight between them and the French soldiers at Lyons when the former went into the barracks there.

I was at St. Martin when the Emperor and Empress made their tour through the new possession. The state carriages had to be left at Sallanches when the sovereigns went up to the great ball offered them at Chamounix, and, when they returned, the little mountain carriages which brought them down halted under the windows of the auberge of St. Martin, in which I lived, to wait for the state carriages to come across the river. They had to wait about half an hour, and as they walked up and down in the road under my window, beside which stood my loaded rifle, I thought how easily I could change the course of European politics, for I could have hit any button on the Emperor's clothes, and I hated him enough to have killed him cheerfully, as an enemy of mankind; but regicide has always seemed to me a great mistake, as it would have been in that case, for it would only have placed the young Prince Imperial on the throne, under the regency of the Empress. I was then a radical republican, with all the sympathies of a Parisian Red, for I had not learned that it is less the form of the government than the character of the governed which makes the difference between governments. I did not spare the life of the Emperor from any apprehension of consequences to me, for I had none. I knew the paths up the mountain at the back of the hotel, and before the confusion should have been overcome, and a pursuit organized, I could have been beyond danger, on my way to the Swiss frontier, for the pine woods came to the back door of the hotel; and beyond that, I never had the habit of thinking of the consequences of what I proposed to do. When I returned to Paris, after the autumn had passed, I told the story to an artist friend, an ultraradical, how I stood at my window with a loaded rifle by my side, and the Emperor twenty feet below, and he shouted with fury, "And you didn't kill him?" Time and fate have punished him more fitly than I should have done, and wise men leave these things to time and fate.