From both schools, the Retrospective and the Commonplace, any invitation to the Alps will receive the same answer. The mountains, begins one voice, are harsh, violent, and unmanageable in outline, crude and monotonous in colour, and devoid of atmosphere. The great masters of the Renaissance never painted the Alps, continues the other, with, remembering Titian, doubtful accuracy. In short, we are given to understand, as politely as may be, that the hill-country may be good for those dull souls which, incapable naturally of appreciating more delicate or subtle charms, require to be strongly stirred; but that to the artist's eye the Alps are the chromolithography of nature—that, in fact, a taste for mountain scenery is bad taste.
Yet the majesty and poetry of the great ranges are not incapable of representation. One mountain sketch of Turner is enough to prove this. But if such an example is thought too exceptional let us take another. I have before me pictures in brown, twelve inches by ten, showing above the mossy roofs of a Tyrolese homestead and the broad sunny downs of Botzen the tusked and horned ramparts which guard King Laurin's rose-garden; the Orteler, its vast precipices of crowning ice-pyramid half seen through belts of cloud; the soaring curve of the Wetterhorn as it sweeps up like an aspiring thought from the calm level life of the pasturages at its feet; the Matterhorn, an Alpine Prometheus chained down on its icy pedestal, yet challenging the skies with dauntless front. Is mind powerless where mere reflection can succeed not once but repeatedly? Can it be impossible to put on canvas subjects which readily adapt themselves to modest-sized photographs? So long as form as well as colour is a source of pleasure, the Alps will offer a store of the most valuable material for art.
Nevertheless, a certain amount of truth underlies all the current criticisms on Alpine scenery. In 'the blue unclouded weather' which sometimes, to the joy of mountaineers and sightseers who reckon what they see by quantity rather than quality, extends through a Swiss August, the air is deficient in tone and gradation. In the central Cantons the prevailing colours are two tints of green. The vivid hue of pasturages and broad-leaved trees is belted by the heavier shade of pine-woods, and both are capped by a dazzling snow-crown, producing an effect to a painter's eye crude and unmanageable. The Alps have, in common with most great natures, rough and rugged places, such as are not found in more everyday lives or landscapes. Their outlines are often wanting in grace, and of a character which does not readily fall into a harmonious composition.
But to allow all this is only to show that here as elsewhere there is need for selection before imitation. Those who, ignoring the essential qualities of the mountains, insist only on their blemishes remind me of the foreigner who sees in English landscapes nothing but a monotony of heavy green earth overshadowed by a sunless sky. Their disparagement is like most erroneous criticism, the honest expression of the little knowledge described in the proverb.
Familiarity with what he represents is essential to the painter's success. Men paint best as a rule the scenery of their own homes. Perugino gives us Umbrian hills and the lake of Thrasimene; Cima and Titian Venetian landscapes and colours; Turner loves most English seas and mists. It is useless, except for a rare genius, to go once to Switzerland and paint one or two pictures, for in the mountains knowledge is especially needed. The first view of the Alps is in most cases a disappointment. Our expectations have been unconsciously based on the great mounds of cumulus cloud which roll up against lowland skies. We expect something comparable to them, and we find only a thin white line which the smallest cloud-belt altogether effaces. First impressions require to be corrected by patient study of detail before any adequate comprehension can be formed of the true scale. The stories of our countryman who proposed to spend a quiet day in strolling along the crest of the chain from the St. Theodule to Monte Rosa, of the New Yorker who thought he saw one of the mules of a party descending the Matterhorn, have become proverbs. I suppose no season passes without the Grands Mulets being mistaken for a company of mountaineers by some new arrivals at Chamonix. And too often Alpine pictures betray a similar confusion of mind in their painters. I have seen the Schreckhorn through utter ignorance of rock-drawing converted into a slender pyramid which might have stood comfortably beside the Mammoth Tree under the roof of the Crystal Palace. Not long ago there was a picture in the Academy of the Lake of Lucerne, where the mountain-tops looked scarcely so high above the water as the frame was above the ground. The hangers had done their best, but nothing could give those mountains height.
Moreover it is well to know something of the substance as well as the size of your subject. Some painters, it is true, have had a conventional mode of expressing all foliage; but their example is not one to be imitated. The different forms and texture of granite and limestone must be carefully attended to. Again, before it is possible properly to paint the golden lights and pearl-grey shadows on the face of the Jungfrau some knowledge must be gained of the meaning of the lines and furrows which seam the upper snows.
A sense for colour is doubtless a born gift. Nevertheless it will take many days of watching before even the keenest apprehension seizes upon all the subtleties of distance and light and shade in the mountains. A dark green pine, a brown châlet, and a white peak may do very well in a German chromolithograph. But the artist and the mountain-lover ask for something better than the clever landscapes of Bierstadt and the Munich school, faithful it may be, but faithful in a dry and narrow manner, and giving us every detail without the spirit of the scene. The forms are there exactly enough, but local colour and sentiment are wanting. We have a catalogue instead of a poem. One of Turner's noble pictures of the gorge of Göschenen is worth a gallery of such compositions.
Those who are seeking to understand mountains will do well not to confine themselves to the round of the tourist. Convenience and health, not love of beauty, have been the chief influences in determining the orbits of our fellow-countrymen. Nothing compels the painter to linger on the bleak uplands round the sources of the Inn, where a shallow uniform trench does duty for the valley which has never yet been dug out, and where the minor and most conspicuous peaks have a mean and ruinous aspect.[74]
If he wishes to paint the central snowy range as portions of the landscape rather than to study them for themselves, he should begin with the further side of the Alps. There, even in the clear summer weather, when the Swiss crags seem most hard and near, and the pine-trees crude and stiff, all the hollows of the hills are filled with waves of iridescent air, as if a rainbow had been diffused through the sky. The distances, purple and blue, float before the eye with a soft outline like that of the young horns of a stag. Even the snows are never a cold white; after the red flush of dawn has left them they pass through gradations of golden brightness until, when the sun is gone, they sink into a soft spectral grey. And in the foreground woods of chestnuts and beeches spread their broad branches over wayside chapels bright with colour, and mossy banks the home of delicate ferns and purple-hearted cyclamens. To those who know them the names of Val Rendena, Val Sesia, Val Anzasca, and Val Maggia call up visions of the sweetest beauty. But the whole Italian slope is free at all times from the alleged defects of Swiss scenery. Further east lies the Trentino, where the mountains stand apart and the valleys spread out to an ampler width, where nature is rich and open-handed, and the landscapes unite Alpine nobility of form to the sunny spaciousness and deep colour of Italy. And close at hand, beyond the Adige, is the country of Titian, where the new school may find a precedent and an example in the great painter of Cadore.
But at length when the crowd has departed let the painter in late September or October pass back to the Swiss Alps. However much he may dislike positive colours, he will find subjects to his taste, harmonies in blue and grey, or studies in grey alone, when the thin autumn vapours swim up the valley and entangle themselves amongst the pine-tops, or when the whole heaven is veiled, and