The Alps

by Sir William Martin Conway

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 of[history], 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 not only produced in the fourth volume of Modern Painters a most suggestive and illuminating work, but by the magic of his language and the charm and aptness of his illustrative drawings attracted to it the attention of all that was best in English society. Whether what followed was directly due to his initiative, I do not know. The next important step was the publication of Mr. Edward Whymper's Scrambles amongst the Alps, which rapidly attained popularity of the best kind. It is difficult nowadays to put one's self in the place of mountain lovers who met with that book when it first appeared. To us it is still full of freshness and charm, but to them it was far more significant. They compared its illustrations with those in Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, published twelve years before, and they were smitten with admiration. "Look at the poor old chromo-lithographs," wrote Leslie Stephen, "which then professed to represent the mountains, and compare them with Mr. Whymper's admirable woodcuts. The difference is really remarkable. Though some of these old illustrations, copied from photographs, suggest the general outlines with tolerable fidelity, most of them utterly fail to represent a mountain at all to an educated eye.... The old daubs are mere random indications of certain obtrusive features which could not well be overlooked. Mr. Whymper's woodcuts seem to bring the genuine Alps before us in all their marvellous beauty and variety of architecture." Ruskin and Whymper, in fact, took up mountain-drawing where Dürer had left it three hundred and fifty years before. They looked at the mountains themselves with the humility that belongs to men who love the truth, and they taught others so to look. Alpine climbing taught men for the first time what mountains actually are. The power so to see them was simultaneously developed, and photography has helped.

[1] NOTE.—As to the historical question referred to at the foot of page 34, see Coolidge's Swiss Travel, pp. 24 and 128, and the references there given to A. von Haller's Die Alpen of 1732.

The question of mountain-photography is a thorny one, but it must be faced. The reader can scarcely deny that if mountains really looked like the ordinary run of commercial photographs of them, they would be ugly or at least unattractive objects. A volume of such photographs would scarcely lead a man, who had never left his home, eagerly to desire a close acquaintance with snowy peaks. That, however, was actually what Mr. Whymper's woodcuts did. Hundreds of readers of his book were thereby led to become mountaineers. Wherein does this different efficiency consist? A photograph, in theory, repeats every detail of the view it contains. Such details as drop out are either too small or too faint to be visible in the print. A camera does not select. It takes all. In this respect it differs altogether from the human eye. If you look fixedly in a definite direction and regard carefully what it is that you actually see, you will discover it to be a few central details only, and that they are surrounded not merely by vaguely defined objects but by objects duplicated. Thus the sight of the eye and the sight of a camera are not alike, either in what is beheld or what is selected. The sense of beauty depends upon what the eye selects. It would seem then that the beauty of a view could not possibly be reproduced by photography, and such was the crude conclusion once held by artists of the capacities of this modern process. Photographers, however, have proved that such is not necessarily the case.

In the infinite effects, all of them beautiful, that a single landscape is capable of yielding, and yielding simultaneously, most are beyond the reach of photography; but the same is likewise true of any one art-process. Pen-and-ink drawing, for example, is as incapable of reproducing colour effects as photography. Each art has its own limited area of possible effect. Photography, in so far as it is an art, is subject to its own definite and rather narrow limitations. A photographer can choose his subject and determine its exact limitations. As he can deal only with forms and tones, he must choose a subject so arranged by nature that its forms are in themselves beautiful, and its tones a harmonious distribution of light and shade. But light and shade varies with the hour of the day and season of the year, and forms vary with the drift of clouds over the hills, so that the selection of moment becomes for the photographer as important as the choice of point of view, direction, and area of subject. Again, by choice of length of exposure and by methods of development, the photographer can alter the quality of light and shade in his negative and the amount of detail he renders. These three factors are entirely under the photographer's control, and in so far as he avails himself of them, not merely to reproduce a view but to reproduce the picturesque effect in a view, he becomes and deserves to be regarded as an artist.