The Alps

by Sir William Martin Conway

THE CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION TO THE HOFKIRCHE OF ST. LEODEGAR

The Principal Catholic Church of Lucerne.

In our own days, as the photograph exhibitions of the Alpine Club have demonstrated, there are no inconsiderable number of mountain artist-photographers. It has been proved that snow mountains are a specially suitable subject for such art. Views in the high regions of ice and rock seldom depend for their chief beauty upon colour. He whose eye is sensitive to colour-effects can, indeed, find such in profusion in the regions of snow, but they are not the effects to which experience shows mountain lovers are as a rule most sensitive. What most of us love in mountains is primarily their form. Grand forms are profusely supplied by frost-riven rocks and cloven glaciers. In great snow-fields and slopes, the surface modelling is often of transcendent beauty, and that modelling can be rendered to perfection by photography, if the right moment be chosen. Photographers who have known what to look for and what to reject, have perhaps done more even than any other kind of artists in revealing the mountains. But the right moment comes comparatively seldom and has to be seized. A climber may pass for hours through gorgeous scenery, full of subjects for a painter, yet there may not be offered to him one photographable effect. He may expose plate after plate, and carry away with him the most interesting topographical and geographical records, but among them all there will not be a single picture that will render a picturesque effect and be worthy to rank as a work of art. The artist-photographer is a man who can snatch the right moment for the right effect. He must be able to recognise immediately and instinctively, when it comes before his vision, an effect of beauty that can be reproduced. He must see in the complexity of every view what the camera will make of it, knowing for a certainty what it can be made to reflect and what to exclude. In fact he must possess the same qualities as any other kind of landscape artist, the eye that recognises an effect suited to his art and the skill to render that effect in his resulting work of art.

Such photographers, as I have said, there are and have been. Their works have opened the eyes of many a climber to effects of beauty in mountains of which they had before been unconscious. Returning to the regions of snow, they have been thus enabled to look for them and to find them. Their own sensibility to beauty has thus been enriched and their power of enjoyment correspondingly increased.

In consequence of the work of poets, writers, painters, photographers, indeed all kinds of artists, and of the stimulus exerted by them upon mountain travellers of all sorts, men have learned in the last half-century to see mountains far better, more truly, and more beautifully than was possible before. We find in them complexities and refinements of beauty the very existence of which was previously unsuspected. We do not merely wonder at their size or shudder at their savagery. We can do that when the mood is on us, but the mood seldom comes. Our forefathers generally looked at them from a distance and thought of them as a whole, seldom doing more than to identify here and there a single individual from the mass. We, on the contrary, have learnt to know them from nearer at hand. We have made friends with them; we can call them all by their names. We know the aspect of each from many points of view, and their features are as familiar to us as were the features of woodside and stream to the mediæval villager. This intimacy with the mountains has taught us that all the snowy ranges of the world are, as it were, of a single race, and that he who knows one knows something about all.

The Alpine climber, who knows the Alps, can be interested in mere description of mountain ascents elsewhere. Knowing what Alpine peaks look like and how they appear in picture and photograph, he can, by aid of pictures and photographs, attain a tolerably complete idea of the aspect of other mountain ranges. Hence the explorers of such ranges, of the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the peaks of Central Africa, South America, and New Zealand, have been called upon to describe the peaks they have climbed, the valleys and glaciers they have traversed, and the scenery of the regions and ranges they have explored, in a way that would have been unintelligible two generations ago. What we now demand of a mountain explorer is not merely to tell us the adventures of his route, but to explain to us wherein the quality of the mountain scenery differs from that which is familiar nearer home. He must be prepared to answer many questions which would not have been asked till recently. Has he been to the Himalayas or the Andes? We want to know whether those great mountains look their size, and, if so, wherein the effect is manifested of a scale greater than the Alps. Is he returning from Sikhim? We shall ask him to tell us what the great peaks there look like when seen from the beautiful forest below. What are the atmospheric effects peculiar to the region? And, with yet more persistence, what is the quality of mountain form which distinguishes the great peaks there, so that, beheld merely through the medium of photographs, they so impress their individuality upon us?

CLOUD-BURST OVER LUCERNE

Knowing, as we do, the great variety of mountain scenery that can be found in the Alps, between the Dolomites of Tirol at one end and the crags of Dauphiny at the other, we expect to be told whether, in the case of the long Andes range, corresponding varieties are discoverable, and what and where they are. Such questions and multitudes more arise within us. It is much if a traveller can answer a few of them. At best he leaves us hungry. It is this hunger that impels us to travel afar ourselves, if fortune permit. Some indeed travel and explore for merely scientific reasons. They desire to add to knowledge and to diminish the area of the unknown. Some perhaps believe that they go merely in search of sport. The normal man is more complex. He has these ends in view to a greater or less extent perhaps; but, if he be a normal mountaineer, deep down within him there assuredly resides a true and hearty attachment to mountains and mountain scenery for the sake of their beauty. He may be too dumb to express it or too shy to admit, but we soon discover that the feeling is there, and that it is a dominant fact in his nature. He may not have analysed it. He may never speak of it, never perhaps even state it to himself, yet when we stand beside him on a mountain height, gazing abroad on the undefiled world of snow spread abroad at our feet, we find that we share with him a common feeling and embrace a common joy. After all, it is the beauty of the snows that takes us all back to them, and again back. Were that beauty blotted out, how many of us would be climbers? We are like anglers in this respect. We set an aim before us and pursue it with vigour and seem to be wholly intent upon it, but it is the beautiful, natural surroundings of our sport to which it owes its charm. Only the artist can make the realisation of that beauty his active aim, and activity is a necessity to most of us, so we employ ourselves actively in the world of beauty, and take her for the exceeding great reward of our seemingly needless and unprofitable toil.