I. AN ARTIST OF MOUNTAINS—C. J. Holmes
Mountains, more than any other of the features of nature, are fundamental, synthetic. They present, untrammelled and without elaboration, the great basic principles on which they are built; their structure has absolute unity, their monumental architecture is simple. Their moods are the moods of primitive humanity, their spirit, like their form, is unmodified, above and below civilisation. Every climber must, at one time or another, have shuddered before the hatred of an Alpine peak, the hatred of all that is primeval in nature for all that is artificially progressive in man. I remember one evening sitting above the Col de Vosa and watching the glow of the sunset on Mont Blanc. The entire range of peaks from the Dôme du Goûter to the Aiguille Verte blazed with colour down to a point a little above where the ragged fringe of the moraines slide into the grassy upland. There a hard line of shadow reflected the contour of the hill on which I sat. As the sun sank, this line of shadow crept up the mountain-side with almost visible speed, till only the topmost pinnacles kept their colour, like a row of beacon-lights flaming above the darkened valley. Gradually they in their turn paled and died.
But it is now, when most onlookers turn away, that the mountains begin to live. When the fire has left the snow, when the rock ridges leap out cold and black, when the fissures of the ice cliffs yawn pitilessly once again, the real character of the place is shown. The mountains are cruel and angry. Traffic with them is not friendship, but war. All the mountaineer’s thrill of conquest is the thrill of victory over an enemy, an enemy who hates as men hate, as the ancient hates the upstart or the lonely giant, the puny multitude, but whose resources are endless and whose ally is the storm.
Snow mountains are seldom friendly. Sometimes they seem to smile, but their welcome, for all its glitter, is treacherous and cruel. With lower hills the case is rather different. The rock precipices and windy fells of Cumberland, the spaces of the Yorkshire moors, have an individuality as complete as Mont Blanc, but less overwhelming. Their anger is sullen, their moods more passive. At times they are almost gracious, but the difference is one of degree only. The quality of their emotion sees no variant in glacier and heather.
It would seem that any normal sensibility could in some measure appreciate these mountain moods, and, where the observer is an artist, reproduce them in line and colour.... And yet it is only in our own day that a painter has appeared with a proper understanding of their true existence. In art the coming of landscape was slow, but the mountain, as a mountain, has come more slowly still. Why this neglect? Why, until long after the landscape picture had become a commonplace, was the mountain not disentangled from the myriad aspects of nature and made the object of artistic interpretation?
Several reasons may be suggested. In the first place, for true appreciation more than a mere acquaintance is necessary. Mountains are reserved. They extend no real welcome even when they do not actively resent familiarity. Only patient perseverance can gauge their real significance. The men of old hated them. Perhaps as they watched from afar the towering army of the Alps, there came to them on the breeze some breath of mountain anger, and they trembled, hardly knowing why. To them the hills were just so many hideous obstacles to war or commerce. To make a way through them was a task to be dreaded. It needs a rare vision to see beauty beyond danger, to recognise the sublime in the menace of death.
But, apart from this, it is doubtful whether the mediæval mind could have grasped the essentials of mountain scenery had it striven to do so—and this is the second reason for delay. The synthetic vision, the subordination of part to a whole, is not really primitive. The savage sees individual objects in strong unhampered outline, but he cannot relate them. His decorative sense lacks cohesion. This very lack is the weakness of Egyptian wall-painting, where harmony of line and movement reaches a point seldom achieved since those early days, but where the feeling of a procession is rarely lost owing to the failure to relate the figures and objects to each other. It needs a new hypercivilised primitivism—to use what appears a contradiction in terms—extraordinarily subtle, backed by a store of imagination and detailed knowledge, which can by its very wisdom select and discard, keeping the chain of essentials, disregarding the rest. And no one has greater need of this than the mountain artist. It is equally useless for him to reproduce, however skilfully, every glacier, every gully on the mountain-side, and to daub vague, unrelated lumps of paint one beside another. The important artistic fact in a mountain scene is the intricate rhythm of line and slope, the true relation of curve to curve, and this is obscured and lost in photographic realism, as it is never realised in the scribblings of a child. The mountain artist must grasp every detail, but distinguish what he requires and discard all else. That is why in the early days of landscape-painting the excitement of new beauties inevitably caused overcrowded pictures. There was no attempt at selection, because the selective point of view had, as yet, no appeal. The last thirty years have brought it to the front.
The third reason for the tardy recognition of mountains is expressed by the man with whom this discussion is really concerned, by Professor C. J. Holmes in his monograph on Constable.[1] ‘Mountains have returned with the desire for design.’ The most significant feature of recent painting is the renaissance of decoration. The easel picture as Corot knew it has been eclipsed by the art of the fresco. Design has replaced light as the central study, just as light replaced the twilit realism of the first ‘plein-airists.’ The primitive Italians knew no landscape-painting in our modern sense. The value of mountains in design could not, therefore, appeal to them; and so it is left to the present day to employ for the first time the mountains with their rhythm and their feeling.
But such generalisation, unsuggested by fact, can have little weight, and confirmation of these statements must be found in an outlined indication of the growth of the landscape tradition, and, springing from it, the treatment of mountains.’