‘The beauty of a distant mountain depends on the line it traces along the sky.... Such forms as suggest the idea of lumpish heaviness are disgusting—round, swelling forms without any break to disencumber them of their weight.
‘Mountains in composition are considered as single objects and follow the same rules;—if they join heavily together in lumpish shapes, if they fall into each other at right angles, or if their lines run parallel—in all these cases the combination will be more or less disgusting.’[5]
Barbizon painting underwent a change somewhat similar to that just described in England. Corot altered his manner and evolved the graceful greenery and scenes of trees and water for which he is admired to-day. It is perhaps to be regretted that he exchanged his strong renderings of mountain and rock for twilight fantasies which, for all their lyrical charm, slide frequently into sentimentality and prettiness. His fellow-landscape-painters, Rousseau, Daubigny, Dupré, and the veteran Harpignies, used mountains either not at all or merely as incidents in a panorama. Courbet alone, the greatest of them all, continued to the last his rugged studies of cliff and slope, blending the romantic tradition with the realist, supplying, as the first real painter of rocks, a noble and fearless link between the ideal and the selective. In true modern landscape the influence of Courbet appears again and again, strengthening and vigorous.
With the coming of Impressionist painting no marked advance is noticeable. Monet and his followers are concerned with light and colour, not with form. Dutch Impressionism—the Hague school With its curious mixture of seventeenth-century genre tradition and modern French landscape methods—keeps to trees and sky. It would be unreasonable indeed to look for the birth of the mountain in art to take place in Holland!
Before passing on to the latest phase of European painting, some attention must be given to the art of the Far East. China, Japan, India, loom large in the history of the landscape tradition, and especially in its newest development, where their influence, as will be seen, has been very great.
In the art of the Far East, whether theoretical or practical, there are traces from the earliest times of a conception of landscape and of its bearing on art somewhat similar to that of Wordsworth. The early Chinese in their aphorisms and paintings loved to express the majesty of mountains. ‘Rhythmic vitality, anatomical structure, conformity with nature, suitability of colouring, artistic composition and finish are the six canons of art,’ wrote Hsieh-Ho in the sixth century A.D., and no subject could be more suitable than a mountain for the application of those canons. Through the later periods of Chinese art, and during the history of the painting of Japan, recurring cases appear of the same inclination.
But there are differences of opinion among the Eastern theorists. Here is Kuo Hsi, who seems to be an early Chinese incarnation of William Gilpin:—
‘Hills without clouds look bare; without water they are wanting in fascination; without paths they are wanting in life; without trees they are dead; without depth-distance they are shallow; without level-distance they are near; and without height-distance they are low.’
Indian art provides such a striking parallel to the ideas of modern European painting that it will be useful to return to it when discussing the new movement. It is sufficient here to say that an examination of Indian landscape drawings will reveal an interest in mountains similar to and no less vivid than that of the Japanese.
The interest in Eastern art began to spread over Europe during the last half of the nineteenth century. The de Goncourt brothers and Whistler by adopting some of the Japanese methods familiarised their countrymen with the ideas and practices of a hitherto little-known art. The researches and writings of Edmond de Goncourt, the flat, roomy arrangements of Whistler, struck a note so new that a wild outcry greeted their efforts. But the strangeness has worn off. Whistler is accepted as a master; Japanese prints are everywhere; and, like the Spanish influence introduced by Manet in the face of general execration, the Eastern ideas have gone to produce a new art.[6]