CHAPTER III
THE LIMESTONE ALPS (1863)
Our hermit among the Alps of Savoy differed in one respect from his predecessors. They, for the most part, saw nothing in the rocks and stones around them except the prison walls of their seclusion; he could not be within constant sight of the mountains without thinking over the wonders of their scenery and structure. And it was well for him that it could be so. The terrible depression of mind which his social and philanthropic work had brought on, found a relief in the renewal of his old mountain-worship. After sending off the last of his Fraser papers, in which, when the verdict had twice gone against him, he tried to show cause why sentence should not be passed, the strain was at its severest. He felt, as few others not directly interested felt, the sufferings of the outcast in English slums and Savoyard hovels; and heard the cry of the oppressed in Poland and in Italy: and he had been silenced. What could he do but, as he said in the letters to Norton, "lay his head to the very ground," and try to forget it all among the stones and the snows?
He wandered about geologizing, and spent a while at Talloires on the Lake of Annecy, where the old Abbey had been turned into an inn, and one slept in a monk's cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery, St. Bernard of Menthon's memory haunting the place, and St. Germain's cave close by in the rocks above. At the end of May he came back to England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Institution. The subject he chose was "The Stratified Alps of Savoy."
At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in papers embedded in Transactions of various societies. Professor Alphonse Favre's great work did not appear until 1867, and the "Mechanismus der Gebirgsbildung" of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English public the subject was a fresh one. To Ruskin it was familiar: he had been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer and note-book. In the field he had compared Studer's meagre sections, and consulted the available authorities on physical geology, though he had never entered upon the more popular sister-science of palaeontology. He left the determination of strata to specialists: his interest was fixed on the structure of mountains—the relation of geology to scenery; a question upon which he had some right to be heard, as knowing more about scenery than most geologists, and more about geology than most artists.
As examples of Savoy mountains this lecture described in detail the Salève, on which he had been living for two winters, and the Brezon, the top of which he had tried to buy from the commune of Bonneville—one of his many plans for settling among the Alps. The commune thought he had found a gold-mine up there, and raised the price out of all reason. Other attempts to make a home in the châteaux or chalets of Savoy were foiled, or abandoned, like his earlier idea to live in Venice. But his scrambles on the Salève led him to hesitate in accepting the explanation given by Alphonse Favre of the curious north-west face of steeply inclined vertical slabs, which he suspected to be created by cleavage, on the analogy of other Jurassic precipices. The Brezon—brisant, breaking wave—he took as type of the billowy form of limestone Alps in general, and his analysis of it was serviceable and substantially correct.
This lecture was followed in 1864 by desultory correspondence with Mr. Jukes and others in The Reader, in which he merely restated his conclusions, too slightly to convince. Had he devoted himself to a thorough examination of the subject—but this is in the region of what might have been. He was more seriously engaged in other pursuits, of more immediate importance. Three days after his lecture he was being examined before the Royal Academy Commission, and after a short summer visit to various friends in the north of England, he set out again for the Alps, partly to study the geology of Chamouni and North Switzerland, partly to continue his drawings of Swiss towns at Baden and Lauffenburg, with his pupil John Bunney. But even there the burden of his real mission could not be shaken off, and though again seeking health and a quiet mind, he could not quite keep silence, but wrote letters to English newspapers on the depreciation of gold (repeating his theory of currency), and on the wrongs of Poland and Italy; and he put together more papers, not then published, in continuation of his "Munera Pulveris."
Since about 1850, Carlyle had been gradually becoming more and more friendly with John Ruskin; and now that this social and economical work had been taken up, he began to have a real esteem for him, though always with a patronizing tone, which the younger man's open and confessed discipleship accepted and encouraged. This letter especially shows both men in an unaccustomed light: Ruskin, hating tobacco, sends his "master" cigars; Carlyle, hating cant, replies rather in the tone of the temperance advocate, taking a little wine for his stomach's sake:
"CHELSEA, 22 Feby, 1865