Kitabı oku: «Italian Alps», sayfa 20

Some of our friends are sitting all the day long watching seriously in dim galleries if perchance they may yet catch the mantle fallen from the prophets of old. There are others who, going straight to daily life and nature, are often too idle or dull-eyed to penetrate beneath the surface. In place of selecting and combining for us elements of beauty, they attempt to tickle our senses with vulgar tricks of imitation. For one 'Chill October' we have had twenty river scenes crowded with smart people in boats; for one sketch of Leighton, Walker, or Mason half a hundred showy trivialities.

From both schools, the Retrospective and the Commonplace, any invitation to the Alps will receive the same answer. The mountains, begins one voice, are harsh, violent, and unmanageable in outline, crude and monotonous in colour, and devoid of atmosphere. The great masters of the Renaissance never painted the Alps, continues the other, with, remembering Titian, doubtful accuracy. In short, we are given to understand, as politely as may be, that the hill-country may be good for those dull souls which, incapable naturally of appreciating more delicate or subtle charms, require to be strongly stirred; but that to the artist's eye the Alps are the chromolithography of nature – that, in fact, a taste for mountain scenery is bad taste.

Yet the majesty and poetry of the great ranges are not incapable of representation. One mountain sketch of Turner is enough to prove this. But if such an example is thought too exceptional let us take another. I have before me pictures in brown, twelve inches by ten, showing above the mossy roofs of a Tyrolese homestead and the broad sunny downs of Botzen the tusked and horned ramparts which guard King Laurin's rose-garden; the Orteler, its vast precipices of crowning ice-pyramid half seen through belts of cloud; the soaring curve of the Wetterhorn as it sweeps up like an aspiring thought from the calm level life of the pasturages at its feet; the Matterhorn, an Alpine Prometheus chained down on its icy pedestal, yet challenging the skies with dauntless front. Is mind powerless where mere reflection can succeed not once but repeatedly? Can it be impossible to put on canvas subjects which readily adapt themselves to modest-sized photographs? So long as form as well as colour is a source of pleasure, the Alps will offer a store of the most valuable material for art.

Nevertheless, a certain amount of truth underlies all the current criticisms on Alpine scenery. In 'the blue unclouded weather' which sometimes, to the joy of mountaineers and sightseers who reckon what they see by quantity rather than quality, extends through a Swiss August, the air is deficient in tone and gradation. In the central Cantons the prevailing colours are two tints of green. The vivid hue of pasturages and broad-leaved trees is belted by the heavier shade of pine-woods, and both are capped by a dazzling snow-crown, producing an effect to a painter's eye crude and unmanageable. The Alps have, in common with most great natures, rough and rugged places, such as are not found in more everyday lives or landscapes. Their outlines are often wanting in grace, and of a character which does not readily fall into a harmonious composition.

But to allow all this is only to show that here as elsewhere there is need for selection before imitation. Those who, ignoring the essential qualities of the mountains, insist only on their blemishes remind me of the foreigner who sees in English landscapes nothing but a monotony of heavy green earth overshadowed by a sunless sky. Their disparagement is like most erroneous criticism, the honest expression of the little knowledge described in the proverb.

Familiarity with what he represents is essential to the painter's success. Men paint best as a rule the scenery of their own homes. Perugino gives us Umbrian hills and the lake of Thrasimene; Cima and Titian Venetian landscapes and colours; Turner loves most English seas and mists. It is useless, except for a rare genius, to go once to Switzerland and paint one or two pictures, for in the mountains knowledge is especially needed. The first view of the Alps is in most cases a disappointment. Our expectations have been unconsciously based on the great mounds of cumulus cloud which roll up against lowland skies. We expect something comparable to them, and we find only a thin white line which the smallest cloud-belt altogether effaces. First impressions require to be corrected by patient study of detail before any adequate comprehension can be formed of the true scale. The stories of our countryman who proposed to spend a quiet day in strolling along the crest of the chain from the St. Theodule to Monte Rosa, of the New Yorker who thought he saw one of the mules of a party descending the Matterhorn, have become proverbs. I suppose no season passes without the Grands Mulets being mistaken for a company of mountaineers by some new arrivals at Chamonix. And too often Alpine pictures betray a similar confusion of mind in their painters. I have seen the Schreckhorn through utter ignorance of rock-drawing converted into a slender pyramid which might have stood comfortably beside the Mammoth Tree under the roof of the Crystal Palace. Not long ago there was a picture in the Academy of the Lake of Lucerne, where the mountain-tops looked scarcely so high above the water as the frame was above the ground. The hangers had done their best, but nothing could give those mountains height.

Moreover it is well to know something of the substance as well as the size of your subject. Some painters, it is true, have had a conventional mode of expressing all foliage; but their example is not one to be imitated. The different forms and texture of granite and limestone must be carefully attended to. Again, before it is possible properly to paint the golden lights and pearl-grey shadows on the face of the Jungfrau some knowledge must be gained of the meaning of the lines and furrows which seam the upper snows.

A sense for colour is doubtless a born gift. Nevertheless it will take many days of watching before even the keenest apprehension seizes upon all the subtleties of distance and light and shade in the mountains. A dark green pine, a brown châlet, and a white peak may do very well in a German chromolithograph. But the artist and the mountain-lover ask for something better than the clever landscapes of Bierstadt and the Munich school, faithful it may be, but faithful in a dry and narrow manner, and giving us every detail without the spirit of the scene. The forms are there exactly enough, but local colour and sentiment are wanting. We have a catalogue instead of a poem. One of Turner's noble pictures of the gorge of Göschenen is worth a gallery of such compositions.

Those who are seeking to understand mountains will do well not to confine themselves to the round of the tourist. Convenience and health, not love of beauty, have been the chief influences in determining the orbits of our fellow-countrymen. Nothing compels the painter to linger on the bleak uplands round the sources of the Inn, where a shallow uniform trench does duty for the valley which has never yet been dug out, and where the minor and most conspicuous peaks have a mean and ruinous aspect.⁷³

If he wishes to paint the central snowy range as portions of the landscape rather than to study them for themselves, he should begin with the further side of the Alps. There, even in the clear summer weather, when the Swiss crags seem most hard and near, and the pine-trees crude and stiff, all the hollows of the hills are filled with waves of iridescent air, as if a rainbow had been diffused through the sky. The distances, purple and blue, float before the eye with a soft outline like that of the young horns of a stag. Even the snows are never a cold white; after the red flush of dawn has left them they pass through gradations of golden brightness until, when the sun is gone, they sink into a soft spectral grey. And in the foreground woods of chestnuts and beeches spread their broad branches over wayside chapels bright with colour, and mossy banks the home of delicate ferns and purple-hearted cyclamens. To those who know them the names of Val Rendena, Val Sesia, Val Anzasca, and Val Maggia call up visions of the sweetest beauty. But the whole Italian slope is free at all times from the alleged defects of Swiss scenery. Further east lies the Trentino, where the mountains stand apart and the valleys spread out to an ampler width, where nature is rich and open-handed, and the landscapes unite Alpine nobility of form to the sunny spaciousness and deep colour of Italy. And close at hand, beyond the Adige, is the country of Titian, where the new school may find a precedent and an example in the great painter of Cadore.

But at length when the crowd has departed let the painter in late September or October pass back to the Swiss Alps. However much he may dislike positive colours, he will find subjects to his taste, harmonies in blue and grey, or studies in grey alone, when the thin autumn vapours swim up the valley and entangle themselves amongst the pine-tops, or when the whole heaven is veiled, and

 
White against the cold white sky
Shine out the crowning snows.
 

Or, if he delights in the subtle play and contrast of colour, he may study the lights and shadows and reflections of the lakes, as the wind and clouds sweep over them, the hue of the hillsides when the purple darkness of the pines becomes a grateful contrast to the rich warm tints of the lower woods, and the rhododendron leaves on the high alps flush with a red brighter than their May blossoms. From some lonely height he may watch the shiftings and gatherings of the mist as it spreads in a 'fleecelike floor' beneath his feet, or the storm-wreaths as they surge in tall columns to the heaven, and break open to reveal a mountain shrine glowing in the rich lights of evening or the pale splendour of a summer moon. He must be a dull man if he does not acknowledge that the mountains have a language worth interpreting, and that to those who can listen, they speak, as Lord Lytton tells us in his pretty fable,

 
– With signs all day.
Down drawing o'er their shoulders fair,
This way and that soft veils of air,
And colours never twice the same
Woven of wind, and dew, and flame.
 

We do not ask or expect many artists to devote themselves to the new country which has been discovered by the Alpine Club above the belt of black and white barrenness which was once thought the typical scenery of the Upper Alps. That there is much that is beautiful, however, in this Wonderland will be readily admitted even by those who doubt whether its beauties are reproducible by art.

The painter who ventures into the snow-world will find, I think, that the subjects it offers divide themselves roughly into three classes: portraits of high peaks; studies of mountain views, that is, of earth and sky-colours blended in the vast distances visible from a lofty stand-point; and studies of snow and ice – of the forms and colours of the snow-field and the glacier. In the first two no conspicuous success has yet been obtained. The great mountains still await their 'vates sacer.'⁷⁴ It is in the last-mentioned, at first sight the least inviting and most perplexing of the branches of Alpine art, that the greatest efforts have been made and with the most result. Until M. Loppé painted, it was only the mountaineer who knew the beauty of the glacier. Its broken cataracts and wave-filled seas were to the stranger formless, colourless masses. The Genevese painter, by dint of patient study and laborious, if pleasurable, exertion, has revealed its secrets to the world, and more than justified the enthusiasm of the Alpine Club.

M. Loppé's pictures might easily be arranged so as to form a kind of 'glacier's progress.' We first find the snows reposing tranquilly in their high rock-cradle and reflecting on their pure surface the tones of the sky from which they have fallen. Then we have the struggle and confusion which attend the encounter of the young glacier with the first obstacles. An irresistible impulse urges the still half-formed ice over the edge, and it is transformed in a moment into a maze of towers and blue abysses, of walls of marble-like snow seamed with the soft veins which mark each year's fall, of crystal-roofed and fretted vaults hung with pendant icicles. M. Loppé paints with wonderful skill not only the forms of the 'séracs,' but the shades and hues given by the imprisoned light and reflections to the frozen mass, combining the whole into a harmony of soft pale colour.

Again we meet the glacier, as it is best known to the world, settled down into middle life, but still seamed by the scars of a stormy youth, earthier, more stained and travel-worn than in its first combat. Here the mottled crust, the green light of the smaller crevices, and the wavelike undulations of the surface are represented with admirable fidelity; but we feel the air is less poetic, and a stray tourist does not offend us as out of place. And now we are present at the last struggle where, under a pall of cloud through which the parent peaks shine down a far-off farewell, the glacier makes its fatal plunge into the valley, for it a valley of death, and we see its end amid the earth and rock-heaps of the terminal moraine. But from under the muddy ruin springs out of a 'dusky door' a new and fuller life, and the mountain stream dashes off on its happy course through the new world of the fields and orchards.

So faithful are these pictures that Professor Tyndall would find in them fit illustrations for a popular discourse. So perfect is sometimes the illusion that we should almost fear a modern version of Zeuxis and the birds, and expect to hear the lecturer calling on his assistant to drive stakes into the canvas.

When M. Loppé turns to summit views we feel that his success is less complete. He has led the way to the and has dared to be the first to depict the mysterious light of the far-off sunrise playing on the highest snows of Mont Blanc, the snowy cantonments of the Alps separated by grey cloud-streams, the gradations from the purple of the zenith to the crocus of the horizon in the vault of heaven seen from 15,000 feet above the sea-level; or the red glow of sunset, when the lowlands are already dark in shadow, and the upper world has a moment of hot splendour before it, too, is overwhelmed by the night.

 
High mountain platforms
Where morn first appears;
Where the white mists for ever
Are spread and upfurl'd,
 

The deep hues of the upper air, the torn edges of the clouds as they are caught by the morning breeze, bear witness to study on the spot. But we demand more delicacy of aerial effect, greater depth of distance, more precision in the handling of the nearer rock-peaks. The painter clearly spends all his love on snow, and does not care so much for the forms of crags. We miss, too, that combined breadth and subtlety of interpretation which belong only to the very highest genius and which no study or perseverance can impart.

But fault-finding is ungrateful where so much has been dared and accomplished. M. Loppé's pictures are doubtless open to criticism in many respects, and they could hardly be otherwise. But the amount of success he has achieved in a region where no one else had ever dared to venture is surely sufficient to make his example worth more than many precepts. At any rate the moment at which a painter has shown London for the first time the capabilities for artistic treatment of the most unpromising of mountain-subjects seems a fitting one for urging the general claims of the Alps.

Let it not be said that Englishmen are dead to the finer influences of the eternal hills to which they so much resort. Let our painters avoid hasty conclusions founded on imperfect knowledge, and attempt the mountains with the same energy and perseverance which have made them subject to our athletic youth. Let them be ready to climb enough to understand the scale and nature of the objects they have to paint, and content, like young mountaineers, to spend season after season in slow training and only partial success. Thus, and thus only, can they hope to conquer the beauties of the mountain-world. But the conquest will repay its cost. The existence of a school of intelligent Alpine landscape-painters would contribute in no small degree to the maintenance of Art in her true position, not as 'the empty singer of a bygone day,' but the visible sign and interpreter of the feeling for beauty of the world of our own days. It also could not fail to result in the increased and more intelligent appreciation of some of the highest forms of scenery, and the consequent repression of the tendency to which wastes so many of the hours when our souls should be most receptive.

Glance and nod and bustle by,

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A.
NOTES FOR TRAVELLERS

The following notes have been framed for use with the 'Alpine Guide,' and make no pretence to be complete in themselves. Besides the necessary references to Mr. Ball's book, they consist of such corrections and additions as I should have supplied had a new edition been in immediate prospect. The edition referred to is that in 10 small sections (2s. 6d. each), Longmans & Co., 1873. The sections which include the country here dealt with are three – 'The St. Gothard and Italian Lakes,' 'East Switzerland,' and 'South Tyrol and the Venetian Alps.'

The best maps for use in the country here described are, for ordinary travellers, Mayr's 'Karte der Alpen' (Ostalpen, Sheets 1 and 3) corrected by Berghaus (Perthes. Gotha. 1871), and the Alpine Club Map of the Central Alps, Sheet IV.

Mountaineers will also require the Swiss (Sheet XX.) and Lombardo-Venetian (Sheets B. 3, 4; C. 3, 4; D. 3, 4) Government Maps. The new survey of Tyrol by the Austrian engineers has been completed, and its result will shortly be given to the public. The existing maps of S. Tyrol and the Trentino are most inaccurate.

CHAPTERS I., II.
VAL MAGGIA – VAL VERZASCA – VAL CANOBBINA

Approaches and Carriage-roads

From central Switzerland by the St. Gothard road or Gries (mule-pass); from the west by the Simplon road and Val Formazza; from the south by Lago Maggiore.

There is an omnibus twice daily up Val Maggia between Locarno and Bignasco, and once daily between Bignasco and Fusio, to which the carriage-road now extends. The carriage-road in Val Verzasca extends to Sonogno, but there is no public conveyance beyond Lavertezzo.

The carriage-road up Val Onsernone is open as far as Comologno.

The road from Locarno to Domo d'Ossola is not, as stated in the 'Alpine Guide,' practicable throughout for cars. There is a break of some length near the frontier.

The road from Canobbio through Val Canobbina to Val Vigezzo was still incomplete in 1874.

Inns

Val Maggia.

• Cevio. An Inn well spoken of by German travellers.

• Bignasco. The house kept by Da Ponte, mentioned in the 'Alpine Guide' still 'very fair' (1874). The 'Posta' supplies clean beds and good country cooking, and is in a charming situation (1874).

• Fusio. Inn and pension frequented by Italians, and said by F. Devouassoud to promise well externally (1874).

Val Verzasca.

• Lavertezzo. A poor-looking Inn. There is a roadside tavern, where bread and wine may be obtained, below the bridge over the stream of Val d'Osola. At Sonogno there is no inn (1874).

Val Vigezzo.

• Santa Maria Maggiore. A fair country Inn (1874).

Peaks and Passes

The ascent of the lesser peaks of the Ticinese valleys scarcely repays the labour. The Basodine and Piz Campo Tencca are mentioned among the passes. No riding animals are to be found in Val Maggia: they must be brought from Faido or Premia. The master of the Tosa Falls inn is a good guide to the Basodine, and peasants are doubtless to be found in Val Bavona who would undertake to lead a traveller to the top.

Val Formazza to Val Maggia.

• Premia or Andermatten to Cevio by Val Rovana, horsepath. See 'Alpine Guide,' vol. ii. p. 311.⁷⁵

• Andermatten to Bignasco by the Forcolaccia and Val Bavona, 6½ hrs.; foot.

• Andermatten to San Carlo in Val Bavona by Passo d'Antabbia; foot; probably fine.

• Tosa Falls to San Carlo and Bignasco; by Passo del Basodine; foot; rope necessary. See p. 15-16:

• or Bocchetta di Val Maggia; foot; either pass about 10 hrs.

• The Basodine, 10,748 feet, can be climbed in ½ hr. from the former pass. See p. 15.

For the passes from Val Bavona to Airolo, and to Val Peccia. See 'Alpine Guide,' pp. 311, 313.

Val Maggia to Val Leventina.

• Airolo to Fusio by Val Lavizzara, see 'Alpine Guide,' p. 311. There is a more direct foot-pass between the two there mentioned, the descent from which on the E. side is by a goat-track down a steep face of rocks.

• Faido to Fusio. See 'Alpine Guide,' p. 311.

• Faido to Broglio and Bignasco by Passo di Campo Tencca. Through the gap between the N. (highest 10,099 ft.) and central peak of Piz C. Tencca; see p. 20-25; foot, 10 hrs. It is not necessary to go round by Prato to enter Val Lavizzara, but the short cut to Broglio is rather difficult to hit off in descending. See p. 20.

Val Maggia to Val Verzasca.

• Broglio to Sonogno; Passo di Redorta, through Val di Prato and Val Partusio, foot, 6 hours. See p. 29.

• Bignasco to Brione; Passo d'Osola,⁷⁶ through Val Coccho (foot), probably the most interesting path between the two valleys.

I can add no information to that contained in the 'Alpine Guide' as to the other passes from Val Maggia to Val Verzasca, or as to the passes from Val Verzasca to Val Leventina.

Routes

Carriage travellers can only drive from Domo d'Ossola to Canobbio (with the break mentioned above), and up and down Val Maggia, Val Verzasca, and Val Onsernone.

For riders and moderate walkers perhaps the best route is

• From Faido to Fusio by Campolungo Pass, thence to Bignasco; spend a day in Val Bavona, and cross by Val Rovana to Val Formazza or Val Onsernone.

For mountaineers —

• Ascend the Basodine from the Tosa Falls, descending through Val Bavona to Bignasco; thence cross Piz Campo Tencca to Faido; drive down to Locarno and up Val Maggia (or by Val Onsernone and Val Rovana) to Bignasco; cross the Passo d'Osola, returning to Locarno by Val Verzasca.

There are many ways through the hills between Locarno and Domo d'Ossola, but none probably to be preferred to the route through Val Canobbina.