Oxford Mountaineering Essays — Themes and Context

se 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.’

When European art began to elaborate the religious conceptions with which it was in early times mainly concerned, landscapes were introduced as part of the Bible stories. But they were purely subordinate. Duccio and Giotto use conventionalised trees and strange bare rocks which, while evidence of wonderful vision, show no sense of the value of landscape for itself. The delicate distances of the Flemish primitives, the backgrounds of Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes, the settings of Cinquecento Madonnas, are merely so much design to fill a space, so many accessories to the figures in the foreground. One would like to except Patinir’s ‘Flight into Egypt,’[2] where the thicket behind the Virgin has more than a merely decorative significance, and shows a loving study of trees and rocks, were not the vistas to left and right pure design. There are also rare landscape studies of Dürer--one particularly, an unfinished study of hills in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford--which are strikingly ahead of their time in their sole preoccupation with nature as distinct from humanity.

But it is really with Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century art that landscape for landscape’s sake makes its appearance, with Rubens, Rembrandt, Koninck, van Goyen. However, to them mountains are as accessory as was nature generally for their predecessors. To give composition, to round off a landscape, to frame a vista, Rubens and the great Dutchmen used hills and crags. There are probably many exceptions to this generalisation. To mention one only, there is a picture by the Flemish Millet (1642-1679) at Munich in which a mountain occupies the centre of the canvas. This mountain, though tree-covered, forms the main element in the painting, and despite the presence of allegorical figures in the foreground, is proof of a curiously modern interest in hill-formation. In the main, however, the contention is true that the mountain in art does not appear in the seventeenth century.

The landscape tradition passed to Claude, and then forked. One branch, the English, produced Wilson, Crome, Constable, Turner, and the water-colourists. To the other belongs Poussin, and through him the Barbizon school in France. (It should here be noticed, at the risk of anticipating, that this last-named group derived from Bonington a large share of Constable’s influence, and owe perhaps the greater part of their inspiration to English sources.)

Traces now begin to appear of a love of mountains for themselves. Crome’s ‘Slate Quarries,’ some of Wilson’s Welsh pictures, many of Turner’s sketches, show rocks and hills painted for their own grandeur and beauty. Similarly, in much of Corot’s early work--before 1830--bare mountain-sides and wastes of rock stand unadorned by trees or other counter-interests.

Of Constable we are told that ‘the grandeur of hills weighed on him. He wanted meadows,’[3] but Plate III. in the book from which this quotation is taken shows that he possessed a very real understanding of mountains.

The recognition proved only momentary, and was soon lost in conventional trickery. In England the water-colourists began once more to use mountains merely to break the level of a landscape, to give a pleasing variety. The idea of depicting them solely for themselves becomes actually abhorrent. An extract from William Gilpin’s _Essays on Landscape-painting_ will show the attitude which became general to the early English school:--

‘In landscape-painting smooth objects would produce no composition at all. In a mountain scene what composition could arise from one smooth knoll coming forward on one side, intersected by a smooth knoll on the other, with a smooth plain perhaps in the middle and a smooth mountain in the distance? The very idea is disgusting.’[4]

To prove the awful result he reproduces a drawing in his book done on these very lines, a drawing so superior to all the other illustrations in the volume as to show how utterly tastes have changed and advanced since his time.

‘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]

It was near the end of last century that first appeared what has so misleadingly been called Post-Impressionism, an art with a new synthetic vision which saw beyond realism, which repudiated illusion, which tried to get deep down to where life and beauty touch and so externalise that indefinite something which makes things what they always seem to us to be. This art which has recreated decoration, which is going to revolutionise stage-craft, house furniture and even building, while it deals unhesitatingly with any subject, is perhaps chiefly significant in its bearing on landscape.

In this department appears that extraordinary parallel with Indian ideas which has already been mentioned. No Indian artist ever aimed at a mere representation of nature. He drew from his store of imagination and memory a revisualised landscape which suggests the idea behind nature and not her seeming reality. To him natural forms were merely incarnations of ideas, and the effort to complete the expression necessitated a repudiation of illusion. It follows that the representative science displayed appears inept, if judged by ordinary outward standards. But when one considers that accuracy is purely relative, and that the synthetic vision naturally subordinates certain features in its preoccupation with others, to condemn Indian drawing as bad, or Byzantine either, for the case is analogous, shows a faulty standard of judgment.[7]

As in Indian, so in modern European art, an understanding of the peculiar ideas which have inspired is necessary for appreciation. Keeping, therefore, this fact in view, that the aim is not for illusion but for the subtler and truer realism which lies in all natural phenomena, we can pass to the consideration of an artist who stands at the head of ‘Post-Impressionist’--or, as I prefer to call it, ‘Fauvist’--landscape tradition, and who really marks the beginning of the new appreciation of mountains.

Paul Cézanne has waited longer than any of his contemporaries for sympathy and fame, but now that his time has come he bids fair easily to outstrip Manet and the Impressionists in importance. As is often the case, the same reason accounts for his being neglected and for his later popularity, and that reason is the complete newness of his outlook. His vision was a much stranger and newer one than had been that of the Impressionists, and yet but for a fortunate failing of his own it might never have been expressed at all. Cézanne was a very great artist and a very bad painter. One may go further and say that had he not been such a bad painter he might never have shown himself to be a great artist. His whole being was clumsy and blundering, and his attempts to emulate the brilliant Manet in his light effects were constantly balked by this very clumsiness. In despair, he gave up the task and lumped down what he saw, and, being a great artist, he saw something quite new.[8] He saw line and decorative grouping where Impressionism saw only a shimmer of sunlight. His tactless, outspoken nature is reproduced in his paintings, be they still-life, figure-pieces, portraits, or landscapes. Mr. Sickert, comparing his work with the ‘gentle painter-like art of Pissarro,’ describes his pictures as ‘ninety per cent. monstrous, tragic failures,’ and from this standpoint the statement seems just enough.[9] But ‘brilliant and sane efficiency’ is not the highest attribute in an artist, and Cézanne by his genius redeems and almost glorifies his clumsiness. To landscape he gave structure and rhythm. In his pictures of Ste. Victoire, of steep fields and hillsides, the strong architecture of the landscape is the framework of the whole.

This originality of Cézanne has been developed and perfected by an artist working in England to-day, whose work is more in sympathy with the moods and structure of mountains than even that of his great predecessor, and the artist is Professor C. J. Holmes, whom I have already quoted (see above).

Mr. Holmes is very modern, and he is an Englishman; that is to say, he is part of a movement which has a deep feeling for synthesis and the subtlety of rhythm--and this is important with a view to what has been said about the synthetic nature of mountains--and also he is a member of the race which has always shown more understanding for nature than any other in Europe or, perhaps, in the world.

France, the leader in matters artistic, has never had any real grasp of nature since the days of Ronsard. The French are too intelligent, too pitilessly logical, to accept the moods of nature without reasoning.

From such a generalisation one should, perhaps, except Rousseau. Although in much of his teaching it is difficult to escape the idea that the nature he preached has been touched up by civilisation, in comparison with many of his disciples he had a genuine desire to escape the works of men. In his political theory, in his morality, in his conception of the beautiful, he turned always to nature for his ideal. From his home in Geneva he learnt to love the mountains, to love the great calm and dignity of them, their aloofness from man and his pettiness:--

‘En effet, c’est une impression générale qu’éprouvent tous les hommes ... que sur les hautes montagnes ... les plaisirs sont moins ardents, les passions plus modérées. Il semble qu’en s’élevant au-dessus du séjour des hommes, on y laisse tous les sentiments bas et terrestres.’[10]

But even here one suspects that Rousseau is rather contrasting the worries of a race cursed with powers of emotion, with the sublime peace of unfeeling nature, than admitting the passion of the hills, which differs only from that of men in its loftiness and nobility. And this last belief is not only held by the England of to-day, but was a prominent conviction of William Wordsworth’s, and he lies behind the English fondness for nature throughout the nineteenth century.

Of the group of great poets who make up the English Romantic Revival, who voiced during the first half of the nineteenth century the ferment of new ideas, the greatest is Wordsworth. Stirred, as were the rest, by the teaching of Rousseau--and it is here perhaps that Rousseau’s chief importance lies--he expressed in his poetry the aspirations which in France found vent in an orgy of political philosophy and the eager, endless search for liberty. His poetry and his sister’s journals foretell that art which was to supersede maudlin subjectivism and, in its turn, Parnassian coldness. Coleridge may have more mystery, Shelley more fire, Keats more music, but it was Wordsworth who really felt the common soul in nature, the fusion of the human and the natural into one scale of moods and longings. He realised that mountains can hate, that they can resent intrusion, as can human beings.

‘I dipped my oars into the silent lake And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat Went heaving through the water like a swan; When, from behind that craggy steep till then The horizons bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me.’[11]

--which shows how mountains can be understood even by man who was no climber, who, indeed, made a point of always walking round rather than over any hill on his way. His belief is the same with every aspect of nature. She has her moods, and they are the same as ours. We can realise them because of

‘A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.’

Wordsworth’s power of expression, and even more his power of selection, lag far behind his power of feeling. But what may detract from the pleasure of actual perusal cannot lessen ultimate historical importance. Modern art must find in Wordsworth its greatest forerunner in the department of nature. From him, as has been hinted, springs the tendency which permeated French literature at the end of last century. The pantheist art of Symbolism which came to influence England in the nineties is, at bottom, a half-English movement.

A love of nature, therefore, is in Mr. Holmes’ blood, and with this great tradition behind him he is working to give mountains the artistic interpretation which has so long been denied them. In his pictures and drawings of the English lakeland he has externalised an aspect of mountain scenery which is quite new. Some one has well expressed it by saying that he paints mountains not so much as they actually look but as one remembers them to be; and this is the same as saying that repudiation of illusion or naturalism enables him to suggest the ‘mountainness’ of the mountain, the vague, essential something which tells one it is a mountain.

In his heritage from Cézanne, Mr. Holmes has at any rate acquired no clumsiness, but greater skill has not tempted him to too much detail. He has carried to still greater lengths synthesis and simplification. In economy of line he can hold his own with any of the new school of painters. With a few bold strokes he gives the massive strength of hills and rocks. It is now possible to realise how simple is the structure of mountains, but at the same time how clear must be the discrimination between the essential and the superfluous. By adopting the black border with which many of the Fauves surround the objects in their pictures, Mr. Holmes is able to dispense with chiaroscuro--almost with perspective. He paints in flat washes of colour, admirably toned, and separates one plane from another by a band of black. The distance springs into being, and perspective is achieved without elaboration, without destruction of essential outline.

Besides this ‘realism of effect’ as opposed to ‘realism of fact,’ Mr. Holmes has another definite aim, which attaches his art still more closely to Fauvism. He has a keen sense of the decorative importance of a picture. He has said himself: ‘The first function of a picture is architectural--it has to be a beautiful part of the wall surface.’[12] This aim is certainly fulfilled in his work. The lines of the hills run in subtle rhythms, and the whole lies gracefully on the wall and becomes a part of it. As ever, Mr. Holmes is his own best critic. He has summed up this double ideal--synthesis and decorative value--as follows:--

‘At the very birth of art we find the necessity of selection and omission, with a view to emphatic statement, recognised more generally perhaps than it has ever been recognised since. And with this necessity we may note another characteristic of primitive art--the love of rhythm and pattern.’[13]

It has been seen that, with the exception of Cézanne, Mr. Holmes has no direct ancestor in European art. But, nevertheless, he is the ready pupil of centuries. His art is not merely, as in the case of several other prominent Fauves, a slavish return to the primitive. It is founded on a thorough knowledge of the past. A further extract from his book[14] will show that he gives a modern expression to centuries of ideals:--