Part 1

[Transcriber’s Note:

Bold text delimited with equal signs, italic text delimited with underscores.]

OXFORD MOUNTAINEERING ESSAYS

TO G. WINTHROP YOUNG

OXFORD MOUNTAINEERING ESSAYS

EDITED BY ARNOLD H. M. LUNN

LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 1912

[_All rights reserved_]

PREFACE

Oxford, they tell us, is the home of movements; Cambridge the home of men. Certainly the miniature movement that took shape in this little book was inspired by a Cambridge man. It was at an Oxford tea-party, where the talk had been unashamedly of mountains and their metaphysic, that Mr. G. Winthrop Young gave the first impulse to the scheme that ultimately produced this collection of essays. To Mr. Young the editor and contributors have been indebted for constant help and advice. He has heartened the despondent, and has inked cold daylight into more than one ‘sunset’ passage.

At Oxford there are a number of Alpine clubs. The oldest and most sedate meets once a year in New College Hall. A less dignified association meets at irregular intervals _on_ New College Hall and other hospitable roofs. Lastly, there is a genial little society which owed its beginnings to some twenty undergraduates who agreed they could spare an occasional arduous evening to the revival of their Alpine memories. One confiding member bought a lantern, and has since endeavoured--with indifferent success--to recoup himself out of spasmodic subscriptions. We shall none of us forget the first meeting. In our innocence we had hoped that a scientist might know something of electricity, and Mr. Bourdillon was in consequence entrusted with the lantern. After much hissing on the part of the machine, and of the audience, a faint glow appeared on the sheet, and enveloped in a halo of restless hues we dimly discerned the dome of Mont Blanc. A pathetic voice from behind the lantern sadly inquired whether we would ‘prefer Mont Blanc green and spluttering or yellow and steady.’ The chairman then proceeded to read a paper illustrated or rather misrepresented by lantern slides, and at the conclusion proposed a very hearty vote of thanks to himself for his interesting and entertaining lecture. The House then divided, and the motion was lost by an overwhelming majority. The minutes also record that a member moved to inhibit the secretary of the Church Union from issuing a printed prayer for ‘faith to remove mountains.’ This motion was lost, as Mr. Tyndale ably pointed out the value of a publication that might facilitate the transfer of some superfluous mountains from the Alps to the monotonous surroundings of Oxford.

The members of this learned society furnished the majority of our contributors. ‘Conscious as we are of one another’s deficiencies,’ we view with misgiving the publication of these essays. We have no virgin ascents, no climbs of desperate difficulty, to record. Our justification must rest on other grounds.

In a paper memorable for the circumstances of its delivery, and the dramatic irony of its concluding words, Donald Robertson pleaded for a simpler treatment of our mountain worship, and claimed that there was ‘still room for a man to tell freely and without false shame the simple story of a day among the mountains.’ And this is what some of us have attempted.

And further, although there scarce remains a great Alpine ridge untrodden by man, though the magic words--‘No information’--are rapidly vanishing from the pages of the _Climber’s Guides_, yet as subjects for literary, artistic, and philosophic inquiry, the mountains are far from exhausted. The basic emotions of the hills, at once bold and subtle, remain an almost untouched field, and many a curious by-path in the psychology of mountaineering has yet to be explored.

Those of us who have ventured to approach our theme in such subjective fashion, who have tried to give something more than a plain record of a climb, who may even have attempted to interpret the secrets of the hills, have probably only courted failure and earned ridicule. But at least we have started on a stirring venture, and we shall consider it successful if only a word here or there serves to recall some forgotten picture, some early romantic impression, to any reader for whom mountains, nature, or wandering have perhaps lost their first halo of romance.

It may be said that greater and more modest mountaineers have waited the experience of years before embodying their reflections in the written word. This reproof leaves us unmoved, for we are only concerned with the message the hills hold for Youth, a message which Youth therefore may be pardoned for attempting to explain. Each age hears different accents in the mountain voices. To the old mountaineer the riven lines of cliff may speak of failing strength or inevitable decay. For the child the white far gates may hide an unknown kingdom of magic. But active Youth need fear no comparison of strength, need draw no moral from decay. For him the gates that childhood could not pass have opened, and disclosed a wonderland ‘more real than childhood’s fairy trove,’ a country of difficult romance, and of perpetual challenge to the undying instincts of knight errantry and young adventure.

A. H. M. L.

_February 1912._

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. AN ARTIST OF MOUNTAINS--C. J. HOLMES, 3 BY MICHAEL T. H. SADLER (Balliol).

II. OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF A CHAMOIS: AND INCIDENTALLY OF SOME OTHER MATTERS, 37 BY JULIAN S. HUXLEY (Balliol).

III. THE MOUNTAINS IN GREEK POETRY, 59 BY NORMAN EGERTON YOUNG (Corpus Christi College).

IV. A JOURNEY, 93 BY HUGH KINGSMILL LUNN (New College).

V. THE MOUNTAINEER AND THE PILGRIM, 109 BY H. E. G. TYNDALE (New College).

VI. PASSES, 137 BY N. T. HUXLEY (Balliol).

VII. BRITISH HILLS, 157 BY H. R. POPE (New College).

VIII. ROOF-CLIMBING AT OXFORD, 177

IX. THE MOUNTAINS OF YOUTH, 197 BY ARNOLD H. M. LUNN (Balliol).

AN ARTIST OF MOUNTAINS

BY

MICHAEL T. H. SADLER (Balliol)

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.’

* * * * *

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.

Again:--

‘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.