Part 2

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:--

‘Painting succeeds in virtue of the things it omits, almost as much as by the assistance of the things it expresses.... In Egyptian art the figures might have been less stiffly uniform, in Crete they sometimes verge on caricature; in Byzantine work they assume too much the rigid character of architecture; with the Italians of the Irecento too much of the Byzantine temper may survive; in China forms may be contorted through the connection of painting with calligraphy. Yet with all their defects, these various phases of painting serve their destined purpose, and serve it much better than the painting of more sophisticated ages has succeeded in doing.... Contours may be as nobly drawn as human skill can draw them, but they must be firm and definite throughout. The colour may be as brilliant or as quiet as circumstances demand, but it must be applied in masses that are flat or nearly flat. Details, forcible suggestion of relief and strong shadows must be avoided. In our own day these limitations have been observed and respected only by a single painter--Puvis de Chavannes--but in virtue of that restraint he has taken his place among the great masters.’

And so the art of Mr. Holmes is a direct practice of his preaching. To the tradition of simplified vision he has brought a conception of his own--the conception of mountains, of their formation; and their rhythm.[15] Not Puvis de Chavannes, whom he has mentioned, nor Daumier, whom perhaps he should have mentioned, felt the character of landscape as deeply as Mr. Holmes has done. In his elimination he is not arbitrary, but natural and very just. His mountains remain synthetic, uncivilised, individual, as they are in nature.

But besides his debt to the centuries of European art, he is greatly helped by his knowledge and love of the art of China and Japan. Like so many modern Europeans, he has been profoundly moved by the marvellous achievements of Eastern painting, but, beyond an admission of general influence, no very clear artistic lineage can be made out.

Mr. Binyon has traced the influence of Hokusai in Mr. Holmes’ work,[16] and the suggestion seems justified. Mr. Holmes has an avowed admiration for the work of the Japanese artist, and apart from this, the folding lines of the hills and the flat, green washes of his water-colours show a distinct affinity.

‘In Japanese painting form and colour are represented without any attempt at relief, but in European methods relief and illusion are sought for.’

This is Hokusai himself, and Mr. Holmes has profited by the comparison to fuse both systems into one.

And so, while, in the matter of Eastern as well as of Western art, his great store of knowledge of the painting of the past is the foundation of his genius, the genius itself--the message and its expression--remains his own.

Before closing it would be well to mention one criticism which has been levelled at Mr. Holmes, and which, if it is true, constitutes a serious charge. He has been accused of being scientific to the point of having a formula on which he works. Perhaps the title of his book is partly responsible for the accusation, and it might certainly have been better chosen. But beyond this no trace of justification is visible. Order and inspiration are not necessarily incompatible. The extravagant lengths reached by the æsthetic movement proved the result of art ignoring science. Eccentricity had become a fetish, and Mr. Holmes is working with his fellow Fauves to restore reason and sanity. There is too much variety in his work to allow of a suspicion of any formula. A series of mountain studies naturally have some affinity, and this affinity has been exaggerated into a definite method. Such a charge cannot be further disproved than by assertion of its falsity. If that is insufficient, let the unsatisfied critic carefully study all Mr. Holmes’ work, and draw a new conclusion. Continued belief in the formula must stay uncombated; but even should the charge be generally accepted as true, the admiration of one at least for Mr. Holmes and his work will remain unshaken.

OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF A CHAMOIS: AND INCIDENTALLY OF SOME OTHER MATTERS

BY

JULIAN S. HUXLEY (Balliol)

II. OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF A CHAMOIS: AND INCIDENTALLY OF SOME OTHER MATTERS

Those who know Rosenlaui will also know that finely pointed little peak, an outlying spur of the Wetterhorn, that looks straight down into the front windows of the hotel--the Dossenhorn. That was my first climb. I confess that it was nothing very thrilling, though I enjoyed it thoroughly. We had a guide--an aged, aged man, whose downhill, bent-knee walk was if anything slower than his very slow but quite automatic and invariable upward pacing. We had a rope, which appeared to me perfectly unnecessary, and was a great nuisance to the airily independent spirit and body of the novice. Two ice-axes lent to our party (of five) an air of considerable distinction. Very little of the day’s happenings have remained to me. I still remember how very easy the rocks of the last arête were; how fine the Wetterhorn looked across the snow plateau; how I wondered why my uncle, a considerable climber in his day, wore trousers instead of knickerbockers; how I ran down most of the way home after unroping; and how, in my innocence, I plunged my face, scarlet from its exposure all unvaselined to the snow-fields, into a basin of cold water--with what results those know who have tried it. Among all this intolerable deal of bread, however, we had a halfpenny worth of something more intoxicating. There is a long snow slope to be crossed slantingly before the col and the hut are reached. It is not at all steep, sloping up to the lower border of the rock pile that forms the pyramidal top of the mountain; but the old guide had ordered the rope, and so there we were plodding diagonally upwards in single file.

All of a sudden there was a rattle, and then a stone leapt off the rocks above to bound down the snow slope some four hundred yards ahead of us. The old guide looked round, and said: ‘Chamois.’

This set us all agog--two or three had never seen the chamois on his native heath. However, the brown coat of the chamois is a good piece of cryptic colouring; he--or they--remained absolutely invisible against the brown rocks. But we had startled him, and he went on moving--for some reason towards us, as we soon discovered when a second stone came down. The third alarmed us a little, for it crossed our path not fifty yards ahead of the leader; so we resolved to halt and keep our eyes open for the next. This was not long in coming; it came with a bound off the rocks, and seemed to be heading for the gap between the last two on the rope. It must have been going at a great pace, for it devoured that snow slope in great hungry leaps, clearing eighty or a hundred feet at a bound, though never rising a yard above the snow; it hummed as it came, with a deep buzzing sound. Altogether it was extremely alarming (I was one of the two hindermost), and it was a considerable relief to see, after it was half-way to us, that it had a slight curl on it, and an outward curl, which caused it to hum past five or six yards behind the tail of our procession. The chamois passed, still invisible, on his way, and we on ours, discussing what would have been the best thing to do supposing his aim had been straighter.

It was that scene that came into my head years later. I had been trying to master some of the rudiments of geology, of which science I was lamentably ignorant, and had at least begun to get into my head the idea of denudation--how the shapes of mountains as we see them are as much due to cutting away as to heaving up--and was grasping the strength of the denuding forces that would go on thus cutting and cutting until nothing was left but one flat plain, did they not thus once more liberate the forces of upheaval. In my textbook there were examples given of the many and various activities working together this work of destruction--wind and sun, rain and frost, sand, rivers, little plants--‘and chamois!’ came suddenly into my mind. A little nail will serve to hang a large picture; and so the whole idea of denudation was fixed in my brain by that one Bernese chamois.

It perhaps, more than any other single thing, taught me to see the transience of the hills. For here, as so often elsewhere, the judgments of the natural man must be unlearnt. ‘The hills stand about Jerusalem,’ says the natural man,--‘The Eternal Hills!’ They are not eternal; they are as transitory, as much slaves of Time, as anything with life. The title is but one more witness to the arrogance, the unimaginativeness of man, who thinks that everything is of the same order of magnitude as he himself; and if he does not notice the hour hand move while he trips along some fraction of the circumference of the seconds dial--why, then, it must be motionless!

But man possesses also a brain, and therein an intelligence, a logical faculty, by means of which he discovers presently that things are not always what they seem; and one of these apparent contradictions is that the mountains must be changing, rising up and wearing down, even though he cannot perceive it directly; and yet even though he can prove that it must be so, it is still very difficult for him to realise it happening.

Our intelligence, indeed, although it thus transcends the senses’ immediate judgments, has to go back to them and ask their aid if it is to attain to fullest knowledge. It is a very imperfect instrument, so built up on the foundations of the five senses that if we cannot feel, hear, taste, smell or, more particularly, see what there is to be dealt with, but only reason about it, we may _know_ quite well that reasoning has led to the only right conclusion, but yet do not _feel_ fully and unquestioningly the rightness of it. We all believe the moon to be a globe; but I must confess that on my first sight of her through a telescope, I experienced a veritable shock of surprise and pleasure to realise, as I saw the craters passing from full face in the centre to profile at the edge, how globular she really was. With the mountains no such ocular demonstration is possible to us. I say to us, for to our descendants it may be. You have but to take a series of photographs of some peak from exactly the same spot at intervals of fifty years or so; then, putting these together in their order, run them through a cinematograph, and you would see your everlasting citadel crumble, shrinking before your eyes like a pricked balloon. Such a condensation of events has already been practised to render such slow processes as the growth of twigs or the complex unfolding of the egg more patent and striking; and there is no reason why it should not be applied to matters of centuries instead of days.

To-day we cannot have the change rendered thus visible to us. We have only indirect methods to help us, methods which demand reflection and imagination. Imagination and reflection, however, are processes demanding more mental energy than the average man is willing to expend, for the average man is mentally of extreme laziness. So the mountains remain eternal, to the average man.

But there is no harm in trying to exercise powers of reflection and of imagination, if I may persuade you to it. Stand on the bridges at Geneva and look at the Rhone slipping down from the lake, clear and blue with a wonderful and almost unreal blue. Then walk down to the junction of the Rhone and the Arve, and see that other river, turbid, greyish-white, a regular glacier stream; identity and name may be taken from it in the union, but it still has strength to rob the robber of his own especial beauty. That discolouring flood--what is it? As you walk back again, the top of Mont Blanc comes gradually from behind the Grande Salève into sight. If you reflect, you will know that those white waves were white from carrying away what only yesterday had been a part of those famous mountains; to-day it is dust, and nameless; to-morrow it will be laid down upon the ocean floor, there to be hardened, kneaded, and baked into the bricks that shall build other, as yet unchristened, hills. If you imagine, you will see in the mind’s eye those same summits, thus continually attacked, gradually shrinking; preserving their beauty to the last, no doubt, like our lovely lake mountains, which though in respect of their former height they be but as roots when the trunk is fallen, yet in themselves show not a trace of decay, and lift their heads as strong and fresh as ever. Yet they dwindle, and will in the end be mountains no more; they will no more have form and shape, no more be named and almost live, endowed with that strong appearance of vivid and obvious personality; mere undulations, they will no more exercise the mountain power upon the mind of man.

What else will help you to see the transience of the hills? Go and stand by a mountain stream where it runs in quick swishing rapids; as I have done by the Drance de Bagnes, and heard sounds as of groaning and muffled giant hammering--great boulders grinding each other in the press of the current, and moving always downwards. Go and look at the enormous moraines that wind down into Italy--each would be a range of hills in England. Had not the Alps another aspect before these were heaped up? And yet, say the geologists, great cenotaphs of the ice were raised in but a fraction of the time since the Alps were born. Try to tackle a rock-and-ice gully with strong sun on it, or (preferably) stay on one side and watch the stones come down: down they come like that every sunny day.