CHAPTER XIII.

THE PELMO AND VAL DI ZOLDO.

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THE VENETIAN TYROL—VAL DI ZOLDO—PASSO D'ALLEGHE—SAN NICOLÒ—CAMPO DI RUTORTO—ON THE PELMO—A LADY'S ASCENT—THE PEOPLE OF VAL DI ZOLDO.

Even in the Venetian Tyrol the tendency of tourists to choose the colder pine-clad north in place of the more tender and varied grace of the south has become observable. Cortina, Caprile, and the Val Fassa are even now on the, in everything but prices, downward path of corruption. But away to the south and outside the 'regular round' there are still many quiet nooks known as yet only to those who

It is across the Italian frontier, and not amongst the stern peaks and solemn pines of Cortina, or in the savage gorge of Landro, that we find the nature which Titian so often sketched and painted. In the foregrounds of the northern dolomite country there is a commonplace stiffness and want of variety, which even the weird crags of the Drei Zinnen or Coll' Agnello cannot render romantic; it lacks the noble spaciousness, the soft and changeful beauties, of the southern region. Its character is German in the place of Italian, it reminds us rather of Dürer than of Titian. It excites and interests the appetite for the wonderful rather than soothes and satisfies our longing for complete and harmonious beauty.

Landscapes composed of blue surging waves of mountains, broken by sharp fins and tusks of rock, of deep skies peopled with luminous masses of white cloud, are familiar to the eyes of thousands who have never seen Italy nor heard of a dolomite. Side by side with the wide sunny spaces, the soft hills and unclouded heaven of the early schools of Perugia and Tuscany, they remain to us as types of what Italian art found most beautiful and sympathetic in nature. The hill-villages of Val di Zoldo claim our interest as the frequent haunts of Titian. While wandering between them, we are amongst the influences which impressed his boyhood and were afterwards the sources of his inspiration. The Pelmo may on good ground assert itself as Titian's own mountain. Mr. Gilbert, in his 'Cadore,' has shown it to us as it stands over against the painter's native town; and it is impossible to turn over the facsimiles of the master's drawings contained in that charming volume without being persuaded that he drew the mountain from life more than once, and his recollection of it very frequently.

Val di Zoldo resembles many of the Venetian valleys in being shaped like a long-necked bottle. In its lower portion a narrow gorge hemmed in by beetling crags, it expands at its head into what, seen from any vantage-ground, shows as a broad sunny basin, divided by green ridges into a labyrinth of fertile glens. The outlines of these ridges are symmetrical in themselves, and they are grouped together in a constantly shifting but harmonious complexity. Away to the south the horizon is fringed by splintered edges of dolomite, black as the receding night when cut clear against the first orange of dawn, or pale gold in the palpable haze of an Italian noon, or crimson with the reflected rays of sunset. As the paths cross the crests from glen to glen, the snowy boss of the Antelao or the painted cliffs of the Sorapis tower loftily over the low intervening ridge which divides Zoppé from the Val d'Ampezzo. But (to accept the hypothesis of Von Richthofen) the great glory of Val di Zoldo lies in the chance which led the coral insects to select the broad downs lying behind the hamlets of Pecol and Brusadaz for pedestals on which to plant their two noblest efforts, the huge wall of the Civetta and the tower of the Pelmo. Elsewhere in the dolomite country edifices may be seen covering a wider space of ground, or decorated with more fantastic pinnacles, the Westminster Palaces and Milan Cathedrals of their order. But these two works belong to the best style or period of insect art; their builders have shown that simplicity of intention and subordination of detail to a central controlling purpose which mark the highest of the comparatively puny efforts of their human competitors.

To travellers the Civetta is best known by its north-western face, to which the little lake of Alleghe lends a picturesque charm sure to catch the fancy of every passer-by. The structure of the mountain as seen from Val di Zoldo appears less intricate; and if the cliffs are not so perpendicular, the prevailing angle from base to cope is steeper. Its crags, glittering with rain or sprinkled with recent snow, shine out at an incredible height athwart the slant rays of a setting sun; in the cloudless morning hours they become ordinary rocks up which the experienced cragsman detects a path, safe enough when the spring is over and the upper ledges have 'voided their rheum.'

To the mind of the climber who wanders beneath its cliffs I know not what incongruous fancies the Pelmo may not suggest. From Val Fiorentina and Santa Lucia its broad shoulders and massive head resemble an Egyptian sphynx; as we move southwards one of the shoulders becomes detached, and the mountain is transformed into a colossal antediluvian cub crouching beside its parent. When clouds part to show the vast glittering crest which overlooks Val di Zoldo we seem to realise 'the great and high wall' of the city coming down from heaven of Apocalyptic vision. If we ever have a 'Practical Tyrol,' the likeness of the solid mass seen from the Ampezzo road to the Round Tower of Windsor will probably be remarked on,—and there will be a certain amount of vulgar truth in the observation.

One of the easiest paths to Val di Zoldo starts from Alleghe, and has been described by Messrs. Gilbert and Churchill. From Caprile, the more usual point of departure, there is a direct track which first attacks the mountain with the headstrong energy of a novice, and then takes a long breathing-space along the level. After passing several bunches of farm-houses, clinging to the steep sides of Monte Fernazza like flies to a window-pane, it again climbs up through woods to the hamlet of Coi.[67] The needful height is then won, and a green terrace, overhanging Alleghe and looking into the heart of the Civetta, leads to the great rolling down which spreads out towards the Pelmo.

Heavy clouds, charged with electricity and rain, had swept about from peak to peak during our walk from Caprile, and the greyness of evening was deepened by heavy showers as we splashed down the wet path from Pecol. Near the river, and nestling under a steep bank crowned by a far-seen church and spire, we came upon the inn of San Nicolò. It stands a little back from the path behind a courtyard, a tall three-storied house, hanging out no vulgar sign of entertainment for man and beast. At the top of the three stories are two bedrooms, clean and spotless, hung with engravings, and furnished with the air of conscious wealth of a farmhouse best-parlour. Their windows give an exquisite glimpse down the deep glen which falls towards Forno di Zoldo, and across to a high ridge capped by a most fantastic fence of dolomite splinters. But if the upstairs rooms are bright and comfortable, they have not the homely charm of the great ground-floor kitchen. It is a wide room, ranged round with rows of lustrous brass pans, alternating with generous, full-bodied, wide-mouthed jugs, which could never give a drop less than the measure painted across them. At one end is the fireplace, of the sort common in southern Tyrol, a deep semicircular bow forming a projection in the outer wall of the house; the floor is slightly raised, and a bench runs round it, leaving the centre to be used for the hearth,—an arrangement which seems to solve the problem of the greatest happiness of the greatest number better even than our old English chimney-corners.

The structure which supports—not the fire, for that lies on the hearthstone, but the pots and pans which may be cooking upon it—is a piece of smith's work, enriched with wrought-out conventional foliage, chains and two noble brass griffins. All the character of the workman has been stamped into the metal, and comes out even in the irregularities of detail which Birmingham might call defects,—a modern and native product, however, as our host with pardonable pride assured us, and the best that the neighbouring forges of Forno di Zoldo can send out.

The master of the house proved to be a man of wealth and position in his native valley. He knew Venice well, and something of the more distant world. 'What can one do?' he said, in answer to our compliments on his house; 'in the mountains there are no cafés, no theatres; one must build a fine house, and get what novelty one can from strangers; but,' he added with a sigh, 'there are not so many.'

In the gloom of a wet evening the conquest of the Pelmo on the morrow seemed little more than a slender hope. Still, in the Alps successes are chiefly won by being always prepared for the best, and we were resolved not to lose a chance. In the matter of guides, however, we found a difficulty. We were ourselves, owing to the causes mentioned in the last chapter, but poorly provided. The Vezzana had not proved beyond our unaided powers. But we had no ambition to dispense with native assistance any further, or to go up the Pelmo by any but the easiest route. The native of Caprile who had carried our wraps over the Passo d'Alleghe was a pleasant fellow, but he had never been on the Pelmo, where, if anywhere, local knowledge is indispensable. It was with some dismay, therefore, that we first learnt that no hunter who knew the mountain could be found nearer than Brusadaz, a hamlet an hour off. However, Brusadaz turned out to be on the way to the Pelmo, and in the early morning we could reckon on finding the inhabitants at home.

As at five A.M. we took the path which wound round the hill rising above the church of San Nicolò, the saw-blade of Monte Piacedel cut a clear sky to the southwards. Brusadaz was soon discovered lying in the centre of a natural theatre, which opens into the main valley very near its fork at Forno di Zoldo, and is directly overlooked on the north by the Pelmo, a square block of smooth, solid and apparently inaccessible precipice. The hunter Agosto di Marco, to whom we bore an introduction, was quickly forthcoming, and, with unusual but welcome readiness, in five minutes prepared to lead us to the mountain. Our luck seemed altogether good, for the stonemen on the Pelmo were clear of mist, and we promised ourselves a day of more than usual enjoyment.

A steep grassy bank severs the quiet hollow of Brusadaz from the Zoppé branch of the valley. We reached the crest at some distance from the base of the Pelmo, and had to follow an up-and-down track in order to gain the lower end of the Campo di Rutorto, a broad level pasturage, lying at the eastern foot of the mountain. The cliffs, up which a way was to be made, were now before us; but we found, to our surprise, that their appearance—partially veiled, it is true, by floating mists—was almost as discouraging as that of the southern face.

There is scarcely any summit in the Alps which from every point of view presents so formidable an appearance as the Pelmo. Time and the various forces of nature, almost invariably create a breach in the defences of great mountains. Here, however, their work has been left unfinished. The upper cliffs are, it is true, broken on the east by a long slope, where, after a fresh fall, snow lies in such quantities as to show that it is easy of ascent. But this snow, when, as in spring, it has accumulated to a sufficient mass, falls from the bottom of the slope over a perpendicular cliff of at least 1,000 feet in height. It is only at what may be called the northern cape of the bay formed by the whole S.E. or Zoppé face of the mountain, that the ridge dividing the Campo di Rutorto from Val Ruton runs up, buttress-like, against the cliffs to a point not perhaps more than 400 or 500 feet lower than the bottom of the upper breach, but fully half a mile distant from it; and the cliffs along this half-mile are quite hopeless in appearance.

It was consequently with some surprise that we found ourselves climbing the buttress in question, and, as far as we could see, about to run our heads against the wall-like rocks on which it rested. Before setting foot on the crags the rope was uncoiled and brought into use. We at once found sufficient employment for our muscles in making long steps, or rather lifts of the body, from ledge to ledge of a rock-face, the angle of which (disregarding our footholds) appeared to approximate very closely on 90. The transverse shelves, however, afforded excellent support, and made our progress a matter of perfect security.

Above the first 150 feet a narrow gully disclosed itself, which led us to higher and more broken rocks. Then, again, the wall looked perfectly smooth, upright, and unassailable. On the last place where it could have found room to rest was a low pile of stones. Standing beside it, we began for the first time to comprehend the key to our dilemma; we were now to turn altogether to the left, and to attempt the formidable task of traversing the face of the Pelmo. Our pathway was before us, a horizontal ledge or groove, at present a few feet broad, shortly narrowing so as to afford only sufficient standing-ground, threatening before long not to do even this. The cliffs around us bent into deep recesses, and each time a projecting angle was reached, the side of the bay seen opposite appeared wholly smooth and impassable.

This portion of the ascent of the Pelmo is, in my limited experience, one of the most impressive, and at the same time enjoyable, positions in which a climber can find himself. Even a sluggish imagination has here enough to stimulate it. The mysterious pathway, unseen from a short distance, seems to open for the mountaineer's passage, and to close up again behind him as he advances. The stones he dislodges, after two or three long bounds, disappear with a whirr into a sheer depth of seething mist, of which the final far-off crash reveals the immensity. The overhanging rocks above, the absence of any resting-place even for the eye below, do not allow him for a moment to forget that the crags to which he clings form part of one of the wildest precipices in Europe.

To walk for a mile or so along a ledge no broader than the sill which runs underneath the top story windows of a London square, with, for twice the height of St. Paul's cross above the pavement, no shelf below wide enough to arrest your fall, must sound an alarming feat to anyone, except perhaps a professional burglar. And yet to a head naturally free from giddiness, and to nerves moderately hardened by mountain experiences, the full sense of the majesty of the situation need not be disturbed by physical fear. The animal 'homo scandens' is not in the slightest danger. His pedestal may be scanty, but it is sufficient. He can follow his chamois-hunter amongst the abysses with as much confidence as Dante followed the elder poet amidst the boiling gulfs of Tartarus.

As we went on, the height of the groove, and consequently the head-room, became, for a time, inadequate to our requirements—a fact which a moment's inattention seldom failed to impress forcibly on the brain. Let the reader picture himself walking along the mantelpiece and the cornice coming down on him so as to force him to stoop or lie flat. 'Va bene!' cheerily remarked the Brusadaz hunter, in reply to some grumbles on this score, 'it is all as easy as this, except one place, and that is of no consequence.' This place, the 'eccentric obstacle' of the guidebook, arrived in due course, a projecting corner where the ledge was not broken away but partially closed in by a roof of rock. There was just room enough to allow a thin person to lie down and worm himself round with due care and deliberation; a brilliant climber could find some support for portions of his body on slight knobs below; those who were neither thin nor brilliant had to trust to the rope and their companions. For us, who followed an adroit and confident leader, there was little difficulty in the feat; but the happy boldness of our predecessor, who, when his companion's courage failed him, himself led the way, did not the less impress us. Mr. Ball, we agreed, had here proved himself in the body as well as in the spirit the true 'Alpine Guide.'

Having all wound or scrambled past the corner as instinct led us, we followed round yet another bay the faithful ledge. At last the precipice above us broke back, and our guide announced that all difficulty was at an end. And so it proved, at least as far as nerves and gymnastics were concerned. But to keep up the pace he now set us was no slight task. We raced upwards through the mists at true chamois-hunter speed, over steep slopes, now of large broken crags, now of smaller and less cohesive fragments, up low cliffs, then over more slopes, until we began to think the mountain interminable. At last, where a stream, the hidden roar of which was often heard, flashed for a moment into light, I was glad to call a halt. Two buttresses of rock, the ends of the topmost ridge of the Pelmo, loomed largely, and, despite our exertions, still loftily overhead; a glimmer of ice shone between them.

We soon came to the glacier, a sheet of uncrevassed ice, sloping slightly from south to north, and filling the large but from below unseen and unsuspected hollow which lies between the horseshoe-shaped battlements of the mountain. 'If the water of the ocean,' writes Professor Huxley, 'could be suddenly drained away we should see the atolls rising from the sea-bed like vast truncated cones, and resembling so many volcanic craters, except that their sides would be steeper than those of an ordinary volcano.' The description exactly fits our peak; and if, reversing the picture, we imagine the level of the Adriatic raised a trifle of 10,000 feet, the glacier would yield its place to a lagoon, and these ridges would exactly represent an atoll of the southern ocean. Our leader at first swerved to the left towards the lower crags which immediately overlooked his native village; turned by our remonstrances, he led us to the highest rocks, a broken crest perfectly easy of access.[68] The verge of the huge outer cliffs, in some places level up to the extreme edge, and unencumbered with loose stones so as to allow of the closest approach, was gained within a few yards of the cairn which marks the summit.

Through a framework of mists we could see down from time to time into Val Fiorentina and along the gorge of Sottoguda, but the upper mass of the Marmolata and all the neighbouring peaks were wrapped in dense folds of leaden-coloured cloud. Feeling that a distant view was hopeless, we hastened to retrace our steps before any wandering storm should burst on the mountain. During the descent the fog became at times thick enough to suggest unpleasant fears of missing the direction. No such calamity, however, occurred; and, gaining a slide on every slope composed of fragments minute enough to allow it, we found ourselves far sooner than we had expected on the brink of the lower precipice. The spot was marked by a patch of dwarf Edelweiss, which, in company with other bright but tiny flowering plants, grew here and there upon the mountain. We made our way rapidly back along the ledge; the confidence of experience more than compensating for the inconvenience of the cliff, to which we had often to hold, being now on the left instead of the right hand. Where the direct descent on to the green buttress had to be made we, by keeping a few yards too much to the left, nearly got into a scrape, which was only avoided by a timely acknowledgment of the error. Strait and narrow as is the right path on the Pelmo, all other ways lead to destruction far too palpably not to induce one immediately to return to it.

On the top of the buttress we rejoined our provision-sack, and enjoyed a long halt in full view of the Antelao, now towering above the clouds, a gigantic vapour-wreathed pyramid. From this point it is, as we found the next day, but a two hours' walk or ride amongst bilberry-bushes and forests to San Vito on the Ampezzo road. To return to San Nicolò was, however, our present object, and our hunter promised a new and easy path. We rushed rapidly down a very steep funnel to the great patch of avalanche-snow which lies against the base of the cliffs in the centre of the Campo di Rutorto. In the sort of cave left between the crag and snow a jet of water, spouting like a fountain of Moses from the arid rocks, served to fill our cups. A little footpath mounts gently the rhododendron-covered slope beyond, and winds as near as it can creep to the huge mountain. The cliffs above are broken, and in this part there was formerly a possibility of scrambling through them. Our guide declared that owing to a fall of rock the passage had now become extremely difficult; and his statement gains some confirmation from the fact that two of my friends who attempted (with a San Vito man) an escalade from this direction, were forced to retreat, one of them with a broken head. While climbing in advance he dislodged with one hand a boulder from a shelf above him, which made its first bound on his skull, fortunately without loosening the firm grasp of his other arm or inflicting any permanent injury. Unstable boulders are the great source of danger in this part of the Alps, and even old climbers require to be constantly reminded that on dolomite rocks they must test before they trust every handhold.

At the south-eastern angle of the Pelmo the cliff rises sheer for some distance and then a wedge of stone suddenly juts out, overhanging its base to an extent which I fear to estimate in figures, and can only describe as incredible. The under part has fallen and lies on the path, but a huge block still hangs threateningly overhead, an appropriate gargoyle for so Titanic an edifice.

The brow beneath it commanded a wide and splendid prospect. To the north rose the red crags of the Sorapis and the more symmetrical outlines of the Antelao. Turning eastwards, green pasturages and gable-formed ridges filled the foreground. The blunt-headed crags of the Sasso di Bosco Nero occupied the middle distance. Beyond the gorge of the Piave we looked across to the least-known portion of the dolomites, the blue mountains, crested with dark teeth and horns, which encompass remote Cimolais.

A sturdy little goatherd, the first human being we had seen since leaving Brusadaz, here came up to greet us. The boy did not depend on his voice alone to summon his flock. Round his shoulders was slung a trumpet, one blast from which sent flying a peal of wild echoes not to be disregarded even by the deafest and most obstinate of goats.

The terrace path continued to skirt the base of the Pelmo, until it reached a platform of pasturage, the Campo sô Pelmo, lying due south of the mountain. From this pasturage a second way may be found to the upper slopes of the Pelmo. It is curious that this line of attack should have been adopted by the Cortina guides in preference to that by the angle of the mountain facing San Vito, so far the nearest and most natural route from Val d'Ampezzo.

The difference in difficulty is probably in favour of the southern ascent, but it can scarcely be sufficient to account for good rock-climbers making a circuit of several miles. Yet Santo Siorpaes in 1872 led Mr. Tuckett round the mountain.

The only English ascent by the southern route was made by Mr. and Mrs. Packe in 1870. They camped out for the night at the southern foot of the mountain. I am glad to be able to quote Mr. Packe's description of the climb, both because his impressions confirm my own, and for the sake of any ladies who may be thereby encouraged to venture on the Pelmo.

'From our camp a gentle ascent of twenty minutes over undulating ground brought us to a grassy mamélon, forming an outlying buttress of the mountain. Here we left the heavier portion of our provisions, and at once commenced to climb north-east up a very steep rocky gully which separates the detached shoulder described by Mr. Freshfield as "the antediluvian cub crouching beside its parent." In this part of the ascent, partly over snow, partly over rocks, though the rope was sometimes brought into use, there was nothing very formidable. When at the foot of the ridge which unites the cub to its parent, we turned to the right, traversing transversely a steep talus of schist, with a precipice below, but at some mètres' distance. After passing this we reached a corner, where the rock came down vertically from above, falling in the same way below; and here the difficulty commenced. For about an hour we were passing along a ledge, which wound round the recesses of the mountain, in one place entirely riven away by a rent in the face of the rock, across which we had to step, while the stones we dislodged fell with a sheer descent to a depth which the eye dared not fathom, but which might have been some six hundred mètres beneath our feet.

'It is this system of ledges on the face of a perpendicular cliff, which, moreover, is crumbling in its nature, that forms the difficulty of the Pelmo; and these cannot be escaped, though they may be varied, approach it from whatever side you will; but, that ours was not the same ledge as that by which Mr. Freshfield mounted is, I think, at once evident from the reasons I have alleged, that our left hand was always to the mountain in ascending, and that there was no place where we were compelled to crawl.

'On emerging from this ledge the precipice on our left hand broke back, and I take it here we had reached the same spot as that attained by Mr. Freshfield from the opposite side. At any rate, from this spot, his description would exactly apply to our route till we reached the summit, which was still about a thousand mètres above us. All serious difficulty was at an end. Our course lay over steep rocks, laced with streams descending from the glacier,[69] and the only vegetation which attracted my notice was here and there the bright yellow flowers of the Alpine poppy. Above these rocks comes the glacier basin, which we crossed, like Mr. Freshfield avoiding the lower ridges on the left, and keeping to the right close to the highest crags of the Pelmo, which we at last reached after a rough and laborious escalade.

'We remained on the summit from 11.30 to 1 P.M., and then returned by exactly the same route, traversing the same ledge, but this time, of course, with our right shoulders to the rock. After a halt at our camp of the preceding night, we made the best of our way down to San Vito, which we reached at 7, and drove thence in our carriage to Cortina the same evening. The mountain of course may be done quicker, but I give the times, if any other lady should like to try the ascent.'

After crossing a gentle elevation, we found ourselves on the verge of the hollow of Brusadaz, and turned along a sledge-track leading down the crest between it and the western branch of Val di Zoldo, beyond which the crest of the Civetta stood forth high above the belts of vapour. The hamlet of Coi, seated as it were astride the narrow ridge, looks down at once on Brusadaz and San Nicolò; a steep corkscrew path led us in twenty minutes to the latter village, where we found our return not even begun to be expected.[70]

The Pelmo and Civetta naturally engross the attention of the traveller on his first visit to Val di Zoldo; but the splendid walls of dolomite which fence in the valley on the south-east and south-west invite a second visit and further exploration. Passes may be found through the western range to Agordo; through the eastern, presided over by the strange block of the Sasso di Bosco Nero, the 'unknown mountains' of Miss Edwards, to the valley of the Piave. They have been already traversed by Mr. M. Holzmann, one of the most indefatigable explorers of this region.[71]

I cannot bring myself to conclude this imperfect notice without paying a tribute to the Italians of the southern dolomites, rendered, as it seems to me, the more due and necessary by the frequent praise which the Bœotian simplicity of their German-speaking neighbours has received from English writers. A mountaineer may well have a good word for the population of Val di Zoldo. Where else in the Alps will he find a valley the natives of which, alone and unincited by foreign gold, have found their way to the tops of the highest peaks? And let it not be thought that this success was an easy one. The Civetta, from whatever side it is seen, is of formidable steepness, and, as I have said before, the Pelmo is to the eye of a mountaineer one of the most perplexing peaks in the Alps. Yet the men of Val di Zoldo, by following their game day after day, and learning that the ledge which offered the chamois a means of escape was also for the hunter a means of pursuit, found out at last the secret of the circuitous access to the upper rocks, which had been for centuries a true 'Gemsen-Freiheit.'

I do not doubt that Mr. Ball was the first man to stand on the highest crest of the Pelmo. Its attainment was probably not an object of sufficient value to the hunters to induce them to cross the upper glacier and brave the peril of being swallowed up alive by some hidden chasm, a risk which weighs heavily on the mind of the peasant who has yet to learn the saving grace of a rope. But the real difficulty lies below, and amateur climbers with foreign guides might have sought long and vainly for the passage which the spirit of the neighbouring villagers had found ready for them.

But it is not alone on the narrow ground of venturesomeness that the people of Val di Zoldo recommend themselves to an English traveller. They possess in a high degree the intelligence and quick courtesy we are accustomed to meet with in Northern Italy. No peasant will pass the stranger as he sits to rest or sketch beside the path without a few bright words of greeting and enquiry, showing often a feeling for natural beauty and a quickness of apprehension rare amongst a secluded population. The slowness alike of mind and of action, the refusal to grasp anything outside their own daily experiences, so common among the peasantry of the Pusterthal, is here unknown. To quote a shrewd observer, 'the men are such gentlemen and the women such ladies, that every chance meeting becomes an interchange of courtesies;' and the traveller, turning northwards, will often have occasion to join in Dickens's regret for what he has left behind, 'the beautiful Italian manners, the sweet language, the quick recognition of a pleasant look or cheerful word, the captivating expression of a desire to oblige in everything.'

CHAPTER XIV.

MEN AND MOUNTAINS.

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Hermann Kirchner, circa A.D. 1600.

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MEN AND MOUNTAINS—MOUNTAIN-HATERS—A LITERARY EXAMPLE—POETS AND PAINTERS—THE PLACE OF ART—ALPINE SCENERY AND ART—THE VARIETY OF THE ALPS—THE SNOW WORLD—MONS. LOPPÉ'S PICTURES—CONCLUSION.

Switzerland, from a distance practically beyond that of the Caucasus at the present day, has in the last thirty years been brought within a few hours of our homes. Increased facilities of travel and of residence in Alpine regions, acting in unison with many less obvious but equally real influences, have extended human sympathy to Nature in her wildest forms and created a new sentiment, the Love of the Alps.

The indifference of men to mountains in past ages has perhaps been exaggerated. The prevalence throughout the world of mountain-worship in different forms seems to show that the great peaks and the eternal snows have before now had power to stir men's minds and to mix with their lives. But the image which has been adored as a god is for a time cast aside, and it is only to distant generations that it becomes valuable for its intrinsic beauty of design and workmanship. In the case of the great ranges the period of neglect had been a long one. In the Europe of the Middle Ages all hilly regions became surrounded by associations of fear and danger. The plan of the universe was indeed held to have been originally divine; but the devil had somehow become clerk of the works, and managed to put in a good deal not in the original specification. Earthquakes, tempests, venomous reptiles and mountains were all accepted as productions of the evil principle.

From this disfavour the mountains have been during the last century slowly emerging. Better acquaintance has led to the discovery of all the beauties and benefits the Alps offer to those who seek them in a proper mood. We have learnt thoroughly to appreciate the variety imparted to all nature by the accidents of hill scenery, to know and love the thousand forms of peaks, the changing charm of lakes and forests, the rush of the grey Swiss torrent under the upright pines, and the blue repose of the Italian stream under the beech shadows. Moreover, Alpine climbing has revealed the wonders of the kingdom of frost and snow. The imprisoned colours of glacier ice, the ruin of its fantastic towers and tottering minarets, the splendour of its fretted and icicle-hung caves are no longer familiar only to Arctic travellers. The overpowering height of some peak soaring majestically heavenwards can never have been felt as it is by those who understand through experience the dimensions and meaning of each rock and patch of snow on its ridges.

The flow of human sympathy towards the mountains has, however, been too recent not to have left many traces of the deep ebb of antipathy which had preceded it. 'Survivals' of the old and narrower tone of thought of a hundred years ago are constantly to be met with in English society. They even penetrate occasionally to the tables-d'hôte of Swiss inns, where they may be recognised by the air of calm superiority generally assumed by the unappreciative, whether in the presence of music, a picture, or a peak.

These representatives of mediæval sentiment are often mediævalists also in their practice. Where their opinions are based on anything besides hereditary prejudice it is very often found if you examine them tenderly that their experience has been coloured, or more correctly speaking obscured, by bodily torture. They have climbed with unboiled peas in their shoes, and without the excuse of their forefathers. For they have deadened their natural senses by bodily discomfort without any hope of prospective gain for their souls. They have literally repeated the old penance by setting out to walk with new boots and cotton socks and a ponderous knapsack. They have rushed over passes and up peaks in bad weather; or overtaxed their powers in a first tour: or they have perhaps never persevered long enough to be able to tread with ease a mountain-path, where the novice dares not lift his eyes from the ground, while his companion, some days or weeks more experienced, can enjoy at once the scenery and motion. No wonder that what is a delight to the wise is to them foolishness, and that they speedily renounce the mountains.

Such mountain-haters still find champions both in English and foreign modern literature. I shall not be tempted to take the late Canon Kingsley as an example, for his amusing attack on mountains[72] is in truth only a plea for flats, and in that light I heartily sympathise with it. Moreover Mr. Kingsley loved all nature so well that his cursing is of the most superficial and Balaamitic character, and the argument he puts in the mouth of his 'peevish friend' would invite mercy by its very feebleness.

A distinguished French critic will furnish us with a far more genuine example of the old school. M. Taine, travelling in the Pyrenees to write a book, experiences a difficulty the reverse of Mr. Kingsley's. Feeling that he ought, as a man of his time, to bless, he yet cannot refrain from cursing altogether. The antique modes of expression flow naturally from his pen; he is constantly reminding us of the once favourite theological view that the mountains are a disease of nature. His language at times resembles that of a medical student fresh from the hospitals and the dissecting-room. He sums up his impressions of the Pyrenees in the reflection that they are 'monstrous protuberances.' Here is a picture from Luchon! 'The slopes hang one over the other notched, dislocated, bleeding; the sharp ridges and fractures are yellow with miserable mosses, vegetable ulcers which defile the nakedness of the rocks with their leprous spots.'[73] This loathsome simile for mountain mosses pleases M. Taine so much that he never mentions them without repeating it. Take now a more general sketch.

'How grotesque are these jagged heads, these bodies bruised and heaped together, these distorted shoulders! What unknown monsters, what a deformed and gloomy race, outside humanity! Par quel horrible accouchement la terre les a-t-elle soulevés hors de ses entrailles?' It would be easy to fill a page or two with such 'elegant extracts.'

Mountaineers may sometimes feel disposed to resent such unworthy treatment of mountain beauty. But the true lover of the Alps is not necessarily disposed to be arrogant in his faith or to wish all the world of the same mind. While he knows that to him the mountains are sympathetic, he admits that they have also an unsympathetic side which is the first to present itself to many. He recognises in the hill country a type of nature, free, vigorous and healthy, and is glad that others should share the enjoyment of it. But as the affection of a sailor for the sea does not blunt him to the pleasures of dry land, so his feeling for the Alps does not make him less susceptible to milder scenes. He does not assert that mountains are the most beautiful objects in creation, but only that they are beautiful. He does not claim for them undivided worship, but a share of admiration.

Little disposed however as we may generally be to proselytise, we must feel that there is one class of our fellow-countrymen amongst whom we like to make converts. We too often find blind to mountain beauty those who, as we think, ought to be its priests and interpreters. For the painter, like the poet, can feel 'harmonies of the mountains and the skies' invisible to the general eye; it is his gift by a higher or more developed sense to recognise and reveal to others the beauties of the visible world. By his happy power of fixing on canvas the vision of a moment, he extends the appreciation of nature of all who intelligently look at his work. Paul Potter and Hobbema have taught us the charm which lurks in the flat and at first sight monotonous landscapes of Holland. Looking through their eyes we see the beauty of the moist sun-suffused atmosphere, of the sudden alternations of shadow and gleam which chequer and gild the abundant verdure and peaceful homesteads. Corot and Daubigny lead us better to appreciate the unfamiliar spirit of French river-sides in the dewy morning hours or the red gloaming, a beauty indistinct in form yet vivid in impression as that of a dream. When we exclaim as we rush past in the steamer or the express, 'What a Cuyp!' or 'How like Corot!' we pay a just tribute to the artist through whose works the essential features of the scene before us have been made so readily recognisable.

In the same way those who have already studied the beautiful Titian (No. 635) in our National Gallery, or the landscape lately exhibited at Burlington House, will find a deeper and subtler pleasure in their first view of the great Belluno valley. But this unfortunately is a rare example. As a rule the Alpine traveller must depend entirely on his own powers of observation and selection, or must sharpen his appreciative faculty by the aid of poets.

For at least the word-painters of our generation have not been false to their mission of expressing and carrying on the best feelings of their age. The works of our living poets abound with sketches of mountain scenery the precision of which may satisfy even a literal-minded enthusiast. In the exquisite Alpine idyll in the 'Princess' we have brought before us one after another the scenes of the Bernese Oberland; Grindelwald with its firths of ice, Lauterbrunnen with its monstrous ledges and 'thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,' or the gentler beauties of the vale of Frutigen and the Lake of Brienz. Beside this finished picture might be placed a gallery of sketches familiar to every reader of contemporary poetry. Mr. Browning draws with sharp, firm strokes the paths over the foothills of Lombardy, where the high arched bridge leaps the blue brook, and at each sudden turn the faded frescoes of a chapel gleam from between the chestnut-trees over whose tops 'the silver spearheads charge.' Mr. Matthew Arnold prefers the more solemn mood of the inner Alps, where above the hillside, 'thin sprinkled with snow,' 'the pines slope, the cloudstrips hung soft in their heads.'

Across the Atlantic, among the other great English-speaking people, the poets have not any more than our own treated mountains as 'outside humanity.' Emerson has dwelt more fully than any of his forerunners on the appeal they make to our intellectual faculty; Joaquin Miller reflects the fascination exerted over the senses by the great Californian ranges.

Art, like poetry, ought surely to be the expression of the strongest and clearest feelings of its day, and thus the interpreter and instructor of weaker or more confused minds. The types of beauty are eternal, but painters are human beings, and a man can successfully paint or describe only what he has seen and felt for himself. The most vivid impressions of each age and individual are necessarily derived from the forms of life around them, and these are therefore the best suited to inspire their art-faculty. The sculptors of the Parthenon did not carve Egyptian dances but Attic festivals; the great Italian masters painted, whether as Virgin, God, or Saint, their own countrymen or women in the scenery of their own homes. In the dulness of our outer lives, the deadness of our souls to natural enjoyments, lies assuredly one of the chief causes of the artistic barrenness of our century. Can we then afford to throw away lightly, as material for art, any form of nature which seems really capable of stirring our minds into some sort of enthusiasm?

Neglect of to us familiar scenes and contemporary subjects is, however, often excused on the ground that these things were unknown to the painters of the Renaissance. In point of fact this amounts to a protestation of our incapacity or unwillingness to discover beauty where it has not been already pointed out, to a confession that amongst us art is dead. For to be able to choose out, harmonise, and idealise the elements of beauty in the world as it goes on around us is the essential quality of living art. It is one, it is true, which is too often missed on the walls of Burlington House.

Many of the most cultivated living artists show their veneration for the old masters by endeavouring to reproduce the results they arrived at, rather than by studying nature at first-hand and in their spirit. Consequently in one half of modern painting we see, in the place of free and spontaneous accomplishment, an abundance of tentative and over-conscious reproduction. And unfortunately this half finds its best justification in the character of the other. To put it simply, our school may—of course with some illustrious exceptions—be divided into those who think too much and feel too little, and those who neither think nor feel at all.

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.[74]

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

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,

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.'[75] 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.

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.