Sir William Martin Conway

I HAVE borrowed the title of this chapter from that of an excellent book, recently published, called How to Look at Pictures. The natural man might suppose that such were questions on which there is nothing to say. The picture is before you, and all you have to do is to open your eyes and let the image of it fall on your retina. What can be more simple? Yet that is not all, because the eye only sees that which it brings with it the power of seeing. How much more one sees in the face of a friend than in that of a stranger! It is similar with all objects. In order to see aright and to see fully, the power of seeing must be acquired. Some learn more easily than others, but all must learn. It is admittedly so with music. The most self-satisfied person cannot refuse to admit that even a short tune is better grasped, better heard, on a second hearing than the first time. What is true of a simple tune is more obviously true of a complicated work. The most accomplished musician does not grasp a Wagner opera at a first hearing. Man is a creature with faculties that need training. He is not born with faculties fully trained by instinct.

To perceive beauty in a scene implies a power of selection. There is beauty in every view if you know how to find it, but the eye has to sift it out. Open your eyes at random. They are saluted by an infinite multitude of details. You can pass from one to another, but you cannot see them all at once. Looking at a tree, you can see a few leaves and twigs surrounded by a green spludge, which experience has taught you is made up of leaves or twigs, but you do not see all the leaves at once; so with blades of grass, flowers in a field, strata edges on a cliff, or crevasses in a glacier. In a broad effect of sunset you cannot be simultaneously conscious of more than a few forms and colours, and, of those you are simultaneously conscious of, one will be more important than the rest—one will give the key-note. Nor can you be equally conscious at one moment of forms and colours, or of colours and light and shade. If a view strikes you at all, it strikes you by some effect in it which you perceive, even though you may not be able to state in words what that effect is. It is clear, however, that any effect is the result of selection by the eye. The effect upon the eye would be unchanged if a quantity of details were blotted out, so long as none of those details formed part of the effect. Thus if you were attracted by the bright effulgence of a snow slope seen against a clear sky (to take a simple instance), and if your mind were concentrated upon that contrast, you would not notice the sudden obliteration of a crevasse in the slope. That detail would form no part of the effect.

As you gaze at any scene you may be continually and rapidly changing the effects you are observing, and that without altering the direction of the eye. Such, in fact, is what every view-gazer is always doing. He is searching for a satisfying effect of beauty out of the multitude of possible effects that could be found, such possible effects being always practically infinite in number. Ultimately it is probable that some one effect will obtain the mastery within him, an effect that his eye is specially capable of seeing and his mind of comprehending. He passes on his way, and a day afterwards recalls yesterday's view. What rises in his memory is not the whole scene with all its details, but the special effect that ultimately impressed him, the result of a kind of survival of the fittest within him of a multitude of competing effects that he saw or almost saw.

THE JUNGFRAU FROM INTERLAKEN

First ascended 1811.

Take, for example, a very simple instance, the view of the Jungfrau from Interlaken on a clear day. What most people see is a roughly triangular white mass below a blue sky, and limited on either hand and below by green slopes and foreground. Suppose the looker to be a meteorologist whose special study is the atmosphere and its clouds. Probably the first thing he will notice will be the quality of the blueness of the sky and the tone of the lower atmosphere between him and the white mountain and green hills. He will, in fact, observe the air-tones, and consciously or unconsciously they will be the key-note of his impression. Next comes an East Londoner with a Toynbee Hall party, let us say. What strikes him is the novelty of the white mountain. Its whiteness is his main impression, the blue and the green being perceived as mere contrasts to that, and the forms of mountain and hills being unimportant shapes of the colour limits. The size of the mountain may be a subsidiary impression, but it will depend still upon the white colour, the wonder being that so large a natural object should be of snow. Anon comes a lover of woods and trees and of the green world. The white mountain for him will merely emphasise and dignify the pine woods and the grassy swards. He will note the draping of the hills by the pine-trees, and the character of the woods. The white peak will have value in the view to him, but only a value subordinate to that of the forest. After him comes a climber, trained, let us say, in the Canadian Rockies, and now for the first time visiting the classic land of climbers. When, on a clear day, the Jungfrau bursts upon his vision, he will give all his eyes to her and her only. He will not observe the greater or lesser blueness of the sky, nor the forms and features of the foreground hills—that is to say, they will not be the first object of his attention, the key-note of the effect he perceives. No! he will notice the form of the snow peak, the modelling of the glacier surface, the striping of the avalanche tracks, the character of the outlining ridges and minor buttresses. He will be subtly conscious of what is snow and what ice, of how and why rocks emerge from the snowy envelope. Where the ignorant will conceive the peak to be a great mound of snow, the newly-arrived climber will feel it to be a mass of rock draped in snow and ice, and his attention will be caught and held by that drapery, its forms and foldings.

Finally there comes an artist, who knows nothing about mountains or forests and cares nothing, but who loves above all else (let us say) colour. What he will see will be some colour effect, some special harmony of tints in sky and snow and forest, some unifying effect that will make white, blue, and green all qualities of a single glory. If he paint the view, that is the effect he will strive to render, and in so doing he will care little about forms and details, little about modellings of glacier drapery and rocky skeleton. The colour-chord will be his aim, and all the power of his vision and the skill of his hand will be concentrated upon that. Or perhaps the artist will not come alone but in company with another of different character. This one cares less about colour than form. What will strike him will be the graceful architecture of the view, the delicate outlines, the intricate rareness of surface modelling in the snow, the strongly relieved emphasis of the limiting lines of the framing hills. Whether the sky be blue of a special tone and the foreground embellished with every shade and combination of greens will be immaterial to him for the time. He will feast his eyes upon form, and form will be the real subject of whatever representation of the scene he may endeavour to set down.

Any one can multiply instances for himself and carry further to any extent the analysis of possible simultaneous varieties of effect in a single view. If to that he add the changes of effect that nature makes by variations of the weather, time of day, and season of the year, it will be evident enough how a single scene may be beheld with infinite variety by the eye of man; and the suspicion will arise that all conceptions, all appreciations, may not be equally fine or equally easy to grasp, and that, where one man may see little, another may be able to see an effect of singular beauty.

It is the true and proper function of a landscape painter to find effects in views, but it does not follow that the effects he sees are those seen by any man in the street. "I never saw a sunset look like that," said a man to Turner when looking at one of his pictures. "No!" was the reply, "but don't you wish you could?" It should be the business of a painter to inspire such envy in those who see his works. If he merely shows us things as we see them for ourselves, he is of little service. At best he does but revive our memories. He should do more. He should stimulate our imaginations to a higher activity, or provide us with something to look for in the future even more than to revive in the past.

To return to our two painters of a previous paragraph: if their drawings of the Jungfrau were shown to the meteorologist, he might be prompt to observe that the atmospheric effect was not rendered, and that the colour of the sky was incorrect. The Toynbee Hall excursionist would find the snow lacking in the radiance that had dazzled him. The forest-lover would declare that he could not identify the character of the trees and that the various greens of the foreground were untrue to nature. Whilst the climber would regard the colourist's Jungfrau as a daub in which all the character of the peak was missed. He would fail to recognise any possible route up its painted image or the signs of the difficulties and dangers of the way. Finally, each artist might regard the other's picture as a more or less mistaken effort.

Yet if all these gentry were animated by a proper spirit they would recognise that their own view was not the only way of seeing the peak, but that any of the others was equally truthful, perhaps equally worthy, nay, that some other effect than those they respectively felt might be superior. Each might learn from the drawings another kind of effect to look for, and raising his eyes from the paper to the peak might then and there see the pictured effect for himself, and thenceforward be able to discover the like again in other places. It is difficult to estimate how far the effective sight of any man has been thus educated, either by pictured scenes, or by a word in season from some companion who shared with him this or the other splendid view. Each of us starts but poorly equipped; each may discover something for himself and to some extent develop his faculties by his own unaided efforts; but ultimately each, even the most naturally gifted, learns far more from others than he originates. The most efficient teachers of how to look are painters—of how to look at scenery, landscape painters. It is unfortunate that the snowy ranges have not been studied by a larger number of the great landscape artists. Turner handled them in their broader aspects and from relatively low and distant points of view; by so doing he greatly helped to spread and deepen a knowledge of mountain beauty. No inconsiderable number of later artists, mostly, however, admittedly of the second rank, have devoted at least a part of their time to mountain-landscape art, some pursuing it to the higher and inner recesses of the snowy region. Yet it must be admitted that the great mountain pictures are yet to be painted. Stott seemed on the verge of a higher success. Segantini almost touched the goal, and would doubtless have come nearer if he had lived longer. Such men amongst the dead, and many living artists, whose names I do not venture to set down lest by inadvertent omission I were to be unjust, have earned our thankfulness by the lessons they have taught; yet plenty more remains to be accomplished. The hills have not inspired landscape painters with all the fulness of their charm.

It is often forgotten that mountains and even snowy mountains found their way into pictures at a very early date. Even the father of modern landscape painting, Hubert Van Eyck, introduced admirable renderings of lines of snowy peaks into the backgrounds of some of his pictures, as, for instance, in the "Three Maries at the Sepulchre," belonging to Sir Frederick Cook, where the effect of a distant range is beautifully suggested. Albrecht DÜrer again, about a century later, made a series of the carefullest studies of mountain scenes in the neighbourhood of the Brenner road, and thenceforward he was fond of introducing excellently-drawn peaks into the backgrounds of his engravings and woodcuts. He possessed a remarkable knowledge of the essential facts of mountain form, so that even a modern mountaineer can learn from his works some of the elements of "how to see." Well-drawn mountains are of frequent occurrence in sixteenth century woodcuts and drawings by the prolific masters of sixteenth century south German and Venetian schools. The fact is one of many proofs of the vitality of that first modern outburst of mountain enthusiasm which gradually faded as the sixteenth century advanced.

It is the commonplace of seventeenth and eighteenth century writers, who chance to refer to mountain scenery, to describe it as of monstrous, horrible, or even hideous character. Contemporary artists gave it corresponding expression. We are wrong to assume that their pictures and prints manifest any incapacity to draw, because we do not recognise in them the peaks and landscapes we know. The fact was that those artists gave quite truthful expression to the impression produced upon them by mountain scenery. Most Alpine lovers have seen prints professing to depict such objects as the Grindelwald glaciers and the surrounding heights, and have wondered how any one with the view before him can have so libelled it. But the artist intended no libel. All snowy peaks to him were inaccessible altitudes; in imagination he doubled their steepness. I myself, when a boy, approached the Matterhorn with a belief that it was built of precipices. I had always heard it so spoken of. With the thing itself before me I sat down to draw it, and quite unintentionally and unconsciously exaggerated its steepness and sharpness in a way that now seems difficult to account for. If such was the effect of preconception upon a modern lad who had already climbed several relatively high Alpine mountains, how easy it must have been for a seventeenth-century artist to be misled, who never thought of climbing at all, and to whose mind the notion of any individual interest attaching to a particular peak was altogether foreign. He merely felt a general awe, or horror, of his surroundings, and in depicting mountain scenery very properly made the rendering of either emotion his chief aim. Pictures painted at that time under those influences are not to be regarded as valueless and ridiculous. They are of great value as enabling us to see with our own eyes what mountain scenery actually looked like to the people of those days, and thus to account for the extraordinary language employed by travellers going the grand tour who attempted to describe the scenery through which they passed when crossing the Alps.

I have thus far only spoken of the educative effect of mountain paintings in teaching us how to see mountain scenery, but there are other forms of art equally efficient. As a matter ofhistory, it was the writers,[1] and especially the poets, who induced the intelligent public to change their attitude towards mountains. I do not know who was the initiator of the movement or in what country it was first apparent. Rousseau deserves to be remembered in this connection. Sir Walter Scott and Byron carried on the work, and were supported by the poets of the Lake School. Goethe and Schiller were widely influential in the same direction. At first it was the vague romanticism of the hills and of the supposed simple life of mountain peasants that attracted sympathetic notice and description. Gradually mountains came to be looked at in greater detail and for their own sake. Finally, in our own day, Ruskin for the first time attempted to analyse mountain beauty, and not only produced in the fourth volume of Modern Painters a most suggestive and illuminating work, but by the magic of his language and the charm and aptness of his illustrative drawings attracted to it the attention of all that was best in English society. Whether what followed was directly due to his initiative, I do not know. The next important step was the publication of Mr. Edward Whymper's Scrambles amongst the Alps, which rapidly attained popularity of the best kind. It is difficult nowadays to put one's self in the place of mountain lovers who met with that book when it first appeared. To us it is still full of freshness and charm, but to them it was far more significant. They compared its illustrations with those in Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, published twelve years before, and they were smitten with admiration. "Look at the poor old chromo-lithographs," wrote Leslie Stephen, "which then professed to represent the mountains, and compare them with Mr. Whymper's admirable woodcuts. The difference is really remarkable. Though some of these old illustrations, copied from photographs, suggest the general outlines with tolerable fidelity, most of them utterly fail to represent a mountain at all to an educated eye.... The old daubs are mere random indications of certain obtrusive features which could not well be overlooked. Mr. Whymper's woodcuts seem to bring the genuine Alps before us in all their marvellous beauty and variety of architecture." Ruskin and Whymper, in fact, took up mountain-drawing where DÜrer had left it three hundred and fifty years before. They looked at the mountains themselves with the humility that belongs to men who love the truth, and they taught others so to look. Alpine climbing taught men for the first time what mountains actually are. The power so to see them was simultaneously developed, and photography has helped.

[1] NOTE.—As to the historical question referred to at the foot of page 34, see Coolidge's Swiss Travel, pp. 24 and 128, and the references there given to A. von Haller's Die Alpen of 1732.

The question of mountain-photography is a thorny one, but it must be faced. The reader can scarcely deny that if mountains really looked like the ordinary run of commercial photographs of them, they would be ugly or at least unattractive objects. A volume of such photographs would scarcely lead a man, who had never left his home, eagerly to desire a close acquaintance with snowy peaks. That, however, was actually what Mr. Whymper's woodcuts did. Hundreds of readers of his book were thereby led to become mountaineers. Wherein does this different efficiency consist? A photograph, in theory, repeats every detail of the view it contains. Such details as drop out are either too small or too faint to be visible in the print. A camera does not select. It takes all. In this respect it differs altogether from the human eye. If you look fixedly in a definite direction and regard carefully what it is that you actually see, you will discover it to be a few central details only, and that they are surrounded not merely by vaguely defined objects but by objects duplicated. Thus the sight of the eye and the sight of a camera are not alike, either in what is beheld or what is selected. The sense of beauty depends upon what the eye selects. It would seem then that the beauty of a view could not possibly be reproduced by photography, and such was the crude conclusion once held by artists of the capacities of this modern process. Photographers, however, have proved that such is not necessarily the case.

In the infinite effects, all of them beautiful, that a single landscape is capable of yielding, and yielding simultaneously, most are beyond the reach of photography; but the same is likewise true of any one art-process. Pen-and-ink drawing, for example, is as incapable of reproducing colour effects as photography. Each art has its own limited area of possible effect. Photography, in so far as it is an art, is subject to its own definite and rather narrow limitations. A photographer can choose his subject and determine its exact limitations. As he can deal only with forms and tones, he must choose a subject so arranged by nature that its forms are in themselves beautiful, and its tones a harmonious distribution of light and shade. But light and shade varies with the hour of the day and season of the year, and forms vary with the drift of clouds over the hills, so that the selection of moment becomes for the photographer as important as the choice of point of view, direction, and area of subject. Again, by choice of length of exposure and by methods of development, the photographer can alter the quality of light and shade in his negative and the amount of detail he renders. These three factors are entirely under the photographer's control, and in so far as he avails himself of them, not merely to reproduce a view but to reproduce the picturesque effect in a view, he becomes and deserves to be regarded as an artist.

In our own days, as the photograph exhibitions of the Alpine Club have demonstrated, there are no inconsiderable number of mountain artist-photographers. It has been proved that snow mountains are a specially suitable subject for such art. Views in the high regions of ice and rock seldom depend for their chief beauty upon colour. He whose eye is sensitive to colour-effects can, indeed, find such in profusion in the regions of snow, but they are not the effects to which experience shows mountain lovers are as a rule most sensitive. What most of us love in mountains is primarily their form. Grand forms are profusely supplied by frost-riven rocks and cloven glaciers. In great snow-fields and slopes, the surface modelling is often of transcendent beauty, and that modelling can be rendered to perfection by photography, if the right moment be chosen. Photographers who have known what to look for and what to reject, have perhaps done more even than any other kind of artists in revealing the mountains. But the right moment comes comparatively seldom and has to be seized. A climber may pass for hours through gorgeous scenery, full of subjects for a painter, yet there may not be offered to him one photographable effect. He may expose plate after plate, and carry away with him the most interesting topographical and geographical records, but among them all there will not be a single picture that will render a picturesque effect and be worthy to rank as a work of art. The artist-photographer is a man who can snatch the right moment for the right effect. He must be able to recognise immediately and instinctively, when it comes before his vision, an effect of beauty that can be reproduced. He must see in the complexity of every view what the camera will make of it, knowing for a certainty what it can be made to reflect and what to exclude. In fact he must possess the same qualities as any other kind of landscape artist, the eye that recognises an effect suited to his art and the skill to render that effect in his resulting work of art.

Such photographers, as I have said, there are and have been. Their works have opened the eyes of many a climber to effects of beauty in mountains of which they had before been unconscious. Returning to the regions of snow, they have been thus enabled to look for them and to find them. Their own sensibility to beauty has thus been enriched and their power of enjoyment correspondingly increased.

In consequence of the work of poets, writers, painters, photographers, indeed all kinds of artists, and of the stimulus exerted by them upon mountain travellers of all sorts, men have learned in the last half-century to see mountains far better, more truly, and more beautifully than was possible before. We find in them complexities and refinements of beauty the very existence of which was previously unsuspected. We do not merely wonder at their size or shudder at their savagery. We can do that when the mood is on us, but the mood seldom comes. Our forefathers generally looked at them from a distance and thought of them as a whole, seldom doing more than to identify here and there a single individual from the mass. We, on the contrary, have learnt to know them from nearer at hand. We have made friends with them; we can call them all by their names. We know the aspect of each from many points of view, and their features are as familiar to us as were the features of woodside and stream to the mediÆval villager. This intimacy with the mountains has taught us that all the snowy ranges of the world are, as it were, of a single race, and that he who knows one knows something about all.

The Alpine climber, who knows the Alps, can be interested in mere description of mountain ascents elsewhere. Knowing what Alpine peaks look like and how they appear in picture and photograph, he can, by aid of pictures and photographs, attain a tolerably complete idea of the aspect of other mountain ranges. Hence the explorers of such ranges, of the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the peaks of Central Africa, South America, and New Zealand, have been called upon to describe the peaks they have climbed, the valleys and glaciers they have traversed, and the scenery of the regions and ranges they have explored, in a way that would have been unintelligible two generations ago. What we now demand of a mountain explorer is not merely to tell us the adventures of his route, but to explain to us wherein the quality of the mountain scenery differs from that which is familiar nearer home. He must be prepared to answer many questions which would not have been asked till recently. Has he been to the Himalayas or the Andes? We want to know whether those great mountains look their size, and, if so, wherein the effect is manifested of a scale greater than the Alps. Is he returning from Sikhim? We shall ask him to tell us what the great peaks there look like when seen from the beautiful forest below. What are the atmospheric effects peculiar to the region? And, with yet more persistence, what is the quality of mountain form which distinguishes the great peaks there, so that, beheld merely through the medium of photographs, they so impress their individuality upon us?

Knowing, as we do, the great variety of mountain scenery that can be found in the Alps, between the Dolomites of Tirol at one end and the crags of Dauphiny at the other, we expect to be told whether, in the case of the long Andes range, corresponding varieties are discoverable, and what and where they are. Such questions and multitudes more arise within us. It is much if a traveller can answer a few of them. At best he leaves us hungry. It is this hunger that impels us to travel afar ourselves, if fortune permit. Some indeed travel and explore for merely scientific reasons. They desire to add to knowledge and to diminish the area of the unknown. Some perhaps believe that they go merely in search of sport. The normal man is more complex. He has these ends in view to a greater or less extent perhaps; but, if he be a normal mountaineer, deep down within him there assuredly resides a true and hearty attachment to mountains and mountain scenery for the sake of their beauty. He may be too dumb to express it or too shy to admit, but we soon discover that the feeling is there, and that it is a dominant fact in his nature. He may not have analysed it. He may never speak of it, never perhaps even state it to himself, yet when we stand beside him on a mountain height, gazing abroad on the undefiled world of snow spread abroad at our feet, we find that we share with him a common feeling and embrace a common joy. After all, it is the beauty of the snows that takes us all back to them, and again back. Were that beauty blotted out, how many of us would be climbers? We are like anglers in this respect. We set an aim before us and pursue it with vigour and seem to be wholly intent upon it, but it is the beautiful, natural surroundings of our sport to which it owes its charm. Only the artist can make the realisation of that beauty his active aim, and activity is a necessity to most of us, so we employ ourselves actively in the world of beauty, and take her for the exceeding great reward of our seemingly needless and unprofitable toil.