1857.

Expedition to the Highlands in 1857.—Kindness of the Marquis of Breadalbane and others.—Camp life, its strong and peculiar attraction.—My servant.—Young Helliwell.—Scant supplies in the camp.—Nature of the camp.—Necessity for wooden floors in a bad climate.—Double-hulled boats.—Practice of landscape-painting.—Changes of effect.—Influences that governed my way of study in those days.—Attractive character of the Scottish Highlands.—Their scenery not well adapted for beginners.—My intense love of it.

In the year 1857 I made the expedition to the Highlands which afterwards became well known in consequence of my book about it.

The Marquis of Breadalbane (the first Marquis) granted me in the kindest way permission to pitch my camp wherever I liked on his extensive estate, and at the same time gave me an invitation to Taymouth Castle. The Duke of Argyll gave me leave to encamp on an island in Loch Awe that belonged to him, and Mr. Campbell of Monzie granted leave to encamp on his property on the Cladich side of the lake. I ought to have gone to Taymouth to thank Lord Breadalbane and accept the hospitality he had offered, but it happened that he had not fixed a date, so I avoided Taymouth. This was wrong, but young men are generally either forward or backward. The Marquis afterwards expressed himself, to a third person, as rather hurt that I had not been to see him.

My advice to any young man who reads this book is always to show that he appreciates kindness when it is offered. There is not very much of it in the world, but there is some, and it is not enough merely to feel grateful; we ought to accept kindness with visible satisfaction. One of my regrets now is to have sometimes failed in this, usually out of mere shyness, particularly where great people were concerned. Here is another instance. When going to Inverary on the steamer, I made the acquaintance of a very pleasant Scotchman, who turned out to be the Laird of Lamont, on Loch Fyne side. He took an interest in my artistic projects, and very kindly invited me to go and see him. Nothing would have been easier,—I was as free as a fish, and might have sailed down Loch Fyne any day on my own boat,—yet I never went.

The book called "A Painter's Camp" gave a sufficient account of my first summer in the Highlands, which was not distinguished by much variety, as I remained almost exclusively at Loch Awe; but the novelty of camp life by choice seems to have interested many readers, though they must have been already perfectly familiar with camp life by necessity in the practice of armies and the experience of African travellers. The true explanation of my proceedings is the intense and peculiar charm that there is about encamping in a wild and picturesque country. I had tasted this on the Lancashire moors, and I wanted to taste it again. Just now, whilst writing, I have on my table a letter from an English official in Africa, who tells me of his camp life. He says: "The wagon was generally my sleeping quarter. I had two tents and a riding horse, and very seldom slept in a house or put the horse in a stable. Such a life was ever, and is now, to me the acme of bliss. No man can be said to have really lived who has not camped out in some such way, and I know well that you especially will say Amen! to this sentiment. Since 1848, I have lived altogether for about six years in the open, and have never caught a cold. Only, through imprudent uncovering of the head, once in 1855, whilst drawing the topography of a mountain, I was struck down by sunstroke."

The reasons for this intense attraction in camp life are probably complex. One certainly is that it brings us nearer to nature, but a still deeper reason may be that it revives obscure associations that belong to the memory of the race, and not to that of the individual. Camping is in the same category with yachting, fishing, and the chase,—a thing practised by civilized man for his amusement, because it permits him to resume the habits of less civilized generations. The delight of encamping, for a young man in vigorous health, is the enforced activity in the open air that is inseparably connected with it.

I had only one servant, a young man from the moorland country on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, perfectly well adapted to life in the Highlands. He had excellent health, and was physically a good specimen of our north-English race. It was a pleasure to see his tall straight figure going over the roughest ground with no appearance of hurry, but in fact with such unostentatious swiftness that few sportsmen could follow him. I was myself active enough then, and accustomed to wild places, but he always restrained himself when we did any mountain work together. He afterwards became well known as the "Thursday" of the "Painter's Camp," but I may give his real name here, which was Young Helliwell. Temperate, hardy, and extremely prudent, not to be caught by any allurements of vulgar pleasure, he lived wisely in youth, and will probably have fewer regrets than most people in his old age.

Young had studied the art of simple cookery at Hollins, so he was able to keep me tolerably well when we happened to have anything to eat, which was not always. There were no provision shops on Lochaweside; Inverary was at some distance in one direction and Oban in the other, and as I had never given a thought to feeding before, I was an utterly incompetent provider. The consequence was that we fasted like monks, except that our abstinence was not on any regular principle; in fact, sometimes we had so little to eat for days together that we began to feel quite weak. This gave us no anxiety, and we only laughed at it, undereating being always more conducive to good spirits than its opposite, provided that it is not carried too far.

The camp consisted of three structures,—my hut, which was made of wooden panels with plate-glass windows; a tent for Young, with a wooden floor, and wooden sides to the height of three feet; lastly, a military bell-tent that served for storing things. My hut was both painting-room and habitation, but it would have been better to have had a separate painting-room on rather a larger scale. Mr. Herkomer afterwards imitated the hut for painting from nature in Wales, and he introduced a clever improvement by erecting his hut on a circular platform with a ring-rail, so that it could be turned at will to any point of the compass. Young's tent was, in fact, also a kind of hut with a square tent for a roof.

In a climate like that of the West Highlands, wooden floors at least are almost indispensable; but a camp so arranged ceases to be a travelling camp unless you have men and horses in your daily service like a Shah of Persia. It may be moved two or three times in a summer.

I have always had a fancy for double-hulled boats (now generally called catamarans), and had two of them on Loch Awe. This eccentricity was perhaps fortunate, as my boats were extremely safe, each hull being decked from stem to stern and divided internally into water-tight compartments. They could therefore ship a sea with perfect impunity, and although often exposed to sudden and violent squalls, we were never in any real danger. One of my catamarans would beat to windward tolerably well, but she did not tack quickly, and occasionally missed stays. However, these defects were of slight importance in a boat not intended for racing, and small enough to be always quite manageable with oars. Since those days I have much improved the construction of catamarans, so that their evolutions are now quicker and more certain. They are absolutely the only sailing-boats that combine lightness with safety and speed.

As to the practice of landscape-painting, I very soon found that the West Highlands were not favorable to painting from nature on account of the rapid changes of effect. Those changes are so revolutionary that they often metamorphose all the oppositions in a natural picture in the course of a single minute. I began by planting my hut on the island called Inishail, in the middle of Loch Awe, with the intention of painting Ben Cruachan from nature, but soon discovered that there were fifty Cruachans a day, each effacing its predecessor, so my picture got on badly. If I painted what was before me, the result was like playing successfully a bar or two from each of several different musical compositions in the vain hope of harmonizing them into one. If I tried to paint my first impression, it became increasingly difficult to do that when the mountain itself presented novel and striking aspects.

Every artist who reads this will now consider the above remarks no better than a commonplace, but in the year 1857 English landscape-painting was going through a peculiar phase. There was, in some of the younger artists, a feeling of dissatisfaction with the slight and superficial work too often produced from hasty water-color sketches, and there was an honest desire for more substantial truth coupled with the hope of attaining it by working directly from nature. My critical master, Mr. Ruskin, saw in working from nature the only hope for the regeneration of art, and my practical master, Mr. Pettitt, considered it the height of artistic virtue to sit down before nature and work on the details of a large picture for eight or ten weeks together. I was eagerly anxious to do what was considered most right, and quite willing to undergo any degree of inconvenience. The truth is, perhaps, that (like other devotees) I rather enjoyed the sacrifice of convenience for what seemed to me, at that time, the sacred cause of veracity in art.

The Highlands of Scotland were intensely attractive to me, as being a kind of sublimation of the wild northern landscape that I had already loved in my native Lancashire; but the Highlands were not well chosen as a field for self-improvement in the art of painting. A student ought not to choose the most changeful of landscapes, but the least changeful; not the Highlands or the English Lake District, but the dullest landscape he can find in the south or the east of England. Norfolk would have been a better country for me, as a student, than Argyllshire. If, however, any prudent adviser had told me to go to dull scenery in those days, it would have been like telling a passionate lover of great capitals to go and live in a narrow little provincial town. I hated dull, unromantic scenery, and at the same time had the passion for mountains, lakes, wild moorland, and everything that was rough and uncultivated,—a passion so predominant that it resembled rather the natural instinct of an animal for its own habitat than the choice of a reasonable being. I loved everything in the Highlands, even the bad weather; I delighted in clouds and storms, and have never experienced any natural influences more in harmony with the inmost feelings of my own nature than those of a great lake's dark waters when they dashed in spray on the rocks of some lonely islet and my boat flew past in the gray and dreary gloaming.

"Le paysage," says a French critic, "est un État d'Âme." He meant that what we seek in nature is that which answers to the state of our own souls. What is called dreary, wild, and melancholy scenery afforded me, at that time, a kind of satisfaction more profound than that which is given by any of the human arts. I loved painting, but all the collections in Europe attracted me less than the barren northern end of our own island, in which there are no pictures; I loved architecture, and chose a country that is utterly destitute of it; I delighted in music, and pitched my tent where there was no music but that of the winds and the waves.

The Loch Awe of those days was not the Loch Awe of the present. There was no railway; there was not a steamer on the lake, either public or private; there was no hotel by the waterside, only one or two small inns, imperceptible in the vastness of the almost uninhabited landscape. The lake was therefore almost a solitude, and this, added to the wildness of the climate and the peculiarly simple and temporary character of my habitation, made nature much more profoundly impressive than it ever is amidst the powerful rivalry of the works of man. The effect on my mind was, on the whole, saddening, but not in the least depressing. It was a kind of poetic sadness that had nothing to do with low spirits. I have never been either merry or melancholy, but have kept an equable cheerfulness that maintains itself serenely enough even in solitude and amidst the desolate aspects of stony and barren lands. As life advances, it is wise, however, to seek the more cheering influences of the external world, and those are rather to be found in the brightest and sunniest landscape, with abundant evidence of happy human habitation; some southern land of the vine where the chestnut grows high on the hills, and the peach and the pear ripen richly in innumerable gardens.