Modern Painters Volume IV Part 16

It will be observed that Fig. 69 is one of the second order of crests, _d_, Fig. 48. The next instance given is of the first order of crests, _c_, in the same figure

[77] This etching, like that of the Bolton rocks, is prepared for future mezzo-tint, and looks harsh in its present state; but will mark all the more clearly several points of structure in question.

The diamond-shaped rock, however, (M, in the reference figure,) is not so conspicuous here as it will be when the plate is finished, being relieved in light from the ma.s.s behind, as also the faint distant crests in dark from the sky.

[78] An anecdote is related, more to our present purpose, and better authenticated, inasmuch as the name of the artist to whom Turner was speaking at the time is commonly stated, though I do not give it here, not having asked his permission. The story runs that this artist (one of our leading landscape painters) was complaining to Turner that, after going to Domo d'Ossola, to find the site of a particular view which had struck him several years before, he had entirely failed in doing so; "it looked different when he went back again." "What," replied Turner, "do you not know yet, at your age, that you ought to _paint_ your _impressions_?"

[79] So, in the exact length or shape of shadows in general, he will often be found quite inaccurate; because the irregularity caused in shadows by the shape of what they fall _on_, as well as what they fall from, renders the law of connection untraceable by the eye or the instinct. The chief _visible_ thing about a shadow is, that it is always of some form which n.o.body would have thought of; and this visible principle Turner always seizes, sometimes wrongly in calculated fact, but always so rightly as to give more the look of a real shadow than any one else.

CHAPTER XVI

RESULTING FORMS:--THIRDLY, PRECIPICES.

-- 1. The reader was, perhaps, surprised by the smallness of the number to which our foregoing a.n.a.lysis reduced Alpine summits bearing an ascertainedly peaked or pyramidal form. He might not be less so if I were to number the very few occasions on which I have seen a true precipice of any considerable height. I mean by a true precipice, one by which a plumb-line will swing clear, or without touching the face of it, if suspended from a point a foot or two beyond the brow. Not only are perfect precipices of this kind very rare, but even imperfect precipices, which often produce upon the eye as majestic an impression as if they were vertical, are nearly always curiously low in proportion to the general ma.s.s of the hills to which they belong. They are for the most part small steps or rents in large surfaces of mountain, and mingled by Nature among her softer forms, as cautiously and sparingly as the utmost exertion of his voice is, by a great speaker, with his tones of gentleness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 73.]

-- 2. Precipices, in the large plurality of cases, consist of the edge of a bed of rock, sharply fractured, in the manner already explained in Chap. XII., and are represented, in their connection with aiguilles and crests, by _c_, in Fig. 42, p. 195. When the bed of rock slopes backwards from the edge, as _a_, Fig. 73, a condition of precipice is obtained more or less peaked, very safe, and very grand.[80] When the beds are horizontal, _b_, the precipice is steeper, more dangerous, but much less impressive. When the beds slope towards the precipice, the front of it overhangs, and the n.o.blest effect is obtained which is possible in mountain forms of this kind.

-- 3. Singularly enough, the type _b_ is in actual nature nearly always the most dangerous of the three, and _c_ the safest, for horizontal beds are usually of the softest rocks, and their cliffs are caused by some violent agency in constant operation, as chalk cliffs by the wearing power of the sea, so that such rocks are continually falling, in one place or another. The form _a_ may also be a.s.sumed by very soft rocks.

But _c_ cannot exist at all on the large scale, unless it is built of good materials, and it will then frequently stay in its fixed frown for ages.

-- 4. It occasionally happens that a precipice is formed among the higher crests by the _sides_ of vertical beds of slaty crystallines. Such rocks are rare, and never very high, but always beautiful in their smoothness of surface and general trenchant and firm expression. One of the most interesting I know is that of the summit of the Breven, on the north of the valley of Chamouni. The mountain is formed by vertical sheets of slaty crystallines, rather soft at the bottom, and getting harder and harder towards the top, until at the very summit it is hard and compact as the granite of Waterloo Bridge, though much finer in the grain, and breaking into perpendicular faces of rock so perfectly cut as to feel smooth to the hand. Fig. 4, p. 107, represents, of the real size, a bit which I broke from the edge of the cliff, the shaded part underneath being the surface which forms the precipice. The plumb-line from the brow of this cliff hangs clear 124 English feet; it is then caught by a ledge about three feet wide, from which another precipice falls to about twice the height of the first; but I had not line enough to measure it with from the top, and could not get down to the ledge. When I say the line hangs _clear_, I mean when once it is off the actual brow of the cliff, which is a little rounded for about fourteen or fifteen feet, from _a_ to _b_, in the section, Fig. 75. Then the rock recedes in an almost unbroken concave sweep, detaching itself from the plumb-line about two feet at the point _c_ (the lateral dimensions are exaggerated to show the curve), and approaching it again at the ledge _d_, which is 124 feet below _a_. The plumb-line, fortunately, can be seen throughout its whole extent from a sharp bastion of the precipice farther on, for the face of the cliff runs, in horizontal plan, very nearly to the magnetic north and south, as shown in Fig. 74, the plumb-line swinging at _a_, and seen from the advanced point P. It would give a similar result at any other part of the cliff face, but may be most conveniently cast from the point _a_, a little below, and to the north of the summit.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 74.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 75.]

-- 5. But although the other divisions of this precipice, below the ledge which stops the plummet, give it altogether a height of about five hundred feet,[81] the whole looks a mere step on the huge slope of the Breven; and it only deserves mention among Alpine cliffs as one of singular beauty and decision, yet perfectly approachable and examinable even by the worst climbers; which is very rarely the case with cliffs of the same boldness. I suppose that this is the reason for its having been often stated in scientific works that no cliff could be found in the Alps from which a plumb-line would swing two hundred feet. This can _possibly_ be true (and even with this limitation I doubt it) of cliffs conveniently approachable by experimental philosophers. For, indeed, one way or another, it is curious how Nature fences out, as it were, the brows of her boldest precipices. Wherever a plumb-line will swing, the precipice is, almost without exception, of the type _c_, in Fig. 73, the brow of it rounding towards the edge for, perhaps, fifty or a hundred yards above, rendering it unsafe in the highest degree for any inexperienced person to attempt approach. But it is often possible to ascertain from a distance, if the cliff can be got relieved against the sky, the approximate degree of its precipitousness.

-- 6. It may, I think, be a.s.sumed, almost with certainty, that whenever a precipice is very bold and very high, it is formed by beds more or less approaching horizontally, out of which it has been cut, like the side of a haystack from which part has been removed. The wonderfulness of this operation I have before insisted upon; here we have to examine the best examples of it.

As, in forms of central rock, the Aiguilles of Chamouni, so in notableness of lateral precipice, the Matterhorn, or Mont Cervin, stands, on the whole, unrivalled among the Alps, being terminated, on two of its sides, by precipices which produce on the imagination nearly the effect of verticality. There is, however, only one point at which they reach anything approaching such a condition; and that point is wholly inaccessible either from below or above, but sufficiently measurable by a series of observations.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 77.]

-- 7. From the slope of the hill above, and to the west of, the village of Zermatt, the Matterhorn presents itself under the figure shown on the right hand in the opposite plate (+38+). The whole height of the ma.s.s, from the glacier out of which it rises, is about 4000 feet; and although, as before noticed, the first slope from the top towards the right is merely a perspective line, the part of the contour _c d_, Fig.

33, p. 181, which literally overhangs,[82] cannot be. An apparent slope, however steep, so that it does not overpa.s.s the vertical, _may_ be a horizontal line; but the moment it can be shown literally to overhang, it _must_ be one of two things,--either an actually pendant _face_ of rock, as at _a_, Fig. 77, or the under edge of an overhanging _cornice_ of rock, _b_. Of course the latter condition, on such a scale as this of the Matterhorn, would be the more wonderful of the two; but I was anxious to determine which of these it really was.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 38. The Cervin, from the East and North-east.]

-- 8. My first object was to reach some spot commanding, as nearly as might be, the lateral profile of the Mont Cervin. The most available point for this purpose was the top of the Riffelhorn; which, however, first attempting to climb by its deceitful western side, and being stopped, for the moment, by the singular moat and wall which defend its Malakhoff-like summit, fearing that I might not be able ultimately to reach the top, I made the drawing of the Cervin, on the left hand in Plate +38+, from the edge of the moat; and found afterwards the difference in aspect, as it was seen from the true summit, so slight as not to necessitate the trouble of making another drawing.[83]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 78.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 79.]

-- 9. It may be noted in pa.s.sing, that this wall which with its regular fosse defends the Riffelhorn on its western side, and a similar one on its eastern side, though neither of them of any considerable height, are curious instances of trenchant precipice, formed, I suppose, by slight slips or faults of the serpentine rock. The summit of the horn, _a_, Fig. 78, seems to have been pushed up in a ma.s.s beyond the rest of the ridge, or else the rest of the ridge to have dropped from it on each side, at _b c_, leaving the two troublesome faces of cliff right across the crag, hard, green as a sea wave, and polished like the inside of a seash.e.l.l, where the weather has not effaced the surface produced by the slip. It is only by getting past the eastern cliff that the summit can be reached at all, for on its two lateral escarpments the mountain seems quite inaccessible, being in its whole ma.s.s nothing else than the top of a narrow wall with a raised battlement, as rudely shown in perspective at _e d_; the flanks of the wall falling towards the glacier on one side, and to the lower Riffel on the other, four or five hundred feet, not, indeed, in unbroken precipice, but in a form quite incapable of being scaled.[84]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 79.]

-- 10. To return to the Cervin. The view of it given on the left hand in Plate +38+ shows the ridge in about its narrowest profile; and shows also that this ridge is composed of beds of rock shelving across it, apparently horizontal, or nearly so, at the top, and sloping considerably southwards (to the spectator's left), at the bottom. How far this slope is a consequence of the advance of the nearest angle giving a steep perspective to the beds, I cannot say; my own belief would have been that a great deal of it is thus deceptive, the beds lying as the tiles do in the somewhat anomalous, but perfectly conceivable house-roof, Fig. 79. Saussure, however, attributes to the beds themselves a very considerable slope. But be this as it may, the main facts of the thinness of the beds, their comparative horizontality, and the daring swordsweep by which the whole mountain has been hewn out of them, are from this spot comprehensible at a glance. Visible, I _should_ have said; but eternally, and to the uttermost, _in_comprehensible. Every geologist who speaks of this mountain seems to be struck by the wonderfulness of its calm sculpture--the absence of all aspect of convulsion, and yet the stern chiselling of so vast a ma.s.s into its precipitous isolation leaving no ruin nor debris near it.

"Quelle force n'a-t-il pas fallu," exclaims M. Saussure, "pour rompre, et pour _balayer_ tout ce qui manque a cette pyramide!" "What an overturn of all ancient ideas in Geology," says Professor Forbes, "to find a pinnacle of 15,000 feet high [above the sea] sharp as a pyramid, and with perpendicular precipices of thousands of feet on every hand, to be a representative of the older chalk formation; and what a difficulty to conceive the nature of a convulsion (even with unlimited power), which could produce a configuration like the Mont Cervin rising from the glacier of Zmutt!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG 80.]

-- 11. The term "perpendicular" is of course applied by the Professor in the "poetical" temper of Reynolds,--that is to say, in one "inattentive to minute exactness in details;" but the effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great, that even the gravest philosophers cannot resist it; and Professor Forbes's drawing of the peak, outlined at page 180, has evidently been made under the influence of considerable excitement. For fear of being deceived by enthusiasm also, I daguerreotyped the Cervin from the edge of the little lake under the crag of the Riffelhorn, with the somewhat amazing result shown in Fig. 80. So cautious is Nature, even in her boldest work, so broadly does she extend the foundations, and strengthen the b.u.t.tresses, of ma.s.ses which produce so striking an _impression_ as to be described, even by the most careful writers, as perpendicular.

-- 12. The only portion of the Matterhorn which approaches such a condition is the shoulder, before alluded to, forming a step of about one twelfth the height of the whole peak, shown by light on its snowy side, or upper surface, in the right-hand figure of Plate +38+. Allowing 4000 feet for the height of the peak, this step or shoulder will be between 300 and 400 feet in absolute height; and as it is not only perpendicular, but a.s.suredly overhangs, both at this snow-lighted angle and at the other corner of the mountain (seen against the sky in the same figure), I have not the slightest doubt that a plumb-line would swing from the brow of either of these bastions, between 600 and 800 feet, without touching rock. The intermediate portion of the cliff which joins them is, however, not more than vertical. I was therefore anxious chiefly to observe the structure of the two angles, and, to that end, to see the mountain close on that side, from the Zmutt glacier.

-- 13. I am afraid my dislike to the nomenclatures invented by the German philosophers has been unreasonably, though involuntarily, complicated with that which, crossing out of Italy, one necessarily feels for those invented by the German peasantry. As travellers now every day more frequently visit the neighborhood of the Monte Rosa, it would surely be a permissible, because convenient, poetical license, to invent some other name for this n.o.ble glacier, whose present t.i.tle, certainly not euphonious, has the additional disadvantage of being easily confounded with that of the _Zermatt_ glacier, properly so called. I mean myself, henceforward, to call it the Red glacier, because, for two or three miles above its lower extremity, the whole surface of it is covered with blocks of reddish gneiss, or other slaty crystalline rocks,--some fallen from the Cervin, some from the Weisshorn, some brought from the Stockhi and Dent d'Erin, but little rolled or ground down in the transit, and covering the ice, often four or five feet deep, with a species of macadamization on a large scale (each stone being usually some foot or foot and a half in diameter), anything but convenient to a traveller in haste. Higher up, the ice opens into broad white fields and furrows, hard and dry, scarcely fissured at all, except just under the Cervin, and forming a silent and solemn causeway, paved, as it seems, with white marble from side to side; broad enough for the march of an army in line of battle, but quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city, and bordered on each hand by ghostly cliffs of that faint granite purple which seems, in its far-away height, as unsubstantial as the dark blue that bounds it;--the whole scene so changeless and soundless; so removed, not merely from the presence of men, but even from their thoughts; so dest.i.tute of all life of tree or herb, and so immeasurable in its lonely brightness of majestic death, that it looks like a world from which not only the human, but the spiritual, presences had perished, and the last of its archangels, building the great mountains for their monuments, had laid themselves down in the sunlight to an eternal rest, each in his white shroud.

-- 14. The first point from which the Matterhorn precipices, which I came to examine, show their structure distinctly, is about half-way up the valley, before reaching the glacier. The most convenient path, and access to the ice, are on the south; but it is best, in order to watch the changes of the Matterhorn, to keep on the north side of the valley; and, at the point just named, the shoulder marked _e_ in Fig. 33, p.

181, is seen, in the morning sunlight, to be composed of zigzag beds, apparently of eddied sand. (Fig. 81.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 81.]

I have no doubt they once _were_ eddied sand; that is to say, sea or torrent drift, hardened by fire into crystalline rock; but whether they ever were or not, the certain fact is, that here we have a precipice, trenchant, overhanging, and 500 feet in height, cut across the thin beds which compose it as smoothly as a piece of fine-grained wood is cut with a chisel.

-- 15. From this point, also, the nature of the corresponding bastion, _c d_, Fig 33, is also discernible. It is the edge of a great concave precipice, cut out of the mountain, as the smooth hollows are out of the rocks at the foot of a waterfall, and across which the variously colored beds, thrown by perspective into corresponding curvatures, run exactly like the seams of canvas in a Venetian felucca's sail.

Seen from this spot, it seems impossible that the mountain should long support itself in such a form, but the impression is only caused by the concealment of the vast proportions of the ma.s.s behind, whose poise is quite unaffected by this hollowing at one point. Thenceforward, as we ascend the glacier, the Matterhorn every moment expands in apparent width; and having reached the foot of the Stockhi (about a four hours'

walk from Zermatt), and getting the Cervin summit to bear S. 11 E., I made the drawing of it engraved opposite, which gives a true idea of the relations between it and the ma.s.ses of its foundation. The bearing stated is that of the apparent summit only, as from this point the true summit is not visible; the rocks which seem to form the greatest part of the mountain being in reality nothing but its foundations, while the little white jagged peak, relieved against the dark hollow just below the seeming summit, is the rock marked _g_ in Fig. 33. But the structure of the ma.s.s, and the long ranges of horizontal, or nearly horizontal, beds which form its crest, showing in black points like arrow-heads through the snow, where their ridges are left projecting by the avalanche channels, are better seen than at any other point I reached, together with the sweeping and thin zones of sandy gneiss below, bending apparently like a coach-spring; and the notable point about the whole is, that this under-bed, of seemingly the most delicate substance, is that prepared by Nature to build her boldest precipice with, it being this bed which emerges at the two bastions or shoulders before noticed, and which by that projection causes the strange oblique distortion of the whole mountain ma.s.s, as it is seen from Zermatt.

[Ill.u.s.tration: J. Ruskin. J. C. Armytage.

39. The Cervin, from the North-West.]

-- 16. And our surprise will still be increased as we farther examine the materials of which the whole mountain is composed. In many places its crystalline slates, where their horizontal surfaces are exposed along the projecting beds of their foundations, break into ruin so total that the foot dashes through their loose red flakes as through heaps of autumn leaves; and yet, just where their structure seems most delicate, just where they seem to have been swept before the eddies of the streams that first acc.u.mulated them, in the most pa.s.sive whirls, there the after ages have knit them into the most ma.s.sive strength, and there have hewn out of them those firm grey bastions of the Cervin,--overhanging, smooth, flawless, unconquerable! For, unlike the Chamouni aiguilles, there is no aspect of destruction about the Matterhorn cliffs. They are not torn remnants of separating spires, yielding flake by flake, and band by band, to the continual process of decay. They are, on the contrary, an unaltered monument, seemingly sculptured long ago, the huge walls retaining yet the forms into which they were first engraven, and standing like an Egyptian temple,--delicate-fronted, softly colored, the suns of uncounted ages rising and falling upon it continually, but still casting the same line of shadows from east to west, still, century after century, touching the same purple stains on the lotus pillars; while the desert sand ebbs and flows about their feet, as those autumn leaves of rock lie heaped and weak about the base of the Cervin.

-- 17. Is not this a strange type, in the very heart and height of these mysterious Alps--these wrinkled hills in their snowy, cold, grey-haired old age, at first so silent, then, as we keep quiet at their feet, muttering and whispering to us garrulously, in broken and dreaming fits, as it were, about their childhood--is it not a strange type of the things which "out of weakness are made strong?" If one of those little flakes of mica-sand, hurried in tremulous spangling along the bottom of the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to float, almost too small for sight, could have had a mind given to it as it was at last borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of the stream, and laid, (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity, in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth's atoms; incapable of any use or change; not fit, down there in the diluvial darkness, so much as to help an earth-wasp to build its nest, or feed the first fibre of a lichen;--what would it have thought, had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of G.o.d should hew that Alpine tower; that against _it_--poor, helpless, mica flake!--the wild north winds should rage in vain; beneath _it_--low-fallen mica flake!--the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around it--weak, wave-drifted mica flake!--the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire?

-- 18. I have thought it worth while, for the sake of these lessons, and the other interests connected with them, to lead the reader thus far into the examination of the princ.i.p.al precipices among the Alps, although, so far as our immediate purposes are concerned, the inquiry cannot be very fruitful or helpful to us. For rocks of this kind, being found only in the midst of the higher snow fields, are not only out of the general track of the landscape painter, but are for the most part quite beyond his power--even beyond Turner's. The waves of snow, when it becomes a princ.i.p.al element in mountain form, are at once so subtle in tone, and so complicated in curve and fold, that no skill will express them, so as to keep the whole luminous ma.s.s in anything like a true relation to the rock darkness. For the distant rocks of the upper peaks are themselves, when in light, paler than white paper, and their true size and relation to near objects cannot be exhibited unless they are painted in the palest tones. Yet, as compared with their snow, they are so dark that a daguerreotype taken for the proper number of seconds to draw the snow shadows rightly, will always represent the rocks as _coal-black_. In order, therefore, to paint a snowy mountain properly, we should need a light as much brighter than white paper as white paper is brighter than charcoal. So that although it is possible, with deep blue sky, and purple rocks, and blue shadows, to obtain a very interesting resemblance of snow effect, and a true one up to a certain point (as in the best examples of the body-color drawings sold so extensively in Switzerland) it is not possible to obtain any of those refinements of form and gradation which a great artist's eye requires.

Turner felt that, among these highest hills, no serious or perfect work could be done; and although in one or two of his vignettes (already referred to in the first volume) he showed his knowledge of them, his practice, in larger works, was always to treat the snowy mountains merely as a far-away white cloud, concentrating the interest of his picture on nearer and more tractable objects.

-- 19. One circ.u.mstance, however, bearing upon art, we may note before leaving these upper precipices, namely, the way in which they ill.u.s.trate the favorite expression of Homer and Dante--_cut_ rocks. However little satisfied we had reason to be with the degree of affection shown towards mountain scenery by either poet, we may now perceive, with some respect and surprise, that they had got at one character which was in the essence of the n.o.blest rocks, just as the early illuminators got at the principles which lie at the heart of vegetation. As distinguished from all other natural forms,--from fibres which are torn, crystals which are broken, stones which are rounded or worn, animal and vegetable forms which are grown or moulded,--the true hard rock or precipice is notably a thing _cut_, its inner _grain_ or structure seeming to have less to do with its form than is seen in any other object or substance whatsoever; and the aspect of subjection to some external sculpturing instrument being distinct in almost exact proportion to the size and stability of the ma.s.s.

-- 20. It is not so, however, with the next groups of mountain which we have to examine--those formed by the softer slaty coherents, when their perishable and frail substance has been raised into cliffs in the manner ill.u.s.trated by Fig. 12 at p. 146,--cliffs whose front every frost disorganizes into filmy shale, and of which every thunder-shower dissolves tons in the swoln blackness of torrents. If this takes place from the top downwards, the cliff is gradually effaced, and a more or less rounded eminence is soon all that remains of it; but if the lower beds only decompose, or if the whole structure is strengthened here and there by courses of harder rock, the precipice is undermined, and remains hanging in perilous ledges and projections until, the process having reached the limit of its strength, vast portions of it fall at once, leaving new fronts of equal ruggedness, to be ruined and cast down in their turn.

The whole district of the northern inferior Alps, from the mountains of the Reposoir to the Gemmi, is full of precipices of this kind; the well known crests of the Mont Doron, and of the Aiguille de Varens, above Sallenches, being connected by the great cliffs of the valley of Sixt, the dark ma.s.s of the Buet, the Dent du Midi de Bex, and the Diablerets, with the great amphitheatre of rock in whose securest recess the path of the Gemmi hides its winding. But the most frightful and most characteristic cliff in the whole group is the range of the Rochers des Fys, above the Col d'Anterne. It happens to have a bed of harder limestone at the top than in any other part of its ma.s.s; and this bed, protecting its summit, enables it to form itself into the most ghastly ranges of pinnacle which I know among mountains. In one spot the upper edge of limestone has formed a complete cornice, or rather bracket--for it is not extended enough to const.i.tute a cornice, which projects far into the air over the wall of ashy rock, and is seen against the clouds, when they pa.s.s into the chasm beyond, like the nodding coping-stone of a castle--only the wall below is not less than 2500 feet in height,--not vertical, but steep enough to seem so to the imagination.

-- 21. Such precipices are among the most impressive as well as the most really dangerous of mountain ranges; in many spots inaccessible with safety either from below or from above; dark in color, robed with everlasting mourning, for ever tottering like a great fortress shaken by war, fearful as much in their weakness as in their strength, and yet gathered after every fall into darker frowns and unhumiliated threatening; for ever incapable of comfort or of healing from herb or flower, nourishing no root in their crevices, touched by no hue of life on b.u.t.tress or ledge, but, to the utmost, desolate; knowing no shaking of leaves in the wind, nor of gra.s.s beside the stream,--no motion but their own mortal shivering, the deathful crumbling of atom from atom in their corrupting stones; knowing no sound of living voice or living tread, cheered neither by the kid's bleat nor the marmot's cry; haunted only by uninterrupted echoes from far off, wandering hither and thither among their walls, unable to escape, and by the hiss of angry torrents, and sometimes the shriek of a bird that flits near the face of them, and sweeps frightened back from under their shadow into the gulf of air: and, sometimes, when the echo has fainted, and the wind has carried the sound of the torrent away, and the bird has vanished; and the mouldering stones are still for a little time,--a brown moth, opening and shutting its wings upon a grain of dust, may be the only thing that moves, or feels, in all the waste of weary precipice, darkening five thousand feet of the blue depth of heaven.

-- 22. It will not be thought that there is nothing in a scene such as this deserving our contemplation, or capable of conveying useful lessons, if it were fitly rendered by art. I cannot myself conceive any picture more impressive than a faithful rendering of such a cliff would be, supposing the aim of the artist to be the utmost tone of sad sublime. I am, nevertheless, aware of no instance in which the slightest attempt has been made to express their character; the reason being, partly, the extreme difficulty of the task, partly the want of temptation in specious color or form. For the majesty of this kind of cliff depends entirely on its size: a low range of such rock is as uninteresting as it is ugly; and it is only by making the spectator understand the enormous scale of their desolation, and the s.p.a.ce which the shadow of their danger oppresses, that any impression can be made upon his mind. And this scale cannot be expressed by any artifice; the mountain cannot be made to look large by painting it blue or faint, otherwise it loses all its ghastliness. It must be painted in its own near and solemn colors, black and ashen grey; and its size must be expressed by thorough drawing of its innumerable details--pure _quant.i.ty_,--with certain points of comparison explanatory of the whole.

This is no light task; and, attempted by any man of ordinary genius, would need steady and careful painting for three or four months; while, to such a man, there would appear to be nothing worth his toil in the gloom of the subject, unrelieved as it is even by variety of form; for the soft rock of which these cliffs are composed rarely breaks into bold ma.s.ses; and the gloom of their effect partly depends on its not doing so.

-- 23. Yet, while painters thus reject the natural, and large sublime, which is ready to their hand, how strangely do they seek after a false and small sublime. It is not that they reprobate gloom, but they will only have a gloom of their own making; just as half the world will not see the terrible and sad truths which the universe is full of, but surrounds itself with little clouds of sulky and unnecessary fog for its own special breathing. A portrait is not thought grand unless it has a thundercloud behind it (as if a hero could not be brave in sunshine); a ruin is not melancholy enough till it is seen by moonlight or twilight; and every condition of theatrical pensiveness or of the theatrical terrific is exhausted in setting forth scenes or persons which in themselves are, perhaps, very quiet scenes and homely persons; while that which, without any accessories at all, is everlastingly melancholy and terrific, we refuse to paint,--nay, we refuse even to observe it in its reality, while we seek for the excitement of the very feelings it was meant to address, in every conceivable form of our false ideal.