1This is Harding’s favorite form of tree. You will find it much insisted on in his works on foliage. I intended to have given a figure to show the results of the pressure of the weight of all the leafage on a great lateral bough, in modifying its curves, the strength of timber being greatest where the leverage of the mass tells most. But I find nobody ever reads things which it takes any trouble to understand, so that it is of no use to write them.
1This is Harding’s favorite form of tree. You will find it much insisted on in his works on foliage. I intended to have given a figure to show the results of the pressure of the weight of all the leafage on a great lateral bough, in modifying its curves, the strength of timber being greatest where the leverage of the mass tells most. But I find nobody ever reads things which it takes any trouble to understand, so that it is of no use to write them.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE LEAF MONUMENTS.
§ 1. Andnow, having ascertained in its main points the system on which the leaf-workers build, let us see, finally, what results in aspect, and appeal to human mind, their building must present. In some sort it resembles that of the coral animal, differing, however, in two points. First, the animal which forms branched coral, builds, I believe, in calm water, and has few accidents of current, light, or heat to contend with. He builds in monotonous ramification, untormented, therefore unbeautiful. Secondly, each coral animal builds for himself, adding his cell to what has been before constructed, as a bee adds another cell to the comb. He obtains no essential connection with the root and foundation of the whole structure. That foundation is thickened clumsily, by a fused and encumbering aggregation, as a stalactite increases;—not by threads proceeding from the extremities to the root.
§ 2. The leaf, as we have seen, builds in both respects under opposite conditions. It leads a life of endurance, effort, and various success, issuing in various beauty; and it connects itself with the whole previous edifice by one sustaining thread, continuing its appointed piece of work all the way from top to root. Whence result three great conditions in branch aspect, for which I cannot find good names, but must use the imperfect ones of “Spring,” “Caprice,” “Fellowship.”
§ 3. I.Spring: or the appearance of elastic and progressive power, as opposed to that look of a bent piece of cord.—This follows partly on the poise of the bough, partly on its action in seeking or shunning. Every branch-line expresses both these. It takes a curve accurately showing the relations between the strength of the sprays in that position (growing downward, upward, or laterally), and the weight of leaves they carry; andagain, it takes a curve expressive of the will or aim of those sprays, during all their life, and handed down from sire to son, in steady inheritance of resolution to reach forward in a given direction, or bend away from some given evil influence.
And all these proportionate strengths and measured efforts of the bough produce its loveliness, and ought to be felt, in looking at it, not by any mathematical evidence, but by the same fine instinct which enables us to perceive, when a girl dances rightly, that she moves easily, and with delight to herself; that her limbs are strong enough, and her body tender enough, to move precisely as she wills them to move. You cannot say of any bend of arm or foot what precise relations of their curves to the whole figure manifest, in their changeful melodies, that ease of motion; yet you feel that they do so, and you feel it by a true instinct. And if you reason on the matter farther, you may know, though you cannot see, that an absolute mathematical necessity proportions every bend of the body to the rate and direction of its motion; and that the momentary fancy and fire of the will measure themselves, even in their gaily-fancied freedom, by stern laws of nervous life, and material attraction, which regulate eternally every pulse of the strength of man, and every sweep of the stars of heaven.
§ 4. Observe, also, the balance of the bough of a tree is quite as subtle as that of a figure in motion. It is a balance between the elasticity of the bough and the weight of leaves, affected in curvature, literally, by the growth ofeveryleaf; and besides this, when it moves, it is partly supported by the resistance of the air, greater or less, according to the shape of leaf;—so that branches float on the wind more than they yield to it; and in their tossing do not so much bend under a force, as rise on a wave, which penetrates in liquid threads through all their sprays.
§ 5. I am not sure how far, by any illustration, I can exemplify these subtle conditions of form. All my plans have been shortened, and I have learned to content myself with yet more contracted issues of them after the shortening, because I know that nearly all in such matters must be said or shown, unavailably. No saying will teach the truth. Nothing but doing. If the reader will draw boughs of trees long and faithfully, giving previous pains to gain the power (how rare!) of drawinganythingfaithfully, he will come to see what Turner’s work is, or any other right work, but not by reading, nor thinking, nor idly looking. However, in some degree, even our ordinary instinctive perception of grace and balance may serve us, if we choose to pay any accurate attention to the matter.
§ 6. Look back to Fig. 55. That bough of Turner’s is exactly and exquisitely poised, leaves and all, for its present horizontal position. Turn the book so as to put the spray upright, with the leaves at the top. You ought to see they would then be wrong;—that they must, in that position, have adjusted themselves more directly above the main stem, and more firmly, the curves of the lighter sprays being a deflection caused by their weight in the horizontal position. Again, Fig. 56 represents, enlarged to four times the size of the original, the two Scotch firs in Turner’s etching of Inverary.1These are both in perfect poise, representing a double action: the warping of the trees away from the sea-wind, and the continual growing out of the boughs on the right-hand side, to recover the balance.
Turn the page so as to be horizontal, and you ought to feel that, considered now as branches, both would be out of balance. If you turn the heads of the trees to your right, they are wrong, because gravity would have bent them more downwards; if to your left, wrong, because the law of resilience would have raised them more at the extremities.
§ 7. Now take two branches of Salvator’s, Figs. 57 and 58.2You ought to feel that these have neither poise nor spring: their leaves are incoherent, ragged, hanging together in decay.
Immediately after these, turn to Plate 57, opposite. The branch at the top is facsimiled from that in the hand of Adam, in Durer’s Adam and Eve.3It is full of the most exquisitevitality and spring in every line. Look at it for five minutes carefully. Then turn back to Salvator’s, Fig. 57. Are you as well satisfied with it? You ought to feel that it is not strong enough at the origin to sustain the leaves; and that if it were, those leaves themselves are in broken or forced relations with each other. Such relations might, indeed, exist in a partially withered tree, and one of these branches is intended to be partially withered, but the other is not; and if it were, Salvator’schoice of the withered tree is precisely the sign of his preferring ugliness to beauty, decrepitude and disorganization to life and youth. The leaves on the spray, by Durer, hold themselves as the girl holds herself in dancing; those on Salvator’s as an old man, partially palsied, totters along with broken motion, and loose deflection of limb.
§ 8. Next, let us take a spray by Paul Veronese4—the lower figure in Plate 57. It is just as if we had gathered one out of the garden. Though every line and leaf in the quadruple group is necessary to join with other parts of the composition of the noble picture, every line and leaf is also as free and true as if it were growing. None are confused, yet none are loose; all are individual, yet none separate, in tender poise of pliant strength and fair order of accomplished grace, each, by due force of the indulgent bough, set and sustained.
§ 9. Observe, however, that in all these instances from earlier masters, the expression of the universal botanical law of poise is independent of accuracy in rendering of species. As before noticed, the neglect of specific distinction long restrained the advance of landscape, and even hindered Turner himself in many respects. The sprays of Veronese are a conventional type of laurel; Albert Durer’s an imaginary branch of paradisaical vegetation; Salvator’s, a rude reminiscence of sweet chestnut; Turner’s only is a faithful rendering of the Scotch fir.
§ 10. To show how the principle of balance is carried out by Nature herself, here is a little terminal upright spray of willow, the most graceful of English trees (Fig. 59). I have drawn it carefully; and if the reader will study its curves, or, better, trace and pencil them with a perfectly fine point, he will feel, I think, without difficulty, their finished relation to the leavesthey sustain. Then if we turn suddenly to a piece of Dutch branch-drawing (Fig. 60), facsimiled from No. 160, Dulwich Gallery (Berghem), he will understand, I believe, also the qualities of that, without comment of mine. It is of course not so dark in the original, being drawn with the chance dashes of a brush loaded with brown, but the contours are absolutely as in the woodcut. This Dutch design is a very characteristic example of two faults in tree-drawing; namely, the loss not only of grace and spring, but of woodiness. A branch is not elastic as steel is, neither as a carter’s whip is. It is a combination, wholly peculiar, of elasticity with half-dead and sapless stubbornness, and of continuous curve with pauses of knottiness, every bough having its blunted, affronted, fatigued,or repentant moments of existence, and mingling crabbed rugosities and fretful changes of mind with the main tendencies of its growth. The piece of pollard willow opposite (Fig. 61), facsimiled from Turner’s etching of “Young Anglers,” in the Liber Studiorum, has all these characters in perfectness, and may serve for sufficient study of them. It is impossible to explain in what the expression of the woody strength consists, unless it be felt. One very obvious condition is the excessive fineness of curvature, approximating continually to a straight line. In order to get a piece of branch curvature given as accurately as I could by an unprejudiced person, I set one of my pupils at the Working Men’s College (a joiner by trade) to draw, last spring, a lilac branch of its real size, as it grew, before it budded. It was about six feet long, and before he could get it quite right, the buds came out and interrupted him; but the fragment he got drawn is engraved in flat profile, in Plate 58. It has suffered much by reduction, one or two of its finest curves having become lost in the mere thickness of the lines. Nevertheless, if the reader will compare it carefully with the Dutch work, it will teach him something about trees.
§ 11. II.Caprice.—The next character we had to note of the leaf-builders was their capriciousness, noted, partly, in Vol. III. chap. ix. § 14. It is a character connected with the ruggedness and ill-temperedness just spoken of, and an essential source of branch beauty: being in reality the written story of all the branch’s life,—of the theories it formed, the accidents it suffered, the fits of enthusiasm to which it yielded in certain delicious warm springs; the disgusts at weeks of east wind, the mortifications of itself for its friends’ sakes; or the sudden and successful inventions of new ways of getting out to the sun. The reader will understand this character in a moment, by merely comparing Fig. 62, which is a branch of Salvator’s,5with Fig. 63, which I have traced from the engraving, in the Yorkshire series, of Turner’s “Aske Hall.” You cannot but feel at once, not only the wrongness of Salvator’s, but its dulness. It is not now a question either of poise, or grace, or gravity; only of wit. Thatbough has got no sense; it has not been struck by a single new idea from the beginning of it to the end; dares not even cross itself with one of its own sprays. You will be amazed, in taking up any of these old engravings, to see how seldom the boughsdocross each other. Whereas, in nature, not only is the intersection of extremities a mathematical necessity (see Plate 56), but out of this intersection and crossing of curve by curve, and the opposition of line it involves, the best part of their composition arises. Look at the way the boughs are interwoven in that piece of lilac stem (Plate 58).
§ 12. Again: As it seldom struck the old painters that boughs must cross each other, so it never seems to have occurred to them that they must be sometimes foreshortened. I chose this bit from “Aske Hall,” that you might see at once, both how Turner foreshortens the main stem, and how, in doing so, he shows the turning aside, and outwards, of the one next to it, to the left, to get more air.6Indeed, this foreshortening lies atthe core of the business; for unless it be well understood, no branch-form can ever be rightly drawn. I placed the oak spray in Plate 51 so as to be seen as nearly straight on its flank as possible. It is the most uninteresting position in which a bough can be drawn; but it shows the first simple action of the law of resilience. I will now turn the bough with its extremity towards us, and foreshorten it (Plate 59), which being done, you perceive another tendency in the whole branch, not seen at all in the first Plate, to throw its sprays to its own right (or to your left), which it does to avoid the branch next it, while theforwardaction is in a sweeping curve round to your right, or to the branch’s left: a curve which it takes to recover position after its first concession. The lines of the nearer and smaller shoots are very nearly—thus foreshortened—those of a boat’s bow. Here is a piece of Dutch foreshortening for you to compare with it, Fig. 64.7
§ 13. In this final perfection of bough-drawing, Turner standswholly alone. Even Titian does not foreshorten his boughs rightly. Of course he could, if he had cared to do so; for if you can foreshorten a limb or a hand, much more a tree branch. But either he had never looked at a tree carefully enough to feel thatit was necessary, or, which is more likely, he disliked to introduce in a background elements of vigorous projection. Be the reason what it may, if you take Lefèvre’s plates of the Peter Martyr and St. Jerome—the only ones I know which give any idea of Titian’s tree-drawing, you will observe at once that the boughs lie in flakes, artificially set to the right and left, and are not intricate or varied, even where the foliage indicates some foreshortening;—completing thus the evidence for my statement long ago given, that no man but Turner had ever drawn the stem of a tree.
§ 14. It may be well also to note, for the advantage of the general student of design, that, in foliage and bough drawing, all the final grace and general utility of the study depend on its being well foreshortened; and that, till the power of doing so quite accurately is obtained, no landscape-drawing is of the least value; nor can the character of any tree be known at all until not only its branches, but its minutest extremities, have been drawn in the severest foreshortening, with little accompanying plans of the arrangements of the leaves or buds, or thorns, on the stem. Thus Fig. 65 is the extremity of a single shoot of spruce foreshortened, showing the resilience of its swords from beneath, and Fig. 66 is a little ground-plan, showing the position of the three lowest triple groups of thorn on a shoot of gooseberry.8The fir shoot is carelessly drawn; but it is not worth while to do it better, unless I engraved it on steel, so as to show the fine relations of shade.
§ 15. III.Fellowship.—The compactness of mass presented by this little sheaf of pine-swords may lead us to the consideration of the last character I have to note of boughs; namely, the mode of their association in masses. It follows, of course, from all the laws of growth we have ascertained, that the terminal outline of any tree or branch must be a simple one, containing within it, at a given height or level, the series of leaves of the year; only we have not yet noticed the kind of form which results, in each branch, from the part it has to take in forming the mass of the tree. The systems of branching are indeed infinite, and could not be exemplified by any number of types; but here are two common types, in section, which will enough explain what I mean.
§ 16. If a tree branches with a concave tendency, it is apt to carry its boughs to the outer curve of limitation, as atA, Fig. 67, and if with a convex tendency, as atB. In either case the vertical section, or profile, of a bough will give a triangular mass, terminated by curves, and elongated at one extremity. These triangular masses you may see at a glance, prevailing in the branch system of any tree in winter. They may, of course, bemathematically reduced to the four typesa,b,c, andd, Fig. 67, but are capable of endless variety of expression in action, and in the adjustment of their weights to the bearing stem.
§ 17. To conclude, then, we find that the beauty of these buildings of the leaves consists, from the first step of it to the last, in its showing their perfect fellowship; and a single aim uniting them under circumstances of various distress, trial, and pleasure. Without the fellowship, no beauty; without the steady purpose, no beauty; without trouble, and death, no beauty; without individual pleasure, freedom, and caprice, so far as may be consistent with the universal good, no beauty.
§ 18. Tree-loveliness might be thus lost or killed in many ways. Discordance would kill it—of one leaf with another; disobedience would kill it—of any leaf to the ruling law; indulgence would kill it, and the doing away with pain; or slavish symmetry would kill it, and the doing away with delight. And this is so, down to the smallest atom and beginning of life: so soon as there is life at all, there are these four conditions of it;—harmony, obedience, distress, and delightsome inequality. Here is the magnified section of an oak-bud, not the size of a wheat grain (Fig. 68). Already its nascent leaves are seen arranged under the perfect law of resilience, preparing for stoutest work on the right side. Here is a dogwood bud just opening into life (Fig. 69). Its ruling law is to be four square, but see how the uppermost leaf takes the lead, and the lower bends up, already a little distressed by the effort. Here is a birch-bud, farther advanced, Fig. 70. Who shall say how many humors the little thing has in its mind already; or how many adventures it has passed through? And so to the end. Help, submission, sorrow, dissimilarity, are the sources of all good;—war, disobedience, luxury, equality, the sources of all evil.
§ 19. There is yet another and a deeply laid lesson to be received from the leaf-builders, which I hope the reader has already perceived. Every leaf, we have seen, connects its work with the entire and accumulated result of the work of its predecessors. Their previous construction served it during its life, raised it towards the light, gave it more free sway and motion in the wind, and removed it from the noxiousness of earth exhalation. Dying, it leaves its own small but well-labored thread, adding, though imperceptibly, yet essentially, to the strength, from root to crest, of the trunk on which it had lived, and fitting that trunk for better service to succeeding races of leaves.
We men, sometimes, in what we presume to be humility, compare ourselves with leaves; but we have as yet no right to do so. The leaves may well scorn the comparison. We who live forourselves, and neither know how to use nor keep the work of past time, may humbly learn,—as from the ant, foresight,—from the leaf, reverence. The power of every great people, as of every living tree, depends on its not effacing, but confirming and concluding, the labors of its ancestors. Looking back to the history of nations, we may date the beginning of their decline from the moment when they ceased to be reverent in heart, and accumulative in hand and brain; from the moment when the redundant fruit of age hid in them the hollowness of heart, whence the simplicities of custom and sinews of tradition had withered away. Had men but guarded the righteous laws, and protected the precious works of their fathers, with half the industry they have given to change and to ravage, they would not now have been seeking vainly, in millennial visions and mechanic servitudes, the accomplishment of the promise made to them so long ago: “As the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands; they shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them.”
§ 20. This lesson we have to take from the leaf’s life. One more we may receive from its death. If ever in autumn a pensiveness falls upon us as the leaves drift by in their fading, may we not wisely look up in hope to their mighty monuments? Behold how fair, how far prolonged, in arch and aisle, the avenues of the valleys; the fringes of the hills! So stately,—so eternal; the joy of man, the comfort of all living creatures, the glory of the earth,—they are but the monuments of those poor leaves that flit faintly past us to die. Let them not pass, without our understanding their last counsel and example: that we also, careless of monument by the grave, may build it in the world—monument by which men may be taught to remember, not where we died, but where we lived.
1They are enlarged, partly in order to show the care and minuteness of Turner’s drawing on the smallest scale, partly to save the reader the trouble of using a magnifying glass, partly because this woodcut will print safely; while if I had facsimiled the fine Turner etching, the block might have been spoiled after a hundred impressions.2Magnified to twice the size of the original, but otherwise facsimiled from his own etching of Œdipus, and the School of Plato.3The parrot perched on it is removed, which may be done without altering the curve, as the bird is set where its weight would not have bent the wood.4The largest laurel spray in the background of the “Susanna,” Louvre—reduced to about a fifth of the original. The drawing was made for me by M. Hippolyte Dubois, and I am glad it is not one of my own, lest I should be charged with exaggerating Veronese’s accuracy.This group of leaves is, in the original, of the life-size; the circle which interferes with the spray on the right being the outline of the head and of one of the elders; and, as painted for distant effect, there is no care in completing the stems:—they are struck with a few broken touches of the brush, which cannot be imitated in the engraving, and much of their spirit is lost in consequence.5The longest in “Apollo and the Sibyl,” engraved by Boydell. (Reduced one-half.)6The foreshortening of the bough to the right is a piece of great audacity; it comes towards us two or three feet sharply, after forking, so as to look half as thick again as at the fork;—then bends back again, and outwards.7Hobbima. Dulwich Gallery, No. 131. Turn the book with its inner edge up.8Their change from groups of three to groups of two, and then to single thorns at the end of the spray, will be found very beautiful in a real shoot. The figure on the left in Plate 52 is a branch of blackthorn with its spines (which are a peculiar condition of branch, and can bud like branches, while thorns have no root nor power of development). Such a branch gives good practice without too much difficulty.
1They are enlarged, partly in order to show the care and minuteness of Turner’s drawing on the smallest scale, partly to save the reader the trouble of using a magnifying glass, partly because this woodcut will print safely; while if I had facsimiled the fine Turner etching, the block might have been spoiled after a hundred impressions.
2Magnified to twice the size of the original, but otherwise facsimiled from his own etching of Œdipus, and the School of Plato.
3The parrot perched on it is removed, which may be done without altering the curve, as the bird is set where its weight would not have bent the wood.
4The largest laurel spray in the background of the “Susanna,” Louvre—reduced to about a fifth of the original. The drawing was made for me by M. Hippolyte Dubois, and I am glad it is not one of my own, lest I should be charged with exaggerating Veronese’s accuracy.
This group of leaves is, in the original, of the life-size; the circle which interferes with the spray on the right being the outline of the head and of one of the elders; and, as painted for distant effect, there is no care in completing the stems:—they are struck with a few broken touches of the brush, which cannot be imitated in the engraving, and much of their spirit is lost in consequence.
5The longest in “Apollo and the Sibyl,” engraved by Boydell. (Reduced one-half.)
6The foreshortening of the bough to the right is a piece of great audacity; it comes towards us two or three feet sharply, after forking, so as to look half as thick again as at the fork;—then bends back again, and outwards.
7Hobbima. Dulwich Gallery, No. 131. Turn the book with its inner edge up.
8Their change from groups of three to groups of two, and then to single thorns at the end of the spray, will be found very beautiful in a real shoot. The figure on the left in Plate 52 is a branch of blackthorn with its spines (which are a peculiar condition of branch, and can bud like branches, while thorns have no root nor power of development). Such a branch gives good practice without too much difficulty.
CHAPTER IX.
THE LEAF SHADOWS.
§ 1. Itmay be judged, by the time which it has taken to arrive at any clear idea of the structure of shield-builders, what a task would open to us if we endeavored to trace the more wonderful forms of the wild builders with the sword. Not that they are more complex; but they are more definite, and cannot be so easily generalized. The conditions which produce the spire of the cypress, and flaked breadth of the cedar, the rounded head of the stone pine, and perfect pyramid of the black spruce, are far more distinct, and would require more accurate and curious diagrams to illustrate them, than the graceful, but in some degree monotonous branching of leaf-builders. In broad principle they are, however, alike. The leaves construct the sprays in the same accumulative way: the only essential difference being that in the sword-builders the leaves are all set close, and at equal intervals. Instead of admitting extended and variable spaces between them, the whole spray is one tower of leaf-roots, set in a perfect spiral. Thus, Fig. 71, atA, represents a fragment of spray of Scotch fir of its real size.Bis the same piece magnified,the diamond-like spaces being the points on which the leaves grew. The dotted lines show the regularity of the spiral. As the minor stems join in boughs, the scars left by the leaves are gradually effaced, and a thick but broken and scaly bark forms instead.
§ 2. A sword-builder may therefore be generally considered as a shield-builder put under the severest military restraint. The graceful and thin leaf is concentrated into a strong, narrow, pointed rod; and the insertion of these rods on them is in a close and perfectly timed order. In some ambiguous trees connected with the tribe (as the arbor vitæ) there is no proper stem to the outer leaves, but all the extremities form a kind of coralline leaf, flat and fern-like, but articulated like a crustacean animal, which gradually concentrates and embrowns itself into the stem. The thicker branches of these trees are exquisitely fantastic; and the mode in which the flat system of leaf first produces an irregular branch, and then adapts itself to the symmetrical cone of the whole tree, is one of the most interesting processes of form which I know in vegetation.
§ 3. Neither this, however, nor any other of the pine formations, have we space here to examine in detail; while without detail, all discussion of them is in vain. I shall only permit myself to note a few points respecting my favorite tree, the black spruce, not with any view to art criticism (though we might get at some curious results by a comparison of popular pine-drawing in Germany, America, and other dark-wooded countries, with the true natural forms), but because I think the expression of this tree has not been rightly understood by travellers in Switzerland, and that, with a little watching of it, they might easily obtain a juster feeling.
§ 4. Of the many marked adaptations of nature to the mind of man, it seems one of the most singular, that trees intended especially for the adornment of the wildest mountains should be in broad outline the most formal of trees. The vine, which is to be the companion of man, is waywardly docile in its growth, falling into festoons beside his cornfields, or roofing his garden-walks, or casting its shadow all summer upon his door. Associated always with the trimness of cultivation, it introduces all possible elements of sweet wildness. The pine, placed nearly alwaysamong scenes disordered and desolate, brings into them all possible elements of order and precision. Lowland trees may lean to this side and that, though it is but a meadow breeze that bends them, or a bank of cowslips from which their trunks lean aslope. But let storm and avalanche do their worst, and let the pine find only a ledge of vertical precipice to cling to, it will nevertheless grow straight. Thrust a rod from its last shoot down the stem;—it shall point to the centre of the earth as long as the tree lives.
§ 5. Also it may be well for lowland branches to reach hither and thither for what they need, and to take all kinds of irregular shape and extension. But the pine is trained to need nothing, and to endure everything. It is resolvedly whole, self-contained, desiring nothing but rightness, content with restricted completion. Tall or short, it will be straight. Small or large, it will be round. It may be permitted also to these soft lowland trees that they should make themselves gay with show of blossom, and glad with pretty charities of fruitfulness. We builders with the sword have harder work to do for man, and must do it in close-set troops. To stay the sliding of the mountain snows, which would bury him; to hold in divided drops, at our sword-points, the rain, which would sweep away him and his treasure-fields; to nurse in shade among our brown fallen leaves the tricklings that feed the brooks in drought; to give massive shield against the winter wind, which shrieks through the bare branches of the plain:—such service must we do him steadfastly while we live. Our bodies, also, are at his service: softer than the bodies of other trees, though our toil is harder than theirs. Let him take them as pleases him, for his houses and ships. So also it may be well for these timid lowland trees to tremble with all their leaves, or turn their paleness to the sky, if but a rush of rain passes by them; or to let fall their leaves at last, sick and sere. But we pines must live carelessly amidst the wrath of clouds. We only wave our branches to and fro when the storm pleads with us, as men toss their arms in a dream.
And finally, these weak lowland trees may struggle fondly for the last remnants of life, and send up feeble saplings again from their roots when they are cut down. But we builders with the sword perish boldly; our dying shall be perfect and solemn, asour warring: we give up our lives without reluctance, and for ever.1
§ 6. I wish the reader to fix his attention for a moment on these two great characters of the pine, its straightness and rounded perfectness; both wonderful, and in their issue lovely, though they have hitherto prevented the tree from being drawn. I say, first, its straightness. Because we constantly see it in the wildest scenery, we are apt to remember only as characteristic examples of it those which have been disturbed by violent accident or disease. Of course such instances are frequent. The soil of the pine is subject to continual change; perhaps the rock in which it is rooted splits in frost and falls forward, throwing the young stems aslope, or the whole mass of earth around it is undermined by rain, or a huge boulder falls on its stem from above, and forces it for twenty years to grow with weight of a couple of tons leaning on its side. Hence, especially at edges of loose cliffs, about waterfalls, or at glacier banks, and in other places liable to disturbance, the pine may be seen distorted and oblique; and in Turner’s “Source of the Arveron,” he has, with his usual unerring perception of the main point in any matter, fastened on this means of relating the glacier’s history. The glacier cannot explain its own motion; and ordinary observers saw in it only its rigidity; but Turner saw that the wonderful thing was its non-rigidity. Other ice is fixed, only this ice stirs. All the banks are staggering beneath its waves, crumbling and withered as by the blast of a perpetual storm. He made the rocks of his foreground loose—rolling and tottering down together; the pines, smitten aside by them, their tops dead, bared by the ice wind.
§ 7. Nevertheless, this is not the truest or universal expression of the pine’s character. I said long ago, even of Turner: “Into the spirit of the pine he cannot enter.” He understood the glacier at once; he had seen the force of sea on shore too often to miss the action of those crystal-crested waves. But the pine was strange to him, adverse to his delight in broad and flowing line; he refused its magnificent erectness. Magnificent!—nay, sometimes, almost terrible. Other trees, tufting crag or hill,yield to the form and sway of the ground, clothe it with soft compliance, are partly its subjects, partly its flatterers, partly its comforters. But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained; nor can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff, far from all house or work of men, looking up to its companies of pine, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it—upright, fixed, spectral, as troops of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other—dumb for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them;—those trees never heard human voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs. All comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of the Vacancy and the Rock: yet with such iron will, that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them—fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of enchanted pride:—unnumbered, unconquerable.
§ 8. Then note, farther, their perfectness. The impression on most people’s minds must have been received more from pictures than reality, so far as I can judge;—so ragged they think the pine; whereas its chief character in health is green and full roundness. It stands compact, like one of its own cones, slightly curved on its sides, finished and quaint as a carved tree in some Elizabethan garden; and instead of being wild in expression, forms the softest of all forest scenery; for other trees show their trunks and twisting boughs: but the pine, growing either in luxuriant mass or in happy isolation, allows no branch to be seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there is nothing but green cone and green carpet. Nor is it only softer, but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage; for it casts only a pyramidal shadow. Lowland forest arches overhead, and chequers the ground with darkness; but the pine, growing in scattered groups, leaves the glades between emerald-bright. Its gloom is all its own; narrowing into the sky, it lets the sunshine strike down to the dew. And if ever a superstitious feeling comes over me among the pine-glades, it is never tainted with the old German forest fear; but is only a more solemn tone of the fairy enchantment that haunts our English meadows; sothat I have always called the prettiest pine glade in Chamouni, “Fairies’ Hollow.” It is in the glen beneath the steep ascent above Pont Pelissier, and may be reached by a little winding path which goes down from the top of the hill; being, indeed, not truly a glen, but a broad ledge of moss and turf, leaning in a formidable precipice (which, however, the gentle branches hide) over the Arve. An almost isolated rock promontory, many-colored, rises at the end of it. On the other sides it is bordered by cliffs, from which a little cascade falls, literally down among the pines, for it is so light, shaking itself into mere showers of seed pearl in the sun, that the pines don’t know it from mist, and grow through it without minding. Underneath, there is only the mossy silence, and above, for ever, the snow of the nameless Aiguille.
§ 9. And then the third character which I want you to notice in the pine is its exquisite fineness. Other trees rise against the sky in dots and knots, but this in fringes.2You never see theedges of it, so subtle are they; and for this reason, it alone of trees, so far as I know, is capable of the fiery change which we saw before had been noticed by Shakespeare. When the sun rises behind a ridge crested with pine, provided the ridge be at a distance of about two miles, and seen clear, all the trees, for about three or four degrees on each side of the sun, become trees of light, seen in clear flame against the darker sky, and dazzling as the sun itself. I thought at first this was owing to the actual lustre of the leaves; but I believe now it is caused by the cloud-dew upon them,—every minutest leaf carrying its diamond. It seems as if these trees, living always among the clouds, had caught part of their glory from them; and themselves the darkest of vegetation, could yet add splendor to the sun itself.
§ 10. Yet I have been more struck by their character of finished delicacy at a distance from the central Alps, among the pastoral hills of the Emmenthal, or lowland districts of Berne, where they are set in groups between the cottages, whose shingle roofs (they also of pine) of deep gray blue, and lightly carved fronts, golden and orange in the autumn sunshine,3gleam on the banks and lawns of hill-side,—endless lawns, mounded, and studded, and bossed all over with deeper green hay-heaps, orderly set, like jewellery (the mountain hay, when the pastures are full of springs, being strangely dark and fresh in verdure for a whole day after it is cut). And amidst this delicate delight of cottage and field, the young pines stand delicatest of all, scented as with frankincense, their slender stems straight as arrows, and crystal white, looking as if they would break with a touch, like needles; and their arabesques of dark leaf pierced through and through by the pale radiance of clear sky, opal blue, where they follow each other along the soft hill-ridges, up and down.
§ 11. I have watched them in such scenes with the deeper interest, because of all trees they have hitherto had most influence on human character. The effect of other vegetation, however great, has been divided by mingled species; elm and oak in England, poplar in France, birch in Scotland, olive in Italy andSpain, share their power with inferior trees, and with all the changing charm of successive agriculture. But the tremendous unity of the pine absorbs and moulds the life of a race. The pine shadows rest upon a nation. The Northern peoples, century after century, lived under one or other of the two great powers of the Pine and the Sea, both infinite. They dwelt amidst the forests, as they wandered on the waves, and saw no end, nor any other horizon;—still the dark green trees, or the dark green waters, jagged the dawn with their fringe, or their foam. And whatever elements of imagination, or of warrior strength, or of domestic justice, were brought down by the Norwegian and the Goth against the dissoluteness or degradation of the South of Europe, were taught them under the green roofs and wild penetralia of the pine.
§ 12. I do not attempt, delightful as the task would be, to trace this influence (mixed with superstition) in Scandinavia, or North Germany; but let us at least note it in the instance which we speak of so frequently, yet so seldom take to heart. There has been much dispute respecting the character of the Swiss, arising out of the difficulty which other nations had to understand their simplicity. They were assumed to be either romantically virtuous, or basely mercenary, when in fact they were neither heroic nor base, but were true-hearted men, stubborn with more than any recorded stubbornness; not much regarding their lives, yet not casting them causelessly away; forming no high ideal of improvement, but never relaxing their grasp of a good they had once gained; devoid of all romantic sentiment, yet loving with a practical and patient love that neither wearied nor forsook; little given to enthusiasm in religion, but maintaining their faith in a purity which no worldliness deadened and no hypocrisy soiled; neither chivalrously generous nor pathetically humane, yet never pursuing their defeated enemies, nor suffering their poor to perish: proud, yet not allowing their pride to prick them into unwary or unworthy quarrel; avaricious, yet contentedly rendering to their neighbor his due; dull, but clear-sighted to all the principles of justice; and patient, without ever allowing delay to be prolonged by sloth, or forbearance by fear.
§ 13. This temper of Swiss mind, while it animated the whole confederacy, was rooted chiefly in one small district which formedthe heart of their country, yet lay not among its highest mountains. Beneath the glaciers of Zermatt and Evolena, and on the scorching slopes of the Valais, the peasants remained in an aimless torpor, unheard of but as the obedient vassals of the great Bishopric of Sion. But where the lower ledges of calcareous rock were broken by the inlets of the Lake Lucerne, and bracing winds penetrating from the north forbade the growth of the vine, compelling the peasantry to adopt an entirely pastoral life, was reared another race of men. Their narrow domain should be marked by a small green spot on every map of Europe. It is about forty miles from east to west; as many from north to south: yet on that shred of rugged ground, while every kingdom of the world around it rose or fell in fatal change, and every multitudinous race mingled or wasted itself in various dispersion and decline, the simple shepherd dynasty remained changeless. There is no record of their origin. They are neither Goths, Burgundians, Romans, nor Germans. They have been for ever Helvetii, and for ever free. Voluntarily placing themselves under the protection of the House of Hapsburg, they acknowledged its supremacy, but resisted its oppression; and rose against the unjust governors it appointed over them, not to gain, but to redeem, their liberties. Victorious in the struggle by the Lake of Egeri, they stood the foremost standard-bearers among the nations of Europe in the cause of loyalty and life—loyalty in its highest sense, to the laws of God’s helpful justice, and of man’s faithful and brotherly fortitude.
§ 14. You will find among them, as I said, no subtle wit nor high enthusiasm, only an undeceivable common sense, and an obstinate rectitude. They cannot be persuaded into their duties, but they feel them; they use no phrases of friendship, but do not fail you at your need. Questions of creed, which other nations sought to solve by logic or reverie, these shepherds brought to practical tests: sustained with tranquillity the excommunication of abbots who wanted to feed their cattle on other people’s fields, and, halbert in hand, struck down the Swiss Reformation, because the Evangelicals of Zurich refused to send them their due supplies of salt. Not readily yielding to the demands of superstition, they were patient under those of economy; they would purchase the remission of taxes, but not of sins; and while the saleof indulgences was arrested in the church of Ensiedlen as boldly as at the gates of Wittenberg, the inhabitants of the valley of Frütigen4ate no meat for seven years, in order peacefully to free themselves and their descendants from the seigniorial claims of the Baron of Thurm.
§ 15. What praise may be justly due to this modest and rational virtue, we have perhaps no sufficient grounds for defining. It must long remain questionable how far the vices of superior civilization may be atoned for by its achievements, and the errors of more transcendental devotion forgiven to its rapture. But, take it for what we may, the character of this peasantry is, at least, serviceable to others and sufficient for their own peace; and in its consistency and simplicity, it stands alone in the history of the human heart. How far it was developed by circumstances of natural phenomena may also be disputed; nor should I enter into such dispute with any strongly held conviction. The Swiss have certainly no feelings respecting their mountains in anywise correspondent to ours. It was rather as fortresses of defence, than as spectacles of splendor, that the cliffs of the Rothstock bare rule over the destinies of those who dwelt at their feet; and the training for which the mountain children had to thank the slopes of the Muotta-Thal, was in soundness of breath, and steadiness of limb, far more than in elevation of idea. But the point which I desire the reader to note is, that the character of the scene which, if any, appears to have been impressive to the inhabitant, is not that which we ourselves feel when we enter the district. It was not from their lakes, nor their cliffs, nor their glaciers—though these were all peculiarly their possession, that the three venerable cantons or states received their name. They were not called the States of the Rock, nor the States of the Lake, but the States of theForest. And the one of the three which contains the most touching record of the spiritual power of Swiss religion, in the name of the convent of the “Hill of Angels,” has, for its own, none but the sweet childish name of “Under the Woods.”
§ 16. And indeed you may pass under them if, leaving the most sacred spot in Swiss history, the Meadow of the ThreeFountains, you bid the boatman row southward a little way by the shore of the Bay of Uri. Steepest there on its western side, the walls of its rocks ascend to heaven. Far, in the blue of evening, like a great cathedral pavement, lies the lake in its darkness; and you may hear the whisper of innumerable falling waters return from the hollows of the cliff, like the voices of a multitude praying under their breath. From time to time the beat of a wave, slow lifted, where the rocks lean over the black depth, dies heavily as the last note of a requiem. Opposite, green with steep grass, and set with chalet villages, the Fron-Alp rises in one solemn glow of pastoral light and peace; and above, against the clouds of twilight, ghostly on the gray precipice, stand, myriad by myriad, the shadowy armies of the Unterwalden pine.5
I have seen that it is possible for the stranger to pass through this great chapel, with its font of waters, and mountain pillars, and vaults of cloud, without being touched by one noble thought, or stirred by any sacred passion; but for those who received from its waves the baptism of their youth, and learned beneath its rocks the fidelity of their manhood, and watched amidst its clouds the likeness of the dream of life, with the eyes of age—for these I will not believe that the mountain shrine was built, or the calm of its forest-shadows guarded by their God, in vain.