This question might be answered in a volume and even then the answer would be incomplete and would not compel assent from all. We can only afford a single phrase here for the reply—"by taking thought." If, when a sight produces on the spectator the thrill that comes from the recognition of beauty, he will concentrate his attention upon it and remember it (as a youth remembers the beautiful face of a girl he has merely passed in the street), and if he will be on the alert to find it again and yet again, he will assuredly obtain by degrees a completer understanding and a more sensitive recognition of that particular kind of beauty. He will find more sides and aspects of it than he at first suspected. It will lead him on to a larger knowledge and a wider sympathy. His æsthetic capacity will be increased and his powers of delight continuously developed. All this in the case of mountain-beauty will come to him, not merely because he wanders among or upon mountains, but because being there he retains towards them a definite attitude of mind—an attitude, however, which is not that of the climber, and which mere climbing and exploration do not by themselves encourage. He that looks for structure will find structure; he that studies routes will find routes. To find beauty it is beauty that must be searched for as a prospector searches for gold. More priceless than gold, beauty abundantly rewards those who find her. With that guerdon in mind let the mountaineering reader ask himself, "Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?"
LUCERNE AND LAKE FROM THE DREI LINDEN
Pilatus with storm breaking over mountain and town.
CHAPTER II
HOW TO SEE MOUNTAINS
I HAVE borrowed the title of this chapter from that of an excellent book, recently published, called How to Look at Pictures. The natural man might suppose that such were questions on which there is nothing to say. The picture is before you, and all you have to do is to open your eyes and let the image of it fall on your retina. What can be more simple? Yet that is not all, because the eye only sees that which it brings with it the power of seeing. How much more one sees in the face of a friend than in that of a stranger! It is similar with all objects. In order to see aright and to see fully, the power of seeing must be acquired. Some learn more easily than others, but all must learn. It is admittedly so with music. The most self-satisfied person cannot refuse to admit that even a short tune is better grasped, better heard, on a second hearing than the first time. What is true of a simple tune is more obviously true of a complicated work. The most accomplished musician does not grasp a Wagner opera at a first hearing. Man is a creature with faculties that need training. He is not born with faculties fully trained by instinct.
To perceive beauty in a scene implies a power of selection. There is beauty in every view if you know how to find it, but the eye has to sift it out. Open your eyes at random. They are saluted by an infinite multitude of details. You can pass from one to another, but you cannot see them all at once. Looking at a tree, you can see a few leaves and twigs surrounded by a green spludge, which experience has taught you is made up of leaves or twigs, but you do not see all the leaves at once; so with blades of grass, flowers in a field, strata edges on a cliff, or crevasses in a glacier. In a broad effect of sunset you cannot be simultaneously conscious of more than a few forms and colours, and, of those you are simultaneously conscious of, one will be more important than the rest—one will give the key-note. Nor can you be equally conscious at one moment of forms and colours, or of colours and light and shade. If a view strikes you at all, it strikes you by some effect in it which you perceive, even though you may not be able to state in words what that effect is. It is clear, however, that any effect is the result of selection by the eye. The effect upon the eye would be unchanged if a quantity of details were blotted out, so long as none of those details formed part of the effect. Thus if you were attracted by the bright effulgence of a snow slope seen against a clear sky (to take a simple instance), and if your mind were concentrated upon that contrast, you would not notice the sudden obliteration of a crevasse in the slope. That detail would form no part of the effect.
As you gaze at any scene you may be continually and rapidly changing the effects you are observing, and that without altering the direction of the eye. Such, in fact, is what every view-gazer is always doing. He is searching for a satisfying effect of beauty out of the multitude of possible effects that could be found, such possible effects being always practically infinite in number. Ultimately it is probable that some one effect will obtain the mastery within him, an effect that his eye is specially capable of seeing and his mind of comprehending. He passes on his way, and a day afterwards recalls yesterday's view. What rises in his memory is not the whole scene with all its details, but the special effect that ultimately impressed him, the result of a kind of survival of the fittest within him of a multitude of competing effects that he saw or almost saw.
THE JUNGFRAU FROM INTERLAKEN
First ascended 1811.
Take, for example, a very simple instance, the view of the Jungfrau from Interlaken on a clear day. What most people see is a roughly triangular white mass below a blue sky, and limited on either hand and below by green slopes and foreground. Suppose the looker to be a meteorologist whose special study is the atmosphere and its clouds. Probably the first thing he will notice will be the quality of the blueness of the sky and the tone of the lower atmosphere between him and the white mountain and green hills. He will, in fact, observe the air-tones, and consciously or unconsciously they will be the key-note of his impression. Next comes an East Londoner with a Toynbee Hall party, let us say. What strikes him is the novelty of the white mountain. Its whiteness is his main impression, the blue and the green being perceived as mere contrasts to that, and the forms of mountain and hills being unimportant shapes of the colour limits. The size of the mountain may be a subsidiary impression, but it will depend still upon the white colour, the wonder being that so large a natural object should be of snow. Anon comes a lover of woods and trees and of the green world. The white mountain for him will merely emphasise and dignify the pine woods and the grassy swards. He will note the draping of the hills by the pine-trees, and the character of the woods. The white peak will have value in the view to him, but only a value subordinate to that of the forest. After him comes a climber, trained, let us say, in the Canadian Rockies, and now for the first time visiting the classic land of climbers. When, on a clear day, the Jungfrau bursts upon his vision, he will give all his eyes to her and her only. He will not observe the greater or lesser blueness of the sky, nor the forms and features of the foreground hills—that is to say, they will not be the first object of his attention, the key-note of the effect he perceives. No! he will notice the form of the snow peak, the modelling of the glacier surface, the striping of the avalanche tracks, the character of the outlining ridges and minor buttresses. He will be subtly conscious of what is snow and what ice, of how and why rocks emerge from the snowy envelope. Where the ignorant will conceive the peak to be a great mound of snow, the newly-arrived climber will feel it to be a mass of rock draped in snow and ice, and his attention will be caught and held by that drapery, its forms and foldings.
Finally there comes an artist, who knows nothing about mountains or forests and cares nothing, but who loves above all else (let us say) colour. What he will see will be some colour effect, some special harmony of tints in sky and snow and forest, some unifying effect that will make white, blue, and green all qualities of a single glory. If he paint the view, that is the effect he will strive to render, and in so doing he will care little about forms and details, little about modellings of glacier drapery and rocky skeleton. The colour-chord will be his aim, and all the power of his vision and the skill of his hand will be concentrated upon that. Or perhaps the artist will not come alone but in company with another of different character. This one cares less about colour than form. What will strike him will be the graceful architecture of the view, the delicate outlines, the intricate rareness of surface modelling in the snow, the strongly relieved emphasis of the limiting lines of the framing hills. Whether the sky be blue of a special tone and the foreground embellished