only produced in the fourth volume of Modern Painters a most suggestive and illuminating work, but by the magic of his language and the charm and aptness of his illustrative drawings attracted to it the attention of all that was best in English society. Whether what followed was directly due to his initiative, I do not know. The next important step was the publication of Mr. Edward Whymper's Scrambles amongst the Alps, which rapidly attained popularity of the best kind. It is difficult nowadays to put one's self in the place of mountain lovers who met with that book when it first appeared. To us it is still full of freshness and charm, but to them it was far more significant. They compared its illustrations with those in Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, published twelve years before, and they were smitten with admiration. "Look at the poor old chromo-lithographs," wrote Leslie Stephen, "which then professed to represent the mountains, and compare them with Mr. Whymper's admirable woodcuts. The difference is really remarkable. Though some of these old illustrations, copied from photographs, suggest the general outlines with tolerable fidelity, most of them utterly fail to represent a mountain at all to an educated eye. … The old daubs are mere random indications of certain obtrusive features which could not well be overlooked. Mr. Whymper's woodcuts seem to bring the genuine Alps before us in all their marvellous beauty and variety of architecture." Ruskin and Whymper, in fact, took up mountain-drawing where Dürer had left it three hundred and fifty years before. They looked at the mountains themselves with the humility that belongs to men who love the truth, and they taught others so to look. Alpine climbing taught men for the first time what mountains actually are. The power so to see them was simultaneously developed, and photography has helped.
[1] NOTE.—As to the historical question referred to at the foot of page 34, see Coolidge's Swiss Travel, pp. 24 and 128, and the references there given to A. von Haller's Die Alpen of 1732.
The question of mountain-photography is a thorny one, but it must be faced. The reader can scarcely deny that if mountains really looked like the ordinary run of commercial photographs of them, they would be ugly or at least unattractive objects. A volume of such photographs would scarcely lead a man, who had never left his home, eagerly to desire a close acquaintance with snowy peaks. That, however, was actually what Mr. Whymper's woodcuts did. Hundreds of readers of his book were thereby led to become mountaineers. Wherein does this different efficiency consist? A photograph, in theory, repeats every detail of the view it contains. Such details as drop out are either too small or too faint to be visible in the print. A camera does not select. It takes all. In this respect it differs altogether from the human eye. If you look fixedly in a definite direction and regard carefully what it is that you actually see, you will discover it to be a few central details only, and that they are surrounded not merely by vaguely defined objects but by objects duplicated. Thus the sight of the eye and the sight of a camera are not alike, either in what is beheld or what is selected. The sense of beauty depends upon what the eye selects. It would seem then that the beauty of a view could not possibly be reproduced by photography, and such was the crude conclusion once held by artists of the capacities of this modern process. Photographers, however, have proved that such is not necessarily the case.
In the infinite effects, all of them beautiful, that a single landscape is capable of yielding, and yielding simultaneously, most are beyond the reach of photography; but the same is likewise true of any one art-process. Pen-and-ink drawing, for example, is as incapable of reproducing colour effects as photography. Each art has its own limited area of possible effect. Photography, in so far as it is an art, is subject to its own definite and rather narrow limitations. A photographer can choose his subject and determine its exact limitations. As he can deal only with forms and tones, he must choose a subject so arranged by nature that its forms are in themselves beautiful, and its tones a harmonious distribution of light and shade. But light and shade varies with the hour of the day and season of the year, and forms vary with the drift of clouds over the hills, so that the selection of moment becomes for the photographer as important as the choice of point of view, direction, and area of subject. Again, by choice of length of exposure and by methods of development, the photographer can alter the quality of light and shade in his negative and the amount of detail he renders. These three factors are entirely under the photographer's control, and in so far as he avails himself of them, not merely to reproduce a view but to reproduce the picturesque effect in a view, he becomes and deserves to be regarded as an artist.
THE CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION TO THE HOFKIRCHE OF ST. LEODEGAR
The Principal Catholic Church of Lucerne.
In our own days, as the photograph exhibitions of the Alpine Club have demonstrated, there are no inconsiderable number of mountain artist-photographers. It has been proved that snow mountains are a specially suitable subject for such art. Views in the high regions of ice and rock seldom depend for their chief beauty upon colour. He whose eye is sensitive to colour-effects can, indeed, find such in profusion in the regions of snow, but they are not the effects to which experience shows mountain lovers are as a rule most sensitive. What most of us love in mountains is primarily their form. Grand forms are profusely supplied by frost-riven rocks and cloven glaciers. In great snow-fields and slopes, the surface modelling is often of transcendent beauty, and that modelling can be rendered to perfection by photography, if the right moment be chosen. Photographers who have known what to look for and what to reject, have perhaps done more even than any other kind of artists in revealing the mountains. But the right moment comes comparatively seldom and has to be seized. A climber may pass for hours through gorgeous scenery, full of subjects for a painter, yet there may not be offered to him one photographable effect. He may expose plate after plate, and carry away with him the most interesting topographical and geographical records, but among them all there will not be a single picture that will render a picturesque effect and be worthy to rank as a work of art. The artist-photographer is a man who can snatch the right moment for the right effect. He must be able to recognise immediately and instinctively, when it comes before his vision, an effect of beauty that can be reproduced. He must see in the complexity of every view what the camera will make of it, knowing for a certainty what it can be made to reflect and what to exclude. In fact he must possess the same qualities as any other kind of landscape artist, the eye that recognises an effect suited to his art and the skill to render that effect in his resulting work of art.
Such photographers, as I have said, there are and have been. Their works have opened the eyes of many a climber to effects of beauty in mountains of which they had before been unconscious. Returning to the regions of snow, they have been thus enabled to look for them and to find them. Their own sensibility to beauty has thus been enriched and their power of enjoyment correspondingly increased.
In consequence of the work of poets, writers, painters, photographers, indeed all kinds of artists, and of the stimulus exerted by them upon mountain travellers of all sorts, men have learned in the last half-century to see mountains far better, more truly, and more beautifully than was possible before. We find in them complexities and refinements of beauty the very existence of which was previously unsuspected. We do not merely wonder at their size or shudder at their savagery. We can do that when the mood is on us, but the mood seldom comes. Our forefathers generally looked at them from a distance and thought of them as a whole, seldom doing more than to identify here and there a single individual from the mass. We, on the contrary, have learnt to know them from nearer at hand. We have made friends with them; we can call them all by their names. We know the aspect of each from many points of view, and their features are as familiar to us as were the features of woodside and stream to the mediæval villager. This intimacy with the mountains has taught us that all the snowy ranges of the world are, as it were, of a single race, and that he who knows one knows something about all.
The Alpine climber, who knows the Alps, can be interested in mere description of mountain ascents elsewhere. Knowing what Alpine peaks look like and how they appear in picture and photograph, he can, by aid of pictures and photographs, attain a tolerably complete idea of the aspect of other mountain ranges. Hence the explorers of such ranges, of the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the peaks of Central Africa, South America, and New Zealand, have been called upon to describe the peaks they have