Part 44 (1/2)

From Cluse he wrote:

The air was as warm as it usually is at the beginning of September, and the country we travelled through beautiful. Many of the trees still green; most of them had a.s.sumed a brownish-yellow tint, but only a few were quite bare. The crops were rich and verdant, the mountains caught from the red sunset a rosy hue blended with violet, and all these rich tints were combined with grand, beautiful, and agreeable forms of the landscape.

At Chamouni, about effects of light:

Here too again it seemed to us as if the sun had first of all attracted the light mists which evaporated from the tops of the glaciers, and then a gentle breeze had, as it were, combed the fine vapours like a fleece of foam over the atmosphere. I never remember at home, even in the height of summer, to have seen any so transparent, for here it was a perfect web of light.

At the Col de Baume:

Whilst I am writing, a remarkable phenomenon is pa.s.sing along the sky. The mists, which are s.h.i.+fting about and breaking in some places, allow you through their openings, as through skylights, to catch a glimpse of the blue sky, while at the same time the mountain peaks, rising above our roofs of vapour, are illuminated by the sun's rays....

At Leukertad, at the foot of the Gemmi, he wrote (Nov. 9th):

The clouds which gather here in this valley, at one time completely hiding the immense rocks and absorbing them in a waste impenetrable gloom, or at another letting a part of them be seen like huge spectres, give to the people a cast of melancholy. In the midst of such natural phenomena, the people are full of presentiments and forebodings ... and the eternal and intrinsic energy of his (man's) nature feels itself at every nerve moved to forebode and to indulge in presentiments.

On the way across the Rhine glacier to the Furka, he felt the half-suggestive, half-distressing sense of mountain loneliness:

It was a strange sight ... in the most desolate region of the world, in a boundless monotonous wilderness of mountains enveloped in snow, where for three leagues before and behind you would not expect to meet a living soul, while on both sides you had the deep hollows of a web of mountains, you might see a line of men wending their way, treading each in the deep footsteps of the one before him, and where, in the whole of the wide expanse thus smoothed over, the eye could discern nothing but the track they left behind them. The hollows, as we left them, lay behind us grey and boundless in the mist. The changing clouds continually pa.s.sed over the pale disc of the sun, and spread over the whole scene a perpetually moving veil.

He sums up the impressions made on him with:

The perception of such a long chain of Nature's wonders, excites within me a secret and inexpressible feeling of enjoyment.

The most profound change in his mental life was brought about by his visit to Italy, 1786-87. The poetic expression of this refining process, this striving towards the cla.s.sic ideal, towards Sophrosyne, was _Iphigenia_.

Its effect upon his feeling for Nature appeared in a more matter-of-fact tone; the man of feeling gave way to the scientific observer.

He had, as he said (Oct. 30th, 1887), lately 'acquired the habit of looking only at things, and not, as formerly, seeing with and in the things what actually was not there.'

He no longer imputed his feelings to Nature, and studied her influence on himself, but looked at her with impersonal interest.

Weather, cloud, mountain formation, the species of stone, landscape, and social themes, were all treated almost systematically as so much diary memoranda for future use. There was no artistic treatment in such jottings; meteorology, botany, and geology weighed too heavily.

The question, 'Is a place beautiful?' paled beside 'Is its soil clay?' 'Are its rocks quartz, chalk, or mica schist?' The problem of the archetypal plant was more absorbing than the finest groups of trees. The years of practical life at Weimar, and, above all, the ever-growing interest in science, were the chief factors in this change, which led him, as he said in his _Treatise on Granite_,

from observation and description of the human heart, that part of creation which is the most youthful, varied, unstable, and destructible, to observation of that Son of Nature, which is the oldest, deepest, most stable, most indestructible.

The enthusiastic subjective realism of stormy youth was replaced by the measured objective realism of ripe manhood. Hence the difference between his letters from Switzerland and those from Italy, where this inner metamorphosis was completed; as he said, 'Between Weimar and Palermo I have had many changes.'

For all that, he revelled in the beauty of Italy. As he once said:

It is natural to me to revere the great and beautiful willingly and with pleasure; and to develop this predisposition day by day and hour by hour by means of such glorious objects, is the most delightful feeling.

The sea made a great impression upon him:

I set out for the Lido...landed, and walked straight across the isthmus. I heard a loud hollow murmur--it was the sea! I soon saw it; it crested high against the sh.o.r.e as it retired, it was about noon and time of ebb. I have then at last seen the sea with my own eyes, and followed it on its beautiful bed, just as it quitted it.

But further on he only remarks: 'The sea is a great sight.'

Elsewhere, too, it is only noticed very shortly.

Rome stimulated his mind to increased productiveness, and, partly for this reason, he could not a.s.similate all the new impressions which poured in upon him from without, from ruins, paintings, churches, palaces, the life of the people. He drew a great deal too; from Frascati he wrote (Nov. 15th, 1786):