Killing Dragons

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It is hard to categorise Ruskin. Born in 1819, the son of a London wine merchant, he was a writer, artist, architect, designer, critic and social opinionator the like of which had never been seen before. He espoused so many different ideas, spanned such a wide field and was so absolute in his judgements that people did not know whether to mock him or stand in awe. Usually they did both. One of Ruskin’s most heartfelt beliefs was that humankind had deviated from its natural state. He spoke not as a Luddite but as a reformer, espousing a form of Christian socialiam with a back-to-basics, self-help dogma of the kind that would later be put into practice by the Arts and Crafts movement.

One can see why he felt the way he did. By 1850 industrialism was entrenched in Britain and wherever Ruskin looked he saw evidence of how nature was being degraded. In Lancashire valleys it was impossible to walk 1,000 yards without meeting a mill or furnace. Not only was industrialisation ruining the countryside, it was ruining the very nature of the goods it produced: beer was flavoured with sulphuric acid; white bread contained alum powder; wholemeal bread was adulterated with potatoes, chalk and pipeclay; tea was made from used leaves and hedgerow clippings; pepper was augmented with floor sweepings; and milk was diluted with water. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1856, ‘In true England all is faked or forged.’1

What Ruskin wanted was a society in which people could make honest, healthy products in an honest, healthy environment. He also believed that the best work - in which he included art - could only be done in surroundings of maximum beauty. His was an economy of aesthetics, and there was no spot in Europe he found so aesthetically pleasing as the Alps. He visited them first in 1832 when he was 13, and continued to do so for much of his life. Mountains, to him, were ‘the beginning and end of all natural scenery’.² Oddly, though, he rarely climbed them and when he did he restricted himself to passes and the most accessible of low peaks. In 1844 he went up Le Buet with Joseph-Marie Couttet, Dr Hamel’s old guide. It was foggy and stormy and he saw nothing of the fabled view. The most memorable moment of the whole day was when Couttet remarked, ‘Poor child! He doesn’t know how to live!’³ Ruskin thought he was making a joke but it was, in fact, the truth. In thrall to his domineering parents until he was middle-aged, Ruskin was many things but he was rarely a partaker. He approached the high peaks in the same manner as he did his strange, unconsummated marriage: look but do not touch - according to one biographer, he likened his wife’s body to a mountain slope full of terrifying ravines. Understandably, perhaps, his aesthetic economy came to nothing. The Alps remained as they always had been, very beautiful and very poor.

To his credit, however, Ruskin did do a lot of very perceptive looking, even if he preferred his perception to the reality. He painted what he saw, and he wrote about it too, becoming the successor of the Romantics. His influence was enormous and there are few people today who have read of the Alps without being touched in some fashion by Ruskin’s works.

Among his many accomplishments Ruskin was an amateur geologist - one of his ambitions was to become president of the Geological Society of London - and he admired the work done by Saussure and Forbes. He met the latter in 1844 when (with his father) he crossed the Simplon Pass. He showed Forbes some sketches he had done of the Matterhorn. ‘His eyes grew keen and his face attentive as he examined the drawings,’ Ruskin wrote, ‘and he turned instantly to me as to a recognised fellow-workman - though yet young, no less faithful than himself. He heard kindly what I had to ask about the chain I had been drawing; only saying with a slightly proud smile, of my peak supposed to be the Matterhorn: “No, and when once you have seen the Matterhorn, you will never take anything else for it!” He told me as much as I was able to learn at that time … but I knew nothing of glaciers then, and he had his evening’s work to finish. And I never saw him again.’4 Ruskin was eternally proud of this interview and became in later years a fervent supporter of Forbes. But he was less generous to other geologists. In his view the Alps ‘formed a background not merely to one particular set of experiments but to all worthwhile existence’.⁵ He disapproved of ‘those worthless and ugly bits of chucky stones which, dignified by the name of “specimens”, become in the eyes of a certain class of people, of such inestimable value’,⁶ and he could not understand how men could be so single-minded in their appreciation of landscape. ‘Many an Alpine traveller, many a busy man of science, volubly represent to us their pleasures in the Alps,’ he wrote, ‘but I scarcely recognise one who would not willingly see them all ground down into gravel, on his being the first to exhibit a pebble of it at the Royal Institution.’⁷ He satirised them in a semi-fictitious encounter between two Englishmen:

A few rosy clouds were scattered on the heaven, or wrapped about their bases, but their summits rose pure and glorious, just beginning to get rosy in the afternoon sun and here and there a red peak of bare rock rose up into the blue out of the snowy mantle.

‘How beautiful,’ I said to my companion, ‘those peaks of rock rise into the heavens like promontories running out into the deep blue of some transparent ocean.’

‘Ah - yes, brown, limestone - strata vertical, or nearly so, dip eight-five and a half,’ replied the geologist.⁸

It was not an inaccurate picture - though few geologists went so far as Ruskin, who was portrayed chipping specimens from gravestones. It must be said, however, that the scientists whom Ruskin abhorred had a much closer acquaintance with the Alps than he did himself. True, they did not ‘love crag and glacier for their own sake’s sake [or]… question their secrets in reverend and solemn thirst’,9 but they did actually climb mountains. Ruskin did nothing of the sort. In 1858 he spent whole weeks in Turin, reporting to his father on the various moods the Alps presented, cursing when they were obscured by cloud, rhapsodising when he could see their tops and being transformed when the range showed itself in its entirety. Later he would inspect them at close quarters but shrank from climbing them. When he visited Chamonix in 1859 he paid more attention to a ghost that was rumoured to live in the woods, and a story of buried treasure, than he did to Mont Blanc. (The ghost proved illusory and when he used divining rods to find the treasure his excavations unearthed nothing but an old key.) He did climb a few passes but found them disappointing - ‘I thought the top of the St. Gotthard very dull and stupid.’¹⁰ His happiest moments were when he could stand on the flat and take in the scenery around. From Chamonix he calibrated some twenty pleasing lines on the Aiguille Blaitière. He categorised them alphabetically, line a-b running across the top of the hillside - ‘the most beautiful single curve I have ever seen in my life’¹¹ - and so on until he reached lines s-t and u-w which were mere flat-chested bulges at an indistinct point on the lower slopes.

Ultimately, Ruskin was a ground-level man. ‘All the best views of hills are at the bottom of them,’¹² he wrote. Everything that was worthwhile in the Alps should be available, in his opinion, to everybody. As he explained: ‘the real beauty of the Alps is to be seen, and seen only, where all may see it, the child, the cripple, and the man of grey hairs’.¹³ Hundreds of Britons agreed with him, migrating south in the summer to visit Chamonix’s Mer de Glace on a mule, traverse the lower slopes of the Glacier des Bossons with a guide - in exactly the same manner as tourists had done in Saussure’s time - to stare at the peaks and then to go home with the news that they had done the Alps. An equal number, however, went to the mountains for higher purposes. For them Ruskin had made the Alps the embodiment of the sublime.

Ruskin’s thoughts on the Alps gestated over a long period and were brought to the public in Modern Painters, a five-volume work whose publication was spread between 1843 and 1860. Its message was that of insight. ‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion - all in one.’14 Ruskin reckoned that Turner had been a man with insight and his advocacy of the painter’s vision was passionate. He had a premonition that all the worthwhile things that were to be seen in nature - in which he included the Alps - would very soon be gone, either swept away by industry or contaminated by materialism. He did not subscribe to dragons, witches and demons - well, not publicly: his search for the Chamonix ghost was only mentioned in his wife’s diaries - but he did find a spiritual element in the Alps and all other mountains which was no longer to be found in more accessible areas. He implored and, at times, commanded people to make the most of what they had while it was still there.

This was fighting talk in mid-nineteenth century Britain, whose industry and ingenuity brought ‘improvements’ by the day. Writing in the Quarterly Review, Lady Eastlake condemned Modern Painters for its ‘false assumptions, futile speculations, contradictory argument, crotchety views and romantic rubbish’.¹⁵ Ruskin did not care. He was contradictory, he was crotchety and at times he may have been more romantic than was currently fashionable. But his assumptions and speculations were valid and he pressed them to the hilt. Presciently, he felt he was working against time. Could people see before it was too late? So many things had already been tarred with the brush of progress. Would the little that survived be worth seeing in a few years? Would it, like real beer, real bread, real milk, real tea and the real Lancashire valleys, be consigned to history? What part did truth - of any sort, other than that of profit - play in modern society?

Ruskin fountained his opinions indiscriminately, personally and rudely. On one occasion he had to defend them in court. His values, however, remained sacrosanct and he refused to deviate from them, particularly when it came to the Alps. His writings, combined with those of the Romantic poets before him - for whom he acted, in a way, as interpreter - inspired people to think of mountains in semi-religious, transcendent terms. Any rugged rock would do for his acolytes. They found solace in Wales’s Snowdonia, England’s Lake District and, to a lesser extent (because farther away), the Scottish Highlands. The Pyrenees and the Eastern Alps in due course entered the sphere of Ruskin’s high priestdom. But it was the Central Alps, from Mont Blanc in the west, to the Wetterhorn in the east and the Matterhorn in the south, on which he spread his altar cloth. This region which had been an obstacle to early pilgrims now became an object of pilgrimage in itself. Writers and painters sought inspiration there. Mendelssohn, Liszt and Wagner composed in the shadow of the hills. ‘Let me create more works like those I conceived in that serene and glorious Switzerland, with my eyes on the beautiful gold-crowned mountains,’ wrote Wagner in 1859, having just included alphorns in the score for Tristan undIsolde. ‘They are masterpieces and nowhere else could I have conceived them.’16 Ruskin influenced Christians, agnostics and explorers alike. Sir Leslie Stephen, who was at various times all three, fell under the Alpine spell, ‘woven in a great degree by the eloquence of Modern Painters”.

Adults of the time and schoolchildren of all subsequent generations felt the blast of Ruskin’s rhetoric. As the Alpine historian Ronald Clark has said, ‘He wrote copiously, at times pompously, at times magnificently, but across whole oceans of prose there sails the message that mountains provide fine, uplifting, thought-provoking sights. For nearly half a century Ruskin used this message to erode the slowly disappearing belief that mountain areas were areas of horror and ugliness and danger. For that, all men are perpetually in his debt.’¹⁷

Ruskin’s message did get through and it did drive men and women to the Alps. When they got there, however, some tended to forget what the message was. They may have looked on the hills as objects of beauty - they all said they did - but what many craved was drama to match the breath-catching scenery, a moment of action to bring the backdrop to life. They wanted to see avalanches like the one that had hit the Hamel expedition, and if they were lucky they got them. In 1848 John Forbes, Queen Victoria’s personal doctor (no relation to James Forbes), visited the Alps and witnessed an avalanche. It slid off a shelf in a V shape that preceded a 100-foot column of snow and ice. The whole stream hung in the air for several seconds before crashing into the trees. Of his companions’ reaction to the spectacle, Forbes remarked: ‘It is like that [state] which accompanies and follows the triumphant close of some elaborate and difficult air by an accomplished singer at the opera … it would hardly have astonished me if, on the present occasion, the spectators … after their pause of fearful delight, had clapped their hands in ecstasy and ended with “Bravo!”’18

Cheap applause was not what Ruskin liked. Had he heard the ‘Bravo’, he would probably have taken the cheerers to a distance and counselled them. It was, however, bread and butter to the Alps’ next most prominent propagandist. While Ruskin elaborated on Alpine splendours, a misfit medical student cantered onto the scene, bearing behind him a cart. It contained nothing but cheap canvas, on which was painted scenes of Mont Blanc, a number of poles to hold the canvas up, and a box of candles - for effect. Nonetheless, he toured England’s home counties to such acclaim that it changed both his career and the world’s view of the Alps. His name was Albert Smith.

Two of Scheuchzer’s dragons
(© THE ALPINE CLUB COLLECTION, LONDON)

Horace Benedict de Saussure
(© THE ALPINE CLUB COLLECTION, LONDON)

Marc-Théodore Bourrit
(© THE ALPINE CLUB COLLECTION, LONDON)

Louis Agassiz
(BY COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON)