THEDIFFERENT TYPES OF ALPINE MAGNIFICENCE.
AS the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol and the Daily Telegraph have both given their blessing, as it were, to Alpine travel, we may conclude that there is really something in the scenery which the Alps afford to excite both religious reverence and that sense of grandiose astonishment which the Telegraph is wont to
extol because it is supposed to bring you near to the heart of the
cosmic forces' of the universe. But we are inclined to hope that the latter class of feelings are rather likely to be roused by leaders 'written at home on Alpine scenery than by the actual vision of it. At least, as far as the present writer is concerned, it is impossible to
conceive a more opposite class of impressions than those excited by Alpine scenery, and those (very much allied to nausea in their physical symptoms) excited by such disquisitions thereon as the following Telegraphesc :—
,,The pure snow is spread like a perpetual missal-cloth, and night and day, sunrise and sunset are the ministering priests, with silence for the Liturgy—except when avalanche, or crackling glacier, or crag, thundering down at the touch of the sunbeam's golden finger, break the stupendous hush with a voice proclaiming the power of the Oreator."
In the impressions produced by the real scenery there is an un- usually strong, sometimes almost oppressive sense of quiet power; in those produced by the Telegraphic descriptions an unusually strong and very oppressive sense of pretentious importance. But as both the Church and the World seem to take it for granted that to see the Alps is really worth not only some cost, but some risk, it is worth considering what it really is which you gain by that cost and risk. If it is only importance in your own or anybody else's eyes, perhaps it is worth rather legs than nothing. It may, how- ever, be maintained,—we have heard it maintained,—that there is an oppressive uniformity about Alpine scenery,—that it conveys, indeed, the sense of wonderful power in a great variety of forms, but that there is no sufficient difference in those forms to make it worth one's while to visit the Alps often or stay there long ; that the granduer of the scenery rather overpowers the free play of thought and fancy, while the monotony of the tone elicited from the one chord of feeling to which appeal is made,—that of physical awe,— becomes wearying and even oppressive before long. That is a criticism on Alpine travel quite worth considering. And the only answer to it of the least value is to show bow very great the variety of the impressions made by different classes of Alpine scenee,—even though you select all of them from those of the grandest and most characteristically Alpine character,—really is. We will take three, all of the grandest, all of the class accessible to the ordinary traveller, ,whether he be moun- taineer or not, and yet to our mind standing almost as widely apart in the memory in relation to the impression produced, as a scene of pure,sublimity would stand from one of pure loveliness. We will take the scenery of the Stelvio Pass, that of the Gorner Grat above Zermatt, and that of the range of Mont Blanc above Chamounix as seen from the opposite heights of the Breveut. So far from
there being anything of monotonous reiteration or uniformity of effect about these different scenes, we do not believe that auy traveller who has seen all three will feel that there is more same- ness about his impressions of them than there is about his impressions of Lucerne and of Windermere.
The Stelvio Pass, if ascended from the northern side,—a car- riage-road pass, though it reaches the height of 9,000 feet,— produces far more of the unmixed feeling of overshadowing, over- powering, overwhelming greatness than any other accessible to ordinary travellers who are not practised mountainers, among the high Alps. This is due, no doubt, to the enormous mass of the Orteler which towers directly over your road as you wind up the interminable zigzags from early morning to late evening, and the great narrowness of the intervening valley between this massive and grandly-shaped mountain and the Stelvio itself, along the side of which the ascent creeps,—the only distant, and that not a very distant view, being the glimpse you get from time to time of the shining glaciers of the Oetz Thal behind you. Tho great glaciers which sweep down on every side from the summit of the Orteler, and which develop rapidly before your eyes and become more and more threatening in their grandeur with every thousand feet in the ascent, at last seem to approach you so closely that you are wrapped round, with glacier almost as you might be by the huge boa constrictor of which their curves remind you. As the great white dome of Monte Cristallo comes out towards the summit of the pass, just when the sun is sinking and the air is becoming chill with the sharpness of an Arctic climate, and the highest pines are far beneath, and the rude galleries, made to protect the path from fulling snow, turn evening almost into night, though the bent peak of the Orteler still high above you, reflects faintly the last glimmer of sunset, the feeling of the crushing predominance over you of the great natural forces in the presence of which you stand, the feeling that you are at once imprisoned and extinguished between the impending glaciers and the depth beneath, rises iuto strange intensity. No- where else in the Alps has this sense of sheer, overwhelming power, this feeling of being a prisoner, with individuality almost obli- terated by the dominance of mightier forces, been felt by' the present writer with anything like equal intensity. It was with an inexpressible sense of relief when the summit of the pass was gained that the forest of mountain tops rising into the twi- light on the Southern side, and the sudden widening-out of the prospect, came upon one. It was like a sudden release from an intolerably grand, and therefore oppressive prison amid the glaciers and precipices of the most secret Alps.
The effect of the view from the Gorner Grat is entirely different. The grandeur due to the vast range, extraordinary variety, and almost unrivalled immensity of Alpine forms folded by huge glaciers which spread their arms on every side, is nowhere visible (except to the genuine mountaineer) in such perfection. The snow mountains stretch round in a vast ellipse, at the focus of which nearest to the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa the spectator stands. You can see the Jungfrau and the Aletschhorn dimly at the extreme end, while the Breithorn, Castor and Pollux, the Loiskamm, and Monte Rosa appear scarcely a stone's-throw off, with only gulfs of glacier between. The Matterhorn, solidest of mountain wedges, regular 'enough in shape to seem almost an Egyptian obelisk expanded by some magic to the height of 6,000 feet above the pedestal on which it is planted, is not two miles away, with great fields of snow stretching between it and the Breithorn ; the wonderfully graceful and symmetric oone of the Weisshorn rises in the middle distance, and between and beyond these striking snow summits there intervene in- numerable links in the chain of peaks which make the panorama complete. It is impossible to find,—to say it is impossible to conceive would be little in comparison, for the actual landscape,goes far beyond imagination,—a wilder scene of desolate power in Switzerland or the Tyrol. There is every element of grandeur present,—interminable snow-fields, certainly over twenty huge glaciers writhing down into the valley within easy range of the spectator's eye, precipices of vast depth and abruptness, startling sharpness of mountain outline such as no landscape which does not contain the Matterhorn could pretend to show, and variety in the forms of power beyond anything the traveller can elsewhere hope to find. But for that very reason the effect is not one of sheer overwhelming sublimity in the least, —it is rather one which impresses on you the extraordinary range and wildness of the Alpine scenery ; the sense of the power of nature, though more striking than ever, is not given in that con- centrated form which overshadows the imagination, and makes you feel with Jacob, " how dreadful is this place !" You have
something of the sublimity of the desert combined with the sublimity of the mountains ; a feeling of the inexhaustibility of space, of the preternatural vastness which is associated with preternatural forces; of a power which may exhaust our wildest freedom, rather than of a power which might crush us by the loosening of a single atom. There is less oppression than in such a scene as the Stelvio, but then there is also less of the sense of limitation. The menace and the shrinking due to the immediate impression made ou the mind is less, indeed, is lost in the sense of wonder, in the multiplicity of surprise which so much variety of desolate power excites, but though the mind is less dwarfed and, so to say, cowed by the grandeur before it, simply 'because its activity is more stimulated and challenged, perhaps the ultimate sense of grandeur resulting is even greater ; for the impression produced by the inexhaustible, iseven more lasting than the impression produced by the overwhelming. The latter con- quers and dismays ; but the former surrounds and insulates as in an infinite sea of power.
The view of the range of Mont Blanc, as seen from the opposite heights of the Brevent, is again quite distinct in character from either of these. The traveller comes over the summit of the col from a scene singularly desolate,—when the writer of this paper -crossed it last, a vulture, which had seized some living prey in its talons, was laughing a most eerie and almost demoniac 'laugh in the sky far overhead,—aud if the afternoon be fine, is suddenly confronted by a perfectly symmetric range of white splinters, needles, domes, and glaciers stretching for at least ten miles in one long range, the glaciers dropping like great tongues -of ice into the green and quiet valley whence the white houses of Chamounix peep ont. Nowhere in Switzerland is the sense of harmony and beauty so perfectly mingled with the sense of sub- dimity. The slender and snowy Aiguilles, which aro almost as thickly set as the ears of corn in a corn-field, and not unlike them in shape,—for the great ribs of green and purple rock, from which the wind has swept away the snow still lying in all the rifts and bringing out the colours against its white ibaokground with wonderful sharpness, resemble, in some degree, ,gigantic ears of wheat,'—stretch away ou both sides of Mout Blanc, as if to set off the wonderful majesty of his vast snow- elopes, and the mighty head that retires far behind, as well as rears itself far above, the general range. The stately lino of peaks 'seems to have been designed, in the wonderful harmony of its parts, aud the exquisite beauty of its perspective, for a fitting resitting of the great centre of the range ; and in spite of the over- whelming display of grandeur, what strikes the mind is more the wonderful grace which distinguishes the magnificence, than any sense of bald and naked power. From the Gorner Grat the -irregularity of the mountain ranges and of the wildernesses of glacier and snow-field is so impressive, that the sense of order and law in the spectator is almost outraged by what seems a lavish and even wasteful expenditure of power on every freak of moms- UM ruggedness and Arctic desolation. The art of the scene, if .art it can be called, consists in its wonderful expression of the wildness of nature, i.e., of the resources of a power to the meaning and distribution of which we have no key. But the symmetry of the range of Mont Blanc suggests creative art whose laws are partly visible to us, at least as visible as the beauty of the rainbow or the majesty of a line of breakers at sea. It happened to the present writer to see the great range as a heavy thunder- storm passed over it, completely hiding it at first, and then leav- ing summit after summit shining with green and purple and gold in the setting sun, as the thunder and the lightning drifted away
towards the west, while the most brilliant and perfect of rainbows spanned the valley of the Arve, resting on one side on the slopes 'of the Elegem, ou the other on the slopes of Mont Blanc. The effect was one which even Turner would have despaired of render- ing,—of magnificence not tamed, but heightened, by the magic of loveliness,—of beauty not diminished, but rendered awful by the splendour of power. Even Shelley, gazing on this scene, was -compelled to write of it,—
"the secret strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee,"
'which would certainly not have been the impression forced upon him as a poet, either by the overwhelming sublimity of the 'Orteler and its glaciers, or by the wild and inexhaustible grandeur of the scene from the Garner Grat. No one who knows the Alps will deny that there are, at the very least, these three utterly distinct typos of grandeur, and infinite gradations between them,—the grandeur which seizes almost with a physical power on the soul and overshadows it ; the grandeur which stimulates and excites and eludes apprehension by the very irregularity and wild- ness of its lavish variety of resource ; and the grandeur which har- monizes and fills, while it tasks, the imagination by the ordered stateliness of its sublimity.
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