Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls: A thousand feet in depth below Its massy waters meet and flow.
I have thus far only spoken of the educative effect of mountain paintings in teaching us how to see mountain scenery, but there are other forms of art equally efficient. As a matter of history, it was the writers, and especially the poets, who induced the intelligent public to change their attitude towards mountains. I do not know who was the initiator of the movement or in what country it was first apparent. Rousseau deserves to be remembered in this connection. Sir Walter Scott and Byron carried on the work, and were supported by the poets of the Lake School. Goethe and Schiller were widely influential in the same direction. At first it was the vague romanticism of the hills and of the supposed simple life of mountain peasants that attracted sympathetic notice and description. Gradually mountains came to be looked at in greater detail and for their own sake. Finally, in our own day, Ruskin for the first time attempted to analyse mountain beauty, and not 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.