Life in the Open Air, and Other Papers/"The Heart of the Andes"
"THE HEART OF THE ANDES."
"Eye to eye we look
On knowledge, under whose command
Is Earth and Earth's, and in whose hand
Is Nature like an open book."
"THE HEART OF THE ANDES."
We of the northern hemisphere have a geographical belief in the Andes as an unsteady family of mountains in South America,—a continent where earthquakes shake the peaks and revolutions the people, where giant condors soar and swoop, where volcanoes hurl up orbed masses of fiery smoke by day and flare luridly by night, where silver may hang in tubers at the roots of any bush, and where statesmen protocol, and soldiers keep up a runaway fight, for the honor and profit of administering guano. Long ago, in the dim cycles, Incas watched the snowy Andes for the daily coming of their God, the Sun. Then the barbaric music of those morning oblations died away, and, except for Potosi, the Andes might have been quite forgotten. First again we hear of them as a scientific convenience. That mysterious entity, the Equator, hung, like a more tenacious Atlantic cable, from peak to peak. French savans climbed and measured it, and found it droll to stand at noon on their own shadows no bigger than dinner-plates. The world began to respect these mountains as pedestals for science; but later, as the Himalayas went up, the Andes went down. Chimborazo dwindled sadly in public esteem when it was proved that Kunchinjinga and Gaourichanka could rest their chins upon its crown without tiptoeing. By and by came Humboldt and lifted the Andes again. He proclaimed anew their marvellous wealth of vegetation, and how they carry on their shoulders the forests and gardens of all climes. He told, also, of their grandeur, and invited mankind to recognize it. But their transcendent glory, as the triumph of Nature working splendid harmony out of brilliant contrast, remained only a doubt and a dream, until Mr. Church became its interpreter to the Northern world.
A great work of art is a delight and a lesson. A great artist owes a mighty debt to mankind for their labor and thought, since thought and toil began. He must give token that he is no thankless heritor of the sum of human knowledge, no selfish or indolent possessor of man’s purest ideals of beauty. The world is very tender, but very exacting with genius. True genius accepts its duty, and will not rest short of the highest truth of its age. A master artist works his way to the core of Nature, because he demands not husks nor pith, but kernel. The inmost spirit of beauty is not to be discerned by dodging about and waiting until the doors of her enchanted castle shall stand ajar. The true knight must wind the horn of challenge, chop down the ogre, garrote the griffon, hoist the portcullis with a petard, and pierce to the shrine, deaf to the blandishments of the sirens. Then when he has won his bride, the queen, he must lead her beauty forth for the world’s wonderment, to dazzle and inspire.
Recipients of the boons of Art have their duty co-ordinate with the artist’s. Art gives a bounty or a pittance, as we have the will or the capacity to receive, — copper to the blind, silver to the fond, red gold to the passionate, dense light of diamond to the faithful lover. We gain from a noble picture according to our serenity, our pureness, our docility, our elevation of mind. Dolts, fools, and triflers do not get much from Art, unless Art may perchance seize the moment to illuminate them through and through, and pierce their pachyderms with thrills of indignant self-contempt and awakening love. For divine Art has power to confound conceit into humility, and shame the unwashed into purifying their hearts. Clown Cymon saw Iphigenia, and presently the clown was a gentleman. Even if we have a neat love for the beautiful, and call ourselves by the pretty, modest title of amateurs, we have a large choice of degrees of benefit. We may see the first picture of our cycle, and receive a butterfly pleasure, a sniff of half-sensual emotion; or we may transmute our butterfly into a bird of paradise, may educate our slight pleasure into a permanent joy, and sweetly discipline our passion of the finer senses into a love and a worship. We can be vulgar admirers of novelty with no pains, or refined lovers of the beautiful with moderate pains. Let no one be diffident. Eyes are twice as numerous as men; and if we look we must see, unless we are timid and blink. We must outgrow childish fancies, — we must banish to the garret our pre-Praxitelite clay-josses, and dismiss our pre-Giottesque ligneous daubs to the flames. We may safely let ourselves grow, and never fear overgrowth. Why should not men become too large for “creeds outworn”!
“The Heart of the Andes” demands far more than a vague confidence that we can safely admire without committing ourselves. It is not enough to look awhile and like a little, and evade discrimination with easy commonplaces. Here is a strange picture evidently believing itself to be good; if not so, it must be elaborately bad, and should be massacred. If good and great, let it have the crown of unfading bays; but the world cannot toss its laurels lightly about to bristle on every ambitious pate. If we want noble pictures and progress to nobler, let us recognize them heartily when they come. An artist feels the warmth of intelligent sympathy, as a peach feels sunshine. The applause of a mob has a noisy charm, like the flapping of wings in an army of wild-pigeons, but the tidal sympathy of a throng of brother men stirs the life-blood. When a man of genius asks if he speak the truth, and the world responds with a magnificent “Ay!” thenceforth his impulses move with the momentum of mankind. Appreciation is the cause and the consequence of excellence.
As a contribution toward the understanding of Mr. Church’s great work, I propose in the following pages to analyze its subject and manner of treatment. I shall eschew technicality of thought and phrase. The subject is new, the scenes are strange, the facts are amazing. People in the United States are familiar with solemn pine woods and jocund plains and valleys, and have studied the bridal-cottage picturesque everywhere; but Cordilleras, and the calm of uppermost peaks of snow, and the wealth of tropic forests, they know not. Some commentary, then, on this novel work, seems not impertinent. I am obliged to execute my task in the few last days while the picture ripens rapidly under the final brilliant touches of its creator; and the necessity of haste must be my excuse for any roughness of style or opacity of condensation.
Before proceeding to the direct analysis, let us notice the strength of our position as American thinkers on Art. Generally with the boons of the past we have to accept the burdens of the past. But only a withered incubus, moribund with an atrophy, squats upon our healthy growth in Art. We may have much to learn, but we have little to unlearn. Young artists, errant with Nature, are not caught and cuffed by the despotism of effete schools, nor sneered down into inanity by conservative dilettantism. Superstition for the past is feeble here, to-day. We might tend to irreverence, but irreverence is soon scourged out of every sincere life. We have a nearly clear field for Art, and no rubbish to be burned. Europe has been wretchedly impeded and futilized in Art by worshipping men rather than God, finite works rather than infinite Nature, and is now at pains to raze and reconstruct its theories. Our business is simpler, and this picture is a token of inevitable success, — a proof and a promise, a lesson and a standard. The American landscape-artist marches at Nature with immense civilization to back him. The trophies of old triumph are not disdained, but they are behind him. He is not compelled to serve apprenticeship in the world’s garrets of trash for inspiration, nor to kotou to any fetish, whether set up on the Acropolis, or the Capitoline, in the Court of the Louvre, or under the pepper-boxes in Trafalgar Square.
No lover of Art should be bullied out of his faith in his own instincts and independent culture by impertinencies about old masters and antique schools. Remember that Nature is the mistress of all masters, and founder of all schools. Nature makes Art possible straightway, everywhere, always.
Habits of mind are in every man’s power which will make him an infallible judge of artistic excellence at once. Does some one ask how to form those habits for comprehending landscape Art? If we are pure lovers of the world of God; if we have recognized the palpitating infinite of blue sky, and loved to name it Heaven; if we have been thrilled with the solemnity of violet dawn, and are rich with remembered pageantries of sunrise, and have known the calm and the promise of twilight glories over twilight glooms, and have chosen clouds to be the companions of our brightest earthly fancies; if we have studied the modesty, the stateliness, and the delicate fiery quietness of the world of flowers, and have been showered with sunbeams and shadows in the tremulous woods; if we have watched where surges come, with a gleam on their crest, to be lavish of light and music on glittering crags; if, with the simple manly singer of old Greece, we deem “water best,” — best for its majesty in Ocean, best in the brave dashes and massy plunge of a waterfall, best in every shady dingle where it drifts dimples full of sweet sunlight, and best in twinkling dew-drops on a lily tossed into showers of sparkles by a humming-bird; if we have felt the large grandeur of plains sweeping up to sudden lifts of mountain, and if mountains have taught us their power and energy, and the topmost snow-peaks their transcendent holy calm; if we have loved and studied Nature thus, and kept our hearts undebased by sense and unbewildered by mammon, — then it is to us that noblest Art appeals, and we are its scholars and its tribunal. Then we have no mundane errors to recant, and will not keep up a shabby scuffle with our convictions, and chuckle punily over some pinchbeck treasure-trove of our conceit, some minor fault in a noble work; but, finding that a bold lover has gone nearer to Nature than we, will choose him for our guide, and follow straight in his track to the penetralia of beauty.
There are two questions to be asked regarding “The Heart of the Andes.” 1. Is it a subject fit to be painted? 2. Is it well done? Genius should not choose for its theme, The Model Frog-Pond, and revel there in the clammy ooze. And if Genius paints the Portals of Paradise, they must not be rusty, repulsive, and baleful as the Infernal doors. This picture is a new-comer of imposing port. When a supernatural guest enters, the first question is, — “Ho, the Great Unknown! Art thou Archangel, or Ogre, or overgrown Scarecrow?” Which of these personages have we here?
“Why paint the Andes?” says anybody. “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Why go among the condors and centipedes for beauty? Cannot Mr. Church stay at home and paint Niagaras? Or the White Mountains, — they are a mile high?”
Why paint the tropics? Every passionate soul longs to be with Nature in her fervor underneath the palms. Must we know the torrid zone only through travelled bananas, plucked too soon and pithy? or by bottled anacondas? or by the tarry-flavored slang of forecastle-bred paroquets? Rosy summer dwells fair and winning beyond our Northern wastes, where winter has been and will be, and we sigh for days of basking in perpetual sunshine. Warmth is the cheer, and sunshine the charm of Nature. Without warmth, we become Esquimaux nibbling at a tallow dip. Without sunshine, color fades away into Arctic pallors. All the blush and bloom and winy ripeness of earthly beauty are the gifts of sunshine. Upon the tropics those gifts are poured out most lavishly.
For some years past, Mr. Church has been helping us to a complete knowledge of the exciting and yet indolent beauty of the tropics. He has learned the passion of those Southern climes, while he has not unlearned the energy of his own. He has painted the dreamy haste of the Magdalena, the cataract of Tequendama, temperate uplands where spring abides forever, and scene after scene of sunny noon and tender evening, with river and plain watched by distant snow-peaks. He has given us already other noble smaller pictures of the Andes, prototypes of the present work.
Men of science have sighed over their bewilderment in tropic zones, where every novelty of vegetation is a phenomenon. Botanists sit there among the ruins of their burst herbariums, and bewail the lack of polysyllabic misnomers for beautiful strangers in the world of flowers. But Art should sing pæans, when it discovers the poetry of form and color entangled among those labyrinths, and hasten to be its interpreter to the world. Mr. Church has attempted to fulfil this duty already, and has painted rich forests by rivers near the sea, where files of graceful cocoa-palms stand above the leggy mangroves, — luxuriant copses where the crimson orchis glows among inland palms, — pulpy-leaved trees all abloom with purple flowers, — delicate mimosas, — ceibas like mounds of verdure, — bowers of morning-glories, so dense that hummingbirds cannot enter, and glades where lianas hang their cables and cords, bearing festoons of large leaves and blossoms with tropic blood shining through their veins. He has happily avoided any feeling of the rank and poisonous. No one calls for quinine after seeing his pictures, or has nightmares filled with caymans and vampires.
So much for the tropical lowlands. “The Heart of the Andes” takes us to the tropical highlands. It claims to convey the sentiment of the grandest scenery on the globe. Through a mighty rift of the South American continent parallel with the Pacific, the Andes have boiled up and crystallized. Under the equator, this Titanic upheaval was mightiest. According to some cosmical law, power worked most vigorously where beauty could afterward decorate most lovingly. Here narrow upright belts of climate are substituted for the breadths of zone after zone from torrid to frozen regions. All the garden wealth of the tropics, all the domestic charm of Northern plain and field and grove, dashed with a richer splendor than their own, are here combined and grouped at the base and along the flanks of bulky ranges topped with snow and fire. Polar scenes are here colonized under the hot equator. Eternal snows climb out of eternal summer. The eye may catch a beam from the scarlet orchis, child of fiery climes, and glance before that rosy light is lost to the solemn white dome of Chimborazo. We can look at the North Pole through the crest of a palm, and cool the fire in our brain by the vision of a frostier than the “frosty Caucasus.” Symbols of passion and of peace face each other. We can see at once what the world is worth. What Nature has deemed man fit to receive, is here bestowed in one largess. All earth’s riches are compacted into one many-sided crystal.
In “The Heart of the Andes,” Mr. Church has condensed the condensation of Nature. It is not an actual scene, but the subtle essence of many scenes combined into a typical picture. A man of genius, painter, poet, organizer in any domain of thought, works with larger joy and impulse when he obeys his creative imagination. Life is too short for descriptive painting; we want dramatic painting. We want to know from a master what are the essentials, the compact, capital, memorable facts which he has had eyes to see and heart to understand in Nature. We should have asked of Mr. Church, after the elaborate studies of his two visits among the Andes, to give us what he has given here, — the vital spirit of these new glorious regions, so that their beauty could become a part of our minds, and all our future conceptions be larger and richer for this new possession.
The first question, then, as to the subject of this picture, is answered. The theme is worthy to be treated. Let us proceed, secondly, to the special analysis.
The picture may be roughly divided into different regions, as follows:—
The Sky.
The Snow Dome.
The Llano, or central plain.
The Cordillera.
The Clouds, their shadows and the atmosphere.
The Hamlet.
The Montaña, or central forest.
The Cataract and its Basin.
The Glade on the right foreground.
The Road and left foreground.
Each of these regions I will take up in order.
The Scene is an elevated valley in the Andes, six thousand feet above the sea; the Time, an hour or two before sunset.
The artist might have chosen an enthusiastic moment of dawn, when peaks of snow over purple shoulders of porphyry confront the coming day. Or he might have exhibited a sunset pageant with marshalling of fiery clouds. Handled with his ability of color, such would have been electrifying effects of power in passionate action. But this picture is to teach the majesty of Power in Repose. The day’s labor is over. High noon is long past, but "gray-hooded even" not yet come. There is rich accumulation of sunshine, and withal an undertone of pensive shadow answering to that consciousness of past and possible sorrow which so deepens every present joy. In a previous great picture, “The Andes of Ecuador” painted after Mr. Church’s first visit, he has depicted the glory of sunset flooding a broad wild valley. There the sun is master, and its atmosphere almost dazzles us away from simple study of the mountain forms. In “The Heart of the Andes” the great snow-peak is master, and its solemn, peaceful light the illuminator of the scene. Any land can see the sun occasionally, but any land cannot see dome mountains of snow. Therefore let the sun retire from this picture, and stand, as we do, spectator; and let us have that moment of day when light is strong and quiet, and shadows deep but not despotic.
The blue sky is the first region of the picture for our study. Unless a landscape conveys a feeling of the infinite, it is not good for immortals. This sky is no brazen canopy, no lustrous burnished screen, no opaque turquoise surface. It is pure, penetrable, lucent in every tremulous atom of its substance, and as the eye pierces its depths, it feels the same vital quiver thrilling through a boundless calm. Without an atmosphere of joy, earthly triumphs and splendid successes are naught. As fully is pure sky a necessary condition of delight in the glories of Nature. Could that divine presence of the snow-peak dwell in regions less clear and radiant than those we are viewing? Blue sky melting into a warmer glow overhangs, surrounds, tenderly enfolds, and rests upon the mountain’s golden crown and silvery-shadowed heights. No blank wall thrusts us back as we seek an egress from the picture, but blue sky clinging and closing about our way leads us on, sphere after sphere into the infinite.
A few motionless cirri lie like wreaths of foam flung together by meeting ripples on this aerial ocean. Pellucid creatures of air are they, dwelling in mid ether from which they came and into which they will presently be transfigured after moments of brilliant incarnation. They seem emanations from the mountain, a film of its own substance, light snow-drifts whirled up into the blue. Their spiritual flakes lift the peak and intensify the hue of the sky. Their white upon the azure is as delicate as the mingling of erect white blossoms and violet-blue wreaths of flowers in the right-hand foreground, which in fact recalls and is a memorial of them. Of the other clouds I will speak as I come to their proper aerial region in the picture.
Next let our thoughts come down from these supernal regions, and pause “new-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.” A man becomes exalted to a demigod, more nobly divine than any of the Olympians, when he can soar to such a summit as this. An isolated snow-peak is the sublimest of material objects, and worthiest of daring Art, if Art but dare. Here it has dared and done.
This mountain is a type, not a portrait. If the reader insists upon a name, he may call it Cayambe, and fancy he sees the ghost of La Condamine stepping off an arc of the Equator on its shoulders, and blowing his icy fingers as he parts the snow to find the line. But Cayambe perhaps does its share in carrying the girdle of the world. It has been useful enough in a scientific way, and need not take the artistic responsibility of resembling this pictured peak. Besides, compared to this, Cayambe is but a stunted hillock, being only some nineteen thousand feet high. The snow line of the equatorial Andes is at sixteen thousand feet, and Cayambe’s three thousand feet of snow would be but a narrow belt on this mountain’s breadth of golden fields of winter. Chimborazo then! — clarum et venerabile nomen — is it Chimborazo? Alas those revolutionary South American republics! — they have allowed El Chimborazo to be dethroned. Once he was chieftain of the long line from Tierra del Fuego to Arctic ice. Then fickle men revolted and set up two temporary bullies, a doubtful duumvirate, Sorato and Illimani. Finally, some uneasy radical rummaged out Aconcagua from modest retirement in the Chilian Andes, and pronounced his ermine to be broadest, unless his brother Tupungato should pretend to rival him. This mountain, dominant at the “Heart of the Andes,” is not then Cayambe or Chimborazo, or any other peak of the equatorial group. It is each and all of them, and more than any. It is the type of the great trachytic domes of the Andes, which stand in such solemn repose beside the fiery vigor of volcanic cones like Cotopaxi, and the terrible ghastly ruin of a gulf of burning craters like Sangay.
And now, let us dally no more with questions, but look and wonder before the supreme object of the picture, — this miracle of vastness, and peace, and beauty, not merely white snow against blue sky, but Light against Heaven. No poetry of words can fitly paint its symmetry, its stateliness, the power of its rising slowly and strongly, from chasm and cloud, up with pearly shadows and coruscating lights, up with golden sunshine upon its crown, up into the empyrean. The poetry is before our eyes. A look can read it. For this is what great Art alone can do, and triumphs in doing. It gives a vision of glory, and every one who beholds it is a poet.
But we can study the architecture of this firm fabric. Consider on what a base it stands, — what buttresses it has. No threatening crag is this that may be sapped. Here toppling ruin will never befall. We are safe in our Paradise at the Heart of the Andes.
Observe the method of its growth. First, across and closing the purple glen to the left, rises a rosy purple mountain, as it were an experiment of form toward the grander edifice. A few spots of snow rest among its tyro domes and pinnacles. It is not, then, a petty structure. The snow tells us that, if it stood where stands the shadowy mountain of the middle background, it would rise far above that cloud-compelling height.
Behind this disrobed model of the grander forms above, rises another experimental mountain, climbing up to the regions where snow gives roundness and softness to anatomical lines of rock. It leans upon the dome, and bears it up with stalwart breadth of shoulder. Separated from its younger brother by profound ravines, it grows up a mighty concave mass, a slow, majestic upward surge, with a sweep, and sway, and climb in every portion of its substance and its surface, and yet so broken by insurgent crests of cliff, paly purple over opalescent shadows, and so varied by slopes of snow, and wreath, and drift, and dimple, and bend, and rounded angle everywhere, that there is no monotony in its solemn curve towards the dome. Faint shadows of clouds dim its lustre. It has not yet attained to the uppermost cloudlessness. A delicate drapery of blue mistiness over its swelling reaches is rendered with masterly refinement.
Two essays have thus been made in mountain building, and two degrees of elevation overcome. Now the vigor of the first purple cliffs, and the broad sweep of the snowy shoulder, are combined in the Dome. Suddenly, across its chasm of isolation, the Dome mounts upward, and marks its firm outlines against the sky. Its convex lines of ascent are bold as the lines of the first model, while its calm, rounded summit repeats the deliberate curves of the snow-clad terrace beneath. There is no insubordination among the parts, nothing careless or temporary in the work. Skill and plan have built up a mass, harmonious, steadfast, and adamantine. This is a firm head upon firm shoulders, whatever else may crumble in a century, and fall to ruin in an æon. Cities of men may sink through the clefts of an earthquake, but this mountain is set up to be a symbol of power for the world’s life.
Observe further the effect of orderly vastness given by the nearly parallel lines of the ridges upholding the Dome. The uppermost of these is a complete system of mutually sustaining buttresses. Up from crag to crag of this ridge, the eye climbs easily; dashing up the shady purple precipices, resting in each gray shadow, speeding across the snowy levels, leaping crevice, and pausing at each fair dimple until it has measured its way up to the specular summit. If colossal peaks rose, naked rock, against the sky, their gloom would be overpowering. And if fiends had the making of worlds, mountains would be dreadful bulks of black porphyry, the flame-born rock, — monuments and portents of malignity. Cyclops and gnomes, to say nothing of more demoniac craftsmen, would never have capped their domes and pyramids with lightsome snow. But mountains, the most signal of earthly facts, are transfigured from gloom to glory by the gentlest creature of all that float and fall, — the snow-flake. It is not enough that air should lie in clouds, and float in mists, and linger in violet haze in every dell of the lower mountains, but there must be a grander beauty than bare mountains, rich with play of strong color, and softened with shadow, can express. High above the strength of his earth God has set the beauty of his earth; — glory of snow above the might of adamant.
When the observer estimates that the Dome is at least sixty miles from his point of view, he will be able to measure the power of its mass and the proportions of its details. Each sunny dimple thus expands to an abyss. Seeming ripples on the snow-fields become enormous mounds heaped up by the whirlwinds that riot forever among those dry, unfathomable drifts, the accumulation of ages. Below the first sheer slope on the front of the summit is a chasm between the precipice and a bare elbow of rock, — a lovely spot of pearly shadow. Measure that chasm with the eye; — into it you might toss Ossa and see it flounder through the snow and drown; and Pelion upon Ossa would only protrude a patch of its dishevelled poll. Things are done in the large among the Andes.
Clouds close the view on each slope of the Dome; on the left touched with orange, where they reflect the glow of the peak; on the right gray and shadowy. They half disclose and half conceal a mysterious infinite on either side. An isolated silvery aiguille juts out of this obscure, a contrast in its color and keen form to the Dome, and hinting at successions of unseen peaks beyond. A slender stratus cloud comes in with subtle effect across the vapors below the summit, — a quiet level for the eye, where all the lines are curved and tending upward.
The Dome is the Alpha and the Omega of the picture, — first to take the eye as the principal light, and the last object of recurring thought when study proves that all the wealth below lies tribute at its feet, and every minor light only recalls its mild benignancy.
It is hard to put the essence of a volume into a few paragraphs. This mountain is a marvel, and merits silent study of hours; I have endeavored to point out briefly its great qualities of construction. The reader must remember that the beauty of snowy mountains is a recent discovery. An age ago, poets had nothing to say of them but a shiver, and painters skulked away and painted “bits.” The sublimity of snow-peaks should underlie all our feeling for the lesser charms of Nature. Yet many people of considerable sentiment still shiver and skulk before these great white thrones of the Almighty. But yet not every one who would, can be a pilgrim to Mecca. Not every one can kneel at the holiest shrines of Nature. Let us be thankful to Mr. Church that he has brought the snowy Andes to us, and dared to demand our worship for their sublimity.
When our mortal nature is dazzled and wearied with too long gazing on the golden mount, where silence dwells and glory lingers longer than the day, we may descend to the Arcadian levels of the Llano at the “Heart of the Andes.” See how the plain slides, smooth as water, carrying sunshine up to the stooping forests at the left-hand base of the central mountain. On the reaches of this savanna is space and flowery pasturage for flocks and herds. Llamas may feed there undisturbed by anacondas. No serpent hugs; no scorpion nips; never a mosquito hums over this fair realm. Perpetual spring reigns. If the Arcadians wish perpetual summer, with its pests and its pleasures, they have only to mount a mule and descend; the torrid zone is but a mile below. Life here may be a sweet idyl; and the great mountains at hand will never let its idyllic quiet degenerate into pastoral insipidity.
A sweep of this fair meadow-land, eddying along under steep banks behind the village, bears us unawares up steep acclivities, and we become mountaineers again, climbing the Cordillera.
The Dome was an emblem of permanent and infinite peace: — this central mass of struggling mountain, with a war of light and shade over all its tumultuous surface, represents vigor and toil and perplexity. The great shadow of the picture is opposed in sentiment, as well as in color and form, to the great light.
Begin with the craggy hillock at the centre of the background, behind the village tower. It seems a mere episode of the life of the great mountain above it; but observe how thoroughly, as in all Mr. Church’s work, its story is told. Detail is suggested, and yet suppressed. The hill is in shadow, but not consigned to utter blackness, and maltreated with coarse neglect. You may perceive or divine every line of sinking surface, and every time-worn channel converging to the gulf in its front. You may feel that it bears up a multitudinous forest on its isolated crest, where fires that sweep the mountain moors, or “paramos,” have not reached. Level with this compact pyramid extends to the left a bench of rocky plateau, where we can gird ourselves for our sturdy task. Then, as we toil resolutely up, we find that earth was not at play when this Titanic mass was reared. Here are mountain upon mountain; crag climbing on the shoulders of crag; plain and slope, and “huddling slant” and precipice; furrow, chasm, plunging hollow, quebrada and abyss; solitary knolls, groups of allied hills, long sierras marked on their sheer flanks with cleavage and rock-slides; conical mounds, walls of stem frontage; myriad tokens of primeval convulsions; proofs everywhere of change, building, razing, upheaval, sinking, and deliberate crumbling away, and how new ruin restores the strong lines that old ruin weakened. Yet, with all this complex action and episode, there is still one steady movement upward of this bold earth-born Hyperion higher toward the masterful heights, with stronger step and larger leap as he learns the power of sustained impulse, and mounts nearer and nearer the region of final mysterious battle in clouds and darkness, on the verge of final triumph beyond the veil. Peace and light dwell upon the Dome. Here is a contrast of mystery and dim chaos; — yet no grim obscure; no shock of hurtling storms. The sun penetrates the veil, and the heights glow pallid-rosy. Over the edge, keen as a wave, of the topmost cliff, float showery mists of tender iridescence; then violet heights and rainbow-mists and wreaths of pale cloud fade together out of sight.
Over all this central mountain play of color rivals infinity of form. Evanescent blues, golden browns, pearly violets, tender purples, and purple greens mantle delicately over its giant shoulders. If the Dome was a miracle of light, this mountain is equally a miracle of light and shade. Gray forests clothe a narrow zone at its base. Then come the “paramos,” the rocky moors covered with long yellow grass, where fires have frequent course and drive the trees down into gorges far beneath their proper level, — then the rocks, all stained and scarred with time, and enriched with lichens and mosses. Over all these many-colored surfaces, air, pale or roseate, floats and deepens in every hollow. Aerial liquidness, tremulous quivers of light, rest on seamed front and smooth cheek. Sunbeams rain gently down from the cloudy continent above. We know not where it is not sun, nor where the melting shadow fades. And all, whether sunlit slope, or profound retreating abyss, or sharp sierra, is seen through leagues of ether, a pellucid but visible medium. Forms become undefined, but never vague in this gray luminousness. The enchantment of beautiful reality in all this central mountain is heightened by the faint pencils of light striking across the void. And observe, as an instance of the delicate perception of truth that signalizes every portion of this picture, that these evanescent beams converge. Diverging rays are familiar to every one who has seen sunsets. Old Sol in the almanacs is a personage of jolly phiz, with spokes of light diverging from cheek and crown. But converging rays can only fall when the sun is, as in this case, behind the point of view; and this disposition of light is a phenomenon comparatively rare. A regard for such fine truths as this arms the artist with a panoply, and makes his work impregnable.
No substitution of trickery for tactics could possibly have drawn up this masterly array of mountain elements. It is thorough knowledge and faithful elaboration of detail that makes this central mass real, and not mythic; a vast, varied pyramid of rock, and not a serrated pancake of blue mud set on edge. Mr. Church proves that he knows and feels grand forms, and the colors which pertain to them as inseparably as the hues of a diamond belong to the facets of a diamond, and that he is able enough, and diligent enough, to express his knowledge and love. This harmonious contrast of sun and shadow, crag and glen, educates the eye forever to disdain those conventional blotches of lazy generalization — vain pretenders to the royal honors of mountains — which cumber so many landscape backgrounds, and demand as much of the student as if he should be required to construct Hamlet from a ghost, the Tuileries from a tile, or Paradise from a pippin.
A canopy of the lofty rain-clouds of this region overhangs the central mountain. We have already observed their shadows; let us now analyze their substance, and note their effect.
Western winds sweeping the Pacific catch dew from the thickets of palm-islands, and foam from breakers on the reefs that shelter blue lagoons, scoop handfuls from the deeps, where sunlight strikes like bended lightning, and tear away the stormy crests of surges. And as the winds hasten on in their hot journey, they play with their treasures of coolness, and find that vapor is a ductile thing, and may be woven into transparent fabrics of clouds, light, fragile, strong, elastic, and with all the qualities of dew and foam, sunny water, and the lurid might of angry sea. Such cloud-wreaths the warm ocean winds hold ready to fling upon every frigid slope of the Andes. No one of these aerial elements is wanting to the clouds over Mr. Church’s majestic Cordillera. They have the shimmer of dew, and the bulk of the surge; they are light as a garland, yet solid to resist a gale. Flexible sunbeams can penetrate this texture, and twine themselves with every fibre, and yet bluff winds cannot shatter them. Brightness and darkness flow and fuse together among their rims and contours.
These are not woolly clouds, nor fleecy breadths of woolliness; not feathery clouds, nor brooding feathered pinions. They are not curls of animal hair, nor plumes of fowls. Only the morbid will be reminded by them of flocks of sheep, or flights of rocs. They are clouds made of vapor, not of flocculent pulp, or rags, or shoddy. They are no more like either syllabub or dumplings than Mr. Churches air is like lymph, his water like yeast, or his peaks like frosted plum-cake. Epithets from the kitchen or the factory are equally out of place. These are veritable clouds of coherent, translucent vapor; — magical creations, because there is no magic in them, but only profound, patient, able handiwork guided by love. They are beautiful because they are actual clouds of heaven, and show that the artist knew the infinite life of clouds and the dramatic energy of their coming and going, eventful with shadow and light, and sometimes with tears and dreary tragedies of storm, — that he has seen what wreathed smiles they have for sunshine, what mild rebuffs for boisterous winds, — seen their coquetries of flying and waiting, their coy advances, their wiles of hiding and peering forth with bright looks from under hoods of gray. And having thus studied the character and laws, the use and the loveliness of these spirits of the air, the artist, knowing that he cannot better the models of Nature, has adopted them. Painting of natural objects must be imitation or mockery. A great artist studies to master type forms. When he has grasped the type, then he can construct individuals as he will, but any attempt to create new types results in inanity or caricature, in the deformity of feebleness, or the deformity of the grotesque.
Nothing in the picture is more masterly than these clouds upon the Cordillera. See how they climb and cling to the slopes, how they bridge the hollows, and fling themselves against the opponent cliffs, how they trail and linger, as if to choose their bivouac for the night-watches. They do not sag ponderous and lethargic, nor droop in sorry dejection, weeping out their hearts because their backs are broken. Nor do they fritter away their dignity in a fantastic dance. They are elate and springy with eagerness through all their brilliant phalanxes, and detach themselves with perfect individuality from the far-away sky and the dark mountain. They are naturally and rightly in their place, and give the needful horizontal, for change of line, after so much height, as well as the needful concealment and revelation of form.
But the Llano at the Heart of the Andes, the village, the Montaña, the cataract, and the inexhaustible charms of the rich foreground, invite us. Let us take at a leap the gulf on the mountain-side where a thread of cascade is faintly visible. We advance over the gradual slope behind the dark forest, and notice the forceful quiet of that breadth of gray woodland in shadow, in the middle distance, with its bold fronts of rock.
Let us here pause for a moment. What have we done? Where are we? Let us review our mountain work before we go among the groves and flowers of Arcady. We passed first up the misty glen to the left under the purple precipices, — a stern gorge and a terrible, though now it look so fair. We beheld the Dome, and approached it reverently. We climbed its three terraces. We studied its impressive mass. We saw where its foundations were laid deep and broad, — the triumphant peace of its golden curves against the sky, —and found exquisite light in its shadows. We noticed the magnificent rolling line of the Cordillera where it cuts against the sky and meets the snows, — observed its varied color and form, and marked what a cloudy world it upholds on Atlantean shoulders. We have, in short, studied the Andes, Cordillera and Nevado, the region of animated clouds above the one, and the realm of sinless sky above the other. This is what we have done; — what we have gained will appear when we come to review the whole picture.
The woods behind the village are next to be studied. Half-way down, a bench of warm rock breaks the slope abruptly. The same formation of precipice appears that reappears in the walls of the cataract. Below this the woods radiate over the descent toward the hamlet, and forward toward the water. In all this multitudinous forest of the Montaña, there is nothing of the gloom of the impenetrable vegetation of the fiery lowlands of the tropics. In this elevated valley vegetation assimilates to that of the temperate zones; there is never any nipping check of winter; the tree can develop its life without harsh discipline of frost, and grow without need of frantic impulse after long lethargy. Hence we are at home, and yet strangers in these woods. Our Northern comrades seem to surround us, but they have suffered promotion. They wear richer uniforms and more plentiful decorations. Kindlier influences have been about. Downright perpetual passionate sunshine has educated their finer spirit, and made gross wrappings of protective bark, and all their organization for enduring cold, needless. It is a community which has been well treated and not maltreated, wisely nurtured and not harshly repressed.
The student will recognize the constituents of these forests in the magnificent types of the foreground. I desire at present merely to call his attention to the healthy cheerfulness of their color, and the vigorous, but not rank, character of their growth. Down in the hot valleys, foliage sucks dank from the sluggish air, and, growing fat and pulpy, is not penetrated by sunlight, but only reflects a hard sheen. Seen from above, lush greens preponderate. Few of the largest trees have leaves of delicate texture like our maples. But the groves across the midlands of the Heart of the Andes are gayer, as becomes their climate. And giving to them a higher degree of what they have, Mr. Church has dashed his magical sunshine in among them everywhere, in every glade and cleft, making the whole scope one far glimmer of tremulous scintillating leafage and burning blossoms. It is, as we feel, a countless grove, with many masses of thicket and careless tangles of drapery, such as we see on the left-hand foreground, and vistas of ambrosial gloom, such as open down the ferny dell on the right.
By the skirts of this forest we come to the village. A city of citizens we should feel to be out of place here. Volcanoes may be suitable companions for the turbulent abodes of men, as men now are. A melodramatic little Vesuvius, threatening when it is not outraging, always discontented, and often an insurgent malecontent, grumbling and bellowing, “full of sound and fury,” a demoniac and revengeful being, — this is a fit emblem, of a modern capital. But the solemn peaks of snow must stand among the giant solitudes. And yet, that we may not be quite deserted of human sympathy, the Artist has placed here a quiet hamlet grouped about its humble sanctuary. This is memorial enough of humanity, — we need not stand here bewildered as if we were its first discoverers. We have no uneasy sense of loneliness and exile. Brother men have lived and loved in this paradise. We do not require a crowd of minor associations such as help to glorify tame scenes of every-day life. Petty histories and romances are wanted to kindle fervors for petty places. Sentimental art demands ruins, and strives to “make old baseness picturesque.” But the magnificence of Nature here can be felt without aid from the past. Historic drapery is not needed. Absolute beauty can be loved at first sight. To think our noblest thoughts, we go away from relics to solitude, to God, and to the future.
There is poetic propriety, therefore, in this undisturbing village sanctified by its shrine of faith. Men have not forgotten their conception of God at the Heart of the Andes, — the heart of the heart of the world, where its pulses beat hottest and strongest. And the Artist sets up his own symbol of faith in the church and the foreground cross, and recognizes here that religion whose civilization alone makes such a picture as his possible. A pleasant hamlet is this, with its reed-thatched huts, — here where life is so easy and goes a-Maying all its days.
Divine repose was expressed by the Dome; manly energy by the Cordillera. And now we welcome a graceful feminine element. Water is the fair stranger we are now to greet. We have been all the while aware of her brilliant presence; and have not rarely wandered away from the rough hills to be refreshed by rainbow showers, and stirred with a sense of dancing motion. Now we may give ourselves fully to the river’s bright influence. Forth from a sunlit spot it comes, as unexpected as if we had not seen its placid delay above, where its pool attracted and fixed the village. It comes with snow memories in the foam of its rock-shattered flow. It curves with deep, clear fulness into an upper rocky basin. It gushes so firm and urgent against its walls that its reflected edges are seen to be heaped higher than the unchecked slide of its mid-current. One inch more in its angle of descent would send that whole smooth clearness flying into foam. But its strong speed does not spoil its mirror-like quietness. It moves steadily on to its beautiful duty, and then suddenly — “the wild cataract leaps in glory.”
The river is transfigured before us. Motion flings itself out into light. Green water snows down in a glimmering belt of white. Every drop dashes away from every other drop. Each one has its own sunbeam. Diamond flashes join into jewelled wreaths. Pearl and opal blend their soft tremors. Sapphire and beryl mingle with the strong glow of amber. And the wreaths intertwine and float together, until the mid-whirl is a gemmy turbulence, a crush of foam and spray, and rays and rainbows.
There is no sharp line to mark where calm sliding water is instantly transmuted into wild falling water. The fall becomes a fall without any harsh edge of precipice. We cannot define where the shadowy gleam above bends fleeter over the first ledges; nor where the bend first breaks with spray, and spray thickens, and the curve passes into a leap, and the leap into a resistless plunge, and all the bends, curves, leaps, and plunges fling themselves together in joyful abandonment, thrilled through and through with sensitive tremors of graceful daring.
As the cataract comes gushing forward rather than dropped in precipitous downfall, so it is not received on a flattened level of water below. Rocks break its plunge, and give it pause. And then this shape of beauty, disarrayed, but fairer thus, springs, not frantic or sullen, into a gloomy chasm, but sweeps, a mist of sunshine, down behind an iridescent veil, upon the white splendors of its own image. It eddies with lambent lights along the warm cliffs, and then glides down the steps and rapids of a new career — on to join the Amazon.
Serene sunshine fills the right of the gulf. On the left, where spray keeps the mosses of the cliff long and rich, is a flow of softened prismatic color, and the angle is filled with opalescent reflected lights from the sunny cataract. This is one of the most enchanting effects in the picture.
The gleam of the Cataract recalls the snows of the Dome. The bending plunge of the one repeats the slow curves of the other. Across leagues of full distance, the light of the fall, secluded and subordinate, answers, like an echo, to the great dominant light. And observe also in the division of the cataract by its bold cliff, and in its parted cascade falling in dimness on the right, a reminiscence of the Cordillera, and the dependent misty light at its summit. Such continuous effects sustain the dramatic unity of the picture, and show that one creative thought reigns everywhere. Observe again how the level of the basin below the cataract corresponds with the emphatic plateau below the mountains, — repose after power. No discomposure or weariness is anywhere possible. We are nowhere beaten back and debilitated by stern, rude heights we cannot climb. Slope and plateau and successive grades of ascent take us gently up from the lowest plane of blue water speeding toward ocean, to blue, illimitable space of sky. Step by step the eye is educated to comprehend the vast scope of the scene, yet no step is abrupt. There is always some spot where the precipice breaks off into ledges, and where steeps pass into declivities.
Before he comes to the complex beauty of the foreground, let the student make one more excursion over the large undulations and among the shady coverts of the central forest, — the Montaña of the Andes. Glows of approaching evening lie among the long shadows and fall across the glades. Not even where the dusky canopy of clouds shuts off sunshine can this become an austere woodland. Trees of many-colored foliage make play of light even in the unillumined spots; and sunshine, streaming low and level, betrays a wilderness of leafage and umbrage, stems and vines.
From these bright labyrinths we emerge again into open daylight. Here, above the basin, warm cliffs uphold a tablet where sunlight may blazon its last fond inscriptions. Other hieroglyphs are already there, — the story of the rock’s own life told in crevice, ledge, and mossy cleft, and the myriad traces of Time, the destroyer and renewer. As air above, so water below has pencilled its legend. Lapping ripples have marked levels of drought and freshet along its base. And the cliffs, doing their part in this interchange of bland influences, send down their image to hang without heaviness in the shimmering water. The still water reflects, as perfectly as the arrowy, shattered water contained, light. How full of mild splendor is this pool of Nepenthe! Into its amphitheatre the river leaps exulting. A maze of woven sunbeams floats above her bold repetition of feats done in her youth among argent snows. She springs out upon her own image, which falls before her, a column of white lustre lengthening over the undulations, only to break in the swift silvery bends of the lower rapid. And above this wavering image Iris floats within her veil of mist, and her bright hues shine through it. The cataract sheds prismatic tints upon the unsunlit cliffs, and the cliffs that are in sunlight shed radiance upon the air. The void is flooded with a glow of reflected lights. All about, trees stoop over the brink and tassel the precipices with tendrils and pendent branches. Delicious spot, which he who will can dream full of the music of falling water, as he sees it brimming with effulgence. It lies open before us, a lucent shell lined with imprisoned rainbows, — a chalice of dissolved pearl, — a flushed corolla, where the cataract rises like a white cone of vestal leaves just opening, — a pool of newly-troubled water, where weary spirits may find healing and lightness of heart.
We come now to the right-hand foreground. Three specific typical trees project over the basin, — a trio of comrades sustaining each other in their vanguard station, — unmistakable individuals, evidently not brothers. I have no names for these pioneers. Probably no arborist, complacent with offensive armor of Latin nomenclature, has penetrated these solitudes at the Heart of the Andes. But no ungainly polysyllable could identify these trees more completely than do their distinctive qualities as here given. Midmost stands the stalwart masculine tree, oak-like in its muscular ramification, and upholding a compact crown of plentiful leafage. Light flashes everywhere in among its leaves, catches them as they turn and gilds them, slants across them sheenily, pierces athwart their masses into the dim hollows and fills them with gleams, stands at openings of cavernous recesses in the dense umbrage and reveals their mysterious obscurity. Twigs and sprays bare of foliage, and showing that the crumbling away of soil beneath is telling upon the more delicate members of the tree, strike forth and crinkle as they clutch sunlight. And yet there is no frivolous minuteness of detail in this masterly tree, leader of the trio, and its fellows; although every leaf and spray and twig seem to be there, alive and animate.. The Artist has here, as everywhere, produced his effect by the peremptory facts of form and color, without weakening precision by attempts to convey ambiguous semblances. Hence his tree is a round salient mass, but not a cactus-like excrescence, and a maze of leafage without being a blur or a mop. In signal contrast to this sturdy, erect outstander is the tree with depending branches and delicate silvery-green foliage, — a tree of more elegance of figure and a mimosa-like sensitiveness of leaves, but vigorous and not at all shrinking from the forward and critical position which it holds. The third tree, the Lepidus of this triumvirate, keeps somewhat in the shady background, and leans rather toward the thicket, being of less notable guise and garb. His stiff, scanty leafage and channelled bark are entirely characteristic of the region. Each of these trees is not only a type in its form and foliage, but also, though less conspicuously, of the garden of smaller growth which, feeding on air, dwells on its trunk. Clustering luxuriance of boweriness belongs to the sheltered recesses, and does not inundate these foremost types. But each is a hanging garden, an upright parterre raising up to sunshine its peculiar little world of warm-blooded mosses, lichens, and tree-plants, sparkling over its trunk like an alighting of butterflies. The tropical sun loads his giants with his pigmies. Observe the rich contrast of the mound of vivid moss with the red trunk of the outermost tree. Each of these trees wears a splendid epiderm, but neither has had the leprosy, — an unpleasant malady which frequently attacks foregrounds. Mr. Church’s trees are too freshly alive, and show that they digest air and water too healthily to suffer with any cutaneous disease. A somewhat formal personage the leader of the pioneer trio may be, but his stiff dignity is invaluable in this sybaritic covert, and to the picture, as giving determined perpendicular lines after so much level and slope. Behind this picturesque group, two companions of theirs come striding out of the dusky woodland, each a standard-bearer of a new, unknown clan, and wearing new insignia of rank.
Let us enter this delightsome pleasaunce whence they come. Sunshine streams in with us a little way, and leaves us for a spot it loves among the choirs of blossoms. So we wander on into ambrosial darkness. And over us the trailers stream with innumerable tendrils; — our firmament is a gentle tempest of gold and green, — a canopy of showering clouds of verdure, — a rain of wreaths and garlands. A cascade of bowery intricacy shoots down inexhaustible, dashing into flowers at its foot, and pouring a slide of sparkling greenery among the ferns toward the pool. The cope of forest overhead flings itself down to mingle with the floral coppices, and lianas bind the bright shower to ther bright spray below. Just where the bosk thickens, a tree fern stands like a plume, waving us inward. Lesser ferns carpet the vista, making a deeper, richer greensward than Northern climates know; but this one is the pride of its race. Its prim gracefulness gains the charm of “sweet neglect” by the droop of its ripened and withered fronds, and by the delicate creepers which climb upon the scales of its past leafage. No plant in the upland tropical woods is more elegant than the tree fern. It surpasses even the palm in refinement of foliage, and its plumes become the substitute for palms in the elevated zones where the latter would chill and wither. Behind this fair, bending Oread, under overarching darkness, extends the gloaming mystery of the Montaña.
This vista of forest conducts us inward to a region as doubtful and dim as the height of the Cordillera above, and contrasts with the open road on the left, guiding us up to the Dome. And when we have had enough of dreamy wandering deep in these bowers of Elysium, we may come forth, and pluck flowers in the wondrous garden at the margin of the picture, — a maze of leaves and blossoms as intricate as the maze of vine-drapery above, or the maze of shower and rainbow at the mountain-top. The Artist has come with his hands full of tribute to Flora, and flung exuberant beauty into this sunny, sheltered spot, where warm dewy airs, stealing up the river, bring summer higher than its wont. Liberal as is the beauty here, there is no cramming, — no outlandish forcing of all possible and many impossible objects into an artificial clustering. Here there is simplicity in complexity, — order in bewilderment. Nor is this spot a glare of metallic lustres, and all aflame with hot splendors, or incarnadined with crimson hues. Peaceful colors govern here as everywhere in this home of peace. The feathery blue cymes of a plant which the Indians name “yatcièl” recall the quiet blues of the sky. White spires mingle with the blues. Below, the convolvulus strews its rosy-purple disks over mantling vines. A scarlet passion-flower, the “caruba,” sparkles upon a garland of its own. Reedy grasses start up erect. And lowest, broad juicy leaves, gilded upon their edges with the all-pervading sunshine, grow full and succulent with moisture from the stream.
A perfect garden, — crowded with infinite delicacy and refinement of leaf and flower, — where there is no spot that is not blossom, or leafage, or dim recess where faded petals may lie, — where all seems so fair with these cloud-like creatures of white, these wreaths of azure bloom, and stars of scarlet, that this gentler beauty of earth almost wins us to forget the grander beauty we have known on the summits far away. And as we turn away from the glade, with a boon of sweet flowers in our memory, the last foremost objects that linger with us are two brilliant white blossoms, dashed with the same light which flashes in the cataract, and burns sublimely in the far beacon, the giant dome of snow.
The sun, which loses no opportunity to pierce in unexpectedly anywhere among these scenes, beloved of sunshine, achieves a weird effect in the shadows upon the rock beneath the morning-glories, cast by the sprays and branches of a dead bush. And notice how these shadows have light in them, as shadows should, and are not dark like the unillumined hollows beneath the rocks and shrubbery. An admirably defined rock, part warm color, part purple shadow, part hidden by the caruba vines, leans against the bank, and aids in supporting it.
In the middle of the lower foreground a large-leaved tree, bristling with epiphytes, stands out in vigorous perspective. The water below is half seen through its branches, and gains by an effect of partial concealment and a passing away out of the picture behind a leafy screen.
The tawny slope of road in the left foreground leads us back to another tangle of forest. All the drooping, waving, tossing, prodigal luxuriance of the glade on the right is here repeated in half-distance, — another denser maze, wellnigh impenetrable, in which we may discern the tree fern, now familiar, and may feel that our previous studies have taught us to know “dingle and bushy dell” and “every bosky bourn of this wild wood from side to side.” A vista, or cleft, across its intricacy, rather suggested than patent, tells us where the path leads towards the Llano and the Hamlet, and the same vista opens to connect the nearest glows and flashes of white light with the radiance of the Dome. Forth from the forest the Road dashes bright as another cataract, and yet a warm surface of trampled earth. An infinite gemminess of flowers scintillates along its course; — there seems no spot where the eye may not catch a sparkle. The same brilliancy gilds the rocks which support the road on the right, and overhang the abyss. Nothing in the picture is truer or more marvellously salient in color and form than the purple crag, with sunlight broken by cross-shadows, lying upon its hither front. Nothing is more boldly characterized, and more full of fresh and vigorous feeling, than the sweep of the road, accurately and precisely defined in all its structure, and bathed in mellow sunlight and mellower shade.
Just at the top of the ascent stands a cross, — a token of gratitude for labor past, and rest achieved. Such crosses are usual among the passes of the Andes, wherever a height has been overcome. The natives pause and repose, and say a thankful Ave, as the two figures in the picture seem to be doing. Their presence is a cheerful incident, and their bright pouchos throw in a dash of gay tropical color. To us also the cross, prominent against its dark background, has sweet symbolical meaning, sanctifying the glories of the spot; and, as in the old saintly legends flowers sprang up under the feet of martyrs, so here a spontaneous garland has grown to wreathe this emblem of sacrifice and love.
Observe next how exquisitely the sloping side of the road toward the dim precipice on the left clothes itself with a mossy verdure, and how the moss thickens and streams down into the chasm, meeting the slender line of sapphire water that trickles from a crevice in the steep. Foremost of all the picture the Artist has set up his trophy in the broken shaft, — the stem of some ancient monarch of the forest. Upon this he has flung his last brilliant spoils. The scarlet orchis stands out like a plume from a tuft of other air-plants, a fall of draping creepers hangs from above, strange rich forms of plants cluster about its base, and, fastened by a fillet of large leaves, each distinct upon its own shadow, one burning white blossom gleams, midway the column, like a jewel upon an argent shield. Upon a branch just by, in bravery of lustrous green plumage, sits the “royal bird of the Incas,” and below gay butterflies twinkle. Through some cleft of forest, beyond the verge of the picture, one trenchant sunbeam strikes, and, falling upon this propylon shaft, seems to set upon the whole great work the sun’s final signet of approval.
I have thus treated rapidly, and perhaps baldly, the signal facts of this picture. Its execution everywhere equals its conception. It is indeed many perfect pictures in one,—as a noble symphony bears in its choral swell a thousand hymns and harmonies. The lover of quiet beauty may here find solace, and he who adores supernal beauty has objects for loftiest worship. Yet so admirable is the dramatic construction of the work, that no scene is an episode, but each guides the mind on to the triumphal crowning spectacle,—every thought in the picture is an aspiration toward the grand dominant thought, the Dome of snow.
"The Heart of the Andes" is in itself an education in Art. No truer, worthier effort has ever been made to guide the world to feel, to comprehend, and to love the fairest and the sublimest scenes of Nature. It opens to us, in these ardent ages, a new earth more glorious than any we have known. What Beauty can do to exalt mankind is as yet only the dream of a few, but must some time become the reality of all. Toward this result Mr. Church offers here a masterpiece, the largess of his bountiful genius. Men are better and nobler when they are uplifted by such sublime visions, and the human sympathies stirred by such revelations of the divine cannot die;—they are immortal echoes, and they
"roll from soul to soul
And grow forever and forever."
Gambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.