A Time of Gifts (22 page)

Yet somehow, and most contradictorily, Grünewald escapes the category I have in mind. The thorn-speckled carcass on the cross is part of an old formula; the horror is extreme; but, thanks to the harrowing poignancy of the attendant mourners and some exempting streak of genius, it is a feeling of drama and tragedy that has the last word,
[5]
removing it—for me, that is—to the atmosphere and mood of ‘Woofully araid,' the extraordinary poem on the Passion by his exact English contemporary, Skelton.
[6]

Critics and apologists blame these cruel scenes on the infectious savagery of the Peasants' War of 1523. This shattering sequel to the religious conflict left few southern Germans untouched. Even if some of these pictures were painted earlier—and the Isenheim altarpiece, for one, ante-dates it by a decade—the cruel temper of the times may well have influenced contemporary painting. But, even if it did, the results are unusual and ambiguous: the horrors of the Thirty Years' and Peninsula Wars affected Callot and Goya in a way that leaves no doubt about their attitude to those wars or the purpose of their work. What, then, are these? Grim heirlooms from the Dark Ages, unenlightened by the Renaissance but animated by its techniques, bursting out under savage stimuli? Perhaps. But religious painting is,
ipso facto
, didactic. What do these pictures enjoin? It is impossible to say. At Byzantium, an impartial grace exalted both the virtuous and the wicked and joined their hands in abstraction. Here, an opposite
agency is at work. Good and evil, kneaded from the same yeastless dough, are united in squalor until both become equally base; and in this equality in abjection, horror chases pity away. Dignity and tragedy take wing together, and one gazes in perplexity. Are saints being martyred or felons slowly despatched? On whose side is the painter? No answer comes.

Perhaps the mood was inescapable. There are certainly traces of it, much reduced, in a few of Altdorfer's pictures. But he outshines his fellow-Danubians like a lyre-bird among carrion-crows. He was from Regensburg. I hadn't been there yet—I missed it when I turned south at Ulm—but I have seen it since, and it explains much. Here, at the northernmost point of the river, a hundred and thirty miles upstream from the Abbey of St. Florian, the ancient stronghold of Ratisbon spans the Danube with a bridge that rivals all the great bridges of the Middle Ages. Those battlements and steeples, wrapped in myth, dominate one of the most complete and convincing mediaeval cities of the world. Anyone who has wandered in these streets can understand why the holy pastorals which his colleagues turned into dialect folk-tales, shift, under his hand, into the mood and the scenery of legends. The episodes of scripture—which are nowhere more splendidly manifest than in his great altarpiece at St. Florian's—are suddenly clothed in the magic and the glamour of fairy stories; fairy stories, moreover, where the Mantua-Antwerp axis, uncoiling brilliant strands into the fabric, has been most potently spinning. Under the gothic interlock of cold whites and greys that canopy hallowed scenes in Flanders, the Biblical characters, clad in robes of lilac and mulberry and lemon and the shrill sulphur hue Mantegna loved, evolve and posture with convincing Renaissance splendour. Pontius Pilate—velvet-clad, mantled in dark sapphire, tasselled and collared like an Elector and turbanned like a Caliph—twists his sprinkled hands between ewer and salver under a magnificent baldaquin of scumbled gold. Through the lancets and the cinquefoils and beyond the diamond panes, the fluted rocks ascend and the woods and cliffs and cloud-banks of Gethsemane frame a luminous
and incandescent sunset that presages Patinir. Though the centurions are knights in dark armour, no mortal smith ever wrought those helmet-wings and metal flourishes and knee-flutes and elbow-fans, even on the anvils of Augsburg and Milan in Maximilian's reign. It is the fabulous harness that flashed later on every pre-Raphaelite Grail-seeker and greaved and gauntleted the paladins in the Coloured Fairy Books. Shifting from Divinity to sacred fable, the same ambience of magic isolates lonely knights among millions of leaves and confronts St. Eustace and the stag with its antlered crucifix in a forest full of hazards and spells.

He is very various. Tufted with spurge and dockweed, a tumble-down cowshed flickers strangely across the meadows with the grisaille highlights of the Nativity. Transparent Babylonian palaces pile capricious tiers of arcaded galleries among shoals of cloud. Palaces, moreover which are elaborated with the almost-completely mastered secrets of perspective which Dürer had brought back from Bologna and Venice. Intoxicating times! It must have been as though Dürer, from the tallest tower in Nuremberg, had floated an invisible geometry over Franconia: a geometry which webbed the air with dotted lines, gridded mountainous duchies, soared across Swabia and Austria and Saxony in chessboard vistas and carelessly loosed off volleys of parallels towards the sovereign bishoprics of the Rhine.
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I didn't know it then but some of his country-pictures—wildernesses with no scriptural episode, nothing human, not even a tumbling Icarus to justify their existence—are the first pure landscape paintings in Europe. I only understood on a journey years later how faithfully his landscape echoes the actual Danube. It was his amazing
Alexander-schlacht
—Alexander's victory over Darius at Issus—that pointed the way: I was looking upstream from Dürnstein (on that later journey) with my mind full of the great
pictures I had been recently gazing at, when an apocalyptic flash revealed that the painted stretch of water in the picture was no Asian river, not even the Granicus. It was the valley of the Danube in the throes of one of its hundreds of battles. It must have been. But, on this first visit, how could I have realized it? The battle in the painted canyon is fought out under a lurid October sunset and the rival armies, like windswept cornfields bristling with lances and poppied with banners, collide in an autumnal light. Whereas the battlefield on my first encounter was dulled with snow, with all contours muffled and fanfares hushed.

* * *

The link between journeys and painting, especially this sort of journey, is very close. There was plenty to think about as I made my way through the snow-bound monastic orchards; and it occurred to me, in the silent fields that followed, and for the hundredth time since my landing in Holland, that so far one painter had presided over every stage of this
Winterreise
. When no buildings were in sight, I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impinged, I was in the world of Peter Brueghel. The white flakes falling beside the Waal—or the Rhine or the Neckar or the Danube—and the zigzag gables and the muffled roofs, were all his. The icicles, too, and the trampled snow, the logs piled on the sledges and the peasants stooped double under loads of faggots. When children with woollen hoods and satchels burst out of a village school with a sudden scamper of miniature clogs, I knew in advance that in a moment they would be flapping their arms and blowing on mittened fingers and clearing a space to beat a top in, or galloping down a lane to slide on the nearest brook, with everyone—children, grown-ups, cattle and dogs—moving about in the wake of their own cloudy breath. When the wintry light crept dimly from slits close to the horizon or an orange sun was setting through the branches of a frozen osier-bed, the identity was complete.

* * *

I headed north-east, treading downhill through the snow, and each step sank deeper. Rooks crowded the trees and the fields below were white and grey parallelograms bordered by many willows. Streams crossed them under lids of ice to join a slatey loop of the river; and the hushed and muffled scenery was the background of Brueghel's
Hunters in the Snow
. Only the hunters themselves were missing, with their spears and their curly-tailed dogs.

I crossed the river to the lights of Mauthausen by a massive and ancient bridge. A tall fifteenth-century castle thrust out into the river and, under its walls, Hans and Frieda were on the quay, true to the vaguest of rendezvous; and I realized, as we waved to each other from afar, that another cheerful evening lay ahead.

* * *

A foothill path next day. The river Enns, which I had crossed by twilight, came winding out of its valley and into the Danube, where it turned downstream to plait a long pale green strand of clear mountain water into the dun-coloured flux. I fetched up at Perg, which lies a few miles from the northern shore. The river, flooding the frozen fields, had been wandering in a tangle of deviant and rejoining streams; at Ardagger, the mountains closed in again. Each time this happened, solemnity invaded.

I slept in the village of Grein that night, just upstream from a wooded and many-legended island. Old perils haunt these defiles. The name itself is thought to be onomatopoeia for the cry of a sailor drowning in one of the whirlpools, for the rapids and reefs of this stretch of the Danube smashed up shipping for centuries. Sailors who fell overboard were allowed to drown: they were looked upon as propitiatory offerings to some Celtic or Teutonic god still surviving in secret from both pre-Roman and pre-Christian times. The Romans, before confronting this menacing reach, threw coins into the stream to placate the river-god Danubius; and later
travellers took the sacrament before making the passage. Maria Theresa's engineers made the journey safer, but the hidden spikes were never completely destroyed till the 1890's. Until then everything hung on the pilot's skill and to some degree it still does; the creases and ruffles turning into sudden cartwheel-twirls amidstream, bear witness to the commotion below. To outwit these hazards, vessels were lashed together like catamarans and steadied by hawsers from the shore. Those travelling upstream were towed by teams of horses and oxen—twenty, thirty and sometimes fifty strong—and escorted by troops of pikemen, to keep robbers at bay. The battlements of Werfenstein, whose castellans lived by wrecking and by plunder, beetle greedily over the rapids; but Barbarossa's army, heading for the Third Crusade, was too numerous to tackle. The castle-dwellers gazed through the arrow-slits and gnawed their knuckles with frustration as the Crusaders trudged downstream.

* * *

The Danube, particularly in this deep gorge, seemed far wilder than the Rhine and much lonelier. How scarce was the river traffic by comparison! Perhaps the fear of ice-jams kept boats at anchor. I could walk for hours without hearing a siren. At rare intervals a string of barges, usually from one of the Balkan Kingdoms, would toil upstream with a cargo of wheat. After delivering their freight and loading up with planks or paving stones, they would glide downstream again with the current. These cargoes were quarried and felled from the banks. Huge horseshoe-cavities were blasted out of the cliffs, and the mountains, from the water's edge to their summits, were a never-ending stand of timber. Deep in snow, the nearly perpendicular rides sundered the forests in long white stripes that were scattered with thousands of felled tree-trunks like the contents of spilled match-boxes. Smaller trunks were cut and stacked in clearings and I could hear the sound of the felling and the voices of the woodmen long before I saw them. From the riverside,
every mile or so, rose the zing of a circular saw and the echo of planks falling, where cloudy ghosts covered in sawdust were dismembering sledge-load after sledge-load of forest giants.

The only other men in these woods were foresters: loden-clad figures in clouted boots who live among deer and squirrels and badgers and polecats. One of them, every now and then, with a gun in the crook of his arm and ice on his whiskers and his eyebrows and a pipe with a lidded china bowl, would materialize among the trees like a vision of Jack Frost. Sometimes we would keep each other company for a mile or two while Breughel dogs trotted alertly ahead. There was plenty of game in these mountains; the cloven slots I noticed in the snow were the prints of roedeer, as I had thought, and once or twice I caught brief glimpses of them, standing at gaze for a moment, then bounding for cover with a scattering of snow from the low branches. But Styria and the Tyrol, the gamekeepers all agreed, those were the places! I learnt that when a young hunter stalks and lays low his first stag, his Jäger marks the occasion with a sort of wood-land blooding that sounds so hoarily ancient and redolent of feudal forest law—or the defiance of it—that the little ceremony has stuck in my mind ever since. The Jäger breaks off a branch and strikes the novice three times across the shoulders, quite hard, saying as he does so, a line for each swish:

Massed shadows, tilting down from the sierras, filled the bottom of the canyon. Here the Danube followed a winding corridor which expanded without warning to giant circular ballrooms and closed again just as abruptly; and for leagues on end this widening and shrinking ravine was empty of all but a cottage and a barn or
two and a scattering of castles and lonely towers and hermitages, all crumbling to fragments. They broke through the forest mass, disintegrating on vertiginous spikes of rock high overhead. As I climbed the hill-path, the ruins fell level and then dropped below and the mountains opposite changed from a wall of branches into a maze of moraines and clefts and buttresses with a ripple of meadows and solitary hamlets along their crests, all of them invisible till now and basking in the sunlight which was denied the lower world. Increasing height laid bare new reaches of the river like an ever-lengthening chain of lakes, and for those rare stretches where the valley ran east and west, the sunrise and the sunset lay reflected and still and an illusion lifted each lake a step higher than its predecessor until they formed gleaming staircases climbing in either direction; and at last the intervening headlands lost touch with the other shore and the watery stairs, now far below, cohered in a single liquid serpent.

At first, only a saw or an axe or the bang of a gun broke the silence of these forests. Soon other sounds would impinge: snow sliding from a branch, a loose rock starting a small avalanche, an occasional barge sending its siren ricochetting from cliff to cliff. Hidden streams, hardly noticed at first, were seldom out of earshot; but the waterfalls, though they were visible for miles, seemed inaudible until I was on them. I could see them cataracting from ledge to ledge, dividing and joining again, vanishing under the trees and dropping in long parabolas to the river; and all in silence, with seemingly as little motion as white horsetails swaying in the faintest of breezes. Then my path would round a spur of rock and a murmur which had been growing slowly was all at once loud as thunder. From a ledge stalactitic with icicles tons of pale liquid jadeite crashed among the rocks, and the spray of its impact loaded the branches with fans of frozen drops. A trough of boulders and a tunnel of ice and frozen bracken rushed it to the cliff's edge and there, in a cloud of mist, flung it clear of the clustering stalactites and the tree-tops and sent it booming into the abyss and out of sight. Then the ensuing furlongs would hush the
roar and slow the headlong pace to the ruffle of a faraway horsetail again.