I. THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE 475

to trace,-and I think have traced rightly, so far as I was then able,-in the last chapter of Modern Painters,¹ the power of mountains in solemnizing the thoughts and purifying the hearts of the greatest nations of antiquity, and the greatest teachers of Christian faith. But I did not then dwell on what I had only felt, but not ascertained,-the destruction of all sensibility of this high order in the populations of modern Europe, first by the fine luxury of the fifteenth century, and then by the coarse lusts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth; destruction so total that religious men themselves became incapable of education by any natural beauty or nobleness; and though still useful to others by their ministrations and charities, in the corruption of cities, were themselves lost,-or even degraded, if they ever went up into the mountain to preach, or into the wilderness to pray.

2. There is no word, in the fragment of diary recording, in last Præterita,² our brief visit to the Grande Chartreuse, of anything we saw or heard there that made impression upon any of us. Yet a word was said, of significance enough to alter the courses of religious thought in me, afterwards for ever.

I had been totally disappointed with the Monastery itself, with the pass of approach to it, with the mountains round it, and with the monk who showed us through it. The building was meanly designed and confusedly grouped; the road up to it nothing like so terrific as most roads in the Alps up to anywhere; the mountains round were simplest commonplace of Savoy cliff, with no peaks, no glaciers, no cascades, nor even any slopes of pine in extent of majesty. And the monk who showed us through the corridors had no cowl worth the wearing, no beard worth the wagging, no expression but of superciliousness without sagacity, and an ungraciously dull manner, showing that

¹ [The last chapter of the fourth volume, Ruskin means; that on “The Mountain Glory”: see Vol. VI. pp. 426 seq.]

² [This should be “last but one.” See ii. ch. xi. § 209 (above, p. 439).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]