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Cornugaya Directory 05
Once more I must caution the reader against expecting to find
highly-finished gems of art in the chapels I have been describing.
A wooden figure not more than two feet high clogged with many coats
of paint can hardly claim to be taken very seriously, and even those
few that were cut by Tabachetti himself were not meant to have
attention concentrated on themselves alone. As mere wood-carving
the Saas-Fee chapels will not stand comparison, for example, with
the triptych of unknown authorship in the Church of St. Anne at
Gliss, close to Brieg. But, in the first place, the work at Gliss
is worthy of Holbein himself: I know no wood-carving that can so
rivet the attention; moreover it is coloured with water-colour and
not oil, so that it is tinted, not painted; and, in the second
place, the Gliss triptych belongs to a date (1519) when artists held
neither time nor impressionism as objects, and hence, though greatly
better than the Saas-Fee chapels as regards a certain Japanese
curiousness of finish and naivete of literal transcription, it
cannot even enter the lists with the Saas work as regards elan and
dramatic effectiveness. The difference between the two classes of
work is much that between, say, John Van Eyck or Memling and Rubens
or Rembrandt, or, again, between Giovanni Bellini and Tintoretto;
the aims of the one class of work are incompatible with those of the
other. Moreover, in the Gliss triptych the intention of the
designer is carried out (whether by himself or no) with admirable
skill; whereas at Saas the wisdom of the workman is rather of Ober-
Ammergau than of the Egyptians, and the voice of the poet is not a
little drowned in that of his mouthpiece. If, however, the reader
will bear in mind these somewhat obvious considerations, and will
also remember the pathetic circumstances under which the chapels
were designed--for Tabachetti when he reached Saas was no doubt
shattered in body and mind by his four years' imprisonment--he will
probably be not less attracted to them than I observed were many of
the visitors both at Saas-Grund and Saas-Fee with whom I had the
pleasure of examining them.
I shall never forget the circumstance of observing a pair of
yellow-bellied woodpeckers,--the most rare and secluded, and, next to
the red-headed, the most beautiful species found in our
woods,--breeding in an old, truncated beech in the Beaverkill
Mountains, an off-shoot of the Catskills. We had been travelling,
three of us, all day in search of a trout lake, which lay far in among
the mountains, had twice lost our course in the trackless forest,
and, weary and hungry, had sat down to rest upon a decayed log. The
chattering of the young, and the passing to and fro of the parent
birds, soon arrested my attention. The entrance to the nest was on the
east side of the tree, about twenty-five feet from the ground. At
intervals of scarcely a minute, the old birds, one after another,
would light upon the edge of the hole with a grub or worm in their
beaks; then each in turn would make a bow or two, cast an eye quickly
around, and by a single movement place itself in the neck of the
passage. Here it would pause a moment, as if to determine in which
expectant mouth to place the morsel, and then disappear within. In
about half a minute, during which time the chattering of the young
gradually subsided, the bird would again emerge, but this time bearing
in its beak the ordure of one of the helpless family. Flying away very
slowly with head lowered and extended, as if anxious to hold the
offensive object as far from its plumage as possible, the bird dropped
the unsavory morsel in the course of a few yards, and, alighting on a
tree, wiped its bill on the bark and moss. This seemed to be the order
all day,--carrying in and carrying out. I watched the birds for an
hour, while my companions were taking their turn in exploring the lay
of the land around us, and noted no variation in the programme. It
would be curious to know if the young are fed and waited upon in
regular order, and how, amid the darkness and the crowded state of the
apartment, the matter is so neatly managed. But ornithologists are all
silent upon the subject.
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