At Chamouni they had the good fortune to meet with Joseph Coutet, a superannuated guide, whom they engaged to accompany the eager but inexperienced mountaineer. Coutet was one of those men of natural ability and kindliness whose friendship is worth more than much intercourse with worldly celebrities, and for many years afterwards Ruskin had the advantage of his care--of something more than mere attendance. At any rate, under such guidance, he could climb where he pleased, free from the feeling that people at home were anxious about him. He was not unadventurous in his scramblings, but with no ambition to get to the top of everything. He wanted to observe the aspects of mountain-form; and his careful outlines, slightly coloured, as his manner then was, and never aiming at picturesque treatment, record the structure of the rocks and the state of the snow with more than photographic accuracy. A photograph often confuses the eye with unnecessary detail; these drawings seized the leading lines, the important features, the interesting points. For example, in his Matterhorn (a drawing of 1849), as Whymper remarks in "Scrambles among the Alps," there are particulars noted which the mere sketcher neglects, but the climber finds out, on closer intercourse, to be the essential facts of the mountain's anatomy. All this is not picture-making, but it is a valuable contribution and preliminary to criticism. From Chamouni this year they went to Simplon, and met J.D. Forbes, the geologist, whose "viscous theory" of glaciers Ruskin adopted and defended with warmth later on, and to the Bell' Alp, long before it had been made a place of popular resort by Professor Tyndall's notice. The "Panorama of the Simplon from the Bell' Alp" is to be found in the St. George's (Ruskin) Museum at Sheffield, as a record of his draughtsmanship in this period. Thence to Zermatt with Osborne Gordon; Zermatt, too, unknown to the fashionable tourist, and innocent of hotel luxuries. It is curious that, at first sight, he did not care for the Matterhorn. It was entirely unlike his ideal of mountains. It was not at all like Cumberland. But in a very few years he had come to love the Alps for their own sake, and we find him regretting at Ambleside the colour and light of Switzerland, the mountain glory which our humbler scenery cannot match. And yet he came back to it for a home, not ill-content. After another visit to Chamouni, he crossed France to Paris, where something awaited him that upset all his plans, and turned his energies into an unexpected channel. CHAPTER II CHRISTIAN ART (1845-1847)