_THE LOVE OF THE ALPS_[1]
Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving on
the outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day's journey
from Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travel
to Basle by night. He courts the heat of the sun and the monotony
of French plains,--their sluggish streams and never-ending poplar
trees--for the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach
to the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is
about Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape.
The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running
streams; the green Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines
begin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has
set, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights;
and he feels--yes, indeed, there is now no mistake--the well-known,
well-loved magical fresh air, that never fails to blow from snowy
mountains and meadows watered by perennial streams. The last hour is
one of exquisite enjoyment, and when he reaches Basle, he scarcely
sleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine beneath the balconies,
and knowing that the moon is shining on its waters, through the town,
beneath the bridges, between pasture-lands and copses, up the still
mountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where the water springs.
There is nothing in all experience of travelling like this. We may
greet the Mediterranean at Marseilles with enthusiasm; on entering
Rome by the Porta del Popolo, we may reflect with pride that we
have reached the goal of our pilgrimage, and are at last among
world-shaking memories. But neither Rome nor the Riviera wins our
hearts like Switzerland. We do not lie awake in London thinking of
them; we do not long so intensely, as the year comes round, to revisit
them. Our affection is less a passion than that which we cherish for
Switzerland.
Why, then, is this? What, after all, is the love of the Alps, and when
and where did it begin? It is easier to ask these questions than to
answer them. The classic nations hated mountains. Greek and Roman
poets talk of them with disgust and dread. Nothing could have been
more depressing to a courtier of Augustus than residence at Aosta,
even though he found his theatres and triumphal arches there. Wherever
classical feeling has predominated, this has been the case. Cellini's
Memoirs, written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well express
the aversion which a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitable
wildernesses of Switzerland.[2] Dryden, in his dedication to 'The
Indian Emperor,' says, 'High objects, it is true, attract the sight;
but it looks up with pain on craggy rocks and barren mountains, and
continues not intent on any object which is wanting in shades and
green to entertain it.' Addison and Gray had no better epithets than
'rugged,' 'horrid,' and the like for Alpine landscape. The classic
spirit was adverse to enthusiasm for mere nature. Humanity was too
prominent, and city life absorbed all interests,--not to speak of what
perhaps is the weightiest reason--that solitude, indifferent
accommodation, and imperfect means of travelling, rendered mountainous
countries peculiarly disagreeable. It is impossible to enjoy art or
nature while suffering from fatigue and cold, dreading the attacks of
robbers, and wondering whether you will find food and shelter at the
end of your day's journey. Nor was it different in the Middle Ages.
Then individuals had either no leisure from war or strife with the
elements, or else they devoted themselves to the salvation of their
souls. But when the ideas of the Middle Ages had decayed, when
improved arts of life had freed men from servile subjection to daily
needs, when the bondage of religious tyranny had been thrown off and
political liberty allowed the full development of tastes and
instincts, when, moreover, the classical traditions had lost their
power, and courts and coteries became too narrow for the activity of
man,--then suddenly it was discovered that Nature in herself possessed
transcendent charms. It may seem absurd to class them all together;
yet there is no doubt that the French Revolution, the criticism of the
Bible, Pantheistic forms of religious feeling, landscape-painting,
Alpine travelling, and the poetry of Nature, are all signs of the same
movement--of a new Renaissance. Limitations of every sort have been
shaken off during the last century; all forms have been destroyed, all
questions asked. The classical spirit loved to arrange, model,
preserve traditions, obey laws. We are intolerant of everything that
is not simple, unbiassed by prescription, liberal as the wind, and
natural as the mountain crags. We go to feed this spirit of freedom
among the Alps. What the virgin forests of America are to the
Americans, the Alps are to us. What there is in these huge blocks and
walls of granite crowned with ice that fascinates us, it is hard to
analyse. Why, seeing that we find them so attractive, they should have
repelled our ancestors of the fourth generation and all the world
before them, is another mystery. We cannot explain what rapport there
is between our human souls and these inequalities in the surface of
the earth which we call Alps. Tennyson speaks of
Some vague emotion of delight
In gazing up an Alpine height,
and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physical
science has created for natural objects has something to do with it.
Curiosity and the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns,
no cultivated tracts of Europe however beautiful, form such a contrast
to our London life as Switzerland. Then there is the health and joy
that comes from exercise in open air; the senses freshened by good
sleep; the blood quickened by a lighter and rarer atmosphere. Our
modes of life, the breaking down of class privileges, the extension of
education, which contribute to make the individual greater and society
less, render the solitude of mountains refreshing. Facilities of
travelling and improved accommodation leave us free to enjoy the
natural beauty which we seek. Our minds, too, are prepared to
sympathise with the inanimate world; we have learned to look on the
universe as a whole, and ourselves as a part of it, related by close
ties of friendship to all its other members Shelley's, Wordsworth's,
Goethe's poetry has taught us this; we are all more or less
Pantheists, worshippers of 'God in Nature,' convinced of the
omnipresence of the informing mind.
Thus, when we admire the Alps, we are after all but children of
the century. We follow its inspiration blindly; and while we think
ourselves spontaneous in our ecstasy, perform the part for which we
have been trained from childhood by the atmosphere in which we live.
It is this very unconsciousness and universality of the impulse we
obey which makes it hard to analyse. Contemporary history is difficult
to write; to define the spirit of the age in which we live is still
more difficult; to account for 'impressions which owe all their force
to their identity with themselves' is most difficult of all. We must
be content to feel, and not to analyse.
Rousseau has the credit of having invented the love of Nature. Perhaps
he first expressed, in literature, the pleasures of open life among
the mountains, of walking tours, of the '_école buissonnière_,'
away from courts, and schools, and cities, which it is the fashion now
to love. His bourgeois birth and tastes, his peculiar religious
and social views, his intense self-engrossment,--all favoured the
development of Nature-worship. But Rousseau was not alone, nor yet
creative, in this instance. He was but one of the earliest to seize
and express a new idea of growing humanity. For those who seem to be
the most original in their inauguration of periods are only such
as have been favourably placed by birth and education to imbibe the
floating creeds of the whole race. They resemble the first cases of an
epidemic, which become the centres of infection and propagate disease.
At the time of Rousseau's greatness the French people were initiative.
In politics, in literature, in fashions, and in philosophy, they had
for some time led the taste of Europe. But the sentiment which first
received a clear and powerful expression in the works of Rousseau,
soon declared itself in the arts and literature of other nations.
Goethe, Wordsworth, and the earlier landscape-painters, proved that
Germany and England were not far behind the French. In England this
love of Nature for its own sake is indigenous, and has at all times
been peculiarly characteristic of our genius. Therefore it is not
surprising that our life and literature and art have been foremost
in developing the sentiment of which we are speaking. Our poets,
painters, and prose writers gave the tone to European thought in this
respect. Our travellers in search of the adventurous and picturesque,
our Alpine Club, have made of Switzerland an English playground.
The greatest period in our history was but a foreshadowing of this.
To return to Nature-worship was but to reassume the habits of the
Elizabethan age, altered indeed by all the changes of religion,
politics, society, and science which the last three centuries have
wrought, yet still, in its original love of free open life among the
fields and woods, and on the sea, the same. Now the French national
genius is classical. It reverts to the age of Louis XIV., and
Rousseauism in their literature is as true an innovation and
parenthesis as Pope-and-Drydenism was in ours. As in the age of the
Reformation, so in this, the German element of the modern character
predominates. During the two centuries from which we have emerged, the
Latin element had the upper hand. Our love of the Alps is a Gothic, a
Teutonic, instinct; sympathetic with all that is vague, infinite, and
insubordinate to rules, at war with all that is defined and systematic
in our genius. This we may perceive in individuals as well as in the
broader aspects of arts and literatures. The classically minded man,
the reader of Latin poets, the lover of brilliant conversation,
the frequenter of clubs and drawing-rooms, nice in his personal
requirements, scrupulous in his choice of words, averse to unnecessary
physical exertion, preferring town to country life, _cannot_
deeply feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will dislike German art,
and however much he may strive to be Catholic in his tastes, will find
as he grows older that his liking for Gothic architecture and modern
painting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing admiration
for Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect of
speculation all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, in respect
of taste all men are either Greek or German.
At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands; the
Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so
much about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our
_cultus_,--a strange reflection, proving how much greater man is
than men, the common reason of the age in which we live than our own
reasons, its constituents and subjects.
Perhaps it is our modern tendency to 'individualism' which makes the
Alps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point--no
claims are made on human sympathies--there is no need to toil in
yoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our own
dreams, and sound the depths of personality without the reproach of
selfishness, without a restless wish to join in action or money-making
or the pursuit of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this
absence of social duties and advantages may be barbarising, even
brutalising. But to men wearied with too much civilisation,
and deafened by the noise of great cities, it is beyond measure
refreshing. Then, again, among the mountains history finds no place.
The Alps have no past nor present nor future. The human beings who
live upon their sides are at odds with nature, clinging on for bare
existence to the soil, sheltering themselves beneath protecting rocks
from avalanches, damming up destructive streams, all but annihilated
every spring. Man, who is paramount in the plain, is nothing here. His
arts and sciences, and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty works,
and conquests and decays, demand our whole attention in Italy or
Egypt. But here the mountains, immemorially the same, which were,
which are, and which are to be, present a theatre on which the soul
breathes freely and feels herself alone. Around her on all sides is
God, and Nature, who is here the face of God and not the slave of man.
The spirit of the world hath here not yet grown old. She is as young
as on the first day; and the Alps are a symbol of the self-creating,
self-sufficing, self-enjoying universe which lives for its own ends.
For why do the slopes gleam with flowers, and the hillsides deck
themselves with grass, and the inaccessible ledges of black rock bear
their tufts of crimson primroses and flaunting tiger-lilies? Why,
morning after morning, does the red dawn flush the pinnacles of Monte
Rosa above cloud and mist unheeded? Why does the torrent shout, the
avalanche reply in thunder to the music of the sun, the trees and
rocks and meadows cry their 'Holy, Holy, Holy'? Surely not for us.
We are an accident here, and even the few men whose eyes are fixed
habitually upon these things are dead to them--the peasants do not
even know the names of their own flowers, and sigh with envy when you
tell them of the plains of Lincolnshire or Russian steppes.
But indeed there is something awful in the Alpine elevation above
human things. We do not love Switzerland merely because we associate
its thought with recollections of holidays and joyfulness. Some of
the most solemn moments of life are spent high up above among the
mountains, on the barren tops of rocky passes, where the soul has
seemed to hear in solitude a low controlling voice. It is almost
necessary for the development of our deepest affections that some sad
and sombre moments should be interchanged with hours of merriment and
elasticity. It is this variety in the woof of daily life which endears
our home to us; and perhaps none have fully loved the Alps who have
not spent some days of meditation, or it may be of sorrow, among their
solitudes. Splendid scenery, like music, has the power to make 'of
grief itself a fiery chariot for mounting above the sources of grief,'
to ennoble and refine our passions, and to teach us that our lives
are merely moments in the years of the eternal Being. There are many,
perhaps, who, within sight of some great scene among the Alps, upon
the height of the Stelvio or the slopes of Mürren, or at night in
the valley of Courmayeur, have felt themselves raised above cares
and doubts and miseries by the mere recognition of unchangeable
magnificence; have found a deep peace in the sense of their own
nothingness. It is not granted to us everyday to stand upon these
pinnacles of rest and faith above the world. But having once stood
there, how can we forget the station? How can we fail, amid the
tumult of our common cares, to feel at times the hush of that far-off
tranquillity? When our life is most commonplace, when we are ill or
weary in city streets, we can remember the clouds upon the mountains
we have seen, the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the scent of
countless flowers. A photograph of Bisson's or of Braun's, the name of
some well-known valley, the picture of some Alpine plant, rouses the
sacred hunger in our souls, and stirs again the faith in beauty and
in rest beyond ourselves which no man can take from us. We owe a
deep debt of gratitude to everything which enables us to rise above
depressing and enslaving circumstances, which brings us nearer in some
way or other to what is eternal in the universe, and which makes us
know that, whether we live or die, suffer or enjoy, life and gladness
are still strong in the world. On this account, the proper attitude
of the soul among the Alps is one of silence. It is almost impossible
without a kind of impiety to frame in words the feelings they inspire.
Yet there are some sayings, hallowed by long usage, which throng
the mind through a whole summer's day, and seem in harmony with its
emotions--some portions of the Psalms or lines of greatest poets,
inarticulate hymns of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, waifs and strays not
always apposite, but linked by strong and subtle chains of feeling
with the grandeur of the mountains. This reverential feeling for
the Alps is connected with the Pantheistic form of our religious
sentiments to which I have before alluded. It is a trite remark, that
even devout men of the present generation prefer temples _not_
made with hands to churches, and worship God in the fields more
contentedly than in their pews. What Mr. Ruskin calls 'the instinctive
sense of the divine presence not formed into distinct belief' lies at
the root of our profound veneration for the nobler aspects of mountain
scenery. This instinctive sense has been very variously expressed by
Goethe in Faust's celebrated confession of faith, by Shelley in the
stanzas of 'Adonais,' which begin 'He is made one with nature,' by
Wordsworth in the lines on Tintern Abbey, and lately by Mr. Roden Noel
in his noble poems of Pantheism. It is more or less strongly felt by
all who have recognised the indubitable fact that religious belief is
undergoing a sure process of change from the dogmatic distinctness of
the past to some at present dimly descried creed of the future. Such
periods of transition are of necessity full of discomfort, doubt, and
anxiety, vague, variable, and unsatisfying. The men in whose spirits
the fermentation of the change is felt, who have abandoned their
old moorings, and have not yet reached the haven for which they are
steering, cannot but be indistinct and undecided in their faith. The
universe of which they form a part becomes important to them in its
infinite immensity. The principles of beauty, goodness, order and law,
no longer connected in their minds with definite articles of faith,
find symbols in the outer world. They are glad to fly at certain
moments from mankind and its oppressive problems, for which religion
no longer provides a satisfactory solution, to Nature, where they
vaguely localise the spirit that broods over us controlling all our
being. To such men Goethe's hymn is a form of faith, and born of such
a mood are the following far humbler verses:--
At Mürren let the morning lead thee out
To walk upon the cold and cloven hills,
To hear the congregated mountains shout
Their pæan of a thousand foaming rills.
Raimented with intolerable light
The snow-peaks stand above thee, row on row
Arising, each a seraph in his might;
An organ each of varied stop doth blow.
Heaven's azure dome trembles through all her spheres,
Feeling that music vibrate; and the sun
Raises his tenor as he upward steers,
And all the glory-coated mists that run
Below him in the valley, hear his voice,
And cry unto the dewy fields, Rejoice!
There is a profound sympathy between music and fine scenery: they both
affect us in the same way, stirring strong but undefined emotions,
which express themselves in 'idle tears,' or evoking thoughts 'which
lie,' as Wordsworth says, 'too deep for tears,' beyond the reach
of any words. How little we know what multitudes of mingling
reminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its fancy
with the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the sentiments
which music or which mountains stir! It is the very vagueness,
changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which
cause their charm; they harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs and
seem to make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious
that unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery
may tend to destroy habits of clear thinking, sentimentalise the mind,
and render it more apt to entertain embryonic fancies than to bring
ideas to definite perfection.
If hours of thoughtfulness and seclusion are necessary to the
development of a true love for the Alps, it is no less essential to a
right understanding of their beauty that we should pass some wet and
gloomy days among the mountains. The unclouded sunsets and sunrises
which often follow one another in September in the Alps, have
something terrible. They produce a satiety of splendour, and oppress
the mind with a sense of perpetuity. I remember spending such a season
in one of the Oberland valleys, high up above the pine-trees, in
a little châlet. Morning after morning I awoke to see the sunbeams
glittering on the Eiger and the Jungfrau; noon after noon the
snow-fields blazed beneath a steady fire; evening after evening they
shone like beacons in the red light of the setting sun. Then peak by
peak they lost the glow; the soul passed from them, and they stood
pale yet weirdly garish against the darkened sky. The stars came out,
the moon shone, but not a cloud sailed over the untroubled heavens.
Thus day after day for several weeks there was no change, till I was
seized with an overpowering horror of unbroken calm. I left the valley
for a time; and when I returned to it in wind and rain, I found that
the partial veiling of the mountain heights restored the charm which
I had lost and made me feel once more at home. The landscape takes a
graver tone beneath the mist that hides the higher peaks, and
comes drifting, creeping, feeling, through the pines upon their
slopes--white, silent, blinding vapour-wreaths around the sable
spires. Sometimes the cloud descends and blots out everything. Again
it lifts a little, showing cottages and distant Alps beneath its
skirts. Then it sweeps over the whole valley like a veil, just broken
here and there above a lonely châlet or a thread of distant dangling
torrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath the mist are more strange. The
torrent seems to have a hoarser voice and grinds the stones more
passionately against its boulders. The cry of shepherds through the
fog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills. The bleating
of penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cowbells, are
mysteriously distant and yet distinct in the dull dead air. Then,
again, how immeasurably high above our heads appear the domes and
peaks of snow revealed through chasms in the drifting cloud; how
desolate the glaciers and the avalanches in gleams of light that
struggle through the mist! There is a leaden glare peculiar to clouds,
which makes the snow and ice more lurid. Not far from the house where
I am writing, the avalanche that swept away the bridge last winter is
lying now, dripping away, dank and dirty, like a rotting whale. I can
see it from my window, green beech-boughs nodding over it, forlorn
larches bending their tattered branches by its side, splinters of
broken pine protruding from its muddy caves, the boulders on its
flank, and the hoarse hungry torrent tossing up its tongues to lick
the ragged edge of snow. Close by, the meadows, spangled with yellow
flowers and red and blue, look even more brilliant than if the sun
were shining on them. Every cup and blade of grass is drinking. But
the scene changes; the mist has turned into rain-clouds, and the
steady rain drips down, incessant, blotting out the view. Then, too,
what a joy it is if the clouds break towards evening with a north
wind, and a rainbow in the valley gives promise of a bright to-morrow!
We look up to the cliffs above our heads, and see that they have just
been powdered with the snow that is a sign of better weather.
Such rainy days ought to be spent in places like Seelisberg and
Mürren, at the edge of precipices, in front of mountains, or above a
lake. The cloud-masses crawl and tumble about the valleys like a brood
of dragons; now creeping along the ledges of the rock with sinuous
self-adjustment to its turns and twists; now launching out into
the deep, repelled by battling winds, or driven onward in a coil of
twisted and contorted serpent curls. In the midst of summer these wet
seasons often end in a heavy fall of snow. You wake some morning to
see the meadows which last night were gay with July flowers huddled
up in snow a foot in depth. But fair weather does not tarry long to
reappear. You put on your thickest boots and sally forth to find the
great cups of the gentians full of snow, and to watch the rising of
the cloud-wreaths under the hot sun. Bad dreams or sickly thoughts,
dissipated by returning daylight or a friend's face, do not fly away
more rapidly and pleasantly than those swift glory-coated mists that
lose themselves we know not where in the blue depths of the sky.
In contrast with these rainy days nothing can be more perfect than
clear moonlight nights. There is a terrace upon the roof of the inn at
Courmayeur where one may spend hours in the silent watches, when all
the world has gone to sleep beneath. The Mont Chétif and the Mont
de la Saxe form a gigantic portal not unworthy of the pile that lies
beyond. For Mont Blanc resembles a vast cathedral; its countless
spires are scattered over a mass like that of the Duomo at Milan,
rising into one tower at the end. By night the glaciers glitter in the
steady moon; domes, pinnacles, and buttresses stand clear of clouds.
Needles of every height and most fantastic shapes rise from the
central ridge, some solitary, like sharp arrows shot against the sky,
some clustering into sheaves. On every horn of snow and bank of grassy
hill stars sparkle, rising, setting, rolling round through the long
silent night. Moonlight simplifies and softens the landscape. Colours
become scarcely distinguishable, and forms, deprived of half their
detail, gain in majesty and size. The mountains seem greater far by
night than day--higher heights and deeper depths, more snowy pyramids,
more beetling crags, softer meadows, and darker pines. The whole
valley is hushed, but for the torrent and the chirping grasshopper and
the striking of the village clocks. The black tower and the houses of
Courmayeur in the foreground gleam beneath the moon until she reaches
the edge of the Cramont, and then sinks quietly away, once more
to reappear among the pines, then finally to leave the valley dark
beneath the shadow of the mountain's bulk. Meanwhile the heights of
snow still glitter in the steady light: they, too, will soon be dark,
until the dawn breaks, tinging them with rose.
But it is not fair to dwell exclusively upon the more sombre aspect of
Swiss beauty when there are so many lively scenes of which to speak.
The sunlight and the freshness and the flowers of Alpine meadows form
more than half the charm of Switzerland. The other day we walked to a
pasture called the Col de Checruit, high up the valley of Courmayeur,
where the spring was still in its first freshness. Gradually we
climbed, by dusty roads and through hot fields where the grass had
just been mown, beneath the fierce light of the morning sun. Not a
breath of air was stirring, and the heavy pines hung overhead upon
their crags, as if to fence the gorge from every wandering breeze.
There is nothing more oppressive than these scorching sides of narrow
rifts, shut in by woods and precipices. But suddenly the valley
broadened, the pines and larches disappeared, and we found ourselves
upon a wide green semicircle of the softest meadows. Little rills of
water went rushing through them, rippling over pebbles, rustling under
dock leaves, and eddying against their wooden barriers. Far and wide
'you scarce could see the grass for flowers,' while on every side
the tinkling of cow-bells, and the voices of shepherds calling to one
another from the Alps, or singing at their work, were borne across the
fields. As we climbed we came into still fresher pastures, where the
snow had scarcely melted. There the goats and cattle were collected,
and the shepherds sat among them, fondling the kids and calling them
by name. When they called, the creatures came, expecting salt and
bread. It was pretty to see them lying near their masters, playing and
butting at them with their horns, or bleating for the sweet rye-bread.
The women knitted stockings, laughing among themselves, and singing
all the while. As soon as we reached them, they gathered round to
talk. An old herdsman, who was clearly the patriarch of this Arcadia,
asked us many questions in a slow deliberate voice. We told him who
we were, and tried to interest him in the cattle-plague, which he
appeared to regard as an evil very unreal and far away--like the
murrain upon Pharaoh's herds which one reads about in Exodus. But
he was courteous and polite, doing the honours of his pasture with
simplicity and ease. He took us to his châlet and gave us bowls of
pure cold milk. It was a funny little wooden house, clean and dark.
The sky peeped through its tiles, and if shepherds were not in the
habit of sleeping soundly all night long, they might count the setting
and rising stars without lifting their heads from the pillow. He told
us how far pleasanter they found the summer season than the long cold
winter which they have to spend in gloomy houses in Courmayeur. This,
indeed, is the true pastoral life which poets have described--a happy
summer holiday among the flowers, well occupied with simple cares, and
harassed by 'no enemy but winter and rough weather.'
Very much of the charm of Switzerland belongs to simple things--to
greetings from the herdsmen, the 'Guten Morgen,' and 'Guten Abend,'
that are invariably given and taken upon mountain paths; to the tame
creatures, with their large dark eyes, who raise their heads one
moment from the pasture while you pass; and to the plants that grow
beneath your feet. The latter end of May is the time when spring
begins in the high Alps. Wherever sunlight smiles away a patch of
snow, the brown turf soon becomes green velvet, and the velvet stars
itself with red and white and gold and blue. You almost see the grass
and lilies grow. First come pale crocuses and lilac soldanellas. These
break the last dissolving clods of snow, and stand upon an island,
with the cold wall they have thawed all round them. It is the fate
of these poor flowers to spring and flourish on the very skirts
of retreating winter; they soon wither--the frilled chalice of the
soldanella shrivels up and the crocus fades away before the grass
has grown; the sun, which is bringing all the other plants to life,
scorches their tender petals. Often when summer has fairly come,
you still may see their pearly cups and lilac bells by the side of
avalanches, between the chill snow and the fiery sun, blooming and
fading hour by hour. They have as it were but a Pisgah view of the
promised land, of the spring which they are foremost to proclaim. Next
come the clumsy gentians and yellow anemones, covered with soft
down like fledgling birds. These are among the earliest and hardiest
blossoms that embroider the high meadows with a diaper of blue and
gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas begin to tuft the
dripping rocks, while frail white fleur-de-lis, like flakes of
snow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled ranunculuses join with
forget-me-nots and cranesbill in a never-ending dance upon the grassy
floor. Happy, too, is he who finds the lilies-of-the-valley clustering
about the chestnut boles upon the Colma, or in the beechwood by
the stream at Macugnaga, mixed with garnet-coloured columbines and
fragrant white narcissus, which the people of the villages call
'Angiolini.' There, too, is Solomon's seal, with waxen bells and
leaves expanded like the wings of hovering butterflies. But these
lists of flowers are tiresome and cold; it would be better to draw
the portrait of one which is particularly fascinating. I think that
botanists have called it _Saxifraga cotyledon_; yet, in spite
of its long name, it is beautiful and poetic. London-pride is the
commonest of all the saxifrages; but the one of which I speak is as
different from London-pride as a Plantagenet upon his throne from that
last Plantagenet who died obscure and penniless some years ago. It is
a great majestic flower, which plumes the granite rocks of Monte Rosa
in the spring. At other times of the year you see a little tuft of
fleshy leaves set like a cushion on cold ledges and dark places of
dripping cliffs. You take it for a stonecrop--one of those weeds
doomed to obscurity, and safe from being picked because they are so
uninviting--and you pass it by incuriously. But about June it puts
forth its power, and from the cushion of pale leaves there springs a
strong pink stem, which rises upward for a while, and then curves
down and breaks into a shower of snow-white blossoms. Far away the
splendour gleams, hanging like a plume of ostrich-feathers from the
roof of rock, waving to the wind, or stooping down to touch the water
of the mountain stream that dashes it with dew. The snow at evening,
glowing with a sunset flush, is not more rosy-pure than this cascade
of pendent blossoms. It loves to be alone--inaccessible ledges, chasms
where winds combat, or moist caverns overarched near thundering falls,
are the places that it seeks. I will not compare it to a spirit of the
mountains or to a proud lonely soul, for such comparisons desecrate
the simplicity of nature, and no simile can add a glory to the flower.
It seems to have a conscious life of its own, so large and glorious
it is, so sensitive to every breath of air, so nobly placed upon its
bending stem, so royal in its solitude. I first saw it years ago on
the Simplon, feathering the drizzling crags above Isella. Then we
found it near Baveno, in a crack of sombre cliff beneath the mines.
The other day we cut an armful opposite Varallo, by the Sesia, and
then felt like murderers; it was so sad to hold in our hands the
triumph of those many patient months, the full expansive life of
the flower, the splendour visible from valleys and hillsides, the
defenceless creature which had done its best to make the gloomy places
of the Alps most beautiful.
After passing many weeks among the high Alps it is a pleasure to
descend into the plains. The sunset, and sunrise, and the stars of
Lombardy, its level horizons and vague misty distances, are a source
of absolute relief after the narrow skies and embarrassed prospects of
a mountain valley. Nor are the Alps themselves ever more imposing than
when seen from Milan or the church-tower of Chivasso or the terrace
of Novara, with a foreground of Italian cornfields and old city towers
and rice-ground, golden-green beneath a Lombard sun. Half veiled
by clouds, the mountains rise like visionary fortress walls of a
celestial city--unapproachable, beyond the range of mortal feet.
But those who know by old experience what friendly châlets, and cool
meadows, and clear streams are hidden in their folds and valleys,
send forth fond thoughts and messages, like carrier-pigeons, from the
marble parapets of Milan, crying, 'Before another sun has set, I too
shall rest beneath the shadow of their pines!' It is in truth not more
than a day's journey from Milan to the brink of snow at Macugnaga. But
very sad it is to _leave_ the Alps, to stand upon the terraces
of Berne and waft ineffectual farewells. The unsympathising Aar
rushes beneath; and the snow-peaks, whom we love like friends, abide
untroubled by the coming and the going of the world. The clouds drift
over them--the sunset warms them with a fiery kiss. Night comes, and
we are hurried far away to wake beside the Seine, remembering, with a
pang of jealous passion, that the flowers on Alpine meadows are still
blooming, and the rivulets still flowing with a ceaseless song, while
Paris shops are all we see, and all we hear is the dull clatter of a
Paris crowd.
_THE ALPS IN WINTER_
The gradual approach of winter is very lovely in the high Alps. The
valley of Davos, where I am writing, more than five thousand feet
above the sea, is not beautiful, as Alpine valleys go, though it has
scenery both picturesque and grand within easy reach. But when summer
is passing into autumn, even the bare slopes of the least romantic
glen are glorified. Golden lights and crimson are cast over the
grey-green world by the fading of innumerable plants. Then the larches
begin to put on sallow tints that deepen into orange, burning against
the solid blue sky like amber. The frosts are severe at night, and the
meadow grass turns dry and wan. The last lilac crocuses die upon the
fields. Icicles, hanging from watercourse or mill-wheel, glitter in
the noonday sunlight. The wind blows keenly from the north, and now
the snow begins to fall and thaw and freeze, and fall and thaw again.
The seasons are confused; wonderful days of flawless purity are
intermingled with storm and gloom. At last the time comes when a great
snowfall has to be expected. There is hard frost in the early morning,
and at nine o'clock the thermometer stands at 2°. The sky is clear,
but it clouds rapidly with films of cirrus and of stratus in the south
and west. Soon it is covered over with grey vapour in a level sheet,
all the hill-tops standing hard against the steely heavens. The cold
wind from the west freezes the moustache to one's pipe-stem. By noon
the air is thick with a coagulated mist; the temperature meanwhile has
risen, and a little snow falls at intervals. The valleys are filled
with a curious opaque blue, from which the peaks rise, phantom-like
and pallid, into the grey air, scarcely distinguishable from their
background. The pine-forests on the mountain-sides are of darkest
indigo. There is an indescribable stillness and a sense of incubation.
The wind has fallen. Later on, the snow-flakes flutter silently and
sparely through the lifeless air. The most distant landscape is quite
blotted out. After sunset the clouds have settled down upon the hills,
and the snow comes in thick, impenetrable fleeces. At night our hair
crackles and sparkles when we brush it. Next morning there is a foot
and a half of finely powdered snow, and still the snow is falling.
Strangely loom the châlets through the semi-solid whiteness. Yet the
air is now dry and singularly soothing. The pines are heavy with their
wadded coverings; now and again one shakes himself in silence, and his
burden falls in a white cloud, to leave a black-green patch upon the
hillside, whitening again as the imperturbable fall continues. The
stakes by the roadside are almost buried. No sound is audible. Nothing
is seen but the snow-plough, a long raft of planks with a heavy stone
at its stem and a sharp prow, drawn by four strong horses, and driven
by a young man erect upon the stem.
So we live through two days and nights, and on the third a north wind
blows. The snow-clouds break and hang upon the hills in scattered
fleeces; glimpses of blue sky shine through, and sunlight glints along
the heavy masses. The blues of the shadows are everywhere intense. As
the clouds disperse, they form in moulded domes, tawny like sunburned
marble in the distant south lands. Every châlet is a miracle of
fantastic curves, built by the heavy hanging snow. Snow lies mounded
on the roads and fields, writhed into loveliest wreaths, or outspread
in the softest undulations. All the irregularities of the hills are
softened into swelling billows like the mouldings of Titanic statuary.
It happened once or twice last winter that such a clearing after
snowfall took place at full moon. Then the moon rose in a swirl of
fleecy vapour--clouds above, beneath, and all around. The sky was
blue as steel, and infinitely deep with mist-entangled stars. The horn
above which she first appears stood carved of solid black, and through
the valley's length from end to end yawned chasms and clefts of liquid
darkness. As the moon rose, the clouds were conquered, and massed into
rolling waves upon the ridges of the hills. The spaces of open sky
grew still more blue. At last the silver light came flooding over all,
and here and there the fresh snow glistened on the crags. There is
movement, palpitation, life of light through earth and sky. To walk
out on such a night, when the perturbation of storm is over and the
heavens are free, is one of the greatest pleasures offered by this
winter life. It is so light that you can read the smallest print with
ease. The upper sky looks quite black, shading by violet and sapphire
into turquoise upon the horizon. There is the colour of ivory upon
the nearest snow-fields, and the distant peaks sparkle like silver,
crystals glitter in all directions on the surface of the snow, white,
yellow, and pale blue. The stars are exceedingly keen, but only a few
can shine in the intensity of moonlight. The air is perfectly still,
and though icicles may be hanging from beard and moustache to the furs
beneath one's chin, there is no sensation of extreme cold.
During the earlier frosts of the season, after the first snows have
fallen, but when there is still plenty of moisture in the ground,
the loveliest fern-fronds of pure rime may be found in myriads on the
meadows. They are fashioned like perfect vegetable structures, opening
fan-shaped upon crystal stems, and catching the sunbeams with the
brilliancy of diamonds. Taken at certain angles, they decompose light
into iridescent colours, appearing now like emeralds, rubies, or
topazes, and now like Labrador spar, blending all hues in a wondrous
sheen. When the lake freezes for the first time, its surface is of
course quite black, and so transparent that it is easy to see the
fishes swimming in the deep beneath; but here and there, where rime
has fallen, there sparkle these fantastic flowers and ferns and mosses
made of purest frost. Nothing, indeed, can be more fascinating than
the new world revealed by frost. In shaded places of the valley you
may walk through larches and leafless alder thickets by silent farms,
all silvered over with hoar spangles--fairy forests, where the flowers
and foliage are rime. The streams are flowing half-frozen over rocks
sheeted with opaque green ice. Here it is strange to watch the swirl
of water freeing itself from these frost-shackles, and to see it
eddying beneath the overhanging eaves of frailest crystal-frosted
snow. All is so silent, still, and weird in this white world, that one
marvels when the spirit of winter will appear, or what shrill voices
in the air will make his unimaginable magic audible. Nothing happens,
however, to disturb the charm, save when a sunbeam cuts the chain of
diamonds on an alder bough, and down they drift in a thin cloud of
dust. It may be also that the air is full of floating crystals,
like tiniest most restless fire-flies rising and falling and passing
crosswise in the sun-illumined shade of tree or mountain-side.
It is not easy to describe these beauties of the winter-world; and yet
one word must be said about the sunsets. Let us walk out, therefore,
towards the lake at four o'clock in mid-December. The thermometer is
standing at 3°, and there is neither breath of wind nor cloud. Venus
is just visible in rose and sapphire, and the thin young moon is
beside her. To east and south the snowy ranges burn with yellow fire,
deepening to orange and crimson hues, which die away and leave a
greenish pallor. At last, the higher snows alone are livid with a last
faint tinge of light, and all beneath is quite white. But the tide
of glory turns. While the west grows momently more pale, the eastern
heavens flush with afterglow, suffuse their spaces with pink and
violet. Daffodil and tenderest emerald intermingle; and these colours
spread until the west again has rose and primrose and sapphire
wonderfully blent, and from the burning skies a light is cast upon the
valley--a phantom light, less real, more like the hues of molten
gems, than were the stationary flames of sunset. Venus and the moon
meanwhile are silvery clear. Then the whole illumination fades like
magic.
All the charms of which I have been writing are combined in a
sledge-drive. With an arrowy gliding motion one passes through the
snow-world as through a dream. In the sunlight the snow surface
sparkles with its myriad stars of crystals. In the shadow it ceases
to glitter, and assumes a blueness scarcely less blue than the sky.
So the journey is like sailing through alternate tracts of light
irradiate heavens, and interstellar spaces of the clearest and most
flawless ether. The air is like the keen air of the highest glaciers.
As we go, the bells keep up a drowsy tinkling at the horse's head.
The whole landscape is transfigured--lifted high up out of
commonplaceness. The little hills are Monte Rosas and Mont Blancs.
Scale is annihilated, and nothing tells but form. There is hardly
any colour except the blue of sky and shadow. Everything is traced in
vanishing tints, passing from the almost amber of the distant sunlight
through glowing white into pale greys and brighter blues and deep
ethereal azure. The pines stand in black platoons upon the hillsides,
with a tinge of red or orange on their sable. Some carry masses of
snow. Others have shaken their plumes free. The châlets are like fairy
houses or toys, waist-deep in stores of winter fuel. With their mellow
tones of madder and umber on the weather-beaten woodwork relieved
against the white, with fantastic icicles and folds of snow depending
from their eaves, or curled like coverlids from roof and window-sill,
they are far more picturesque than in the summer. Colour, wherever it
is found, whether in these cottages or in a block of serpentine by
the roadside, or in the golden bulrush blades by the lake shore, takes
more than double value. It is shed upon the landscape like a spiritual
and transparent veil. Most beautiful of all are the sweeping lines of
pure untroubled snow, fold over fold of undulating softness, billowing
along the skirts of the peaked hills. There is no conveying the
charm of immaterial, aërial, lucid beauty, the feeling of purity and
aloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the fine touch on all our
senses of light, colour, form, and air, and motion, and rare tinkling
sound. The magic is like a spirit mood of Shelley's lyric verse. And,
what is perhaps most wonderful, this delicate delight may be enjoyed
without fear in the coldest weather. It does not matter how low the
temperature may be, if the sun is shining, the air dry, and the wind
asleep.
Leaving the horse-sledges on the verge of some high hill-road, and
trusting oneself to the little hand-sledge which the people of the
Grisons use, and which the English have christened by the Canadian
term 'toboggan,' the excitement becomes far greater. The hand-sledge
is about three feet long, fifteen inches wide, and half a foot above
the ground, on runners shod with iron. Seated firmly at the back,
and guiding with the feet in front, the rider skims down precipitous
slopes and round perilous corners with a rapidity that beats a horse's
pace. Winding through sombre pine-forests, where the torrent roars
fitfully among caverns of barbed ice, and the glistening mountains
tower above in their glory of sun-smitten snow, darting round the
frozen ledges at the turnings of the road, silently gliding at a speed
that seems incredible, it is so smooth, he traverses two or three
miles without fatigue, carried onward by the mere momentum of his
weight. It is a strange and great joy. The toboggan, under these
conditions, might be compared to an enchanted boat shooting the rapids
of a river; and what adds to its fascination is the entire loneliness
in which the rider passes through those weird and ever-shifting scenes
of winter radiance. Sometimes, when the snow is drifting up the pass,
and the world is blank behind, before, and all around, it seems like
plunging into chaos. The muffled pines loom fantastically through
the drift as we rush past them, and the wind, ever and anon, detaches
great masses of snow in clouds from their bent branches. Or again at
night, when the moon is shining, and the sky is full of flaming
stars, and the snow, frozen to the hardness of marble, sparkles with
innumerable crystals, a new sense of strangeness and of joy is given
to the solitude, the swiftness, and the silence of the exercise.
No other circumstances invest the poetry of rapid motion with more
fascination. Shelley, who so loved the fancy of a boat inspired with
its own instinct of life, would have delighted in the game, and would
probably have pursued it recklessly. At the same time, as practised
on a humbler scale nearer home, in company, and on a run selected for
convenience rather than for picturesqueness, tobogganing is a very
Bohemian amusement. No one who indulges in it can count on avoiding
hard blows and violent upsets, nor will his efforts to maintain his
equilibrium at the dangerous corners be invariably graceful.
Nothing, it might be imagined, could be more monotonous than an Alpine
valley covered up with snow. And yet to one who has passed many months
in that seclusion Nature herself presents no monotony; for the changes
constantly wrought by light and cloud and alternations of weather
on this landscape are infinitely various. The very simplicity of the
conditions seems to assist the supreme artist. One day is wonderful
because of its unsullied purity; not a cloud visible, and the pines
clothed in velvet of rich green beneath a faultless canopy of light.
The next presents a fretwork of fine film, wrought by the south wind
over the whole sky, iridescent with delicate rainbow tints within the
influences of the sun, and ever-changing shape. On another, when the
turbulent Föhn is blowing, streamers of snow may be seen flying from
the higher ridges against a pallid background of slaty cloud, while
the gaunt ribs of the hills glisten below with fitful gleams of lurid
light. At sunrise, one morning, stealthy and mysterious vapours clothe
the mountains from their basement to the waist, while the peaks are
glistening serenely in clear daylight. Another opens with silently
falling snow. A third is rosy through the length and breadth of the
dawn-smitten valley. It is, however, impossible to catalogue the
indescribable variety of those beauties, which those who love nature
may enjoy by simply waiting on the changes of the winter in a single
station of the Alps.
* * * * *
_WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS_
I
Light, marvellously soft yet penetrating, everywhere diffused,
everywhere reflected without radiance, poured from the moon high above
our heads in a sky tinted through all shades and modulations of blue,
from turquoise on the horizon to opaque sapphire at the zenith--_dolce
color_. (It is difficult to use the word _colour_ for this scene
without suggesting an exaggeration. The blue is almost indefinable,
yet felt. But if possible, the total effect of the night landscape
should be rendered by careful exclusion of tints from the
word-palette. The art of the etcher is more needed than that of the
painter.) Heaven overhead is set with stars, shooting intensely,
smouldering with dull red in Aldeboran, sparkling diamond-like in
Sirius, changing from orange to crimson and green in the swart fire of
yonder double star. On the snow this moonlight falls tenderly, not in
hard white light and strong black shadow, but in tones of cream and
ivory, rounding the curves of drift. The mountain peaks alone glisten
as though they were built of silver burnished by an agate. Far away
they rise diminished in stature by the all-pervading dimness of bright
light, that erases the distinctions of daytime. On the path before our
feet lie crystals of many hues, the splinters of a thousand gems. In
the wood there are caverns of darkness, alternating with spaces of
star-twinkled sky, or windows opened between russet stems and solid
branches for the moony sheen. The green of the pines is felt, although
invisible, so soft in substance that it seems less like velvet than
some materialised depth of dark green shadow.