Day After
Day Breaks With The Rarest Gold Upon The Mountain Spires, And
Creeps, Growing And Glowing, Down Into The Valley.
From end to end
the snow reverberates the sunshine; from end to end the air tingles
with the light, clear and dry like crystal.
Only along the course
of the river, but high above it, there hangs far into the noon, one
waving scarf of vapour. It were hard to fancy a more engaging
feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to believe that
delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature of the
incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon the sky is
arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour - mild and pale and melting
in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of
purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable
lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An English
painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger
that 'the values were all wrong.' Had he got among the Alps on a
bright day he might have lost his reason. And even to any one who
has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the
spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of
insanity. The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your
eye; the neighbouring dull-coloured house in comparison is miles
away; the summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand;
the nigh slopes, which are black with pine trees, bear it no
relation, and might be in another sphere. Here there are none of
those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and
spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of air and
light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in
climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely. A glaring
piece of crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism
and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding
definition; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more
than scenically trying, and yet hearty and healthy, making the
nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile: such is the winter
daytime in the Alps.
With the approach of evening all is changed. A mountain will
suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten
minutes the thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that
are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile,
overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the place,
the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours.
The latest gold leaps from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the
moon shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be
mellowed and misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon
a hilltop, and here and there a warmly glowing window in a house,
between fire and starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow.
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