White against the cold white sky
Shine out the crowning snows.
Or, if he delights in the subtle play and contrast of colour, he may study the lights and shadows and reflections of the lakes, as the wind and clouds sweep over them, the hue of the hillsides when the purple darkness of the pines becomes a grateful contrast to the rich warm tints of the lower woods, and the rhododendron leaves on the high alps flush with a red brighter than their May blossoms. From some lonely height he may watch the shiftings and gatherings of the mist as it spreads in a 'fleecelike floor' beneath his feet, or the storm-wreaths as they surge in tall columns to the heaven, and break open to reveal a mountain shrine glowing in the rich lights of evening or the pale splendour of a summer moon. He must be a dull man if he does not acknowledge that the mountains have a language worth interpreting, and that to those who can listen, they speak, as Lord Lytton tells us in his pretty fable,
—— With signs all day.
Down drawing o'er their shoulders fair,
This way and that soft veils of air,
And colours never twice the same
Woven of wind, and dew, and flame.
We do not ask or expect many artists to devote themselves to the new country which has been discovered by the Alpine Club above the belt of black and white barrenness which was once thought the typical scenery of the Upper Alps. That there is much that is beautiful, however, in this Wonderland will be readily admitted even by those who doubt whether its beauties are reproducible by art.
The painter who ventures into the snow-world will find, I think, that the subjects it offers divide themselves roughly into three classes: portraits of high peaks; studies of mountain views, that is, of earth and sky-colours blended in the vast distances visible from a lofty stand-point; and studies of snow and ice—of the forms and colours of the snow-field and the glacier. In the first two no conspicuous success has yet been obtained. The great mountains still await their 'vates sacer.'[75] It is in the last-mentioned, at first sight the least inviting and most perplexing of the branches of Alpine art, that the greatest efforts have been made and with the most result. Until M. Loppé painted, it was only the mountaineer who knew the beauty of the glacier. Its broken cataracts and wave-filled seas were to the stranger formless, colourless masses. The Genevese painter, by dint of patient study and laborious, if pleasurable, exertion, has revealed its secrets to the world, and more than justified the enthusiasm of the Alpine Club.