After some three months spent in intimacy with these slopes and fields, go down to the swallow’s summer quarters—to Martigny, or elsewhere on the plain—and mark the Zinnias and French Marigolds, Asters and Sweet-Williams, and the flaming beds of Petunias, Salvias, and Geraniums. Mark how gross seems all this “cultivation” after the Alpine wildness. You are at once constrained to ask yourself. What is there derogatory in wildness if to be cultivated is to be as these garden flowers? You see at once more clearly than possibly you ever saw before that, after all, refinement is largely a relative quantity, and that even the Rose, Dean Hole’s “Queen Rosa,” can appear coarse after you have spent a season with the Gentian.
And perhaps it is this feeling that can account in some measure for our habit of isolating all Alpines upon rockworks. Perhaps it prompts us to treat them with special deference; and though we will not, cannot deny the Balsam, or the Tropeolum, or the Cactus Dahlia our loudest acclamations; though we keep for these and suchlike products of cultivation a proud place in our affections, hailing them as familiars allied most intimately to our ordinary, worldly natures,—though, I say, we hold this grosser, gaudier vegetation with loving tenacity to our hearts, yet is our rarer self in instant touch with these Alpine wild-flowers, and, as it were, conducts them honourably to a shrine apart.
The Aster and the Edelweiss are now in bloom above us, and we are “list’ning with nice distant ears” to the chime of the cattle-bells, wind-wafted from the higher pastures, half wishing it were our business to climb. We could, if we would, be again with the youth of the year; for one of the delightful possibilities of Alpine residence is to be able to follow spring and summer well into the heart of autumn. But this year we dare not; our task is to watch these half-way fields to the end of the floral seasons. Nor is our lot a hard one. Though flower-land hereabouts is now nearly a dream of yesterday, yet have we much that can still hold us to the spot, enchanted and instructed; though for some few days past the fields have seen their best, and are now for the most part spacious park-like pleasaunces of yellowish-green, yet have we still the famous setting of
“... dreaming mountains,
Lifted from the world together”;
yet have we still the vast, irreproachable arena which, there is no gainsaying, has helped towards the deep and lasting impression we have gathered from the meadows.
Over yonder, towering high above the Grand St. Bernard road, and reflected snow for snow and precipice for precipice in the placid waters of the lake, is the Grand Combin, one of the noblest units of “those great constellations of snow-peaks which Nature has massed, in splendid and prodigal confusion,” in this part of Switzerland; away, at the end of the Val Ferret, are the white and graceful lines of the Grand Golliaz, flanked on the near side by the massif of Saleinaz, and on the further side by the Groupe du Grand Saint-Bernard; while, immediately above us, suffused with the red of the flowering Rhododendron, are the steep and rocky masses of the Breyaz, the Clocher d’Arpette, and the Catogne, that curious mountain that can be seen from Vevey and Lausanne, a sugarloaf-like cone, blocking the very centre of the Rhône Valley.
What a happy thing it is that in this neighbourhood the mountains are reminiscent of nothing except their own giant individualities. How vexing when this is otherwise—when, I mean, there is a lion rock, or a weeping woman, or a head of Napoleon in the landscape; as when Mark Twain discovered that one of the aiguilles flanking Mont Blanc “took the shapely, clean-cut form of a rabbit’s head.” At Château d’Oex, for instance, the outline of the Gummfluh is a really creditable profile likeness of the great Gladstone with his collar, and that of the Rubli next door presents the profile of O’Connell, the Irish patriot. Apart from the damage inflicted upon the landscape by the intrusion of party politics, such huge examples of Nature’s unconscious incursions into portraiture, when once they have made themselves plain, become a distressing obsession; and especially is this so for the artist who attempts to paint these mountains without producing a puzzle-picture. Fortunately, there are some places which up to the present seem to know nothing of such untoward resemblances in their surroundings; fortunately, there are some beauty-spots which have so far escaped the eye with the disturbing gift of “seeing forms” in clouds and trees and whatnot; and Champex is one such. At Champex we may rest and dream without fear of our indulgence degenerating into a nightmare.
But this is not such a season for dreaming as was the spring; we are far more of the world than we were when the Vernal Gentian, that “turquoise lighting a ground of green,” was heralding all that is now so rapidly falling before the scythe. Yet it must not be supposed that these fields have lost all power to nourish or stimulate the imagination. The configuration and nature of the ground are so varied that haymaking is a more lengthy and irregular operation than it is upon the plains. We have only to turn to the ousy land where the Grass-of-Parnassus [1] opens its white, green-veined, Ranunculus-like flowers among the large, rich-blue bells of Campanula Scheuchzeri and the tall, paler blue spikes of Polemonium cœruleum, the well-known Jacob’s Ladder of our gardens; or to the drier stretches where the Heather is just tinting its olive-green branches with a suspicion of rose, and the Rampions, Arnica, Hieracium, and Brown Gentian are mingling with the warm grey, feathery seed-heads of Anemone sulphurea. Here we find the flowers and butterflies as numerous and as gay as ever; here among the grasses is Banagna Atrata, the little dull-black moth with white-tipped wings, seeking sanctuary from the devastating work of the reapers; Zygœna carniolica, one of the most distinct and fascinating of the bright Burnet butterflies, a stranger to England, greedily absorbed upon the flowers of the Scabious; numberless Fritillaries, speeding hither and thither, their burnished pearl-backed wings flashing in the sunlight,—here, in fact, we have summer at its height, uninjured, undisturbed—a place, as Walden was, where we may “transact some private business with the fewest obstacles.”