So that a court-yard, a worm-eaten hut, a parched and melancholy plain, may be as beautiful as the sublimest mountain.
“Certainly. You know the fields of the Flemish painters, how flat they are; you are never tired of looking at them. Take something that is still more trivial, an interior of Van Ostade; an old peasant is sharpening a chopping-knife in the corner, the mother is swaddling her nursling, three or four brats are rolling about among the tools, the kettles and benches; a row of hams is ranged in the chimney, and the great old bed is displayed in the background under its red curtains. What could be more common! But all these good people have an air of peaceful contentment; the babies are warm and easy in the over-wide breeches, glossy antiques transmitted from generation to generation. There must have been habits of security and abundance, for a scattered household to lie pellmell on the ground in this fashion; this comfort must have lasted from father to son, for the furniture to have assumed that sombre color and all the hues to harmonize. There is not an object here that does not point to the unconstraint of an easygoing life and uniform good-nature. If this mutual fitness of the parts is the mark of fine painting, why not of fine nature? Real or fancied, the object is the same; I praise or I blame one with as good right as the other, because the practice or the violation of the same rules produces in me the same enjoyment or the same displeasure.”
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
ABOVE GABAS.
Mountains then may have another beauty than that of grandeur? "Yes, since they sometimes have a different expression. Look at that little isolated chain, against which the Thermes support themselves: nobody climbs it; it possesses neither great trees, nor naked rocks, nor points of view. And yet I experienced a genuine pleasure there yesterday; you follow the sharp backbone of the mountain that protrudes its vertebrae through its meagre coating of earth; the poor but thickset turf, sunburnt and beaten by the wind, forms a carpet firmly sewn with tenacious threads; the half-dried mosses, the knotty heaths strike their stubborn roots down between the clefts of the rock; the stunted firs creep along, twisting their horizontal trunks. An aromatic and penetrating odor, concentrated and drawn forth by the heat, comes from all these mountain plants. You feel that they are engaged in an eternal struggle against a barren soil, a dry wind, and a shower of fiery rays, driven back upon themselves, hardened to all inclemencies, and determined to live. This expression is the soul of the landscape; now, given so many varied expressions, you have so many different beauties, so many chords of passion are stirred. The pleasure consists in seeing this soul. If you cannot distinguish it, or if it be wanting, a mountain will make upon you precisely the effect of a heap of pebbles.”
That is an attack on the tourists; to-morrow I will test your reasoning in the gorge of Eaux-Chaudes, and see if it is right.