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THE MAY FIELDS

“This is the hour, the day,

The time, the season sweet.

Quick! hasten, laggard feet,

Brook not delay;

• • • •

… Maytide will not last;

Forth, forth, while yet ’tis time, before the

Spring is past.”

Lewis Morris, Time to Rejoice.

It is essential that we arrive amid the Alpine fields in May; for we must watch them from the very beginning. To postpone our coming until June would be to miss what is amongst the primest of Alpine experiences: the awakening of the earlier gems in their shy yet trustful legions. Indeed, in June in any ordinary year, we should risk finding several lovely plants gone entirely out of bloom, except perhaps quite sparsely in some belated snow-clogged corner; for, be it remembered, we shall not be climbing higher than this region: we do not propose to pursue Flora as she ascends to the topmost pasture. As for following the very general rule and coming only in late July, it is quite out of the question. We must come in May; and it should be towards the middle of the month—although the exact date will, of course, be governed by the advanced or retarded state of the season. Speaking generally, however, the 15th is usually neither too early nor too late. It is wiser to be a day or so too early than otherwise, because at this altitude it is remarkable how soon Nature is wide awake when once she has opened her eyes. The earliest floral effects are of the most fleeting in the Alps; and, like most things fleeting in this changeful world, they are of the most lovely. To some it may appear laughable to say that one day is of vast importance; but it is only the truth. Down on the plains things are positively sluggish by comparison (though an artist, wishing to paint them at their best, knows only too well how rapid even are these). As in Greenland, up here, at 4,800 feet, vegetation adapts itself in all practical earnest to the exigencies of shortened seasons. June’s glories are quick in passing; so, alas, are July’s; but the glories of May, having usually but a brief portion of the month in which to develop, pass, as it were, at breathless speed.

Yes, if ever there is a nervous energy of nature, it is in May in Alpine regions; and it behoves us to be equally quick and timely. For instance, this year (1910) I was struck by the fact that, two weeks after the last vestige of an avalanche had cleared from off a steep slope at the foot of the Breyaz, three or four cows belonging to the hotels were grazing contentedly on rich green grass, and the Crocus and Soldanella had already bloomed and disappeared.

When we quit the plains their face is well set towards June. Spring’s early timidity and delicacy are past; the Primrose, Scilla, Hepatica, Violet, and Wood-Anemone have retired into a diligent obscurity and the fields are already gay with the Orchids and the Globe-Flower. But up here at Champex we find ourselves back with the Crocus, springing fresh and glistening from the brown, snow-soaked sward, and with the as yet scarcely awakened Cowslip. As we climb up from Martigny the slopes grow more and more wintry-looking, and we may perhaps begin to regret leaving the wealth of blushing apple-blossom which dominates the azure-blue fields of Myosotis below the Gorges du Durnand. And this regret will probably become more keen when we plunge into the forests just below Champex and find them still choked with snow and ice. But we are soon and amply repaid for what at first seems a mad ostracism on our part. One or two brief days, full of intense interest in watching Alpine nature’s unfolding, and all regrets have vanished, and we have quite decided that these May fields are a Paradise wherein, in Meredith’s words, “of all the world you might imagine gods to sit.”

The Crocus is not for long alone in making effective display. The Soldanella soon joins it after a few hours of warm sunshine; in fact, in many favoured corners it is already out when we arrive. And Geum montanum is no laggard; neither are the two Gentians, verna and excisa, nor the yellow-and-white Box-leaved Polygala. By the time the 20th of the month has come the pastures are thickly sown with pristine loveliness, and by the 25th this is at the height of perfection—a height to which nothing in paint or in ink can attain. Flora has touched the fields with her fairy wand and they have responded with amazing alacrity. Turn which way we will, the landscape is suffused with the freshest of yellow, rose, and blue; and broad, surprising acres of these bewitching hues lie at our very door, coming, as it were,

“In our winter’s heart to build a tower of song.”

ANEMONE SULPHUREA and VIOLA CALCARATA in the Val d’Arpette in June.

Our “laundered bosoms” swell with hymns of praise; the plains have receded into Memory’s darker recesses, and we vote these Alpine meadows to a permanent and foremost place in our affections—so much so, indeed, that, with Théophile Gautier, we unhesitatingly declare (though not, be it said, with quite all the musical exaggeration of his poet spirit):

“Mais, moi, je les préfère aux champs gras et fertiles

Qui sont si loin du ciel qu’on n’y voit jamais Dieu.”

We know, of course, Divinity is not absent on the plains. When the poet says otherwise it is a tuneful licence with which we are merely tolerant. We quite understand that there is a more moderate meaning behind his extravagance. We know, and everybody acquainted with Alpine circumstance knows, that in the Alps there is a very strong and striking sense of the nearer presence of the Divine in nature. There is a superior and indescribable purity, together with a refinement and restraint which defies what is the utmost prodigality of colour; and, much as we love the divinity of things in the plains, the divinity of those of high altitudes must take a foremost position in our esteem and joy.

Mr. A. F. Mummery has a fine passage touching this subject—a passage that may well be quoted here, for it sums up in admirable fashion all that we ourselves are feeling. “Every step,” he says, “is health, fun, and frolic. The troubles and cares of life, together with the essential vulgarity of a plutocratic society, are left far below—foul miasmas that cling to the lowest bottoms of reeking valleys. Above, in the clear air and searching sunlight, we are afoot with the quiet gods, and men can know each other and themselves for what they are.” “The quiet gods”—yes, indeed! Here, if anywhere, in May and June, is quietness; here at this season these hosts of lovely flowers are indeed “born to blush unseen” and, in Man’s arrogant phrase, to “waste their sweetness on the desert air.”

But what nonsense it is, this assumption that the flowers are wasted if not seen by us! It is not for that reason we should be here: it is not because the flowers would benefit one iota by our presence. What is it to them whether they have, or have not been seen by Man? “We are what suns and winds and waters make us,” they say; and, in saying thus, they speak but the substantial truth. Their history is one of strenuous self-endeavour; their unique and dazzling loveliness they have attained “alone,” oblivious of Man’s presence in the world. After age-long effort, from which their remarkable happiness and beauty are the primest distillations, Man stumbles upon them in their radiance, declares they are languishing for want of his admiration, and at once commiserates with them upon their lone and wasted lot. What fond presumption! How typically human!

Is there not proof abundant of Nature’s “profuse indifference to mankind?” Why, then, should Man assume that all things are made for him? why, in his small, lordly way, should he say—as he is for ever saying—“The sun, the moon, the stars, have their raison d’être in Me?” In a sense he is right, but not in the arrogant sense he so much presumes. All things help to make him. The sun, moon, and stars are for him, inasmuch as he would not be what he is—he would not, probably, be Man—did they not exist. But neither, then, would the black-beetle be as it is. Do not let him forget the high claims of the black-beetle.

“Man stands so large before the eyes of man

He cannot think of Earth but as his own;

All his philosophies can guess no plan

That leaves him not on his imagined throne.”

Let us be humble: let us merge ourselves modestly in the scheme of things. It is not to cheer up the flowers in their “loneliness” that we ought to be with them here in the spring. We ought to be here because of all that the flowers and their loveliness can do for us, in lifting us above “the essential vulgarity of a plutocratic society,” and in revealing us to ourselves and to each other as rarely we are revealed elsewhere. Here with these pastures are health and vigour—vigour that is quiet and restful; here is unpretentiousness more radiant, more glorious, than the most dazzling of pretensions. Here, if we will, we can come and be natural—here, where Man, that “feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances,” as Mr. Bernard Shaw calls him, can be in the fullest sense a man, and be in no wise ashamed of it. For here, in a word, is Nature—unaffected, unconventional, unconscious of herself, yet in the highest degree efficient. The purity of it all is wonderful. And it is this, with its beneficent power, that we waste.

If spring is reckoned pure below, among “the foul miasmas that cling to the lowest bottoms of reeking valleys,” how much purer must it not be reckoned under Alpine skies! The amelioration is already marked after we have risen a few hundred feet from the plains. Our minds climb with our bodies, both attuning themselves to the increasing purity of our surroundings, until at some 5,000 feet we feel, to use a homely expression, as different as chalk from cheese. And nothing aids more potently in this attunement than do the fields of springtime blossoms.

“Why bloom’st thou so?” asks the poet of these flowers—

“Why bloom’st thou so

In solitary loveliness, more fair

In this thy artless beauty, than the rare

And costliest garden-plant?”

The question has been answered, or, at any rate, answered in important part, and far more truthfully than by any blind, patronising remark about “wasted beauty.” Wasted! It is an accusation which the flowers should hurl at us! Wasted? Yes; wasted, in so far as we do not yet take advantage of the Alpine spring; wasted, in so far as we arrive only in late July or early August!

Nor should our praise be counted amongst surprises. Champex’s fields bear witness to it being no mere idle adulation. On the flat damp grass-land, intersected by sparkling glacier streams, which stretches away to the north of the lake, great and brilliant groups of Caltha palustris (only the common Marsh-Marigold, it is true, but of how much more luscious, brilliant hue than down upon some lowland marsh) lie upon a vast rosy carpet of Primula farinosa, effectively broken here and there by the rich purple tints of Bartsia alpina and the ruddier hues of Pedicularis. And this wondrous wealth of yellow and rose is found again on the extensive sunny slopes to the south of the lake; but here Gentiana verna asserts its bright blue presence amongst the Primula, and the effect is even more astonishingly gay than it is to the north. Like Count Smorltorks “poltics,” it “surprises by himself.”

On these southern slopes, too, are quantities of Micheli’s Daisy, enlivening still more with their glistening whiteness the beautiful colour-scheme. There are also colonies of the two Pinguiculas, mauve and creamy-white; also of the quaint Alpine Crowfoot and of the yet more quaint, æsthetically tinted Ajuga pyramidalis—the most arresting of the Bugles—and of the demure little Alpine Polygala, varying from blue (the type) through mauve to reddish-pink, even to white. Here, also, is the Sulphur Anemone just unfolding the earliest of its clear citron-coloured blossoms. But to see this Anemone to fullest advantage we must turn to the drier pastures to the east and north of the lake, where it is scattered in endless thousands amongst sheets of Gentiana verna and excisa and a profusion of the yellow Pedicularis (tuberosa), the white Potentilla (rupestris), the golden Geum (montanum), the purple Calamintha (alpina), the canary-yellow Biscutella (lævigata), the rosy-red Saponaria (ocymoides), and many another of the earlier pasture-flowers. And by the side of all this ravishing young life and colour are the still remaining avalanches of piled-up frozen snow—grim reminders of what wild riot winter makes upon these pastures whilst the flowers are sleeping.

Surely, then our praise is not surprising? Surely, nowhere in the Alps in May shall we find anything more admirable or more amazingly colour-full than are these pasture-slopes and meadows of Lac Champex? In some one or other respect their equal may be found in many favoured places; in many spots we shall find most astonishing displays of other kinds of plants than we have here—of, for instance, the white Anemone alpina and the purple Viola calcarata, as on the slopes of the Chamossaire above Villars-sur-Ollon (though the Viola is in quantity near Champex, in the Val d’Arpette, in June), or of the Pheasant-eye Narcissus, as at Les Avants and Château d’Oex, and the Daffodil, as at Champéry and Saas; but, taking Champex’s floral wealth as a whole, it can have few, if any superiors in point of abundance and colour at this early season. Mindful of what Mr. Reginald Farrer has said of Mont Cenis towards the end of June, we may safely declare that the Viola and Gentian clothed slopes of that district are not the only slopes in the Alps which might be “visible for miles away.”

EARLY JUNE FIELDS beyond Praz de Fort in the Val Ferret, backed by the Groupe du Grand Saint-Bernard et du Grand Golliaz.

Perhaps some more substantial idea of these fields at this season may be gathered from the pictures facing pages iii and 3; but these transcriptions, though to the uninitiated they may appear reckless with regard to truth, are really far from adequate. Seeing the thing itself must, in this case, alone bring entire belief and understanding. “Colour, the soul’s bridegroom,” is so abounding, so fresh, light, joyful, and enslaving, that, after all has been said and done to picture it, one sits listless, dejected and despairing over one’s tame and lifeless efforts; one feels that it must be left to speak for itself in its own frank, dreamland language—language at once both elusive and comprehensible. The soul of things is possessed of an eloquent and secret code which is every whit its own; and the soul of these fields is no exception. In spite of Wordsworth, there is, and there must be, “need of a remoter charm”; there is, and there must be, an “interest unborrowed from the eye”; and it is just this vague, appealing “something”—this “something” so real as to transcend what is known as reality—which speaks to us and invades us in the bright and intimate presence of these hosts of Alpine flowers.

In rural parts of England spring is said to have come when a maiden’s foot can cover seven daisies at once on the village green. Why, when spring had come here, on these Alpine meadows, I was putting my foot (albeit of goodlier proportions than a maiden’s) upon at least a score of Gentians! Whilst painting the study of Sulphur Anemones (facing page 96) about May 20, my feet, camp-stool, and easel were perforce crushing dozens of lovely flowers—flowers which in England would have been fenced about with every sort of reverence. But sacrifice is the mot d’ordre of a live and useful world; worship at any shrine is accompanied by some “hard dealing”; and, sadly as it went against the grain, there was no gentler way in which I could effect my purpose.

Looking at the close-set masses of blossom, it is difficult to realise into what these slopes and fields will develop later on. There seems no room for a crop of hayfield grass. Amid this neat and packed abundance there seems no possible footing for a wealth of greater luxuriance. And yet, in a few weeks’ time, these fields will have so changed as to be scarcely recognisable. What we see at present, despite its ubiquity, is but a moiety of all they can produce. June and July will border upon a plethora of wonders, though they will not perhaps be rivals to the exquisite charm of May.