Spring in Switzerland
There are places, it seems, where the earth, for all her aching load of time, cannot grow old, but retains her carefree spirit of unselfconscious youth. If one is lying at this time of year upon a green “alp,” some three thousand feet above the Rhone Valley, it is idle to remind oneself that human life has probably existed on the planet for 400,000 years: the fact is neither credible nor important. This landscape, surely, has but just emerged, clean and sparkling, from its primal chaos, a perfect thing, without a past, without traditions, without the sense of tears that brims up so often out of ancientness. This sea of flowers, rushing into form and colour the moment the snow melts, foams over the grass for the first time. No one has seen them before, nor do they expect to be seen. The mind receives the overflowing beauty without a hint of the weariness that thoughts of the long, long past bring usually. Laughter, dance and song are the passwords here, not reflection.
As spring steals over this region between the valleys and the heights, there comes with her a lightheartedness that belongs only to youth. Switzerland belongs to the childhood of the world, and the man who first called it the Playground of Europe had a moment of inspiration. A playground can offer little to the sophisticated, but spring in this land of running water and abundant flowers can certainly offer this magic touch of earth when it was young. The toy chalets, perched here and there as only a child, it seems, would perch them; the profusion of Christmas trees, balanced in ranks as though set upon flat wooden pedestals: the very cows emerging from long winter seclusion in countless picturesque arks, kicking and dancing as they taste the delicious lower pastures—all these contribute to the conviction that one has stumbled upon some primal nursery, where the earth is at play, refusing to be serious. The air is full of the sound of bells. There is even the detail of the naughty cow, punished for wilful disobedience by being deprived of her bell, put in the corner thus, and sent to Coventry, before the rest of the herd.
Few besides the natives, come to witness this annual exhibition of gay, carefree youthfulness. The winter tourists have gone home, the summer horde not yet arrived; the larger hotels, lately packed with teeming life, are given over to a general cleaning which makes them look as if they could never be habitable again; and the smaller inns, always open, attract no visitors as yet. Above four thousand feet, the snow still lies thick, and an occasional enthusiast, lingering on for wet-snow skiing, may still be seen, despite the uncomfortable heat of the sun, and although, in the valleys, the orchards are in bloom. He haunts the northern slopes, for the Souther ones that take the full sun are bright emerald green, held b the million flowers, with countless rivulets that sing their way over the soaked grass. This mood of generous exuberance when spring brings her profusion at about three thousand feet, is enjoyed every year by only a handful of adventurous; residents, who know just where to look for it.
A brief period, of course, but one of vivid, sharp refreshment it passes gradually up the great mountain sides. To each layer of a thousand feet, as summer threatens, and spring climbs higher, she brings the appropriate flowers; when summer is established at a thousand feet, spring flits to the next thousand feet above, taking her primulas, her soldanellas her anemones with her; above seven thousand feet or so she may be found even in the heats of August. The “région d’en haut,” as they call it, retains during April and May this happy air of careless youth, where the earth refuses to grow old. Daring the late spring storms, and before the summer blaze begins, is the time to taste it.
In so many places, and to so many minds, spring, with her hint of promises unfulfilled, conceals behind her gaiety a touch of sadness. The loveliest of old gardens has its wistfulness; the startling places, where emotions are deep and strong, their melancholy. To Paestum, for instance, where the Greek temples rise out of the forsaken plain, between the blue sea and the yet bluer Calabrian Hills, where roses and violets bloom twice a year, spring brings no lightheartedness, but rather the reverse:
“O world, in very truth thou art too young!
When wilt thou learn to wear the garb of age?
World with thy covering of yellow flowers!
Hast thou forgot what generations sprung
Out of thy loins, and loved thee, and are gone?
Hast thou no place in all their heritage
Where thou dost only weep—that I may come,
Nor fear the mockery of thy yellow flowers?”
Here on this green alp above the Rhéne Valley, spring invokes a gayer song than this mournful utterance. Remembering some great poet who “sang about thy prime,” one hears him singing still, entirely oblivious that “the worm had hardly left his tongue before thy nightingales were come again.” If necessary to remember anything in particular, it would be surely about “the cow jumped over the moon,” “dickory dickory dock,” or else about “Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn.” Nursery songs are here the appropriate note.