On the north of the valley of Ossau is a cleft; it is the way to Eaux-Chaudes. An entire skirt of the mountain was torn out in order to open it; the wind eddies through the hollows of this chilly pass; the precipitous cut, of a dark iron-color, lifts its formidable mass as if to overwhelm the passerby; upon the rocky wall opposite are perched twisted trees in rows, and their thin, feathery tops wave strangely among the reddish projections. The highway overhangs the Gave which eddies five hundred feet below. It is the stream which has hollowed out this prodigious groove, coming back again and again to the attack, and for whole centuries together; two rows of huge rounded niches mark the lowering of its bed, and the ages of its toil; the day seems to grow dark as you enter; it is only a strip of sky that can be seen above the head.
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On the right, a range of giant cones rises into relief against the intense azure; their bellies crowd one upon another and protrude in rounded masses; but their lofty peaks swing upward with a dash, with a gigantic sort of flight, towards the sublime dome whence streams the day.
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The light of August falls on the stony escarpments, upon the broken walls, where the rock, damasked and engraven, gleams like an oriental cuirass. Leprous spots of moss are there incrusted; stems of dried box dangle wretchedly in the crannies; but they are lost sight of in such heroic nakedness: the ruddy or blackened colossi display themselves in triumph in the splendor of the heavens.
Between two channelled granite towers stretches the little village of Eaux-Chaudes. But who, here, pays any attention to the village? All thought is taken up by the mountains. The eastern chain, abruptly cut off, drops perpendicularly like the wall of a citadel; at the summit, a thousand feet above the highway, are esplanades expanding in forests and meadows, a crown green and moist, whence cascades ooze forth by the hundred. They wind broken and flaky along the breast of the mountain, like necklaces of pearls told off between the fingers, bathing the feet of the lustrous oaks, deluging the bowlders with their tempest, then at last spreading themselves out in long beds where the level rock lures them to sleep.
The wall of granite falls away; at the east, an amphitheatre of forests suddenly opens up. On all sides, as far as the eye can reach, the mountains are loaded with wood to the very top; several of them rise, in all their blackness, into the heart of the light, and their fringe of trees bristles against the pale sky. The charming cup of verdure rounds its gilded margin, then drops into hollows, overflowing with birch and oak, with tender, changeable hues that lend additional sweetness to the mists of morning. Not a hamlet is to be seen, no smoke, no culture; it is a wild and sunny nest, no doubt like to the valley that, on the finest day of the happiest springtide of the universe, received the first man.
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The highway makes a turn, and everything changes. The old troop of parched mountains reappears with a threatening air. One of them in the west is crumbling, shattered as if by a cyclopean hammer. It is strewn with squared blocks, dark vertebrÆ snatched from its spine; the head is wanting, and the monstrous bones, crushed and in disorder, scattered to the brink of the Gave, announce some ancient defeat. Another lying opposite, with a dreary air, extends its bald back a league away; in vain you go on or change your view: it is always there, always huge and melancholy. Its naked granite suffers neither tree nor spot of verdure; a few patches of snow alone whiten the hollows in its sides, and its monotonous ridge shifts sadly its lines, blotting out half the sky with its bastions.
Gabas is a hamlet in a barren plain. The torrent here rumbles underneath glaciers and among shattered tree-trunks; it descends, lost at the bottom of the declivity, between colonnades of pines, the mute inhabitants of the gorge. The silence and constraint contrast with the desperate leaps of the snowy water. It is cold here, and everything is sad; only, on the horizon may be seen the Pic du Midi in its splendor, lifting its two jagged piles of tawny gray into the serene light.
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II.
In spite of myself I have been dreaming here of the antique gods, sons of Greece, and made in the likeness of their country. They were born in a similar country, and they spring to life again here in ourselves, with the sentiments which gave birth to them.
I imagine idle and curious herdsmen, of fresh and infantile souls, not yet possessed by the authority of a neighboring civilization and an established dogma, but active, hardy, and poets by nature. They dream—and of what, if not of the huge beings that all day long besiege their eyes? How fantastical are those jagged heads, those bruised and heaped-up bodies, those twisted shoulders! What unknown monsters, what melancholy, misshapen race, alien to humanity! By what-dread travail has the earth brought them forth from her womb, and what contests have their blasted heads sustained amidst clouds and thunderbolts! They still threaten to-day; the eagles and the vultures are alone welcome to sound their depths. They love not man; their bowlders lie in wait to roll upon him, so soon as he shall violate their solitudes. With a shiver they hurl upon his harvests a tide of rocks; they have but to gather up a storm in order to drown him like an ant.
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How changeable is their face, but always to be dreaded! What lightnings their summits hurl among the creeping fogs! That flash causes fear like the eye of some tyrant god, seen for a moment, then hid again. There are mountains that weep, amidst their gloomy bogs, and their tears trickle down their aged cheeks with a hollow sob, betwixt pines that rustle and whisper sorrowfully, as if pitying that eternal mourning. Others, seated in a ring, bathe their feet in lakes the color of steel, and which no wind ever ruffles; they are happy in such calm, and gaze into the virgin wave at their silver helmet. How mysterious are they at night, and what evil thoughts do they turn over in winter, when wrapped in their shroud of snow! But in the broad day and in summer, with what buoyancy and how glorified rises their forehead to the sublimest heights of air, into pure and radiant realms, into light, to their own native country. All scarred and monstrous though they be, they are still the gods of the earth, and they have aspired to be gods of heaven.
But lo, where comes a second race, lovely and almost human, the choir of the nymphs, fleeting and melting creatures who are daughters of those misshapen colossuses. How comes it that they have begotten them? No one knows; the birth of the gods, full of mystery, eludes mortal eye. Some say that their first pearl has been seen to ooze from an herb, or from a cranny beneath the glaciers, in the uplands. But they have dwelt long in the paternal bowels; some, burning ones, keep the memory of that inner furnace whose bubbling they have looked upon, and which, from time to time, still makes the ground to tremble; others, icy cold, have crossed the eternal winter that whitens the summits. At the outset, all retain the fire of their race; dishevelled, screaming, raving, they bruise themselves against the rocks, they cleave the valleys, sweep away trees, struggle and are sullied. What transport is here—maidenly and bacchanal! But, once they have reached the smooth beds which the rounded rock spreads out for them, they smile, they hush themselves in sleep, or they sport. Their deep eyes of liquid emerald have their flashes. Their bodies bow and rise again; in the vapors of morning, in sudden falls, their water swells, soft and satiny as a woman’s breast. With what tenderness, what delicately wild quiverings they caress the bended flowers, the shoots of fragrant thyme that thrive between two rocky edges on the bank! Then with sudden caprice they plunge deep down in a cavern, and scream and writhe as mad and wayward as any child. What happiness in spreading out thus to the sun! What strange gayety, or what divine tranquillity, in that transparent wave as it laughs or eddies! Neither the eye nor the diamond has that changeful clearness, those burning and glaucous reflections, those inward tremblings of pleasure or of anxiety; women though they are, they are indeed goddesses. Without more than human might, would they have availed, with their soft wave, to wear these hard cliffs, to bore through these impregnable barriers? And by what secret virtue do they know, they, so innocent of aspect, how at one time to torture and slay him who drinks, and, again, to heal the infirm and the invalid? They hate the one and love the other, and, like their fathers, they bestow life and death at their pleasure.
Such is the poetry of the pagan world, of the childhood of mankind; thus each one framed it for himself, in the dawn of things, at the awaking of imagination and conscience, long before the age when reflection set up defined worship and studied dogmas. Among the dreams that blossomed in the morning of the world, I love only those of Ionia.
Hereupon Paul became vexed, and called me a classicist: “You are all like that! You take one step forward into an idea, and then stop short like cowards. Come now; there are a hundred Olympuses in Egypt, in Iceland, in India. Each one of those landscapes is an aspect of Nature; each of those Gods is one of the forms in which man has expressed his idea of Nature. Admire the god by the same standard as the landscape; the onion of Egypt is worth as much as Olympian Jove.” That is too strong, yet I take you at your word; you shall stand by your assertion, and extract a god from your onion.
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“This very instant; but first transport yourself to Egypt, before the coming of warriors and priests, upon the river-ooze, among savages half naked in the mire, half drowned in water, half burned by the sun. What a sight is that of this great black shore steaming under the heat, where crocodiles and writhing fish lash the waters of the pools! Myriads of mosquitoes buzz in the air; large-leaved plants lift their tangled mass; the earth ferments and teems with life; the brain grows giddy with the heavy exhalations, and man, made restless, shudders as he feels in the air and coursing through his limbs the generative virtue by whose means everything multiplies and grows green. A year ago nothing grew on this ooze: what a change! There springs from it a tall, straight reed, with shining thongs, the stem, swollen with juices, striking deep into the slime; with every day it expands and changes: green at the outset, it reddens like the sun behind the mists. Unceasingly does this child of the ooze suck therefrom juices and force; the earth broods over it and commits to it its every virtue. See it now, how, of its own accord, it lifts itself half-way, and at last wholly, and warms in the sun its scaly belly filled with an acrid blood; blood that boils, and so exuberant that it bursts the triple skin and oozes through the wound! What a strange life! and by what miracle is it that the point of the summit becomes a plume and a parasol? Those who first gathered it wept, as though some poison had burned their eyes; but in the winter-time, when fish fails, it rejoices him who meets it. Those enormous heaped-up globes, are they not the hundred breasts of the great nurse, mother Earth? New ones reappear as often as the waters retire; there is some divine force hidden beneath those scales. May it never fail to return! The crocodile is god, because it devours us; the ichneumon is god, because it saves us; the onion is god, because it nourishes us.”
The onion is god, and Paul is its prophet; you shall have some this evening, with white sauce. But, my dear friend, you frighten me; you blot out with one stroke three thousand years of history. You put on one level races of artists and races of visionaries, savage tribes and civilized nations. I like the crocodile and the onion, but I like Jupiter and Diana better. The Greeks have invented the arts and sciences; the Egyptians have only left some heaps of ashlar-work. A block of granite is not as good as either Aristotle or Homer. They are everywhere the first who, through clear reasoning, have reached a conception of justice and have made science. Then, however evil our time may be, it surpasses many another. Your grotesque and oriental hallucinations are beautiful, at a distance however; I am willing to contemplate them, but not to submit to them. Now-a-days we have no poetry, be it so; but we appreciate the poetry of others. If our museum is poor, we have the museums of all ages and all nations. Do you know what I get from your theories? Three times a month they will save me four francs; I shall find fairy-land in them, and shall have no further occasion for going to the opera.
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