North of the Alps, the everlasting winter is interrupted by summers that struggle and soon yield; south of the Alps, the everlasting summer is interrupted by spasmodic and spiteful winters that never get a real hold, but that are mean and dogged. The in between, in either case, is just as it may be. But the lands of the sun are south of the Alps, forever.
In the morning, the sun shines strong on the horizontal green cloud-puffs of the pines, the sky is clear and full of life, the water runs hastily, still browned by the last juice of crushed olives. And there the earth's bowl of crocuses is amazing. You cannot believe that the flowers are really still. They are open with such delight, and their pistil thrust is so red-orange, and they are so many, all reaching out wide and marvelous, that it suggests a perfect ecstasy of radiant, thronging movement, lit-up violet and orange, and surging in some invisible rhythm of concerted, delightful movement. You cannot believe they do not move, and make some sort of crystalline sound of delight. If you sit still and watch, you begin to move with them, like moving with the stars, and you feel the sound of their radiance. All die little cells of the flowers must be leaping with flowery life and utterance.
The daisies are out too, in sheets, and they too red-mouthed. The first ones are big and handsome. But as March goes on, the dwindle to bright little things, like tiny buttons, clouds of them together. That means summer is nearly here.
In some places there are odd yellow tulips, slender, spiky and Chinese-looking. They are very lovely, pricking out their dulled yellow in slim spikes. But they too soon lean, expand beyond themselves, and are gone like an illusion.
And when the tulips are gone, there is a moment's pause, before summer. Summer is the next move.
In the pause towards the end of April, when the flowers seem to hesitate, the leaves make up their minds to come out. For sometime, at the very ends of the bare boughs of fig trees, spurts of pure green have been burning like little cloven tongues of green fire vivid on the tips of the candelabrum. Now these spurts of green spread out, and begin to take the shape of hands, feeling for the air of summer. And tiny green figs are below them, like glands on the throat of a goat.
Now the aspens on the hill are all remarkable with the translucent membranes of blood-veined leaves. They are gold-brown, but not like autumn, rather like thin wings bats when like birds—call them birds—they wheel in clouds against the setting sun, and the sun glows through the stretched membrane of their wings, as through thin, brown-red stained glass. This is the red sap of summer, not the red dust of autumn.
The cherry tree is something the same, but more sturdy. Now, in the last week of April, the cherry blossom is still white, but waning and passing away: it is late this year, and the leaves are clustering thick and softly copper in their dark blood-filled glow. It is queer about fruit trees in this district. The pear and the peach were out together. But now the pear tree is a lovely thick softness of new and glossy green, vivid with a tender fullness of apple-green leaves, gleaming among all the other green of the landscape, the half-high wheat, emerald, and the grey olive, half-invisible, the browning green of the dark cypress, the black of the evergreen oak, the rolling of the heavy green puffs of the stone-pines, the flimsy green of small peach and almond trees, the sturdy young green of horse-chestnut. So many greens, all in flakes and shelves and tilted tables and round shoulders and plumes and haggles and uprising bushes, of greens and greens, sometimes blindingly brilliant at evening, when the landscape looks as if it were on fire from inside, with greenness and with gold.
By May, the nightingale will sing an unbroken song, and the cate pink rag of floweret. Also there are very lovely an audible Tuscan cuckoo will be a little more audible. Then the lovely pale-lilac irises will come out in all their showering abundance of tender, proud, spiky bloom, till the air will gleam with mauve, and a new crystalline lightness will be everywhere.
There will be tufts of iris everywhere, arising up proud and tender. When the rose colored wild gladiolus is mingled in the corn, and the love-in-the-mist opens blue: in May and June, before the corn is cut.
But as yet is neither May nor June, but the end of April, the pause between spring and summer, the nightingale singing uninterrupted, the bean-flowers dying in the bean-fields, the bean-perfume passing with spring, the little birds hatching in the nests, the olives pruned, and the vines, the last bit of late sloughing finished, and not much work to hand, now, not until the peas are ready to pick, in another two weeks or so.
So the change, the endless and rapid change. In the sunny countries, the change seems more vivid, and more complete than in the grey countries. In the grey countries, there is a grey or dark permanency, over whose surface passes change ephemeral, leaving no real mark.
But in the sunny countries, change is the reality and permanence is artificial and a condition of imprisonment. Hence, to the northerner, the phenomenal world is essentially because it is temporal and must cease to exist. Its very existence implies ceasing to exist, and this is the root of the feeling of tragedy.
But to the southerner, the sun is so dominant that shadow, or dark, is only merely relative: merely the result of something getting between one and the sun.
In the human race, the one thing that is always there is the shining sun, and dark shadow is an accident of intervention.
For my part, if the sun always shine, and always will shine, in spite of millions of clouds of words. In the sunshine, even death is sunny. And there is no end to the sunshine.
That is why the rapid change of the Tuscan spring is utterly free, for me, of any senses of tragedy. The sun always shines. It is our fault if we don' t think so.
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