Up and down Madeira.
No drop-curtain, at any theatre I have seen, was ever
so richly imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts
and frowning cliffs and gloomy valleys and long, plunging
cataracts, as the actual landscape of Madeira, when
we drew nearer and nearer to it, at the close of a
tearful afternoon of mid-January. The scenery
of drop-curtains is often very holdly beautiful, but
here Nature, if she had taken a hint from art, had
certainly bettered her instruction. During the
waits between acts at the theatre, while studying
the magnificent painting beyond the trouble of the
orchestra, I have been most impressed by the splendid
variety which the artist had got into his picture,
where the spacious frame lent itself to his passion
for saying everything; but I remembered his thronging
fancies as meagre and scanty in the presence of the
stupendous reality before me. I have, for instance,
not even mentioned the sea, which swept smoother and
smoother in toward the feet of those precipices and
grew more and more trans-lucently purple and yellow
and green, while half a score of cascades shot straight
down their fronts in shafts of snowy foam, and over
their pachydermatous shoulders streamed and hung long
reaches of gray vines or mosses. To the view from
the sea the island is all, with its changing capes
and promontories and bays and inlets, one immeasurable
mountain; and on the afternoon of our approach it
was bestridden by a steadfast rainbow, of which we
could only see one leg indeed, but that very stout
and athletic.
There were breadths of dark woodland aloft on this
mountain, and terraced vineyards lower down; and on
the shelving plateaus yet farther from the heights
that lost themselves in the clouds there were scattered
white cottages; on little levels close to the sea there
were set white villas. These, as the ship coquetted
with the vagaries of the shore, thickened more and
more, until after rounding a prodigious headland we
found ourselves in face of the charming little city
of Funchal: long horizontal lines of red roofs,
ivory and pink and salmon walls, evenly fenestrated,
with an ancient fortress giving the modern look of
things a proper mediaeval touch. Large hotels,
with the air of palaces, crowned the upland vantages;
there were bell-towers of churches, and in one place
there was a wide splotch of vivid color from the red
of the densely flowering creeper on the side of some
favored house. There was an acceptable expanse
of warm brown near the quay from the withered but
unfailing leaves of a sycamore-shaded promenade, and
in the fine roadstead where we anchored there lay
other steamers and a lead-colored Portuguese war-ship.
I am not a painter, but I think that here are the
materials of a water-color which almost any one else
could paint. In the hands of a scene-painter
they would yield a really unrivalled drop-curtain.
I stick to the notion of this because when the beautiful
goes too far, as it certainly does at Madeira, it leaves
you not only sated but vindictive; you wish to mock
it.
