544 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The view I hold firmly, and which I wish to place before you to- 

 day, is that this popular belief that the love of mountains is a taste, 

 or, as some would say, a mania, of advanced civilization, is erroneous. 

 On the contrary, I allege it to be a healthy, primitive and almost uni- 

 versal human instinct. I think I can indicate how and why the oppo- 

 site belief has been fostered by eminent writers. They have taken too 

 narrow a time limit for their investigation. They have compared the 

 nineteenth century not with the preceding ages, but with the eigh- 

 teenth. They have also taken too narrow a space limit. They have 

 hardly cast their eyes beyond western Europe. Within their own lim- 

 its I agree with them. The eighteenth century was, as we all know, 

 an age of formality. It was the age of Palladian porticoes, of inter- 

 minable avenues, of formal gardens and formal style in art, in liter- 

 ature and in dress. Mountains, which are essentially romantic and 

 Gothic, were naturally distasteful to it. The artist says ' they will not 

 compose,' and they became obnoxious to a generation that adored com- 

 position, that thought more of the cleverness of the artist than of the 

 aspects of nature he used as the material of his work. There is a 

 great deal to'be said for the century; it produced some admirable re- 

 sults. It was a contented and material century, little stirred by en- 

 thusiasms and aspirations and vague desires. It was a phase in human 

 progress, but in many respects it was rather a reaction than a develop- 

 ment from what had gone before. Sentiment and taste have their tides 

 like the sea, or, we may here perhaps more appropriately say, their 

 oscillations like the glaciers. The imagination of primitive man ab- 

 hors a void, it peoples the regions it finds uninhabitable with aery 

 sprites, with ' Pan and father Sylvanus and the sister nymphs,' it wor- 

 ships on high places and reveres them as the abode of deity. Chris- 

 tianity came and denounced the vague symbolism and personification 

 of nature in which the pagan had recognized and worshipped the un- 

 seen. It found the objects of its devotion not in the external world, 

 but in the highest moral qualities of man. Delphi heard the cry 

 ' Great Pan is dead ! ' But the voice was false. Pan is immortal. 

 Every villager justifies etymology by remaining more or less of a pagan. 

 Other than villagers have done the same. The monk driven out of the 

 world by its wickedness fell in love with the wilderness in which he 

 sought refuge, and soon learned to give practical proof of his love of 

 scenery by his choice of sites for his religious houses. But the litera- 

 ture of the eighteenth century was not written by monks or country- 

 men, or by men of world-wide curiosity and adventure like the Ital- 

 ians of the renaissance or our Elizabethans. It was the product of a 

 practical common-sense epoch which looked on all waste places, heaths 

 like Hindhead, or hills like the Highlands, as blemishes in the scheme 

 of the universe, not having yet recognized their final purpose as golf 



