338 ON MOUNTAINS AND MANKIND. 



dislike, rising in some instances to abhorrence. Extreme examples 

 have been repeatedly quoted. We have all heard of the bishop who 

 thought the devil was allowed to put in mountains after the fall of 

 man ; of the English scribe in the tenth century who invoked " the 

 bitter blasts of glaciers and the Pennine host of demons" on the 

 violators of the charters he was employed to draft. The examples on 

 the other side have been comparatively neglected. It seems time they 

 were insisted on. 



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 Avhy the 

 opposite 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 eighteenth. They have also taken too narrow a space limit. 

 They have hardly cast their eyes beyond western Europe. Within 

 their own limits I agree with them. The eighteenth century wag, as 

 we all knoAv, an age of formality. It was the age of Palladian porti- 

 coes, of interminable avenues, of formal gardens, and formal style 

 in art, in literature, 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 composition, 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 })ro- 

 duced some admirable results. It Avas a contented and material 

 century, little stirred by enthusiasms and aspirations and vague 

 desires. It was a phase in human progress, but in nuuiy respects it 

 was rather a reaction than a development 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 abhors a void; it peoples the 

 regions it finds uninhabitable with aery sprites, with '^ Pan and 

 father Sylvanus and the sister nymphs; " it worships on high phutes 

 and reveres them as the abode of Deity. Christianity came and 

 denounced the vague symbolism and personification of natui-e in 

 which the pagan had recognized and worshipped the Unseen. 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 vil- 

 lager 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 lie 



