September i, 1904J 



NA TURE 



429 



taken too narrow a time-limit for their investigation. They 

 have coinpared 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. \Vithin their own limits I agree 

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

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

 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 pro- 

 duced some admirable results. It was a contented and 

 material century, little stirred by enthusiasms and 

 aspirations and vague desires. It was a phase in human 

 progress, but in many 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 places and reveres them as the abode 

 of Deity. Christianity came and denounced the vague 

 symbolism and personification of Nature in which the pagan 

 had recognised and worshipped the Unseen. It found the 

 objects of its devotion not in the e.xternal world but in the 

 highest moral qualities of man. Delphi heard the cry 

 " (jreat 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 bv its wicked- 

 ness fell in love with the wilderness in which he sought 

 refuge, and soon learnt to give practical proof of his love 

 of scenery by his choice of sites for his religious houses. 

 But the literature of the eighteenth century was not written 

 by monks or countrymen, or by men of world-wide curiosity 

 and adventure like the Italians 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 recognised their 

 final purpose as golf links or gymnasiums. Intellectual 

 life was concentrated in cities and courts, it despised the 

 country. Books were written by townsmen, dwellers in 

 towns which had not grown into vast cities, and whose 

 denizens therefore had not the longing to escape from 

 their homes into purer air that we have to-dav. They 

 abused the Alps frankly. But all they saw of them was the 

 comparatively dull carriage passes, and these thev saw at 

 the worst time of year. Hastening to Rome for Easter, 

 they traversed the Maurienne while the ground was still 

 brown with frost and patched untidily with half-melted 

 snowdrifts. It is no wonder that Gray and Richardson, 

 having left spring in the meadows and orchards of 

 Chambfry, grumbled at the wintry aspect of Lanslebourg. 



That at the end of the eighteenth century a literarv lady 

 of Western Europe preferred a Paris gutter to the Lake of 

 Geneva is an amusing caricature of the spirit of the age 

 that was passing away, but it is no proof that the love of 

 mountains is a new mania, and that all earlier ages and 

 peoples looked on them with indifference or dislike. Words- 

 worth and Byron and Scott in this country, Rousseau and 

 Goethe, De Saussure and his school abroad broke the ice, 

 but it was the ice of a winter frost, not of a Glacial period. 



Consider for a moment the literature of the tw-o peoples 

 who have most influenced European thought — the Jews and 

 the Greeks. I need hardly quote a book that before people 

 quarrelled over education was known to every child — the 

 Bible. I would rather refer you to a delightful poem in 

 rhyming German verse written in the seventeenth century 

 by a Sw-iss author, Rebman, in which he relates all the 

 great things that happened on mountains in Jewish history : 

 how Solomon enjoyed his Sommerfrische on Lebanon, and 

 Moses and Elias both disappeared on mountain tops ; how 

 kings and prophets found their help among the hills ; how 

 closely the hills of Palestine are connected with the story 

 of the Gospels. 



NO. 18 I 8, VOL. 70] 



Consider, again, Greece, where I have just been wander- 

 ing. Did the Greeks pay no regard to their mountains" 

 They seized eagerly on any striking piece of hill sceneiy 

 and connected it with a legend or a shrine. They took their 

 highest mountain, broad-backed Olympus, for the home of 

 the gods ; their most conspicuous mountain, Parnassus, for 

 the home of poetry. They found in the cliffs of Delphi a 

 dwelling for their greatest oracle and a centre for their 

 patriotism. One who has lately stood on the top of 

 Parnassus and seen the first rays of the sun as it springs 

 from the waves of the -ligean strike its snows, while Attica 

 and Boeotia and Euboea still lay in deep shadow under his 

 feet, will appreciate the famous lines of Sophocles, which 

 I will not quote, as I am uncertain how you may pronounce 

 Greek in this University. Vou may remember, too, that 

 Lucian makes Hermes take Charon, when he has a day out 

 from Hell, to the twin-crested summit, and show him the 

 panorama of land and sea, of rivers and famous cities. 

 The Vale of Tempe, the deep gap between Olympus and 

 Ossa, beautiful in its great red cliffs, fountains, and spread- 

 ing plane-trees, was part of a Roman's classical tour. The 

 superb buttresses in w-hich Taygetus breaks down on the 

 valley of the Eurotas were used by the Spartans ior other 

 purposes besides the disposal of criminals and weakly babies. 

 The middle regions — the lawns above the Langada Pass, 

 " virginibus bacchata Lacjenis Taygeta " — are frequented 

 to this day as a summer resort by Spartan damsels. The 

 very top, the great rock that from a height of Sooo feet 

 looks down through its woods of oaks and Aleppo pines 

 on the twin bays of the southern sea, is a place of 

 immemorial pilgrimages. It is now occupied by a chapel 

 framed in a tiny court, so choked with snow at the beginning 

 of June that I took the ridge of the chapel roof for a dilapi- 

 dated stoneman. I have no time to-day to look for evidence 

 in classical literature, to refer to the discriminating epithets 

 applied in it to mountain scenes. 



A third race destined apparently to play a great part in 

 the world's history — the Japanese — are ancient mountain 

 lovers. We are all aware that Fusiyama to the Japanese 

 is (as .Ararat to the .Armenians) a national symbol ; that its 

 ascent is constantly made by bands of pilgrims ; that it is 

 depicted in every aspect. Those who have read the pleasant 

 book of Mr. Watson, who, as English chaplain for some 

 years at Tokio, had exceptional opportunities of travel in 

 the interior, will remember how often he met with shrines 

 and temples on the summits of the mountains, and how he 

 found pilgrims w-ho frequented them in the belief that they 

 fell there more readily into spiritual trances. The Japanese 

 Minister, when he attended Mr. Watson's lecture at the 

 .Alpine Club, told us that his countrymen never climbed 

 mountains without a serious — that is to say, a religious — 

 object. 



India and China would add to my evidence had I know- 

 ledge and time enough to refer to their literature. I 

 remember Tennyson pointing out to me in a volume of trans- 

 lations from the Chinese a poem, written about the date of 

 King .Alfred, in praise of a picture of a mountain landscape. 

 But 1 must return to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 

 in Europe; I may go earlier — even back to Dante. His 

 allusions to mountain scenery are frequent ; his Virgil had 

 all the craft of an .Alpine rock-climber. Read Leonardo 

 da Vinci's " Notes," Conrad Gesner's " Ascent of Pilatus " ; 

 study the narratives of the .Alpine precursors Mr. Coolidge 

 has collected and annotated with admirable industry in the 

 prodigious volume he has recently brought out. 



It is impossible for me here to multiply proofs of my 

 argument, to quote even a selection from the passages that 

 show an authentic enthusiasm for mountains that may be 

 culled from writers of various nations prior to .*.D. 1600. 

 I must content myself with the following specimens, which 

 will probably be new to most of my hearers. 



Benoit Marti was a professor of Greek and Hebrew at 

 Bern, and a friend of the great Conrad Gesner (I call him 

 great, for he combined the qualities of a man of science 

 and a man of letters, was one of the fathers of botany as 

 well as of mountaineering, and was, in his many-sidedness, 

 a typical figure of the Renaissance). Marti, in the year 

 i.i;58 or 1559, wrote as follows of the view from his native 

 city : — 



" These are the mountains which form our pleasure and 

 delight " (the Latin is better — " deliciae nostrse, nostrique 



