TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 615 
I shall venture, speaking as I am here to a literary audience, and in a 
University town, to dwell for a few minutes on their place in literature—in 
the mirror that reflects in turn the mind of the passing ages. For Geography 
is concerned with the interaction between man and Nature in its widest 
sense. There has been recently a good deal of writing on this subject—I cannot 
say of discussion, for of late years writers have generally taken the same view. 
That view is that the love of mountains is an invention of the nineteenth 
century, and that in previous ages they had been generally looked on either with 
indifference or positive 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 civilisation, is erroneous. On the contrary, I allege it to be a healthy, 
primitive, and almost universal human instinct. I think I can indicate how and 
why the opposite belief has been fostered by eminent writers. They have taken 
too narrow a time-limit for their investigation. They have compared the nine- 
teenth 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 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 produced 
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 imagina- 
tion 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 external world but in the highest moral qualities of man, 
Delphi heard the cry ‘Great Pan isdead!’ 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 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-day. They abused the 
Alps frankly. But all they saw of them was the comparatively dull carriage 
passes, and these they saw at the worst time of year, Hastening to Rome for 
