and Gray had no better epithets than
'rugged,' 'horrid,' and the like for Alpine landscape. The classic
spirit was adverse to enthusiasm for mere nature. Humanity was too
prominent, and city life absorbed all interests,--not to speak of what
perhaps is the weightiest reason--that solitude, indifferent
accommodation, and imperfect means of travelling, rendered mountainous
countries peculiarly disagreeable. It is impossible to enjoy art or
nature while suffering from fatigue and cold, dreading the attacks of
robbers, and wondering whether you will find food and shelter at the
end of your day's journey. Nor was it different in the Middle Ages.
Then individuals had either no leisure from war or strife with the
elements, or else they devoted themselves to the salvation of their
souls. But when the ideas of the Middle Ages had decayed, when
improved arts of life had freed men from servile subjection to daily
needs, when the bondage of religious tyranny had been thrown off and
political liberty allowed the full development of tastes and
instincts, when, moreover, the classical traditions had lost their
power, and courts and coteries became too narrow for the activity of
man,--then suddenly it was discovered that Nature in herself possessed
transcendent charms. It may seem absurd to class them all together;
yet there is no doubt that the French Revolution, the criticism of the
Bible, Pantheistic forms of religious feeling, landscape-painting,
Alpine travelling, and the poetry of Nature, are all signs of the same
movement--of a new Renaissance. Limitations of every sort have been
shaken off during the last century; all forms have been destroyed, all
questions asked. The classical spirit loved to arrange, model,
preserve traditions, obey laws. We are intolerant of everything that
is not simple, unbiassed by prescription, liberal as the wind, and
natural as the mountain crags. We go to feed this spirit of freedom
among the Alps. What the virgin forests of America are to the
Americans, the Alps are to us. What there is in these huge blocks and
walls of granite crowned with ice that fascinates us, it is hard to
analyse. Why, seeing that we find them so attractive, they should have
repelled our ancestors of the fourth generation and all the world
before them, is another mystery. We cannot explain what rapport there
is between our human souls and these inequalities in the surface of
the earth which we call Alps. Tennyson speaks of