Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece | Page 2

entertain it.' Addison 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
Some vague emotion of delight In gazing up an Alpine height,
and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physical science
has created for natural objects has something to do with it. Curiosity
and the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns, no cultivated
tracts of Europe however beautiful, form such a contrast to our London
life as Switzerland. Then there is the health and joy that comes from
exercise in open air; the senses freshened by good sleep; the blood
quickened by a lighter and rarer atmosphere. Our modes of life, the
breaking down of class privileges, the extension of education, which
contribute to make the individual greater and society less, render the
solitude of mountains refreshing. Facilities of travelling and improved
accommodation leave us free to enjoy the natural beauty which we seek.
Our minds, too, are prepared to sympathise with the inanimate world;
we have learned to look on the universe as a whole, and ourselves as a
part of it, related by close ties of friendship to all its other members
Shelley's, Wordsworth's, Goethe's poetry has taught us this; we are all
more or less Pantheists, worshippers of 'God in Nature,' convinced of
the omnipresence of the informing mind.
Thus, when we admire the Alps, we are after all but children of the
century. We follow its inspiration blindly; and while we think ourselves
spontaneous in our ecstasy, perform the part for which we have been
trained from childhood by the atmosphere in which we live. It is this
very unconsciousness and universality of the impulse we obey which
makes it hard to analyse. Contemporary history is difficult to write; to
define the spirit of the age in which we live is still more difficult; to
account for 'impressions which owe all their force to their identity with
themselves' is most difficult of all. We must be content to feel, and not
to analyse.
Rousseau has the credit of having invented the love of Nature. Perhaps
he first expressed, in literature, the pleasures of open life among the
mountains, of walking tours, of the 'école buissonnière,' away from
courts, and schools, and cities, which it is the fashion now to love. His

bourgeois birth and tastes, his peculiar religious and social views, his
intense self-engrossment,--all favoured the development of
Nature-worship. But Rousseau was not alone, nor yet creative, in this
instance. He