Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece | Page 3

was but one of the earliest to seize and express a new idea
of growing humanity. For those who seem to be the most original in
their inauguration of periods are only such as have been favourably
placed by birth and education to imbibe the floating creeds of the whole
race. They resemble the first cases of an epidemic, which become the
centres of infection and propagate disease. At the time of Rousseau's
greatness the French people were initiative. In politics, in literature, in
fashions, and in philosophy, they had for some time led the taste of
Europe. But the sentiment which first received a clear and powerful
expression in the works of Rousseau, soon declared itself in the arts
and literature of other nations. Goethe, Wordsworth, and the earlier
landscape-painters, proved that Germany and England were not far
behind the French. In England this love of Nature for its own sake is
indigenous, and has at all times been peculiarly characteristic of our
genius. Therefore it is not surprising that our life and literature and art
have been foremost in developing the sentiment of which we are
speaking. Our poets, painters, and prose writers gave the tone to
European thought in this respect. Our travellers in search of the
adventurous and picturesque, our Alpine Club, have made of
Switzerland an English playground.
The greatest period in our history was but a foreshadowing of this. To
return to Nature-worship was but to reassume the habits of the
Elizabethan age, altered indeed by all the changes of religion, politics,
society, and science which the last three centuries have wrought, yet
still, in its original love of free open life among the fields and woods,
and on the sea, the same. Now the French national genius is classical. It
reverts to the age of Louis XIV., and Rousseauism in their literature is
as true an innovation and parenthesis as Pope-and-Drydenism was in
ours. As in the age of the Reformation, so in this, the German element
of the modern character predominates. During the two centuries from
which we have emerged, the Latin element had the upper hand. Our
love of the Alps is a Gothic, a Teutonic, instinct; sympathetic with all
that is vague, infinite, and insubordinate to rules, at war with all that is

defined and systematic in our genius. This we may perceive in
individuals as well as in the broader aspects of arts and literatures. The
classically minded man, the reader of Latin poets, the lover of brilliant
conversation, the frequenter of clubs and drawing-rooms, nice in his
personal requirements, scrupulous in his choice of words, averse to
unnecessary physical exertion, preferring town to country life, cannot
deeply feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will dislike German art,
and however much he may strive to be Catholic in his tastes, will find
as he grows older that his liking for Gothic architecture and modern
painting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing admiration
for Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect of
speculation all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, in respect of
taste all men are either Greek or German.
At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands; the
Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so much
about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our
cultus,--a strange reflection, proving how much greater man is than
men, the common reason of the age in which we live than our own
reasons, its constituents and subjects.
Perhaps it is our modern tendency to 'individualism' which makes the
Alps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point--no
claims are made on human sympathies--there is no need to toil in
yoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our own
dreams, and sound the depths of personality without the reproach of
selfishness, without a restless wish to join in action or money-making
or the pursuit of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this
absence of social duties and advantages may be barbarising, even
brutalising. But to men wearied with too much civilisation, and
deafened by the noise of great cities, it is beyond measure refreshing.
Then, again, among the mountains history finds no place. The Alps
have no past nor present nor future. The human beings who live upon
their sides are at odds with nature, clinging on for bare existence to the
soil, sheltering themselves beneath protecting rocks from avalanches,
damming up destructive streams, all but annihilated every spring. Man,
who is paramount in the plain, is nothing here. His arts and sciences,

and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty works, and conquests and
decays, demand our whole attention in Italy or Egypt. But here the
mountains, immemorially the same, which