From that time onward the influence of scenery on the human imagination took a different course. The gods were dethroned, and the invisible spirits of nature no longer found worshippers; but it was impossible that the natural features which had prompted the primeval beliefs should cease to exercise a potent influence on the minds of men. This influence has varied in degree and in character from generation to generation, as we may see by comparing its place in the literature of successive periods. Probably at no time has it been more potent than it is at the present day.
To discuss fully this wide subject would demand far more space than can be given to it here. I propose, therefore, to select two portions of it only; one from the beginning and the other from the end of its historical development. I shall try to show first, by reference to primitive myth and legend what were the earliest and most obvious effects of prominent elements of topography on the imagination, and secondly, what these effects are or should be now in the midst of modern science and universal education.
The mythology of Ancient Greece supplies many illustrations of the way in which the physical aspects of the land have impressed their character on the religious beliefs and superstitions of a people. The surface of that country is almost everywhere rugged, rising into groups of bare, rocky hills and into chains of lofty mountains which separate and enclose isolated plains and valleys. The climate embraces all the softness of the Mediterranean shores, together with the year-long snows and frosts of Olympus on the one hand, and the almost sub-tropical heat of the lowlands of Attica on the other. The clouds and rains of the mountains have draped the slopes with umbrageous forests, and have spread over the plains a fertile soil which has been cultivated since before the dawn of history. Thus, while a luxuriant vegetation clothes the lower grounds with beauty, bare crags and crests are never far away. The soft and the harsh of nature, the soothing and the repulsive, are placed side by side. The indolence begotten of a teeming soil and sunny clime is quickened by proximity to the stern mountain-world—the home of thunder-clouds, tempests, and earthquakes. In the childhood of mankind, the physical features of such a country could not fail to react powerfully upon the imagination of those who dwelt among them, calling forth visions of grace and beauty, and at the same time imparting to these visions a variety and vigour which would hardly have been developed among the dwellers on monotonous plains. The natural influence of scenery and climate like those of Greece upon the imagination of a race endowed with a large share of the poetic faculty has never been more forcibly or gracefully expressed than by our own Wordsworth, in a well-known passage in the fourth book of his Excursion.
With the source of the early Hellenic myths we are not so much concerned in the present inquiry as with the form in which they have reached us. Whether they arose in Greece, or, having been brought from some other home, received their final shape there, is of less moment than the actual guise in which we find them in the earliest Greek literature. There cannot, I think, be any doubt that to the striking topography of Thessaly they are largely indebted for the dress in which they appear in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. We may recognise among them some of the earliest recorded efforts of the human imagination to interpret the aspects of nature, and these aspects were unmistakably such as presented themselves in that particular portion of the ancient world.
The wide Thessalian plain, the largest area of lowland in Greece, lies upon Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks, which, in the lower parts of the region, are overlain with a level tract of alluvial soil. Round this plain stretches a girdle of lofty and imposing mountains, composed chiefly of hard crystalline schists and limestones. On the north the crags and snowy crests of Olympus rise high and bare above the dense forests that clothe their slopes. To the eastward, above the narrow chasm of Tempe, through which the drainage of the great inland basin escapes to the sea, the grey peak of Ossa forms the northern end of a long chain of heights which, farther south, mount into the ridge of Pelion. Along the southern edge of the plain another vast mountain barrier sweeps eastward from Mount Pindus through the lofty chain of Othrys to the sea.
No other part of Greece presents such diversities of topography and of climate as are to be found within the region thus encircled with mountains. The peaceful beauty and spontaneous fertility of the plain offer an impressive contrast to the barren ruggedness of the surrounding heights. High above the gardens, meadows, and corn-fields, sharply-cut walls and pinnacles of white limestone mount out of the thick woodland into the clear upper air. Nor is evidence wanting of those catastrophes which from time to time convulse a mountain region. At the base of the bare cliffs and down the rocky declivities lie huge blocks of stone that have been detached by the weather from the precipices above. And, doubtless, from time immemorial the dwellers on these slopes have been familiar with the crash and tumult of the landslip, and with the havoc wrought by it on forest and field. Along the mountain-ridges, too, clouds are ever gathering, and thunderstorms are of continual recurrence. The lightnings of Olympus are visible from Othrys, and to the inhabitants of the intervening plain the incessant peals and reverberations from the northern and southern ranges might well sound like shouts of mutual defiance from the two lines of lofty rampart, as where, in a more northern clime
"Jura answers from her misty shroud
Back to the joyous Alps that call to her aloud."
If to these daily or frequently returning meteorological phenomena we add the terrors of occasional earthquakes, such as affect most mountainous countries and are known to have convulsed different parts of Greece within historic times, we perceive how favourable the conditions of environment must have been for exciting the imagination of an impressionable people. Whether, therefore, the early Hellenic myths arose in Hellas, or came from elsewhere, they could hardly fail in the end to betray the influence of the surroundings amid which they were handed down from generation to generation. The snowy summits of Olympus, rising serenely above the shifting clouds into the calm, clear, blue heaven, naturally came to be regarded as the fit abode of the gods who ruled the world. The association of that mountain-top with the dwelling-place of the immortals, first suggested to the imagination of the early settlers in Thessaly, passed outwards to the utmost bounds of the Hellenic world. Everywhere the word Olympus came to be synonymous with heaven itself.
In the myth of the Gods and the Titans, as handed down in early Greek poetry, the influence of Thessalian topography is abundantly conspicuous. The two opposite mountain ranges of Olympus and Othrys became the respective strongholds of the opposing hosts. The convulsions of that ten years' struggle, whether suggested or not by the broken features of the ground and the conflicts of the elements, assuredly took their poetic colouring from them. The riven crags piled in confusion one above another, the rock-strewn slopes, the trees uprooted by landslips, the thunder-peals that resound from the misty mountain-chains, seem still to tell of that primeval belief, wherein the Titans were pictured as striving with frantic efforts to scale the heights of Olympus by piling Ossa on Pelion, hurling huge rocks and trees through the darkened air, and answering the thunderbolts of Zeus with fierce peals from the clouds of their lofty citadel. In the magnificent description of Hesiod, beneath all the supernatural turmoil we catch, as it were, the tumult of a wild storm among the Thessalian hills, with such added horrors as might be suggested to the imagination of the poet from the recollection or tradition of former earthquake or volcanic eruption.