But live they do, in their own way—not only in their form and individuality, but in the constant cycle of their changeableness. They approach to being closed systems, independent in some degree of the rest of the world; partial individuals, they have a share in determining their future selves. Once raised to mountains, they contain within themselves the germs of their own destiny; and if not possessing such power as true life possesses of blossoming into a predetermined form, scarcely to be altered by all the efforts of the outside world, yet at least marking down beforehand the limits beyond which the outer influences cannot mould them, preordaining the main succession of their future history, and the essential quality of the forms they are to take. And again, though they have not the true vital property of reproducing their kind by means of a mere particle of their own substance, that grows, and in its growth takes up the atoms of outer matter and moulds them to its will, they have a kind of reproduction scarcely less strange, where like generates not like, but unlike. In their decay they are laying new foundations. Grain torn from grain of solid rock, boulder from boulder is swept away; layer after layer of grains or boulder is laid—‘well and truly laid’; rock system piled upon rock system; till the time comes, and all this is upheaved into a chain of peaks which, though their every particle were taken from the substance of that older chain, will be like it in being a mountain range, but in that alone. So they have their being, in a different and vaster cycle than man’s, their life only another fragment of that change which is the single fixed reality.
And what is the moral of all this? You may well ask; for I do not know that I know myself. Proceed to the fact that our mountains are but crinkles on the rind of a small satellite of one star among the millions, and we deduce the littleness of man: which has been done before. Point out how, in spite of all their size and their terrors, they fall one by one to the climber, and we with equal facility prove his greatness: which also others have successfully attempted. Insist on their mutability, and it merely takes us back to Heraclitus and his πάντα ῥεῖ. Perhaps one moral is that feeling as well as reasoning, reasoning as well as feeling, is necessary to true knowledge; a conclusion which would appeal to followers of M. Bergson, but hardly falls within the scope of this book.
The chief moral is, I expect, that the mountains can give the climber more than climbing, and will do so if he but keep his eyes open. From them there will come to him flashes of beauty and of grandeur, light in dark places, sudden glimpses of the age, the glory, and the greatness of the earth.
THE MOUNTAINS IN GREEK POETRY
BY
NORMAN EGERTON YOUNG
(Corpus Christi College)
III. THE MOUNTAINS IN GREEK POETRY
Before we try to discover from their literature the feelings of the Greeks for the mountains, we should first trace clearly the origin of our own attitude towards high places.
Nature-worship is a reaction from the life of crowded communities; contrast and change are the essentials of rest. It is only for those whose life is passed in great cities fully to appreciate the mountains; in their own country the hills have no honour, for where men make their living they cannot appreciate life. But we are so much accustomed to accept as absolute our personal standard of beauty, made up of all those things which seem to us beautiful on account of their contrast to our ordinary surroundings, that it is hard to realise the fact that all expressions of beauty depend upon individual perception, and are therefore relative. A converse often illuminates the less obvious side of a question, and the converse of our love for the mountains is strikingly shown by Sir Leslie Stephen, who records that a highly intelligent Swiss guide pronounced the dreary expanse of chimney-pots round the South-Western Railway finer than the view from the top of Mont Blanc. It was a contrast to his ordinary life, and therefore, for him, beautiful. For to the guide, qua guide, a mountain is not a form of the Idea of Beauty, but a problem in higher mathematics, each possible route an indeterminate equation in terms of glacier, rock, ice, and snow; and the great guide is he who can solve most truly in theory and in practice the daily variations of these and other unknown quantities. A mountain to him may be like a great book made odious by being set as a holiday task.
But the guide is hardly a fair example, since he is the product of an artificial demand: let us take, as a less extreme case, the more primitive inhabitants of a mountainous land, whose living comes from the land itself, not indirectly from the great cities through services rendered to their holiday-makers. The peasants of such a country must work the land for their living, not look at it; life comes before æstheticism, and the artistic temperament is an inadequate remedy for an empty stomach. To such men the mountains do not represent beauty and strength and freedom, but an amazing waste of the surface of the earth, useless deserts, from which every acre of lowland and slope must be redeemed for crops and vineyards.