The beauties of inanimate nature have their turn to be descanted on; and here our selecter spirits have a double task to perform: first, to throw contempt on those who do not feel them; and, secondly, on those who do. For, explain it how you will, they and their few friends are evidently the only people who have an accurate perception of beauty as well as of truth.
"It is an uncharitable error to ascribe the delight with which unpoetical persons often speak of a mountain-tour, to affectation. The delight is as real as mutton and beef, with which it has a closer connexion than the travellers themselves suspect; arising, in great measure, from the good effects of mountain air, regular exercise, and wholesome diet, upon the spirits. This is sensual, indeed, though not improperly so; but it is no concession to the materialist. I do not deny that my neighbour has a soul, by referring a particular pleasure in him to the body." (P. 35.)
So much for the unpoetic traveller with staff and knapsack, glorying, it may be, in his feats of pedestrianism. He is permitted, in spite of his grossness, to have a soul within his body. But the more poetic fraternity are not therefore to pass scatheless.
"The noisiest streams are the shallowest. It is an old saying, but never out of season, least of all in an age the fit symbol of which would not be, like the Ephesian personification of nature, multimamma—for it neither brings forth nor nourishes—but multilingua. Your amateur will talk by the ell, or, if you wish it, by the mile, about the inexpressible charms of nature; but I never heard that his love had caused him the slightest uneasiness.
"It is only," continues the writer, in a style which becomes suddenly overclouded with a strange metaphysical obscurity,—"it is only by the perception of some contrast that we become conscious of our feelings. The feelings, however, may exist for centuries, without the consciousness; and still, when they are mighty, they will overpower consciousness; when they are deep, it will be unable to fathom them. Love has been called 'loquacious as a vernal bird,' and with truth; but his loquacity comes on him mostly in the absence of his beloved. Here too the same illustration holds: the deep stream is not heard until some obstacle opposes it. But can anybody, when floating down the Rhine, believe that the builders and dwellers in those castles, with which every rock is crested, were blind to all the beauties around them? Is it quite impossible that they should have felt almost as much as the sentimental tourist, who returns to his parlour in some metropolis, and puffs out the fumes of his admiration through his quill? Has the moon no existence independent of the halo about her? [sic] or does the halo even flow from her? Is it not produced by the dimness and density of the atmosphere through which she has to shine? Give me the love of the bird that broods over her own nest, rather than of one who lays her eggs in the nest of another, albeit she warble about parental affection as loudly as Rousseau or Lord Byron." (P. 50.)
Nevertheless, we should not adopt the present writer, with all his two-fold fastidiousness, as our guide to enlighten us upon the highest sort of pleasure which scenery produces. He lays far more stress than to us seems due on the pictorial art as a means of cultivating a taste for the beauties of nature. It is quite true that a person familiar with the art of painting will see in an ordinary landscape points of interest which another would overlook. But as the sublimer objects in nature cannot be represented in pictures, so as to convey an impression of sublimity, it is not here that we can learn how to appreciate them. You paint a river and all the amenities of the landscape through which it flows; you cannot paint the sea and its grandeur. On no canvass can you transfer a mountain so as to bring with it the true impression of its sublimity.
That which we call the love of nature must exist in very different forms in minds of different habits and culture. The professional artist notes the various forms, the various colours, how they blend and contrast; he likes to see the whole field of vision richly and harmoniously filled. The poet, after spending a whole day in rapture amongst the mountains, could scarcely give you the exact outline of a single peak; he cannot fill you a solitary canvass; he has grouped all that his memory retains by the law only of his own feelings; he can describe the scene only by the emotions it has called forth.
There is also, no doubt, a simpler love of natural objects that never seeks to express itself either with the pencil or the pen. And this may, as our writer suggests, form a component part of that love of their country for which mountaineers are particularly distinguished. Yet, having ourselves had occasion to notice how very destitute of what is called sentiment, the peasantry of the noblest country are found to be, we should rather attribute the passionate love of home that is remarkable in the Swiss or the Norwegian to this,—that the causes which make home dear to all men are aggravated in their case by the mountainous seclusion in which they live. One who has resided in the same valley all his life, knows every one in that valley, and knows no one beyond it. The whole of the inhabitants form, as it were, one family. And though the sublimity of the mountains around him affects his mind but little, yet their lofty summits present to him (merely as so much matter and form) great physical objects to which he gets familiarised and attached. Each time he raises his eyes, he sees them there eternal in the heavens he can go no where to escape them; and they enclose for him whatever he possesses in common with all other countrymen—his own field, its hedge, its stile,—the village church,—the bridge over the torrent stream on which he played when a boy, and stood and gossipped when a man.
"When I was in the lake of Zug," says our author, "which lies bosomed among such grand mountains, the boatman, after telling some stories about Suwarrow's march through the neighbourhood, asked me,—Is it true that he came from a country where there is not a mountain to be seen? Yes, I replied; you may go hundreds of miles without coming to a hillock. That must be beautiful! he exclaimed: das muss schön seyn.... This very man, however, had he been transported to the plains he sighed for,—even though they had been as flat as Burnet's Paradise, or the tabula rasa which Locke supposed to be the paradisiacal state of the human mind—(why is this piece of folly introduced? or what wit or sense can there be in attributing this childish absurdity to Locke?) would probably have been seized with the homesickness which is so common among his countrymen, as it is also among the Swedes and Norwegians, but which I believe is hardly found, except in the natives of a mountainous and beautiful country."[13]
We have said that the prevailing characteristic of these semi-philosophers is the love of contradicting whatever to the majority of men seems a simple and intelligible truth. We will give two very short instances of this spirit of contradiction. We need not say that they are religious men, or that the want of piety in the world is their frequent subject of animadversion. "I was surprised just now," says one of the brothers, "to see a cobweb round a knocker: for it was not on the gate of heaven." You would suppose, therefore, that a man could not be too earnest in knocking at this gate that it might be opened to him. But this is what all the religious world is saying, and to float with the stream would be intolerable. It is discovered, therefore, that the religious world make of salvation, of the entrance into heaven, a matter of too much personal interest. "Catholic religion has wellnigh been split up into personal, so that the very idea of the former has almost been lost; and it is the avowed principle of what is called the Religious World that every body's paramount, engrossing duty is to take care his own soul." (P. 194.) What is called the Religious World world be a little surprised to hear itself censured by the archdeacon on such a ground as this.
Our next, which is very brief, is a still more striking instance of this contradictious and exclusive spirit. "The glories of their country,"—he is speaking of the ancient Greeks,—"inspired them with enthusiastic patriotism; and an aristocratical religion—(which, until it was supplanted by a vulgar philosophy, was revered in spite of all its errors)—gave them," &c. It was a "vulgar philosophy" that doubted of the truth of Paganism! It is, at all events, a very commonplace philosophy at the present day which discredits the gods of Olympus, and is therefore to be spoken of with due contempt.