Perhaps some of our contemporary love of wild scenery is owing to the comfortable circumstances in which we behold it; transportation, tunnels, fine hotels, luxuries of every description enable us to view mountains in security and serenity; but if we had to pass over them in acute discomfort and in constant danger, our attitude might be more like Addison’s. This by no means explains why the once “horrid” has become fashionable; but it helps to explain the modern love of wild scenery.
Had Addison been told that two centuries later people would build hotels on the edge of Alpine precipices, he would have dismissed the idea as a silly dream; no one would put a roadhouse there. “But, Mr. Addison, I am not talking of roadhouses. These hotels are not on the way to something else; they are not a means, they are an end. People will travel three thousand miles from California to New York, sail three thousand miles from New York to Europe just to spend the summer in a mountain hotel, where it costs twenty dollars a day—” he would have regarded the coming generation as idiotic.
It was Thomas Gray, author of the Elegy, who was one of the first English travellers to see the beauty of the Alps, and it was he therefore who is originally responsible for making them fashionable. He and Horace Walpole drove over the mountains in a chaise, and Gray wrote to his friend West, “Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief.” This was a new note in literature.
It is my belief that mountains and wild scenery are more appreciated today by citified folk who love them for the change and novelty than they are by those who are forced to live among them all the time. When I was young, I walked with three of my college mates from New Haven to the White Mountains; it was a fine expedition, and took us some three weeks. I remember toward twilight on a certain day we entered a gorge and passed through into a place surrounded by austere mountains.
A farmer addressed us: “Where do you boys come from?”
“Connecticut.”
He slowly and solemnly repeated the word CONN-ECT-ICUT—as though he were saying MESOPOTAMIA, and added, “My, I’d like to see Connecticut.”
We told him it was not so very remarkable.
“We have no such mountains as these in Connecticut.”
He replied, “Oh, damn these mountains! I’m sick of the sight of them.” And it appeared that he had never been out of that valley.