Part 3

Look at the Matterhorn, and be told how like it is to Strasburg Cathedral; but rock spires are not built upwards like ones of stone and mortar; they are monoliths, cut out of the solid rock. The stony layers of the rock, once lying flat and soft upon the sea-bottom, then hardened, then gripped and crumpled by the ageing earth like so many sheets of wet paper, now are cut through, and show their free edges on the steep flanks of the mountain. Fixed long ago in waves and curves, now they are immobile, but they treasure within themselves the forms which the ice and the sun are to reveal. As if the sculptor were to have but half the shaping of his work, and the block of marble almost of itself disclose its hidden Oenus, or turn a Hercules planned into a Hylas accomplished, so the rock masses contain within themselves no infinite possibility of forms--there is, to start with, a quality of mountain concealed in the rock, so that the aerial sculptors may work as they please, and never find a Dent du Midi in the Mont Blanc range, or fashion a Weisshorn from the Dolomites. But that is another story. Even though the rocks thus decree that the instruments of their destruction shall be as well instruments to reveal their hidden beauties, yet destruction none the less it is. How gigantic a destruction those cut, upcurving layers of rock can testify.

But in the same way as our mind can know and yet not feel the mutability of the mountains, so it may know and yet not grasp their size and its extent. Here again the new lesson is hard to be learnt by brain alone: ‘Everest 29,002, Mont Blanc 15,786, Scawfell Pike 3210’--the figures convey but a part. The hills must take the mind by assault through the breaches of sense.

Those moments come but rarely. I have seen the west face of Skiddaw once, and once Schiehallion from the Struan road, towering as high as any Alpine peak might do; and Donkin’s famous photograph of the Weisshorn gives one something of the true feeling. But the most complete revelation came to me at the head of the Swiss Val Ferret.

We had already begun to appreciate the bigness of things, but rather through our own littleness than for any unusual grandeur revealed in them. As you walk up the deep, close valley, you have on your right, in contrast to the monotonous dry ridge of even middle height to the left, a succession of broad bluffs or buttresses that sustain the east end and guard the eastern glacier gateways of that great Cathedral of Three Nations, the massif of Mont Blanc. There is one below and one above the end of the Saleinaz glacier, and on the side of each a lesser bluff, an inward, forward-projecting pillar that narrows the gateway to a mere postern, with only glimpses of the broad aisle above. Both these doorposts bear the same name--Tita Moutse or Tête Moutze; a very good name, certainly, but you would think that the dwellers at Proz-de-Fort, just between the two, might find it confusing, even though on Barbier’s map one is printed black and upright, the other thin and in italics. It is difficult to render these distinctions in speaking--and perhaps they have not all got Barbier’s map. However, that is not our concern at present. Farther up is another big buttress (rejoicing in the name of Treutze Bouc), and another, and then the Glacier de la Neuvaz, with the Châlet Ferret on the other hand, and feather beds for weary travellers.

These buttresses, and especially the Treutze Bouc, are calculated to annoy the walker. There they stand, looking no bigger than a buttress of Snowdon or Saddleback; there as here the mountain torrents cut away the ground in the same way, and the same broad-faced bluffs are left. As with bluffs, so with ships: it is almost impossible to grasp the size of a big liner out at sea, her build is the same as that of any other steamship, and there is no standard of comparison. Here in the Val Ferret one learns by bitter experience and blistered feet. The road winds on and on, across torrent-beds, through alder-woods, along hot slopes--and the summit of Treutze Bouc is not yet opposite. After this lengthy demonstration of the disadvantages and unpleasantnesses of size, the mountains at last relent and show the other side of the picture.

I shall never forget the impression of colossal grandeur that showed itself at a turn of the road opposite the gate of the Glacier de la Neuvaz. Nothing was lacking in the chain. In the foreground, below a grassy bank, flowed the Drance de Ferret--only a smallish stream, but big enough and swift enough unbridged to stop such a small animal as man from gaining its other side. Across it lay a fallen pine; and from this, better than from the standing trees, you realised to what a height the pine-trunks grow. Of these there was a thick wood filling up the level bottom left by the receding glacier; the green sea extended back and back until the tops of the separate trees were not to be made out, and the whole wood tapered away in perspective like a band of clouds towards the setting sun. In the end it turned a corner to the right--a thin green line beyond the grey terminal moraine. This corner filled a little indentation in the hill behind. The eye travelled up naturally from the green line of trees to the green slope, and saw that slope as part of a great rounded hill, rather like a bit of the Downs in general appearance; but had it been hollow you could have gone on pouring your Chanctonburies and Sinoduns and Beachy Heads and Hogs backs into it, and they would have rattled about like small-shot inside. The stream of trees let you see how big it was, as hills on the horizon show the greatness of the setting moon. I think the hill was nameless. Beyond it, in another plane of distance, rose another peak--this one brown, of bare rock, and rather jagged; the vegetation had ended on the part concealed behind the green hill. Up and up the eye travelled, and was amazed to find that if the green had been but a spur of the brown, so the brown was but a spur of the white. Mont Dolent arose from, behind it like the pursuing peak in the _Prelude_. All its rocky middle and its snowline were in their turn hidden by the brown spur before them; only the white slanting chisel edge of the summit soared up to sight. Stream--tree--wood--mountains: one, two, and three ... each formed a stepping-stone to the one beyond, making it possible for the whole grandeur of the peak to slip down, as it were, and find place within the narrow limits of the brain waiting at the other end.

There it was able to take up its station beside that other thought which entered there, not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, but by the swift chamois and the mountain torrents. The two, holding mutual colloquy, together tell what Wordsworth learnt in another fashion, that the mountains are

‘Huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men.’

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.

It was in this light that the Greeks saw their mountains. In their eyes they compared very unfavourably with their great natural rival, the sea. It is true that the sea was mildly reproved by the epithet ἀτρυγετός for producing no crops, but it made amends, being the good-natured Mediterranean, by helping to transport the produce of other lands, while the mountains were a positive obstacle to commerce.

We may note that in Il. i. 156:--

ἦ μάλα πολλὰ μεταξὺ, οὔρεά τε σκιόεντα θάλασσά τε ἠχήεσσα,[17]

the mountains and the sea are both alike mentioned as barriers between people and people, although it may be questioned whether the idea is more definite than that of distance, to which the epithet σκιόεντα is more appropriate. In this case the mountains are introduced merely to give a concrete horizon to the idea of remoteness conveyed by μάλα πολλά and σκιόεντα.

The sea was commonly regarded by the Greeks as a tie between land and land, the mountains as a barrier. So they damned the mountains with faint praise of their timber, their hunting grounds, and, most unkindest cut, the wider view of the sea from their cliffs. There was no one to tell the primitive Greeks that from the hated mountains, by streams and melting snows, came the very meadows in which they delighted, that the richness of their ideal pasture-lands of Thessaly was produced, not in spite of, but actually by the mountains round. So they continued to regard them as heaps of waste, and it was this view which was primarily responsible for the reticence about the mountains with which we meet in Greek literature. In all the Odyssey there are hardly twenty lines descriptive of the mountains. In one of the most beautiful lines of Homer:--

εἴσατο δ’ ὡς ὅτε ῥινὸν ἐν ἠεροειδέϊ πόντῳ.[18] _Od._ v. 281.

the picture is of the island, not of its mountains; they are mentioned, but merely because a low-lying island is not visible in ‘misty’ distance.

The first use of the mountains in simile is to represent big, ugly people: of the Cyclops,

καὶ γὰρ θαῦμ’ ἐτέτυκτο πελώριον, οὐδὲ ἐῴκει ἀνδρί γε σιτοφάγῳ, ἀλλὰ ῥίῳ ὑλήεντι ὑψηλῶν ὀρέων, ὅ τε φαίνεται οἶον ἀπ’ ἄλλων.[19] _Od._ ix. 190.

and of the queen of the Læstrygones,

τὴν δὲ γυναῖκα εὗρον ὅσην τ’ ὄρεος κορυφήν, κατὰ δ’ ἔστυγον αὐτήν.[20] _Od._ x. 112.

For the most part, the mountains are treated with contemptuous indifference. It is evident that, as a place of outlook over low-lying scenery or the sea, a height of some sort is necessary, and where such an outlook is mentioned by Homer he does not grudge it an epithet; but in such a passage as the following the hill is nothing, the view from it all-important:--

εἶδον γὰρ σκοπιὴν ἐς παιπαλόεσσαν ἀνελθὼν νῆσον, τὴν πέρι πόντος ἀπείριτος ἐστεφάνωται· αὐτὴ δὲ χθαμαλὴ κεῖται· καπνὸν δ’ ἐνὶ μέσσῃ ἔδρακον ὀφθαλμοῖσι διὰ δρυμὰ πυκνὰ καὶ ὕλην.[21] _Od._ x. 194.

There is only one passage in Homer in which one mountain is seen from another. Poseidon is watching the battle before Troy from the highest crest of wooded Samothrace:--

ἔνθεν γὰρ ἐφαίνετο πᾶσα μὲν Ἴδη, φαίνετο δὲ Πριάμοιο πόλις καὶ νῆες Ἀχαιῶν.[22] _Il._ xiii. 13.

If we analyse our own pleasure in the ascent of a mountain, giving due importance to the view of other peaks from it, we shall realise how significant it is that this reference is unique in Homer.

Of rock-climbers Homer had a very poor opinion: he would be a very bold man now who would say of any rock peak in the world:--

οὐδέ κεν ἀμβαίη βροτὸς ἀνὴρ οὐδ’ ἐπιβαίη, οὐδ’ εἴ οἱ χεῖρές τε ἐείκοσι καὶ πόδες εἶεν· πέτρη γὰρ λίς ἐστι, περιξεστῇ εἰκυῖα.[23] _Od._ xii. 77.

Baedeker himself could not more vehemently warn of a novice from a dangerous face; but there was little chance that the climb in question would ever become ‘an easy day for a lady,’ as it led past the cave of Scylla, whose six heads would have required a toll likely to leave an appreciable gap in the largest party.

Once only in the Iliad a rock is chosen as a type of steadfastness:--

ἴσχον γὰρ πυργηδὸν ἀρηρότες, ἠΰτε πέτρη ἠλίβατος, μεγάλη, πολιῆς ἁλὸς ἐγγὺς ἐοῦσα, ἥ τε μένει λιγέων ἀνέμων λαιψηρὰ κέλευθα κύματά τε τροφόεντα, τά τε προσερεύγεται αὐτήν· ὣς Δαναοὶ Τρῶας μένον ἔμπεδον οὐδὲ φέβοντο.[24] _Il._ xv. 617.

But to the Greeks rocky cliffs appeared as a rule pitiless, inhuman, and heartless, rather than steadfast in a good sense, as above. We may notice the famous passage in which Patroclus rebukes Achilles for his hardness of heart:--

νηλεές, οὐκ ἄρα σοί γε πατὴρ ἦν ἱππότα Πηλεύς, οὐδὲ Θέτις μήτηρ· γλαυκὴ δέ σε τίκτε θάλασσα πέτραι τ’ ἠλίβατοι, ὅτι τοι νόος ἐστὶν ἀπηνής.[25] _Il._ xvi. 33.

If Homer is disappointing, Hesiod is far more so. If anywhere in Greek literature we should expect some recognition of the grandeur of the mountains, it is undoubtedly in descriptions of their birth. A poet could hardly hope to find a more Titanic subject than that mighty travailing of the Earth; but this is all Hesiod finds to say:--

γείνατο δ’ Οὔρεα μακρά, θεῶν χαρίεντας ἐναύλους, Νυμφέων, αἳ ναίουσιν ἀν’ οὔρεα βησσήεντα.[26] _Theogony_, 129.

‘Long’ of all mountain epithets! ‘Graceful’ is insult added to injury! We must suppose that Hesiod would have preferred Amicombe Hill to Great Mis Tor, the curves of the Downs to the towers of the Dolomites.

It is not surprising that the Nymphs should have stuck in the throat of certain commentators, who propose to expunge the second line. Certainly a real mountain is the least suitable habitation for a Nymph, and it is a pity that no artistic member of the Alpine Club could have been present to astonish Hesiod with a lightning sketch of large troups of Nymphs--in the days when Jaeger was unknown, and furs still clothed their natural owners--shivering like angels on the needle-point of the Charmoz or on the more appropriate summit of the Jungfrau. There is one possible explanation, hinted at in the Clouds of Aristophanes, namely, that the Oceanids were identified with clouds; but this is probably a later rationalist theory, which would have astonished the early poets themselves.

There is not one line in Hesiod which shows a real appreciation of the mountains: some few allusions to Olympus are the nearest approach to enthusiasm, but the seat of the gods also proves a broken reed to those who would portray the Greeks as mountain-lovers. It was necessary that the gods should be able to look down on the earth, yet the anthropomorphic tendencies of the age subjected them to the same disadvantage as modern aviators, namely, inability to remain motionless in the air. It therefore became necessary for them to take possession of the highest fixed support, Olympus.

Olympus is a real mountain, but for the benefit of its divine tenants, more especially perhaps of the goddesses, the poets idealised it almost out of recognition. We have Homer’s description of the summit:--

[Οὔλυμπος] ὅθι φασὶ θεῶν ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ ἔμμεναι· οὔτ’ ἀνέμοισι τινάσσεται, οὔτε ποτ’ ὄμβρῳ δεύεται οὔτε χιὼν ἐπιπίλναται, ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἴθρη πέπταται ἀννέφελος, λευκὴ δ’ ἐπιδέδρομεν αἴγλη.[27] _Od._ vi. 42.

This process of describing an ideal and then locating it in a definite accessible spot has many parallels, though few in which access and its consequent disillusionment were so easy; we may compare Atlantis, Avernus, King Arthur’s Cave on Lliwedd, and the superstition which was not uncommon a few years ago, that a subtropical Paradise would be found beyond the outer ice of the Arctic Circle.

Another passage, quoted from Lucian in a paper by Mr. Douglas Freshfield, on ‘Mountains and Mankind,’[28] as showing that the Greeks loved their mountains, is not altogether convincing: Hermes takes Charon, when he has a day out from Hell, to the twin-crested summit, and shows him the panorama of land and sea, of rivers and famous cities. The first impulse is to reject this allusion as proving, not Lucian’s love for the mountains, but his excellent taste in contrast, for the holiday of the dweller below the earth should rightly be spent in its high places. This is true as far as it goes, but apart from the personal tastes of Lucian, to which we have no more guide in his works than to those of Shakespeare or any other true dramatist, we must admit that he here gives us the nearest parallel to those conditions from which we escape to the contrast of the mountains. London duties, it is true, compare favourably with those of Charon, but our reward in escaping from them is greater, just in so far as the Alps are greater than Parnassus. The principle and the scale of contrast are the same: this passage would therefore seem to be nearer akin to our modern mountain-worship than might at first appear. But here again it may be claimed that the mountain is not made of much account except as the means of obtaining a wider view of the more fashionable beauties of nature.

Professor Palgrave asserts that the dramatists seldom show appreciation of scenery, but we must add to his exceptions Euripides’ description of the sunrise glow on the mountains:--

Παρνησιάδες δ’ ἄβατοι κορυφαὶ καταλαμπόμεναι τὴν ἡμερίαν ἁψῖδα βροτοῖσι δέχονται.[29] Eur. _Ion._ 87.

An excellent test of the impression made on the Greek mind by any class of natural phenomenon is to observe to what extent representatives of that class have been personified; if we apply this test to the case of the mountains, we shall be amazed at the Greek disregard for them. When in the case of so abstract a conception as that of time we find personification, not only of the idea as a whole, but also of its sub-divisions (Ὧραι), we may naturally expect, not only a great Personal representative of mountains in general, as Poseidon represented the sea, but also particular personifications of great peaks or ranges, which in our eyes have at least as marked an individuality as rivers or winds.

Yet, with the single exception of Atlas, no mountain in Greek literature has been represented as an animate being. It is possible that Tennyson had some precedent for his ‘Mother’ Ida; μητέρα θήρων[30] is the Homeric phrase. Certainly a close connection exists between Taÿgetus and Taÿgete, daughter of Atlas, and there is some suggestion of malevolent personality in the inhospitable behaviour of the ‘Wandering Rocks.’ But these are ill-defined and isolated instances, which, even if numbered by scores, instead of by scattered units, would not materially affect the argument.

About Atlas we have many different stories. In the earliest account he is one of the older family of gods, father of Calypso, ὀλοόφρων,[31] wizard Atlas, knowing the depths of every sea; and to him are entrusted the pillars which keep heaven and earth apart.

According to Hesiod, he was the son of the Titan Iapetus, and brother of Menœtius, Prometheus, and Epimetheus, all of whom incurred the anger of Zeus--Prometheus and Menœtius for active hostility to him, Epimetheus and Atlas apparently for no more personal reason than that their father was one of the hated Titans: for this offence Atlas was punished by the task of holding up the whole weight of heaven on his shoulders. It does not seem to have occurred to the early writers that the extreme edge of an inverted hemisphere is a most unsymmetrical position for the sole supporter of its weight.