Part 4
The mountain, Atlas, was evidently the Peak of Teneriffe,[32] of which the Phœnicians may well have brought a description to Greece. It was afterwards supposed to be in North Africa, and in consequence dwindled to a comparatively insignificant range containing no conspicuous peak. The Titanid and the mountain were ingeniously connected in later times by the introduction of Perseus with the head of Medusa, which he showed to Atlas at his own request, thus turning him to stone.
A variation of this story marks an intermediate stage towards the rationalisation of the myth: in it Atlas is represented as a king who refuses to show hospitality to Perseus on account of a prophecy of danger to himself from a son of Zeus; he is turned into stone by the same means, but as a punishment for his churlishness.
The completely rationalised version represents him as a king in the far West, skilled in astronomy, and the inventor of the globe. This story may have had its origin in Homer’s ‘wizard’ Atlas, and was probably connected with the far older myths of Atlantis and the Garden of the Hesperides.
It is evident that we have to thank the Phœnicians for bringing one great mountain so prominently before the Greeks that alone of all mountains in their literature it is endued with personality. But it is lamentable to observe how the affairs of Atlas, once released from Phœnician control, descend into the bourgeois rut of semi-divine nonentity. He proceeded to marry a nymph, who bore him seven other nymphs, of whom Maia, mother of Hermes, is alone conspicuous. These nymphs lived together on Mount Cyllene until forced to fly from Orion, whom they escaped by the conventional stage-device of metamorphosis, becoming first doves (πελείαδες) and then the constellation of the Pleiades.
Mr. Bury[33] traces a connection between the epithet ὀρειᾶν as applied to the Pleiades and the name Ὠαρίων, translating
ἐστι δ’ ἐοικὸς ὀρειᾶν γε Πελειάδων μὴ τήλοθεν Ὠαρίων’ ἀνεῖσθαι.
by ‘It is meet that the rising of the Mountain Hunter should not be far from the Mountain Pleiades.’ This would be unique among Greek references to the mountains if the remotest etymological connection could be traced between Ὠαρίων and ὄρος; but this is rather a B in ‘Both’ derivation, and it may be mentioned for what it is worth that the name Orion is otherwise explained for us by Ovid.[34]
One alone of the Pleiad nymphs is justified, to a follower of Mr. Bury, in her mountain abode. If we accept Ἀλκυόνη as a personification of ἄλκη,[35] we must certainly allow her to enthrone herself on the highest peaks of the ancient world, provided, of course, that she was not so presumptuous as to sit on her father.
It is clear, therefore, that the Greeks owed the introduction of the mountain into the Titan story to the Phœnicians’ description of Teneriffe, and that they elaborated the myth with very little regard for geography and none at all for consistency. In spite of Mr. Bury’s gallant salvage work, we must confess that the mountain element is lost from the story as soon as it is left in the hands of the Greeks, who treat it as a hen treats the duckling she has hatched: an adaptable duckling, for as a metamorphosis story it has made a very good chicken, though in the process it shames its proper parents.
In Theocritus we find an exception to the absence of mountain personification in Menalkas’ Αἴτνα, μᾶτερ ἔμα,[36] but it stands alone: the Cyclops, who was quite as much the child of Ætna, seems to regard the mountain merely as an ice-box providing him with cool water:--
ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ, τό μοι ἁ πολυδένδρεος Αἴτνα λευκᾶς ἐκ χίονος πότον ἀμβρόσιον προίητι.[37]
It would be hard, in speaking of the snows of a mountain, to find a less appropriate epithet than πολυδένδρεος.
There is little else in Theocritus about the mountains except that Daphnis
χιὼν ὥς τις κατετάκετο μακρὸν ὑφ’ Αἷμον. ἢ Ἄθω ἢ Ῥοδόπαν ἢ Καύκασον ἐσχατόωντα.[38]
If we compare Pindar’s descriptions of the mountains with those of any other Greek poet, it is not hard to make ourselves believe that he knew something of their secrets. But as soon as we set these passages side by side with the rest of his own work, we see them sink back into insignificance. He wrote four or five great mountain lines, but for each of these he wrote ten for the valleys, fifty for the stars, a hundred for the sea.
Still, we cannot often find a mountain honoured in Greek with such an epithet as ὑψιμέδων,[39] usually applied to Zeus alone; and Pindar also makes the first mention of the ‘age’ of the hills:--
Φλιοῦντος ὑπ’ ὠγυγίοις ὄρεσι.[40]
It is not clear why a hill should in general be considered older than a plain: they are said to have emerged from the Deluge within quite a short time of each other. But it would be pedantic to summon scientists and insist on accuracy at the cost of such hoary phrases as ‘the eternal hills,’ which are still the delight of those pessimists who habitually allude to mankind as ἐφημέριδες.
Among Pindar’s descriptive phrases we may notice ἔμβολον Ἀσίας, of the headland of Caria. The word, to a Greek, could not but suggest its naval use, the ‘prow’ of Asia riding unmoved upon the waves.
Actual references to mountaineering are so rare that we are tempted to find an exception in
καὶ πάγον Κρόνου προσεφθέγξατο· πρόσθε γὰρ νώνυμνος, ἇς Οἰνόμαος ἆρχε, βρέχετο πολλᾷ νιφάδι[41]
by supposing it to be the only surviving record of a first ascent by the Theban Heracles, who claimed in consequence the right to name the summit ascended. Paley would add to the dangers and credit of the expedition by finding in ‘βρέχετο πολλᾷ νιφάδι’ ‘a curious and noteworthy tradition of a glacial or post-glacial period!’
But all other mountain scenes in Pindar, whether adorned with glaciers or not, pale before the description of the eruption of Ætna:--
τᾶς ἐρεύγονται μὲν ἀπλάτου πυρὸς ἁγνόταται ἐκ μυχῶν παγαί· ποταμοὶ δ’ ἁμέραισιν μὲν προχέοντι ῥόον καπνοῦ αἴθων’, ἀλλ’ ἐν ὄρφναισιν πέτρας φοίνισσα κυλινδομένα φλὸξ ἐς βαθεῖαν φέρει πόντου πλάκα σὺν πατάγῳ. κεῖνο δ’ Ἁφαίστοιο κρουνοὺς ἑρπετὸν δεινοτάτους ἀναπέμπει· τέρας μὲν θαυμάσιον προσιδέσθαι, θαῦμα δὲ καὶ παρεόντων ἀκοῦσαι.[42] Pind. _Pyth._ i. 15.
We need not enjoy this description any the less for feeling that Pindar is not thinking of Ætna the mountain, nor even of Ætna the volcano, but only of the eruption, which is not in his eyes an eruption of Ætna but of the monstrous breath of Typhoeus. The mountain is dismissed with little more than the usual trite epithets--κίων οὐρανία, νιφοέσσα, πάνετες χιόνος ὀξείας τιθήνα,[43] of which the last phrase conveys an even more false suggestion than the similar χιονοτρόφος κιθαίρων.[44]
Although references to the mountains are even more rare in drama, this particular eruption is ‘foretold’ by Prometheus:--
ἐκραγήσονταί ποτε ποταμοὶ πυρὸς δάπτοντες ἀγρίαις γνάθοις τῆς καλλικάρπου Σικελίας λευροὺς γύας· τοιόνδε Τυφὼς ἐξαναζέσει χόλον θερμῆς ἀπλήστου βέλεσι πυρπνόου ζάλης καίπερ κεραυνῷ Ζηνὸς ἠνθρακωμένος.[45] Æsch. _P.V._ 367.
Here Ætna has neither part nor lot in the eruption: Typhoeus is made responsible for the whole, in spite of the fact that he has already been reduced to ashes.
The mountains which form the setting of the Prometheus Vinctus are regarded solely as a bleak, inhospitable, and, above all, inhuman, background for the sufferings of the Titan. It is amazing to us that when he is left alone and calls upon the forms of nature around, only the mountains have no place in the circle of silent witnesses to whom he cries:--
ὦ δῖος αἰθὴρ καὶ ταχύπτεροι πνοαί, ποταμῶν τε πηγαί, ποντίων τε κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα, παμμῆτόρ τε Γῆ καὶ τὸν πανόπτην κύκλον Ἡλίου καλῶ.
The rushing of winged winds, the sources of the rivers, the multitudinous laughter of the distant sea, Earth, the Mother of All, and the all-seeing orb of the Sun--all these are to look upon his torments; but the mountains are degraded by their omission below the very springs which rise upon them.
It may be suggested, as an explanation, that motion formed an essential part of the Greek idea of beauty; for motion is the outward and visible sign of life. We may observe that the words δῖος αἴθηρ make the air for a moment the medium of thought, expressed in which ‘wind’ is the pure and abstract idea of motion.
Prometheus, then, calls for sympathy there alone where motion (or, in the case of Earth, motherhood) gives promise of life and sympathy.
It is interesting, in view of the fact that brightness was also an element in the Greek conception of beauty, to notice that no phase of the sea so combines these two qualities of brightness and motion as its ‘multitudinous laughter.’ The path of gold of the rising sun may be brighter, a storm more swift in motion, but the perfect combination of the two ideals is here described.
It is natural that brightness or light should be held in such honour, but it is more surprising that beauty should be associated with motion in many cases in which the connection seems to us extremely remote.
The winds are the most conspicuous case of this: the Greeks personified more winds than they could name points of the compass, and Greek poetry is almost as full of the winds as of the sea.
This is especially marked in the Iliad, where anything which shows the movement of the wind, whether snow, the sea, a cornfield, mist, or clouds, is described again and again, while still air is only mentioned in a few scattered passages.
In one of these snow is described falling through a calm[46] to represent the same showers of stones which had just been compared to snow driven by a tempest; so it is evident that no importance attaches to the calmness, but both passages convey the sense of motion, though in a slightly different degree.
In another very remarkable passage Homer makes use of stationary clouds round a mountain-top as a type of steadfastness:--
ἀλλ’ ἔμενον νεφέλῃσιν ἐοικότες, ἅς τε Κρονίων νηνεμίης ἔστησεν ἐπ’ ἀκροπόλοισιν ὄρεσσιν ἀτρέμας, ὄφρ’ εὕδῃσι μένος Βορέαο καὶ ἄλλων ζαχρηῶν ἀνέμων, οἵ τε νέφεα σκιόεντα πνοιῇσιν λιγυρῇσι διασκιδνᾶσιν ἀέντες· ὣς Δαναοὶ Τρῶας μένον ἔμπεδον οὐδὲ φέβοντο.[47] _Il._ v. 522.
But for the most part the mists and the clouds, and even the sea, must be stirred to motion by the wind before they are considered worthy of a Greek poet’s attention.
The allusions to the wind-stirred sea are innumerable; the eddies of war are often compared to a whirlwind; the misty clouds are broken apart by the wind to reveal, now the dark waves of the sea, now the black peaks of a mountain:--
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀφ’ ὑψηλῆς κορυφῆς ὄρεος μεγάλοιο κινήσῃ πυκινὴν νεφέλην στεροπηγερέτα Ζεύς, ἔκ τ’ ἔφανεν πᾶσαι σκοπιαὶ καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι καὶ νάπαι, οὐρανόθεν δ’ ἄρ’ ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ.[48] _Il._ xvi. 297.
But here the unmoved rock is merely a background of darkness, in contrast to the light of the clouds, as in the Prometheus it is a background of stillness to the motion of the drama.
We have also, in the theory that motion was essentially connected with the ancient ideal of beauty, some explanation of the fact that rounded heights, clothed with leafy woods where the wind could
‘fling Their placid green to silver of delight.’
seemed more beautiful to the Greeks than scarps of naked rock; and it is natural that the poets of such an ideal, superficial though it may seem to us, should pass by the silent majesty of Ætna with careless customary epithets until the fires within burst their bounds and poured ostentatiously to the sea in ‘eddies of blood-red flame.’
It would seem that the Greeks felt fear and awe alone of the great mountains, as was natural; for they had no intimate knowledge of them, nor ever sought in the mountains the emotions reserved for those who match their strength against the great forces of nature. These sensations, in the Greek, were inspired by the sea. But for us the spell of the mountains has grown stronger than that of the waves, for the days are gone in which the sea alone was the home of peril and mystery. We follow the spirit of the Greeks, not the letter of their song; for though they sang of the sea, it was of her freedom and strength, of her secrets and dangers, and of these much has passed from her. Though we may still cross the seas on which the _Argo_ sailed, the greater part of their romance is dead, and the Admiralty charts are its epitaph. Scylla and Charybdis are mapped; there is, for the vandal to read, a latitude and a longitude of Tyre.
We have still with us the seas of romance, of the Sagas, of the Odyssey, of the Ancient Mariner; we may still look from
‘Magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn.’
But these are armchair adventures, fireside voyages: these we must share with the cripple and the old. We who are young may find in the mountains new worlds of adventure and romance of which the Greeks knew nothing; but though the beauties, the perils, the rewards are changed, the spirit is the same. No sea hero of the Greeks would be long a stranger among mountaineers: where now but in the mountains should Odysseus wander, πολύτλας, πολύμητις, first in every quest of perilous glory, crowning the hopes of long years of wanderers?
Our mountain-worship is then no new creed, nor artificial dogma, but a new epiphany of the spirit of Hellas; and the spirit will be the same, even though the men of later ages find their romance beneath the seas whereon the Greeks sought it, or above the mountains in which our quest is set.
A JOURNEY
BY
HUGH KINGSMILL LUNN (New College)
IV. A JOURNEY
Every right-minded reader loves a few books in defiance of his own critical canons. One cannot be for ever brooding over the best that is known and thought in the world. Such an uncanonical book to me is Ouida’s _Moths_. It was in Dresden, towards the end of May 1908, that I read it for the first time. Summer was in the air, a German summer of blue skies and lazy white clouds drifting to the south. In April, when I arrived, I liked Dresden well enough, was prepared to stop there quietly till October, learning German. But as the cold weather passed, each day left me more restless, cramped by the monotonous, speckless streets, irked by a vision of the summer Alps, a shining mountain wall beyond the southern horizon. The spirit of romance was upon me, that heedless of realistic truth invests with ideal charm whatever is far off. To such a mood Ouida appealed strongly. For she was perhaps the last of those romantics who created out of the dust and dreariness of eighteenth-century Europe a fairyland of beauty. Germany to her was still the mystic land, dreaming of the Middle Ages; Italy still Mignon’s Italy, a place of orange groves and pillared palaces. In the ardour of her revolt against the naturalist school she often, no doubt, became grotesque. Her landscapes are as gloriously unreal as the heroes and heroines who move through them. But what of that? Unreality has its own charm, and even its own truth.
Certainly that May in Dresden I read with uncavilling love all that she had to tell of Ischl, in the Austrian Alps, on whose mountains you may shoot, if you will, the golden eagle and the vulture. And with envy and longing I read how Vere and Correze retreated from the world to an old house, simple yet noble, with terraces facing the Alps of the Valais. Here on the hills above Sion the air is pure and clear as crystal, strong as wine, the cattle maiden sings on the high grass slopes, and the fresh-water fisherman answers her from his boat on the lake below. In vain I reminded myself that one does not shoot golden eagles, and that the Valaisan peasants, bent by ceaseless labour almost out of human semblance, have neither the leisure nor the wish to carol songs to one another. The divine unreason of romance was too strong for me, quickening and giving colour to a prosaic discontent with a studious life in a too orderly German town.
And so it came about, exactly when and how I forget, that I decided to go to Switzerland: a simple decision, yet thrilling enough to me just free from ten years of school discipline. The German family with which I was staying had fixed on a Bavarian village, Oberkreuzberg by name, for their summer holidays. It seemed to me that this village would be a convenient base from which to make a hurried dash of two or three days to the Alps. Bavaria, however, was a bigger place than I had thought, and Oberkreuzberg, when I arrived there one evening in the middle of July, seemed desolatingly apart from the world. And though, as the days passed, I grew to love the place, this sense of detachment did not weaken. Oberkreuzberg was set on a spur of the highest mountain in the Bavarian Forest. From the church that crowned the hill the houses fell sharply away to the south on either side of the straggling main street. In all directions, except the north, the outlook was bounded only by the horizon. To the east were the low-lying Bohemian hills, to the south the Danube, and the plain beyond, where Munich lies, and farther still the mountains of Tyrol, visible to the naked eye, so the villagers said, on a clear winter day. And to the south-west, visible to me alone, hung the chain of the Swiss Alps. The wide prospect made the village seem not less but more obscure. To those locked in a narrow valley, however desolate, the world lies on the other side of the hills. But between Oberkreuzberg and the world lay expanses stretching away to dim horizons.
The villagers took a frank delight and interest in me that further strengthened my feeling of distance from ordinary life. Stray Germans from the north, burghers from Munich, came with each summer, but hitherto no Englishman had visited the village. My arrival was an event. Indeed, Herr Göckeritz, the genial old Saxon with whom I stayed in Dresden, told me that it had been mentioned in a sermon as a token of Oberkreuzberg’s spreading fame. I was a reversed Haroun-al-Raschid, important because unknown. The village children followed me about curiously, and when I shut myself in my room clamoured outside till appeased with largesse of pfennig pieces. On the grass in front of my window lay logs ready for building purposes, and the Annas, Marias, and Babettes of the village, small bare-legged girls, used to disport themselves there every afternoon, chasing each other from log to log with reckless agility. In the fields near by I could see their elders working, bent battered peasants.
Outside the village were scattered some large boulders, and on the flat top of one of these I would spend an hour or two each afternoon, reading and meditating. The blue distances troubled me with the vague longings which had stirred to song many a little German poet in the days before Bismarck. The melodies of their heart’s unrest are mere sentimental vapourings to the modern critic. What does it all mean, he asks, this talk of wandering, knapsack on back, into the wide world to seek the blue flower of romance on the blue hills of the horizon? In the same spirit Leslie Stephen, the high-priest of orthodox mountain-worship, found Byron’s Swiss poetry cheap and insincere. As a hard-headed agnostic, suspicious of emotion not founded on fact, he resented no doubt such verse as:--
‘The fish swam by the castle wall, And they seemed joyous each and all. The eagle rode the rising blast, Methought he never flew so fast.’
This eagle, flying past Chillon to the mountains of Ouida’s Ischl, rode a purely romantic blast, and was visible only to romantic eyes. The orthodox climber, however, does not care for romance. His love of the mountains is based, like domestic love, on knowledge and understanding. It is reasoned, almost respectable. But the visions of Byron and of the German Romantics have the magic of first love, passionately adoring what is unknown and out of reach. It is profitless to weigh romance against reason. I can only say that I never loved the mountains better than in those long afternoons when they shone before my spirit, hidden from the eyes of my body.
Cynara, when she reads these pages, will dismiss all this talk of yearnings, spiritual unrest, and what not as literary verbiage. And indeed I might never have left Bavaria, had it not been for memories of the previous summer at Champex, where I had rowed and climbed and quarrelled with Cynara, and where Cynara’s sister, who cultivated a conscientious contempt for men in general, and myself in particular, had stung my young soul by insisting that there were in me the makings of a blameless curate. This summer they had gone to Saas Fee, and Cynara wrote to me from there, praising the place ardently, and ending her letter with the careless-cruel hope that I would like Bavaria. Like Bavaria! And the letter had reached me on the damp, dark evening of my arrival at Oberkreuzberg. The need for a personal protest reinforcing my desire towards the Alps settled any lingering hesitation. I had four pounds with me. Before leaving Dresden I wrote, in the hope of increasing this sum, an essay for a competition in the _Saturday Westminster_. The subject was, ‘On making a Fool of Oneself,’ and I treated the theme with a humour which at the time seemed quite delicious. In retrospect I am astonished that they gave me an honourable mention. Cruder methods of raising money proved more successful, and a generous uncle solved all material difficulties.
Two evenings before I started I went with Herr Göckeritz after supper to one of the village inns. The landlord played the zither, and Herr Göckeritz, after telling a few anecdotes rather broad than long, sang a little wistful ditty of a poor fiddler wandering through the world in sunshine and rain, with no friend but his fiddle:--
‘Und wenn einst vor der letzten Tür Mein letztes Lied verklang, Und wenn an meiner Geige mir Die letzte Saite sprang, Ach, nur ein Plätzchen gönnt mir dann An stiller Friedhofswand, Wo von der Wandrung ruhen kann Der arme Musikant.’
The whole essence of that lovable absurd German romanticism is in these lines. They haunted me on my journey, and long after, and even now have power to quicken the memory of those days. As we walked home beneath a quiet starry sky I told Herr Göckeritz that I was going to Switzerland. His only comment was an offer to lend me some money. Life is like that.
It was shortly before five o’clock in the morning that I set out on my journey. For economy’s sake I had decided to walk to a station fifteen miles away, thus saving, as I later realised, a little more than sixpence. My clothes were in a Gladstone bag which I hung over my shoulders, pulling the straps into position with a handkerchief tied across my chest. And so, a curious figure, I swung down a path that led to the main road through a little wood. Before entering the wood I turned round for a last look at the village. It seemed in the still dawn a living thing, sad, and lonely, and patient, like its inhabitants. For the moment I felt sorry to go. It was unlikely that Saas Fee would welcome me with wonder and delight. It was probable that neither Cynara nor Cynara’s sister would regard me with the affectionate awe of Maria, Anna, and Babette. However, I did not return.