THE MOUNTAINS IN GREEK POETRYBYNORMAN EGERTON YOUNG(Corpus Christi College)

‘Huge and mighty forms, that do not liveLike 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 truevital 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 staramong 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 hisπάντα 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.

Beforewe 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 toour 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,quaguide, 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 byμάλα πολλάandσκιόεντα.

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.18Od.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 insimile is to represent big, ugly people: of the Cyclops,

καὶ γὰρ θαῦμ’ ἐτέτυκτο πελώριον, οὐδὲ ἐῴκειἀνδρί γε σιτοφάγῳ, ἀλλὰ ῥίῳ ὑλήεντιὑψηλῶν ὀρέων, ὅ τε φαίνεται οἶον ἀπ’ ἄλλων.19Od.ix. 190.

and of the queen of the Læstrygones,

τὴν δὲ γυναῖκαεὗρον ὅσην τ’ ὄρεος κορυφήν, κατὰ δ’ ἔστυγον αὐτήν.20Od.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 ἀνελθὼννῆσον, τὴν πέρι πόντος ἀπείριτος ἐστεφάνωται·αὐτὴ δὲ χθαμαλὴ κεῖται· καπνὸν δ’ ἐνὶ μέσσῃἔδρακον ὀφθαλμοῖσι διὰ δρυμὰ πυκνὰ καὶ ὕλην.21Od.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.22Il.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 boldman 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.23Od.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 πέτρηἠλίβατος, μεγάλη, πολιῆς ἁλὸς ἐγγὺς ἐοῦσα,ἥ τε μένει λιγέων ἀνέμων λαιψηρὰ κέλευθακύματά τε τροφόεντα, τά τε προσερεύγεται αὐτήν·ὣς Δαναοὶ Τρῶας μένον ἔμπεδον οὐδὲ φέβοντο.24Il.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 θάλασσαπέτραι τ’ ἠλίβατοι, ὅτι τοι νόος ἐστὶν ἀπηνής.25Il.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.26Theogony, 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 αἰεὶἔμμεναι· οὔτ’ ἀνέμοισι τινάσσεται, οὔτε ποτ’ ὄμβρῳδεύεται, οὔτε χιὼν ἐπιπίλναται, ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἴθρηπέπταται ἀννέφελος, λευκὴ δ’ ἐπιδέδρομεν αἴγλη.27Od.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,’28as 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 famouscities. 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 κορυφαὶκαταλαμπόμεναι τὴν ἡμερίανἁψῖδα βροτοῖσι δέχονται.29Eur.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 atleast 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 θήρων30is 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,31wizard 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.

The mountain, Atlas, was evidently the Peak of Teneriffe,32of 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 Perseuswith 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 releasedfrom 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. Bury33traces a connection between the epithet ὀρειᾶν as applied to the Pleiades and the nameὨαρίων, translating

ἐστι δ’ ἐοικὸςὀρειᾶν γε Πελειάδωνμὴ 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 betweenὨαρίωνandὄρος; 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 acceptἈλκυόνηas a personification ofἄλκη,35we 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 handsof 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,36but 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 Αἴτναλευκᾶς ἐκ χίονος πότον ἀμβρόσιον προίητι.37

It would be hard, in speaking of the snows of a mountain, to find a less appropriate epithet thanπολυδένδρεος.

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 asὑψιμέδων,39usually 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 accuracyat the cost of such hoary phrases as ‘the eternal hills,’ which are still the delight of those pessimists who habitually allude to mankind asἐφημέριδες.

Among Pindar’s descriptive phrases we may noticeἔμβολον 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 πάγονΚρόνου προσεφθέγξατο· πρόσθε γὰρνώνυμνος, ἇς Οἰνόμαος ἆρχε, βρέχετο πολλᾷνιφάδι41

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 ἁγνόταταιἐκ μυχῶν παγαί· ποταμοὶ δ’ ἁμέραισιν μὲν προχέοντι ῥόον καπνοῦαἴθων’, ἀλλ’ ἐν ὄρφναισιν πέτραςφοίνισσα κυλινδομένα φλὸξ ἐς βαθεῖαν φέρει πόντου πλάκα σὺν πατάγῳ.κεῖνο δ’ Ἁφαίστοιο κρουνοὺς ἑρπετὸνδεινοτάτους ἀναπέμπει· τέρας μὲν θαυμάσιον προσιδέσθαι, θαῦμα δὲ καὶ παρεόντων ἀκοῦσαι.42Pind.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 monstrousbreath of Typhoeus. The mountain is dismissed with little more than the usual trite epithets—κίων οὐρανία, νιφοέσσα, πάνετες χιόνος ὀξείας τιθήνα,43of which the last phrase conveys an even more false suggestion than the similarχιονοτρόφος κιθαίρων.44

Although references to the mountains are even more rare in drama, this particular eruption is ‘foretold’ by Prometheus:—

ἐκραγήσονταί ποτεποταμοὶ πυρὸς δάπτοντες ἀγρίαις γνάθοιςτῆς καλλικάρπου Σικελίας λευροὺς γύας·τοιόνδε Τυφὼς ἐξαναζέσει χόλονθερμῆς ἀπλήστου βέλεσι πυρπνόου ζάληςκαίπερ κεραυνῷ Ζηνὸς ἠνθρακωμένος.45Æsch.P.V.367.

Here Ætna has neither part nor lot in the eruption: Typhoeus is made responsible for the whole, in spite of thefact 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 κυμάτωνἀνήριθμον γέλασμα, παμμῆτόρ τε Γῆκαὶ 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 wordsδῖος αἴθηρmake 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 morewinds 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 calm46to 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 Κρονίωννηνεμίης ἔστησεν ἐπ’ ἀκροπόλοισιν ὄρεσσινἀτρέμας, ὄφρ’ εὕδῃσι μένος Βορέαο καὶ ἄλλωνζαχρηῶν ἀνέμων, οἵ τε νέφεα σκιόενταπνοιῇσιν λιγυρῇσι διασκιδνᾶσιν ἀέντες·ὣς Δαναοὶ Τρῶας μένον ἔμπεδον οὐδὲ φέβοντο.47Il.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 μεγάλοιοκινήσῃ πυκινὴν νεφέλην στεροπηγερέτα Ζεύς,ἔκ τ’ ἔφανεν πᾶσαι σκοπιαὶ καὶ πρώονες ἄκροικαὶ νάπαι, οὐρανόθεν δ’ ἄρ’ ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ.48Il.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

‘flingTheir 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 forthose 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 theArgosailed, 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 foamOf perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn.’

But these are armchair adventures, fireside voyages: these we must share withthe 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.

Everyright-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’sMoths. 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. Thespirit 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 makea 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, theworld 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 recklessagility. 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:—

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