Savages, on the other hand, are prevented from appreciating snow
mountains, avalanches, roaring torrents, ocean storms, deep glens,
jungles, and solitudes, not only by their lack of refinement, but by
their fears of wild animals, human enemies, and evil spirits. "In the
Australian bush," writes Tylor (_P.C._, II., 203), "demons whistle in
the branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the
trunks to seize the wayfarer;" and Powers (88) writes in regard to
California Indians that they listen to night noises with unspeakable
horror:
"It is difficult for us to conceive of the speechless
terrors which these poor wretches suffer from the screeching
of owls, the shrieking of night-hawks, the rustling of the
trees ... all of which are only channels of poison wherewith
the demons would smite them."
To the primitive mind, the world over, a high mountain is the horror
of horrors, the abode of evil spirits, and an attempt to climb it
certain death. So strong is this superstition that explorers have
often experienced the greatest difficulty in getting natives to serve
as porters of provisions in their ascents of peaks.[6] Even the Greeks
and Romans cared for landscape only in so far as it was humanized
(parks and gardens) and habitable. "Their souls," says Rohde (511),
"could never have been touched by the sublime thrills we
feel in the presence of the dark surges of the sea, the
gloom of a primeval forest, the solitude and silence of
sunlit mountain summits."
And Humboldt, who first noted the absence in Greek and Roman writings
of the admiration of romantic scenery, remarked (24):
"Of the eternal snow of the Alps, glowing in the rosy
light of the morning or evening sun, of the loveliness
of the blue glacier ice, of the stupendous grandeur of
Swiss landscape, no description has come down to us
from them; yet there was a constant procession over
these Alps, from Helvetia to Gallia, of statesmen and
generals with literary men in their train. All these
travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable
roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages
their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar,
when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his
time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical
treatise 'De Analogia.'"
A sceptical reader might retort that the love of romantic scenery is
so subtle a sentiment, and so far from being universal even now, that
it would be rash to argue from its absence among savages, Greeks, and
Romans, that love, a sentiment so much stronger and more prevalent,
could have been in the same predicament. Let us therefore take another
sentiment, the religious, the vast power and wide prevalence of which
no one will deny.