people, they had begun to be rejected by the more thoughtful men in the
community. There slowly grew up a belief in the settled and continuous
sequence of nature.[15] In the midst of the schemes that were devised
for explaining the old myths or making them fit into the widening
experience of later ages, we may detect the dawn of the scientific
spirit. Observant men were now able to recognise that what had been
regarded by their grandfathers as evidence of supernatural agency,
might well have been produced by natural and familiar processes of
change. The early geographers afford us some interesting illustrations
of the growth of this naturalism. Thus, Herodotus, in his excellent
description of the physical geography of Thessaly, takes occasion, as
a man of his reverent spirit naturally would, to mention the popular
belief that the striking gorge of Tempe had been rent open by a
blow from the trident of Poseidon. He admits the likelihood of the
explanation, but immediately proceeds to state his opinion that the
formation of this defile was not an abnormal manifestation of divine
power, but was to be regarded as an example of the ordinary system
of the world. 'Whoever believes,' he says, 'that Poseidon causes
earthquakes and rents in the earth will recognise his handiwork in the
vale of Tempe. It certainly appeared to me to be quite evident that the
mountains had been there torn asunder by an earthquake.'[16]
Coming down some four centuries later we find that in Strabo, while
all allusion to the supernatural has disappeared, the formation of
the topography by natural causes is described with as much confidence
as if the events were vouched for by documentary evidence. 'When the
present chasm of Tempe,' he remarks, 'was opened by the shocks of an
earthquake, and Ossa was torn away from Olympus, the Peneius flowed out
through this passage to the sea, and thereby drained the interior of
the country.'[17] He speaks also of the two lakes Nessonis and Bœbeis
as remnants of the large sheet of water which had originally covered
the lowlands of Thessaly.
The myths and legends of the Teutonic races supply many illustrations
of primitive attempts to account for some of the more striking external
phenomena of nature. In comparing these interpretations with those of
the Greeks, we cannot fail to perceive the influence of the different
scenery and climate amid which they took their birth. The dwellers in
the west of Scandinavia spent their lives under the shadow of lofty,
rugged fjelds, surmounted by vast plains of snow. They were familiar
with the gleam of glaciers, the crash of ice-falls, the tumult of
avalanches. Cloud and mist enshrouded them for weeks together. Heavy
rains from the broad Atlantic swelled their torrents and waterfalls.
Out of the dark forests, the naked rock rose in endless fantastic and
suggestive shapes. The valleys were strewn with blocks of every size
detached from the cliffs above. Mounds of earth and stones, like huge
graves, mottled the lower grounds over which they had been dropped
by old glaciers and ice-sheets. It was a region difficult of access
and hard to traverse, stern and forbidding in aspect, abounding in
gigantic, fantastic, and uncouth features, while the harshness of its
topography was but little tempered by that atmospheric softness which
sometimes veils the rocky nakedness of sunnier climes.
Away from the great mountain-tracts of Norway, though the topography
was on a diminished scale, there were many features similar in kind,
and fitted to awaken like fancies in the minds of those who dwelt
among them. The hill groups that rise out of the great Germanic plain,
such as the Hartz and the detached heights of central Scotland, though
far less imposing than the Scandinavian fjelds abound nevertheless in
picturesque details. Along the sides of their cliffs, especially in the
narrow valleys by which they are traversed, crags and pinnacles of odd
and often imitative shapes rise one above another. Solitary boulders,
unlike any of the rocks around, are strewn over the hills and scattered
far across the plains. Green, grassy mounds, like gigantic earthworks,
or groups of sepulchral tumuli, stand conspicuously on the bare heathy
moors. And when to these singular natural features there is added
the strangely impressive influence of the clouds, mists, and other
meteorological conditions that mark the changeful climate of western
Europe, we are presented with such a combination of effective causes
as might well stimulate the fancy of an imaginative people, and might,
among the members of the great Teutonic family, evoke feelings and
superstitions not less characteristic than those of ancient Greece.
The grandeur and ruggedness of the scenery of these western and
northern European countries, and the frequent sombreness of the
climate are faithfully reflected in the prevalent Teutonic myths and
superstitions. Thor and his mallet found a congenial home among the
Scandinavian mountains and fjords. There, too, was the appropriate
haunt of the Frost-giants. The race of giants, with their fondness
for stones and rocks, to whom so much influence in altering the
external aspects of nature was ascribed by the Teutonic races, might
have had their ancestral abode among the crags and defiles of the
north-west, but they readily naturalised themselves among the less
rugged tracts of northern Germany and of Britain. The dwarfs, trolls,
fairies, and hill-folk who, whether or not they are to be regarded
as representatives of a diminutive human population that originally
inhabited those regions, were believed to dwell under the earth and
in caves, and who were regarded as having played a distinct though
subordinate part in changing the surface of the land, would find
appropriate haunts wherever the Teutons established themselves. The
personification of natural forces and the effects produced by the
supernatural beings so pictured to the imagination, certainly bear a
marked family likeness all over the west and north-west of Europe.
There is, moreover, one feature that distinguishes the myths and
legends of those northern lands--the grim humour which so often lights
them up. The grotesque contours of many craggy slopes where, in the
upstanding pinnacles of naked rock, an active imagination sees forms of
men and of animals in endless whimsical repetitions, may sometimes have
suggested the particular form of the ludicrous which appears in the
popular legend. But the natural instinct of humour which saw physical
features in a comical light, and threw a playful human interest over
the whole face of nature, was a distinctively Teutonic characteristic.
A few examples from the abundant collection that might be gathered must
here suffice. Some of the most singular features of the landscapes of
the north-west of Europe arise from the operations of the ice-sheets,
glaciers, and icebergs of that comparatively late geological period
to which the name of the Ice Age is given. The perched boulders which
stand poised near the verge of cliffs or scattered over the sides and
summits of hills, everywhere suggested the working of supernatural
agency. In some districts they were looked upon as missiles hurled by
giants who fought against each other. In others, they were regarded
as the work of giantesses, or 'auld wives,' as they were called in
Scotland, who to exhibit their prowess would transport masses of rock
as large as hills from one part of the country to another.
This capacity in such supernatural beings to carry huge burdens of
stone or earth has furnished an explanation of many islands and mounds
along the maritime parts of Britain and the countries bordering
the Baltic Sea. Ailsa Craig, that stands so picturesquely in the
middle of the Firth of Clyde, was the handiwork of a carline, who,
for some object which is not very clear, undertook to carry a huge
hill from Scotland to Ireland. Before she had got half-way over, her
apron-strings broke and the rock fell into the sea, whence it has
projected ever since as the well-known island. In proof of the legend a
hollow among the Carrick hills is pointed out as the place from which
the mass of rock was removed.
Along the Baltic coasts many similar tales are told. Thus the island of
Hven was dropped where it stands by the giantess Hvenild, who wished to
carry some pieces of Zealand over to the south of Sweden. Sex seems to
have counted for little in the nature or amount of work accomplished,
for witches and warlocks, giants and giantesses, were equally popular
and equally powerful. A mighty giant in the Isle of Rugen, vexed that,
as his home stood on an island, he had always to wade from it when he
wished to cross over to Pomerania, resolved to make a causeway for his
greater convenience. So, filling his apron with earth, he proceeded
to carry out his purpose, but soon the weight of his burden broke an
opening in the apron, and such a quantity of stuff fell out as to
form the nine hills of Rambin. Stopping the hole, however, he went
on until another bigger rent was torn open, from which earth enough
tumbled to the ground to make thirteen of the other little hills that
now appear in that district. But he succeeded at last in reaching
the sea with just enough of earth left in the apron to enable him to
make the promontory of Prosnitz Hook and the peninsula of Drigge.
There still remained, however, a narrow passage between Pomerania and
Rugen which he had no material left to bridge over, and so in a fit
of rage and vexation he fell dead, and his undertaking still remains
incomplete.[18] The geologist who has studied the singular forms and
distribution of the 'glacial drift' can best appreciate this and
similar attempts to account for the shapes and grouping of these still
enigmatical mounds and ridges.
The progress of Christianity extirpated the pagan gods and giants,
but failed to destroy the instinctive craving after a supernatural
origin for striking physical features. This surviving popular demand
consequently led to gradual modification of the older legends.
In Catholic countries the deeds of prowess were not infrequently
transferred to the hands of the Virgin or of saints. Thus at Saintfort,
in the Charente region, a huge stone that lies by the river Ney is said
to mark where the Virgin dropped from her apron one of four pillars
which she was carrying across. In Britain, and especially in Scotland,
the devil of the Christian faith appears to have in large measure
supplanted the warlocks and carlines of the earlier beliefs, or at
least to have worked in league with them as their chief. All over the
country 'devil's punchbowls,' 'devil's cauldrons,' 'devil's bridges'
and other names mark how his prowess has been invoked to account for
natural features which in those days were deemed to require some more
than ordinary agency for their production.
These popular efforts to explain physical phenomena which, from the
earliest days of human experience, have appealed most forcibly to
the imagination, have survived longest in the more rugged and remote
regions, partly, no doubt, because these regions have lain furthest
away from the main onward stream of human progress, but partly also
because it is there that the most impressive topographical features
exist. The natural influence of mountain-scenery upon the mind is
probably of an awe-inspiring, depressing kind. We all remember the
eloquent language in which Mr. Ruskin depicts what he calls the
'mountain gloom.' Man feels his littleness face to face with the mighty
elemental forces that have found there their dwelling-place. Even so
near our own time as the later decades of the eighteenth century men of
culture could hardly find language strong enough to paint the horrors
of that repulsive mountain-world into which they ventured with some
misgivings, and from which they escaped with undisguised satisfaction.
After we have made every allowance for the physical discomforts
inseparable from such journeys at that time, when neither practicable
roads nor decent inns had been built, it is clear that mountain-scenery
not only had no charm for intelligent and observant men, but filled
them with actual disgust. Not until the nineteenth century did these
landscapes come into vogue with ordinary sightseers. Only within the
last two or three generations have mountains begun to attract a vastly
larger annual band of appreciative pilgrims than ever crowded along
what used to be called the 'grand tour.' For this happy change we are
largely indebted to the Alpine ascents and admirable descriptions of
the illustrious De Saussure on the Continent, and to the poetry of
Scott and Wordsworth in this country.
It is interesting to inquire how, after the popular feeling has thus
been so entirely transformed, mountainous scenery now affects the
imagination of cultivated people who visit it, whether impelled by the
mere love of change or by that haunting passion which only the true
lover of mountains can feel and appreciate. Even under the entirely
changed conditions of modern travel and general education, we can
detect the working of the same innate craving for some explanation of
the more salient features of mountain-landscape that shall satisfy
the imagination. The supernatural has long been discarded in such
matters. Even the most unlearned traveller would demand that its
place must be taken by scientific observation and inference. But the
growth of a belief in the natural origin of all the features of the
earth has grown faster than the capacity of science to guide it.
Nowhere may the lasting influence of scenery on the imagination be
more strikingly recognised than in the vague tentative efforts of
the popular mind to apply what it supposes to be scientific method
to the elucidation of these more impressive elements of topography.
The crudest misconceptions have been started and implicitly accepted,
which, though supposed to be based on observation of nature, are in
reality hardly less unnatural than the legends of an older time. They
have nevertheless gained a large measure of popular acceptance, because
they meanwhile satisfy the demands of the imagination.
To the geologist whose duty it is to investigate these questions in
the calm dry light of science, there is no task more irksome than
to combat and dislodge these popular, preconceived opinions, and
to procure an honest, intelligent survey of the actual evidence of
fact upon which alone a solid judgment of the whole subject can be
based. It is not that the evidence is difficult to collect or hard to
understand. But so vividly does striking topography still appeal to the
imagination, so inveterate has the habit become of linking each sublime
result with the working of some stupendous cause, and of choosing in
this way what is supposed to be the simplest and grandest solution of a
problem, that men will hardly listen to any sober presentation of the
facts. They refuse to believe that the interpretation of the earth's
surface, like that of its planetary motion, is a physical question
which cannot be guessed at or decided _a priori_, but must be answered
by an appeal to the evidence furnished by Nature herself.
For this antagonism geologists are, no doubt, chiefly themselves to
blame. While the growth of a love of natural scenery, and especially of
that which is lofty and rugged, has been late and slow, the desire to
ascertain the origin and history of the various inequalities of surface
on which the charms of scenery so largely depend, and by careful
scrutiny to refer these inequalities to the operation of the different
natural agencies that produced them, has been later and slower still.
Men had for several generations explored the rocks that lie beneath
their feet, and had, by laborious and patient effort, deciphered the
marvellous history of organic and inorganic changes of which these
rocks are the record, before they seriously set themselves to study
the story of the present surface of the land. And thus what was one of
the earliest problems to interest mankind has been one of the latest to
engage the attention of modern science.
This slowness of development, though it has allowed much misconception
to grow up rank and luxuriant, has been attended with one compensating
advantage, inasmuch as the various branches of inquiry into which
the discussion of the problem resolves itself have made rapid
progress in recent years. We are thus in a far better position to
enter on a consideration of the subject than we were a generation
ago. And though one may still hear a man gravely expounding familiar
topographical features much as his grandfather would have done, as
if in the meanwhile no thoughtful study had led to a very different
interpretation, these popular fallacies, which manifest such vitality,
can now be combated with a far wider experience, and a much ampler
wealth of illustration from all parts of the globe.
The various elements of a landscape appear to the ordinary eye so
simple, so obviously related to each other, and often so clearly
and sharply defined, that they are not unnaturally regarded as the
effects of some one general operation that acted for their special
production; and where they include abrupt features, such as a ravine or
a precipice, they are still popularly believed to be in the main the
work of some sudden potent force, such as an earthquake or volcanic
explosion. There is a general and perfectly intelligible unwillingness
to allow that scenery which now appears so complete and connected in
all its parts was not the result of one probably sudden or violent
cause. Yet the simplest explanation is not always necessarily the
correct one. In reality, the problems presented to us by the existing
topography of the land, fascinating though they are, become daily more
complex, and demand the whole resources of geological science. They
cannot be solved by any rough-and-ready process. They involve not only
an acquaintance with the recent operations of Nature, but an extensive
research into the history of former geological periods. The surface
of every country is like a palimpsest which has been written over
again and again in different centuries. How it has come to be what it
is cannot be told without much patient effort. But every effort that
brings us better acquainted with the story of the ground beneath our
feet, and at the same time gives an added zest to our enjoyment of the
scenery at the surface, is surely worthy to be made.
These remarks lead me naturally to the concluding section of my
subject, in which I propose to inquire how far the discoveries of
science have affected the relation of scenery to the imagination. It
has often been charged against scientific men that the progress of
science is distinctly hostile to the cultivation alike of the fancy and
of the imagination, and that some of the choicest domains of literature
must necessarily grow more and more neglected as life and progress
are brought more completely under the sway of continued discovery and
invention. We hear these complaints, now in the form of a helpless and
hopeless wail, now as an angry and impotent protest. That they are made
in good faith, and are often the expression of deep regret and anxious
solicitude for the future of some parts of our literature cannot be
doubted, and in so far they deserve to be treated by scientific men
with hearty respect and sympathy. But is there really anything in
the progress of science that is inimical to the cultivation of the
imaginative faculty and the fullest blossoming of poetry? The problems
of life--truth and error, love and hope, joy and sorrow, toil and rest,
peace and war, disease and death, here and hereafter--will be with us
always. From the days of Homer they have inspired the sweet singers of
each successive generation of men, and they will continue to be the
main theme of the poets of the future. As for the outer world in which
we live, the more we learn of it the more marvellous does it appear,
and the more powerfully does it make its mute appeal to all that is
highest and best within us. And, after all, how little have we yet
learnt! How small is the sum of all our knowledge! It is still and ever
must be true that, in the presence of the Infinite, 'the greater our
circle of light, the wider the circumference of darkness that surrounds
it.' When the man of letters complains that we have dethroned the old
gods, discarded the giants and witches, and erected in their place a
system of cold and formal laws that can evoke no enthusiasm, and must
repress all poetry, has he never perceived how a true poet can pierce,
as our late Laureate could, through mere superficial technicalities
into the deeper meaning of things, and can realise and express, in
language that appeals to the soul as well as to the ear, the divine
harmony and progressive evolution which it is the aim of science to
reveal? Let me ask such a critic to ponder well the sonnet of Lowell's:
'I grieve not that ripe knowledge takes away
The charm that nature to my childhood wore;
For, with that insight, cometh, day by day,
A greater bliss than wonder was before:
The real doth not clip the poet's wings;
To win the secret of a weed's plain heart
Reveals some clue to spiritual things,
And stumbling guess becomes firm-footed art.'
It will not, I think, be hard to show that in dissipating the popular
misconceptions which have grown up around the question of the origin
of scenery, science has put in their place a series of views of
nature which appeal infinitely more to the imagination than anything
which they supplant. While in no way lessening the effect of human
association with landscape, science lifts the veil that hides the past
from us, and in every region calls up a succession of visions which, by
their contrast with what now presents itself to the eye and by their
own unlooked-for marvels, rivet our attention. Scenes long familiar are
illumined by 'a light that never was on land or sea.' We view them as
if an enchanter's wand were waving over us, and by some strange glamour
were blending past and present into one.
Let me try to illustrate these remarks by three examples culled from
the scenery of each of the three kingdoms. First, I would transport
the reader in imagination to a lonely valley in the far west of the
county of Donegal. The morning light is sparkling in diamonds from
the dewdrops that cluster on the bent and heather, and is throwing
a rainbow sheen across each web of gossamer that hangs across our
path as we climb the long rough slope in front. Around are bare bleak
moorlands, too high and infertile for cultivation, from the sides
and hollows of which the peasants dig their fuel. The signs of human
occupation grow fewer and fainter as we ascend. The barking of the
village dogs and the shouts from the school playground no longer reach
our ears. And while we thus retire from the living world of to-day, it
almost seems as if we enter into progressively closer communion with
the past. Yonder, only a few miles to the north, lies the deep hollow
of Glen Columbkill--that western seclusion where tradition records that
St. Columba, the great apostle of the Scots, in his earlier years,
loved to bury himself for meditation and prayer. Mouldering cross and
crumbling cairn, to which latter every pious pilgrim adds a stone,
keep his memory green through the centuries. It is with him and his
courageous friends and disciples, rather than with sights and sounds
of the present time, that we feel ourselves in contact here. And when,
high up on this bare mountain-side, we come upon the ruined cells which
these devoted men built with their own hands out of the rough stones of
the crest, and to which they betook themselves for quiet intercourse
with Heaven, amid the wild winds and driving rains of these western
hills, the halo of human courage and self-denial falls for us on this
solitude to heighten its loneliness and desolation.