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.