THE LURE OF THE MOUNTAINS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3495, 1 March 1921, Page 49

THE LURE OF THE MOUNTAINS.

During the past two months many people have been visiting our grand scenery of the Southern Alps, some making the walking trip from Te Anau to Milford, some visiting Mount Cook, and a very few undertaking genuine mountaineering. As the Dominion progresses and facilities for travel and for sojourn in our mountain regions increase, more and more of our people will become familiar with their grandeur and loveliness, for there are few in these days for whom the mountains have no fascination. But the lure of the mountains is a modern thing ; we find few traces of it in literature before the latter part of the eighteenth century. Early literature, including that of mediaeval Europe, is mainly occupied with man ; nature comes in mainly as a background or an accessory to his achievements and sufferings, let we know the Greeks had a very keen sense of the beauty cf nature. Their poets made the high mountains the resort of their gods, and there are some passages in the Greek tragedians that evince the modern sense of the sublimity of wild mountain scenery. And tins sense is often shown in the poetry of the Old Testament. But in primitive times, and indeed up to the eighteenth century, it was the milder beauties of nature that had most attraction, flowers, green meadows, gentle valleys and hills imposing no obstacle to human intercourse. Probably people living among the mountains have always felt their charm, but as for the majority it seems as if so long as mountains meant danger and impediment to human intercourse they repelled rather than attracted. The Alps could not become the playground of Europe before the development of modern means of transit and communication. And to ascend high mountains' for the sake of ascending them is a very modern thing indeed, ft was not till 1786 that Mount Blanc was first ascended. Por a quarter of a century after there were only half a dozen ascents of high Swiss mountains, and it was not till the middle o! last century that high mountain climbing was made an art and a sport and the Alpine Club was formed. Now we hear of peak after peak, so far inaccessible, being conquered bv some adventurous climber, and the ascent of the giant Mount Everest is being planned. High mountain climbing mav he merely a form of sport, undertaken with out scientific object and with little aesthetic motive, yet it is surely one of the highest form of sport. And most climbers, one would think, feel something of The joy of life in steepness overcome, Ancl victories of ascent, and looking down On all -tiiit has looked down on us, and joy In breathing nearer heaven. But non-professional climbers may win this joy by very moderate ascents, while those who can hardly climb at all mayconsole themselves by the knowledge that it is the view from below that offers most beauty. It is strange in these days to come upon references to mountains *by writers of the past which reveal an utter want of any sense of their beauty and sublimity. Thus James Howell, who in the seventeeth century compiled a sort of guide book for the use of travelling Englishmen (a continental tour of a leisurely description was then a favoured way of finishing the education of well todo young gentlemen) speaks of the Alps as “high, horrid, and disfigured bv snow." In the same century the famous diarist, John Everlyn, can find nothing better to say of them than that it seems as if nature hail swept up the rubbish of the earth to clear and form the great plain of Lr -.hardy. Here you have an indication of t-h-j underlying feeling that led men to like or dislike diverse aspects of nature ; the Lombardy plain was a great granary, highly serviceable to man; the mountain range was merely a hindrance and a source of danger. In Mediaeval times it was the common belief that mountain regions were the haunt of horrible dragons, which, of course, did not tend to make mountains In designing B. & ('. Corsets, all types of figures have been provided for. Ladies with full, medium or slim figures can he certain of securing a B. & O. Corset to fit them with complete comfort and to give long service. B. A C. are British oorßets, and embody that, high standard of quality for which British goods are famous. All leading drapers stock B. & C. Corsets. —l6.

popular. John Evelyn was a man of culture, a landscape gardener, and a genuine lover of nature, but of nature in her softer aspects. Still, one meets with occasional testimony to old time appreciation of mountains. There is a curious old book published in 1611, an account of a walking tour made by one Thomas Coryatt, and quaintly entitled, “Coryatt’s Crudities Hastily Gobbled up in Five Months Travel in France, Italy, etc.” “What, I pray you,” asks the author, “is more pleasant, more delectable and more acceptable untp man than to behold the heights of the hills, as it were the very Atlantes themselves of heaven, to admire Hercules’ pillars ? And he goes on to enumerate mountains famous in classic legend and history, and in the Bible. Coryatt records that he walked 1975 miles during this tour, and before starting on more extended travels in the East, he hung up his travel-worn shoes in Odcombe Church in his native Somerset village. But he was more of a walker than a climber. In Savoy he found the mountains so rough and rocky that he as last bargained with i chairman to carry- him over! “It seemeth,” he records, ‘ very dangerous in divers places to travel under the rocky mountains, because many of them are cloven and do seem at the very instant that a man is under them to threaten to overwhelm him.” And in his observations on Switzerland he does not even mention the mountains. In spite of his panegyric of mountains, in presence with them he feels their dangers and inconveniences, rather than their beauty, and they are interesting to him because of the human stories associated with them rather than for themselves. The Alps had few classical associations, for they were bevond the range of the myth making Greeks, and though in later days' Romans were continually travelling them in passing to and from Gaul no reference to the beautv of their peaks, their glaciers, and their lakes has come down to us. There was, however, one early lover of nature whose writings breathe the modern feeling of peace and joy in presence of the sublimity of the mountains. This was Conrad Gesner, a distinguished naturalist of the sixteenth century He first visited mountains in order to study thenvegetation, but came to love them for their own sakes. Writing in Latin to a friend he tells him that he has resolved to ascend mountains, or at least a mountain, every vear. He wonders that men can be satisfied to rest indolently at home and not come forth to behold the wonderful spectacles of nature's theatre. Ten vears later he again writes. “Here nothing annoying or importunate can reach the ears, no tumult and noise of cities, no brawls of men. Here in profound, and indeed religious silence, you seem to hear from the lofty mountain peaks the harmony of the celestial spheres.” It was the famous Jean Jaques Rousseau, an originator of mam- modern ideas, who introduced the cult of mountains and set the fashion of writing about their beauty and the charm of their solitude. In England Horace Walpole helped to make nppreeia tion of mountain scenery fashionable, while the great poets of the later years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth, who revolted from the conventional standards of poetry -dominant in the eighteenth century, were genuine nature lovers and true devotees of the mountains. Coleridge. Wordsworth. Shelley, Bvron, how many splendid passages descriptive of mountain beauty and grandeur do we not owe to them? And Rnskin, in his prose poetry, has celebrated the mountains as worthily as any. Our nineteenth century literature is filled with love of the mountains. In the complexity, the fever, and the doubt- of our age their sub’in-iit'- and their quietude are more than ever welcome, speaking of eternal realities beyond the passing shows of the world.