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Words: 61113 in 18 pages
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CHAP. PAGE
I THE MEDIAEVAL ATTITUDE 9
II THE PIONEERS 22
V MONTE ROSA AND THE B?NDNER OBERLAND 82
VI TIROL AND THE OBERLAND 92
X THE ALPS IN LITERATURE 208
BIBLIOGRAPHY 251
INDEX 254
THE ALPS
THE MEDIAEVAL ATTITUDE
Rousseau is usually credited with the discovery that mountains are not intrinsically hideous. Long before his day, isolated men had loved the mountains, but these men were eccentrics. They founded no school; and Rousseau was certainly the first to popularise mountains and to transform the cult of hill worship into a fashionable creed. None the less, we must guard against the error of supposing that mountain love was confined to the few men who have left behind them literary evidence of their good taste. Mountains have changed very little since man became articulate, and the retina of the human eye has changed even less. The beauty of outline that stirs us to-day was implicit in the hills "that shed their burial sheets about the march of Hannibal." It seems reasonable to suppose that a few men in every age have derived a certain pleasure, if not from Alpine travel at least from the distant view of the snows.
The literature of the Ancient World contains little that bears upon our subject. The literature of the Jews is exceptional in this respect. This is the more to their credit, as the mountains of Judaea, south of the beautiful Lebanon range, are shapeless and uninteresting. Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Job, and Isaiah contain mountain passages of great beauty. The Old Testament is, however, far richer in mountain praise than the New Testament. Christ retired more than once to the mountains; but the authors of the four Gospels content themselves with recording the bare fact that certain spiritual crises took place on mountain-tops. There is not a single indication in all the gospels that Nazareth is set on a hill overlooking one of the fairest mountain prospects in all Judaea, not a single tribute to the beauty of Galilee girdled by the outlying hills of Hermon.
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