And perhaps the revelation of mountain beauty depends not only on the physical constitution of the mountains but also on the angle of spiritual reflection. There have been long ages when man was badly placed to see the light of timeless beauty shining through the mountain screen, and it is perhaps no accident that this light should have become clearer when a greater light was partially obscured.
The beginning of mountain mysticism in the eighteenth and of systematic mountaineering in the nineteenth century coincided with defeatist periods in Christian history. It is, as I pointed out in my book, Switzerland and the English, an interesting coincidence that Rousseau, who was, as Leslie Stephen remarked, "the first to set up mountains as objects of human worship," should have completed the Nouvelle Heloise, which had so great an influence on the development of the mountain cult, in the same year, 1759, that Diderot's Encyclopaedia, that manifesto of scepticism, was published, and that exactly one hundred years later the Origin of Species and Peaks, Passes and Glaciers should have made a simultaneous appearance.
It would seem as if both in 1759 and 1859 Providence provided an antidote to complete scepticism. The Alpine Club and Darwinism are in effect contemporary phenomena. They were born together but, fortunately for the Alpine Club, they did not decline together.
References
Text from: Arnold Lunn, Mountains of Memory, London, Hollis and Carter, 1948
Image: Fogbow on the Matterhorn, from Edward Whymper, Scrambles amongst the Alps in the Years 1860-69, published 1873 (via Wikipedia)
1 comment:
I shall hunt down a copy of Mountains of Memory, yet another book purchase off the back of reading this blog.
Coincidentally, I came across Arnold Lunn last week when I started reading Winthrop Young’s Mountains with a Difference. I liked the last line of Lunn’s Editor’s Preface “..a book which proves that in the country of the mind the one-legged man is king.”!
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