But the same valley can be the setting for another picture: down from the top there seem to come great processions, gay like Benozzo Gozzoli’s ‘Procession of the Magi,’ many leagues long and all ordered and together, though part is hidden in the green woods, part in the valley’s folds. We seem to take our place in the upward journey, and soon it will be our turn to wonder what new thing we shall see beyond the barrier. Perhaps encompassing mists will give place suddenly at the summit to a sunny prospect of some great cathedral range, to take our place in one of those processions and descend to the richness of an Italian land. Or, if it is on the far side that the mists have gathered, and the gateway of the pass is barred by a deep grey veil of nothingness, at least the mists will lift high enough to show the two gentle arms of our mother earth descending to where we are, strong and lit by a strange internal light, ready to hold us up as we take the last step into the grey, where we shall see no more.
Not much more than a hundred years ago a tourist remarked that he found the Scottish hills ‘most of all disgusting when the heather was in bloom.’ There is something very taking about this phrase. It was, of course, a commonplace of the eighteenth century to feel aversion, awe, horror, even hatred for mountains, but the epithet ‘disgusting’ is a refinement of abuse. The Scottish hills failed to arouse any of the deeper emotions in this gentleman--it would have been a compliment to them to suggest they could. They merely filled him with disgust, and the feeling was aggravated by the sight of a profusion of flowers of an unpleasant purple colour.
We have no reason to suppose that the author of this judgment was deficient in taste or sensibility according to the standards of his time. We may credit him with a happy turn for expression, but not with any originality of view. The resulting reflections are rather surprising. It seems natural that men should once have looked on the Alps with horror and repulsion. They were the abode of storms and killing cold and avalanches, and stood for all the forces of nature which war most fiercely against man. But the British hills never stood for the negation of life. At the worst they were only waste land, unreclaimed from nature. So there seems to be something perversely utilitarian in the man who could observe their soft colours and graceful outlines with nothing but disgust. But the perversity--if perversity is a fair name for the æsthetic attitude in disagreement with our own--belonged to the age and not to the man. To-day, no doubt, he would have quoted descriptive poetry with the loudest, and mountain literature would have lost an adjective.