NO LOVE OF ROMANTIC SCENERY

Savages, on the other hand, are prevented from appreciating snow mountains, avalanches, roaring torrents, ocean storms, deep glens, jungles, and solitudes, not only by their lack of refinement, but by their fears of wild animals, human enemies, and evil spirits.  “In the Australian bush,” writes Tylor (P.C., II., 203), “demons whistle in the branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the trunks to seize the wayfarer;” and Powers (88) writes in regard to California Indians that they listen to night noises with unspeakable horror: 

“It is difficult for us to conceive of the speechless terrors which these poor wretches suffer from the screeching of owls, the shrieking of night-hawks, the rustling of the trees ... all of which are only channels of poison wherewith the demons would smite them.”

To the primitive mind, the world over, a high mountain is the horror of horrors, the abode of evil spirits, and an attempt to climb it certain death.  So strong is this superstition that explorers have often experienced the greatest difficulty in getting natives to serve as porters of provisions in their ascents of peaks.[6] Even the Greeks and Romans cared for landscape only in so far as it was humanized (parks and gardens) and habitable.  “Their souls,” says Rohde (511),

“could never have been touched by the sublime thrills we feel in the presence of the dark surges of the sea, the gloom of a primeval forest, the solitude and silence of sunlit mountain summits.”

And Humboldt, who first noted the absence in Greek and Roman writings of the admiration of romantic scenery, remarked (24): 

“Of the eternal snow of the Alps, glowing in the rosy light of the morning or evening sun, of the loveliness of the blue glacier ice, of the stupendous grandeur of Swiss landscape, no description has come down to us from them; yet there was a constant procession over these Alps, from Helvetia to Gallia, of statesmen and generals with literary men in their train.  All these travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages their attention.  It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical treatise ‘De Analogia.’”

A sceptical reader might retort that the love of romantic scenery is so subtle a sentiment, and so far from being universal even now, that it would be rash to argue from its absence among savages, Greeks, and Romans, that love, a sentiment so much stronger and more prevalent, could have been in the same predicament.  Let us therefore take another sentiment, the religious, the vast power and wide prevalence of which no one will deny.

NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION