University of Virginia Library

I

“Earth's Dugs, Wens, Warts, Imposthumes”—such
are some of the epithets applied to mountains in a
seventeenth-century phrase book, which also lists
among appropriate descriptive adjectives, “insolent,
ambitious, uncouth, inhospitable, sky-threatening,
forsaken, pathless.” In both biblical and classical atti-
tudes toward mountains there was interesting dualism.
Phrases from the Old Testament echo in our memories:
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence
cometh my help.” There are various such passages in
the Psalmist. But in the same book we find prophecy
of an attitude that is to echo in the New Testament:
“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and
hill shall be laid low.” In spite of the Sermon on the
Mount, there is almost no description of mountains in
the New Testament, but the general impression is
adverse. The social philosophy seems to be that the
“high” is suspect, the “low” much preferable. As the
seventeenth-century theologian Laurence Clarkson
said: “If you would understand the Scriptures, you shall
read it calleth rich men wicked Mountains, and poor
believing men Valleys.”

A similar basic contradiction is felt in classical liter-
ature. The Greeks seldom described mountains, but
when they did, inclined to such adjectives as “stately,
cloud-touching, star-brushing.” They worshipped their
gods on Mount Olympus and invoked the Muses on
Helicon. Gilbert Murray described the Greek attitude
thus: “They did not describe forests or mountains; they
worshipped them and built temples in them. Their love
for nature was that of the mountaineer and the seaman,
who does not talk much about the sea and mountains,
but who sickens and pines if he is taken away from
them.” With the exception of Lucretius, who experi-
enced among mountains the exultation described by
romantic English poets, attitudes of classical Latin
poets were usually adverse. Catullus, Vergil, and
Horace seldom described mountains, and, when they
did, felt them dangerous, desolate, hostile and used such
adjectives as ocris, asperus, arduus, horridus.

Since the mountain-attitudes of Elizabethan and
seventeenth-century poets go back almost entirely to
the Bible and the classics, we shall not pause over those
of the Middle Ages except for one comparison. Dante
knew mountains well enough, as his realistic account
of Bismantova shows, but, whether influenced by his
own experience or by Latin and New Testament for-
bears, he did not like them. The Mount of Purgatorio
is as allegorical as Bunyan's Hill Difficulty. On the
other hand, Petrarch ascended Mount Ventoux in April
1335 for his own pleasure and so exulted in the experi-
ence that his words have been repeated in anthologies
for mountain-climbers. Modern scholarship has shown
that his experience was not unique. But for the most
part, medieval men climbed mountains only through
necessity.

Allegorization, abstraction, and personification so
overshadow realism that the mountain-imagery of the
Renaissance is largely stereotyped. Shakespeare proba-
bly never saw a mountain or a really high hill. Moun-
tains are infrequent in his nature-imagery and a purely
literary heritage: “... jocund day/ Stands tip-toe on
the misty mountain tops”; “new lighted on a heaven-
kissing hill”; “make Ossa like a wart”—such phrases
had a literary origin. The “mountains on whose barren
breast/ The labouring clouds do often rest” of L'Allegro
were not seen by Milton from Horton or Cambridge.
Bunyan's “Delectable Mountains” and his “Hill
Difficulty” are simple biblical moralizings. Equally
traditional were attitudes Andrew Marvell crowded
into a stanza of “Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-
borow”:

Many travellers of the seventeenth century were so
conditioned by their Latin or New Testament heritage
that they felt little except terror when on the Grand
Tour they were forced to cross mountains. Thomas
Coryate, attempting a record-breaking journey,
described in Coryats Crudities (1611), tried to make

the ascent on foot from Aiguebelle, because, as he
confessed, he was afraid to go on horseback. Finally,
he hired natives to carry him in a chair and, when
he came to precipices, he kept his eyes closed. James
Howell described his mountain-experience in his Fa-
miliar Letters (1650). He crossed the Alps from Italy
after having crossed the Pyrenees, which he found “not
so high and hideous as the Alps; but for our mountains
in Wales... they are but Molehills in comparison of
these; they are but Pigmies compared to Giants, but
Blisters to Imposthumes, or Pimples to Warts.” John
Evelyn, an experienced traveller, showed only
momentary appreciation of Alpine scenery, largely
stressing in his Diary dangers and discomforts. His basic
preference for plains may be seen in an entry on the
sight of the Alps from Mergozzo. The mountains rose
suddenly, “after some hundreds of miles of the most
even country in the World, and where there is hardly
a stone to be found, as if nature had here swept up
the rubbish of the Earth in the Alps, to forme and
cleare the Plaines of Lombardy.”

“The rubbish of the Earth,” said Evelyn, and Charles
Cotton completed his condemnation of the “Peak dis-
trict” in The Wonders of the Peak with a couplet:

Hovering in both minds was something more profound
than the literary heritage from Roman and New Testa-
ment ancestors, a theological dilemma that was revived
in the seventeenth century to become one of the early
modern clashes between science and religion.