Nevertheless, we should not adopt the present writer, with all his
two-fold fastidiousness, as our guide to enlighten us upon the highest
sort of pleasure which scenery produces. He lays far more stress than
to us seems due on the pictorial art as a means of cultivating a taste
for the beauties of nature. It is quite true that a person familiar
with the art of painting will see in an ordinary landscape points of
interest which another would overlook. But as the sublimer objects in
nature cannot be represented in pictures, so as to convey an
impression of sublimity, it is not here that we can learn how to
appreciate them. You paint a river and all the amenities of the
landscape through which it flows; you cannot paint the sea and its
grandeur. On no canvass can you transfer a mountain so as to bring
with it the true impression of its sublimity.
That which we call the love of nature must exist in very different
forms in minds of different habits and culture. The professional
artist notes the various forms, the various colours, how they blend
and contrast; he likes to see the whole field of vision richly and
harmoniously filled. The poet, after spending a whole day in rapture
amongst the mountains, could scarcely give you the exact outline of a
single peak; he cannot fill you a solitary canvass; he has grouped all
that his memory retains by the law only of his own feelings; he can
describe the scene only by the emotions it has called forth.
There is also, no doubt, a simpler love of natural objects that never
seeks to express itself either with the pencil or the pen. And this
may, as our writer suggests, form a component part of that love of
their country for which mountaineers are particularly distinguished.
Yet, having ourselves had occasion to notice how very destitute of
what is called _sentiment_, the peasantry of the noblest country are
found to be, we should rather attribute the passionate love of home
that is remarkable in the Swiss or the Norwegian to this,--that the
causes which make home dear to all men are aggravated in their case by
the mountainous seclusion in which they live. One who has resided in
the same valley all his life, knows every one in that valley, and
knows no one beyond it. The whole of the inhabitants form, as it were,
one family. And though the sublimity of the mountains around him
affects his mind but little, yet their lofty summits present to him
(merely as so much matter and form) great physical objects to which he
gets familiarised and attached. Each time he raises his eyes, he sees
them there eternal in the heavens he can go no where to escape them;
and they enclose for him whatever he possesses in common with all
other countrymen--his own field, its hedge, its stile,--the village
church,--the bridge over the torrent stream on which he played when a
boy, and stood and gossipped when a man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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