tower
above the human form with a colossal imperturbability which withers our
importance and confuses our standards of value. Victor Hugo never quite
freed himself from the mediaeval dread of the mountains or the mediaeval
speculation on their meaning. His letters to his wife from the Alps and
Pyrenees record his impressions with a painstaking and detailed accuracy
which does not forget the black-and-yellow spider performing somersaults
on an imperceptible thread hung from one brier to another. The emotion
after an hour on the Rigi-Kulm "is immense." "The tourist comes here to
get a point of view; the thinker finds here an immense book in which
each rock is a letter, each lake is a phrase, each village is an accent;
from it arise, like a smoke, two thousand years of memories."

Here speaks the true panoramic man, the man whose mind attains to
fulness of expression on mountain-tops from which the whole landscape of
life may be contemplated. And yet he notes the "ominous configuration
of Mount Pilatus" and its terrible form, and writes of adjoining
mountains as "these hump-backed, goitred giants crouching around me in
the darkness." The Rigi appears as "a dark and monstrous perpendicular
wall."

His mind is occupied with the presence of idiots in the Alps. He finds
an explanation: "It is not granted to all intelligences to co-habit with
such marvels and to keep from morning till evening without intoxication
and without stupor, turning a visual radius of fifty leagues across the
earth around a circumference of three hundred." On the Rigi his musings
on the magnificence of the view are checked by the presence of a cretin.
Behold the contrast! An idiot with a goitre and an enormous face, a
blank stare, and a stupid laugh is sole participator with Victor Hugo in
this "marvellous festival of the mountains."

"Oh! abysm!" he cries; "the Alps were the spectacle, the spectator was
an idiot! I forgot myself in this frightful antithesis: man face to face
with nature; Nature in her superbest aspect, man in his most miserable
debasement. What could be the significance of this mysterious contrast?
What was the sense of this irony in a solitude? Have I the right to
believe that the landscape was designed for him--the cretin, and the
irony for me--the chance visitor?"

The idiot and the mountain shared, no doubt, a supreme indifference to
the commotion which their proximity had set up in the poet's mind. With
his love of antithesis