t be of
the "essentially pachydermatous order." He commented at length on the
peculiar temperament of those who have expressed dislike of his perfect
playground--Chateaubriand, Johnson, Addison, Bishop Berkeley. Bishop
Berkeley, who crossed Mont Cenis on New Year's Day 1714, complained that
he was "put out of humour by the most horrible precipices." There is
huge comfort to be drawn from Stephen's pages descriptive of the
"simple-minded abhorrence of mountains," and from his categorical
declaration that love of the sublime shapes of the Alps springs from "a
delicate and cultivated taste." But we are puzzled by the presence
outside the pale of some who cannot rightly be called "pachydermatous."
I am turning over the pages of Sarah Bernhardt's autobiographical
revelations. "I adore the sea and the plain," she writes, "but I neither
care for mountains nor for forests. Mountains seem to crush me, and
forests to stifle me." Strange that the high priestess of expression,
the interpreter of every phase of human passion and sorrow, she who dies
terribly twice a day, and mercilessly conducts us to the attenuated air
and dizzy heights of intense emotion, should feel no kinship with the
mountains. It may be that they are antagonistic to the fine arts of
simulation and will brook no companionship of feeling that is not real.
And her stage-worn heart is certainly not in alliance with Fiona
Macleod's _Lonely Hunter_.

But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on
A lonely hill.

We might assume that the traditional wildness of the great tragedienne
would have found a chord of sympathy in the avalanche or in the fierce
torrent breaking over the rocks. Rousseau's hysteria and wild assaults
on the conventions of Society and literature have been traced to the
mountains. Lord Morley emphasizes that Rousseau "required torrents,
rocks, dark forests, mountains, and precipices," and that no plains,
however beautiful, ever seemed so in his eyes. There is naturally a
complete divergence of opinion between lovers and haters of mountains as
to their effect on the literary mind. We like to associate peaks of
genius with peaks of granite. Ruskin found fault with Shakespeare's lack
of impression from a more sublime country as shown by the sacrilegious
lines--

Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow
Upon the valleys whose low vassal seat
The Alps doth spit, and void his rheum upon.

There are anomalies in the capacity for aesthetic