the work of
designing priests and bewildered speculators, and revert to that pure
and simple religion which is divinely implanted in the heart of every
uncorrupted human being. The Savoyard vicar, if you have any doubts,
will tell you what is the true creed; and if you don't believe it, is
Rousseau's rather startling corollary, you ought to be put to death.

That final touch shows the arbitrary and despotic spirit characteristic
of the relentless theorist. I need not here inquire what relation may be
borne by Rousseau's theories to any which could now be accepted by
intelligent thinkers. It is enough to say that there would be, to put it
gently, some slight difficulty in settling the details of this pure
creed common to all unsophisticated minds, and in seeing what would be
left when we had destroyed all institutions alloyed by sin and
selfishness. The meaning, however, in this connection of his love of
nature, taking the words in their mere common-sense, is in harmony with
his system. The mountains, whose worship he was the first to adumbrate,
if not actually to institute, were the symbols of the great natural
forces free from any stain of human interference. Greed and cruelty had
not stained the pure waters of his lovely lake, or dimmed the light to
which his vicar points as in the early morning it grazes the edges of
the mighty mountain buttresses. Whatever symbolism may be found in the
Alps, suggesting emotions of awe, wonder, and softened melancholy, came
unstained by the association with the vices of a complex civilisation.
If poets and critics have not quite analysed the precise nature of our
modern love of mountain scenery, the sentiment may at least be
illustrated by a modern parallel. The most eloquent writer who, in our
day, has transferred to his pages the charm of Alpine beauties, shares
in many ways Rousseau's antipathy for the social order. Mr. Ruskin would
explain better than anyone why the love of the sublimest scenery should
be associated with a profound conviction that all things are out of
joint, and that society can only be regenerated by rejecting all the
achievements upon which the ordinary optimist plumes himself. After all,
it is not surprising that those who are most sick of man as he is should
love the regions where man seems smallest. When Swift wished to express
his disgust for his race, he showed how absurd our passions appear in a
creature six inches high; and the mountains make us all Lil