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Popular Culture Review
frequency and intensity of violence in our whole society. As I have argued
elsewhere we are still part of the Romantic Age, the very one that gave
mountains their favorable press two hundred and fifty years ago (“Of Cinema
Violence*'). Romantics worship force (Victor Hugo, the veritable prototype of
the Romantic, penned the memorable line voiced by the hero of his play
Hemani, “Je suis une force qui va!”—“I am an active force!”), and the casting
off of all restraints.
If mankind early on made a pact with the presence of water, as I have
claimed, long ago solidly sealed and delivered, an equally basic peace seems
finally to have been delivered with mountains. Our love for their beauteous
charms, “the beginning and end of all natural scenery,” the post-Romantic
Ruskin was to call them, may come from Romanticism, with all its excesses and
aspects of violence, but it does exist, and as a true revolution it has almost
completely obliterated the long-standing aversion and fear that for centuries
preceded it.
The time is the present. Of our fifty united states virtually every one
features, somewhere, a mountain or two, big or small, perhaps an extended or
pervasive range. Having a picturesque prominence in the background of one’s
home actually increases property values. The average citizen much enjoys the
view, may very well go hiking on a mountain trail, drive up to the top of this or
that peak, even locate his castle high upon a mountain crest. There is no sense of
dread or alienation. It simply feels natural to enjoy such examples of nature’s
bounty. We have reached a sense of oneness, a true acceptance of mountain
environment.7
West Virginia University West
Armand E. Singer
Notes
1 The observation is reported in Robert Burton’s Anatomy o f Melancholy.
2 Marias sneers that Petrarch “. . . ascends a mountain in order to contemplate on the
summit, but once there he does not know enough to look around, and instead reads St.
Augustine." Some scholars have even argued that the climb was allegorical, not real. As a
longtime scrambler. I can attest that Petrarch’s account o f his pains and struggles to reach
the summit ring true.
J Italian Renaissance painters depict mountainous backgrounds, but only Leonardo da
Vinci shows any real mountain experience. Cf. his “’Storm over the Mountain," sketched
during an actual visit to the Alps. See “Geology/Landscapes."
4 Havelock Ellis notes that untenanted nature is “essentially foreign to the sociallyminded French" (80-81). Symonds comments on “. . . the aversion which a Florentine or
Roman felt for the inhospitable wilderness o f Switzerland" (29). Azorin, the Spanish
novelist-essayist, adds: “El sentido de la Naturaleza es completamente modemo" (9:17).
By and large, the claim is unexceptionable. Shakespeare, however, more than once
reveals an appreciation for the world o f mountains, e.g., “Thou shalt be as free as
mountain winds" or “Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep" (both from The
Tempest): see Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for several others. John Dunn, more the
creature o f his own time, refers to mountains as “warts, and pock-holes in the face/Of th’
earth" Nicolson 28.