Connected with this love of liberty we find a singular manifestation
of love of mountains, and see our painters traversing the wildest
places of the globe in order to obtain subjects with craggy foregrounds
and purple distances. Some few of them remain content with pollards
and flat land; but these are always men of third-rate order; and the
leading masters, while they do not reject the beauty of the low
grounds, reserve their highest powers to paint Alpine peaks or Italian
promontories. And it is eminently noticeable, also, that this pleasure
in the mountains is never mingled with fear, or tempered by a spirit
of meditation, as with the mediaeval; but it is always free and
fearless, brightly exhilarating, and wholly unreflective; so that the
painter feels that his mountain foreground may be more consistently
animated by a sportsman than a hermit; and our modern society in
general goes to the mountains, not to fast, but to feast, and leaves
their glaciers covered with chicken-bones and egg-shells.
Connected with this want of any sense of solemnity in mountain
scenery, is a general profanity of temper in regarding all the rest of
nature; that is to say, a total absence of faith in the presence of
any deity therein. Whereas the mediaeval never painted a cloud, but
with the purpose of placing an angel in it; and a Greek never entered
a wood without expecting to meet a god in it; we should think the
appearance of an angel in the cloud wholly unnatural, and should be
seriously surprised by meeting a god anywhere.
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