Obstacles.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Conway, Moncure Daniel
Mephistopheles on Crags—Emerson on Monadnoc—Ruskin on Alpine peasants—Holy and Unholy Mountains—The Devil’s Pulpit—Montagnards—Tarns—Tenjo—T’ai-shan—Apocatequil—Tyrolese Legends—Rock Ordeal—Scylla and Charybdis—Scottish Giants—Pontifex—Devil’s Bridges—Le géant Yéous.
Related to the demons of Barrenness, and to the hostile human demons, but still possessing characteristics of their own, are the demons supposed to haunt gorges, mountain ranges, ridges of rocks, streams which cannot be forded and are yet unbridged, rocks that wreck the raft or boat. Each and every obstruction that stood in the way of man’s plough, or of his first frail ship, or his migration, has been assigned its demon. The reader of Goethe’s page has only to turn to the opening lines of Walpurgisnacht in Faust to behold the real pandemonium of the Northern man, as in Milton he may find that of the dweller amid fiery deserts and volcanoes. That labyrinth of vales, crossed with wild crag and furious torrent, is the natural scenery to surround the orgies of the phantoms which flit from the uncultured brain to uncultured nature. Elsewhere in Goethe’s great poem, Mephistopheles pits against the philosophers the popular theory of the rugged remnants of chaos in nature, and the obstacles before which man is powerless.
Faust. For me this mountain mass rests nobly dumb;
I ask not whence it is, nor why ‘tis come?
Herself when Nature in herself did found
This globe of earth, she then did purely round;
The summit and abyss her pleasure made,
Mountain to mountain, rock to rock she laid;
The hillocks down she neatly fashion’d then,
To valleys soften’d them with gentle train.
Then all grew green and bloom’d, and in her joy
She needs no foolish spoutings to employ.
Mephistopheles. So say ye! It seems clear as noon to ye,
Yet he knows who was there the contrary.
I was hard by below, when seething flame
Swelled the abyss, and streaming fire forth came;
When Moloch’s hammer forging rock to rock,
Far flew the fragment-cliffs beneath the shock:
Of masses strange and huge the land was full;
Who clears away such piles of hurl’d misrule?
Philosophers the reason cannot see;
There lies the rock, and they must let it be.
We have reflected till ashamed we’ve grown;
The common folk can thus conceive alone,
And in conception no disturbance know,
Their wisdom ripen’d has long while ago:
A miracle it is, they Satan honour show.
My wanderer on faith’s crutches hobbles on
Towards the devil’s bridge and devil’s stone.1
The great American poet made his pilgrimage to the mountain so beautiful in the distance, thinking to find there the men of equal elevation. Did not Milton describe Freedom as ‘a mountain nymph?’
To myself I oft recount
The tale of many a famous mount,—
Wales, Scotland, Uri, Hungary’s dells;
Roys, and Scanderbergs, and Tells.
Here Nature shall condense her powers,
Her music, and her meteors,
And lifting man to the blue deep
Where stars their perfect courses keep,
Like wise preceptor, lure his eye.
To sound the science of the sky.