Don't talk to me of the
moral and physical superiority of mountain races, for I tell you it
is a dream. Civilization, art, poetry, belong to the lowlands. Are
the English mountaineers, pray, or the French, or the Germans? Were
the Egyptians mountaineers, or the Romans, or the Assyrians, as soon
as they became a people? The Greeks lived among mountains, but they
took care to inhabit the plains; and it was the sea and not the hills
which made them the people which they were. Does Scotland owe her
life to the highlander, or to the lowlander? If you want an
experimentum crucis, there is one. As for poetry, will you mention
to me one mountain race which has written great poetry? You will
quote the Hebrews. I answer that the life of Palestine always kept
to the comparatively low lands to the west of Jordan, while the
barbarous mountaineers of the eastern range never did anything,--had
but one Elijah to show among them. Shakspeare never saw a hill
higher than Malvern Beacon; and yet I suppose you will call him a
poet? Mountaineers look well enough at a distance; seen close at
hand you find their chief distinctions to be starvation and
ignorance, fleas and goitre, with an utter unconsciousness--unless
travellers put it into their heads--of the "soul-elevating glories"
by which they have been surrounded all their lives.
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