CHAPTER VIII.

OBSTACLES.

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. [138]


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.


But instead of finding there the man using those crags as a fastness
to fight pollution of the mind, he


searched the region round
And in low hut my monarch found:
He was no eagle, and no earl;--
Alas! my foundling was a churl,
With heart of cat and eyes of bug,
Dull victim of his pipe and mug. [139]


Ruskin has the same gloomy report to make of the mountaineers of
Europe. 'The wild goats that leap along those rocks have as much
passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men that toil
among them. Perhaps more.' 'Is it not strange to reflect that hardly
an evening passes in London or Paris but one of those cottages is
painted for the better amusement of the fair and idle, and shaded
with pasteboard pines by the scene-shifter; and that good and kind
people,--poetically minded,--delight themselves in imagining the
happy life led by peasants who dwell by Alpine fountains, and kneel
to crosses upon peaks of rock? that nightly we lay down our gold to
fashion forth simulacra of peasants, in gay ribbons and white bodices,
singing sweet songs and bowing gracefully to the picturesque crosses;
and all the while the veritable peasants are kneeling, songlessly, to
veritable crosses in another temper than the kind and fair audiences
dream of, and assuredly with another kind of answer than is got out
of the opera catastrophe.' [140]

The writer remembers well the emphasis with which a poor woman at whose
cottage he asked the path to the Natural Bridge in Virginia said,
'I don't know why so many people come to these rocks; for my part,
give me a level country.' Many ages lay between that aged crone and
Emerson or Ruskin, and they were ages of heavy war with the fortresses
of nature. The fabled ordeals of water and fire through which the human
race passed were associated with Ararat and Sinai, because to migrating
or farming man the mountain was always an ordeal, irrespective even of
its torrents or its occasional lava-streams. A terrible vista is opened
by the cry of Lot, 'I cannot escape to the mountain lest some evil take
me!' Not even the fire consuming Sodom in the plains could nerve him
to dare cope with the demons of the steep places. As time went on,
devotees proved to the awe-stricken peasantries their sanctity and
authority by combating those mountain demons, and erecting their altars
in the 'high places.' So many summits became sacred. But this very
sanctity was the means of bringing on successive demoniac hordes to
haunt them; for every new religion saw in those altars in 'high places'
not victories over demons, but demon-shrines. And thus mountains became
the very battlefields between rival deities, each demon to his or her
rival; and the conflict lasts from the cursing of the 'high places'
by the priests of Israel [141] to the Devil's Pulpits of the Alps
and Apennines. Among the beautiful frescoes at Baden is that of the
Angel's and the Devil's Pulpit, by Götzenberger. Near Gernsbach,
appropriately at the point where the cultivable valley meets the
unconquerable crests of rock, stand the two pulpits from which Satan
and an Angel contended, when the first Christian missionaries had
failed to convert the rude foresters. When, by the Angel's eloquence,
all were won from the Devil's side except a few witches and usurers,
the fiend tore up great masses of rock and built the 'Devil's Mill'
on the mountain-top; and he was hurled down by the Almighty on the
rocks near 'Lord's Meadow,' where the marks of his claws may still
be seen, and where, by a diminishing number of undiminished ears,
his groans are still heard when a storm rages through the valley.

Such conflicts as these have been in some degree associated with every
mountain of holy or unholy fame. Each was in its time a prosaic Hill
Difficulty, with lions by no means chained, to affright the hearts
of Mistrust and Timorous, till Dervish or Christian impressed there
his holy footprint, visible from Adam's Peak to Olivet, or built
there his convents, discernible from Meru and Olympus to Pontyprydd
and St. Catharine's Hill. By necessary truces the demons and deities
repair gradually to their respective summits,--Seir and Sinai hold
each their own. But the Holy Hills have never equalled the number of
Dark Mountains [142] dreaded by man. These obstructive demons made
the mountains Moul-ge and Nin-ge, names for the King and Queen of
the Accadian Hell; they made the Finnish Mount Kippumaki the abode
of all Pests. They have identified their name (Elf) with the Alps,
given nearly every tarn an evil fame, and indeed created a special
class of demons, 'Montagnards,' much dreaded by mediæval miners,
whose faces they sometimes twisted so that they must look backward
physically, as they were much in the habit of doing mentally, for ever
afterward. Gervais of Tilbury, in his Chronicle, declares that on the
top of Mount Canigon in France, which has a very inaccessible summit,
there is a black lake of unknown depth, at whose bottom the demons
have a palace, and that if any one drops a stone into that water,
the wrath of the mountain demons is shown in sudden and frightful
tempests. From a like tarn in Cornwall, as Cornish Folklore claims,
on an accessible but very tedious hill, came up the hand which received
the brand Escalibore when its master could wield it no more,--as told
in the Morte D'Arthur, with, however, clear reference to the sea.

I cannot forbear enlivening my page with the following sketch of a
visit of English officers to the realm of Ten-jo, the long-nosed
Mountain-demon of Japan, which is very suggestive of the mental
atmosphere amid which such spectres exist. The mountains and forests
of Japan are, say these writers, inhabited as thickly by good and
evil spirits as the Hartz and Black Forest, and chief among them,
in horrible sanctity, is O-yama,--the word echoes the Hindu Yama,
Japanese Amma, kings of Hades,--whose demon is Ten-jo. 'Abdul and
Mulney once started, on three days' leave, with the intention of
climbing to the summit--not of Ten-jo's nose, but of the mountain;
their principal reason for so doing being simply that they were told
by every one that they had better not. They first tried the ascent on
the most accessible side, but fierce two-sworded yakomins jealously
guarded it; and they were obliged to make the attempt on the other,
which was almost inaccessible, and was Ten-jo's region. The villagers
at the base of the mountain begged them to give up the project; and
one old man, a species of patriarch, reasoned with them. 'What are
you going to do when you get to the top?' he asked. Our two friends
were forced to admit that their course, then, would be very similar
to that of the king of France and his men--come down again.

The old man laughed pityingly, and said, 'Well, go if you like; but,
take my word for it, Ten-jo will do you an injury.'

They asked who Ten-jo was.

'Why Ten-jo,' said the old man, 'is an evil spirit, with a long nose,
who will dislocate your limbs if you persist in going up the mountain
on this side.'

'How do you know he has got a long nose?' they asked, 'Have you ever
seen him?'

'Because all evil spirits have long noses'--here Mulney hung his
head,--'and,' continued the old man, not noticing how dreadfully
personal he was becoming to one of the party, 'Ten-jo has the longest
of the lot. Did you ever know a man with a long nose who was good?'

'Come on,' said Mulney hurriedly to Abdul, 'or the old fool will make
me out an evil spirit.'

'Syonara,' said the old man as they walked away, 'but look out for
Ten-jo!'

After climbing hard for some hours, and not meeting a single human
being,--not even the wood-cutter could be tempted by the fine timber
to encroach on Ten-jo's precincts,--they reached the top, and enjoyed
a magnificent view. After a rest they started on their descent,
the worst part of which they had accomplished, when, as they were
walking quietly along a good path, Abdul's ankle turned under him,
and he went down as if he had been shot, with his leg broken in two
places. With difficulty Mulney managed to get him to the village
they had started from, and the news ran like wild-fire that Ten-jo
had broken the leg of one of the adventurous tojins.

'I told you how it would be,' exclaimed the old man, 'but you would
go. Ah, Ten-jo is a dreadful fellow!'

All the villagers, clustering round, took up the cry, and shook
their heads. Ten-jo's reputation had increased wonderfully by this
accident. Poor Abdul was on his back for eleven weeks, and numbers of
Japanese--for he was a general favourite amongst them--went to see him,
and to express their regret and horror at Ten-jo's behaviour. [143]

It is obvious that to a demon dwelling in a high mountain a
long nose would be variously useful to poke into the affairs of
people dwelling in the plains, and also to enjoy the scent of
their sacrifices offered at a respectful distance. That feature
of the face which Napoleon I. regarded as of martial importance,
and which is prominent in the warriors marked on the Mycenæ pottery,
has generally been a physiognomical characteristic of European ogres,
who are blood-smellers. That the significance of Ten-jo's long nose
is this, appears probable when we compare him with the Calmuck
demon Erlik, whose long nose is for smelling out the dying. The
Cossacks believed that the protector of the earth was a many-headed
elephant. The snouted demon (figure 15) is from a picture of Christ
delivering Adam and Eve from hell, by Lucas Van Leyden, 1521.

The Chinese Mountains also have their demons. The demon of the mountain
T'ai-shan, in Shantung, is believed to regulate the punishments
of men in this world and the next. Four other demon princes rule
over the principal mountain chains of the Empire. Mr. Dennys remarks
that mountainous localities are so regularly the homes of fairies in
Chinese superstition that some connection between the fact and the
relation of 'Elf' to 'Alp' in Europe is suggested. [144] But this
coincidence is by no means so remarkable as the appearance among
these Chinese mountain sprites of the magical 'Sesame,' so familiar
to us in Arabian legend. The celebrated mountain Ku'en Lun (usually
identified with the Hindoo Kush) is said to be peopled with fairies,
who cultivate upon its terraces the 'fields of sesamum and gardens
of coriander seeds,' which are eaten as ordinary food by those who
possess the gift of longevity.

In the superstitions of the American Aborigines we find gigantic demons
who with their hands piled up mountain-chains as their castles, from
whose peak-towers they hurled stones on their enemies in the plains,
and slung them to the four corners of the earth. [145] Such was the
terrible Apocatequil, whose statue was erected on the mountains, with
that of his mother on the one hand and his brother on the other. He
was Prince of Evil and the chief god of the Peruvians. From Quito
to Cuzco every Indian would give all he possessed to conciliate
him. Five priests, two stewards, and a crowd of slaves served his
image. His principal temple was surrounded by a considerable village,
whose inhabitants had no other occupation than to wait on him. [146]

The plaudits which welcomed the first railway train that sped beneath
the Alps, echoing amid their crags and gorges, struck with death
the old phantasms which had so long held sway in the imagination of
the Southern peasantry. The great tunnel was hewn straight through
the stony hearts of giants whom Christianity had tried to slay, and,
failing that, baptised and adopted. It is in the Tyrol that we find
the clearest survivals of the old demons of obstruction, the mountain
monarchs. Such is Jordan the Giant of Kohlhütte chasm, near Ungarkopf,
whose story, along with others, is so prettily told by the Countess Von
Gunther. This giant is something of a Ten-jo as to nose, for he smells
'human meat' where his pursued victims are hidden, and his snort makes
things tremble as before a tempest; but he has not the intelligence
ascribed to large noses, for the boys ultimately persuade him that
the way to cross a stream is to tie a stone around his neck, and he
is drowned. One of the giants of Albach could carry a rock weighing
10,000 pounds, and his comrades, while carrying others of 700 pounds,
could leap from stone to stone across rivers, and stoop to catch
the trout with their hands as they leaped. The ferocious Orco, the
mountain-ghost who never ages, fulfils the tradition of his classic
name by often appearing as a monstrous black dog, from whose side
stones rebound, and fills the air with a bad smell (like Mephisto). His
employment is hurling wayfarers down precipices. In her story of the
'Unholdenhof'--or 'monster farm' in the Stubeithal--the Countess Von
Gunther describes the natural character of the mountain demons.

'It was on this self-same spot that the forester and his son took up
their abode, and they became the dread and abomination of the whole
surrounding country, for they practised, partly openly and partly in
secret, the most manifold iniquities, so that their nature and bearing
grew into something demoniacal. As quarrellers very strong, and as
enemies dreadfully revengeful, they showed their diabolical nature by
the most inhuman deeds, which brought down injury not only on those
against whom their wrath was directed, but also upon their families for
centuries. In the heights of the mountains they turned the beds of the
torrents, and devastated by this means the most flourishing tracts of
land; on other places the Unholde set on fire whole mountain forests,
to allow free room for the avalanches to rush down and overwhelm the
farms. Through certain means they cut holes and fissures in the rocks,
in which, during the summer, quantities of water collected, which froze
in the winter, and then in the spring the thawing ice split the rocks,
which then rolled down into the valleys, destroying everything before
them.... But at last Heaven's vengeance reached them. An earthquake
threw the forester's house into ruins, wild torrents tore over it,
and thunderbolts set all around it in a blaze; and by fire and water,
with which they had sinned, father and son perished, and were condemned
to everlasting torments. Up to the present day they are to be seen
at nightfall on the mountain in the form of two fiery boars.' [147]

Some of these giants, as has been intimated, were converted. Such was
the case with Heimo, who owned and devastated a vast tract of country
on the river Inn, which, however, he bridged--whence Innsbruck--when
he became a christian and a monk. This conversion was a terrible
disappointment to the devil, who sent a huge dragon to stop the
building of the monastery; but Heimo attacked the dragon, killed him,
and cut out his tongue. With this tongue, a yard and a half long, in
his hand, he is represented in his statue, and the tongue is still
preserved in the cloister. Heimo became a monk at Wilten, lived
a pious life, and on his death was buried near the monastery. The
stone coffin in which the gigantic bones repose is shown there,
and measures over twenty-eight feet.

Of nearly the same character as the Mountain Demons, and possessing
even more features of the Demons of Barrenness, are the monsters
guarding rocky passes. They are distributed through land, sea,
and rivers. The famous rocks between Italy and Sicily bore the
names of dangerous monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, which have now
become proverbial expressions for alternative perils besetting any
enterprise. According to Homer, Scylla was a kind of canine monster
with six long necks, the mouths paved each with three rows of sharp
teeth; while Charybdis, sitting under her fig-tree, daily swallowed
the waters and vomited them up again. [148] Distantly related to these
fabulous monsters, probably, are many of the old notions of ordeals
undergone between rocks standing close together, or sometimes through
holes in rocks, of which examples are found in Great Britain. An
ordeal of this kind exists at Pera, where the holy well is reached
through a narrow slit. Visitors going there recently on New Year's
Day were warned by the dervish in charge--'Look through it at the
water if you please, but do not essay to enter unless your consciences
are completely free from sin, for as sure as you try to pass through
with a taint upon your soul, you will be gripped by the rock and held
there for ever.' [149] The 'Bocca della Verità'--a great stone face
like a huge millstone--stands in the portico of the church S. Maria
in Cosmedin at Rome, and its legend is that a suspected person was
required to place his hand through the open mouth; if he swore falsely
it would bite off the hand--the explanation now given being that a
swordsman was concealed behind to make good the judicial shrewdness
of the stone in case the oath were displeasing to the authorities.

The myth of Scylla, which relates that she was a beautiful maiden,
beloved by Glaucus, whom Circe through jealousy transformed to a
monster by throwing magic herbs into the well where she was wont to
bathe, is recalled by various European legends. In Thuringia, on the
road to Oberhof, stands the Red Stone, with its rosebush, and a stream
issuing from beneath it, where a beautiful maid is imprisoned. Every
seven years she may be seen bathing in the stream. On one occasion
a peasant passing by heard a sneeze in the rock, and called out,
'God help thee!' The sneeze and the benediction were repeated,
until at the seventh time the man cried, 'Oh, thou cursed witch,
deceive not honest people!' As he then walked off, a wailing voice
came out of the stone, 'Oh, hadst thou but only wished the last time
that God would help me. He would have helped me, and thou wouldst
have delivered me; now I must tarry till the Day of Judgment!' The
voice once cried out to a wedding procession passing by the stone,
'To-day wed, next year dead;' and the bride having died a year after,
wedding processions dread the spot.

The legends of giants and giantesses, so numerous in Great Britain,
are equally associated with rocky mountain-passes, or the boulders
they were supposed to have tossed thence when sportively stoning each
other. They are the Tor of the South and Ben of the North. The hills of
Ross-shire in Scotland are mythological monuments of Cailliachmore,
great woman, who, while carrying a pannier filled with earth and
stones on her back, paused for a moment on a level spot, now the site
of Ben-Vaishard, when the bottom of the pannier gave way, forming the
hills. The recurrence of the names Gog and Magog in Scotland suggests
that in mountainous regions the demons were especially derived from the
hordes of robbers and savages, among whom, in their uncultivable hills,
the ploughshare could never conquer the spear and club. Richard Doyle
enriched the first Exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in London, 1877,
with many beautiful pictures inspired by European Folklore. They were
a pretty garniture for the cemetery of dead religions. The witch once
seen on her broom departing from the high crags of Cuhillan, cheered
by her faithful dwarf, is no longer unlovely as in the days when she
was burned by proxy in some poor human hag; obedient to art--a more
potent wand than her own--she reascends to the clouds from which she
was borne, and is hardly distinguishable from them. Slowly man came
to learn with the poet--


It was the mountain streams that fed
The fair green plain's amenities. [150]


Then the giants became fairies, and not a few of these wore at last
the mantles of saints. A similar process has been undergone by another
subject, which finds its pretty epitaph in the artist's treatment. We
saw in two pictures the Dame Blanche of Normandy, lurking in the ravine
beside a stream under the dusk, awaiting yon rustic wood-cutter who is
presently horizontal in the air in that mad dance, after which he will
be found exhausted. As her mountain-sister is faintly shaped out of
the clouds that cap Cuhillan, this one is an imaginative outgrowth of
the twilight shadows, the silvery glintings of moving clouds mirrored
in pools, and her tresses are long luxuriant grasses. She is of a
sisterhood which passes by hardly perceptible gradations into others,
elsewhere described--the creations of Illusion and Night. She is not
altogether one of these, however, but a type of more direct danger--the
peril of fords, torrents, thickets, marshes, and treacherous pools,
which may seem shallow, but are deep.

The water-demons have been already described in their obvious aspects,
but it is necessary to mention here the simple obstructive river-demons
haunting fords and burns, and hating bridges. Many tragedies, and
many personifications of the forces which caused them, preceded the
sanctity of the title Pontifex. The torrent that roared across man's
path seemed the vomit of a demon: the sacred power was he who could
bridge it. In one of the most beautiful celebrations of Indra it is
said: 'He tranquillised this great river so that it might be crossed;
he conveyed across it in safety the sages who had been unable to pass
over it, and who, having crossed, proceeded to realise the wealth
they sought; in the exhilaration of the soma, Indra has done these
deeds.' [151] In Ceylon, the demon Tota still casts malignant spells
about fords and ferries.

Many are the legends of the opposition offered by demons to
bridge-building, and of the sacrifices which had to be made to them
before such works could be accomplished. A few specimens must suffice
us. Mr. Dennys relates a very interesting one of the 'Loh-family
bridge' at Shanghai. Difficulty having been found in laying the
foundations, the builder vowed to Heaven two thousand children if the
stones could be placed properly. The goddess addressed said she would
not require their lives, but that the number named would be attacked by
small-pox, which took place, and half the number died. A Chinese author
says, 'If bridges are not placed in proper positions, such as the
laws of geomancy indicate, they may endanger the lives of thousands,
by bringing about a visitation of small-pox or sore eyes.' At Hang-Chow
a tea-merchant cast himself into the river Tsien-tang as a sacrifice
to the Spirit of the dikes, which were constantly being washed away.

The 'Devil's Bridges,' to which Mephistopheles alludes so proudly, are
frequent in Germany, and most of them, whether natural or artificial,
have diabolical associations. The oldest structures often have legends
in which are reflected the conditions exacted by evil powers, of
those who spanned the fords in which men had often been drowned. Of
this class is the Montafon Bridge in the Tyrol, and another is the
bridge at Ratisbon. The legend of the latter is a fair specimen of
those which generally haunt these ancient structures. Its architect
was apprentice to a master who was building the cathedral, and laid
a wager that he would bridge the Danube before the other laid the
coping-stone of the sacred edifice. But the work of bridging the river
was hard, and after repeated failures the apprentice began to swear,
and wished the devil had charge of the business! Whereupon he of the
cloven foot appeared in guise of a friar, and agreed to build the
fifteen arches--for a consideration. The fee was to be the first three
that crossed the bridge. The cunning apprentice contrived that these
three should not be human, but a dog, a cock, and a hen. The devil,
in wrath at the fraud, tore the animals to pieces and disappeared;
a procession of monks passed over the bridge and made it safe;
and thereon are carved figures of the three animals. In most of the
stories it is a goat which is sent over and mangled, that poor animal
having preserved its character as scape-goat in a great deal of the
Folklore of Christendom. The Danube was of old regarded as under the
special guardianship of the Prince of Darkness, who used to make great
efforts to obstruct the Crusaders voyaging down it to rescue the Holy
Land from pagans. On one occasion, near the confluence of the Vilz
and Danube, he began hurling huge rocks into the river-bed from the
cliffs; the holy warriors resisted successfully by signing the cross
and singing an anthem, but the huge stone first thrown caused a whirl
and swell in that part of the river, which were very dangerous until
it was removed by engineers.

It is obvious, especially to the English, who have so long found a
defensive advantage in the silver streak of sea that separates them
from the Continent, that an obstacle, whether of mountain-range
or sea, would, at a certain point in the formation of a nation,
become as valuable as at another it might be obstructive. Euphemism
is credited with having given the friendly name 'Euxine' to the
rough 'Axine' Sea,--'terrible to foreigners.' But this is not so
certain. Many a tribe has found the Black Sea a protection and a
friend. In the case of mountains, their protective advantages would
account at once for Milton's celebration of Freedom as a mountain
nymph, and for the stupidity of the people that dwell amid them,
so often remarked; the very means of their independence would also
be the cause of their insulation and barbarity. It is for those who
go to and fro that knowledge is increased. The curious and inquiring
are most apt to migrate; the enterprising will not submit to be shut
away behind rocks and mountains; by their departure there would be
instituted, behind the barriers of rock and hill, a survival of the
stupidest. These might ultimately come to worship their chains and
cover their craggy prison-walls with convents and crosses. The demons
of aliens would be their gods. The climbing Hannibals would be their
devils. It might have been expected, after the passages quoted from
Mr. Ruskin concerning the bovine condition of Alpine peasantries,
that he would salute the tunnel through Mont Cenis. The peasantries
who would see in the sub-alpine engine a demon are extinct. Admiration
of the genii of obstruction, and horror of the demons that vanquished
them, are discoverable only in folk-tales distant enough to be pretty,
such as the interesting Serbian story of 'Satan's jugglings and God's
might,' in which fairies hiding in successively opened nuts vainly
try to oppose with fire and flood a she-demon pursuing a prince and
his bride, to whose aid at last comes a flash of lightning which
strikes the fiend dead.

One of the beautiful 'Contes d'une Grand'mère,' by George Sand,
Le géant Yéous, has in it the sense of many fables born of man's
struggle with obstructive nature. With her wonted felicity she
places the scene of this true human drama near the mountain Yéous,
in the Pyrenees, whose name is a far-off echo of Zeus. The summit
bore an enormous rock which, seen from a distance, appeared somewhat
like a statue. The peasant Miquelon, who had his little farm at the
mountain's base, whenever he passed made the sign of the cross and
taught his little son Miquel to do the same, telling him that the
great form was that of a pagan god, an enemy of the human race. An
avalanche fell upon the home and garden of Miquelon; the poor man
himself was disabled for life, his house and farm turned in a moment
into a wild mass of stones. Miquel looked up to the summit of Yéous;
the giant had disappeared; henceforth it was the mighty form of an
organic monster which the boy saw stretched over what had once been
their happy home and smiling acres. The family went about begging,
Miquelon repeating his strange appeal, 'Le géant s'est couché sur
moi.' But when at last the old man dies, the son resolves to fulfil the
silent dream of his life; he will encounter the giant Yéous still in
possession of his paternal acres. With eyes of the young world this
boy sees starting up here and there amid the vast debris, the head
of the demon he wishes to crush. He hurls stones hither and thither
where some fearful feature or limb appears. He is filled with rage;
his dreams are filled with attacks on the giant, in which the colossal
head tumbles only to reappear on the shoulders; every broken limb has
the self-repairing power. There is no progress. But as the boy grows,
and the contest grows, and need comes, there gathers in Miquel a
desire to clear the ground. When he begins to think, it is no longer
the passion to avenge his father on the stony giant which possesses
him, but to recover their lost garden. Thus, indeed, the giant himself
could alone be conquered. The huge rocks are split by gunpowder, some
fragments are made into fences, others into a comfortable mansion
for Miquel's mother and sisters. When the garden smiles again, and
all are happy the demon form is no longer discoverable. [152]

This little tale interprets with fine insight the demonology of
barrenness and obstruction. The boy's wrath against the unconscious
cause of his troubles is the rage often observed in children
who retaliate upon the table or chair on which they have been
bruised, and it repeats embryologically the rage of the world's
boyhood inspired by ascription of personal motives to inanimate
obstructions. Possibly such wrath might have added something to
the force with which man entered upon his combat with nature; but
George Sand's tale reminds us that whatever was gained in force was
lost in its misdirection. Success came in the proportion that fury
was replaced by the youth's growing recognition that he was dealing
with facts that could not be raged out of existence. It is crowned
when he makes friends with the unconquerable remnant of the giant,
and sees that he is not altogether evil.

It is at this stage that the higher Art, conversant with Beauty, enters
to relieve man of many moral wounds received in the struggle. Clothed
with moss and clematis, Yéous appears not so hideous after all. Further
invested by the genius of a Turner, he would be beautiful. Yéous is
a fair giant after all, only he needed finish. He is a type of nature.

The boyhood of the world has not passed away with Miquel. We find a
fictitious dualism cherished by the lovers of nature in their belief or
feeling that nature exerts upon man some spiritual influence. Ruskin
has said that in looking from the Campanile at Venice to the circle
of snow which crowns the Adriatic, and then to the buildings which
contain the works of Titian and Tintoret, he has felt unable to
answer the question of his own heart, By which of these--the nature
or the manhood--has God given mightier evidence of Himself? So nature
may teach the already taught. While Ruskin looks from the Campanile,
the peasant is fighting the mountain and calling its rocky grandeurs
by the devil's name; before the pictures he kneels. Untaught by art
and science, the mind can derive no elevation from nature, can find no
sympathy in it. It is a false notion that there is any compensation for
the ignorant, denied access to art-galleries, in ability to pass their
Sundays amid natural scenery. Health that may bring them, but mentally
they are still inside the prison-walls from which look the stony eyes
of Fates and Furies. Natural sublimities cannot refine minds crude
as themselves; they must pass through thought before they can feed
thought; it is nature transfigured in art that changes the snow-clad
mountain from a heartless giant to a saviour in snow-pure raiment.