CHAPTER XXII

CONCERNING THE POPULAR TASTE IN SCENERY AND SOME HAPPY PEOPLE


We had somewhat scorned the idea of Watkins, as being one of Nature's
show-places. In fact, Watkins Glen is, so to say, so nationally beautiful
as latterly to have received a pension from the Government of the United
States, which now undertakes the conservation of its fantastic chasms and
waterfalls. Some one--I am inclined to think it was myself--once said
that he never wished to go to Switzerland, because he feared that the
Alps would be greasy with being climbed. I think it is clear what he
meant. To one who loves Nature for himself, has his own discovering eyes
for her multiform and many-mooded beauty, it is distasteful to have some
excursionist effect of spectacular scenery labelled and thrust upon him
with a showman's raptures; and, in revulsion from the hypocritical
admiration of the vulgar, he turns to the less obvious and less
melodramatic beauty of the natural world. The common eye can see Nature's
beauty only in such melodramatic and sentimental forms--dizzy chasms,
foaming waterfalls, snow-capped mountains and flagrant sunsets, just as
it can realize Nature's wildness of heart only in a menagerie. That a
squirrel or a meadow-lark, or even a guinea-pig, is just as wild as the
wild beasts in a travelling circus is outside the comprehension of the
vulgar, who really hunger after mere marvels, whatever they may be, and
actually have no eyes for beauty at all.

Thus really sublime and grandiose effects of Nature are apt to lose their
edge for us by over-popularization, as many of her scenes and moods have
come to seem platitude from being over-painted. Niagara has suffered far
more from the sentimental tourist and the landscape artist than from all