avow that, in my humble contributions to Alpine literature, I have
myself made some very poor and very unseasonable witticisms. I confess
my error, and only wish that I had no worse errors to confess. Still I
think that the poor little jokes in which we mountaineers sometimes
indulge have been made liable to rather harsh constructions. We are
accused, in downright earnest, not merely of being flippant, but of an
arrogant contempt for all persons whose legs are not as strong as our
own. We are supposed seriously to wrap ourselves in our own conceit, and
to brag intolerably of our exploits. Now I will not say that no
mountaineer ever swaggers: the quality called by the vulgar "bounce" is
unluckily confined to no profession. Certainly I have seen a man
intolerably vain because he could raise a hundred-weight with his little
finger; and I dare say that the "champion bill-poster," whose name is
advertised on the walls of this metropolis, thinks excellence in
bill-posting the highest virtue of a citizen. So some men may be silly
enough to brag in all seriousness about mountain exploits. However, most
lads of twenty learn that it is silly to give themselves airs about mere
muscular eminence; and especially is this true of Alpine
exploits--first, because they require less physical prowess than almost
any other sport, and secondly, because a good amateur still feels
himself the hopeless inferior of half the Alpine peasants whom he sees.
You cannot be very conceited about a game in which the first clodhopper
you meet can give you ten minutes' start in an hour. Still a man writing
in a humorous vein naturally adopts a certain bumptious tone, just as
our friend "Punch" ostentatiously declares himself to be omniscient and
infallible. Nobody takes him at his word, or supposes that the editor of
"Punch" is really the most conceited man in all England. But we poor
mountaineers are occasionally fixed with our own careless talk by some
outsider who is not in the secret. We know ourselves to be a small sect,
and to be often laughed at; we reply by: assuming that we are the salt
of the earth, and that our amusement is the first and noblest of all
amusements. Our only retort to the good-humoured ridicule with which we
are occasionally treated is to adopt an affected strut, and to carry it
off as if we were the finest fellows in the world. We make a boast of
our shame, and say, if you laugh we must crow. But we don't really mean
anything: if we did, the only word which the English language would
afford wherewith to describe us would be the very unpleasant antithesis
to wise men, and certainly I hold that we have the average amount of
common sense. When, therefore, I see us taken to task for swaggering, I
think it a trifle hard that this merely playful affectation of
superiority should be made a serious fault. For the future I would
promise to be careful, if it were worth avoiding the misunderstanding of
men who won't take a joke. Meanwhile, I can only state that when Alpine
travellers indulge in a little swagger about their own performances and
other people's incapacity, they don't mean more than an infinitesimal
fraction of what they say, and that they know perfectly well that when
history comes to pronounce a final judgment upon the men of the time, it
won't put mountain-climbing on a level with patriotism, or even with
excellence in the fine arts.
The reproach of real _bonâ fide_ arrogance is, so far as I know, very
little true of Alpine travellers. With the exception of the necessary
fringe hanging on to every set of human beings--consisting of persons
whose heads are weaker than their legs--the mountaineer, so far as my
experience has gone, is generally modest enough. Perhaps he sometimes
flaunts his ice-axes and ropes a little too much before the public eye
at Chamonix, as a yachtsman occasionally flourishes his nautical costume
at Cowes; but the fault may be pardoned by those not inexorable to human
weaknesses. This opinion, I know, cuts at the root of the most popular
theory as to our ruling passion. If we do not climb the Alps to gain
notoriety, for what purpose can we possibly climb them? That same
unlucky trick of joking is taken to indicate that we don't care much
about the scenery; for who, with a really susceptible soul, could be
facetious under the cliffs of Jungfrau or the ghastly precipices of the
Matterhorn? Hence people who kindly excuse us from the blame of
notoriety-hunting generally accept the "greased-pole" theory. We are, it
seems, overgrown schoolboys, who, like other schoolboys, enjoy being in
dirt, and danger, and mischief, and have as much sensibility for natural
beauty as the mountain mules. And against this, as a more serious
complaint, I wish to make my feeble protest, in order that my
lamentations on quitting the profession may not seem unworthy of a
thinking being.
Let me try to recall some of the impressions which mountaineering has
left with me, and see whether they throw any light upon the subject. As
I gaze at the huge cliffs where I may no longer wander, I find
innumerable recollections arise--some of them dim, as though belonging
to a past existence; and some so brilliant that I can scarcely realise
my exclusion from the scenes to which they belong. I am standing at the
foot of what, to my mind, is the most glorious of all Alpine
wonders--the huge Oberland precipice, on the slopes of the Faulhorn or
the Wengern Alp. Innumerable tourists have done all that tourists can do
to cocknify (if that is the right derivative from cockney) the scenery;
but, like the Pyramids or a Gothic cathedral, it throws off the taint of
vulgarity by its imperishable majesty. Even on turf strewn with
sandwich-papers and empty bottles, even in the presence of hideous
peasant-women singing "Stand-er auf" for five centimes, we cannot but
feel the influence of Alpine beauty. When the sunlight is dying off the
snows, or the full moon lighting them up with ethereal tints, even
sandwich-papers and singing women may be forgotten. How does the memory
of scrambles along snow arêtes, of plunges--luckily not too deep--into
crevasses, of toil through long snowfields, towards a refuge that seemed
to recede as we advanced--where, to quote Tennyson with due alteration,
to the traveller toiling in immeasurable snow--
Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill
The châlet sparkles like a grain of salt;--
how do such memories as these harmonise with the sense of superlative
sublimity?
One element of mountain beauty is, we shall all admit, their vast size
and steepness. That a mountain is very big, and is faced by
perpendicular walls of rock, is the first thing which strikes everybody,
and is the whole essence and outcome of a vast quantity of poetical
description. Hence the first condition towards a due appreciation of
mountain scenery is that these qualities should be impressed upon the
imagination. The mere dry statement that a mountain is so many feet in
vertical height above the sea, and contains so many tons of granite, is
nothing. Mont Blanc, is about three miles high. What of that? Three
miles is an hour's walk for a lady--an eighteen-penny cab-fare--the
distance from Hyde Park Corner to the Bank--an express train could do it
in three minutes, or a racehorse in five. It is a measure which we have
learnt to despise, looking at it from a horizontal point of view; and
accordingly most persons, on seeing the Alps for the first time, guess
them to be higher, as measured in feet, than they really are. What,
indeed, is the use of giving measures in feet to any but the scientific
mind? Who cares whether the moon is 250,000 or 2,500,000 miles distant?
Mathematicians try to impress upon us that the distance of the fixed
stars is only expressible by a row of figures which stretches across a
page; suppose it stretched across two or across a dozen pages, should we
be any the wiser, or have, in the least degree, a clearer notion of the
superlative distances? We civilly say, "Dear me!" when the astronomer
looks to us for the appropriate stare, but we only say it with the
mouth; internally our remark is, "You might as well have multiplied by a
few more millions whilst you were about it." Even astronomers, though
not a specially imaginative race, feel the impotence of figures, and try
to give us some measure which the mind can grasp a little more
conveniently. They tell us about the cannon-ball which might have been
flying ever since the time of Adam, and not yet have reached the
heavenly body, or about the stars which may not yet have become visible,
though the light has been flying to us at a rate inconceivable by the
mind for an inconceivable number of years; and they succeed in producing
a bewildering and giddy sensation, although the numbers are too vast to
admit of any accurate apprehension.
We feel a similar need in the case of mountains. Besides the bare
statement of figures, it is necessary to have some means for grasping
the meaning of the figures. The bare tens and thousands must be clothed
with some concrete images. The statement that a mountain is 15,000 feet
high is, by itself, little more impressive, than that it is 3,000; we
want something more before we can mentally compare Mont Blanc and
Snowdon. Indeed, the same people who guess of a mountain's height at a
number of feet much exceeding the reality, show, when they are
cross-examined, that they fail to appreciate in any tolerable degree the
real meaning of the figures. An old lady one day, about 11 A.M.,
proposed to walk from the Aeggischhorn to the Jungfrau-Joch, and to
return for luncheon--the distance being a good twelve hours' journey for
trained mountaineers. Every detail of which the huge mass is composed is
certain to be underestimated. A gentleman the other day pointed out to
me a grand ice-cliff at the end of a hanging glacier, which must have
been at least 100 feet high, and asked me whether that snow was three
feet deep. Nothing is more common than for tourists to mistake some huge
pinnacle of rock, as big as a church tower, for a traveller. The rocks
of the Grands Mulets, in one corner of which the châlet is hidden, are
often identified with a party ascending Mont Blanc; and I have seen
boulders as big as a house pointed out confidently as chamois. People
who make these blunders must evidently see the mountains as mere toys,
however many feet they may give them at a random guess. Huge overhanging
cliffs are to them steps within the reach of human legs; yawning
crevasses are ditches to be jumped; and foaming waterfalls are like
streams from penny squirts. Everyone knows the avalanches on the
Jungfrau, and the curiously disproportionate appearance of the little
puffs of white smoke, which are said to be the cause of the thunder; but
the disproportion ceases to an eye that has learnt really to measure
distance, and to know that these smoke-puffs, represent a cataract of
crashing blocks of ice.
Now the first merit of mountaineering is that it enables one to have
what theologians would call an experimental faith in the size of
mountains--to substitute a real living belief for a dead intellectual
assent. It enables one, first, to assign something like its true
magnitude to a rock or snow-slope; and, secondly, to measure that
magnitude in terms of muscular exertion instead of bare mathematical
units. Suppose that we are standing upon the Wengern Alp; between the
Mönch and the Eiger there stretches a round white bank, with a curved
outline, which we may roughly compare to the back of one of Sir E.
Landseer's lions. The ordinary tourists--the old man, the woman, or the
cripple, who are supposed to appreciate the real beauties of Alpine
scenery--may look at it comfortably from their hotel. They may see its
graceful curve, the long straight lines that are ruled in delicate
shading down its sides, and the contrast of the blinding white snow with
the dark blue sky above; but they will probably guess it to be a mere
bank--a snowdrift, perhaps, which has been piled by the last storm. If
you pointed out to them one of the great rocky teeth that projected from
its summit, and said that it was a guide, they would probably remark
that he looked very small, and would fancy that he could jump over the
bank with an effort. Now a mountaineer knows, to begin with, that it is
a massive rocky rib, covered with snow, lying at a sharp angle, and
varying perhaps from 500 to 1,000 feet in height. So far he might be
accompanied by men of less soaring ambition; by an engineer who had been
mapping the country, or an artist who had been carefully observing the
mountains from their bases. They might learn in time to interpret
correctly the real meaning of shapes at which the uninitiated guess at
random. But the mountaineer can go a step further, and it is the next
step which gives the real significance to those delicate curves and
lines. He can translate the 500 or 1,000 feet of snow-slope into a more
tangible unit of measurement. To him, perhaps, they recall the memory of
a toilsome ascent, the sun beating on his head for five or six hours,
the snow returning the glare with still more parching effect; a stalwart
guide toiling all the weary time, cutting steps in hard blue ice, the
fragments hissing and spinning down the long straight grooves in the
frozen snow till they lost themselves in the yawning chasm below; and
step after step taken along the slippery staircase, till at length he
triumphantly sprang upon the summit of the tremendous wall that no human
foot had scaled before. The little black knobs that rise above the edge
represent for him huge impassable rocks, sinking on one side in scarped
slippery surfaces towards the snow-field, and on the other stooping in
one tremendous cliff to a distorted glacier thousands of feet below. The
faint blue line across the upper névé, scarcely distinguishable to the
eye, represents to one observer nothing but a trifling undulation; a
second, perhaps, knows that it means a crevasse; the mountaineer
remembers that it is the top of a huge chasm, thirty feet across, and
perhaps ten times as deep, with perpendicular sides of glimmering blue
ice, and fringed by thick rows of enormous pendent icicles. The marks
that are scored in delicate lines, such as might be ruled by a diamond
on glass, have been cut by innumerable streams trickling in hot weather
from the everlasting snow, or ploughed by succeeding avalanches that
have slipped from the huge upper snowfields above. In short, there is no
insignificant line or mark that has not its memory or its indication of
the strange phenomena of the upper world. True, the same picture is
painted upon the retina of all classes of observers; and so Porson and a
schoolboy and a peasant might receive the same physical impression from
a set of black and white marks on the page of a Greek play; but to one
they would be an incoherent conglomeration of unmeaning and capricious
lines, to another they would represent certain sounds more or less
corresponding to some English words; whilst to the scholar they would
reveal some of the noblest poetry in the world, and all the associations
of successful intellectual labour. I do not say that the difference is
quite so great in the case of the mountains; still I am certain that no
one can decipher the natural writing on the face of a snow-slope or a
precipice who has not wandered amongst their recesses, and learnt by
slow experience what is indicated by marks which an ignorant observer
would scarcely notice. True, even one who sees a mountain for the first
time may know that, as a matter of fact, a scar on the face of a cliff
means, for example, a recent fall of a rock; but between the bare
knowledge and the acquaintance with all which that knowledge
implies--the thunder of the fall, the crash of the smaller fragments,
the bounding energy of the descending mass--there is almost as much
difference as between hearing that a battle has been fought and being
present at it yourself. We have all read descriptions of Waterloo till
we are sick of the subject; but I imagine that our emotions on seeing
the shattered well of Hougomont are very inferior to those of one of the
Guard who should revisit the place where he held out for a long day
against the assaults of the French army.
Now to an old mountaineer the Oberland cliffs are full of memories; and,
more than this, he has learnt the language spoken by every crag and
every wave of glacier. It is strange if they do not affect him rather
more powerfully than the casual visitor who has never been initiated by
practical experience into their difficulties. To him, the huge buttress
which runs down from the Mönch is something more than an irregular
pyramid, purple with white patches at the bottom and pure white at the
top. He fills up the bare outline supplied by the senses with a thousand
lively images. He sees tier above tier of rock, rising in a gradually
ascending scale of difficulty, covered at first by long lines of the
débris that have been splintered by frost from the higher wall, and
afterwards rising bare and black and threatening. He knows instinctively
which of the ledges has a dangerous look--where such a bold mountaineer
as John Lauener might slip on the polished surface, or be in danger of
an avalanche from above. He sees the little shell-like swelling at the
foot of the glacier crawling down the steep slope above, and knows that
it means an almost inaccessible wall of ice; and the steep snowfields
that rise towards the summit are suggestive of something very different
from the picture which might have existed in the mind of a German
student, who once asked me whether it was possible to make the ascent
on a mule.
Hence, if mountains owe their influence upon the imagination in a great
degree to their size and steepness, and apparent inaccessibility--as no
one can doubt that they do, whatever may be the explanation of the fact
that people like to look at big, steep, inaccessible objects--the
advantages of the mountaineer are obvious. He can measure those
qualities on a very different scale from the ordinary traveler. He
measures the size, not by the vague abstract term of so many thousand
feet, but by the hours of labour, divided into minutes--each separately
felt--of strenuous muscular exertion. The steepness is not expressed in
degrees, but by the memory of the sensation produced when a snow-slope
seems to be rising up and smiting you in the face; when, far away from
all human help, you are clinging like a fly to the slippery side of a
mighty pinnacle in mid air. And as for the inaccessibility, no one can
measure the difficulty of climbing a hill who has not wearied his
muscles and brain in struggling against the opposing obstacles. Alpine
travellers, it is said, have removed the romance from the mountains by
climbing them. What they have really done is to prove that there exists
a narrow line by which a way may be found to the top of any given
mountain; but the clue leads through innumerable inaccessibilities;
true, you can follow one path, but to right and left are cliffs which no
human foot will ever tread, and whose terrors can only be realised when
you are in their immediate neighbourhood. The cliffs of the Matterhorn
do not bar the way to the top effectually, but it is only by forcing a
passage through them that you can really appreciate their terrible
significance.
Hence I say that the qualities which strike every sensitive observer are
impressed upon the mountaineer with tenfold force and intensity. If he
is as accessible to poetical influences as his neighbours--and I don't
know why he should be less so--he has opened new avenues of access
between the scenery and his mind. He has learnt a language which is but
partially revealed to ordinary men. An artist is superior to an
unlearned picture-seer, not merely because he has greater natural
sensibility, but because he has improved it by methodical experience;
because his senses have been sharpened by constant practice, till he can
catch finer shades of colouring, and more delicate inflexions of line;
because, also, the lines and colours have acquired new significance, and
been associated with a thousand thoughts with which the mass of mankind
has never cared to connect them. The mountaineer is improved by a
similar process. But I know some sceptical critics will ask, does not
the way in which he is accustomed to regard mountains rather deaden
their poetical influence? Doesn't he come to look at them as mere
instruments of sport, and overlook their more spiritual teaching? Does
not all the excitement of personal adventure and the noisy apparatus of
guides, and ropes, and axes, and tobacco, and the fun of climbing,
rather dull his perceptions and incapacitate him from perceiving
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills?
Well, I have known some stupid and unpoetical mountaineers; and, since I
have been dismounted from my favourite hobby, I think I have met some
similar specimens among the humbler class of tourists. There are
persons, I fancy, who "do" the Alps; who look upon the Lake of Lucerne
as one more task ticked off from their memorandum book, and count up the
list of summits visible from the Görnergrat without being penetrated
with any keen sense of sublimity. And there are mountaineers who are
capable of making a pun on the top of Mont Blanc--and capable of nothing
more. Still I venture to deny that even punning is incompatible with
poetry, or that those who make the pun can have no deeper feeling in
their bosoms which they are perhaps too shamefaced to utter.
The fact is that that which gives its inexpressible charm to
mountaineering is the incessant series of exquisite natural scenes,
which are for the most part enjoyed by the mountaineer alone. This is, I
am aware, a round assertion; but I will try to support it by a few of
the visions which are recalled to me by these Oberland cliffs, and which
I have seen profoundly enjoyed by men who perhaps never mentioned them
again, and probably in describing their adventures scrupulously avoided
the danger of being sentimental.