lamentable proceeding than the ordinary view of a sunrise can hardly be
imagined. You are cold, miserable, breakfastless; have risen shivering
from a warm bed, and in your heart long only to creep into bed again. To
the mountaineer all this is changed. He is beginning a day full of the
anticipation of a pleasant excitement. He has, perhaps, been waiting
anxiously for fine weather, to try conclusions with some huge giant not
yet scaled. He moves out with something of the feeling with which a
soldier goes to the assault of a fortress, but without the same
probability of coming home in fragments; the danger is trifling enough
to be merely exhilatory, and to give a pleasant tension to the nerves;
his muscles feel firm and springy, and his stomach--no small advantage
to the enjoyment of scenery--is in excellent order. He looks at the
sparkling stars with keen satisfaction, prepared to enjoy a fine sunrise
with all his faculties at their best, and with the added pleasure of a
good omen for his day's work. Then a huge dark mass begins to mould
itself slowly out of the darkness, the sky begins to form a background
of deep purple, against which the outline becomes gradually more
definite; one by one, the peaks catch the exquisite Alpine glow,
lighting up in rapid succession, like a vast illumination; and when at
last the steady sunlight settles upon them, and shows every rock and
glacier, without even a delicate film of mist to obscure them, he feels
his heart bound, and steps out gaily to the assault--just as the people
on the Rigi are giving thanks that the show is over and that they may
go to bed. Still grander is the sight when the mountaineer has already
reached some lofty ridge, and, as the sun rises, stands between the day
and the night--the valley still in deep sleep, with the mists lying
between the folds of the hills, and the snow-peaks standing out clear
and pale white just before the sun reaches them, whilst a broad band of
orange light runs all round the vast horizon. The glory of sunsets is
equally increased in the thin upper air. The grandest of all such sights
that live in my memory is that of a sunset from the Aiguille du Goûté.
The snow at our feet was glowing with rich light, and the shadows in our
footsteps a vivid green by the contrast. Beneath us was a vast
horizontal floor of thin level mists suspended in mid air, spread like a
canopy over the whole boundless landscape, and tinged with every hue of
sunset. Through its rents and gaps we could see the lower mountains, the
distant plains, and a fragment of the Lake of Geneva lying in a more
sober purple. Above us rose the solemn mass of Mont Blanc in the richest
glow of an Alpine sunset. The sense of lonely sublimity was almost
oppressive, and although half our party was suffering from sickness, I
believe even the guides were moved to a sense of solemn beauty.
These grand scenic effects are occasionally seen by ordinary travellers,
though the ordinary traveller is for the most part out of temper at 3
A.M. The mountaineer can enjoy them, both because his frame of mind is
properly trained to receive the natural beauty, and because he alone
sees them with their best accessories, amidst the silence of the eternal
snow, and the vast panoramas visible from the loftier summits. And he
has a similar advantage in most of the great natural phenomena of the
cloud and the sunshine. No sight in the Alps is more impressive than the
huge rocks of a black precipice suddenly frowning out through the chasms
of a storm-cloud. But grand as such a sight may be from the safe
verandahs of the inn at Grindelwald, it is far grander in the silence of
the Central Alps amongst the savage wilderness of rock and snow.
Another characteristic effect of the High Alps often presents itself
when one has been climbing for two or three hours, with nothing in sight
but the varying wreaths of mist that chased each other monotonously
along the rocky ribs up whose snow-covered backbone we were laboriously
fighting our way. Suddenly there is a puff of wind, and looking round we
find that we have in an instant pierced the clouds, and emerged, as it
were, on the surface of the ocean of vapour. Beneath us stretches for
hundreds of miles the level fleecy floor, and above us shines out clear
in the eternal sunshine every mountain, from Mont Blanc to Monte Rosa
and the Jungfrau. What, again, in the lower regions, can equal the
mysterious charm of gazing from the edge of a torn rocky parapet into an
apparently fathomless abyss, where nothing but what an Alpine traveller
calls a "strange formless wreathing of vapour" indicates the storm-wind
that is raging below us? I might go on indefinitely recalling the
strangely impressive scenes that frequently startle the traveller in the
waste upper world; but language is feeble indeed to convey even a
glimmering of what is to be seen to those who have not seen it for
themselves, whilst to them it can be little more than a peg upon which
to hang their own recollections. These glories, in which the mountain
Spirit reveals himself to his true worshippers, are only to be gained by
the appropriate service of climbing--at some risk, though a very
trifling risk, if he is approached with due form and ceremony--into the
furthest recesses of his shrines. And without seeing them, I maintain
that no man has really seen the Alps.
The difference between the exoteric and the esoteric school of
mountaineers may be indicated by their different view of glaciers. At
Grindelwald, for example, it is the fashion to go and "see the
glaciers"--heaven save the mark! Ladies in costumes, heavy German
professors, Americans doing the Alps at a gallop, Cook's tourists, and
other varieties of a well-known genus, go off in shoals and see--what?
A gigantic mass of ice, strangely torn with a few of the exquisite blue
crevasses, but denied and prostrate in dirt and ruins. A stream foul
with mud oozes out from the base; the whole mass seems to be melting
fast away; the summer sun has evidently got the best of it in these
lower regions, and nothing can resist him but the great mounds of
decaying rock that strew the surface in confused lumps. It is as much
like the glacier of the upper regions as the melting fragments of snow
in a London street are like the surface of the fresh snow that has just
fallen in a country field. And by way of improving its attractions a
perpetual picnic is going on, and the ingenious natives have hewed a
tunnel into the ice, for admission to which they charge certain
centimes. The unlucky glacier reminds me at his latter end of a wretched
whale stranded on a beach, dissolving into masses of blubber, and hacked
by remorseless fishermen, instead of plunging at his ease in the deep
blue water. Far above, where the glacier begins his course, he is seen
only by the true mountaineer. There are vast amphitheatres of pure snow,
of which the glacier known to tourists is merely the insignificant
drainage, but whose very existence they do not generally suspect. They
are utterly ignorant that from the top of the icefall which they visit
you may walk for hours on the eternal ice. After a long climb you come
to the region where the glacier is truly at its noblest; where the
surface is a spotless white; where the crevasses are enormous rents
sinking to profound depths, with walls of the purest blue; where the
glacier is torn and shattered by the energetic forces which mould it,
but has an expression of superabundant power, like a full stream
fretting against its banks and plunging through the vast gorges that it
has hewn for itself in the course of centuries. The bases of the
mountains are immersed in a deluge of cockneyism--fortunately a shallow
deluge--whilst their summits rise high into the bracing air, where
everything is pure and poetical.
The difference which I have thus endeavoured to indicate is more or
less traceable in a wider sense. The mountains are exquisitely
beautiful, indeed, from whatever points of view we contemplate them; and
the mountaineer would lose much if he never saw the beauties of the
lower valleys, of pasturages deep in flowers, and dark pine-forests with
the summits shining from far off between the stems. Only, as it seems to
me, he has the exclusive prerogative of thoroughly enjoying one--and
that the most characteristic, though by no means only, element of the
scenery. There may be a very good dinner spread before twenty people;
but if nineteen of them were teetotalers, and the twentieth drank his
wine like a man, he would be the only one to do it full justice; the
others might praise the meat or the fruits, but he would alone enjoy the
champagne; and in the great feast which Nature spreads before us (a
stock metaphor, which emboldens me to make the comparison), the high
mountain scenery acts the part of the champagne. Unluckily, too, the
teetotalers are very apt, in this case also, to sit in judgment upon
their more adventurous neighbours. Especially are they pleased to carp
at the views from high summits. I have been constantly asked, with a
covert sneer, "Did it repay you?"--a question which involves the
assumption that one wants to be repaid, as though the labour were not
itself part of the pleasure, and which implies a doubt that the view is
really enjoyable. People are always demonstrating that the lower views
are the most beautiful; and at the same time complaining that
mountaineers frequently turn back without looking at the view from the
top, as though that would necessarily imply that they cared nothing for
scenery. In opposition to which I must first remark that, as a rule,
every step of an ascent has a beauty of its own, which one is quietly
absorbing even when one is not directly making it a subject of
contemplation, and that the view from the top is generally the crowning
glory of the whole.
It will be enough if I conclude with an attempt to illustrate this last
assertion: and I will do it by still referring to the Oberland. Every
visitor with a soul for the beautiful admires the noble form of the
Wetterhorn--the lofty snow-crowned pyramid rising in such light and yet
massive lines from its huge basement of perpendicular cliffs. The
Wetterhorn has, however, a further merit. To my mind--and I believe most
connoisseurs of mountain tops agree with me--it is one of the most
impressive summits in the Alps. It is not a sharp pinnacle like the
Weisshorn, or a cupola like Mont Blanc, or a grand rocky tooth like the
Monte Rosa, but a long and nearly horizontal knife-edge, which, as seen
from either end, has of course the appearance of a sharp-pointed cone.
It is when balanced upon this ridge--sitting astride of the knife-edge
on which one can hardly stand without giddiness--that one fully
appreciates an Alpine precipice. Mr. Justice Wills has admirably
described the first ascent, and the impression it made upon him, in a
paper which has become classical for succeeding adventurers. Behind you
the snow-slope sinks with perilous steepness towards the wilderness of
glacier and rock through which the ascent has lain. But in front the ice
sinks with even greater steepness for a few feet or yards. Then it
curves over and disappears, and the next thing that the eye catches is
the meadowland of Grindelwald, some 9,000 feet below. I have looked down
many precipices, where the eye can trace the course of every pebble that
bounds down the awful slopes, and where I have shuddered as some
dislodged fragment of rock showed the course which, in case of accident,
fragments of my own body would follow. A precipice is always, for
obvious reasons, far more terrible from above than from below. The
creeping, tingling sensation which passes through one's limbs--even when
one knows oneself to be in perfect safety--testifies to the thrilling
influence of the sight. But I have never so realised the terrors of a
terrific cliff as when I could not see it. The awful gulf which
intervened between me and the green meadows struck the imagination by
its invisibility. It was like the view which may be seen from the ridge
of a cathedral roof, where the eaves have for their immediate
background the pavement of the streets below; only this cathedral was
9,000 feet high. Now, any one standing at the foot of the Wetterhorn may
admire their stupendous massiveness and steepness; but, to feel their
influence enter in the very marrow of one's bones, it is necessary to
stand at the summit, and to fancy the one little slide down the short
ice-slope, to be followed apparently by a bound into clear air and a
fall down to the houses, from heights where only the eagle ventures to
soar.
This is one of the Alpine beauties, which, of course, is: beyond the
power of art to imitate, and which people are therefore apt to ignore.
But it is not the only one to be seen on the high summits. It is often
said that these views are not "beautiful"--apparently because they won't
go into a picture, or, to put it more fairly, because no picture: can in
the faintest degree imitate them. But without quarrelling about words, I
think that, even if "beautiful" be not the most correct epithet, they
have a marvellously stimulating effect upon the imagination. Let us look
round from this wonderful pinnacle in mid air, and note one or two of
the most striking elements of the scenery.
You are, in the first place, perched on a cliff, whose presence is the
more felt because it is unseen. Then you are in a region over which
eternal silence is brooding. Not a sound ever comes there, except the
occasional fall of a splintered fragment of rock, or a layer of snow; no
stream is heard trickling, and the sounds of animal life are left
thousands of feet below. The most that you can hear is some mysterious
noise made by the wind eddying round the gigantic rocks; sometimes a
strange flapping sound, as if an unearthly flag were shaking its
invisible folds in the air. The enormous tract of country over which
your view extends--most of it dim and almost dissolved into air by
distance--intensifies the strange influence of the silence. You feel the
force of the line I have quoted from Wordsworth--
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
None of the travellers whom you can see crawling at your feet has the
least conception of what is meant by the silent solitudes of the High
Alps. To you, it is like a return to the stir of active life, when,
after hours of lonely wandering, you return to hear the tinkling of the
cow-bells below; to them the same sound is the ultimate limit of the
habitable world.
Whilst your mind is properly toned by these influences, you become
conscious of another fact, to which the common variety of tourists is
necessarily insensible. You begin to find out for the first time what
the mountains really are. On one side, you look back upon the huge
reservoirs from which the Oberland glaciers descend. You see the vast
stores from which the great rivers of Europe are replenished, the
monstrous crawling masses that are carving the mountains into shape, and
the gigantic bulwarks that separate two great quarters of the world.
From below these wild regions are half invisible; they are masked by the
outer line of mountains; and it is not till you are able to command them
from some lofty point that you can appreciate the grandeur of the huge
barriers, and the snow that is piled within their folds. There is
another half of the view equally striking. Looking towards the north,
the whole of Switzerland is couched at your feet; the Jura and the Black
Forest lie on the far horizon. And then you know what is the nature of a
really mountainous country. From below everything is seen in a kind of
distorted perspective. The people of the valley naturally think that the
valley is everything--that the country resembles old-fashioned maps,
where a few sporadic lumps are distributed amongst towns and plains. The
true proportions reveal themselves as you ascend. The valleys, you can
now see, are nothing but narrow trenches scooped out amidst a tossing
waste of mountain, just to carry off the drainage. The great ridges run
hither and thither, having it all their own way, wild and untamable
regions of rock or open grass or forest, at whose feet the valleys exist
on sufferance. Creeping about amongst the roots of the hills, you half
miss the hills themselves; you quite fail to understand the massiveness
of the mountain chains, and, therefore, the wonderful energy of the
forces that have heaved the surface of the world into these distorted
shapes. And it is to a half-conscious sense of the powers that must have
been at work that a great part of the influence of mountain scenery is
due. Geologists tell us that a theory of catastrophes is
unphilosophical; but, whatever may be the scientific truth, our minds
are impressed as though we were witnessing the results of some
incredible convulsion. At Stonehenge we ask what human beings could have
erected these strange grey monuments, and in the mountains we
instinctively ask what force can have carved out the Matterhorn, and
placed the Wetterhorn on its gigantic pedestal. Now, it is not till we
reach some commanding point that we realise the amazing extent of
country over which the solid ground has been shaking and heaving itself
in irresistible tumult.
Something, it is true, of this last effect may be seen from such
mountains as the Rigi or the Faulhorn. There, too, one seems to be at
the centre of a vast sphere, the earth bending up in a cup-like form to
meet the sky, and the blue vault above stretching in an arch majestical
by its enormous extent. There you seem to see a sensible fraction of the
world at your feet. But the effect is far less striking when other
mountains obviously look down upon you; when, as it were, you are
looking at the waves of the great ocean of hills merely from the crest
of one of the waves themselves, and not from some lighthouse that rises
far over their heads; for the Wetterhorn, like the Eiger, Mönch, and
Jungfrau, owes one great beauty to the fact that it is on the edge of
the lower country, and stands between the real giants and the crowd of
inferior, though still enormous, masses in attendance upon them. And, in
the next place, your mind is far better adapted to receive impressions
of sublimity when you are alone, in a silent region, with a black sky
above and giant cliffs all round; with a sense still in your mind, if
not of actual danger, still of danger that would become real with the
slightest relaxation of caution, and with the world divided from you by
hours of snow and rock.
I will go no further, not because I have no more to say, but because
descriptions of scenery soon become wearisome, and because I have, I
hope, said enough to show that the mountaineer may boast of some
intellectual pleasures; that he is not a mere scrambler, but that he
looks for poetical impressions, as well as for such small glory as his
achievements may gain in a very small circle. Something of what he gains
fortunately sticks by him: he does not quite forget the mountain
language; his eye still recognises the space and the height and the
glory of the lofty mountains. And yet there is some pain in wandering
ghostlike among the scenes of his earlier pleasures. For my part, I try
in vain to hug myself in a sense of comfort. I turn over in bed when I
hear the stamping of heavily nailed shoes along the passage of an inn
about 2 A.M. I feel the skin of my nose complacently when I see others
returning with a glistening tight aspect about that unluckily prominent
feature, and know that in a day or two it will be raw and blistered and
burning. I think, in a comfortable inn at night, of the miseries of
those who are trying to sleep in damp hay, or on hard boards of châlets,
at once cold and stuffy and haunted by innumerable fleas. I congratulate
myself on having a whole skin and unfractured bones, and on the small
danger of ever breaking them over an Alpine precipice. But yet I
secretly know that these consolations are feeble. It is little use to
avoid early rising and discomfort, and even fleas, if one also loses the
pleasures to which they were the sauce--rather too _piquante_ a sauce
occasionally, it must be admitted. The philosophy is all very well which
recommends moderate enjoyment, regular exercise, and a careful avoidance
of risk and over-excitement. That is, it is all very well so long as
risk and excitement and immoderate enjoyment are out of your power; but
it does not stand the test of looking on and seeing them just beyond
your reach. In time, no doubt, a man may grow calm; he may learn to
enjoy the pleasures and the exquisite beauties of the lower
regions--though they, too, are most fully enjoyed when they have a
contrast with beauties of a different, and pleasures of a keener
excitement. When first debarred, at any rate, one feels like a balloon
full of gas, and fixed by immovable ropes to the prosaic ground. It is
pleasant to lie on one's back in a bed of rhododendrons, and look up to
a mountain top peering at one from above a bank of cloud; but it is
pleasantest when one has qualified oneself for repose by climbing the
peak the day before and becoming familiar with its terrors and its
beauties. In time, doubtless, one may get reconciled to anything; one
may settle down to be a caterpillar, even after one has known the
pleasures of being a butterfly; one may become philosophical, and have
one's clothes let out; and even in time, perhaps--though it is almost
too terrible to contemplate--be content with a mule or a carriage, or
that lowest depth to which human beings can sink, and for which the
English language happily affords no name, a _chaise à porteurs:_ and
even in such degradation the memory of better times may be pleasant; for
I doubt much whether it is truth the poet sings--
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
Certainly, to a philosophical mind, the sentiment is doubtful. For my
part, the fate which has cut me off, if I may use the expression, in the
flower of my youth, and doomed me to be a non-climbing animal in future,
is one which ought to exclude grumbling. I cannot indicate it more
plainly, for I might so make even the grumbling in which I have already
indulged look like a sin. I can only say that there are some very
delightful things in which it is possible to discover an infinitesimal
drop of bitterness, and that the mountaineer who undertakes to cut
himself off from his favourite pastime, even for reasons which he will
admit in his wildest moods to be more than amply sufficient, must expect
at times to feel certain pangs of regret, however quickly they may be
smothered.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 33: From "The Playground of Europe," 1871.]
BEHAVIOR[34]
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The soul which animates nature is not less significantly published in
the figure, movement, and gesture of animated bodies, than in its last
vehicle of articulate speech. This silent and subtle language is
Manners; not _what_, but _how_. Life expresses. A statue has no tongue,
and needs none. Good tableaux do not need declamation. Nature tells
every secret once. Yes, but in man she tells it all the time, by form,
attitude, gesture, mien, face, and parts of the face, and by the whole
action of the machine. The visible carriage or action of the individual,
as resulting from his organization and his will combined, we call
manners. What are they but thought entering the hands and feet,
controlling the movements of the body, the speech and behavior?
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg.
Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius
or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a
rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details
adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a
depth to the morning meadows. Manners are very communicable: men catch
them from each other. Consuelo, in the romance, boasts of the lessons
she had given the nobles in manners, on the stage: and, in real life,
Talma taught Napoleon the arts of behavior. Genius invents fine manners,
which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and, by the advantage
of a palace, better the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they
have learned into a mode.
The power of manners is incessant,--an element as unconcealable as
fire. The nobility cannot in any country be disguised, and no more in a
republic or a democracy than in a kingdom. No man can resist their
influence. There are certain manners which are learned in good society,
of that force, that, if a person have them, he or she must be
considered, and is everywhere welcome, though without beauty, or wealth,
or genius. Give a boy address and accomplishments, and you give him the
mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes. He has not the trouble of
earning or owning them; they solicit him to enter and possess. We send
girls of a timid, retreating disposition to the boarding-school, to the
riding-school, to the ballroom, or wheresoever they can come into
acquaintance and nearness of leading persons of their own sex; where
they might learn address, and see it near at hand. The power of a woman
of fashion to lead, and also to daunt and repel, derives from their
belief that she knows resources and behaviors not known to them; but
when these have mastered her secret, they learn to confront her, and
recover their self-possession.
Every day bears witness to their gentle rule. People who would obtrude,
now do not obtrude. The mediocre circle learns to demand that which
belongs to a high state of nature or of culture. Your manners are always
under examination, and by committees little suspected,--a police in
citizen's clothes,--but are awarding or denying you very high prizes
when you least think of it.