Both pilgrim and mountaineer may claim for themselves the virtue of
enthusiasm. But if they be humble-minded men they will not deny the
possible existence of other and nobler forms of enthusiasm. If this
virtue of theirs be not identical with all excellence, it must be
capable of definition or analysis in terms other than itself. The
pilgrim’s answer is easily given: he goes out to seek recreation, in
the fullest sense of the word, to introduce a new element into his
life. ‘I go to free myself from the Wheel of Things by a broad and
open road.’ Less easy to define is the τέλος of the mountaineer; under
no moral compulsion, he endures the pilgrim’s hardships for a less
definite end, yet returns year after year in search of discomfort. A
writer endeavouring to analyse this enthusiasm has put it down as a
mild madness, a drawback to mountain-climbing. It is in great part an
enthusiasm for past and future: put the mountaineer among his hills,
and he is no sooner in full training than he begins to anticipate
with joy his return to civilisation. Place him once more at home, and
he will be eager to return to his old haunts, will busy himself in
planning for the next year. He climbs, as it seems, against his will.
Yet he sets out willingly in search of recreation, knowing that he
will certainly find it through hours of toil. He finds also a very
full pleasure, forgetting readily the early start and all the thousand
inconveniences which afford copy for the scribbler. The moon in the
pine woods, the early dawn in the upper snow, the descent of Mont
Blanc towards the sunset are not for valley-dwellers; and to attain
these rewards the mountaineer welcomes the opportunity of an enforced
self-denial:--
‘Carnis terat Superbiam
Potus cibique parcitas.’
He shares also the pilgrim’s joy of solitude and contemplation in the
long hours of silence, and the joy of friendly conversation with all
manner of men at the close of day. He regards no day, however trying,
as wasted which is spent above snow-line, and next day he can take his
ease in the valley with a clear conscience. ‘It is pleasant,’ says
Leslie Stephen, ‘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.’ Herein lies a point of resemblance between
pilgrim and mountaineer: to feel the need of qualifying for this
repose, which loses half its value when it is not the reward of labour.
Finally, the mountaineer will learn two secrets by experience. He will
discover the secret of those philosophers that have dominion over the
young, that one may argue (on mountains as elsewhere) from any given
premise with equally convincing logic to two contrary conclusions.
This is the essence of the mountaineer’s freedom of mind; for wherever
he may find himself he can advance many reasons for or against every
proposal, as conscience-free as the pilgrim himself, calling in
prudence to support equally his bold or his lazy wishes; which is a
dangerous thing for all climbers, as Mr. Worldly Wiseman knows. He will
learn also the secret of a true holiday, which the pilgrim possesses:
that this lies, not in the abandonment of everything familiar in search
of distraction, but in taking up some fresh and absorbing interest,
which will continue from one holiday to another.