There are few people who are not at heart geographers; the passion may
be repressed or forgotten, but it is probably ready to reappear, and
elderly persons often surprise themselves no less than their youthful
companions by the zeal with which they attempt to mould the face of the
earth by amateur engineering: it is in early years, however, that the
passion inevitably shows itself.
It was the chief delight of a community of cousins, brought together
each summer at the sea-side, to spend as much of the day as the day
left possible in altering in every conceivable manner, by dams,
diversions, or channels, the geography of a wet strip of sand, which
the tide in its next advance would restore to its old conformation.
Sometimes operations, more ambitious in the durability of their
materials, were begun in a stream inland; pools were made, and the
stream diverted into a new, or perhaps a long disused, channel.
Sometimes, too, a party of us would explore along a stream to its
source, which we rarely reached, since even small streams are apt to
extend farther than childish zeal will endure, though fired by the
ambition of finding a real spring, entrancing to the dwellers among
sluggish south-country rivers.
But it was with our first visit to the Alps that the revelation came.
Here were streams without number, small enough to follow, during the
course of a long picnicking day, up to real authentic springs, which
bubbled clear and cold from the ground at our feet. Geography could
be made and altered; our dams made pools where none were before, or
caused the paths and water-courses of the neighbourhood to exchange
their functions, so that the inhabitants of lonely chalets found their
water supply miraculously curtailed, and visited the culprits up above
with guttural wrath. Watersheds, things hard for the low-lander
to comprehend--mere imaginary lines drawn across gently swelling
sand-ridges or downs--gained new life when seen as the jagged ridge
of the Engelhörner, or the great line of green hills north from the
Schwartzhorn to the bastion of Tschingli over Haslithal.
With the magic of water was joined the mystery of the other side. If
we followed any of the streams up and up, to the Engelhörner or the
Schöniwanghörner, whither should we see the torrents going, when the
rain that fell on the mountains streamed down the far side? The quest
of the geographer was made concrete; and as water has been the chief
power in the making of geography, so it is first to start the quest
in a child’s imagination, and the best guide in the knight-errantry
of childhood. But the streams that fell from the precipices of the
Engelhörner and Wellhorn pointed out a course beyond our ambitions; not
yet could we aspire to be climbers, and they still guard their secret,
though ready to yield it, now the time has come, to an ambition
strengthened with strengthened limbs. Even the grass slopes of the
Schöniwanghörner were too high to cross; but the great day came when
we started at six, with two mules, to cross the Great Scheidegg, so
long a barrier at the head of the valley slung between Wetterhorn and
Schwartzhorn, with Grindelwald as our object.
It was a water-following on a great scale; we started with the sound
of the Reichenbach falls in our ears, and followed along the line
of least resistance, made by the stream. Still before breakfast we
passed the Schwartzwald, where the stream was already shorn of so much
of its strength that it could be harnessed and made to pass through
hollowed half tree-trunks to do the work of a saw-mill. Higher up was
the region of bogs and grass slopes, each few hundred yards sending
its half-buried tinkling trickle to join the head waters of the river
itself. And then, without warning, the path took a final zig, and
brought us to the top; and for the first time we saw part of the land
of the other waters, with the other glaciers and snow-fields, grass
peaks and stony ones, which gave them birth. We saw how the valleys
bent round to Thun and Brienz, how the valley of Lauterbrunnen and
the peak of the Jungfrau fitted on to a world whose horizon had been
suddenly enlarged; looking for those places above all which had gained
special interest and familiarity from the pictured slips in our
chocolate packets.
That evening, after a hot trudge up from Grindelwald, and a cool
descent along the home stream that somehow rested our tired limbs, we
returned to Rosenlaui with a new sense of expansion and a vague feeling
of the coherence of things, for the dead lines of the map had become
actual and living before our eyes. Yet this feeling soon gave place
to the disappointing yet somehow thrilling thought, that by enlarging
our horizon we had only left ourselves ringed about by a wider circle
of other sides, making it still less likely than before that we should
ever solve the abiding questions of our childhood.
For four years the Alps remained a memory and a hope, till in 1907 the
long horrors of the Certificate Examination were followed by the thrill
of the night journey, enjoyed to the full owing to a constitutional
inability to sleep, and a drive from Martigny to the upper part of the
Val de Bagnes, a shut-in and self-centred valley presided over by the
Combin. It was here that Italy became identified with the other side.
Here I was first initiated as a climber, and taken up the Ruinette; and
for two lazy hours on the top I watched the Italian mountains raise
themselves up from the ever-thickening screen of mist with which the
Lombard plains seemed to be hiding their secret. A few weeks later came
twenty minutes’ actual walking on Italian soil, between the Great St.
Bernard and the Col de Fenêtre. Italy lay at our feet, brought near to
us by the road winding down visibly to Aosta, and by the first Italian
notices of ‘Caccia Riservata,’ as well as by the southward-flowing
water.
That day saw, too, the registering of a vow, fulfilled in the next
year, to visit the country of the Gran Paradiso and the Grivola. Peaks
there and around Mont Blanc fell before our onslaught, and we grew
to be hardened climbers; while passes became mere incidents in the
journey between one peak and another. But Geography was roused from her
hiding-place by a walking tour two years later--part of the regular
‘Tour of Mont Blanc’ from Chamonix to Champex with variations. The Col
du Bonhomme was unsatisfactory because, after much display, it failed
to turn a watershed at the first attempt, and, after including the Col
des Fours, left us still in the Rhone basin, with the Col de la Seigne
between us and Italy. Geography was displeased, but her craving after
completeness was satisfied by the long drive from Aosta up the Italian
side of the Great St. Bernard. Two known regions were linked up, and
of the remembered dips and corners of the road seen from the top, each
had had its answer. Also I had a sense of triumph in having cheated the
powers of the universe by taking several ounces of water in my soaked
clothes across the watershed to the Swiss side of the Col de Fenêtre.
The passion still retained its childish power, but in a wider sense.
By being children we had been nearly in the position of the first
primitive inhabitants of such a country of mountain and valley: to them
peaks are haunts of terror and danger, the parents of all the powers
of destruction--winds, avalanches, and lightnings--which descend upon
them; their situation makes them geographers by profession: at first
their eyes are turned down stream, and communication only extends over
the main valley and its tributaries, till a more venturesome spirit
arises and uses the water as his guide, but now, ascending it, takes
the line of least resistance over the passes to the peoples of the
neighbouring river-basins; and ancient legends of hill tribes give
a prominent place to watersheds, and great heroes are often made to
conquer a monster which has been terrorising the valley, and fling him
into some great lake at the head of the waters of the next basin.
Did he not embody the terror of those frowning walls, and was not his
conquest a victory indeed?
Thus the passes gained in importance, while the peaks were afar off
and terrible: they were already in use when there filtered through to
Herodotus across section after section of trade route the tradition,
confused in its long journey, of a town of Pyrene and a river Alpis;
when a new wave of inhabitants, scarcely pushing communication between
valley and valley themselves, used their mountain hardiness to extract
toll from the Roman merchants whose enterprise brought them across
the St. Bernard and the Mont Cenis to Vienna and Lugdunum; and each
traveller added to their importance and fame, while the local paths
were linked up into great highways, joining country to country, and
shrine to shrine, making a way for invasions, for pilgrims, or for
traders. The pass where Xenophon’s men cried θάλασσα! θάλασσα!
possesses a reality and interest of its own, not shared by the almost
laughable description of the mythical peaks of Krophi and Mophi in
Herodotus. But for us, even as children, there was a difference: the
prowess and achievements of our elders made impossible the fear which
our ancestors felt even for ‘Helm Crag, Helvellyn, and Butterlip
Howe’--the last-named a small wooded eminence about two hundred feet
high--yet we lacked the spiritual and bodily pride which the attainer
of summits must possess. What climber has not known the moment when
this has failed him suddenly, and he has realised the impudence of
his presence among the mountain sanctuaries and of his trial of
strength face to face with the mountain’s bulk; when he either expiates
the crime of his intrusion by a great and tranquillising humility,
or struggles, only to find all he sees assume a mask of grinning
hatefulness? The attainer of summits follows a way which, even if
definite, is none the less new and none the less formidable to each
successive user: we children, like them, were pass-goers, enterers of
a sanctuary of a different kind, one hallowed by the slow toil of
generations, where the mountains could not resent intrusion, since it
was the mark of their community of life with the humble folk whom they
supported.
Even then we were no longer geographers by profession, still less now,
when the Alps are to us no longer a barrier to be forced, but the
playground of Europe, whither we in our sophisticated age make trains
convey us; and it seems as if the amateur geography of our childhood
were a mere survival, to be put away together with other childish
things when we grow up to be ‘modern men,’ with the climber’s devotion
to peaks, and the true modern appreciation of mountains. Shall we not
come to treat passes as highest minima instead of lowest maxima, and so
despise them; and will not our new mystical attitude make the partial
survival in us of primitive man a bar to the growth of a right spirit?
For your true mountain lover professes himself a mystic: he is one of
those that ‘live by places,’ and he waits upon the fruition of those
moments in which his senses give him a sudden feeling of fellowship
with his surroundings, when
‘A gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery....’
These moments, he will tell you, are an end in themselves, and not
pursued for any moral strengthening of our social fibre for fighting
the battles of life. Only in isolation from his fellows, from science,
and from the interference of intelligence, when he adopts a ‘wise
passivity’ of mere sensation, is this sense of fellowship granted
him; and among the peaks, under the spell of his rhythmical bodily
movements, he and the silent mountains stand face to face, as pure
living sensation and lifeless matter, and each finds in the other a
mysterious completion.
This is the creed he professes; but how rarely comes one who can
practise it or achieve its enjoyment. Nearly all indeed share in some
degree this passion for fellowship; nearly all live their lives as
much by places as by people. The contrast is put by Wordsworth in one
of the poems on the Naming of Places, that called ‘Joanna’s rock’:--
‘Amid the smoke of cities did you pass
The time of early youth; and there you learned,
From years of quiet industry, to love
The living beings by your own fireside
With such a strong devotion, that your heart
Is slow towards the sympathies of them
Who look upon the hills with tenderness,
And make dear friendships with the streams and groves.’
They are the extremes: Joanna cannot understand the frame of mind at
all; Wordsworth is, in this mood, the perfect example of the life lived
in the fellowship of inanimate things.
But to few is the fellowship thus whole-heartedly given. For this it
is necessary to be a true æsthete (using the word in an unprejudiced
sense), so that in the one indivisible act of seeing, the one great
moment, a whole message is revealed. But life refuses to divide
itself into such moments; we cannot isolate ourselves either from the
continuity of the past or the community of the present. Most men move
on a plain of less concentration and greater self-consciousness, where
the act of seeing inevitably includes and leads up to reflection and
analysis. We still have the animal and the primitive man within us,
linking us to the past and the flow of time; and reason, the common
gift of all men, keeps always lurking in the background. Yet we still
strive after this immediacy of fellowship, but there come times when
the snow-peaks and the rocks have fed our appreciation on too strong a
draught, when our senses, relying on themselves alone, are over-sated,
and there seems a film before our eyes, so that we are no longer ‘alive
and drinking up our wonder,’ but the draught stagnates without us and
turns to bitterness.
Then we must be humble, and resign our pretensions to an ‘æsthetic
geography’ for one on a lower scale; we shall return to the passes,
which will remain to us the emblem of a new ‘geography of the spirit’
which, instead of trying to gain all in one tremendous moment, will
be content to browse upon the myriad things which intelligence sees
displayed. Even as a picture, an arrangement of lines and colours, the
pass has much that the higher peaks cannot give us: the deep curve of
the summit, slung between its supporting peaks, appeals to us by its
grace and weakness; there is a discontinuity of colour and clearness
as each bastion of the valley comes out from the curve its forerunner
had hidden. But these effects are heightened and brought together by
our geography; we imagine the glaciers that separated those bastions
from one another; that cup at the end is perhaps the work of some other
mighty glacier of the far side, piled up so high that it fell across
the watershed and cut its way down; maybe there is a giant moraine,
bigger than most of our English mountains, still to bear witness of it.
But it is the stream and the road which hold our imagination; the
water tells us of all the powers which we know to be at work, but
which our senses are too slow to perceive. Each stream is itself part
of the great cycle of water, each is an agent in the mountain cycle,
perpetually hurrying the actual fabric of the mountains down to the
sea; their voice is never silent even on the summits; they are the
lords of the peaks, moulding them slowly to new shapes, and their
murmur seems to call the clouds, ‘chased by the hounding winds from
distant seas,’ to come and renew their springs for a new course of the
never-ending circle.
But the road takes our geography farther afield and peoples our
imaginings. We have softened the immediacy of our ‘æsthetic geography’
by the aid of intelligence; the road softens it by bringing in
humankind to stand with us facing the gulf between the living and the
inanimate. As the water alters our view of the mountains by bringing
to light the importance of time, so does the road alter our view of
ourselves. As we look up a pass from below, the view of the road
appearing and vanishing round the folds of the valley brings to us
two pictures of men. Winding away from us up to the skyline goes the
pilgrim’s progress, the slow toiling advance upwards to gain the
view of things not seen. Many there are, but few together; some on
side-tracks; some on the old steep road with its rough stones now
overgrown, more on the new smooth driving road which turns about so
that they can take their eyes from the goal; some even making a path
for themselves, either above on the hillside, steering for some nearer
gap on the skyline, which does not cross the main watershed; others
below the road, toiling painfully along the stream-bed. And each in
turn we see reach the summit and disappear; we cannot see what they
see, nor even the expression of their faces as they confront the other
side.
But the same valley can be the setting for another picture: down
from the top there seem to come great processions, gay like Benozzo
Gozzoli’s ‘Procession of the Magi,’ many leagues long and all ordered
and together, though part is hidden in the green woods, part in the
valley’s folds. We seem to take our place in the upward journey, and
soon it will be our turn to wonder what new thing we shall see beyond
the barrier. Perhaps encompassing mists will give place suddenly at
the summit to a sunny prospect of some great cathedral range, to take
our place in one of those processions and descend to the richness of
an Italian land. Or, if it is on the far side that the mists have
gathered, and the gateway of the pass is barred by a deep grey veil of
nothingness, at least the mists will lift high enough to show the two
gentle arms of our mother earth descending to where we are, strong and
lit by a strange internal light, ready to hold us up as we take the
last step into the grey, where we shall see no more.