Not much more than a hundred years ago a tourist remarked that he found
the Scottish hills ‘most of all disgusting when the heather was in
bloom.’ There is something very taking about this phrase. It was, of
course, a commonplace of the eighteenth century to feel aversion, awe,
horror, even hatred for mountains, but the epithet ‘disgusting’ is a
refinement of abuse. The Scottish hills failed to arouse any of the
deeper emotions in this gentleman--it would have been a compliment to
them to suggest they could. They merely filled him with disgust, and
the feeling was aggravated by the sight of a profusion of flowers of an
unpleasant purple colour.
We have no reason to suppose that the author of this judgment was
deficient in taste or sensibility according to the standards of his
time. We may credit him with a happy turn for expression, but not
with any originality of view. The resulting reflections are rather
surprising. It seems natural that men should once have looked on the
Alps with horror and repulsion. They were the abode of storms and
killing cold and avalanches, and stood for all the forces of nature
which war most fiercely against man. But the British hills never stood
for the negation of life. At the worst they were only waste land,
unreclaimed from nature. So there seems to be something perversely
utilitarian in the man who could observe their soft colours and
graceful outlines with nothing but disgust. But the perversity--if
perversity is a fair name for the æsthetic attitude in disagreement
with our own--belonged to the age and not to the man. To-day, no doubt,
he would have quoted descriptive poetry with the loudest, and mountain
literature would have lost an adjective.
A generation or two later came the first real explorers of our hills,
and left behind them a record of their sensations in language which
makes very curious reading nowadays. It is difficult to recognise in
their precipices the gentle slopes of Skiddaw and Helvellyn. We cannot
see things through their eyes. It is easy to laugh at their extravagant
expressions, but perhaps after all theirs was the Golden Age of
English Mountaineering. They left the valleys where men dwell with the
adventurous expectation of voyagers on uncharted seas. As they rose
step by step they became conscious, as never before, of towering height
and unplumbed depth. And when they went home and told the tale of their
adventures, there was no unimpressionable critic to accuse them of
exaggerating the height here or the angle of inclination there.
However, this happy period was short-lived. With the exploration of
the higher Alps mountaineering terms began to acquire a new meaning.
Only quite steep slopes were now called precipices, and words like
‘perpendicular’ began to have a definite objective meaning. British
hills were no longer regarded as too mountainous to climb. Instead,
they were dismissed as not mountainous enough to be worth climbing.
But this, too, was only a phase, which passed away in its turn as the
feeling for mountains became more general. Men began to look in their
home hills for something at least of that which they found in the
Alps, and they were not disappointed. Indeed, the mountain feeling
became at last so little limited that the mountain lover could find in
every hill some realisation of his longings, and he might say, with a
perversion of the old tag about humanity: ‘I am a man; all that is of
the mountains I count akin to myself.’
Is this, too, only a phase? A great mountaineer, writing not so very
long ago, gave it as his opinion that the sport of mountaineering in
the Alps was already on the decline. He may not have been right--surely
he cannot have been right. But if even the high Alps are in danger of
vulgarisation, what may not be the fate of our British hills? The great
god Pan is very gracious to his worshippers, but not when they come
in crowds. One by one his haunts are discovered and laid bare, his
chosen sanctuaries are called by uncouth names, even his beloved fennel
is catalogued in the list of mountain flora. The oreads of to-day, if
there were any, would be pointed out like chamois, and would probably
suffer the common fate of everything which is rare and beautiful.
This is not an unduly pessimistic picture. In fact, it might stand
as a description of what has actually happened in one range of hills
which suffers from too great popularity--the mountains of Harz. The
Germans are genuine lovers of mountains, but there is something
prosaically thorough about their Schwärmerei. Like the well-informed
and communicative frequenter of picture galleries, they are determined
to miss nothing themselves, and to see that the other visitors miss
nothing either. And so all well-behaved travellers in the Harz walk
along well-kept paths, sit down on rustic benches, are admonished by
notice-boards when to admire the view, and are provided at suitable
intervals with the means of drinking beer and coffee. Nothing is
wanting--not even the professional jodeler. And yet Nature is greater
than German officialdom, and the country refuses to be entirely spoilt.
For all the time, though no one enters them, long miles of forest
stretch away on either side of the crowded paths; not mere woods, which
you can cross in an hour, or an afternoon, but the original forests
of all fairy-tales. They have the gloom that belongs to primeval
pine-woods. Unchanging and immense, they stand to-day as they stood
when they swallowed up the Roman legionaries. Somewhere among them Pan
may still be sitting, out of earshot of the clink of coffee-cups, and
the voice of Echo working for hire.
Of course, it is unlikely that our hills will ever fall a prey to the
particular form of municipal exploitation which goes on in Germany.
But the effect of familiarity may be as dangerous to the individual as
that of popularity is to the mountains. We see it in the Cumberland
dalesman who has never taken the trouble to climb the hill behind his
farm, and look down into the valley on the other side. Take him up
with you, and he will set his eyes for the first time on half a dozen
farms whose names are often on his lips, and whose inhabitants he has
often met at Keswick Market or the Grasmere Games. All his life long he
has taken his native hills for granted, scarcely conscious of what he
felt for them. It is only when he exchanges them for the flat fields
of the southern counties, or some trans-atlantic plain, that he knows
himself for a highlander at heart. With us, it is true, the case is
different. We go to the mountains as a refuge from the dull levels
of existence. But even for us may come a day when there is no savour
in our appreciation of the too familiar outlines, when our eyes are
dulled and our senses blunted. For though the contrast between the
artificiality of life and the peace and freedom of the hills has never
been so marked as it is to-day, the step from the one to the other
has never been so short. Some of our hills have been turned into a
sort of suburban playground of our northern towns, and there are times
when we seem to detect the staleness of the suburbs even in the windy
heights. The very easiness of access becomes a snare. Paradoxically,
the contrast is sometimes lessened and not brightened, because men come
with the atmosphere of the towns they have left behind still clinging
to them. They come perhaps with the same friends, and discussing
the same questions, that are part of their life at home. Instead of
sloughing the crust of habit as they slough their city clothes, they
let it overlay their sensibilities. The man in the street, introduced
suddenly into a theatre at an emotional moment, sees nothing but a
group of posturing actors watched by a gaping crowd. In the same way
it is not all gain that men can step so quickly from the town to the
mountain side. It may mean that the mountains dwindle as the distance
is diminished.
We must make the most of our mountains then, and come to them in
the right spirit, for they will never crush indifference with the
overpowering force of fourteen thousand feet of rock and snow. And
herein lies the special charm of rock-climbing. It provides the
sharpest possible contrast with everyday life, and jerks the pedant
out of his groove. There are only two directions in which the average
Englishman of to-day can get back to the bare realities of life as
a struggle of man with Nature--the mountains and the sea. Hence the
futility of the common taunt against the rock-climber--that he climbs
his mountain by a difficult way instead of walking up it by the
easiest; the implication, of course, being that the truest philosophy
of life is summed up in the categorical imperative of America--‘Get
there.’ As well taunt the genuine yachtsman because he prefers to sail
his boat across the Channel, not without danger and discomfort, when he
might go over in the latest turbine steamer, and hardly notice that he
had ever left the land. Each attempts in his own way to escape from the
toils of civilisation. It is not the impulse which is artificial and
perverse, but the conditions of life which close all other avenues of
escape.
It is very difficult to say how much of the joy of climbing is
physical, how much æsthetic. The two sides react upon each other.
Perception is at its keenest during physical exhilaration, and
conversely nothing is so conducive to a sense of vital energy and
well-being as the appreciation of beauty. And yet the truth of this
is often unrealised. Ruskin with his reference to the greasy pole is
typical of a large number of people who appear to think that because
the climber’s pleasure is partly physical, contemplation can have no
part in it. They say, too, that we should look at mountains as at a
picture which is so hung by a thoughtful Providence that it can only
be properly appreciated from the valleys where men are meant to stay.
We who go closer get the perspective wrong, like the too inquisitive
critic who cannot see the picture for the paint. Was Swinburne then
less of a poet because it was his delight to leave the sheltered shore
and swim out into the sea, fighting its waves and matching his strength
against theirs? The physical strife brings insight and understanding,
instead of negating them. Only the sailor understands the sea, only
the climber understands the mountains. Nor, of course, is it true that
the beauty of mountains can be best appreciated from below. That is a
fiction invented by the plainsman to excuse his want of enterprise.
Even in the British Isles, where the secrets of the hills are not so
well guarded as in the Alps, there are a hundred Scottish corries
and Welsh cwms where none but the climber ever goes. The tourist who
travels through Glencoe sees nothing so fine as the upper cliffs of
Bidian nan Bian, or the chasms of Buchaille Etive. Spurred on by wholly
unworthy motives he may struggle up the laborious southern slopes of
Nevis, and buy picture postcards at the top. Under his feet the dull
amorphous summit breaks down in splendid precipices to Alt a’ Mhuilinn.
But he will see nothing of them except the dipping foreground of
flat stones. He may admire the view from the top of Scawfell, but the
climber within a few hundred yards of him on the Pinnacle arête is
moving in another and a more beautiful world. From across the valley
Lliwedd appears as a featureless face, grand only in the sweep of its
descent to Cwm Dwli. But to the climber it reveals an infinite variety
of rock scenery. There is no flat foreground to detract from the sense
of height. The eye looks straight across a mile of emptiness to the
opposing bastions of Crib Goch.
This sense of the beauty of his surroundings can never be far from the
climber’s consciousness, though sometimes, it is true, the physical
side is uppermost. There is the sheer gymnastic joy that comes from
the ready response of muscle and nerve to sudden need, the sense of
perfect bodily fitness which the Greeks prized among the best things of
life. Nowhere else does a measure of strength and skill meet with such
a splendid reward as in the mountains. Down in the plains a man may
live his whole life through and never know what it is to face danger
which only his own efforts can defeat, to strain body and mind to the
verge of absolute exhaustion. At home he can take a train if he is
tired, put on a coat if he is cold. Rain suggests nothing more to him
than muddy streets, or a noise on his window-pane. Wind only emphasises
the comfort of his chair. He is a caricature of a man, distorted by
the numberless accretions of civilisation which cover him like an
unnatural growth. He pities the lion at the Zoo for his lost freedom,
and lives himself in a comfortable cage of his own making. But put him
down at the foot of a Cumberland gully on a stormy day. The first jet
of icy water down his back will wash away the affectations and rouse
the primitive man. There is no pleasure here in the feel of the wet
rocks, no æsthetic delight in waterfalls or misty depths, nothing but
the satisfaction of the fighting instinct which lies dormant in every
one of us. The falling water attacks him like a living thing; it numbs
his hands, confuses his senses, tries to take the very heart out of
him. For once in his life at least he is face to face with the forces
of Nature--cold, wind, and rain. If things go badly with him, this is
not a game, in which failure means nothing more than the opportunity
of showing the spirit of the sportsman. There is nothing chivalrous
about Nature; when she wins she presses her advantage home. The man who
challenges her will find the water will fall more heavily, the cold
grow more numbing, just when his own powers are on the wane. Before he
is back among his sofa-cushions he may gain an insight into some simple
things which are usually kept under cover in this artificial age.
But this is only a single side of rock-climbing, and not perhaps the
most universally popular. There are fine-day climbers who know nothing
of this paradoxical pleasure born of pain. But it is the side which
is generally prominent in the winter months. In the presence of ice
and snow there is more of conflict, less of communion with the hills.
Man enters as an intruder, and has to make good his footing. For that
reason perhaps the actual joy of achievement is more keen.
But for pleasure unalloyed there is nothing to equal a climb up
difficult rock on a fine summer day. Who can describe the exhilaration
that comes from the use of muscles responsive to the call, from the
sense of mastery and ease in the very face of danger, from the splendid
situations and wide outlook? Every faculty is at full stretch. The
whole being is stimulated to the intensest appreciation of beauty in
all its forms--beauty of life itself and beauty of movement, beauty of
height and depth and distance. It must surely have been moments such
as these that Stevenson had in mind when he prayed to the Celestial
Surgeon:
‘Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake.’
Such moments are necessarily few. It is one of the limitations of
mortal man that he cannot live for long upon the heights. But always
and everywhere the climber is most vividly alive. There are continual
appeals to so many sides of his nature that he cannot be indifferent to
them all. Now one may come home to him, and now another, but at least
he never falls a prey to that most deadly of all soul-diseases--apathy.
But though climbing, even in the British Isles, means all that we have
said and more, far more, beside, there is just one grain of truth
lurking at the bottom of what Ruskin said. To the rock-climber the
pure æsthetic pleasure of contemplation comes in flashes, not in a
steady glow. There is so much to distract him--the technicalities of
his art, the continuous attention to details, half automatic as it may
become, which alone makes climbing justifiable--even the voices and
proximity of his companions. For though there is nothing discordant in
the presence of sympathetic friends, the conscious introduction of the
personal element must always widen the gulf between man and Nature.
For that reason the climber should sometimes go alone. He should
let his mind be as nearly as possible the empty cupboard of the old
metaphysicians, and leave it to the mountains to make it a storehouse
of impressions. They will be more true and vivid just because there
are no counter influences to weaken them or crowd them out. If he
would enter wholly into the spirit of the hills, let him go alone into
some remote valley of the Scottish Highlands, till the last footpath
vanishes and the highest bothy is left behind. Let him make his bed
in the heather undisturbed by any sign of the presence of man or of
his handiwork. The cold wind that comes with dawn will waken him as
the first thin mists are gathering round the peaks three thousand feet
above. As he climbs the steep slopes of heather in the half-light the
mists roll down to meet him, till he is the only living, moving thing
in a world of whiteness and silence. The heather dwindles, here and
there black rock-ridges show for a moment and disappear. As in a dream
he takes no count of time or distance, till at last he steps out upon
the summit and the sun meets him, shining level with his eyes. Like
an ebbing tide the mists roll back towards the valleys, leaving the
mountain-tops of Scotland shining clear in the brilliance of the upper
air. He is alone with the hills, and stands like one initiated into a
strange and beautiful mystery.
But it is of the nature of mysteries that they cannot be interpreted to
those who do not know. To the unbeliever they sound like mockeries--or
at the best the unmeaning fancies of ‘an idle singer of an empty day.’
Let those who are indifferent to mountains protest in the name of
sanity and common sense. Perhaps the climber is to be envied his good
fortune in being something more than sane.