At what I am now about to say of Edward Whymper, he would himself
either have hooted with cynical ridicule or else would have heard
with a slow and cold smile of amused scorn, but to me his was a sad,
gloomy, if not indeed a pathetic figure. I do not say this because
he was a lonely man--and in all life I have met no one who was
quite as lonely as he--but because he walked always in the shadow
of self. I am not implying that he was selfish, for he was not. In
his business transactions--albeit not an easy man to “best,” and
not above driving a hard bargain with those whom he distrusted--he
was not only as good as his word, but was the soul of integrity and
honour. Prepared as he was to fulfil his share of the contract to
the letter, he expected and required that others should do the same.
Yet when dealing with those who had treated him handsomely he could
be quixotically generous. Even to those to whom he owed nothing, he
did many unselfish kindnesses for which he expected no gratitude, and
was prepared to go unrequited. While the professional mendicant was
sternly and mercilessly shown the door, the deserving poor he was
always, if stealthily and secretly, ready to help.
Yet, looking back on him as I knew him all those years, I ask myself
whether there was really one being in the world who really “mattered”
to Edward Whymper, or by whose death his serenity would have been
disturbed. It was Robert Montgomery, I believe, who wrote a poem in
which he pictured the tragic loneliness of “the last man” left alone
in the world.
Had it been possible, by some such universal cataclysm as, say, a
world-wide earthquake, for every living creature, with one exception,
to perish off the face of the earth, and had Edward Whymper been that
one exception, I verily believe that, whistling softly to himself at
the wonder of it all, he would, with untrembling fingers, calmly have
filled and lit his pipe, and have sat down, were anything left to sit
upon, to contemplate the ruins of a world, and then, first of all, to
consider how to get his next meal, and, after that, to think out how
to accommodate himself to the unusual and inconvenient circumstances
in which he found himself. Nor would he have forgotten, with such
instruments as happened to be within reach, to take such astronomical
and meteorological bearings as he thought would prove valuable in the
interests of science.
It is of course preposterous and inconceivable to suppose any such
situation as I have imagined, and some of my readers may reasonably
suppose that I am either laughing at them or wishing them to laugh
at Whymper or myself. I assure them I am doing nothing of the
sort, for, with no inconsiderable knowledge of the man, I honestly
believe that in such circumstances he would have behaved exactly
as I have said. They are magnificent, those qualities of absolute
self-dependence, self-containment and self-contentment which Whymper
possessed, but to me at least and at times they seemed almost
superhuman. He walked, as I have said, in the shadow of self; was
content so to walk, and apparently had no conception of and no wish
to live a life to the happiness or sorrow of which it was in the
power of others to contribute. A man who can so isolate himself is
possibly to be envied, even if it never occurred to him that he is
also to be pitied. Yet in spite of the fact that he was perfectly
satisfied with his lot in life, and in living that life according to
the cut-and-dried system by which he ordered it, and in spite, too,
of the fact that he would have assured one that he was, and indeed
believed himself to be, a happy man, Edward Whymper was, as I have
said, not only the loneliest but the most pathetic human creature I
have ever known.