CHAPTER X

THE ALPS IN LITERATURE

The last chapter has brought the story of mountaineering up to

modern times, but, before we close, there is another side of Alpine

exploration on which we must touch. For Alpine exploration means

something more than the discovery of new passes and the conquest of

virgin peaks. That is the physical aspect of the sport, perhaps the

side which the average climber best understands. But Alpine exploration

is mental as well as physical, and concerns itself with the adventures

of the mind in touch with the mountains as well as with the adventures

of the body in contact with an unclimbed cliff. The story of the

gradual discovery of high places as sources of inspiration has its

place in the history of Alpine exploration, as well as the record of

variation routes too often expressed in language of unvarying monotony.

The present writer once undertook to compile an anthology whose

scope was defined by the title--_The Englishman in the Alps_. The

limitations imposed by the series of which this anthology formed a

part prevented him from including the Alpine literature of foreign

authors, a fact which tended to obscure the real development of the

Alpine literature. In the introduction he expressed the orthodox views

which all good mountaineers accept without demur, explaining that

mountaineers were the first to write fitly of the mountains, that

English mountaineers had a peculiar talent in this direction, and that

all the best mountain literature was written in the last half of the

nineteenth century. These pious conclusions were shattered by some very

radical criticism which appeared in leading articles of _The Times_

and _The Field_. The former paper, in the course of some criticisms

of Mr. Spender’s Alpine Anthology, remarked: “In the matter of prose,

on the other hand, he has a striking predilection for the modern

‘Alpine books’ of commerce, though hardly a book among them except

Whymper’s _Scrambles in the Alps_ has any real literary vitality, or

any interest apart from the story of adventure which it tells. Mummery,

perhaps, has individuality enough to be made welcome in any gallery,

and, of course, one is glad to meet Leslie Stephen. But what is C. E.

Mathews doing there? Or Norman Neruda? Or Mr. Frederic Harrison? In

an anthology which professed to be nothing more than a collection of

stories of adventure, accidents, and narrow escapes, they would have

their place along with Owen Glynne Jones, and Mr. Douglas Freshfield,

and innumerable contributors to _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_ and _The

Alpine Journal_.”

We rubbed our eyes when we read these heterodox sentiments in such

a quarter. Mr. Mathews was, perhaps, an Alpine historian rather

than a writer of descriptive prose, and he does not lend himself to

the elegant extract, though he is the author of some very quotable

Alpine sketches. To Mr. Freshfield we owe, amongst other good things,

one short passage as dramatic as anything in Alpine literature, the

passage in which he describes the discovery of Donkin’s last bivouac on

Koshtantau. _The Field_ was even more emphatic:

“What is not true is that the pioneer sportsmen who founded the

Alpine Club had exceptional insight into the moods of the snow.

One or two of them, no doubt, struck out a little literature as

the result of the impact of novel experiences upon naïve minds....

On the whole, in spite of their defects, their machine-made

perorations and their ponderous jests, they brought an acceptable

addition to the existing stock of the literature of adventure....

But they had their limitations, and these were rather narrow. They

dealt almost exclusively with the externals of mountaineering

experience; and when they ventured further their writing was

apt to be of the quality of fustian. Their spiritual adventures

among the mountains were apt to be melodramatic or insignificant.

Perhaps their Anglo-Saxon reticence prevented themselves from

‘letting themselves go.’... At all events there does remain this

notable distinction--that, while the most eloquent writings of

the most eloquent Alpine Club-man are as a rule deliberately

and ostentatiously objective, the subjective literature of

mountains--the literature in which we see the writer yielding to

the influence of scenery, instead of lecturing about its beauties,

existed long before that famous dinner party at the house of

William Mathews, senior, at which the Alpine Club was founded.

England, as we have said, contributed practically nothing to that

literature.”

We have quoted this passage at some length because it expresses a novel

attitude in direct contradiction to the accepted views sanctified by

tradition. We do not entirely endorse it. The article contains proof

that its writer has an intimate knowledge of early Alpine literature,

but one is tempted to fancy that his research did not survive the

heavy period of the ’eighties, and that he is unacquainted with those

modern writers whose work is distinctly subjective. None the less, his

contention suggests an interesting line of study; and in this chapter

we shall try briefly to sketch the main tendencies, though we cannot

review in detail the whole history, of Alpine literature, a subject

which requires a book in itself.

The mediæval attitude towards mountains has already been discussed,

and though we ventured to protest that love of the mountains was not

quite so uncommon as is usually supposed, it must be freely admitted

that the literature of the Middle Ages is comparatively barren in

appreciation of mountain scenery. There were Protestants before Luther,

and there were men such as Gesner and Petrarch before Rousseau; but the

Middle Ages can scarcely rob Rousseau of the credit for transforming

mountain worship from the cult of a minority into a comparatively

fashionable creed. Rousseau’s own feeling for the mountains was none

the less genuine because it was sometimes coloured by the desire to

make the mountains echo his own philosophy of life. Rousseau, in this

respect, set a fashion which his disciples were not slow to follow.

The mountains as the home of the rugged Switzer could be made to

preach edifying lay sermons on the value of liberty. Such sentiments

were in tune with the spirit of revolt that culminated in the French

Revolution. A certain Haller had sounded this note long before Rousseau

began to write, in a poem on the Alps which, appearing in 1728,

enjoyed considerable popularity. The author is not without a genuine

appreciation for Alpine scenery, but he is far more occupied with his

moral, the contrast between the unsophisticated life of the mountain

peasant and the hyper-civilisation of the town. Throughout the writings

of this school which Haller anticipated and Rousseau founded, we can

trace an obvious connection between a love for the untutored freedom of

the mountains and a hatred of existing social conditions.

It is, therefore, not surprising to find that this new school of

mountain worship involved certain views which found most complete

expression in the French Revolution. “Man is born free, but is

everywhere in chains.” This, the famous opening to _The Social

Contract_, might have heralded with equal fitness any mountain passage

in the works of Rousseau or his disciples. Perhaps these two sentiments

are nowhere fused with such completeness as in the life of Ramond de

Carbonnière, the great Pyrenean climber. We have not mentioned him

before as he took no part in purely Alpine explorations. But as a

mountaineer he ranks with De Saussure and Paccard. His ascent of Mont

Perdu, after many attempts, in 1802, was one of the most remarkable

climbing exploits of the age. He invented a new kind of crampon. He

rejoiced in fatigue, cold, and the thousand trials that confronted

the mountaineer in the days before club-huts. His own personality

was singularly arresting; and the reader should consult _The Early

Mountaineers_ for a more complete sketch of the man than we have space

to attempt. Ramond had every instinct of the modern mountaineer. He

delighted in hardship. He could appreciate the grandeur of a mountain

storm while sitting on an exposed ledge. He lingers with a delight that

recalls Gesner on the joy of simple fare and rough quarters. He is the

boon companion of hunters and smugglers; and through all his mountain

journeys his mind is alert in reacting to chance impressions.

But his narrative is remarkable for something else besides love for

the mountains. It is full of those sentiments which came to a head in

the French Revolution. Mountain description and fierce denunciations

of tyranny are mingled in the oddest fashion. It is not surprising

that Ramond, who finds room in a book devoted to mountaineering for a

prophecy of the Revolution, should have played an active part in the

Revolution when it came. Ramond entered the Revolutionary Parliament

as a moderate reformer, and when the leaders of the Revolution had no

further use for moderate reformers he found himself in the gaol at

Tarbres. Here he was fortunately forgotten, and survived to become

Maître des Requêtes under Louis XVIII. Ramond is, perhaps, the most

striking example of the mountaineer whose love for mountains was only

equalled by his passion for freedom. In some ways, he is worthier of

our admiration than Rousseau, for he not only admired mountains, he

climbed them. He not only praised the simple life of hardship, he

endured it.

Turning to English literature, we find much the same processes at work.

The two great poets whose revolt against existing society was most

marked yielded the Alps a generous measure of praise. It is interesting

to compare the mountain songs of Byron and Shelley. Byron’s verse is

often marred by his obvious sense of the theatre. His misanthropy had,

no doubt, its genuine as well as its purely theatrical element, but it

becomes tiresome as the _motif_ of the mountain message. No doubt he

was sincere when he wrote--

“I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me, and to me

High mountains are a feeling, but the sum

Of human cities torture.”

But as a matter of actual practice no man lived more in himself, and

instead of becoming a portion of his surroundings, too often he makes

his surroundings take colouring from his mood. His mountains sometimes

seem to have degenerated into an echo of Byron. They are too anxious

to advertise the whole gospel of misanthropy. The avalanche roars a

little too lustily. The Alpine glow is laid on with a heavy brush,

and his mountains cannot wholly escape the suspicion of bluster that

tends to degenerate into bombast. This is undeniable, yet Byron at his

best is difficult to approach. Freed from his affectations, his verse

often rises to the highest levels of simple, unaffected eloquence.

There are lines in _The Prisoner of Chillon_ with an authentic appeal

to the mountain lover. The prisoner has been freed from the chain that

has bound him for years to a pillar, and he is graciously allowed the

freedom of his dungeon--a concession that may not have appeared unduly

liberal to his gaolers, but which at least enabled the prisoner to

reach a window looking out on to the hills--

“I made a footing in the wall,

It was not therefrom to escape.

But I was curious to ascend

To my barr’d windows, and to bend

Once more upon the mountain high

The quiet of a loving eye.

I saw them and they were the same

They were not changed like me in frame;

I saw their thousand years of snow

On high--their wide long lake below.

And the blue Rhone in fullest flow; ...

I saw the white walled distant town;

And whiter sails go skimming down;

And then there was a little isle

Which in my very face did smile,

The only one in view.”

As the train swings round the elbow above the lake, the mountaineer

released from the chain of city life can echo this wish to bend the

quiet of a loving eye on unchanging mountains.

Coleridge has some good lines on Mont Blanc, but one feels that they

would have applied equally well to any other mountain. Their sincerity

is somewhat discounted by the fact that Coleridge manufactured an

enthusiasm for Mont Blanc at a distance from which it is invisible.

With Shelley, we move in a different atmosphere. Like Byron, he

rebelled against society, and some comfortable admirers of the poetry

which time has made respectable are apt to ignore those poems which,

for passionate protest against social conditions, remained unique

till William Morris transformed Socialism into song. Shelley was more

sincere in his revolt than Byron. He did not always keep an eye on

the gallery while declaiming his rebellion, and his mountains have no

politics; they sing their own spontaneous melodies. Shelley combined

the mystic’s vision with the accuracy of a trained observer. His

descriptions of an Alpine dawn, or a storm among the mountains, might

have been written by a man who had studied these phenomena with a

note-book in his hand. Nobody has ever observed with such sympathy “the

dim enchanted shapes of wandering mist,” or brought more beauty to

their praise. Shelley’s cloud poems have the same fugitive magic that

haunts the fickle countries of the sky when June is stirring in those

windy hills where--

“Dense fleecy clouds

Are wandering in thick flocks among the mountains

Shepherded by the slow unwilling wind.”

Shelley did not start with the poem, but with the mountain. His

mountains are something more than a convenient instrument for the

manufacture of rhyme. He did not write a poem about mountains as a

pleasant variation on more conventional themes. With Shelley, you know

that poetry was the handmaid of the hills, the one medium in which

he could fitly express his own passionate worship of every accent

in the mountain melody. And for these reasons Shelley seems to us a

truer mountain poet than Byron, truer than Coleridge, truer even than

Wordsworth, for Wordsworth, though some of his Alpine poetry is very

good indeed, seems more at home in the Cumberland fells, whose quiet

music no other poet has ever rendered so surely.

The early literature of the mountains has an atmosphere which has

largely disappeared in modern Alpine writing. For, to the pioneers of

Alpine travel, a mountain was not primarily a thing to climb. Even

men like Bourrit and Ramond de Carbonnière, genuine mountaineers in

every sense of the term, regarded the great heights as something more

than fields for exploration, as the shrines of an unseen power that

compelled spontaneous worship. These men saw a mountain, and not a

problem in gymnastics. They wrote of mountains with a certain naïve

eloquence, often highly coloured, sometimes a trifle bombastic.

But, because the best of them had French blood in their veins, their

outpourings were at least free from Saxon self-consciousness. They were

not writing for an academic audience lenient to dullness, but convulsed

with agonies of shame at any suspicion of fine writing. One shudders

to think of Bourrit delivering his sonorous address on the guides of

Chamounix as the high priests of humanity before the average audience

that assembles to hear an Alpine paper. We have seen two old gentlemen

incapacitated for the evening by a paper pitched on a far more subdued

note. Yet, somehow, the older writings have the genuine ring. They

have something lacking in the genial rhapsodies of their successors.

“We can never over-estimate what we owe to the Alps”: thus opens a

characteristic peroration to an Alpine book of the ’eighties. “We are

indebted to them and all their charming associations for the greatest

of all blessings, friendship and health. It has been conclusively

proved that, of all sports, it is the one which can be protracted to

the greatest age. It is in the mountains that our youth is renewed.

Young, middle-aged, or old, we go out, too often jaded and worn in mind

and body; and we return invigorated, renewed, restored, fitted for the

fresh labours and duties of life. To know the great mountains wholly is

impossible for any of us; but reverently to learn the lessons they can

teach, and heartily to enjoy the happiness they can bring is possible

to us all.”

If a man who has climbed for thirty years cannot pump up something more

lively as his final summary of Alpine joys, what reply can we make

to Ruskin’s contention that “the real beauties of the Alps are to be

seen and to be seen only where all may see it, the cripple, the child,

and the man of grey hairs”? There are a few Alpine writers who have

produced an apology worthy of the craft, and have shown that they had

found above the snow-line an outlet for romance unknown to Ruskin’s

cripple, and reserves of beauty which Ruskin himself had never drawn,

and there are, on the other hand, quite enough to explain, if not

to justify, the unlovely conception of Alpine climbers embodied in

Ruskin’s amiable remarks: “The Alps themselves, which your own poets

used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a beer

garden which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again with

shrieks of delight. When you are past shrieking, having no articulate

voice to say you are glad with, you rush home red with cutaneous

eruptions of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccoughs of

self-satisfaction.”

With a few great exceptions, the literature of mountaineers is not

as fine as the literature of mountain lovers. Let us see what the

men who have not climbed have given to the praise of the snows. What

mountaineer has written as Ruskin wrote? Certainly Ruskin at his best

reaches heights which no mountaineer has ever scaled. When Ruskin read

his Inaugural Address in the early ’fifties to an audience in the

main composed of Cambridge undergraduates, he paused for a moment and

glanced up at his audience. When he saw that the fleeting attention of

the undergraduates had been arrested by this sudden pause, he declaimed

a passage which he did not intend any of them to miss, a passage

describing the Alps from the southern plains: “Out from between the

cloudy pillars as they pass, emerge for ever the great battlements of

the memorable and perpetual hills.”... When he paused again, after

the sonorous fall of a majestic peroration, even the most prosaic of

undergraduates joined in the turbulent applause.

“Language which to a severe taste is perhaps a trifle too fine,” is

Leslie Stephen’s characteristic comment. “It is not every one,” he

adds, with trenchant common sense, “who can with impunity compare

Alps to archangels.” Perhaps not, and let us therefore be thankful to

the occasional writer, who, like Ruskin and Leslie Stephen himself

at his best, is not shamed into dullness by the fear of soaring too

high. But Ruskin was something more than a fine writer. No man, and

no mountaineer, ever loved the Alps with a more absorbing passion;

and, in the whole realm of Alpine literature, there is no passage more

pregnant with the unreasoning love for the hills than that which opens:

“For to myself mountains are the beginning and the end of all Alpine

scenery,” and ends: “There is not a wave of the Seine but is associated

in my mind with the first rise of the sandstones and forest pines of

Fontainebleau; and with the hope of the Alps, as one leaves Paris with

the horses’ heads to the south-west, the morning sun flashing on the

bright waves at Charenton. If there be no hope or association of this

kind, and if I cannot deceive myself into fancying that, perhaps at

the next rise of the road, there may be seen the film of a blue hill

in the gleam of sky at the horizon, the landscape, however beautiful,

produces in me even a kind of sickness and pain; and the whole view

from Richmond Hill or Windsor Terrace--nay, the gardens of Alcinous,

with their perpetual summer--or of the Hesperides (if they were flat,

and not close to Atlas), golden apples and all--I would give away in an

instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of

lady-fern.”

George Meredith was no mountaineer; but his mountain passages will not

easily be beaten. His description of the Alps seen from the Adriatic

contains, perhaps, the subtlest phrase in literature for the colouring

of distant ranges: “Colour was steadfast on the massive front ranks; it

wavered in its remoteness and was quick and dim _as though it fell on

beating wings_.” And no climber has analysed the climber’s conflicting

emotions with such sympathetic acuteness. “Would you know what it is to

hope again, and have all your hopes at hand? Hang upon the crags at a

gradient that makes your next step a debate between the thing you are

and the thing you may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the

climber like flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses,

sufficient if just within grasp, as mortal hopes should be.”

We have quoted Ruskin’s great tribute to the romance which still haunts

the journey to the Alps even for those who are brought up on steam.

Addington Symonds was no mountaineer; but he writes of this journey

with an enthusiasm which rings truer than much in Alpine adventure:

“Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving on

the outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day’s journey

from Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travel

to Basle by night. He courts the heat of the sun and the monotony

of French plains--their sluggish streams, and never-ending poplar

trees--for the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach to

the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is about

Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields

broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams;

the great Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin

to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has set,

the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights;

and he feels--yes, indeed, there is now no mistake--the well-known,

well-loved, magical fresh air, that never fails to blow from snowy

mountains, and meadows watered by perennial streams. The last hour

is one of exquisite enjoyment, and when he reaches Basle he scarcely

sleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine beneath the balconies,

and knowing that the moon is shining on its waters, through the town,

beneath the bridges, between pasture-lands and copses, up the still

mountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where the water springs.

There is nothing in all experience of travelling like this. We may

greet the Mediterranean at Marseilles with enthusiasm; on entering

Rome by the Porta del Popolo we may reflect with pride that we have

reached the goal of our pilgrimage, and are at last among world-shaking

memories. But neither Rome nor the Riviera wins our hearts like

Switzerland. We do not lie awake in London thinking of them; we do

not long so intensely, as the year comes round, to revisit them. Our

affection is less a passion than that which we cherish for Switzerland.”

Among modern writers there is Mr. Belloc, who stands self-confessed as

a man who refuses to climb for fear of “slipping down.” Mr. Belloc has

French blood in his veins, and he is not cursed with British reserve.

In his memorable journey along the path to Rome, he had, perforce, to

cross the Jura, and this is how he first saw the Alps--

“I saw, between the branches of the trees in front of me, a sight

in the sky that made me stop breathing, just as a great danger at

sea, or great surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make

a man stop breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as

a boy, something I had never seen so grandly discovered as was

this. In between the branches of the trees was a great promise of

unexpected lights beyond....

“Here were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps,

which now for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura;

and, because they were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they

were a mile or two high, they were become something different

from us others, and could strike one motionless with the awe of

supernatural things. Up there in the sky, to which only clouds

belong, and birds, and the last trembling colours of pure light,

they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the things of the sky....

“These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one’s

immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest,

those few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is

something more. Let me put it thus: that from the height of

Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean humility, the

fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of

God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that

divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion,

and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I know that we laughers

have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast

and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the

soul of a sane man.... That it is also which leads some men to

climb mountain tops, but not me, for I am afraid of slipping down.”

That is subjective enough, with a vengeance; for those few lines one

would gladly sacrifice a whole shelf full of climbing literature

dealing with the objective facts that do not vary with the individual

observer.

Mr. Kipling again, though no mountaineer, has struck out one message

which most mountaineers would sacrifice a season’s climbing to have

written. A brief quotation gives only a faint impression of its beauty--

“At last, they entered a world within a world--a valley of leagues

where the high hills were fashioned of the mere rubble and refuse

from off the knees of the mountains. Here, one day’s march carried

them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer’s clogged pace bears him

in a nightmare. They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and

behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the

main pile! A rounded meadow revealed itself, when they had reached

it, for a vast table-land running far into the valley. Three days

later, it was a dim fold in the earth to southward.

“‘Surely the Gods live here,’ said Kim, beaten down by the silence

and the appalling sweep and dispersal of the cloud-shadows after

rain. ‘This is no place for men!’

“Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away

towards the snow-line, where from east to west across hundreds of

miles, ruled as with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped.

Above that, in scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to

fight their heads above the white smother. Above these again,

changeless since the world’s beginning, but changing to every mood

of sun and cloud, lay out the eternal snow. They could see blots

and blurs on its face where storm and wandering wullie-wa got up to

dance. Below them, as they stood, the forest slid away in a sheet

of blue-green for mile upon mile; below the forest was a village in

its sprinkle of terraced fields and steep grazing-grounds; below

the village they knew, though a thunderstorm worried and growled

there for the moment, a pitch of twelve or fifteen hundred feet

gave to the moist valley where the streams gather that are the

mothers of young Sutluj.”

Then there is Mr. Algernon Blackwood, who is, I think, rather a

ski-runner than a mountaineer. Certainly he has unravelled the

psychology of hill-wandering, and discovered something of that strange

personality behind the mountains. No writer has so successfully caught

the uncanny atmosphere that sometimes haunts the hills.

The contrast is even more marked in poetry than in prose. In prose,

we have half-a-dozen Alpine books that would satisfy a severe critic.

In poetry, only one mountaineer has achieved outstanding success. Mr.

G. Winthrop Young, alone, has transferred the essential romance of

mountaineering into poetry which not mountaineers alone, but every

lover of finished craftsmanship, will read with something deeper

than pleasure. But, while Mr. Young has no rival in the poetry of

mountaineering, there is a considerable quantity of excellent verse of

which mountains are the theme. We have spoken of Shelley and Byron.

Among more modern poets there is Tennyson. He wrote little mountain

poetry, and yet in four lines he has crystallised the whole essence of

the Alpine vision from some distant sentinel of the plains--

“How faintly flushed, how phantom fair

Was Monte Rosa, hanging there

A thousand shadowy pencilled valleys

And snowy dells in a golden air.”

Sydney Dobell has some good mountain verse; and if we had not already

burdened this chapter with quotations we should have borrowed from

those descriptions in which Morris clearly recalls the savage volcanic

scenery of Iceland. Swinburne, in the lines beginning--

“Me the snows

That face the first of the morning”--

has touched some of the less obvious spells of hill region with his own

unerring instinct for beauty.

F. W. H. Myers in eight lines has said all that need be said when the

hills have claimed the ultimate penalty--

“Here let us leave him: for his shroud the snow,

For funeral lamps he has the planets seven,

For a great sign the icy stair shall go

Between the stars to heaven.

One moment stood he as the angels stand,

High in the stainless eminence of air.

The next he was not, to his fatherland

Translated unaware.”

Mrs. Holland has written, as a dedication for a book of Alpine travel,

lines which have the authentic note; and Mr. Masefield in a few

verses has caught the savage aloofness of the peaks better than most

mountaineers in pages of redundant description.

The contrast is rather too marked between the work of those who loved

mountains without climbing them and the literature of the professional

mountaineers. Even writers like Mr. Kipling, who have only touched

mountains in a few casual lines, seem to have captured the mountain

atmosphere more successfully than many a climber who has devoted

articles galore to his craft. Of course, Mr. Kipling is a genius and

the average Alpine writer is not; but surely one might not unreasonably

expect a unique literature from those who know the mountains in all

their changing tenses, and who by service of toil and danger have wrung

from them intimate secrets unguessed at by those who linger outside the

shrine.

Mountaineering has, of course, produced some great literature. There is

Leslie Stephen, though even Stephen at his best is immeasurably below

Ruskin’s finest mountain passages. But Leslie Stephens are rare in the

history of Alpine literature, whereas the inarticulate are always with

us.

In some ways, the man who can worship a mountain without wishing to

climb it has a certain advantage. He sees a vision, where the climber

too often sees nothing but a variation route. The popular historian

has often a more vivid picture of a period than the expert, whose

comprehensive knowledge of obscure charters sometimes blinds him to the

broad issues of history. Technical knowledge does not always make for

understanding. The first great revelation of the mountains has a power

that is all its own. To the man who has yet to climb, every mountain

is virgin, every snow-field a mystery, undefiled by traffic with man.

The first vision passes, and the love that is based on understanding

supplants it. The vision of unattainable snows translates itself into

terms of memory--that white gleam that once belonged to dreamland into

an ice-wall with which you have wrestled through the scorching hours

of a July afternoon. You have learned to spell the writing on the

wall of the mountains. The magic of first love, with its worship of

the unattainable, is too often transformed into the soberer affection

founded, like domestic love, on knowledge and sympathy; and the danger

would be greater if the fickle hills had not to be wooed afresh every

season. Beyond the mountain that we climb and seem to know, lurks ever

the visionary peak that we shall never conquer; and this unattainable

ideal gives an eternal youth to the hills, and a never-failing

vitality to our Alpine adventure. Yet when we begin to set down

our memories of the mountains, it seems far easier to recall those

objective facts, which are the same for all comers, the meticulous

details of route, the conditions of snow and ice, and to omit from our

epic that subjective vision of the mountain, that individual impression

which alone lends something more than a technical interest to the story

of our days among the snow. And so it is not altogether surprising that

the man who has never climbed can write more freely and more fully of

the mountains, since he has no expert knowledge to confuse the issue,

no technical details to obscure the first fine careless rapture.

The early mountaineers entered into a literary field that was almost

unexplored. They could write of their hill journeys with the assurance

of men branching out into unknown byways. They could linger on the

commonplaces of hill travel, and praise the freedom of the hills with

the air of men enunciating a paradox. To glorify rough fare, simple

quarters, a bed of hay, a drink quaffed from the mountain stream, must

have afforded Gesner the same intellectual pleasure that Mr. Chesterton

derives from the praise of Battersea and Beer. And this joy in

emotions which had yet to be considered trite lingers on even into the

more sedate pages of _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_. The contributors

to those classic volumes were rather frightened of letting themselves

go; but here and there one lights on some spontaneous expression of

delight in the things that are the very flesh and blood of our Alpine

experience--the bivouac beneath the stars, the silent approach of dawn,

the freemasonry of the rope, the triumph of the virgin summit. “Times

have changed since then,” wrote Donald Robertson in a recent issue of

_The Alpine Journal_--

“Times have changed since then, and with them Alpine literature.

Mountaineering has become a science, and, as in other sciences,

the professor has grown impatient of the average intelligence,

and evolved his own tongue. To write for the outside public is

to incur the odium of ‘popular science,’ a form of literature

fascinating to me, but anathema to all right-minded men. Those best

qualified to speak will only address themselves to those qualified

to listen, and therefore only in the jargon of their craft. But

the hall-mark of technical writing is the assumption of common

knowledge. What all readers know for themselves, it is needless and

even impertinent to state. Hence, in the climbing stories written

for the elect, the features common to all climbs must either be

dismissed with a brief reference, or lightly treated as things only

interesting in so far as they find novel expression.”

Those who worship Clio the muse will try to preserve the marriage of

history and literature, but those whose only claim to scholarship is

their power to collate facts by diligent research, those who have not

the necessary ability to weave these facts into a vital pattern, will

always protest their devotion to what is humorously dubbed scientific

history. So in the Alpine world, which has its own academic traditions

and its own mandarins, you will find that those who cannot translate

emotions (which it is to be hoped they share) into language which

anybody could understand are rather apt to explain their discreet

silence, by the possession of a delicate reserve that forbids them to

emulate the fine writing of a Ruskin or the purple patches of Meredith.

Now, it should be possible to discriminate between those who endeavour

to clothe a fine emotion in worthy language, and those who start with

the intention of writing finely, and look round for a fine emotion

to serve as the necessary peg. Sincerity is the touchstone that

discriminates the fine writing that is good, and the fine writing

that is damnable. The emotions that are the essence of mountaineering

deserve something better than the genteel peroration of the average

climbing book. Alpine literature is a trifle deficient in fine frenzy.

The Mid-Victorian pose of the bluff, downright Briton, whose surging

flood of emotions is concealed beneath an affectation of cynicism, is

apt to be tedious, and one wonders whether emotions so consistently and

so successfully suppressed really existed within those stolid bosoms.

A great deal of Alpine literature appeals, and rightly appeals, only

to the expert. Such contributions are not intended as descriptive

literature. They may, as the record of research into the early records

of mountaineering and mountains, supply a much-needed link in the

history of the craft. As the record of new exploration, they are sure

to interest the expert, while their exact description of routes and

times will serve as the material for future climbers’ guides. But

this is not the whole of Alpine literature, and the danger is that

those who dare not attempt the subjective aspects of mountaineering

should frighten off those who have the necessary ability by a tedious

repetition of the phrase “fine writing,” that facile refuge of the

Philistine. The conventional Alpine article is a dreary affair. Its

humour is antique, and consists for the most part in jokes about fleas

and porters, and in the substitution of long phrases for simple ones.

Its satire is even thinner. The root assumption that the Alpine climber

is a superior person, and that social status varies with the height

above sea level, recurs with monotonous regularity. The joke about

the tripper is as old as the Flood, and the instinct that resents his

disturbing presence is not quite the hall-mark of the æsthetic soul

that some folk seem to think. It is as old as the primitive man who

espied a desirable glade, and lay in wait for the first tourist with

a club. “My friends tell me,” writes a well-known veteran, “that I am

singular in this strange desire to avoid meeting the never-ceasing

stream of tourists, and I am beginning to believe that they are right,

and that I am differently constituted from other people.” The author of

this trite confession has only to study travel literature in general

and Alpine literature in particular to discover that quite commonplace

folk can misquote the remark about the madding crowd, and that even

members of the lower middle class have been known to put the sentiment

into practice. A sense of humour and a sense for solitude are two

things which their true possessors are chary of mentioning.

It might be fairly argued that the average mountaineer does not pretend

to be a writer, fine or otherwise, that he describes his climbs in a

club journal intended for a friendly and uncritical audience, and that

he leaves the defence of his sport to the few men who can obtain the

hearing of a wider audience. That is fair comment; and, fortunately,

mountaineering is not without the books that are classics not only of

Alpine but also of English literature.

First to claim mention is _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_, a volume

“so fascinating,” writes Donald Robertson, “so inspiring a gospel of

adventure and full, free life, that the call summoned to the hills an

army of seekers after the promised gold.” That is true enough. But the

charm of these pages, which is undoubted, is much more due to the fact

that the contributors had a good story to tell than to any grace of

style with which they told it. The contributors were drawn from all

walks of life--barristers, Manchester merchants, schoolmasters, dons,

clergymen, and scientists; and unless we must affect to believe that

Alpine climbing inspires its devotees with the gift of tongues, we need

not appear guilty of irreverence for the pioneers if we discriminate

between the literary and intrinsic merit of their work. They were

educated men. They did not split their infinitives, and they could

express their thoughts in the King’s English, a precedent not always

followed by their successors. We must, however, differentiate between

the Alpine writing which gives pleasure because of its associations,

and the literature which delights not only for its associations and

story, but also for its beauty of expression. Let us, as an example,

consider two passages describing an Alpine dawn--

“We set out from the bivouac at three in the morning. The night was

cloudless, and the stars shone with a truly majestic beauty. Ahead

of us, we could just see the outline of the great peak we proposed

to attack. Gradually, the east lightened. The mountains became

more distinct. The eastern sky paled, and a few minutes later the

glorious sun caught the topmost peaks, and painted their snows with

the fiery hues of dawn. It was a most awe-compelling spectacle.”

This passage may please us, not because the language is fine or

the thoughts subtly expressed, but simply because the scenes so

inadequately described recall those which we ourselves have witnessed.

The passage would convey little to a man who had never climbed. Now

consider the following--

“On the glacier, the light of a day still to be born put out our

candles.... We halted to watch the procession of the sun. He came

out of the uttermost parts of the earth, very slowly, lighting peak

after peak in the long southward array, dwelling for a moment,

and then passing on. Opposite, and first to catch the glow, were

the great mountains of the Saasgrat and the Weisshorn. _But more

beautiful, like the loom of some white-sailed ship far out at sea,

each unnamed and unnumbered peak of the east took and reflected the

radiance of the morning._ The light mists which came before the sun

faded.”...

Like the other passage this brief description starts a train of

memories; but, whereas the first passage would convey little to a

non-climber, Sir Claud Schuster has really thought out the sequence

of the dawn, and has caught one of its finer and subtler effects by

the use of a very happy analogy. The phrase which we have ventured to

italicise defines in a few words a brief scene in the drama of the

dawn, an impression that could not be conveyed by piling adjective on

adjective.

There are many writers who have captured the romance of mountaineering,

far fewer who have the gift for that happy choice of words that gives

the essence of a particular Alpine view. Pick up any Alpine classic at

a venture, and you will find that not one writer in fifty can hold your

attention through a long passage of descriptive writing. The average

writer piles on his adjectives. From the Alpine summit you can see a

long way. The horizon seems infinitely far off. The valleys sink below

into profound shadows. The eye is carried from the dark firs upward to

the glittering snowfields. “The majestic mass of the ... rises to the

north, and blots out the lesser ranges of the.... The awful heights of

the ... soar upwards from the valley of.... In the east, we could just

catch a glimpse of the ... and our guides assured us that in the west

we could veritably see the distant snows of our old friend the....” And

so on, and so forth. Fill in the gaps, and this skeleton description

can be made to fit the required panorama. It roughly represents nine

out of ten word pictures of Alpine views. Examine Whymper’s famous

description of the view from the Matterhorn. It is little more than

a catalogue of mountains. There is hardly a phrase in it that would

convey the essential atmosphere of such a view to a man who had not

seen it.

Genius has been defined as the power of seeing analogies, and we have

sometimes fancied that the secret of all good Alpine description lies

in the happy choice of the right analogy. It is no use accumulating

the adjective at random. Peaks are high and majestic, the snow is

white. Certainly this does not help us. What we need is some happily

chosen phrase which goes deeper than the obvious epithets that

apply to every peak and every snowfield. We want the magical phrase

that differentiates one particular Alpine setting from another. And

this phrase will often be some apparently casual analogy drawn from

something which has no apparent connection with the Alps. “Beautiful

like the loom of some white-sailed ship,” is an example which we have

already quoted. Leslie Stephen’s work is full of such analogies. He

does not waste adjectives. His adjectives are chosen for a particular

reason. His epithets all do work. Read his description of the view from

Mont Blanc, the Peaks of Primiero, the Alps in winter, and you feel

that these descriptions could not be made to apply to other Alpine

settings by altering the names and suppressing an occasional phrase.

They are charged with the individual atmosphere of the place which

gave them birth. In the most accurate sense of the word, they are

autocthonous. A short quotation will illustrate these facts. Here is

Stephen’s description of the view from the Schreckhorn. Notice that

he achieves his effect without the usual largess of jewellery. Topaz

and opal are dispensed with, and their place is taken by casual and

apparently careless analogies from such diversified things as an opium

dream, music, an idle giant.

“You are in the centre of a whole district of desolation,

suggesting a landscape from Greenland, or an imaginary picture

of England in the glacial epoch, with shores yet unvisited by

the irrepressible Gulf Stream. The charm of such views--little

as they are generally appreciated by professed admirers of the

picturesque--is to my taste unique, though not easily explained

to unbelievers. They have a certain soothing influence like slow

and stately music, or one of the strange opium dreams described

by De Quincey. If his journey in the mail-coach could have led

him through an Alpine pass instead of the quiet Cumberland hills,

he would have seen visions still more poetical than that of the

minister in the ‘dream fugue.’ Unable as I am to bend his bow, I

can only say that there is something almost unearthly in the sight

of enormous spaces of hill and plain, apparently unsubstantial as a

mountain mist, glimmering away to the indistinct horizon, and as it

were spell-bound by an absolute and eternal silence. The sentiment

may be very different when a storm is raging and nothing is visible

but the black ribs of the mountains glaring at you through rents in

the clouds; but on that perfect day on the top of the Schreckhorn,

where not a wreath of vapour was to be seen under the Whole vast

canopy of the sky, a delicious lazy sense of calm repose was the

appropriate frame of mind. One felt as if some immortal being, with

no particular duties upon his hands, might be calmly sitting upon

those desolate rocks and watching the little shadowy wrinkles of

the plain, that were really mountain ranges, rise and fall through

slow geological epochs.”

Whymper never touches this note even in the best of many good mountain

passages. His forte was rather the romance of Alpine adventure than the

subtler art of reproducing Alpine scenery. But in his own line he is

without a master. His style, of course, was not so uniformly good as

Stephen’s. He had terrible lapses. He spoils his greatest chapter by a

most uncalled-for anti-climax. He had a weakness for banal quotations

from third-rate translations of the classics. But, though these lapses

are irritating, there is no book like the famous _Scrambles_, and there

is certainly no book which has sent more new climbers to the Alps.

Whymper was fortunate, for he had as his material the finest story

in Alpine history. Certainly, he did not waste his chances. The book

has the genuine ring of Alpine romance. Its pages are full of those

contrasts that are the stuff of our mountain quest, the tragic irony

that a Greek mind would have appreciated. The closing scenes in the

great drama of the Matterhorn move to their appointed climax with the

dignity of some of the most majestic chapters in the Old Testament. Of

their kind, they are unique in the literature of exploration.

Tyndall, Whymper’s great rival, had literary talent as well as

scientific genius, but his Alpine books, though they contain fine

passages, have not the personality that made _Scrambles in the Alps_ a

classic, nor the genius for descriptive writing that we admire in _The

Playground of Europe_. Of A. W. Moore’s work and of Mummery’s great

classic we have already spoken. Mummery, like Whymper, could translate

into words the rollicking adventure of mountaineering, and though he

never touches Leslie Stephen’s level, some of his descriptions of

mountain scenery have a distinct fascination.

A few other great Alpine books have appeared between _Peaks, Pastures,

and Glaciers_ and the recent work _Peaks and Pleasant Pastures_. Mr.

Douglas Freshfield and Sir Martin Conway are both famous explorers

of the greater ranges beyond Europe, and their talent for mountain

description must have inspired many a climber to leave the well-trodden

Alpine routes for the unknown snows of the Himalayas. Mr. Freshfield’s

Caucasian classic opens with a short poem that we should like to

have quoted, and includes one of the great stories on mountain

literature--the search for Donkin and Fox. Sir Martin Conway brings to

his work the eye of a trained Art critic, and the gift for analysing

beauty, not only in pictures, but in Alpine scenery. He is an artist in

colour and in words.

Contrary to accepted views, we are inclined to believe that Alpine

literature shows signs of a Renaissance. Those who hold that the

subject-matter is exhausted, seem to base their belief on the fact that

every virgin peak in the Alps has been climbed, and that the literature

of exploration should, therefore, die a natural death. This belief

argues a lack of proportion. Because a certain number of climbers have

marched up and down the peaks of a certain range, it does not follow

that those mountains no longer afford emotions capable of literary

expression. The very reverse is the case. It is perilously easy to

attach supreme importance to the sporting side of our craft. Mountain

literature is too often tedious, because it concentrates on objective

facts. When all the great mountains were unclimbed, those who wrote of

them could not burden their pages with tiresome details of routes and

times. When every mountain has been climbed by every conceivable route,

the material at the disposal of the objective writer is fortunately

exhausted. There are few great Alpine routes that remain unexplored.

There are a thousand byways in the psychology of mountaineering that

have never been touched, and an excellent book might have been written

on this subject alone. Every mountaineer brings to the mountains the

tribute of a new worshipper with his own different emotions. “Obtain an

account of the same expedition from three points on the same rope, and

you will see how different. Therefore, there is room in our generation

for a new _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_ by the best pens in the Club

telling freely, and without false shame, the simple story of a day

among the mountains.”

The pioneers had every advantage, a new subject for literary

expression, a new field of almost untouched exploration, phrases that

had yet to become trite, emotions which never become trite though

their expression is apt to fall into a rut. And yet it seems doubtful

whether they wrote more freely and more truly than some of those who

are writing to-day. In some directions, mountain descriptions have

advanced as well as mountain craft. We have no Leslie Stephen and no

Whymper, but the best pens at work in _The Alpine Journal_ have created

a nobler literature than that which we find in the early numbers. “_The

Alpine Journal_,” remarked a worthy president, is “the champagne of

Alpine literature.” Like the best champagne, it is often very dry.

The early numbers contained little of literary value beyond Gosset’s

great account of the avalanche which killed Bennen, and some articles

by Stephen and Whymper. Neither Stephen nor Whymper wrote their best

for the club journal. _The Cornhill_ contains Stephen’s best work, and

Whymper gave the pick of his writing to the Press. One may safely say

that the first forty years of the club journal produced nothing better

than recent contributions such as “The Alps” by A. D. Godley, “Two

Ridges of the Grand Jorasses” by G. W. Young, “The Middle Age of the

Mountaineer” by Claud Schuster, “Another Way of Alpine Love” by F. W.

Bourdillon, “The Ligurian Alps” by R. L. A. Irving, and “Alpine Humour”

by C. D. Robertson. Nor has good work been confined to _The Alpine

Journal_. The patient seeker may find hidden treasures in the pages

of some score of journals devoted to some aspect of the mountains.

The new century has opened well, for it has given us Prof. Collie’s

_Exploration in the Himalaya and other Mountain Ranges_, a book of

unusual charm. It has given us Mr. Young’s mountain poems, for which

we would gladly jettison a whole library of Alpine literature. It has

given us _Peaks and Pleasant Pastures_, and a fine translation of Guido

Rey’s classic work on the Matterhorn. With these books in mind we can

safely assert that the writer quoted at the beginning of this chapter

was unduly pessimistic, and that England has contributed her fair share

to the subjective literature of the Alps.

Let us hope that this renaissance of wonder will suffer no eclipse;

let us hope that the Alps may still offer to generations yet unborn

avenues of discovery beside those marked “No Information” in the pages

of _The Climber’s Guides_. The saga of the Alps will not die from lack

of material so long as men find in the hills an inspiration other than

the challenge of unclimbed ridges and byways of mountain joy uncharted

in the ordnance survey.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Alpine Club collects every book dealing with the mountains and

also most of the articles that appear in the Press and Magazines. The

Catalogue of the Alpine Club Library should, therefore, be the most

complete bibliography in existence. The additions to the Club Library

are published from time to time in _The Alpine Journal_.

The most useful bibliographies of Alpine book that are accessible to

the general reader are contained in _Ueber Eis and Schnee_, by Gottlieb

Studer (1869-1871), and _Swiss Travel and Swiss Guide Books_, by the

Rev. W. A. B. Coolidge (1889).

Perhaps the most thorough book on every phase of the Alps, sporting,

social, political and historical is _The Alps in Nature and History_,

by the Rev. W. A. B. Coolidge (1908).

For the Geology of the Alps and the theory of Glacier Motion there are

no better books than _The Glaciers of the Alps_, by John Tyndall (1860;

reprinted in the Everyman Library), and _The Building of the Alps_, by

T. G. Bonney (1912).

For the practical side of mountaineering, _Mountaineering_, by C. T.

Dent (Badminton Library), is good but somewhat out of date.

The best modern book on the theory and practice of mountaineering is

_Modern Mountain Craft_, edited by G. W. Young (1914). This book is

in the Press. It contains chapters on the theory of mountain craft

in summer and winter, and in addition a very able summary of the

characteristic of mountaineering in the great ranges beyond Europe as

described by the various experts for the particular districts.

Winter mountaineering and ski-ing are dealt with in _The Ski-Runner_,

by E. C. Richardson (1909); _Ski-ing for Beginners and Mountaineers_,

by W. R. Rickmers (1910); _How to Ski_, by Vivian Caulfield (1910);

_Ski-ing_, by Arnold Lunn (1912).

For the general literature of mountaineering the reader has a wide

choice. We cannot attempt a comprehensive bibliography, but the

following books are the most interesting of the many hundred volumes on

the subject.

The early history of mountaineering is dealt with in Mr. Coolidge’s

books referred to above. There is a good historical sketch in the first

chapter of the Badminton volume. The most readable book on the early

pioneers is _The Early Mountaineers_, by Francis Gribble (1899). _The

Story of Alpine Climbing_, by Francis Gribble (1904), is smaller than

_The Early Mountaineers_; it can be obtained for a shilling.

We shall, where possible, confine our list to books written in English.

This is not possible for the earlier works, as English books do not

cover the ground.

_Descriptio Montis Fracti juxta Lucernam._ By Conrad Gesner. 1555.

_De Alpibus Commentarius._ By Josias Simler. 1574.

_Coryate’s Crudities._ By T. Coryate. 1611. This book contains the

passage quoted on p. 15. It has recently been reprinted.

_Diary (Simplon, etc.)._ By John Evelyn. 1646. (Reprinted in the

Everyman Library.)

_Remarks on Several Parts of Switzerland._ By J. Addison. 1705.

_Itinera per Helvetiæ Alpinas Regiones Facta._ By Johann Jacob

Scheuchzer. 1723.

_Die Alpen._ By A. von Haller. 1732.

_An Account of the Glaciers or Ice Alps in Savoy._ By William

Windham and Peter Martel. 1744.

_Travels in the Alps of Savoy._ By J. D. Forbes. 1843.

_Mont Blanc._ By Albert Smith. 1852.

_The Tour of Mont Blanc._ By J. D. Forbes. 1855.

_Wanderings among the High Alps._ By Alfred Wills. 1856.

_Summer Months among the Alps._ By T. W. Hinchcliff. 1857. (Very

scarce.)

_The Italian Valleys of the Pennine Alps._ By S. W. King. 1858.

_Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers._ (First Series.) 1859. (Scarce and

expensive.)

_Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers._ (Second Series.) (Two volumes.)

(Scarce.) 1862.

_The Eagles’ Nest._ By A. Wills. 1860. (Scarce.)

_The Glaciers of the Alps._ By John Tyndall. 1860.

_Across Country from Thonon to Trent._ By D. W. Freshfield. 1865.

_The Alps in 1864._ By A. W. Moore. (Privately reprinted.) (Very

scarce, reprinted 1902.)

_The High Alps without Guides._ By A. B. Girdlestone. (Scarce.)

1870.

_Scrambles among the Alps._ By Edward Whymper. 1871. This famous

book went into several editions. It has been reprinted in Nelson’s

Shilling Library. The original editions with their delightful

wood-cuts cannot be bought for less than a pound, but are well

worth the money.

_The Playground of Europe._ By Leslie Stephen. 1871. This classic

can be bought for 3_s._ 6_d._ in the Silver Library. The original

edition is scarce and does not contain the best work.

_Hours of Exercise in the Alps._ By J. Tyndall. 1871.

_Italian Alps._ By D. W. Freshfield. 1876.

_The High Alps in Winter._ By Mrs. Fred Burnaby (Mrs. Le Blond.)

1883.

_Above the Snow Line._ By C. T. Dent. 1885.

_The Pioneers of the Alps._ By C. D. Cunningham and W. de W. Abney.

(An account of the great guides.) 1888.

_My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus._ By A. F. Mummery. 1895.

(Reprinted in Nelson’s Shilling Library.)

_The Alps from End to End._ By Sir Martin Conway. 1895. This has

been reprinted in Nelson’s Shilling Library.

_The Annals of Mont Blanc._ By C. E. Mathews. 1898.

_Climbing in the Himalaya and other Mountain Ranges._ By Norman J.

Collie, 1902. Includes some excellent chapters on the Alps.

_The Alps._ Described by Sir Martin Conway. Illustrated by A.

O. M’Cormick. 1904. A cheap edition without Mr. M’Cormick’s

illustrations has been issued in 1910.

_My Alpine Jubilee._ By Frederic Harrison. 1908.

_Recollections of an Old Mountaineer._ By Walter Larden. 1910.

_Peaks and Pleasant Pastures._ By Claud Schuster. 1911.

The poetry of Mountaineering as distinct from the poetry of mountains

is found in--

_Wind and Hill._ By G. W. Young. 1909.

This book is out of print. The mountain poems have been reprinted in--

_The Englishman in the Alps._ An Anthology edited by Arnold Lunn.

1913. This Anthology includes long extracts from one to five

thousand words chosen from the best of Alpine prose and poetry.

Other Alpine Anthologies are--

_The Voice of the Mountains._ By E. Baker and F. E. Ross. 1905.

_In Praise of Switzerland._ By Harold Spender. 1912.

The reader will find good photographs very useful. The earliest

Alpine photographer to achieve distinct success was Mr. Donkin, whose

excellent photographs can be bought cheaply. Signor Sellâs--the supreme

artist in mountain photography--also sells his work. Messrs. Abraham

of Keswick have photographed with thoroughness the Alps and the rock

climbs of Cumberland and Wales. Their best work is reproduced in _The

Complete Mountaineer_. (1908.)

INDEX

Abbühl, Arnold, 96

Aggasiz, 104-10

Aiguille, Mont, 29-30

Almer, Christian, 125, 129

Alpine Club, the, 130

_Alpine Journal, The_, 73, 249

_Alps in 1864, The_, 135

_Annals of Mont Blanc, The_, 60, 134

Arkwright, Captain, 117

Ball, John, 118-19, 130

Balmat, Jacques, 60-81

Balmat (in Wills’s guide), 125-9

Beaupré, 30

Beck, Jean Joseph, 86-89

Belloc, Hilaire, 226

Bennen, 154, 157-8

Berkeley, 15

Blackwell, 112

Blackwood, Algernon, 229-30

Blanc, Mont, 47, 60-81, 121-4, 187

Blond, Mrs. Le, 200

Bonney, Prof., 133

Bourrit, 54-9, 60, 74-80, 220

Bremble, 15

Buet, the, 49-50

Byron, 215-17

Canigou, Pic, 30

Carbonnière, Ramond de, 214-15

Carrel, J. A., 152-83

Carrel, J. J., 152-3, 154

Cawood, 189

Charles VII, 29

Charpentier, 103

Clement, 53

Coleridge, 217

Colgrove, 187

Collie, Prof., 250

Conway, Sir Martin, 247

Coolidge, Mr., 44, 129

Coryat’s _Crudities_, 15

Croz, 163-80

Cust, 189

Davies, 136

Dent du Midi, 53

Desor, 105

Dobell, Sydney, 231

Dollfus-Ausset, 106

Douglas, Lord Francis, 163-80

Dragons in the Alps, 40-42

Dübi, Dr., 72-3

Dumas, Alexandre, 62-72

Dürer, 18-19

_Early Mountaineers, The_, 27, 214

Fairbanks, Rev. Arthur, 188

Farrar, Captain, 97-101

Finsteraarhorn, 96-101

Forbes, J. D., 116-18

Freshfield, Mr. Douglas, 12, 29, 72, 247

Gersdorf, Baron von, 73-9

Gesner, Conrad, 33-9

Giordani, Pietro, 89

Giordano, 159, 161-3, 168

Girdlestone, the Rev. A. B., 187-8

Glockner, The Gross, 92-4

Godley, A. D., 249

Gorret, Aimé, 152-3, 181.

Gribble, Mr. Francis, 26, 44, 46

Grove, Francis, 187

Guideless climbing, 138-43, 185-9

Gurk, Bishop of, 93-4

Haddington, Lord, 45

Hadow, 163-80

Haller, 213

Hamel, Dr., 117

Hannibal, 22-3

Hardy, 135-6

Hawkins, Vaughan, 153-4

_High Alps without Guides, The_, 187-8

Hinchcliffe, 130, 135

Holland, Mrs., 231

Holland, Philemon, 23

Hôtel des Neuchâtelois, 104

_Hours of Exercise in the Alps_, 131, 153-4

Hudson, 163-80, 187

Hugi, 97-100

Hugisattel, 100

Irving, Mr. R. L. A., 249

James, William, 107-9

John of Austria, Archduke, 94-5

Jungfrau, 96

Kaisergebirge, 199

Kennedy, E. S., 187

Kipling, 228-9, 232

Lauener, Ulrich, 125-9

Lauteraarhorn, 109

Luc, De, 48-50

Martel, Peter, 45-6

Marti, 16, 36-7

Masefield, John, 232

Mathews, C. E., 46-8, 134-5

Mathews, William, 130

Matterhorn, the, 147-84, 189

Meredith, George, 224

Meyers, the, 85-101

Monboso, 28

Moore, Dr. John, 46

Moore, W. A., 135, 199

Morris, William, 231

Morse, Mr. 189, 191

Mountaineering in Great Britain, 193-4, 197-9

Mountaineering, modern, 185-207

Mountaineering in winter, 199-207

Mountaineering without guides, 138-43, 185-9

Mountains in Art, 17-20

Mountains in Literature, 208-50

Mountains, Mediæval attitude to, 1-21

Müller, 30-31

Müller, John, 33

Mummery, 183-4, 191, 246

Murith, Prior, 50, 52, 53

_My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus_, 191

Myers, F. W. H., 231

Ortler, the, 94-5

Paccard, Dr., 67-80

Parker, Messrs., 153

Parrot, Dr., 90

Paulcke, 208

_Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_, 235, 239-40

_Peaks and Pleasant Pastures_, 250

_Penhall_, 184

Perrandier, 103

Peter III, 30

Petrarch, 26-7

Pic du Midi, 30

Pichler, Joseph, 94

Pilate, Pontius, 31-2

Pilatus, 31-4

Placidus à Spescha, 82-4

_Playground of Europe, The_, 131, 132-3

Pococke, Dr., 45

Pope, Hugh, 199

Popocatapetl, 30

Punta Giordani, 89

Purtscheller, 189

Rey, Guido, 152-9

Robertson, Donald, 235-6, 249

Rochefoucauld, Duc de, 46

Rosa, Monte, 28-9, 85-91, 129

Rotario of Asti, 24

Rousseau, 9, 212-3, 214

Ruskin, 221-4

Salis, Ulysses von 151

Saussure, De, 46-8, 60

Scheuchzer, 39-43

Schuster, Sir Claud, 241, 249, 250

_Scrambles in the Alps_, 133-4

Sella, Quintino, 159, 161-3, 168

Shelley, 218-19

Simler, 37-9

Ski-ing, 200-7

Smith, Albert, 119-24

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 131-3, 136-7, 140-1, 243, 245

Stockhorn, 30-1

Stogdon, Mr. John, 188

Studer, Gottlieb, 109-10

Swinburne, 231

Symonds, Addington, 224-6

Taugwalders, the, 163-80

Tennyson, Lord, 230-1

Theodule, 12

Titlis, 44

Tödi, the, 83

_Tour of Mont Blanc, The_, 110

Tuckett, 136-7

Tyndall, John, 131, 157-8

Ulrich of Württemberg, 32

Velan, the, 50-2

Venetz, 103

Ventoux, Mont, 26

Vinci, Leonardo da, 19-20, 27-8

Vogt, 105

Walker, Mr. Horace, 199

Watt, Joachim von, 32

Weston, Mr., 12

Wetterhorn, the, 109, 111-12, 125-9

Whymper, Edward, 133, 147-84

Wicks, Mr., 189

Wills, Mr. Justice, 111-14, 125-9

Wilson, Mr., 189

Windham, 45

Young, Sir George, 135

Young, G. Winthrop, 230, 249, 250

Young, Norman, 11

Zumstein, 90-1

Zumstein Spitze, 91

Zsigmondy, 189

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IN PREPARATION

_ANCIENT EGYPT._ By F. LL. GRIFFITH, M.A.

_THE ANCIENT EAST._ By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A., F.B.A.

_A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE._ By HERBERT FISHER, LL.D.

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_MODERN TURKEY._ By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A.

_FRANCE OF TO-DAY._ By ALBERT THOMAS.

_HISTORY OF SCOTLAND._ By Prof. R. S. RAIT, M.A.

_HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF SPAIN._ By J.

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_LATIN LITERATURE._ By Prof. J. S. PHILLIMORE.

_ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAISSANCE._ By ROGER E. FRY.

_LITERARY TASTE._ By THOMAS SECCOMBE.

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_A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY._ By CLEMENT WEBB, M.A.

_POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bacon to Locke._ By G. P.

GOOCH, M.A.

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Prof. W. L. DAVIDSON.

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ERNEST BARKER, M.A.

_THE CRIMINAL AND THE COMMUNITY._ By Viscount ST. CYRES.

_THE CIVIL SERVICE._ By GRAHAM WALLAS, M.A.

_THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT._ By JANE ADDAMS and R. A.

WOODS.

_GREAT INVENTIONS._ By Prof. J. L. MYRES, M.A., F.S.A.

_TOWN PLANNING._ By RAYMOND UNWIN.

London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

_And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Mr. Gribble’s _Early Mountaineers_, Chap. V., where the

arguments on each side are skilfully summarised.

[2] Not “The Tirol,” still less “The Austrian Tirol,” but “Tirol.” We

do not speak of “The Scotland” or “The British Scotland.”

[3] The origin of the Alpine Club is, to some extent, a matter of

dispute, the above is the view usually entertained.

[4] Mount Blanc is divided between France and Italy; and the Italian

frontier crosses Monte Rosa.

[Transcriber’s Note:

Page 255, Index entry “Gedley, A. D., 249”, changed to read “Godley, A.

D., 249” and moved to appropriate spot in index.

Obvious printer errors corrected silently.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.]