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MOUNTAIN
MEDITATIONS
AND SOME SUBJECTS OF
THE DAY AND THE WAR
_By_ L. LIND-AF-HAGEBY
AUTHOR OF "AUGUST STRINDBERG:
THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT"
[Illustration: Publisher's device]
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
_First published in 1917_
(_All rights reserved_)
CONTENTS
PAGE
MOUNTAIN-TOPS 7
THE BORDERLAND 44
REFORMERS 84
NATIONALITY 131
RELIGION IN TRANSITION 179
MOUNTAIN-TOPS
Freres de l'aigle! Aimez la montagne sauvage!
Surtout a ces moments ou vient un vent d'orage.
VICTOR HUGO.
I belong to the great and mystic brotherhood of mountain worshippers.
We are a motley crowd drawn from all lands and all ages, and we are
certainly a peculiar people. The sight and smell of the mountain affect
us like nothing else on earth. In some of us they arouse excessive
physical energy and lust of conquest in a manner not unlike that which
suggests itself to the terrier at the sight of a rat. We must master the
heights above, and we become slaves to the climbing impulse, itinerant
purveyors of untold energy, marking the events of our lives on peaks and
passes. We may merit to the full Ruskin's scathing indictment of those
who look upon the Alps as soaped poles in a bear-garden which we set
ourselves "to climb and slide down again with shrieks of delight," we
may become top-fanatics and record-breakers, "red with cutaneous
eruption of conceit," but we are happy with a happiness which passeth
the understanding of the poor people in the plains.
Others experience no acceleration of physical energy, but a strange
rousing of all their mental faculties. Prosaic, they become
poetical--the poetry may be unutterable, but it is there; commonplace,
they become eccentric; severely practical, they become dreamers and
loiterers upon the hillside. The sea, the wood, the meadow cannot
compete with the mountain in egging on the mind of man to incredible
efforts of expression. The songs, the rhapsodies, the poems, the
aesthetic ravings of mountain worshippers have a dionysian flavour which
no other scenery can impart.
Yesterday I left the turmoil of a conference in Geneva and reached home
amongst my delectable mountains. I took train for the foot of the hills
and climbed for many hours through drifts of snow. This morning I have
been deliciously mad. First I greeted the sun from my open chalet window
as it rose over the range on my left and lit up the great glacier before
me, throwing the distant hills into a glorious dream-world of blue and
purple. Then I plunged into the huge drifts of clean snow which the
wind had piled up outside my door. I laughed with joy as I breathed the
pure air, laden with the scent of pines and the diamond-dust of snow. I
never was more alive, the earth was never more beautiful, the heavens
were never nearer than they are to-day. Who says we are prisoners of
darkness? Who says we are puppets of the devil? Who says God must only
be worshipped in creeds and churches? Here are the glories of the
mountains, beauty divine, peace perfect, power unfathomable, love
inexhaustible, a never failing source of hope and light for our
struggling human race. I am vaguely aware of the unreasonableness of my
delirium of mountain joy, but I revel in it. And I sing with Sir Lewis
Morris--
More it is than ease,
Palace and pomp, honours and luxuries,
To have seen white presences upon the hills,
To have heard the voices of the eternal gods.
The emotions engendered by mountain scenery defy analysis. They may be
classified and labelled, but not explained. I turn to my library of
books by mountain-lovers--climbers, artists, poets, scientists. Though
we are solitaries in our communion with the Deity, though we worship in
great spaces of solitude and silence and seek rejuvenescence in utter
human loneliness, we do not despise counsels of sympathy and approval.
The strife rewarded, the ascent accomplished, we are profoundly grateful
for the yodel of human fellowship. And--let me whisper it in
confidence--we do not despise the cooking-pots. For the mountains have a
curious way of lifting you up to the uttermost confines of the spirit
and then letting you down to the lowest dominions of the flesh.
"Examine the nature of your own emotion (if you feel it) at the sight of
the Alps," says Ruskin, "and you find all the brightness of that emotion
hanging like dew on a gossamer, on a curious web of subtle fancy and
imperfect knowledge." Such a result of our examination would but add to
our confusion. Ruskin's mind was so permeated with adoration of mountain
scenery that his attempts at cool analysis of his own sensations failed,
as would those of a priest who, worshipping before the altar, tried at
the same time to give an analytical account of his state of mind.
Ruskin is the stern high priest of the worshippers of mountains; to him
they are cathedrals designed by their glory and their gloom to lift
humanity out of its baser self into the realization of high destinies.
The fourth volume of _Modern Painters_ was the fount of inspiration from
which Leslie Stephen and the early members of the Alpine Club drank
their first draughts of mountaineering enthusiasm. But the disciples
never reached the heights of the teacher. Listen to the exposition by
the Master of the services appointed to the hills:
"To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God's
working--to startle its lethargy with a deep and pure agitation of
astonishment--are their higher missions. They are as a great and noble
architecture, first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered also
with mighty sculpture and painted legend."
There is a solemn stateliness about Ruskin's descriptions of the
mountains, which in the last passage of the chapter on _The Mountain
Gloom_ rises to the impassioned cadences of the prophet.
He could tolerate no irreverent spirits in the sanctuary of the
mountain. Leslie Stephen's remark that the Alps were improved by
tobacco smoke became a profanity. One shudders at the thought of the
reprimand which Stevenson would have drawn down upon himself had his
flippant messages from the Alps come before that austere critic. In a
letter to Charles Baxter, Stevenson complained of how "rotten" he had
been feeling "alone with my weasel-dog and my German maid, on the top of
a hill here, heavy mist and thin snow all about me and the devil to pay
in general." And worse still are the lines sent to a friend--
Figure me to yourself, I pray--
A man of my peculiar cut--
Apart from dancing and deray,
Into an Alpine valley shut;
Shut in a kind of damned hotel,
Discountenanced by God and man;
The food?--Sir, you would do as well
To cram your belly full of bran.
The soul of Ruskin was born and fashioned for the mountains. His first
visit to Switzerland in 1833 brought him to "the Gates of the
Hills--opening for me a new life--to cease no more except at the Gates
of the Hills whence one returns not. It is not possible to imagine," he
adds of his first sight of the Alps, "in any time of the world a more
blessed entrance into life for a child of such temperament as mine.... I
went down that evening from the garden terrace of Schaffhausen with my
devotion fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful."[1]
[Footnote 1: _Life of Ruskin_, by Sir Edward Cooke
(George Allen and Unwin Ltd.).]
That profound stirring of the depths of the soul which Ruskin avowed as
the impetus to his life's work is only possible when the mind is fired
by a devotion to the mountains which brooks no rival. "For, to myself,
mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery," he
wrote in _The Mountain Glory_; "in them, and in the forms of inferior
landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up." And he
completely and forever reversed Dante's dismal conception of scenery
befitting souls in purgatory by saying that "the best image which the
world can give of Paradise is in the slope of the meadows, orchards, and
cornfields on the sides of a great Alp, with its purple rocks and
eternal snows above."
No lover of mountains has approached Ruskin in intensity of veneration.
Emile Javelle is not far away. Javelle climbed as by a religious
impulse; his imagination was filled by Alpine shapes; he, like Ruskin,
had forfeited his heart to the invisible snow-maiden that dwells above
the clouds. When Javelle was a child his uncle showed him a collection
of plants, and amongst them the "Androsace ... rochers du Mont Blanc."
This roused the desire to climb; the faded bit of moss with the portion
of earth still clinging to the roots became a sacred relic beckoning him
to the shrine of the white mountain. In the same way Ruskin, mature and
didactic, yet withal so beautifully childlike, tells us "that a wild bit
of ferny ground under a fir or two, looking as if possibly one might see
a hill if one got to the other side, will instantly give me intense
delight because the shadow, the hope of the hills is in them." Both
lovers showed the same disdain of the mere climber. Javelle's Alpine
memories record his sense of aloofness from the general type of member
of the Alpine Club.
Whilst Ruskin's communion with the mountains found an outlet in prolific
literary output, and a system of art and ethics destined to leaven the
mass of human thought, the infinitude and grandeur of mountain scenery
had a dispersive effect on Javelle's mind. I can so well understand him.
He wandered over the chain of Valais--my mountains (each worshipper has
his special idols)--the Dent du Midi, the Vaudois Alps, and the Bernese
Oberland in search of beauty, more and more beauty. He ascended peak
after peak, attracted by an irresistible force, permeated by a desire
for new points of view, forgetful of the haunts of men.
And when, between times, Javelle tried to write a book, a great and
learned book on rhetoric, he could never finish it. For seven years he
laboured at preparing it, collecting notes, seeking corroborative
evidence. His Alpine climbing had taught him the elusiveness of isolated
peaks of knowledge. He saw that rhetoric is dependent on aesthetics and
aesthetics on psychology and sociology and philosophy, and all on
anthropology; that there are no frontiers and no finality and no
knowledge which is not relative and imperfect. It was all a question of
different tops and points of view, and so the book was not finished when
he died, still in search of the super-mountain of the widest and
largest view, still crying out his motto, "Onward, higher and higher
still! You must reach the top!"
Beware, O fellow mountaineers, of such ambitions. For that way madness
lies. I know the lure and the shock. As I write this I sit gazing across
the valley upon the mountain on my right. It is known by the name of the
Black Head; it has a sombre shape, it has never been known to smile. It
towers above me with a cone-shaped top, a figure of might and dominion.
For a dozen years it has checked my tendency to idealistic flights by
reminding me of the inexorable laws of Nature. It is true it does not
conceal the smiling glacier in front of me, with its ceaseless play of
light and shadow, colour and form, but it arrests the fancy by its
massive immovability. And yet, when I leave my little abode of bliss and
wander forth into the heights above (ah, humiliation that there should
be heights above), I find my black top subjected to a process of
shrinking. As I reach the top it ignominiously permits itself to be
flattened out to a mere ridge without a head, a Lilliputian hill
bemoaning its own insignificance.
Such are the illusions of the mountain play. Yet the climb and the
heights have ever served man as a symbol of the search for certainty.
Lecky invokes the heights as the only safe place from which to view
history and discover the great permanent forces through which nations
are moved to improvement or decay. Schopenhauer compares philosophy to
an Alpine road, often bringing the wanderer to the edge of the chasm,
but rewarding him as he ascends with oblivion of the discords and
irregularities of the world. Nietzsche's wisdom becomes pregnant upon
lonely mountains; he claims that whosoever seeks to enter into this
wisdom "must be accustomed to live on mountain-tops and see beneath him
the wretched ephemeral gossip of politics and national egoism."
But the mountain-tops make sport of the certainties of philosophers as
well as of those of fools. The safest plan is to ascend them without too
heavy an encumbrance of theories. You may then meet fairies and goblins
who beckon you to the caves of mystery, you may stray into the hills of
Arcadia and meet Pan himself. "Sweet the piping of him who sat upon the
rocks and fluted to the morning sea." You may even find yourself on
Olympus, the mount of a thousand folds, listening to the everlasting
assault upon the Gods by the Titans, sons of strife. And if you are very
patient you may witness Zeus, the lightning-gatherer, pierce the black
clouds and rend the sky, illuminating hill and vale with the fierce
light which makes even the battle of Troy intelligible.
You may bathe your soul in that Natura Maligna which only reveals its
blessings to pagans and poets. Byron is the chosen bard of the
destructive might of the mountains--
Ye toppling crags of ice!
Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down
In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me!
. . . . .
The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds
Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury,
Like foam from the roused ocean of deep Hell,
Whose every wave breaks on a living shore,
Heaped with the damned like pebbles.
He had the nature-mystic's thirst for a touch of the untamed power of
Nature, for communion with the magnificence of death, shaking the
mountain with wind and falling snow, with leaping rock and earth-eating
torrent. Such would fain die that they may experience the joys of being
possessed by Nature. For they have entered on the marriage of life and
death, heaven and hell, and out of the roaring cataclysm of destruction
they rise winged with a new life.
Whilst the poets chant the awful power of the distant mountain, Byron
comes to us out of the mountain, fashioned by its force, intoxicated by
the wine of its wild life. Mountain climbers meet with strange and
unexpected bedfellows in the course of their wanderings. In his cry for
the baptism of the wild winds of the mountain, Matthew Arnold approaches
Byron closely--
Ye storm-winds of Autumn
. . . . .
Ye are bound for the mountains--
Ah, with you let me go
. . . . .
Hark! fast by the window
The rushing winds go,
To the ice-cumber'd gorges,
The vast seas of snow.
There the torrents drive upward
Their rock-strangled hum,
There the avalanche thunders
The hoarse torrent dumb.
--I come, O ye mountains!
Ye torrents, I come!
Shelley sings exquisitely of its grandeur, its ceaseless motion; he
voices the wonderment of man before the complex problem of Mont Blanc.
But his mind has never participated in the revels on the mountain, he
has not lost and barely recovered his soul in adventurous crevasses. He
retains something of the old horror of the desolate heights--
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there. How hideously,
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.--Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin?
There is a trace of the same awe in Coleridge's deathless hymn to Mont
Blanc--
On thy bald, awful head, O sovran Blanc,
. . . . .
O dread and silent mount!
Nearly all the poets have been moved by the primitive sense of their
awe-commanding power. Wordsworth never forgets the blackness, though he
is, above all, the bard of mountain light and sweetness, of warbling
birds and maiden's haycocks. The poet does not lose the blessed gift of
wonder possessed by children and savages. And nothing in Nature can
startle the mind like the sight of a mighty range of mountains. They
recall primitive feelings of fear before the great unknown, they tower
above the human form with a colossal imperturbability which withers our
importance and confuses our standards of value. Victor Hugo never quite
freed himself from the mediaeval dread of the mountains or the mediaeval
speculation on their meaning. His letters to his wife from the Alps and
Pyrenees record his impressions with a painstaking and detailed accuracy
which does not forget the black-and-yellow spider performing somersaults
on an imperceptible thread hung from one brier to another. The emotion
after an hour on the Rigi-Kulm "is immense." "The tourist comes here to
get a point of view; the thinker finds here an immense book in which
each rock is a letter, each lake is a phrase, each village is an accent;
from it arise, like a smoke, two thousand years of memories."
Here speaks the true panoramic man, the man whose mind attains to
fulness of expression on mountain-tops from which the whole landscape of
life may be contemplated. And yet he notes the "ominous configuration
of Mount Pilatus" and its terrible form, and writes of adjoining
mountains as "these hump-backed, goitred giants crouching around me in
the darkness." The Rigi appears as "a dark and monstrous perpendicular
wall."
His mind is occupied with the presence of idiots in the Alps. He finds
an explanation: "It is not granted to all intelligences to co-habit with
such marvels and to keep from morning till evening without intoxication
and without stupor, turning a visual radius of fifty leagues across the
earth around a circumference of three hundred." On the Rigi his musings
on the magnificence of the view are checked by the presence of a cretin.
Behold the contrast! An idiot with a goitre and an enormous face, a
blank stare, and a stupid laugh is sole participator with Victor Hugo in
this "marvellous festival of the mountains."
"Oh! abysm!" he cries; "the Alps were the spectacle, the spectator was
an idiot! I forgot myself in this frightful antithesis: man face to face
with nature; Nature in her superbest aspect, man in his most miserable
debasement. What could be the significance of this mysterious contrast?
What was the sense of this irony in a solitude? Have I the right to
believe that the landscape was designed for him--the cretin, and the
irony for me--the chance visitor?"
The idiot and the mountain shared, no doubt, a supreme indifference to
the commotion which their proximity had set up in the poet's mind. With
his love of antithesis Hugo had seized the picture of the glories of the
mountain wasting themselves before the gaze of the senseless idiot.
Apart from geographical conditions and hygienic defects there is an
interesting aesthetic problem connected with the presence of idiots in
the mountains. It is not only the idiot who is indifferent to the
beauties of the Alps; the sane and healthy peasant whose eyes wander
over the glaciers and snow-fields as he rests for a few minutes from
hoeing his potatoes is not moved by the sight to ecstatic delight.
I have many dear friends amongst peasants. They are richly endowed with
common sense and kindness of heart; their brains can compete favourably
with those of the folk of any other country. Their hard struggle with a
rebellious soil has given them a quiet determination and tenacity of
purpose which are the root of Alpine enterprise and resourcefulness.
They possess character and independence in a high degree--mental
reflexes of the peaks of freedom, ever before their eyes. But they,
children of the mountain, born and bred amidst its beauties, are
surprisingly insensitive to beauty.
I remember one exquisite sunset--one of those superlative sunsets that
burn themselves into the consciousness with a joy akin to pain, and of
which only a few are allotted to each human life. I stood watching the
sinking sun throw a crimson net over the snow mountains as the shadow of
night crept slowly up the hillside. The sky took on an opal light in
which were merged and transcended all the colours of the day. Every
pinnacle and rock was lit up as by a heavenly fire, the pines were
outlined like black sentinels against the sky, guardians of that
merciful green life from which we spring and to which we return. My old
friend the goat-herd and daily messenger from the highest pastures stood
beside me. "Beautiful, Pierre," I said, "and in this you have lived all
your life."
"Yes," he said, slowly shifting the pipe from the left side of his
mouth to the right; "the cheese is fat and good in the mountains, and
the milk is not poisonous as it is in the plains, but it is hard work
for the back to carry it down twice a day." He looked at me as if
searching for better understanding. "But I will tell you something
nice," he added, by way of stirring up my sluggish imagination; "the
little brown cow has calved, and this autumn we are going to kill the
old cow, and we shall have good meat all the winter."
Far be it from me to join in the thoughtless generalizations about the
obtuseness of the Alpine peasant which have disfigured some of the
literature of climbing. These climbers have shown infinitely greater
obtuseness before Alpine realities than the peasants derided by them.
True, a star may compete in vain with a cheese in suggesting visions of
joy, but our supercilious climbers forget that their admiration of
nature's marvels is generally built up on a substratum of cheese--or the
equivalent of cheese--plentifully supplied by the labour of others.
There is another class of climbers who idealize the peasant and the
guide, and who write of Alpine peasant-life as if it were nothing but a
series of perilous ascents nobly undertaken for the advancement of
humanity.
I can understand the indifference of the peasant to the visions around
him. After a hard day's scything or woodcutting on slopes so steep that
the resistance of one's hob-nailed boots seems like that of soft soap, I
have felt profoundly healthy and ready to go to bed without listening to
any lyrics on the Alps. And even the thought of Tennyson's "awful rose
of dawn" would not have roused me before the labour of the next day.
But we--how proud I am of that "we"!--who have chosen hard labour on the
mountain know something which the mere visitors (though they be members
of many Alpine Clubs) know not. We have a sense of home which no other
habitation can impart--a passionate love of the soil, a unity with the
little patch that is our own, bringing joys undimmed by any descriptions
of other-worldly possessions. Our trees may be wrecked by an avalanche,
our garden plot may be obliterated by a land slip; the stone walls we
build up in defiance of the snow are always pulled down by mountain
sprites. Our agriculture is precarious, and every carrot is bought by
the sweat of our brow. The struggle keeps pace with our love--there is a
tenfold sweetness in the fruit we reap. And when fate compels us to
leave our mountains we are pursued by restlessness. We know no peace, no
home elsewhere. We do assume the airs of Victor Hugo's cretin when we
are placed face to face with the riches of Croesus or the splendours
of Pharaoh.
We must reluctantly admit that the phenomenon of cold indifference to
mountain scenery may occur without any corresponding degree of idiocy.
In the _Playground of Europe_, Leslie Stephen told us that a man who
preserves a stolid indifference in face of mountain beauty must be of
the "essentially pachydermatous order." He commented at length on the
peculiar temperament of those who have expressed dislike of his perfect
playground--Chateaubriand, Johnson, Addison, Bishop Berkeley. Bishop
Berkeley, who crossed Mont Cenis on New Year's Day 1714, complained that
he was "put out of humour by the most horrible precipices." There is
huge comfort to be drawn from Stephen's pages descriptive of the
"simple-minded abhorrence of mountains," and from his categorical
declaration that love of the sublime shapes of the Alps springs from "a
delicate and cultivated taste." But we are puzzled by the presence
outside the pale of some who cannot rightly be called "pachydermatous."
I am turning over the pages of Sarah Bernhardt's autobiographical
revelations. "I adore the sea and the plain," she writes, "but I neither
care for mountains nor for forests. Mountains seem to crush me, and
forests to stifle me." Strange that the high priestess of expression,
the interpreter of every phase of human passion and sorrow, she who dies
terribly twice a day, and mercilessly conducts us to the attenuated air
and dizzy heights of intense emotion, should feel no kinship with the
mountains. It may be that they are antagonistic to the fine arts of
simulation and will brook no companionship of feeling that is not real.
And her stage-worn heart is certainly not in alliance with Fiona
Macleod's _Lonely Hunter_.
But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on
A lonely hill.
We might assume that the traditional wildness of the great tragedienne
would have found a chord of sympathy in the avalanche or in the fierce
torrent breaking over the rocks. Rousseau's hysteria and wild assaults
on the conventions of Society and literature have been traced to the
mountains. Lord Morley emphasizes that Rousseau "required torrents,
rocks, dark forests, mountains, and precipices," and that no plains,
however beautiful, ever seemed so in his eyes. There is naturally a
complete divergence of opinion between lovers and haters of mountains as
to their effect on the literary mind. We like to associate peaks of
genius with peaks of granite. Ruskin found fault with Shakespeare's lack
of impression from a more sublime country as shown by the sacrilegious
lines--
Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow
Upon the valleys whose low vassal seat
The Alps doth spit, and void his rheum upon.
There are anomalies in the capacity for aesthetic enjoyment of mountain
scenery which exclude some minds which we should expect to find amongst
the devotees and include others for whom we might look amongst the
scoffers. Dickens was profoundly affected by the mountain-presence. His
letters show the true rapture. Of the scenery of the St. Gothard he
writes: "Oh God! what a beautiful country it is. How poor and shrunken,
beside it, is Italy in its brightest aspect!" He sees "places of
terrible grandeur unsurpassable, I should imagine, in the world." Going
up the Col de Balme, he finds the wonders "above and beyond one's
wildest expectations." He cannot imagine anything in nature "more
stupendous or sublime." His impressions are so prodigious that he would
rave were he to write about them. At the hospice of the Great St.
Bernard he awakes, believing for a moment that he had "died in the night
and passed into the unknown world." Tyndall's scientific ballast cannot
keep him from soaring in a similar manner. His _Glaciers of the Alps_
contains some highly strung sentences of delight. "Surely," he writes of
sunset seen near the Jungfrau, "if beauty be an object of worship, these
glorious mountains with rounded shoulders of the purest white,
snow-crested, and star-gemmed, were well calculated to excite sentiments
of adoration." His wealth of words increases with the splendour of the
views in which he revels; he becomes a poet in prose, he calls up symbol
and simile, he strains language to express the inexpressible. The sky
of the mountain is "rosy violet," which blends with "the deep zenithal
blue"; it wears "a strange and supernatural air"; he sees clear spaces
of amber and ethereal green; the blue light in the cave of the glacier
presents an aspect of "magical beauty." There is true worship of the
idol in the following lines descriptive of sunrise on Mont Blanc:
The mountain rose for a time cold and grand, with no apparent
stain upon his snows. Suddenly the sunbeams struck his crown and
converted it into a boss of gold. For some time it remained the
only gilded summit in view, holding communion with the dawn,
while all the others waited in silence. These, in the order of
their heights, came afterwards, relaxing, as the sunbeams struck
each in succession, into a blush and smile.
Tyndall holds the mastership of polychromatic description of the
beauties of the mountain; he makes us feel his own response to their
call to the depths of aesthetic perception in the human soul. Words gush
forth from him in a fervour of gratitude for the pleasures of the eye.
He may measure and weigh, he may set out as an emissary of cold
scientific investigation: he returns hot with admiration and raving of
the marvels of God upon the hills. But even he reaches a point where
the realization of the utter inadequacy of expression paralyses the
desire to convey the emotion to others. "I was absolutely struck dumb by
the extraordinary majesty of this scene," he writes of one evening, "and
watched it silently till the red light faded from the highest summits."
Verestchagin astonished his wife by painting his studies of snow in the
Himalayas at an altitude of 14,000 feet, tormented by hunger and thirst
and supported by two coolies, who held him on each side. She had the
pluck and the endurance to follow him on his long climbs, but being a
less exalted mortal, her sense of fitness was unduly strained by the
intensity of Verestchagin's devotion to clouds and mountain-tops. "His
face is so frightfully swollen," she tells us, "that his eyes look
merely like two wrinkles, the sun scorches his head, his hand can
scarcely hold the palette, and yet he insists on finishing his sketches.
I cannot imagine," she reflects, "how Verestchagin could make such
studies." There were, nevertheless, occasions when the inaction,
following on intense aesthetic emotion, stayed Verestchagin's busy brush.
One day, relates Madame Verestchagin, he went out to sketch the sunset:
He prepared his palette, but the sight was so beautiful that he
waited in order to examine it better. Several thousand feet below
us all was wrapped in a pure blue shadow; the summits of the
peaks were resplendent in purple flames. Verestchagin waited and
waited and would not begin his sketch. "By and by, by and by,"
said he; "I want to look at it still; it is splendid!" He
continued to wait, he waited until the end of the evening--until
the sun was set and the mountains were enveloped in dark shadows.
Then he shut up his paint-box and returned home.
As I read these lines I find myself wondering how many paint-boxes have
been shut up by the sight of the mountains. I know many have been
opened, and, amongst these, not a few which might have served humanity
better by remaining shut. But we may safely assume that despite the
general tendency of mountain worshippers to attempt to paint--in colours
strong and language divine--the effect on their minds, there are
exceptional instances of noble and self-imposed dumbness. Not the
dumbness which is practising the old device of--
Reculer pour mieux sauter,
but a genuine silence of humility before the mysteries of nature. We
sigh in vain for a glimpse of these exceptional souls. They resist our
best climbing qualifications and are as inaccessible as the mists above
our highest tops. And we prefer, naturally, our talking companions,
those who shrink not from the task of ready interpretation.
"The Alps form a book of nature as wide and mysterious as Life," says
Frederic Harrison in his _Alpine Jubilee_, in one of those clear-cut and
well-measured passages of mountain homage, which are balm to the
tormented hearts of those who feel themselves afloat on the clouds of
mystery. "To know, to feel, to understand the Alps is to know, to feel,
to understand Humanity."
I am not at all sure this is true; it is probably entirely untrue.
Humanity--in the abstract--is apt to suffer an enforced reduction in
magnitude and importance when seen from Alpine heights. But it is one of
those phrases which we hug instinctively as the bearers of food for
hungry hearts. We do not want Leslie Stephen's reminder of metaphysical
riddles, "Where does Mont Blanc end and where do I begin?" We do not
want to be paralysed by philosophic doubt for the rest of our mortal
lives on the hills. We prefer to be stirred to emotional life by those
who are transported by love of beauty to the realms of unreason.
In the autobiography of Princess Helene Racowitza--the tragically
beloved of Ferdinand Lassalle--there is evidence of such transport. She
has but reached one of the commonplaces of tourist ventures. From the
Wengern Alp she watches the play of night and dawn on the Jungfrau:
Again and again the glory of God drew me to the window. In
the immense stillness of the loneliness of the mountains, the
thundering of the avalanches that crashed from time to time
from the opposite heights was the only sound. It was as if one
heard the breath of God, and in deepest reverence one's heart
stood almost still.
She beholds the moon pale and the summit of the Jungfrau glitter in "a
thousand prismatic colours" from the rising sun:
Once more I was shaken to the depths of my soul, thankful that
I was allowed to witness this and to enjoy it thus. A great joy
leapt up in my heart, which more surely than the most fervent
prayer of thanks penetrated to the infinite goodness of the
great Almighty.
The sincerity of the religious feeling is enhanced by its simplicity.
The more complex experiences of the true mystical nature retain the same
intensity of devotional fervour. Anna Kingsford, whose interpretations
of the inner meaning of Christianity place her in the foremost rank of
modern mystics, was caught up to God by the beauty of the mountains. Her
friend and biographer, Edward Maitland, describes their effect on one in
whom a fiercely artistic soul did combat with a frail and suffering
body. It was whilst near the mountains that she conceived her beautiful
utterance on the Poet:
But the personality of the Poet is Divine: and being Divine, it
hath no limits.
He is supreme and ubiquitous in consciousness: his heart beats in
every Element.
The Pulses of all the infinite Deep of Heaven vibrate in his own:
and responding to their strength and their plenitude, he feels
more intensely than other men.
Not merely he sees and examines these Rocks and Trees: these
variable Waters, and these glittering Peaks.
Not merely he hears this plaintive Wind, these rolling Peals:
But he IS all these: and with them--nay, IN them--he rejoices and
weeps, he shines and aspires, he sighs and thunders.
And when he sings, it is not he--the Man--whose Voice is heard:
it is the voice of all the Manifold Nature herself.
In his Verse the Sunshine laughs; the Mountains give forth their
sonorous Echoes; the swift Lightnings flash.
The great continual cadence of universal Life moves and becomes
articulate in human language.
O Joy profound! O boundless Selfhood! O Godlike Personality!
All the Gold of the Sunset is thine; the Pillars of Chrysolite;
and the purple Vault of Immensity!
Anna Kingsford did not consciously seek the mountains to find there the
release of imprisoned powers of utterance. The mountains sought her by
their beauty and called forth the true mystic's ecstasy of communion.
Mystics of all times and all religions have found inspiration and
strength of spirit on the hilltops; they have forsaken the haunts of men
for the silence of the heights, preparing themselves by meditation and
self-purification to receive the Beatific Vision. They have gone up
alone in anguish and uncertainty, they have come down inspired bearers
of transcendental tidings to men. These messengers of the spirit have
known the joys of illumination and the secret of the strength of the
hills.
Others have sought in agony and mortification of mind the vision which
was denied them. For in chasing away the images of sin they forgot to
make room for the images of beauty. With Simeon Stylites, they point to
their barren sojourn on the hills:
Three winters that my soul might grow to thee,
I lived up there on yonder mountain-side,
My right leg chained into the crag, I lay
Pent in a roofless close of ragged stones.
It is to the rarefied perception of beauty that we may trace the
quickening of spirit which artists and poets experience on the
mountains. Heine, going to the Alps with winter in his soul, "withered
and dead," finds new hope and a new spring. The melodies of poetry
return, he feels once again his valour as a soldier in the war of
liberation of humanity.
The process of unburdening hearts has been continuous since we
discovered the boundless capacity of the hills to hide our shame and
discharge our thunder. Petrarch set the example on the top of Mont
Ventoux when he deliberately recollected and wept over his past
uncleanness and the carnal corruptions of his soul. I never tire of that
dearly sentimental mixture of world-weariness and nature-study which
Elisee Reclus called the _History of a Mountain_. "I was sad, downcast,
weary of my life. Fate had dealt hardly with me: it had robbed me of all
who were dear to me, had ruined my plans, frustrated all my hopes.
People whom I called my friends had turned against me when they beheld
me assailed by misfortune; all mankind with its conflicting interests
and its unrestrained passions appeared repulsive in my eyes." Thus he
invites us to follow him towards the lofty blue peaks. In the course of
his wanderings he finds Nature's peace and freedom, and as his love of
the mountains expands, kind tolerance returns to his heart. He takes
geological and meteorological notes, he studies men and beasts on the
peaks, and never forgets to draw moralizing comparisons. The climb is to
him the symbol of "the toilsome path of virtue," the difficult passes,
the treacherous crevasses reminders of temptations to be overcome by a
sanctified will.
I am afraid modern climbers show scant regard for Elisee Reclus' rules
for moral exercises. Many are moved by an exuberance of physical energy
which rejoices in battle with Nature. They love the struggle and the
danger, the exercise and the excitement. They find health and good
temper, jollity and good-fellowship, through their exertions. They glory
shamelessly in useless scrambles which demand the sweat of their brow
and the concentrated attention of their minds. They seek to emulate the
chamois and the monkey in hanging on to rocks and insecure footholds.
When they do not climb, they fill libraries with descriptions of their
achievements, dull and unintelligible to the uninitiated, bloodstirring
and excellent to the members of the brotherhood. They write in a jargon
of their own of chimneys and buttresses and basins and ribs, of boulders
and saddles and moraine-hopping. They become rampant at the thought of
the stout, unworthy people who are now dragged to the tops by the help
of rope-chains and railings. They sarcastically remark that they may
have to abandon certain over-exploited peaks through the danger of
falling sardine-tins. They issue directions for climbing calculated to
chase away the poet from the snow-fields, as when Sir Martin Conway says
that a certain glacier must be "struck at the right corner of its
snout," and "its drainage stream flows from the left corner."
They do not hesitate to admit that they would continue to climb even if
there were no views to be enjoyed from the tops. "I am free to confess,"
wrote A. F. Mummery, "that I would still climb, even though there were
no scenery to look at." And Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond echoes this sentiment
in a defiant challenge to their uncomprehending critics. "To further
confound the enemy," she writes, "we do not hide the fact that were no
view obtainable from the summit a true climber would still continue to
climb."
Why do they climb? The motives are many--the result joy. Yes, joy, even
in the providential escapes and the "bad five minutes," beloved by our
naive scribes of the ice-axe, in the perils and death which they court
for the sake of adventure and exploration. Sir Martin Conway speaks of
the systematic climber as the man for whom climbing takes the place of
fishing and shooting. How depressingly banal! Yet Sir Martin Conway has
written some of the finest tributes to the glories of the Alps, and has
shown himself a master of artistic interpretation of their wealth of
beauty. Whymper excels in matter-of-fact history of climbs, yet there is
an undercurrent of reverence for the mysteries of Nature's beauty.
The expert cragsman climbs to attain acrobatic efficiency, and may aim
at nothing higher than inspired legs. Mrs. Peck climbed to establish the
equality of the sexes. Mr. and Mrs. Bullock Workman climbed in the
Himalayas with strong determination to name a mountain Mount Bullock
Workman. They did, and the mountain, which attains 19,450 feet, is none
the worse. Climbers are exceedingly human in their love of getting to
the top before fellow-climbers. Here they follow the ordinary rules for
human conduct in commerce, politics, and literature. There have been
some loud and unseemly quarrels as to honours and fame attendant on the
first successful conquest of a desirable peak. It has been generally
held that if you cannot get a mountain to yourself you can at any rate
devise a new route. But I cannot bring myself to speak harshly of such
failings. The utmost I will say is that it were better if such
enthusiasm were tempered with a little humour.
Mark Twain saw through that deadly seriousness of the pure climber. He
saw the fatuity of mere peak-hunting. It impressed him strongly even on
the Rigi-Kulm. "We climbed and climbed," he writes in _A Tramp Abroad_,
"and we kept on climbing; we reached about forty summits: there was
always another one just ahead."
But the pure climber is always a fountain of delight, even though he
does not see himself as others see him. The pages of Conway, Mummery,
Sir Claud Schuster, and Bruce abound in gems of nature-lore, ever fresh
and ever alluring. As I search for more self-revelation in my books by
mountain-lovers, I find myself observed through the window. It is only a
cow on her way to the hollow tree into which the water courses out of
the earth. But the cow brings me back to the strenuous Alpine life, and
I find myself concluding, as I replace the books on their shelves, that
I do not care why men climb so long as they climb in spirit and body.
THE BORDERLAND
This evening the blind man came up the path from the village. I was
sitting on a stump of pine listening to the merry peal of the bells of
the little village church below. He carried a milk-can, and felt his way
with a long staff, with which he tapped the stones in front of him. He
hesitated for a moment as he passed me, as if vaguely conscious of a
disturbing presence. We have been good friends, the blind man and I, and
have had many a talk on this, our common path. But to-night I sat
silent, wondering. For a message had reached me that a friend had been
killed in battle. A man strong and active in body, intensely alive and
sensitive in soul. One of those whom we can never think of as dead, so
wholly do they belong to life.
The blind man stopped at a little distance. He chose a place where the
trees have been cleared and the snow mountains spread themselves for
the feast of the eyes of those who can see. He put his milk-can and his
staff on the ground, and stood for a moment with head bowed as if
crushed by his infirmity. Then he threw up his hands and raised his
head, as though a sudden vision had come to him--his whole body tense
and expectant, like that of a man who strains every nerve to catch a
message from the hills across the valley. For a minute he remained
still, as if receiving something in his hands borne by the silence. Then
he picked up his staff and his can. He turned round and faced me for a
moment before resuming his journey. There was a smile on his lips and a
strange radiance in his sightless eyes, and I wished that I, too, might
see what he had seen.
For the darkness with which we are afflicted lay heavily around me, and
seemed greater even than the blindness of the eyes. The war has brought
the mystery of death to our hearts with pitiless insistence. Every
bullet that finds its mark kills more than the soldier who falls. Ties
of love and friendship are shattered hour by hour and day by day, as the
guns of war roar out their message of destruction. We are all partners
in a gigantic Dance of Death such as Holbein never imagined. To him
Death was the wily and insistent enemy of human activity and hope, a spy
watching in the doorway for an opportunity to snap the thread of life.
We have cajoled and magnified Death until he has outgrown all natural
proportions; through centuries of war and preparation for war we have
appealed to him to settle our national differences. We have outdone the
earthquake and the cyclone in valid claims upon his power and presence;
we have outwitted pestilence and famine in our efforts to hold his
attention. We, of the twentieth century, have attained mastery in the
art of killing. We kill by fire and bursting shell, we kill by mine and
gas. We dive under the surface of the water to surprise our enemy, we
fly in the air and sow fire and devastation upon the earth. We have
chained science to our chariot of Death, we have made giant tools of
killing which mow down regiments of men at great distances. We send out
fumes of poison which envelop groups of human beings, killing them
gently, and emphasizing the triumph of art by leaving them in attitudes
simulating life. We project shells so powerful that men disappear in
the explosion, melted, disintegrated by its destructive force.
And when long-distance scientific methods of man-killing fall short of
the passions of the fray or the exigencies of the fight, we return to
the primitive ways of savages, and kill by dagger and knife, by bayonet
and fist. Thus millions of men are slain in this war, which has achieved
superiority over all other wars in history by the number of its dead and
its gigantic destructiveness. And other millions of men and women are
plunged into sorrow and mourning for the dead, and to them the meaning
of life is hidden behind a veil of tears and blood.
There is an incongruity about death on the battlefield which assails the
mind. The incongruity is there notwithstanding the probability that the
soldier who faces the fire of the enemy will be killed. It defies the
mathematical calculation of chances. It rises naturally as a protest
against the sudden termination of life at its fullest. Death after a
long illness, at the eventide of life, partakes of the order of falling
leaves and autumnal oblivion. It may come softly as sleep when the day's
work is done; it may come mercifully to end bodily pain and
wretchedness. There are moments in every life when the ebb of physical
force is so low that death seems but a step across the border--a change
by which we desire to cure the weariness of thought. The soldier goes
into battle charged with youth and life, buoyant with energy of muscle
and nerve. Death seizes him at the noontide of life and leaves us
blindly groping for other-worldly compensation.
The present war is being fought against a background of questions which
cannot be suppressed by discipline or the mere fulfilment of patriotic
duty. The old acceptance of the social order is passing away. The old
acceptance of religious nescience is passing away; there is a new
impatience to reach the foundation of things, a popular clamour for
explanation of the riddles of life. Out of the decivilizing forces of
war, its tumult and wreckage, there emerges a new quest for truth.
Simple souls are troubled with a warlike desire for evidence of
immortality. The parson's exhortations to live by faith and unreasoning
acceptance of ecclesiastical doctrine fall on inattentive ears. "There
is a shocking recrudescence of superstition and devil-worship," said a
clergyman to me the other day; "people consult fraudulent mediums and
fortune-tellers."