‘A gentle shock of mild surpriseHas carried far into his heart the voiceOf mountain torrents; or the visible sceneWould enter unawares into his mindWith all its solemn imagery....’
‘A gentle shock of mild surpriseHas carried far into his heart the voiceOf mountain torrents; or the visible sceneWould enter unawares into his mindWith all its solemn imagery....’
These moments, he will tell you, are an end in themselves, and not pursued for any moral strengthening of our social fibre for fighting the battles of life. Only in isolation from his fellows, from science, and from the interference of intelligence, when he adopts a ‘wise passivity’ of mere sensation, is this sense of fellowship granted him; and among the peaks, under the spell of his rhythmical bodily movements, he and the silent mountains stand face to face, as pure living sensation and lifeless matter, and each finds in the other a mysterious completion.
This is the creed he professes; but how rarely comes one who can practise it or achieve its enjoyment. Nearly all indeed share in some degree this passion for fellowship; nearly all live their lives asmuch by places as by people. The contrast is put by Wordsworth in one of the poems on the Naming of Places, that called ‘Joanna’s rock’:—
‘Amid the smoke of cities did you passThe time of early youth; and there you learned,From years of quiet industry, to loveThe living beings by your own firesideWith such a strong devotion, that your heartIs slow towards the sympathies of themWho look upon the hills with tenderness,And make dear friendships with the streams and groves.’
‘Amid the smoke of cities did you passThe time of early youth; and there you learned,From years of quiet industry, to loveThe living beings by your own firesideWith such a strong devotion, that your heartIs slow towards the sympathies of themWho look upon the hills with tenderness,And make dear friendships with the streams and groves.’
They are the extremes: Joanna cannot understand the frame of mind at all; Wordsworth is, in this mood, the perfect example of the life lived in the fellowship of inanimate things.
But to few is the fellowship thus whole-heartedly given. For this it is necessary to be a true æsthete (using the word in an unprejudiced sense), so that in the one indivisible act of seeing, the one great moment, a whole message is revealed. But life refuses to divide itself into such moments; we cannot isolate ourselves either from the continuity of the past or the community of the present.Most men move on a plain of less concentration and greater self-consciousness, where the act of seeing inevitably includes and leads up to reflection and analysis. We still have the animal and the primitive man within us, linking us to the past and the flow of time; and reason, the common gift of all men, keeps always lurking in the background. Yet we still strive after this immediacy of fellowship, but there come times when the snow-peaks and the rocks have fed our appreciation on too strong a draught, when our senses, relying on themselves alone, are over-sated, and there seems a film before our eyes, so that we are no longer ‘alive and drinking up our wonder,’ but the draught stagnates without us and turns to bitterness.
Then we must be humble, and resign our pretensions to an ‘æsthetic geography’ for one on a lower scale; we shall return to the passes, which will remain to us the emblem of a new ‘geography of the spirit’ which, instead of trying to gain all in one tremendous moment, will be content to browse uponthe myriad things which intelligence sees displayed. Even as a picture, an arrangement of lines and colours, the pass has much that the higher peaks cannot give us: the deep curve of the summit, slung between its supporting peaks, appeals to us by its grace and weakness; there is a discontinuity of colour and clearness as each bastion of the valley comes out from the curve its forerunner had hidden. But these effects are heightened and brought together by our geography; we imagine the glaciers that separated those bastions from one another; that cup at the end is perhaps the work of some other mighty glacier of the far side, piled up so high that it fell across the watershed and cut its way down; maybe there is a giant moraine, bigger than most of our English mountains, still to bear witness of it.
But it is the stream and the road which hold our imagination; the water tells us of all the powers which we know to be at work, but which our senses are too slow to perceive. Each stream is itself part of the great cycle of water, each isan agent in the mountain cycle, perpetually hurrying the actual fabric of the mountains down to the sea; their voice is never silent even on the summits; they are the lords of the peaks, moulding them slowly to new shapes, and their murmur seems to call the clouds, ‘chased by the hounding winds from distant seas,’ to come and renew their springs for a new course of the never-ending circle.
But the road takes our geography farther afield and peoples our imaginings. We have softened the immediacy of our ‘æsthetic geography’ by the aid of intelligence; the road softens it by bringing in humankind to stand with us facing the gulf between the living and the inanimate. As the water alters our view of the mountains by bringing to light the importance of time, so does the road alter our view of ourselves. As we look up a pass from below, the view of the road appearing and vanishing round the folds of the valley brings to us two pictures of men. Winding away from us up to the skyline goes the pilgrim’s progress, the slow toiling advance upwards to gain theview of things not seen. Many there are, but few together; some on side-tracks; some on the old steep road with its rough stones now overgrown, more on the new smooth driving road which turns about so that they can take their eyes from the goal; some even making a path for themselves, either above on the hillside, steering for some nearer gap on the skyline, which does not cross the main watershed; others below the road, toiling painfully along the stream-bed. And each in turn we see reach the summit and disappear; we cannot see what they see, nor even the expression of their faces as they confront the other side.
But the same valley can be the setting for another picture: down from the top there seem to come great processions, gay like Benozzo Gozzoli’s ‘Procession of the Magi,’ many leagues long and all ordered and together, though part is hidden in the green woods, part in the valley’s folds. We seem to take our place in the upward journey, and soon it will be our turn to wonder what new thing we shall see beyond the barrier. Perhapsencompassing mists will give place suddenly at the summit to a sunny prospect of some great cathedral range, to take our place in one of those processions and descend to the richness of an Italian land. Or, if it is on the far side that the mists have gathered, and the gateway of the pass is barred by a deep grey veil of nothingness, at least the mists will lift high enough to show the two gentle arms of our mother earth descending to where we are, strong and lit by a strange internal light, ready to hold us up as we take the last step into the grey, where we shall see no more.
Notmuch more than a hundred years ago a tourist remarked that he found the Scottish hills ‘most of all disgusting when the heather was in bloom.’ There is something very taking about this phrase. It was, of course, a commonplace of the eighteenth century to feel aversion, awe, horror, even hatred for mountains, but the epithet ‘disgusting’ is a refinement of abuse. The Scottish hills failed to arouse any of the deeper emotions in this gentleman—it would have been a compliment to them to suggest they could. They merely filled him with disgust, and the feeling was aggravated by the sight of a profusion of flowers of an unpleasant purple colour.
We have no reason to suppose that the author of this judgment was deficient intaste or sensibility according to the standards of his time. We may credit him with a happy turn for expression, but not with any originality of view. The resulting reflections are rather surprising. It seems natural that men should once have looked on the Alps with horror and repulsion. They were the abode of storms and killing cold and avalanches, and stood for all the forces of nature which war most fiercely against man. But the British hills never stood for the negation of life. At the worst they were only waste land, unreclaimed from nature. So there seems to be something perversely utilitarian in the man who could observe their soft colours and graceful outlines with nothing but disgust. But the perversity—if perversity is a fair name for the æsthetic attitude in disagreement with our own—belonged to the age and not to the man. To-day, no doubt, he would have quoted descriptive poetry with the loudest, and mountain literature would have lost an adjective.
A generation or two later came the first real explorers of our hills, and leftbehind them a record of their sensations in language which makes very curious reading nowadays. It is difficult to recognise in their precipices the gentle slopes of Skiddaw and Helvellyn. We cannot see things through their eyes. It is easy to laugh at their extravagant expressions, but perhaps after all theirs was the Golden Age of English Mountaineering. They left the valleys where men dwell with the adventurous expectation of voyagers on uncharted seas. As they rose step by step they became conscious, as never before, of towering height and unplumbed depth. And when they went home and told the tale of their adventures, there was no unimpressionable critic to accuse them of exaggerating the height here or the angle of inclination there.
However, this happy period was short-lived. With the exploration of the higher Alps mountaineering terms began to acquire a new meaning. Only quite steep slopes were now called precipices, and words like ‘perpendicular’ began to have a definite objective meaning. British hills were no longer regarded as toomountainous to climb. Instead, they were dismissed as not mountainous enough to be worth climbing. But this, too, was only a phase, which passed away in its turn as the feeling for mountains became more general. Men began to look in their home hills for something at least of that which they found in the Alps, and they were not disappointed. Indeed, the mountain feeling became at last so little limited that the mountain lover could find in every hill some realisation of his longings, and he might say, with a perversion of the old tag about humanity: ‘I am a man; all that is of the mountains I count akin to myself.’
Is this, too, only a phase? A great mountaineer, writing not so very long ago, gave it as his opinion that the sport of mountaineering in the Alps was already on the decline. He may not have been right—surely he cannot have been right. But if even the high Alps are in danger of vulgarisation, what may not be the fate of our British hills? The great god Pan is very gracious to his worshippers, but not when they come incrowds. One by one his haunts are discovered and laid bare, his chosen sanctuaries are called by uncouth names, even his beloved fennel is catalogued in the list of mountain flora. The oreads of to-day, if there were any, would be pointed out like chamois, and would probably suffer the common fate of everything which is rare and beautiful.
This is not an unduly pessimistic picture. In fact, it might stand as a description of what has actually happened in one range of hills which suffers from too great popularity—the mountains of Harz. The Germans are genuine lovers of mountains, but there is something prosaically thorough about their Schwärmerei. Like the well-informed and communicative frequenter of picture galleries, they are determined to miss nothing themselves, and to see that the other visitors miss nothing either. And so all well-behaved travellers in the Harz walk along well-kept paths, sit down on rustic benches, are admonished by notice-boards when to admire the view, and are provided at suitableintervals with the means of drinking beer and coffee. Nothing is wanting—not even the professional jodeler. And yet Nature is greater than German officialdom, and the country refuses to be entirely spoilt. For all the time, though no one enters them, long miles of forest stretch away on either side of the crowded paths; not mere woods, which you can cross in an hour, or an afternoon, but the original forests of all fairy-tales. They have the gloom that belongs to primeval pine-woods. Unchanging and immense, they stand to-day as they stood when they swallowed up the Roman legionaries. Somewhere among them Pan may still be sitting, out of earshot of the clink of coffee-cups, and the voice of Echo working for hire.
Of course, it is unlikely that our hills will ever fall a prey to the particular form of municipal exploitation which goes on in Germany. But the effect of familiarity may be as dangerous to the individual as that of popularity is to the mountains. We see it in the Cumberlanddalesman who has never taken the trouble to climb the hill behind his farm, and look down into the valley on the other side. Take him up with you, and he will set his eyes for the first time on half a dozen farms whose names are often on his lips, and whose inhabitants he has often met at Keswick Market or the Grasmere Games. All his life long he has taken his native hills for granted, scarcely conscious of what he felt for them. It is only when he exchanges them for the flat fields of the southern counties, or some trans-atlantic plain, that he knows himself for a highlander at heart. With us, it is true, the case is different. We go to the mountains as a refuge from the dull levels of existence. But even for us may come a day when there is no savour in our appreciation of the too familiar outlines, when our eyes are dulled and our senses blunted. For though the contrast between the artificiality of life and the peace and freedom of the hills has never been so marked as it is to-day, the step from the one to the other has never been so short. Some ofour hills have been turned into a sort of suburban playground of our northern towns, and there are times when we seem to detect the staleness of the suburbs even in the windy heights. The very easiness of access becomes a snare. Paradoxically, the contrast is sometimes lessened and not brightened, because men come with the atmosphere of the towns they have left behind still clinging to them. They come perhaps with the same friends, and discussing the same questions, that are part of their life at home. Instead of sloughing the crust of habit as they slough their city clothes, they let it overlay their sensibilities. The man in the street, introduced suddenly into a theatre at an emotional moment, sees nothing but a group of posturing actors watched by a gaping crowd. In the same way it is not all gain that men can step so quickly from the town to the mountain side. It may mean that the mountains dwindle as the distance is diminished.
We must make the most of our mountains then, and come to them in theright spirit, for they will never crush indifference with the overpowering force of fourteen thousand feet of rock and snow. And herein lies the special charm of rock-climbing. It provides the sharpest possible contrast with everyday life, and jerks the pedant out of his groove. There are only two directions in which the average Englishman of to-day can get back to the bare realities of life as a struggle of man with Nature—the mountains and the sea. Hence the futility of the common taunt against the rock-climber—that he climbs his mountain by a difficult way instead of walking up it by the easiest; the implication, of course, being that the truest philosophy of life is summed up in the categorical imperative of America—‘Get there.’ As well taunt the genuine yachtsman because he prefers to sail his boat across the Channel, not without danger and discomfort, when he might go over in the latest turbine steamer, and hardly notice that he had ever left the land. Each attempts in his own way to escape from the toils of civilisation. It is not theimpulse which is artificial and perverse, but the conditions of life which close all other avenues of escape.
It is very difficult to say how much of the joy of climbing is physical, how much æsthetic. The two sides react upon each other. Perception is at its keenest during physical exhilaration, and conversely nothing is so conducive to a sense of vital energy and well-being as the appreciation of beauty. And yet the truth of this is often unrealised. Ruskin with his reference to the greasy pole is typical of a large number of people who appear to think that because the climber’s pleasure is partly physical, contemplation can have no part in it. They say, too, that we should look at mountains as at a picture which is so hung by a thoughtful Providence that it can only be properly appreciated from the valleys where men are meant to stay. We who go closer get the perspective wrong, like the too inquisitive critic who cannot see the picture for the paint. Was Swinburne then less of a poet because it was his delight to leavethe sheltered shore and swim out into the sea, fighting its waves and matching his strength against theirs? The physical strife brings insight and understanding, instead of negating them. Only the sailor understands the sea, only the climber understands the mountains. Nor, of course, is it true that the beauty of mountains can be best appreciated from below. That is a fiction invented by the plainsman to excuse his want of enterprise. Even in the British Isles, where the secrets of the hills are not so well guarded as in the Alps, there are a hundred Scottish corries and Welsh cwms where none but the climber ever goes. The tourist who travels through Glencoe sees nothing so fine as the upper cliffs of Bidian nan Bian, or the chasms of Buchaille Etive. Spurred on by wholly unworthy motives he may struggle up the laborious southern slopes of Nevis, and buy picture postcards at the top. Under his feet the dull amorphous summit breaks down in splendid precipices to Alt a’ Mhuilinn. But he will see nothing of them exceptthe dipping foreground of flat stones. He may admire the view from the top of Scawfell, but the climber within a few hundred yards of him on the Pinnacle arête is moving in another and a more beautiful world. From across the valley Lliwedd appears as a featureless face, grand only in the sweep of its descent to Cwm Dwli. But to the climber it reveals an infinite variety of rock scenery. There is no flat foreground to detract from the sense of height. The eye looks straight across a mile of emptiness to the opposing bastions of Crib Goch.
This sense of the beauty of his surroundings can never be far from the climber’s consciousness, though sometimes, it is true, the physical side is uppermost. There is the sheer gymnastic joy that comes from the ready response of muscle and nerve to sudden need, the sense of perfect bodily fitness which the Greeks prized among the best things of life. Nowhere else does a measure of strength and skill meet with such a splendid reward as in the mountains.Down in the plains a man may live his whole life through and never know what it is to face danger which only his own efforts can defeat, to strain body and mind to the verge of absolute exhaustion. At home he can take a train if he is tired, put on a coat if he is cold. Rain suggests nothing more to him than muddy streets, or a noise on his window-pane. Wind only emphasises the comfort of his chair. He is a caricature of a man, distorted by the numberless accretions of civilisation which cover him like an unnatural growth. He pities the lion at the Zoo for his lost freedom, and lives himself in a comfortable cage of his own making. But put him down at the foot of a Cumberland gully on a stormy day. The first jet of icy water down his back will wash away the affectations and rouse the primitive man. There is no pleasure here in the feel of the wet rocks, no æsthetic delight in waterfalls or misty depths, nothing but the satisfaction of the fighting instinct which lies dormant in every one of us. The falling water attacks him like a living thing; itnumbs his hands, confuses his senses, tries to take the very heart out of him. For once in his life at least he is face to face with the forces of Nature—cold, wind, and rain. If things go badly with him, this is not a game, in which failure means nothing more than the opportunity of showing the spirit of the sportsman. There is nothing chivalrous about Nature; when she wins she presses her advantage home. The man who challenges her will find the water will fall more heavily, the cold grow more numbing, just when his own powers are on the wane. Before he is back among his sofa-cushions he may gain an insight into some simple things which are usually kept under cover in this artificial age.
But this is only a single side of rock-climbing, and not perhaps the most universally popular. There are fine-day climbers who know nothing of this paradoxical pleasure born of pain. But it is the side which is generally prominent in the winter months. In the presence of ice and snow there is more of conflict, less of communion with the hills. Manenters as an intruder, and has to make good his footing. For that reason perhaps the actual joy of achievement is more keen.
But for pleasure unalloyed there is nothing to equal a climb up difficult rock on a fine summer day. Who can describe the exhilaration that comes from the use of muscles responsive to the call, from the sense of mastery and ease in the very face of danger, from the splendid situations and wide outlook? Every faculty is at full stretch. The whole being is stimulated to the intensest appreciation of beauty in all its forms—beauty of life itself and beauty of movement, beauty of height and depth and distance. It must surely have been moments such as these that Stevenson had in mind when he prayed to the Celestial Surgeon:
‘Lord, thy most pointed pleasure takeAnd stab my spirit broad awake.’
‘Lord, thy most pointed pleasure takeAnd stab my spirit broad awake.’
Such moments are necessarily few. It is one of the limitations of mortal man that he cannot live for long upon the heights.But always and everywhere the climber is most vividly alive. There are continual appeals to so many sides of his nature that he cannot be indifferent to them all. Now one may come home to him, and now another, but at least he never falls a prey to that most deadly of all soul-diseases—apathy.
But though climbing, even in the British Isles, means all that we have said and more, far more, beside, there is just one grain of truth lurking at the bottom of what Ruskin said. To the rock-climber the pure æsthetic pleasure of contemplation comes in flashes, not in a steady glow. There is so much to distract him—the technicalities of his art, the continuous attention to details, half automatic as it may become, which alone makes climbing justifiable—even the voices and proximity of his companions. For though there is nothing discordant in the presence of sympathetic friends, the conscious introduction of the personal element must always widen the gulf between man and Nature. For that reason the climber should sometimes goalone. He should let his mind be as nearly as possible the empty cupboard of the old metaphysicians, and leave it to the mountains to make it a storehouse of impressions. They will be more true and vivid just because there are no counter influences to weaken them or crowd them out. If he would enter wholly into the spirit of the hills, let him go alone into some remote valley of the Scottish Highlands, till the last footpath vanishes and the highest bothy is left behind. Let him make his bed in the heather undisturbed by any sign of the presence of man or of his handiwork. The cold wind that comes with dawn will waken him as the first thin mists are gathering round the peaks three thousand feet above. As he climbs the steep slopes of heather in the half-light the mists roll down to meet him, till he is the only living, moving thing in a world of whiteness and silence. The heather dwindles, here and there black rock-ridges show for a moment and disappear. As in a dream he takes no count of time or distance, till at last hesteps out upon the summit and the sun meets him, shining level with his eyes. Like an ebbing tide the mists roll back towards the valleys, leaving the mountain-tops of Scotland shining clear in the brilliance of the upper air. He is alone with the hills, and stands like one initiated into a strange and beautiful mystery.
But it is of the nature of mysteries that they cannot be interpreted to those who do not know. To the unbeliever they sound like mockeries—or at the best the unmeaning fancies of ‘an idle singer of an empty day.’ Let those who are indifferent to mountains protest in the name of sanity and common sense. Perhaps the climber is to be envied his good fortune in being something more than sane.
Ina book such as this, where the University of Oxford provides the one central sun round which, planet-wise, the diverse essays revolve, each all but breaking from all connection with the rest, and only just held back by that gravitating force—in such a book, it would be a pity not to seek to make that force more strong. In what way could this be better done than by some account of Oxford climbing, where the University provides not only the spiritual background, but the very physical basis of the theme?
Then, too, there is another reason for the attempt. The art of roof-climbing, at Oxford, alas! no less than elsewhere, is in need of defenders who will speak out for her. Herself still inarticulate,she needs the good offices of any champion she can find amidst the universal enmity in which she finds herself. Poor struggling wretch, in expectation of foes, she has found them: but has been deceived, too often, in those that should have been friends.
Indigenous authority, not, perhaps, without some show of reason, though here and there one of its Argus eyes may consciously wink at the art’s clandestine or unobtrusive practice, will yet trim the vials of punitive wrath for the foolish one who is discovered. That was to be looked for; but there is hardship when brother turns on brother (big bully on baby brother); climbers there are that have the Alps for their pleasure, and are privileged in acquaintance with the princely among mountains, who yet grudge the poor stay-at-home his sincerest flattery, tell him he is to be despised for his ascents, rebuked for his foolhardiness, and chastised for his disobedience.
Poor Cinderella of Climbing! May the Prince soon come, and cast hisfavourable glance upon her. Meanwhile let it be for me to play the part of Matrimonial Agency, display and recite her charms and publish them abroad, so that perchance they may thus catch the eye of the destined Sprig of Royalty.
With forethought, knowing the fastidious taste of these gentlemen in their search for a true princess, let us recite her personal charms—the glimpses of beauty and of cold unknown secrets which even her more humble wooer may find—her beauty, which is the reward, given to a mind tense and braced by the hard labour of unwonted muscles on slippery places. Imagine a prickly ridge of the horned and perforated tiles deemed suitable for roof-trees, gained by a climb up the body of a companion, laid flat along the sloping roof. All around are stone and brick ranges, peaks which more than their Alpine counterparts deserve to be called Clocher or Tour, showing in the darkness little of their dilettante symmetry of the artificial: the deep valleysbetween filled with their rivers of light, carrying their noisy freight along: cols in the near range vouchsafing their strange glimpses of the more distant: beneath, a wide and gloomy desert, with here and there lamp-posts for oases of our symbol of mountain-water.
Throughout, a jump in nearness to the stars, and a fellow-tingling unwarranted by a bare forty-feet approximation to them. By our own act we are cut off from men: the thickness of a single wall, if but it be the outer house-wall, dispossesses us of our humanity, and gives back our lost kinship with the stars.
Peak and col, valley, river, and pass—all are there: but the real, broad-sustaining Alps do not gape suddenly to a show of the imagined trolls of our story-books at work beneath, and full of unintelligible hatred against ourselves. While here, on our tile-summits and pipe-couloirs, we know the trolls for a reality, their life the very negation of the fount of our new spirit gained in the traverse from plastered side to plainof a wall; the rousing of their incomprehensible rage leading to pursuit and loss of our world.
Signs of their inhabitance are all around us: vents, traps for the feet, showing signs of the furnaces where they are ever at labour to fuse the dead message of the written page into living matter of a brain for the breathing hole of some typho of a senseless machine, whose groans are chained to the production of sweetest music in College organ-pipes; sudden lights flashed out by one of the trolls, to the displaying of a pair of legs spider-wise across the entrance to his lair, or the painted globe sphering the radiance shed upon the small-hourly labours of the troll of highest Matterhorn.
And yet the peril of them is greater in imagination than in reality—dazzled by the light in which he loves to bathe himself, he cannot see the wanderer on the heights, who may dance unobserved in the view of public streets. The troll-kind are like some power able to shake the earth, and to overwhelmlife when the time comes, but now only manifesting a greater grandeur to the eyes—volcano, flame, or flood: engrossed in their own subterranean labours, they give scarce a thought to us, and we may even mock at them from without; discover yourself, however, and he becomes the arch-enemy, like the all-powerful earth-force, ready to annihilate those whom it supports, and yet some evil power they have had upon the Climber—they have lured him to desist from praises of his lady, and to run off in disquisitions upon their ugly selves. Thwart them, Climber, and return to your Princess! She has granted Beauties—she does not deny Adventures: no—you may meet with strange ones on the tops—unexpected sights that would lose half their strangeness if they had been known and sought.
One befell upon a chapel—that chapel whose top is adorned with the four symbolic figures known to common repute as Faith, Hope, Charity, and Mathematics. To the Climber they are rather Spirits of the Heights, beckoninghim on with enticement of gesture, expression still alluring spite of that strange emaciation, that attrition of feature given to them in their high desolate realm by the unruly Elements....
The chapel—if you will allow a short excursus—is a good climb; it is best taken from the west; the heights once gained, there follows a spread-eagle traverse on a ledge past the clock (to resist setting its hands at sixes and sevens—if that metaphor be allowed—is hard). Thirty feet below are the flag-stones of the quad; next time you pass beneath the chapel arch, think of slow midnight figures shuffling along that narrow ledge above, feeling with anxious feet for the unseen, unpleasant wires, ridges, and minor anfractuosities with which it is beset.
From the ledge there is a press-up (without holds) on to the balustrade: what may be called the shoulder is now reached. The final pitch, a very interesting eastward-facing pipe, is left to climb: and then there we are in thepure air of truth with Mathematics and the rest of them.
Seldom is there space on summits for an encounter with Adventure. Here, however, a flat-topped balustrade runs round the top; this, on a second visit, we thought should be perambulated, and perambulation was in progress when suddenly the leader stopped short—another step and he would have been plunged in a crevasse. True, it was so narrow that he could not have fallen past his arms; but then this was none of your smooth cold ice-cracks. It belonged to the volcano rather than the glacier—a square pipe leading down twistingly to red-hot fires below. Lucky for him he had not stepped unwarily, now to be wedged in it, his helpless body fast, suffering a double and simultaneous metamorphosis, into frozen mutton above, smoked ham below.
It was only a chimney really, but you have no idea how curious a chimney looks from above, especially a big square one like this, without vestige of chimney-pot, and edge flush with the balustrade inthe centre of which it had taken it into its head to debauch. And then its position, thus in the very chapel—that was strange. With the poet we asked:
‘What occupation do you here pursue?This is a lonesome place for one like you’;
‘What occupation do you here pursue?This is a lonesome place for one like you’;
but we got no answer—the embers did not even give one ‘flash of mild surprise,’ and we never knew what manner of man was warmed at the blaze we had seen dying.
So much for Adventure; now let us seek Romance.
Wadham Gardens are beautiful—but usually only to be seen as setting to a flower show, to the accompaniment of a band, and upon payment of a shilling. The Climber sees them free of charge, in their own self-sufficient beauty (not decreased by the moonlight), and solitary. Even the owls are almost silent—birds of the twilight more than of the midnight. The squirrels (for there are still squirrels, even here, far within the brick-and-mortar girdle)—they are long asleep. The Warden is safe in bed. The Climber, who is here partly for the garden’s sake,partly to prospect for a route up the College, swishes through the soaking grass along by the shadow of the pines and cedars. Ha!—‘Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?’—What is that dark form that he sees ‘cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green’? The Climber, cautiously approaching, greets with joy a hedge-pig (hedgehog, called by the general name—illogical and less euphonious). He is very tame; even permits a finger to stroke the only strokeable part of him, his soft furry stomach, before rolling up into a pin-cushion. Leaving him thus defensive and spherical, the Climber passes on, only by the next tree to find another; and the performance is repeated.
No route was found that night; but as in the Alps not seldom the off-day in the upland valley brings with birds and flowers a new and equal joy with that of the summits, so the moon-lit hedge-pigs of Wadham touched a chord of romance all their own, and vivified that night with as strong a memory as any hard-won roof-tree could have done.
But it is not always through such moon-lit Edens that the Climber passes; sometimes it is the fierce flames of the Cities of the Plain.
Trinity (to make a necessary digression) has a roof, which, once reached, is mostly walking. It has also a quad with gravel paving, an absence of Bodleian libraries in close propinquity, and the usual complement of chairs. In addition, it sometimes makes six bumps. After one of those occasions it was therefore not unexpected when the Climber, perambulating the Trinity leads, saw beyond the further roof-tree Vesuvius in full eruption—red smoke in a whirling column, full of blazing sparks sailing up and off on the wind. Crawling up the roof-tree and looking over, the Climber saw a sight, not unfamiliar in itself, but strange when viewed from such a viewpoint, and with such detachment. A bit of hell was here on earth. Devils in deshabille were dancing round a flaming pyre, screaming, with shrieking laughter. Others, issuing from the dark doors round the prison-like yard, brought with them offerings for the fire. The iron gates thatbarred the further side of the square from the night beyond were reminders that none might pass out from this pit: ‘Lasciate ogni speranza’ was doubtless inscribed upon their outer face. It was a relief to find that the servers of the flames brought no writhing Spirits of the Damned, but mere inanimate combustibles.
Well might the Climber lie there gazing till the flames were sinking on to the ember-pile, and the corybantic Zoroastrian bacchanals (for all the three rituals they combined) had begun to slink off to their cells.
To ease stiff limbs, the chapel was taken on the homeward way; and from its top the final flare was seen—a last great blaze, streamers of burning paper floating eastwards away (scaring, no doubt, Eden’s nocturnal browsers), showers of sparks, and then all sinking to a mere flicker in the quiet night. And so to bed.
The Climber can thus penetrate into secret places, see strange sights, have familiar ones for him transmogrified.But this is not all. Profit is combined with pleasure. In an emergency, how useful he can prove.
He may perhaps be allowed to relate a case in point: One Lent Term, after a heavy fall of snow, the inmates of a certain College, which shall be nameless, finding the snow hang heavy on their feet, took it into their heads to take it into their hands, and thence dispatched it as a challenge through the windows of their neighbour College—through the very windows once source of light to the famous Galetti (gone down to posterity, by one of Clio’s whims, with name distorted almost out of recognition). After much shouting and the filling of the historic chamber with snow, the challenge was taken up.
I am no Homer to describe the combat, nor were I one, would this be the place to do so....
Long had they struggled, when there arrived on the field a messenger. His message, delivered with more jocularity than he would have exhibited in Greek drama, was to the effect that the Deanhad been peeping through some alleyway, had seen that any direct interference was useless, and had resorted to the method of blockade. All the gates were shut, and the prophets of Baal were to be mercilessly dealt with. ‘Que faire’? Hostilities ceased; earth became united in its opposition to Olympus. Racked brains gave birth to hasty plans—all proved abortive, till suddenly one—a full-armoured Minerva—flashed from its parent’s engendering lead. ‘The Climber, the Climber!’ was all the cry. Soon he appeared, triumphantly escorted, and bearing in his arms his rope. One end of this went through the window (that window, serving more often for the passage of insults, not wholly unaccompanied by injuries, now consecrated to pacific use), and was grasped within by six strong men. The other end became a loop, into which the foot of one of the aliens was inserted. No sooner this, than, hey presto! a pull by the six, and, an alien no longer, he was clinging to his own country’s boundary—the window-sill. No Customs examinationor landing formalities—other stalwarts gripped him, and he disappeared into the bowels of his fatherland, a pair of legs for an instant waving farewell to his late enemies.
This was repeated more than a score of times, till at length not one remained for the cunning Dean and his unwreaked vengeance. Barred gates, alert porters, grinning scouts, confidently waiting dons:—who was the instrument to bring them all to nought?—the Climber!
This much for its use to others. Rich use to the Climber himself it has too. Not only as a way out of the prosaic world of streets and staircases into another where for a glorious dusky hour he may feel free, alone with himself, the night, and active limbs, but also as a true training for the more grave realities of nobler peaks in other lands. General exercise for arms (lying sadly fallow if only the ordinary run of games be followed), and back and legs—that is something; but more special practice is given in lightness of balancing and in training a dizzy head. Cat-soft feet are needed there wheretell-tale tiles are crossed, where dons abound, and where sharp-hearing porters lurk. Light, even-pulling arms alone can with safety grip frail roof-trees, tiles, or chimney-pots. Then, in reality, it is not common to be above precipices of the true vertical: here in the comfortable city they are never to be avoided. It is physically no doubt as easy to step across above a plumb drop than where the ground is sloping; but however steep the slope, there is some comfort in it for the untrained head, while every crumb of it drops away down the perpendicular.
Soon, however, under necessity’s spell, the reluctant cerebellum (where, I am told, our balance-bump is to be found) becomes used to the smooth uncompromising walls, and the Climber can sally qualmless forth to tackle Dolomites or Cumberland climbs.
Beauty, Romance, Adventure; Help to others; Use, both for mind and body, to oneself: I hope the Climber has said enough to show our Cinderella forth for What she really is. And, gentle reader,you will not grumble if her champion, for reasons not obscure, can display no betraying blazon on his shield. Having championed his fair, and been acclaimed victor in the lists, he rides triumphant forth to kneel before his sovran liege—the British Public. ‘What is your name, that I may honour you?’ ‘Sire, if you will permit me, I will present you with my card.’ Which done, he vanishes, leaving not a wrack behind save the white pasteboard with the two words upon it:
ΑΝΩΝΥΜΟΣ ΤΙΣ
‘Fire made them, earth clothed them, man found them,Our playmates the princes of hills,Last uttered of time, and love-fashioned,Of a fullness of knowledge impassionedFor freedom: boy-hearts, royal wills,Sun nursed them, wind taught them, frost crowned them.Light o’er them, life with them, peace round them,They have waited in masterless strengthFor the moment of mortal awaking,When bright on new vision upbreakingFar beacons of freedom, at lengthArt saw them, hope sought them, youth found them.’Geoffrey Winthrop Young.
‘Fire made them, earth clothed them, man found them,Our playmates the princes of hills,Last uttered of time, and love-fashioned,Of a fullness of knowledge impassionedFor freedom: boy-hearts, royal wills,Sun nursed them, wind taught them, frost crowned them.
Light o’er them, life with them, peace round them,They have waited in masterless strengthFor the moment of mortal awaking,When bright on new vision upbreakingFar beacons of freedom, at lengthArt saw them, hope sought them, youth found them.’Geoffrey Winthrop Young.
Fewhaunters of the Alps can have altogether escaped the dreary ceremonies in some mountain Tabernacle, manufactured perhaps from a drawing-room whose windows reveal malicious glimpses of the snows that suggest a more acceptable service. Few but would recognise the discourse meandering onfrom the inevitable text, that cry of the soul to great hills afar, which constant quotation cannot wholly mar, to the final application which asserts that the sojourn among the mountains is only given that, fortified in soul and body, we may return to the battle of life. To some of us this pious reflection must appear irredeemably vulgar. Those moments on the hills when the pulses of life seem quickened with new fire are given for the sake, and for the sake alone, of the moments themselves. To adapt them to didactic disquisition is to degrade the chief things of the ancient mountains. For the hills are no mere nursing-home to recuperate after the drudgery of the plains. Those that climb to advance science, to surpass records, to improve their digestion miss the real appeal. For we deserve or we do not deserve the mountains according as we regard them as an end in themselves or as a means to an end.
An apology has already been offered in the Introduction for a subjective treatment of mountains. Whether the mountainthat we loved is an entity independent of man is a question that may be left to philosophers to discuss. Man may or may not be the measure of all things, but to some extent every man undoubtedly fashions Nature in the mould of his own beliefs. Every mountain lover brings something new to the common worship: for each of us spells out a different syllable in the universal message of the hills. So these pages contain an attempt to analyse one aspect of the mountains, that aspect which is caught in childhood and youth.
The thread that binds the scattered memories of seventeen summers and eleven winters in the Alps is the half-belief that in some sense the mountains are not only so many tons of rock and ice, that they are something more than the ruins of chaos, and possess an individuality elusive but none the less very real. In an uninspired age when a dogmatic Christianity was pitted against an even more dogmatic Rationalism, this belief in a mountain soul found its most poetic expression in an unsuspectedquarter. Leslie Stephen would have smiled grimly at any attempt to read more than a figurative meaning into certain passages ofThe Alps in Winter; but no one can read that lofty confession of an agnostic’s faith without feeling that it is this rather than the essay of that name which constitutes the trueAgnostic’s Apology. Naturalism could not resist the mute appeal of ‘those mighty monuments of a bygone age ... to which in spite of all reason it is impossible not to attribute some shadowy personality.’ And there is the ring of something more than fantasy in the final words: ‘Their voice is mystic and has found discordant interpreters, but to me at least it speaks in tones at once more simple and more awe-inspiring than that of any mortal teacher.’
What the heart feels to-day, philosophy may assume to-morrow. It would be easy to find a further illustration in Fechner’s great vision of the Earth Soul; easy but unprofitable, for no faith, least of all a fragileAberglaubesuch as this, can stand the strain of a philosophicformula. This sense of a conscious personality in Nature is most powerful in childhood. I do not pretend that our childhood peopled its surroundings with fairies, goblins, and similar stage supers. Nor shall I add to the accumulations of mischievous nonsense that have become fashionable at a time when literature delights, without understanding, to dabble in the curious psychology of childhood. The modern conception of the child seems oddly mistaken. He is pictured as a sexless cherub trailing clouds of moral glory from a prenatal paradise. But the child is non-moral, and only acquires with difficulty and growth the conventional ethics of his elders. The natural child is cruel with the cruelty that comes from an absence of experience of pain. Without experience his imagination has nothing to build on, for, as that genial cynic Hobbes remarks, ‘Pity is the imagining unto oneself of a woe.’ The modern child and the mediæval man have much in common. The imagination of both is at once vivid and restricted. From thissprings the experimental cruelty as well as that intense joy of life equally characteristic of the age of childhood and of the Middle Ages. The world of the fifteenth century was narrower, but within its restricted boundaries far richer in romantic possibilities than the world as it now exists for the ‘grown-ups.’ For all but the child the dog-headed men have had their day. So the narrow limits that bounded our wanderings in those early Grindelwald summers contained a world instinct with an intangible romance that the years have never expelled.
My first distinct mountain memory is that of watching at the age of four Grindelwald and our temporary home in flames. An aunt tried to banish the terrifying spectacle by a handkerchief round my eyes, a needless precaution. As a proper child I was fascinated by the prospect of vicarious emotion, and the possibility of some fellow-creature roasting in the flames added interest to the drama. But it was not Grindelwald in flames, it was the ruthless indifference of the Eiger insolently preening its snows in theblood-red haze of the catastrophe that really gripped me with fear. The mountains bind us by their very superiority to suffering. The unrelenting callousness that hurls the boulders down the gully in which we are pinned appeals to our primitive imaginations. ‘The attitude of the creature towards his Creator,’ said Newman, ‘should be one of abject submission.’ ‘Not abject,’ replied some Anglican divine, ‘respectful.’ ‘Not submission,’ says the mountaineer, ‘resistance.’ Analyse the peculiar appeal of some stern struggle against a mountain stronghold, and it is this sentiment that is most prominent. Conflict without animosity makes the strongest demand on the fighting instinct and the faculty for worship. Like children we like to see how far we can go. We learn to honour the reserve of strength that is not exerted against us and of beauty that we cannot overcome.