Not much more than a hundred years ago a tourist remarked that he found the Scottish hills ‘most of all disgusting when the heather was in bloom.’ There is something very taking about this phrase. It was, of course, a commonplace of the eighteenth century to feel aversion, awe, horror, even hatred for mountains, but the epithet ‘disgusting’ is a refinement of abuse. The Scottish hills failed to arouse any of the deeper emotions in this gentleman—it would have been a compliment to them to suggest they could. They merely filled him with disgust, and the feeling was aggravated by the sight of a profusion of flowers of an unpleasant purple colour.

We have no reason to suppose that the author of this judgment was deficient in taste or sensibility according to the standards of his time. We may credit him with a happy turn for expression, but not with any originality of view. The resulting reflections are rather surprising. It seems natural that men should once have looked on the Alps with horror and repulsion. They were the abode of storms and killing cold and avalanches, and stood for all the forces of nature which war most fiercely against man. But the British hills never stood for the negation of life. At the worst they were only waste land, unreclaimed from nature. So there seems to be something perversely utilitarian in the man who could observe their soft colours and graceful outlines with nothing but disgust. But the perversity—if perversity is a fair name for the Æsthetic attitude in disagreement with our own—belonged to the age and not to the man. To-day, no doubt, he would have quoted descriptive poetry with the loudest, and mountain literature would have lost an adjective.

A generation or two later came the first real explorers of our hills, and left behind them a record of their sensations in language which makes very curious reading nowadays. It is difficult to recognise in their precipices the gentle slopes of Skiddaw and Helvellyn. We cannot see things through their eyes. It is easy to laugh at their extravagant expressions, but perhaps after all theirs was the Golden Age of English Mountaineering. They left the valleys where men dwell with the adventurous expectation of voyagers on uncharted seas. As they rose step by step they became conscious, as never before, of towering height and unplumbed depth. And when they went home and told the tale of their adventures, there was no unimpressionable critic to accuse them of exaggerating the height here or the angle of inclination there.

However, this happy period was short-lived. With the exploration of the higher Alps mountaineering terms began to acquire a new meaning. Only quite steep slopes were now called precipices, and words like ‘perpendicular’ began to have a definite objective meaning. British hills were no longer regarded as too mountainous to climb. Instead, they were dismissed as not mountainous enough to be worth climbing. But this, too, was only a phase, which passed away in its turn as the feeling for mountains became more general. Men began to look in their home hills for something at least of that which they found in the Alps, and they were not disappointed. Indeed, the mountain feeling became at last so little limited that the mountain lover could find in every hill some realisation of his longings, and he might say, with a perversion of the old tag about humanity: ‘I am a man; all that is of the mountains I count akin to myself.’

Is this, too, only a phase? A great mountaineer, writing not so very long ago, gave it as his opinion that the sport of mountaineering in the Alps was already on the decline. He may not have been right—surely he cannot have been right. But if even the high Alps are in danger of vulgarisation, what may not be the fate of our British hills? The great god Pan is very gracious to his worshippers, but not when they come in crowds. One by one his haunts are discovered and laid bare, his chosen sanctuaries are called by uncouth names, even his beloved fennel is catalogued in the list of mountain flora. The oreads of to-day, if there were any, would be pointed out like chamois, and would probably suffer the common fate of everything which is rare and beautiful.

This is not an unduly pessimistic picture. In fact, it might stand as a description of what has actually happened in one range of hills which suffers from too great popularity—the mountains of Harz. The Germans are genuine lovers of mountains, but there is something prosaically thorough about their SchwÄrmerei. Like the well-informed and communicative frequenter of picture galleries, they are determined to miss nothing themselves, and to see that the other visitors miss nothing either. And so all well-behaved travellers in the Harz walk along well-kept paths, sit down on rustic benches, are admonished by notice-boards when to admire the view, and are provided at suitable intervals with the means of drinking beer and coffee. Nothing is wanting—not even the professional jodeler. And yet Nature is greater than German officialdom, and the country refuses to be entirely spoilt. For all the time, though no one enters them, long miles of forest stretch away on either side of the crowded paths; not mere woods, which you can cross in an hour, or an afternoon, but the original forests of all fairy-tales. They have the gloom that belongs to primeval pine-woods. Unchanging and immense, they stand to-day as they stood when they swallowed up the Roman legionaries. Somewhere among them Pan may still be sitting, out of earshot of the clink of coffee-cups, and the voice of Echo working for hire.

Of course, it is unlikely that our hills will ever fall a prey to the particular form of municipal exploitation which goes on in Germany. But the effect of familiarity may be as dangerous to the individual as that of popularity is to the mountains. We see it in the Cumberland dalesman who has never taken the trouble to climb the hill behind his farm, and look down into the valley on the other side. Take him up with you, and he will set his eyes for the first time on half a dozen farms whose names are often on his lips, and whose inhabitants he has often met at Keswick Market or the Grasmere Games. All his life long he has taken his native hills for granted, scarcely conscious of what he felt for them. It is only when he exchanges them for the flat fields of the southern counties, or some trans-atlantic plain, that he knows himself for a highlander at heart. With us, it is true, the case is different. We go to the mountains as a refuge from the dull levels of existence. But even for us may come a day when there is no savour in our appreciation of the too familiar outlines, when our eyes are dulled and our senses blunted. For though the contrast between the artificiality of life and the peace and freedom of the hills has never been so marked as it is to-day, the step from the one to the other has never been so short. Some of our hills have been turned into a sort of suburban playground of our northern towns, and there are times when we seem to detect the staleness of the suburbs even in the windy heights. The very easiness of access becomes a snare. Paradoxically, the contrast is sometimes lessened and not brightened, because men come with the atmosphere of the towns they have left behind still clinging to them. They come perhaps with the same friends, and discussing the same questions, that are part of their life at home. Instead of sloughing the crust of habit as they slough their city clothes, they let it overlay their sensibilities. The man in the street, introduced suddenly into a theatre at an emotional moment, sees nothing but a group of posturing actors watched by a gaping crowd. In the same way it is not all gain that men can step so quickly from the town to the mountain side. It may mean that the mountains dwindle as the distance is diminished.

We must make the most of our mountains then, and come to them in the right spirit, for they will never crush indifference with the overpowering force of fourteen thousand feet of rock and snow. And herein lies the special charm of rock-climbing. It provides the sharpest possible contrast with everyday life, and jerks the pedant out of his groove. There are only two directions in which the average Englishman of to-day can get back to the bare realities of life as a struggle of man with Nature—the mountains and the sea. Hence the futility of the common taunt against the rock-climber—that he climbs his mountain by a difficult way instead of walking up it by the easiest; the implication, of course, being that the truest philosophy of life is summed up in the categorical imperative of America—‘Get there.’ As well taunt the genuine yachtsman because he prefers to sail his boat across the Channel, not without danger and discomfort, when he might go over in the latest turbine steamer, and hardly notice that he had ever left the land. Each attempts in his own way to escape from the toils of civilisation. It is not the impulse which is artificial and perverse, but the conditions of life which close all other avenues of escape.

It is very difficult to say how much of the joy of climbing is physical, how much Æsthetic. The two sides react upon each other. Perception is at its keenest during physical exhilaration, and conversely nothing is so conducive to a sense of vital energy and well-being as the appreciation of beauty. And yet the truth of this is often unrealised. Ruskin with his reference to the greasy pole is typical of a large number of people who appear to think that because the climber’s pleasure is partly physical, contemplation can have no part in it. They say, too, that we should look at mountains as at a picture which is so hung by a thoughtful Providence that it can only be properly appreciated from the valleys where men are meant to stay. We who go closer get the perspective wrong, like the too inquisitive critic who cannot see the picture for the paint. Was Swinburne then less of a poet because it was his delight to leave the sheltered shore and swim out into the sea, fighting its waves and matching his strength against theirs? The physical strife brings insight and understanding, instead of negating them. Only the sailor understands the sea, only the climber understands the mountains. Nor, of course, is it true that the beauty of mountains can be best appreciated from below. That is a fiction invented by the plainsman to excuse his want of enterprise. Even in the British Isles, where the secrets of the hills are not so well guarded as in the Alps, there are a hundred Scottish corries and Welsh cwms where none but the climber ever goes. The tourist who travels through Glencoe sees nothing so fine as the upper cliffs of Bidian nan Bian, or the chasms of Buchaille Etive. Spurred on by wholly unworthy motives he may struggle up the laborious southern slopes of Nevis, and buy picture postcards at the top. Under his feet the dull amorphous summit breaks down in splendid precipices to Alt a’ Mhuilinn. But he will see nothing of them except the dipping foreground of flat stones. He may admire the view from the top of Scawfell, but the climber within a few hundred yards of him on the Pinnacle arÊte is moving in another and a more beautiful world. From across the valley Lliwedd appears as a featureless face, grand only in the sweep of its descent to Cwm Dwli. But to the climber it reveals an infinite variety of rock scenery. There is no flat foreground to detract from the sense of height. The eye looks straight across a mile of emptiness to the opposing bastions of Crib Goch.

This sense of the beauty of his surroundings can never be far from the climber’s consciousness, though sometimes, it is true, the physical side is uppermost. There is the sheer gymnastic joy that comes from the ready response of muscle and nerve to sudden need, the sense of perfect bodily fitness which the Greeks prized among the best things of life. Nowhere else does a measure of strength and skill meet with such a splendid reward as in the mountains. Down in the plains a man may live his whole life through and never know what it is to face danger which only his own efforts can defeat, to strain body and mind to the verge of absolute exhaustion. At home he can take a train if he is tired, put on a coat if he is cold. Rain suggests nothing more to him than muddy streets, or a noise on his window-pane. Wind only emphasises the comfort of his chair. He is a caricature of a man, distorted by the numberless accretions of civilisation which cover him like an unnatural growth. He pities the lion at the Zoo for his lost freedom, and lives himself in a comfortable cage of his own making. But put him down at the foot of a Cumberland gully on a stormy day. The first jet of icy water down his back will wash away the affectations and rouse the primitive man. There is no pleasure here in the feel of the wet rocks, no Æsthetic delight in waterfalls or misty depths, nothing but the satisfaction of the fighting instinct which lies dormant in every one of us. The falling water attacks him like a living thing; it numbs his hands, confuses his senses, tries to take the very heart out of him. For once in his life at least he is face to face with the forces of Nature—cold, wind, and rain. If things go badly with him, this is not a game, in which failure means nothing more than the opportunity of showing the spirit of the sportsman. There is nothing chivalrous about Nature; when she wins she presses her advantage home. The man who challenges her will find the water will fall more heavily, the cold grow more numbing, just when his own powers are on the wane. Before he is back among his sofa-cushions he may gain an insight into some simple things which are usually kept under cover in this artificial age.

But this is only a single side of rock-climbing, and not perhaps the most universally popular. There are fine-day climbers who know nothing of this paradoxical pleasure born of pain. But it is the side which is generally prominent in the winter months. In the presence of ice and snow there is more of conflict, less of communion with the hills. Man enters as an intruder, and has to make good his footing. For that reason perhaps the actual joy of achievement is more keen.

But for pleasure unalloyed there is nothing to equal a climb up difficult rock on a fine summer day. Who can describe the exhilaration that comes from the use of muscles responsive to the call, from the sense of mastery and ease in the very face of danger, from the splendid situations and wide outlook? Every faculty is at full stretch. The whole being is stimulated to the intensest appreciation of beauty in all its forms—beauty of life itself and beauty of movement, beauty of height and depth and distance. It must surely have been moments such as these that Stevenson had in mind when he prayed to the Celestial Surgeon:

Such moments are necessarily few. It is one of the limitations of mortal man that he cannot live for long upon the heights. But always and everywhere the climber is most vividly alive. There are continual appeals to so many sides of his nature that he cannot be indifferent to them all. Now one may come home to him, and now another, but at least he never falls a prey to that most deadly of all soul-diseases—apathy.

But though climbing, even in the British Isles, means all that we have said and more, far more, beside, there is just one grain of truth lurking at the bottom of what Ruskin said. To the rock-climber the pure Æsthetic pleasure of contemplation comes in flashes, not in a steady glow. There is so much to distract him—the technicalities of his art, the continuous attention to details, half automatic as it may become, which alone makes climbing justifiable—even the voices and proximity of his companions. For though there is nothing discordant in the presence of sympathetic friends, the conscious introduction of the personal element must always widen the gulf between man and Nature. For that reason the climber should sometimes go alone. He should let his mind be as nearly as possible the empty cupboard of the old metaphysicians, and leave it to the mountains to make it a storehouse of impressions. They will be more true and vivid just because there are no counter influences to weaken them or crowd them out. If he would enter wholly into the spirit of the hills, let him go alone into some remote valley of the Scottish Highlands, till the last footpath vanishes and the highest bothy is left behind. Let him make his bed in the heather undisturbed by any sign of the presence of man or of his handiwork. The cold wind that comes with dawn will waken him as the first thin mists are gathering round the peaks three thousand feet above. As he climbs the steep slopes of heather in the half-light the mists roll down to meet him, till he is the only living, moving thing in a world of whiteness and silence. The heather dwindles, here and there black rock-ridges show for a moment and disappear. As in a dream he takes no count of time or distance, till at last he steps out upon the summit and the sun meets him, shining level with his eyes. Like an ebbing tide the mists roll back towards the valleys, leaving the mountain-tops of Scotland shining clear in the brilliance of the upper air. He is alone with the hills, and stands like one initiated into a strange and beautiful mystery.

But it is of the nature of mysteries that they cannot be interpreted to those who do not know. To the unbeliever they sound like mockeries—or at the best the unmeaning fancies of ‘an idle singer of an empty day.’ Let those who are indifferent to mountains protest in the name of sanity and common sense. Perhaps the climber is to be envied his good fortune in being something more than sane.