In a 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 his favourable 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 valleys between 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 plain of 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 overwhelm life 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, beckoning him 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 the pure 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 in the 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:

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 that barred 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 Dean had 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 examination or 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 where tell-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:

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