The last chapter has brought the story of mountaineering up to modern times, but, before we close, there is another side of Alpine exploration on which we must touch. For Alpine exploration means something more than the discovery of new passes and the conquest of virgin peaks. That is the physical aspect of the sport, perhaps the side which the average climber best understands. But Alpine exploration is mental as well as physical, and concerns itself with the adventures of the mind in touch with the mountains as well as with the adventures of the body in contact with an unclimbed cliff. The story of the gradual discovery of high places as sources of inspiration has its place in the history of Alpine exploration, as well as the record of variation routes too often expressed in language of unvarying monotony.

The present writer once undertook to compile an anthology whose scope was defined by the title—The Englishman in the Alps. The limitations imposed by the series of which this anthology formed a part prevented him from including the Alpine literature of foreign authors, a fact which tended to obscure the real development of the Alpine literature. In the introduction he expressed the orthodox views which all good mountaineers accept without demur, explaining that mountaineers were the first to write fitly of the mountains, that English mountaineers had a peculiar talent in this direction, and that all the best mountain literature was written in the last half of the nineteenth century. These pious conclusions were shattered by some very radical criticism which appeared in leading articles of The Times and The Field. The former paper, in the course of some criticisms of Mr. Spender’s Alpine Anthology, remarked: “In the matter of prose, on the other hand, he has a striking predilection for the modern ‘Alpine books’ of commerce, though hardly a book among them except Whymper’s Scrambles in the Alps has any real literary vitality, or any interest apart from the story of adventure which it tells. Mummery, perhaps, has individuality enough to be made welcome in any gallery, and, of course, one is glad to meet Leslie Stephen. But what is C. E. Mathews doing there? Or Norman Neruda? Or Mr. Frederic Harrison? In an anthology which professed to be nothing more than a collection of stories of adventure, accidents, and narrow escapes, they would have their place along with Owen Glynne Jones, and Mr. Douglas Freshfield, and innumerable contributors to Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers and The Alpine Journal.”

We rubbed our eyes when we read these heterodox sentiments in such a quarter. Mr. Mathews was, perhaps, an Alpine historian rather than a writer of descriptive prose, and he does not lend himself to the elegant extract, though he is the author of some very quotable Alpine sketches. To Mr. Freshfield we owe, amongst other good things, one short passage as dramatic as anything in Alpine literature, the passage in which he describes the discovery of Donkin’s last bivouac on Koshtantau. The Field was even more emphatic:

“What is not true is that the pioneer sportsmen who founded the Alpine Club had exceptional insight into the moods of the snow. One or two of them, no doubt, struck out a little literature as the result of the impact of novel experiences upon naÏve minds.... On the whole, in spite of their defects, their machine-made perorations and their ponderous jests, they brought an acceptable addition to the existing stock of the literature of adventure.... But they had their limitations, and these were rather narrow. They dealt almost exclusively with the externals of mountaineering experience; and when they ventured further their writing was apt to be of the quality of fustian. Their spiritual adventures among the mountains were apt to be melodramatic or insignificant. Perhaps their Anglo-Saxon reticence prevented themselves from ‘letting themselves go.’... At all events there does remain this notable distinction—that, while the most eloquent writings of the most eloquent Alpine Club-man are as a rule deliberately and ostentatiously objective, the subjective literature of mountains—the literature in which we see the writer yielding to the influence of scenery, instead of lecturing about its beauties, existed long before that famous dinner party at the house of William Mathews, senior, at which the Alpine Club was founded. England, as we have said, contributed practically nothing to that literature.”

We have quoted this passage at some length because it expresses a novel attitude in direct contradiction to the accepted views sanctified by tradition. We do not entirely endorse it. The article contains proof that its writer has an intimate knowledge of early Alpine literature, but one is tempted to fancy that his research did not survive the heavy period of the ’eighties, and that he is unacquainted with those modern writers whose work is distinctly subjective. None the less, his contention suggests an interesting line of study; and in this chapter we shall try briefly to sketch the main tendencies, though we cannot review in detail the whole history, of Alpine literature, a subject which requires a book in itself.

The mediÆval attitude towards mountains has already been discussed, and though we ventured to protest that love of the mountains was not quite so uncommon as is usually supposed, it must be freely admitted that the literature of the Middle Ages is comparatively barren in appreciation of mountain scenery. There were Protestants before Luther, and there were men such as Gesner and Petrarch before Rousseau; but the Middle Ages can scarcely rob Rousseau of the credit for transforming mountain worship from the cult of a minority into a comparatively fashionable creed. Rousseau’s own feeling for the mountains was none the less genuine because it was sometimes coloured by the desire to make the mountains echo his own philosophy of life. Rousseau, in this respect, set a fashion which his disciples were not slow to follow. The mountains as the home of the rugged Switzer could be made to preach edifying lay sermons on the value of liberty. Such sentiments were in tune with the spirit of revolt that culminated in the French Revolution. A certain Haller had sounded this note long before Rousseau began to write, in a poem on the Alps which, appearing in 1728, enjoyed considerable popularity. The author is not without a genuine appreciation for Alpine scenery, but he is far more occupied with his moral, the contrast between the unsophisticated life of the mountain peasant and the hyper-civilisation of the town. Throughout the writings of this school which Haller anticipated and Rousseau founded, we can trace an obvious connection between a love for the untutored freedom of the mountains and a hatred of existing social conditions.

It is, therefore, not surprising to find that this new school of mountain worship involved certain views which found most complete expression in the French Revolution. “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” This, the famous opening to The Social Contract, might have heralded with equal fitness any mountain passage in the works of Rousseau or his disciples. Perhaps these two sentiments are nowhere fused with such completeness as in the life of Ramond de CarbonniÈre, the great Pyrenean climber. We have not mentioned him before as he took no part in purely Alpine explorations. But as a mountaineer he ranks with De Saussure and Paccard. His ascent of Mont Perdu, after many attempts, in 1802, was one of the most remarkable climbing exploits of the age. He invented a new kind of crampon. He rejoiced in fatigue, cold, and the thousand trials that confronted the mountaineer in the days before club-huts. His own personality was singularly arresting; and the reader should consult The Early Mountaineers for a more complete sketch of the man than we have space to attempt. Ramond had every instinct of the modern mountaineer. He delighted in hardship. He could appreciate the grandeur of a mountain storm while sitting on an exposed ledge. He lingers with a delight that recalls Gesner on the joy of simple fare and rough quarters. He is the boon companion of hunters and smugglers; and through all his mountain journeys his mind is alert in reacting to chance impressions.

But his narrative is remarkable for something else besides love for the mountains. It is full of those sentiments which came to a head in the French Revolution. Mountain description and fierce denunciations of tyranny are mingled in the oddest fashion. It is not surprising that Ramond, who finds room in a book devoted to mountaineering for a prophecy of the Revolution, should have played an active part in the Revolution when it came. Ramond entered the Revolutionary Parliament as a moderate reformer, and when the leaders of the Revolution had no further use for moderate reformers he found himself in the gaol at Tarbres. Here he was fortunately forgotten, and survived to become MaÎtre des RequÊtes under Louis XVIII. Ramond is, perhaps, the most striking example of the mountaineer whose love for mountains was only equalled by his passion for freedom. In some ways, he is worthier of our admiration than Rousseau, for he not only admired mountains, he climbed them. He not only praised the simple life of hardship, he endured it.

Turning to English literature, we find much the same processes at work. The two great poets whose revolt against existing society was most marked yielded the Alps a generous measure of praise. It is interesting to compare the mountain songs of Byron and Shelley. Byron’s verse is often marred by his obvious sense of the theatre. His misanthropy had, no doubt, its genuine as well as its purely theatrical element, but it becomes tiresome as the motif of the mountain message. No doubt he was sincere when he wrote—

But as a matter of actual practice no man lived more in himself, and instead of becoming a portion of his surroundings, too often he makes his surroundings take colouring from his mood. His mountains sometimes seem to have degenerated into an echo of Byron. They are too anxious to advertise the whole gospel of misanthropy. The avalanche roars a little too lustily. The Alpine glow is laid on with a heavy brush, and his mountains cannot wholly escape the suspicion of bluster that tends to degenerate into bombast. This is undeniable, yet Byron at his best is difficult to approach. Freed from his affectations, his verse often rises to the highest levels of simple, unaffected eloquence. There are lines in The Prisoner of Chillon with an authentic appeal to the mountain lover. The prisoner has been freed from the chain that has bound him for years to a pillar, and he is graciously allowed the freedom of his dungeon—a concession that may not have appeared unduly liberal to his gaolers, but which at least enabled the prisoner to reach a window looking out on to the hills—

As the train swings round the elbow above the lake, the mountaineer released from the chain of city life can echo this wish to bend the quiet of a loving eye on unchanging mountains.

Coleridge has some good lines on Mont Blanc, but one feels that they would have applied equally well to any other mountain. Their sincerity is somewhat discounted by the fact that Coleridge manufactured an enthusiasm for Mont Blanc at a distance from which it is invisible.

With Shelley, we move in a different atmosphere. Like Byron, he rebelled against society, and some comfortable admirers of the poetry which time has made respectable are apt to ignore those poems which, for passionate protest against social conditions, remained unique till William Morris transformed Socialism into song. Shelley was more sincere in his revolt than Byron. He did not always keep an eye on the gallery while declaiming his rebellion, and his mountains have no politics; they sing their own spontaneous melodies. Shelley combined the mystic’s vision with the accuracy of a trained observer. His descriptions of an Alpine dawn, or a storm among the mountains, might have been written by a man who had studied these phenomena with a note-book in his hand. Nobody has ever observed with such sympathy “the dim enchanted shapes of wandering mist,” or brought more beauty to their praise. Shelley’s cloud poems have the same fugitive magic that haunts the fickle countries of the sky when June is stirring in those windy hills where—

Shelley did not start with the poem, but with the mountain. His mountains are something more than a convenient instrument for the manufacture of rhyme. He did not write a poem about mountains as a pleasant variation on more conventional themes. With Shelley, you know that poetry was the handmaid of the hills, the one medium in which he could fitly express his own passionate worship of every accent in the mountain melody. And for these reasons Shelley seems to us a truer mountain poet than Byron, truer than Coleridge, truer even than Wordsworth, for Wordsworth, though some of his Alpine poetry is very good indeed, seems more at home in the Cumberland fells, whose quiet music no other poet has ever rendered so surely.

The early literature of the mountains has an atmosphere which has largely disappeared in modern Alpine writing. For, to the pioneers of Alpine travel, a mountain was not primarily a thing to climb. Even men like Bourrit and Ramond de CarbonniÈre, genuine mountaineers in every sense of the term, regarded the great heights as something more than fields for exploration, as the shrines of an unseen power that compelled spontaneous worship. These men saw a mountain, and not a problem in gymnastics. They wrote of mountains with a certain naÏve eloquence, often highly coloured, sometimes a trifle bombastic. But, because the best of them had French blood in their veins, their outpourings were at least free from Saxon self-consciousness. They were not writing for an academic audience lenient to dullness, but convulsed with agonies of shame at any suspicion of fine writing. One shudders to think of Bourrit delivering his sonorous address on the guides of Chamounix as the high priests of humanity before the average audience that assembles to hear an Alpine paper. We have seen two old gentlemen incapacitated for the evening by a paper pitched on a far more subdued note. Yet, somehow, the older writings have the genuine ring. They have something lacking in the genial rhapsodies of their successors. “We can never over-estimate what we owe to the Alps”: thus opens a characteristic peroration to an Alpine book of the ’eighties. “We are indebted to them and all their charming associations for the greatest of all blessings, friendship and health. It has been conclusively proved that, of all sports, it is the one which can be protracted to the greatest age. It is in the mountains that our youth is renewed. Young, middle-aged, or old, we go out, too often jaded and worn in mind and body; and we return invigorated, renewed, restored, fitted for the fresh labours and duties of life. To know the great mountains wholly is impossible for any of us; but reverently to learn the lessons they can teach, and heartily to enjoy the happiness they can bring is possible to us all.”

If a man who has climbed for thirty years cannot pump up something more lively as his final summary of Alpine joys, what reply can we make to Ruskin’s contention that “the real beauties of the Alps are to be seen and to be seen only where all may see it, the cripple, the child, and the man of grey hairs”? There are a few Alpine writers who have produced an apology worthy of the craft, and have shown that they had found above the snow-line an outlet for romance unknown to Ruskin’s cripple, and reserves of beauty which Ruskin himself had never drawn, and there are, on the other hand, quite enough to explain, if not to justify, the unlovely conception of Alpine climbers embodied in Ruskin’s amiable remarks: “The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a beer garden which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again with shrieks of delight. When you are past shrieking, having no articulate voice to say you are glad with, you rush home red with cutaneous eruptions of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccoughs of self-satisfaction.”

With a few great exceptions, the literature of mountaineers is not as fine as the literature of mountain lovers. Let us see what the men who have not climbed have given to the praise of the snows. What mountaineer has written as Ruskin wrote? Certainly Ruskin at his best reaches heights which no mountaineer has ever scaled. When Ruskin read his Inaugural Address in the early ’fifties to an audience in the main composed of Cambridge undergraduates, he paused for a moment and glanced up at his audience. When he saw that the fleeting attention of the undergraduates had been arrested by this sudden pause, he declaimed a passage which he did not intend any of them to miss, a passage describing the Alps from the southern plains: “Out from between the cloudy pillars as they pass, emerge for ever the great battlements of the memorable and perpetual hills.”... When he paused again, after the sonorous fall of a majestic peroration, even the most prosaic of undergraduates joined in the turbulent applause.

“Language which to a severe taste is perhaps a trifle too fine,” is Leslie Stephen’s characteristic comment. “It is not every one,” he adds, with trenchant common sense, “who can with impunity compare Alps to archangels.” Perhaps not, and let us therefore be thankful to the occasional writer, who, like Ruskin and Leslie Stephen himself at his best, is not shamed into dullness by the fear of soaring too high. But Ruskin was something more than a fine writer. No man, and no mountaineer, ever loved the Alps with a more absorbing passion; and, in the whole realm of Alpine literature, there is no passage more pregnant with the unreasoning love for the hills than that which opens: “For to myself mountains are the beginning and the end of all Alpine scenery,” and ends: “There is not a wave of the Seine but is associated in my mind with the first rise of the sandstones and forest pines of Fontainebleau; and with the hope of the Alps, as one leaves Paris with the horses’ heads to the south-west, the morning sun flashing on the bright waves at Charenton. If there be no hope or association of this kind, and if I cannot deceive myself into fancying that, perhaps at the next rise of the road, there may be seen the film of a blue hill in the gleam of sky at the horizon, the landscape, however beautiful, produces in me even a kind of sickness and pain; and the whole view from Richmond Hill or Windsor Terrace—nay, the gardens of Alcinous, with their perpetual summer—or of the Hesperides (if they were flat, and not close to Atlas), golden apples and all—I would give away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of lady-fern.”

George Meredith was no mountaineer; but his mountain passages will not easily be beaten. His description of the Alps seen from the Adriatic contains, perhaps, the subtlest phrase in literature for the colouring of distant ranges: “Colour was steadfast on the massive front ranks; it wavered in its remoteness and was quick and dim as though it fell on beating wings.” And no climber has analysed the climber’s conflicting emotions with such sympathetic acuteness. “Would you know what it is to hope again, and have all your hopes at hand? Hang upon the crags at a gradient that makes your next step a debate between the thing you are and the thing you may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient if just within grasp, as mortal hopes should be.”

We have quoted Ruskin’s great tribute to the romance which still haunts the journey to the Alps even for those who are brought up on steam. Addington Symonds was no mountaineer; but he writes of this journey with an enthusiasm which rings truer than much in Alpine adventure: “Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving on the outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day’s journey from Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travel to Basle by night. He courts the heat of the sun and the monotony of French plains—their sluggish streams, and never-ending poplar trees—for the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach to the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is about Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams; the great Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights; and he feels—yes, indeed, there is now no mistake—the well-known, well-loved, magical fresh air, that never fails to blow from snowy mountains, and meadows watered by perennial streams. The last hour is one of exquisite enjoyment, and when he reaches Basle he scarcely sleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine beneath the balconies, and knowing that the moon is shining on its waters, through the town, beneath the bridges, between pasture-lands and copses, up the still mountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where the water springs. There is nothing in all experience of travelling like this. We may greet the Mediterranean at Marseilles with enthusiasm; on entering Rome by the Porta del Popolo we may reflect with pride that we have reached the goal of our pilgrimage, and are at last among world-shaking memories. But neither Rome nor the Riviera wins our hearts like Switzerland. We do not lie awake in London thinking of them; we do not long so intensely, as the year comes round, to revisit them. Our affection is less a passion than that which we cherish for Switzerland.”

Among modern writers there is Mr. Belloc, who stands self-confessed as a man who refuses to climb for fear of “slipping down.” Mr. Belloc has French blood in his veins, and he is not cursed with British reserve. In his memorable journey along the path to Rome, he had, perforce, to cross the Jura, and this is how he first saw the Alps—

“I saw, between the branches of the trees in front of me, a sight in the sky that made me stop breathing, just as a great danger at sea, or great surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man stop breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy, something I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between the branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond....

“Here were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps, which now for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and, because they were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile or two high, they were become something different from us others, and could strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there in the sky, to which only clouds belong, and birds, and the last trembling colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the things of the sky....

“These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one’s immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest, those few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more. Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.... That it is also which leads some men to climb mountain tops, but not me, for I am afraid of slipping down.”

That is subjective enough, with a vengeance; for those few lines one would gladly sacrifice a whole shelf full of climbing literature dealing with the objective facts that do not vary with the individual observer.

Mr. Kipling again, though no mountaineer, has struck out one message which most mountaineers would sacrifice a season’s climbing to have written. A brief quotation gives only a faint impression of its beauty—

“At last, they entered a world within a world—a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of the mere rubble and refuse from off the knees of the mountains. Here, one day’s march carried them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer’s clogged pace bears him in a nightmare. They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the main pile! A rounded meadow revealed itself, when they had reached it, for a vast table-land running far into the valley. Three days later, it was a dim fold in the earth to southward.

“‘Surely the Gods live here,’ said Kim, beaten down by the silence and the appalling sweep and dispersal of the cloud-shadows after rain. ‘This is no place for men!’

“Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away towards the snow-line, where from east to west across hundreds of miles, ruled as with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped. Above that, in scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to fight their heads above the white smother. Above these again, changeless since the world’s beginning, but changing to every mood of sun and cloud, lay out the eternal snow. They could see blots and blurs on its face where storm and wandering wullie-wa got up to dance. Below them, as they stood, the forest slid away in a sheet of blue-green for mile upon mile; below the forest was a village in its sprinkle of terraced fields and steep grazing-grounds; below the village they knew, though a thunderstorm worried and growled there for the moment, a pitch of twelve or fifteen hundred feet gave to the moist valley where the streams gather that are the mothers of young Sutluj.”

Then there is Mr. Algernon Blackwood, who is, I think, rather a ski-runner than a mountaineer. Certainly he has unravelled the psychology of hill-wandering, and discovered something of that strange personality behind the mountains. No writer has so successfully caught the uncanny atmosphere that sometimes haunts the hills.

The contrast is even more marked in poetry than in prose. In prose, we have half-a-dozen Alpine books that would satisfy a severe critic. In poetry, only one mountaineer has achieved outstanding success. Mr. G. Winthrop Young, alone, has transferred the essential romance of mountaineering into poetry which not mountaineers alone, but every lover of finished craftsmanship, will read with something deeper than pleasure. But, while Mr. Young has no rival in the poetry of mountaineering, there is a considerable quantity of excellent verse of which mountains are the theme. We have spoken of Shelley and Byron. Among more modern poets there is Tennyson. He wrote little mountain poetry, and yet in four lines he has crystallised the whole essence of the Alpine vision from some distant sentinel of the plains—

Sydney Dobell has some good mountain verse; and if we had not already burdened this chapter with quotations we should have borrowed from those descriptions in which Morris clearly recalls the savage volcanic scenery of Iceland. Swinburne, in the lines beginning—

has touched some of the less obvious spells of hill region with his own unerring instinct for beauty.

F. W. H. Myers in eight lines has said all that need be said when the hills have claimed the ultimate penalty—

Mrs. Holland has written, as a dedication for a book of Alpine travel, lines which have the authentic note; and Mr. Masefield in a few verses has caught the savage aloofness of the peaks better than most mountaineers in pages of redundant description.

The contrast is rather too marked between the work of those who loved mountains without climbing them and the literature of the professional mountaineers. Even writers like Mr. Kipling, who have only touched mountains in a few casual lines, seem to have captured the mountain atmosphere more successfully than many a climber who has devoted articles galore to his craft. Of course, Mr. Kipling is a genius and the average Alpine writer is not; but surely one might not unreasonably expect a unique literature from those who know the mountains in all their changing tenses, and who by service of toil and danger have wrung from them intimate secrets unguessed at by those who linger outside the shrine.

Mountaineering has, of course, produced some great literature. There is Leslie Stephen, though even Stephen at his best is immeasurably below Ruskin’s finest mountain passages. But Leslie Stephens are rare in the history of Alpine literature, whereas the inarticulate are always with us.

In some ways, the man who can worship a mountain without wishing to climb it has a certain advantage. He sees a vision, where the climber too often sees nothing but a variation route. The popular historian has often a more vivid picture of a period than the expert, whose comprehensive knowledge of obscure charters sometimes blinds him to the broad issues of history. Technical knowledge does not always make for understanding. The first great revelation of the mountains has a power that is all its own. To the man who has yet to climb, every mountain is virgin, every snow-field a mystery, undefiled by traffic with man. The first vision passes, and the love that is based on understanding supplants it. The vision of unattainable snows translates itself into terms of memory—that white gleam that once belonged to dreamland into an ice-wall with which you have wrestled through the scorching hours of a July afternoon. You have learned to spell the writing on the wall of the mountains. The magic of first love, with its worship of the unattainable, is too often transformed into the soberer affection founded, like domestic love, on knowledge and sympathy; and the danger would be greater if the fickle hills had not to be wooed afresh every season. Beyond the mountain that we climb and seem to know, lurks ever the visionary peak that we shall never conquer; and this unattainable ideal gives an eternal youth to the hills, and a never-failing vitality to our Alpine adventure. Yet when we begin to set down our memories of the mountains, it seems far easier to recall those objective facts, which are the same for all comers, the meticulous details of route, the conditions of snow and ice, and to omit from our epic that subjective vision of the mountain, that individual impression which alone lends something more than a technical interest to the story of our days among the snow. And so it is not altogether surprising that the man who has never climbed can write more freely and more fully of the mountains, since he has no expert knowledge to confuse the issue, no technical details to obscure the first fine careless rapture.

The early mountaineers entered into a literary field that was almost unexplored. They could write of their hill journeys with the assurance of men branching out into unknown byways. They could linger on the commonplaces of hill travel, and praise the freedom of the hills with the air of men enunciating a paradox. To glorify rough fare, simple quarters, a bed of hay, a drink quaffed from the mountain stream, must have afforded Gesner the same intellectual pleasure that Mr. Chesterton derives from the praise of Battersea and Beer. And this joy in emotions which had yet to be considered trite lingers on even into the more sedate pages of Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers. The contributors to those classic volumes were rather frightened of letting themselves go; but here and there one lights on some spontaneous expression of delight in the things that are the very flesh and blood of our Alpine experience—the bivouac beneath the stars, the silent approach of dawn, the freemasonry of the rope, the triumph of the virgin summit. “Times have changed since then,” wrote Donald Robertson in a recent issue of The Alpine Journal—

“Times have changed since then, and with them Alpine literature. Mountaineering has become a science, and, as in other sciences, the professor has grown impatient of the average intelligence, and evolved his own tongue. To write for the outside public is to incur the odium of ‘popular science,’ a form of literature fascinating to me, but anathema to all right-minded men. Those best qualified to speak will only address themselves to those qualified to listen, and therefore only in the jargon of their craft. But the hall-mark of technical writing is the assumption of common knowledge. What all readers know for themselves, it is needless and even impertinent to state. Hence, in the climbing stories written for the elect, the features common to all climbs must either be dismissed with a brief reference, or lightly treated as things only interesting in so far as they find novel expression.”

Those who worship Clio the muse will try to preserve the marriage of history and literature, but those whose only claim to scholarship is their power to collate facts by diligent research, those who have not the necessary ability to weave these facts into a vital pattern, will always protest their devotion to what is humorously dubbed scientific history. So in the Alpine world, which has its own academic traditions and its own mandarins, you will find that those who cannot translate emotions (which it is to be hoped they share) into language which anybody could understand are rather apt to explain their discreet silence, by the possession of a delicate reserve that forbids them to emulate the fine writing of a Ruskin or the purple patches of Meredith.

Now, it should be possible to discriminate between those who endeavour to clothe a fine emotion in worthy language, and those who start with the intention of writing finely, and look round for a fine emotion to serve as the necessary peg. Sincerity is the touchstone that discriminates the fine writing that is good, and the fine writing that is damnable. The emotions that are the essence of mountaineering deserve something better than the genteel peroration of the average climbing book. Alpine literature is a trifle deficient in fine frenzy. The Mid-Victorian pose of the bluff, downright Briton, whose surging flood of emotions is concealed beneath an affectation of cynicism, is apt to be tedious, and one wonders whether emotions so consistently and so successfully suppressed really existed within those stolid bosoms.

A great deal of Alpine literature appeals, and rightly appeals, only to the expert. Such contributions are not intended as descriptive literature. They may, as the record of research into the early records of mountaineering and mountains, supply a much-needed link in the history of the craft. As the record of new exploration, they are sure to interest the expert, while their exact description of routes and times will serve as the material for future climbers’ guides. But this is not the whole of Alpine literature, and the danger is that those who dare not attempt the subjective aspects of mountaineering should frighten off those who have the necessary ability by a tedious repetition of the phrase “fine writing,” that facile refuge of the Philistine. The conventional Alpine article is a dreary affair. Its humour is antique, and consists for the most part in jokes about fleas and porters, and in the substitution of long phrases for simple ones. Its satire is even thinner. The root assumption that the Alpine climber is a superior person, and that social status varies with the height above sea level, recurs with monotonous regularity. The joke about the tripper is as old as the Flood, and the instinct that resents his disturbing presence is not quite the hall-mark of the Æsthetic soul that some folk seem to think. It is as old as the primitive man who espied a desirable glade, and lay in wait for the first tourist with a club. “My friends tell me,” writes a well-known veteran, “that I am singular in this strange desire to avoid meeting the never-ceasing stream of tourists, and I am beginning to believe that they are right, and that I am differently constituted from other people.” The author of this trite confession has only to study travel literature in general and Alpine literature in particular to discover that quite commonplace folk can misquote the remark about the madding crowd, and that even members of the lower middle class have been known to put the sentiment into practice. A sense of humour and a sense for solitude are two things which their true possessors are chary of mentioning.

It might be fairly argued that the average mountaineer does not pretend to be a writer, fine or otherwise, that he describes his climbs in a club journal intended for a friendly and uncritical audience, and that he leaves the defence of his sport to the few men who can obtain the hearing of a wider audience. That is fair comment; and, fortunately, mountaineering is not without the books that are classics not only of Alpine but also of English literature.

First to claim mention is Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, a volume “so fascinating,” writes Donald Robertson, “so inspiring a gospel of adventure and full, free life, that the call summoned to the hills an army of seekers after the promised gold.” That is true enough. But the charm of these pages, which is undoubted, is much more due to the fact that the contributors had a good story to tell than to any grace of style with which they told it. The contributors were drawn from all walks of life—barristers, Manchester merchants, schoolmasters, dons, clergymen, and scientists; and unless we must affect to believe that Alpine climbing inspires its devotees with the gift of tongues, we need not appear guilty of irreverence for the pioneers if we discriminate between the literary and intrinsic merit of their work. They were educated men. They did not split their infinitives, and they could express their thoughts in the King’s English, a precedent not always followed by their successors. We must, however, differentiate between the Alpine writing which gives pleasure because of its associations, and the literature which delights not only for its associations and story, but also for its beauty of expression. Let us, as an example, consider two passages describing an Alpine dawn—

“We set out from the bivouac at three in the morning. The night was cloudless, and the stars shone with a truly majestic beauty. Ahead of us, we could just see the outline of the great peak we proposed to attack. Gradually, the east lightened. The mountains became more distinct. The eastern sky paled, and a few minutes later the glorious sun caught the topmost peaks, and painted their snows with the fiery hues of dawn. It was a most awe-compelling spectacle.”

This passage may please us, not because the language is fine or the thoughts subtly expressed, but simply because the scenes so inadequately described recall those which we ourselves have witnessed. The passage would convey little to a man who had never climbed. Now consider the following—

“On the glacier, the light of a day still to be born put out our candles.... We halted to watch the procession of the sun. He came out of the uttermost parts of the earth, very slowly, lighting peak after peak in the long southward array, dwelling for a moment, and then passing on. Opposite, and first to catch the glow, were the great mountains of the Saasgrat and the Weisshorn. But more beautiful, like the loom of some white-sailed ship far out at sea, each unnamed and unnumbered peak of the east took and reflected the radiance of the morning. The light mists which came before the sun faded.”...

Like the other passage this brief description starts a train of memories; but, whereas the first passage would convey little to a non-climber, Sir Claud Schuster has really thought out the sequence of the dawn, and has caught one of its finer and subtler effects by the use of a very happy analogy. The phrase which we have ventured to italicise defines in a few words a brief scene in the drama of the dawn, an impression that could not be conveyed by piling adjective on adjective.

There are many writers who have captured the romance of mountaineering, far fewer who have the gift for that happy choice of words that gives the essence of a particular Alpine view. Pick up any Alpine classic at a venture, and you will find that not one writer in fifty can hold your attention through a long passage of descriptive writing. The average writer piles on his adjectives. From the Alpine summit you can see a long way. The horizon seems infinitely far off. The valleys sink below into profound shadows. The eye is carried from the dark firs upward to the glittering snowfields. “The majestic mass of the ... rises to the north, and blots out the lesser ranges of the.... The awful heights of the ... soar upwards from the valley of.... In the east, we could just catch a glimpse of the ... and our guides assured us that in the west we could veritably see the distant snows of our old friend the....” And so on, and so forth. Fill in the gaps, and this skeleton description can be made to fit the required panorama. It roughly represents nine out of ten word pictures of Alpine views. Examine Whymper’s famous description of the view from the Matterhorn. It is little more than a catalogue of mountains. There is hardly a phrase in it that would convey the essential atmosphere of such a view to a man who had not seen it.

Genius has been defined as the power of seeing analogies, and we have sometimes fancied that the secret of all good Alpine description lies in the happy choice of the right analogy. It is no use accumulating the adjective at random. Peaks are high and majestic, the snow is white. Certainly this does not help us. What we need is some happily chosen phrase which goes deeper than the obvious epithets that apply to every peak and every snowfield. We want the magical phrase that differentiates one particular Alpine setting from another. And this phrase will often be some apparently casual analogy drawn from something which has no apparent connection with the Alps. “Beautiful like the loom of some white-sailed ship,” is an example which we have already quoted. Leslie Stephen’s work is full of such analogies. He does not waste adjectives. His adjectives are chosen for a particular reason. His epithets all do work. Read his description of the view from Mont Blanc, the Peaks of Primiero, the Alps in winter, and you feel that these descriptions could not be made to apply to other Alpine settings by altering the names and suppressing an occasional phrase. They are charged with the individual atmosphere of the place which gave them birth. In the most accurate sense of the word, they are autocthonous. A short quotation will illustrate these facts. Here is Stephen’s description of the view from the Schreckhorn. Notice that he achieves his effect without the usual largess of jewellery. Topaz and opal are dispensed with, and their place is taken by casual and apparently careless analogies from such diversified things as an opium dream, music, an idle giant.

“You are in the centre of a whole district of desolation, suggesting a landscape from Greenland, or an imaginary picture of England in the glacial epoch, with shores yet unvisited by the irrepressible Gulf Stream. The charm of such views—little as they are generally appreciated by professed admirers of the picturesque—is to my taste unique, though not easily explained to unbelievers. They have a certain soothing influence like slow and stately music, or one of the strange opium dreams described by De Quincey. If his journey in the mail-coach could have led him through an Alpine pass instead of the quiet Cumberland hills, he would have seen visions still more poetical than that of the minister in the ‘dream fugue.’ Unable as I am to bend his bow, I can only say that there is something almost unearthly in the sight of enormous spaces of hill and plain, apparently unsubstantial as a mountain mist, glimmering away to the indistinct horizon, and as it were spell-bound by an absolute and eternal silence. The sentiment may be very different when a storm is raging and nothing is visible but the black ribs of the mountains glaring at you through rents in the clouds; but on that perfect day on the top of the Schreckhorn, where not a wreath of vapour was to be seen under the Whole vast canopy of the sky, a delicious lazy sense of calm repose was the appropriate frame of mind. One felt as if some immortal being, with no particular duties upon his hands, might be calmly sitting upon those desolate rocks and watching the little shadowy wrinkles of the plain, that were really mountain ranges, rise and fall through slow geological epochs.”

Whymper never touches this note even in the best of many good mountain passages. His forte was rather the romance of Alpine adventure than the subtler art of reproducing Alpine scenery. But in his own line he is without a master. His style, of course, was not so uniformly good as Stephen’s. He had terrible lapses. He spoils his greatest chapter by a most uncalled-for anti-climax. He had a weakness for banal quotations from third-rate translations of the classics. But, though these lapses are irritating, there is no book like the famous Scrambles, and there is certainly no book which has sent more new climbers to the Alps. Whymper was fortunate, for he had as his material the finest story in Alpine history. Certainly, he did not waste his chances. The book has the genuine ring of Alpine romance. Its pages are full of those contrasts that are the stuff of our mountain quest, the tragic irony that a Greek mind would have appreciated. The closing scenes in the great drama of the Matterhorn move to their appointed climax with the dignity of some of the most majestic chapters in the Old Testament. Of their kind, they are unique in the literature of exploration.

Tyndall, Whymper’s great rival, had literary talent as well as scientific genius, but his Alpine books, though they contain fine passages, have not the personality that made Scrambles in the Alps a classic, nor the genius for descriptive writing that we admire in The Playground of Europe. Of A. W. Moore’s work and of Mummery’s great classic we have already spoken. Mummery, like Whymper, could translate into words the rollicking adventure of mountaineering, and though he never touches Leslie Stephen’s level, some of his descriptions of mountain scenery have a distinct fascination.

A few other great Alpine books have appeared between Peaks, Pastures, and Glaciers and the recent work Peaks and Pleasant Pastures. Mr. Douglas Freshfield and Sir Martin Conway are both famous explorers of the greater ranges beyond Europe, and their talent for mountain description must have inspired many a climber to leave the well-trodden Alpine routes for the unknown snows of the Himalayas. Mr. Freshfield’s Caucasian classic opens with a short poem that we should like to have quoted, and includes one of the great stories on mountain literature—the search for Donkin and Fox. Sir Martin Conway brings to his work the eye of a trained Art critic, and the gift for analysing beauty, not only in pictures, but in Alpine scenery. He is an artist in colour and in words.

Contrary to accepted views, we are inclined to believe that Alpine literature shows signs of a Renaissance. Those who hold that the subject-matter is exhausted, seem to base their belief on the fact that every virgin peak in the Alps has been climbed, and that the literature of exploration should, therefore, die a natural death. This belief argues a lack of proportion. Because a certain number of climbers have marched up and down the peaks of a certain range, it does not follow that those mountains no longer afford emotions capable of literary expression. The very reverse is the case. It is perilously easy to attach supreme importance to the sporting side of our craft. Mountain literature is too often tedious, because it concentrates on objective facts. When all the great mountains were unclimbed, those who wrote of them could not burden their pages with tiresome details of routes and times. When every mountain has been climbed by every conceivable route, the material at the disposal of the objective writer is fortunately exhausted. There are few great Alpine routes that remain unexplored. There are a thousand byways in the psychology of mountaineering that have never been touched, and an excellent book might have been written on this subject alone. Every mountaineer brings to the mountains the tribute of a new worshipper with his own different emotions. “Obtain an account of the same expedition from three points on the same rope, and you will see how different. Therefore, there is room in our generation for a new Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers by the best pens in the Club telling freely, and without false shame, the simple story of a day among the mountains.”

The pioneers had every advantage, a new subject for literary expression, a new field of almost untouched exploration, phrases that had yet to become trite, emotions which never become trite though their expression is apt to fall into a rut. And yet it seems doubtful whether they wrote more freely and more truly than some of those who are writing to-day. In some directions, mountain descriptions have advanced as well as mountain craft. We have no Leslie Stephen and no Whymper, but the best pens at work in The Alpine Journal have created a nobler literature than that which we find in the early numbers. “The Alpine Journal,” remarked a worthy president, is “the champagne of Alpine literature.” Like the best champagne, it is often very dry. The early numbers contained little of literary value beyond Gosset’s great account of the avalanche which killed Bennen, and some articles by Stephen and Whymper. Neither Stephen nor Whymper wrote their best for the club journal. The Cornhill contains Stephen’s best work, and Whymper gave the pick of his writing to the Press. One may safely say that the first forty years of the club journal produced nothing better than recent contributions such as “The Alps” by A. D. Godley, “Two Ridges of the Grand Jorasses” by G. W. Young, “The Middle Age of the Mountaineer” by Claud Schuster, “Another Way of Alpine Love” by F. W. Bourdillon, “The Ligurian Alps” by R. L. A. Irving, and “Alpine Humour” by C. D. Robertson. Nor has good work been confined to The Alpine Journal. The patient seeker may find hidden treasures in the pages of some score of journals devoted to some aspect of the mountains. The new century has opened well, for it has given us Prof. Collie’s Exploration in the Himalaya and other Mountain Ranges, a book of unusual charm. It has given us Mr. Young’s mountain poems, for which we would gladly jettison a whole library of Alpine literature. It has given us Peaks and Pleasant Pastures, and a fine translation of Guido Rey’s classic work on the Matterhorn. With these books in mind we can safely assert that the writer quoted at the beginning of this chapter was unduly pessimistic, and that England has contributed her fair share to the subjective literature of the Alps.

Let us hope that this renaissance of wonder will suffer no eclipse; let us hope that the Alps may still offer to generations yet unborn avenues of discovery beside those marked “No Information” in the pages of The Climber’s Guides. The saga of the Alps will not die from lack of material so long as men find in the hills an inspiration other than the challenge of unclimbed ridges and byways of mountain joy uncharted in the ordnance survey.