IV
Both pilgrim and mountaineer may claim for themselves the virtue of enthusiasm. But if they be humble-minded men they will not deny the possible existence of other and nobler forms of enthusiasm. If this virtue of theirs be not identical with all excellence, it must be capable of definition or analysis in terms other than itself. The pilgrim’s answer is easily given: he goes out to seek recreation, in the fullest sense of the word, to introduce a new element into his life. ‘I go to free myself from the Wheel of Things by a broad and open road.’ Less easy to define is the τέλος of the mountaineer; under no moral compulsion, he endures the pilgrim’s hardships for a less definite end, yet returns year after year in search of discomfort. A writer endeavouring to analyse this enthusiasm has put it down as a mild madness, a drawback to mountain-climbing. It is in great part an enthusiasm for past and future: put the mountaineer among his hills, and he is no sooner in full training than he begins to anticipate with joy his return to civilisation. Place him once more at home, and he will be eager to return to his old haunts, will busy himself in planning for the next year. He climbs, as it seems, against his will.
Yet he sets out willingly in search of recreation, knowing that he will certainly find it through hours of toil. He finds also a very full pleasure, forgetting readily the early start and all the thousand inconveniences which afford copy for the scribbler. The moon in the pine woods, the early dawn in the upper snow, the descent of Mont Blanc towards the sunset are not for valley-dwellers; and to attain these rewards the mountaineer welcomes the opportunity of an enforced self-denial:—
‘Carnis terat Superbiam
Potus cibique parcitas.’
He shares also the pilgrim’s joy of solitude and contemplation in the long hours of silence, and the joy of friendly conversation with all manner of men at the close of day. He regards no day, however trying, as wasted which is spent above snow-line, and next day he can take his ease in the valley with a clear conscience. ‘It is pleasant,’ says Leslie Stephen, ‘to lie on one’s back in a bed of rhododendrons, and look up to a mountain-top peering at one from above a bank of cloud; but it is pleasantest when one has qualified oneself for repose by climbing the peak the day before, and becoming familiar with its terrors and its beauties.’ Herein lies a point of resemblance between pilgrim and mountaineer: to feel the need of qualifying for this repose, which loses half its value when it is not the reward of labour.
Finally, the mountaineer will learn two secrets by experience. He will discover the secret of those philosophers that have dominion over the young, that one may argue (on mountains as elsewhere) from any given premise with equally convincing logic to two contrary conclusions. This is the essence of the mountaineer’s freedom of mind; for wherever he may find himself he can advance many reasons for or against every proposal, as conscience-free as the pilgrim himself, calling in prudence to support equally his bold or his lazy wishes; which is a dangerous thing for all climbers, as Mr. Worldly Wiseman knows. He will learn also the secret of a true holiday, which the pilgrim possesses: that this lies, not in the abandonment of everything familiar in search of distraction, but in taking up some fresh and absorbing interest, which will continue from one holiday to another.