Leslie Stephen admitted this, and he had less cause to admit it than most. “I utterly repudiate the doctrine that Alpine travellers are, or ought to be, the heroes of Alpine adventure. The true way, at least, to describe all my Alpine adventures is to say that Michael Anderegg, or Lauener, succeeded in performing a feat requiring skill, strength, and courage, the difficulty of which was much increased by the difficulty of taking with him his knapsack and his employer.” Now, this does less than justice to Leslie Stephen, and to many of the early mountaineers. Often they supplied the brain of the party, and the directing energy. They were pioneers. Yet mountaineering as a fine art owes almost as much to the men who first dispensed with professional assistance. A man who climbs habitually with guides may be, and often is, a fine mountaineer. He need be nothing more than a good walker, with a steady head, to achieve a desperate reputation among laymen.
Many of the early pioneers were by no means great athletes, though their mountaineering achievements deceived the public into crediting them with superhuman nerve and strength. Many of them were middle-aged gentlemen, who could have taken no part in active sports which demand a swift alliance of nerve and muscle; but who were quite capable of plugging up the average mixture of easy rock and snow that one meets on the average first-class Alpine peak. They had average endurance, and more than average pluck, for the prestige of the unvanquished peaks still daunted all but the courageous.
They were lucky in that the great bulk of Alpine peaks were unconquered, and were only too ready to be conquered by the first climber who could hire two trusty Swiss guides to cut the steps, carry the knapsack, and lead up the rocks. It is usually said of these men: “They could not, perhaps, have tackled the pretty rock problems in which the modern cragsman delights. They were something better than gymnasts. They were all-round mountaineers.” This seems rather special pleading. Some one said that mountaineering seemed to be walking up easy snow mountains between guides, and mere cragsmanship consisted in leading up difficult rock-peaks without guides. It does not follow that a man who can lead up the Chamounix aiguilles knows less of the broader principles of mountaineering than the gentleman who is piloted up Mont Blanc by sturdy Swiss peasants. The issue is not between those who confine their energies to gymnastic feats on Welsh crags and the wider school who understand snow and ice as well as rock. The issue is between those who can take their proper share in a rock-climb like the Grepon, or a difficult ice expedition like the Brenva Mont Blanc, and those who would be completely at a loss if their guides broke down on an easy peak like the Wetterhorn. The pioneers did not owe everything to their guides. A few did, but most of them were good mountaineers whose opinion was often asked by the professionals, and sometimes taken. Yet the guided climber, then and now, missed the real inwardness of the sport. Mountaineering, in the modern sense, is a sport unrivalled in its appeal to mind and body. The man who can lead on a series of really first-class climbs must possess great nerve, and a specialised knowledge of mountains that is almost a sixth sense. Mountaineering between guides need not involve anything more than a good wind and a steady head. Anybody can get up a first-class peak. Only one amateur in ten can complete ascent and descent with safety if called on to lead.
In trying to form a just estimate of our debt to the early English pioneers, we have to avoid two extremes. We must remember the parable of the dwarf standing on the giant’s shoulders. It ill becomes those who owe Climbers’ Guides, and to some extent good maps, to the labours of the pioneers to discount their achievements. But the other extreme is also a danger. We need not pretend that every man who climbed a virgin peak in the days when nearly every big peak was virgin was necessarily a fine mountaineer. All praise is due to the earliest explorers, men like Balmat, Joseph Beck, Bourrit, De Saussure, and the Meyers, for in those days the country above the snow-line was not only unknown, it was full of imagined terrors. These men did a magnificent work in robbing the High Alps of their chief defence—superstition. But in the late ’fifties and early ’sixties this atmosphere had largely vanished. Mr. X came to the A valley, and discovered that the B, C, or D horn had not been climbed. The B, C, and D horn were average peaks with a certain amount of straightforward snow and ice work, and a certain amount of straightforward rock work. Mr. X enjoys a fortnight of good weather, and the services of two good guides. He does what any man with like opportunities would accomplish, what an undergraduate fresh to the Alps could accomplish to-day if these peaks had been obligingly left virgin for his disposal. Many of the pioneers with a long list of virgin peaks to their credit would have made a poor show if they had been asked to lead one of the easy buttresses of Tryfan.
Rock-climbing as a fine art was really undreamt of till long after the Matterhorn had been conquered. The layman is apt to conceive all Alpine climbs as a succession of dizzy precipices. To a man brought up on Alpine classics, there are few things more disappointing than the ease of his first big peak. The rock work on the average Oberland or Zermat peaks by the ordinary route is simple, straightforward scrambling up slopes whose average inclination is nearer thirty than sixty degrees. It is the sort of thing that the ordinary man can do by the light of Nature. Rock-climbing, in the sense in which the Dolomite or lake climber uses the term, is an art which calls for high qualities of nerve and physique. Such rock climbing was almost unknown till some time after the close of this period. No modern cragsman would consider the Matterhorn, even if robbed of its fixed ropes, as anything but a straightforward piece of interesting rock work, unless he was unlucky enough to find it in bad condition. All this we may frankly admit. Mountaineering as an art was only in its infancy when the Matterhorn was climbed. And yet the Englishmen whom we have mentioned in this chapter did more for mountaineering than any of their successors or predecessors. Bourrit, De Saussure, Beck, Placidus à Spescha, and the other pioneers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, deserve the greatest credit. But their spirited example gave no general impetus to the sport. They were single-handed mountaineers; and somehow they never managed to fire the world with their own enthusiasm. The Englishmen arrived late on the scene. The great giants of more than one district had been climbed. And yet mountaineering was still the pursuit of a few isolated men who knew little or nothing of their brother climbers, who came and struggled and passed away uncheered by the inspiring freemasonry of a band of workers aiming at the same end. It was left to the English to transform mountaineering into a popular sport. Judged even by modern standards some of these men were fine mountaineers, none the less independent because the fashion of the day decreed that guides should be taken on difficult expeditions. But even those who owed the greater part of their success to their guides were inspired by the same enthusiasm which, unlike the lonely watchfires of the earlier pioneers, kindled a general conflagration.
CHAPTER VIII
THE STORY OF THE MATTERHORN
The history of mountaineering contains nothing more dramatic than the epic of the Matterhorn. There is no mountain which appeals so readily to the imagination. Its unique form has drawn poetic rhapsodies from the most prosaic. “Men,” says Mr. Whymper, “who ordinarily spoke or wrote like rational beings when they came under its power seemed to quit their senses, and ranted, and rhapsodied, losing for a time all common forms of speech. Even the sober De Saussure was moved to enthusiasm.”
If the Matterhorn could thus inspire men before the most famous siege in Alpine history had clothed its cliffs in romance, how much more must it move those for whom the final tragedy has become historical? The first view of the Matterhorn, and the moment when the last step is taken on to the final crest, are two moments which the mountaineer never forgets. Those who knew the old Zermat are unpleasantly fond of reminding us that the railway train and the monster hôtels have robbed Zermat of its charm; while the fixed ropes and sardine tins—[Those dear old sardine tins! Our Alpine writers would run short of satire if they could not invoke their aid]—have finally humiliated the unvanquished Titan. It may be so; but it is easy enough to recover the old atmosphere. You have only to visit Zermat in winter when the train is not running. A long trudge up twenty miles of shadowed, frosty valley, a little bluff near Randa, and the Matterhorn soars once more into a stainless sky. There are no clouds, and probably not another stranger in the valley. The hôtels are closed, the sardine tins are buried, and the Matterhorn renews like the immortals an undying youth.
The great mountain remained unconquered mainly because it inspired in the hearts of the bravest guides a despairing belief in its inaccessibility. “There seemed,” writes Mr. Whymper, “to be a cordon drawn round it up to which one might go, but no further. Within that line gins and efreets were supposed to exist—the wandering Jew and the spirits of the damned. The superstitious natives in the surrounding valleys (many of whom firmly believed it to be not only the highest mountain in the Alps, but in the world) spoke of a ruined city on the summit wherein the spirits dwelt; and if you laughed they gravely shook their heads, told you to look yourself to see the castle and walls, and warned one against a rash approach, lest the infuriated demons from their impregnable heights might hurl down vengeance for one’s derision.”