The Alps

by Arnold Lunn

I saw them and they were the same
They were not changed like me in frame;
I saw their thousand years of snow
On high—their wide long lake below.
And the blue Rhone in fullest flow; ...
I saw the white walled distant town;
And whiter sails go skimming down;
And then there was a little isle
Which in my very face did smile,
The only one in view.”

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—

“Dense fleecy clouds
Are wandering in thick flocks among the mountains
Shepherded by the slow unwilling wind.”

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.”