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—
“How faintly flushed, how phantom fair
Was Monte Rosa, hanging there
A thousand shadowy pencilled valleys
And snowy dells in a golden air.”