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.