We drove down through vineyards and past a large villa and church, and through a narrow Via Garibaldi into a Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele. The south side of the square was formed by the hotel, an imposing building which contains within its walls the post and diligence offices. The windows command a view up Val Malenco, terminated by the twin peaks of the Schwestern, which appear from this side as two rocky teeth, hardly to be recognised as the pure snow-cones which look in at every window at Pontresina.
I have now, I hope, given an account of the mountains of Val Masino, which, though far from complete, may suffice to aid mountaineers who wish to visit them, and to direct attention to some of the most enjoyable expeditions within their limits. But, as I put aside the various pamphlets from which I have tried to add to my own information on this group, I notice that a worthy Herr Professor has remarked on the first ascent of the Disgrazia, that it was 'wholly devoid of scientific interest and results.' I fancy my learned friend preparing to lay down this holiday chronicle with a similar shrug of the shoulders; and I feel indisposed to allow him his criticism until he has first submitted it to be examined in detail, and listened to what may be urged on the other side.
'The Alps,' that shrug seems to say, 'are not a playground for idle boys, but a store-room full of puzzles; and it is only on the understanding that you will set to work to dissect one of these that you can be allowed to enter. You have free leave to look on them, according to your taste, as an herbarium, or as a geological, or even an entomological museum, but they must be treated, and treated only, as a laboratory. The belief that the noblest use of mountains is to serve as a refectory at once mental and physical for an overworked generation, that—
Men in these crags a medicine find
To stem corruption of the mind,
is a poetical delusion unworthy of the philosopher who penned the lines. You must not come here to climb for mere health, or to indulge a sensual love of the beautiful, or, still worse, that brutelike physical energy which may be more harmlessly exhausted in persecuting foxes or trampling turnips. Μηδεὶς ἀγεωμέτρητος εἰσίτω. Come with a measuring rod or not at all.'
So far our critic. In his anxiety to claim on behalf of science exclusive dominion over the mountains, he forgets that all great works of nature are not only monuments of past changes but also living influences. The physical history of our globe is a study the importance of which no one at the present day is likely to disallow. Because we refuse to look on mountains simply as so much historical evidence, we of the Alpine Club do not by any means, as has been frequently suggested, range ourselves amongst the Philistines. We listen with the greatest interest to the men of genius whose mission it is to interpret the hieroglyphics of the temple in which we only worship. But we do not all of us recognise it as our duty to try to imitate their researches. Nor would the wiser of them wish for imitation from an incompetent herd of dabblers, who, however much they might gratify individual vanity, would advance the general sum of knowledge about as much as an ordinary amateur sketchbook does art.
Is it always better for a man, when acres of red rhododendron are in full bloom around him, and the insects are filling the air with a delicious murmur, to be engrossed body and soul in poking about for some rare plant or impaling an unfortunate beetle? When two hundred miles of mountain and plain, lake and river, cornland and forest, are spread out before the eyes, ought one to be remembering that 'justification' depends on ascertaining whether the back is resting on granite or feldspathic gneiss?
The preposterous pretension that no one is 'justified' (it is the favourite word) in drinking in mountain glory in its highest forms unless he brings as a passport a profession of research, cannot be too strongly denounced. To require from every Alpine climber some show of a scientific object would be to preoccupy men's minds at the moment when they should, and would otherwise, be most open to enlarging influences; it would in many cases be to throw away moral advantages and to encourage egotism, vanity, and humbug.
An obvious comparison may perhaps render more clear the relative positions of the simple lover of the Alps and the scientific dabbler. Rome is almost as universal a goal of modern travel as Switzerland. There also is a great history to be studied, on many of the problems of which investigation of the ground we tread may throw light.