Nor was it only in the domestic circle that de Saussure could put his foot down if required. In one of the Genevan revolutions—that of 1782—he also showed his mettle in an energetic fashion. He was a magistrate at the time, and one day, when he came down to the Hôtel de Ville, he found that the popular party had risen in revolt, and seized the building. The rioters requested him to take his place, and exercise magisterial functions on lines which they would dictate. When he refused, they arrested him, but released him on the following day. Then, hearing that they proposed to search his house for arms, he decided to resist. He, Trembley, the mathematician, his family, his servants, and his dog, constituted the tiny garrison. They barricaded the doors, stationed themselves at the windows armed with muskets, and successfully defied a gang of revolutionists who came to blow them up with hand-grenades. His assailants were reduced to threatening to murder his friends if he did not surrender; and it was only this final menace that brought about the capitulation of the Genevan Fort Chabrol.
Our business here, however, is not with the politician, but with the traveller and the man of science. His widest celebrity is no doubt due to his famous ascent of Mont Blanc. If he was not the first man to climb that mountain, he was, at any rate, the first to believe that it could be climbed. Bourrit, as late as 1773, had written of ‘the absolute impossibility of attaining to its summit.’ De Saussure, as early as 1760, had offered a reward to anyone who could find a way to the top, and undertaken to pay a day’s wages to anyone who tried and failed. The reward was not claimed until twenty-six years later, when Jacques Balmat got it. When the way was found, de Saussure, though now forty-seven years of age, at once made haste to follow it. His ascent—the third—was accomplished on August 3, 1787; he published a short pamphlet, giving an account of it, in the course of the same year.
THE AIGUILLE AND DÔME DU GOÛTER, MONT BLANC
The climb was, beyond question, a great feat for a philosopher of forty-seven, and it brought the name of de Saussure under the notice of thousands of people who would never otherwise have heard of him. A still greater feat, accomplished a little later, was the camping out, for something over a fortnight, on the Col du Géant. But it is not upon either of these feats that de Saussure’s real fame reposes. He is reckoned among great men partly because he was the first student of geology who knew his business, and partly because he is the only Alpine writer of his period whose works have stood the test of time.
The geologists who preceded him fall into two classes. There were the mere fossilizers, who had about as much claim to be considered men of science as have the stamp-collectors of the present day; there were the theorists who geologized, so to say, in the air, threw out hasty generalizations from their studies, and thought it beneath their dignity as philosophers to correct these hypotheses by the further observation of phenomena. De Saussure combined their methods. His life was one long, patient study of geological phenomena. But he collected in order to collate; his aim was always to see the part in its relation to the whole, the particular in its relation to the general; and he had a fine contempt for the amateurs who collected fossils in the same spirit in which they might have collected pottery or bric-à-brac.
‘The one aim,’ he wrote, ‘of most of the travellers who call themselves naturalists is the collection of curiosities. They walk, or rather they creep about, with their eyes fixed upon the earth, picking up a specimen here and a specimen there, without any eye to a generalization. They remind me of an antiquary scratching the ground at Rome, in the midst of the Pantheon or the Coliseum, looking for fragments of coloured glass, without ever turning to look at the architecture of these magnificent edifices.’
The most remarkable thing, however, is that de Saussure, being a geologist, should have been a stylist. He certainly never meant to be one. He would never have written a book merely to show his skill in word-painting; his one purpose in writing was to communicate discoveries of importance. At the time when Bourrit was making himself famous by his picturesque descriptions of the Alps, the greater man wrote to him modestly: ‘I too have an idea of publishing something on the natural history of these mountains. It is with that end in view that I have been studying them for so many years.’ And in the introduction of his great work, he apologizes for what seems to him the baldness of his style: ‘More practised in climbing rocks than in polishing phrases, I have attempted nothing more than to render clearly the objects which I have seen, and the impressions which I have felt.’
It was an apology offered without affectation or false modesty. It announced a departure from the literary fashion of the day, which was to write of the mountains in the language of high-flown sentiment. Rousseau had set the fashion; Ramond de Carbonnière, the philosopher of the Pyrenees, was ready to carry it on; de Luc and Bourrit were doing what they could. De Saussure wished to announce himself as the disciple of none of these, but as the plain man who had made a careful study of his subject, and wished to be heard because of what he had to say and not because of his manner of saying it. He hardly understood that he was, in the full sense of the word, a man of letters—a literary artist. That is a point which has since been settled in his favour by his readers.
He might easily have written a treatise that would have been invaluable to specialists and intolerable to everyone else. Guided by a sure instinct, he preferred to write the narrative of his journeys, taking the reader, as it were, by the hand, making him his confidant, showing him his discoveries in the order in which he makes them, and so luring him on to take an interest in a subject generally accounted dull. And, though his first care was always to observe, and to collate his observations, with a view to the advancement of learning, there always was in him something of the poet, which must out from time to time, temporarily giving the go-by to the man of science.