He could tolerate no irreverent spirits in the sanctuary of the mountain. Leslie Stephen's
remark that the Alps were improved by tobacco smoke became a profanity. One shudders at the thought of the reprimand which Stevenson would have drawn down upon himself had his flippant messages from the Alps come before that austere critic. In a letter to Charles Baxter, Stevenson complained of how “rotten” he had been feeling “alone with my weasel-dog and my German maid, on the top of a hill here, heavy mist and thin snow all about me and the devil to pay in general.” And worse still are the lines sent to a friend—
Figure me to yourself, I pray— A man of my peculiar cut— Apart from dancing and deray, Into an Alpine valley shut;
Shut in a kind of damned hotel, Discountenanced by God and man; The food?—Sir, you would do as well To cram your belly full of bran.
The soul of Ruskin was born and fashioned for the mountains. His first visit to Switzerland in 1833 brought him to “the Gates of the Hills—opening for me a new life—to cease no more except at the Gates of the Hills whence
one returns not. It is not possible to imagine,” he adds of his first sight of the Alps, “in any time of the world a more blessed entrance into life for a child of such temperament as mine.... I went down that evening from the garden terrace of Schaffhausen with my devotion fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful.” [1]
[1] Life of Ruskin, by Sir Edward Cooke (George Allen and Unwin Ltd.).
That profound stirring of the depths of the soul which Ruskin avowed as the impetus to his life's work is only possible when the mind is fired by a devotion to the mountains which brooks no rival. “For, to myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery,” he wrote in The Mountain Glory; “in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up.” And he completely and forever reversed Dante's dismal conception of scenery befitting souls in purgatory by saying that “the best image which the world can give of Paradise is in the slope of the meadows, orchards, and cornfields on the sides of a great Alp, with its purple rocks and eternal snows above.”
No lover of mountains has approached Ruskin
in intensity of veneration. Emile Javelle is not far away. Javelle climbed as by a religious impulse; his imagination was filled by Alpine shapes; he, like Ruskin, had forfeited his heart to the invisible snow-maiden that dwells above the clouds. When Javelle was a child his uncle showed him a collection of plants, and amongst them the “Androsace ... rochers du Mont Blanc.” This roused the desire to climb; the faded bit of moss with the portion of earth still clinging to the roots became a sacred relic beckoning him to the shrine of the white mountain. In the same way Ruskin, mature and didactic, yet withal so beautifully childlike, tells us “that a wild bit of ferny ground under a fir or two, looking as if possibly one might see a hill if one got to the other side, will instantly give me intense delight because the shadow, the hope of the hills is in them.” Both lovers showed the same disdain of the mere climber. Javelle's Alpine memories record his sense of aloofness from the general type of member of the Alpine Club.