Mountain Craft

by Unknown

There is yet further justification to be found for them in the only literature accessible to them—the famous alpine classics, and the original relationship of amateur and guide therein set forth. We mountaineers owe so much to these early explorers and to their inspiring records, which first set our feet on the mountain way and which remain our most cherished and revered companions, that it is an ungrateful task to have to forsake them for a moment in the interests of veracity and of our modern mountain craft. But many of these notable pioneers, or at least those whose personality is most permanent in literature, were not mountaineers in the technical sense in which we understand the word to-day. Mountaineering, as an art, has made immense strides among amateurs and professionals alike since their time, due largely to the force of their original impulse. What was true of their time is no longer true; and while their writing will remain the source of every climber’s inspiration until mountaineering may be forgotten in the passion for winter sports and aviation, it is not in the best interests of the sport that their pronouncements should be considered as absolutely or, even on technical points, as relatively true of modern conditions. They were undoubtedly fortunate in their guides. When they were not, we do not hear of it, or only in a passing sentence. The amateurs were themselves few in number, and the most enterprising naturally attracted to themselves the few considerable personalities among a race of as yet unspoiled mountain peasants and hunters. They found them companions, men of intelligence, manners and courage. The knowledge of mountaineering conditions was in its infancy, and the peasant was accustomed from childhood to such knowledge as existed. Relatively to the present day he was better physically equipped than his employer, who was primarily an explorer or a walking enthusiast. He was therefore not undeserving of the implicit confidence placed in his judgment and skill.

The Guide as he is.

Conditions have changed. Guides have no longer the opportunity of travelling up and down the Alps to secure the same wide basis of experience. Only a few of them are taken beyond their own valleys; and when they are, they are associated in most cases with local experts, who relieve them of the necessity of exerting their brains to discover the new conditions. Only in very rare cases among their multiple employers do they ever get the same opportunity of long contact with more active or educated intelligences, such as could react upon their own appreciation of their own mountain problems. The organized conditions for tourist life in the Alps, the separate quarters in hotel and hut, the rapid succession of engagements with men of different nationalities and divergent types, and their own guide-schools, inculcating precise codes of manners to use with ‘Herren,’ forbid the old freedom of intercourse. The best and most travelled of guides has a different manner on the mountain and in the hotel. There is no authority so absolute as that of the hotel-keeper in a small democratic Swiss community in all that affects the tourist traffic. And the ideas of an average hotel-keeper as to the nature of tourists and as to the proper behaviour towards them on the part at least of his, the hotel-keeper’s, dependents or inferiors are not unlike those of a head waiter in a city restaurant. The tradition that the guide is a professional servant has become engrained. The stoutest of mountaineering democrats has to accept its restrictions, once off the mountains, if only to save his guide’s discomfort. And the average guide on his side, dealing every summer with succeeding varieties of incapable amateurs often ignorant of his language, and accustomed to the passive acceptance of his service to hoist them up conventional peaks, has grown up in a traditional atmosphere of aloofness and of courteous disregard for his employers as mountaineers in his own professional sense. A collective professional attitude has established itself of which the early days knew little or nothing; the most independent of guides, however well he may know his employer’s capacity by experience, cannot but find the utmost difficulty in discarding tradition and associating himself with the amateur’s judgment if it happens to conflict with local hear-say or with the view of some inferior professional using the familiar patois. And just in so far as a collective opinion, in theatre or crowd or guild, is inferior to the individual judgment of the majority of intelligent individuals who compose it, and echoes, as if unanimously, the more blatant voice of the more vulgar elements, in so far is the capacity, even of good individual guides of the present day, inferior to that of their predecessors in matters requiring the exercise of wider intelligence upon unforeseen problems or new conditions. Just in so far, also, are guides hampered by their body of tradition and prejudice from profiting by their contact with more educated minds, or from learning to apply new principles to the special circumstances of their profession. With the formalizing, even in details, of the route up every regular peak, the stimulus of romance and adventure has gone for them far more than for the amateur. The new generation finds its only outlet in the autumn chamois-hunting, if at all. Its mountaineering is just business.

There are some rare and notable exceptions—perhaps as many in actual number as formed the chosen band of guides who led the early mountaineers in their pleasant comradeship of triumph—but they are attached in almost all cases for each season to affectionate and jealous employers, and for the general mass of climbers there exists only a general mass of guides of the limited and professional cast of mind. In continuance of early pioneering tradition some great amateurs of the old school still maintain that the guide’s word should be law in all tactical and even strategical decisions. These are the fortunate men, whose knowledge and reputation can command the services of the surviving body of exceptions. If they were not so fortunate, they would have to reconsider their view, or they would, at the present date, see more of hotels than of huts, of pastures than of peaks.

The Amateur as he may be.

If guides have, as a whole, not progressed in the responsible and sympathetic qualities essential for management, amateurs have improved out of all proportion. Mountain craft, the mastery of the laws that govern ice and rock and of their application, has become an exact science, and the educated intelligence, under right guidance, is able in a season or so to enter upon a whole inheritance of knowledge, of detail and principle, which it took decades of tentative experiment to discover. In the matter of purely technical skill also, of physical performance, of balance, the use of the feet, of the axe, the rope and the eyes, the phenomenon common to all sports has made itself evident: each new generation of climbers appears to inherit, almost as an instinct and without visible or conscious study, a greater adaptability, an easier apprehension, as it were, of the necessary and improving physical adjustments which had to be laboriously acquired by the previous generation. Consequently the good amateur now brings to the partnership a mountaineering qualification unimagined fifty years ago, possessed of an accumulated knowledge of all varying and recorded conditions and of a transmitted instinct for the novel athletic requirements.

In stating this, I do not wish for a moment to be thought to undervalue either the spirit or the skill of the few great early guideless parties who first broke loose from the growing oppression of the professional guiding traditions. They had to face a hostile criticism of whose intensity we have now little conception. In the then condition of mountaineering knowledge their independent action, undertaken deliberately in the best interest of mountaineering as a great pursuit, postulated a resolute courage and a readiness for responsibility that proved to be as well justified by their record of performance as it remains deserving of our wholehearted admiration. The relations of amateur and guide would probably in any case have followed the same line of development. But these pioneers did more than anticipate. They first taught the amateur that it was safe for him, if he wished, to prosecute the craft for himself, and that he possessed advantages that could make him, if he followed them up independently, all but the equal of the best guides.

A guide is, in fact, only a ‘guide’ in the sense that he belongs to a professional class. The name can no longer be used to imply an inherent supremacy in all fields of mountaineering. Similarly an amateur possesses an inheritance and opportunities which make it possible for him to make himself as good as a guide in many, and better than a guide in several, important qualifications.

The Composite Mountaineer.

The title mountaineer can no longer be confined to the man of the mountains. It connotes the perfect mastery of a difficult craft to which guide and amateur alike aspire. This mountain science consists of several departments of equal importance, in some of which the amateur, in others the guide, starts with an initial advantage. In relation to its absolute acquisition there are bad professionals and medium professionals, and bad amateurs and moderate amateurs, according to their personal and not their class values. If they develop their experience and skill at an even rate, either will retain his initial advantage over the other according as the degree of difficulty or the special character of the climbing gives the greater opportunity to the special qualities of the one or of the other. Ultimately, in the highest flights of mountaineering, a point of difficulty is reached which calls for the highest degree of efficiency in all the departments; and since human endurance is limited and economy is essential for emergencies, the ideal combination for swift and secure progress in these ultimate expeditions is to be found in the association of the qualities of the guide and the amateur, each supremely qualified in his own department.