I have left to the last the consideration of the one exceptional case where, for want of sufficient material as a basis for judgment, no clear crystal of modern mountaineering opinion has had opportunity to fashion itself, and where the old debate as between ‘guided’ and ‘guideless’ still survives with something of its old vivacity. This is the case of the highest flights possible in mountaineering, the ascent of the limited number of really great ridges and faces in the Alps and in less explored ranges. These climbs provide the most magnificent exercise of strength, endurance, nerve and spirit, all acting in harmony and all at their utmost tension, that human daring or ingenuity has yet discovered or invented. If they do not represent the limit of possible human achievement, they represent the limit of achievement possible with security in a single day of human effort. They are the ambition of every wholehearted mountaineer, but they fall to the lot of only the few. Many of them are seldom repeated; on others the conditions vary greatly between the rare ascents. Even among the fortunate few who succeed, it will be still fewer who can honestly say that they remained sufficiently masters of themselves and of the situation throughout the long day of extraordinary effort, sufficiently in command of muscle and nerve to meet all the physical demands unassisted and with a critical judgment, sufficiently conscious of all the tactical, human and technical manœuvres by which the success was finally won, to be able to recover from memory a detached opinion as to the relative difficulty of the climb, or to be able to estimate fairly their own ability to repeat the day ‘unguided’ in all its problems for leadership as well as in its tests of pure skill and endurance. It is a common failing among even the best of mountaineers to forget how much they have been ‘morally’ assisted by their company, or how little they may have personally contributed to the actual carrying through of a great climb, in the afterglow of its success. The more we allow for the unusual physical and emotional reaction of these great ascents, the less security we feel in applying standards of common judgment to the opinions and narratives of their few conquerors. The body of ordinary expert mountaineering opinion is of little assistance. Mountaineers whose experience is limited to normal ascents, or who may even have ‘done’ some of these greater climbs between two expert professionals with their bodies and their judgments equally in a condition of suspense, are only a few degrees better qualified than the climbing public to judge of the combination of human faculties required for leadership and management in their secure conquest. We are forced, therefore, to take as our basis for comparison in forming our opinion the few records of such supreme ascents as have been performed by both guided and guideless parties. If, then, we examine these dispassionately, and allow for the golden spectacles of a natural exaltation, the greater where it is the less professional and the more personal, we may decide that the sum of purely dangerous incident, of benightments, races with darkness, breakages of cornice, etc., which they narrate, adds up to the disadvantage of the guideless ascents. The proportion of danger incurred is the one absolute standard by which all mountaineering can be judged. Between danger and difficulty there is a clear line of demarcation, which shifts according to our ability, but which is always perceptible. In doing without guides, these gallant parties, from their own accounts, while they triumphed equally over the difficulties, skirted more closely and more continuously along the border-line of danger.
Reason would bring us to the same conclusion. When we are estimating the limit of what is humanly safe in mountaineering, we are considering not what is securely possible for a single individual, a comparatively low standard, but that which it may be possible for an ideal combination of mountaineering qualities to achieve in one day. Up to the present time we find in certain of the best of the guides the highest development yet attained in one of the two groups of necessary qualifications; in certain of the best of the amateurs we find the highest development in the other. Until guides are enabled to enjoy all the advantages of the amateur’s education and mental training while they still retain their own natural conditions of life, or until amateurs can live the lives of guides and yet remain all that wider circumstance and opportunity assist to make them as amateurs, the finest mountaineering combination will and must still remain that of the associated group-qualities of guide and amateur, each group in its highest degree of individual development.
If a small but concrete proof were needed that neither the combination of the best of guides alone nor of the best of amateurs alone represents the most efficient type of mountaineering machine, it might be found in the history of the conquest of a number of great alpine climbs, which for years defeated alike good guides in association and good amateurs in association, but finally yielded in almost all cases to the combination of good guides and good amateurs.
But it is dangerous to dogmatize. When we are talking of exceptional ascents we are dealing with exceptional men; and if we say that for the safe performance of these exceptional ascents the best amateur parties will be strengthened by the addition of the best of guides, it is with the knowledge that amateur climbing has made extraordinary strides of recent years, and that in any season the conjunction of two or more hitherto unimagined amateur stars may yet further raise the recognized limits of the safely possible in guideless climbing. In such case, the time-honoured discussion as to what degree of difficulty makes a guide indispensable to an expert amateur party, in order to minimize its dangers, with all its heartburnings and rash intrusions, will be removed into an even more remote sphere than the already rarefied atmosphere of exceptional climbs in which alone it is still permissible. The matter may then be for super-mountaineers to debate. The discussion is now, in all but these extreme cases, dead. Sentiment or ignorance may still return to the old war-cries ‘guided’ and ‘guideless,’ used with the old significance, in fireside journals; in safe print moonshine may yet confuse the climbing ways which troops of stars have illuminated; but in the mountains new developments have established new doctrine, and a mountaineer is safe from criticism worthy of the name if he regulates his practice according to modern interpretation.
The Management of Guides
If or when a leader decides to take guides, he has to know how to manage them. I have already said that he is not now entitled merely to engage the best guides available, and then leave all the direction and responsibility to them. Few modern guides expect or deserve this. His abdication will be followed by starts on wrong days, amazing meals, more visits to huts than mountains, unaccountable retreats, and final disgust with guides altogether. His party, at the close, will have attained no harmony and have lived divided into two camps. The amateur members will have been the least considered; they will either have been dry-nursed or oppressed. The surrender of their leader’s functions to the guides will have left them with no authoritative channel through which to secure their proper share of responsibility and independence. They will have become discontented and adopted the conventional language of the lower criticism, abusing the guides for their tobacco, their peaty clothes, their drinking and want of enterprise; much as is still set forth in accredited climbing books of the ‘picture-me-then!’ class. The guides for their part, undirected and uninspired, will have fallen back upon their professional traditions and caution, meeting the unsympathetic atmosphere, which they do not understand, with taciturnity, aggravating interference or childish assertiveness. The whole blame will have lain with the leader. Just for a handful of silver he left them, renouncing his entire responsibilities because one or two of his party were to receive certain shillings in return for their skilled companionship. The party has had no leader, no focus for authority and opinion, and it could attain no success.
Guide Nature.
A guide is as much a human being as any amateur in the party. If it is necessary for the manager to have constant care of the health and morale of his friends, it is doubly so in the case of his guides. The average guide is a peasant, with the limitations that frame peasant virtues. His guiding motive is the struggle for existence under hard conditions. His winters are spent in wood chopping, hard work and keeping warm, with cards, wine and village gossip for distraction. His public is preponderatingly masculine: in many mountain villages the proportion of boys to girls is five to three. His winter society consists of a fluctuating population, crudely packed for the cold months, and dispersed in parasitic occupations during the summer; it has therefore not even a parochial sense of responsibility in the creation of its prejudices. All talk circulates round ‘francs.’ His short summer season is a succession of conflicts with varying degrees of incompetence, in a business in which his conscious superiority is seldom challenged. It is impressed upon him that his most paying accomplishments are an obliging manner and a smattering of spoken tongues. He has small occasion to measure himself against other men or get an idea of his own personal value, because the world comes to him in its most artificial form, and plays him only at his own game with a fantastic handicap. He is a child, with a precocious development on a special line which gives him his one standard for manhood in general. Outside his valley he has to fear the antagonism, even the petty violence, of any local trade union; inside it he has all a schoolboy’s fear of outraging some point of rigid local etiquette. There is no more of William Tell and the edelweiss post card in the material life of a Swiss valley than there is of Robin Hood and Merrie England in an agricultural village. If the guide turns back on an ascent, after hearing some incomprehensible patois from a fellow-villager the evening before in a hut, or if he refrains from bullying a surly official on our behalf, on whose good offices he may be dependent, or if he shows no active sympathy in our condemnation of a recalcitrant porter, who may be his wife’s cousin, we have no right to expect anything different. If after a gorgeous sunset and a romantic ascent he still cares more for our francs than our fellowship, it is perfectly natural. We should look for nothing else, if we had not fashioned our typical guide in youth from the narrative of the great literary pioneers, who still found here and there a sympathetic village unspoiled by hotels and tourists, or a natural son of the hills whose responsive courtesy could reflect, if it did not comprehend, the symbolical attributes, born of the realization of romantic success and physical well-being, with which the imagination of the contented employer invested his guide’s leadership. We too find a few such men. But we recognize them as exceptions, or as beings who visit us in their full splendour only in the roseate hours of reminiscence following on a great climb.
The guide as we know him is hill-born, hill-bred,—that is, a child, with a child’s capacity for becoming much what we make him,—a companion, a valet or a machine,—and with a child’s suspicion and shyness, which he hides under an appearance of professional reserve or a formal politeness.
The Right Footing.