An apology has already been offered in the Introduction for a subjective treatment of mountains. Whether the mountain that we loved is an entity independent of man is a question that may be left to philosophers to discuss. Man may or may not be the measure of all things, but to some extent every man undoubtedly fashions Nature in the mould of his own beliefs. Every mountain lover brings something new to the common worship: for each of us spells out a different syllable in the universal message of the hills. So these pages contain an attempt to analyse one aspect of the mountains, that aspect which is caught in childhood and youth.
The thread that binds the scattered memories of seventeen summers and eleven winters in the Alps is the half-belief that in some sense the mountains are not only so many tons of rock and ice, that they are something more than the ruins of chaos, and possess an individuality elusive but none the less very real. In an uninspired age when a dogmatic Christianity was pitted against an even more dogmatic Rationalism, this belief in a mountain soul found its most poetic expression in an unsuspected quarter. Leslie Stephen would have smiled grimly at any attempt to read more than a figurative meaning into certain passages of The Alps in Winter; but no one can read that lofty confession of an agnostic’s faith without feeling that it is this rather than the essay of that name which constitutes the true Agnostic’s Apology. Naturalism could not resist the mute appeal of ‘those mighty monuments of a bygone age ... to which in spite of all reason it is impossible not to attribute some shadowy personality.’ And there is the ring of something more than fantasy in the final words: ‘Their voice is mystic and has found discordant interpreters, but to me at least it speaks in tones at once more simple and more awe-inspiring than that of any mortal teacher.’
What the heart feels to-day, philosophy may assume to-morrow. It would be easy to find a further illustration in Fechner’s great vision of the Earth Soul; easy but unprofitable, for no faith, least of all a fragile Aberglaube such as this, can stand the strain of a philosophic formula. This sense of a conscious personality in Nature is most powerful in childhood. I do not pretend that our childhood peopled its surroundings with fairies, goblins, and similar stage supers. Nor shall I add to the accumulations of mischievous nonsense that have become fashionable at a time when literature delights, without understanding, to dabble in the curious psychology of childhood. The modern conception of the child seems oddly mistaken. He is pictured as a sexless cherub trailing clouds of moral glory from a prenatal paradise. But the child is non-moral, and only acquires with difficulty and growth the conventional ethics of his elders. The natural child is cruel with the cruelty that comes from an absence of experience of pain. Without experience his imagination has nothing to build on, for, as that genial cynic Hobbes remarks, ‘Pity is the imagining unto oneself of a woe.’ The modern child and the mediæval man have much in common. The imagination of both is at once vivid and restricted. From this springs the experimental cruelty as well as that intense joy of life equally characteristic of the age of childhood and of the Middle Ages. The world of the fifteenth century was narrower, but within its restricted boundaries far richer in romantic possibilities than the world as it now exists for the ‘grown-ups.’ For all but the child the dog-headed men have had their day. So the narrow limits that bounded our wanderings in those early Grindelwald summers contained a world instinct with an intangible romance that the years have never expelled.
My first distinct mountain memory is that of watching at the age of four Grindelwald and our temporary home in flames. An aunt tried to banish the terrifying spectacle by a handkerchief round my eyes, a needless precaution. As a proper child I was fascinated by the prospect of vicarious emotion, and the possibility of some fellow-creature roasting in the flames added interest to the drama. But it was not Grindelwald in flames, it was the ruthless indifference of the Eiger insolently preening its snows in the blood-red haze of the catastrophe that really gripped me with fear. The mountains bind us by their very superiority to suffering. The unrelenting callousness that hurls the boulders down the gully in which we are pinned appeals to our primitive imaginations. ‘The attitude of the creature towards his Creator,’ said Newman, ‘should be one of abject submission.’ ‘Not abject,’ replied some Anglican divine, ‘respectful.’ ‘Not submission,’ says the mountaineer, ‘resistance.’ Analyse the peculiar appeal of some stern struggle against a mountain stronghold, and it is this sentiment that is most prominent. Conflict without animosity makes the strongest demand on the fighting instinct and the faculty for worship. Like children we like to see how far we can go. We learn to honour the reserve of strength that is not exerted against us and of beauty that we cannot overcome.
‘Love thou the Gods and withstand them, lest thy
fame should fail at the end—
And thou be but their thrall and their bondman,
who wast born for their very friend.’
Five summer months we spent in a little village a few miles from Grindelwald. We came in the early days of May just as the snow began to call a late retreat from the pastures above the chalet. We watched the fields rich in the promise of spring, and caught some afterglow from
‘The gleam of the first of summers on the yet untrodden grass.’
The most prosaic child can fashion from a back-garden of weeds a world of magical fancies. So it is not surprising that we found in our summer playground a wealth of intimate suggestion. For it is true of the child, as was said of Fechner, that ‘his only extravagances are those of thought, but these are gorgeous ones.’
As the shortening days at the end of September foretold the long winter sleep we sorrowfully departed for the City of Dreadful Night. The sorrows and joys of childhood are singularly final. The wider imagination of youth can realise that the Alps are not irrevocably lost when the train steams sadly out of the platform at Berne. No such consolations suggested themselves to us as children, and the weary months that had to elapse before the next glimpse of Paradise might as well have been eternity. But life is vital only by contrast, and it may have been that the mountain passion found its strongest ally in a childhood divided between the generous open life of the hills and the sullen gloom of a London Square.
To those days we owe the fascination that even now invests the railway journey to the Alps with a romance that an older school would have us believe vanished with the last stage-coach. Perhaps it did for them. But for those who have been brought up on steam, there can be few things more provocative of wonder than the journey to Switzerland. We used to wait for the vigilant nurse to trumpet forth the evidences of deep slumber, and then gently raised the blinds always relentlessly drawn. For us the rattle and roar of the night express—to some a discordant chaos of sound—seemed ‘the music nighest bordering upon heaven,’ a brave accompaniment to the drama that flashed past us into the night, dim white spaces of open road, sleeping hamlets, shadowy trees and waters mirroring the stars. Could any contrast be more intense than the sunlit joy of that first morning in Berne when the ‘authentic air of Paradise’ seemed to linger round the terrace, and the leaden despair of the return to Charing Cross in a fog? I am still susceptible to the riotous excitement of the nights in the train. Even now I can barely understand how any one can remain unmoved as the train sweeps from the gates of the Jura to reveal beyond the morning mists the host of peaks from the Wetterhorn to the Blumlisalp.