Part 8
And yet the peril of them is greater in imagination than in reality--dazzled by the light in which he loves to bathe himself, he cannot see the wanderer on the heights, who may dance unobserved in the view of public streets. The troll-kind are like some power able to shake the earth, and to overwhelm life when the time comes, but now only manifesting a greater grandeur to the eyes--volcano, flame, or flood: engrossed in their own subterranean labours, they give scarce a thought to us, and we may even mock at them from without; discover yourself, however, and he becomes the arch-enemy, like the all-powerful earth-force, ready to annihilate those whom it supports, and yet some evil power they have had upon the Climber--they have lured him to desist from praises of his lady, and to run off in disquisitions upon their ugly selves. Thwart them, Climber, and return to your Princess! She has granted Beauties--she does not deny Adventures: no--you may meet with strange ones on the tops--unexpected sights that would lose half their strangeness if they had been known and sought.
One befell upon a chapel--that chapel whose top is adorned with the four symbolic figures known to common repute as Faith, Hope, Charity, and Mathematics. To the Climber they are rather Spirits of the Heights, beckoning him on with enticement of gesture, expression still alluring spite of that strange emaciation, that attrition of feature given to them in their high desolate realm by the unruly Elements....
The chapel--if you will allow a short excursus--is a good climb; it is best taken from the west; the heights once gained, there follows a spread-eagle traverse on a ledge past the clock (to resist setting its hands at sixes and sevens--if that metaphor be allowed--is hard). Thirty feet below are the flag-stones of the quad; next time you pass beneath the chapel arch, think of slow midnight figures shuffling along that narrow ledge above, feeling with anxious feet for the unseen, unpleasant wires, ridges, and minor anfractuosities with which it is beset.
From the ledge there is a press-up (without holds) on to the balustrade: what may be called the shoulder is now reached. The final pitch, a very interesting eastward-facing pipe, is left to climb: and then there we are in the pure air of truth with Mathematics and the rest of them.
Seldom is there space on summits for an encounter with Adventure. Here, however, a flat-topped balustrade runs round the top; this, on a second visit, we thought should be perambulated, and perambulation was in progress when suddenly the leader stopped short--another step and he would have been plunged in a crevasse. True, it was so narrow that he could not have fallen past his arms; but then this was none of your smooth cold ice-cracks. It belonged to the volcano rather than the glacier--a square pipe leading down twistingly to red-hot fires below. Lucky for him he had not stepped unwarily, now to be wedged in it, his helpless body fast, suffering a double and simultaneous metamorphosis, into frozen mutton above, smoked ham below.
It was only a chimney really, but you have no idea how curious a chimney looks from above, especially a big square one like this, without vestige of chimney-pot, and edge flush with the balustrade in the centre of which it had taken it into its head to debauch. And then its position, thus in the very chapel--that was strange. With the poet we asked:
‘What occupation do you here pursue? This is a lonesome place for one like you’;
but we got no answer--the embers did not even give one ‘flash of mild surprise,’ and we never knew what manner of man was warmed at the blaze we had seen dying.
So much for Adventure; now let us seek Romance.
Wadham Gardens are beautiful--but usually only to be seen as setting to a flower show, to the accompaniment of a band, and upon payment of a shilling. The Climber sees them free of charge, in their own self-sufficient beauty (not decreased by the moonlight), and solitary. Even the owls are almost silent--birds of the twilight more than of the midnight. The squirrels (for there are still squirrels, even here, far within the brick-and-mortar girdle)--they are long asleep. The Warden is safe in bed. The Climber, who is here partly for the garden’s sake, partly to prospect for a route up the College, swishes through the soaking grass along by the shadow of the pines and cedars. Ha!--‘Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?’--What is that dark form that he sees ‘cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green’? The Climber, cautiously approaching, greets with joy a hedge-pig (hedgehog, called by the general name--illogical and less euphonious). He is very tame; even permits a finger to stroke the only strokeable part of him, his soft furry stomach, before rolling up into a pin-cushion. Leaving him thus defensive and spherical, the Climber passes on, only by the next tree to find another; and the performance is repeated.
No route was found that night; but as in the Alps not seldom the off-day in the upland valley brings with birds and flowers a new and equal joy with that of the summits, so the moon-lit hedge-pigs of Wadham touched a chord of romance all their own, and vivified that night with as strong a memory as any hard-won roof-tree could have done.
But it is not always through such moon-lit Edens that the Climber passes; sometimes it is the fierce flames of the Cities of the Plain.
Trinity (to make a necessary digression) has a roof, which, once reached, is mostly walking. It has also a quad with gravel paving, an absence of Bodleian libraries in close propinquity, and the usual complement of chairs. In addition, it sometimes makes six bumps. After one of those occasions it was therefore not unexpected when the Climber, perambulating the Trinity leads, saw beyond the further roof-tree Vesuvius in full eruption--red smoke in a whirling column, full of blazing sparks sailing up and off on the wind. Crawling up the roof-tree and looking over, the Climber saw a sight, not unfamiliar in itself, but strange when viewed from such a viewpoint, and with such detachment. A bit of hell was here on earth. Devils in deshabille were dancing round a flaming pyre, screaming, with shrieking laughter. Others, issuing from the dark doors round the prison-like yard, brought with them offerings for the fire. The iron gates that barred the further side of the square from the night beyond were reminders that none might pass out from this pit: ‘Lasciate ogni speranza’ was doubtless inscribed upon their outer face. It was a relief to find that the servers of the flames brought no writhing Spirits of the Damned, but mere inanimate combustibles.
Well might the Climber lie there gazing till the flames were sinking on to the ember-pile, and the corybantic Zoroastrian bacchanals (for all the three rituals they combined) had begun to slink off to their cells.
To ease stiff limbs, the chapel was taken on the homeward way; and from its top the final flare was seen--a last great blaze, streamers of burning paper floating eastwards away (scaring, no doubt, Eden’s nocturnal browsers), showers of sparks, and then all sinking to a mere flicker in the quiet night. And so to bed.
The Climber can thus penetrate into secret places, see strange sights, have familiar ones for him transmogrified. But this is not all. Profit is combined with pleasure. In an emergency, how useful he can prove.
He may perhaps be allowed to relate a case in point: One Lent Term, after a heavy fall of snow, the inmates of a certain College, which shall be nameless, finding the snow hang heavy on their feet, took it into their heads to take it into their hands, and thence dispatched it as a challenge through the windows of their neighbour College--through the very windows once source of light to the famous Galetti (gone down to posterity, by one of Clio’s whims, with name distorted almost out of recognition). After much shouting and the filling of the historic chamber with snow, the challenge was taken up.
I am no Homer to describe the combat, nor were I one, would this be the place to do so....
Long had they struggled, when there arrived on the field a messenger. His message, delivered with more jocularity than he would have exhibited in Greek drama, was to the effect that the Dean had been peeping through some alleyway, had seen that any direct interference was useless, and had resorted to the method of blockade. All the gates were shut, and the prophets of Baal were to be mercilessly dealt with. ‘Que faire’? Hostilities ceased; earth became united in its opposition to Olympus. Racked brains gave birth to hasty plans--all proved abortive, till suddenly one--a full-armoured Minerva--flashed from its parent’s engendering lead. ‘The Climber, the Climber!’ was all the cry. Soon he appeared, triumphantly escorted, and bearing in his arms his rope. One end of this went through the window (that window, serving more often for the passage of insults, not wholly unaccompanied by injuries, now consecrated to pacific use), and was grasped within by six strong men. The other end became a loop, into which the foot of one of the aliens was inserted. No sooner this, than, hey presto! a pull by the six, and, an alien no longer, he was clinging to his own country’s boundary--the window-sill. No Customs examination or landing formalities--other stalwarts gripped him, and he disappeared into the bowels of his fatherland, a pair of legs for an instant waving farewell to his late enemies.
This was repeated more than a score of times, till at length not one remained for the cunning Dean and his unwreaked vengeance. Barred gates, alert porters, grinning scouts, confidently waiting dons:--who was the instrument to bring them all to nought?--the Climber!
This much for its use to others. Rich use to the Climber himself it has too. Not only as a way out of the prosaic world of streets and staircases into another where for a glorious dusky hour he may feel free, alone with himself, the night, and active limbs, but also as a true training for the more grave realities of nobler peaks in other lands. General exercise for arms (lying sadly fallow if only the ordinary run of games be followed), and back and legs--that is something; but more special practice is given in lightness of balancing and in training a dizzy head. Cat-soft feet are needed there where tell-tale tiles are crossed, where dons abound, and where sharp-hearing porters lurk. Light, even-pulling arms alone can with safety grip frail roof-trees, tiles, or chimney-pots. Then, in reality, it is not common to be above precipices of the true vertical: here in the comfortable city they are never to be avoided. It is physically no doubt as easy to step across above a plumb drop than where the ground is sloping; but however steep the slope, there is some comfort in it for the untrained head, while every crumb of it drops away down the perpendicular.
Soon, however, under necessity’s spell, the reluctant cerebellum (where, I am told, our balance-bump is to be found) becomes used to the smooth uncompromising walls, and the Climber can sally qualmless forth to tackle Dolomites or Cumberland climbs.
Beauty, Romance, Adventure; Help to others; Use, both for mind and body, to oneself: I hope the Climber has said enough to show our Cinderella forth for What she really is. And, gentle reader, you will not grumble if her champion, for reasons not obscure, can display no betraying blazon on his shield. Having championed his fair, and been acclaimed victor in the lists, he rides triumphant forth to kneel before his sovran liege--the British Public. ‘What is your name, that I may honour you?’ ‘Sire, if you will permit me, I will present you with my card.’ Which done, he vanishes, leaving not a wrack behind save the white pasteboard with the two words upon it:
ΑΝΩΝΥΜΟΣ ΤΙΣ
THE MOUNTAINS OF YOUTH
BY
ARNOLD H. M. LUNN (Balliol)
IX. THE MOUNTAINS OF YOUTH
‘Fire made them, earth clothed them, man found them, Our playmates the princes of hills, Last uttered of time, and love-fashioned, Of a fullness of knowledge impassioned For freedom: boy-hearts, royal wills, Sun nursed them, wind taught them, frost crowned them.
Light o’er them, life with them, peace round them, They have waited in masterless strength For the moment of mortal awaking, When bright on new vision upbreaking Far beacons of freedom, at length Art saw them, hope sought them, youth found them.’ GEOFFREY WINTHROP YOUNG.
Few haunters of the Alps can have altogether escaped the dreary ceremonies in some mountain Tabernacle, manufactured perhaps from a drawing-room whose windows reveal malicious glimpses of the snows that suggest a more acceptable service. Few but would recognise the discourse meandering on from the inevitable text, that cry of the soul to great hills afar, which constant quotation cannot wholly mar, to the final application which asserts that the sojourn among the mountains is only given that, fortified in soul and body, we may return to the battle of life. To some of us this pious reflection must appear irredeemably vulgar. Those moments on the hills when the pulses of life seem quickened with new fire are given for the sake, and for the sake alone, of the moments themselves. To adapt them to didactic disquisition is to degrade the chief things of the ancient mountains. For the hills are no mere nursing-home to recuperate after the drudgery of the plains. Those that climb to advance science, to surpass records, to improve their digestion miss the real appeal. For we deserve or we do not deserve the mountains according as we regard them as an end in themselves or as a means to an end.
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.
Chalet life is a useful corrective for those who regard the Swiss as a nation of hotelkeepers and guides. We soon picked up the unlovely patois, and gradually worked our way into the life of the village. We made friends with the owner of the chalet, and spent long hours on the Grindelalp watching the evolution of cheese. We made shameless love to the daughter of the chalet, now a dignified matron. A deserted kine shed was fitted up as a temporary home, and my brother, despite his obvious reluctance, was required to accept the rôle of our offspring. On Sunday we joined the brown-coated congregation in the white-washed Zwinglian church, helped to swell the mournful drone to which Luther’s sonorous hymns are intoned, and listened with incurious awe to the torrent of language with which the ‘Gletcher Pfarrer’ drenched his fold.
Our imagination took its suggestion from those around us. We did not play at soldiers or enginedrivers, for our hero was an old guide. It is significant that we admired him not so much for his sixty odd ascents of the Wetterhorn as for a mythical reputation, which we probably evolved from our sense of the heroic proprieties, that he beat his wife and looked upon the wine when it was red. Inspired by our knight of the rope, we surreptitiously stole an old pick-axe and some forty feet of clothes-line, and daily made our way to the woods above. The will to believe is the greatest asset of childhood, the age of unconscious pragmatism, and we convinced ourselves that, but for the steps laboriously hewed from the yielding earth, we could never have ascended so grim a slope. One day we received a rude awakening. A little damsel followed us, smiled cynically at the elaborate preparations, and then ran lightly up the perilous incline, disdainfully dodging the steps. The moment held material for tragedy. We affected an air of scornful indifference, but the pick-axe was never disturbed again.