Romance And Effort
By G. Winthrop Young.
(As spoken by him in toasting the Club at its Annual Dinner, on the 26th November, 1910.)
To my mind, and I hope to yours, the hour immediately following upon an excellent dinner, amid most delightful company, should be consecrated to coffee and contemplation. We ourselves would describe our condition as one of poetic meditation – our friends might call it by another name. In its essence it is repose- and repose is not consonant with the distraction of making an after-dinner speech. Upon a similar occasion our characteristically British King, Henry IV., called emphatically on
Sleep, gentle Sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse
to visit him; adding a quite reasonable protest against the monologues which his author forced upon him, –
My poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep!
And if the poorest, then what is to be said of the impossibility of awakening, through the drowsiness of dessert and empty dishes, the richest subject of all, the subject of “The Mountains”? I know well that I am supposed to be toasting the Ramblers’ Club, but I count it among the greatest pleasures that have fallen to me in life to be attached, however irregularly, to your Club; and since I cannot regard myself, or you, as existing apart from the mountains, I shall venture to include the part in the whole, and delay your slumber for a few moments while wishing a health to the Hills – the steepest and the wildest of them !
My friend Mr. Claud Schuster, in a charming speech to you last year, to which, in the parlance of newspaper correspondence, “my attention has just been called,” had the audacity to pillory me as typical of a presumably inferior class of mountaineers, one which cares only for the difficulty and danger of climbing, and whose taste is dulled to the more subtle charms of mountain beauty and atmosphere.
Now in the first place I do not think such a differentiation exists. In the second place, if it did, Mr. Schuster could I not claim that he or I belong exclusively to either section of it. Why, for his part, when I first met him, he was spurring an exhausted guide in furious progression along the extreme crest of the Egginer-grat! And, for my part, if I cannot claim to follow him, in anything but my admiration, on his annual literary discursions and discussions about the remoter purlieus of Mont Blanc, I can count upon his indulgence towards my one modest dedication at the shrine of Mountain Romance.
But having dissociated Mr. Schuster personally from his glittering pose, I shall have pleasure in showing you on what a fallacy its brilliance is based. What is the charm of mystery or beauty if we are forbidden to attempt to penetrate or possess it? What is the use of a mountain but to go up it? Why, when our nascent strength and appreciation have sampled the glories of smooth curve and yielding slope, is our manhood to refrain from fathoming the rare secrets, the richer inspiration of dominant precipice and untrodden summit? No! A true mountaineer can never be happy in the hills until he has gripped the very heart of their beauty, and that heart lies hidden behind the pitiless ice-wall, the hardest ribs of rock. You, gentlemen, I know, go further; you are not content until you have sounded more ominous depths, and taken your auguries of happy scrambling from the very entrails of the hills!
To my mind, and my assumption is no less legitimate, the problem-climber is the real poet. He is the truest mystic whose imagination can create for him all Monte Rosa in a Snowdon boulder; just as a child, the only genuine romanticist, fashions a Himalaya finer than all fact from his Land of Counterpane. Was there ever a man who loved the mountains as we all love them- progressively, and did not want to climb them – progressively? Even Ruskin scaled the Fells and only discovered the greased-poliness of the Grépon because the Grépon was not then every mountaineer’s money: as a poor epicure might argue:- “How glorious to drink the brown beer of British peaks, because we can all afford to get outside it; but the man who unseals the red champagne of Chamonix rocks is a wastrel and an acrobat!”
You probably know well enough what Ruskin and Shelley and Æschylus and Wordsworth and Stevenson and the other prophets of Peak and Open Air have had to say, but perhaps you will allow me to illustrate my point from a few less likely sources. I have chosen them myself at random, from memory.
Who more unlikely to seek danger for its own sake than prosaic Livy? And yet Livy knew all about the qualities of avalanche snow. Listen to him, in old Philemon Holland’s translation, describing “the slabbery snow-broth that melts and relents about our heels.”
What of Roger Ascham, the first of serious-minded pedagogues? He had a very poor opinion of your mere walker: “Walking alone into the field hath no token in it, a pastyme lyke a simple man which is neither flesh nor fishe.”
Sir Philip Sydney, the gallant gentleman of all time, is only sorrowful that his rock-climbing days are over:
The rocks which were of constant mind, the mark,
In climbing steep, now hard refusal show.
You would not expect gymnastics from Dr. Johnson, the Lexicographer. This, however, is his argument, taken from Rasselas, which incidentally meets Mr. Schuster at every point. The Prince is protesting against crossing the hills: “I have been told,” he says, that respiration is difficult upon lofty mountains, yet from these precipices . . . it is very easy to fall; therefore I suspect that from any height where life can be supported there may be danger of too quick descent.” “Nothing” replied the artist (who is clearly Dr. Johnson), “nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.” A very sound mountaineering philosophy!
To avoid fatiguing you I will only refer in passing to a few more improbable evidences. The most classic of poets, Gray, is an unexpected convert to the fever: “These mountains are ecstatic . . . a fig for your poets and painters, your gentlemen and clergymen who have not been among them!” Gentle Charles Lamb was an enthusiastic Fell-climber. Miss Jane Austen – what speaker dare now omit reference to the claims of women – very properly makes the most charming of her heroines remark:-“What are men to rocks and mountains?” The order of her preference is significant: she puts the cliff-climb first, the mountain second and, of course, the men last.
In the poet Keats, however, we lost prematurely not only the most exquisite of poets but the most promising of crag-climbers. I need not refer to his ascents of Ben Nevis and elsewhere, but a sentence in one letter is a most noteworthy admission of his familiarity with technical difficulty. He had varied a long morning walk with some rock scrambling on the cliffs of Lodore, and writes:- “I had an easy climb . . . about the fragments of rocks, and should have got, I think, to the summit, but unfortunately I was stopped by slipping one leg into a squashy hole.” These unforeseen “squashy holes” on ridge or glacier are the real dangers of the mountains, far more than the difficulties of a purely technical character which we are condemned for essaying.
The truth is that no man or boy can confine his pleasure to one aspect of the hills. The ever-receding horizons of mountain difficulty entice his eyes and feet from the moment he once leaves the highway.
In my own case, if I may introduce so slender an illustration, I first saw rocks, so far as I can remember, as a child, on your Yorkshire moors, and our host at Malham Tarn presented our nursery with a terrifying picture of Gordale Scar, under which he had written “The Road to Church.” As I was far too conscientious a child ever to conceive of not going to church, all my earliest speculations were directed towards the discovery of routes- that must clearly exist-up the impossible rocks in the photograph. That was the first lure.
Later, but still nearly a quarter of a century ago, I started mountaineering with my father. My first rock ascent, the first use of my feet and hands, was on Tryfan. On the summit we met two men with a rope. At once I was fired with an interest that has only grown with the years. But it was not until quite recently that I learned that this was the occasion of the first ascent of the North Gully by the brothers Williams, and that I had been associated (however remotely) with the real beginning of the rock-climbing era in Wales.
Yet a few years later I made my first trip, in big boots, to the Lakes, still in a spirit that would have contented the most orthodox mountain rambler. On the platform at Keswick a square genial man came up to me and said:- “You must forgive my interest, but what rocks are you bound for? Nailed boots go straight to my heart.” That was John Robinson, and I was at once plunged into all the rush of the new epoch of Lake climbing.
You see I never had a chance! None of us have who once feel the grit of the granite through the heather. Once started on the slopes of Mountain Adventure we discover that every advance that we make in climbing science reveals to us new enchantments and stimulates our power of enjoying them. Our limit of advance in difficulty or danger is fixed not by a smaller or greater possession of romantic feeling, but by our physical fitness or by the restrictions of the family or professional claims which we voluntarily accept. We all chase the Will-o’-the-Wisp Romance. We differ only in our ability to overtake him on different kinds of ground. Some lurk for him easily in the valleys, some run him down doggedly on the moors, some overtake him, with the use of every good fibre that is in them, on the greater and fiercer cliffs.
We are all at heart romanticists. In all but performance we are alike. It is not easily perceptible, because we are not all equally qualified to give expression to our inspiration. And here lies the real difference. The wilder the chase and the more marvellous the capture, the less are we able to speak of it to other folk. I will give you an instance in two letters I got during this last extraordinary season of unequal weather. The first was from a sub-alpine enthusiast, who had spent most of his time glowering at the clouds from the smoking-room window. He wrote four sides of romantic speculation about what he had not been able to do. The other was a post-card from a climber who had been sleeping out and traversing peaks, day after day, under conditions that nothing but the strongest imagination could have made pleasant. He wrote simply: “Great Caesar ! Great season ! All rain and moraine !”
The core of the matter is all contained in the story of the development of our new climbing prophet, John Keats. When he started on his pilgrimage, he wrote flamboyantly:-
There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he!
He took
An Inkstand
In his Hand
And a Pen,
Big as ten,
In the other.
And away
In a Pother
He ran
To the Mountains,
And Fountains,
And Ghostes,
And Postes,
And Witches,
And Ditches.
And wrote,
In his coat,
When the weather was coo1-
Fear of gout;
And without,
When the weather was warm.
Oh! the charm
When we choose
To follow one’s nose
To the North, to the North,
To follow one’s nose to the North![1]
That was Keats as a poetic or romantic rambler; Now hear him after four months of the discipline of difficulty: “I am now comparatively a mountaineer. I have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about their grandeur.”
Gentlemen, when I drink to the Club to-night, it is coupled with the wish that you may never cease to feel the joy of the weary foot and the dragging muscle; for I am persuaded that only through the discipline of effort and under the stimulus of progressive discovery is the sense quickened to the full realization of Mountain Romance.