Mountains of the Mind (14 page)

Ruskin’s equation of effeminacy with lifelessness, weakness and error is a sour reminder of how tightly braided ideas of bravery were with ideas of masculinity at that time. But his point is also distinctively Victorian in its belief that overcoming a danger made one ‘a better’ person. Nietzsche, a more famous metaphysician of fear than Ruskin, would later put it more punchily: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Risk-taking – scaring yourself – was, provided you survived, a potent means of self-improvement. And self-improvement was to the later Victorians, especially to the mountain-going middle classes, a powerfully attractive ideal. In 1859 Samuel Smiles published his instant classic,
Self-help
. Smiles’s message was simple and,
on the face of it, democratic. With ambition and with effort, anything could be achieved by anyone. ‘Great men … have belonged to no exclusive class or rank in life,’ he declared in his introduction. ‘The poorest have sometimes taken the highest places, nor have difficulties apparently the most insuperable proved obstacles in their way.’

One of the fundamentals of Smiles’s creed was that difficulty brought out the best in a person. ‘It is not ease, but effort – not facility, but difficulty, that makes men,’ he wrote. ‘Sweet indeed are the uses of adversity … They reveal to us our powers, and call forth our energies … Without the necessity of encountering difficulty, life might be easier, but men would be worth less.’ From here it was an easy step to the idea of deliberate self-testing: that one ought to seek out difficulty in order to maximize self-improvement. The line of least resistance always led downwards, according to Smiles. Those who took on and surmounted difficulties, by contrast, ended up bettering themselves.

Casting around for a metaphor with which to hammer home his idea, Smiles settled, tellingly, on mountain-climbing. ‘Wherever there is difficulty, the individual man must come out for better for worse,’ he wrote. ‘Encounter with it will train his strength, and discipline his skill; heartening him for future effort … The road to success may be steep to climb, and it puts to the proof the energies of him who would reach the summit.’ Smiles’s doctrine of self-improvement through difficulty was admirably classless in its aims – anyone can be anyone – but it was assimilated most thoroughly by the Victorian bourgeoisie, many of whom put it to the test in the hazardous arena of the mountains.

As the thriving Empire brought with it greater domestic stability, prosperity and comfort, Victoria’s burghers became increasingly fond of risk-taking. The middle classes needed a danger valve, as it were – somewhere they could let off the steam which built up
through cosseted urban living – and the Alps were just the place, for there everyone could find their own levels of risk. ‘The danger on the glaciers is more imaginary than real,’ reassured the Baedeker guide to Switzerland in its ‘Glaciers’ section. Quite so: for most visitors that was just the point: one could imagine all manner of dreadful events taking place on the Alpine glaciers, and on the mountains through which they so gradually flowed – but it didn’t happen often. The fact that people were killed now and again was inspiring for those who weren’t, because it kept the possibility of death at least in sight, and that was essential to the mountain experience.

A measure of the mid-Victorian enthusiasm for vertigo can be taken from the success of Albert Smith, the rambunctious satirist and entrepreneur who from 1853 occupied the cavernous Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly with his show, ‘The Ascent of Mont Blanc’. Smith, a sedentary man by inclination, had himself succeeded in climbing the mountain in August 1851, abetted by a battalion of guides and an intemperate amount of alcohol (Smith’s liquid provisions for the expedition were: sixty bottles of
vin ordinaire
, six bottles of Bordeaux, ten bottles of St George, fifteen bottles of St Jean, three bottles of cognac, and two bottles of champagne). He broadcast his success across London on his return, and in March 1853 opened his show-hall account of the ascent to the public, replete with pretty female ushers in dirndls, a cut-out Swiss chalet (never mind that Mont Blanc was in France), dioramas of the mountain which were furled across the back of the stage, a shaggy St Bernard and – a final touch of Alpine verisimilitude – a brace of chamois that skittered about on the parquetry and shat at inconvenient times during the performance. A pit orchestra played the ‘Chamonix Polka’ and the ‘Mont Blanc Quadrille’, while Smith recited in his resonant voice the thrilling story of his climb.

The show was, in other words, an extravaganza of Alpine kitsch. But what it offered was a chance to experience risk vicariously. ‘You
begin to ascend it obliquely,’ Smith would boom to the rapt auditorium, describing his ascent of the Mur de la Côte. ‘There is nothing below but a chasm in the ice. Should the foot slip or the baton give way, there is no chance for life. You would glide like lightning from one frozen crag to another, and finally be dashed to pieces hundreds of feet below in the horrible depths of the glacier.’ ‘
Oooh
,’ shuddered the audience. In distinctly unprecipitous Piccadilly, they could put themselves virtually in danger, could for an hour or two be among the rocks and the steep ice of Mont Blanc and then, when the lights came on, could stand up, shrug on their coats, shiver metaphorically and leave. The thrill lay in being a spectator, not a partaker (and it is an enduring thrill: the same one which still sells the tickets for every disaster movie, every account of every catastrophe).

The public loved Smith’s amalgam of the exotic and the awful. The show had a six-year sell-out run, and took over £30,000. ‘By his own ability and good humour,’ wrote Dickens approvingly, ‘Smith is able to thaw [Mont Blanc’s] eternal ice and snow; so that the most timid ladies may ascend it twice a day … without the smallest danger of fatigue’. In the summer of 1855 Britain was, according to
The Times
, gripped with ‘Mont Blanc mania’. More and more tourists were travelling to the Alps to see the superlative summit of Mont Blanc; more and more, too, were trying to scale it.

While 1850 was the noon of the nineteenth century, 1859 was its hinge. Smiles’s influential book appeared, and so too did Charles Darwin’s
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
. One of Darwin’s most appealing and versatile ideas was the survival of the fittest (a phrase which didn’t in fact appear in
The Origin of Species
,
but was coined by Darwin’s contemporary, the philosopher Herbert Spencer), and it was this premise which from the 1860s onwards put a new edge on the notion of risk-taking as test. For the mountains provided a laboratory in which an accelerated version of natural selection took place, and could be seen at work. What was simultaneously awful and enthralling about the mountains was how serious even the tiniest error of judgement could be. A slip that might turn an ankle in a city street could in the mountains plunge one fatally into a crevasse or over an edge. Not turning back at the right time didn’t mean being late for dinner; it meant being benighted and freezing to death. On the loss of a glove, a day could pivot from beauty to catastrophe.

Everything was thrillingly amplified in the mountains: there the selective pressures were ubiquitous and much more immediate in their consequences. Being in the mountains was thus a powerful clarification of one’s abilities and of one’s fitness. And the weakest – well, the weakest went to the wall. ‘The law of survival of the fittest,’ growled Alfred Mummery approvingly of solo climbing in 1892, ‘has full and ample chance of eliminating him should he be, in any way, a careless or incapable mountaineer.’ The same survivalist values were being entrenched in America, especially in Alaska, where saloon-bars filled with gold-diggers and woodsmen provided fertile breeding grounds for a pungently masculine Darwinism. The bard of the Alaskan gold-rush, Robert Service, wrote an uncompromising little ditty on exactly this theme: ‘This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive; / That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive.’ The American West and its attendant frontier myths have ever since been extremely masculine: knights doing battle on the freeway in their armoured trucks, classical body worship, and the howling wilderness.

What qualities was the successful mountaineer or explorer proven to possess? Manliness, one might answer straight away – that very
Victorian concept which would morph in the twentieth century into machismo. Climbing a mountain provided a confirmation of one’s strength, an affidavit of pluck and potency, an assurance of resourcefulness, self-sustenance and manhood. When John Tyndall recollected his first ascent of the Weisshorn he did so in terms of a virginity being taken. ‘I pressed the very highest snowflake of the mountain,’ he wrote, ‘and the prestige of the Weisshorn was forever gone.’ H. B. George, discussing mountain travel at the turn of the nineteenth century, claimed it was the urge ‘to explore the earth and to subdue it’ which ‘has made England the great colonizer of the world, and has led individual Englishmen to penetrate the wildest recesses of every continent’.

Patriotism, too, was involved. ‘The authentic Englishman,’ declared Leslie Stephen, ‘is one whose delight is to wander all day amongst rocks and snow; and to come as near breaking his neck as his conscience will allow.’
*
Perhaps the most prized quality which was made visible by the landscape, however, was the combination of resilience and reticence which we now call grit. Grit was the ability to put one foot in front of the other for as long as necessary. To tread ceaselessly in the prints of the man in front. To know when to take the lead yourself and to be sufficient to that moment. And above all, not to complain. To play up, in other words, and to play the game. Tennyson, as so often, had a line for it in his poem
‘Ulysses’: ‘ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’. Grit was ingrained in the imperial generations of Britain from an early age – the boarding-school system churned out generation after generation of boys allegedly full of the stuff – and it was considered to be the moral substance which underpinned Britain’s martial success, its zeal for exploration and its Empire-building: its prolific pinking of the map.

It was also grit which the mountains demanded of those who went among them. In 1843 James Forbes described an Alpine journey as ‘perhaps the nearest approach to a military campaign with which the ordinary citizen has a chance of meeting’. Drained of energy as he climbed the final snow ramps of the Weisshorn, Tyndall kept himself going by remembering the traits which had made Englishmen famous in battle: ‘It was mainly the quality of not knowing when to yield, of fighting for duty even after they had ceased to be animated by hope.’ Leslie Stephen preferred to think of himself as a polar explorer. ‘Struggling in the winter towards a hut,’ he wrote, ‘one is but playing at danger, but for the moment one can sympathize with the Arctic adventurer pushing towards the pole, and feeling that the ship which he has left behind is the sole basis of his operations.’ The icescapes and rock faces of the mountains were in many ways so featureless, so entirely lacking in human specifics, that they were the perfect site for reimagining oneself at will, whether into a soldier battling on in the face of death, or an imperturbable and dauntless explorer.

For many nineteenth-century mountaineers, then, being among the mountains was little more than a role-playing game. The mountains provided a mythic kingdom, an alternative world in which you could reinvent yourself as whoever you wanted. They were a ‘playground’ – as Stephen christened the European Alps – in which grown men could play at danger: an arena of recreation, but also one of self re-creation. Nevertheless, it didn’t matter how
you imagined yourself or the mountains: the landscape could still kill you.

I once went for almost a year without mountains. Stuck on the tablelands of Cambridgeshire, working without prospect of a break, I lusted after verticality. The only relief was the dark church towers which punctuated the horizon, and the white spires of the colleges, pirouetting away into thin air. One day in late January I cracked and caught a bus to Euston, where a friend and I boarded the sleeper to the Highlands.