• The Alps. Described by Sir W. Martin Conway. Painted

by A. D. McCormick. London A. and C. Black. [Ws. net.] SIR MARTIN CONWAY has written a very delightful, and, we would add, to the lover of great hills a very soothing, book. Most stories of mountain travel have a disquieting effect upon the unfortunate man who reads them in his study. The names run in his head for weeks; he has an aggrieved interest in the record of climbs and expeditions, quarrelling with the fates that such good fortune was not for him ; and if he be a real mountaineer at heart, he will get a bad dose of vicarious hill-sickness, that malady which is chronic always, but liable to become acute on small provocation. But Sir Martin Conway's book will not disturb his equanimity. For one thing, it deals with very familiar places, and will call up pleasing memories of past adventures rather than fire with the ambition to undertake new ones. Further, it is the philosophy of mountaineering which he gives us, the meditations which may well come to all hill-lovers when they reflect upon the joys of their life, and the strange link which binds them to the solitudes of the mountains. The "treasures of the snow" are recondite treasures, and the man who knows them best is apt to be a tongue-tied being, slow to attempt a confession of faith. Sir Martin Conway, who combines an almost un- rivalled mountaineering record with the gift of acute obser- vation and a pure and delicate style, has written a book whose full charm will only be known to the initiate, but which may give the unbelieving crowd some hint of what mountains mean to those who love them. In the full sense of the word it is a confession of faith, for high mountains are a kind of religion. The famous words of Ruskin, which are quoted in the first chapter, embody this feeling :—" In- finitely beyond all that we had ever thought or dreamed,—the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful to us ; not more awful, round Heaven, the walls of sacred Death." Apart from charms of scenery and weather or the delights of travel and climbing, the great snow peaks must seem to many a visible symbol of the Unseen, an earnest of immortality. This side of the book is, as we have said, for the mountaineer ; for the lay reader there is ample entertain- ment in the many admirable descriptive passages, illustrated, as they are, by Mr. McCormick's pictures. The illustrations seem to us almost the most successful specimens of colour- printing we have met with. The colouring of the Alps, both in the low levels and in the great snowfields, is often ex- . 4quisitely simple ; and the artist is most successful when he is

dealing with broad effects, such as some lake sunset or a mass of snow outlined against a clear sky. The view of the Matterhorn at twilight from the Riffelberg could hardly be bettered, or, to take other instances from the Zermatt group, the pictures of the Lyskamm and the Breithorn, in which the contour of the snows is rendered with complete fidelity. There is a view of the Dent Blanche from the little Riffelsee, in which the delicately fluted summit of that white tooth is beautifully reproduced. The more complicated effects do not seem to us so successful, though in almost all there is some- thing to interest the reader, some fleeting impression of his own to be recalled.

The author takes the old catholic view of mountaineering, which is almost lost sight of in these times, when to wriggle for days round some squat boulder in the Lakes is the hobby of many fine climbers. The true mountaineer is not a specialist, because the basis of his creed is the love of mountains, and not merely a taste for a particular form of gymnastics. "It behoves us to make that interest wide and comprehensive, not restricting it to mountains as mere things to climb, nor to mountains of a particular character or at a particular time of year, but allowing it to embrace mountain scenery as a whole, and at all seasons." The old generation were, above all

things, mountain travellers. They travelled to explore the mountains, and climbed as an incident in their travels. Far be it from us to say a. word against what is one of the most manly and fascinating of hutnan. pastimes ; but we confess that a climb which is only a climb and nothing more does not greatly attract us. If a man merely wants a difficult rock and a chance of breaking his neck, he can get it as well in a

suburban quarry. The mountaineer's true business is not to go hunting for precipices to exercise his agility on—that is the work for an off-day—but to get somehow to the top of the peak, or the neck of the pass, by an interesting and difficult route if possible, but in any case to get there. For many subtle causes go to make up the fascination of mountains, of which the sport of climbing is only one. After their obvious beauty, or perhaps before it, comes the charm of their human interest. An unknown peak in an untrodden desert is not the same thing as the snows which rise from a long-settled land of vineyards, and bear names long famous in the world's history :—

"It is above all the human interest that ennobles a peak and makes the ascent of it desirable. It is to climb an elevation which men have seen ; to climb a peak that has been named, that has been looked at for centuries by the inhabitants at its base that travellers have passed by and observed, that has a place it the knowledge and memory of men. If there were a great mountain in full view of London or Rome, how much more interesting it would be to climb than some nameless lump in Central Asia, like K2, that was never within view of any abode of men."

For a mountain to be altogether desirable it should have this halo of story over it, and it should also have the charm of

contrast, raising its untamed solitudes from the habitable valleys. Why are the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau finer mountains than, say, the Zinal Rothhorn ? The flitter peak is by far the better peak for the cliMber, it is infinitely less staled by common use, and in certain aspects its cliffs are of unequalled magnificence. But it has no glamour of history, and it is hidden away in the tangle of mountains at the head of the Trift, so that the contrast of green pastures with eternal snows is not present to the spectator.

Sir Martin Conway is artist as well as traveller, and the book is full of pictures of chance impressions caught on the mountains, of which we can only say that their fidelity is as remarkable as their intrinsic beauty. All climbers know the exquisite sensation of being wrapped in mist on a high snow- field, and the sudden transfiguration when the sun pierces it, or those rare moments when the terrors of a thunderstorm subside, and a bridal calm reigns in the great spaces. These and many other phases of weather the reader will find in this book. The author is never happier than in his description of Alpine spring, that amazing riot of elemental colours seen in a diamond atmosphere. He very rightly puts the view from the "alps" or mountain pastures above all other sights, for there the great structure of the mountains is seen as a whole, from the bases wrapped in pine woods to the lonely ice of the summits. Such landscapes are the possession of all; but to see mountains as Sir Martin Conway sees them requires the seeing eye. "The sights of nature may measure men, but individual men cannot measure them. If a man thinks little of Niagara, that opinion measures him, not Niagara." It is the old truth which Coleridge saw :— " We receive but what we give : And in our life alone does Nature live.

Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud."

For such a knowledge a man must not only have the artist's eye, but he must be something of a climber, since the mountains only reveal their secrets to those who can penetrate their recesses. The mystery of the icefields is obvious enough to any picnic party, but only one who has spent nights in a high glacier-camp can know the full meaning of those eerie soli-

tudes. Nor is a wide view as much to the man who walks up an easy ascent as to the climber who, after long hours in crack and chimney with his nerves tense and no prospect but a rock .wall, pulls himself suddenly up to the edge and sees an immense horizon gleaming beyond him. Sir Martin Conway is, if anything, more a devotee of passes and glaciers than summits. "To climb a peak," he says, "is to make an expedi- tion, but to cross a pass is to travel. In the one case you normally return to the spot whence you set out; in the other you go from the known to the unknown, from the visible to what is beyond." In glaciers he finds "the vital element, the living inhabitants of the high world." It is a curious and pleasing fancy, for glaciers are indeed the brooks of the great mountains, and their patient and resistless movement is in keeping with the austere world they dwell in.

We have said that, as compared with other Alpine works, this is a soothing book. If at moments it may tantalise by recall- ing past delights, it dwells constantly on the consolations of

philosophy which experience brings. No mountain-lover will read it without gratitude for such a picture as this of the

rewards of the veteran:—

" A range of mountains is not a wall to him but a deep extend- ing mass. He feels the recesses and projections. He has a sense of what is round the corner. The deep circuits of the hills are present in his imagination even when unbeheld. He knows their white loneliness. The seen end of a glacier-snout implies to him all the unseen upper course and expanse of its gathering ground. Thus every view to him is instinct with implications of the un- seen and the beyond. Such knowledge well replaces the mystery of his youthful ignorance. If time has taken something away, it has amply repaid the theft. It is not his debtor. He may mingle now with the crowd who never quit the roads, and no external sign shall distinguish him from them, but the actual difference between them is fundamental. For the snows are beyond their ken, and belong to the same region as the sky ; but they are within his area; they form part of his intellectual estate ; they hold his past life upon their crests. Where the lowlander looks and wonders, the mountaineer possesses and remembers, nor wonders less for being able to realise the immensity of the mass of beauteous detail that unites to form a mountain landscape."