BOOKS.
THE PLAYGROUND OF EUROPE.* No one probably at the present day would misunderstand the title of this book, no one probably of the last generation would have dreamed of using it. The Alps, in the widest sense of the term, have become the region to which large and increasing numbers resort for health and recreation, and within the last few years they have been fully explored in all their recesses, mainly by English- men on their holiday excursions. It is possible that the taste for mountain climbing among those who have the strength, and for travelling under the shadow of the mountains among those who cannot go higher, may in course of time die out ; though perhaps, as an excellent mountaineer once predicted, the men who con- quered the Alps will be remembered by a generation which had ceased to follow in their track. But at present there is no sign of anything of the kind ; in every corner of the Alps new accommo- dation is year by year afforded to travellers, and no hotel ever seems to fail for want of custom. And if anything in the way of literature could stimulate the mountaineering taste, it would be such a book as has just been published by one of the most skilful, most experienced, and most widely known of English climbers.
One portion of the volume is devoted to narratives, reprinted, all of them from the publications of the Alpine Club, of sundry diffi3ult expeditions, chiefly in the Bernese Oberland. Another section is devoted to some general descriptions of more remote regions, among which the Eastern Carpathians are at once the least known and the least inviting to visit. In this portion of the book there is little to call for remark ; it possesses the peculiar humour which pervades all Mr. Stephen's writings, and which, though having a genuine individuality of its own, now and then strongly reminds one of Oliver Wendell Holmes. But narratives equally interesting in their matter, and equally well if differently told, might be extracted in considerable number from the same re- positories. The remainder of the work, however, is of a very different kind, and of much higher merit. By way of prologue, Mr. Stephen has given two very interesting chapters, one on the mode in which mountains were regarded in the days when no one appreciated their beauty, and one on the sources from which the love of mountain scenery has sprung. And by way of epilogue, come two chapters on mountaineering. One explains the reasons why those who have climbed the Alps understand and love them better than their most ardent admirer who stays in the valleys. The other gives what may fairly be regarded as an authoritative exposition of the nature of the dangers to be encountered, and the principle of the true precautions requisite ; for it is based on a paper read to the Alpine Club by Mr. Stephen, as president, and deliberately published in their journal as embodying the general opinion of the club.
Mr. Stephen is regarded by the initiated in Alpine craft as the very personification of the disposition to look on the Alps purely as a playground, and to repudiate any idea of scientific or other profit ; and certainly there may be found in most of his writings on the subject ample justification for such an estimate. But the papers which he has here collected show that under all the chaff, occasionally of a somewhat grim and cynical kind, there lies rare grain, in the shape of a very keen appreciation of the poetic and imaginative charms of the Alps. As Mr. Stephen himself puts it, "I venture to deny that even punning is incompatible with poetry, or that those who make the pun can have no deeper feeling in their bosoms, which they are perhaps too shamefaced to utter." It is, perhaps, impossible to make those who have never stood on a mountain top, or climbed a sharp ridge with precipices on either hand, fully understand the pleasure. The mountains speak most eloquently to the initiated, but possibly no one can act as an interpreter to explain their meaning to the multitude. Mr. Stephen has made by far the most successful attempt at accom- plishing this difficult task, and his language will give a thrill of pleasure to every climber at familiar sentiments so well translated into words. But whether it will be equally significant to others no mountaineer can judge, we can but request our readers to take
• 77se Raygrouud of Europe. By Leslie Stephen, lab PresIdeat of the Alpine nigh. Landon: Longmont. 187L
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the following passage as a specimen, and refer them to Mr.. Stephen's book, if, as we believe they are inclined to ask for more :—
" Suppose that we are standing upon the Wengern Alp ; between the Mooch and the Eiger there stretches a round white bank, with a curved. outline, which we may roughly compare to the back of one of Sir E. Landseer's lions. The ordinary tourists—the old man, the woman, or the cripple, who are supposed to appreciate the real beauties of Alpine scenery—may look at it comfortably from their hotel. They may see its graceful curve, the long straight linos that are ruled in delicate shad- ing down its aides, and the contrast of the blinding white snow with the dark blue sky above ; but they will probably guess it to be a mere bank —a snowdrift, perhaps, which has been piled by the last storm. If you pointed out to them one of the great rocky teeth that projected from its- summit, and said that it was a guide, they would probably remark that he looked very small, and would fancy that ho could jump over the bank with an effort, Now a mountaineer knows, to begin with, that it is a. massive rocky rib, covered with snow, lying at a sharp angle, and vary- ing perhaps from 500 to 1,000 feet in height. So far he might be ac- companied by men of less soaring ambition ; by an engineer who had been mapping the country, or an artist who had been carefully observ- ing the mountains from their bases. They might learn in time to inter- pret correctly the real meaning of shapes at which the uninitiated guess. at random. But the mountaineer can go a step further, and it is the next step which gives the real significance to those delicate curves and lines. He can translate the 500 or 1,000 feet of snow-slope into a more tangible unit of measurement. To him, perhaps, they recall the memory of a toilsome ascent, the sun beating on his head for five or six. hours, the snow returning the glare with still more parching effect; a stalwart guide toiling all the weary time, cutting steps in hard blue ice, the fragments hissing and spinning down the long straight grooves in the snow till they lost themselves in the yawning chasm below ; and, step after step taken along the slippery staircase, till at length he trium- phantly sprang upon the summit of the tremendous wall that no human foot had scaled before. The little black knobs that rise above the edge represent for him huge impassable rocks, sinking on one side in scarped, slippery surfaces towards the snowfield, and on the other stooping in one tremendous cliff to a distorted glacier thousands of feet below. The faint blue line across the upper ndvd, scarcely distinguishable to the eye, represents to one observer nothing but a trifling undulation ; a second perhaps, knows that it means a crevasse; the mountaineer remembers that it is the top of a huge chasm, thirty feet across, and perhaps ten. times as deep, with perpendicular sides of glimmering blue ice, and fringed by thick rows of enormous pendent icicles. The marks that are scored in delicate lines, such as might be ruled by a diamond on glass, have been cut by innumerable streams trickling in hot weather from the everlasting snow, or ploughed by succeeding avalanches that. have slipped from the huge upper snowfields above. In short, there is no insignificant line or mark that has not its memory or its indibatiotr of the strange phenomena of the upper world. True, the same picture is painted upon the retina of all classes of observers; and so Person, and a schoolboy and a peasant might receive the same physical impres- sion from a set of black and white marks on the page of a Greek play ; but to one they would be an incoherent conglomeration of unmeaning and capricious lines, to another they would represent certain sounds more or less corresponding to some English words; whilst to the scholar they would reveal some of the noblest poetry in the world, and all the associations of successful intellectual labour."
Mingled with descriptions like these, we find occasional passages which may well horrify any non-climber, wherein Mr. Stephen dwells on the fascination which the contemplation of danger has. To look down a precipice and speculate on the way in which one- self or one's comrade would be smashed in falling is an amuse-, ment the bare idea of which is enough to make the ordinary reader's flesh creep, and yet every mountaineer knows by his own experience that Mr. Stephen is right, that there is a keen and most pleasurable stimulus afforded to one's mental and moral energies by the contemplation of danger, and the knowledge that one's own nerve and strength must and cau keep one safe. Were it not so, or rather, for those to whom this feeling is unknown, mountain-climbing ought not to be regarded as a lawful pursuit ; for the dangers, if real, are to a large extent imaginary also. That is to say, the imagination is liable to be attacked by phantoms of unreal dangers, as well as by the substance of real ones ; and those who are terrified by either are thereby rendered unfit to encounter them. But those whose faculties are braced, rather than shaken, by acquaintance with the powers of the mountain world, derive thence a training which is of service in other and more important. pursuits, and can afford to disregard the many who refuse to believe that such a result is possible.
We must not, however, devote all our space to the concluding section of Mr. Stephen's book, though it be the most interesting,. and omit to notice his introductory chapter. Mountains hardly figure in poetry or in books of travel before the eighteenth cen- tury, and that most unpoetical age, with its taste for Dutch gar- dens and tendency to explain all things in heaven and earth off- hand on a priori principles, instead of through patient experiment and induction, could not be expected either to admire or to under- stand ragged, barren, informal, inexplicable things like the great snow mountains. Mr. Stephen thinks that the love for mountain scenery "came in with the renewed admiration for Shakespeare, for Gothic architecture, for the romantic school of art and litera- ture, and with all that modern revolutionary spirit which we are as yet hardly in a position to criticize "; and he fastens Rousseau the charge, or the credit, of having been the first to set up mountains as objects of human admiration. We almost won- der that he did not work out his problem a step further, and trace the origin of mountain climbing, which is by no means merely admiration translated into action, though that element is not to e ignored, in another tendency of the modern spirit, more closely allied to the revolutionary than love of romance, namely, the 'restless eagerness to find out everything which can be known, and willingness to expend any amount of patient labour on the task. 'The temper which takes a pleasure in encountering difficulties, and 'rejoices in every separate obstacle as something to be overcome, the spirit of adventure which finds an indescribable charm in plunging into the unknown, are as old, at any rate, as the Norse- men. But the tendency to which we refer is that which is mani- fested in chemical analysis, in the application of the microscope to physiology, in the general unwillingness among the votaries of all sciences to accept any phenomena as ultimate facts incapable of further explanation. The present generation are unable to rest -contented with the idea that any problem is insoluble, and the form which this takes among travellers is a restless desire to explore every corner that remains unknown. No doubt vanity has been .another motive, the wish to achieve, and to be known to have achieved, something never before accomplished ; but the credit thence derivable is absolutely infinitesimal except in the .case of great and conspicuous peaks or passes, and yet every aniuor mountain, every variation of a pass, finds its explorer. It is doubtless impossible to prove this assertion ; if mountain- eering were to cease, now that the Alps have been pretty thoroughly conquered, it might be said that vanity could find no food, as well as that there was nothing more unknown to be brought to light. And it is true also that the "joy of the deed" is a potent motive, especially to Englishmen, with their double strain 'of Norse blood through Danish and Norman ancestors, and one which Mr. Stephen, in his almost petulant dislike to science on the Alps, is likely to rate higher than the other. But the number of scientific men who have also been Alpine climbers is too great for a fair average, considering how comparatively few there have been of each species, and we may fairly prefer the hypothesis which connects the two by a better link than mere coincidence.
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