BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Call of the Mountains
Travels Amongst the Great Andes. By Edward Whymper. The Chiltern Library. (John Lehmann. 8s. 6d.) Climbs of my Youth. By Andre Roch. (Lindsay Drummond. 12s. 6d.)
MOUNTAINEERING, as a goddess, sprang fully armed into a rough field of human interest, equipped with a panoply of aesthetic and even mystical attractions, to capture the affections of an intelligent few. It awakened a devotion not unlike a revivalist fervour among its first devotees. This has given to its short history of barely a century of active hill exploration something of the character and many of the phases of a religious movement.
From the start it has been fortunate in its exponents. With equal conviction great savants, de Saussure or Tyndall, could determine its scientific importance and Leslie Stephen fix it for ever as a star in the literary firmament. In subsequent generations there were always writers like Conway or Mummery, Guido Rey or Kugy, to recolour its excitement or picture new mountain beauty. Hitherto the humanists have had it over the scientists, for whom the fresh wonders of glacier or of atmospheres contracted, or grew too specialised for easy reading. There arc signs indeed that their place may be taken even more successfully by the technicians, those for whom the craft of climbing has itself become a science ; whereas to the humanists the mountains themselves stood first, the quality of their own performance very much second. The change is inevitable. The major part of our youth is now mechanical minded or science trained. The adventurous aspect of climbing is also now part of a universal awareness, so that tens of thousands go scrambling where fifty years ago we reckoned in tens.
It is the physical self-realisation that attracts them. But the real feeling for mountains is inborn, like the ear for music or the eye for art, and the percentage of those who possess it among climbers stays much the same as before. The result may well be that tech- nical climbing books may supersede the literature of romantic mountaineering. If it be so, mountaineering itself is not likely to survive long as a passion upon the interest of its techniques alone. It is quite as likely however, that a reaction will follow, in time to save its unique opportunities ; because those who carry on, and who renew, the tradition are not the thousands who drop out as the climbing sensation palls, but the few for whom the adventure is lit with an inward glow, the romantic feeling for mountains.
At the very start, Edward Whymper personified both aspects of the developments to come. A born journalist, an artist and athlete, for a few years of his youth he was inspired to heroic courses by the sheer adventure of climbing, the beauty of the Alps and the fascination of the unknown. The tragic drama of the Matterhorn accident established him for life as the leading European mountaineer
and writer. His own bent, however, was towards the accumulation and imparting of detailed knowledge, and his brief romantic phase once ended, and enshrined admirably in his great book Scrambles in the Alps, he turned perhaps even more happily to his explorations in the Andes with their wider field for the scientific inquisitions beloved of the encyclopaedic age.
For the attractive Chiltern Library edition of The Great Andes, Frank Smythe has written a biographical foreword. There could have been no one more suitable. Like Whymper he devoted his life to mountains, and to writing about them. As a superb photographer he illustrated his own books no less artistically, and he had more than Whymper's talent for writing an exciting story of adventure excitingly. There the likeness ended, for Frank Smythe, who has just died all too early on the last of his Himalayan journeys, was in himself an entirely lovable personality, with a boyish enthusiasm for adventure, a mystical passion for mountain beauty in every form that lasted all his life, and with a gallant determination continuously to achieve the highest possible, in climbing, writing or even in thinking, which at times overtested his powers but remained wholly sympathetic. In this foreword he has readjusted some of the features of his former biography of Whymper, and produced a very balanced study of the man and his work. The more we know of Whymper, the better do we realise the almost miraculous force with which the mountain revelation broke upon his generation, illuminating a temperament and mind forceful, narrow and egocentric to a vision of romance, and to the writing of two first-rate books. His Andes remains one of our best books of mountain exploration, old-fashioned only in so far as it recalls a more serious age when climbing adven- tures had still to go decently veiled under the gossamer of scientific observations.
All the most readable adventure stories are written about the author's first thrills and early years. The chapters telling of the first climbs preserve the authentic mountain challenge and glamour, as the boy first heard or felt it among hills, or quivered to it in a mountain book. Arnold Lunn in his Mountains of Youth, now re-issued in a new edition, understands this well, and it is the way things seemed to him in his fortunate sojournings in the Alps as a boy which he reproduces for us vividly, with a happy blend of wit and of poetic feeling. Much of his early climbing was done with his younger brother Hugh Kingsmill, yet another witty writer, talker and reviewer whose recent death leaves literature the poorer by the loss of a pungent and fearless critic. It was Arnold Lunn whose dynamic enthusiasm as an undergraduate launched the Oxford Mountaineering Club early in the century and edited the Oxford Mountaineering Essays, still unrivalled in their class. As a humanist and scholar he belongs to the romantic order of mountain writer. It is the magic of mountains and the story of human relationship with them which occupies him, far more than the mechanics of climbing. He is a keen controversialist in other fields, and the initiator of ski-ing as a sport and as a technique on the Continent, his books convince us that it is mountains, and for their own sake, that lie nearest his heart. Their outlines are visible in the background of his philosophy. His sense of humour is as evident as his sincerity, and it was he Itvho insisted—even to Hitler—that there should be gaiety even in sport, and that there are still people who do things for the pleasure and fun of doing them.
No memories could better represent the latest, or what may be called specialist, phase in climbing literature than those of the great Swiss mountaineer Andre Roch. Not that Roch is only a technician. He is a gifted mountain photographer, probably the best all-round mountaineer of the day, and a genuine lover of mountains. But he has been born to the mechanical age, and his knowledge and skill are committed to the solving of new and harder problems, using the additional aids made necessary by the steeper angles and smoother surfaces which novel adventure must attempt. He tells simply but dramatically the 'stories of his early climbs, once again the most effective memories of a climbing life. He is describing the limits of what has been, and possibly of what can be, achieved physically, using the new techniques with restraint. There is no reckless dis- reerth of past cisperience, or of the value of Wel such .g; charic-. tensed the Naziind Fascist or beWeeri the wars. The stones show us the growth of a great mountaineer, who can preserve throughout the-right spirit of modesty and courage. And yet, almost from the first, is there not some shadow over the stories— a sense of harshness or strain, as though human strength had been continuously at the breaking point and much of that pleasurable reaction lost which made the happy atmosphere (of delight in the doing even more than in the result) of earlier books ?
In our training for fitness in life, and more particularly in the short-term schools starting under the Outward Bound Trust, we arc bringing in the adventure and discipline of mountain and sea to complement the academic schooling of lessons and games. The effect upon the character of those undergoing the month's concen- trated treining is proven. But we are still experimenting how to attract the majority, of those who need the trainirg most. The reminder comes usefully, from the changes we are noting in mountain literature, that while the effect of a good mountain training is undoubtedly to form character, it is the freedom of the adventure in pleasurable independence which attracted ourselves, and which must remain the secret of its power to attract boys and girls, and to hold them to a healthy purpose even when away from the hills.
GEOFFREY WINTHROP YOUNG.
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