Tyndall was not altogether satisfactory.’20 In fact, the target of his parody was not Tyndall at all; it was Francis Tuckett, a Bristol Quaker and leather merchant who was with Stephen on the first ascent of the Goûter Route (PD) on Mont Blanc in 1861. Tuckett explored the virtually unknown mountain ranges of Corsica, Greece, Norway, the Pyrenees, Algeria and the Dolomites, but he had the reputation of being slow and ponderous and was obsessed with collecting and recording scientific data. Nevertheless, he amassed a tally of over 40 new peaks and passes between 1856 and 1865, including the Aletschhorn (PD, 4,193m/13,756ft) and the Königspitze (PD, 3,851m/12,634ft).
The three principal centres for the early mountaineers were Chamonix, Grindelwald and Zermatt. Seiler’s Hotel in Zermatt, in particular, became a second home for the Alpine Club, where members gathered to plan their routes while the guides sat on the low wall in front of the hotel, waiting for their clients. A conversation outside the hotel recorded by the Rev. J. F. Hardy in August 1861 captures the mood of the early days of alpine exploration:
‘I say, old fellow, we’re all going up the Monte Rosa to-morrow, won’t you join us? We shall have capital fun.’
‘What, is that Hardy? Oh yes, do come, there’s a good fellow.’
Before I had time to answer, a voice, discovered to be J. A. Hudson’s was heard to mention the Lyskamm, upon which hint I spake.
‘Ah, the Lyskamm! That’s the thing. Leave Monte Rosa and go in for the Lyskamm; anybody can do the Monte Rosa, now the route’s so well known; but the Lyskamm’s quite another affair.’
‘Yes, indeed, I expect it is. Why, Stephen couldn’t do it.’
‘He was only stopped by the bad state of the snow.’
‘Well, Tuckett failed too.’
‘He was turned back by the fog.’
‘So may we be.’
‘Certainly we may, also we mayn’t, and in the present state of the weather the latter’s more likely of the two.’21
And so a party of eight British climbers, including Hardy and Hudson, and six guides made the first ascent of the Lyskamm (AD, 4,527m/14,852ft) and on the summit they sang the National Anthem.
The Playground of Europe by Leslie Stephen and Scrambles Amongst the Alps by Edward Whymper, both published in 1871, are perhaps the best contemporary accounts of the Golden Age of alpine climbing. Stephen and Whymper epitomised two contrasting approaches to climbing: the former primarily concerned with the aesthetic, almost mystical appeal of the landscape; the latter searching for self-fulfilment and personal achievement.
In later life, Leslie Stephen was an eminent literary critic and biographer who encouraged Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson in the early stages of their careers and was knighted for services to literature. His father, Sir James Stephen, was said to have ruled large parts of the Empire as Under Secretary for the Colonies, and was later appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. His first wife was the daughter of William Thackeray, at that time regarded as second only to Charles Dickens as a novelist, and his children included Virginia Woolf, the author, and Vanessa Bell, the painter, who later formed part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
Stephen was educated at Eton and Cambridge and taught philosophy at Cambridge until increasing religious doubts forced him to renounce Holy Orders in 1862 and consequently his fellowship. In The Playground of Europe he wrote: ‘The mountains represent the indomitable force of nature to which we are forced to adapt ourselves; they speak to man of his littleness and his ephemeral existence; they rouse us from the placid content in which we may be lapped when contemplating the fat fields which we have conquered and the rivers which we have forced to run according to our notions of convenience. And, therefore, they should suggest not sheer misanthropy, as they did to Byron, or an outburst of revolutionary passions, as they did to his teacher Rousseau, but that sense of awe-struck humility which befits such petty creatures as ourselves.’ Like so many agnostic or atheistic climbers since, he felt a sense of awe and wonder in the Alps that he found difficult to explain in rational terms: ‘If I were to invent a new idolatry...I should prostrate myself, not before beast, or ocean, or sun, but before one of these gigantic masses to which, in spite of all reason, it is impossible not to attribute some shadowy personality.’
A man who substituted ‘long walks for long prayers’,22 Stephen was proud of the fact that he once covered 80km/50 miles from Cambridge to London in 12 hours in order to attend the Alpine Club annual dinner. In the Alps he made numerous first ascents including the Rimpfischhorn (PD, 4,199m/13,776ft) in 1859, the Schreckhorn (AD, 4,078m/13,379ft) in 1861, Monte Disgrazia (PD, 3,678m/12,067ft) in 1862 and the Zinal Rothorn in 1864. In common with many early alpinists he did not enjoy climbing in Britain, perhaps because of the absence of guides, and failed to find the way up Pillar Rock in 1863: ‘The atmosphere of the English Lakes is apt to be enervating’,23 he observed. However he did put up the first recorded sea cliff climb in Cornwall near his holiday home in St Ives, in 1858. In 1867, at the age of 35, he married and curtailed his climbing activities, later establishing a society called the ‘Sunday Tramps’, who went on long walks through the English countryside. Their motto was ‘High Thinking and Plain Living’, and Douglas Freshfield, Martin Conway and Clinton Dent (all three future presidents of the Alpine Club) were members.
Although self-revelation (no doubt selective) was not uncommon, critical comments about the personalities of fellow climbers (but not guides) were largely banished from nineteenth-century mountain literature by the conventions of the time. In many cases companions were simply referred to by an initial. Candid accounts of fellow climbers were not at all common until well after the Second World War, and therefore reliable descriptions of the character and personality of the early climbers by third parties are comparatively rare, barring obsequious, or at least highly coded, obituaries. However, because of his many literary associations, it is possible to obtain several different descriptions of Stephen. In To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, the father, Mr Ramsay, is clearly based on Stephen. He is a distant, austere and needy individual, self-centred and insecure. The character of Vernon Whitford, a scholarly, unworldly idealist, in George Meredith’s The Egoist was also based on Stephen. In later life, he appears to have become a solitary, difficult and demanding man. When a visitor outstayed his welcome he became visibly agitated and muttered, quite audibly, to himself, ‘Why can’t he go? Why can’t he go?’ A contemporary described him as ‘critical yet deprecating, sarcastic and mournful...not one who ranks either himself or others very high’.24
Even allowing for increasing age, it is hard to believe that this is the same man who played cricket in the main square of Zinal in Switzerland ‘with a rail for a bat and a granite boulder for a ball. My first performance was a brilliant hit to leg...off Macdonald’s bowling. To my horror I sent the ball clean through the western window of the chapel.’25 Or who, returning from the first ascent of Monte Disgrazia in two carriages with Edward Kennedy and Melchior Anderegg, tried to ‘get up an Olympic chariot race’ and then sat up drinking champagne until the early hours. His account of climbing in the Golden Age is full of the heedless fun of climbing: ‘It was necessary to cut steps as big as soup tureens, for the result of a slip would in all probability have been that the rest of our lives would have been spent sliding down a snow slope and that the employment would not have lasted long enough to become at all monotonous.’26 The apparent contradiction between the levity, humour and mild anarchism of Stephen the climber and the melancholic austerity of Stephen the father and intellectual perhaps explains the appeal of alpinism for many mid-Victorians.
Stephen was president of the Alpine Club from 1866 to 1868 and Editor of the Alpine Journal. Together with John Tyndall, he was in many ways the Club’s intellectual mentor in its early years. Elected to the Metaphysical Society, whose diverse membership included William Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, Cardinal Manning, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin and Thomas Huxley, Stephen helped to turn the Alps into a ruggedly congenial meeting place for members of the intellectual upper middle class of the mid-Victorian generation, in much the same way as Geoffrey Winthrop Young did for a later generation with his Pen-y-Pass meets in Wales. On a rare visit to the Club towards the end of the century