from the 1953 Everest expedition, the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society have a somewhat uneasy relationship to this day.
While scientific and military considerations motivated much early mountain exploration, for John Ruskin the overwhelming attraction was aesthetic. Ruskin was the son of a prosperous sherry merchant in the City of London who bemoaned the fact that his son knew ‘the shape of every needle round Mont Blanc, and could not tell you now where Threadneedle Street is’.30 Like Rousseau, Ruskin was a social critic and reformer, but whereas mountains were merely a backdrop for Rousseau’s social and political ideas, Ruskin saw the appreciation and understanding of mountain beauty as an end in itself. He was a gifted public orator, with the ability to speak with absolute conviction on a huge range of topics, and was as popular at working men’s clubs as he was at Eton and Oxford.
Ruskin became a convert to and prophet of the cult of mountains after making his first visit to the Alps and reading De Saussure’s Voyage dans les Alpes in 1833 at the age of 14. He went on to visit the Alps 19 times between 1833 and 1888. A visionary and frequently contradictory thinker and aesthete, he loved mountains and hated mountaineers with almost equal passion. Domineering and protective parents combined with a lack of personal initiative meant that he never climbed himself and, perhaps as a consequence, he despised people who did, regarding almost any intrusion into the high mountain environment as a sacrilege. He identified the heroic tendency in many climbers – ‘the real ground for reprehension of Alpine climbing is that with less cause, it excites more vanity than any other athletic skill’ – and rejected it forcefully: ‘True lovers of natural beauty...would as soon think of climbing the pillars of the choir at Beauvais for a gymnastic exercise, as of making a playground of Alpine snow.’31 An accomplished artist, he was also profoundly influenced by scientific developments and had ambitions to become president of the Geological Society. He particularly admired the works of Alexander von Humboldt, the great German explorer and scientist, and the pioneering geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell, who popularised the concept that the present landscape is the key to the past. In Modern Painters Volume IV: Of Mountain Beauty (1856), Ruskin set out to open people’s eyes to mountain beauty by interpreting its individual components, using a slightly uneasy combination of artistic criticism and scientific analysis, while maintaining an awareness of the aesthetic and spiritual value of the landscape as a whole. The book had a major influence on many early alpinists, including Leslie Stephen, redefining their perception of beauty.
In a typical example of his sometimes contradictory thinking, Ruskin saw the mountains as sacred examples of God’s work but, despite his opposition to climbing, he also recognised that they might be a means for men to test and discover themselves. In a letter to his father in 1863 he wrote: ‘If you come to a dangerous place, and turn back from it, though it may have been perfectly right and wise to do so, still your character has suffered some slight deterioration: you are to that extent weaker, more lifeless, more effeminate, more liable to passion and error in future; whereas if you go through with the danger, though it may have been apparently rash and foolish to encounter it, you come out of the encounter a stronger and better man, fitter for every sort of work or trial, and nothing but danger produces this effect.’32 This was far more than Burke’s eighteenth-century idea that terror ‘always produces delight when it does not press too close’. By the mid-nineteenth century deliberately seeking out risk and danger had become morally desirable.
Changing attitudes to the moral value of danger reflected the huge influence of the theory of evolution set out by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), which was subtitled The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The biological concept of evolution rapidly became woven into almost every aspect of British thought, providing an apparent justification for imperialism abroad and sharp class divisions at home. But the theory also gave rise to self-doubt, that evolution might be followed by dissolution, and that increasing wealth and comfort were making British society soft and decadent. It was the political philosopher Herbert Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, and the idea of economic and social Darwinism spurred the British to ever greater efforts to demonstrate their ‘fitness’ in both their work and leisure pursuits. In Germany, Nietzsche also believed in the moral value of danger and saw in mountaineering the perfect testing ground for his cult of the hero and contempt for weakness: ‘The discipline of suffering – of great suffering – know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto...This hardness is requisite for every mountain climber.’33 Nietzsche’s philosophy influenced German-speaking climbers, many of whom were students, from the late nineteenth century onwards, and through the writing of German and Austrian mountaineers it had a profound impact on the post-war generation of British climbers in the 1950s and 60s.
Under the influence of eighteenth-century notions of the sublime, mountain travellers had already experienced feelings of awe, terror and exultation once reserved for God. By the mid to late nineteenth century, as urbanisation, industrialisation and scientific developments, including the theory of evolution, progressively undermined the authority of the established church, the experience of walking and climbing in the mountains became at least a partial substitute for traditional religious observance for a growing number of people. At the time of its formation in 1857 more than a quarter of the members of the Alpine Club were clergymen, but many of their books and diaries come close to idolatry. St Augustine warned against confusing the created with the creator, which he regarded as the fundamental sin of paganism. By this standard many of the Victorian reverends who climbed in the Alps were certainly pagans and some were practically animists, ascribing emotions and intentions to the mountains that they climbed. While many saw in the beauty of the mountains confirmation of the existence of God through the perfection of his creation, others lost their religious faith but found a sort of secular pantheism that satisfied their need for spiritual renewal.
In 1825 the first railway in the world was constructed from Stockton to Darlington. Within a few decades all the major centres of population in Britain were connected by rail, and the ability to travel significant distances in relative comfort combined with the growth of the middle class and increasing leisure to create a sports boom. During the 1850s, 62 new race meetings were added to the calendar; the rules of boxing were established in 1857, those of football in 1859 and rugby union in 1871. The first county cricket matches were played in 1873 and the first Wimbledon lawn tennis championship took place in 1877.34 Soon the railways were advancing beyond the towns and cities into the mountains, opening up once remote parts of the country to visitors from the cities. In 1844, at the age of 74, Wordsworth was indignant at a proposal to extend the railway from Manchester beyond Kendal to Windermere, fearing that the Lakes would be inundated with ‘the whole of Lancashire, and no small part of Yorkshire’.35
In the Alps, the great passes became accessible to wheeled transport from 1800, initially as a result of Napoleon’s military road-building programme. Railways followed from 1847 onwards and contributed to the dramatic growth of tourism. A thousand new inns and hotels were built between 1845 and 1880, many of them above 1,000m. Thomas Cook conducted his first alpine tour to Geneva and Mont Blanc in 1863. The tour in 1864 was extended to include Interlaken and Kandersteg. John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland in 1838 indicated a journey time by coach from London to Geneva or Basle of 14 days, including two days in Paris, at a cost of £20. By 1852, using railways, the journey time had reduced to three days and the cost to just £2.36
Many of the mountain pioneers were aware that the sacred beauty they so admired was under threat from these developments. They saw the damage that was being done to the English countryside and feared that the Alps would go the same way. As the inhabitants of Grindelwald hacked away at their glaciers and exported the ice to Parisian restaurants, and railways headed up once remote and silent valleys, Ruskin thundered: ‘You have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars.’37 But ironically, Ruskin’s own writing, painting and photography simply attracted more tourists to the mountains.
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