Social climbing

“ Empty of personal desire, indifferent to an ascent that formerly would have thrilled his heart with ambition and delight, he understood that climbing had ever been a ritual for his soul and of his soul, and that power must result from its sincere accomplishment. ”

“ That's a proud honour.
But—A kind and courteous girl and boy; a reverent, self-controlled, pure life—that's best of all!
Out where I lived at the Pacific Coast, there were a lot of people who belong to a club of mountain climbers, and everybody had an ambition to climb as high as possible. It was a great boast if one could say he had penetrated far up Mount Robson. To reach the topmost point was what everybody desired, and they went through a lot of toil to get there.
Mountain climbing is no easy job. ”

“ The longing which every boy has to climb is called the climbing instinct. In Hyladdu the climbing instinct was nipped in the bud,—smothered, crushed, kept under. He was forbidden to swing on gates, taught to avoid fence-posts, lamp-posts, and flag-staffs, and to look upon hills as summits of danger. Of shinning, he knew but the name. And that the very idea of climbing might be kept from his mind, all climbing plants were rooted out from the grounds; not even a morning-glory was allowed to run up a string! ”

“ So climbing tests a man's judgment, his physical endurance, and tries his soul. It brings out his true character. The veneer of convention wears through inside a few miles of trail work and reveals the individual precisely as he is, often to his shame but usually to his glory. Thus a silent, backward boy one day became a hero by diving headlong across smooth ice to rescue a trio of climbers who had lost their footing and had started to slide across a glacier. ”

“ It is the leader that can give the truest description of an easy climb. Where the one man can do all the work, his followers go up without a thought beyond their rope’s length. When difficulties are shared discussion is necessary, and the memory is assisted by subsequent references to faulty moves or to troubles that all were instrumental in overcoming. It is astonishing how few men can recall the details of a rock climb to the extent of recapitulating the successive pitches in, say, two hours of gully work. ”

“ Say to yourself:5 'Some people may call you Difficulty, old hill; but I know that your name is Opportunity. You're here just to prove that I can do something worth while.' Then the climbing is the best fun—really! ”

“ As far as the summit, they had contrived to keep close behind. The difficulties of the descent, however, overtaxed their powers, with the result that the guided party soon far outstripped them, and they were left to their own resources. Hence the sad predicament in which we found them. It is this special breed of “guideless” climber, who is guideless only in that he does not himself engage and pay for the services of a guide, that has in the past done so much to bring discredit upon guideless climbing proper. ”

“ But if your climb proves to belong throughout to the exceptional class, you must remain on the watch, ready to employ in time those fine shades of management to which alone nerves and muscles working near their limit respond. A good first man on the rope, guide [Pg 132] or amateur, is always an emotional subject, though his self-control may conceal his inward fluctuations. The leading guide’s mood in the early morning hours of climbing will frequently be clouded by his sense of the serious work before him and the threat of responsibility it shadows for him. ”

“ Fortunately in this world, the wonder of one day is taken as a matter of course the next; so now, five years after my first fight for individual freedom, the girl climber at the Hermitage need expect nothing worse than raised eyebrows when she starts out unchaperoned and clad in climbing costume. ”

“ My previous experience had been chiefly, if not exclusively, with men who were eager to start on any attempt, no matter how desperate, and who were far too polite to inquire whether their employer knew anything about the art of climbing. At an early stage in the proceedings, however, these men had invariably developed a most touching, but none the less most inconvenient, affection for their wives and families, and were compelled by these most commendable feelings to discontinue the ascent. ”

“ Slack habits on short English climbs prevent a party ever finding its rhythm, or even discovering its value as a combination. A good party acquires a fine collective momentum from the impulse transmitted by the sharp ending of one climber’s effort to the immediate start of the next man. There is as attainable a rhythm in ‘interrupted’ climbing as in continuous climbing. ”

“ Whereas, if any one of our experienced and cautious guideless party had been hit by one of the countless stones with which the athletes converted the mountain side for long hours into an active volcano, there would have followed the inevitable outcry over “reckless guideless climbing”; not only from Press and public but even, I fear, from some of the guardians of ancient mountaineering tradition in our climbing associations. To the chance of this absurdity does the perpetuation of the outworn distinction between ‘guided’ and ‘guideless’ condemn any modern mountaineer of enterprise. ”

“ I have seen houses a little straitened that were obliged to give Cæsar a coat to go to the door, another to bring in dinner, and another to curry the horses. To climb up to the second or third story is, to be sure, inconvenient; but once there, your climbing ends. Parlours, bedrooms, kitchen, and all the rest, are on the same level. In America, you have the dinner in the cellar, and the cook in the garret; and nothing but ups and downs the whole day. Moreover, climbing is a disposition of our nature. “In our proper motion we ascend.” See with what avidity we climb when we are boys ”

“ Much of his individual power is drawn from their sympathy, that should be then centred upon him alone. And this applies not only to the climbing of the leader. It is quite as bad form for him, when he is safely up, to exchange airy jokes across the head of another climber in the throes of a passage. A word or movement heard, or still worse, half heard, takes off the climber’s attention and dissipates the concentration necessary for a delicate balance or a supreme hoist. ”

“ You may pile accomplishment upon acquisition mountain high; but if you fail to be a social man, demonstrating to society that your lot is with the rest, a little child with a song in its mouth, and a kiss for all and a pair of innocent hands to lay upon the knees, shall lead more hearts and change the direction of more lives than you. ”

“ What climber has not known the moment when this has failed him suddenly, and he has realised the impudence of his presence among the mountain sanctuaries and of his trial of strength face to face with the mountain’s bulk; when he either expiates the crime of his intrusion by a great and tranquillising humility, or struggles, only to find all he sees assume a mask of grinning hatefulness? ”

“ Not only do we practise moving singly almost to the exclusion of collective continuous climbing, but we allow the interrupted method to destroy the rhythm and pace that properly form part of good ‘one-at-a-time’ climbing. Such sectional climbing establishes a habit which is bad for the individual style and disastrous in big mountaineering.
A mountaineer on a rope has to learn to feel that he is charged with a portion of a united personality represented by the rope. ”

“ Knowledge of the craft is far more widely spread, and the climbing attempted is of a standard that demands an equal share of responsible work from us all. It is now recognized that the strength of a party lies in its collective capacity, not in its leader as one outstanding exponent. But the tradition still survives, and some oppressed parties will still awaken in the casual climber a wonder at the large amount of hectoring they will endure from their leader compared with the little which his methods enable them to achieve. ”

“ The real mountain climber never gives up until he has reached the highest peak and the lure of the climb to this peak is always before him to draw him on.
That should be the way in human progress—a peaceful, quiet progress. ”

“ For a consideration they will boost wealthy climbers into society. The climbers are people like the De Boodles, who have suddenly come into great wealth, and who wish to be in it with others of great wealth who are also of high social position. They don’t know how to do the trick, so they seek out some booster like Reggie, strike a bargain with him, and he steers ’em up against the ‘Among-Those-Present’ game until finally you find the De Boodles have a social cinch. ”

“ Beside his winter fire, too, when he sees the great valleys and the high peaks taking form, once more, in the smoke-wreaths of his evening pipe, the days spent in the valleys—days when he never climbed at all—will mean for him a flood of precious memories that he will have no desire to stay. This perhaps applies with greater force to the climber in a new country, for he cannot—like his brother in the older lands—take his ease along the level road, nor, in a moment of temporary mental aberration, be tempted by a mountain railway! ”

“ There are heights and valleys which, to those who seek them in a sympathetic spirit, are better “seats of learning” than any school or university in the land; there are days when the climber seems to rise into a rarer mental as well as visual atmosphere, and to leave far below him the crass cares and prejudices of commonplace life. ”

“ Now who could "climb out" anywhere on the shoulders of the younger son of a baronet, or on Claude Wilson's shoulders, who hoped some time to be a partner in a solicitor's office, or on the shoulders of Harry Majendie, who, if all went well, and since he had interest, might be an archdeacon before he died?
But the climber cannot have too many friends of her own sex. Something may happen to them; they may emerge into a bigger life, where the men of a country-town cannot emerge. ”

“ Now, we may rightly call him the true mountaineer or climber of hills, who possesses the true love of mountain climbing, which, being a mean between two extremes, may be fitly termed a virtue. First, indeed, it is right to call the love of mountain climbing an active virtue, and not one of contemplation, for to no one is the ascent of a hill possible by contemplation alone; still, the virtue of a mountain climber is for a truth not wholly active, but is partly contemplative, as we shall show further on. ”

“ While climbing, at first with slow and toilsome but reliant steps, and, later on, with swifter, surer progress, that summit to which his genius urged him, he was often and again confronted by the clamor of discontent, the jealousies of his profession, and the various forms of opposition his rapid, upward course evoked ”

“ Independent exploration gradually gave way to the charm of meeting others bent on the same pursuit of climbing; but this feeling was not without its drawbacks, and tended to check what has been called cosmopolitanism in mountaineering. ”

“ Each attempts in his own way to escape from the toils of civilisation. It is not the 166 impulse which is artificial and perverse, but the conditions of life which close all other avenues of escape.
It is very difficult to say how much of the joy of climbing is physical, how much æsthetic. The two sides react upon each other. Perception is at its keenest during physical exhilaration, and conversely nothing is so conducive to a sense of vital energy and well-being as the appreciation of beauty. ”

“ The Great Gully.—The satisfactory part of this climb is that its greatest difficulty confronts us at the outset. Once the first pitch is accomplished we are perfectly certain that the combined skill of the party is sufficient to insure a successful ascent of the remainder. There is no gradual increase in the technical difficulty of the subsequent passages, to vex the soul of the conscientious climber with doubts as to the morality of advancing, when a critical position might be reached where descent is dangerous and further ascent beyond his powers. ”

“ A sapient jury drew from this sad event the moral that a guide should be employed as a safeguard against sudden mists; but few men need fear mists less than those who choose to climb when it is pitch dark. ”

“ The mountaineers are non-social. As they stand to-day, each man “fighting for his own hand, with his back against the wall,” they recognize no social compact. Each one is suspicious of the other. Except as kinsmen or partisans they cannot pull together. ”

“ Climatic conditions and the members of one’s party introduce sufficient variety. Years ago an expert reporter was trying to teach me shorthand. His method was to induce me to copy out the same report again and again; it was an excellent idea, and the system was well vindicated with apter pupils. Likewise in climbing, an apt pupil will learn rapidly by repetition of the same ascents. ”

“ Well-deserving persons are trammelled in their activities. So far and no farther! Wherever we look, we see them chained to the lowest stages. 'Not beyond the boundary we have mapped out for you,' says the Government. 'You want to climb, you are equipped to be brave mountaineers, you lack nothing you need to reach the summit, neither courage, nor endurance, nor strength. Yet remain below, remain below!' The foot-hills reached at the first spurt, mere child's play for their abilities, are the only heights they are allowed to scale. ”

“ To climb as an individual, each man has to learn how he can most safely and economically manage his muscles, his will and his nerves, and how to accommodate his personal rhythm to the accidents of rock structure. To climb in a party, he has to adjust this to the collective rhythm of whatever men he climbs with. He has not only to get up rocks, he has to do so as part of a machine. ”