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The association between mountaineering and taking risks is conventional and has been so since mountaineering emerged in Western Europe as a distinct preoccupation during the first half of the nineteenth century. Whatever else mountaineering might be about, it has always at least been about risk.Footnote 1 Scholarship on English alpinism in its formative period – the first two decades of the second half of the nineteenth century – has long acknowledged this association. Scholarship has, however, only begun to recognize the complex nature of risk in early English alpinism. Recently, Ann C. Colley has shown that John Ruskin's exposure to danger in the Alps (“his numerous and repeated ascents . . . were often tough and sometimes dangerous” [43]), his experience of having a fragile grasp on a fragile environment and his constant exposure to views which were fleeting and fragmentary profoundly influenced his principles of artistic representation.
It seems that Ruskin climbed not only for the thrill of exertion and the rage to collect his geological specimens but also for a perspective that reveals more than a panorama – that also exposes, in spite of the accompanying annoyances and frustrations, the privilege of the imperfect vision, which opens up a space for the imagination and leads one into the spiritual mystery of the landscape. (63)
The present article is concerned with the mountaineering writings of Ruskin's contemporary and the leading British physicist of his day, John Tyndall. Tyndall was just eight months Ruskin's junior and they knew each other well. Vulnerability to danger was at least as important to Tyndall as Colley has shown it to be for Ruskin. Risk is a central – arguably the central – theme of Tyndall's alpine writing. But unlike Ruskin, Tyndall found it impossible to engage with danger in the high mountains and absorb the experience of that engagement into his larger project, which in Tyndall's case was scientific and cultural. Risk presented a professional, moral, and emotional challenge to Tyndall that he was utterly and explicitly unable to resolve. His work reveals the dynamic, unstable, and highly problematic nature of mid-Victorian attitudes toward danger. The most severe terrain in the high Alps – terrain which could not be traversed without taking serious risks – and the temptation to enter that terrain were Tyndall's constant and proximate fellow-travellers in the Alps. They haunted his alpine project. With them, he experienced a complex relationship of achievement (in successfully maintaining his detachment), desire, and alienation.
Previous scholarship has established that the middle decades of the nineteenth century were a formative period for Western – and specifically Anglo-American – attitudes toward risk. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon have recently endorsed the view that modern attitudes toward risk had their origin in “the emergence of risk as a dominant way of knowing and intervening in the world beginning in the nineteenth century” (17; see also Erwald). Their work depends on and advances the work of Nikolas Rose, who associates emergent attitudes toward risk with an emergent sense of the centrality of the individual and “the individualized ethos of neo-liberal politics: choice, personal responsibility, control over one's fate, self-promotion and self-government” (249). Baker and Simon recognize the imprint of these nineteenth-century roots in contemporary Western attitudes toward risk: “The cultural trend we identify as embracing risk fits closely with the advanced liberal emphasis on the individual” (17).
Meanwhile, in the Alps, at the same time as new attitudes toward risk were germinating in England, English climbers were achieving virgin summits at a rapid rate, taking risks, sometimes extreme risks, as they did so. Two ascents frame the period when English climbers reinvented alpinism and claimed it, at least temporarily, for their own. In 1854, Alfred Wills, later Sir Alfred Wills, climbed the Wetterhorn, above Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland, incorrectly believing himself to be the first to do so; and in 1865, a party of four Englishmen and three guides – two Swiss and one Savoyard – became the first to climb the Matterhorn. The relevance of their achievements for the study of risk in that period depends not just on the fact that their new pastime demonstrably involved risks but also and at least as importantly on the fact that the first English alpinists were an extremely influential group of people, predominantly men. As K. Theodore Hoppen writes in The Mid-Victorian Generation: 1846–1886, “The Alpine Club, founded in 1857, helped to strengthen feelings of community and brotherhood both on the glaciers and in everyday life. Soon the Alps were swarming with British academics – lawyers, scientists, writers, and physicians” (489). The relevance of their experiences to the emergence of new, broadly-based attitudes toward risk depends as well on the fact that they almost universally deployed their successes and failures very prominently in the public domain. According to the late nineteenth century jurist and historian Frederic William Maitland, the first issue of the Alpine Club's first periodical, Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, published in 1859, made a splash to rival Darwin's Origin of Species: “Few books of 1859 were more brilliantly successful or more truly ‘epoch-making’ than the first volume of ‘Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers,’ though this was the year of ‘The Origin of Species’” (82). In a society increasingly concerned about risk, alpinists provided abundant material for discussion.
Modern scholarship on risk has at the same time been becoming increasingly interested in climbing and mountaineering. Mountaineering and rock climbing provide useful anecdotal and illustrative material in modern studies of risk. (See, for example, Adams 3 and 89.) But the association between modern mountaineering and the cultural status of risk has also been discussed more pointedly. Although he mentions risk and mountaineering in the nineteenth century only in passing, Jonathan Simon argues that mountaineering may help people cope with the greater exposure to risk in contemporary society and may also help them fulfil the desire to experience risks that modern culture generates; climbing “may provide a productive place . . . in which to explore the development of skills, mentalities, and communities appropriate to the risks that are being shifted to people” (202).
Scholars specifically interested in mountaineering in the nineteenth century have generally taken for granted that risk is an unproblematic and unchanging element of alpinism, but some recent work has associated the emergence of mountaineering with the political and economic culture of nineteenth-century Britain especially on the basis of the risk-taking that it always involves. David Robertson, in an excellent study, acknowledges the central significance of danger in the early decades of English mountaineering but treats dangers as objective conditions for which climbers did or did not properly prepare themselves. He identifies four “real dangers” (having dispensed with some illusory ones), “the insecure snow-bridge over a crevasse, the slippery foot-hold on hard ice, the fall of ice or rock from above, and unpredictable bad weather” (130) – a list identical to one which a modern mountaineer might compile.Footnote 2 More recently, Hoppen stresses that, at the expense of risk-taking, the atmosphere of masculine, academic, and intellectual retreat among early English alpinists, an element of mountaineering which was certainly significant, must have been the important element for some early climbers, if not for the leading climbers. In so doing, Hoppen locates alpinism in the inclination of English intellectuals in general and scientists in particular to create networks in the form of clubs. For Hoppen, Tyndall's alpinism was a natural extension of his eagerness to join clubs. He was a member not only of the Alpine Club but also the X Club, The Club, and the Metaphysical Society:
The new upper-middle class intellectual aristocracy of the time was a closely inter-related coterie. Its characteristic attitude was one of critical but confident disinterestedness; its characteristic doctrine that ‘the world could be improved by analysing the needs of society and calculating the possible course of its development’; its characteristic venue the Alps, where, from the 1850s onwards, the intelligentsia was to find a ruggedly congenial vacation habitat. (489)
Hoppen understands the interest of these club members in mountaineering to be appropriately high-brow and disinterested; it “reflected a complex set of emotions: a new attitude to nature, a love of physical exertion, a search for the transcendental beyond orthodox religion, even a quest for scientific discovery” (489). In an article published in the 1990s, Peter Hensen characterizes Victorian alpinism as an expression of imperialist values: “the invention of mid-Victorian mountaineering demonstrates that middle-class men . . . actively constructed an assertive masculinity to uphold their imagined sense of Britain's imperial power” (303–04).Footnote 3 Elaine Freedgood, in Victorian Writing About Risk, also associates mid-Victorian mountaineering with its contemporary socio-economic culture:
The ability of Britons to face and to survive danger – from the scaling of the Matterhorn to the sailing of the Niger – became part of a new British self-conception based on a complex moralizing of the profits of industry and empire. Risk, as described by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, becomes, in bourgeois economics, “a moral excuse for profit.” (8–9)
In fact, Freedgood argues, the suffering, the pain, and the risk were ways of dealing with the anxieties about the future generated by nineteenth-century capitalist risk-taking. “The climber suffers no matter what,” she writes; “I am suggesting that there is a cultural analog to masochism. What I call cultural masochism is a collective means of preemptively expressing and relieving anxiety: it is both the enactment and the popular representation of a voluntary and knowing embrace of danger” (105).Footnote 4
The Mid-Victorian Alpine Project
By the time the English got involved, alpinism was already a half-century old. It is generally considered to have begun in 1786, when a mineral hunter and a physician, both natives of Chalmonix, became the first to reach the summit of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe. At that time, no other high alpine summit was known to have been climbed, nor did a tradition of mountaineering exist. News of the event gradually seeped through the European media. Jacques Balmat (the mineral hunter) and Michel-Gabriel Paccard (the physician) summited out on 8 August. In the first item in the “Universal Register” section of the Times for 14 November of the same year, their achievement receives its first English notice. Balmat and Paccard's achievement and the notoriety and income that they were able to generate from it were an inspiration to others. One by one, other high summits were reached. In August 1811, the Jungfrau (4158 m.) was climbed; in August 1813, the Breithorn (4164 m.); and in August 1829, the Finsteraarhorn (4273.9 m.), the highest mountain in the Bernese Oberland.
But sixty years after Balmat and Paccard's famous first ascent, most of the highest mountains in the Alps remained unscaled. By 1850, the tops of only five of the twenty-five highest mountains in the Alps had been reached. During the next three decades, this situation was to change dramatically. By 1880, all of the remaining twenty of the twenty-five highest had been climbed. This sudden success was not the result of advances in equipment or techniques; nor had the skill of the alpinists suddenly been raised to a higher level by the leadership of an outstanding climber. In the 1850s the English had arrived. All five of the highest mountains that had been climbed before 1850 had been climbed by continental Europeans. Between 1854 and 1880, English climbers became the first to reach the summits of seventeen of the remaining twenty highest mountains in the Alps.
John Tyndall the Alpinist
In the process of achieving this success, the English transformed the character of alpine mountaineering. By the early 1860s they had introduced into alpine climbing an urgency, intensity, nationalism, and competitiveness which it had not known before. But it did not begin that way. English mountaineering in the 1850s was principally informed by contemporary scientific goals, purposes, and values and was characterized by a restraint and deliberateness which those values imply. John Tyndall played a crucial role in assigning to English mountaineering this scientific character. The greatest and most influential of the early English mountaineers, Tyndall, was also a leading English scientist.Footnote 5 He achieved fame as a mountaineer especially as one of the first ascensionists of the Weisshorn (together with his guide and porter), but he began to travel in the high mountains for scientific purposes, and his scientific principles and values governed his alpine experiences generally. He expresses in his writing a deep reverence for the tradition of scientific exploration which he was advancing.
Tyndall first went into the high mountains to study the structural effects of the massive levelling power of gravity on matter.Footnote 6 In Glaciers of the Alps, the first monograph on his experiences in the Alps, he describes how his dissatisfaction with the accepted theory concerning cleavage properties in shale (observed in northern Wales) provoked his first “expedition” into the high mountains. The accepted theory was that cleavage properties in shale were an expression of the processes of sedimentation which provided the material for the stone, each line of cleavage representing an interruption in the deposition of sediments. Tyndall doubted this. He suspected that cleavage was the result of intense material pressures caused by the action of gravity on massive quantities of sediment. In response to a paper that Tyndall delivered on the subject at the Royal Institution on 10 June 1856, Professor Thomas Henry Huxley, the biologist and champion of progressive scientific causes, who was to become Tyndall's close friend, suggested that he and Tyndall travel together in the Alps that summer to study similar cleavage properties in glacial ice. Tyndall writes:
Such are the circumstances, apparently remote enough, under which my connection with glaciers originated. My friend, Professor Huxley, was present at the lecture referred to: he was well acquainted with the work of Professor Forbes, entitled ‘Travels in the Alps,’ and he surmised that the question of slaty [sic] cleavage, in its new aspect, might have some bearing upon the laminated structure of glacier-ice discussed in the work referred to. He therefore urged me to read the ‘Travels,’ which I did with care, and the book made the same impression upon me that it had produced upon my friend. We were both going to Switzerland that year, and it required but a slight modification of our plans to arrange a joint excursion over some glaciers of the Oberland, and thus afford ourselves the means of observing together the veined structure of the ice. (8)
Tyndall and Huxley were taking their places in a tradition of scientific exploration of the high Alps, which was now several decades old and distinctly international. The moment of Tyndall's initiation upon arriving in Switzerland was obviously deeply meaningful to him.
On the 16th of August 1856 I received my alpenstock from the hands of Dr. Hooker, in the garden of the Pension Ober, at Interlaken. It bore my name, not marked, however, by the vulgar brands of the country, but by the solar beams which had been converged upon it by the pocket lens of my friend. (10)
A few days later, having wandered far across country and high up to the Grimsel Hospice and then still higher into the barren, slopes above the Unteraar glacier, he settled into a rustic shelter built by his scientist predecessors. Carved into the door, he found the names “Agassiz, Forbes, Desor, Dolfuss, Ramsay, and others” (19). Still higher, on a glacial moraine, he discovered Agassiz's original and much more primitive stone shelter:
Upon the great central moraine which runs between the branches [of the Finsteraar and Lauteraar glaciers] were perched enormous masses of rock, and, under the overhanging ledge on one of these, M. Agassiz had his Hôtel des Neufchâtelois. The rock is still there, bearing traces of names now nearly obliterated by the weather, while the fragments around also bear inscriptions. There in the wilderness, in the grey light of evening, these blurred and faded evidences of human activity wore an aspect of sadness. It was a temple of science now in ruins, and I a solitary pilgrim to the desecrated blocks. (19)
Tyndall termed his trips to the Alps “expeditions.”Footnote 7 Accordingly, Tyndall shows himself to have been preoccupied during his expeditions of 1856, 1857, 1858, and 1859 with various kinds of scientific work. He was constantly, even obsessively, engaged in observation – programmatic observation of cleavage in glacial ice, of the effects of past glaciations on exposed vertical rock faces, of erosion caused by wind and water, and spontaneous observation, especially of light and atmospheric effects – and measurement, especially of air temperatures at various altitudes, of the boiling point of water, also at various altitudes, and of the movement of glaciers.
Tyndall and Risk-Taking
Inevitably, Tyndall's scientific work in high alpine terrain frequently brought him to the edge of dangerous ground, often highly dangerous ground, and forced him to make choices about the risks which he was prepared to undertake. He describes, often with some precision, the nature of the dangers he encountered and his attitude in negotiating or avoiding those dangers. His attitude was, not surprisingly, founded on principle, tested against observation and experience. From the moment of his arrival in the Alps, Tyndall shows himself to have been forming hypotheses about everything he saw. One of these hypotheses, directly relevant to risk, was that science could identify an orderliness and predictability in events which seemed, on first sight, to reveal forces which were violent and chaotic on a vast scale. On 17 August 1856, having arrived in the high Alps the previous afternoon, Tyndall stepped onto a glacier for the first time in his life. The scene, one of “savage magnificence” (12), was powerfully enhanced by a series of avalanches which thundered down from the surrounding heights, the visual and auditory effects of which Tyndall describes at some length (12–13). Soon after, when he and Huxley had climbed to a position from which they could study the “frozen mass” of the glacier more effectively, the “mechanical conditions of the glacier revealed themselves” (13). Tyndall now saw that “confusion is merely the unknown intermixture of laws, and becomes order and beauty when we rise to their comprehension” (13).
With understanding comes predictability and with predictability, the capacity to control. Tyndall was not especially interested in harnessing the energies he observed around him in the Alps. There, control for Tyndall meant above all the capacity to control one's situation and one's self; nerve, in other words, and the avoidance of risk, which entailed a lack of control. Control meant his ability to negotiate the alpine environment safely, to be able to carry out scientific work in a powerfully unstable environment without placing himself in the hands of chance. Risk-taking was not consistent with Tyndall's philosophy of science or his identity as a scientist. In fact, alpinism as Tyndall understood it represented a repudiation of risk-taking. This is nowhere better expressed than in his account of the first ascent of the Weisshorn. Mid-way on that mountain's eastern ridge – long, jagged, steep, and spectacularly exposed on both sides – Tyndall and his small team of one guide, the legendary Johann Bennen, and one porter, the sturdy and stoical Ulrich Wenger, encountered a knife-sharp section of delicate snow.Footnote 8 It was, in modern climbing parlance, the crux of the climb, the moment of truth. Tyndall records his dismay at the sight of it (“How to pass this snow catenary I knew not, for I had no idea of a human foot trusting upon so frail a support” [23]) and his greater dismay as he watched Bennen move out onto it.
[Bennen] tried the snow by squeezing it with his foot, and to my astonishment commenced to cross. Even after the pressure of his feet the space he had to stand on did not exceed a handbreadth. I followed him exactly as a boy walking along a horizontal pole, with toes turned outwards. (235)
All three men crossed safely. The incident, on reflection, taught Tyndall not that you have to take risks if you want to be the first to climb the Weisshorn but that there was really nothing to fear.
It is quite surprising the number of things the simple observation made by Faraday, in 1846, enables us to explain. Benen's instinctive act is justified by theory. The snow was fine in grain, pure and moist. When pressed, the attachments of its granules were innumerable, and their perfect cleanness enabled them to freeze together with a maximum energy. It was this freezing together of the particles at innumerable points which gave the mass its sustaining power. Take two fragments of ordinary table ice and bring them carefully together, you will find that they freeze and cement themselves at their place of junction; or if two pieces float in water, you can bring them together, when they instantly freeze, and by laying hold of either of them gently, you can drag the other after it through the water. Imagine such points of attachment distributed without number through a mass of snow. The substance becomes thereby a semi-solid instead of a mass of powder. My guide, however, unaided by any theory, did a thing from which I, though backed by all the theories in the world, should have shrunk in dismay. (235)
The idea that nonchalance is in fact appropriate for a scientist on such occasions is a leitmotif of Tyndall's alpine writing. In 1861, to cite another example, when crossing the Gauli Glacier, in the eastern Bernese Oberland, again with Bennen as his guide, and in the company of a much less experienced friend, Tyndall had to cross a bergschrund – a massive fissure in the glacial ice opening onto a black abyss – and then, immediately on its other side, establish himself on and ascend a wall of snow and ice with the bergschrund gaping below him. Someone less knowledgeable and experienced would have been alarmed, but without reason:
Had you, unaccustomed to mountain climbing, found yourself upon such an incline, you would have deemed it odd. Its steepness was greater than that of a cathedral roof, while below us, and within a few yards of us, the slope was cut by a chasm into which it would be certain death to fall. Education enables us to regard a position of this kind almost with indifference, still the work was by no means unexciting. (207–08)
The significance of nonchalance in such situations especially depends for Tyndall on the nature of alpine dangers as he understood them. Crossing a snow catenary or ascending an icy slope above a bergschrund, Tyndall understood himself to be discovering, with the help of scientific knowledge, the slenderest of safe passages through a powerfully dangerous landscape. His ability to move with confidence in such places was a measure not of how safe the Alps really are but, with the benefit of scientific knowledge, of the extraordinary capability that science provides in dealing with a dangerous world. In wild Alpine terrain, the stakes were high and the margin for error often perilously narrow. All of the forces that Tyndall studied in the Alps were powerful and all were destructive. Frost and the heat of the sun were constantly shattering and loosening even the hardest rock. Gravity was tearing the mountains down, whether as massive avalanches or as the finest rock powder. The mountains were being crushed just by their own ponderous weight.Footnote 9 Everywhere the landscape bore vast scars of glaciation. The Alps, in Tyndall's vision, were enveloped in one ceaseless, colossal act of self destruction. Tyndall's sense of this process was so immediate that he could hardly escape a vision of the landscape fully levelled.Footnote 10 The mountains seemed to him almost temporary and provisional.
With only limited scientific insight, these processes of destruction might seem to be fundamentally cyclical. Science had discovered the cycles and, to some extent, the mechanisms of mountain building and destruction. With the benefit of that knowledge, Tyndall was easily able to imagine a time when mountain-building forces had thrown up the Alps and also a time when they would be no more.
This peak [the Eggishorn, above Fiesch, Switzerland] and those adjacent, which are similarly shattered, exhibit a striking picture of the ruin which Nature inflicts upon her own creations. She buildeth up and taketh down. She lifts the mountains up by her subterranean energies, and then blasts them by her lightnings and her frost. (213)
But with deeper insight, the destructive forces which were everywhere active in the Alps could be recognized as ultimately linear. The “primal essence” of all that happens materially in the universe is motion: “One primal essence underlies all natural phenomena – and that is MOTION. Every aspect of Nature is a quality of motion” (224). Motion seeks “repose”; the search for this repose might seem perpetual, but is it?
The incessant tendency of material forces is toward final equilibrium; and if the quantity of this tendency be finite, a time of repose must come at last. If one portion of the universe be hotter than another, a flux instantly sets in to equalise the temperatures; while winds blow and rivers roll in search of a stable equilibrium. Matter longs for rest . . . (213)
The condition to which this process must inevitably lead is death:
The state to which material nature tends is not one of perfection, but of death. Life is only compatible with mutation; and when the attractions and repulsions of material atoms have been satisfied to the uttermost, life ceases, and the world thenceforward is locked in everlasting sleep. (213–14)
Tyndall, obviously, is not here talking about death as it is inevitably embedded in the rhythms of organic life. Death in this context is the central element in a more profound teleology and the end of organic life and of all rhythmic cycles, organic or inorganic.
In the Alps, nature reveals her truest self most purely – energy seeking rest on a vast scale, energy that in England is muted, obscure, and nearly satisfied. The Alps, then, far from being of merely local or exotic interest, far from being an escapist playground or an ideal location for disinterested intellectual discussion, offered a confrontation with reality. The central term of that reality – death – and its moral associations – darkness and savagery; primitive forces, hostile to life – defined the Alps for Tyndall more precisely than any other qualities or characteristics. In 1856, for example, in Tyrol, while Tyndall was studying a glacier, his guide spotted a chamois; Tyndall writes: “The creature stood upon a cliff some hundreds of yards to our left, and seemed to watch our movements. It was a most graceful animal, and its life and beauty stood out in forcible antithesis to the surrounding savagery and death” (26). In 1861, ascending the desolate Urbachtal, in the eastern Bernese Oberland, Tyndall found himself thinking of “a state of things which had disappeared from the world before the development of man” (205). As he approached the Gauli Glacier, at the head of the Urbachtal, he was aware of entering an alien domain: “the world of life and beauty is now retreating, and the world of death and beauty is at hand” (206). Later, from the summit of the Eggishorn, in a further corner of the Bernese Oberland, Tyndall's gaze fell on the Matterhorn: “Then come the repellent crags of Mont Cervin; the idea of moral savagery, of wild untamable [sic] ferocity, mingling involuntarily with our contemplation of the gloomy pile” (215).
The association Tyndall draws between the forces of destruction evident in the Alps and “moral savagery” was not for him just rhetorical window dressing. Those forces, striving as they were to annihilate life itself, represented a proximate, visible, and tangible challenge to the values that Tyndall held most dear: knowledge, progress, hope, and order. Moreover, if unopposed, they provoked in mankind a state of mind similarly at odds with Tyndall's value system. The natural, primitive human response to the alpine landscape was one of superstitious fear: the savage landscape inspired in “the savage mind” a belief in mysterious powers active in the universe:
The savage saw in the fall of a cataract the leap of a spirit, and the echoed thunder-peal was to him the hammer-clang of an exasperated god. Propitiation of these terrible powers was the consequence, and sacrifice was offered to the demons of the earth and air. (221)
This state of mind represented, in a sense, a second front in the struggle against ultimate, perpetual death and on this front much ground could be won. Even if mankind could not escape material Nature's relentless march toward repose, it could liberate itself from the superstitious beliefs and fatalistic attitudes inspired by witnessing that march.
In this struggle, as in Tyndall's efforts to explore the domain of death without placing himself in its power, ground could only gradually be won and one culture was more effective at winning it than another. Human beings are inclined to cling tenaciously to inherited beliefs:
One by one [under the influence of “the intellectual powers of man”] natural phenomena were associated with their proximate causes; this process still continues, and the idea of direct personal volition mixing itself in the economy of nature is retreating more and more. Many of us fear this tendency; our faith and feelings are dear to us, and we look with suspicion and dislike on any philosophy which would deprive us of the relations in which we have been accustomed to believe, as tending directly to dry up the soul. Probably every change from ancient savagery to our present enlightenment excited, in a greater or lesser degree, a fear of this kind. (221–22)
In Tyndall's eyes, “our present enlightenment” was nowhere so far advanced as in Protestant England. The English had given up trusting in miracles and prayer: “In Protestant countries, at least, I think it is conceded that the age of miracles is past” (222). He looks with sympathetic condescension on the local Catholic priests and their flocks, who attempt to escape the destructive forces of nature by means of prayer: “we all smile at the poor Tyrolese priest, who, when he feared the bursting of a glacier, offered the sacrifice of the mass upon the ice as a means of averting the calamity” (223). The reliance of the priests and their parishioners on prayer betrayed a sad ignorance of how nature actually works and resulted in a fatalistic acceptance of troubles that often could have been avoided. It was ineffectual, in other words, and likely to lead to a wastefulness of human life. Whatever the Catholic priests may have thought, Tyndall could only see them and the wider culture that he understood them to exemplify and represent as adrift in a dangerous world, unnecessarily exposing themselves and their parishioners to danger without even vaguely appreciating that they were doing so, moving unconsciously back and forth across the line that separated the irrational and uncertain from the rational, probabilistic, and controllable.
Englishmen and Their Guides
One factor significantly destabilized this otherwise coherent and seemingly static national, professional, and personal project: the English climbers’ complex and intense relationship with their guides. The English climbers’ relationship with their local guides represented a challenge to this project, a challenge which was chronic, dynamic, unresolved in the mid-Victorian period, and directly relevant to issues of risk and control. Every day they spent with the guides, especially the days spent in the high mountains, the English were busy observing and evaluating the guides. They were busy comparing the guides’ values with their own and measuring the differences, in both practical and moral terms. Experiences on the mountain tested, confirmed, and revealed the virtues of Catholic culture and the savage mind as against those of science, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment. They discovered similarities as well as differences. Tyndall recognized very admirable qualities in the guides, many of which he understood himself to share with them. Where he identified a difference between himself and the best of his guides, it was often only of degree or performance, not of quality. He (like many of his fellow English alpinists) praised the best guides without reservation for their intelligence, honesty, and dependability. He admired the guides’ strength, stamina, and nerve, their climbing ability and their capacity to endure the deprivation of all ordinary comforts. Given his own more sedentary lifestyle, his greatest ambition was to keep up with the guides, which at his best, to his great satisfaction, he managed to do. After he had gained a little experience in the mountains, Tyndall was repeatedly concerned to prove himself able to keep up with the guides and take care of himself, within limits. He never imagined that he could compete with them, or do without them, but he repeatedly wanted to prove to them that on all but the most dangerous terrain, he could be counted on the take care of himself. In 1858, for example, during Tyndall's third “expedition” to the Alps, he and a friend, Professor A. C. Ramsay, who was an expert on glaciers, decided to cross the Strahleggpass (which Tyndall refers to as the “Strahleck”), a serious and remote high alpine pass in the Bernese Oberland, to the south of Grindalwald. They engaged the services of the local guide, Ulrich Lauener.
When we first spoke of crossing the Strahleck, Lauener said it would be necessary to take two guides at least; but after a day's performance on the ice he thought we might manage very well by taking, in addition to himself, the herd of the alp, over the more difficult part of the pass. He had further experience of us on the second day, and now, as we approached the herd's hut, I was amused to hear him say that he thought any assistance beside his own unnecessary. (83–84)
Tyndall, like other English climbers, vied with the guides and porters to see who could be less self-serving and more generous with the meagre comforts and provisions in a high, makeshift camp.
Tyndall understood himself to differ from the best guides most distinctly not in terms of climbing ability (where they differed in degree) but in terms of control – control of self and control of situation, especially on precarious ground. In this respect they differed not just in degree but in kind. Tyndall believed that the guides, products as they were of a savage culture, were not interested in controlling themselves and their situation to anything like the same degree as the English climbers and were in any case largely unaware of control as a virtue.Footnote 11 Tyndall recognized the hand of instinct more readily than intellectual analysis or rational calculation in a guide's act of boldness, whether spontaneous or measured. When, for example, in 1858, Tyndall and Ramsay were on their way to a crossing of the “Strahleck” with Lauener, Ramsay suddenly fell on very exposed ground and began what might have become a slide to his death. Lauener instantly threw himself down the slope, intercepted Ramsay, and managed to arrest his fall and convey him back to safety. Tyndall saw instinct in action: “The act made a very favourable impression on me, it was so prompt and instinctive. An eagle could not swoop upon its prey with more directness of aim and swiftness of execution” (85). Similarly, in 1861 when, during the first ascent of the Weisshorn, Bennen dared, having paused to collect himself, to cross the exposed catenary of snow, Tyndall attributed Bennen's daring to instinct: “Bennen's instinctive act” succeeded where Tyndall, “though backed by all the theories in the world, should have shrunk in dismay” (235). To his mind, the guides acted naturally and without rational calculation, while their English clients acted with deliberation, which included an estimation of possible consequences. In this instance as in so many others, while the guide's superior skill and strength were important in the success of a climb, it was that obscure alloy in them of instinct, boldness, and carelessness of danger that made the crucial difference between failure and success.
The stark contrast between the guides’ appetite for risk and the risk aversion of their English clients, combined with the English dependence on the guides for success, was probably the most important cause of a distinct and chronic restlessness in the English alpine project. Provisionally, English climbers were content to adopt the role of managers of resources – financial, technological, and (often unruly) human resources. Their role was strategic, logistical, and supportive. But not far beneath the surface they were engaged in protracted brooding, even agonizing, about their subordinate position as mountaineers. Their brooding would reach a decisive state only later in the nineteenth century, when Tyndall's generation had given way not only to the relatively brash group of Leslie Stephen, Horace Walker, A. W. Moore, and Edward Whymper, but also to their successors, alpinists who emerged as leading lights in the 1870s and 1880s, people like Albert Mummery, W. C. Slingsby, and Norman Collie. Mummery and his contemporaries succeeded in climbing with guides as their equals in skill and strength and in achieving major new ascents entirely on their own – practices which they defended in uncompromising position papers in the Alpine Journal.Footnote 12
In the mid-Victorian decades, the efforts of English climbers to liberate themselves from their guides were abortive. While Tyndall was striving to gain his guide's approval, other English climbers were trying to show that they could do very well without guides. A year before Tyndall stepped onto the glacier above Grindelwald for the first time, the Reverend Charles Hudson had declared, in word and deed, his intention to liberate English climbers from their dependence on guides. In 1855 he made the first guideless ascent of Mont Blanc and the following year published the story of his achievement in ringing tones: Where There's a Will There's a Way: An Ascent of Mont Blanc by a New Route and Without Guides. But Hudson's project failed on all points. His first guideless ascent of Mont Blanc by a new route was minimally new and minimally creative; and people had been going up the mountain by a route that differed very little from the one Hudson “discovered” for more than half a century. His claimed first ascent of the Mont Blanc du Tacul, a subsidiary summit of Mont Blanc, has never been recognized as a likely first ascent – the mountain had probably been ascended for the first time long before by hunters and collectors of crystals. Hudson's significant first ascents, by contrast, were done not only with the assistance of guides, but in the company of a small army of guides, porters, and friends.Footnote 13 English climbers continued to arrive at Chamounix, Zermatt, and Grindelwald full of nationalistic conceit. Edward Whymper recalled imagining, at the beginning of his first mountaineering trip to the Alps, in 1861, that guides were nothing more than “pointers-out of paths and great consumers of meat and drink, but little more” (35). But hard experience sooner or later convinced Whymper and his fellow countrymen that a good guide was a sine qua non of serious alpine climbing.
Tyndall, Leslie Stephen, Edward Whymper, and A. W. Moore all go out of their way to make clear that they were dependent on their guides, who, they also make clear, were unmistakably superior as climbers. Stephen spoke for all when he made a distinction between “the skill and courage of Swiss guides, and the ambition of their employers” (Playground 74). His accounts of his own mountaineering achievements supply vivid support. On his first ascent of the Zinalrothorn (4221 meters, to the north of Zermatt), on 22 August 1864, Stephen describes himself as being utterly at the mercy of his guide and the rope:
In a few places I found myself fumbling vaguely with my fingers at imaginary excrescences, my feet resting upon rotten projections of crumbling stone, whilst a large pointed slab of rock pressed against my stomach, and threatened to force my centre of gravity backwards beyond the point of support. My chief reliance was upon the rope; and with a graceful flounder I was presently landed in safety upon a comparatively sound ledge. (Playground 105)
His incapacity during the descent was even more dramatic:
I will not tell at length how I was sometimes half-suspended like a bundle of goods by the rope; how I was sometimes curled up into a ball, and sometimes stretched over eight or nine feet of rock; how the rope got twisted round my legs and arms and body, into knots which would have puzzled the Davenport Brothers; how, at one point, I conceived myself to be resting entirely on the point of one toe upon a stone coated with ice and fixed very loosely in the face of a tremendous cliff, whilst Melchior [one of his guides] absurdly told me I was “ganz sicher” [“very safe”], and encouraged me to jump; how [his other guide] Jacob seemed perfectly at ease . . . (Playground 109)
Stephen no doubt does himself an injustice in such accounts, as does Tyndall in similar passages, but not to the extent of concealing the fact that he was the one who did the really hard climbing.
The point is worth reinforcing, especially because of the tendency that set in already in the late nineteenth century of reading contemporary mountaineering practices and standards into earlier, mid-Victorian mountaineering achievements. Probably under the influence of alpinists such as Mummery, late Victorian scholars and intellectuals were inclined to re-interpret the modest role that mid-Victorian English alpinists claimed for themselves as false humility. According to Bernard Lightman, in the early 1870s, on the eve of Tyndall's Belfast lecture in 1874, “in the public's mind, Tyndall was associated with daring ascents of alpine peaks in his courageous quest for knowledge” (205). Leslie Stephen's biographer, the Cambridge-educated historian and jurist Frederic William Maitland, acknowledges, and discusses at some length, Stephen's insistence on the superiority of guides, but he remains circumspect (Maitland 93–94). He cites as counter-evidence the testimony of friends who insisted that Stephen “unduly deprecated his own powers” (95). No doubt on the basis of such influences, Maitland is prepared to believe that in ascending the Zinalrothorn, Stephen put in “a very fine performance” (85).
Similarly, Thomas Hardy, whose career as a novelist was substantially supported by Stephen, in his capacity as editor of the Cornhill magazine romanticized Stephen in a poetic tribute by identifying him with one of the mountains he had climbed “with ventured life and limb” (Maitland 278). In a letter reproduced in Maitland's biography (together with the poem), Hardy recalled that, upon seeing the Schreckhorn while travelling in the Bernese Oberland in 1897, the mountain's “spare and desolate figure” merged in his imagination with that of the man: “As I lay awake that night, the more I thought of the mountain, the more permeated with him it seemed: I could not help remarking to my wife that I felt as if the Schreckhorn were Stephen in person” (277). In his letter – written just after Stephen's death – Hardy expresses the conviction that Stephen's modesty was not credible: “His frequent conversations on his experiences in the Alps recurred to me, experiences always related with modesty in respect to his own achievements, and with high commendation of the achievements of others, which were really no greater than his own” (277). In the 1980s, Noel Annan was able confidently to portray Stephen as an alpine hero, on the basis of no new evidence contradicting the accounts of Stephen and his colleagues.Footnote 14
Stephen was the first man to climb the Schreckhorn and could claim a number of other peaks as his own. Everyone spoke of him as one of the great climbers of his day; better perhaps on ice and snow than on rocks, but a master of both; a climber who delighted in long, steep snow slopes, as well as in cutting steps, and able to manage the loose scree of the Bietschorn. . .. Unlike some of the brotherhood he was opposed to guideless climbing and chastened the English Alpinists by telling them that a third-rate guide was always superior to a first-rate amateur. This was untrue . . . (90)
The long debate about climbing with or without guides was in large part a debate about whether alpinism could be advanced without taking serious risks and, if it could not, about who should be taking those risks. In the late nineteenth century, English climbers who liberated themselves from guides simultaneously began placing themselves in situations of clear and serious danger. The mid-Victorians chose not to liberate themselves from their dependence on guides and not to tolerate risk-taking among themselves, even in situations where an individual Englishman was only exposing himself to danger (see Stephen's “Alpine Dangers” 275). But they also express the allure they felt for the world beyond control, no one more than Tyndall. Tyndall expressed his absolute certainty that vast areas of the Alps were and would always remain off-limits for all responsible and respectable people, but he did not resist expressing at the same time the profound and intense frustration that remaining within proper boundaries generated in his soul. Tyndall is, on the one hand, very clear about the fact that to take risks willingly and consciously or to undertake a mountaineering project which would carry one onto terrain where one would not be fully in control would have been to betray his personal and the English national program. Tyndall's commitment to his principles and this program was sufficiently strong that he identified on that basis huge stretches of alpine landscape where he believed no one would ever safely go and no one should ever try to go. On 5 August 1861, for example, having made the easy ascent of the Siedelhorn in the eastern Bernese Alps to be able to enjoy the views, Tyndall's gaze came to rest on the north-eastern face of the Schreckhorn: “The grimmest fiend of the Oberland closes the view at the head of the Lauteraar Glacier; this is the Schreckhorn, whose cliffs on this side no mountaineer will ever scale” (211–12).Footnote 15
Much more dramatic and painful was the decision that Tyndall made less than three weeks later, under the influence of Bennen's advice, to abandon his hopes of climbing the Matterhorn without even making another attempt on the mountain. He compensates for the lack of a story of ferocious but unavailing effort by recalling the details of an earlier attempt, also with Bennen as guide, details which include Tyndall half-way up a cliff, pressed “against the rock with legs and arms outstretched like a huge and helpless frog” (259). In the summer of 1861, Bennen told Tyndall that he “was dead against any attempt on the mountain” (261). More than that, Tyndall was warned that the risks in climbing the Matterhorn would be severe. The locals conspired to put him off. Bennen had arranged for a Zermatt guide to help Tyndall over the glacier to the Italian side to meet up with him. “Why attempt what is impossible?” the man asked. He went on, “Only think, Herr, what will avail your ascent of the Weisshorn if you are smashed upon the Mont Cervin. Mein Herr! . . . thun Sie es nicht [don't do it]” (256). The warnings are presented as justification for his summary retreat. Who could blame him for turning his back on the Matterhorn if it involved risks of that scale?
While Tyndall never admits to having deliberately violated his principles of control and risk-aversion, he expresses vividly his longing to have done so. Tyndall saturates terrain where control is impossible with an obscure, fascinating, and potent value. The land of death and beauty haunts his project and leaks into it at its margins. He finds it profoundly compelling and suggests that he might in fact occasionally have been traversing it, despite his best intentions. It has an appeal which he seems only just able to resist and one which is most vividly expressed in the later chapters of his second mountaineering book, as if the desire to experience that vulnerability was growing ever stronger with the years. On, for example, Tuesday, 13 August 1861, Tyndall and Bennen, having been becalmed by foul weather in a hotel at one end of a long stretch of the Aletsch glacier, decided to visit the then new hotel at Bel Alp, at the other end. The weather became more intensely foul once they were committed to the glacier. Tyndall found it exhilarating.
On we went. Hark once more, to the thunder, now preceded by vivid lightning gleams which flash into my eyes from the polished surface of my axe. Gleam follows gleam, and peal succeeds peal with terrific grandeur; and the loaded clouds send down from all their fringes dusky streamers of rain. These look like water-spouts, so dense is their texture. Furious as was the descending shower; hard as we were hit by the mixed pellets of ice and water, I scarcely enjoyed a scene more. Grandly the cloud-besom swept the mountains, their colossal outlines looming at intervals like over-powered Titans struggling against their doom. (218)
The next day, Tyndall, drawn to return to the limits of safety, found a pine tree whose trunk had been distorted in such a way that it bulged out over the deep chasm through which a glacier flowed:
I stood upon the horizontal part of the tree, and, hugging its upright stem, looked down into the gorge. It required several minutes to chase away the timidity with which I hung over this savage ravine; and, as the wind blew more forcibly against me, I clung with more desperate energy to the tree. In this wild spot, and alone, I watched the dying fires of the day, until the latest glow had vanished from the mountains. (219)
Out on rough terrain, Tyndall sensed danger's transformative power within him. Fear made him sharper. He realized this, for example, on a day out alone in the high ground above Zermatt: “the thought of peril keeps the mind awake, and spurs the muscles into action; they move with alacrity and freedom, and the time passes swiftly”; and later the same day, he recalled the positive influence of fear: “I felt just sufficient fear to render me careful” (136–37).
More than anything else, Tyndall shows his project to have been controlled more by a desire to experience danger at close quarters than by a desire to record boiling temperatures at high altitudes. Pushing himself at least to the edge of secure terrain was what his alpine years were really all about. Tyndall says that his interest in science led him to climb Mont Blanc for the first time: “From the time of my arrival at the Montanvert the thought of ascending Mont Blanc, and thus expanding my knowledge of the glaciers, had often occurred to me” (60). But his long account of the ascent and descent includes details about dangers encountered, yet nothing about glaciers:
On the heights to our right, loose ice-crags seemed to totter. . .. We were glad to get out of the range of these terrible projectiles, and still more so to escape the vicinity of that ugly crevasse. To be killed in the open air would be a luxury, compared to having the life squeezed out of one in the horrible gloom of these chasms. . .. (67)
Tyndall, it is true, makes clear at times in his popular accounts of alpine writing that his scientific insights were most fully recorded elsewhere. But Tyndall's statement of intent in the Introduction defines a dual purpose. Scientific insight would be its primary purpose: “When the idea of writing this book first occurred to me, it was not my intention to confine myself to the glaciers alone, but to make the work a vehicle for the familiar explanation of such general physical phenomena as had come under my notice” (9). But it would also “reveal the mode of life, as well as the scientific objects, of an explorer of the Alps” (9). Despite his best intentions, Tyndall's account is dominated by the terrain he hardly dared to admit having traversed and the places he did not dare to go.
Tyndall defined a vast domain in the Alps which was both physically and psychologically dominant, the appeal of which enveloped and infiltrated his project but which his principles did not allow him to enter, whose attractive power he could not name or define, and whose value he could not fathom. The forces which accounted for its fascination were not, according to Tyndall, significant metaphorically – for example, being analogous to the kinds of threats that we are up against in this life – but significant absolutely. In the high Alps, Nature's most fundamental teleology, a teleology hostile to life itself and beyond any power of opposition, was most immediately revealed. Since the attractive power of that landscape operated in a psychological domain which was so alien to Tyndall's scientifically based conceptual framework that he was unable to place it in any meaningful way, in attempting to describe his experience of it, he lapsed into the language of poetry and religion. It was terrain that his project could not, conceptually, tread. In August of 1861, his desire to climb the Matterhorn drove him onto such rhetorical ground. One evening, wandering alone above Zermatt, he was aware of an “indefinable longing” for the mountain: “The Matterhorn was all bare, and my vision ranged with an indefinable longing from base to summit over its blackened crags” (256). It was a “mystic pinnacle” and it held him with “irresistible fascination” until he turned away (257). Having turned away, the sense of loss that he felt had nothing to do with objective knowledge which he might have gained: “The hope that had filled my mind had been suddenly dislodged, and pure vacuity took its place. It was like the breaking down of a religion, or the removal of a pleasant drug to which one had been long accustomed” (262).
In admitting to the powerful hold which the alpine landscape had over him, Tyndall suggests, indirectly, that he not only depended on his guides but also felt something like envy for them; and that he envied them especially because they went freely where he could not go, into “the world of death and beauty.” In choosing to make public this envy, he reveals, too, that it was part of his identity, if not as a scientist then possibly as an Englishman or simply as a man, that the desires which generated that envy were not only controlled but that they were powerfully present, needing to be controlled. Tyndall chose to make clear that his desire to move outside the domain of control, into the domain of risk, was almost as powerful as his will to resist. The representations of Englishwomen, who were also present in the high mountains in the 1850s and 1860s, reinforce, if obscurely, this impression of sensitivity on questions of manliness. Englishwomen were involved in alpinism already in the 1850s, but always in the company of men (most often husbands or brothers and always also guides) and always on mountains that were easier to climb and had been climbed before. But there was one notable exception. Lucy Walker climbed dozens of mountains, over the span of several years, most often in the company of her father and brother, Frank and Horace Walker, who were leading alpinists. Her most notable achievements were to be among the first ascensionists (together with her father, brother, and two guides) of the Balmhorn (3699 meters, above the village of Kandersteg, in Switzerland, in 1864) and to be the first woman to climb the Matterhorn. But the men who recorded her achievements seem to have found it impossible to characterize her as a climber. Despite her extensive experience and genuine achievements, practically nothing is known about her actual capability as an alpinist or her performance on the mountain.Footnote 16 The silence concerning Lucy Walker's ability as a climber can be interpreted in many ways, but it may at least be fair to say that the male climbing community found it difficult to say either that Lucy was or was not a fine climber – that she either was or was not strong, skillful, and bold. To position her abilities in relationship to those of men was just too sensitive a topic.
During the second half of the nineteenth century local guides, the inner logic of mountaineering, and possibly also English women climbers were, in an uncoordinated way, pulling and pushing English men into the domain of risk-taking. During the 1850s and 1860s, English climbers kept those pressures at bay. They maintained alpinism as an ideally risk-free pastime, a monument to English nerve, control, common-sense, and a very qualified sense of responsibility. If any single value rationalized the mountaineering enterprise, with its complex set of elements held for the most part in precarious balance, it was opening up new ground – traversing hitherto un-traversed land, seeing sights that no one had ever seen before. The appeal of widening these particular horizons was enhanced by the well-established romantic qualities of the alpine landscape and the social acceptability of European alpine culture. If the rewards offered by mountaineering often involved taking risks, it was the guides who were required to take them. Elaine Freedgood's arguments to the contrary not-withstanding, if the narratives of mid-Victorian English alpinists demonstrate in any way that aggressive risk-taking provides the moral justification for profits gained, we will have to look for that demonstration in the experience of the guides, not their English clients. Similarly, there is very little in these narratives to support the idea, advanced by Peter Hensen, that the English alpinists put on display the virtues of heroic, individualistic English masculinity. Mountaineering in Tyndall's accounts is richly social, both in the business of climbing and in the eagerness to share the experience with audiences back home. The English are, in their accounts, compassionate employers and prudent managers of resources. Their personal fame is treated as the by-product of an international team's adventure. In these ways and in others, the narratives of the mid-Victorian English alpinists offer a valuable window onto aspects of the mid-Victorian character, not necessarily those we have sometimes been led to expect.
