Hours of Exercise in the Alps

By JOHN TYNDALL, LL. D., F. R. S. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1871.

PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S volume has not only great merits, but a great and constant charm. Few writers on scientific topics possess in such degree the art of flinging over their stern subject-matter that mellow light of sentiment which conciliates the uninitiated mind without cheapening, as it were, the theme. Science we imagine has few such useful friends in literature : it were much to be wished that literature had a few such friends in science. By which we mean that literary topics would largely gain if writers would wander as far afield in search of a more rigorous method, as Professor Tyndall has travelled hitherward in search of a graceful one. But indeed Professor Tyndall seems to us so admirable a writer chiefly because he is so clear, so educated a thinker. It would be hard to make an unsymmetrical statement of conceptions so definite as those in which he deals. The habit of accurate thought gives a superb neatness to his style. “ The mind,” he excellently says, in his recent “ Fragments of Science,” “is, as it were, a photographic plate, which is gradually cleansed by the effort to think rightly, and which, when so cleansed, and not before, receives impressions from the light of truth.” This sentence may serve at once as an example of the author’s admirable way of putting things, and as a text for remark on the highly clarified condition of the Professor’s own intellect. The reader moves in an atmosphere in which the habit of a sort of heroic attention seems to maintain a glare of electric light. On every side he sees shining facts, grouped and piled like the Alpine ice-masses the author commemorates in the present volume.

When Professor Tyndall starts forth in the early morning to climb an Alpine peak, or when he stands triumphant and still vigilant on the summit, he resolves the mysteries of the atmosphere, the weather, the clouds, the glaciers, into various hard component facts, which, to his eye, deepen rather than diminish the picturesqueness of the scene. In the midst of chaos and confusion the analytic instinct rises supreme. “As night drew near the fog thickened through a series of intermittances which a mountain-land alone can show. Sudden uprushings of air would often carry the clouds aloft in vertical currents, while horizontal gusts swept them wildly to and fro. Different currents, impinging on each other, sometimes formed whirling cyclones of cloud. The air was tortured in its search of equilibrium.” And elsewhere : “ Monte Rosa was still in shadow, but.... her precipices were all aglow. The purple coloring of the mountains . . . . was indescribable ; out of Italy I have never seen anything like it. Oxygen and nitrogen could not produce the effect ; some effluences from the earth, some foreign constituent of the atmosphere, developed in those deep valleys by the southern sun, must sift the solar beams, weaken the rays of medium refrangibility, and blend the red and violet of the spectrum to that incomparable hue.” These are fair examples of the explanatory gaze, as we may say, at nature, which so richly substantiates the author’s perception of the beautiful, making him on all occasions an admirably vivid painter. The source of the reader’s satisfaction is his sense of these firm particulars, as it were, close behind the glittering generals of common fine writing. It must be confessed that Professor Tyndall’s manner makes our lighter descriptive arts seem somewhat inexpensive. We have had suggested to us, as we read, Mr. Raskin’s strongly contrasted manner of treating the same topics. He is almost equally familiar with mountain scenery, and some of his noblest writing occurs in the Alpine chapters of “Modern Painters.” But the difference in tone, in attitude, in method, in result, between the two men, is most striking and interesting. In one we have the pursuit of the picturesque in nature tempered and animated by scientific curiosity ; in the other, linked and combined with a sort of passionate sentimentality. Professor Tyndall, to our minds, never rises so high as Mr. Ruskin at certain inspired moments ; we doubt if he has ever stood kneedeep in flower-streaked Alpine grasses, and seen, above him, with just that potent longing of vision, “the waves of everlasting green roll silently into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines.” But we may say of Professor Tyndall that, on the whole, he gives the mind a higher lift. His pages are pervaded by a cool contagious serenity which reminds one of high mountain air on a still day. He exhales a kind of immense urbanity, − the good-humor of a man who has mastered a multitude of facts. Mr. Ruskin, on the other hand, stands oppressed and querulous among the swarming shapes and misty problems his magnificent imagination and his “theological” sympathies have evoked ; as helpless as that haltskilled wizard of the Coliseum, of whom Benvenuto Cellini narrates. He leaves in the mind a bitter deposit of melancholy ; whereas Professor Tyndall’s recitals have passed through the understanding with the cleansing force of running water. This difference is perhaps owing especially, however, to the fact that in Mr. Ruskin you are fatigued by a perpetual sense of waste exertion ; and that half your pleasure in reading Tyndall comes from the admirable economy of his style. He is all concentration. His narrative never ceases to be a closely wrought chain of logically related propositions. No sentence but really fills (and has paid for, so to speak) the space it occupies. If there is no “nonsense ” about Professor Tyndall’s writing, it is in a deeper sense than through the comparatively vulgar fact that he is a frank materialist, and leaves the whole class of imponderable factors out of his account; in the sense, rather, that his writing is so strictly constructive and positive, leaving in its march no stragglers behind and reaching its goal by the straightest road. He consumes his own smoke. The author of “ Modern Painters,” on the other hand, though he has written so much (and to such excellent purpose) on “composition ” in art, has not practised it in literature so rigorously as might have been wished. But it would be very absurd to push our comparison too far. It was suggested by the simple fact that, like Mr. Ruskin, Professor Tyndall is a man of powerful imagination.

The volume which has given us a pretext for these remarks is a record of Professor Tyndall’s various exploits in the Alps. He has pursued Nature into her highest places and gathered observations at the cost of much personal exertion and exposure. Some of his chapters have already appeared ; all of them were substantially written at the time of the adventures they relate, and are full of the immediate freshness, the air of business, of genuine mountaineering. Those who will read at the same time Mr. Leslie Stephen’s recent delightful “Playground of Europe ” will find here potently recalled their own long summer days in Switzerland. Mr. Stephen, though none the less a mountaineer, is a very happy humorist; and the reader’s complaint with Professor Tyndall will be, possibly, that he is too little of one. He is fearfully in earnest; he has an unwavering eye to business ; and herewith the reader will scarcely fail to observe, quite ungrudgingly, the author’s fine habit of egotism. It is very serene, very robust, and it carries the best conscience in the world. It makes its first appearance when, in the Preface, he erects into peculiarly personal application the very interesting question of the source of the modern interest in fine scenery, and dedicates his book to a friend on the ground, apparently (reversing the common order of obligation), of his being one “whom I taught in his boyhood to handle a theodolite and lay a chain” ; it recurs in the various rugged resting-points and rare breathingspaces of his perilous scrambles, and it rises perhaps to a climax in the last chapter of the volume, where, in an account of a stormy voyage to Algeria, he relates how in the face of danger he “ watched with intense interest the workings of his own mind,” − and apparently found them satisfactory. Professor Tyndall indeed gravitates, at all times most naturally, to self-reference. In the “Fragments of Science,” before mentioned, having occasion to speak with enthusiasm of Carlyle, he tells us how he “ must ever remember with gratitude that, through three long cold German winters, Carlyle placed me in my tub, even when ice was on its surface, at five o’clock every morning.” This seems to us a capital instance of the so-called naïveté of genius. But we confess that to ourselves this same naïveté is never offensive, and that it is no mean entertainment to read a powerful mind by flashes of egotism. The author’s self-complacency appears to he but part and parcel of the fine in good-humor with which he regards things general. The reader, too, will willingly concede the right of a genial equanimity to one who has learned it in action so thoroughly as Professor Tyndall. His book reveals to us a superb working organization. That manner of rest from overwork, which he comes to Switzerland to seek, will seem to many persons a rather arduous pastime. But once a-trudge on his icy slopes, climbing, noting, straining, buffeting, −with his “solid nutriment for the day consisting of part of a box of meat-lozenges,” − he feels the sources of strength renewed. And in case of bad weather he has other wholesome expedients. During a period of storm on the Bel-Alp he rolls himself in his plaid, lights his pipe, and masters “ Mozely on Miracles.”

We must not enter into the details of our author’s various adventures. They were all as bravely achieved as they are vividly narrated. Professor Tyndall concedes more than some authorities to the much-discussed perils of mountaineering. Mr. Leslie Stephen appears to place them at a minimum, − so long, that is, as vigilance is at its maximum. But Professor Tyndall hints at contingencies in which even the utmost care leaves an all-sufficient margin for calamity. Such was the occasion in which the guide Joseph Bennen, here commemorated, found his death ; apropos of which one may remark that the author’s portraiture of Bennen, − the “ Garibaldi der Führer,” − a series of firm touches scattered here and there through the volume, is one of the best things it contains. There has recently been much talk in England about Alpine perils, and an attempt manifested to draw the line between lawful and wanton self-exposure. The details of this question need not occupy us here, removed as we are, compared with the English, from this particular field of enterprise : though indeed it may well have been raised recently among readers of this magazine by the admirable narratives of a gentleman himself profoundly indifferent to such fine distinctions. Professor Tyndall’s volume, suggestive of so many things, has been so of none more than of just this point of the vanity of saying to human audacity, curiosity, − the great motive energy of our Anglo-Saxon race, by whatever names we call it,−that it shall, in any direction, go thus far and no farther. We shall live to see it go farther than we can yet forecast its course. Mr. Clarence King and his friend, for instance, have been setting fresh examples, in our own Western Alps, for which coming years will surely furnish a sufficient following, − and yet awhile without that “ perpetual leather gaiter and ostentation of bath-tub ” which they apprehend. What man can attempt, by hook or by crook, he will never consent to abjure on a priori grounds even the most elaborately rational. There is no rest for him but after the fact, and in the unfolding of human experiences these defiant yet seductive facts press more and more upon his conscience. Its constant exhibition of the exquisite mettle of the human will gives perhaps its greatest interest to Mr. Tyndall’s book. The author himself, Indeed, claims that for the wise man there need be nothing vain or wanton in Alpine climbing. It is subjectively as valuable a discipline as it is rich in objective revelations. “ Spirit and matter are interfused. The Alps improve us totally, and we return from the precipices wiser as well as stronger men.” To this, as far as we are able, we heartily subscribe. It seems to us that the perilous ascent of the Matterhorn was amply justified by the inrush of those “musings” the author so eloquently describes, and which were conditioned then and there. After the great efforts of the Alps, the efforts of daily life, pitched chiefly as they are in a lower key, are vanquished with greater ease. Common solitude is more tolerable, after a taste of that palpable loneliness which sits among the upper peaks ; the vulgar heats of life seem mild in contrast with the swelter of Swiss hillsides ; among our daily fatigues we may recall with profit the resolution which unmeasured itself through the endless phases of a Swiss ascent. The “eloquence of nature,” we suppose, is the proper motto of Professor Tyndall’s book. It is surely an excellent one. Nature as a teacher, as a friend, as a companion, is, especially among ourselves, decidedly underestimated. But her claims in these respects are, to our mind, to be received with a qualification. We are to remember that nature dwells within us as well as without, and that we have each of us a personal Alp to climb, − some formidable peak of character to dismantle of its frowning mystery and to decorate with the little flag-stick of mastery, before we can roam at our ease through the mysteries of matter. In other words, eternal Nature is less a pure refuge than the poets would have us believe. She is an excellent teacher for those whose education is fairly begun, a most effective comforter for those whom she finds half comforted.