Chapter Eight - Halcyon Days 1911-1913

He came up to Wales again at Easter that year. Easter 1911 was the apotheosis of the Welsh parties organised by Geoffrey Young – the biggest, the most catholic, and the wildest. There were serious climbers, young men being taught to climb, a contingent of Irishmen who sailed across the Channel to Holyhead, hated Pen-y-Pass when they got there, and spent their time playing golf outside the hotel and reading Pascal in the smoking room; walkers, wives, cousins and friends; finally, once more, Mr. Eckenstein and Dr. Blodig, the Austrian climber, who had climbed all the Viertausend-Meter peaks in the Alps but four. The social and musical side was rather predominant, though a certain amount of climbing got done. I didn’t get to see much of George, being more or less shackled as an interpreter to Herr Doctor; but the effect of the crowd was to make him seem a little aloof and detached, rather withdrawn into himself.

We found him there when we arrived, a good deal cut about the face and hands after a tumble on the Cyrn Las where he had made a second ascent two days before. I was worried about this – he looked rather battered and bruised and I was afraid it would ruin his beauty. But he was not worried. ‘I could do with a little roughing up,’ he muttered rather ironically. The next day we did the Great Gully on Craig yr Ysfa, on the Tuesday. It was snowy in places and iced in places, and was a slow business. Few of us were able to give the scenery the attention which George felt it deserved. A day was devoted to Tryfan again. One buttress was enough for most people, but Geoffrey and George did three – two ascents and a difficult descent.

On Easter Sunday George and Herbert Reade took Dr. Blodig up Route I on Lliwedd, and then made the Girdle Traverse, by way of showing a distinguished visitor the best they could of Welsh climbing in the shortest time. George led and Dr. Blodig on his return told everyone, including George, that in his opinion he, George, ‘would not be alive long’. Poor George was quite upset and thought that Herr Doctor was being very unfair. He always used to defend himself vigorously against any suggestion that he was not a perfectly prudent mountaineer, and looked most comically dismayed and surprised over this dictum. He was prudent, according to his own standards, but his standards were not those of the ordinary medium-good rock-climber. The fact was that difficult rocks had become to him a perfectly normal element; his prodigious reach, his great strength, and his admirable technique joined to that cat-like agility made him completely secure on rocks so difficult as to fill less competent climbers with a sense of hazardous enterprise.

But he was very careful of unskilled performers, and very down on any clumsiness or carelessness. I never saw him do a reckless or ill-considered thing on steep rocks. He hated the irresponsible folly of ignorance which led incompetent people into dangerous situations and so brought mountaineering into disrepute.

On this occasion in Wales, he and Geoffrey rescued, on Easter Monday, a German from Bradford, who was making a new route of his own up some wet mossy slab in Clogwyn-y-Person in lace-up oxfords, a long mackintosh and reversible vulcanite cuffs. They worked for three hours in increasingly dangerous and slippery conditions to get him down, more than once nearly being pulled off by his clumsy down-climbing and lurching gait on the narrow ledges of the traverse. The wretched man offered them a sovereign as soon as he found himself in safety. They stood in the common room of the hotel, with many people gathered round. The German was a little worse for wear, pale and rather knocked about, and yet managed to produce the coin in the manner of a lord handing out alms.

This was adding insult to injury in George’s opinion.
‘No thank you,’ he said coolly.
But Geoffrey was not so scrupulous. With a delighted smile, he made a little bow and took the sovereign, saying gravely, ‘Thank you, sir. This token of your gratitude does not go unremarked.’
When the man was out of earshot, there was great laugher and many comments from all quarters. George rounded on Geoffrey with a kind of savagery.
‘Why did you take it?’ He said, regarding the gold coin with repugnance. ‘Wretched bloody man! The nerve of it, the hubris, after getting himself stuck up there with no clue how to get on or get down! Then treating us all like lackeys. Geoffrey! It’s impossible!’
‘Calm down, Galahad,’ Geoffrey laughed, with a hand on his shoulder. It was face-saving for him, and besides, I think, genuine, according to his own lights. He doesn’t know who we are! We might have been local miners, or farriers for all he could guess. And the joke’s on him!’
Dr. Blodig came up then – he had been busy at the table in the corner with Reade and H. O. Jones – and with great ceremony bestowed on them two ‘medals’ cut of red crepe paper, sticking them on with safety pins, and intoning in his charmingly idiosyncratic English, ‘for honour and value in live safing’. The medals were thus inscribed also. But George was too indignant to enjoy the joke or even the sovereign and his comments to me about it were very severe.
We walked out together down to Glas Cwm and the stone shack that was the head of the copper mines on Glas Llyn and sat before it on a rotting old bench made from stones and a couple of boards nailed together.
‘I simply hate the attitude of privilege!’ he ranted. ‘The idea that the whole bloody world owes one something because of where and how one was born. Without ever considering that “lesser mortals” might have merit, let alone feelings! It’s disgusting!’ Hesitating a moment, he looked at me sharply. ‘Thank God you’re not that way, even if you do have money.’ Some irony crept in this last, the glimmering of humour. ‘You take people as they are, and not for what the world supposes them to be.’
‘Thank you.’ I was very touched by this confidence, even though I felt it was largely untrue. This was how he saw me, and that was valuable. ‘But,’ I took up his hand, for he was so agitated, ‘he didn’t mean to be insulting.’

‘No,’ he threw back his hair. ‘They never do!’ He looked out over the mist that was crawling across the lake in waves. ‘What I simply cannot abide is the hubris of it, stupid people of no skill, who do not belong on mountains at all, trundling up without any knowledge of where they are or what to do, in the wrong clothes, trusting all to God or what you will that they will be all right, or that some local will save them if they come to grief. You know what happened to us! You saw what happened to Donald – and we knew what we were doing and how to judge conditions! It’s a bloody stupid waste! How many times have search or rescue parties been themselves benighted by such fools?’
‘Very many,’ I said quietly.
‘Yes!’ he retorted savagely. ‘And when one is rescued,’ he said to the absent offender,’ do have the grace not to behave as though the effort of your rescuers was all so much your due! They put their lives at risk! For your stupidity!’ He sat seething in silence for some time, before he sighed heavily and looked at me. His eyelashes were sparkling with dew and he was red with the cold.

‘Thank you for listening,’ he said in a softer tone, taking my hand. ‘Thank you for coming up here with me. I could not stay there and spoil everyone’s fun, and I couldn’t keep it in. It wanted nothing less than a lonely place, the open sky and a sympathetic girl. Thank you.’ He leaned and kissed me hastily. ‘Come, let’s walk, it’s cold. Shall we go down to the lake?’ We did, walking down and back and by the time we returned to the Gorphwysfa he was in much better spirits.

Of course he took risks himself, especially when alone – and he climbed more alone than was customary in his early days. His adventures, like his solitary invention of the Slab Climb on the East Buttress in 1907, got him more of a reputation for recklessness than he really deserved. But young men of twenty-one are apt to take risks, and risks are to some extent inherent in mountaineering. He admitted that he had a taste for adventure, admitted it freely. He said that this was one reason why he was so fond of solitary and guideless climbing; it so heightened the sense of adventure. When alone, he took risks for no one but himself, as he would explain, if hard-pressed. But he drew a clear distinction between the love of adventure, the pitting of a man’s skill and strength and knowledge against difficulties and odds and the love of danger for its own sake. The one was his delight – with the other he had no patience. I remember his scathing comments on one or two climbing accidents where the parties were obviously tackling ascents entirely beyond them, or where there had been admittedly carelessness in the making of preparations, securing belays, or using sound rope. ‘They had no business being there!’ he said, in tones of angry grief, about one of these accidents, the death of H. O. Jones and his wife on their honeymoon in the Alps.

When he wasn’t climbing he foregathered a good deal with one or two of the non-climbers for conversation. George was a very dogged disputant then. I remember well the first time I heard him in a full-dress discussion. In fact I was so much impressed that I wrote down an account of the affair at some length and used it later in Peking Picnic. It took place on the damp evening of that Easter Sunday in the smoking room of Pen-y-Pass. Owning to the death of someone’s grandfather, the usual sing-song wasn’t taking place. The old gentlemen were doing feats of strength with Geoffrey and Owen, the publican, in the hall and the younger members rather désoeuvré round the fire under Mrs. Herbert Reade’s presidency.

George and one of the Irishmen, Page Dickinson, one of Geoffrey’s cousins, were the protagonists and the subject was whether one should or shouldn’t have principles. George held that one should – at least one or two fundamental ones, and keep as close up to them as possible. Dickinson had no objection to one’s having principles, so long as he may be prepared to break them. Mrs. Reade pronounced herself to have none. Here were the makings of a famous ethical row – and we had it! Dickinson really had all the cards in his hands: he was quick, he was witty, and his mind was rather deadly in its keenness; he was exceedingly well-informed. He was taking the side easiest to defend – the broadminded, airy, tolerant point of view. It was not difficult for him to make George’s insistence on thinking right and doing right look both pedestrian and priggish. He was very unsparing. The sensibility of the meeting was on the whole against George, at the start, anyhow. George stood up to it superbly, really. No irony, no diabolical guile would budge him from his position – that it might and must be necessary to alter the letter of principles to suit the fresh facts or entered into a previous experience, but that the spirit informing them would remain the same. There was a right, and if you wanted to you could find it – and this right was supremely important.

The discussion grew very heated. George was really out-matched. But the thing that gradually emerged most, for me, was George’s practical demonstration of living up to the principle of keeping one’s temper in an argument in spite of shrewd blows given and received. And there was his extraordinary insistence on purity of motive. I have a picture of the group now – Mrs. Reade in her armchair on one side of the fire; Dickinson opposite with his feet on the arm of the chair, mowing down opposed theories with the delight and skill of a good fencer. George on the floor between them, his arms round his knees, unclasped now and then to throw back his hair; stammering a little with his eagerness and impatience, and the difficulty at getting out what he had to say – but getting it out all the same, while in corners pairs expounded their views to one another or put in a quick word.

And the big black-haired Munsterman drummed with his fists on the bookcase and talked about Jeremy Bentham, the 18th Century philosopher, whose thesis was that nature has placed mankind under the governance of pain and pleasure and that it is for these alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. His was a view of the individual as exhibiting a natural, rational self-interest – a psychological egoism. Bentham held that there are advantages to a moral philosophy based on a principle of utility. The principle of utility is clear compared to other moral principles, allows for objective and disinterested public discussion, and enables decisions to be made where there seem to be conflicts of prima facie legitimate interests. There was much to recommend this view, except that it gave rise to certain fluidity of morals, shall we say, which was not actually conducive to society’s good.

George went on to Birkenhead from Wales. We heard from him there, as ‘unable’ to make any ascents here – being stuck in the house due to dull social obligations – ‘this house being exhausted and our neighbours at home just now’ as he wrote. Two ablative absolutes! But he said he would come and spend three nights with us before term began, which he did, for the Alpine Club dinner and other events. He had his dress clothes this time! Along the way, he stopped with friends – Sligger Urquhart at Balliol and Jacques Raverat and Gwen Darwin, two friends from the Bloomsbury set, both painters and also friends of Geoffrey Keynes, who were just then engaged to be married.

We spent much of our time during this visit in the British Museum. The collection of Chinese paintings had been opened fairly recently and I had never seen them, and of course I must. They had been brought to the West by Aurel Stein in 1908, and this was their first exhibition. We spent hours there, George fairly intoxicated with their beauty. But I didn’t need so much coaching over these as I had over the Post-Impressionists. I could go the whole way with George at once. The simplicity, the assurance, the consummate perfection of design, the beauty of the most vivid portraiture, the exquisite economy of line, and still more of colour, pressed in close between the framework of a most rigid convention, flowering out from it. They took one’s breath away at first glance.

The Great Spring of Earthly Paradise is a beautiful thangka, or religious painting, of the ‘pure land’ of Chenrezig, or Avalokitesvara Padmapani, the Buddha of Compassion and patron of Tibet. The Dalai Lama is supposed to be a reincarnation of this Buddha. It was part of the most ancient frescos of Tuen-huang (or Cha-tcheou, the Saciou of Marco Polo), which the Tibetan domination of the 9th Century served from ruin. At Tuan-huang, in the numerous sanctuaries explored by Sir Aurel Stein, there were all kinds of frescos and paintings on silk, most in very good condition. Stein stumbled upon his greatest discovery, ‘The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’ at Dunhuang. He bribed Abbot Wang, the leader of the monastic group in charge of the caves, and smuggled away thousands of manuscripts written in Chinese, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tibetan, Runic Turki and Uighur. Among these manuscripts was the world's oldest printed document, The Diamond Sutra, from 863 A.D.

The painting shows the Buddha, holding a crystal globe and seated on a lotus throne under a canopy decorated with flowers. The lotus throne wafts on the curlings of waves, echoing the blue of the Buddha's hair, framed by a pronounced halo. The Buddha is surrounded by four Bodhisattvas and six monks. Among the two figures shown in the realm of the mortals on the lower plane, the woman on the left of the picture is intact, while only the hat remains from her missing male counter-part to the right. In the centre of the lower level there is a doorway, symbolising the entrance to Avalokitesvara’s Paradise. In Tibetan Buddhist paintings, by contrast, this gateway is painted like a patch of cloth under the lotus throne of Buddha. Or the entrance is indicated by a square or oblong piece of silk appliquéd in the middle of the lower border to denote the heavenly entrance. Particularly pronounced is the influence in the ornamental nature of the foliage, jewellery design and the mode of highlighting the features, such as the nose, chin, cheek and forehead.

What a field for speculation they opened up! Exactly why did they make the compositions of European artists look almost childish? We hurried to the National Gallery to see. We compared the Great Spring of Earthly Paradise with the Primavera. Now, George loved Botticelli beyond all telling, but with the folder from the Chinese Collection at the British Museum in hand we stood before his beloved Primavera, and found that while there were similarities in subject and arrangement of composition, the Earthly Paradise was so much more sophisticated and subtle and rich.

It is unbelievable, the shock of this beauty, the delicately shaped perfection of flower of rose and paler rose, and white against the unrelieved fawn-coloured background. It was easy to see why the Chinese painted their masterpieces of flowers on backgrounds of brown silk. Later, when I was in Chieh Tai in China after George had died, I thought often on this painting and those days and what a rich treasure they were. That picture is one of the supreme masterpieces of the world, and because Art carries truth like an arrow or a pang, it has always been able to evoke for me that rarest perfection of the rejoicing spirit of creation.
‘How shall I now ever look on Renaissance art and not be disappointed?’ I asked him now.

George thought for a moment. ‘Think of the difference between Venetian and Florentine painting as a parallel,’ he said. ‘Everything that the Venetians had to express in them was expressed to perfection, a complete and consummate achievement. As here, with The Earthly Paradise,’ he tapped the folder in his hand. ‘But the Florentine artists never finished with a subject – there was always about their pictures a sense of the “yet more”, of some idea to great for them striving for expression behind their finished work, as here with Sandro- ’ he looked up at the Botticelli. ‘I cannot say it is better to be like the Chinese, or the Venetians, but it is more satisfying. And yet, there is in this a sense of realms yet undreamt of, fresh fields, or mountains to climb,’ he smiled at me.
‘Thank you.’

‘And what does Stein say of all this?’ he asked me with some amusement, for I had been reading Aurel Stein’s books, in preparation for this visit, but George had not.
‘Oh you must read him!’ I insisted. ‘He has the most profound awe for the grace of the culture that spawned such work. He’s fascinating! A regular cross between Marco Polo and Schliemann! I’ll send them to you when I’ve finished!’
In 1900, Marc Aurel Stein, a Hungarian in the British service in India and an archaeologist, set out to confirm his theories about rich past of the Silk Road. During his expedition of 1906-1908 while surveying in the Kunlun mountain range in western China, Stein suffered frostbite and lost several toes on his right foot. This was his second expedition and fourth book on the subject of his various travels.
‘I do look forward to it, if I can wrest his books from you, that is,’ George teased. ‘Hmm. That makes me wonder, your mention of Schliemann. What do think there is in the theory of the relation of Chinese to Greek art? Let’s go and look!’

We had to consider this among the Elgin Marbles and so raced off back to the British Museum before it closed. What we discovered between Greek and Chinese sculpture was the same stylisation, the same purity and simplicity of form, the same formal, yet casual grace. We were convinced that only high civilisations could achieve such subtleties. Was there any connection Bronze Age warriors – one could hardly call them explorers – reputed to have made it so far as Western China and the similarity of artistic styles? Or was it simply the style of the age? We could not answer our own questions. But George decided in any case that he must have a cast of the Hypnos for his rooms at Charterhouse.

He stayed an extra night to go with us to hear Debussy’s Pellias and Melisande in the Queen’s Hall, though it involved a start at 6 AM and breakfast first, to get back to Charterhouse in time for early school or chapel. That was a good evening! Donald Tovey was sitting a few seats off and began to give us a resume of the play and the music: he stood up to do it, and forgot everything but his thesis, as was his habit. The lights went down, the overture began, while he was still pouring out criticism in his high level voice, till he was hushed and pulled down into his seat by his indignant neighbours. That sort of thing began the evening well for George – he was delighted by human oddity. It worked a kind of Puckish element in him, of mischievous amusement, that he didn’t indulge nearly enough. From this point of view the evening was a success. I cried, as often happens at the opera. It was more human oddity! George was enchanted.

In spite of my immersion in the stage, I was able at times to watch George and see how he was responding to it all, for I was anxious that he should enjoy it. He was at first leaning forward a little, critically, then sank back with eyes closed in the uncomfortable seat with an expression of pained beatitude so familiar to English music lovers. I had seen this in him before in the evenings I had spent in his rooms – with the firelight playing on the panelling and the tea things on the hearth: the little bronze horse on the mantelpiece in front of the cloudy background of the Hebridean sketch I had given him; the books; the sense of ease and warmth and deep satisfaction. How rare those hours, and our mutuality, with the easy interchange of ideas, the quick comeback of his mind with mine, while the music spoke its impersonal version of life. Schubert or Stravinsky or Debussy; it summed up everything that was between us.

Perhaps the strangest quality of music is the power it has of translating the personal and immediate for us into the universal or eternal; or, working backwards, as it were, of bringing the universal, the whole meaning of things, with arrowy immediacy and certainty into our personal knowledge. And thus we see our own problems and experience, our immediate apprehensions of life, clothed with the aspect of eternal truth; they take on for us a different importance, a new weight; they are revalued in the serene terms of a celestial currency – they look otherwise than they did in our defaced personal coinage of silver and copper. And this change of values is effected in us by music so swiftly and smoothly; the solvent slips into our being without friction of argument or dogma to arouse our irritable wills. No prose, no preacher, could so drive these certainties home.

‘You were much moved!’ he said to me as we came out. None of them had liked the opera but myself – and George said I had only enjoyed it because it made me cry. We sat up, the whole party of us, until 2.30 AM, when we got home, talking about connections between the emotions and aesthetics first of all, and then on to heaven knows what else. But George’s Puckish mood was strong on him and my chief impression of that night was seeing this new mischievous side. By now I was accustomed to mirth occasionally and teasing from him, but on this evening, he ragged a very imposing elder sister – Grace – and another person of consideration – my Mother – who were both there, in a very penetrating and skilful fashion. He was in tremendous spirits, and not even the prospect of being called at five could make him anything but reluctant to shut down and go to bed!

He was in just as good form the next morning when I came down to see him off; a feat which made him throw up his hands and his long, delightful ‘Oh! Oh!’s. We made plans for spending his days of Coronation leave in Wales again, and in the interval for seeing more pictures on Wednesdays, or whichever was the half-holiday that term.

George was getting to be a tremendous hand at making friends. At this time one was always coming across fresh specimens, so to speak, of his handiwork; often the most unlikely people. He had all sorts of special assets to the task, of course, one of the chief being a certain lively curiosity about humankind. He liked to get to know people, to find out about them, to see them work, like the alarm watch. Then there was his quite extraordinary personal charm, which had to be felt to be believed. It certainly created in the people he met a strange predisposition to be friends with him.

But he never used this, so to speak, in any way. He can’t have been wholly unconscious of it – that would argue an impossible stupidity, but his attitude towards it, if you can call it anything so definite as an attitude, was one of complete indifference, an almost ferocious negligence. It was irrelevant, he made one feel, to the delightful business of making friends. He presented to the newcomer a delightful and charming aspect, just the happiest admiration of certainty and modesty, with the pleasantest assumption of common interests. He invited him, so to speak, to explore these a little together, to see what came of it.

When I saw George at work on a new person he thought he was going to like, I was always reminded of Henry James’ ‘let us sit down for a little and talk about her!’ Her being books or pictures, generally then, and later equally after politics. A literary companion is inevitable. He considered life, as I have said, in such a literary way. And a good deal generally came of it, because if there weren’t common interests, he could almost create them by his own enthusiasms.

The amount of thought he put into the matter was especially remarkable. He didn’t expect relationships either to come into being or to remain in good order without intelligent endeavours. This isn’t to say that friendship with him was an artificial or laboured thing in the least – no one took greater spontaneous delight in people. But he knew that spontaneity is also capricious, and he was not at all all-prepared to leave one of the most important things in life to the mercy of caprice. He often expressed amazement at the lack of care with which people in general conducted their relationships, compared with their painstaking industry over, say, money making. He himself laboured with a delighted artistry at this great and joyful business of friends; understanding them, enjoying them, sharing his best pleasures with them unstintingly; shouldering the obligations, often very onerous, as he interpreted them, of being someone’s friend and equally rightly ready to accept the good office of his friends himself. To come across ant important contribution to the theory of friendship excited him tremendously.

I remember on one occasion when he was with us, getting out Petrarch’s Letters and reading him the great passage on friendship there, when Petrarch’s friend had ill-used him.

‘Now, unhappy man, you were to take the last false step, the last and most deplorable. You began to speak ill of the very friend whom you had so lauded, although he was not doing any ill to you, but merely refusing to prevent others who were. I grieve, dear friend, at such fickleness. These shortcomings fill me with pity and shame. Like Brutus, I feel no confidence in the arts in which you are so proficient. What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions? Ah! How much better it would have been, how much more fitting for a philosopher, to have grown old peacefully in the country, meditating, as you yourself have somewhere said, upon the life that endures for ever, and not upon this poor fragment of life.... See how different my treatment of you is from yours of Epicurus, in your works at large, and especially in the De Finibus. You are continually praising his life, but his talents you ridicule. I ridicule in you nothing at all. Your life does awaken my pity, as I have said; but your eloquence call for your talents and nothing but congratulation.

‘In these storms of life, to return to the point, not throwing my anchor in any port for a long time, I sought out I don't know how many true friends – for it is difficult to judge with certainty who is a true friend, and they are always scarce – but innumerable acquaintances. It thus fell to me to write to many people who were widely separated in spirit and circumstances; and my letters are so varied that, as I reread them now, I sometimes appear to have spoken as though at war with myself. Anyone who has experience of a similar situation will admit that I was forced to do this. The first care of a writer is to pay attention to the person to whom he writers; this is the one way to understand what and how to write and the other circumstances. It is appropriate to speak to the brave man in one way, and to the cowardly in another; in one way to the inexperienced youth, and in another to the old man who has performed the duties of life; in one way to a man swelled with prosperity, and in another to a man pinched by adversity; in one way, lastly, to the student of letters renowned for his ability, and in another to the man who wouldn't understand anything you said in a lofty manner.

‘Infinite are the varieties of men, and there is no more similarity among their minds than among their foreheads; and just as the stomach, not only of diverse people, but even of one person, is not delighted at all times by the same food, so the same spirit is not to be nourished at all times by the same manner of composition. The labour is therefore twofold: to think about who it is you propose to write to, and what kind of mood he will be in when he reads what you intend to write. In these difficulties, I was forced to differ a great deal from myself [multum a me ipso differre]; and so that this may not be turned into a vice by unfair critics, in part I have availed myself of the benefit of fire, and in part you would help me if you kept these letters secret, and suppressed the author's name.

‘If you cannot hide them from the few friends who are left, since friendship has the eyes of a lynx and there is nothing that cannot be penetrated by the sight of friends, warn them that if they still have any of these letters at home, they should throw them away, lest they be disturbed by changes in the content or the language. For it has fallen out that I, who have collected these things together in one place – which it never entered my mind that you would request or that I would agree to – often avoided labor by repeating the same things from one letter to another, and thus, as Terence puts it, made use of what was mine. But suddenly, when all these things that were written over many years and sent to various parts of the world had been brought together in one place and at one time, the deformity of the entire body was easily apparent, though it was hidden in the members, and a word that gave pleasure once in a single letter began to be distasteful when repeated frequently in the whole work, so that it needed to remain in one letter, and be erased from the remainder.

‘Similarly, mindful of the way Cicero was ridiculed by Seneca, I have withdrawn many things that deal with private cares, which were not unworthy of notice when they were written, but which would now be tedious to even the fondest reader, I have withdrawn. Although for the greater part I follow the custom of Cicero in these letters rather than Seneca; for Seneca collected in his letters anything to do with morality from almost all his books; whereas Cicero dealt with philosophical matters in his books, and included personal [familiar] and novel matters, as well as various opinions of his times, in his letters. Seneca may feel about this as he likes, but I find them thoroughly pleasant reading – the kind of reading that is a relaxation from straining over difficult matters which, if done continuously, weakens the spirit, but if done occasionally, delights it.’

George was immensely struck by it and caused me at once to make a proper translation and copy it out for him to carry off. He wrote to me, when he arrived home, of our visit:


May 9 1911 Charterhouse
The Chinese pictures still haunt me, in spite of the sights and sounds in this glorious country. I returned to order a copy of the Binyous book to be sent to you and you ought to receive it soon. I hope you will like it, but if not please send it here and allow me to give you something else – perhaps a bust of Hypnos? I am very busy at the moment preparing lectures on the Renaissance, which thrills me a good deal.

And again, later:
June 2 1911 Charterhouse
Dear Cottie
I am told that the Coronation will be in about a fortnight’s time. ‘They’ must be lying – but still it is about time either to have plans or to resolve to have none. I suspect in fact, and am very sorry that there is no hope of Wales; it is not so much that I am poor as that my poverty involves some inconveniences to the men I live with. I hope you aren’t angry with me for not writing before. Alas! This is my ordinary behaviour. The best method of proceeding, if ever you want to get anything out of me, is to write a rude postcard. I feel more a beast than usual this time, because I had such an agreeable and such an admirable letter from you: really, you will have to give me lessons in the art of being gentle at the same time as being clear and firm. My own efforts are so pitiable because when I succeed in making people understand what I mean I usually prevent them understanding me and they think I want to knock them down with a club.

‘You also sent me a book, which I hadn’t the grace to acknowledge. Thank you. I can’t condemn myself very heartily for the reprehensible habit of leaving my belongings in other people’s houses because it gives me so much pleasure when I get them back. The quality of the pleasure depends partly on the honesty of the other party, since it is more of a triumph to get things back which one never expected to see again; but there is also a nice feeling of association about objects which have inhabited other people’s houses.

‘I suppose you desert London for the most part in this heat – or are you having a gay time? I’m grateful for the country. Lord! It’s good to be about here! Particularly as I spend many glorious nights under the stars. I expect I told you about the proposed site for my camp. It has been rather a success. My brother comes over from Guildford and one of the beaks from here – not very beaky: a farm supplies bread and eggs and washes up our messes. A nightjar perches in the Scotch firs a few yards away and makes a thrilling music; the mist is white in the valleys; and there is no hill between our heathery couch and Hindhead ten miles away. The sun gives signal for our uprising (in theory) and one often gets an hour’s work done before early school, so you see there are possibilities for poetry and in industry in this health-giving arrangement. If I write more, I shan’t finish before school – and then I shall leave it till tomorrow and tear it up in disgust. I suppose there’s no chance of seeing you in these parts? Goodbye my dear.

This term I fancy things began to go rather more easily for him at Charterhouse and he was shaking down into it. He hadn’t yet begun his innovations which made matters lively later on. But the ‘health-giving arrangement’ of the Camp on Royal Heath ended in something like disaster. It was a spring of early sudden heat, in which the strain of short nights, hard work, scrambled meals, scorching several miles day and night on a bicycle, told severely on his heart. It became very doubtful if he would be allowed to climb. We asked him to come to us in Scotland if he were not able to go to the Alps. He wrote, too late to change his plans, to condole with me on my certainty of not going: ‘of course there can’t be any real compensation, but evidently you will have a good time in Scotland.’ Then a week later he wrote that he was to go after all.

Charterhouse Jul 26 1911
I am healthy enough so the expert pronounces – and I shall be off to the Alps on Tuesday or Wednesday. I won’t profess to be in despair, but it would have been good to stay with you in the Island of Mull (even though the house is ugly), and it will be disappointing not to meet you in the Alps. I am sorry I couldn’t let you know earlier, as I am afraid it must have been inconvenient. I didn’t much expect to be allowed to climb: the body is very fickle. I was prostrated with a bad heart a month ago and now it is all right again.

My companions in the Alps are Irving, the Winchester master and one of our old party
and the prospects seem to be pleasant. We start at Modave and hope to work our way via the Grivola, Grand Paradis, etc. to Mont Blanc. And then – but I think that is enough for today or I shall be talking of some wild chimera.

You didn’t sound particularly pleased with Mull, but I hope the sun has shone since then. I can hardly believe that is isn’t my glorious country. I have been occupied in a rather dismal fashion for the last week, correcting examination papers, etc. But I had a nice piece of news yesterday – Smith Elder offer to publish my book in the spring: there will be some revisions to do. I am almost tired of that MS; but still it is a pleasing prospect for a vain and young man. I shall have to send you a picture postcard from the Alps.

So off he went for that most wonderful of seasons. What a year it was! Cloudless day succeeding cloudless day, the weather seemed as though it couldn’t break. The glaciers were thus very open and troublesome, but the rocks were clean and hot and bone dry. For days and weeks on end climbers could count with apparent certainty on perfect conditions and perfect skies. Phyllis Brooke wrote to me from Zermatt, ‘All the climbers are rake-like in figure and skinned as to nose and own to the best season ever known. Mr. H has finished a rattling season including Brunnen, Grivola by the North Face, Grand Paradis, Weisshorn to Zmutt. The Smut – do you spell it with an S or a Z? was done by a stout German Jewess as her first and only mountain last week accompanied by her chauffeur and three guides. It is a popular climb this year, three or four parties being on it most days. Mr. Wollaston pressed for more news, says I am to tell you that there are hundreds of young people running up and down the Matterhorn like so many flies. Mr. Bowen rescued a guideless German on the Zmutt.’

What a season to climb in! And what a season to miss! I groaned with dreadful envyings in Scotland as the news of the tremendous feats of that wonderful season began to come in. First, a card from George at Cague –
I hope you won’t be distressed at seeing white mountain on a p.c. This one (the Grivola) has a fine N. arête – the beautiful curve in the middle of the picture. We are going to look at it tomorrow, but I expect it will be too icy – we don’t feel good enough for ten hours step-cutting! I like this district. The Grand Paradis group is very fine and there are many beautiful peaks on a rather smaller scale. They are difficult to get at from here and an expedition yesterday to an unfrequented Grat ran into twenty hours. We spent one splendid day on the Herbetet, the most northerly point on the Grand Paradis Ridge – quite first-class rock-climbing. Four valleys meet here and Mont Blanc reigns superbly at the end of one of them. Not a bad place, you may imagine! We go to Courmayeur in a few days. I have heard nothing of anyone else.

Then, more cards from Geoffrey Young and H. O. Jones telling of the successful assault on the Brouillard Ridge of Mont Blanc, and again later of the ascent of the Grandes Jorasses, the Col des Grandes Jorasses and the descent to the Col des Hirondelles. I had a card from George with the same story, from Courmayeur:
‘This is to tell you what I know will rejoice your heart – that Mt. Blanc has been traversed from the Sella Hut by the Col Emile Rey and Brouillard Ridge and the Jorasses two ways, down to the Col des Hirondelles and up from the Col des Grandes Jorasses – all of course by ‘the poet’ [meaning Geoffrey] and his party – perhaps you know already. We had a most pleasing expedition on the Grivola by the N. arête and are now hoping to traverse Mont Blanc by the Col de la Tour Ronde. Many thanks for your letter which I found here today. I almost envy you.’
And, finally, more letters from H. O. Jones and Geoffrey, describing the terrific ascent of the Mer de Glace face of the Grepon.

We were together in London in October for the Alpine Club meeting, some time after his return to Charterhouse and had a great hearing about the Alps. George was tremendously enthusiastic about the great success of the year, the astounding feats of ‘the poet and his party’. He recurred again and again to the ‘magnificence’ of their achievements, the splendour of the actual places they had gone up, basking in the audacity they’d planned and the durable purpose and persistence hat put through the expectations. The strands of his interest ran linked, concerned now with the technical difficulties, now with the skill that overeave them. He told the story of little Ralph Toddhunter, coming up the Mer de Glace face of the Grepon, who inevitably, when the man above him called to him to come on was found just below, the slack of the rope neatly coiled in his hand, ‘as cool as if he were on Route II’. How, with the endeavour to realise their experiences – what it must have meant to be there! – his was perhaps the dominant interest. He was greatly pleased with H. O. Jones’ account of Toddhunter’s escapade. And when the big expeditions had been thoroughly dealt with, there was his own season to hear about. He had had a very good time. His heart had held out, on the whole, well, and the party had done some thoroughly good expeditions, among them the traverse of Mont Blanc by the Eastern buttress of Mont Maudit.

It was this last expedition which, then and afterwards, stood out most for him among his climbs of that season. At the time he was in a sort of intoxication of mountaineering enthusiasm: but it was impossible not to see that this day had had a special importance. He had been unwell during the earlier part of the climb, and I remember listening as he tried to explain how gradually the impressions from without had entered and overcome, bit by bit, the disastrous and defeating emotions which illness and weakness on a mountain produce, till the vacillation of comfort or discomfort ceased to absorb him and he was set free, as he said, from himself, for the time. In that freedom he learnt something new about mountaineering, watching, first with deliberate concentration, then by moving among the noblest sights in the Alps. He had plainly got hold of some further experience which had affected him profoundly, which seemed to him the most fitting, perhaps the only prelude to the splendid close – the moments on the summit, with health and fitness and soon strength returned, and about him a perfection of beauty which passing beyond natural limits into another kingdom. Probably such expressions are impossible to communicate, though the fact of them may be evident – but to George they were actually the most important thing in mountaineering. He wanted to understand them, to realise their meaning and place in the many-sided whole that is mountaineering experience; to discover their bearing on the rest of one’s life.

It’s not a subject which lends itself to precise expression and he was frankly bothered by the vagueness which seemed unavoidable in any account of it. But it was an incessant preoccupation with him. This effort to understand was constant. Valuing these experiences highly, he desired to be increasingly awake and responsive to them, and much of his time on mountains and off them was spent in studying the conditions in himself and others which were most favourable to such awareness and response. The value in expectation for him lay very largely in the extent to which it promoted such experiences, whether by beauty or difficulty, or variety or surprise, and just in the measure of freedom that he found in himself there. Sometimes, the mountains did not do their share, were ugly or repellent, and then he almost hated them. Sometimes he was not able to respond and then he almost hated himself.
‘I was heavy!’ he used to say, intones of deep disgust, describing this latter condition.

Almost all of his wiring about mountains or climbing is coloured by this question of the value of the mountaineer’s experience. The account of the traverse of Mont Blanc by the Mont Maudit, published in the Alpine Journal (Volume 32) was a deliberate attempt to deal with it. When he was planning it, he told me that it was to be an account of an expedition from inside, not from outside’ in terms of sensations and emotions rather than the facts of the climb. And he achieved his end as far perhaps as it could be achieved. ‘Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here…. Have we found a kingdom? Perhaps….’ It remains for those who share his attitude, a very valuable and beautiful piece of mountaineering literature. Later, in ‘The Mountaineer as Artist’, in the Climber’s Club Journal, he tackled the subject again, from a lighter and more sophisticated point of view. The comparison to musical experience is almost inevitable, so like great music is the march of light throughout the day across the spaces of sky and now, the alterations of effort and repose, the sustained tension, the undercurrent of delight, the variations on the theme of difficulty, the sharp note of risk, and at the close, the great harmonies of sunset and physical fatigue, bearing the satisfied spirit out in to a luminous peace. For George, the importance of the comparison lay in the effort to reclaim the values of the climber’s experience. He was constantly regretful that so few mountaineering writers ever attempted this. ‘They go on telling us where they have been and what they did – why won’t they tell us what they thought about it? That might have some interest.’ Happily, in the years since, this trend has become more common in mountaineering literature, but was not at all common then.

When he was editing the Climber’s Club Journal in 1920 he asked me for an article, and I suggested doing one on Failure, and the effects of defeat on a person’s attitude towards climbing. He was very much interested, and excited by the idea. ‘That would be a real contribution’ he said. It led onto a discussion of the whole subject of failure, and the qualities and attitude of the person failing, which made it either into a sort of catharsis juxtapose or a purely defeatist failing, a kind of acedias. He was clear that the first was right, that failure should result in a fresh tempering of the will, a squaring of the shoulders of resolution, but what exactly produced the attitude was harder to define.

The season of 1911 was memorable for him in another respect. Of his four previous seasons, though the first two, with Graham Irving, had been guideless, he had been too much of a novice to take much part in the counsels of the party, and during the two latter he had climbed with guides. In 1911, he took no part in the leading, except perhaps for half an hour, during the whole season – a characteristic bit of modesty, for he was already very good, but he did share in the deliberations and the planning of the expeditions. So it is fair to say that in this season he first began to taste, in the Alps, the full flavour of big expeditions undertaken without professional assistance. No one without actual climbing experience can quite realise how greatly this one circumstance alters the character of an expedition. All the technical problems involved, such as the weather, route, practicability of obstacles and so on, take on a sudden fresh importance and become immensely more interesting and exciting. More important than this, the whole psychological quality of the experience is changed. Every climber knows how, at first at any rate, the mere fact of being the first man on the rope intensifies the experience of any climb, each impression, whether of difficulty or certainty or danger or security, comes with a sharp clear impact on his consciousness and his reactions to each one are deepened in proportion. In the case of a party thrown entirely on its own resources for the undertaking of a first-class expedition in the Alps, both the interest of the stopwork and this heightened psychological state are present to the nth degree.

Now, George was violently interested in both these sides of mountaineering. The psychological side was of the first importance technical side absorbed him too. He got immense enjoyment from the work of planning an expedition, studying the route beforehand, either on the spot or from maps and photographs – a habit which he carried with him to Everest – and working out with detailed care and much ingenuity how it was to be tackled. This one might call the intellectual side of mountaineering, and George dearly loved exercising his intellect on anything! He had too a very rare and great gift for this particular technical side of leadership, as became fully apparent later. He had an extremely quick eye for a mountain, picking up like lightning the smallest indication of a possible route. His memory, bad for a good many things, was almost perfect for this. He could carry in his head in bulk and in detail the whole structure of some peak or mountain in which he hoped to effect a break, and he used to work on them in his mind at odd moments, much as chess-players are said to work out chess problems in omnibuses. In the dead of winter, when the Alps seemed very far away, he would suddenly come out of his brown study or plump into a pause into quite other conversation with the question ‘What do you think about this?’ and then follow with a project for a new route on a mountain, a col, a never-attempted ridge, or an unfrequented face. Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn attracted him especially in this regard. Most of his ‘wild chimaeras’ related to one or the other. He was already and indeed always drawn to the big and the unexplored – the great walls that mountaineers as a rule set aside as obviously impossible. The great SE face of the Matterhorn, the South face of Mont Blanc between the Brouillard Ridge and the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey, and the huge Eastern cliffs of Mont Banc between the Peuterey Ridge and the Col de Brenva – over all these his climbing fancy brooded year after year, sustaining and speculating, pondering the possibilities; while he climbed in their neighbourhood, his eye was always on the watch for some fresh clue or hint that might give the secret of their invincibility away. ‘It must be possible somewhere,’ he said to me over and over of the Brenva Face. Of course, I am bound to say that his tremendous optimism showed a good deal with this!

Of these, the Kuffner ridge on Mont Maudit is well known. It was climbed first by Moritz von Kuffner with the guides Alexander Burgener and Joseph Furrer from the 2nd to the 4th of July 1887. And up until 1930, there were only four registered repetitions; the second climb being in 1901, undertaken by the Italian climbers E. Canzio and F. Mondini with Henri Brocherel; the third was made by George and Graham Irving. One cannot emphasise the achievement of this ridge vigorously enough, since it is one of the greatest routes on Mont Blanc and is rated at Hard Very Severe.

He came up to town several times that autumn. We spent one afternoon at the South Kensington Museum, which later became the Victoria and Albert, looking at the Persian plates and pots in the Salting Collection. He went into ecstasies over them, their lovely clear colours and firm reiterated patterns. In the middle we ran into Dr. Billy Wills, who hadn’t met George before. He preceded us home to tea and was quite indignantly incredulous when his enquiries about George to my family produced the information that he was a schoolmaster. He had taken him for the newest of undergraduates or someone even younger. This made us laugh – more of his being taken for a pupil at Charterhouse, only on a grander scale!