LITERARY SPECTATOR.
AULDJO ON MONT BLANC*.
IF any person in Switzerland is reported as doing a particularly absurd thing, the stigma is invariably fixed upon Old England. It is the English who are everywhere mixing up the marvellous and absurd. Switzerland is the happy scene of many national exploits, of which the nation is not cognizant : here the dull Briton 'effervesces, and often discharges his gaiety with the vehemence and noisiness of a bottle of pop, impatient of its stone walls and cork doors. Among the quiet and frugal Swiss, and in the centre of the
sublime scenery of the country, the English are everywhere bustling, spending, boating. climbing, gambling. Well-dressed always, well attended, and well-provided, with an air of stiffness and decorum, the Englishman might pass for the gravest of mortals ; and such i
he s, till he strips his coat and runs, and climbs for a wager or undertakes, for the simple sake of astonishing the natives, to sacrifice his ease or his pocket, perhaps his health, in some other rare achievement of labour, folly, and bravery combined. To climb Mont Blanc seems just now the ordeal of the traveller : it appears that even the ladies of Chamouni insist upon this exploit as a necessary qualification for a guide—they will not condescend to accept the services of a poor man, unless, forsooth, he " has been up the mountain." The prevailing idea among the adventurous English in Switzerland, is that they are doing all this for the honour of their country ! What a precious document did Messrs. Clarke and Sherwill leave at the top of Mont Blanc, to hand down to posterity the fact that two Englishmen had in this century so far outstripped their contemporaries as to reach this elevated point ! " We had enclosed a few branches of laurel," says Dr. Clarke, " in a cylinder of glass [meaning a bottle] with the name of our King, and of his deservedly popular Minister, [poor Mr. Canning, we presume,] subjoining the names of the most remarkable persons of the age, whether high in honour as enlightened politicians, revered as sincere and eloquent theologians, admired as elegant, useful as laborious physicians, or adorning the walks of private life by the mingled charm of urbanity, gentleness, accomplishments, and beauty." This inscription in a beer-bottle was intended for all posterity ; it probably being supposed by Dr. Clarke, that it was perhaps the sole monument of our country calculated to reach a distant period. England, dear England, was alone in their minds : a spot was selected which looked towards England, "the land of our hopes," and the "bottle then buried deep in the snow, an humble record but sincere : hermetically sealed down by an icy plug, covered with a winter's snow, and perhaps gradually incorporated into the substance of a solid cube of ice, it may possibly remain unaltered for centuries, like the insects preserved in amber, and so bear witness to distant generations, when other proud memorials have crumbled into dust."
It is an admirable commentary upon this amusing piece of folly, to find that this same bottle was found by Mr. AuLnao two short years after it had " been hermetically sealed," and secured with all pains for an existence of ages, set up in a snug corner, half filled with water, and the immortal inscription already illegible. Englishmen must therefore contrive to inform posterity of the existence of their great men by some other means. The love of distinction, connected of course with anxiety for the honour of Britain, appears to have been the ruling motive for Mr. Auldjo's ascent. We do not collect from his book that he had any other object to gratify ; and we find, that after arriving with great labour and suffering at the summit, the first and only thing he did before he went to sleep, was, not to survey the boasted prospect from the point, but to take up his telescope to see who were watching him from an inferior mountain opposite and the valley below. We must do Mr. Auldjo the justice to say, that he has written a plain and interesting narrative of an arduous exploit ; and though there might not be much use in his putting himself into situations of danger, still there was no great harm : the world could have done very well without him had he been unfortunate, and he would have had the honour of being the very first Briton entombed in Mont Blanc. It is possible, too, that in that elevated region, where the air is so rarefied, and the cold so piercing, that he might, as Dr. Clarke hoped for his bottle, " have become incorporated in a solid cube of ice," and "remained, like a fly in amber, unaltered for many centuries." We must say, that of the two specimens of the nineteenth century,Mr. Auldjo and the inscription, we should infinitely prefer to be judged of by the human fossil rather than the bottled eloquence of Dr. Clarke. Mr. Auldjo rarely sins against good taste in his descriptions ; he often paints a scene with accuracy ; and though he does, as almost all writers of description do, deal in words too large for their ideas, still his book is an exceedingly creditable one. The plates with which it is illustrated are in their way admirable. Lithography is particularly well adapted to give the white lights and dark shadows of mountain snow and ice ; and the artist has well managed the most difficult point of his task, that of giving an appearance of bulk and loftiness to objects necessarily drawn in small. Many of our readers have probably looked over Mr. Brockcdon's " Passes of the Alps," with the genuine admiration which they deserve : nevertheless, there is something in delicacy of finish, in minute. workmanship, and that harmonizing of all the lights, in a piece of exquisite engraving, which fails in representing the "grand me
Auldjo's Narrative of an Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc, I Vol, 1928.
qualities" of mountain scenery. The aspect of piled rocks, gaping chasms, high-reaching and nodding cliffs, with peaks that seem to pierce the sky, communicate to the spectator the pleasure of horror—they give the mind the shock which precedes excitement : the equivalent to this shock is perhaps better conveyed by the rough and shadowy outlines of lithography than by the burin of the most exquisite engraver.
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