Now, it should be possible to discriminate between those who endeavour to clothe a fine emotion in worthy language, and those who start with the intention of writing finely, and look round for a fine emotion to serve as the necessary peg. Sincerity is the touchstone that discriminates the fine writing that is good, and the fine writing that is damnable. The emotions that are the essence of mountaineering deserve something better than the genteel peroration of the average climbing book. Alpine literature is a trifle deficient in fine frenzy. The Mid-Victorian pose of the bluff, downright Briton, whose surging flood of emotions is concealed beneath an affectation of cynicism, is apt to be tedious, and one wonders whether emotions so consistently and so successfully suppressed really existed within those stolid bosoms. A great deal of Alpine literature appeals, and rightly appeals, only to the expert. Such contributions are not intended as descriptive literature. They may, as the record of research into the early records of mountaineering and mountains, supply a much-needed link in the history of the craft. As the record of new exploration, they are sure to interest the expert, while their exact description of routes and times will serve as the material for future climbers’ guides. But this is not the whole of Alpine literature, and the danger is that those who dare not attempt the subjective aspects of mountaineering should frighten off those who have the necessary ability by a tedious repetition of the phrase “fine writing,” that facile refuge of the Philistine. The conventional Alpine article is a dreary affair. Its humour is antique, and consists for the most part in jokes about fleas and porters, and in the substitution of long phrases for simple ones. Its satire is even thinner. The root assumption that the Alpine climber is a superior person, and that social status varies with the height above sea level, recurs with monotonous regularity. The joke about the tripper is as old as the Flood, and the instinct that resents his disturbing presence is not quite the hall-mark of the æsthetic soul that some folk seem to think. It is as old as the primitive man who espied a desirable glade, and lay in wait for the first tourist with a club. “My friends tell me,” writes a well-known veteran, “that I am singular in this strange desire to avoid meeting the never-ceasing stream of tourists, and I am beginning to believe that they are right, and that I am differently constituted from other people.” The author of this trite confession has only to study travel literature in general and Alpine literature in particular to discover that quite commonplace folk can misquote the remark about the madding crowd, and that even members of the lower middle class have been known to put the sentiment into practice. A sense of humour and a sense for solitude are two things which their true possessors are chary of mentioning.