MISCELLANY No 79
Another technical literary term: II
Last week I promised that today I
would get Henry Knight out of the palaver he had got himself into, on his clifftop. However, it has come to my attention, as they
say, that Mr Hardy (writing in 1872) borrowed elements of his account from Sir
Leslie Stephen’s ‘Bad Five Minutes in the Alps’, so here I offer you his rather
similar account (published in 1862). Sir
Leslie used the experience, whether from his imagination or for real, to lead
into a very lengthy piece of religious philosophy, as well one might if in his
tricky position, which I have edited out.
I promise I really will return
next week to get Knight out of his uncomfortable position, one way or another. I have not forgotten that we are looking for
a newly-minted literary term to describe this particular stitherum.
From A BAD FIVE MINUTES IN THE ALPS (1862)
By Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), the founding Editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and writer on philosophy, ethics, and literature,
... I resolved to take a stroll in spite of the rain.
Leaving the little Babel of distracted life, I was soon breasting a steep slope
behind the village. Every tree and every blade of grass was soaked and
saturated in wet; the path was a series of puddles rapidly connecting
themselves into rivulets; the veil of rain first softened the outlines of the
houses, and then speedily blotted out the whole village from my sight. An hour
or two of resolute tramping and I was wet to the skin—a mere animated sponge, living
on my supplies of internal warmth. Vigorous exercise soon put a stop to all
cerebral action except that which was concentrated on finding the way—no very
easy task in the pervading gloom. I had, however, reached a little upland glen
well known to me as offering, in fine weather, a grand view of distant
snow-peaks through the jaws of the cliffs. It was time to return, and the demon
who amuses himself by beguiling Alpine travellers suggested the memory of a
certain short cut which involved a bit of amusing scrambling. I was speedily
occupied in fighting my way downwards through a steep ravine, cloven by a
vicious little torrent from a lofty glacier, when—how it happened I know not,
for all forms of earth and grassy slope were obliterated at a few yards by the
descending showers—I suddenly found that I had left the right track and was
descending too sharply towards the stream. At the same time I saw, or thought I
saw, that by crossing the face of a cliff for a few yards I should regain the
ordinary route. The first step or two was easy; then came a long stride, in
which I had to throw out one hand by way of grappling-iron to a jutting rock
above. The rock was reeking with the moisture, and as I threw my weight upon it
my hand slipped, and before I had time to look round I was slithering downwards
without a single point of support. Below me, as I well knew, at a depth of some
two hundred feet, was the torrent. One plunge through the air upon its rugged
stones and I should be a heap of mangled flesh and bones.
Instinctively I flung abroad arms and legs in
search of strong supports; in another moment I was brought up with a jerk. My
hands now rested on the narrow ledge where my feet had been a moment before,
and one foot was propped by some insecure support whose nature I could not
precisely determine. During the fall—it can hardly have lasted for a second—I
had space for only one thought; it was that which had more than once occurred
to me in somewhat similar situations, and might be summed up in the single ejaculation—'
at last!' Expanded to greater length, it was the one startled reflection
that the experience which I had so often gone through in imagination was now at
length to be known to me in the bitter reality. It was the single flash of
emotion which—as one may guess—passes through the brain of the criminal when
the drop falls, or the signal is given to the firing party. I had often made my
way along dangerous ridges bounded by cliffs of gigantic height; I had clung to
steep walls of ice and passed shiveringly across profound crevasses; a partial
slip in such places had given me some faint foretaste of the sensation produced
by an accident, and the single thought—if it may be called a thought—that
occurred to me was this electric shock of colourless expectation. I call it
colourless, for the space was too brief to allow even of conscious alarm or
horror. Another half-second, and all thought would have been summarily stopped;
but when I suddenly felt that I was no longer falling, the next wave of emotion
was compounded of vehement excitement and a sort of instinctive sense that
everything might depend on my retaining presence of mind.
Desperately
choking back the surging emotions that seemed to shake my limbs, I sought for
some means of escape. By slowly moving my left hand I managed to grasp a stem
of rhododendron which grew upon the ledge of rock, and felt tolerably firm;
next I tried to feel for some support with the toe of my left boot; the rock,
however, against which it rested, was not only hard, but exquisitely polished
by the ancient glacier which had forced its way down the gorge. A geologist
would have been delighted with this admirable specimen of the planing powers of
nature; I felt, I must confess, rather inclined to curse geology and glaciers.
Not a projecting ledge, corner, or cranny could I discover; I might as well
have been hanging against a pane of glass. With my right foot, however, I
succeeded in obtaining a more satisfactory lodgement; had it not been for this
help I could only have supported myself so long as my arms would hold out, and
I have read somewhere that the strongest man cannot hold on by his arms alone
for more than five minutes. I am, unluckily, very weak in the arms, and was
therefore quite unable to perform the gymnastic feat of raising myself till I
could place a knee upon the ledge where my hands were straining.
Here, then, I was, in an apparently hopeless
predicament. I might cling to the rocks like a bat in a cave till exhaustion
compelled me to let go; on a very liberal allowance, that might last for some
twenty minutes, or, say half an hour. There was, of course, a remote chance
that some traveller or tourist might pass through the glen; but the ordinary
path lay some hundred yards above my head, on the other side of a rock pinnacle,
and a hundred yards was, for all practical purposes, the same thing as a
hundred miles; the ceaseless roar of the swollen torrent would drown my voice
as effectually as a battery of artillery; but, for a moment or two, I
considered the propriety of shouting for help. The problem was, whether I
should diminish my strength more by the effort of shouting than the additional
chance of attracting attention was worth. If the effort shortened my lasting
powers by five minutes, it would so far diminish the time during which succour
could be brought to any purpose. I had not the necessary data for calculation,
and was not exactly in a frame of mind adapted for cool comparison of figures;
but a spasm of despair kept me silent. Help in any form seemed too unlikely to
be worth taking into account; the one thing left was to live as long as I
could, though, to say the truth, five minutes' life on such a rack was a very
questionable advantage. The vague instinct of self-preservation, however,
survived its reason; all that I could really hope was that, by husbanding my
strength as carefully as possible, I might protract existence till about the
time when the dinner-bell would be ringing for my friends—a quarter of an hour
away.
Well, I would protract it—indeed, at times, a
thought almost emerged to consciousness that I would make it as agreeable as
might be under the circumstances; but that, I need not say, was a thought
which, however sensible, had too much of mockery in it to be explicitly
adopted. In dumb obstinacy I clung as firmly as might be to the rocks, and did
my best to postpone the inevitable crash. Yet I felt that it was rapidly
approaching, and felt it at times almost with a sense of relief. It is often
said that persons in similar situations have seen their whole past existence
pass rapidly before them. They have lived again every little incident of their
lives which had been forgotten in ordinary states of mind. No such vision of
the past remains engraved upon my memory; and yet I have a vivid recollection
of the general nature of the thoughts that jostled and crowded each other in my
mind. For the most part, I seemed to be a passive agent, utterly unable to
marshal my ideas or to exercise any choice as to the direction my speculations
should take. My will seemed to be annihilated, and I felt like a person to
whom, by some magic, the operations of another man's mind should be thrown open
for inspection. I was at once the actor and the spectator of a terrible
drama—the last moments, for so I then supposed them to be, of a human being
under irrevocable sentence of death.
A puff of wind had driven aside the wreaths of mist;
and high above me I could see towering into the gloomy skies a pinnacle of
black rock. Sharp and needle-like it sprang from its cloud-hidden base, and
scarcely a flake of snow clung to its terrible precipices. There was I, cut off from my
kind, with black rocks frowning above me and the pitiless chasm beneath. No
angelic vision was required to announce my approaching fate. Death was coming with
all but visible strides. Nature looked savage enough, marking my sufferings
with contemptuous indifference.
Years ago I had rowed and lost a race or
two on the Thames, and there was a certain similarity in the situations, for
there comes a time in a losing race when all hope has departed, and one is
labouring simply from some obscure sense of honour. The sinews of the arms are
splitting, the back aches, and the lungs feel as though every blood-vessel in
them were strained almost to bursting point. Whatever vital force is left is
absorbed in propelling the animal machine; no reason can be distinctly given
for continuing a process painful in a high degree, dangerous to the
constitution, and capable of producing no sort of good result; and yet one
continues to toil as though life and happiness depended upon refraining from a
moment's intermission, and, as it were, nails one's mind—such as is left—down
to the task. Even so the effort to maintain my grasp on the rock became to me
the one absorbing thought; this fag end of the game should be fairly played
out, come what might, and whatever reasons might be given for it. It was
becoming tempting to throw up the cards and have done with it. Even the short
sharp pang of the crash on the rocks below seemed preferable to draining the
last dregs of misery. And yet, stupidly or sensibly, my mind fixed itself on at
least holding out against time, and discharging what seemed to be a kind of
duty. All other motives were rapidly fading from me, and one theory of the universe
seemed to be about as uninteresting as another. The play should be played out,
and as well as it could be done.
Yet, before the end, I gave one more
frantic glance at the position, and suddenly, to my utter astonishment, a new
chance revealed itself. Could I grasp a certain projection which I now observed
for the first time, I might still have a chance of escape. But to gain it, it
was necessary to relax my hold with the right hand, and make a slight spring
upwards. If the plan had occurred to me at the first moment, it might not have
been difficult. But my strength had ebbed so far that success was exceedingly
doubtful. Still it was the one chance, and at worst would hasten the crisis. I
gathered myself up, crouching as low as I dared, and then springing from the right
foot, and aiding the spring with my left hand, I threw out my right at the
little jutting point. The tips of my fingers just reached their aim, but only
touched without anchoring themselves. As I fell back, my foot missed its former
support, and my whole weight came heavily on the feeble left hand. The clutch
was instantaneously torn apart, and I was falling through the air. The old
flash of surprise crossed my mind, tempered by something like a sense of
relief. All was over!
The
mountains sprang upwards with a bound. But before the fall had well begun,
before the air had begun to whistle past me, my movement was arrested. With a
shock of surprise I found myself lying on a broad bed of deep moss, as
comfortably as in my bed at home. As my bewildered senses righted themselves, I
understood it all. The facts were simple and rather provoking. Before
attempting the passage across the rock-face, I had noted, though without much
conscious attention, that beneath my narrow ledge there was a broader one, some
ten feet lower down. The sudden alarm produced by the slip, whilst reviving so
much else, had expunged this one practically useful memory completely and
instantaneously. But now, as it came back to me, I easily convinced myself not
only that I had never been in danger, and thus that all my agony had been
thrown away, but that I had never even done anything rash. It was rather
humiliating, but decidedly consoling, and in some sense comforting to my
self-esteem. As I slowly picked myself up, I looked at my watch. It followed,
from a comparison of times, that I had not been stretched on the rack for more
than five minutes. Besides the obvious reflection that in such moments one
lives fast, it also followed that I might still be in time for dinner. I got on
my legs, trembling at first, but soon found that they could carry me as fast as
usual down the well-known path. I was in time to join my friends at the table
d 'hôte, joined in the usual facetiousness about the soup, and spent the
evening—for the clouds were now rolling away—in discussing the best mode of
assaulting our old friend the Teufelshorn.
