Excerpted from The Armchair Mountaineer Edited by David Reuther and John Thorn

How, then, shall we distinguish emotionally between the mountaineer and the sportsman?

The great majority of men are in a sense artists; some are active and creative, and some participate passively. No doubt those who create differ in some way fundamentally from those who do not create; but they hold this artistic impulse in common: all alike desire expression for the emotional side of their nature. The behavior of those who are devoted to the higher forms of Art shows this clearly enough. It is clearest of all, perhaps, in the drama, in dancing, and in music. Not only those who perform are artists, but also those who are moved by the performance. Artists, in this sense, are not distinguished by the power of expressing emotion, but the power of feeling that emotional experience out of which Art is made. We recognize this when we speak of individuals as artistic, though they have no pretension to create Art. Arrogant mountaineers are all artistic, independently of any other consideration, because they cultivate emotional experience for its own sake; and so for the same reason are sportsmen. It is not paradoxical to assert that all sportsmen—real sportsmen, I mean—are artistic; it is merely to apply that term logically, as it ought to be applied. A large part of the human race is covered in this way by an epithet usually vague and specialized, and so it ought to be. No difference in kind divides the individual who is commonly said to be artistic from the sportsman who is supposed not so to be. On the contrary, the sportsman is a recognizable kind of artist. So soon as pleasure is being pursued, not simply for its face value—as it is being pursued at this moment by the cook below, who is chatting with the fishmonger when I know she ought to be basting the joint—not in the simplest way, but for some more remote and emotional object, it partakes of the nature of Art.

Andrew Irvine, who accompanied Mallory on his final ascent

This distinction may easily be perceived in the world of sport. It points the difference between one who is content to paddle a boat by himself because he likes the exercise, or likes the sensation of occupying a boat upon the water, or wants to use the water to get to some desirable spot, and one who trains for a race; the difference between kicking a football and playing in a game of football; the difference between riding individually for the liver's sake and riding to hounds. Certainly neither the sportsman nor the mountaineer can be accused of taking his pleasure simply. Both are artists; and the fact that he has in view an emotional experience does not remove the mountaineer even from the devotee of Association football.

But there is Art and ART. We may distinguish among artists. Without an exact classification or order of merit we do so distinguish habitually. The"Fine Arts" are called "fine" presumably because we consider that all Arts are not fine. The epithet artistic is commonly limited to those who are seen to have the artistic sense developed in a peculiar degree.

It is precisely in making these distinctions that we may estimate what we set out to determine—the value of mountaineering in the whole order of our emotional experience. To what part of the artistic sense of man does mountaineering belong? To the part that causes him to be moved by music or painting, or to the part that makes him enjoy the game?

By putting the question in this form we perceive at once the gulf that divides the arrogant mountaineer from the sportsman. It seems perfectly natural to compare a day in the Alps with a symphony. For mountaineers of my sort mountaineering is rightfully so comparable; but no sportsman could or would make the same claim for cricket or hunting, or whatever his particular sport might be. He recognizes the existence of the sublime in great Art, and knows, even if he cannot feel, that its manner of stirring the heart is altogether different and vaster. But mountaineers do not admit this difference in the emotional plane of mountaineering and Art. They claim that something sublime is the essence of mountaineering. They can compare the call of the hills to the melody of wonderful music, and the comparison is not ridiculous.