PARTISAN REVIEW
izing institutions of the public school and university, walked fifteen
miles three days before his death at the age of 67, a modest record
compared with Stephen's grandfather, who celebr.ated his seventieth
birthday by walking 25 miles to breakfast, then to his office, and
home again the same day. Fifty miles a day was about the average
for the "Sunday Tramps" organized by Stephen. And walking was
the least strenuous of the sports to which Stephen and his friends were
addicted. Stephen remembered, as the most important events of his
university days, the two occasions when the Trinity Hall boat, with
himself as coach, went "head of the river." And the most cherished
memories of his later life were his mountain climbing expeditions, on
which he was joined by such other enthusiasts as Meredith, Huxley,
Harrison and F. W. Maitland; Stephen himself was the first person
to
scale the Schreckhorn.
Mountaineering was no idle, leisure-time amusement. It was a
disciplined, exacting game, with a precise set of rules and code of
behavior-a paradigm of life itself. When Stephen put to himself
the ultimate question of the meaning of life, it was to his favorite
sports, rowing and mountaineering, that he looked for an answer.
In "A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps," one of his most thoughtful
and per.sonal essays, he pictured himself hanging over a precipice and
asking himself the value of life. As his finger.s clung desperately to
the edge of the rock, he contemplated the vision of eternity lying
in wait for him below. He reviewed in his mind the answers of
Christianity, pantheism and Mill's Religion of Humanity, rejecting
the first because it did not appreciate the goodness of man, the
second because it did not appreciate his individuality, and the third
because it pretended to make too much of him. It was not until he
recalled the physical sensation of a race on the Thames that the
answer came to him. He remembered how he had rowed on, in this
race that was already lost, every muscle aching and his lungs strained
almost to the breaking point, for no other reason than "some obscure
sense of honor." So now, hanging over the precipice, he was over–
whelmed by the instinctive thought that the "fag end of the game
should be fairly played out, come what might, and whatever reasons
might be given for it."
If
the sportsman, submitting himself to the ordeal of the Thames
or the Alps, must be satisfied with answers so vague as an "obscure
