“A banner with a strange device”: Longfellow’s Excelsior, Alpine idealism and the transcendent in European mountaineering [“Une Bannière a l’étrange devise”: Le Poème Excelsior de Longfellow, idéalism alpin et transcendence en alpinism']

Abstract

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Excelsior was published in 1841 and very soon came to be strongly associated with European Alpine mountaineering. Longfellow was influenced by German cultural approaches to mountains, mediated via the literature of the both the Sturm und Drang movement, German Idealism and pan-European Romanticism. The poem briefly recounts the tale of a young man struggling through Alpine peaks and passes to an unspecified fate near the Great St. Bernard Pass. Located by the faithful hounds of the monastery and half buried in snow, he still clutches in his icy hand ‘That banner with a strange device/Excelsior!’ Longfellow constructed his aesthetics of the infinite from Pre-Romantic, Sublime and Gothic elements but the literary topos of Excelsior owes most to German literary and philosophical sensibilities. This reverence for mountain landscapes and their symbolic importance was reinforced in German culture by romantic nationalism and the literature of young Germans’ self-discovery that had romanticized the ‘wild call of the mountains.’ The cult of doomed and evanescent youth is a feature of the Sturm und Drang. Above all, German Idealist thought found in the struggle to climb a mountain and attain a summit the perfect metaphor for the dialectical method and the teleological drive towards the Ideal, exemplified in Goethe’s Faust. The motifs of ascent, absorption into the Absolute and engagement in “aspiration without object” all place this within the domain of philosophical idealism. The phrase “Excelsior!” was adopted by mountaineers in the nineteenth century, Le Club Alpin Français choosing it as the club motto at the club’s foundation in 1874. It attained considerable cultural force amongst German speaking Alpinists experimenting with new forms of Lebensphilosophie that emphasised the cultivation of the will. The phrase lost much of its power through overuse, debasement, parody and ridicule but remains an epiphenomenal presence in literary appropriations of mountaineering.