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Show 120. lasting issue about the value of the mountaineer's experience, raised by John Ruskin. Debates about the value of mountaineering pitted mountaineers of the scientific and aesthetic tradition against Ruskin, who was the most articulate critic of alpinism. These debates were not just about the dangers and rewards of the athletic side of mountaineering, but called into question the right way to perceive mountains in particular, and wild Nature in general. Alpinists like John Tyndall, Leslie Stephen, Edward Whymper, and Clarence King opposed Ruskin not simply because he had attacked their activity.- but because they had learned a good deal about the beauty of mountains from his writings. Thus he called out their best defenses of the rewards of their activity. Ruskin's strongest criticism of alpinism came in Sesames and Lillies, even before the accident on the Matterhorn. "You dispise nature," he told the mountaineers, "the alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear garden, which you set yourself to climb and slide down again with 'shrieks of delight.'" After the accident on the Matterhorn, he revised and enlarged his criticism in the preface to his second edition, explaining that his objection was not due to the dangers, but went deeper; "the real ground for reprehension of Alpine climbing is that, with less cause, it excites more vanity than any other athletic skill. . . . " He thought that the real beauty of Switzerland was lost "by the country being regarded as half watering place, |