Mountains of the Mind Read online

  But then, as Dennis tries to describe the exact feelings stirred in him as he reached a dangerously narrow part of the route, something unusual happens to his language:

  We walk’d upon the very brink, in a literal sense, of Destruction; one Stumble, and both Life and Carcass had been at once destroy’d. The sense of all this produc’d different motions in me, viz., a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled.

  Against all his expectations, Dennis discovered that walking ‘upon the very brink’ – just one stumble away from violent death – brought him an odd pleasure. No vocabulary exists to describe what he experienced, so Dennis has to invent one using the artificial logic of the oxymoron. He has to resort to paradox – to allow each ‘motion’ its equal and opposite emotion, and say that he felt ‘a delightful Horrour’ and ‘a terrible Joy’.

  We see here one of the earliest modern memoirs of pleasurable fear in the mountains. It is an account which, looking backwards from our age of adrenaline, appears quaint. John Dennis may not have been the first man to discover the congenial aspects to vertigo, but it was him and people like him, returning from the largely unknown world of high mountains with new experiences to tell of, who laid the foundations of future responses to mountains: to height and to fear. Dennis’s glimpse that there was pleasure to be had from vertigo would, over the course of 300 years, blossom and amplify into our era’s headlong pursuit of danger – people flinging themselves off cranes attached to rubber-bands, off mountainsides attached to ropes, and out of planes attached to nothing at all.

  Around the middle of the eighteenth century something happened which would both diffuse and formalize Dennis’s understanding that there was a pleasure to be found in fear. An intellectual doctrine was proposed which revolutionized both the perception of wild landscapes and contemporary attitudes to fear. It is a doctrine which continues silently to dominate both our imaginative relationship with wilderness and our conceptions of bravery and fear. That influential doctrine was known as the Sublime (a word which means ‘lofty’ or ‘elevated’), and it delighted in chaos, intensity, cataclysm, great size, irregularity – the aesthetic antipodes, in other words, of the preceding age’s neo-classicism. Out of its tumult emerged a fierce, and for a time peculiarly British, affection for wild landscape of all types: oceans, ice-caps, forests, deserts and, above all, mountains.

  In 1757 a young Irishman with a bright future published a short work with a long title. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, by Edmund Burke (1729–97), tried to account for the passions evoked in the human mind by what Burke called ‘terrible objects’. Burke was interested in our psychic response to things – a rushing cataract, say, a dark vault or a cliff-face – that seized, terrified and yet also somehow pleased the mind by dint of being too big, too high, too fast, too obscured, too powerful, too something, to be properly comprehended. These were sublime sights – hectic, intimidating, uncontrollable – and they inspired in the observer, said Burke, a heady blend of pleasure and terror. Beauty, by contrast, was inspired by the visually regular, the proportioned, the predictable. So, for example, an Attic sculpture was beautiful, or the balanced grace of the Parthenon, whereas an avalanche or a flooding river was sublime. In Burke’s physiological terms, beauty had a relaxing effect on the ‘fibres’ of the body, whereas sublimity tightened these ‘fibres’. ‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger,’ he wrote:

  that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

  At the core of Burke’s thesis was the proposal that these sublime sights caused terror, and terror was a passion which, he wrote, ‘always produces delight when it does not press too close’ (Burke was right in this; anyone who has experienced real fear for any length of time beyond the split-second will know how it commands your rapt and exclusive attention). So it would be impossible to appreciate the Sublime if one were, say, hanging by a handhold from a cliff-face. But if you came just near enough to a waterfall or a cliff-edge to suggest to your imagination the possibility of self-destruction, then you would feel a sublime rush. It was the suggestion of harm, melded with the knowledge that no harm was likely to come, which induced this delightful terror: the improbable parading as the possible. The English physician and philosopher David Hartley, writing in 1749, put it succinctly: ‘If there be a precipice, a cataract, a mountain of snow etc. in one part of the scene, the nascent ideas of fear and horror magnify and enliven all the other ideas, and by degrees pass into pleasures, by suggesting the security from pain.’

  Burke’s smartly written treatise gave a verbal form and an intellectual respectability to the inchoate experiences which we saw John Dennis struggling to articulate seventy years earlier. Once Burke had coded the sublime – had provided a portfolio of words and ideas upon which the intellectual public at large could draw – it percolated quickly through the wider imagination. After A Philosophical Enquiry, no forest could be but dark and gloomy, no range of peaks but icy and majestic. Certain adjectives – sublime, awful, dreadful – became inseparably wedded to certain nouns – mountains, oceans, chasms. Philosophers and aestheticians across Europe turned their prodigious attentions to the question of the Sublime, and as a concept it began to sprawl in a suitably chaotic and ungovernable way across the neat partitions of classical aesthetics.

  Burke didn’t originate the concept of the Sublime; it had been around since the Greek rhetorician Longinus wrote his treatise Peri Hupsous, or On the Sublime, in the third century AD, and interest in the Sublime had subsequently been reinvigorated by Boileau’s French translation of Peri Hupsous in 1674. But Longinus and his intellectual descendants had been concerned with the Sublime as a literary effect: how language, not landscape, could be lofty, grand or inspiring. What Burke did was to divert this pre-existent interest in grandness on to the experience of the eighteenth-century’s newest of pleasures, the natural landscape. His famous little book provided a new lens through which wilderness could be viewed and appreciated. He gave previously vague and undistinguished forms of awe a local habitation (oceans, deserts, mountains, ice-caps) and a name (the Sublime).

  The eighteenth-century rage for the Sublime not only transformed the way people perceived and wrote about landscapes, but also the way they behaved around them. When previously wildernesses had been shunned, now they were sought out as arenas of intense experience: places you could be temporarily disconcerted, or presented with the illusion of menace. ‘I must have torrents, rocks, pines, dead forest, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices beside me to frighten me,’ remarked Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1785, ‘for the odd thing about my liking for precipitous places is that they make me giddy, and I enjoy this giddiness greatly, provided that I am safely placed.’ The French writer Jacques Cambry would wait for violent sea storms to blow in to the Breton coast, before going to stand on the brink of a sea-cliff. ‘You think you can feel the earth quaking,’ he wrote ecstatically, ‘you flee instinctively; all your faculties are seized by a stunned feeling, fear, and inexplicable agitation.’

  The Sublime provided a new impulse for eighteenth-century tourism. Instead of visiting the classical site, increasing numbers of tourists chose to spend their holidays tripping from cliff-top to glacier to volcano – from sublime sight to sublime sight. The ruins of mountains competed with the ruins of antiquity as places of interest. The number of visitors to Vesuvius, for example, increased dramatically in the 1760s and 1770s, there no longer to gaze dutifully downwards at the domestic details of antiquity – pondering the use of this spigot or that bowl in the daily round of a Roman housewife – but to rubberneck in helpless astonishment at the mountain itself. Some chose to get even closer to the peaks, and to climb them. In Chamonix, th
e town nestled beneath the needles and glaciers of Mont Blanc, guiding became a profitable business, as locals dragged foreigners keen for a sublime fix up to the viewing promontory on the Montanvert. And in Britain, seekers of the Sublime and of its slightly tamer cousin, the Picturesque, were responsible for opening up the mountainous areas of the Lake District, North Wales and Scotland. The Caledonian Tour, which took in the coastal beauty spots and inland wildernesses of Scotland, became particularly popular. Among the best-known of the first generation of Caledonian tourists was Dr Samuel Johnson, who undertook a journey to ‘the Western Isles of Scotland’ in 1773.

  Six feet tall and some sixteen stone heavy, the formidable body of Dr Johnson was itself almost a sublime presence. When he arrived at Buchan, on the north-east coast of Scotland, Johnson had already visited Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa and been rowed in calm seas through its famous Gothic archways. Now he and Boswell had come across country to see the Buller of Buchan, another renowned rock-formation. Johnson had wanted to go to China to see the Great Wall, so Scotland was always going to be a poor substitute. Nevertheless, he was impressed by the Buller. He described it thus:

  It is a rock perpendicularly tubulated, united on one side with a high shore, and the other rising steep to a great height, above the main sea. The top is open, from which may be seen a dark gulf of water which flows into the cavity, through a breach made in the lower part of the inclosing rock. It has the appearance of a vast well bordered with a wall.

  Many of those who came to visit the Buller were content to view it from the security of the main cliff-edge. From there they could safely watch the sea boiling and sucking in the breach, and watch the fulmars which nested on the seawards cliff glide to and fro on their hunting forays.

  Some among the bolder visitors, however, were tempted to walk out along the apex of the arch of rock. There was no real danger. True, in places the ridge narrowed to only two or three feet wide, and the ground underfoot was tussocky, uneven and crumbling near its edges. And when you looked down at your feet you could see the sea moving below the arch, so that it felt as though the arch itself was swaying liquidly back and forth, liable to pitch you to a watery death … But then that was the point of doing the walk in the first place; to deceive your mind into imagining its own annihilation. The ridge of the Buller, in other words, was the ideal place to experience the Sublime.

  The Buller of Buchan.

  To the dismay of Boswell, Johnson insisted that they make the crossing. Boswell shuffled slowly across, and declared it ‘horrid to move along’. Dr Johnson, however, took it – like so many things in life – in his considerable stride, walking along without hesitation or stutter. For such a cumbrous man, he was remarkably agile: on the ground, as on the page, he was sure of his step. Afterwards, Johnson described the traverse in level-headed terms:

  The edge of the Buller is not wide and to those that walk round, appears very narrow. He that ventures to look downward sees, that if his foot should slip, he must fall from his dreadful elevation upon stones on one side, or into water on the other. But terrour without danger is only one of the sports of fancy, a voluntary agitation of the mind that is permitted no longer than it pleases.

  The significant difference between Johnson and John Dennis was that Johnson briefly scared himself because he chose to do so. In the ninety years which intervened between Dennis and Johnson, under the influence of the Sublime, the pursuit of fear had begun.

  Nevertheless, as far as mountains were concerned, the eighteenth century remained on the whole the century of appreciation from afar. For most people the principal attraction had not to do with setting foot upon the mountains, but with regarding them from a safe distance. The mountains were full of authentic and visible dangers – catastrophic shows of rockfall and avalanche, blizzards, precipices – and therefore they were reliable places to experience the Sublime. Down in the valleys you could stare up at the sky-scraping peaks, and from there you could hypothesize about what it would be like to fall from one of them or be caught up in an avalanche. ‘What struck me most in Switzerland among the curiosities of nature were those horrid structures the Alps,’ wrote a German traveller in 1785. ‘One is awe-stricken at the view, and longs to impart this pleasant sense of horror to all one’s friends.’ Percy Shelley liked to show off about the Alpine dangers to which he had been exposed as a child. ‘I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes,’ he claimed boastfully. ‘Dangers which sport upon the brink of precipices have been my playmate; I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc.’ This was all brag – in reality Shelley had always kept a prudent distance from edges – but his desire to style himself as a risk-taker was a sign of the growing enthusiasm for derring-do.

  So energetically did the tourists of the eighteenth century take to the mountains, though, that within not too many years mountainous scenery became almost old hat. Summering in the French Alps in 1816, Byron was outraged at how blasé some of the visitors to the mountains could be. ‘At Chaumoni –,’ he dashed down in a righteously indignant letter to a friend:

  in the very eyes of Mont Blanc – I heard another woman – English also – exclaim to her party – ‘Did you ever see anything more rural ’ – as if it was Highgate or Hampstead – or Brompton – or Hayes. ‘Rural ’ quotha! – Rocks – pines – torrents – Glaciers – Clouds and Summits of eternal snow far above them – and ‘Rural’!

  In Byron’s indignation, and in the Englishwoman’s stylized enervation with the appearance of the landscape, can be seen the pith of what would become an ubiquitous impulse in nineteenth-century travel: the urge to leave the beaten track. Once looking at the mountains from the valleys had become just the same as looking at Highgate, or Hampstead Heath, or Brompton, or Hayes, once the superlatively jagged scenery of Chamonix left a spectator cold, new ways had to be found of experiencing the mountains: ways of refreshing those sublime sensations of ‘delightful terror’ which were no longer offered by spectacle alone.

  The answer, of course, was to go into the mountains, and to put yourself at more risk. Once you were up among them, your touristic trip could turn into something much more serious: a stumble, perhaps, and then a fall.

  During the first two years of the nineteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge developed what he called ‘a new sort of Gambling’, to which he confessed he had become ‘much addicted’. But then Coleridge had an addictive personality. He was addicted to conversation, addicted to thought and, devastatingly, addicted to laudanum. For a while, too, he was addicted to vertigo. Stimulation was the thing: the infinitely curious Coleridge was interested in experiences which stretched or heightened his perceiving mind, which somehow increased its acreage or sharpened its point – whether those experiences were induced by precipices or by pipes of opium.

  Coleridge’s gambling worked as follows. Pick a mountain, any mountain. Climb to the top of it and then, instead of ‘winding about ’till you find a track or other symptom of safety’ – instead of looking for the easy way down – wander on, and ‘where it is first possible to descend’, descend, and ‘rely upon fortune for how far down this possibility will continue’. It was Russian Roulette, with the mountain-top the chamber of the gun and the ways off the mountain the bullets and the blanks.

  On 2 August 1802 Coleridge’s gambling got him into trouble. He had scrambled to the summit of Scafell in the Lake District – at 973 metres England’s second highest mountain, and a threatening little rock peak when approached from the wrong angle. The weather was volatile that day: a lurid sky to the south suggested a storm was imminent. It was time to get down. By his own admission ‘too confident, and too indolent to look around’, Coleridge decided to gamble, and headed off to the north-east edge of the summit plateau. He couldn’t have chosen a worse direction. For that line took him towards what is known now as Broad Stand, a steep giant’s staircase of rock slabs and sloping ledges. Determined to keep to the rules of his own game (�
�rely upon fortune for how far down this possibility will continue’), however, Coleridge started to make his way down.

  The descent began easily enough as he stepped from ledge to ledge, but soon the gaps between the ledges lengthened. Coleridge had to improvise. Faced with a sheer wall of seven feet, he let himself hang by his arms before dropping blindly to the next ledge. This shook him up physically: ‘the stretching of the muscles of my hands and arms, and the jolt of the Fall on my Feet, put my whole Limbs in a Tremble’. It also committed him to finding a route down. There was no way of reversing that move; a rubicon had been crossed. Coleridge kept moving down the cliff, but the situation was quickly becoming more grave – every drop ‘increased the Palsy of my limbs’.

  And then, suddenly, he found himself stuck. He was on a wide rock ledge with an unclimbable slab of rock above him. The wind was starting to whistle in his ears. Below him was a twelve-foot drop to a ledge so narrow ‘that if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself’.

  What to do? To be sure, nobody else would have done what Coleridge did: