Mountains of the Mind (13 page)

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 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:

Stuck on the cliff-face, with a storm drawing nearer which would make the rocks slicker and even less safe, Coleridge didn’t panic.
No, he lay on his back and reflected on the indestructibility of his faculty of Reason. Faced with extreme bodily danger, Coleridge retreated into the fastness of his intellect and looked out from there, from where the rocks and the storm and the drop all seemed like illusions. He
thought
himself out of a tight spot, in other words.

Indeed, when Coleridge emerged from his rational ‘Trance’, he noticed that several feet to his left along the ledge there was a slender gap in the rock, a chimney down which he could lower himself (it is now known as Fat Man’s Peril). He took off his rucksack, ‘slipped down as between two walls, without any danger or difficulty’, and survived to tell the tale, though for the rest of the day he felt in a ‘stretched and anxious state of mind’.

Coleridge’s descent of Broad Stand is generally considered to be the first rock-climb. For Coleridge, his escape was proof of the majesty of reason over reality. He was wrong, of course. His escape had nothing to do with reason – he was just lucky enough to find a way out of his fix. You can’t idealize cliffs and rocks out of existence, no matter how hard you try. Many people since Coleridge have discovered this. In a notorious incident in 1903, one hundred and one years after Coleridge’s perilous descent, four climbers were killed while attempting to climb the steep slabs below Hopkinson’s Cairn, also on Scafell. They were buried in the Wasdale Head churchyard, and onto each of their gravestones was chipped the same Miltonic epigraph: ‘One moment stood they as the angels stand High in the stainless immanence of air; The next they were not, to their Fatherland Translated unaware.’

Coleridge’s rock-climb began a century in which risk-taking in the mountains escalated. A hunger for willed and authentic fear came to
usurp the more decorous pleasures of the Sublime. The proviso that one must, in Rousseau’s words, be ‘safely placed’ in order to enjoy the frisson of risk became increasingly disregarded. Out to the mountains in growing numbers went the risk-takers. In his 1829 guide to Switzerland, the British publisher and travel-writer John Murray wrote with relish of how in the Alps ‘the individual may be engulfed in some horrid chasm in the rending glacier, which instantly yawns to receive him, or the precipice may await him, should he escape the other perils so profusely scattered over the peaks of Switzerland’. Mariana Stark, the author of an 1836 guidebook to the Alps, advised lady mountain-goers ‘to stare as much as possible over the edge of precipices’. In this way, Stark reasoned, your imagination would be so glutted with terror ‘that you become capable of beholding height with sang-froid’. Intense beauty, altitude and solitude – certainly these were all important elements of the new glamour of mountains. But combined with them was the element of danger. The mountains provided an environment deliciously riven by risk, where you could test yourself against a profusion of hazards and difficulties.

It is above all this idea of risk-taking as a test which dominates nineteenth-century attitudes towards fear. The deeper one advances into the century, the more entangled become concepts of risk with concepts of selfhood and self-knowledge. In contemporary journals, biographies and expedition accounts, certain themes and attitudes towards wild landscape recur. Foremost among them is that of victory and defeat, of struggle and reward. In these books nature is figured usually as an enemy, or lover, to be vanquished or ravished according to how you saw it. While an alertness to the desolate beauties of wilderness remains in place, what moves decisively to the fore is a sense of a wild landscape, with all its hazards and asperities, as a testing-ground – a stage on which the self can be best illuminated. Crossing the snow-fields of the Alps or slogging over the polar tundra revealed what you were made of – and whether it was the right stuff.
An editorial in
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
in November 1847, discussing the exploration of the Arctic, caught this mindset well: ‘The evident design of Providence in placing difficulties before man is to sharpen his faculties for their mastery.’

Importantly, exposure to the risks and beauties of wilderness didn’t only elucidate one’s personal qualities; it could also actively improve them. Consider, for example, a letter which John Ruskin wrote to his father from Chamonix in 1863. ‘That question of the moral effect of danger is a very curious one,’ he began: