Mountains of the Mind (9 page)

Between about 1810 and 1870, the scale of deep time was constructed and labelled. It will be familiar to anyone who has opened a geology textbook; as resonant a litany as the shipping forecast: Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary, Quarternary … The compressive power of language – more powerful even than the geophysical forces it was describing – was set to work on the geological past, and hundreds of millions of years were effortlessly compacted into a few letters. A late developer among the sciences, during the nineteenth century geology rushed on precociously fast, naming and labelling as time unrolled further and further behind it. Popular geology handbooks proliferated, and the reading public was brought increasingly to understand what the more lyrically inclined geologists were starting to call the ‘symphony of the earth’ – the repeating pattern of uplift and erosion which produced mountains and seas, basins and ranges. Innumerable articles were published on geology and its revelations in periodicals across Europe and America. Everyone was made privy to the secrets of the earth’s past. ‘The wind and the rain have written illustrated books for this generation,’ wrote Charles Dickens in a piece for his periodical
Household Words
in 1851, ‘from which it may learn how showers fell, tides ebbed and flowed, and great animals, long extinct, walked up the craggy sides of cliffs, in remote ages. The more we know of Nature, in any of her aspects, the more profound is the interest she offers to us.’

As well as being excited by the spans of time uncovered by geology, the nineteenth-century imagination was aroused by the concept of geophysical force – the inconceivable power necessary to knead sandstone like pastry, to collapse trees into shiny seams of coal and to crush marine life into blocks of marble. Romanticism had left the collective nineteenth-century nervous system attuned to appreciate excess, and this inherited lust for the grandiose and the gigantic in part explains the enthusiasm with which geology was embraced.

In mid-century Britain, John Ruskin read widely in the writings of geology, and in turn began to write brilliantly himself about the slow-motion drama of mountain scenery. The 1856 publication of Ruskin’s
Of Mountain Beauty
was, like the appearance in 1830 of Lyell’s
Principles
, a seminal moment in European landscape history. ‘Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery’, pronounced Ruskin at the outset, and he brooked no quarrel with that statement throughout the rest of the book. Where Lyell was a teacher, Ruskin was a dramaturge. Before his gaze, the landscape offered up the stories of its making. Meditating on the nature of granite, with its medley of minerals and colours, Ruskin dreamt of the violence inherent in its making: ‘The several atoms have all different shapes, characters, and offices; but are inseparably united by some fiery, or baptismal process which has purified them all.’ Basalt he perceived to have at one stage in its career possessed ‘the liquefying power and expansive force of subterranean fire’. Seen through the optic of Ruskin’s prose, geology became war or apocalypse; the view from the top of a mountain became a panorama over battlegrounds upon which competing armies of rock, stone and ice had warred for epochs, with incredible slowness and unimaginable force. To read Ruskin on rocks was – and still is – to be reminded of the agencies involved in their making.

In America, too, between 1820 and 1880 there emerged a dynasty of landscape artists – Frederick Edwin Church foremost among
them – who drew their inspiration from the dramatic natural scenery of the States. While they were clearly influenced by the British triumvirate of Ruskin, Turner and John Martin, these painters were filled also with a distinctively American desire to express both awe at and pride in the landscape of their country: to celebrate God’s chosen land. To this end, they produced immense and often lurid canvases of American wildernesses – the red rock citadels of the desert states, the mountainous throne-rooms of the Andes, the flaring skies and mirror lakes of the Rockies, or the vaporous magnificence of the Niagara Falls. Their giant pictures emphasized the puniness and transience of man: often one or two minuscule human figures can be seen in a corner of the canvas, dwarfed by the massive profiles of the landscape. These artists were also thoroughly versed in botany and geology: some of the pictures contained so much landscape detail that, when they were first exhibited, viewers were supplied with opera glasses so that they could see the extraordinary geological accuracy of the painting – a reminder of how intertwined were geology and representations of mountains.

Oil painting is an appropriate medium to represent the processes of geology, for oil paints have landscapes immanent within them: they are made of minerals. Oil paints were first devised in the fifteenth century, when Flemish painters – the van Eyck brothers foremost among them – tried mixing linseed oil with various natural pigments, and found they had created a substance which was not only more vibrant in colour, but also more malleable in terms of drying time than traditional egg tempera. Many of the pigments they blended with the oils were mineral in origin. Unburnt pit-coal was used to render the shadows of flesh, particularly by the Flemish and
Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. Black chalk and common coal were used to furnish a brown tint. The light blues employed to render mountains as films in the far background in the work of, say, Claude or Poussin would have come from copper carbonates or compounds of silver. The ‘scumbling’ effect of which the Dutch masters were so fond for their skyscapes (it gives a cloud-like texture to the skies which superbly imitates the consistency of cirrostratus) was achieved using ground glass as a pigment and ashes as a context. ‘Sinopia’, or red earth, was used to give rouging tints to faces or clothing, or to provide the first tracing of a fresco on to plaster. Geology, therefore, is intimate with the history of painting; in oil paintings of landscapes, the earth has been pressed into service to express itself.

An even closer coincidence between medium and message can be found in the ‘scholar’s rocks’ which became popular in the T’ang and Sung dynasties of China. Seven centuries before Romanticism revolutionized Western perceptions of mountains and wilderness, Chinese and Japanese artists were celebrating the spiritual qualities of wild landscape. Kuo Hsi, a celebrated eleventh-century Chinese painter and essayist, proposed in his
Essay on Landscape Painting
that wild landscapes ‘nourished a man’s nature’. ‘The din of the dusty world,’ he wrote, ‘and the locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors; while, on the contrary, haze, mist and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks.’ This venerable Eastern esteem for wilderness explains the popularity of scholar’s rocks, single stones which have been carved into intricate, dynamic shapes by the powers of water, wind and frost. They were harvested from caves, river-beds and mountainsides, and mounted on small wooden pedestals. The stones – which scholars kept on their desks or in their studies, much as we might now keep a paperweight – were valued for how they expressed the history and the forces of their making. Each detail on a rock’s surface, each groove or notch or air-bubble or ridge or perforation, was
eloquent of aeons. Each rock was a tiny, hand-held cosmos. Scholar’s rocks were not metaphors for a landscape, they were landscapes.

Many of these rocks have survived and can be seen in museums. If you stare at one closely enough, and for long enough, you lose your sense of scale, and the whorls, the caverns, the hills and the valleys which nature has inscribed in them can seem big enough to walk through.

Not everybody, it should be said, was exhilarated by the advances of geology in the nineteenth century. There was a widespread feeling that geology, like the other sciences, had in some way displaced humanity. Scientific inquiry and methodology had been invited into the heart of the human project, and from there it had proved – in the most merciless and irrefutable way possible – that human beings were no more or less important than any other agglomeration of matter in the universe. It had eroded the Renaissance world-view of man as the measure of all things. The desolating expanses of time revealed by geology were more persuasive proof than any other of humankind’s insignificance. To understand that mountains decayed and fell was inevitably to sense the precariousness and mortality of human endeavours. If a mountain could not withstand the ravages of time, what chance a city or a civilization? ‘The hills are shadows,’ wrote Tennyson in his elegy for stasis
In Memoriam
, ‘and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands; / They melt like mist, the solid lands, / Like clouds they shape themselves and go.’ And ‘From’ flowed into ‘form’: philology was showing that language was subject to the same ceaseless shiftings as everything else. Not even words stood for what they once did. Nothing endured any longer except change.

By and large, however, the disclosures of geology were found inspiring rather than menacing. As well as explaining the forces of the earth, Ruskin urged his public to interpret landscapes for their absence as much as their presence: what had been subtracted from the hills by cataclysm or by the ceaseless work of erosion. In Ruskin’s writing, hills on imaginary hills arose before one’s eyes in a fantasia of contingency, might-have-been and once-was. Like a magnificent Prospero, Ruskin summoned up the ghosts of mountains past; had them arise in the space above the skylines and ridges of the present day. Wild nature, he taught, was a ruin of something once even more astonishing – a dilapidation of what he called ‘the first splendid forms that were once created’. Even the Matterhorn, whose upwards flourish drew admirers in their thousands to the Zermatt valley, Ruskin pointed out to be a sculpture: gouged, chiselled and pared from a single block by the furious energies of the earth. As John Muir would do later in the United States, John Ruskin taught his many readers that the geological past was everywhere apparent – if only one knew
how
to look.

John Ruskin also believed that mountains moved. And this was perhaps his most important contribution to the formation of our mountains of the mind. Before publishing
Of Mountain Beauty
, Ruskin had spent years pacing the lower paths of the Alps; sketching, painting, observing, meditating. He had concluded that the apparently arbitrary jaggedness of mountain ridges was an illusion. In fact, examined with due diligence and patient eyes, mountains revealed their fundamental form of organization to be the curve, and not the angle as might be concluded by superficial observation. Mountains were inherently curved, and mountain ranges were shaped and arranged like waves. They were waves of rock – ‘the silent wave of the blue mountain’ – and not waves of water.

Moreover, said Ruskin, mountain ranges, like hydraulic waves, were prone to motion. They had been cast up by colossal forces, and
were still being moved by them. That the movement of mountains could only be imagined and not witnessed was – as James Hutton had pointed out – a function of the minute life-span of a human being. They were not static, but fluid: rocks fell from their summits, and rainwater poured off their flanks. For Ruskin, this perpetual motion was what made mountains the beginning and end of all natural scenery. ‘Those desolate and threatening ranges of dark mountain,’ he wrote: