The Landscapes of the Sublime 1700-1830

Classic Ground

C. Duffy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137332172
• eBook ISBN: 9781137332189
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The Landscapes of the Sublime examines the place of the 'natural sublime' in the cultural history of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. Drawing on a range of scholarship and historical sources, it offers a fresh perspective on the different species of the 'natural sublime' encountered by British and European travellers and explorers.

1

‘We had hopes that pointed to the clouds’: The Alps and the Poetics of Ascent

However wonderful what I have advanced may appear, I shall not want evidences of its truth, and shall only find those incredulous, who have never ascended above the plain.

– Louis Ramond de Carbonnières, ‘Observations on the Glacieres and the Glaciers’¹

The quotation in this chapter’s title is taken from William Wordsworth’s description of crossing the Simplon Pass in Book VI of The Prelude, long considered one of the defining episodes of Romantic-period writing.² Wordsworth’s refashioning of this moment from his tour of the Alps in 1790 has become, in Alan Liu’s terms, ‘one of a handful of paradigms capable by itself of representing the poet’s work’.³ More than half a century after Samuel Holt Monk described the same lines as the ‘apotheosis’ of ‘the experience that lay behind the eighteenth-century sublime’, Book VI of The Prelude also remains the favoured literary paradigm of the ‘Romantic’ encounter with the natural sublime, a so-called ‘set piece of the sublime’, as Thomas Weiskel puts it.⁴ Wordsworth’s apostrophe to the imagination – that ‘awful Power’ which recovers the mental ‘prowess’ initially ‘usurped’ by the ‘soulless image’ of Mont Blanc – is routinely said to coincide with the Kantian model of the sublime that many twentieth-century historians of the discourse on the sublime have identified as the theoretical goal of eighteenth-century British enquiry into sublime effect (The Prelude, vi, ll. 592, 594, 611, 527–8). Hence, for example, Monk’s seminal suggestion ‘that there is a general similarity between the point of view of the Critique of Judgement and The Prelude’.⁵

Recent critical commentaries on Wordsworth’s work have re-examined Book VI of The Prelude and offered a number of different interpretative contexts for its address to the imagination. Liu’s rereading of the passage in Wordsworth: the Sense of History, for example, suggests that the struggle for primacy which Wordsworth dramatises in Prelude VI is not so much a struggle between the individual imagination and the natural world as it is a struggle between the individual imagination and historical process.⁶ The vocabulary of Wordsworth’s apostrophe to the imagination, Liu suggests, records a specific engagement with Napoleon’s crossing of the Alps in 1800, en route to defeat the Austrians at Marengo. Wordsworth is thus testing the imagination, or poetic power, against political power, rather than against a material nature. This explains, Liu concludes, why Wordsworth’s first account of his Alpine tour, in his Descriptive Sketches of 1793, does not contain any comparable address to the imagination: because Wordsworth’s actual antagonist in the apostrophe to the imagination, Napoleon, had not yet crossed the Alps.

Readings such as Liu’s undoubtedly illuminate the contextual and discursive richness of Wordsworth’s texts. However, they do not – they are not intended to – interrogate the adequacy of the Simplon Pass episode as a paradigm of the ‘Romantic sublime’, defined, following the paradigms of Kant’s ‘Analytic’, as an ultimately transcended conflict between the individual imagination and something outside the self, be that nature or history. We can begin to interrogate that adequacy, however, by returning to the most obvious, and the most curiously overlooked, interpretative context for Book VI of The Prelude: the extensive European cultural engagement with the Alps during the long eighteenth century, and particularly with the valley of Chamonix, in Haute Savoie, site of some of the most dramatic Alpine landscapes in Europe, and of the highest mountain in Western Europe, Mont Blanc.

In Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Marjorie Hope Nicolson documents at length the manner in which the Alps, in particular, functioned during the eighteenth century as the locus where a succession of anxious British travellers came gradually to transfer the affective responses traditionally evoked by the idea of God, to those aspects of the physical universe which seemed most to partake of the qualities of their supposed creator: in short, the Alps became, according to Nicolson’s analysis, a figure of the grandeur of God, and the locus for the secularisation of religious attitudes. Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that Nicolson’s study is more or less exclusively concerned with British engagements with the Alps (a focus shared, for example, by Jim Ring and Robert Macfarlane), and more or less unconcerned with descriptions of the ‘natural sublime’ within contemporary philosophical aesthetics, part of my argument in this chapter is that the religious responses which Nicolson describes are in fact only a single strand of a much wider contemporary genre of engagement with the Alpine sublime, which Nicolson neglects, and that these religious responses are conditioned, at least in part, by a dialectical relationship with that wider engagement. My purpose in this chapter is to chart the contours of that wider engagement. My argument here is that eighteenth-century exploration of the Alps, and, again, of Chamonix-Mont Blanc in particular, generates something which I want to call the ‘discourse of ascent’: a discourse which consistently correlates the physical ascent of the Alps with a variety of ostensibly unrelated forms of elevation: moral, political, epistemological, aesthetic – as well as religious.

Obviously, this ‘discourse of ascent’ has some important precursors in Renaissance writing, notably in Petrarch’s ‘Ascent of Mont Ventoux’, in which Petrarch records having gained not only moral and spiritual insight during his ascent, but also having acquired a new perspective on his own subjectivity. This discourse also parallels and complements contemporary formulations of the link between height or elevation and the sublime with eighteenth-century philosophical aesthetics, such as Burke’s discussion of height in his Philosophical Enquiry. Despite these precursors and parallels, however, the point that I wish to make about the ‘discourse of ascent’ is that it is locally and culturally specific, generated in response to a quite precise geographical region, and encoded with quite specific cultural values: it is quintessentially of and about the Alps, and the Alps alone. It is this culturally and geographically specific discourse of ascent, then, rather than works of philosophical aesthetics, which I want to suggest constitutes an alternative, and ostensibly more immediate, context for understanding Romantic-period engagements with the Alpine sublime, not least amongst them Wordsworth’s famous apostrophe to the imagination in Book VI of The Prelude.

‘For whom is Switzerland a remarkable country?’: discovering the Alpine sublime

In his popular and influential epistolary novel Julie, ou, la Nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de Deux Amans Habitans d’Une Petite Ville au Pieds des Alpes (1761), unnoticed by Nicolson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau equates the physical ascent of the Alps, a landscape still relatively unfamiliar to mainstream European culture at the time, not simply with aesthetic gratification or scientific discovery, but with the achievement of an elevated consciousness. Writing to his lover from the Upper Valais, in the twenty-third letter of the first part of Julie, Rousseau’s protagonist, St Preux, recalls:

Here it was that I plainly discovered, in the purity of the air, the true cause of that returning tranquillity of soul, to which I had been so long a stranger. The impression is general, though not universally observed. Upon the tops of mountains, the air being subtle and pure, we respire with greater freedom, our bodies are more active, our minds more serene, our pleasures less ardent, and our passions much more moderate. Our meditations acquire a degree of sublimity from the grandeur of the objects that surround us. It seems as if, being lifted above all human society, we had left every low, terrestrial sentiment behind; and that as we approach the ethereal regions the soul imbibes something of their eternal purity.⁷

This specific passage, not simply Rousseau’s claim, echoes throughout eighteenth-century and Romantic-period writing about the Alpine sublime. Helen Maria Williams, for example, quotes it in full in her Tour in Switzerland, while G. W. Bridges both paraphrases and quotes it in his Alpine Sketches (1814). By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the refrain is virtually clichéd. ‘Nothing is better calculated to exalt the imagination and improve the feelings of man,’ according to Henry Coxe’s widely used Traveller’s Guide in Switzerland (1816), than ‘the towering and majestic Alps of Helvetia’.⁸

Rousseau’s influential correlation of physical ascent with bodily and mental elevation actually originates in the published records of the earliest European expeditions to the Alps, and to Chamonix-Mont Blanc in particular, the ‘general’ opinion to which he refers in the passage quoted. To Wordsworth’s striking claim that our seemingly innate taste for mountainous landscapes actually originated in the seventeenth century, we can add the fact that the valley of Chamonix, the scene of so many Romantic-period engagements with the Alpine sublime, was only discovered by mainstream European culture in the mid-eighteenth century. ‘Incredible as it may appear’, Ebel’s Traveller’s Guide through Switzerland noted in 1818, by which time Chamonix was well established as a premier attraction on the European Grand Tour, ‘this valley so singularly interesting, in which is seen the highest mountain of the old world, was entirely unknown till the year 1741’.⁹ As Ebel suggests in answering the opening question of his Guide – ‘for whom is Switzerland a remarkable country?’ – the European discovery of Chamonix-Mont Blanc had been multivalent:

every individual who knows how to derive some enjoyment from the contemplation of nature, or who is desirous of acquiring a rich store of the most lively images, or of the most innocent gratifications; he likewise, whose breast labours under affliction, or whose cares require consolation, who is in need of being roused and fortified, may remain assured that he will find [...] whatever he may wish for.¹⁰

In the second half of the eighteenth century, in other words, the ‘singularly interesting’ valley of Chamonix came to be identified as a site of immense scientific importance, as a ‘rich store’ of ‘lively images’ for the artist, as a locus of ‘fortification’ and ‘consolation’ for the physically or emotionally ‘afflicted’, and as the destination of choice for those simply seeking ‘some enjoyment from the contemplation of nature’. In other words, Chamonix-Mont Blanc was in the process of being transformed from a landscape unknown to European culture into ‘classic ground’, as the Shelleys pointedly called it in their History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), into a landscape overwritten with a range of cultural values and expectations, centring around the promise of ‘gratification’.¹¹ And from the outset, the European perception of these Alpine ‘gratifications’ was inextricably linked with the idea, the practice and the image of ascent.

Ebel dates the European discovery of Chamonix to 1741, the year of the earliest (recorded) British expedition to the region, by William Windham and Richard Pococke, the latter on his way home from the three-year journey around the Middle East which later provided the subject for his influential Description of the East (1743–45).¹² Windham and Pococke left Geneva on 19 June 1741 and reached Chamonix three days later. Windham’s record of the scenes they discovered there, in his Account of the Glacieres, or Ice Alps, in Savoy (1744), effectively originates the tropes that will become conventional in Romantic-period engagements with the Alpine sublime: the tension between the desire to provide credible narrative and the difficulty of describing incredible landscape in sober terms; the tension between the evidently impoverished locals and the perception, or the wish to perceive their society as idyllic, etc.¹³ Hence, for example, while Windham registers his desire to provide reliable witness of Chamonix in the language of natural philosophy, ‘in the plainest Manner, without endeavouring to embellish it by any florid Description’, he also acknowledges the inherent difficulty of describing the glacial landscape, admitting that he is ‘extremely at a Loss how to give a right idea of it’.¹⁴ Similarly, while Windham observes that the local pop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: In Search of ‘Classic Ground’
• 1 ‘We had hopes that pointed to the clouds’: The Alps and the Poetics of Ascent
• 2 ‘A volcano heard afar’: Vesuvius, Etna and the Poetics of Depth
• 3 ‘The region of beauty and delight’: Reimagining the Polar Sublime
• 4 ‘The lone and level sands’: Romanticism and the Desert
• 5 ‘My purpose was humbler, but also higher’: Thomas De Quincey at the Final Frontier
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index