Mountains of the Mind

by Robert Macfarlane

  My Limbs were all in a tremble – I lay upon my Back to rest myself, and was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, and the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight – and blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason and the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us!

  O God, I exclaimed aloud – how calm, how blessed am I now – I know not how to proceed, how to return, but I am calm and fearless and confident – if this Reality were a dream, if I were asleep, what agonies had I suffered! What screams! When the Reason and the Will are away, what remain to us but Darkness and Dimness and a bewildering Shame and Pain that is utterly Lord over us, or fantastic Pleasure, that draws the soul along swimming through the air in many shapes, even as a Flight of Starlings in a Wind.

  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:

  but this I know and find, practically, that if you come to a dangerous place, and turn back from it, though it may have been perfectly right and wise to do so, still your character has suffered some slight deterioration; you are to that extent weaker, more lifeless, more effeminate, more liable to passion and error in future; whereas if you go through with the danger, though it may have been apparently rash and foolish to encounter it, you come out of the encounter a stronger and a better man, fitter for every sort of work and trial, and nothing but danger produces this effect.

  Ruskin’s equation of effeminacy with lifelessness, weakness and error is a sour reminder of how tightly braided ideas of bravery were with ideas of masculinity at that time. But his point is also distinctively Victorian in its belief that overcoming a danger made one ‘a better’ person. Nietzsche, a more famous metaphysician of fear than Ruskin, would later put it more punchily: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Risk-taking – scaring yourself – was, provided you survived, a potent means of self-improvement. And self-improvement was to the later Victorians, especially to the mountain-going middle classes, a powerfully attractive ideal. In 1859 Samuel Smiles published his instant classic, Self-help. Smiles’s message was simple and, on the face of it, democratic. With ambition and with effort, anything could be achieved by anyone. ‘Great men … have belonged to no exclusive class or rank in life,’ he declared in his introduction. ‘The poorest have sometimes taken the highest places, nor have difficulties apparently the most insuperable proved obstacles in their way.’

  One of the fundamentals of Smiles’s creed was that difficulty brought out the best in a person. ‘It is not ease, but effort – not facility, but difficulty, that makes men,’ he wrote. ‘Sweet indeed are the uses of adversity … They reveal to us our powers, and call forth our energies … Without the necessity of encountering difficulty, life might be easier, but men would be worth less.’ From here it was an easy step to the idea of deliberate self-testing: that one ought to seek out difficulty in order to maximize self-improvement. The line of least resistance always led downwards, according to Smiles. Those who took on and surmounted difficulties, by contrast, ended up bettering themselves.

  Casting around for a metaphor with which to hammer home his idea, Smiles settled, tellingly, on mountain-climbing. ‘Wherever there is difficulty, the individual man must come out for better for worse,’ he wrote. ‘Encounter with it will train his strength, and discipline his skill; heartening him for future effort … The road to success may be steep to climb, and it puts to the proof the energies of him who would reach the summit.’ Smiles’s doctrine of self-improvement through difficulty was admirably classless in its aims – anyone can be anyone – but it was assimilated most thoroughly by the Victorian bourgeoisie, many
of whom put it to the test in the hazardous arena of the mountains.

  As the thriving Empire brought with it greater domestic stability, prosperity and comfort, Victoria’s burghers became increasingly fond of risk-taking. The middle classes needed a danger valve, as it were – somewhere they could let off the steam which built up through cosseted urban living – and the Alps were just the place, for there everyone could find their own levels of risk. ‘The danger on the glaciers is more imaginary than real,’ reassured the Baedeker guide to Switzerland in its ‘Glaciers’ section. Quite so: for most visitors that was just the point: one could imagine all manner of dreadful events taking place on the Alpine glaciers, and on the mountains through which they so gradually flowed – but it didn’t happen often. The fact that people were killed now and again was inspiring for those who weren’t, because it kept the possibility of death at least in sight, and that was essential to the mountain experience.

  A measure of the mid-Victorian enthusiasm for vertigo can be taken from the success of Albert Smith, the rambunctious satirist and entrepreneur who from 1853 occupied the cavernous Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly with his show, ‘The Ascent of Mont Blanc’. Smith, a sedentary man by inclination, had himself succeeded in climbing the mountain in August 1851, abetted by a battalion of guides and an intemperate amount of alcohol (Smith’s liquid provisions for the expedition were: sixty bottles of vin ordinaire, six bottles of Bordeaux, ten bottles of St George, fifteen bottles of St Jean, three bottles of cognac, and two bottles of champagne). He broadcast his success across London on his return, and in March 1853 opened his show-hall account of the ascent to the public, replete with pretty female ushers in dirndls, a cut-out Swiss chalet (never mind that Mont Blanc was in France), dioramas of the mountain which were furled across the back of the stage, a shaggy St Bernard and – a final touch of Alpine verisimilitude – a brace of chamois that skittered about on the parquetry and shat at inconvenient times during the performance. A pit orchestra played the ‘Chamonix Polka’ and the ‘Mont Blanc Quadrille’, while Smith recited in his resonant voice the thrilling story of his climb.

  The show was, in other words, an extravaganza of Alpine kitsch. But what it offered was a chance to experience risk vicariously. ‘You begin to ascend it obliquely,’ Smith would boom to the rapt auditorium, describing his ascent of the Mur de la Côte. ‘There is nothing below but a chasm in the ice. Should the foot slip or the baton give way, there is no chance for life. You would glide like lightning from one frozen crag to another, and finally be dashed to pieces hundreds of feet below in the horrible depths of the glacier.’ ‘Oooh,’ shuddered the audience. In distinctly unprecipitous Piccadilly, they could put themselves virtually in danger, could for an hour or two be among the rocks and the steep ice of Mont Blanc and then, when the lights came on, could stand up, shrug on their coats, shiver metaphorically and leave. The thrill lay in being a spectator, not a partaker (and it is an enduring thrill: the same one which still sells the tickets for every disaster movie, every account of every catastrophe).

  The public loved Smith’s amalgam of the exotic and the awful. The show had a six-year sell-out run, and took over £30,000. ‘By his own ability and good humour,’ wrote Dickens approvingly, ‘Smith is able to thaw [Mont Blanc’s] eternal ice and snow; so that the most timid ladies may ascend it twice a day … without the smallest danger of fatigue’. In the summer of 1855 Britain was, according to The Times, gripped with ‘Mont Blanc mania’. More and more tourists were travelling to the Alps to see the superlative summit of Mont Blanc; more and more, too, were trying to scale it.

  While 1850 was the noon of the nineteenth century, 1859 was its hinge. Smiles’s influential book appeared, and so too did Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. One of Darwin’s most appealing and versatile ideas was the survival of the fittest (a phrase which didn’t in fact appear in The Origin of Species, but was coined by Darwin’s contemporary, the philosopher Herbert Spencer), and it was this premise which from the 1860s onwards put a new edge on the notion of risk-taking as test. For the mountains provided a laboratory in which an accelerated version of natural selection took place, and could be seen at work. What was simultaneously awful and enthralling about the mountains was how serious even the tiniest error of judgement could be. A slip that might turn an ankle in a city street could in the mountains plunge one fatally into a crevasse or over an edge. Not turning back at the right time didn’t mean being late for dinner; it meant being benighted and freezing to death. On the loss of a glove, a day could pivot from beauty to catastrophe.

  Everything was thrillingly amplified in the mountains: there the selective pressures were ubiquitous and much more immediate in their consequences. Being in the mountains was thus a powerful clarification of one’s abilities and of one’s fitness. And the weakest – well, the weakest went to the wall. ‘The law of survival of the fittest,’ growled Alfred Mummery approvingly of solo climbing in 1892, ‘has full and ample chance of eliminating him should he be, in any way, a careless or incapable mountaineer.’ The same survivalist values were being entrenched in America, especially in Alaska, where saloon-bars filled with gold-diggers and woodsmen provided fertile breeding grounds for a pungently masculine Darwinism. The bard of the Alaskan gold-rush, Robert Service, wrote an uncompromising little ditty on exactly this theme: ‘This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive; / That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive.’ The American West and its attendant frontier myths have ever since been extremely masculine: knights doing battle on the freeway in their armoured trucks, classical body worship, and the howling wilderness.

  What qualities was the successful mountaineer or explorer proven to possess? Manliness, one might answer straight away – that very Victorian concept which would morph in the twentieth century into machismo. Climbing a mountain provided a confirmation of one’s strength, an affidavit of pluck and potency, an assurance of resourcefulness, self-sustenance and manhood. When John Tyndall recollected his first ascent of the Weisshorn he did so in terms of a virginity being taken. ‘I pressed the very highest snowflake of the mountain,’ he wrote, ‘and the prestige of the Weisshorn was forever gone.’ H. B. George, discussing mountain travel at the turn of the nineteenth century, claimed it was the urge ‘to explore the earth and to subdue it’ which ‘has made England the great colonizer of the world, and has led individual Englishmen to penetrate the wildest recesses of every continent’.

  Patriotism, too, was involved. ‘The authentic Englishman,’ declared Leslie Stephen, ‘is one whose delight is to wander all day amongst rocks and snow; and to come as near breaking his neck as his conscience will allow.’* Perhaps the most prized quality which was made visible by the landscape, however, was the combination of resilience and reticence which we now call grit. Grit was the ability to put one foot in front of the other for as long as necessary. To tread ceaselessly in the prints of the man in front. To know when to take the lead yourself and to be sufficient to that moment. And above all, not to complain. To play up, in other words, and to play the game. Tennyson, as so often, had a line for it in his poem ‘Ulysses’: ‘ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’. Grit was ingrained in the imperial generations of Britain from an early age – the boarding-school system churned out generation after generation of boys allegedly full of the stuff – and it was considered to be the moral substance which underpinned Britain’s martial success, its zeal for exploration and its Empire-building: its prolific pinking of the map.

  It was also grit which the mountains demanded of those who went among them. In 1843 James Forbes described an Alpine journey as ‘perhaps the nearest approach to a military campaign with which the ordinary citizen has a chance of meeting’. Drained of energy as he climbed the final snow ramps of the Weisshorn, Tyndall kept himself going by remembering the traits which had made Englishmen famous in battle: ‘It was mainly the quality of not knowing when to yield, of fighting for duty even a
fter they had ceased to be animated by hope.’ Leslie Stephen preferred to think of himself as a polar explorer. ‘Struggling in the winter towards a hut,’ he wrote, ‘one is but playing at danger, but for the moment one can sympathize with the Arctic adventurer pushing towards the pole, and feeling that the ship which he has left behind is the sole basis of his operations.’ The icescapes and rock faces of the mountains were in many ways so featureless, so entirely lacking in human specifics, that they were the perfect site for reimagining oneself at will, whether into a soldier battling on in the face of death, or an imperturbable and dauntless explorer.

  For many nineteenth-century mountaineers, then, being among the mountains was little more than a role-playing game. The mountains provided a mythic kingdom, an alternative world in which you could reinvent yourself as whoever you wanted. They were a ‘playground’ – as Stephen christened the European Alps – in which grown men could play at danger: an arena of recreation, but also one of self re-creation. Nevertheless, it didn’t matter how you imagined yourself or the mountains: the landscape could still kill you.

  I once went for almost a year without mountains. Stuck on the tablelands of Cambridgeshire, working without prospect of a break, I lusted after verticality. The only relief was the dark church towers which punctuated the horizon, and the white spires of the colleges, pirouetting away into thin air. One day in late January I cracked and caught a bus to Euston, where a friend and I boarded the sleeper to the Highlands.

  We woke to find the train hustling and clanking its way through an icy glen. Snow rested in deep cross-sections to either side of the track; a white jacket unzipped by the snow-plough. The glen curved round ahead of the train, and when I leaned out of a corridor window, the wind cold on my face, I could see the rails carrying the sunlight off into the distance in two bright, converging tightropes.