also capable of producing pleasure, because ‘terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close’. By the late eighteenth century, the emerging urban professional classes in Britain felt sufficiently in control of their own lives and of the environment to make ‘terror that does not press too close’ a desirable experience, and mountain travel met this new need.
Burke also identified solitude as a sublime experience: ‘Temporary solitude...is itself agreeable...[But] an entire life of solitude contradicts the purposes of our being...[D]eath itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.’10 Many early visitors to the mountains identified solitude as one of the most appealing features of the landscapes they sought out – a reaction to their increasingly overcrowded lives in the cities – and access to open spaces came to be seen as a symbol of human freedom. In 1848 John Stuart Mill wrote that ‘solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without’.11
In 1769, 30 years after his journey through the Alps with Horace Walpole, Thomas Gray wrote his Journal of the Lakes, an account that established the Lake District as the definitively sublime English landscape of ‘turbulent chaos’ and ‘shining purity’. By the 1780s, visitors were pouring into the Lake District and Snowdonia, and the more adventurous began to visit Switzerland and Savoy. Most early visitors, like many tourists today, did not stray far from the roads and were content to admire the views from the valley, but in 1792 Joseph Budworth, a retired army captain who had lost his arm at the siege of Gibraltar, walked some 385km/240 miles through the Lake District, hiring local guides to take him into the high fells. The account of his travels encouraged the development of fell walking as a respectable and fashionable pastime that combined an aesthetic appreciation of the landscape with a distinctly sporting attitude to movement through the mountains. In Britain, an activity may be said to have entered the cultural mainstream when it becomes the object of popular humour. A tour of the Lakes achieved this status in 1811 when it was satirised in William Combe’s illustrated poem The Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of the Picturesque.12
In Scotland the original rationale for mountain exploration was primarily military, to extend the network of roads, bridges and forts set up by General Wade after the first Jacobite uprising in 1715, and used to subdue the second in 1745. Captain Birt, a surveyor under Wade’s command in the 1720s, used the conventional vocabulary of the time to describe the Scottish mountains as ‘monstrous excrescences...rude and offensive to the sight...their huge naked rocks producing the disagreeable appearance of a scabbed head...a dismal gloomy brown drawing upon a dirty purple and most of all disagreeable when the heather is in bloom’.13 As the security threat receded, the country gradually opened up to more peaceful travel, but perceptions of the landscape were slow to change. In 1773, the committed urbanite Dr Johnson undertook a tour of Scotland during which he observed of the Highlands that ‘an eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility...[T]his uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller.’14 Over the ensuing decades, painters and writers depicting a romantic landscape of shining lochs, gnarled Caledonian pines, craggy mountains and regal stags transformed this uniformity of barrenness into highly desirable real estate for the leisured classes. Today, one of General Wade’s military roads forms part of the West Highland Way, along which dozens of travellers may be seen each day trudging through the peat and rain, presumably in the hope and expectation that it will afford some amusement.
The fresh appeal of the mountains was publicised in pictures, plays, poems and novels. Englishmen purchased paintings by Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and their many eighteenth-century followers, copiers and imitators,15 and there was a flourishing trade in prints. By the nineteenth century, landscape painting, which was virtually unknown before the seventeenth century, had become the dominant art form, and for many urban visitors to the country the appeal of the landscape lay in its similarity to the pictures they had been taught to admire, hence the expression ‘picturesque’. Turner visited the Alps in 1802, producing his Alpine Sketchbook which was later championed by Ruskin in his paean to ‘mountain gloom and mountain glory’16 and helped to define the idea of mountain beauty in the mid-nineteenth century. Like other landscape painters, Turner also sought to capture the moral dimension of the mountains as ‘chastisers of human vanity and hubris’:17 it was no coincidence that he painted Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps in 1812, the year of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.
The English Romantic poets were also energetic propagandists for the new natural aesthetic. For a time Coleridge and Wordsworth lived some 13 miles apart in the Lake District, in Keswick and Grasmere respectively. Both were prodigious walkers and regularly set out on foot to visit each other, returning the same day. Both of them also went climbing, Wordsworth as a schoolboy in search of birds’ eggs, Coleridge in search of sensation. Coleridge’s description of descending Broad Stand on Scafell in the Lake District in 1802 is the first literary account of an adrenaline-rush brought about by rock climbing:18 ‘Every Drop increased the Palsy of my Limbs’, he wrote of his descent, and when he reached the safety of Mickledore he ‘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!’ In his account, the landscape was merely the backdrop against which he experienced a personal drama of risk and fear.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the idea that mountains are beautiful and worthy of exploration for their aesthetic appeal was revolutionary. By the mid-nineteenth century the idea was commonplace amongst the urban professional classes, but it was still a concept that would have been incomprehensible to the majority of the population at that time, as they struggled to make a living. Leslie Stephen, an early pioneer of alpine climbing, was taken aback when a visiting Swiss guide found the rooftops and chimneys of London far finer than the view from Mont Blanc. Likewise, Cecil Slingsby, the Yorkshire-born ‘father of Norwegian mountaineering’, once told his guide that he thought the view of the fjord and mountains from his house was very fine. The guide shook his head philosophically: ‘Not so fertile,’ he replied.19 To the people who actually lived and worked in the mountains, the romantic ideal was absurd. Amateur mountaineering (as opposed to professional guiding) was overwhelmingly an activity undertaken by rich, well-educated men, and later women, who lived in the towns and cities of the plains, and the appeal of the mountains lay, in large part, in their contrast to a comfortable life in town. Even Wordsworth conceded that ‘cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions’.20
AESTHETES AND HEROES
Relief from the day-to-day toil of earning a living from the land also enabled the emerging urban middle classes to entertain thoughts of personal liberty and self-fulfilment. Both were an essential part of the Romantic movement. Romantic heroes are vigorous and passionate individualists, with little regard for the social consequences of their actions; love, hate, resentment and jealousy, martial ardour and contempt for cowards are all admired. They are frequently selfish, solitary, violent, anti-social and anarchic.21 Some climbers clearly conform to this aspect of the romantic tradition, even if they may appear to lack any aesthetic appreciation. Many more are attracted by the mildly anarchic self-image of the sport, and even the most law-abiding climbers appear to take some vicarious pride in the antics of the wilder members of the climbing community. As climbing has developed in Britain over the past 200 years, these twin aspects of the Romantic movement – the aesthetic and the heroic – have developed side by side, sometimes complementary, sometimes in conflict. Aesthetes emphasise the beauty and spiritual appeal of the mountains and man’s emotional response to the landscape. The heroic school is more concerned with personal courage and the pursuit of freedom and self-fulfilment. While the aesthetic school is contemplative, the heroic is competitive. The aesthete seeks harmony with nature; the hero seeks to conquer nature. For the vast majority of climbers today and throughout history, the pleasures of mountaineering combine both elements, and the balance between the two often shifts with increasing years: the
