British Romanticism in European Perspective

Into the Eurozone

Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137461964
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What, and when, is British Romanticism, if seen not in island isolation but cosmopolitan integration with European Romantic literature, history and culture? The essays here range from poetry and the novel to science writing, philosophy, visual art, opera and melodrama; from France and Germany to Italy and Bosnia.

1

The Genealogy of the Scientific Sublime: Glaciers, Mountains and the Alternating Modes of Representation

Kaz Oishi

The language of the ‘scientific sublime’

On 19 June 1741, a group of young British travellers set out for what was to be an epoch-making expedition to the glaciers of Chamonix. The party consisted of William Windham, his tutor Edward Stillingfleet, Robert Price, Thomas Hamilton, Seventh Earl of Hadinton, and four other men. This was part of their Grand Tour, but they intended to make a serious scientific investigation into the glaciers.¹ The glaciers of Bern had already been studied by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer in his Itinera alpina tria, published in London in 1708 with a dedication to the Royal Society. But no investigation had yet been made into the Mer de Glace at Chamonix. In An Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy (1744), Windham recorded how he was driven by strong ‘curiosity’ to conduct an arduous five-hour journey to the glaciers whose ‘Beauty and Variety’ would provide rich subjects for skilful paintings and ‘lively and poetical’ imagination (1). On the top of the Montenvers, about 7,000 feet high, he embraced the mixed feelings of ‘terror’ and ‘pleasure’ inspired by the ‘extraordinary’ view:

We had an uninterrupted View quite to the Bottom of the Mountain, and the Steepness of the Descent, join’d to the Height where we were, made a View terrible enough to make most People’s Heads turn. In short, after climbing with great Labour for four Hours and three Quarters, we got to the Top of the Mountain; from whence we had the Pleasure of beholding Objects of an extraordinary Nature. We were on the Top of a Mountain, which, as well as we could judge, was at least twice as high as mount Salve, from thence we had a full View of the Glacieres. I own to you that I am extremely at a Loss how to give a right Idea of it; as I know no one thing which I have ever seen that has the least Resemblance to it. (Windham 7–8)

Although Windham begins in an impersonal tone, he soon slips into the subjective, anti-mimetic expression, ‘I am extremely at a Loss how to give a right Idea of it’, to emphasize height, steepness, and the perspective infinity. The emphasis on the ineptitude of linguistic expression for a sublime view is a rhetorical cliché. A picturesque framework is evident, especially when Windham transcribes the ‘Pleasure’ he derived from the aesthetic quality of the view. Furthermore, on climbing the Maule at Bonneville, he presents a ‘Picturesque Prospect’ (11) over the snow-covered mountains rising high all around in the form of an amphitheatre.

This aesthetic appreciation of the glacial spectacle, however, is immediately followed in the Account by another analytic report on the shapes and structures of the glaciers and Windham’s discovery that whole glaciers were continually moving downwards. This was confirmed by the Genevan engineer Peter Martel, who set out shortly afterwards to make observations and experiments with proper equipment. He measured the heights and temperatures of every part of the glaciers and even tried to map them out with a camera obscura. He then asserted that ‘all the Ice has a Motion from the higher Parts towards the lower’, sliding continually towards the outlets into the valley (Windham, 21). He even collected plants for botanical investigation and, furthermore, named the lofty mountain there ‘Mont Blanc’ for the first time in history (23). The short pamphlet, published at first under Martel’s name, and then under Windham’s own, promptly won the latter’s admission as a fellow to the Royal Society. Their successful expeditions to the Chamonix glaciers set up a new platform for scientific explorations in the eighteenth century. Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat were inspired to attain the summit of Mont Blanc in August 1786. Horace-Bénédict De Saussure also achieved a successful ascent to make thorough scientific observations in the following year.² All these narratives contributed to establishing their Alpine images in subsequent travel writings.

But how should we locate them in the genealogy of the sublime? Windham’s was one of the earliest scientific discourses on the Alpine glaciers, if not Mont Blanc itself. His experience and narrative style differ from those of the ‘Romantic sublime’, which Frances Ferguson defines in the Idealistic and Existential context (1–36, 55–96) or which Thomas Weiskel defines in the purely aesthetic or psychological framework (34–62, 136–64). Instead, Windham interlaces an objective and methodical narrative with sensational and even romantic moments of ecstasy at the sight of the wonderful scene. In the history of literature, the episode of Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole crossing the Alps during their 1739 Grand Tour has often been taken to epitomize the emergence of the sublime. Seventeen years later, the aesthetics of the sublime was formulated by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) and was further elaborated later by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, Lord Kames and many others as a component of ‘the picturesque’. As such, the sublime came to constitute a crucial aspect of Romantic literature. Would it be misleading, then, to position the scientific discourses on glacial mountains in the early eighteenth century as an alternative source for the Romantic images of the Alps, as we find notably in Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’? If not, would the detached, controlled language of scientific narratives pose a rhetorical and stylistic dilemma for the later, more imaginative poetics of the sublime?

The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of scientific investigations into natural phenomena and the onset of overseas expeditions all at once. Much earlier than the search for the picturesque at home, people had already travelled wide and abroad with interest in various scientific fields, such as geology, geography, climatology, cartography, oceanography, topography, anthropology and astronomy. Barbara Maria Stafford therefore emphasizes that their accounts, designed to provide factual information on natural systems, defined themselves against ‘the practices of the Picturesque’: they are fundamentally realistic and ‘less interested in the involuntary effect of experience on the individual’ (2). Whether eighteenth-century travelogues are truly devoid of picturesque language is highly questionable. In Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840, Paul Smethurst rigorously examines how the representational practices of the picturesque and Romanticism were simultaneously incorporated into the narratives of traveller-scientists, such as Cook and Humboldt. The relationship between the aesthetics of the sublime and the science of natural wonders is rather interactive and interlocked. Smethurst defines ‘the natural sublime’ (101, 154) as a hybrid product of the narrative techniques of scientific and picturesque travelogues. Cian Duffy’s study is crucial on this point. He elucidates how the eighteenth-century scientific interest in the Alps shaped the sublime images of mountains in the literature of the Romantic age. Accounts by Windham, Marc Theodore Bourrit, and De Saussure all contributed to the making of Romantic Alpine images in the writings and poems of Helen Maria Williams, Coleridge and the Shelleys. Perhaps it is true that what Duffy calls ‘the trope of ascent’ (148–9) permeates them all, but a question then arises regarding how the eighteenth-century scientific language can be united with the Romantic aesthetics of the sublime on the stylistic level. The alliance of the analytical and aesthetic languages of mountainous wonder originated back in the late seventeenth century, when Thomas Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth (1681) provoked a philosophical debate on the geological history. The mixed modes of representation were more or less widely accepted by the time Windham published his account of the Chamonix glaciers in 1744.

Investigations into the mysteries of glaciers, rocks, and mountains were part of the Enlightenment pursuit of ‘a system’ of the universe. Travel narratives on such natural wonders obsessively sought to elucidate secrets of nature, while entertaining the audience with the tales of wonder, throughout the eighteenth century and the Romantic era. In an article in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, Clifford Siskin questions the legitimacy of the Enlightenment/Romanticism periodization by pointing out that the Enlightenment preoccupation with the building of a ‘SYSTEM’ (or ‘SYSTEMS’) keeps haunting literature in the Romantic period (‘Problem’, 101–26). The language of natural wonder is self-contradictory from the very beginning: it incorporates both analytical and aesthetic qualities and alternates two different modes of representation. Its ambivalent nature continued to embellish and develop the narratives of snow-covered mountains in both travelogues and poems throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this article, I should like to examine the way in which the scientific language of the sublime was formulated through eighteenth-century exploration narratives and then how their alignment with the aesthetic mode of the sublime could comprise the basis for the Romantic images of icy mountains.

The ramifications of the language of the sublime

The taste for sublime mountains certainly emerged much earlier than the 1740s. John Dennis, on crossing the Alps during his Grand Tour in 1688, already recorded his fascination with the ‘transporting’ sense of ‘a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy’ (2:380). He was thrilled with ‘the frightful view’ of the craggy, irregular rocks piled as ‘the Ruins upon Ruins in monstrous Heaps, and Heaven and Earth confounded’ (2:381). An admirer of both Thomas Burnet and Isaac Newton, he proved to be the first critic that distinguished the idea of ‘the sublime’, as irregular, enchanting and ruinous, from ‘the beautiful’, which is based on ‘regularity, order, and beauty’ (1:202). In traversing the Apennines at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Addison was also impressed by the ‘rude Prospects of so many Rocks rising one above another’ and the deep chasms cut by the torrents of rain and snow-water’ (Remarks, 164–5). Bishop Berkeley, tramping over the Alps in 1714, highly commended ‘a pleasing horror’ at the ‘prospect of the wide and deep ocean, or some huge mountain whose top is lost in the clouds’ (159). No less eloquent was Theocles in Shaftesbury’s ‘The Moralists’, in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). Reflecting Shaftesbury’s own experience of crossing the Alps, he envisages ‘the narrow brink of the deep precipices’ which filled the traveller’s minds with ‘giddy horror’ when they look down to the bottom, surrounded by ‘the ruin of the impending rock, with falling trees which hang with their roots upwards’ (316). For Theocles, this awe-inspiring scene is an example of ‘convulsion’ in nature, which curiously suggests ‘the idea of an order and perfection’ when combined with ‘harmony’ and ‘discord’ (273). It pleases our senses because we pursue ‘the love of wondering’ and ‘we seek something new to wonder at’ (290).

But Theocles does not remain absorbed in the rhapsodic appraisal of the ‘wonderful’. He begins to observe a history of the earth. The rapture at magnificent spectacles seamlessly gives way to a philosopher’s observation on geological transformations:

Here thoughtless men, seized with the newness of such objects, become thoughtful and willingly contemplate the incessant changes of this earth’s surface. They see, as in one instant, the revolutions of past ages, the fleeting forms of things, and the decay even of this our globe, whose youth and first formation they consider, whilst the apparent spoil and irreparable breaches of the wasted mountain show them the world itself only as noble ruin, and make them think of its approaching period. (316)

Wonder at an uncommon object invokes even unthinking people to meditate on the constant process of ‘Revolutions’ through which the earth’s surface has been reshaped with ruins and decays. Theocles here deliberately moderates his enthusiasm and regulates the Longinian language of transport and elevation. The transition from wonder to contemplation and analysis is identical with the one registered in Windham’s Account. This, in fact, has been a clichéd response to the marvellous since the classical era. In the opening passage of Metaphysics, Aristotle points out that man’s inherent desire to know is indicated by sensorial perceptions, in particular sight, which serve as an impetus (1:114). He also claims in On Rhetoric that the desire to know the new and the wonderful is connected with aesthetic pleasure, a pleasure drawn from ‘a work of imitation, as in painting and sculpture and poetry’ (91). Matthew Scott, in his study of the aesthetics of wonder, discerningly argues that wonder as thus connected to mimesis provides a tension between the ‘affective’ mode and the ‘cognitive’ mode in representation (54). The dilemma regarding how to render intelligibly the aesthetic response to a curious and sensational object continues to haunt various kinds of literature from the seventeenth century up to the Romantic era.³ The Royal Society, for instance, desisted from the ‘extravagant’ mode in favour of the rational mode of representation, a ‘naked, natural’, and ‘clear’ style close to ‘the Mathematical plainness’ as Thomas Sprat called it (113). Joseph Addison, in an article of The Spectator on 24 June 1712, on the other hand, celebrates the pleasure annexed to a ‘new or uncommon’ idea, to ‘the Pursuit after Knowledge’, and to the ‘search into the Wonders of [God’s] creation’, and yet he strictly distinguishes the scientific examination of the world from more enhancing imaginative visions (3:545). Nevertheless, the two modes of representation are reconcilable: they are often interconnected in the same discourse. The writings of Shaftesbury and Windham both demonstrate how smoothly the affective representation slides into the cognitive representation of the sublime. For Adam Smith, wonder at the novelty of nature excites both human body and imagination, but only leads naturally to cognitive reflection and philosophical inquiry, which restores a sense of physical balance (55–6). The aesthetic pleasure of wonder inspires the desire to know the extraordinary and thus prepares the way for philosophic and analytical contemplation.

One obvious source for all these affective-cognitive representations of the geological sublime is Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s classic study exhaustively demonstrates, Burnet’s discourse marked the turning point in history at which wilderness and mountain scenery began to be appreciated in the emerging aesthetic framework, even though his theory was initially conceived to offer a rational and theological account of the ill-shaped and irregular earth. Burnet describes how a violent and perpetual process of fluctuations disrupted, dissolved and ruined the old world after Noah’s deluge and thus created ‘Subterraneous Cavities and Subterraneous Waters; and lastly, Mountains and Rocks’, which are ‘the wonder of the Earth’ (93). After he made a distinction between orators, who represent nature with ‘graces and ornaments’, and philosophers, who view her ‘with a more impartial eye’, he begins to contemplate the infinite presence of God lying behind natural wonders (90). ‘The greatest objects of Nature’, such as the boundless heaven, the wide sea, and mountains, are ‘the most pleasing to behold’, and their majesty ‘inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions’ (109). We then ‘naturally … think of God and his greatness’, because whatever possesses ‘the shadow and appearance of INFINITE’ fills the human mind with its excessiveness and transports it into ‘a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration’ (109–10). Burnet seeks to comprehend and render intelligibly the infinite, undefinable presence of the Creator and the Created.

Certainly Burnet’s manner of representation often becomes more visionary than rational or mimetic, heavily drawing on the biblical, not empirical, evidence to the process of geological configuration. It was this Longinian language of the sublime and the poetics of the infinite that exerted so much influence upon later generations in their views on mountains and the earth, including John Dennis, Shaftesbury, Addison and Coleridge, while it provoked attacks from both natural philosophers and theologians (Nicolson 184–323).⁴ It is noteworthy, however, that Burnet distinguishes the two kinds of ‘pleasure’ derived from the sight of the wonderful:

There is a double pleasure in Philosophy, first that of Admiration, whilst we contemplate things that are great and wonderful, and do not yet understand their Causes; for though admiration proceed from ignorance, yet there is a certain charm and sweetness in that passion. Then the second pleasure is greater and more intellectual, which is that of distinct knowledge and comprehension, when we come to have the Key that unlocks those secrets, and see the methods wherein those things come to pass that we admir’d before. (113...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction: Into the Eurozone: European Dimensions of British Romanticism, Then and Now
• 1 The Genealogy of the Scientific Sublime: Glaciers, Mountains and the Alternating Modes of Representation
• 2 ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Origins of European Romanticism in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics and Rousseau’s Reveries
• 3 Cross-channel Discourses of Sensibility: Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote
• 4 ‘Amphibious Grown’: Hester Thrale, Della Crusca and the Italian Origins of British Romanticism
• 5 L’Exception Anglaise: Joseph Priestley Abroad and Romantic Poetics
• 6 ‘Mistaken for Natives of the Soil’: Translation and Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants
• 7 Family, Marriage and the State in Romanticism’s Other Genres
• 8 ‘What means this wild, this allegorick Mask?’: British Anticipations of Romantic Opera c. 1740
• 9 Blake and the European (Pre)History of Melodrama: Beyond the Borders of Time and Stage
• 10 From the English to the French Revolution: The Body, the World and Experience in Locke’s Essay, Bentley’s ‘A Prospect of Vapourland’ and Blake’s Songs
• 11 ‘Some roads unfold before us / Without a beaten track’: Unearthing Bosnia’s Romantic Spirit through the Hasanaginica and Mak Dizdar’s Stone Sleeper
• Bibliography
• Index