all this produc’d different motions in me, viz., a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled.
Against all his expectations, Dennis discovered that walking ‘upon the very brink’ – just one stumble away from violent death – brought him an odd pleasure. No vocabulary exists to describe what he experienced, so Dennis has to invent one using the artificial logic of the oxymoron. He has to resort to paradox – to allow each ‘motion’ its equal and opposite emotion, and say that he felt ‘a delightful Horrour’ and ‘a terrible Joy’.
We see here one of the earliest modern memoirs of pleasurable fear in the mountains. It is an account which, looking backwards from our age of adrenaline, appears quaint. John Dennis may not have been the first man to discover the congenial aspects to vertigo, but it was him and people like him, returning from the largely unknown world of high mountains with new experiences to tell of, who laid the foundations of future responses to mountains: to height and to fear. Dennis’s glimpse that there was pleasure to be had from vertigo would, over the course of 300 years, blossom and amplify into our era’s headlong pursuit of danger – people flinging themselves offcranes attached to rubber-bands, off mountainsides attached to ropes, and out of planes attached to nothing at all.
Around the middle of the eighteenth century something happened which would both diffuse and formalize Dennis’s understanding that there was a pleasure to be found in fear. An intellectual doctrine was proposed which revolutionized both the perception of wild landscapes and contemporary attitudes to fear. It is a doctrine which continues silently to dominate both our imaginative relationship with wilderness and our conceptions of bravery and fear. That influential doctrine was known as the Sublime (a word which means ‘lofty’ or ‘elevated’), and it delighted in chaos, intensity, cataclysm, great size, irregularity – the aesthetic antipodes, in other words, of the preceding age’s neo-classicism. Out of its tumult emerged a fierce, and for a time peculiarly British, affection for wild landscape of all types: oceans, ice-caps, forests, deserts and, above all, mountains.
In 1757 a young Irishman with a bright future published a short work with a long title.
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
, by Edmund Burke (1729–97), tried to account for the passions evoked in the human mind by what Burke called ‘terrible objects’. Burke was interested in our psychic response to things – a rushing cataract, say, a dark vault or a cliff-face – that seized, terrified and yet also somehow pleased the mind by dint of being too big, too high, too fast, too obscured, too powerful, too
something
, to be properly comprehended. These were sublime sights – hectic, intimidating, uncontrollable – and they inspired in the observer, said Burke, a heady blend of pleasure and terror. Beauty, by contrast, was inspired by the visually regular, the proportioned, the predictable. So, for example, an Attic sculpture was beautiful, orthe balanced grace of the Parthenon, whereas an avalanche or a flooding river was sublime. In Burke’s physiological terms, beauty had a relaxing effect on the ‘fibres’ of the body, whereas sublimity tightened these ‘fibres’. ‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger,’ he wrote:
that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the
sublime
; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
At the core of Burke’s thesis was the proposal that these sublime sights caused terror, and terror was a passion which, he wrote, ‘always produces delight when it does not press too close’ (Burke was right in
Against all his expectations, Dennis discovered that walking ‘upon the very brink’ – just one stumble away from violent death – brought him an odd pleasure. No vocabulary exists to describe what he experienced, so Dennis has to invent one using the artificial logic of the oxymoron. He has to resort to paradox – to allow each ‘motion’ its equal and opposite emotion, and say that he felt ‘a delightful Horrour’ and ‘a terrible Joy’.
We see here one of the earliest modern memoirs of pleasurable fear in the mountains. It is an account which, looking backwards from our age of adrenaline, appears quaint. John Dennis may not have been the first man to discover the congenial aspects to vertigo, but it was him and people like him, returning from the largely unknown world of high mountains with new experiences to tell of, who laid the foundations of future responses to mountains: to height and to fear. Dennis’s glimpse that there was pleasure to be had from vertigo would, over the course of 300 years, blossom and amplify into our era’s headlong pursuit of danger – people flinging themselves offcranes attached to rubber-bands, off mountainsides attached to ropes, and out of planes attached to nothing at all.
Around the middle of the eighteenth century something happened which would both diffuse and formalize Dennis’s understanding that there was a pleasure to be found in fear. An intellectual doctrine was proposed which revolutionized both the perception of wild landscapes and contemporary attitudes to fear. It is a doctrine which continues silently to dominate both our imaginative relationship with wilderness and our conceptions of bravery and fear. That influential doctrine was known as the Sublime (a word which means ‘lofty’ or ‘elevated’), and it delighted in chaos, intensity, cataclysm, great size, irregularity – the aesthetic antipodes, in other words, of the preceding age’s neo-classicism. Out of its tumult emerged a fierce, and for a time peculiarly British, affection for wild landscape of all types: oceans, ice-caps, forests, deserts and, above all, mountains.
In 1757 a young Irishman with a bright future published a short work with a long title.
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
, by Edmund Burke (1729–97), tried to account for the passions evoked in the human mind by what Burke called ‘terrible objects’. Burke was interested in our psychic response to things – a rushing cataract, say, a dark vault or a cliff-face – that seized, terrified and yet also somehow pleased the mind by dint of being too big, too high, too fast, too obscured, too powerful, too
something
, to be properly comprehended. These were sublime sights – hectic, intimidating, uncontrollable – and they inspired in the observer, said Burke, a heady blend of pleasure and terror. Beauty, by contrast, was inspired by the visually regular, the proportioned, the predictable. So, for example, an Attic sculpture was beautiful, orthe balanced grace of the Parthenon, whereas an avalanche or a flooding river was sublime. In Burke’s physiological terms, beauty had a relaxing effect on the ‘fibres’ of the body, whereas sublimity tightened these ‘fibres’. ‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger,’ he wrote:
that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the
sublime
; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
At the core of Burke’s thesis was the proposal that these sublime sights caused terror, and terror was a passion which, he wrote, ‘always produces delight when it does not press too close’ (Burke was right in
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