VI
As stated in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory
(p. 345): “If the 'Mountain Glory' did not shine full
splendor in the earlier eighteenth century, the 'Moun-
tain Gloom' was gone. We find nothing to parallel
Marvell's 'unjust' and 'hook-shouldered' mountains that
deform earth, nothing (except conventional hymns) of
the early Christian strain of abasing the hills in order
to exalt the valleys. Mountains had ceased to be mon-
strosities and had become an integral part of varied
and diversified Nature.” Even in a poem like Richard
Blackmore's Creation (1713), basically intended as a
reply to Lucretius, the author went further than the
old utilitarian argument, showing himself aware of the
growing interest in geology by introducing passages
on the stratification of the earth, the part played by
mountains in production of minerals and gems, and the
relationship of mountains to the origins of rivers and
springs.
The extent to which consciousness of geological
theories of mountains developed among laymen may
be seen in James Thomson's Seasons (1744), individual
parts of which began to appear from 1726 to 1730.
Thompson had an important prerequisite for his inter-
est in mountains—he was a Scot. As he wrote of the
Laplanders, many Scots
... ask no more than simple Nature gives;
They love their mountains, and enjoy their storms.
When he made the Grand Tour, he felt little of the
alarm and distaste of many earlier travellers among
the Alps. In
Liberty (1734-36), he described the moun-
tains as they appeared to him in a passage beginning:
... their shaggy mountains charm
More than or Gallic or Italian plains;
And sickening fancy oft, when absent long,
Pines to behold their Alpine views again.
Alan Dugald McKillop has studied various of Thom-
son's mountain-passages in
The Background of
Thomson's Seasons, particularly in Chapter II, “De-
scription and Science.” He has analyzed in detail an
extended mountain-passage in “Autumn” (lines 700-30)
as it developed from the quarto edition of 1730 to the
complete
Seasons, fourteen years later. Turning from
one scientific authority to another, Thomson considered
in turn theories of “attraction,” “distillation,” “perco-
lation” in relation to the development of mountains.
The passage becomes more and more technical as the
author proceeds, showing his interest in geological
theories which frequently threaten the poetic emphasis
of the original passage. But while overemphasis on
scientific verisimilitude mars the effect of some partic-
ular passages, there is no question that James Thomson
was the finest English mountain-poet before William
Wordsworth.
Every reader of “Tintern Abbey” or The Prelude is
aware that in youth Wordsworth had vacillated be-
tween fear and exaltation so far as grand Nature was
concerned. Terror was often in the ascendency as he
remembered himself “more like a man flying from
something that he dreads than one who sought the
thing he loved.”
While yet a child, and long before his time,
Had he perceived the presence of the power
Of greatness; and deep feelings had impressed
So vividly great objects that they lay
Upon his soul like substances
(
The Excursion, I, 132-38).
“In the mountains did he
feel his faith.” Surrounded
by lesser English hills, Wordsworth felt “a sense of
stability and permanence,” but among the Alps he was
always conscious of “the fury of the gigantic torrents,”
and their “almost irresistible violence,” “Havoc, and
ruin, and desolation.” Among the snow-capped Alps,
it was almost impossible to escape from the “depressing
sensation” that the whole was in a rapid process of
dissolution. The savagery of the terror of Nature echoes
through his early acquaintance with Alpine mountains,
“winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,”
“rocks that muttered close upon our ears,” “black
drizzling crags,” “the sick sight and giddy prospect of
the raging storm,” “huge fragments of primeval moun-
tain spread/ In powerless ruin.” But this is not
Wordsworth's mature conclusion of the power of
mountains upon human imagination. To comprehend
that, we must include with “Mountain-Attitudes” the
sense of “The Sublime in Natural Scenery” that
accompanied the human discovery of the vast in exter-
nal Nature.
