The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond(3)
When one turns from the murdered Sisi to look southward over the waters, the true drama of Geneva’s location becomes evident. This city on its lovely lake has an operatic hinterland. Here we are not faced with a hilltop castle or a medieval nunnery, as in many places in Europe. Rather, on the far shore from Geneva, in France, rise the Alps, or technically the pre-Alps, in a wall of foothills. They drop to the water as dark green cliffs, seemingly unrelieved by any softening gap or declivity. It appears preposterous that civilized Geneva should share a lake with these untamed heights. Yet were that all that one saw when looking across the waves, the vista would remain striking, but not unforgettable. But as the names of the streets surrounding Sisi make clear, the cliffs opposite presage another presence.
Beyond the green wall, lurking like a permanent cumulus congestus thunderhead, visible even on this haziest of days, stand the summits of the Mont Blanc range, their eternal alabaster mantle of snow rising in superb mockery of the steambath suffered by the humans of Geneva on this day. The mountains are white, but not innocent, and there is no way not to see them. To look south from Geneva is to behold a horizon of might and majesty. The mountains—indifferent, superior—seem to block out the sky. Small wonder that they have captured imaginations for centuries.
MOUNTAINS WERE FEARED. Dragons and ogres prowled their summits. They rudely got in the way of travel to important places, like Rome. They were God’s punishment for man’s sinfulness. They were useless. With their avalanches, landslides, and crashing boulders, they were killers. One should climb only as far as the high pastures; almost certain death lay farther up. Mountains were grotesque; the people who lived in their midst were inbred imbeciles, les crétins des Alpes, as the French phrase has it. As such, they were suited to their awful habitat. “[T]hese distorted mindless beings,” wrote an English traveler in the Alps, “commonly excite one’s disgust by their hideous, loathsome, and uncouth appearance, by their obscene gestures, and by their senseless gabbling.”
As for mountainous scenery, the tradition of excoriation is just as withering. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s appraisal of the Alps in the 1780s can stand in for dozens of similar denunciations. For Goethe, “These zig-zags and irritating silhouettes and shapeless piles of granite, making the fairest portion of the earth a polar region, cannot be liked by any kindly man.” As with so many present-day Germans careering southward at the wheel of a Mercedes, the great man wanted nothing more than to get the mountains behind him and luxuriate in the embrace of Italy.
At about the same time that Goethe was dismissing the mountains, another view of them was coming to the fore. Yes, the view is terrifying, went the novel argument, but that is what makes it beautiful, not ugly. Two hundred years ago, a shift in sensibility took hold and became entrenched in our psyche, so much so that lovers in our day beholding Mont Blanc are more likely to give their squeeze a squeeze. They don’t turn away from the vista; they wallow in it, savor it, get turned on by it.
This aesthetic change occurred gradually. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more and more scions of rich aristocratic families, accompanied by a scholarly tour guide known as a cicerone, embarked on the cultural and carnal excursion that came to be called the Grand Tour. Most numerous among these travelers were the British, who took passage at Dover, debarked at Ostend, then proceeded to Paris and Geneva. Their carriages were disassembled at the foot of the Alps, hauled across the Great St. Bernard Pass, then put back together for a journey through the artistic motherlode of Italy: Turin, Florence, then Rome, with multiple side trips, depending on whether the traveler wanted to spend years, rather than months, abroad. Homeward, some would take in the great cities of northern Europe, before ending their tour admiring the collections in the palaces and townhouses of Flanders.
The Grand Tour was a rite of passage, an itinerant finishing school, an occasion to sow wild oats and meet the high-born ladies of Europe, a post-Oxbridge graduate course in civilization and a months-long occasion to polish one’s French, then the language of choice among the polite society of Europe. It was only a matter of time before these travelers began to take note of the great anomaly of their journey: the untrammeled, inhuman Alps. As the porters of these young aristocrats grunted under the load of their chaises, hauling them up and over the treacherous mountain passes that would eventually lead to the sunny plains of Lombardy, out came the sketch pads. The vistas were unearthly, uncanny, so at odds with the formal gardens adorning their home estates. Why such chaos? How could God have created it? The Enlightment, then stretching human horizons, had begun touching such young men, or at least those who took their education seriously.
Already in the 1680s, an English cleric named Thomas Burnet had posited that the Alps had been formed after the seven days of Creation, thereby explaining the mysterious absence of mountains in Genesis. Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth caused an unholy stir among the learned classes. Isaac Newton, whose Principia on physics (published in the same decade as Burnet’s work) would lead Deists to believe in a clockwork universe, fashioned by God then left alone to keep ticking, felt moved to write a lengthy letter to Burnet and suggest that each “day” of Creation could, in fact, encompass a much, much longer period of time than is customarily understood by that word.
Throughout the eighteenth century, biblical literalism wobbled on its pedestal. Although many of the pious believed Creation to have taken place on 24 October 4004 BCE, as calculated by James Ussher, the unfortunately entitled Primate of Ireland, the incremental advances of nascent scientific disciplines could not be ignored. For the Alps, this led to a peculiar hybrid period of science and superstition during the early 1700s. A Swiss scholar, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, produced finely observed topographic maps of the mountains, yet he still had some of their peaks patrolled by dragons, in whose existence he firmly believed. Similarly, to him and many others, the marine fossils found on the rocky slopes of the mountains were deposited there by the receding waters of the biblical Flood.