The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond(6)
The trysting takes place on the waters and along the shores of Lake Geneva, most notably east of Vevey, in a hamlet called Clarens. The lovers find the mountainous setting purifying, worthy of their unsullied souls. When they get caught out in a storm on the lake, all of Europe swooned in empathetic fright. And when their love is consummated, many readers no doubt took to the privacy of their rooms. Julie became an emotional and intellectual landmark, situated in the hearts and minds of aspiring Romantics and, quite concretely, at the foot of the Alps.
I have read Julie and can quite sincerely state that it is unreadable. I am not an outlier in holding this opinion: Historian Simon Schama calls it “perhaps the most influential bad book ever written.” But it does not matter what gimlet-eyed critics of the twenty-first century think; for Rousseau’s contemporaries, his tale captured the aspirations of their time. The moment had come to break free, to realize one’s innate goodness, to look upon nature as a friend, to see it as a reflection far profounder than that produced by a Claude Glass.
One can certainly sympathize with the sentiment. Yet when I stand on the lakefront of Clarens, there is still that damned view across the water. The green cliffs form a dark fence protecting the great white monsters touching the sky. The setting is an open invitation to indulge in the pathetic fallacy—i.e., imbuing the natural world with human emotion. Not only did Rousseau find this setting amenable to a change of worldview, but so too did a much later artist, Igor Stravinsky, who composed his epochal Rite of Spring in Clarens. To my mind, the latter’s violent, discordant hymn to nature, culminating with a young woman dancing herself to death, seems a more apposite work for the site.
Nonetheless, it is Rousseau who clears up any lingering bewilderment about the attractions of inhospitable landscapes. Writing more than two decades after Julie, the philosopher explains what it is about mountain scenes that so fascinates him: “I must have torrents, rocks, pines, dead forest, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices beside me to frighten me, for the odd thing about my liking precipitous places is that they make me giddy, and I enjoy this giddiness, provided that I am safely placed.” He could, in fact, be describing the delights of roller coasters, which in many languages are called mountains, usually Russian or American. Rousseau is endorsing thrill-seeking, and where better to feel an enjoyable frisson than in the company of a death-inviting drop? As long as one is, in Rousseau’s formulation, “safely placed.”
Hence the Alps are a source of titillation, or, as Rousseau and his followers preferred to describe it, the Sublime. The Swiss did not popularize the notion; that distinction belongs to an Irishman, Edmund Burke. Although today the patron saint of reactionary scolds, Burke as a young man wrote an influential treatise on the subject of apprehending nature. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature … is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror,” Burke remarked, before going on to say, “Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.”
Burke gave a philosophical stamp of approval to having the vapors; Rousseau pointed out the locale where they might be best experienced—and supplied a Romantic ideology advocating the search for such heightened emotion. As I pass the lakeside town of Montreux, like one of the countless literary pilgrims to have come this way two centuries ago, it occurs to me that my initial reaction on seeing Mont Blanc earlier in the day was useful. Had I not felt that way, I would have been unable to appreciate the next stage of the sublime process: the warm, snuggly embrace of terror.
THE CHILLON CASTLE stands just offshore, perched on a rocky island the same color as its tawny fortifications. It is a multiturreted jewel, a small masterpiece sited in a place of scenic perfection. The castle’s landward walls are almost windowless, with watchtowers, sentry walks, and slits for archers that show its role as a jealous guardian of the Via Italica, the age-old trade route linking Burgundy with Lombardy by way of the nearby Great St. Bernard Pass. Lakeward, the fa?ade is punctuated by graceful Gothic windows to take in the view long enjoyed by the ruling family of the region, who regularly summered at Chillon and held feasts in the four great halls of the castle. That view from those halls contrasts the serenity of Lake Geneva and the violence of the Alps, which may account for its status as Switzerland’s most visited tourist shrine for generations. In the late nineteenth century, Henry James has the doomed heroine of his novella Daisy Miller explore the castle in the company of a confused suitor she has met at nearby Vevey.
As I drift through the halls and dungeons and courtyards, a weird zephyr of fairy voices wafts around the stone walls and staircases. I locate its source: a children’s troupe from Moscow is performing a play to celebrate the bicentenary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between Russia and Switzerland. The effect is lovely, a spur to fantasy.
At about the same time those diplomatic ties were knotted, a trio of Rousseau-loving pilgrims toured the castle. Unlike so many others who mooned ineffectually on the shores of the lake, these three were artists of genius: Percy Bysshe Shelley, his future wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and the clubfooted copulator extraordinaire of his era, Lord Byron. Poems soon issued forth from them celebrating the beauty and melancholy of the area, Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, about a monk held captive in the castle, immortalizing the thousand-year-old structure as a redoubt of Romanticism.