Alpine Intervention:

The Effects of the Swiss Clime on the Works of Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley

The assumption that Romantic poetry and prose presents nature and the natural world in an ornamental, delicate manner is both naive and misinformed. The works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley disprove any such supposition with vivid portrayals of nature which work to displace the relation of nature and man as one of object and observer. Instead, nature appears in their works Mont Blanc, Manfred, and Frankenstein as an active subject; a force by which mankind can be irreversibly affected and a presence from which humankind should learn to reevaluate themselves. A certain lack of control of the natural world permeates these works and as the pieces' prime human movers struggle against such an idea, man is presented in all his follies. Yet such revelations are meant to be transformative and are integral to a revolution in one’s own perception. Nature gives man a sort of ultimatum: stop fighting the cycle and find solace in the natural world, a place which will foster sustainable human progress, or continue on a destructive path which leads to eventual digression.

The aforementioned poets, Lord Byron and the Shelley’s, are well-known for their communicative literary circle and their summer spent on Lake Geneva in 1816, from which great works were spawned. Byron’s residence, Villa Diodati became an intellectual haven, protected from the violently shifting weather that the Alpine surroundings seemed to be casting down upon them. Their brief travels in and around the mountain region exposed to them a captivatingly concentrated diversity of ecosystems and natural landforms which they had never before conceived. For their unpolluted imaginations, a “youth [that] has been past as theirs in pursuing, like the swallow, the inconstant summer of delight and beauty which invests in the visible world…the freshness of a diviner nature,” a summer like the one at Villa Diodati was exactly the poetic stimulation these writers needed (P. Shelley iv). The most revealing factual record from that summer, History of a Six Weeks Tour, which illuminates the immediate sentiments felt by Mary and Percy Shelley upon exploring the Swiss Alpine region. In the history’s main text, Mary Shelley describes the landscape:

Range after range of black mountains are seen extending one before the other, and far behind all, towering above every feature of the scene, the snowy Alps. They were an hundred miles distant, but reach so high in the heavens, that they look like those accumulated clouds of dazzling white that arrange themselves on the horizon during summer. Their immensity staggers the imagination, and so far surpasses all conception, that it requires an effort of the understanding to believe that they indeed form a part of the earth (94).

The magnitude of the setting, reflected in the gravity of Mary Shelley’s language indicates the momentous effect the setting was having upon them. The Alpine setting acquainted the writers with a new sort of relationship between man and his surroundings that was far from what they had known in England. Suddenly they found themselves in a landscape where man had to mold to the confines set by nature, where civilization had to adapt to life in the rich enclaves of narrow valleys lay between stark rocky inclines, and where the weather could change in an instant, possibly heaving avalanches of rocky snow down upon human populations. Their descriptions of the villages they stayed in are often curt while their depictions of the natural setting are lengthy and verbose, confirming that the impersonal, commanding presence of the natural setting had all but completely seized their attention.

What is not commonly known about that “wet ungenial summer” of 1816, which was spent mostly indoors, is that the inclement weather was caused by the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, which discharged such quantities of dust into the stratosphere that the entire world noted darker skies and noticeably cooler temperatures for a three year span (Phillips 61). The group would have been aware of the catastrophic natural phenomenon, and the combination of the weather and the looming mountain clime must have made them feel rather insignificant, while the natural environment seemed to be growing all the more insurmountable.

Such reflections become significant when placed alongside the literary works that were inspired by the Swiss mountain region, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc being the most immediate reference to the sojourn on Lake Geneva. Shelley’s immediate veneration of the colossal mountain quickly spirals into a complex interweaving of perceptions as the poet stands upon a bridge over the river Arve which seems to flow “through the ravine as influences from the material world flow through the mind” (Dean 1). The query then becomes who is affecting whom; is the natural scene imposing on the poet’s consciousness, or is the poet projecting his perceptions onto the natural scene which reflect them back to him? Lines from the poem would indicate that the natural setting is not simply an inactive mirror for the human mind, but itself an essential participant whose actions go mostly unnoticed. References to “The secret strength of things/ which governs thought” and the wilderness’s “mysterious tongue/ which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild” seem to point toward the underlying goings-on in nature which are always ready to teach man its wisdom, he must only dip into a universal natural consciousness to access it (ll. 76-77, 139-140).

Shelley’s recapitulation of viewing Mont Blanc in the History of a Six Weeks Tour indicates how momentous the occasion was for him:

I never knew—I never imagined what mountains were before. The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of ecstatic wonder, not unallied to madness…and black with its depth below, so deep that the very roaring of the untamable Arve, which rolled through it, could not be heard above -- all was as much our own, as if we had been the creators of such impressions in the minds of others as now occupied our own. Nature was the poet, whose harmony held our spirits more breathless than that of the divinest” (Shelley 152).

Importantly, he finishes by naming nature as the poet, right after he implies that it was as if the observer himself was creating the impressions that the scene before him creates, countering his own statement. It is evident then, that when the lines of the poem that read “The everlasting universe of things/…where from secret springs/ the source of human thought its tribute brings,” that inevitably, nature is working to impress upon man certain knowledge which is manifested in the beauty and immensity of its worldly presence (ll. 1, 4-5). By the fourth stanza, the poet is realizing, through the image of gray clouds covering the mountain’s summit, that he may never be able uncover the beginning of the mountain, reaffirming its eternality, while the artificial world created by man can be easily wiped away with the mountain’s icy glaciers. He also states in History of a Six Weeks Tour that “One would think that Mont Blanc, like the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and that the frozen blood for ever circulated through his stony veins (Shelley 151). The image then reaffirms, that “the natural and the necessary, figured as the gross and determinate body, win out over the artificial and human,” that nature will always have something to imbue upon man, he simply must be consciously available to receive it (Morton, 211).

Lord Byron’s Manfred more complexly addresses the natural, in the form of a narrative poem showing man’s attempts to overcome that which is larger than him, but it inevitably becomes a narrative of man’s fall. Manfred’s declining mental state seems derived from the ever-escalating distance he places between the natural and himself in a pursuit of the unworldly, which he believes will expose to him the secrets of existence. The ominous feel of the natural setting, the dizzying beauty of jagged Alpine peeks, removes Manfred just far enough from a world with which most readers are familiar to become the realm of the Gothic and the supernatural. Evil in the poems is evidenced as not being derived from the natural and perhaps not even the supernatural, because it only exists when it is conjured by Manfred; he manifests the evil and it seems to come from within him, negatively affecting the surrounding natural world (Twitchell 602). As Manfred finds no solace in both the material world of man and the realm of the supernatural, he often withdraws into nature, wishing that he could end his life in the same way all other natural things are allowed. But Manfred has transcended his natural existence and now cannot die a natural death; even a mountain prevents him from leaping onto its jagged crags so he can “stain not our pure vales with thy guilty blood” (I.ii.ll. 111).

The first spirits he encounters are simply references to the natural forces, air, mountain, ocean, earth, wind, and night, which “have no forms, beyond the elements” and they emphasize that they are “immortal, and do not forget,” yet feebly, they seem to be at Manfred’s will when he calls upon them (I.i.ll. 182, 149). We discover that this is not quite true when he asks them to perform what is beyond their natural conduct; he simply cannot be obliged and becomes enraged that nature would imply that natural entities should not and cannot overstep their limitations, especially since that is all he is attempting to do for the entire poem. In a description of the poet, written by William Hazlitt around the time of the poet’s death, Lord Byron appears to “scorn all things, even himself. Nature must come to him to sit for her picture—he does not go to her” (235). This also seems to be the case with the character of Manfred and because of this, nature denies him his death wish, proving that the natural world is more powerful than Manfred, even in its seeming powerlessness. In a letter to John Murray discussing his poem, Byron had explained that in Manfred, “almost all the persons—but two or three—are spirits of the earth and air, or the water…who appear to him [Manfred] and are of no use” (Byron). The elemental spirits may simply “productive and operative executors of nature,” but it is this realization by man, his understanding of how they operate as a part of the unity of all life, that will give him access to their invaluable wisdom (Twitchell 606).

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein becomes a culmination of many of these concepts, finally materializing the provocative fireside discourses at Villa Diodati into a novel of man’s betrayal of a world that is not his to own. It is important that the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation takes place far from the industrialized society, in “a rural world dominated by scenes of sublime natural beauty” and valleys where “high snowy mountains were immediate boundaries” (Phillips 64, Shelley 73). Taking the climate at the time of the novel’s inspiration, it would seem as if the natural world was intentionally forcing the writers indoors, prompting them to reflect upon the doom and gloom around them, and forcing the horrible visions of Mary Shelley out into its quasi-human form. In this wild locale, far from the sanity of civilization, amongst the fury of turbulent unpredictable climes, “a flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me [Victor]” exposing to the creator, and mankind alike, the horrors of which only man is capable of creating (Shelley 76).

In his scientific studies, Victor found the same kind of power and control over the natural that Manfred found in supernatural magic: “new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows” (M. Shelley 64). By harnessing the ultimate power, the unnamed “spark of being,” Victor finally violates the natural order in which man is not the creator of his own kind. As a synthesis of the parts of once naturally existing elements, a patchwork replica of man made from the dead components of men, the monster becomes the ultimate enemy of the species he was born to imitate. From his inception, the monster has no place in humanity and he must retreat into the lifeless glaciers of the Alps knowing that by moving “perpetually mountainwards and northwards, towards the cold barren places where human survival, indeed life itself, is threatened, and ultimately extinguished,” that “the caves of ice” will be the only locale “which man does not grudge” (Phillips 66, M. Shelley 146).

Interestingly, the monster is neither human nor natural, yet, his composition of entirely natural human parts is somehow hideously unacceptable, and so he grows to be a supernatural manifestation of nature’s response to Victor’s wrongdoings. The monster becomes part of the natural setting while Victor is punished by it; for the first time, the monster has found a way to directly harm his maker. Provocations from the monster to Victor such as: “Follow me; I seek the everlasting ice of the North, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I am impassive” show that the monster is using the natural world to perform his vengeance (M. Shelley 248). Ultimately, an emphasis is placed on the creation’s indifference toward humanity; he murdered the innocent apathetically and he will do the same to his master, much like nature heaves destruction upon humanity uncaringly. The environments in which Victor must pursue the monster become increasingly hostile, and they finally enter the artic circle with the chase culminating on the remotest patches of ice that break off and float aimlessly out into the freezing Arctic Sea.

In a letter in the History of a Six Weeks Tour, Percy Shelley writes, “In these regions every thing changes, and is in motion. This vast mass of ice has one general progress, which ceases neither day nor night; it breaks and bursts for ever: some undulations sink while others rise; it is never the same” (154). This image greatly reflects the ideology that went into the literary works that came out of that summer sojourn that these three young British writers took into a natural environment that was very foreign to them. The poets would go on to write many more ecologically inspired pieces about the ever changing cyclicality of the natural world and man’s ignorantly linear way of thinking; a resistance to the natural order of things which results in catastrophe. Percy Shelley once wrote, “Do we not see that the laws of nature perpetually act by disorganization and reproduction, each alternately becoming cause and effect?” The characters of Manfred and Victor Frankenstein purposefully did not, and they act as examples against which the natural retaliates against the narcissist ignorance of one of its own species. The Alpine setting which inspired these stories certainly struck fear and awe into the consciousness of the writers, and made for a surreal natural environment in which nature actually has a strong enough presence to fight back. Perhaps the most romantic of these ideas comes about in the ultimate message of these stories: human society and culture at large are negations of the natural, but the solution is not a return to nature, but an entire reconstruction of society as something which is part of a larger natural entity and an acceptance of man’s slighter place on the hierarchy of a very grand scale.

WORKS CITED

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