Dr. Johnson And The Mountains

by J. Geoffrey Brook

“Dr. Johnson in his famous dictionary defined us as barbarians and savages.”

G. D. Abraham
(The Complete Mountaineer)

With all due respect to Mr. Abraham, Dr. Johnson in his famous dictionary did nothing of the sort.

His definition of a mountaineer fell into two parts, the second being complementary to the first, thus:—

1. (1) An inhabitant of the mountains.
2. (2) A savage; a freebooter, a rustick.

In Johnson’s day, and for some time after, the name mountaineer was given exclusively to one who lived in the mountains, and it was not until the practice of scaling mountains for pleasure developed that the word changed its meaning and widened its application, so that today the mountaineer is not so much one who lives in the mountains, but rather the casual visitor to them.  We could perhaps recall some mountaineers to whom the terms of Johnson’s second definition might be applied, but let that pass!

Dr. Johnson held strong views, which he did not shrink from expressing on all subjects of interest, whether he rightly under­stood them or not, and it is interesting, if not edifying, to recall his recorded comments on the mountains and the country scene generally.

Johnson was essentially a townsman, more interested in people than in places. He believed that when a man is tired of London he is tired of life, and said that the only excuse for living in the country was when a man had a task that could only be done better there than in the town.

When Mr. Thrale once rashly asked him to contrast English and French scenery he received the following broadside:

“Never heed such nonsense, Sir; a blade of grass is always a blade of grass whether it grows in one country or another; let us, if we do talk, talk about something; men and women are my subjects of inquiry.”

He was not a mountaineer, neither in his own definition nor in ours.  He was, however, no pale literary man, but a character of robust physique, who thought nothing in his youth of walking from Lichfield to Birmingham and back, a distance of 32 miles, and in his old age of holding at bay, single-handed, a gang of street ruffians.

Johnson lived just about the end of the period when man approached the mountains with fear and trembling, and just before the period when the poetic — romantic view began to prevail.  Therefore it is not surprising to find him regarding the mountain scene with neither abject fear nor fulsome adulation.  With one or two perverse exceptions he took up his usual position of sturdy common sense.  One exception was when he wrote:

“He that has seen Dovedale has no need to visit the Highlands.”

One can only assume this was written with the dual object of pleasing his Derbyshire friend Taylor, and annoying his Scottish friend Boswell.

So far as we know he never reached the summit of a single mountain, but had he visited the Highlands as a younger man, we feel sure he would have done so.  Is there not a note of regret in a letter he wrote to Mrs. Thrale from Skye?

” Here are mountains which I should once have climbed, but to chmb steeps is now very laborious, and to descend them dangerous; and I am now content with knowing, that by scrambling up a rock, I shall only see other rocks, and a wider circuit of barren desolation.”

In spite of his remark to Mrs. Thrale that, ” seeing Scotland, madam, is only seeing a worse England ” he was persuaded in 1773, by his friend and biographer James Boswell, to visit the Highlands and the Islands.  Considering the state of the Inns, roads and lack of transport at that time, this journey, for a ponderous old gentleman of 64 years, used to a sedentary life, was no mean feat.  He braved filthy, flea-ridden hostels, rough roads and rougher seas, came through it all with general good humour and set down his impressions in his “Journey to the Western Islands,” and in several letters.

But the chief source of our knowledge of the great tour is Boswell’s Imperishable, “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.”

The couple left Edinburgh on August 18th, 1773, and travelling up the east coast visited St. Andrews, Dundee, Montrose, and

Aberdeen. From there Fort Augustus was reached via Banff and Inverness.  They stayed a night at Anoch, then crossed to Skye at Glenelg.  In addition to Skye they visited Raasay, Coll, Mull and Iona, returning to Edinburgh after calling on Boswell’s father at Auchinleck.

Thomas Gray, the poet, visited Gordale Scar in 1769 and “stay’d there, (not without shuddering) a quarter of an hour.”  Somehow we cannot imagine Dr. Johnson shuddering even if he had suddenly and unexpectedly found himself on top of the Innaccessible Pinnacle, but he was without doubt impressed in a gloomy sort of way by the Highland scenery, as two quotations from his “Journey” will show.

“It will very readily occur that uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath, and waterfalls; and that those journeys are useless labours which neither impregnate the imagination nor enlarge the understanding.”

And later:

“Regions mountainous and wild, thinly inhabited, and thinly cultivated, make a great part of the earth, and he that has never seen them, must live unacquainted with much of the face of nature, and with one of the great scenes of human existence.”

Near Loch Ness they visited the Fall of Fiers.  The Doctor must have been tired that day, for he writes:

“The country at the bridge strikes the imagination with all the gloom and grandeur of Siberian Solitude.  We desired our guides to show us the Fall, and dismounting, clambered over very rugged crags, till I began to wish our curiosity might have been satisfied with less trouble and danger.”

Later we imagine the travellers moving slowly through Glen Shiel, each probably lost in his own thought, when Johnson suddenly becomes aware of his surroundings.  Let Boswell speak:

“Dr. Johnson owned he was now in a scene of as wild nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my in­accurate observations.”

“There, (said I) is a mountain like a cone.”

Johnson. ” No, Sir, It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top, but one side of it is larger than the other! “

Another mountain I called immense.

Johnson. “No, it is no more than a considerable pro­tuberance ! “

Anyone more thin-skinned than Boswell might have found this sort of thing a little irritating!

The travellers passed over Mann Ratagan which Johnson called, “a formidable hill which we climbed with more difficulty than we had yet experienced.”

They stayed a night at Glenelg, their chief worry here being the live-stock.

“Mrs. Boswell” writes Johnson ” had warned us that we should catch something, and had given us sheets for our security, ‘for ______ and ______’ she said, ‘ came back from Skye scratching themselves.’  I thought sheets a slender defence against the confederacy with which we were threatened.”

But clean hay was found, and the night passed in comparative comfort.

Next day they were rowed in the pouring rain from Glenelg down the Sound of Sleat to Armadale, from thence past Isle Oronsay and arrived eventually at Coirechatachan to stay with one Mackinnon.

Says Dr. Johnson:

“The hill behind the house we did not climb. The weather was rough, and the height and steepness discouraged us.”

A pity the weather was rough, but probably even in fine weather the height and steepness of the scree slopes of Beinn na Cailhch (2,403 ft.) would still have discouraged them.

From Coirechatachan they crossed to Raasay, and here Boswell somehow got permission to leave Johnson for a day, going off with old Malcolm McLeod and others.  The party was called between 5 and 6 o’clock a.m.; spent the day traversing the island, and climbed to the top of Dun Caan (1,450 ft.), on the summit of which they performed a Highland dance.  What the philosophical Rambler thought of this escapade is not reported.

To the reader who loves mountains as much as he revels in Boswell and Johnson there is one profoundly disappointing omission in both their accounts of Skye.  So far as both are con­cerned, the unique and unforgettable feature of the Island, the Cuillin Hills, might never have existed.

There is just one passing remark in a letter of Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, written from Talister, which could refer to the Cuillin.

“The mountains about it are of great height, with waterfalls succeeding one another so fast, that as one ceases to be heard another begins.”

So much for the Cuillin.

On the Island of Coll they did at least set off to chmb a hill, an episode which must be told in Boswell’s own words.

” I proposed that Col should show me the great stone, mentioned in a former page as having been thrown by a giant to the top of a mountain.  Dr. Johnson, who did not like to be left alone, said he would accompany us as far as riding was practicable.  We ascended a part of the hill on horseback, and Col and I scrambled up the rest.  A servant held our horses, and Dr. Johnson placed himself on the ground, with his back against a large fragment of rock.  The wind being high, he let down the cocks of his hat, and tied it with his handkerchief under his chin.  While we were employed in examining the stone, which did not repay our trouble in getting to it, he amused himself with reading “GATAKER ON LOTS AND ON THE CHRISTIAN WATCH,” a very learned book of the last age.

When we described him from above, he had a most eremitical appearance, and on our return told us, he had been so much engaged by Gataker, that he had never missed us.”

Before leaving Skye I recommend any climber who is also a Johnsonian to take a day off from the hills to visit Dunvegan Castle, where Johnson and Boswell stayed for several days.  Amongst other things such as a lock of Prince Charles’ hair and part of Flora MacDonald’s corsets, he will see the original letter written by Dr. Johnson on his return to London thanking Lady McLeod for her hospitality.

In 1774 Johnson made a journey into Wales with Mr. and Mrs. Thrale.  Perhaps he missed the stimulating company of Boswell, but whatever the reason, his only record of this tour was a diary of brief notes, published posthumously.  He wrote to Boswell:

“Wales is so little different from England that it offers nothing to the speculation of the traveller.”

And he said that:

“Instead of bleak and barren mountains, there were green and fertile ones.”

I wrote earher that in all probability Dr. Johnson had never climbed a mountain, but in this same letter to Boswell there is one brief, tantalising sentence throwing the whole question in doubt.

He wrote:

“I have been in five or six counties in North Wales . . . have been upon Penmanmaur and Snowdon, and passed over into Anglesea.”

Did Dr. Johnson ever climb Snowdon — or even Penmanmaur?  Alas, we shall never know, but, as Boswell might have said:

“The thought of Dr. Johnson, that majestick teacher of moral and rehgious wisdom, ascending to the summit of mighty Snowdon, conjures in the mind a succession of Pleasing images.”

If Johnson was never a mountaineer he had at least a glimmering of the truth that physical elevation brings, or should bring, moral elevation. In one of his Rambler essays, “Adventures of Living in a Garret,” he writes:

“I have found dullness to quicken into sentiment in a thin ether, as water, though not very hot, boils in a receiver partly exhausted; and heads, in appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon rising ground, as the flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out into stiffness and extension.”

But, he adds later:

“I know there are some who would continue blockheads on the summit of the Andes or the peak of Teneriffe.”

And with these chastening words we can take leave of Johnson, Boswell and the hills, carrying only perhaps in our ears the faint murmur of an imaginary conversation.

BOSWELL:

“As many worthy men have suffered death in late years, is not mountain climbing a foolhardy pursuit?”

JOHNSON:

“Sir, he that climbs mountains must expect to meet with difficulty, discomfort and danger.
“That the rewards are regarded as adequate compensation for these is a strong argument in favour of the pastime.
“Little can be known of either the hardships or the rewards by the man that never strays above the level plain, and the testimony of those who have attained great heights cannot be disregarded. That valuable lives have been lost is regrettable, but unavoidable.”

BOSWELL:

“But, sir, might not some means of mechanical transport be contrived up the mountain side, thus enabling the old and infirm, as well as the young and vigorous, to view the extensive panorama to be seen from the summit?”

JOHNSON:

“Why, Sir, what paltry stuff is this.
“Nothing of value is acquired without effort, and he that is carried up a mountain side in a conveyance will derive little of value from either the excursion or the panorama.
“As for the old and infirm, how many have the inclination for mountain ascents?
“If a man has not satisfied such desires in his youth, then when age and infirmity arrive, let him be satisfied with the prospect from the plain.
“And now, sir, let us change the subject.”