THE NIGHTMARE

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

(Ulysses: James Joyce)

In an influential essay on the sublime and beautiful (1756), Edmund Burke argued the goal of great art was the infinite and "no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear" which intensified the appreciation of natural phenomena. Art critic, Sir Uvedale Price, a follower of Burke, wrote that "it would be difficult to conceive any set of objects, to which, however grand in themselves, an addition of terror would not give a higher degree of sublimity... The sea is at all times a grand object; need I say how much that grandeur is increased by the violence of another element, and again, by thunder and lightning? Why are rocks and precipices more sublime, when the tide dashes at the foot of them, forbidding all access or cutting of all retreat, than when we can with ease approach... The most savage rocks, precipices and cataracts, as they keep their stations, are only awful; but should an earthquake shake their foundations, and open a new gulf between the cataract - he, who removed from immediate danger, could dare at such a moment to gaze on such a spectacle, would surely have sensations of a much higher kind, than those which were impressed upon him when all was still and unmoved."

In other words, Sir Uvedale's pleasure at gazing on a sight like the Reichenbach Falls would be heightened if a mighty earthquake could be arranged to take place at the same time. Not only is he able to analyse sights that once filled travellers with supersititous dread, but to demand an additional seismic thrill. This attitude hints at a high degree of comfort and complacency. People had come along way from the time when mountains were thought horrid and oppressive with cold, unhealthy airs. They were able to look at landscapes as aesthetic artefacts, paintings that might be improved with an added dash of drama or sensation: hence the contrived wildness of the landscape garden.

Eternal Archetypes

An eloquent sufferer from nightmares was the young Charles Lamb (1775 - 1834) whose classic essay on Witches and Other Night-Fears appeared in the London Magazine - classic because it had a pertinence and depth absent from his more fanciful excursions. He begins by sympathising with the medieval peasant's fear of the supernatural, for they had no method by which they could separate the likely from the palpably absurd:

"That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire - that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed - that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forests - or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring - were all equally probable when no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of the indigent eld - has neither likelihood or unlikelihood a priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile soul's may fetch in the devil's market."

Lamb traces the source of his childish night-fears to a book by Stackhouse called The History of the Bible containing many vivid pictures, including theWitch raising up Samuel. But then, subtly, he does not hold the drawing responsible for his terrors, only for the "shape and manner of their visitation" - in others words, the illustration provided the armature, the framework, on which the loose, runny fears could seize and assemble. In an extraordinarly prescient paragraph, deriving from Coleridge (who investigated his own nightmares exhaustively) he anticipates what Jung formulated over a century later: a universal unconscious hoarding preternatural archetypes: "Gorgons and Hyrdras, and Chimæras dire - stories of Celæno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archetypes in us, and eternal..."

In the final part, he confesses to being no longer tormented by night-fears, for he knows them for the "mockeries" they are. His dreams, grown prosaic, are filled with staid architecture and buildings quite unlike the icy caves and pleasures domes of Kubla Khan. The very tameness of his soul's flights makes him conclude that prose is his natural element.

Stranger than Lamb's youthful imaginings were the nightmares of his young friend, essayist and opium addict, Thomas De Quincey, who evoked his dark alliance with the poppy seed and the alarming visions it induced. "I seemed every night," he wrote, "to descend, not metaphorically but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses." Space was amplified "to an extent of unutterable infinity"; a night seemed to take a century to pass and the minutest incidents of childhood were precisely recalled. Vast architecture loomed; mysterious seas welled and "on the rocking waters of that ocean human, faces began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens; faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries - my agitation was infinite - my mind tossed - and surged with the ocean." This vision should not be a fearful one, yet it is, for it reminds one of the pool of history, the drowning generations, faces that rise and dip out of sight, as if smoothed away by a gesture.

Dwelling on doom was a speciality of the opium-eater who described a nightmarishly fast journey by stagecoach from Manchester to Westmorland. An outside passenger, De Quincey was seated next to the driver, who had fallen asleep over his reins, when he saw ahead a young man and woman in "a frail, reedy gig". The heavy stagecoach was bearing down on them and De Quincey let out a warning cry. A few seconds before impact, the young man yanked his horse out of the stagecoach's path. The "little cany carriage" received a harsh blow which "resounded terrifically". De Quincey looked back. The horse's forelegs were splayed on the crest of the road, the young man trembling, and the lady throwing up her arms to heaven as "from the manly tenderness of this flattering, murmuring, whispering love...suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crowned phantom with all the equipage of his terrors and the tiger roar of his voice."

More about De Quincey and the Romantics