Romantic Localities

Europe Writes Place

Christoph Bode, Jacqueline Labbe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317324300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Romantic Localities explores the ways in which Romantic-period writers of varying nationalities responded to languages, landscapes – both geographical and metaphorical – and literatures.

1 ‘HOW BURSTS THE LANDSCAPE ON MY SIGHT!’: PEDESTRIAN EXCURSIONS INTO THE ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE

Felicitas Menhard

Romantic poets are constantly on their feet. Few literary periods are as crowded with walkers as the Romantic era; the walk may even be defined as a ‘quintessentially … Romantic image’.¹ Beside the fact that pedestrianism was an important and widespread means of travelling at the time, it also constituted a vital factor in the physical and intellectual well-being of nearly all major Romantic writers. William Hazlitt’s joy in walking, for example, is instantly recognizable in his impulsive ‘Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner – and then to thinking!’² John Keats, too, was an avid walker; he toured the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands in the summer of 1818. In a letter to Benjamin Haydon, he described the trip as ‘a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue – that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expence’.³ The age’s most prominent walkers, however, are undeniably Wordsworth and Coleridge. In ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, Hazlitt records the different peripatetic habits that accompanied their writing of verse; whereas Coleridge ‘liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood’, Wordsworth preferred ‘walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption’.⁴ Wordsworth can indeed be regarded as the foremost pedestrian poet of the Romantic age; Thomas De Quincey once noted that the poet probably walked a 100,000 miles in his lifetime,⁵ and indeed, the theme of walking can hardly be separated from Wordsworth’s creative potential or sense of self. As John Elder argues, ‘Wordsworth’s understandings of history, of poetry, and finally of the integrity of his own life may all be related to … depictions of himself walking’.⁶

This essay explores the relationships between the mode of pedestrian travel and poetic explorations of the Romantic landscape. By reading the act of walking both as a physical performance and as an intellectual and aesthetic entry into experience, I shall examine discourses of movement, process and discovery, establishing parallels between a corporeal and a textual pedestrianism. In the poems considered, including texts by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the post-Romantic Thomas Hardy, very different types of walkers and motivations for walking are presented; going on foot always contains, however, the promising potential of a discovery about the self that is shaped by varying and dynamic perspectives on the landscape.

The act of walking is semantically polyvalent, as it comprises numerous different physical, sensual and aesthetic implications. Of course, one simple distinction serves to divide walkers into two principal groups: those who walk for pleasure and those who walk out of necessity. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the ratio between these two groups was strongly inclined towards the latter, as ‘only the poorest people walked … roads’ while everyone who could afford it ‘hired others – sedan chairmen – to do their walking for them’.⁷ Walking in the Romantic age constituted a necessary, though demanding and often strenuous form of travelling for the lowest of social orders, while today, ‘walking is a form of therapy’.⁸ By contemporary cultural standards, taking a walk signifies taking a break, escaping the routine, letting the soul breathe for a few minutes, or even hours. However, this pleasurable pedestrianism is something that the Romantic poetical subject engages in as well. The speaker in Wordsworth’s ‘Discharged Soldier’, for instance, starts out on his leisurely stroll purely for diversion, as walking grants him a ‘restoration like the calm of sleep / But sweeter far’,⁹ and nowhere can the delight in and enjoyment of going by foot be seen more clearly than in the journals and poems of Dorothy Wordsworth, whose late immobility rendered her ‘A prisoner on [her] pillowed couch’¹⁰ and clearly caused her a substantial amount of anguish and longing to ‘wander, free as air’ again.¹¹

What, then, characterizes walking as a physical and spiritual experience? The most obvious facts can easily be stated: walking is defined as a relatively continuous motion through a landscape or any kind of other rural or urban space. In this sense, it is literally a very ‘down-to-earth’ activity; indeed, it appears that ‘[t]here is nothing more concrete than putting one foot in front of the other’.¹² Walking is furthermore defined as an intensely physical act and can be, depending on the route and on the walker, more or less demanding on the body. Going on foot is also a comparatively slow movement; this becomes especially important when considering the perspective of the walker. The views of pedestrians are often panoramic, roaming over wide spaces, allowing the eye to travel freely at its own pace.¹³ Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison’ (1797) functionalizes the dichotomy between this all-encompassing vista of the walkers:

Now, my friends emerge

Beneath the wide wide heaven – and view again

The many-steepled tract magnificent

Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,

and the speaker’s restricted visual position inside the bower:

Pale beneath the blaze

Hung the transparent foliage; and I watched

Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see

The shadow of the leaf and stem above

Dappling its sunshine!¹⁴

to create two wholly different realms of aesthetic experience. The ‘zooming-in’ on the leaf, to use cinematographic terms, is positioned in direct contrast to the panoramic, bird’s-eye perspective of the pedestrians. Moreover, the views offered to peripatetic travellers are continuously in motion, changing in a doubled sense: changing themselves by incessantly shifting their aim and focus, but also changing the walker, who, by receiving these heterogeneous external impressions, experiences an internal transformation generated by the traces which the landscape leaves within him. ‘The mobile gaze of the pedestrian traveller’¹⁵ thus inevitably leads to intellectual, emotional or spiritual movement and expansion inside the walker. Along these lines, we can make a first connection between walking and thinking – or walking and writing, for that matter. This connection is certainly longstanding: in the Platonic Dialogues, philosophical discussions were led while walking, and Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, first published in 1782, establishes explicit associations between the mental act of dreaming (or thinking) and the physical act of walking.¹⁶ Both the creative and the pedestrian act are characterized by impulses of motion and process, by the fusion of external impressions with internal knowledge. Niccolini describes walking as an indefinite movement through space, which is not far removed from the act of writing.¹⁷ Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ (1804) could be taken as a direct poetological comment on these correlations, as its speaker not only wanders ‘lonely as a cloud’, but, more importantly, transfers the impressions accumulated on this walk to an intellectual reproduction of reality, to the ‘inward eye’.¹⁸ It is exactly this transmission which famously constitutes the ultimate aesthetic value of the daffodils. Undeniably, a conversion arises in both the walker and the writer, which modifies their view of and approach to reality and its parameters. Moreover, the discourse of discovery is intrinsic to going on foot, as well as to thinking and/or writing. Like the walker, who travels in search of both outward impressions and self-discovery, the writer discovers ideas and thoughts through and within the process of composition.

These links between the peripatetic and the intellectual act are perhaps most vividly illustrated in William Blake’s ‘Mental Traveller’ (c. 1803). In this text, the speaker embarks on an imaginative journey which, interestingly enough, also contains an actual pedestrian experience. In the first stanza, the mental traveller distinctly disconnects his intellectual path from ‘cold earth-wanderers’.¹⁹ His objective is the reproduction of an endless series of images that all relate to the same circular story. In the dreamlike landscape of the traveller, the cyclical nature of life ceaselessly repeats itself in a most unnatural reversal: as a male babe is born, the old woman tending to him grows younger in age as he matures. Then, as the man ages further, there springs ‘from the fire of the hearth / A little female babe’,²⁰ and the ‘aged host’²¹ is driven out into nature to seek a young maiden. As he carries the female infant with him, he reverses in age and rejuvenates until ‘he becomes a wayward babe / And she a weeping woman old’²² – the cycle is complete and prepared to repeat itself. In typically Blakeian imagery that is fundamentally dialectical, the transgression of the mental traveller into a realm where the most basic human laws are turned upside down is rendered as a struggle between the male and the female, the young and the old, but also as a search for the possibility of permanence and closure through wandering ‘on the desert wild’.²³ Here, the pedestrian experience is a highly disorienting and threatening one: when the cottage fades from the sight of the aged walker, travelling through the landscape becomes a sort of nightmare without a definite focal point. Both visual and physical laws are unhinged in radical shifts of perspective:

For the eye altering, alters all;

The senses roll themselves in fear

And the flat earth becomes a ball;

The stars, sun, moon – all shrink away,

A desert vast without a bound;

And nothing left to eat or drink,

And a dark desert all around.²⁴

As both the speaker and the child ‘wander in terror and dismay’,²⁵ it becomes clear that this poem presents walking as a process which has, like its structure, no definite beginning or end; it is a movement that is just as aimless and fluid as the constant vacillation of birth and death in the ‘land of men and women too’.²⁶

The ‘Old Man Travelling’ in Wordsworth’s short peripatetic sketch of 1797 is, as can be expected, somewhat more firmly grounded in the sphere of reality. Still, walking seems to be a largely intellectually determined activity for him as well: he is ‘A man who does not move with pain, but moves / With thought’.²⁷ This pedestrian engages in a slow, meditative, introspective kind of motion and appears to be almost wholly numb to external impressions or influences outside of his own consciousness. His visual, sensual and emotional contact with the landscape he traverses is very restricted, as he is ‘insensibly subdued to settled quiet’.²⁸ He notices little of his surroundings, and just as little notice is taken of him: even ‘the little hedgerow birds’ that he meets along his way ‘regard him not’.²⁹ This non-human perspective at the opening of the poem serves to distance the walker from our gaze and interpretative efforts even further: why is he walking, and where to? Only towards the end of the text, in conversation with the speaker, does his pedestrian purpose become frighteningly apparent: he is going to pay a last visit to his dying son who has been wounded as a marine soldier. These last lines, whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction – Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe
• 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape – Felicitas Menhard
• 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality – Jacqueline Labbe
• 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland – Kristin Ott
• 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9) – Tom Furniss
• 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake – Nicola J. Watson
• 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere – Polly Atkin
• 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry – Samantha Matthews
• 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination – Stefanie Fricke
• 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795) – Angela Wright
• 10 Henry Crabb Robinson’s Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey – James Vigus
• 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans – Rolf Lessenich
• 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama – Sophie Thomas
• 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth’s ‘Magnificent Debt’ – J. Douglas Kneale
• 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley’s Dim Crotonian Truths – Rosa Karl
• 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott’s The Talisman – Silvia Mergenthal
• 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster’s A Voyage Round the World – Christoph Bode
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index