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Magic in the Land
| Article
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18711 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
5,713 Words |
| Author
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Lincoln Allison
Lincoln Allison is senior lecturer of politics at the
University of Warwich in England. He is author of A Journey
Quite Different: Collected Walks, Manchester University Press
(1988). |
I feel at times as if I've spent the significant part of my life traveling toward horizons in the hope that a special kind of view or scene lies beyond. It is a quest for certain landscapes. The result is usually disappointment: Occasionally, in an olive grove in the Greek mountains, in an English primeval woodland, in a Tunisian oasis, there has been fleeting satisfaction. In this essay I want to analyze this obsession with scenery, this need to see the view, to explore and assess the landscape.
There are those, of course, who couldn't care less, whose instinctive reaction to traveling in a strange land has been to pull the curtain, get out the book, or fall asleep. But generally, the concern with landscape is a mark of civilization, even sophistication. It was a preoccupation of Petrarch and Wordsworth, ahead of their respective times. It is to be found in societies in proportion to their leisure and general level of development. That land is beautiful has repeatedly been "discovered" throughout history. Wordsworth quotes an old woman in his youth as saying, "Bless me! Folk are always talking about prospects: when I was young there was never sic a thing neamed." There is another Cumbrian legend, which Wordsworth does not quote, that the Lake Poets in the 1820s discovered an old lady of a hundred living in Kendal, ten miles from Windermere, who had never seen a lake. They duly transported her to the banks of Windermere and set her down to observe the reaction, at which she uttered the baffled remark, immortal for its simple truth, "There's nowt to see, but hills and trees and water." The simple generalization, which should be treated with caution like all simple generalizations, is that landscape means little to genuine rustics. As Sir Kenneth Clark said in his seminal lectures on Landscape into Art, given forty years ago when the system of national parks was just being established in England, "Today agricultural laborers are almost the only class of the community who are not enthusiastic about natural beauty."
The more complex observation is that Wordsworth's life, from 1770 to 1850 in England, a time of the most rapid urbanization and industrialization the world had ever known--was a period during which there was a massive and abiding movement toward reverence for landscape. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Confessions, was, perhaps, ahead of his time in writing:
The wandering life is what I like.... It is already clear what I mean by fine country. Never does a plain, however beautiful it may be, seem so in my eyes. I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, steep roads to climb or descend, abysses beside me to
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