LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE.
IN the Romanes Lecture at Oxford this year Sir Archibald Geikie has dealt with a subject which has been little worked out, viz., the effect exercised by types of scenery on literature. The lecturer confines himself to the scenery of Great Britain, which he divides, for his purposes, into Low- lands, Uplands, and Highlands. The Lowlands of England lie roughly to the south-east of a line drawn from the mouth of the Humber through the Midlands to the Bristol Channel, and the typical parts of this region are the lime- stones and clays of the Oolitic series, where Cowper lived, and mused, and recalled to a people who had been fed on innutritious urban poetry the more placid and usual charms of Nature. In the Lowlands of Scotland, however, we have a quite different character of scenery, largely portrayed by Thomson, whom, from some points of view, we may regard as the first British Nature-poet. But a far greater was to come in the person of Burns, in whom "for the first time in English literature the burning ardour of a passionate soul went out in tumultuous joy towards Nature." Burns has in- terpreted for all time the scenery of Lowland Scotland, though, as Sir A. Geikie points out, his landscapes "are marked by some curious limitations." The British Uplands take in the Border scenery, where our great ballad literature had rise,—a region for many centuries chiefly pastoral. It is a region where the topographical conditions—the succession of separated dales— compelled isolation and habits of self-dependence. Just as Cowper's poetry is full of the charm of a quiet (indeed, we might almost say a commonplace) English landscape dedicated to simple rural toil, so the ballad poetry is one of foray and adventure,—in each case the implication being that the soil makes the man. Thirdly, we come to the Highlands of Britain, to the rugged, mountainous ground of Central and Northern Scotland and the English Lakes. Here is the scenery which has inspired the poetry of " Ossian," and which has given rise to the noble Nature-poetry of Wordsworth. Thus, a geologist like Sir Archibald Geikie would be inclined to furnish us with a new classification of poetry based on the influence of natural scenery, in determining what may be called the moral and aesthetic climate of poetry, as well as its form and the character of its themes. Given a nation capable of poetic expression, and we might predict with approach to certainty the varied forms which its poetry would take from an examination of its strata.
While we can see a very real and genuine relation of land- scape to literature, we more than doubt whether this close correspondence can be maintained. At present no law as to intellectual production can be formulated even distantly.
Why out of the arid and barren soil of Germany, which had produced nothing since Luther's version of the Bible two centuries before, the rich genius of Leasing should all at once have flowered, we cannot say, any more than we can tell why such a constellation of genius should have marked the Grand Siecle in France. The physiological methods of inquiry pro- secuted by Taine no more satisfy us than do the analogous methods of Buckle in the interpretation of history. In a very wide and general sense it is no doubt true that the soil does make the man, if we include in soil the climate, the conformation of the ground, and, indeed, every aspect of Nature. Thus we trace in the poetry both of Greece and England the influence of the sea on the mental outlook of the people. Take away the sea as a habitual com- panion from Englishmen, and their life and literature would have been utterly different. As far as life is moulded by scenic and natural influences, so must literature as an expression of life be moulded and inspired by those influences. With this all will agree; but when it comes to a complete corre- spondence between scenery and literary expression, we doubt whether any distinct theory can be set forth and maintained. Shakespeare, Sir A. Geikie truly reminds us, introduced the Warwickshire landscape freely into his plays, so that in Bohemia, for instance, we feel that we are still watching Midland rustics amid familiar scenes in the "bright Stratford meadows." But whence came the vision of the enchanted island in The Tempest ? It had no existence in Shakespeare's actual world, but was woven out of such stuff as dreams are made of. Shelley was born in that quiet Lowland region of England to which Cowper, who was his contemporary, belonged ; but there is no influence of Sussex scenery (which, by the way, appalled Cowper when he saw it, owing to the size of the hills) in Shelley's poetry. In suburban Hamp- stead Keats saw in vision the Argive heights and the bounteous meadows of Enna. A very remarkable contrast is afforded by the way in which two poets—contemporaries—treated the life of the poor,—we refer to Wordsworth and Crabbe. The former found love in "the huts where poor men lie," and, amid scenes of outer poverty and hardship, whether in London streets or Cumberland dales, an inner beauty and dignity. Crabbe, at the same time, found what Mr. Ruskin, in treating of an author of our time, called "studies in cutaneous disease" in a Suffolk village. Can we say that this vast difference of mental outlook and of moral feeling was due to the fact that Crabbe and Wordsworth lived on different sides of Sir A. Geikie's imaginary line P It is one thing for a poet to incorporate into his work pictures of scenes familiar to his eye and dear to his heart, and quite another thing for these scenes to have completely moulded the nature of his work. Dante, for instance, has blended in the Diving Commedia pictures from over more than half of Italy ; but we feel that the peculiar note of his work originated in other than scenic causes, that he would have written quite differently had he been a Frenchman, even had he lived in that part of France which borders on Italy, and which resembles much of Italy in its scenic features. Rousseau made mountainous scenery fashionable, and many people are apt to think it was because he was born amid romantic scenery, but it was much more due to the fact that he was the child of a passionate 7.ate1•lectual idealism which, seeing wrong and corruption everywhere in society, imagined a stern purity in the mountains which should act as a healing medicine for social ill-health.
Within limits we admit the truth of scenic and natural influence on intellectual production. In the first place, no great literature, apart from a certain class of religious poetry or rhapsody, has been produced outside the tem- perate regions, or is likely to be. There seem to be physiological and racial, as well as spiritual, conditions which determine the production of great works of genius. In the next place, Hegel has said with truth that, even in the limits of the temperate zone, particular kinds of scenery appear to prejudicially affect production. No great writers or artists have lived in, and few have come from, either very magnificent mountain scenery or from immense plains, which afford no distinct objects, but which, like mid-ocean, over- whelm us with a sense of infinity. If a Shakespeare, came from that little driblet of an Avon, Lowell satirieally asks, what might not his countrymen expect from the mighty Mississippi ? But the mighty Mississippi turns up no Shake-, speare, and up to the present American literature is mainly represented by authors who have grown up in scenic con- ditions similar to those of England. There is for all of us a kind of breaking-point in contemplating Nature ; she can become too mighty, too infinite, too overwhelming for us. We cannot take it all in; we cannot body forth its tremendous import in artistic forms. Doubtless the lonely prophet or religious anchorite in the Thebaid does draw nearer to the Infinite in the vast desert or on the mystic heights crowned by Alpine snows ; and perchance the pure metaphysician may gain in the same way, though Plato lived in Athens, Kant at Konigsberg, Spinoza at Amsterdam, and Hume at Edinburgh. But that kind of mind does not express itself in forms of art ; and we take it that the artistic mind as such must find lines and proportions in Nature, that it must discover limitations and variety, that it cannot satisfy itself save by the "not too much " of the Greeks, who first developed art and literature to a high point of ideal excellence. It is then, as Hegel says, the soft, pleasant, and varied scenery of a temperate climate in which we should expect the finest fruits of art and literature to ripen ; it is, in fact, the scenery which produced a Shake- speare, a Homer, a Dante, a Goethe, a Raphael, a Molire, a Chaucer, a Milton. It is in the climate where human vigour can be maintained throughout the year, in which extreme heat does not enervate or extreme cold depress, and it is amid the scenery which the mind can easily take in and with which it can be familiar and friendly.
We are, then, so far in agreement with Sir Archibald Geikie that we think Nature has provided certain general conditions for the highest forms of human expression. It is possible that at some time in the distant future a great poetry may arise in Venezuela or a great art on the banks of the Niger ; but it is not probable. When, however, we are confronted with particular geological strata, and are led to believe that the old Red Sandstone will give us one variety of poetry and the Oolitic another, that proximity to the sea will tend to epics or the neighbourhood of grassy downs will inspire lyrics, we venture to express a doubt. There has been another element at work in our own, as in other lands, besides scenery,—the element of race. The line drawn by Sir A. Geikie across England is almost as truly a racial line as a geological. On the one hand we have pre-eminently the Saxon peoples,—the Angles and Saxons in East Anglia, the South Saxons in South-East England, the West Saxons in Wessex. On the other side we have a much more mixed population with a great infusion of Celtic blood. Similar phenomena exist in Italy, which is scored all over with diverse races. We must, in considering why " Ossian " differs from Scott, why Byron is of another moral " climate " than Cowper, ask ourselves how much race has to do with these diverse manifestations of genius. Perchance the secret of genius and its modes of expression will never be unveiled to mankind; but if it is, we venture to think that race will play a greater part in that secret than scenery, or even climate, factors though these both aro.
Previous page
