The takers: The Adventures of the First Tourists. By Norman
Nicholson. (Robert Hale, 18s.)
THE LAKE DISTRICT has been written about endlessly and its literature is well stuffed with anecdotes and philosophisings about the figures, permanent or passing, which have graced its thun- derous landscape. Mr. Nicholson may have seemed to set himself a difficult task in conjuring an interesting book out of people's reactions to the region : surely, we think, it has all already been said? But here he has produced something exciting about 'the way people look at the Lakes,' most of it based on very perceptive analysis of the impact of the District'on such diverse chroniclers as Celia Fiennes, De Quincey, Thomas Gray, Harriet Martineau —among many others.
This skilful essay in the history of Taste Applied To The Study Of Landscape embraces compressed accounts of the geology, geography, ecology and economy, and of the mutual impacts of man, beast, weather and terrain; and then enlarges into dissection of the accounts written by that strange battalion of travellers, ex- ploiters and sensation-mongers who discovered and rediscovered the Lakes through the better part of three centuries.
Nothing can seem less dignified than an unworthy emotion examined in tranquillity; the author, by judicious quotation and comment, illustrates the abysmal silliness and the high degree of self-deception that impelled the pens of those who translated the grim splendour of lake and rock and fell into dainty tributes to the Ideal of the Picturesque. Being a Cumbrian as well as a poet, the author has a very clear understanding of what the various celebrities were looking for; what they thought they saw; and a good deal of what they actually saw, as they ambled, rode, or struggled across the landscape.
He shows us Defoe reacting like a good journalist, clearly seeing the region as 'the most barren and frightful' in England; Celia Fiennes, an old maid travelling for her own pleasure and therefore unlikely to distort what she saw for effect's sake; Gilpin, who amassed a fortune and spent his leisure transmuting the oddities of English landscape into the formula of picturesqueness. Gray avoided any of the hints on how-to-look-at-Nature dropped by these propagandists and emerges as the most perceptive and much the most sensual of observers before Wordsworth. Or rather, both Wordsworths; for Mr. Nicholson is particularly sharp in scrutin- ising the writings of Dorothy as well as the whole personality of William. has grown, at least partly, out of that sensibility that enabled him to 'learn to observe and feel, chiefly from Nature herself.' In sum- ming up, the author reminds us that 'the country is not man's picture gallery, his pleasure garden, his playing field; it is his workshop, his home, his bed and his board'-l-a consideration that
Is too often absent even from the minds of present-day Lakers.
A. V. COTON
Previous page
