Chapter 6
THE PATH OUT OF THE GARDEN
I. TWO WALKERS AND THREE WATERFALLS
Two weeks before the end of the century, a brother and sister went walking across the snow. Both were dark-complexioned, and their friends remarked that you could see their bad posture when they walked, but the resemblance ended there. He was tall, Roman-nosed, calm, while she was small and had fiery eyes that everyone noticed. The first day of their journey, December 17, they had gone twenty-two miles on horseback before they parted with their friend, the horses’ owner, and walked another twelve miles to their lodgings, “having walked the last three miles in the dark and two of them over hardfrozen road to the great annoyance of our feet and ancles. Next morning the earth was thinly covered with snow, enough to make the road soft and prevent its being slippery.” As they had the day before, the travelers turned aside to see a waterfall amid this mountainous landscape. “Twas a keen frosty morning,” the brother went on in his Christmas Eve letter, “showers of snow threatening us but the sun bright and active; we had a task of twenty one miles to perform in a short winter’s day. . . . On a nearer approach the water seemed to fall down a tall arch or rather nitch which had shaped itself by insensible moulderings in the wall of an old castle. We left this spot with reluctance but highly exhilarated.”
In the afternoon they came upon another waterfall, whose water seemed to turn to snow as it fell amid the ice. He continued, “The stream shot from between the rows of icicles in irregular fits of strength and with a body of water that momently varied. Sometimes it threw itself into the basin in one continued curve, sometimes it was interrupted almost midway in its fall and, being blown towards us, part of the water fell at no great distance from our feet like the heaviest thunder shower. In such a situation you have at every moment a feeling of the presence of the sky. Above the highest point of the waterfall large fleecy clouds drove over our heads and the sky appeared of a blue more than usually brilliant.” After the detour to the waterfall, they walked the next ten miles in two and a quarter hours “thanks to the wind that drove behind us and the good road,” and he seemed to relish their prowess in walking almost as much as the scenery. Seven more miles took them to their next resting spot, and in the morning they walked into Kendal, the gateway to the Lake District, where they had come to live.
The century they were approaching as fast as their new home was the nineteenth century, and the home was a cottage on the outskirts of the small lakeside village of Grasmere; the two vigorous walkers themselves were, as many may have already guessed, William and Dorothy Wordsworth. What they did on those four days across the Pennine Mountains of northern England, what they had done and would do as walkers, was extraordinary. What exactly makes it so is hard to pin down. People had traveled by foot much farther and in far worse conditions before. People had begun, by the time of the poet’s and his sister’s birth nearly thirty years before, to admire some of the wildest features of the British countryside—mountains, cliffs, moors, storms, and the sea, as well as waterfalls. In France and Switzerland a few people had begun to climb mountains—the summit of Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest peak, had first been reached fourteen years earlier. Wordsworth and his companions are said to have made walking into something else, something new, and thereby to have founded the whole lineage of those who walk for its own sake and for the pleasure of being in the landscape, from which so much has sprung. Most who have written about this first generation of Romantics propose that they themselves introduced walking as a cultural act, as a part of aesthetic experience.
Christopher Morley wrote in 1917, “I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much practiced before the Eighteenth Century. We know from Ambassador Jussurand’s famous book how many wayfarers were abroad on the roads in the Fourteenth Century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures of moving meditation and scenery. . . . Generally speaking, it is true that cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy.” Morley is not far off the mark, in his first sentence, though much of the eighteenth century had passed before Wordsworth was born in 1770. But then he conflates walking as a fine art with cross-country walking, which is where the confusion slips in. Since Morley, the subject of walking and English culture has been taken up in three books, all of which go further in proposing that it was in the late eighteenth century, when Wordsworth and his peers set out afoot, that this walking began.
Morris Marples’s delightful 1959 Shank’s Pony: A Study of Walking, Anne D. Wallace’s 1993 Walking, Literature, and English Culture, and Robin Jarvis’s 1998 Romantic Poetry and Pedestrian Travel all use as their demonstration case the German minister Carl Moritz. During his walk across England in 1782, Moritz often found himself scorned and ejected by innkeepers and their employees, while coachmen and carters continually asked him if he wanted a ride. He concluded that it was his mode of travel that made him seem out of place to those he encountered: “A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man, or an out-of-the-way-being, who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by everybody that meets him.” Reading his book, one is moved to speculate on whether his dress, manner, or accent disconcerted the people he encountered, rather than his walking. But his explanation is largely accepted by the three who cite him.
Travel itself was enormously difficult until the late eighteenth century in England. The roads were atrocious and plagued by highwaymen and their pedestrian equivalents, footpads. Those who could afford to went by horse or by coach, carriage, or at worst, wagon, sometimes with weapons; walking along the public roads often signified that one was either a pauper or a footpad, at least until the 1770s, when various intellectuals and eccentrics began to walk there for pleasure. By the late eighteenth century, the roads were improving in both quality and safety, and walking was becoming a more respectable mode of travel. On the cusp of the next century, the Wordsworths were having a splendid time walking not only roads but fells and byways; fear of crime and denigration seem to be the furthest things from their mind as they admired the view and enjoyed their own powers of walking in weather that would keep most people huddled indoors.
They had visited the Lake District six years before their midwinter walk. “I walked with my brother at my side, from Kendal to Grasmere, eighteen miles, and afterwards from Grasmere to Keswick, fifteen miles, through the most delightful country that ever was seen,” wrote Dorothy in the initial flush of pleasure after that excursion in 1794, and then she wrote defensively to her aunt, “I cannot pass unnoticed that part of your letter in which you speak of my ‘rambling about the country on foot.’ So far from considering this as a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me infinitely more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post chaise—but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings.” If we take Dorothy Wordsworth in 1794 rather than Carl Moritz in 1782 as our witness, we find walking cross-country was nothing worse than unladylike and unconventional.
Though Wordsworth is in some sense the founding father (and therefore Dorothy the aunt) of a modern taste that has done much to shape the more pleasant parts of our world and the imaginations of those in it, he himself was heir to a long tradition, and so it is more accurate to see him as a transformer, a fulcrum, a catalyst for the history of walking in the landscape. His precursors, it is true, had not walked much on the public roads (and for the most part, neither do his modern descendants, since cars have made roads dangerous and miserable again). Though many traveled on foot out of necessity before him, few did so for pleasure, and these historians therefore conclude that walking for pleasure was a new phenomenon. In fact, walking had already become an important activity, though not as trave
l. Few of Wordsworth’s pedestrian antecedents are to be found traveling along the public roads, but many of them were strolling in gardens and parks.
II. THE GARDEN PATH
Halfway through the nineteenth century, Thoreau wrote, “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?” For Thoreau, the desire to walk in the unaltered landscape no longer seemed to have a history, but to be natural—if nature means the timeless truth we have found, not the historic specific we have made. Though many nowadays go to the fields and woods to walk, the desire to do so is largely the result of three centuries of cultivating certain beliefs, tastes, and values. Before that, the privileged seeking pleasure and aesthetic experience did indeed walk only in a garden or a mall. The taste for nature already entrenched in Thoreau’s time and magnified in our own has a peculiar history, one that has made nature itself cultural. To understand why people chose to walk out in certain landscapes with certain agendas, one must first understand how that taste was formed in and launched from English gardens.
We tend to consider the foundations of our culture to be natural, but every foundation had builders and an origin—which is to say that it was a creative construction, not a biological inevitability. Just as a twelfth-century cultural revolution ushered in romantic love as first a literary subject and then a way of experiencing the world, so the eighteenth century created a taste for nature without which William and Dorothy Wordsworth would not have chosen to walk long distances in midwinter and to detour from their already arduous course to admire waterfalls. This is not to say that no one felt a tender passion or admired a body of water before these successive revolutions; it is instead to say that a cultural framework arose that would inculcate such tendencies in the wider public, give them certain conventional avenues of expression, attribute to them certain redemptive values, and alter the surrounding world to enhance those tendencies. It is impossible to overemphasize how profound is the effect of this revolution on the taste for nature and practice of walking. It reshaped both the intellectual world and the physical one, sending populations of travelers to hitherto obscure destinations, creating innumerable parks, preserves, trails, guides, clubs, and organizations and a vast body of art and literature with almost no precedent before the eighteenth century.
Some influences stand out like a landmark and leave a traceable legacy with evident heirs. But the most profound influences soak into the cultural landscape like rain and nourish everyday consciousness. Such an influence is likely to go undetected, for it comes to seem the way things have always been, the natural or even the only way to look at the world. This is the influence Shelley had in mind when he wrote, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Such an influence is the Romantic taste for landscape, for wild places, for simplicity, for nature as an ideal, for walking in the landscape as the consummation of a relationship with such places and an expression of the desire for simplicity, purity, solitude. Which is to say, walking is natural, or rather part of natural history, but choosing to walk in the landscape as a contemplative, spiritual, or aesthetic experience has a specific cultural ancestry. This is the history that had already become naturalized for Thoreau and that took walkers farther and farther afield—for the changing history of walking is inseparable from the changing taste in places in which to walk.
The real reason Wordsworth and his peers seem to be the founders rather than the transformers of a tradition of walking for aesthetic reasons is because the walks that preceded theirs are so unremarkable. In fact these short walks in safe places are only incidental to the histories of architecture and gardens; they have no literature of their own, only mentions in novels, journals, and letters. The core of their history is concealed within another history, of making places to walk, places that became larger and more culturally significant as the eighteenth century wore on. It is also the history of a radical transformation of taste, from the formal and highly structured to the informal and naturalistic. It seems, in its origins, a trivial history of the idle aristocracy and their architecture, but in its results it created some of the most subversive and delightful places and practices in the contemporary world. The taste for walking and landscape became a kind of Trojan horse that would eventually democratize many arenas and in the twentieth century literally bring down the barriers around aristocratic estates.
The practice of walking can be traced through places. By the sixteenth century, as castles were beginning to turn into palaces and mansions, galleries—long narrow rooms like corridors, though often leading nowhere—often began to be part of the design. They were used for exercise indoors. “Sixteenth-century doctors stressed the importance of daily walking to preserve health, and galleries made exercise possible when the weather would otherwise have prevented it,” writes Mark Girouard in his history of the country house. (The gallery eventually became a place for displaying paintings, and though museum galleries are still a place where people stroll, the strolling is no longer the point.) Queen Elizabeth added a raised terrace walk to Windsor Castle and walked there for an hour before dinner on every day that was not too windy. Walking was still more for health than for pleasure, though gardens were also being used for walking, and some kind of pleasure must have accrued there. But the taste for landscape was still fairly limited. On October 11, 1660, Samuel Pepys went walking in St. James’s Park after dinner, but he only notes the water pumps at work there. Two years later, on May 21, 1662, he writes that he and his wife went walking in White Hall Garden, but he seemed most interested in the lingerie of the king’s mistress in the privy garden, evidently hung there to dry. It was society that interested him, not nature, and landscape was not yet a significant subject for British painting and poetry, as it was to become. Until the surroundings became important, the walk was just movement, not experience.
A revolution was under way, however, in gardens. The medieval garden had been surrounded by high walls, in part for security in unstable times. In pictures of these gardens, the occupants most often sit or recline, listening to music or conversing (the enclosed garden had been, since the Song of Songs, a metaphor for the female body, and at least since the rise of the courtly love tradition, the site of much courtship and flirtation). Flowers, herbs, fruit-bearing trees, fountains, and musical instruments made them places that speak to all the senses, and the world outside this voluptuous sanctum seemed to provide more than enough exercise, since medieval nobles were still bodily involved in military and household matters. As the world became safer and the aristocratic residence became more a palace than a fortress, the gardens of Europe began to expand. Flowers and fruit were disappearing from the gardens; it was the eye to which these expanded realms appealed. The Renaissance garden was a place in which one could take a walk as well as sit, and the Baroque garden grew vast. Just as walking was exercise for those who need no longer work, so these vast gardens were cultivated landscapes that need no longer produce anything more than mental, physical, and social stimulation for walkers.
Were the Baroque garden not so ostentatious a display of wealth and power, its abstractness could be called austere. Trees and hedges were forced into squares and cones; paths, avenues, and walks were laid out as straight lines; water was pumped into fountains or poured into geometrical pools. A platonic order, a superimposition of the ideal on the messy material of the real, triumphed. Such gardens extended the geometry and symmetry of architecture into the organic world. But they still provided opportunities for informal and private behavior: throughout their history, one of the major functions of aristocratic gardens was to give people a place to retreat from the household into contemplation or private conversation. In England, William and Mary added new gardens to Hampton Court in 1699, gardens in which one could walk for a mile before reaching the wall. Walks, or paths, were becoming increasingly important parts of gardens, and they are indirect evidence of the increasing popularity of walking (in this context, “a walk” meant a
path broad enough for two to walk abreast; it could be called a conversational route). English traveler and chronicler Celia Fiennes wrote of a garden she visited near the beginning of the eighteenth century, “There is gravel walks and grass and close walks, there is one walk all the length of the Garden called the Crooked Walke, of grass well cut and rowled, it is indented in and out in corners and so is the wall, which makes you thinke you are at the end of the walke several times before you are.” But the walls of the garden were disappearing, and the distinction between it and the landscape beyond became harder and harder to find. Renaissance Italian gardens had been built by preference upon slopes that gave views of the countryside beyond, connecting the garden to the world, but French and English gardens seldom had such settings. The line of sight only extended to the garden wall, then eventually through a variety of openings in the garden wall.
When the ha-ha came into being in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the walls came down in Britain. A ditch relatively invisible from any distance, the ha-ha—so named because strollers were said to exclaim “Ha ha!” in surprise when they came upon it—provided an invisible barrier that allowed the garden’s inhabitants to gaze into the distance uninterrupted. Where the eye went, the walker would soon follow. Most English estates consisted of a series of increasingly controlled spaces: the park, the garden, and the house. Originally hunting preserves, parks remained as a kind of buffer zone between the leisure classes and the agricultural land and workers around them and often provided timber and grazing space. The garden was typically a much smaller space surrounding the house. Susan Lasdun, in her history of these parks, writes of the straight avenues of trees planted in parks and gardens in the seventeenth century: “These avenues provided the shade and shelter for walks which, having been made fashionable by Charles II, were now becoming de rigueur in parks. . . . Certainly the liking for air and exercise was already considered an ‘English’ taste. Walks were now laid out by private owners in their country parks, and walking became as much a part of the pleasure of a park as hunting, driving and riding. The walks themselves were made increasingly interesting, with aesthetic considerations developing from the simple static vista from a window or terrace, to something that took account of a more mobile point of view. . . . The walker in fact made a circuit, and in the eighteenth century this was to become the standard manner for viewing gardens and parks. The days when it was only safe to walk on the castle terrace—the allure—had long since passed.”
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 12
