Housman Country
Page 22
Coleridge was as good a talker as he was a walker, and the two habits were for him closely related. One of the places he did both was Shropshire. In 1798 he took charge of a Unitarian congregation in Shrewsbury, with a view to becoming its minister. The previous incumbent had failed to identify Coleridge when he went to meet the coach, and was explaining this to the congregation when a man he had seen engaged in energetic conversation with his fellow-passengers arrived and ‘dissipated all doubts [as to his identity] by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he staid; nor has he since, that I know of.’ The reporter is William Hazlitt, whose family had moved to the Shropshire market town of Wem the year before. The nineteen-year-old Hazlitt ‘rose one morning before daylight to walk ten miles in the mud’ to Shrewsbury to hear Coleridge preach, and was suitably impressed. Hazlitt’s father had also been a Unitarian minister and it was the custom for ministers to visit each other when in the area, so the following week Coleridge came to Wem to dine off a leg of Welsh mutton and turnips. The next morning, he set off back to Shrewsbury. ‘I accompanied him six miles on the road,’ Hazlitt recalled. ‘It was a fine morning in the middle of winter, and he talked the whole way.’ Coleridge spoke of philosophy and politics and walked in much the same way as he talked: ‘I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by shifting from one side of the foot-path to the other. This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle, as I have done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a strait line.’ Hazlitt, perhaps understandably, would later write that he, like Housman, preferred walking on his own and in silence: ‘I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors nature is company enough for me,’ he wrote in his essay ‘On Going a Journey’ (1822). ‘I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time.’
Hazlitt had been invited by Coleridge to visit him in Somerset and it seemed only appropriate that most of his 150-mile journey to Nether Stowey was accomplished on foot: through Shrewsbury, Worcester, Upton-upon-Severn, Tewkesbury, Gloucester, Bristol and Bridgwater. This seems a huge distance, but such walks were not uncommon at the time. While in 1773 Samuel Johnson and James Boswell made their tour of Western Isles by carriage, boat and on horseback, the Romantics accomplished similar tours mostly on foot. A six-week trip around Scotland undertaken by Coleridge and the Wordsworths in the summer of 1803 may officially have been made in a jaunting car, a rather more elegant version of a pony cart, but the roads were often so bad that they had to get down and walk much of the way. After the party broke up, Coleridge went off on his own, setting out for Edinburgh from Tarbet: by the time he had reached Perth he calculated that he had walked 263 miles in eight days, despite suffering from atonic gout and being prescribed carminative bitters in order to rid himself of ‘truly poisonous, & body-&-soul-benumming Flatulence and Inflation’. Uncertain health seemed no obstacle to such excursions, and when John Keats and his friend Charles Brown went on a tour of northern England, Scotland and Ireland in 1818 they covered over 600 miles in forty-four days, mostly on foot – a circumstance that some have argued hastened the poet’s death just three years later. The Romantic attitude to walking was summed up by Hazlitt: ‘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!’
Exploring the countryside on foot became increasingly popular during the nineteenth century, with guidebooks including suggestions for lengthy walks as part of a tourist’s experience. The Murray’s Handbook that Housman used when checking local details recommended ‘Pedestrian Tours’ of between eleven and twenty miles. As the nineteenth century progressed and more and more people found themselves pent up in industrial towns and cities, recreational walks in the countryside became increasingly popular, either undertaken informally or in organised groups. Detailed maps for those who wanted to ensure they did not get lost on country rambles had slowly become available from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first Ordnance Survey map (covering Kent and part of Essex) had been published on 1 January 1801, but the subsequent mapping of the whole country would not be complete until 1870. These early maps were not very portable: the first one was made up of ‘four massive rectangular sheets, each one around thirty inches wide and twenty inches high’. They were also expensive: the map for Devon covered eight sheets and cost six guineas, the equivalent of ‘forty days’ wages for a craftsman in the building trade.’ By 1870, however, the price had dropped to 2s 6d, bringing maps within the financial reach of many more people. The familiar Revised New Edition of one-inch-to-the-mile OS maps was published between 1896 (the year A Shropshire Lad was published) and 1904, a period that coincided with the rise of hiking as a popular pastime.
It was also during this period that poetry, its fin-de-siècle flirtation with the metropolitan life snuffed out with the century, re-embraced the countryside. A man like Housman who composed his poems while striding energetically across the land was in marked contrast to the traditional late-Victorian image of the poet, languishing picturesquely, and preferably consumptively, in a city garret – or indeed Gilbert and Sullivan’s Wildean aesthete in Patience, who recommended that you merely ‘walk down Piccadilly / With a poppy or a lily / In your medieval hand’. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Songs of Travel and Other Verses was published the same year as A Shropshire Lad and similarly stood apart from 1890s metropolitan greenery-yallery, celebrating life on the open road and a different kind of bohemianism from the one found at the Café Royal. If Housman’s poems are poems of exile from ‘the happy highways’ of his rural childhood, Stevenson’s were written at an even more remote distance from home, in the South Seas, and are similarly infused with yearning for the countryside of his youth. It seems hardly coincidental that when Stevenson died in 1894, Housman should write a poem about him, incorporating lines from Stevenson’s own ‘Requiem’ and published above an obituary in The Academy magazine. The first poem in Stevenson’s Songs of Travel was ‘The Vagabond’:
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river –
There’s the life for a man like me,
There’s the life for ever.
Literary vagabondage was taken to the limit by W.H. Davies, who in 1893, at the age of twenty-two, left his Welsh home for America, where he spent six years travelling round the country both on foot and by leaping on and off freight trains. To earn his keep he begged or did casual work, and he often slept rough. His travels came to an end when he was involved in an accident: he missed his footing while trying to jump on a train, as a result of which his right leg had to be amputated at the knee. He returned to Britain and ended up in London, drinking heavily and living in doss-houses, from which he set off tramping the countryside on his wooden leg as an itinerant pedlar. The title poem of his first volume of poetry, The Soul’s Destroyer, published in 1905, describes the poet waking up with a crashing hangover,
With limbs all sore from falling here and there
To drink the various ales the Borough kept
From London Bridge to Newington, and streets
Adjoining, alleys, lanes obscure from them,
Then thought of home and of the purer life,
Of Nature’s air, and having room to breathe,
A sunny sky, green field, and water’s sound …
This vision of nature inspires him to set out from London to walk back to Wales:
All day walked I, and that same night, I scorned
The shelter of a house, lay peaceful down
Beneath the glorious stars […]
Such joy a hundred times a day was mine
To see at every bend of the road the face
Of Nature different. And oft I sat
To hear the
lark from his first twitter pass
To greater things as he soared nearer heaven;
Or to the throstle, singing nearer home …
Davies is clearly an extreme case, and this poem is as much about the destructive nature of alcohol as it is about the contrast between the streets of London and life on the open road. It was not, however, merely indigence that made him declare in his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908): ‘I would rather take a free country walk, leaving the roads for the less trodden paths of the hills and lanes, than ride in a yacht or coach.’ The freedom he felt as a walker is the same as Coleridge’s: ‘every man his own path-maker’.
Davies may have walked partly from financial necessity, but in the early years of the twentieth century walking and poetry had once again become associated in the way they had been for the Romantics. ‘’Tis spring; come out to ramble / The hilly brakes around’, Housman urged in ‘The Lent Lily’ (XXIX), one of several poems in which the pleasures of country expeditions are recommended. The reveille in Housman’s poem of that name (IV) is not a military one: it is a call to those who waste their time lying late in bed to get up and out into the countryside.
Up, lad, up, ’tis late for lying:
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
‘Who’ll beyond the hills away?’
It is not merely that walking in the countryside is good for the health and spirits; Housman reminds the lad that life is too short to idle away:
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.
A renewed popular association of poetry and walking was partly a reaction against the Decadent poets of the 1890s. The novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, writing in 1977 about the generation who became young men in the 1900s, described the early years of the twentieth century as ‘a time of great popular writers’. The public ‘enjoyed, without perceiving any subtleties, the stories of Hardy, Conrad and Kipling. Furthermore, they read poetry. The “pocket anthology” fitted into a Norfolk jacket and could be taken out on long weekend walks; it had fine thin pages and a piece of ribbon attached as a bookmarker. The Golden Treasury (1891 edition) was the right size for this, so too was A Shropshire Lad.’
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury was itself conceived while walking. The book’s compiler, Francis Turner Palgrave, had become a friend of Tennyson and in 1860 had accompanied the poet on a walking tour of Cornwall in search of places associated with King Arthur as background material for Idylls of the King. It was ‘while traversing the wild scenery of Treryn Dinas’, an Iron Age cliff-fort on a Cornish promontory, that Palgrave suggested the idea of an anthology to Tennyson, hoping that the poet would become its co-editor. In the event, Palgrave received only encouragement and occasional advice from Tennyson, who found Palgrave’s devotion rather tiresome. Unaware of this, he dedicated his anthology to Tennyson, and what many readers saw as the imprimatur of the Poet Laureate undoubtedly helped the book become widely popular. In his preface to the first edition, Palgrave wrote: ‘Poetry gives treasures “more golden than gold”, leading us in higher and healthier ways than those of the world, and interpreting to us the lessons of Nature.’ The title page carries an engraving of a naked shepherd boy sitting on a rock beneath a tree on which a warbling bird perches; he is playing on a pipe and a dog is lying at his feet. Also on the ground are some pan pipes, apparently discarded, and this along with the fact that the boy has human rather than goat’s feet suggests an English Arcadia rather than a classical one. Indeed, the very first poem in the book is Thomas Nashe’s ‘Spring’ from his play Summers Last Will and Testament (1592), in which ‘shepherds pipe all day’ in the daisy-spangled English fields while ‘the pretty birds do sing’. Anyone who doubted that the mainstream of English poetry – at any rate as it was perceived in 1891 – was a pastoral one need only leaf through this anthology.
Although consisting of nearly 400 pages, The Golden Treasury was deliberately designed to be both affordable (originally retailing at 4s 6d) and portable, ‘a small octavo of a very pretty shape and size and type’ bound in gold-stamped green cloth. Another inexpensive book to slip into the jacket pocket was E.V. Lucas’s The Open Road: A Little Book for Wayfarers, first published by Grant Richards in 1899 and in its thirty-third edition by 1923. It had been specially devised for the literary-minded rambler, and is the book that in Howards End Leonard Bast recommends to the Schlegels after he has spent a whole night walking in the countryside, setting out from Wimbledon for the North Downs. Bast was just the sort of reader Lucas had in mind when compiling the book, which, he wrote, ‘aims at nothing but providing companionship on the road for city-dwellers who make holiday. It has no claims to completeness of any kind: it is just a garland of good or enkindling poetry and prose fitted to urge folk into the open air, and, once there, to keep them glad they came – to slip easily from the pocket beneath a tree or amongst the heather, and provide lazy reading for the time of rest, and perhaps a phrase or two for the feet to step to and the mind to brood on when the rest is over.’
The endpapers depict two highly stylised English landscapes, one illuminated by the sun, the other by the moon, through which the broad open road of the title winds, and they were designed by William Hyde, whom Grant Richards employed to illustrate an edition of A Shropshire Lad in 1908. The first section of the anthology is titled ‘The Farewell to Winter and the Town’ and opens with Edward FitzGerald’s ‘The Meadows in Spring’. Lucas was one of those anthologists who fell foul of Housman, who affected to be ‘speechless with surprise and indignation’ when he discovered that some of his poems had been included in The Open Road.
A similar volume to Lucas’s was Alfred H. Hyatt’s The Footpath Way: An Anthology for those who travel by Countryside (1906). ‘This little selection is intended for those who, in search of quiet, and having slipped the volume into the pocket, desire to refresh the mind while resting beside “the footpath way”,’ Hyatt wrote in his introduction. ‘Most of the poems and passages chosen to fill these pages throb with the true joy of the open air, each in its turn suggesting some happy country thought or painting some pastoral scene.’ Hyatt believed that even a bicyclist would miss out on much of what Nature has to offer – ‘she flies before the scorching cycle like a frightened bird’ – and that the only true way to appreciate the countryside was on foot. ‘Man was a born pedestrian,’ he writes, ‘and it is only at walking pace, an easy loitering pace too, that Nature can really be got to talk.’ Like Lucas’s anthology, this one admits a few Americans such as Walt Whitman and Washington Irving, but is essentially promoting the discovery of the English landscape.
Perhaps the most literary of all ramblers was Edward Thomas, who had been a lover of the countryside from his earliest years. He began his career as a prolific writer of prose, much of which he considered hack-work undertaken simply in order to feed his family. He nevertheless became one of the most prominent and popular celebrants of the English countryside in such books as The Heart of England (1906), The South Country (1909), The Icknield Way (1913) and In Pursuit of Spring (1914). He did not start writing poetry until 1914, and although he is counted amongst the war poets (he was killed at Arras on Easter Monday in 1917), all his poems were written before he went to the Western Front. Many of them are about the English landscapes he explored on foot, notebook in hand, taking his ‘credo’ from Richard Jefferies, the nineteenth-century nature writer whose biography he wrote in 1909: ‘Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind.’ Getting outdoors and into the countryside was also the impulse behind Thomas’s popular anthology The Pocket Book of Songs for the Open Air (1907). ‘I have gathered into it much of the finest English poetry,’ he wrote in the volume’s introduction, ‘and that, at its best, can hardly avoid the open air.’ The
very first poem in the anthology, printed without the poet’s permission and to his considerable annoyance, was Housman’s ‘Reveille’.
Two Pilgrims in Housman Country
Many writers make a particular landscape their own when they write about it, and readers often like the idea of visiting places they feel they know from books. Local tourist offices are only too happy to exploit such connections by enticing people to ‘Wordsworth Country’, ‘Brontë Country’ or ‘Hardy’s Wessex’. Among the events organised in 2009 to mark the 150th anniversary of Housman’s birth was ‘A walk in Housman Country’, which was in fact restricted to the area around Clun. The difference between this ‘Housman Country’ and other landscapes associated with writers – or indeed painters (‘Constable Country’) or composers (‘Elgar Country’) – is that the man after whom it is named never lived or worked there. Whereas writers such as Wordsworth, Hardy and the Brontës were describing in their stories, novels and poems real places that they knew intimately, when in 1926 Housman donated the manuscript of A Shropshire Lad to the library at Trinity College, he observed that ‘it reposes in the appropriate company of Milton’s Lycidas’, a pastoral elegy in which an idealised Theocritan ‘Cambridge’ bears little relation to the real university town.