4. TRAVEL DIARIES
In the first part of his life, Beckford was an extensive traveller, albeit one who embarked on journeys with an entourage and certain cumbersome artefacts – his bed, his books, and his pictures – which he deemed necessary to make life comfortable wherever he went. We have seen that he loved Switzerland and Italy for quite different reasons, while Paris and Lisbon also had their rival attractions for him. But from his earliest days, Beckford became a journeyer of a different sort; he began those fantastic escapes and daydreams that were intimately connected with his deepest feelings and with the artistic temperament that already showed in his adolescence. Wandering about the idyllic dales and lakes of Fonthill, Beckford allowed his imagination to
transport him into exotic realms far removed from the confines of his father’s considerable estate: he peopled the woods and hills of Wiltshire with imaginary inhabitants who had the colourful characteristics of his favourite oriental figures. Blending the real and the imaginary became part of his artistic style and we find it already apparent in Dreams, his earliest travel writing which forms our first extract of that genre.
In a startlingly direct address to his reader, Beckford announces, in the opening lines of Dreams, that he will describe his travels through a mist that hovers before his eyes, mockingly differentiating himself from previous travel writers who kept to a mundane realism. His new style develops the mixture of descriptive accuracy with superimposed mood, whether of awe, fear or even humorous detachment, that we have found in his oriental tales. But now he adds a greater tone of intimacy, a confessional note that reminds us of Rousseau and which, as in Rousseau’s hands, he uses to draw the reader closer to the experience of the author.1 When he feels impelled to more fanciful story-telling, he feels no inhibition in doing that too.
A tone of dreaminess is set even before Beckford leaves English shores for the Continent. We find him vainly searching for solitariness among the crowds of pilgrims at Canterbury. He tells us that he already misses the seclusion of the native hills of his beloved Wiltshire which, nevertheless, he seems to be able to conjure up effortlessly. This manner of interrupting the travelogue with a dream sequence is repeated at various points on the journey through northern Europe; sometimes his romancing is brought on by physical stimuli such as a landscape bathed in moonlight, or a fine, noble vista. We soon begin to recognise these interruptions as a technique to heighten contrasts and to stimulate his reader’s expectation of what might await him when he is transported to regions southward where myth and fancy have ever had a freer reign. In the meantime, Beckford also wants to amuse. He does so by satirizing the plodding, commonsensical way of life of the Flemish, the first Continentals he encounters. With their neat, clean abodes and friendly habits, they seem by his cynical lights, to lead vacuous, stupid existences. The scenes of flat lands with great horizons, canals with windmills and a hazy winter light are described in a way that is meant to conjure, in the reader’s mind, images of Flemish paintings. The lives of the inhabitants of the Low Countries are made out to be as flat as the landscape: the smoke-filled taverns and the vile Flemish dialect provide a dreary backcloth for men whose oysterish look and flabby complexion attest to an aquatic descent! Beckford realizes only too well that these outlandish remarks will put him in the same xenophobic category as Tobias Smollett whose carps and grumbles against the French and Italians had made him notorious.2
When we are transported southwards, to Italy, a richer, more majestic tone is apparent. Here Beckford takes the picturesque more seriously, carefully showing off classical ruins (and his knowledge) against a background that can be primevally rude and even savage. Everywhere the colour, shapes and architectural splendours of classical, sylvan settings dazzle and impress the reader, bringing images of Claudian landscapes to his mind. At times Beckford’s story-telling bent gets the better of him; in Letter XXIII, we are entertained to a chilling if somewhat incongruous Gothic tale in the middle of the travelogue.
Travel literature had, of course, had a considerable vogue throughout the eighteenth century although its forms had varied greatly. Early accounts of tours in Britain, like Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724–26, concentrated on giving a detailed description of the cities and towns of the country, together with information about the manners and modes of living of its inhabitants. In contrast to this somewhat provincial approach, there had also been a more expansive, tradition of travel writing that treated of all parts of the globe and may be traced back as far as Samuel Purchas’s exotic accounts of the East at the beginning of the seventeenth century.1 Inheriting the mediaeval explorers’ tales (with which Beckford was already familiar as a boy) these writers cast their net wide and added another dimension to the genre, tracing the origin and nature of primitive societies so that they could better heap praise on their own ‘polite’ European estate or, if that was their bent, hark back to the innocence of some idyllic existence for ever out of reach.
When British travellers took to the Continent on the Grand Tour, it was often in search of the physical remnants of that classical civilization with which they had been imbued and which they unquestioningly accepted as the source of their own culture. So in 1729, Conyers Middleton, preparing to write a life of Cicero, went to Rome to soak up the atmosphere and reported back, enthusiastically, that being able to stroll about the Forum and gain an impression of the place, redoubled his appreciation of Cicero’s eloquence. As the century went on, this kind of travel writing became infused with a more personal tone, revealing the character of the writer whether it was splenetic as in the case of Smollet, intrepid as in the case of Piozzi2 or simply frantic as Boswell was among his Corsicans.3 On the whole, though, these diary-like accounts dwelt upon men and manners, skipping lightly over details of landscape or locale.
By the 1760s the kind of travel writing which we call the picturesque had made its appearance. It entailed paying attention to scenery and vista of place as well as, and in some cases rather than, the customs and manners of men.
Arthur Young’s Six Week Tour Through the Southern Counties of England and Wales, 1768, is an enthusiastic outpouring of this sort, celebrating the grandeur of nature and viewing her scenes with the artist’s eye. Landscape painters, especially Poussin, Claude and Salvatore Rosa provided models of how to look at natural settings in an idealized, even dramatic way. When this approach was used in a continental setting, such as in Patrick Brydone’s Tour Through Sicily and Malta, 1773, elements of the sublime and of wild dominate.Etna is shown billowing forth its molten lava into the snowy fields below. In a similar spirit William Coxe evokes the majesty of the Alps in his Swiss sketches showing an admiration for the great irregularities of nature rather than her symmetries. Although he has time to discuss the constitution and manners of the Swiss, it is the evocative description of the mountains, echoing the earlier trip of Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole to the Grande Chartreuse, which is the work’s richest vein.1
These allusions to the grandeur of Continental landscape are reflected in Beckford and indeed he appended to Dreams a description of his own visit to the Grande Chartreuse in 1778. However, his mood as an early travel writer is most akin to that of his contemporary, William Gilpin, when that most English author describes the beauties of the Lakes and Westmoreland.2 Gilpin suggests that mists and fogs, far from obscuring a view, may enhance its beauty and inspire the observer with an aesthetic vision that is more complete than anything derived from an ‘unclouded’ and therefore banal sighting. The picturesque calls for a blend of visual landscape and imaginative insight which will lead to artistic expression. If Brydone and Coxe stood apart from the scenes they describe, Gilpin immerses himself in his, finding an individual perspective uplifting. His approach is most similar to that we have seen announced so portentously by the young author of Dreams.
Four years after Dreams, Beckford was busy on another piece of travel writing, this time a private diary that he kept during his visit to Portu
gal in 1787. The Journal, not written for publication though perhaps intended to be enjoyed by a chosen coterie, shares certain characteristics of Dreams: it is directly addressed to a reader, this time the diarist’s ambiguous ‘you’; and it is laced with stories, anecdotes and references that will amuse and entertain that member of the cognoscenti. We find in the Journal too the confessional tone already familiar in Dreams: it is addressed to an equal and confidant whom the author trusts and respects. The diarist tells the story of his stay in Portugal during the long, hot summer of 1787. While there are detailed and vivid descriptions of courtly life in the decadent, Catholic society of late eighteenth-century Lisbon, there is also a sub-plot in which the writer’s emotional anxieties, frustrations and passions are shared with the reader. Not only is the agonizingly slow saga of the attempt to get Beckford presented to the Queen of Portugal set out with all its twists and turns, but other much more dangerous subjects are candidly set forth. We discover that the young men of Lisbon, with their dashing good looks, emotional directness and languid femininity delighted Beckford. This degree of candour about his emotional life only recurs in his later correspondence with Gregorio Franchi.1
The same events of the summer of 1787, judiciously edited for publication, receive different treatment in the Sketches, which appeared many years later in 1834. While the Journal’s prose are at times vibrant, at times subdued, reflecting the author’s moods and enthusiasms, there is a more consistent polish to the suave presentation of the events of that summer in the Sketches, addressed, at it was, to a middle class public of the 1830s. Here the tone is extrovert: stories are rounded off with a smoothness that is lacking in the Journal; nothing is allowed to spoil the cosmopolitan and polished impression that the snobbish Beckford, posing as the grand seigneur, wanted to give his bourgeois reader. The grandeur and decadence of life in the ancien régime is played up. All the great, noble families of Portugal make their appearance; church dignitaries, theologians and court celebrities jostle with one another to find a space in the glamorous web of the story. Beckford is seen everywhere, cavorting in high society and attending as an impish observer, the gaudy spectacle of an outwardly pious and extravagantly Catholic society. Editing out all unpleasantness does not make the Sketches bland; its elegant prose has captivated critics as discerning as André Parreaux while others, such as Boyd Alexander have preferred the Journal with its ‘little touches… trifling details’ skilfully and more humorously presented.2
The last of Beckford’s travel works represented in our collection is, in some senses, his finest and must rate highly in his work as a whole. The Recollections, written half a century after Dreams, once again combines what we now recognize as his Romantic leanings, his need to tarry and sometimes to explore the by-ways, with a mature control of métier expressed in a fine tautness of prose. From its first pages Beckford sets a jaunty tone: the opening scene is a clever evocation of Portuguese history and exploration in a tableau of the Tagus estuary, crammed with ships from all nations, which forms the backcloth for the departure of Beckford and his friends, laden with domestic and culinary impedimenta, on their leisurely journey through the Portuguese countryside to visit the great mediaeval monasteries at Alcobaça and Batalha.
The excursion soon assumes that jocular and self-mocking air so familiar to the reader of Beckfordian tales. We are treated to many amusing anecdotes and scenes, to the quarrelsomeness of his travelling companions, the greed of the monks and abbots, the honest virtue of the peasants and the delectable nubility of the novices that he cannot help noticing in the cloisters. Among these spicy and amusing episodes are the more serious artistic themes: the Portuguese countryside is described with the observant eye of the artist, delighted by the exotic fauna and flora, by sights of cane, bamboo, and enormous bulrushes under a vivid, azure sky. Much lushness there is too in the orchards of plum, pear and apricot and the gardens of thyme and camomile where Beckford wandered alone, having abandoned his travelling companions to their gastronomic treats or the slumbers that inevitably followed their excesses. Taken out into the morning freshness or shown the scarred battlefield of Aljubarrota,1 the reader of the Recollections is never left unentertained. Moments of peace come as well – whether they are in the exquisite Gothic chapel at Batalha or before the finely carved regal tomb at Alcobaça – and then the traveller at last finds some respite from the demands of the trail.
5. CONCLUSION
Pausing along the way, distracted by the sight of a picturesque vista or the threatening gloom of a cavernous entrance, or simply stopped by the beauty of wild flowers, Beckford’s protagonist is always observant and always ready to convert what he sees into art. He is guided by a genius much skilled in giving detailed descriptions of locales but adding to them an imaginative flavour that distinguishes the writing from the banal travel accounts written by most of Beckford’s contemporaries. Beckford’s own journeying spirit, taking him along wayside, sometimes languorous paths, is not always easy to capture by representative passages from his work because we need an expanse of text to follow him at his own pace; to savour the digressions as much as the talent that enabled him to tell a story concisely or bring a drama to a climactic conclusion.
Nevertheless, our selection has trailed Beckford from his early literary production to his last – from the fresh, inspired mood of The Vision with its stark, gripping story and surreal description, its tone of threatening horror and foreboding to the lush, effervescence of the Recollections, with its sparkling, lyrical prose. We have seen that Beckford’s literary moods varied greatly: that while he could lose himself in fantasy or whimsicality, there is always a firm control of métier, an innate mastery of story-telling, even in the course of descriptive narrative. Sometimes he is taken by the need to be humorous and poke fun: in the Biographical Memoirs we find him at his most bantering, by the time of Azemia at his most jaded and cynical. But wherever his moods direct him, his writer’s talent finds the right words, the rhythm of prose, taut or languid, the richness of language to embellish the narrative or to flush out its images, a sharpness of tone to complement the sharpness of eye that he undoubtedly had.
Beckford’s literary reputation has been assessed by modern critics too narrowly on Vathek. Writing in a lachrymose vein, J. W. Oliver, one of the earliest modern Beckford scholars, disturbed by Beckford’s heterodoxy, said in 1932:
One wishes that he had written oftener as he does in those letters1 of things and people of his everyday experience and made fewer excursions into the ecstatic and fantastic. We might then have lost Vathek (and English literature, despite the undoubted power of that remarkable book, is rich enough to stand such a loss), but we should have gained a body of contribution to social satire and clearly etched pictures of life and manners which would have given Beckford a place among our authors much higher and more secure than the not very high and rather detached eminence which critics have conceded to his eccentric genius.2
This is a curious comment from one who was familiar with Dreams or the Sketches, though he may not have read the Journal in its then exclusively manuscript form. For in those works, as we have seen, can be found the ‘clearly etched pictures of life’ which Oliver seems to have overlooked. Indeed throughout his travel writing and even in the novels, Beckford provides a ceaseless flow of daily images, as well as more flamboyant and picturesque flourishes. If occasionally he is carried away by his own exuberance, it is usually short-lived and his fine sense of balanced prose disciplines any tendency to excess. Two writers of discernment disassociated themselves from Oliver’s view. Sacheverell Sitwell, rated Beckford’s Portuguese works, the Sketches and the Recollections, as ‘an infinitely greater achievement’ than Vathek. Sitwell, himself a writer of grace and elegance, finds a rich literary talent in those neglected works.3 Rose Macaulay, writing in 1946, was equally enthusiastic. She distinguishes Beckford’s accounts of Portugal from anything else that had been written by previous English visitors, talking of his supple and easy prose’ a
nd adding, almost enviously, that ‘to write like Beckford is a rare gift’.4
Across the channel, Beckford’s writing has always been sympathetically interpreted just as in his actual life he was well received on the Continent, even at the times when he was ostracized at home. In a lively and forceful preface to the 1876 edition of Vathek, no less prominent a figure than Stéphane Mallarmé enthused over the masterly architecture and the aesthetic finesse of the Conte Arabe but he also made his reader aware of Beckford’s other works – his novels, his satire (showing that French penchant for sniffing out the political) and his travel writing. His praise of Beckford is warm and his high opinion was shared by his fellow academician, Prosper Mérimée. At the time when Oliver was expressing his grudging opinion of Beckford’s literary status, the French scholar André Parreaux began a lifetime’s work on Beckford, bringing a sensitivity and insight to his subject little matched in England. Parreaux, fascinated by the man, also realized the versatility of his literary achievement. While he understood Boyd Alexander’s complaint that the Sketches lacked some of the livelier, vivid detail of the Journal, Parreaux admired the unity of tone and atmosphere that Beckford managed to create in that work; as to the Recollections, which he translated and edited himself, he was delighted with its fluid, subtle style.1
From the time of Oliver and Parreaux onward, attention tended to focus either on Vathek and its place in the tradition of the Gothic novel or on biography, so fascinating and absorbing is Beckford’s life. Two English scholars made important contributions to Beckford studies – Guy Chapman worked on many aspects of Beckford’s life and letters; and Boyd Alexander, who for years was keeper of the Beckford archive among the Hamilton papers, published both the Journal and later correspondence, an eighteenth-century art form in which Beckford was much skilled. They were followed by several generations of writers and critics who took up particular aspects of Beckford’s many-sidedness: H. A. N. Brockman was interested in Beckford’s architectural ventures; James Lees Milne in his collecting mania and art connoisseurship; while Brian Fothergill produced an elegant and readable new biography.
Vathek and Other Stories Page 4
