Simon Schama-Landscape and Memory-Vintage (1996)

A C C L A IM

FOR

Sim on Scham a’s Landscape and Memory “An extraordinary book. . . . Schama’s range o f reference is enormous. . . . Landscape a n d M em ory is a continual delight, learned [and] full o f elegant riffs . . . an impressive enrich­ ment o f the general sensibility.”

— Chicago T ribu ne

“ Deserves to become a classic. . . . Schama is one o f those rare, imaginative historians who introduce the reader to a kind o f yesteryear they never dreamed existed.”

— T im e

“ Landscape a n d M em ory will inform and haunt, chasten and enrage its readers. It is that rarest o f commodities in our cultural marketplace, a work o f genuine originality.” — The N ew R ep u b lic

“A bold journey across thirty centuries and four continents. . . . Schama manages his tour de force with extravagant wit [and] copious detail.”

— W ashington Post Book World

“This is one o f the most intelligent, original, stimulating, self-indulgent, perverse, and irre­ sistibly enjoyable books that I have ever had the delight o f reviewing.” — Philip Ziegler, The D a ily Telegraph (London)

“ Dazzling . . . brilliant and stirring . . . rich and stimulating. . . . Propelled by Schama’s sparkling style, the book springs along like a deer in the woods.”

— Boston Globe

“ Far-ranging . . . ambitiously disheveled. . . . By giving chance and accident major roles in history, Schama is also making room for other unpredictable things— passion, personal­ ity, charisma, eloquence, art, sex. His history . . . allows individual human beings in all their clumsy complexity back on stage.”

— N ew York magazine

“ History needs its singers o f epic tales, and Schama . . . aims to oblige. . . . [He] has devoured libraries in shaping this . . . rich, purposeful study. . . . Few historians have made ancient places come alive so well. . . . Superbly illustrated . . . immensely entertaining.” — The N a tio n

“A writer whose story-telling skills, descriptive power, imagination and verve make a com­ parison with Kipling by no means absurd.. . . Vivid, elaborate, unashamedly colorful. . . . Readers will continue to derive pleasure from this remarkable book, so ambitious in concep­ tion, so consistendy entertaining in execution.”

— N ew York R eview o f Books

ALSO

BY S I M O N

SCHAMA

Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the N etherlands 17 8 0 -18 13 Two Rothschilds and the La n d o f Israel The Embarrassment o f Riches: A n Interpretation o f D utch C u ltu re in the Golden A ge Citizens: A Chronicle o f the French Revolution D ead C ertainties (U nw arranted Speculations)

Simon Schama Landscape and Memory Simon Schama was born in London, in 1945, and since 1966 has taught history at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard uni­ versities. He is now O ld Dominion Foundation Professor o f the Humanities in the departments o f art history and history at Columbia University. H e is the prize-winning author o f P a t r i­ ots a n d Liberators: R ev o lu tio n in the N etherlands 17 8 0 -1 8 1 3 ; The Em barrassm ent o f Riches: A n Interp retation o f D u tc h C u l ­ ture in the G olden Age; C itizen s: A C hron icle o f the French R e v ­ olution; and D e a d C er ta in ties (U n w a rra n ted Speculations). H e is also the writer-presenter o f historical and art-historical documentaries for B B C television and art critic at The N ew Yorker. He lives outside N ew York City with his wife and two children.

L andscape AND M emory SIMON SCHAMA

V I N T A G E

B O O K S

A D iv is io n o f R a n d o m H o u se, In c . /

N e w York

F I R S T VI N T AG E B OOK S E D I T I O N , N O V E M B E R 1996 Copyright © 1995 by Sim on Schama

A ll rights reserved under Interna tion al a n d P a n-A m erica n Copyright Conventions. Published in the U nited States by Vintage Books, a division o f R andom House, Inc., New Tork. Originally published in hardcover by A lfred A . Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1999.

The Library o f Congress has cataloged the K n o p f edition as follows: Schama, Simon. Landscape a n d m em ory /Sim on Schama — 1st A m erica n ed. p. cm. Includes index. isbn 0-679-40299-1

1.

Landscape— History. 2. Landscape assessment— History. 3. H u m a n ecology— History. I. Title. GF30.S33 1994 304.2'3— dc20 93-48346 CIP Vintage isbn: 0-67 9 -7 3 9 12 -7

Book design by Iris Weinstein

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

Prin ted in the U nited States o f A m erica

FOR CH LO E AND

G A B R IE L

I t is in v a in to dream o f a wildness d ista n t fr o m ourselves. There is none such. I t is the bog in o u r brains a n d bowels, the p rim itiv e vigor o f N a tu re in us, th a t inspires th a t d ream . I sha ll never f i n d in the wilds o f L a bra d o r a ny g re a ter wildness than in some recess o f Concord, i.e. than I im p o rt in to it. HENRY DAVID T H O R E A U ,

Journal, August 30, 1856

Contents

I n t r o d u c t io n

part

Prologue

3

o n e

Wood

The Detour

chapter

one

23

In the Realm o f the Lithuanian Bison

i

The Royal Beasts o f Bialowieza

37

ii

The Last Foray

53

iii

Mortality, Immortality

61

chapter

two

D e r Holzweg: The Track Through the Woods

i

The H unt for Germania

75

ii

Blood in the Forest

81

iii

Arminius Redivivus

100

iv

W aldsterben

120

chapter

three

The Liberties o f the Greenwood

i

Green Men

135

ii

Living in the Woods: Laws and Outlaws

142

iii

Hearts o f Oak and Bulwarkso f Liberty?

153

iv

The Pillars o f Gaul

174

v

In Extremis

179

CONTENTS chapter

four

The Verdant Cross

Grizzlies

185

Vegetable Resurrection

201

Pathfinders

207

The Verdant Cross

214

Tabernacles

226

Volvos at the Sepulchre

240

part

chapter

Water

tw o

Streams o f Consciousness

five

The Flow o f Myth

245

Circulation: Arteries and Mysteries

256

Holy Confluences

263

Fons Sapientiae

268

Nile Brought to Tiber

282

Bernini and the Four Rivers

289

chapter

six

Bloodstreams

Sir Water Ralegh Loses His Drift

307

The Man in the Brown Paper Boat

320

Power Lines

333

The Political Theory o f Whitebait

352

Bodies o f Water

362

The Waters o f Isis: The Thames and the Nile

374

part

chapter

seven

th ree

Rock

Dinocrates and the Shaman:

Altitude, Beatitude, Magnitude The Woman on Mount Rushmore

385

Dinocrates and the Shaman

399

Elevations

411

Exorcising Pilate

424

Calvaries o f Convenience

436

The Last Sacro Monte}

442

CONTENTS chapter

eig h t

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

Delightful Horror

447

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

463

The Seat o f Virtue

478

Conquests

490

Albert the Great

498

Prospects o f Salvation

502

PART F O U R

chapter

Woody WdtCYy Rock

n in e

Arcadia Redesigned

E t in A r c a d ia Ego

517

Primitives and Pastorals

526

Rudeness and Confusion

538

A n Arcadia for the People: The Forest o f Fontainebleau

546

Arcadia under Glass

560

The Wild, Hairy Huckleberry

571

Notes

579

A Bibliographic Guide

613

Acknowledgements

623

Index

625

C o lo r pla tes fo llow pages i 8 y 8 2 ,1 1 4 , 2 10 , 338, a n d 330.

Introduction

I t was only when I got to secondary school that I realized I wasn’t supposed to like Rudyard Kipling. This was a blow. N o t that I much minded leaving Kim and M owgli behind. But P u ck o fP o o k ’s H i l l was a different story— my favorite story, in fact, ever since I had been given the book for my eighth birthday. For a small boy with his head in the past, Kipling’s fantasy was potent magic. Apparendy, there were some places in England where, if you were a child (in this case Dan or Una), people who had stood on the same spot centuries before would suddenly and inexplicably materialize. With Puck’s help you could time-travel by standing still. O n Pook’s Hill, lucky Dan and Una got to chat with Viking warriors, Roman centurions, Norman knights, and then went home for tea. I had no hill, but I did have the Thames. It was not the upstream river that the poets in my Palgrave claimed burbled betwixt mossy banks. Nor was it even the wide, olive-drab road dividing London. It was the low, gull-swept estu­ ary, the marriage bed o f salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank, toward a thin black horizon on the other side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy who always seemed to beat us in the County Cricket Championship. O n most days the winds brought us a mixed draught 3

e d ite d o u t o f th e id yll. It w a s J o h n M u ir , th e p r o p h e t o f w ild e r n e s s , w h o a c t u ­

Albert

ally c h a ra c te r iz e d Y o s e m ite as a “ p a rk v a lle y ” a n d c e le b r a te d its r e s e m b la n c e to

Bierstadt,

an “ a rtificial la n d s c a p e - g a r d e n

The Tosemite Valley, 1868.

. . . w ith c h a r m in g g r o v e s a n d m e a d o w s a n d

th ic k e ts o f b lo o m i n g b u s h e s .” T h e m o u n ta in s th a t ro s e a b o v e th e “ p a r k ” h a d “ fe e t set in p in e - g r o v e s an d g a y e m e r a ld m e a d o w s , th e ir b r o w s in th e sky; b a th e d in lig h t, b a th e d in flo o d s o f s in g in g w a te r , w h ile s n o w - c lo u d s a v a la n c h e an d th e w in d s sh in e an d s u r g e an d w r e a th e a b o u t th e m as th e ye a rs g o b y , as

C arleton W atkins,

Cathedral Rock, 2,600 feet, Yosem ite.

INTRODUCTION

9

if into these mountain mansions Nature had taken pains to gather her choicest treasures to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her.” 3 But o f course nature does no such thing. We do. Ansel Adams, who admired and quoted Muir, and did his best to translate his reverence into spectacular nature-icons, explained to the director o f the National Park Service, in 1952, that he photographed Yosemite in the way he did to sanctify “ a religious idea” and to “ inquire o f my own soul just what the primeval scene really signifies.” “ In the last analysis,” he wrote, “ Half Dome is just a piece o f rock. . . . There is some deep personal distillation o f spirit and concept which moulds these earthly facts into some transcendental emotional and spiritual experience.” T o protect

A n sel A d am s,

Valley View from Tunnel Esplanade, Y o sem ite N ation al Park.

Yosemite’s “spiritual potential,” he believed, meant keeping the wilderness pure; “ unfortunately, in order to keep it pure we have to occupy it.” 4 There is nothing inherently shameful about that occupation. Even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free o f our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product. And it is the argument o f Landscape a n d M em ory that this is a cause not for guilt and sorrow but celebration. Would we rather that Yosemite, for all its overpopulation and overrepresentation, had never been identified, mapped, emparked? The brilliant meadow-floor which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden was in fact the result o f regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian occupants. So while we acknowl­ edge (as we must) that the impact o f humanity o f the earth’s ecology has not

INTRODUCTION been an unmixed blessing, neither has the long relationship between nature and culture been an unrelieved and predetermined calamity. At the very least, it seems right to acknowledge that it is our shaping perception that makes the dif­ ference between raw matter and landscape. The word itself tells us as much. It entered the English language, along with herring and bleached linen, as a Dutch import at the end o f the sixteenth century. And landschap, like its Germanic root, Landschaft, signified a unit of human occupation, indeed a jurisdiction, as much as anything that might be a pleasing object o f depiction.5 So it was surely not accidental that in the Nether­ landish flood-fields, itself the site o f formidable human engineering, a commu­ nity developed the idea o f a landschap, which in the colloquial English o f the time became a landskip. Its Italian equivalents, the pastoral idyll o f brooks and

H enry Peacham ,

Rura Mihi et Silentium, from Minerva Britannia, 16 12 .

wheat-gold hills, were known as parerga, and were the auxiliary settings for the familiar motifs o f classical myth and sacred scripture. But in the Netherlands the human design and use o f die landscape— implied by the fishermen, cattle drovers, and ordinary walkers and riders who dotted the paindngs o f Esaias van de Velde, for example— was the story, stardingly sufficient unto itself. With the vogue for Dutch landskips established in England, the scholarartist Henry Peacham included in his drawing manual, Graphice, the first prac­ tical advice to his compatriots on how to compose one. But lest anyone suppose that all they had to do was somehow translate the objects o f their gaze into twodimensional form, Peacham’s book o f emblems, M inerva B rita n n ia, published the same year, set them right.6 Positioned beside an image o f the British arca-

INTRODUCTION dia, Peacham’s emblem R u m M ih i et S ile n tiu m made it clear that the rustic life was to be valued as a moral corrective to the ills o f court and city; for the medic­ inal properties o f its plants; for the Christian associations o f herbs and flowers; and above all for its proclamation o f the stupendous benevolence o f the Cre­ ator. What his emblem was supposed to invoke was the quintessentially English scene: “Some shadie grove upon the Tham es fairc side/ Such as we may neere princely Richmond see.” 7 But the woodcut that the drawing master supplied as illustration looks a lot more like the poetic arcadia than the Thames valley. It is an inventory o f the standard features o f the humanist happy valley: rolling hills safely grazed by fleecy flocks and cooled by zephyrs moist and sweet. It supplied the prototypical image that was reproduced in countless paintings, engravings, postcards, railway train photographs, and war posters, which

Frank N e w b o u ld , W orld W ar II civilian-effort poster.

merely had to be executed in order to summon up loyalty to the temperate, blessed isle. The framed border o f Peacham’s woodcut is strikingly elaborate, as such printed emblems often were. They acted as a kind o f visual prompt to the atten­ tive that the truth o f the image was to be thought o f as poetic rather than lit­ eral; that a whole world o f associations and sentiments enclosed and gave meaning to the scene. The most extreme example o f such deliberate framing was the so-calied Claude-glass, recommended in the eighteenth century to both artists and tourists o f “picturesque” scenery. A small, portable mirror backed with dark foil, it was named for the French painter who most perfectly harmonized classical architecture, leafy groves, and distant water. If the view in

INTRODUCTION the mirror approximated to this Claudian ideal, it was judged sufficiently “pic­ turesque” to be appreciated or even drawn. Later variations tinted the glass with the light o f a radiant dawn or a roseate sunset. But it was always the inher­ ited tradition, reaching back to the myths o f Arcadia, Pan’s fertile realm popu­ lated with nymphs and satyrs, that made landscape out o f mere geology and vegetation. “This is how we see the world,” Rene Magritte argued in a 1938 lecture explaining his version o f La Condition hu m aine (color illus. 2) in which a paint­ ing has been superimposed over the view it depicts so that the two are contin­ uous and indistinguishable. “We see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation o f what we experience on the inside.”8 What lies beyond the windowpane o f our apprehension, says Magritte, needs a design before we can properly discern its form, let alone derive pleasure from its per­ ception. And it is culture, convention, and cognition that makes that design; that invests a retinal impression with the quality we experience as beauty. It is exactly this kind o f presumption that many contemporary landscapists find so offensive. So instead o f having pictorial tradition dictate to nature, they have tried hard to dissolve the artistic ego within natural process.9 Their aim is to produce an anti-landscape where the intervention o f the artist is reduced to the most minimal and transient mark on the earth. The British artists Andy Goldsworthy and David Nash, for example, have made works that invoke nature without forcing it into museum-ready shape: “ found” sculptures from shoreline driftwood or naturally charred tree limbs; cairns made from beach pebbles; or balls o f leaves and snow bound with thorns and twigs and sited so as to decompose or metamorphose with the natural processes o f the seasons (color illus. 3). But while much o f this minimalist landscape is always stirring and often very beautiful, it seldom escapes from the condition it implicitly crit­ icizes. Quite as much as with Carleton Watkins or Ansel Adams, the camera is required to capture the natural moment. So the organizing move o f the artist is merely displaced from the hand on the paintbrush to the finger on the shut­ ter. And in that split instant o f framing, the old culture-creatures re-emerge from their lair, trailing the memories o f generations behind them.10 In the same chastened spirit, environmental historians have also lamented the annexation o f nature by culture. While not denying the landscape may indeed be a text on which generations write their recurring obsessions, they are not about to rejoice in the fact. The arcadian idyll, for example, seems just another pretty lie told by propertied aristocracies (from slave-owning Athens to slave-owning Virginia) to disguise the ecological consequences o f their greed. And they have made it a point o f honor to restore a distinction between landscape and manscape, and to see if a history could not be written that might not assume the earth and its diverse species were created for the express and exclusive pleasure o f what Muir witheringly called “ Lord Man.”

INTRODUCTION Especially in the United States (where the interplay o f men and habitat has long been at the heart o f national history), the best environmental histories have brilliandy realized that ambition. Whether chronicling the ice-world o f Antarctica, the fiery Australian bush, the ecological transformation o f New England, or the water-wars o f the American West, writers like Stephen Pyne, William Cronon, and Donald Worster have accomplished the feat o f making inanimate topography into historical agents in their own right.11 Restoring to the land and climate the kind o f creative unpredictability conventionally reserved for human actors, these writers have created histories in which man is not the be-all and end-all o f the story. But though environmental history offers some o f the most original and challenging history now being written, it inevitably tells the same dismal tale: o f land taken, exploited, exhausted; o f traditional cultures said to have lived in a relation o f sacred reverence with the soil displaced by the reckless individual­ ist, the capitalist aggressor. And while the mood o f these histories is under­ standably penitential, they differ as to when the Western fall from grace took place. For some historians it was the Renaissance and the scientific revolutions o f the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that doomed the earth to be treated by the West as a machine that would never break, however hard it was used and abused.12 For Lynn White, Jr., it was the invention, in the seventh century A .D ., o f a fixed-harnessed plow that sealed the earth’s fate. The “ knife” o f the new implement “ attacked the land” ; farming became ecological war. “ Formerly man had been part o f nature; now he was the exploiter o f nature.” 13 Intensive agriculture, then, is said to have made possible all manner o f modern evils. It gouged the earth to feed populations whose demands (whether for necessities or luxuries) provoked yet further technological innovations, which in turn exhausted natural resources, spinning the mad cycle o f exploita­ tion at ever more frantic revolutions, on and on through the whole history o f the West. And perhaps not even the West. Perhaps, say the most severe critics, the entire history o f settled (rather than nomadic) society, from the irrigation-mad Chinese to the irrigation-mad Sumerians, is contaminated by the brutal manip­ ulation o f nature. Only the Paleolithic cave-dwellers, who left us their cave paintings as evidence o f their integration with, rather than dominion oyer, nature, are exempted from this original sin o f civilization. Once the archaic cos­ m ology in which the whole earth was held to be sacred, and man but a single link in the long chain o f creation, was broken, it was all over, give or take a few millennia. Ancient Mesopotamia, all unknowing, begat, global warming. What we need, says one such impassioned critic, Max Oelschlaeger, are new “ creation myths” to repair the damage done by our recklessly mechanical abuse o f nature and to restore the balance between man and the rest o f the organisms with which he shares the planet.14

INTRODUCTION It is not to deny the seriousness o f our ecological predicament, nor to dis­ miss the urgency with which it needs repair and redress, to wonder whether, in fact, a new set o f myths are what the doctor should order as a cure for our ills. What about the old ones? For notwithstanding the assumption, commonly asserted in these texts, that Western culture has evolved by sloughing off its nature myths, they have, in fact, never gone away. For if, as we have seen, our entire landscape tradition is the product o f shared culture, it is by the same token a tradition built from a rich deposit o f myths, memories, and obsessions. The cults which we are told to seek in other native cultures— o f the primitive forest, o f the river o f life, o f the sacred mountain— are in fact alive and well and all about us if only we know where to look for them. And that is what Landscape an d Memory tries to be: a way o f looking; o f rediscovering what we already have, but which somehow eludes our recogni­ tion and our appreciation. Instead o f being yet another explanation o f what we have lost, it is an exploration o f what we may yet find. In offering this alternative way o f looking, I am aware that more is at stake than an academic quibble. For if the entire history o f landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor, and allegory, where measurement, not memory, is the absolute arbiter o f value, where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine o f our self-destruction. At the heart o f this book is the stubborn belief that this is not, in fact, the whole story. The conviction is not born from any wishful thinking about our past or our prospects. For what it is worth, I unequivocally share the dismay at the ongoing degradation o f the planet, and much o f the foreboding about the possibilities o f its restoration to good health. The point o f Landscape a n d M em ­ ory is not to contest the reality o f this crisis. It is, rather, by revealing the rich­ ness, antiquity, and complexity o f our landscape tradition, to show just how much we stand to lose. Instead o f assuming the mutually exclusive character o f Western culture and nature, I want to suggest the strength o f the links that have bound them together. That strength is often hidden beneath layers o f the commonplace. So Landscape an d Memory is constructed as an excavation below our conven­ tional sight-level to recover the veins o f myth and memory that lie beneath the surface. The “cathedral grove,” for example, is a common tourist cliche. “Words o f veneration describe this land o f ahs,” says one particularly breathless book on the old growth forests o f the Pacific Northwest.15 But beneath the com­ monplace is a long, rich, and significant history o f associations between the pagan primitive grove and its tree idolatry, and the distinctive forms o f Gothic architecture. The evolution from Nordic tree worship through the Christian iconography o f the Tree o f Life and the wooden cross to images like Caspar

INTRODUCTION David Friedrich’s explicit association between the evergreen fir and the archi­ tecture o f resurrection (color illus. i) may seem esoteric. But in fact it goes direcdy to the heart o f one o f our most powerful yearnings: the craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality. It is why groves o f trees, with their annual promise o f spring awakening, are thought to be a fitting decor for our earthly remains. So the mystery behind this commonplace turns out to be elo­ quent on the deepest relationships between natural form and human design. Whether such relationships are, in fact, habitual, at least as habitual as the urge toward domination o f nature, said to be the signature o f the West, I will leave the reader to judge. Jung evidendy believed that the universality o f nature myths testified to their psychological indispensability in dealing with interior terrors and cravings. And the anthropologist o f religion Mircea Eliade assumed them to have survived, fully operational, in modern, as well as traditional, cultures. M y own view is necessarily more historical, and by that token much less confidendy universal. N o t all cultures embrace nature and landscape myths with equal ardor, and those that do, go through periods o f greater or lesser enthusiasm. What the myths o f ancient forest mean for one European national tradition may translate into something entirely different in another. In Ger­ many, for example, the forest primeval was the site o f tribal self-assertion against the Roman empire o f stone and law. In England the greenwood was the place where the king disported his power in the royal hunt yet redressed the injustices o f his officers. I have tried not to let these important differences in space and time be swal­ lowed up in the long history o f landscape metaphors sketched in this book. But while allowing for these variations, it is clear that inherited landscape myths and memories share two common characteristics: their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions that we still live with. National identity, to take just the most obvious example, would lose much o f its ferocious enchantment without the mystique o f a particular land­ scape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a home­ land.16 The poetic tradition o f la douce F rance— “ sweet France”— describes a geography as much as a history, the sweetness o f a classically well-ordered place where rivers, cultivated fields, orchards, vineyards, and woods are all in harmo­ nious balance with each other. The famous eulogy o f the “sceptred isle,” which Shakespeare puts in the mouth o f the dying John o f Gaunt, invokes cliff-girt insularity as patriotic identity, whereas the heroic destiny o f the N ew World is identified as continental expansiveness in the landscape lyrics o f “America the Beautiful.” And landscapes can be self-consciously designed to express the virtues o f a particular political or social community. The scale o f the Mount Rushmore monument, as we shall see, was crucial to its sculptor’s ambition to proclaim the continental magnitude o f America as the bulwark o f its democ­

INTRODUCTION racy. And on a much more intimate level, nineteenth-century advocates o f the American suburban idyll, like Frank Jesup Scott, prescribed carpets o f frontyard lawns, undivided by fences, as an expression o f social solidarity and com­ munity, the imagined antidote to metropolitan alienation. The designation o f the suburban yard as a cure for the afflictions o f city life marks the greensward as a remnant o f an old pastoral dream, even though its goatherds and threshers have been replaced by tanks o f pesticide and industrialstrength mowing machines. And it is just because ancient places are constantly being given the topdressings o f modernity (the forest primeval, for example, turning into the “wilderness park” ) that the antiquity o f the myths at their core is sometimes hard to make out. It is there, all the same. Driving at night along Interstate 84, through the relic o f what was once “ the brass capital of America,” Waterbury, Connecticut, a creamy glow radiates from the top o f a hill overlooking the freeway. A bend in the road suddenly reveals the light source as a neon cross, thirty feet tall— virtually all that remains o f “ Holy Land, U SA ,” built by a local lawyer in the 1960s. Familiar as we are with reli­ gious theme parks, Holy Land seems immediately classifiable as a Catholic answer to Disneyland. But its siting as a hill pilgrimage, its devotional mis­ sion, and its conscientious if clumsy attempts to reproduce the topography o f the Passion in southern New England mark it as the last sacro m onte, the artificial Calvaries whose origins date back to the Italian Franciscans o f the fifteenth century. To see the ghostly outline o f an old landscape beneath the superficial cov­ ering o f the contemporary is to be made vividly aware o f the endurance o f core myths. As I write, The New York Times reports an ancient ash tree at El Escorial, near Madrid, where the Virgin makes herself known to a retired cleaning lady on the first Saturday o f each month, much to the chagrin o f the local social­ ist mayor.17 Behind the tree is o f course the monastery-palace o f the Most Catholic King o f Spain, Philip II. But behind both are centuries o f associations, cherished particularly by the Franciscans and Jesuits, o f apparitions o f the Vir­ gin seated in a tree whose Eastertide renewal o f foliage symbolized the Resur­ rection. And behind that tradition were even more ancient pagan myths that described old and hollowed trees as the tomb o f gods slaughtered on the boughs and encased within the bark to await a new cycle o f life. Landscape and Memory has been built around such moments o f recogni­ tion as this, when a place suddenly exposes its connections to an ancient and peculiar vision o f the forest, the mountain, or the river. A curious excavator o f traditions stumbles over something protruding above the surface o f the com­ monplaces o f contemporary life. He scratches away, discovering bits and pieces o f a cultural design that seems to elude coherent reconstitution but which leads him deeper into the past. Each o f the chapters that follow might be thought o f as an excavation, beginning with the familiar, digging down through layers o f

INTRODUCTION memories and representations toward the primary bedrock, laid down centuries or even millennia ago, and then working up again toward the light o f contem­ porary recognition. M y own burrows through time only follow, o f course, where many other conscientious moles have already dug, throwing up tracers for the historian as they push through obscurity. Many o f the stories told in the book celebrate their perseverance and passion as they recount their labors. Some o f these zeal­ ous guardians o f landscape memory— like Julius von Brincken, Tsar Nicholas I’s warden o f the Polish primeval forest o f Bialowieza, or Claude Francois Denecourt, who invented the romantic hike in the woods o f Fontainebleau— became so rooted in a particular landscape that they became its g e n iu s loci, the “spirit o f the place.” Others appointed themselves the custodians o f an ancient tradition— like the prolific Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who undertook to decode the hieroglyphs o f Egyptian obelisks for the popes o f Baroque Rome so that their transplantation could be seen as the pagan Nile baptized by Christian Rome, or Sir James Hall, who tied willow rods together in a primitive arch to prove that the pointed Gothic style had begun with the interlaced boughs o f trees. Colorful as many o f these devotees o f nature myths were, they were emphatically not just a motley collection o f eccentrics rambling down memory lane. Each one believed that an understanding o f landscape’s past traditions was a source o f illumination for the present and future. That conviction made them less antiquarians than historians, or even prophets and politicians. They waxed passionate about their favorite places because they believed they could redeem the hollowness o f contemporary life. And I have followed them into the wild woods, upstream along the rivers o f life and death, up into the high mountains, not in the spirit o f a cultural camper but because so many o f our modern con­ cerns— empire, nation, freedom, enterprise, and dictatorship— have invoked topography to give their ruling ideas a natural form. Joel Barlow, American poet, commercial agent, diplomat, and mythographer, was but one o f these explorers who linked the passions o f their own time to ancient obsessions o f nature. H e sought the origins o f the Liberty Tree in the ancient Egyptian myth o f Osiris’s resurrection because he wanted to root the most important emblem o f freedom in both the American and French rev­ olutions in a cult o f nature. That seemed to him to make the urge to liberty not just a modern notion but an ancient, irresistible instinct, a truly n a tu r a l right. Barlow was following what, a century later, the great art historian and iconographer A by Warburg would call the path o f “social memory” (sozialen G edachtnisses) . 16 As one might expect from a scholar trained in his tradition, Warburg was primarily concerned with the recurrence o f ancient motifs and expressive body gestures in the later classical art o f the Renaissance and Baroque. But he had read as deeply in anthropology and early social psychol­

INTRODUCTION ogy as in art history. So his inquiries took him well beyond the purely formal issue o f the survival o f particular gestures and conventions in painting and sculpture. For Warburg those were merely the indicators pointing to something profoundly surprising and even troubling about the evolution o f Western soci­ ety. Beneath its pretensions to have built a culture grounded in reason, he believed, lay a powerful residue o f mythic unreason. Just as Clio, the Muse of history, owed her beginnings to her mother, Mnemosyne, a more instinctual and primal persona, so the reasoned culture o f the West, with its graceful designs o f nature, was somehow vulnerable to the dark demiurges o f irrational myths o f death, sacrifice, and fertility. None o f this means that when we, too, set off on the trail o f “social mem­ ory” we will inevitably end up in places where, in a century o f horror, we would rather not go, places that represent a reinforcement of, rather than an escape from, public tragedy. But acknowledging the ambiguous legacy o f nature myths does at least require us to recognize that landscapes will not always be simple “places o f delight”— scenery as sedative, topography so arranged to feast the eye. For those eyes, as we will discover, are seldom clarified o f the prompt­ ings o f memory. And the memories are not all o f pastoral picnics. For that matter, a striking number o f those who have been the most deter­ mined investigators o f nature myths, like Nietzsche and Jung, have not been among the most warmhearted enthusiasts o f pluralist democracy. And even today, the most zealous friends o f the earth become understandably impatient with the shuffles and scuffles, compromises and bargains o f politics when the “death o f nature” is said to be imminent, and the alternatives presented as a bleak choice between redemption and extinction. It is at this point, when envi­ ronmental imperatives are invested with a sacred, mythic quality, which is said to demand a dedication purer and more uncompromising than the habits of humanity usually supply, that memory may help to redress the balance. For what I have tried to show in Landscape an d Memory is that the cultural habits o f humanity have always made room for the sacredness o f nature. All our land­ scapes, from the city park to the mountain hike, are imprinted with our tena­ cious, inescapable obsessions. So that to take the many and several ills o f the environment seriously does not, I think, require that we trade in our cultural legacy or its posterity. It asks instead that we simply see it for what it has truly been: not the repudiation, but the veneration, o f nature. Landscape a nd Memory is not meant as facile consolation for ecological dis­ aster. Nor does it make any claim to solve the profound problems that still beset any democracy wanting both to repair environmental abuse and to preserve lib­ erty. Like all histories, this is less a recipe for action than an invitation to reflec­ tion, and is meant as a contribution to self-knowledge rather than a strategy for ecological rescue. But if by suggesting that over the centuries cultural habits have formed which have done something with nature other than merely work

i . C a s p a r D a v i d F r i e d r i c h , The C ro ss a n d ( '.at h r d r a I in the M o u n t a i n s , ca . 1 S 1 :

2.

Rene M agritte, La Condition humaine, 1933.

3.

A n d y G o ld s w o r th y , Wind, cloud, sun, rain, 1985.

4.

X ylo th eq u e, F raneker, the N etherlan ds (photo: Rosamund Purcell).

5. Anselm Kiefer, The Cauterization o f the Rural District ofBuchen , 1974.

INTRODUCTION it to death, that help for our ills can come from within, rather than outside, our shared mental world, this book may not entirely have wasted good wood pulp. Shelve it between optimism and pessimism— represented, as it happens, by two other kinds o f wood-books. The volumes o f the xylotheque, the “wooden library,” are the product o f a time when scientific inquiry and poetical sensibil­ ity seemed effortlessly and wittily married: the Enlightenment o f the eighteenth century (color illus. 4). In the German culture where modern forestry began, some enthusiast thought to go one better than the botanical volumes that merely illustrated the taxonomy o f trees. Instead the books themselves were to be fabricated from their subject matter, so that the volume on Fagus, for exam­ ple, the common European beech, would be bound in the bark o f that tree. Its interior would contain samples o f beech nuts and seeds; and its pages would literally be its leaves, the folios itsfeu ille s. But the wooden books were not pure caprice, a nice pun on the meaning o f cultivation. By paying homage to the vegetable matter from which it, and all literature, was constituted, the wooden library made a dazzling statement about the necessary union o f culture and nature. T w o and a half centuries later, after the sunny confidence o f the Enlighten­ ment had been engulfed in catastrophe, after landscapes picturesque and sub­ lime had been chewed up by war and fertilized by the bones and blood o f the unnumbered dead, another German created a different kind o f wooden book (color illus. 5). But on the pages o f Anselm Kiefer’s book, history is written in letters o f fire, and the optimism o f the eighteenth century’s culture o f nature is consumed in smoke. The leaves o f the volume, called by the artist C a u te r iz a ­ tion o f the R u r a l D istr ic t o f Buchen (the district named for the beeches), are scorched by the conflagrations o f total war, o f the consummation o f nature in atrocity. We cannot help but think o f fire as the element o f annihilation. But both mythographers and natural historians know better: that from the pyre rises the phoenix, that through a mantle o f ash can emerge a shoot o f restored life. So if this is a book o f memories, it is not meant as a lament at the cremation o f our hope. Rather, it is a journey through spaces and places, eyes wide open, that may help us keep faith with a future on this tough, lovely old planet.

PART

ONE

W ood

Y e len a

(toAstrov)

Y o u ’re still a young m an. Y ou look about thirty-six or thirty-seven. I d on’t suppose i t ’s as interesting as you say. Forest, forest, fo r e s t. . . monotonous, I should have thought.

S o n ia

No. I t ’s tremendously interesting. Every year, the doctor p la nts new trees a n d they’ve sent him a bronze m edal a n d a diplom a already. ANTON CHEKHOV

Uncle Vanya, act i

PROLOGUE

The Detour

I t took the mound at G iby to make me grasp just what was meant by “land­ scape and memory.” A t first glance, when it flashed by the window o f the ancient Mercedes, it looked nondescript, just a scrubby hill on which someone had planted a makeshift cross; another parochial fetish in a place still agitated with piety. But something about it snagged my attention, made me feel uneasy, required I take another look. We turned the car round. We had been driving through the northeastern corner o f Poland, a coun­ try where frontiers march back and forth to the abrupt commands o f history. The same fields o f wheat and rye moving in slow waves with the rhythm o f the breeze had been Lithuanian, German, Russian, Polish. And as the car ate up the kilometers between the old boating resort o f Augustow and the medieval church town o f Sejny, we seemed to be moving backward in time. Plows were drawn by horses. The same horses— big, lumbering, high-cruppered chestnuts and bays— pulled carts packed with sunburned farm children along rutted roads and paths. The air smelled o f cattle. A wide white early-evening sky was neither troubled by the scream o f jets nor punctured by pylons. Beside chimney pots, 2 3

PROLOGUE storks stood sentinel at their monstrously overbuilt nests, untidy citadels of twigs and branches. Every so often pairs o f the birds, mates for life, would engage in noisy bouts o f conjugal fencing, their lurid pink bills clacking against each other. O ff to the east, a dark wall o f forest, the most ancient in Europe, rose adamandy against the horizon. I had come to Poland to see this forest. See what, exacdy, I wasn’t sure. Historians are supposed to reach the past always through texts, occasionally through images; things that are safely caught in the bell jar o f academic con­ vention; look but don’t touch. But one o f my best-loved teachers, an intellec­ tual hell-raiser and a writer o f eccentric courage, had always insisted on directly experiencing “a sense o f place,” o f using “the archive o f the feet.” M y subject was landscape myth and memory, and this woodland wilderness, the puszcza, stretching all the way along the borderland that Poland shared with Belarus and Lithuania, was the “native realm” o f writers o f our time like Czeslaw Milosz and Tadeusz Konwicki; or past time like Adam Mickiewicz.1 Generation after generation, such writers had created a consolatory myth o f a sylvan countryside that would endure uncontaminated whatever disasters befell the Polish state. And with a swerve o f logic that only connoisseurs o f Polish history can appre­ ciate, this sempiternal homeland was celebrated (in Polish) as “ Lithuania.” O L ith u a n ia , my country, thou A r t like good health, I never knew till now How precious, till I lost thee? “Just imagine,” said a friend, “you Americans singing ‘Canada the Beau­ tiful.’ ” Unstable identities are history’s prey. There was, I knew, blood beneath the verdure and tombs in the deep glades o f oak and fir. The fields and forests and rivers had seen war and terror, elation and desperation; death and resur­ rection; Lithuanian kings and Teutonic knights, partisans and Jews; Nazi Gestapo and Stalinist N K V D . It is haunted land where greatcoat buttons from six generations o f fallen soldiers can be discovered lying amidst the woodland ferns. The Mercedes pulled up outside the porch o f a handsome wooden Lithua­ nian church, its timbers the color o f burnt umber, the roof surmounted by an onion-shaped cupola covered in gray slate. A brown garland o f wheat hung slackly over the door. Families were beginning to arrive for evensong beneath flights o f racing swallows. Small boys dragged their feet while their mothers pulled them into the church, holding bunches o f blue meadow flowers— lupines and cornflowers— in their spare hand. A hundred yards up the road, and set back from it on a steeply rising embankment, was the wooden cross, backlit by the six o ’clock sunshine like a

The D etour painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Skeptical pilgrims in a land notorious for instant martyrologies, we approached the cross up a grassy slope, dotted with boulders, hundreds o f them, standing on end like a congregation or a battal­ ion guarding a holy way. Halfway to the top we could read script on a small notice pinned to the cross telling us that in early 1945, here, at Giby, hundreds o f men and women accused o f supporting the Polish Home Army were taken to their death by the N K V D , Stalin’s security police. The little hill had been given a fresh crown o f yellow sand on which rested roughhewn slabs o f pol­ ished granite. The stones were engraved with perhaps five hundred names, listed alphabetically from A to Z , then beginning again with A names, as though someone, late at night, had clapped his hand to his head and said, “Jesus Maria, what about Stefan and Jan and Marta?” and people for whom there was no last name and people for whom there was no first name, for both kinds appeared on these gray slabs. A single stone, at a remove from the rest, lay on its side amidst the boulders, declaring “ they died because they were Poles.” Post-Communist Poland is full o f such places, raw, chafing histories torn from decades o f official silence yet still imperfectly recovered; markers freshly dug or posted. But the real shock waited at the top o f the mound. For beyond the cross the ground fell sharply away to reveal a landscape o f unanticipated beauty. A fringe o f bright young trees marked the horizon floor, but at their back, like giants holding the hands o f children, stood the black-green phalanx o f the primeval forest. In the mid-ground a silver ribbon o f river, one o f the many lakes and streams feeding into the course o f the Niemen, wound through reedy marshes and fields o f green corn. The windows o f isolated timber cot­ tages caught the sunset beside the edge o f quiet ponds where geese stood doing nothing very much. “ Behold,” one could hear Mickiewicz declaim in his grand­ est rhetorical manner: “ Lithuania.” For this, surely, was the picture that filled his mind’s eye in his Parisian exile. . . . bear o f f my y earning soul to roam Those little wooded hills, those field s beside The azu re N iem en, spreading g reen a n d wide, The v ari-p ain ted cornfields like a q u ilt, The silver o f the rye, the whea tfields 3g i l t .3 What filled my own field o f vision formed the shape o f a window or a paint­ ing, a rectangular space, composed o f horizontally layered scenery. Here was the homeland for which the people o f Giby had died and to which, in the shape o f their memorial hummock, they had now been added. Their memory had now assumed the form o f the landscape itself. A metaphor had become a real­ ity; an absence had become a presence.

PROLOGUE

26

Such grassy swellings— tumuli— were the first marks that man made upon the European landscape. Within such burial barrows the bodies o f the hon­ ored dead would be united with the earth that had produced them, freeing their spirits for the journey to another abode. Lithuania was the last pagan nation to be converted to Christianity as late as the fourteenth century. And the ancient native tradition has endured by memorializing the nation’s mar­ tyrs and heroes in the form o f a kopiec— a grassy mound sometimes built from the ground up, sometimes added to the crown o f a naturally standing hill. On the outskirts o f the ancient Polish capital o f Krakow, another patriot son o f Lithuania, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, fallen in a doomed revolutionary struggle against Russia in the 1790s, is enshrined by just such a hill, unnaturally coni­ cal, constructed from soil said to have been carted from the hero’s batdefields.4 Now it is a terraced beauty spot from which hand-holding lovers can survey the elegant old city wheezing in polluted fumes from the Nowa Huta steel­ works on its smoggy horizon. At the foot o f the mound, Kosciuszko’s sacred relics— a coat and a sword— hang in a shrine-like space within a toy fortress built by the Austrians. Beneath the rocks o f Giby, though, there is nothing but dirt. Some months earlier, in the nearby forest o f Augustowska, a mass grave had been found, sur­ mised to be the place where the N K V D had executed this entire village for sup­ porting the Polish Home Army rather than the Communists. Bodies were exhumed but badges and buckles and boots had shown them to be German sol­ diers; death’s-head insignia appearing amidst the bones; murderers murdered. So the five hundred o f Giby are still ghosts in transit; dragged who knows where, disposed o f in some Arctic ice-hole along with millions o f other victims. But the village was determined to go through with its act o f repatriation. The yellow sand at the foot o f the litde hill marking a track had been freshly added in preparation for a ceremony in a few weeks. And as survivors’ memories released more names, they too would be added to the granite slabs. There would, somehow, be a homecoming. There was another population that once had also belonged to this land­ scape for whom homecomings were out o f the question. For Poland’s Jews en route to the charnel house, a view o f the countryside had been blotted out by the shutters and nailed-down slats o f transport wagons clattering relentlessly toward the death camps. In our mind’s eye we are accustomed to think o f the Holocaust as having no landscape— or at best one emptied o f features and color, shrouded in night and fog, blanketed by perpetual winter, collapsed into shades o f dun and gray; the gray o f smoke, o f ash, o f pulverized bones, o f quick­ lime. It is shocking, then, to realize that Treblinka, too, belongs to a brilliandy vivid countryside; the riverland o f the Bug and the Vistula; rolling, gende land, lined by avenues o f poplar and aspen. Its numberless graves, like the memorial at Giby, are marked by unworked standing stones.

The D etour

27

I had always thought o f the Jews o f the Alte Land as essentially urban types, even when they lived in villages: tradesmen and artisans; tailors and carpenters and butchers and bakers; with the rebbe as the lord o f the shted; microcosms o f the great swarming communities o f Wilno and Biatystok and Minsk. And so it often was, but the villages we walked through, these picture-perfect rustic cot­ tages with their slanting timber eaves and crook-fenced gardens, had once been Jewish houses. “Seventy percent, eighty percent o f the people here and here and here,” said Tadeusz, “— all Jews.” So even if they had not worked the earth with their hands or cut hay in the fields, these Jews had been country people, no less than the villagers o f the Cotswolds or the peasants o f the Auvergne. And one group among them, people known to everyone in the border country o f Poland and Lithuania, had even been people o f the forest, the wilderness puszcza. A m ong them, somewhere, was my family. M y mother’s father, Mark, who did become a butcher, left this region along with three brothers, at the turn o f the century, driven by the horseback terror o f the Cossack pogroms. But his father, Eli, like many other Jews, made his living cutting timber from the great primeval forests, hauling it to the tributaries that fed the Niemen and floating the logs north to the sawmills o f Grodno or, even farther downstream, all the way to the old provincial city o f Kowno. The waters were full o f these Jewish river rats, sometimes spending weeks at a time on the rafts, sleeping in crude cabins constructed from logs propped on end in the company o f chickens and each other. During the brutal Lithuanian winters when the rivers were frozen, he would transport the timber on long sleds driven by big Polish farm horses or teams o f oxen. From Kowno or Wilno on the river Viliya the lumber would be sold to the Russian railway companies for ties, or freight wagons, or shipped further downstream in rafts o f a thousand or more logs, to the Baltic for export, usually handled by other and grander Jewish timber companies. Somewhere, beside a Lithuanian river, with a primeval forest all about it, stood my great-grandfather Eli’s house; itself made o f roughly fashioned tim­ ber with a cladding o f plaster, surrounded by a stone wall to announce its social pretensions. M y mother, who was born and grew up in the yeasty clamor o f London’s Jewish East End, retains just the scraps and shreds o f her father’s and uncle’s memories o f this landscape: tales o f brothers fending o ff wolves from the sleds (a standard brag o f the woodland taverns); o f the dreamy youngest brother, Hyman, falling asleep at the loading depot and rudely woken by being tied to a log and heaved into the river. Was this family as improbable as the Yiddishe woodsmen o f Ruthenia I had seen in an old Roman Vishniak photo, pol­ ing logs in their sidelocks and homburgs; lumberjacks m it tzitzis? And just where, exactly, was this place, this house, this world o f stubby yel­ low cigarettes, fortifying pulls from grimy vodka bottles, Hassidic songs bel­ lowed through the piny Poylishe velder? “Where was it?” I pressed my mother while we sat eating salad in a West End hotel. For the first time in my life I badly

PROLOGUE

28

needed to know. “ Kowno gubernia, outside Kowno, that’s all we ever knew. She shrugged her shoulders and went back to the lettuce. The history o f the country only deepens the uncertainty. For “ Lithuania” is not coterminous with the present borders o f the shrunken Baltic republic; still less with its language and religion. For centuries it covered an immense expanse o f territory stretching all the way from the Black Sea in the south to the Bug river in the west to the Baltic in the north. In 1386 its hunter-king Jagietto married the Polish queen Jadwiga, creating by their union the Great Polish realm. Over time the cultural identity o f the south and west o f the coun­ try was colonized by Poland. Its landowning gentry came to speak and write Polish and call themselves by the Polish name o f szlachta. In the late eighteenth

Jewish lum berm en, Ruthenia (photo: Roman Vishniac).

century Poland was brutally and cynically partitioned and the pieces devoured by its neighbors— the Prussians, the Russians, and the Austrians. The Lithua­ nian heartland became Russian, and its Polish-speaking poets came to think o f it as the captive homeland. With no formal frontiers to cross, itinerant Jewish traders migrated within the Russian Empire as family connections or economic incentives beckoned, north from the Ukraine or Byelorussia, south from Latvia, magnetized by die great center o f piety and cultural passion in Wilno. My great-grandfather and his four boys, like so many other wood-shleppers, were outriders o f this JudeoLithuanian world, by Yiddish standards, real backwoodsmen, as at home with horses and dogs and two-handled saws as with prayer books and shabbos can­ dles. We drove further north from Giby, past synagogues with drunkenly undu-

The D etour lating gables and whitewashed walls (the wooden structures having all been burned by the SS and their local collaborators), cutting through darker wood­ land dominated by spruce and fir. I remembered someone in a Cambridge common room pestering the self-designated “non-Jewish Jew” and Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, himself a native o f this country, about his roots. “Trees have roots,” he shot back, scornfully, “ Jews have legs.” And I thought, as yet another metaphor collapsed into ironic literalism, Well, some Jews have both and branches and stems too. So when Mickiewicz hails “ye trees o f Lithuania” as if they belonged only to the gentry and their serfs, foresters, and gamekeepers, I could in our fam­ ily’s memory lay some claim to those thick groves o f larch, hornbeam, and oak. I dare say that even the lime tree, worshipped by pagan Germans and Lithua­ nians as the abode o f living spirits, lay on Eli Sztajnberg’s sleds and carts wait­ ing to be turned into the clogs and sandals worn everywhere in the Lithuanian villages. Notoriously, Jews and Gentiles did not share the Lithuanian woods as happy neighbors. From the time they arrived in the forest region in the mid seventeenth century, fleeing from the slaughter inflicted by Bogdan Chmielnicki’s murderous Cossacks in the Ukraine, relations have been always para­ doxical, sometimes painful.5 Though Great Poland had been home to the Jews for much longer, perhaps as far back as the twelfth century, they had always constituted an irreducibly distinctive presence in the kingdom, what Aleksander Hertz has defined as a caste.6And though their economic value was recognized, neither the intense, often primitive fervor o f Polish Catholicism nor the mysti­ cism o f Slavic Christian Orthodoxy was auspicious for humanizing the Jewish presence. And to these two kinds o f dangerous ecstasies, Judaism added its own, in the form o f Hassidism, invented at precisely the time that Poland was in the process o f being torn to shreds by the partitioning powers. So Polish Jews became themselves doubly flayed by history: martyrs’ martyrs. Though the first Polish pogrom took place in Warsaw in 1 794 while the nation was in its termi­ nal throes, the riot remained an isolated incident and its leaders were punished, rather than celebrated, by the national government. Somehow, the worlds o f the Jews and the Poles, anxious and often affronted by each other, were too thoroughly shaken together for the poison o f demonization to work its way through the bloodstream o f the nineteenth-century nation. So should we be surprised to discover the Polish super-patriot Adam M ic­ kiewicz, whose great statue dominates the market square o f Krakow, not merely ambivalent about the Jews, but uncomfortably, undeniably, related to them? O f his intimate familiarity there can be no doubt. His mother was herself from a family o f Jewish converts, but her uncle with whom Adam spent his child­ hood country holidays was uncompromising and unbaptized. So that, unlike many young Poles o f his generation, Mickiewicz grew up with Jews in his sights

30

PROLOGUE

and for that matter in his blood. According to one o f his friends, Antoni Odyniec, the boy Mickiewicz stayed with a Jewish merchant on his first visit to Wilno and listened rapdy to the old man’s Yiddish stories.7 In this world, where the Lithuanian towns spilled into the muddy countryside, it was impossible not to collide with rabbis and peddlers and carters and tailors and millers and horse traders and schnorrers, though some in Mickiewicz’s class moved swiftly through the swishing coat-hems and the prodding fingers with their eyes averted and noses in the air. But Mickiewicz’s lawyer father had no such qualms. He lodged the family in Zydowska Street (Jew Street) and took their cases even when it meant arguing against the Mother Superior o f a Basilian order o f nuns. When Mickiewicz became a teacher he moved southwest to the second great city o f Lithuania, Kowno, where the medieval alleys hummed with Jew­ ish commotion. With his penchant for expeditions to rural backwaters, espe­ cially the dusty, ill-shod world o f the river rafters, hunters, and foresters, it seems inconceivable that the young poet did not explore the rural districts along the west bank o f the Niemen. So I shall claim him for a Landsm ann. Such kinships have their complications. Mickiewicz, part Catholic, part Jew, part convert, part messianist, was neither consistently philo-semitic nor anti-semitic (though he was capable o f expressions o f both). It was rather that where so many o f his contemporaries saw the history o f the two nations as nec­ essarily alien to each other, Mickiewicz the poet from the beginning saw just how snarled up they were in each other’s fate. In 1832, following the collapse o f the November uprising against the tsar— the great catastrophe o f his life— he wrote a gospel o f national religion explicitly associating Poland’s martyrdom with the Passion o f Christ: The Books o f the Polish Pilgrim . Book 15 features a Christian forester who declines a highwayman’s invitation to pillage a local Jew­ ish inn and kill its occupants and instead turns on the robber. Bleeding from his wounds, he goes to the Jews and asks their help in making sure the thief is put out o f action. T o his amazement (and though they give him brandy and tend his wounds) the Jews are full o f querulous skepticism— dubious about the story, fearful the forester may demand payment for his protection, protesting it was not their job to clear the forest o f robbers. Unable to make them com­ prehend his altruism, the forester walks off, groaning with pain, into the woods: The Jews knew that he was grievously wounded but they felt that they had done ill and they wished to persuade themselves that they had done no ill. So they talked loudly, that they might deafen their consciences.8 Mickiewicz’s little parable is a classic item o f Polish anti-semitism, neither better nor worse than the ancient Catholic tradition from which it so obviously descended.9 Its Jews are stereotyped as callous, mean-minded unbelievers,

The D etour impervious to the meaning o f disinterested sacrifice and ignobly timorous into the bargain. Above all, these Hebrews, huddled in their inn somewhere, are made to appear out o f place in their surroundings, a scenic anomaly. All o f which makes the presentation o f the Jew in P u n T adeusz just two years later, in 1834, all the more astonishing. For although Jankiel (the name o f his old Yiddish host in Wilno) is also an innkeeper, he is as much in his ele­ ment in the countryside as the feudal barons, foresters, and peasants who pop­ ulate Mickiewicz’s story o f O ld Lithuania on the brink o f the modern world. The same fox-fur hat and long coat which in other stories make the Jew con­ spicuously different now actually seem to be made from native fabric and intri­ cately embroidered and ornamented with precious stones and metals. The drink he brews is a miraculously potent and mysteriously delectable honeymead. The inn itself is exotically picturesque, “ turned up roof o f lath and straw askew/ . . . crooked as the torn cap o f a Jew.” Yet somehow it belongs absolutely to the native landscape:

A style o f architecture q u ite unknow n To foreigners a n d now become o ur own . . . This in n was like a tem ple fr o m behind The oblong fr o n t, like N o a h }s ark designed™

But what really naturalizes Jankiel is his music. Music is so important in P a n T ad eusz that it might as well have been a tone poem. It is as elaborately and as passionately described as the Lithuanian landscape and it is always meant to speak o f a native feeling so powerful, so ancient, and so instinctive that it can hardly be communicated in any other form. A t the center o f the story o f two feuding dynasties is a great woodland hunt during which one o f the many offi­ cials o f the retinue, the “seneschal,” plays on a bison horn, a call that echoes over and over again throughout the forest; a sound to which Mickiewicz gives a feral tone, bonding together the men and the beasts, the hunters and their quarry, in a kind o f primitive sylvan companionship. A t the very end o f P a n T adeusz the warring Soplicowo and Horeszko fam­ ilies are abruptly reconciled by the sudden appearance o f a Russian threat, and their reconciliation is crowned by the marriage o f Tadeusz to Zosia, uniting the clans. And it is at this point that Jankiel is asked by the bride to take out his zembalo— the old Polish dulcimer— and play for the wedding. A t first he refuses, but then is sweet-talked by Zosia into consenting:

H e sat and , ta k in g up the instrum ent, H e looked a t i t w ith p rid e a n d deep content; A s when a veteran hears his country}s call,

PROLOGUE

32

Whose grandsons take his sword down fro m the wall, A n d laughs: it's long since he has held the blade, B u t yet he feels it w ill not be betrayed The Jew’s dulcimer thus becomes a musical weapon, unsheathed to turn a wedding party into a patriotic communion. And Jankiel’s performance becomes a musical history o f Poland’s sorrows and defiance: beginning with the polonaise o f May 3; the anthem o f Kosciuszko’s revolution o f 1794; chang­ ing to a violent dissonance recalling the betrayal o f the revolution at Targowica and the Russian intervention, finally closing with the D^browski mazurka adopted by the Polish legions fighting with the Napoleonic armies in the hope o f a national resurrection: T hat a ll the strings like brazen trum pets blared, A n d fro m the trum pets to the heavens sped That march o f trium ph: Poland is not dead!12 Jankiel finishes, exhausted by this patriotic consummation; “ His floating beard majestically tipped;/Upon his cheeks two strange red circles showed,/And in his eye a youthful ardour glowed.” With tears in his eyes, he greets General D^browski as if he were the awaited Messiah. H e sobbed, the honest Jew, H e loved our country like a p a triot true. D&browski ga ve the Jew his hand to kiss, A n d thanked him kindly fo r his courtesies. It is difficult to imagine a more complete transformation. Once an alien presence in the native land, the Jew has become its ancestral embodiment, as natural a figure in the landscape as hunters and woodsmen. The idea o f the Yiddish polonaise strummed on the zembalo by Jankiel the patriot is not quite as bizarre as it seems. For when Kosciuszko’s troops faced the Russians in their hopeless resistance in 1794, the Warsaw National Guard included a Jewish legion commanded by Berek Joselewicz, the first Jewish company under arms since the Dispersion, something undreamed o f by the French Revolution.13 For Mickiewicz, dwelling amidst the Polish Diaspora in Paris, and becom­ ing possessed by spiritual and messianic visions, the Jewish and Polish experi­ ences o f exile and suffering were directly analogous, even providentially related. It must have seemed to him a mysterious union o f blood, not merely o f nations but o f sexes, for the male Polish Lithuanian Mickiewiczes seemed destined to marry not just Jewish women, but Jewish women from the ranks o f the Frankist

The D etour sect that had believed in the appearance o f the Messiah in the eighteenth cen­ tury. In the same year that P a n T adeusz was published Adam married Celina Szymanowska, the granddaughter o f one o f the most ardent Frankists in Poland.14 Some literary historians, embarrassed by Mickiewicz’s plunge into the cult o f “Towianist” messianism that prophesied the convergence o f Chris­ tianity and Judaism, have argued that it was his wife’s passions (she was clini­ cally unstable, they have implied, since she ended her life in a home for the insane) that swayed him. But the truth was much more obviously the other way about. By the time he met Celina, Mickiewicz was already stirred by what seemed to be the ordained union o f the fate o f both tribes. In 1842 he would tell his students at the College de France (in tones o f divine election reminis­ cent o f Michelet’s threnodies for the Chosen o f republican France) that it was not accidental that this people [the Jews] chose Poland for their fatherland. The most spiritual o f all people, they are capable o f grasp­ ing the highest values o f humanity. But halted by their development, unable to see the end promised to them by Providence, they scattered the powers o f their spirit in earthly ways and thus became contami­ nated. And yet it is only they who have not ceased to await the M es­ siah and this faith o f theirs has undoubtedly influenced the character o f Polish Messianism.15 Jewish emancipation and Jewish conversion, then, were part o f the same historical process that would usher in a new era. In this new sacred epoch the converted Jews would take their place alongside their fellow Poles in a doubly redeemed homeland. One o f his closest friends was Armand Levy, a Polish Catholic o f Jewish descent who became guardian o f Mickiewicz’s children after the poet’s death in 1855 and who himself returned to his old faith. In 1845 Levy and Mickiewicz went together to the synagogue in the rue Neuve Saint-Laurent, on Tisha B ’Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction o f the Jerusalem temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. and the Romans in 70 a . d . And it was with Levy that Mickiewicz seems to have dreamed up the fantastic enterprise o f the “ Hus­ sars o f Israel.” It was the Crimean War that gave him his opportunity. In this most seri­ ous war o f the mid nineteenth century, British and French troops came to the defense o f the Ottoman Empire against Russia. O n the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, the Polish emigres planned to recruit a “ Cossack” regiment to fight with the Ottoman army commanded by one Sadik Pasha, for­ merly the Ukrainian nobleman Michal Czajkowski. It was Mickiewicz’s glori­ ously harebrained notion to expand this legion to include an explicidy “ Hebraic” regiment recruited partly from Polish Jews who had been forced to

P ROLOGUE

32

Whose grandsons take his sword down fro m the wall, A n d laughs: i t ys long since he has held the blade, B u t yet he feels it w ill not be betrayed The Jew’s dulcimer thus becomes a musical weapon, unsheathed to turn a wedding party into a patriotic communion. And Jankiel’s performance becomes a musical history o f Poland’s sorrows and defiance: beginning with the polonaise o f May 3; the anthem o f Kosciuszko’s revolution o f 1794; chang­ ing to a violent dissonance recalling the betrayal o f the revolution at Targowica and the Russian intervention, finally closing with the D^browski mazurka adopted by the Polish legions fighting with the Napoleonic armies in the hope o f a national resurrection: That a ll the strings like brazen trum pets blared, A n d fro m the trumpets to the heavens sped T hat march o f triumph: Poland is not dead!12 Jankiel finishes, exhausted by this patriotic consummation; “ His floating beard majestically tipped;/Upon his cheeks two strange red circles showed,/And in his eye a youthful ardour glowed.” With tears in his eyes, he greets General D^browski as if he were the awaited Messiah. H e sobbed, the honest Jew, H e loved our country like a p a triot true. Dpbrowskigave the Jew his ha nd to kiss, A n d thanked him kindly fo r his courtesies. It is difficult to imagine a more complete transformation. Once an alien presence in the native land, the Jew has become its ancestral embodiment, as natural a figure in the landscape as hunters and woodsmen. The idea o f the Yiddish polonaise strummed on the zembalo by Jankiel the patriot is not quite as bizarre as it seems. For when Kosciuszko’s troops faced the Russians in their hopeless resistance in 1794, the Warsaw National Guard included a Jewish legion commanded by Berek Joselewicz, the first Jewish company under arms since the Dispersion, something undreamed o f by the French Revolution.13 For Mickiewicz, dwelling amidst the Polish Diaspora in Paris, and becom­ ing possessed by spiritual and messianic visions, the Jewish and Polish experi­ ences o f exile and suffering were directly analogous, even providentially related. It must have seemed to him a mysterious union o f blood, not merely o f nations but o f sexes, for the male Polish Lithuanian Mickiewiczes seemed destined to marry not just Jewish women, but Jewish women from the ranks o f the Frankist

The D etour

33

sect that had believed in the appearance o f the Messiah in the eighteenth cen­ tury. In the same year that P a n Tadeusz was published Adam married Celina Szymanowska, the granddaughter o f one o f the most ardent Frankists in Poland.14 Some literary historians, embarrassed by Mickiewicz’s plunge into the cult o f “Towianist” messianism that prophesied the convergence o f Chris­ tianity and Judaism, have argued that it was his wife’s passions (she was clini­ cally unstable, they have implied, since she ended her life in a home for the insane) that swayed him. But the truth was much more obviously the other way about. By the time he met Celina, Mickiewicz was already stirred by what seemed to be the ordained union o f the fate o f both tribes. In 1842 he would tell his students at the College de France (in tones o f divine election reminis­ cent o f Michelet’s threnodies for the Chosen o f republican France) that it was not accidental that this people [the Jews] chose Poland for their fatherland. The most spiritual o f all people, they are capable o f grasp­ ing the highest values o f humanity. But halted by their development, unable to see the end promised to them by Providence, they scattered the powers o f their spirit in earthly ways and thus became contami­ nated. And yet it is only they who have not ceased to await the M es­ siah and this faith o f theirs has undoubtedly influenced the character o f Polish Messianism.15 Jewish emancipation and Jewish conversion, then, were part o f the same historical process that would usher in a new era. In this new sacred epoch the converted Jews would take their place alongside their fellow Poles in a doubly redeemed homeland. One o f his closest friends was Armand Levy, a Polish Catholic o f Jewish descent who became guardian o f Mickiewicz’s children after the poet’s death in 1855 and who himself returned to his old faith. In 1845 Levy and Mickiewicz went together to the synagogue in the rue Neuve Saint-Laurent, on Tisha B’Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction o f the Jerusalem temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. and the Romans in 70 A.D. And it was with Levy that Mickiewicz seems to have dreamed up the fantastic enterprise o f the “ Hus­ sars o f Israel.” It was the Crimean War that gave him his opportunity. In this most seri­ ous war o f the mid nineteenth century, British and French troops came to the defense o f the Ottoman Empire against Russia. O n the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, the Polish emigres planned to recruit a “ Cossack” regiment to fight with the Ottoman army commanded by one Sadik Pasha, for­ merly the Ukrainian nobleman Michal Czajkowski. It was Mickiewicz’s glori­ ously harebrained notion to expand this legion to include an explicitly “ Hebraic” regiment recruited partly from Polish Jews who had been forced to

PROLOGUE

34

serve in the Russian army and had been taken prisoner by the Turks and partly from Ottoman Jewish volunteers themselves. It was an extravagantly Polish fantasy, this dream o f the Jewish-PolishTurkish-Cossack, a thousand cavalrymen astride shiny black mounts, brilliantly kitted out in gold braid and shakoes, brandishing their sabers at the Russian hordes. Yet it was not, perhaps, any more lunatic than the visions that the Vien­ nese Theodor Herzl would have, forty years later, o f equestrian pioneers, Zion­ ists on Lippizaners surveying the Galilean fella h in . The Hussars o f Israel were not a success. Though there were a handful o f Jewish volunteers among the “Cossack” regiment, their commander, Sadik Pasha/Czajkowski, continued to refer to “scurvy Jews,” and the Turks them­ selves (not for the last time) imagined the Hussars to be the first step in an international Jewish conspiracy to take Palestine. The enterprise would become envenomed in loathing and ridicule and Mickiewicz would himself collapse and die in Constantinople o f a strange and unidentifiable agony o f the gut, perhaps poisoned for the eccentricity o f his visions. A Jewish midwife had brought him into the world, and Levy, the reborn Jew, would pass a hand over his expiring brow. A few months before the sorry demise o f the dream and the dreamer, on a sultry Sabbath day in September 1855, the two friends in Israel-Lithuania, Mickiewicz and Levy, went to another synagogue. This time the temple was in Izmir, the port city that the rest o f the world knew as Smyrna. With an inter­ preter they went to see the local haham and attended Sabbath services. Again the poet was profoundly moved. Black silk gowns and candlelight flickering against the walls transported him at once to his lost, beloved Lithuania. The Sefardi melodies, the food stuffed with dried figs and apricots and perfumed with cinnamon and rosewater, the divans covered with silk and tapestry made no difference at all. Izmir was, he said, the image o f a Jewish Lithuanian town, Kowno-in-Levant. Quite mad, o f course, except that my father’s father’s family lived in Izmir while my mother’s father’s family lived in Kowno. As far as I know, none o f the Schamas or the Steinbergs became Cossacks, though my mother swears we had a circus rider who also tamed wild horses, though never on the shabbos. I had been to Izmir many years ago, but never to Kowno. But now it is Kaunas, not the “ Lithuania” o f Mickiewicz’s p atria but the Baltic Lithuanian republic, with its own non-Slavic tongue. Though my visa was for Poland it might be possible, I thought, to cross the frontier. But we were cautioned that getting back was an altogether different proposition, taking our place in the three-day line waiting to migrate through Poland and westward on to the fleshpots o f E C capitalism. I had to be in Krak6w in two days. Kowno itself would have to remain a tantalizing distance away. But to be in my grandfather’s landscape— timbered Lithuania— I did not need to cross

The D etour

35

any borders at all. When I stood on the mound at Giby I was already there. But still I hungered for some familiar name, scanned the map o f the frontier coun­ try for something that echoed. A t its very northeastern tip, two miles from the border itself, was a place marked “ Punsk.” What was it my mother had said about the place the brothers went for the logs as she fretted about ancient ene­ mies lurking in the woods— Cossacks, Poles, Nazis, N K V D — a place the broth­ ers went to fetch logs . . . Pinsk? T o o far south. Something like that. It would be a detour, but then this whole expedition to a Poland that was once a Lithuania had been a detour. I had always liked that word, m eandering, its snaking run o f syllables flowing who knows where? We pointed the Mercedes back north and the countryside opened up into rolling hills, cultivated fields, the forest still pursuing us darkly at the skyline. Whatever it had once been, Punsk is now a Lithuanian town; Polish spo­ ken to strangers, the Baltic tongue among its people. When Vilnius was being intimidated into temporary submission by Soviet troops in 1990, an office o f the Lithuanian independence movement Sajudis was established there, and the overgrown village became a main transit point for donations o f food, clothes, even money crossing the border. Some o f the children, hurrying to their con­ firmation service at the twin-spired church, were dressed in the standard East European miniature ball-gowns and bridal dresses. But others wore ethnic Lithuanian costume, with green and red embroidered pillbox hats and short green jackets. We asked and there was neither embarrassment or hesitation. “ Over there,” said a stout man in front o f the church, pointing to a row o f solid cot­ tages with overhanging gables and fenced yards lining the main street, “ all Jew­ ish properties; not now, no Jews now.” There had to be, I knew, a Jewish cemetery and there was. Hands waved us in the general direction, but we drove out o f the village (more than once), vainly searching the streets before we realized it must have been sited much fur­ ther off. The Mercedes followed a street until it became a dirt road, then a farm track. We found ourselves at the edge o f a wheat field, the car’s wheels spin­ ning crazily in a deep tractor-tread rut. Bogdan, the driver, gunned the engine savagely and careened through the field to descend again to a metalled path. We got out and, beyond the snarling and the smoke o f scorched rubber, there it was: a crumbling gray stone wall attempting to contain an acre or so o f trees and long-unmowed grass. Behind the wall the ground rose in a gentle slope. It was a burial mound. Inside the enclosure what had looked like grass turned out to be a solid carpet o f dandelions, packed so thickly that they formed a rippling, deep-pile meadow, perhaps a foot and a half tall, catching the light through the trees in dancing speckled patterns. It took a while to see any sign o f stones at all, but close to the top o f the little hill, one or two stuck out from the undergrowth

PROLOGUE

36

at crazy angles. Was this all? Were these the generations o f Jewish Punsk? Had the Nazis ripped out the stones as they had throughout Poland? Or had the Lithuanians done it themselves? It was only by crushing the dandelions underfoot that I could feel some­ thing other than soft-packed dirt. I knelt down and parted the stalks and leaves, brushed away the fuzz o f their seedballs. Two inches o f grizzled stone appeared, the Hebrew lettering virtually obliterated by heavy growths o f tawny and mustard-colored lichen. I could just make out a name, Tet, Bet Yud, Hay, Tevye, Tovye? I sat and swept my arms about in the dandelions like a child mak­ ing a snow-angel. Another stone appeared and another. Digging down a few inches brought another up from the netherworld. I could have spent a day with a shovel and shears and exposed an entire world, the subterranean universe o f the Jews o f Punsk. But to what end? I thought o f my father, looking stoically out at Hamp­ stead Heath and reverting to cricket metaphors before he died: “When you’ve had your innings, you’ve had your innings.” The tombs themselves were being buried, sliding gently and irrevocably into their companionable mound as ver­ dant Lithuania rose to reclaim them. The headstones that had been lovingly cut and carved were losing any sign that human hands had wrought them. They were becoming a geological layer. I lay down and stared through the branches at the blue beyond, listened to the elms and the poplars saying an indistinct Kaddish, and thought, Well, once there was a Lithuania and no Jews and for that matter no Christians either. Then there were Jews and some o f them lived about the wood and took it to the rivers and the towns, and now there are no Jews again and the forest stands there. Perhaps Deutscher was right, I thought. Trees have roots; Jews have legs. So I walked away from the mound at Punsk.

CHAPTER

ONE

In the Realm o f the Lithuanian Bison

i

The Royal Beasts o f Biatowieza

P lease, try the bison,” said Tadeusz. “ Really, it’s very good.” So I did, and had to admit that it tasted better than it looked— crimson and stringy— arranged vividly on the “huntsman’s platter” between the wild boar and the elk venison. In fact it tasted like nothing I’d ever eaten before: a strange sweetness lurking beneath its cheesy pungency. I might even have got greedy had I not seen the blocky chestnut-brown animals that same afternoon happily tearing and mashing the pasture o f their ancestral habitat, the great primeval forest o f Biatowieza. I knew that every season there was a modest cull from the wild herd and that American millionaires who could put down a cool five thou­ sand dollars had the chance to shoot one for the pedantic pleasure o f pointing out to guests in Oregon or California or Texas that, no, the head over the wet bar was not an American buffalo but a Lithuanian bison. But I was also mind­ ful that there were no more than two hundred and forty o f the animals here, another two hundred in a state park in the south o f the country, a pair here and there in zoos, and that was the entirety o f the European bison. So I took my time with the garish red meat and thought about the Ger man soldiers freezing in the forest in the winter o f 1918, butchering the bison 3 7

38

I N T H E R E A L M OF T H E L I T H U A N I A N B I S O N

w ith their artillery. I th o u g h t abou t K in g Stanislas A u g u stu s P oniatow ski, the last king o f Poland, sending boxes o f sm oked bison to his mistress, the Russian empress Catherine the G reat, even as she w h ette d her appetite for Poland itself. I th o u g h t o f Julius von Brincken, T sar N ich olas I ’s c h ie f forester, tracking the ch o co late-bro w n animals thro u g h the w inter sn o w , ink ing their num bers o n his census.1 B u t m ost o f all I th o u g h t o f M ikotaj H ussow ski.

+ + + im agin e

A

yo u n g

POLE

in M ich elan g elo ’s R o m e, so berly attired in

scholar’s cap, but affecting the floor-length co a t, trim m ed w ith sable, and the th igh-high b oots that had becom e the favored style o f the Polish gentry. T h is dress was supposed to proclaim their descent from the ancient w arrior race o f the rivers and w o o d s o f northeast E u rope, identified b y Tacitu s as “ Sarm atian.” 2 B u t while the Rom an historian had disparaged the Sarm atians as little better than forest brigands, exhibiting a “ degraded aspect” and “ living in w ago n s and o n horseback,” Polish chronicler-historians o f the Renaissance m ade them a horseback nobility, equal before each o th er and invincible to foreigners. Som e o f these early national histories, it is true, preferred a m ore sedentary m yth o f origins, insisting that the western Slavs had always dw elled betw een the N iem en, V istula, and B u g rivers. But

the

“ Sarmatian

costu m e”

recorded in early Polish portraits, w ith its emphasis o n hide and fur, came closer to the probable truth: an o ri­ gin from the nom adic tribes o f the northern Carpathians.3 Perhaps o u r scholar H ussow ski was bold en o u g h to sport the lo n g w hiskers o f his co u n trym en , for he w as, after all, the son o f a M aster o f the H u n t. T h o u g h his origins w ere m o d ­ est, he had been given a th o ro u g h hum anist ed ucatio n , co m p risin g b o th sacred devo tio n and classical learning at the Jagiellonian U niversity o f K rako w , then in its glory days. Som etim e before 1520 he had been b ro u g h t to R o m e in the retinue o f Erasmus C io lek , the bishop o f Po lotsk , virtually the easternm ost see o f the R om an church. A n d it was there that the prom ising y o u n g hu n ter-po et pen ned the first, indeed the only, full-length o d e to the Lithu anian bison: C a r ­ men de Statura, Feritate ac Venatione Bisontis, on e thousand and seventy lines o f the m ost grand iloquen t Latin verse. T h o u g h the sources are fragm entary, it seems that H u ssow ski, w h o m w e should n o w translate into his R om an dig n ity as N ico lau s H ussovianus, c o m ­ posed the p oem expressly for Pope L e o X , a n o torio usly passionate hunter. C e r­ tainly it also answered to w hat was then a h u ge curiosity ab o u t exo tic beasts,

The Lithuanian Bison, engravini from J. von Brincken

La Foret Imperiale de Bialowieza, 1828.

The Royal Beasts o f Bialowieza

39

stoked by the voyages o f discovery and the transport to Rome and other Euro­ pean courts o f shiploads o f rhinoceros, tapirs, and gangling apes. Hussovianus was the northern forest’s answer to the boosters o f tropical exotica: a celebrant o f the monstrous splendor o f the bison— tight-curled above, shaggy beneath, the brute o f the Scythian wastes. It was a great pity that he was not given the opportunity to recite it formally before the pope, so that he could roll his Polish accent around his bisonic verse-melodies: B arba riget late p endentibu s horrida villis, L u m in a terrorum p lena fu r o r e ru bent T erribilisque iubae collo f u n d u n t u r in armos E tg e n u a et fro n te m et pectoris im a tegu nt.s [ A bristling beard ha n g in g in shaggy lengths, Its eyes, sh in in g w ith a fe a r f u l red rage A n d a terrible m ane spreading fro m its neck A n d covering shoulders a n d knees a n d breast.] But Leo died in December 1521 and the new pope, the Dutch Hadrian VI, may have had a more conventionally pastoral attitude to ungulates. A t any rate, Hussovianus seems to have languished and it was only when he returned to Krakow in 1523, with his great bison ode rededicated to the Polish queen Bona, that he saw it published in octavo by the Bibliotheca Zalusciana. It is, by any standards, a strange and marvellous work: eccentric and eru­ dite, scientific and fantastic, solemn and gossipy. Though Hussovianus paid proper tribute to those like Aristotle and Pliny who had preceded him in iden­ tifying the animal, being the scrupulous humanist that he was, he also enjoyed correcting the errors and fallacies o f earlier writers. The true bison was not the shaggy, maned bonasus described by Aristotle dwelling on the borders o f Mace­ donia, whose skin “when stretched covers a seven-seat dining room,” and which gave birth within a high rampart o f dung and defended itself by a copi­ ous voiding o f scorching turds which it then kicked at its aggressors (a tactic more faithfully represented in Roeland Savery’s 1610 painting than the anatomy o f the beast itself).6 Nor was it the wild “ auroch,” or “ur-oxen” as Caesar called them, roaming the endless Hercynian forest o f Germany whose slaughter, he imagined, battle-hardened that country’s young warriors.7 Other medieval and Renaissance chroniclers like the German Conrad Celtis had described the “ glittering eye” and “ inward curving horns” o f the belua vasta (huge monster).8 But no writer before Hussovianus was so anatomically exhaustive— from the head, somewhat resembling an aged lion, to the tufted tail, horizontally erected whenever the animal was frightened or provoked. He goes on to describe its feeding and rutting habits, its longevity (about forty

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years for the m ale), its n otoriously mercurial tem peram ent, and the p h e n o m e­ nal speed and strength o f its charges. A n d H ussovianus co n clu des w ith a lo n g section on the traditions o f the great bison hunts o f the Sarm atian princes, thousands o f liveried beaters pressing the animals tow ard a preassigned e n c lo ­ sure w here royal hunters w o uld dispatch the beasts before pavilions o f applaud­ ing o nlookers to the sound o f the mort blo w n th ro u g h a h u n tin g horn. D e Bisonte was as m uch a w ork o f eth n o graph y as natural history. H u sso ­ vianus was at pains to present the aw esom e beast as a sym bol o f the heroic tenacity o f his native land and landscape. Even in the first centu ry Pliny had no ted that the bison had retreated in the face o f co lo n izatio n to the depth s o f the great H ercynian forest that marked the eastern bo rd er betw een ancient “ G erm ania” and the u nknow n and u n co n quered barbarian w ilderness o f

R oeland Saven

Bison Attacked by Hounds, 1610.

Scythia. N o w , H ussow ski claim ed, the bison w as to be fou n d o n ly in the Lithuanian forest “ and no o th er place in the w o rld .” T h e survival o f the ancient bison in the primeval w o o dland o f the Polish-Lithuanian realm so m e h o w seem ed a sign o f its elect historical destiny. S o as m u ch as M ik oiaj H ussow ski was anxious to present h im self at R o m e as the learned and piou s H ussovianus, the representative o f a true P o lish -C ath o lic Renaissance, his p o em celebrated the raw ungovernability o f the Lithuanian forest w o rld . T h e paradox is explained by the m o m en t in Polish h istory at w h ich H u s ­ sowski was w riting. F o r a centu ry and a h a lf Poland had been ruled by the L ithuanian dynasty o f the JagieUons. In j 386 Io gaila, the last pagan g ran d d uke o f Lithuania, had married the tw elve-year-old Jadwiga o f A n jo u and P o lan d, uniting their realms u nder his freshly baptized kingship. A n d w hile Lithuania

The Royal Beasts o f Bialowieza and Poland preserved their respective identities under the union, it was natural for the first generation o f history-chroniclers in the sixteenth century to add to the ancestral history and geography o f lowland Poland the sylvan world o f the Lithuanian warrior aristocracy. The bison was as important to the Lithuanian-Polish cult o f knighthood as the bull was for the Spanish warrior caste at the other end o f Christianity’s fron­ tiers.9 It was a one-ton prodigy, exhibiting the primitive ferocity o f the frontier wilderness. “ Here in the wildest forest o f Lithuania,” Hussowski wrote, echo­ ing Albertus Magnus’s D e a n im a lia , “ may be found an animal so mighty that three men may be seated between his two horns” ; a beast o f dark savagery com ­ parable to nothing else; the pendulous shaggy dewlap descending from throat and belly to the ground; the short but wiry mane and beard; the great muscled hump set on its back; the bulbous purplish-blue tongue; the peculiar transverse pupils o f the black eyes set in black or dark red cornea; the unearthly honking call o f distress to other animals in the herd; the phenomenal displays o f strength, as when two beasts in the hunt o f King Alexander in the early six­ teenth century smashed into the pavilion holding his wife, Helena, and her courtiers, crushing the structure and nearly killing the queen.10 In Hussowski’s prototype o f Polish bison lore (and in the many accounts which followed over the next century), like that o f Ritter Sigismund von Herberstein, the Austrian ambassador to Muscovy,11 the animal was depicted as a miraculous relic o f a presocial, even prehistoric past— a tribal, arboreal world o f hunters and gatherers, at the same time frightening and admirable. The bison became a talisman o f survival. For as long as the beast and its succoring forest habitat endured, it was implied, so would the nation’s martial vigor. Its very brutishness operated as a test o f strength and justice. The animal featured in ordeals imposed by primitive courts like that o f the fifteenth-century prince o f Lithuania Zygmunt the Great, who punished a criminal o f his own court by dressing him in brilliant red and letting him be torn to pieces by enraged bison. And prowess in the bison hunts became woven into the legends o f all those princes who had defended the marcher realm against Teutons from the west and Tatars from the east. Prince Witold was said to have practiced capturing young bison single-handed as an exercise in martial preparation. His cousin, the king, known since his conversion as Wladislaw, was said to have hunted at the lodge o f Bialowieza— literally, the White Tower— before his messianic battle with the Order o f the Teutonic Knights at Griinwald. Mountainous piles o f animal car­ casses that could supply both smoked meat and hide shields for his soldiers were sent by raft along the Narew river. First kill the bison, then the Germans. The heroic savagery o f the provoked beast— the Latin term belua, or “ monster,” is often used in the literature— became associated with the immen­ sity, darkness, and depth o f its original habitat. That it dwelled in the deep woods and in small “ families,” rather than on the open grasslands in large,

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slowly moving herds, was important for bison lore. The animals came to be seen as fugitive, unpredictable: peaceful until provoked, elusive until attacked, deadly when enraged. They were, in short, very much like those other occu­ pants o f woodland literature and history— outlaws and partisans

both of

whom were to feature very heavily in the romantic history o f Polish resistance. By retreating to the realm o f the bison, the depths o f the primeval forest, those later survivors o f national disaster in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would find asylum, succor, the promise o f re-emergence. For two centuries Great Poland had been able to boast that it was the most territorially extensive, if by no means institutionally strongest, state in Europe. Until the end o f the seventeenth century it profited from the weakness o f its neighbors, with Muscovy to the east still juvenile and chaotic, the German states to the west and Bohemia to the south torn apart and depopulated by dev­ astating wars o f religion. Poland occupied an indeterminate space in between, and gloried in its incoherence. Its aristocracy and gentry, the szlachta, sold their huge grain harvests to canny Dutch traders who arrived in Danzig Memel boasting (with good reason) o f the gold pieces in their wagons; enough to fund the most grandiose pretensions o f the Sarmatian aristocracy. Elaborate Baroque houses and formal parks, designed by Italian or French landscape architects, began to appear in the countryside east and south o f Warsaw or among the fields and meadows that had been cleared from the Lithuanian woods. The great magnate dynasties— the Radziwitts, Lubomirskis, Oginskys, Potockis, Tarnowskis, Zamoyskis— who housed themselves in this way continued to think o f themselves as a free and independent equestrian class; altogether dif­ ferent from, and preferable to, the crushed fops o f Versailles and Whitehall.12 Uniquely in Baroque Europe, their votes elected the monarch; and no law could be legitimate should just one o f them dissent. Bizarrely anomalous though this “Polish anarchy” came to seem in a world o f states increasingly governed by centralized bureaucracies and managed legislatures, it was o f a piece with the Polish nobles’ view o f themselves as cultivated editions o f the warrior hordes. And when in September 1683 their king, Jan Sobieski, led the Catholic armies that liberated Vienna from the Turkish siege, the cult o f the feudal horseback levy seemed to have been brilliantly vindicated. The climactic moment o f the battle was the headlong charge o f the Polish hussars, swooping down from the Vienna woods against the encampment o f the Ottoman sultan and his grand vizier. The understandably elated king wrote to his wife o f a rout o f three hundred thousand Turks, a force at least four times the size o f his own army. And since the Ottoman army had included the horse­ back soldiers o f the Tatar khan, Sobieski could claim to have preserved Chris­ tian Europe from the heathen horde. Its barbarism seemed to him exemplified by the wanton slaughter o f “ a mass o f innocent local Austrian people,” not to mention an ostrich looted from the Habsburg emperor’s menagerie.

The Royal Beasts o f Bialowieza However spectacular, the victory at Vienna represented not the perpetua­ tion but the end o f Polish-Lithuanian chivalric power. The Lithuanian prince Sapieha had, in fact, detained the arrival o f his horsemen until after the batde had been fought, and shortly after took them o ff in expeditions o f anarchic marauding. Sobieski slogged on with further wars against the Turks as his power crumbled at home, and eventually retired to the elegant little palace he had built at Wilanow, outside Warsaw. With its formal park and grandiose collection o f paintings and sculpture, it became the prototype for the Baroque country estates that rapidly became fashionable in eighteenth-century Poland. Though the Polish nobility began to ape the manners and dwellings o f their Western counterparts, in their hunting lodges they still sustained the illu­ sion that Sarmatian blood coursed through their veins; that they remained the worthy heirs o f the warriors who had vanquished the Teutonic knights, the Tatar hordes, and the Turkish janissaries. In fact the Masters o f the Hunts prided themselves on ignoring the increasingly elaborate rules and regulations that affected hunting in Western Europe. Instead, as Baron von Brincken noted, the customs o f blood sports remained unapologetically primitive: “The hunter pursues his game as he pleases without submitting to any rules whatso­ ever; his equipment consisting solely o f a poor gun which he loads, as he wishes with shot or with bullets; a game-bag and a hunting horn made from juniper wood. For the chase he uses only hunting hounds that come from a stock so strong and so brave that they will attack wolves and even bears. Mastiffs that might well be o f use in hunting big game are never used and the many species o f tracking dogs [like spaniels] are hardly known.” 13 Bialowieza, the White Tower, home o f the zu br, was one o f the most spec­ tacular o f these resorts o f illusion; and in the eighteenth century no one enjoyed the place more than the electors o f Saxony, after they had been promoted to the Polish throne. When Augustus II or Augustus III came to the primeval forest to hunt bison, elk, bear, wolf, wild boar, and lynx, they could indeed imagine themselves following the trails o f Wladislaw Jagiello, Zygmunt, and Alexander. A t the top o f the little hill overlooking the banks o f the litde Narewka river, an area was cleared to make a park with a handsome and curious hunting lodge at its center. It was constructed o f timber— to preserve the sense o f the huntprimitive— though the interior apartments were provided with enough tapes­ tries and oak furniture to give the place an air o f sophistication. O n the twenty-seventh o f September 1752 the assembly yard in front o f the lodge was filled with an immense pack o f horses, hounds, foresters, and rid­ ers dressed in gray hunting coats, trimmed in green velvet. King Augustus III (who seldom condescended to venture into Poland at all) had come with his queen Maria Jozefa and his two sons, Xavier and Karl, to hunt bison and elk. In their train were marshals and officers o f the Polish court— Hetman Branicki

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(who had, doubtless to the king’s chagrin, built a spectacular palace, already called “the Polish Versailles” at nearby Bialystok), Wielopolski, Wilcewszki, Poniatowski, and the Saxon Grand Master o f the Hunt, Graf Wollersdorff.14 And though the pretense was o f primitive improvisation, elaborate advance planning, amounting almost to a small military campaign, had ensured that the day would not be wasted. This was just as well since the king was enormously fat, frequendy drunk, and, unlike his grandfather Augustus the Strong, who sired three hundred illegitimate children, not much given to sustained exertion. Though its stock o f game could hardly be rivalled, either in quantity or diversity, Bialowieza in some respects was no place for a halfhearted hunter. There was, after all, a good reason why this green ark o f mammals had survived. Since the puszcza wilderness had never been cleared, it presented (and still does) formidable obstacles to penetration by riders, let alone an easy shot. Tree roots o f fallen oaks, many hundreds o f years old, rise like brutally spiked ram­ parts, twenty feet high, from the forest floor. Carpets o f brilliant green algae suddenly part to reveal the black brackish water o f deep bogs beneath. And though there are clearings where elk and deer and bison like to graze, by the time hunters have appeared on the spot, their quarries have more than enough notice to flee. Which is why deep winter, when snow could muffle the sound o f pursuit and when the animals could be tempted with strategically placed offerings o f hay, became a favorite hunting season. But Augustus and family had planned the hunt for the autumn, before the climate became too severe to enjoy their stay. So before their arrival an advance party o f tracker-hunters had staked out an area o f the woods within which they would enclose the bison, using the usual thousand-strong army o f beaters. The idea was that the line o f beaters, making as much noise as possible, would grad­ ually form a closing semicircle as it pressed the game toward a custom-designed enclosure in the woods, complete with ornate pavilion where the royal family would take their shots. The gorgeously dressed courtiers had litde more to do than load the royal guns and hand them over. Even by the standards o f the venery-crazed Saxons it was a good day. The queen, obviously no mean shot (though a trapped bison must offer a substan­ tial target even to the most trembling fingers and myopic eye), dispatched twenty bison, almost half the total bag o f forty-two, a massed fanfare sounding the mort each time one o f the enormous animals came crashing down. In between blasting away at the doomed zubre, Maria Jozefa, evidendy a more studious soul than her husband, amused herself by reading, the octavo held high in her long, kid-gloved hands.15 Thirteen elk and two roebuck were shot to make up a grand total o f fifty-seven, all o f which were, as custom required, duly arrayed on the ground for the inspection o f the king, according to size and grandeur. Each o f the carcasses was then weighed and distributed, minus heads, anders, and whatever other parts may have been prized as trophies, to the beat­

The Royal Beasts o f Bialowieza ers as pay. Augustus was so pleased with the day’s work that he had an obelisk erected by the riverbank recording for posterity the numbers, weight, and type o f the kill. It is still there, bragging in golden limestone o f so many bulls, cows, and calves, facing trees carved with the initials o f Polish tourists. The electors o f Saxony, all o f Europe knew, had only been made kings o f Poland by grace o f the Russian Empire, formidably increased in territory and military strength. And since true Polish sovereignty had already become a pious fiction by the mid eighteenth century, it was not surprising when Catherine the Great effectively imposed her discarded lover, Stanislas Poniatowski, on the Polish parliament, the Sejm. What was a surprise, not least to the empress, who was banking on his lassitude, was the degree o f energy, enthusiasm, and intel­ ligence that Poniatowski brought to the job. In Stanislas’s Bialowieza, the slaughter o f the bison stopped. This was less from any acknowledgement on his part o f the symbolic aura o f the animal than from his relative indifference to the hunt and the traditional protection accorded to the bison and the lynx as “ royal beasts.” But what the last king o f Poland lacked in venery, he more than made up for in scientific curiosity. A typ­ ical product o f the A ge o f Reason, what Stanislas really enjoyed hunting, were facts. So the Enlightenment came to the Lithuanian woods, especially in the per­ son o f the treasurer-general o f Lithuania, Antoni Tyzenhaus. He was the first official custodian o f the forest not to see it simply as a place where otherwise impotent kings could play the Sarmatian warrior at the expense o f the elk, but as a unique ecological and economic resource. Tyzenhaus was first and fore­ most an aggressive political economist, anxious to do something productive with Lithuania’s vast potential. Because o f their sacred place in the theology o f the royal hunt, the ancient frontier forests had been spared the kind o f indus­ tries that elsewhere in Europe, from England to Brandenburg, had cut huge slices out o f their acreage. There were no breweries, no glassworks, no tanner­ ies, no iron forges, not even charcoal burners in Bialowieza. Virtually the only commercial activities had been the ancient occupation o f wild apiculture: delec­ table honey gathered by the foresters from specially tended woodland beehives, and the blond, spongy bark stripped from linden trees to make their sandals and clogs. Beyond the core o f the royal game reserve, though, the sleeping forests were being roughly wakened by the kiss o f modernity. Unlike western states where vast tracts were reserved to royal protection (or exploitation), the Polish-Lithuanian forest had, over centuries, been alienated to the same aris­ tocratic magnates who dominated the political system. Whether they owned the land outright or not mattered little since use-right leases were so vaguely defined that the noble houses treated their woods as their exclusive property. As the Polish commonwealth became weaker, the Radziwitls, Tyszkiewiczes,

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Lubomirskis, and the rest began to support their neo-feudal pretensions with aggressive business. The forests were suddenly seen as an immense capital asset. They stood at the hydrological divide between rivers that flowed either south toward the Black Sea or north to the Baltic. With the help o f freshly cut canals, linking the Bug, the Vistula, and the Niemen, harvested timber could be sent to ports like Danzig. And then there was potash. By the middle o f the eighteenth century, a trav­ eller to Lithuania might smell the Radziwitt forests before he saw them, the smoke clouds from potash pits hanging over vast areas o f cleared alders. And beneath the fumes alert nostrils could distinguish a peculiar mixture o f odors: the sulfurous potash residue fouling the air with the smell o f rotting eggs over­ laid with the cloying scent o f boiling birch tar and pine pitch. A t the eastern end o f Biatowieza, the Tyszkiewicz family, which owned large tracts o f the woods, were beginning to establish glassworks. Finally, there was the perennial obsession with the international grain trade. Sharply rising population throughout Europe was driving prices upward and lib­ eralized markets were sending them even higher. T o a Brarucki or a Potocki, eager to exchange his old costume o f a whiskery Sarmatian squire for the latest edition o f a refined, Francophone, international “ gendeman,” complete with rococo palace, Meissen porcelain, ormolu furniture, pseudo-Fragonards, resi­ dential theater, ballet, and orchestra, a park lavishly supplied with fountains, it was easy to agree with the steward who would whisper delightfully in his ear: slash and burn; plant and earn. Like his Prussian neighbor Frederick the Great, King Stanislas wanted to ensure that the royal state got its share o f all this busy good fortune. So he sum­ moned lawyers versed in ancient customs and contracts to look over traditional leases and see if they could not be turned into something more aggressively profitable. Bureaucrats like Tyzenhaus, with armies o f clerks and scribes, were turned loose on the forests to verify what was the king’s share, and to see what enterprises might be initiated. Serious men in perruques, short dark coats, and pince-nez descended on the puszcza villages. The sound o f goose quills scratch­ ing vellum and barking German instructions began to be commonplace in the local inns. Karol Radziwilt and his neighbors were not delighted with this interfer­ ence. Poniatowski they thought an upstart who owed his throne to his tour o f duty in Catherine’s bed (admittedly a demanding service). By 1772 their dis­ affection had turned into outright revolt. For Stanislas, the price o f crushing the rebellion with the help o f Russian troops was brutal: the cession o f large areas o f the country, east, south, and west, respectively, to Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Paradoxically, the humiliation o f the first partition spurred Stanislas and his counsellors to more strenuous efforts at reform. The choice seemed starkly

The Royal Beasts o f Bialowieza clear: a new Poland or no Poland at all. Taxation, education, the economy, and finally the political system itself all became targets o f radical change. In Lithuania Tyzenhaus pressed on busily, carrying out the first statistical survey o f the royal forests, instituting what were proudly advertised as scientific plans for timber cuts and replanting, dredging clogged rivers so that the lum­ ber could be rafted to ports on the Baltic. Needless to say, his activism earned him the hatred o f all the major aristocratic proprietors o f the region. Eventu­ ally they made enough fuss to be rid o f him, but his determination that Poland’s forests should be a concern o f the state remained. In fact forestry experts were sprouting like suckers in a coppice. Where once magnates with cultural pre­ tensions had competed for the best dancing master or string orchestra, they now liked to show off their residential forester: earnest figures who could stride through the woods and impress courtiers from Warsaw with long lectures on grafting and the binomial classification o f rare fungi. Some aristocrats went even further, rolled up their muslin sleeves and became their own foresters, publishing the results o f their estate management. The most impressive o f all these works was written by the first published woman forester in Europe, Anna Jabtonowska Sapieha. Other lords o f the trees, like the archbishop o f Gniezno, established their own elaborate woodland admin­ istration. Sylvanomaniacs in silk breeches got into fierce arguments about whether timber should be felled before complete maturity, on the prudence o f drastic thinning, on the timetables for replanting, whether burning for potash and charcoal should be restricted or even prohibited outright.16 This burst o f rationalism went the way o f the rest o f the Polish reforms under Stanislas Augustus. The more serious they became, the less the Russians liked it, until, in 1792, Catherine felt threatened enough by a newly promul­ gated constitution to lead a coalition o f the other two partition powers that carved further enormous slices out o f Poland. Tw o years later, in 1794, and in defiance o f the coalition powers, the Lithuanian-born veteran o f the American Revolution Tadeusz Kosciuszko announced a Polish insurrection from the market square o f the old Jagiellonian capital, Krakow. After courageous but hopeless resistance (a constant theme in its history), the last remnant o f Poland disappeared down the gullets o f its neighbors. And Bialowieza along with other Lithuanian p uszcza to the north— Knyszynska and Augustowska— finally became Russian.17 There was a brief rush o f fools’ euphoria when the apparently invincible success o f Napoleonic arms created a “ Duchy o f Warsaw” and the forest returned to the Poles. Regiments o f the ninety thousand Polish troops that made up by far the largest foreign contingent o f the Grande Armee bivouacked beneath the alders and birches o f Bialowieza en route to Russia in the late spring o f 1812. In P a n Tadeusz Mickiewicz has a cannonball land in the depths o f the forest at the very feet o f an amazed bison “in his mossy lair”— “ a twirling,

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whirling, hissing shell/ That went off with a roar; the first time then/ He was afraid and sought a deeper den.” His compatriots were bolder. Lithuanian Light Horse, sporting the red four-cornered hats that Kosciuszko’s peasant sol­ diers had worn in 1794, were the first across “their” river Niemen on June 24, riding into the old Grand Duchy. In December what was left o f them returned. O f the thirty thousand troops that had made up the Fifth Polish Corps, just one hundred and twenty-six survived the successive horrors o f Borodino, the burning o f Moscow, the bitter retreat, and the nightmare crossing o f the icy Berezina river. Four-fifths o f the entire Polish division o f the Grande Armee had perished in a single campaign. Bialowieza was retaken by Russian troops in 1813 and would remain the personal domain o f the tsars for another century. Although the Congress o f Vienna established a pseudo-autonomous “ Kingdom o f Poland,” ruled indirectly by the Russian monarch, virtually all o f Lithuania disappeared into Rus­ sia proper. And it was precisely on the borderland o f the ancient forest that the frontier o f the Russian Empire was extended to encompass the Niemen cities o f Grodno and Kowno, as well as Bialystok farther south. It may be that hunt­ ing had something to do with these border changes. Alexander I’s ancestor the tsarina Elizabeth had been sent a present o f two bison by the king o f Prussia, and the reputation o f Bialowieza as a huntsman’s paradise was certainly known in Moscow. Oddly enough (and not for the last time), care o f the forest was entrusted not to Russians but to Baltic Germans. The governor o f Lithuania Baron von Bennigsen, perhaps mindfiil that forestry had already become an’ established discipline in the courts o f eighteenth-century Germany, appointed men with names like Plater and Henke to senior posts in the forest administra­ tion. They in turn hired graduates o f a new forestry school established in War­ saw in 1820. For the first time a periodical, predictably called Sylwan, published their proceedings. And while its pages were filled mosdy with sober technical information, the care o f the p uszcz* became more than pure arboriculture Deprived o f any more direct means ofpolitica1 self-expression, natural history had to substitute for national history as a way o f nurturing the Polish-Lithuanian her­ itage. When shaded with the Romantic cult o f nature, the scientific zeal to record and classify the flora and fauna o f forest topography acted as a stealthy way to celebrate the glories o f the native homeland. In September 1820 one o f these conscientious Balts, Julius von Brincken, German by ongm but Polish by upbringing (and thus a one-man combination l u Z V1SOr; n P° T « m e to Bialowieta. Experienced though he was m the lore o f the great forests, he was thunderstruck by what he aw there. It was, he wrote m his U im o irc, the very picture o f ancient Sarmaua: a sylvan arcadta that had long vanished from even the wilder regions ofPrussia and Saxony. As cml.zanon had steadily moved eastward, whole species-elk and lynx and b.son-had retreated before it into the most inaccessible forests.

The Royal Beasts o f Bialowieza

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Arcady o f old, so Greek writers like Pausanias had said, had been a place o f dense brutishness, running with wild swine, where the people o f the forest were more like animals than men. Was Bialowieza the Lithuanian arcady? The

human specimens he

observed certainly seemed like mysteriously preserved relics. For the forest people with their nut-brown weather-beaten faces and short fustian coats were evidendy not true serfs, whatever their official legal status. They conspicuously disdained the drudgery o f the fields for an arcadian life o f hunting and gath­ ering, much the same, he supposed, as their pagan Lithuanian ancestors. Their dwellings, sometimes deep within the woods, were log cabins o f weathered larch, thatched with rye. And their arcane knowledge o f the ancient forest was so intimate and so intricate, it allowed them to subsist handsomely on the most succulent wild mushrooms, on the intensely fragrant tiny bog cranber­ ries that they boiled into preserves and stored in stone pots, aromatic wild woodland honey, broad leaves o f sorrel and bulbs o f wild garlic. In return for a paltry sum paid each year to the government, the foresters, gamekeepers, and beaters attached to the royal hunt were allowed to take any game they wanted within their district (excepting elk and bison). So their larders were stuffed with venison: wild boar, reindeer, hare, and bear. Pelts from the otter, bad­ ger, ermine, beaver, and marten, sold to itinerant merchants, or carted by themselves to Hajnowka or even Grodno, more than paid for their licenses and supplies o f the velvety vodka, flavored with the marzipan-like “ bison grass” ( H ierochloe odorata). The longer von Brincken stayed at Bialowieza, the deeper grew his inner turmoil. His whole personality and intellect had been shaped by the Enlight­ enment’s cult o f reason. His profession as official forester, not to mention the academic literature and the prosperity o f the tsar’s great imperium, positively required him to divest all sentimentality, all cloudy romanticism. What Bialowieza and places like it— who knew how many— in Lithuania represented was revenue, latent productivity, enterprise. What they needed, undeniably, was the firm smack o f scientific management. The Russian government had already done away with the outrageous starosties by which any backwoods squire could do what he wanted with land and woods and pocket the proceeds. But matters had to be put on a more orderly footing. The state should see to it that potash and pitchworks were situated in regulated sites; that timber should be cut according to proper principles o f ja r d in a g e and in areas that made sense for their transportation by road or river. And the woodsmen them­ selves should no longer be able to help themselves to anything that moved for the price o f a few roubles and kopecks, an incentive to destroy entire stocks o f game altogether. Instead they should be obliged to sell their pelts only to the forestry officials themselves and be paid per pelt, indeed rationed to so many pelts per animal per year. Discipline had to supplant chaos.

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I N T H E R E A L M OF T H E L I T H U A N I A N B I S O N And then there was the primeval forest itself: a thing o f glory and terror.

Von Brincken had never seen anything like it. Where were the beech trees? For there was everything else: ash, aspen, maple, oak, linden, willow, birch, elm, hornbeams and spindle trees, pine and fir, all growing in a crazed jumble, amidst a vast botanical charnel house o f rotting trunks, roots, and limbs. The irregu­ larity was dreadful, sublime, perfecdy imperfect. What was needed, o f course, set out in the appendix to his book, was a methodical forestry that would, over time— and, given the size and wildness o f the place, a very long time, perhaps a century and a half— bring it into some kind o f proper hierarchy. Varieties would be massed together so that those most suitable for one purpose, like shipbuild­ ing, could be efficiendy harvested at the allotted time, while timber more suit­ able for building materials would be cultivated elsewhere. In this ideal regime, the trees would be graduated in age, so that foresters would not need to wan­ der all through the woods looking for trees o f maximum maturity or whatever the designated age might be for the job. Specimens o f a like variety and matu­ rity would present themselves in tidy battalions ready for their marching orders. N o one could accuse him, then, o f not doing his duty, o f not considering with the utmost scrupulousness what the science o f forestry economics demanded. But there was another von Brincken, one who listened to the wind rushing through the trees as he lay in his little bedroom in the wooden lodge on the hill, who marvelled at the immense girth o f the great elms and birches, who counted with stupefaction eight hundred and fifteen rings on an ancient linden tree and saw in his mind’s eye the grisly sacrificial offerings o f pagan Lithuanians that he had read about in the old chronicles, ribbons o f flesh appended to its boughs as propitiation to the tree-gods.18 When storms ripped through the dells, von Brincken heard the villagers invoke the name o f the heathen oak-deity Perkunas, the lord o f the thunderclap and the lightning bolt. Yet for all the Gothic savagery o f the old forest, he could not help but imagine himself its high priest and protector. For the zubre he felt only love, an ardor that even the dryly official prose o f his M emoire fails to conceal. Even when hunting, he pursued them with an admirer’s passion. When he ate them, savoring the special delicacy o f smoked bison’s lung, or the musky bouillon made from their bones, he did so with plea­ sure and gratitude. But what he liked to do best was to count them. The task had to wait for the first snows. The bison were creatures o f habit, and when their foraging needs took them from one site to the next in the freez­ ing dawn sunshine, searching for the wild hazelnut, spindle tree, and hornbeam saplings they favored in winter, the canniest foresters would know their route. Using posts, von Brincken marked out a dependable crossing point from one sector o f the woods to the other and then calculated the traffic from their hoofprints. Sometimes he even saw families on their morning march, their coats

The Royal Beasts o f Bialowieza changed to a dark chocolate for the winter. And though he was under no illu­ sion that his counting method was rigorously scientific, he was confident enough to publish the number for 1828 o f seven hundred and thirty-two, including ninety-three calves, more than twice the depleted numbers that had survived the comings and goings o f the Napoleonic wars. Von Brincken respected the stubborn resolution o f the creatures and sym­ pathized with their seasonal irritability. During winter a bull bison planted across a forest path was simply immovable. T o approach it at closer than twenty paces invited a thirty-mile-an-hour charge. Far from being shy o f humans, much less panicked by them, it stood, coolly indifferent to carts or walkers, often turning its great rear in sheer contempt. There was nothing for it but to wait until it trudged off into the woods, or else make an enormous detour around the obstacle. Their densely packed mass o f muscle and bone was, he thought, awesome, remembering the seven-year-old bull, shot at twenty paces through the breast, that had needed sixty men to load it onto the game cart; and the day when huntsmen’s horses, reined in an enclosure, had suddenly been faced with a bison herd and had galloped o ff in panic, smashing the enclo­ sure to escape. When another young adult bull was killed von Brincken reserved it for meticulous anatomical description. Using calipers, he measured precisely the distance from the base o f the horns to the base o f the tail, from the base o f the horns to the tip o f the muzzle; the circumference at breast and belly; the width o f its nostrils, the length o f large and small intestines (fifty-five and one hun­ dred and twenty-eight feet, respectively). Anything that could be enumerated was. But, for von Brincken it was as much a matter o f honor as science. Some authorities, reporting on the American buffalo, had casually indicated it to be o f superior size to the European bison, without bothering to compare it to the latter’s awesome dimensions. N ow he would put them right. This was not the worst o f it. The two titans o f Enlightenment natural his­ tory, Linnaeus and Buffon, who agreed on virtually nothing, were, in this case, o f one opinion that the bison was merely a wild variant o f domestic cattle, that its beard and belly-mane were not true characteristics but merely features that were associated with particular climates and habitats. The bison, they both opined, was not in fact a distinctive species at all. Von Brincken was contemp­ tuous o f their taxonomic dogma, based on no direct observation. When they imagined they were describing the bison, they were in fact, he pointed out, describing the wild ox, or auroch, the shaggy animal found once, but no more, in the woods o f eastern Germany as well as Lithuania and Russia. Polish ver­ nacular, he wrote, understood the distinction better than these august zoolo­ gists; for the auroch was a tur, the bison always a zu br. That there was nothing remotely domestic about the bison had been proved by the history o f an orphaned female which the foresters had tried to persuade to nurse from a cow,

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and then from a goat. The bison calf had pushed the barnyard animals away in powerful disgust, preferring to take a cereal pap from a dish held by humans. And when, some years later, attempts were made to mate the female with a prize bull, the bison had responded to the courtship by charging the bull. So much for its domestic lineage. The more he saw, the more he wrote, the more von Brincken was com­ mitted to the peculiarity o f the bison and its one home in the primeval forest o f Lithuania. When the Prussians occupied the area around Biatystok, he reported (with undisguised pleasure), they had made attempts to coax the ani­ mals out o f Biatowieza, but without any success. Under the Saxon kings, ani­ mals that had been transported to Germany invariably failed to reproduce. What they needed, he concluded, was the unique ecology the ancient forest offered, species o f herbs and grasses that could be found nowhere else: the parzydolo, Queen o f the Meadows; or the zaraza , the bitter buttercup that was not only repugnant but harmful to domestic catde; the mixture o f ash bark and linden seeds with which they spiced their diet. Against all his training, the Baron von Brincken, conservateur-en-chefo f the national forest o f the Kingdom o f Poland, chevalier o f the Order o f St. Stanis­ las (Second Class), was in danger o f becoming a Romantic. It wasn’t just the bison. For centuries the forest had been a shelter for species that, to the west, had failed to hold their own against human settlement and colonization. The great elk, for example, in von Brincken’s description fig­ ures as the Romantic animal par excellence, worshipped by the pagans as divine and, in its obstinate solitude and “melancholy,” shunning even the bison as too gregarious. Since the High Middle Ages, they had disappeared from the Ger­ man forests, retreating eastward. For a while they had been threatened by the tsar Paul’s characteristically eccentric determination to outfit his Russian cav­ alry in elk-skin breeches. Happily for the elk, the ape-like tsar’s cranium had been staved in with a malachite paperweight by the palace guard. So the big animals could once again graze in reclusive security among the aspens and ash trees o f Biatowieza. The forest was different and its denizens were different. Its wolves and black bears and the lynx that lived in the hollows o f tree stumps, its predatory birds, eagles and owls, were bigger and wilder than in Germany and Bohemia. Instead o f the paragon o f Enlightenment animals, an industrious and exacting hydraulic engineer, the Lithuanian beaver was a sloven, simply depositing crude piles o f twigs and branches beside a river, rather than bothering with carefully constructed dams and lodges. It was, wrote von Brincken, ever generous to the local mammals, the fault o f civilization, hunting and harrying the beaver until he was reduced to a rudimentary shack. We shall never know if the baron was in danger o f going native and imi­ tating the Lithuanian beaver: o f relapsing into a life o f woodland improvisation.

The Last Foray The relentlessly confident plans for the economic organization o f the region appended to his book suggest otherwise. Whatever the temptations, the starchcollar imperial bureaucrat ultimately prevailed over the loose-blouse Romantic conservationist. In the second half o f the nineteenth century von Brincken’s vision o f a wild forest disciplined into a productive timber plantation would come dangerously close to realization. But precisely because he had also been so eloquent on the mystique o f the p uszcza as a sacred preserve o f the arboreal past, the core o f Biatowieza was left alone. The hunting lodge on the hill was rebuilt to somewhat grander specifications, the villagers given regular jobs as foresters and gamekeepers. But although, for a century and more, the rulers o f Russian empires, from Tsar Nicholas I to General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, liked to show off their royal hunt, there was, at the same time, something about the heart o f the forest that remained irreducibly alien; impen­ etrable, resistant.

ii

The Last Foray

On the nineteenth o f November 1830, revolution broke out in Warsaw, Polish style. One group ofinsurrectionaries forced their way into the Belvedere Palace in an attempt to assassinate the tsar’s brother and regent, the grand duke C o n ­ stantine. Another group tried to storm the Russian barracks in tazienki Park. Both efforts were botched but the city arsenal yielded enough weapons for Warsaw to evict the Russians in an explosion o f patriotic anger. Much o f the country followed and, as usual in such circumstances, attempts at mediation died between obdurate reaction (in Moscow) and revolutionary passion (in Poland). In January 1831 the tsar was formally deposed as king o f Poland, an act o f bravura that was followed by nine months o f desperate warfare against a relentlessly augmenting Russian army. After some initial victories, the battle o f Ostrolenka broke the main body o f the Polish army, and a noose tightened around Warsaw. Driven to extremity, the last rebel troops commanded by the wooden-legged General Sowinski fell back to the cemetery at Wola, where they died literally heaped on the graves o f their ancestors. The failed gamble exacted a dreadful price. The “ Kingdom o f Poland” established by the Congress o f Vienna ceased to exist, even as a Russian pro­ tectorate. Hundreds were executed in the ferocious repression that followed.

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Thousands o f the old Polish and Lithuanian nobility were dispossessed o f their manors and sent on brutally vindictive forced marches into remote Siberian exile. In the forest region o f Podlasia partisans retreated to the deep woods, among them Emilie Plater, the woman soldier whose family had provided forestry officials earlier in the century. But in the open countryside, between fields o f ripening rye, bodies hung from gallows, shredded by the busy crows. The poet Adam Mickiewicz was in Rome when the November rising erupted, completing his verses “To the Polish Mother” : vanquished his tombstone w ill be the scaffold}s wood H is only glory the weeping o f a woman A n d the long night-talks o f his compatriots.19 Though he had spent much o f his young life wrapped in such laments, he did not leap into the next mail coach travelling northeast. In all likelihood Mickiewicz understood only too well what agonies lay ahead, for when he did make his move, it was to Paris to rally support and prepare a relief committee. Only then did he travel eastward to Prussian Posen (once Polish Poznan) in time to greet his own brother Francis among bands o f demoralized refugees fleeing from the disaster. He was hardly a shirker, but not unreasonably, the poet may have felt he had already had more than his due share o f calamity. In 1823, while teaching at Kowno, he had been arrested as one o f a group o f selfdesignated “ Philomaths” ; nothing much more than the standard Romantic reading clubs, full o f students sweaty with secret patriotic excitement and vodka-soaked vows o f sacrifice. Six months in prison and six months’ house arrest was followed by a sentence o f exile in Russia. This did not mean a penal colony in the tundra. Mickiewicz and his friends parted after a farewell banquet o f songs and tear-stained embraces. But for the next six years he lived, succes­ sively, in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa, fairly lionized by writers like Pushkin and Bestuzhev, themselves leading uneasy lives snooped at by absurd and sinister tsarist spies conspicuously skulking amidst cafe smoke, reading rooms, and opera boxes. Then, unpredictably, in 1829 Mickiewicz was given his freedom to travel. He went south to Italy, where there were already colonies o f Polish exiles, per­ petually grieving for their country during bouts o f heavy drinking and latenight mazurkas danced slowly before laughing, uncomprehending Romans. At Madame Khlustine’s salon Mickiewicz met James Fenimore Cooper, already America’s most famous writer on the strength o f his first two Leather-Stocking Tales: The Pioneer and The Last o f the Mohicans. Together the bard o f Lithua­ nia and the scribe o f Westchester went riding in the campagna. More than likely they talked o f the most famous writer o f all, whom they both passionately admired, Walter Scott.20

The Last Foray Mickiewicz, o f course, had an already-formed and strongly individual lit­ erary identity. His Lithuania would never be mistaken for the Scottish Borders or the Adirondacks. The long poems he wrote in the grievous aftermath o f the failed uprising drew on all his native obsessions: the endurance o f Lithuania’s pagan spirit cults in Forefathers’ Eve and the providentially designed Christian martyrdom and redemption in The Books o f the Polish P ilg rim . Yet there is a great deal o f Scott in Mickiewicz’s wonderful medieval epic, K o n ra d W allenrod, not least in its exploration o f shifting allegiance in a continuing borderland war. The poem has a Lithuanian child abducted and brought up by the T eu ­ tonic knights, rising to become the Grand Master o f the Order, only to lead them deliberately to disaster in his homeland, an elaborate exercise in suicidal revenge. Its tragic themes o f enforced exile, ingratiation and infiltra­ tion,

the

assumption

of a

mask— all, o f course, directly reflected

Mickiewicz’s

own

experience in Russia and his complicated relationship with

Adam

the brutal chastisement o f the

M ickiewicz jhoto: Nadar).

xsax-batiushka,

the

emperor.

in Warsaw,

Back

father-

new generations o f students circulated W allenrod as his­ torical allegory and recited it silently

in

their humiliated

heads. Settled exile,

in

his

Mickiewicz

Parisian met

up

with James Fenimore Cooper again.

The

American

had

come to see his own work as a declaration o f frontier independence against his father’s Whiggish cultivation. Cooper Senior had given his name to C oo perstown by hacking back the wilderness and creating settlement. Cooper Junior would invent Natty Bumppo as the forest sage and adept, capable o f wisdoms denied to the bearers o f civilization.21 It is not surprising, then, that the Pole and the American saw each other as kindred spirits. Cooper went to work in Paris, helped by Lafayette, organizing a Committee for Poland, while Mickiewicz (with perhaps Pushkin’s bouncing musical rhymes echoing in his head as well) composed his own masterpiece o f woodland nativism: P a n Tadeusz.

56

I N T H E R E A L M OF T H E L I T H U A N I A N B I S O N Both the Leather-Stocking Tales and P an Tadeusz celebrate worlds their

authors knew to be already extinct. But they also both hoped that the spirit embodied in their works o f communion with the landscape

an enduring code

o f brotherhood, o f wrongs redressed through selfless action— might somehow be transmitted to the national future. Even if the wild woods were reduced to dreary rows o f obedient saplings, grown only to be industrially harvested for the wants o f the city, even if the great forest were to be cleared altogether, the mem­ ory o f sylvan virtue could be preserved in their literature as the hidden heart o f national identity. The temporal structure o f Pan Tadeusz is its most complicated feature: a twisted braid o f memory and anticipation that ends on a passionately optimistic note, but at a historical juncture— 1812— that all its readers would know fin­ ished in disaster. Mickiewicz’s childhood around Nowogrodek and his years as student and teacher in Wilno and Kowno provided him with the landscapes and society that were woven into the luminous fabric o f his poetically remembered Lithuania. But the young gentry at the center o f the poem— the Frenchified Count Horeszko and Tadeusz himself o f the enemy clan o f the Soplica— are themselves bound to a historically determined destiny; to ancient memories o f mutual wrongs, personal, dynastic, and national. Tadeusz is the son o f Jacek Soplica, whose courtship o f the Horeszko lord’s daughter was ritually rejected by the presentation o f a dish o f sour black soup. T o avenge the wound, he joins the Russians in the Kosciuszko wars and kills Horeszko. T o atone for his trea­ son, he spends the rest o f his life as a patriotic warrior with the French, appear­ ing in the action o f the poem disguised as a Bernardine monk. His son Tadeusz is named for the general— Kosciuszko— he betrayed. The story o f Pan Tadeusz, then, is a war o f memories. The family feud, feeding off bitter memories, boils over into an all-out batde, a “ foray,” or mil­ itary expedition, o f one clan against another. Incapable o f forgetting or forgiv­ ing the Soplica treason, Gerwazy, the grizzled retainer o f the Horeszko family, leads an attack on Tadeusz’s house. Just as the manor is about to fall before the onslaught, both families are suddenly overwhelmed by the intrusion o f a greater feud— that o f Pole against Russian. Like other great Romantic historical writers o f his time— Scott and Hugo, for example— Mickiewicz set his story in a building that itself carried memory in its crumbling stones. The old manor house o f his uncle Judge Soplica to which Tadeusz returns at the beginning of the story is warped by jealousy; the ruined casde whose disputed possession sets the two clans at each other’s throats. But most powerfully of all, the poet makes the landscape itself the carrier o f memory: things that are buried but will not stay interred; a nature that proceeds, season to season, birth to death to birth, indifferent to the revolutions o f state and the bickering o f dynasts. The truly heroic historians o f the drama are trees. Their great antiquity gives them an authority that spans the generations o f Polish history, and they shelter

The Last Foray within their woodland recesses the values that keep Lithuania— an idea as much as a place— alive. Mickiewicz addresses them familiarly as ancestors, kin, friends, but also reverentially as the pillars o f an unwritten, organic constitution: Com rades o f L ith u a n ia n kings, ye trees O f Switez, Kuszelew o, Biatow ieza, Whose shadow once the crowned heads d id cover Y e woods! the last to h u n t am ong you there Was the last k in g g r e a t W ito ld 3s cap to wear, L a st happy w arrior o f Jagietto}s race, L a st L ith u a n ia n m onarch o f the chase. Trees o f my fa th e r la n d ! i f heaven w ill T h a t I retu rn there, shall I f in d you s t illP M y fr ie n d s o f old, are you a live today? A m o n g whom as a ch ild I used to play; A n d is the g r e a t B a ub lis liv in g fo u n d By ages hollowed out, in whose wide round A dozen fo lk could sup as in a room ?22 Such trees embodied both freedom and legitimacy. The “last king” to wear “ great W itold’s cap” was Zygmunt August ( 1 548-1572), who was ritually made duke o f Lithuania as well as king o f Poland by wearing the kolpak, the ances­ tral fur hat. And sometimes the trees acted as priesdy guardian and instructor in the immemorial continuity o f this history. The “great Baublis” was an immense oak on the Paszkiewicz estate, venerated in ancient Lithuania as a sacred tree. Its hollow interior had been scooped out to display a cabinet o f Lithuanian antiquities, so that it was, at the same time, a place o f festivity, where “a dozen folk could sup,” and a museum o f national memory. Even today, vis­ itors to the national park in Biatowieza can pay their respects to oaks that are officially designated “ national monuments.” They are named for the lost kings o f Poland— Alexander, Jan Sobieski, Stanislas Augustus, and the like— but the affinity is closer than batdeships named for admirals and generals since the fiveand six-hundred-year-old trees are, in effect, the contemporaries o f the monarchs, their kin in place and time. In the forest glades allegiances and identities become sharpened and resolved. The rustic company at Tadeusz’s uncle’s house goes mushrooming in the woods, hunting expertly for orange and fly agaric. Tw o o f the party are not much interested in collecting fungi— the pretty-boy count and the aging sophisticate Telimena, who is attempting instead to hunt Tadeusz. T o show off their distinction from the bumpkin squires, they begin to talk o f Italy— “Ye classic waterfalls o f T ivo li/ . . . Pity our sad lo t!/ . . . in Soplicowo raised.”

I N T H E R E A L M OF T H E L I T H U A N I A N B I S O N

58

A n d so they started talking o f blue sky, O f m urm uring seas, sweet airs a n d m ountains high, A s travellers do, m ingling fro m tim e to tim e Contem pt a nd laughter fo r their native clime. T et a ll around in solemn splendour stood The glory o f the Lith u a n ia n wood!23 Tadeusz’s gallantry abrupdy shifts from the coquette to the vegetation as he springs to the defense o f his native realm. Yes, he said, he too had seen such southern trees in the botanical gardens at Wilno— the overrated cypress and the “dwarfish lemon with its golden ball/And lacquered leaves, in shape so short and stumpy/Like a small woman, ugly, rich and dumpy” ; how could it compare with an “honest birch, a fairer one,/That’s like a peasant weeping for her son.” Telimena, grasping the point only too accurately, retorts, “Soplicas, it’s well known, have this disease,/No country but their fatherland can please.”24 But all this is mere skirmishing on the edge o f the woods. The heart o f the poem unfolds in the heart o f the forest. It is, necessarily, a hunt: the Lithua­ nian drama o f sacred violence, the measure o f fitness for battle. N o writer before Mickiewicz had described the etiology o f the ancient forest with such a keen eye, or worked harder to convey its shifting zones o f light and darkness. Even today, forests like Bialowieza are marvels o f variety. It is only second growth and plantation woodland that is monotonous, relendess dense stands o f conifers. Uncleared old growth forest produces its own natural zones o f wild-grass clearings. Beaver-felling and consumption o f saplings by red deer and bison thin out areas to produce glades where the grazing animals can fur­ ther browse before the vegetation closes in again. Even within the heart o f the forest, the death o f a giant oak creates a temporary hole in the hundred-foothigh hardwood canopy to allow sunlight to speckle the woodland floor, itself textured with fern and moss and layers o f leaves but here and there decorated with minute gold and white flowers. Much o f the woods lie under water. Fallen trunks lying across the course o f streams create black ponds, twenty feet deep, and odorous peat-swamps filled with frogs and thunderfish and covered with a gray coating o f algae from which, during spring and summer, blades o f iris and marsh marigold sprout, like tufts o f hair on a bald man’s pate. And there never yet has been a nature writer who, confronted with primi­ tive forest, has not resorted to the vocabulary o f architecture. Indeed, since it has been impossible to visualize or verbalize nature in terms free o f cultural association, the woodland interior has been habitually conceived o f as a living space, a vaulted chamber. The trees o f the Lithuanian primeval forest are pres­ ent in every conceivable state o f growth and decomposition, their vertical columns everywhere intersected by horizontal fallen trunks; curved and bent

The Last Foray boughs and branches suggesting arched portals to some grandiose vaulted hall. Burls and stumps take the shape o f exuberantly carved bosses and finials: improbable and fantastic forms that became the passion o f Romantic painting from the Hudson Valley to Scandinavia. But, as Mickiewicz noticed, the archi­ tecture often seems to be in ruins: A fa lle n oak thrusts branches to the sky, Lik e a huge b u ild ing , fr o m which overgrown Protrud e the broken shafts a n d walls o}erthrown.25 The poem climbs over this debris o f wrecked arches and vaults, explosively shattered timber, splintered and shredded. And as it penetrates deeper into the woods, the vocabulary becomes military: the timber forming itself into “ ram­ parts” and “ barricades,” jagged-edged palisades pointing at the intruder beyond which “ the forest lords dwell, boar and w o lf and bear.” And at the threshold o f this primeval no-man’s-land it stops, the light dying, the silence absolute, broken only by the woodpeckers (which in Biatowieza have the vio­ lence and echo o f gunshot), and the hurried scampering o f a squirrel, like a civilian scrambling for safety amidst the wreckage, before the shooting begins. Late for the hunt, Tadeusz joins it, with the monk, his disguised father, fol­ lowing to keep a watchful eye, heading direcdy for the deep puszcza. M ic­ kiewicz suddenly abandons his lyrical description to evoke a different and terrifying world, the “ innermost recess,” a place o f death and darkness. Anthills, hornets’ nests, vicious thorns and brambles protect a terrain that the poet presents as deformed: “ . . . stunted, worm-like trees/Are reft o f leaves and bark by foul disease./With branches tangled up in mossy knots,/And hump­ backed trunks and beards o f fungus clots . . . ” These barriers culminate in a dense fog beyond which, “ fables so declare,” is a kind o f primitive paradise: an ark o f species, animal and vegetable; some o f every kind. “Midmost the emperors o f the forest hold/Their court, the Bison, Bear and Buffalo old.” Their progeny are sent beyond this secret cradle-world, called “ Motherland” by the huntsmen, but the archetypal animals remain in a zoological utopia: They say the beasts in this metropolis D o ru le themselves a n d thence go o d order is; N o civ ilising h u m a n custom spoils, N o law o f property their world embroils; They know no duels nor in battles strive. In their ancestral paradise they live, The w ild beast w ith the tam e lives as a brother, N o r either ever bites or butts the other.

60

I N T H E R E A L M OF T H E L I T H U A N I A N B I S O N E }en though a m an should g o there a ll unarm ed, H e would pass through the m idst o f them unharm ed. The same courtesies are not, alas, reciprocated. A bear, drawn by the temp­

tation o f woodland honey, strays beyond the barrier and becomes the hunts­ men’s quarry. The two young men— the count and Tadeusz

fire and miss the

charging animal. He is about to scalp the count’s blond hair with his paw when three o f the older generation, servants and officers to the two warring families, appear and fire off what seem to be the fatal shots. The “seneschar then sounds the mort on his bison horn. The music amplified, multiplied, and echoed by the whole forest relates the prowess o f the seneschal’s youth; sounding on and on, it becomes a virtual history of this hunt and all others: the summons to the hounds, the sharp yelping and baying, the thunder o f shot and the dying fall. For unlike some modern ecological sensibilities, the old epics o f the forest were not squeamish about the kill, experiencing it as a consummation, not a dese­ cration, o f woodland nature. With the bear expiring bloodily on the grass, the old men (for these are Poles) proceed to quarrel about whose bullet stopped the animal, an argument settled by Gerwazy, who drew his knife and cu t the snout in twain A n d , carving up the lobules o f the brain, Took out the bullet, wiped it on his frock A n d measured it against his own flint-lock. The bullet turns out to have come from his musket, but too scared to fire it off, he had given it to the monk. Only one man, declares Gerwazy, could shoot that well and that was the banished, villainous Jacek Soplica, Tadeusz’s father. Before more direct comparisons can be made the monk disappears into the undergrowth, leaving the company to celebrate with gold-flecked Gdansk vodka and the traditional bigos: the stew of sauerkraut, vegetables, sausages, and smoked meats, “parboiled till the heat draws o ut/T he living juices from the cauldron’s spout,/And all the air is fragrant with the smell.”27 Such a royal bigos is, o f course, the famished dream o f an exile, sitting in a Paris apartment, pulling the damp Seine air through his nostrils and trying instead to savour the aroma o f venison and boar and bison smothered in juicy sauerkraut, working to complete the olfactory memory with background notes o f leafmold, boletus, gunpowder, and bear-musk. Such a woodland, too, is a landscape o f memory, seen through a lead-pane window: gray houses meta­ morphosing into timber ruins; the streets invaded by the forest primeval; an unattainable Lithuania governed by bison, a commonwealth o f perfect justice and peace, impregnable behind palisades o f splintered hornbeam.

M ortality, Im m ortality

iii

Mortality, Immortality

Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs o f the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. So goes the argument o f this book. But it should also be acknowledged that once a certain idea o f landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way o f mud­ dling categories, o f making metaphors more real than their referents; o f becom ­ ing, in fact, part o f the scenery. Mickiewicz imagined the forest depths as a naturally fortified shelter, where the Polish-Lithuanian nation had begun and to which, harried on all sides, it would finally retreat. In the primitive darkness, they would be reinforced by native wood-fauns, the blue-blooded, green-eyed, green-whiskered Leshy, who would lead their enemies astray, take them captive, and release them only after humiliation o f ritual inversions. The chastened pursuers would have to exchange their right and left shoes, wear their tunics backward, and be sent packing from the forest. But even without the help o f the Leshy, rebel soldiers, defeated in the open field, were well aware that the forests that still covered a third o f Poland’s land surface in 1831 could provide tactical refuge against the Cossack cavalry o f the tsar. So it was that Bialowieza, as well as Augustowska to the north and Swietokryszka to the south, became strongholds o f resistance for months, if not years, after the main body o f nationalist insurrection had disintegrated. The pattern o f 1831-32 repeated itself thirty years later. As with so many revolutions, that o f the 1860s began with memory. For it was when the Rus­ sian government attempted to ban demonstrations commemorating the thirti­ eth anniversary o f the Novem ber uprising that the cycle o f repression and resistance began that culminated in another round o f desperate and hopeless revolt in January 1863. And once again, a makeshift army destroyed by the sheer weight o f Russian numbers, besieged in the cities, turned to the ancient woods for safety and succor. Defiance o f the Russian bear from the realm o f the Lithuanian bison and the wolf, though, was in the end a Romantic illusion. The cover o f the forest sharply contracted in winter as the need for food, fuel, and family took the par­ tisans, irresistibly, toward the villages where the Cossack patrols were waiting. So the forest idyll became a forest prison; the cradle o f primitive freedom, a syl­ van graveyard, dotted with wooden crosses and piles o f stones. The cult o f

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Bialowieza’s local heroes became a cult o f futile martyrdom; vengeance against the foe, a matter o f desultory skirmishing; a “Muscovite” patrol shot while watering their horses; their throats cut while sleeping in their tents or drinking beer in a woodland inn. In return, captured partisans were spread-eagled against trees and smeared with wild honey for red ants and the savage mosqui­ toes o f Bialowieza to enjoy, a light entertainment for the Cossacks before the shooting began. No writer has conveyed this sense o f directionless chagrin better than the modern Polish writer Tadeusz Konwicki. Himself an errant soul who strayed in and out of Communism, Konwicki’s Kompleks Polski (The Polish Complex) has its own narrator adrift in the time continuum, moving without warning back and forth between Polish disasters, from the end o f the Second World War to the wobbly bravura o f 1863. A platoon o f rebel soldiers raises the flag o f the white eagle o f Lithuania in the heart o f the forest, but as he wanders in the wilderness, stranded somewhere between life and death, the captain prays, with increasing desperation, for at least a small victory, a respite from humiliation. It is not to be. On the edge o f the forest the Cossack commander gives the order to move out, reciting lines from Mickiewicz’s friend Pushkin: Once again our standards have broken through the breaches o f Warsaw fa llen once ag ain: A n d Poland like a regim ent in flig h t flin gs its bloody banner to the dust. .. . You turned your head around in a senseless desire to see the woodsman’s cottage, and the encouraging sight o f bright smoke streaming straight up into the spring blue o f the sky. You saw the woodsman who had turned you in. He was looking at your ill-treated body, your legs spread shamefully like those o f a gutted boar

He

whispered something. . . . His eyes were moist, there was an uncer­ tainty in his voice as he moved his numb lips, but you, my brother across these eighty years, read on the woodsman’s twitching Ups that question which is always with us: “Was it worth it?”28 But Konwicki’s ironic fatalism is a twentieth-century version o f the Polish predicament. The tragic romance o f the Lithuanian forest somehow survived even the second abundant helping o f disaster in 1863-64, when the Poles were robbed o f any dlusion that the great powers o f Europe cared enough for their fate to hold Russia accountable for its repression. Before the censor and his police moved into their Warsaw offices with new and more formidable powers, Amir Grottger produced his three cycles o f history prints— Polonia, Warszawa, and Lttrva

chronicling in darkly operatic scenes the martytology o f Poland’s

Mortality, Im m ortality failed revolutions. The Lithuanian cycle opens with the figure o f death flying over the black and terrifying puszcza, yawning tomb-like bogs guarded not by the stoical bison but by a snarling lynx. A forester receives the call to arms, leaves his wife and child, only to die beneath the trees in the company o f his fellow woodsmen and hunting dogs, defiantly brandishing the banner of Lithuania. Tw o further scenes o f obligatory patriotic piety complete the cycle: the forester’s ghost appears unseen to the young widow and her crying infant. Finally, in front o f an open grave a vision o f the crowned Virgin and child appears to suggest, none too subtly, the celestial rewards of sacrifice. For many years, Grottger’s

consola­

tory art was available only

far

from

the

sites o f its topogra­ phy. In the 1870s a Pole !Artur G rottger, jjthograph from |Utwa.

wanting

to

acquire “ Lithuania” would have to go to Krakow in the much more liberal region o f Austrian Galicia to buy

it.

influence

Under the o f artists

and architects con­ gregating around the village o f Zakopane, fifty miles south of Krakow, the cult of patriotic

landscape

was transported from the Lithuanian forests to the Tatra mountains in the extreme southeastern corner o f old Poland.29 T o this new generation of Romantics, it was the rocks and lakes o f the south, rather than the ancient woodland, that enclosed the heart o f ancient and future Poland. The fate o f the Lithuanian forest in the aftermath o f the second defeat was once again grim. Another wave o f dispossessions took place, as it had in the 1830s. Many thousands o f szlachta were exiled to the remote Russian interior; others still more unfortunate swung again from the gibbets erected by the very same specialist in repression, Muravyev, who had been responsible for the ter­ ror thirty years before. More confiscated land was transferred to officers o f the

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Russian army who had participated in the campaign as well as others favored by the government. Poland was now known as “ the Vistula province” and Lithuania divided into the districts o f Wilno, Kowno, and Grodno. Bialowieza became once more the personal hunting preserve o f the tsar and a railway line was built all the way from Moscow to transport the parties o f grand dukes and generals o f the imperial staff who flocked to the forest in the sum­ mer and autumn. A new and much grander “chateau” was built in the 1880s, three stories high beneath ornately decorated Belarussian timber gables and a fantastic, spired tower at the end o f one wing. There was a sunken Roman bath and imperial bed to accommodate Alexander III, as well as lodges and stables scattered about the park. The forestry school at Warsaw, which had been, even more than other academic institutions, a hotbed o f patriotic enthusiasm, had been swiftly abolished in 1832, and the “imperial woodlands” were now admin­ istered direcdy from St. Petersburg. But whether in the hands o f the state or those o f private landowners, the object in the latter part o f the nineteenth cen­ tury was to wring as much profit out o f the forests as they could possibly yield. Increasingly, too, the story, like much else in the tsarist economy, was one of German demand and Russian supply, with a phantom Poland lying in between as a minor inconvenience. Prussia extended so far to the east that it was a logical mar­ ket for whatever the old Polish provinces could supply. Huge areas were defor­ ested and turned over to grain. And since hardwoods grew on the richer soils, it was disproportionately those that were felled, leaving conifers standing or replanted in relendess rows on the poorer ground. With the arrival o f the railroads, the lumber industry became even more important with contract agents (like my great-grandfather) supplying timber for wagons and ties. A classic tum-of-thecentury hysteria about finite supplies sent lumber prices into orbital inflation, driving the engine o f deforestation even further. Half o f all the wood imported into Germany in the thirty years before World War I came from the Niemen forests.30 And as the great border forests lost more and more acreage to the sawmills and pulp factories that began to crowd the country towns, slowly but surely, woodland Lithuania was turning into an economic fief o f the Second Reich. N ot far behind the dark gray suits and homburgs were the field-gray uni­ forms and spiked helmets. For if the First World War was not a direct conse­ quence o f economic competition, there remains compelling evidence that once it had begun, the imperial German government and General Staff saw occupa­ tion o f land to the east as one solution to the (largely imaginary) crises o f over­ population and undersupply. The territories in question stretched from the Ukraine in the south, rich in both grain and minerals, to the timberlands o f the Baltic in the north. Whether this enormous belt o f land was to be directly col­ onized or merely brought inescapably within a zone o f German economic arbi­ tration was o f little importance. The end result would be the same. Lithuania, Poland, the Ukraine would exist to service the Greater German Reich.31

Mortality, Im mortality

65

Both strategically and logistically, the northeastern corner o f Europe, then, could not escape the brunt o f the conflict. During the very first month o f the war, August 1914, the Russian imperial armies advanced into East Prussia along a line that corresponded exacdy with the Lithuanian forests from Gumbinnen to Augustow. O n August 31, at Tannenberg, where in 1410 the Teutonic knights had been annihilated by the Lithuanian army, the whole Russian Sec­ ond Army was destroyed. A week later the Masurian lakeland on the borders o f East Prussia and Lithuania saw the Russian line buckle, fold, and collapse. Heavy artillery turned the hills and meadows into smoking craters, the late summer woodlands into walls o f fire. And when the smoke cleared, to reveal a charred landscape o f black stumps and gray ash, the German divisions had passed through the whole o f Poland and Lithuania, and stood on a line well east o f Wilno and Grodno. Yet another pseudo-Poland was established, this time under German protection. A t Bialowieza, the eagles o f the Hohenzollerns replaced those o f the Romanovs in the state bedroom. Lumbermen— engineers and entrepre­ neurs— setded in for a lengthy, lucrative stay at Hajnowka, at the western edge o f the forest. Unemployed laborers were drafted from Prussia to man the sawmills that worked round the clock, in time with the loggers clearing huge areas o f the woods. The cool air filled with the scent o f pine resin and the sour rawness o f fresh-cut oak. Before the war was over, the forest had lost a full 5 percent o f its area. Five million cubic meters o f wood had been shipped directly to Germany. The trees o f Lithuania were not the only hostages o f the occupation. Camped in the park, German troops helped themselves indiscriminately to its animals. A whiskery major from Hanover or a stout O b e rleu tn a n tfr o m Hessen who had scarcely ever frightened a pheasant could fancy himself the equal o f the mastiff classes o f Prussia, gunning down elk and stag with his artillery. And there were creatures these men remembered only from their childhood: the chocolate-brown shaggy wisents seen on a Sunday afternoon at Hagenbeck’s Tierpark near Hamburg or grazing the pasture o f their ditched enclosure at the Berlin zoo. For along with all the other tributes to the imperial economy, Bialowieza’s bison had been exported, some as purchases, some as gifts, west­ ward to Germany. In fact the animals were so well established in German zoos that an international register o f the wisents v/zs kept in Berlin. In the same year that German armor smashed its way through the woods, Lorenz Hagenbeck (the son o f the great animal trader, Carl Hagenbeck) sent three o f the Polish bison to Stockholm in exchange for two hundred Swedish plow-horses for the use o f German farmers.32 But as the conditions o f the war deteriorated, the bison (along with almost everything else that moved on four legs) came to be seen as so much standing meat. The herd had already suffered serious attrition from the intensive

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exploitation o f the forest in the years leading up to the war, as well as from the tsar’s trigger-happy hunting parties. It might have been even worse had the Russians followed the example o f the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose idea o f an afternoon’s sport was to machine-gun the animals with the latest product o f the imperial munitions factory at Steyr. But between capital­ ists and hunters the number o f bison halved, from eight hundred to four hun­ dred and sixty in 1914. When things began to go badly, in the winter o f 1918, anything on legs was butchered to feed the famished troops. Hunger was kept at bay with a lordly diet o f venison, boar, and hare. By the time the conscripts were down to polecat and weasel, the bison were doomed. Some sources claim that they were eliminated altogether, an unknown corporal devouring the last slice o f a musky haunch. Others maintain that a number in single digits survived (the most often cited number is four), the last dying o f natural causes in 1921. In Stanislas C zyz’s D ream Book fo r O u r Tim es a character roams the fields and woods after the war and finds abandoned trenches covered with barbed wire, beneath which wild strawberries are growing. Resurrected as a free state by the Versailles conference, the Polish republic, with the pianist and Chopinvirtuoso Ignace Paderewski as its prime minister, drew on a dense grove o f national memory for its patriotic solidarity. Though a separate ethnic Lithua­ nian republic had been established on the Baltic with its capital in Kowno, rebaptized Kaunas,.most o f the great urban centers o f the old Grand Duchy— Wilno, Grodno, and Mickiewicz’s hometown o f Nowogrodek— were all returned to Poland. J6zef Pilsudski, its generalissimo, was himself a Lithuanian Pole who almost destroyed his country in a war against the Soviet Union by gambling on a campaign that would have extended the northeast frontier all the way to the Dnieper river. And the puszcza remained, as always, an emblem o f national immortality, o f the certainty o f resurrection. In 1926 Stefan Zeromski published his own contri­ bution to the genre, Puszcza Jodlowa, swimming in mystical allusions to a sacred past and a sylvan destiny. Though the wildernesses o f Zeromski’s own world were the southern forests o f Lysica and Nida, the songs he sings and the scenes he paints are the same: o f wilderness chapels in which repose the rotting remains o f medieval knights becoming one with their hunting grounds; o f hacked-about martyrs o f 1863 who come to lie with them in the humus; bear and wolf taking the spirit o f freedom into their lair; “white towers in the woodland valleys, car­ peted with violets

Who knows whether men won’t come to cut the forest in

the name o f some business or some profit, but whatever their law might be, whosoever they should be, I would call to the barbarians, ‘I forbid you to do this

This is the forest o f kings, bishops, princes, peasants___ It belongs nei­

ther to you or me. It belongs only to God. It is a Holy Land.’ ”33 But short o f God disclosing a way to make the zloty convertible without hard currency reserves, the sacred space o f the puszcza was likely to have to sur­

Mortality, Im m ortality render to the profane needs o f the Polish economy. Railroad lines that had been torn up, and cities scarred by shellfire, had lumber merchants cracking their knuckles in anticipation. So, predictably, Bialowieza simply exchanged the Ger­ man companies that had dominated before and during the war for a different contractor: the British lumber company Century, which managed to do more comprehensive damage to the forest during its five-year lease between 1924 and 1929 than the entire German military occupation. In the same year the British departed, the zu b re returned to their ances­ tral home. A biologist, Jan Stolczman, had made it his mission to re-create a breeding stock and turned to the very zoos o f Europe that before the war had imported bison from Lithuania. So Biatowieza received its reparations in the kind it valued most: zubre. Back they came from Hamburg and Berlin, even from Stockholm, where Hagenbeck had made the trade for plow-horses in 1915. Some cows were shipped up from a small herd that had somehow remained safe in the south o f the country throughout the war. And in the summer o f 1929, with enough time for the notoriously decorous quadrupeds to build up to their autumn rutting, the repatriated bulls were uncrated in the palace park. A photograph in the natural history museum records the moment o f patriotic jubilation: beaming soldiers with their four-cornered caps, astride the open boxes while the big animals, their heads already low ­ ered sniffing the grass, take bloodshot stock o f the woodland meadow like landlords inspecting their house after the eviction o f particularly disagreeable tenants. Under the impact o f a series o f natural disasters— plagues o f voracious insects, fungal blights, and in 1928-29 a brutally severe winter that resulted in the destruction o f many o f the forest’s oldest oaks and firs— forest conservation suddenly came to be taken seriously by the Polish state. In the early 1930s the Pilsudski government established the League for Nature Conservation and des­ ignated Bialowieza as one o f the country’s first three national parks. What really needed protecting, however, was Poland itself. It was with this in mind that in the summer o f 1934, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Jozef Lipski, invited Germany’s most compulsive hunter to Bialowieza. Everything about Hermann Goring would have been preposterous had he also not been so dangerous. In 1934 he was forty-one, already running to the corpulence that would turn him into the monstrous, jewel-encrusted hippopotamus o f the Third Reich. The essence o f Goring’s personality was sen­ sual appetite and in this he perfectly complemented Hitler, whose ecstasies were ideological. Hitler the nut-cutlet vegetarian was offset by Goring the sensual­ ist, who liked to sink his teeth into broad slabs o f bleeding meat. There was something o f the child playing Pasha about Goring; the acquisition o f brutal despotism in order to reach out and grab whatever his fat little heart desired without fear o f opposition: a pot o f diamonds carried round with him by a spe-

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68

d a il y h ir e d s e r v a n t le s t h e fe e l a s u d d e n u r g e t o tr a w l h is h a n d s t h r o u g h th e b r illia n t ro c k s ; th e o b s e s s io n w ith je w e lle d d a g g e r s ; th e b i g g e s t m o d e l r a ilw a y in th e w o r ld , fitte d in t o a c u s to m - b u ilt r o o m a t th e C a r in h a lle , a v a s t la k e s id e e sta te e a s t o f B e r lin c o n s t r u c te d a r o u n d a m a u s o le u m fo r h is first w ife . In his p r im e , G o r in g

ad o re d

h u n t i n g o p p o n e n t s , r iv a ls , a n d h e a v ily

a n d e r e d s ta g s , th e d iffe r e n c e b e in g th a t h e h a d a h e a lth y r e s p e c t fo r th e q u a d r u p e d s . E a r lie r in 1 9 3 4 h e h a d e n a c te d a R e ic h G a m e L a w , d r a fte d w it h t h e h e lp o f his c h i e f fo r e s te r, U lr ic h S c h e r p in g , w h o s e a n c e s to r s h a d b e e n g a m e k e e p e r s t o th e k in g s o f P ru ssia. T h e la w m a d e G o r i n g h i m s e l f th e first R e ic h s ja g e r m e is te r ( e n t id in g h im t o d ress u p lik e a n e x tr a fr o m D er Freischutz) a n d p r o v id e d c a p ita l p u n is h m e n t fo r a n y o n e w it h th e te m e r ity t o k ill a n e a g le . V iv is e c t io n w a s p r o h ib ite d o n p a in o f d e p o r ta tio n o r o f b e in g d is p a tc h e d t o a c o n c e n t r a t io n c a m p w h e r e th e m e d ic a l s t a f f w a s less fb s sy a b o u t o p e r a t in g o n h u m a n s th a n h o u n d s .

And then there were Goring’s own bison. For what to the Poles was Lithuania’s

talismanic

beast, for Goring was the symbol o f hairy Teutonic bullishness. He too was supplied with breeding bulls by the Berlin zoo (along with Scandinavian elk) begin

and

planned

populating

to his

Schorf Heide estate, east o f Berlin, with progeny produced, according to the best veterinary eugenic advice, from mating with hybrid cows. On June 10, 1934, Goring appeared on the grounds o f the Carinhalle in a spectacularly illmatched outfit o f von Richthofen aviator’s rubber, billowing Barrymore sleeves, high boots, and hunting knife stuck in his bulging belt. Massed, greenliveried foresters roared their admiration. Diplomats reached deep within their training to mask titters behind expressions o f charmed admiration. Goring then ceremoniously introduced a bison bull to his intended mate. But both parties, as a reading o f Hussovianus or von Brincken would have predicted, trotted off in inconvenient disgust. The Reichsjagermeister was not to be denied, how­ ever, and had more o f the animals shipped to his immense hunting estate at Rominten at the very border o f Lithuania and the northeasternmost tip o f Prus­ sia. Almost at home, they flourished in the company o f Teutonic wolves and any stags who managed to escape Goring’s constant artillery in rutting season.

Hermann Goring at Bialowieza.

Mortalityi, Im m ortality

69

Needless to say, Goring cast a glittering and covetous eye on Biatowieza. He slept in the tsar’s bed, vast enough to accommodate his frightening bulk, and wallowed like a hog in the marble sunken bath. After his initial visit he made sure that not a year went by without a visit to the primeval forest in Lithuania, and as the years passed, his foreign policy and his hunting habits gratifyingly converged. The Poles were understandably apprehensive about German intentions to their east and for some years were given smiling reassur­ ances by Goring, as battalions o f boar and deer dropped to his gun, that the foreign interests o f the two states in fact coincided; that Germany had no designs on the Danzig corridor. H e went so far as to insinuate that the Poles and the Germans might together carve up adjoining territories, the former annexing part o f the Ukraine while the Reich moved up the Baltic. These barefaced lies continued even while Germany was negotiating the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union that provided for a joint invasion and partition o f Poland. But if the Poles had their suspicions, they were regularly disarmed by the glad-handing jocularity o f the hunter. Until almost the very end they had no idea they were to be the prey. When war broke out in September 1939, the B litzk rie g was so savage and so swift that the German army reached Biatowieza in a matter o f weeks. While Polish cities lay in cinders from bombing raids, a single plane from Goring’s Luftwaffe scored a direct hit on the local church, much to the distress o f foresters who were unable to credit the Reichsjagermeister with such casual barbarism. Under the agreement with the Soviets, the Germans withdrew to a line on the Bug river. For two years Biatowieza became Russian once more; but the commissars were less interested in hunting than enforcing sound ideologi­ cal principles in the local population. O n June 2 2,19 4 1, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Exactly five days later there was a swastika flying over Alexander’s “palace” in Biatowieza. While the SS would dearly have liked to have flametorched the forest to purge it o f any possible shelter for partisans, the animalloving Reichsmarschall took it as his personal property. H e even obliged a delegation o f foresters that had come to Berlin to see him, dressed in their overpressed Sunday suits, to implore him, on bended knee, to restore the dam­ aged church. As for the primeval forest, it was a heilig er H a in , a “ sacred grove.” N o t a leaf was to suffer hurt. Fur and feathers were to be strictly protected. For the elk and bison were now his elk and bison— German elk and bison— members o f a big family that included his own pet lion. Someday the Reichs­ jagermeister would return to the lair o f Wladyslaw Jagiello and Witold and with the sound o f the hallali ringing over the carcass o f a great stag, the Teutonic knight, reborn for the ages, would wipe out the shame o f Griinwald. I f the creatures o f the woods lived undisturbed under the regime o f Ulrich Scherping’s German forest guards, the same protection was not extended to

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the local population. During their brief occupation in September 1939, the German army had already given Biatowieza a sample o f the terror they would inflict on the area two years later. The innkeeper o f the Zubr tavern, Michat Zdankiewicz, who was reckless enough to make free with his opinions o f the occupiers, first had dogs set on him, then was shot standing over the grave he had just dug.34 In the summer o f 1941 open season was declared on the Jews who made up about 12 percent o f Biatowieza’s population. The procedure was routine, not just for the SS but for the regular troops o f the German army; in this case Battalion 322 o f General Fedor von Bock’s Army Division o f the Cen­ ter. The five hundred and fifty Jews were lined up in the forecourt o f the hunt­ ing palace, the women and children separated from men and boys over sixteen. The next day the males were taken into the deep forest and somewhere amidst the old oaks and lindens were shot beside their mass grave. Their families were deported to the ghetto at Pruzhany and ended up in the extermination ovens o f Treblinka, where massed freestanding stones mark their monument. But if Jews were to be erased altogether from the southern Lithuanian woodland villages, the landscape itself was to be decisively altered so that it would become what Goring and other enthusiasts o f the Teutonic H e im a t like the Reichskommissar for the Affirmation o f German Culture, Heinrich Himmler, believed it should have been all along: an unbroken extension o f East Prus­ sia. As soon as the German occupation o f Poland was completed by the end o f September 1939, Himmler commissioned a team led by SS Oberfuhrer Kon­ rad Meyer, who had been Professor o f Agriculture at Berlin University, to plan a colonization program that would make over the alien landscape into some­ thing unmistakably German. Poles were to be deported, along with Jews, shipped further east, or else reduced to the status o f barnyard animals that could be stabled or slaughtered as the freshly reclaimed landscape required. Their cottages, regarded as primitive dwellings, symptomatic o f the semi­ evolved, were to be obliterated and replaced by houses appropriate to a truly German countryside.35 By the summer o f 1941 this program o f physical and human alteration had already been well advanced in the “ General Gouvernement” and areas directly annexed to the Reich. Now that the German army also occupied the eastern, ex-Soviet zones, the plans o f Germanization could be extended all the way to the ancient Lithuanian forests. In his capacity as Master o f the German Forests (Reichsforstmeister), Goring had created a special government department for conservation, the Reichsstelle fur Naturschutz, with Walther Schonichen as its director, a figure who in the 1920s had complained bitterly in print about the loss o f Germany’s African colonies that contained tracts o f primeval rain forest. Now he was able, with Goring’s eager assistance, to contemplate creating a huge protected forest zone, expanding outward from Biatowieza itself, to an area more than six times the original acreage o f the Polish National Park.36

M ortality, Im m ortality The first task toward realizing this “ total landscape plan,” as it was desig­ nated, was to empty villages. Between late June and mid August 1941 thou­ sands o f farmers and foresters from the old, timbered villages on the edge o f the forest were deported out o f the area; trudging along the roads with a bat­ tered bag, their houses in flames behind them, their animals wasted in the burn­ ing barns. Around the village o f Narew, northwest o f Bialowieza, Battalion 322 behaved with characteristically brisk cruelty, rounding up the population on the pretext o f checking papers, then driving the men off into the puszcza Ladzka nearby and shooting about a hundred after the usual excavation o f a forest pit by the prisoners. One or two o f the men managed to escape by feigning death. And when the news passed round, villagers returned to the site at night, dug amidst the mass grave for their family members, and brought them back clan­ destinely to Narew for burial in the local cemetery. Similar scenes were repeated throughout the area. A t least nine hundred villagers (not counting the Jewish deportees) were murdered in this way. The flamboyant hunting lodges o f Bialowieza became home to the differ­ ent divisions o f the Nazi terror. The commander o f Battalion 322, Kobylinski, took up residence in the tsar’s hunting apartments while the rest o f the palace was filled up with officers, Goring’s specially deputed forester Ulrich Scherping and his staff, and some units o f German airmen, known locally as “ Fligs.” Down the hill a little way, the gendarmerie and Gestapo occupied the brick annexes that had served as post office and “ town hall.” From these headquar­ ters, the army, police, and forest guards for three years carried out a policy o f merciless brutality that, as elsewhere in occupied Europe, specialized in public hangings, a dozen or so at a time with the villagers obliged to be spectators or join the next line on the swinging gibbets. O n at least one occasion, a group o f young teenagers were rounded up for some act o f courageous, childish misbe­ havior and were sentenced to execution. The commander’s idea o f clemency was to accept the offer o f a group o f septuagenarians to be hanged in their place.37 T w o ideas o f the primeval forest were at war in occupied Bialowieza. The goal o f the German terror, once Jews had been eliminated from the scenery, was to use violence (mauling by retrained hunting hounds became a routine punishment) to dissuade the local population from taking to the woods as par­ tisans or aiding and abetting those who might already be there. The woods became instead their colony o f death, a place o f mass executions, dispatched close to the roadside perimeter o f the dark forest; a dirty business o f hasty entries and exits. Once its humans had been made docile, the forest could be prepared by dependable German foresters for its proper role as the Greater Reich’s most splendid hunting ground. With its Polish-Lithuanian identity completely wiped out, it could be presented as a great, living laboratory o f purely Teutonic species: eagles, elk, and wolves. And since a painting o f a bison

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hung on Goring’s wall at the Carinhalle (presented to him by the finance min­ ister o f the 1930s, Hjalmar Schacht), the most famous o f the forest animals could, at last, be definitively reclassified as zoologically Aryan. But the local tyrants o f the Third Reich were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempt to dispossess Polish Lithuania o f its memory o f the puszcza. The seneschal’s bison horn and Jankiel’s dulcimer, played from the heart o f the for­ est, still echoed. And as they had done generation after generation, partisan bands gathered in the deep woods. More remarkable still, from the spring of 1943 Jewish escapees from the ghettos in Bialystok, Kowno, and Wilno found their way to the forests, especially the Augustowska. By November that year there were at least four hundred such woodland Jewish fighters.38 It was true, as one o f them admitted, that “life is no safer in the forest than the Ghetto; every day means a rendezvous with death.”39 But at the very least it was a world at exactly the opposite pole from the false security o f the ghetto walls. In place o f its wretched and ultimately murderous hierarchies, partisans like Chaim Yellin from Kowno established what they imagined, like so many generations before, to be a primitive community o f equals, living in pits covered with branches and moss, or abandoned woodsmen’s huts. “ In the forest,” Yellin told Avraham Tory, the Jews “entered a new world. Even people whom they had known assumed a different appearance in the forest camp. There, even one’s speech was different, the way one walked was different, one’s thoughts were different.” Calling themselves “wolves,” the veterans went on nocturnal forays out from their pits to the woodland villages to try to procure oil, soap, candles. When there was none to be had, they “ borrowed” horses and stole altar can­ dles from the churches. O f all the generations o f puszcza fighters, they were the most desperate: hated by the Lithuanian militias who collaborated with the Germans, despised or ignored by the Soviet partisans from whom they tried to scrounge supplies dropped from Russian planes. Yet where and when they could, they fought as bravely and bitterly as the Polish and Soviet forest resistance. Combat was unpredictable and murderous, and it did not stop with the German retreat. For when the N K VD terror replaced the Nazis’ , brutal forest fighting took place between Communist and Home Army troops, the latter beneath the hornbeams, the leafmold turned yet again to accommodate fresh graves— Catholic, Jewish, Orthodox, atheist— beside the stone piles and wooden crosses o f 1831 and 1864. With the Germans gone, one might have expected Stalin, as the latest tsar, to repossess their greatest hunt. And with Poland’s borders moved westward and Lithuania an annexed province o f the Soviet Empire, nothing would have been easier. Perhaps, though, stalking the wolf and the bison was the one blood sport in which Stalin showed little interest. Perhaps he was vexed by the total failure o f the Moscow State Circus to train the bison to perform tricks, or to do anything at all except horn the walls o f their cages. At any rate he agreed to

M ortality, Im m ortality keep the most ancient tract o f forest on the Polish side o f the border with Byelorussia. Within the pudgy frame o f the Ukrainian peasant-dictator Nikita Khrushchev, on the other hand, was an ardent and sly hunter. In the late 1950s he abruptly decided that a new hunting lodge was required to impress foreign grandees and senior members o f the n o m enklatu ra who would nervously stand around in fur hats as foresters obligingly drove the game their way. (Some o f the Bialowieza foresters claim the animals were drugged to make them an easy hit for even the most vodka-saturated magnates o f the Party.) Like much o f his decision-making, Khrushchev’s order came without any warning and with an impossible deadline attached. And like coundess other buildings in the Soviet Empire, its concrete and wood went up at frantic speed and then fell down immediately before it could be used.40 But for the Soviet state, like many o f its predecessors, forestry was a branch o f state security. During the forty years o f Communist rule, the border between the Byelorussian republic and Poland ran right through the center o f the for­ est. Students at the forestry school in Bialowieza became accustomed to a steady droning noise that sounded through the woods and which came from an immense and unwieldy mowing device used by the Soviet border guards. A forty-foot-wide strip had been cleared, right in the middle o f the woods, and a vast growling machine— Big Mower— was used to keep it clean-shaven and vis­ ible from the guard towers. For the woods had a way o f invading the routemap o f the police state with their undergrowth, creating botanically sheltered places o f sedition. N o doubt about it, the woods were reactionary accomplices in the chauvinist conspiracy to undermine People’s Democracy. Big Mower has fallen silent now and the guardhouse was deserted the day I saw it. The barrier poles remain but the green and yellow flag o f Belarus has replaced the red banner o f the Soviets. Every day tattered convoys o f Belarus­ sian cars line up at other, unforested checkpoints on the Polish frontier. “We are their West,” said my photographer friend Tadeusz with characteristically grim irony. I f the forest survived the Third Reich, the little palace o f the Saxon kings and o f Stanislas Augustus and the tsars did not. The last o f the royal hunters, Goring, who never did return to his favorite preserve, ordered it burned to the ground as the Germans retreated. The same fires consumed his other hunting lodges, at Rominten on the Lithuanian border and on the Schorf Heide, an elaborately planned G otterdd m m eru n g o f the big game, thoroughly in keeping with the Nazi preference for collective suicide over collective shame. So the reindeer and the elk and Goring’s favorite raccoons went up in flames along with his fantasies o f the Teutonic woods. O n the foundations o f the old palace the Communist Park Service built a little hotel o f poured concrete. In the late spring it is overrun by battalions o f excited schoolchildren on field trips. In one o f the small rooms overlooking the

I N T H E R E A L M OF T H E L I T H U A N I A N B I S O N park I was woken up at 2 a.m. by an orgy o f door-slamming and shouted Ger­ man hilarity. Sleep came fitfully, interrupted predictably by nightmares o f deportation while storks clacked their red bills from rooftop guardnests. We rose to see the dawn from inside the forest, hoping to catch some o f the wild bison herd on the move before they settled for the day in a remote and inaccessible woodland pasture. The bison failed to materialize, and an immense stillness manded the woods, with only the tapping o f woodpeckers and the push o f the breeze through the treetops to fill the silence. Inside the forest dark­ ness I made my way over fallen logs decorated with plate-size shaggy mush­ rooms o f magenta and gold, toward wooden crosses and stones, graves unmarked on the tourist maps, unknown bodies beneath the leafrnold. The day before, our forester-guide Wlodek, whose startling blue eyes smiled from a face the color o f tree bark, had given us his landscape memories: o f the woodlands east o f Minsk where he grew up; o f the borderlands o f Hun­ gary where he was caught by Soviet troops fleeing from the debacle o f 1939; o f the Arctic g u la g where he watched friends die o f hunger and exposure, a pris­ oner with a fever o f 103° forced to sit with his feet in a bucket o f ice water for six hours as a penalty for “ malingering” ; the arid landscape o f northern Iran through which he trudged with the rest o f the “Anders” army o f Poles, released once Hitler attacked Stalin, on its way to British-held Iraq; the tropical land­ scape o f the African coast where he caught malaria en route to Durban and the troop ships; the rolling meadows o f Essex where he trained as a pilot in the exiled Polish Air Force; the burned-out shells o f German cities where he threw bars o f chocolate to small children; the desperate women whom he and his mates called “ Dutch” when they wanted a night o f illegal fraternization. And all the time he had hung on to his memories o f the Lithuanian woods as if they were the parachute cords o f his identity. He had remembered the dark smell o f the bison and the almond-sweet fragrance o f the bison-grass vodka. “ I don’t care about the state,” he said when I asked him about the Great Alter­ ation from communism to democracy. “This is my state”— he smiled, waving airily at the trees— “nature; you understand: the state o f nature.”

CHAPTER

TWO

Der Holzweg: The Track Through the Woods

i

1878

The H unt for Germania

The naturalist Franz Lichterfeld visits Biatowieza. In the pages

o f the popular journal D ie N a t u r he sides with Aristode and Buffon, authoritatively pronouncing the bison, the wisent, to be identical with the Teutonic wild ox, the auroch. As for the forest itself, it is ein B ild d er altgerm anischen W ald un g en von C d sa r u n d T a citu s erzd hlt (the very picture o f the ancient woods as described by Caesar and Tacitus).1

au tu m n

1943

A. detachment o f SS winds its way up the mountain road west o f Ancona trac­ ing a black line in the autumn gold: crows in the corn. Clouds o f chalky dust rise from the road while the exhaust from the armored cars shakes the unhar­ vested wheat. Ten miles down, on the Adriatic coast, Ancona waits in frantic terror for an Allied bombing raid. Already it chokes on the brown dust o f dis75

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aster while the iron and stone wreckage o f its port crumbles into the tepid turquoise sea. Italy spins in turmoil. The last days o f July had seen the end o f Mussolini’s dictatorship. Now, his Roman Empire is open to barbarian occu­ pation, the Germans obeying Hider’s orders not to relinquish an inch o f the Apennine center and north; the Anglo-Saxon allies advancing slowly and bloodily from the south. Released from formal military obligations, the rem­ nant o f the Italian army disintegrates, spilling thousands into the countryside, where, as Fascist squadri and partisan bande, they fight like snarling dogs over the bones o f the fallen dictatorship. South of Iesi, the medieval hill-town where the most Italian o f German emperors, Frederick II, had been born, the litde column turns into a rutted car­ riage road and halts in front of a grandly Palladian nineteenth-century palazzo.2 Its pilastered columns speak authority but the visitors are famous for their con­ tempt for such outworn pretensions. Fascist militiamen hammer melodramatically on the door while the German officers scrutinize the house, their boots crunching on the weedy gravel. It is open season in the Marche, when the hills crack with gunshot and uccellati, “litde birds,” drop from the sky to be spitted between lay­ ers of roasting mushrooms. But these hunters have other quarry, not partisans, not even Jews. They have come for the birth certificate o f the German race. According to scholars who staffed the SS’s special research division o f clas­ sics and antiquity, the Ahnenerbe (Race Ancestry), this had been supplied by the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus.3 His G erm ania; or, O n the O rigin an d Situation o f the Germ ans had been written around the year 98, with Trajan’s armies still embatded with the Teutonic tribes, and was a backhanded tribute from civilization to barbarism. The Roman legions had been attempting to sub­ due the Germans, Tacitus ruefully conceded, for two hundred and ten years and “ between the beginning and end o f that long period . . . neither Sammite nor Carthaginian, neither Spain nor Gaul . . . [has] taught us more lessons.” There was a reason for the Germans proving such obdurate foes. Unlike Tacitus’s own contemporaries in imperial Rome, they had managed to remain, in all essentials, children o f nature. O f course, that nature, in universum tam en silvis horrida a u tpa lu dibu sfoeda, “for the most part brisding forests and foul bogs,”4 was decidedly unappealing to Roman taste. But it had to be conceded that this daunting and gloomy landscape, where even the short­ horned catde were undersized, had nurtured a warrior race o f formidable toughness, a people that does “no business, private or public, without arms in their hands. 5 Should it happen that the community where they are born is drugged with long years o f peace and quiet, many o f the high-born youth vol­ untarily seek those tribes which are at the time engaged in some war; for rest is unwelcome to the race.”6 Tacitus’s Germans, clad in the skins o f wild beasts or, according to the firstcentury geographer Pomponius Mela, in a garment made from tree bark, vir­

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tually defined the Ladn understanding o f “ uncivilized.” Yet had any Roman­ ized Germans ever read their first ethnography, they might still have been flat­ tered rather than insulted by their characterization as dwellers in swamps and woods. For though Tacitus makes them ferocious primitives, he also invests them with natural nobility through their instinctive indifference to the vices that had corrupted Rome: luxury, secrecy, property, sensuality, slavery. They were, in strong contrast to the Romans, bereft o f wine and letters, a “people without craft or cunning.” 7 By counter-example, then, Tacitus’s text was as much concerned with what it was to be truly Roman as with what it was to be truly German. So it was inevitable that it came to be a shared possession, coveted and contested between author and subject, Rome and Germany. The manuscript itself trav­ elled back and forth across the Alps in the luggage o f whichever o f the two cul­ tures claimed to be its principal guardian. In 852 the monk Rudolf o f Fulda cited Tacitus as the authority for a reference to the river Weser, so that it seems probable that a manuscript copy o f the G erm a n ia lay in that Benedictine monastery’s famous library.8 But it would take another six hundred years before an authentic text would come to light. And it would, inevitably, be Italian humanists who would unearth it.9 In 1425 the most resourceful and tireless o f all the manuscript hunters, Poggio Bracciolini, wrote to his friend Niccolo Niccoli that the G erm an ia was indeed in a German monastery. Tw o decades later, another dogged retriever o f antique texts, Enoch o f Ascoli, was dispatched to Germany by Pope Nicholas V, to bring back as many Greek and Latin manuscripts as he could lay his hands on. By the time he returned, in 1455, the pope was dead, but among his haul was a codex from the abbey at Hersfeld, close to Fulda both geographically and in the training o f scribes. Deprived o f his patron, Enoch initially failed to find a buyer for his hoard. But two years later just such an enthusiast showed up in Rome in the person o f the chancellor o f Perugia, Stefano Guarnieri. By the end o f the decade Guarnieri had brought back to his library at Iesi a compilation o f three manuscripts: a ninth-century script o f another o f Tacitus’s works, the A g r ic o la , quite probably a fragment from the great Hersfeld codex itself; a fourth-century account o f the Trojan War; and a version o f the G erm ania, copied in his own hand, possibly directly from the German manuscript, but equally possibly from an intermediary source (color illus. 10). Copying such treasures was not a casual recording exercise. Guarnieri took great pains to emulate the Caroline ninth-century script o f the A g ricola so that his “Tacito” would in every respect feel close to the original. In 1470, at the border o f the Latin and Germanic worlds in Venice, the G erm a n ia became the very first o f Tacitus’s works to be printed. Three years later it was published in Nuremberg, and with the first vernacular translation, published in Leipzig in 1496, it came to lodge permanently in the bloodstream o f German culture.10

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Once printed, the Germ ania took on a life o f its own and the Guarnieri manuscript slipped back into drowsy obscurity in the palazzo library in the hills back o f Ancona. Revolution arrived in the 1790s and the male line o f the Guarnieri disappeared. The chancellor’s legacy, however, lived on through a marriage alliance to the dynasty o f the Marche family o f the counts Balleani, who inherited the palazzi and the great library that went with them. These Balleanis, moreover, embraced the modern century with gusto while other equaUy venerable families were content to expire in a haze o f provincial d olcefa r niente. Trading their hose for spats, they became aristocratic entrepreneurs, built a spanking new Palladian palazzo at Fontedamo, and established a modern, mechanized silk-weaving manufacture close by. They grew rich on high rents and busy markets and the Academy o f Rome awarded them prizes for the qual­ ity o f Fontedamo silk. Even the catastrophe o f the pebrine epidemic that wiped out the industrious worms failed to do much damage to either the riches or the reputation o f the Balleanis as the grandest o f notables in the otherwise back­ ward province o f the Marche. A t the end o f this busy, prospering century, the family fortune ended up in the hands o f Count Aurelio, whose investments bore fruit while, alas, his loins did not. So vecchio Aurelio turned to his sister’s considerable brood for an heir and chose the seventh o f her nine children for no other reason (though a good one) than that he had been given the same name. So, at six years old, piccolo Aurelio— “ Lelo” to his family— inherited three palazzi and a serious fortune. And after the Great War, he crossed the Adantic to the one place where he could most enjoy it. In New York he did a litde o f this and that on Wall Street; met and married Silvia Palermo, thus adding the Banco Siciliano to the family assets, which may have helped cut his losses dur­ ing the Crash. He cut a figure in Manhattan, acquiring a nice Charleston kickstep that he took pleasure in showing off well into his eighties. Whenever possible he lunched at Giovanni’s, in midtown, where herds o f zebra roamed the crimson wallpaper but the pasta tasted paisan. At home, the Fascist government took a sudden, unhealthy interest in the Balleani “Tacito.” In 1902 the professore o f classics at the local high school, Cesare Annibaldi, had “discovered” what was now called the Codex Aesinas lat. 8 (after the Latin name for Osimo, the third o f the Balleani palazzi) and estab­ lished it as the closest surviving link with the original. Before and after the First World War an entire cottage industry o f German philologists, obsessed with the tribal origins o f their new Reich, made it their business to comb through the manuscript folio by folio. For in the 1920s it came to be seen, in the deci­ sive phrase o f Eduard Norden, as their Urgeschichte, and some o f his most avid readers hungered to have it return to its “natural homeland,” Among them were Alfred Rosenberg, the Party’s principal ideologue; Heinrich Himmler, who prided himself on his classical cultivation; and not least, Adolf Hider.

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In 1936 Mussolini visited Berlin, and the fiihrer took the opportunity, by way o f expressing his enthusiasm for the historical relationship between Rome and Germany, to ask if the Codex Aesinas might not be brought back to the Reich.11 N o philologist, the Duce obliged his host and, when told by his advis­ ers that it belonged to a notorious anti-Fascist, the count Balleani, may have been still more delighted to dispossess him. O n the other hand, Mussolini was also a great snob and the self-appointed guardian o f the Roman imperial legacy (Tacitus included). So when a storm o f protest greeted the suggestion that the Codex Aesinas leave Italy, Mussolini reneged on his offer. Doubdess this did not please Hider. But nor did he care so very much about the manuscript that he would make special exertions to seize it from his ally. Heinrich Himmler, on the other hand, cared very much indeed. Did not Tacitus, in chapter 4, expressly endorse “the opinions o f those who hold that in the peoples o f Germany there has been given to the world a race unmixed by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure [propriam etsin ceram ], like no one but themselves” ?12 And while it seems odd (even obscene) to think o f the SS as a cultural institution, Himmler’s pretensions to ideologi­ cal integrity were demonstrably serious. It was for the SA to indulge in mind­ less violence; his kind would be mindful. It was the task o f National Socialist scholarship to demonstrate the historical as well as the biological basis o f Aryan supremacy, and in the invincible ancient Germanic tribes, the Semnones (with their partiality for human sacrifice) and the martial Cherusci, Himmler believed he could find just such vindication. Guided by his cultural mentor Hermann Wirth, he founded the Ahnenerbe in 1935 as an academic organization that under the aegis o f the SS would promote and pursue research into Germanic antiquity and racial identity conceived in its broadest sense. Thus there would not only be archaeologists and classical historians in blackshirts, but also philol­ ogists, ethnographers, and biologists.13 T o have had the Aesinas G erm ania return to the Fatherland in 1936 would thus have been a crowning victory, every bit as important for Himmler as the Berlin Olympics and the reoccupa­ tion o f the Rhineland. Through the war years the frustration o f this act o f philological repatri­ ation was evidently not forgotten. Through the good offices o f the German ambassador in Rome, Hans G eorg von Mackensen, one o f the most enthu­ siastic Latinists o f the Ahnenerbe, Dr. Rudolph Till, had managed to secure access to the codex. A photographic facsimile was made in Berlin, and then, presumably in deference to the sensibilities o f an ally, the codex went back to Italy. But once Mussolini had been overthrown, the Reich no longer had to bother with such courtesies. A nd in 1943 Till published his new “ authorita­ tive” edition, complete with a foreword by SS Reichsfuhrer Himmler (to the effect that the future would only be granted to those who understood the stock o f their ancestry).14 The timing could not possibly have been acciden­

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tal. Himmler’s foreword was, in effect, the warrant for the seizure o f the codex. Which is why the SS were parked on the grass in front o f the palazzo Balleani at Fontedamo. They had come to make good on Mussolini’s reckless gesture— to repatriate the G erm ania to the Fatherland after a millennium o f exile. They were to be denied again. Once they had smashed in the door, the SS stood in the empty, echoing vestibule o f Fontedamo with no one to answer their barked commands. With the help o f the local Fascists, they then pro­ ceeded to take the house apart. The manuscript was not, o f course, in the library; nor did there seem to be any alcoves, swinging doors, or secret closets that might be concealing the prize. And as room after room declared itself bar­ ren, what began as a systematic search turned into a violent festival o f vindic­ tive malice. Frescoes were scraped to the bare plaster, smeared with obscenities; paintings slashed; furniture ripped apart; mosaic floors smashed to shivers and ground into colored powder with the butt end o f machine guns. And while one Balleani house was being demolished from the inside out, another at Osimo, the hill-town to the southeast, was sheltering the family in its deep cellars. For Count Aurelio had been served well by his expansive brand o f dynastic paternalism. Barroom gossip, doubdess falling from the slack tongue o f a local Fascist, had tipped o ff the count’s driver in advance on the German excursion to Fontedamo. And even before he had let the fam­ ily know, he had transported clothes and food to Osimo, enough to keep the count and his family hidden for weeks. And that house had been built, in the sixteenth-century fashion, to withstand assault: a fortress-like structure dom­ inating one side o f a piazza and opening onto the street from a single, inhos­ pitable doorway. Still more helpfully, the Guarnieris had constructed deep below the house a labyrinth o f cellars that ran below the square and con­ nected with other noble palazzi. So where this subterranean Machiavellian architecture had once lodged wine and muskets and swordsmen, it now con­ cealed Aurelio and Silvia and their two children, Lodovico and the little girl Francesca, who still remembers hearing violent, angry beating sounds far above o f thwarted soldiers. And all this time, the codex itself lay peacefully in the one place the SS failed to search, perhaps because it appeared to be the most obviously open and uninhabited. For there was, in fact, yet a third Balleani palazzo, in the very cen­ ter o f Iesi itself. The soldiers had looked, but they had found only empty rooms, an abandoned place. They had not looked hard enough. A t the side o f the square where the infant Frederick Hohenstaufen had been snatched from the bloody birth canal o f his mother, in full public view, and shown to the cit­ izenry in a demonstration o f irrefutable imperial succession; behind the rococo facade o f the palazzo with the Madonna and child lodged in a niche above the

Blood in the Forest door; beneath the sala g r a n d e with its spectacularly coffered ceiling and por­ traits o f the Guarnieris and the Balleanis hanging on the crimson walls; deep in a little kitchen cellar, inside a tin-lined trunk, was the manuscript that began in capitals o f red and black

d e o r ig in e e t s it u g e r m a n o r u m

.

Perhaps, in the place o f his extraordinary birth, the emperor, who like Countess Balleani grew up Sicilian, and kept company with racially impure Semites, Arabs and Jews alike, was, in the end upholding his version o f the Reich against theirs. And if Frederick II was indeed the. g e n iu s loci o f Iesi, it was certainly not his fault that in 1966, in the vaults o f the Banco Siciliano in Flor­ ence, the invading floodwaters o f the Arno succeeded, where the SS had failed, in briefly taking hostage o f Chancellor Guarnieri’s “Tacito.” 15

ii

Blood in the Forest

The fruidess quest by the cultural storm troops o f the Third Reich for Codex Aesinas lat. 8 must represent one o f the most tenacious examples o f the obses­ sion with a myth o f origins. It was ironic, o f course, that while the hunt was driven by a need for an ancestral memory o f woodland warriors, the writer who provided the pedigree was thinking as much o f his own (Roman) history as that o f his adversaries. For as curious as Tacitus was about the Germans in their own right, his picture o f the topography, manners, and religious rituals o f the bar­ barian tribes is, in all essential respects, that o f a not-Rome. Nowhere is this more evident than in his description o f the German habi­ tat. The very first lines o f the G erm a n ia proclaim its separation from Latinized Gaul by daunting barriers o f water and rock as well as by “ mutual misgivings” ( m u tu o m etu). And when Tacitus writes o f inform em terris he uses a word that meant, simultaneously, “ shapeless” a n d “ dismal.” For a Roman, the sign o f a pleasing landscape was necessarily that which had been formed, upon which man had left his civilizing and fructifying mark. But according to Tacitus, the Germans were not disposed to work their land; they would rather take their subsistence from hunting, gathering, and the spoils o f war. So even though much o f the country was, in fact, fertile enough to support a fairly dense pop­ ulation, Tacitus paints a landscape o f Germania in tones o f dun and darkness: a cold, damp place, inured to a “ bitter climate,” “ pleasant neither to live in nor to look upon unless it be one’s fatherland.” 16

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D E R H O LZ W EG : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

But it was this uncompromising ruggedness o f the ancestral, forested Ger­ many that most recommended it to the antiquarian warriors o f the Ahnenerbe.17 One o f their most eager enthusiasts was the Reichsminister o f Agriculture, Rudolf Darre, who had coined the term B lu t u n d Boden (Blood and Soil) as a Nazi motto,18 and who pushed for a policy o f N aturschutz (pro­ tection o f nature) as a state priority. Darre was one o f many Nazi pedigreehunters who seized on the connection made by Tacitus between the formidable barriers o f German topography and the apparently indigenous nature o f the race, only “very slightly blended with new arrivals.” 19 Even more rewarding for this racial genealogy was the Roman’s description o f the ancient myth-hymns o f the Germans that extolled the primal deity Tuisto, deum terra editum , who had literally issued from the soil. Tuisto had given birth to Mannus, the first man, who in his turn had produced three sons, each the ancestral forefather o f a German tribe. Beyond all other peoples, Tacitus seemed to be saying, the Ger­ mans were true indigens, sprung from the black earth o f their native land, for personally I associate myself with the opinions o f those who hold that in the peoples o f Germany there has been given to the world a race unmixed by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no-one but themselves, whence it comes that their physique, so far as can be said with their vast numbers, is identical: fierce blue eyes, red hair, tall frames, powerful.20 This, o f course, was just what the eugenic historians o f the Reich, even if they did not have blue eyes and red hair, wanted to read. Never mind that for Tacitus and his Roman readers, racial purity, bred up from the inform em terris, was not an unmixed virtue. In the ancient polarization between culture and nature, it was clear (not least from the radically deforested Italian peninsula) where their allegiance lay. In fact it is not too much to say that classical civi­ lization has always defined itself against the primeval woods. In the first Mesopotamian epic the warrior Gilgamesh claims his right to rule by journey­ ing to the center o f the Cedar Forest and slaying its guardian, Humbaba— “Kill him, grind him up, pulverize him,” urges Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu.21 Pulp the wild man o f the woods and make his timber into fine buildings, into towns. Rome, too, tested its legitimacy against the boundaries o f the wild wood. Livy’s history o f early Rome described the Ciminian forest o f Etruria as “even more impassable and appalling” than the German woods. After their defeat at the hands o f the Romans in 3 1 0 B.C. the Etruscans retreated into this fastness. To general amazement the consul Marcus Fabius, who spoke Etruscan, decided to reconnoiter the enemy position by penetrating the woods. But he took care to disguise himself as a wild man, dressed in skins, with a herdsman’s billhook as his only weapon.22

6. T h e c r o s s at C iib y.

7. C iih v : v ie w f r o m t h e m o u n d
8. Puszca Biaiowieza

(photo: Tadcusz Rolkc).

9. Punsk: the Jewish cemetery

(photo: Tadeusz Rolkc).

io. T he Codex Aesinas, First Folio, Tacitus’s Germania.

11.

A lb r e c h t A ltd o r f e r , St. Cicovjjc n u d the D r n tjo ii, 1 5 1 0 .

12.

Roeland Saverv. The Bohemian Husbandman, ca. 16 16.

1 3 - C a s p a r D a v id F r ie d r ic h , The “ C h a s s e u r ” in the Forest, i 8 i v

14. Album , Hermannsdenkmal, D etm old, 1875.

1 5 - A n s e lm K ie fe r , Tree w ith P a le tte , 1 9 7 8 .

Blood in the Forest But in the first century A.D., when Tacitus was writing, the alien forest was German, specifically the immense Hercynian forest that extended in different belts, west to east, all the way from the Rhine across the Danube perhaps as far as the Elbe. A t least one map o f Roman roads, attributed to Castorius, showed “Allemania” at the perimeter o f the known world, terminating in a barrier o f trees. In its densest areas the Hercynian forest was said to take nine days to cross north to south. But this was a mere excursion, compared to a journey west to east. Caesar, whose D e hello G allico had actually initiated many o f the features o f the collective German portrait, including their chastity, their martial wildness, and their common property,23 recorded the common opinion that unencum­ bered travellers had journeyed sixty days eastward without ever seeing its edge.24 O n their return they told stories o f strange and various kinds o f wild beasts long extinct elsewhere— flat-antlered elks that used the valonia oaks as their “ couch” ; hairy aurochs with red-black eyes and fearsome curving horns and, according to Pliny, strange birds whose plumage shone like fire in the depths o f the night.25 Most important the Hercynian forest was unimaginably ancient, literally pre­ historic according to Tacitus’s friend Pliny, “intacta aevis et congenita mundo prope immortali sorte miracula excedit” (coeval with the world, which surpasses all marvels by its almost immortal destiny).26 There is in this description a note o f awestruck admiration as well as repugnance that exactly reflected Rom e’s mixed feelings about the forest. On the one hand, it was a place which, by definition, was “ outside” (fo ris) the writ o f their law and the governance o f their state. O n the other hand, their own founding myths were sylvan. Classical Greece had venerated groves sacred to Artemis and Apollo and their cults o f fertility, the hunt, and the tree-oracle had been transferred to Rome. Arcadia was imagined in both cultures as a wooded, rocky place, the haunt o f satyrs, the realm o f Pan. According to Vir­ gil, the city itself had sprung from the motherwood Rhea Silvia, where wildmen and giants issued from the trunks o f oaks. The fig tree beneath which Romulus and Remus were said to have been suckled by the she-wolf had been removed to the forum, where it too was an active devotional site. And by the time o f Tacitus and Pliny it had become commonplace to contrast the mythic simplicity o f an archaic “ timbered” Rome, when the first Senate was no more than a rustic hut, with what moralists complained was the gilded decadence o f the empire. Tacitus’s wooded Germania, then, was in some ways desirably, as well as deplorably, primitive. The “creatures” who “when not at war spend time in hunting but more in idleness . . . sleeping and eating” recalled the arcadian por­ trait o f arboreal man given by Lucretius in his D e reru m n a tu ra , living in con­ tentment beneath the tall trees, his hunger satisfied by acorn-laden oaks, nuts, and berries and his thirst slaked by the rushing brook. Tacitus’s Germans are, for sure, less idyllic and more barbaric, but the barely worked fabric o f their

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dw ellings proclaim ed their closeness to brute nature. N o t o n ly did they eschew stone; they “ have n o t even learned to use quarry-stone o r tiles: the tim ber they use for all purposes is unshaped, and stops short o f all ornam ent o r attraction. In w inter som e o f them hibernated like beasts, g o u g in g o u t pits in the g ro u n d and ro o fin g it over w ith d u n g .27 T h e essence o f their social sim plicity was sum m ed up by T a c itu s’s o b ser­ vation that “ nullas G erm anorum populis urbes habitari” (non e o f the G erm an tribes live in [w alled] cities).28 N o t o n ly this bu t their houses are n o t even contiguou s w ith each o th er, let alone jo ined in streets and terraces. “ T h e y live sep­ arated and scattered, accord ing as spring-w ater, m eado w o r gro ve appeals to each man. . . . Everyone keeps a clear space around his h o u se.” And

that

separation

preserves

them from an overbearing co llec­ tive

authority;

protects

their

instinctive liberty. L ivin g as they did either in the depths o f the forest o r beside the reedy sw am p, the Germ ans had m anaged, m ore by natural

E ngraving from

intuition than considered ju d g e ­

Philip Cluverius,

m ent, to preserve a w o rld o f tim ­

Germaniae Antiquae , 1616.

bered virtue. A t its heart was a natural religion that believed it d egrading

to

confine

w orship

w ithin m asonry walls o r to repre­ sent

gods

w ith

hum an

faces.

Instead veneration o f divinities that lo d g ed w ithin, and were indivisible

from ,

natural

p h e­

nom ena like great oaks, was prac­ ticed in the open in ho ly groves. T acitus reserves his m ost dism ayed description for the Sem nones— the “ oldest and best born o f the Swabian tribes” — w h o co nvene their annual assem blies in the sacred forest grove. It is there, he tells us, “ initia g en tis” (w here the race first arose), as if u nco iling, fern-like, from the dark and sp o n g y hum us. T h eir mark o f rem em brance o f this w o o d lan d tribal birth is to offer a hu m an sacrifice and display the corpse o n a tree trunk, “ here w here dw ells the g o d w h o is lord o f all th in g s.” 29 It seems possible that the grisly rite was a re-enactm ent o f the self-sacrifice o f the T eu to n ic g o d W otan , w h o han ged h im self o n the bo u gh s o f the cosm ic ash tree Yggdrasil (the N o rd ic sym bol o f the universe) for nine

Blood in the Forest days and nights, in a ritual o f death and resurrection.30Waiting in vain for suc­ cor, Wotan saw beneath the great tree a vast pile o f stone runes, which he suc­ ceeded in raising through the force o f his supernatural will. Standing erect, the runes liberated Wotan from his arboreal ordeal and into a new, rejuvenated life o f unprecedented power and strength. The woodland sacrifice, then, is likely to have been a ritual o f collective tribal rebirth. But Tacitus saw only an act o f horrifying barbarism. And he was not much more attracted by the Semnones’ convention o f binding the hands and feet o f laymen with cords before they are permitted to enter the inner sanc­ tum o f the woods. The humiliation is meant to signify their prostration before the presiding divinity o f the tribal birthplace. Should any devotee stumble, he is not to be helped to his feet but has to writhe and squirm his way from under the trees like so much mortal vermin.31 And it is these morbid associations, described by a not altogether neutral Latin commentator, between blood sacv

v

rifice, prostrate servitude, primitive woodland freedom, and a myth o f ethnic origins that would cast the longest and darkest shadow over the fate o f German nationality. Obviously this kind o f primitive indignity arouses only revulsion in the sardonic patrician Tacitus. But the inversion o f Roman values in the Teutonic woods is not without its redeeming features. Since their territories, as far as he knows, have no mines bearing silver or gold, the Germans have been spared this corrupting luxury, forgoing ornament both in their simple dwellings and on their bodies. For dress they wear nothing but sim­ ple cloaks fastened sometimes with a thorn or else the skins and pelts o f wild animals. Only the very

richest among them affect undergarments as a badge o f status. But though the women go about with their arms and much o f their upper body bare, “ the mar­ riage tie with them is strict. . . . They are almost the only barbarians who are content with one wife apiece,” and so (in marked contrast to the mores o f Tac­ itus’s Rome) “ their life is one o f fenced-in chastity.” There is no arena with its seductions: no opulent dinners to corrupt and debauch them, no exchange o f secret letters, hardly any adultery at all. The result o f all this rugged self-denial is to produce specimens o f formidable toughness and stature. The hallmark o f the innocent vitality o f the Germans is that their mothers suckle their own infants rather than pass them on to wet nurses, so that children grow “ up amid nakedness and squalor into that girth o f limb and frame which is to our peo­ ple a marvel.” 32

D E R H O LZ W EG : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

86

T h is portrait o f G erm ania as a n o t-R o m e is co m p leted by its relative ind if­ ference to p roperty and elaborate distinctions o f rank, and its m arked prefer­ ence

for

spontaneous

form s

o f com m u nity:

co m m u nal

feasting

and

hospitality. “ T o close the d o o r against any hum an bein g is a crim e.” T h e ir diet is peculiarly sim ple— w ild fruit, gam e, cu rdled m ilk— and th ey drink a strange am ber co n c o ctio n o f ferm ented barley o r o th er grains, frequen tly in legen d ary am ou nts, so that days and nights run tog e th e r. A t their tribal assem blies art­ less ( if overm uscular) candor is valued o ver verbal sophistry and tho se c o n ­ v icted

of

serious

crim es

m eet w ith sw ift, ro u g h ju s­ tice. Sen tences are adm inis­ tered

by

the

landscape

itself: traitors and deserters are

h anged

from

trees,

w hile the m ore infam ous “ cow ard s and p o o r fighters and

sexual

deviants”

are

“ p lu n g ed in the m ud o f marshes w ith a hurdle on their h eads” so that the vile­

E ngraving from

ness o f their transgression

Philip Cluverius,

w ill be sw allow ed in the

Germaniae

m orass.33 A n d w h en they

Antiquae , 1616.

co m e to the end o f this life o f instinctual habit they are buried in a m o u n d w ith the utm o st

sim plicity.

Even

tribal nobles are crem ated w ith

specially

designated

kinds o f w o o d — oak, beech, pin e, o r ju niper— reaffirm ­ in g to the last their bond w ith the forest.34 T h ere is som ething like a theory o f social g eo g rap h y lurking in the G er­ m ania, draw n from earlier sources, n o w lost, like the Histories o f the G reek p hilosopher Posid oniu s.35 F o r it is the G erm an closeness to their natural ha b i­ tat that contrasts so m arkedly w ith R o m e and w hich gave som e o f its later m o r­ alizing w riters like the Stoic Seneca the occasion for a lam ent on decadence.

C o n sid er the peoples beyon d the limits o f the R om an em pire. I speak o f the G erm ans and all those vagrant tribes one m eets beyon d the

Blood in the Forest Danube. Living on sterile soil they must bear a perpetual winter and a gloomy sky. A

mere thatched roof protects them

against the

rain. . . . They nourish themselves on the wild beasts which they hunt in the forests. Are they unhappy? N o, there is no unhappiness in that which has become natural through habit; what has become necessity soon becomes pleasure. . . . Thus what you would regard as misery is the natural way o f life o f many peoples.36 The armies o f the Caesars may have fought the battles but it was the prose o f Tacitus that ordained the conflict, for generations, for centuries to come, on and on: wood against marble; iron against gold; fur against silk; brutal serious­ ness against elegant irony; bloody-minded tribalism against legalistic universalism. N o wonder the Axis was a disaster; no wonder that with the Duce swinging from a lamppost, the SS had come to transport Tacitus back where they thought he belonged, north o f the Alps. He had, after all, given them more than their tribal identity. He had also given them their U rheld, their original hero: Arminius, prince o f the Cherusci, who inhabited the extensive forested regions on either bank o f the river Weser. Arminius was the superhero o f the tribes, the Roman citizen who had redis­ covered his blood loyalty and become conqueror o f three Roman legions: Her­ mann the German. H e appears in the A n n a ls , written twenty years after the G erm a n ia and which are Tacitus’s enduring masterpiece. The chronicle o f the Roman Empire beginning with the death o f Augustus and presumably ending with the suicide o f Nero (for the last part has been lost) is one long exercise in ironic contemplation o f the discrepancy between lofty purposes and base prac­ tices. A t the heart o f the first three books is the murderous war between Rome and the German tribes; the fight to the death between the two authentic heroes, Arminius and the emperor Tiberius’s nephew Germanicus. That con­ flict was even more sharply defined by the fact that Arminius was the son o f a captured German chief who, like many such captives, had made a military career in the Roman armies, commanding Cheruscan auxiliary troops. But it was only when Arminius returned to his ancient tribal identity, raising the rebellion against the empire that culminated in the slaughter o f a whole Roman army in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A .D ., that Tacitus paradoxically grants him the qual­ ities o f a true hero: the custodian o f extinct ideals: audacious, patriotically single-minded, and energetic, the antithesis o f the public world with which Tacitus was himself intimate and which he evidendy despised as lethargic, cyn­ ical, and weak. Germany, and the terror o f its woods and marshes, is designed in his history as the ordeal o f empire— the place where it would discover just what it was made of, what it was worth.

D E R H O LZ W EG : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

88 alas

fo r

p u b l iu s

q u in t il iu s

v a r u s

! — remembered only as one o f

European history’s most ignominious losers, on a par with “the unhappy Gen­ eral Mack” (as Tolstoy presents him), the Austrian commander routed at Austerlitz, or the General Staff o f the French army in 1940. There is something especially humiliating (for the one side) and gratifying (for the other) about a catastrophic ambush, especially when the general failed to heed the warnings. Alas for Publius Quintilius Varus, the Custer o f the Teutoburger Wald; Custer in many ways, since Velleius Paterculus, the one and only surviving source, pays particular attention to Varus’s racial and cultural arrogance, despising the Ger­ mans as “having nothing human about them but voice and limbs.” 37 T o Varus, then, they were benighted savages, living in trees and bogs, brutes that required civilizing, not by the sword but by the omnipotent force o f Roman law. In Velleius’s account, Varus courts hubris precisely because he is a speci­ men o f everything that was wrong with the Roman Empire o f Tiberius. (Velleius’s grandfather had fought with Brutus and Cassius, so he may well have had a long republican animus against the pretensions o f the imperial line.) Varus, he implies, had been ripened and softened by his years in North Africa and Syria, where he had been pampered by voluptuaries and corrupted by Lev­ antine indolence. Posted to Germany, he turns into a petty oriental despot, levying excessive taxes and personally presiding over legal tribunals and “ fan­ cying himself a city praetor dispensing justice in the forum instead o f the com­ mander o f an army in the middle o f Germany.” Varus is a hothouse plant, fated to perish beneath the dull iron skies o f the north. Arminius, on the other hand, is a tough nut o f the beechwoods. The very fact that (like so many other rebels) he had served in the Roman armies only pointed up the exactly drawn opposition between incarnations o f decadence and those o f martial vigor. Arminius the veteran knew Rome; Varus the intruder was ignorant o f Germany. While the Roman patronizingly imagined the Germans as children— uncultivated, fearful, and naively incapable o f dis­ simulation— Arminius was in fact highly intelligent, fearless, and lethally skilled in subterfuge. What was evidently the classic history o f the disaster in the Teutoburger Wald, written by Pliny the Elder, has been lost. But from Velleius’s brief his­ tory, the stark outlines o f a catastrophe are clear enough. In the late summer o f the year 9 a . d . Varus marched his army, numbering twenty-five thousand in all and comprising three legions and six auxiliary regiments, from their summer quarters on the river Weser toward more protected winter quarters on the Rhine. At some point on the march— the precise site is still unforgivingly dis­ puted by archaeologists— the route ran between treacherous swamps and impenetrable forest, precisely (indeed suspiciously) the German scenery sum­ marily characterized by Tacitus in the opening o f the Germ ania. And it was there, in the tribal heartland, with no room for maneuver, that the legions were

Blood in the Forest

89

suddenly confronted by a huge force o f Cheruscan spearmen rushing from the forest and falling on the encumbered Romans. T o retreat meant becoming helplessly bogged down in the swamp. T o cut their way through the loose Cheruscan ranks, which seemed to come and go with mercurial swiftness, meant penetrating the terrible woods in an effort to root them out. For three days, under rains o f javelins, the Romans attempted to hold their ground, more o f them cut down with each sally o f the Cheruscan spear-warriors. A bare rem­ nant managed to survive and reach the Roman camp on the Rhine to report the slaughter. Varus himself, surveying the bloody fiasco, fell on his sword. The A n n a ls o f Tacitus only begin after the magnitude o f the disaster has been realized in Rome. His account o f what then followed in the long and bru­ tal campaign for vindication is presented as a trial o f Roman fortitude. The hap­ less Varus is replaced by his antitype, the relendessly virtuous Germanicus, the son o f the emperor Tiberius’s brother, Drusus, and thus the grandson o f Augustus. N o t only does Germanicus more than make up for Varus’s defects, he is sketched by Tacitus as in every way a match for Arminius, fully his equal in strategic cunning, ruthless bloodthirstiness, and military charisma. Needless to say, the doppelgangers are too good to survive, both falling prey to treach­ ery among their own people rather than each other. Writing at the end o f the first century A .D ., when Germany was by no means pacified, Tacitus had a healthy respect for the barbarians as the social equiva­ lent o f a force o f nature. He projected some o f the same mixture o f disgust and awed trepidation onto Germanicus himself, making his narrative o f the cam­ paign o f the years 1 5 -1 7 A .D . a terrifying tour de force o f exorcism and vindi­ cation. Tacitus makes it clear from the start that the campaign is all about effacing the stain o f military humiliation; that Tiberius was determined to pen­ etrate the German heardand where his predecessor the shrewd Augustus would have been content to give it a wide berth. Having put down a mutiny among the understandably apprehensive troops, Germanicus deliberately leads them direcdy across the Rhine and through a deep forest where (like Hercules) he has to choose between alternative woodland paths. His first military action is a surprise raid as a German religious festival is being celebrated: “ Neither age nor sex inspired pity: places sacred and profane were razed indifferently to the ground,” including a holy grove, “ the most noted religious centre o f these tribes.” 38 As the campaign takes him deeper into Westphalia, Germanicus grows obsessed with avenging Varus’s ghost, almost to the point o f vicariously reliv­ ing the trauma. He leads his soldiers right to the Teutoburger Wald, throwing causeways over flooded swamps as they approach the forest “ hideous to sight and memory.” Six years after the disaster, its debris remained scattered around the site like a museum o f calamity. Shreds and marks o f Varus’s camp, all tidily measured according to the regulation intervals for officers and men, were still

90

D E R H O LZ W EG : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

visible, as w ere the broken walls and ditches w here fugitive soldiers had p a th et­ ically tried to take cover. T h e patterned distribution o f bleached bones described the w ay the soldiers had died: heaped up like little backw ard -curving waves w here they had sto o d their gro u n d ; rand om ly strew n ab o u t w h ere they had fled. Still m ore gruesom e sights appeared in the forest itself: skulls nailed to tree trunks; w o o d lan d altars w here captive tribunes and centu rions had been slau g h ­ tered. A n d as G erm anicu s’s soldiers began to gather up the b ones for interm ent in a great burial m o u n d, surviving veterans elaborated o n the ho rro r; o f torture pits and unspeakable insults that desecrated the R om an eagles and standards. G radually a great natural ossuary rose on the field, betw een the b o g s and the w o o d s; soldiers carrying bones in their cloaks, “ no man [know ing] w h eth er he consigned to earth the remains o f a stranger o r a kinsman, bu t all th o u g h t o f all as friends and m em bers o f o ne family, and, w ith anger rising against the enem y, m ou rn ed at o nce and hated .” 39 M uch

T ib eriu s’s displeasure

E ngraving from

G erm anicus then broke the c o n ­

to

Philip Cluverius,

v entio n that forbade com m anders

Germaniae Antiquaey 1616.

from associating w ith the dead lest they pollu te their authority: he threw the first dirt o n the mass grave and co n d u cted the funeral solem nities. M ilitary exorcism was n o t so easily accom plished. A fter an initial en gagem en t,

Arm in ius’s

troops

retreated into the w o o d s w here, w ith perverse disregard for prece­ dent, the R om an soldiers follow ed. N o t surprisingly, they w ere su dd enly faced w ith the enem y w heelin g abo u t in a charge beneath the trees. A ro u t w as on ly avoided by the rapid reinforcem ent o f fresh legions. W orse was to follo w . G e r­ m anicus divided the arm y, evacuating part o f it h im self alo n g the river Em s, leaving his veteran general Caecina to face Arm inius. F o r days the R om an troops flou nder a bo u t in the marshes, attem pting to h o ld their o w n against hitand-run attacks by the Cherusci soldiers cam ped o n the h igh g ro u n d in the w o o d s. O n e n igh t the R om an cam p is kept awake by G erm an tribal chants and ululations co m in g from the forest and Caecina dream s that Q u in tiliu s V arus rises from the sw am p, horribly b lo od ied , calling to him and stretchin g o u t a

Blood in the Forest gory arm to drag the general in. The next day the Germans fall on the mired Roman troops, mutilated horses slithering in the mud before collapsing on their own riders.40 It was only in the following year, 16 A .D ., that Germanicus’s army was able to achieve a victory solid enough to allow the Romans to retire from Germany with some semblance o f honor. As Tacitus describes it, it was accomplished by Germanicus taking a leaf, as it were, from Arminius’s own book o f forestfighting. First he disguises himself as a Cheruscan tribesman in a wild-animal’s pelt to spy out the enemy’s positions in one o f their sacred groves. Then he does his best to dispel the Roman troops’ terror o f woodland combat. There is no need, he argued, to assume that the Germans will always prevail in the for­ est. Used intelligently, Roman weapons might actually prove superior. Short swords could slash at the enemy’s unprotected faces, causing enough chaos for them to become encumbered in the thick vegetation with their unwieldy spears and long wickerwork shields.41 A series o f battles followed, some on a narrow plain from which the defeated Cherusci flee to the safety o f the forest, pursued by Romans who fell trees holding enemy soldiers trying to hide among the branches. A t the climax, huge numbers o f Germans pack into a woodland space so tighdy that, as Ger­ manicus had predicted, they lose all possibility o f free maneuver. The forest fortress becomes a deathtrap o f hopelessly flailing lances and discarded shields, Germanicus ordering his men to take no prisoners, for “ nothing but the exter­ mination o f the race would end the war.”42 Finally, then, Germanicus had exorcised Varus’s ghost by annihilating the tree-worshipping barbarians inside their own woodland lair, indeed in a grove specially dedicated to Thor. It had become something o f a test to see whether an urban and imperial state could in fact impose its will on barbarian wilder­ ness. Tacitus had been evenhanded enough in his distribution o f vices and virtues to allow both Latins and Germans to claim him as their vindicator. And although the documentary trail o f the G erm a n ia peters out into an indistinct track for much o f the Middle Ages, when Tacitus himself was all but forgotten, two facts concerning the fate o f manuscript copies remain incontestable: first, that they lay in German monastery libraries; second, that the Italians meant to repatriate them. Few cared more to succeed in this enterprise than the first Italian com­ mentator to specifically cite the G erm a n ia in a letter, dated 1458. Enea Silvio de’Piccolomini, the humanist cleric who subsequendy became Pope Pius II, took a typically Roman view o f its significance. The text, he wrote, merely showed how far the Germans had come since their rude beginnings. But they still had some way to go before being decendy integrated into the civilization o f Roman Christendom.43 One o f Enea Silvio’s correspondents, the poet G io­ vanni Campano, attending the diet o f German princes at Regensburg in 1471

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(a year after the G erm ania was first published in V en ic e), preten d ed to flatter his hosts by pro d u cin g a eu lo g y o f G erm an history, the better to persuade them to take up arms against the Turks. B u t his real view o f the barbarians was revealed in private letters to his Italian friends in w h ich he bitterly com p lained a bo u t the filthy fo o d , appalling clim ate, and the stink o f d ecayin g corpses. It was exacdy this kind o f habitual condescension that ignited the patriotic fire o f the po et, scholar, and orator Conrad Celtis, w h o m ore than any oth er Renaissance humanist was responsible for reclaim ing the Germ ania for the G er­ mans. D escribing him self as having been born “ in the m iddle o f the H ercynian for­ est,” Celtis was altogether an extraordinary

figure.

The

son o f a peasant winem aker from W ipfeld in Franconia, he was determ ined enou gh to exchange viticulture for humanist culture to escape from hom e on a lum ber raft dow n the river M ain. T h e epitom e o f the wandering poet-scholar, he studied in H eid elberg, R ostock

Leipzig,

before

and

reaching

Krakow in 1489, w here he had a sensually ecstatic affair w ith Hasilina R yztonic, the wife o f a Polish noblem an. “ H o w happy I was in that hour

amid

embraces

kisses

holdin g

and H asa’s

soft breasts in m y hands and burying m yself in her sweet thighs.” 45 Celtis strayed far en o u g h into the Polish countryside to hunt bison, but his view o f Poland as a place hopelessly sunk in drunken squalor may have been colored by his rejection at the hands o f the pas­ sionate but unpredictable Hasa. In his later Liber A m orum she was decisively annexed as one o f the four corners o f G erm any, the others being represented by U rsula o f M ainz, Elsula o f N urem berg, and Barbara o f L iibeck.46 W as it his Polish experience that led C eltis, in an oration delivered in 1492 at the U niversity o f Ingolstadt, w here he had been ap pointed to the faculty, to differentiate the G erm ans as sharply as he co u ld from the truly barbarous and nom adic Scythians and Sarm atians, “ as uncivilised and brutal as beasts o f prey

H ans B urgkm air, epitaph portrait; o f C on ra d C eltis, woodcut

Blood in the Forest wandering over wild untrodden deserts like catde” ? In extricating the history o f the ancient Germans from the monopoly o f Italian interpretation, Celtis played a decisive role in pushing Germany away from the domination o f papal Rome. Attacks on the decadence o f the Roman church had been increasingly given voice in the second half o f the fifteenth century. And though he nowhere mentions Tacitus by name in the oration, Celtis evidendy meant to persuade his German audience to understand their own history in decidedly non-Italian terms. Though he begins by conceding to conventional Latin prejudices, say­ ing that he was “ born in the midst o f barbarians and drunkards,” and although he sometimes deplores the lawlessness that infested his native countryside, Celtis’s real purpose at Ingolstadt was to stir in his German audience a power­ ful sense o f their own natural nobility, and especially the grandeur o f their antiquity. Invoking the shade o f Arminius, he urged his countrymen to “ assume, O men o f Germany, that ancient spirit o f yours with which you so often confounded and terrified the Romans and turn your eyes to the frontiers o f Germany; collect her torn and broken territories. Let us be ashamed, ashamed, I say, to have placed upon our nation the yoke o f slavery. . . . O free and powerful people, O noble and valiant race.” So even while much o f the speech is devoted to Celtis’s appeals to his countrymen to shake off their rep­ utation for philistinism by cultivating arts and learning, he presents it as a kind o f revolt against Italian culture: the oppressive decadence o f urban Rome. T o such an extent are we corrupted by Italian sensuality and by fierce cruelty in extracting filthy lucre that it would have been far more holy and reverent for us to practice that rude and rustic life o f old, living within the bounds o f self-control, than to have imported the para­ phernalia o f sensuality and greed which are never sated, and to have adopted foreign customs.47 Celtis’s debt to Tacitus was unmistakable, both in his account o f Arminius’s victory over the legions and his evocation o f the sylvan simplicity o f ancient Germany. Where Tacitus himself had used his ethnography to make a subtle criticism o f Rome, Celtis and contemporaries like the Strasbourger Jacob Wimpheling, whose Teutschland (Germany) appeared in 1501, made forceful contrasts between the diseased south and the healthy north. Latin Europe offered the rounded arch, Roman statute law, syphilis, and, as Michael Baxandall characterizes this view, “ a rather flashy way o f standing with the feet together, one leg carrying the weight, the other elegantly bent.”48 In the north, though much invaded and corrupted by Italian ways, were to be seen the relics o f a free and pure life: Germanic common law, civic liberty, domestic piety, and the pointed Gothic architecture o f cathedrals like Strasbourg that Wimpheling eulogized as the most perfect and most natural form o f sacred building.

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For a while this aggressive attack on Romanism was useful to the imperial cause. In Vienna Maximilian I, w ho had been crow ned em peror in 1493, au th o­ rized Celtis to create a Poets’ C o llege at the university and there he lectured expressly on Tacitus, as a w ay o f further disseminating his message about a rebo m G erm any, to be nourished by a return to ancient virtues and revitalized learning. Celtis’s ow n edition o f the Germ ania appeared in Vienna in 1500.49 D urin g this campaign it was always the pope o f R om e, his bishops, and his courtiers that w ere the targets o f Tacitean polemics— not the H o ly Rom an Emperor, the G erm an H absburg Maximilian. Em peror and pope had quarreled for centuries over the

P ainting on parchm ent after Erhard von E tzlau b,

Nuremberg and the Forests o f St. Lorenz and St. Sebaldus, 1516.

governance o f Christian Europe. A n d such was the venom ous hostility betw een pope and em peror at this time that any attack on Italian, papal dom ination was boun d to be construed as a gesture o f solidarity w ith the em peror. Bu t w hether the em peror w ould turn o u t to be the cham pion or enem y o f the Germ ania nova, the “ new G erm any,” w ould depend on the assertiveness w ith w hich he w ould prosecute the reform o f the church. Celtis him self was reluctant to turn his rhetoric against the emperor. But follow ing his death in 1508, there was nothing to stop militant apostles, impatient w ith the pace and radicalism o f reform , from turning Celtis’s reading o f the Germania into an attack on both em peror and pope.

Blood in the Forest This is precisely what happened in the famous case o f Ulrich von Hutten. Another wandering poet-scholar, von Hutten (who, unlike Celtis, also turned soldier) initially looked to Maximilian to become the new Arminius and take the war to Rome itself. But by the time he came to write his own dialogue, A r m in iu s, Martin Luther had already begun his own dramatic assault on the authority o f the church o f Rome. Indeed it may well have been Luther who first insisted on stripping the national hero o f his Romanized name and rebaptizing him with his vernacular war-moniker, Hermann, literally the “ man o f the army.”50 Increas­ ingly disappointed in the failure o f the new emperor, Charles V , to support the Lutheran position, Hutten hoisted the standard o f Arminius in the camp o f the Reformation. By the time he committed himself to outright rebellion against both the Roman church and the Holy Roman Emperor, von Hutten had him­ self become Hermann, “the father o f the nation.” There even seemed to be analogies with the original Arminius, once obedient to the commands o f Rome but finally driven to revolt and ethnic self-discovery by the plight o f his people. It was not just German history that was being reborn in the first decades o f the sixteenth century, but German geography. For along with the rediscovery o f Hermann, the national father, came the mapping o f a Fatherland. Perhaps Celtis’s most creative legacy was the project he planned but never accomplished for a G er­ m a n ia Illustrata: a great compendium o f topographical description and histori­ cal chronicle. Once again he imagined it as a German response to a genre that had already been established in the Latin world by an Ita lia Illustrata, and which was modeled on the books o f the Greek geographer Strabo. But from his out­ line, G erm ania jjeneralis, it also seems likely that he wanted to specifically answer the standard reproaches that southerners made o f the beastliness, ugliness, and inclement quality o f German cities and countryside. His description o f the city and region o f Nuremberg, the Norimberga, went out o f its way to extol the virtues o f German woods, above all, o f course, the remaining tracts o f the Urwald itself, the Hercynian forest, a place haunted by Druid groves o f “ murmuring leaves” and “ dark valleys where sonorous torrents plunged through rocks.”51 As Christopher W ood has pointed out in his rich study on Altdorfer’s land­ scapes, by the time the German forest was being identified as the authentically native German scenery, much o f it was fast disappearing under the axe.52 So the geographers who wanted to celebrate the organically living world o f the Ger­ man woods (and by implication dispose o f the dead world o f Roman masonry) needed to replant it with their literary and visual imagination. T o accomplish this cultural reafforestation, they relied on two strategies, apparently in contra­ diction, but which nevertheless somehow managed to complement each other in the reawakened German imagination. The first approach, adopted by a number o f Conrad Celtis’s pupils, was to make a virtue o f the changes that had so visibly altered the density o f the German woods. The geographer Johannes Rauw, for example, while paying tribute to the

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original grandeur o f the ancient forests, dismissed its dem onization as the hom e o f barbarism as so m uch Italian slander, and praised instead the m ore com p act forests like the O d enw ald and the Thu ringer W ald into w hich it had b een divided. Likewise, the Black Forest o u g h t to be th o u g h t o f n o t as barren wilderness but as the place w here the finest b e e f cattle, exceeding even those o f Bohem ia, H u n ­ gary, and Poland, w ere raised.53 Such forests were n o w reim agined as dom esti­ cated w oodlands, intersected by arable land and orchards, and living in easy relationship w ith the cities they surrounded, like N u rem berg and W u rzb u rg . T h e

w oods o u g h t no longer, then, to be th o u g h t o f as brutal wildernesses b u t rather as places o f health and wealth. Sebastian M unster’s Cosmographey praised the Black Forest for its “ w onderful and copious co ld and w arm springs to bathe in” and painted w ord pictures o f the great rafts o f building tim ber floating d o w n the R hine tow ard Strasbourg bringing b a c k ^ m ^ / r e a c h year for the forest p eo p le.54 A n d the very first regional botany o f any kind was the Silva H ercynia o f Joachim Camerarius the Y ou n ger, published at Frankfurt am M ain in 1588.55 A t the same tim e that they presented their w o o d s as a m ore po p u lo u s and hum ane landscape, the patriotic topographers o f the G erm an Renaissance did n o t w ant to lose the connection, taken from T acitus, b etw een their forest hom e and their im m unity to the seductions o f city life Italian style. T e n years ag o , in a brilliant article, Larry Silver argued that the renew ed interest in T acitu s’s p o r­ trait o f the ancient G erm ans had ch anged the im age o f the “ w ild m an” from a brute into a noble savage. A lbrech t A ltd orfer’s Fam ily o f Satyrs, w ith a go ld en-

Blood in the Forest haired th o u g h t

m o th er to

and

represent

sturd y this

97

infant, better-

g ro o m e d version o f w ildn ess.56 F o r m u ch o f the M id d le A g e s , hairy, Martin Schongauer,

Wild Man hpporting Inblazoned Meld, ca. 480-90.

cannibalistic, sexually o m n iv o ­ rous w ild m en and w o m en had represented the antithesis o f the civilized C h ristian .57 B u t b e g in n in g in the later part o f the fifteenth cen tu ry— the sam e p erio d that saw the reappearance o f the G erm ania— w ild m en w ere m ade o v er in to exem plars o f the v ir­ tu o u s and natural life. T h e o lo g ia n s like the S trasb o u rg cleric G eiler v o n K aiserberg associated th em w ith in co n testably h o ly hairy m en: the an ch o rite saints and herm its o f early C hristianity. A n d o v er the n ext ce n tu ry w ild m en tu rn ed in to co n sp icu o u sly g e n d e r creatures. T o ch aracterize th em as n a tu r a l bein gs n o lo n g e r requ ired im ages o f bestiality. T h e o ld stereo ­ types o f w ild m en m u n ch in g o n infants o r d o in g unpleasant thin gs w ith animals w ere replaced by parago ns o f fam ily life: a hairy h a n d -h o ld in g betw een dem ure co u p les, o r sn u b -n o sed little w ild -th in gs h avin g their heads p atted b y their

Hans L e o n h a rt fchaufelein,

Wild M an and Wild Woman.

p ro u d parents. T h e w o o d la n d idylls even p resented the o xy m o ro n ic spectacle o f w ild -b u t-w illin g m en dilig en tly ten d in g to flocks o r even tillin g fields. In o th e r w o rd s, the w ild m en and the ancient G erm an s had m erg ed t o g e th e r in the im a g in ed w o o d la n d h o m e . T h e ir adversary, after all, w as the sam e: th e co u rt and city cu ltu re o f the L atin so u th . A n d it w as a c o m ­ plain t against the vices o f that w o rld th at the

N u re m b e rg

poet

H ans

Sachs p u t in to the m o u th o f his w ild fam ily in th e “ L a m en t o f the W ild F o rest-F o lk a b o u t the P erfid ­ iou s W o r ld .” T h o u g h the co u ple are still hirsute, th eir nakedness is n o w b e c o m in g ly co n cea led b y g e n ­ ero u s w reaths o f folia g e. T h e h u s­ b an d has a tree branch as a staff w ith w h ic h to fulfil the p ro tective duties o f p a ter fa m ilia s. A n d w hile his w ife ’s left hand clasps the vine that signifies her fertility, her rig h t hand

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rests benevolently upon the fruit o f her womb. Even the dog (known to the ancient Romans as domesticated by the Germans and even, on occasion, buried with them) appears as an emblem o f natural faithfulness in a fickle world. Echoing Celtis’s own contrast between “the woods [which] are pleasing to the muses” and the “city, hateful to poets,”58 the couple announce their return to the native German forest, the seat o f ancestral virtue: A n d so we left our worldly goods To make our home in these deep woods W ith our little ones protected From that falsehood we rejected We feed ourselves on native fr u its A n d fro m the earth dig tender roots For d rink pure springs are p len tifu l For garm ents grass a n d leaves we make O u r homes are made o f caves o f stone A n d no-one takes what’s not his own. . . . When a ll the world w ill see the light A n d every m an live true, upright, In equal, unconnivinggood, I t ’s then we’ll gladly leave the wood?9 Before long an entire genre o f sentimental ethnography developed, espe­ cially in southern Germany, in which it was increasingly difficult to distinguish between the cleaned-up wild men and the various ancestral Germans embel­ lished from Tacitus, who were now thought to have dwelled in a sylvan arcadia. Johannes Bohemus, for example, who lived in Aub, near Wurzburg, and who published a work in 1520 comparing the manners and mores o f different peoples, developed an idyllic portrait o f the first Germans. They had, he insisted, called each other Bruder and dwelled in a sylvan arcadia where no-one . . . strove for earthly riches for each was satisfied with what nature accorded him: to find a soft place under some shady tree to serve him and his wife and dear children as a refuge; to obtain honest nourishment from the fruits o f the field and the milk o f the animals; to clothe their nakedness with the broad leaves o f trees.60 T o do justice to the German woods, to their tribal ancestors and their mod­ ern descendants, then, required as much subdety as determination. Their inhabitants had to be wild enough to be distinguished from the effete Italian townsmen, but not so wild as to incur the old accusations o f brutishness. It was

Blood in the Forest

99

the astounding achievement o f Albrecht Altdorfer, in particular, to make the forest its e lf the natural protagonist o f this German difference. And in his draw­ ings, woodcuts, and paintings, Altdorfer managed exacdy to produce images o f German trees and woods that in their stardingly dense and writhing forms proclaimed an unmistakable difference from anything attempted in Italian art. Altdorfer’s hometown o f Regensburg, on the Danube, was an important center o f exacdy the kind o f patriotic humanism represented by Celtis and his followers’ fascination with German antiquity and topography. But he also belonged to a religious world where sculptors and architects had, from the mid­ dle o f the fifteenth century onward, ornamented church interiors with living bowers, the columns and vaults sprouting tendrils and leaves. In some o f the most elaborately organic examples in south Germany, twists o f boughs and branches, bursting with foliage, rose into a living, naturally canopied taberna­ cle.61 So although some o f Altdorfer’s trees seem wilfully and fantastically styl­ ized, they are evidently meant as the supports o f both a verdant sanctuary tabernacle and a tribal dwelling place. There is one astonishing painting, executed by Altdorfer around 1510, that not merely visualizes but actually seems to grow this vegetable world o f holy heroism (color illus. n ) . Within its modest frame a creeping, luxuriant forest o f ferns, evergreens, and oaks takes possession o f almost the entire surface o f the parchment sheet, glued to a limewood panel. (L in d e, the early High German word for “limewood,” Michael Baxandall reminds us, signified a sacred grove as well as the lime tree.)62 Only a mean little space at bottom right is torn open so that a mountain prospect can provide an intelligible sense o f depth and distance. The ostensible subject o f the painting is St. George not so much slaying as apparently paying his compliments to the dragon. And though he is conven­ tionally represented as the epitome o f the m iles Christianu s, the knight con­ fronting the forces o f hell, the toy-like miniaturization o f the action (in an already small work) strengthens the impression that the real hero o f the piece is as much the Teutonic forest as the Christian warrior. I f he is a George, then, he is also a quasi-Hermann. The panel constitutes a true revolution in landscape painting, not least because o f the extraordinary care Altdorfer has taken to tran­ scribe the conventions o f ornamental church foliage directly to the painting, thereby creating a consecrated space. This did not mean, however, that A lt­ dorfer’s foliage is unrecognizably stylized. Quite the contrary, in fact. He has evidently drawn with the scientific rigor o f Diirer and Leonardo, but the paint­ ing transcends mere naturalistic accumulation by producing a startling sensa­ tion o f the engulfing totality o f the woodland, as if the beholder were being smothered and blindfolded with leaves. And by interposing itself between us and our expectations o f visual depth, the curtain o f greenery virtually obliter­ ates the possibility o f narrative, o f storytelling. Confined in f r o n t o f a corner o f the leaf-wall, George and the dragon are no more the dramatic protagonists o f

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the scene than an introductory chorus before a proscenium curtain. The story, we begin to understand as the leaves emit light onto yet more leaves, piling up and overlapping in densely embroidered frond-like panels, is the forest. This German wood is not “the setting” ; it is the history itself.63 Almost a century later the connections between ancient Germany, utopian primitivism, and the woodlands were revived at the Frankenthal court o f the elector palatine Frederick III and the Prague court o f the mystically inclined Emperor Rudolf II. Artists o f the “Frankenthal circle” like Gillis Coninxloo and Roeland Savery were actually from the Netherlands or the Rhineland frontier o f Germany. But the cavernous woodland interiors in which vegetation swal­ lows up isolated parties o f hunters faithfully reproduced the kind o f sylvan arcadias that had become an established taste in Germany and Danubian Austria. Savery, in particular, had been commissioned by Rudolf to paint a number of mountain scenes in the Tyrol and around the Bohemian Woods that were yet another extension o f the “ Hercynian forest.” In the first decade o f the seven­ teenth century he painted the definitive image o f the Bohemian forester (color illus. 12), clad, shod, and hatted in fustian and hides, the ancient, hirsute wild man evolved into a wholly sympathetic W aldm ann— the man o f the woods. To represent the world o f nature rather than the world o f culture, he is posed against the pathetic ruins o f antiquity irreversibly invaded by greenery. He is everything the ideal o f the Roman classical hero is not: rustic to the point o f seeming a denizen o f the woods rather than its sovereign. And Savery’s little triumph o f the rustic over the classical is at exactly the opposite pole o f taste from contemporary Italian pastorals, where the landscape is devised as a setting for architecture or figures from an antique frieze. And compared with the refined herdsmen, transported from the Greek and Roman lyric traditions o f music and poetry, Savery’s bearded W aldm ann seems made from the elements he inhabits: earth and timber. Nectar being in short supply in the German woods, he makes do with wild honey and strong ale. His music is made by the rustic sackbut and the hurdy-gurdy, not the flute and lute.

iii

Arminius Redivivus

For all the hopes and passions o f its advocates, the Germania, nova did not come into being. If the sheer number o f editions o f Tacitus’s text could alone

Arminius Redivivus

l o

1

have guaranteed its vitality, the reborn Germany ought to have been the won­ der o f the Baroque age. But by the conclusion o f the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, there had been twenty-six editions o f the G erm a n ia and Germany lay in shat­ tered fragments. Its only power was the Holy Roman Empire, once again tied inseparably to the Roman church militant. Its landscape, which had given such cheer to the humanists o f Conrad Celtis’s generation, was a destitute ruin: depopulated and burnt-over; a wilderness traipsed by pathetic caravans o f des­ titute vagrants and brutalized by marauders. A t the end o f the eighteenth century the German Romantics would com­ plain that a kind o f Baroque despotism, overlaid with banal classical

courtliness,

had

atro­

phied the national culture. The pugnacious

Hermann,

released

by the sixteenth-century human­ ists from his Latin servitude, had reverted

to

classical

decorum.

Likewise, the instinctively native pleasure in the homely, with all Engraving from

its knobbly Gothic irregularities

Philip Cluverius,

and woodland wanderings, was

Germaniae,

again frowned on as regrettable

Antiquae, 1616.

coarseness. What had taken its place in the world o f the German courts, the Romantics argued, had been an international, Fran­ cophone culture o f reason, dom ­ inated by the revival o f the Latin classics and the passion for scien­ tific inquiry. But in their indigna­ tion against the supremacy o f reason, they almost certainly exaggerated the degree to which Enlightenment universalism actually suffocated an interest in native Germanism. Com men­ taries on Tacitus with vivid illustrations o f the mores o f the ancient Germans were widely available throughout the seventeenth century. Even when com­ mentators like Philip Cluverius, who from his chair in the stronghold o f clas­ sicism at Leiden University wanted to emphasize the savagery, rather than the virtue, o f the woodland tribes, the spectacular engravings included in the vol­ ume undercut the criticism by playing up the austere dignity o f warriors and primitive families. It was the survival, rather than the disappearance, o f the cult o f Arminius and o f the woodland H e im a t, even at a time when German political fortunes

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were at their lowest ebb, that enabled a later generation to revitalize the ancient myths and traditions. The reality o f German eighteenth-century forestry bore very little resemblance to the nostalgic yearning for the ancient broadleaf forests o f the tribes. For what little o f the mixed hardwood stands had survived the Thirty Years’ War and the Wars o f the North at the end o f the seventeenth cen­ tury had been laid waste by greedy and prodigal princelings, eager to cash in on the demands for naval timber from the Atlantic and Baltic powers, England, France, and the Dutch republic. And when the oak and beech were gone, the replanting was generally in quickly maturing conifers, according to the pre­ scription o f the first German forestry manuals published in the mid eighteenth century. But even as prolific forests o f fir and larch rose in the heartland o f the old German woods, the cultural imagination o f Germany was being intensely reseeded with the oak groves o f yore. For by the middle o f the eighteenth century the ancient mystique o f rus­ tic innocence, martial virility, and woodland nativism had all converged to cre­ ate a fresh generation o f patriots, steeped in Tacitus and the cult o f the Teutoburger Wald. In the 1760s the poet and dramatist Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock published his epic trilogy o f plays based on the life and death o f Arminius/Hermann. They were written, moreover, in the self-consciously archaic “ bardic” style purportedly derived from the dialects said to have sur­ vived in the oral traditions o f the common Volk.6* And while the cultural enemy in the sixteenth century had been Italy, now it was the new international lan­ guage o f classicism— French— that was held to have debased native German manners and speech. And to the extent that French culture, and the notorious French partiality for rational discourse and skeptical inquiry, dominated the cul­ ture o f the court elites, so it was held to account by this latest generation o f “Arminians” as amoral and cosmopolitan. Redemption was to be found by flee­ ing this Frenchified world o f court and city fashions and returning, once more, to the authentic Germania o f the villages, uncontaminated by modernity. In a climactic scene in the Klopstock drama, immediately before the battle a Druid apostrophizes the oaks o f Germany as the abode o f their gods, the natural embodiment o f the Fatherland: ancient, strong, and indestructible.65 T o root German culture once more in its native soil was the consuming ambition o f the most eloquent and influential o f these custodians o f folkmemory: Johann Gottfried Herder. In a series o f essays Herder attacked the universalist claims o f aesthetes like the scholar Winckelmann, who, from his post as secretary and librarian to a Roman cardinal, insisted on the unarguable supremacy o f (especially Greek) classicism. Instead o f this displaced cos­ mopolitanism, Herder, the heir o f Celtis, argued for a culture organically rooted in the topography, customs, and communities o f the local native tradi­ tion. Authentic native culture, he insisted, embodying the flesh and blood o f true German history, had to be sought not in the idealized forms o f Greek

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nudes but in the unapologetically vernacular arts: folklore, ballads, fairy tales, and popular poetry.66 Instead o f Greek and Roman history, Herder promoted the importance o f the very epoch most aggressively despised by the interna­ tional and Francophone philosophes o f the Enlightenment: the Middle Ages. Where they wrote it o ff as a period o f unalloyed barbarism and superstition, a midnight o f the classical soul, Herder and his followers celebrated it as the best o f all German times: sacred, communal, and heroic. In their imagination, too, they saw not only a medieval German world peopled with the carolling balladeers, the m innescinger, but an as yet unspoiled native landscape— run by boar and wild ox, a great realm o f the forest prolific in treasures for lord and churl alike. It was hardly surprising, then, that these medieval inspirations sent the early generation o f German Romantics to the woods. In 1772, for example, a group o f students at Gottingen University, under the spell o f Klopstock’s tribal Druids, spent a night beneath the moon and stars in what was said to be an ancient oak grove. With their hands linked by garlands made o f oak leaves, they swore eternal friendship and fraternity and constituted themselves a H a in B u n d , literally a “ Grove-League,” from which their druidical odes would seek to rejuvenate their Fatherland.67 Enormous oak trees began to figure again in elaborately allegorical paintings, as the emblem o f Germania itself. Another favorite theme was the withered tree that was prophesied to become green once more when the medieval emperor Frederick Barbarossa, scourge o f the Italians, would return from his centuries-long slumber in the mountain tomb o f the Kyffhauser. When the great day came, he would unwind his beard (which had grown three times about the stone table within the mountain) and emerge from his rock, resurrected like Wotan and Christ, and hang his great shield on the boughs o f the oak, green with the vigor o f new German life.68 The promised triumph o f German greenery over Latin masonry produced a virtual oak-fetish in the art and literature o f the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One o f the most stardingly original o f all German graphic artists o f this period, Karl Wilhelm Kolbe, acquired the nickname o f “ Eichen-Kolbe” (Oaken Kolbe) and used his long rambles in the woods near Dessau as a starting point for etchings that recalled the woodland scenes o f the sixteenth century by the zeal with which they suffocated classical figures in gigantic, all-enveloping vegetation. More conventional landscapists like the Braunschweig painter Pascha Weitsch, obviously swayed by Klopstock’s evo­ cation o f the “ tallest, oldest, holiest oaks,” began to paint the woods o f pol­ larded oaks at Querum, not as conventionally pastoral scenery but as a patriotic tabernacle. In the most powerful o f his many oakwood studies Weitsch painted himself, sketchbook on his lap, while a brilliant light illumi­ nates trees that display both the battering o f ancient history and the luxuriant growth o f a new age.69

T h e w ars a g a in s t N a p o le o n p r o v id e d m o r e o p p o r t u n i t i e s t o c a s t t h e b a t tle b e t w e e n R o m a a n d G e r m a n i a — c i t y a n d f o r e s t , t h e o l i v e a n d t h e o a k — in s till s h a rp e r c o n tr a s ts .

H e in ric h

von

K le is t ’ s H c n u m u is s c b ln c b t , d e s c r ib e d

by

its

a u t h o r as h is “ g if t t o t h e G e r m a n s , ” e x p r e s s l y c a s t i t s e l f a s a b o n d b e t w e e n p a s t a n d p o s t e r i t y , c a lli n g o n th e n a tiv e w a r r io r s fo r f r e e d o m

t o r c d e d ic a te t h e m ­

s e l v e s in t h e g r o v e s o f t h e i r a n c e s t o r s . W h e n G e o r g F r i e d r i c h K e r s t i n g w a n t e d t o p a i n t a m e m o r i a l t o t h r e e f r ie n d s w h o h a d b e e n k i l l e d in t h e w a r , h e p o r ­ t r a y e d t h e m in t h e f l o p p y - h a t t e d n l t d c n t s c b u n i f o r m o f t h e L u t z o w F r e i k o r p s

P a s ch a W e its c h ,

O ak Forest. Near Qtierum with selfportrait, 1800.

A rm in iu s Redivivus in the thick o f an oakwood. This was expressly meant to be a volunteer Homt Guard, and Kersting’s trio (who were in fact killed at different times and in dif ferent places o f battle) have become allegorical incarnations o f the patriotic vol unteer. They are posed in complementary attitudes, the upright and vigilan figure balanced by another figure at rest (but only after the insignia o f the iror cross has given proof o f his valor in combat). Paradoxically, the most famou! o f the three, Theodor Korner, the young Saxon poet who had written stirring calls to arms and who had been killed early on in the fighting, in March 1813 is shown in the glades, pensive and melancholy as if meditating the heavy price o f patriotic sacrifice. Predictably, Korner’s memorial was sited beneath a mas sive and ancient oak. A pendant, painted in 1815, poses a mourning maiden deep in the bowers o f a dense grove, weaving a garland o f oak leaves meant a a poignant signifier o f both victory and death.70

G eorg Friedrich Kersting, On Sentry Duty, 1815.

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D E R H O LZ W EG : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

The Kerstings were shown in an exhibition o f patriotic painting at Dresden in 1814 alongside a painting that became the most enduring o f all the icons o f the Freiheitskrieg: Caspar David Friedrich’s “Chasseur” in the Forest (color illus. 13). Contemporary critics had no difficulty in recognizing the heavy load o f patriotic symbols carried by the painting: the raven, perched on the felled fir stumps (signifying martyred soldiers), singing its song o f death to the isolated French chasseur. But Friedrich’s composition was much more than a mechani­ cal inventory o f such inspirational emblems. It might almost be considered as a bookend to the Altdorfer St. George. Both panels are dominated by a forbid­ ding screen o f foliage that sharply encloses the space within which their histo­ ries may be read. In both cases, too, the forest itself acts German, but there the similarities end. For while the leaves o f Altdorfer’s Silva H ercynia are lit with the illumination o f a sacred triumph, in Friedrich’s fir forest they are edged with the snow o f death. The Christian-German warrior George is seen in heroic pro­ file, whereas the French soldier, serving Napoleon— the new emperor and, by virtue o f his conquests, the king o f Italy, too— is seen from the rear, as if to emphasize his vulnerability. Whereas the woodland solitude seems to be the ally o f St. George, it is evidently the adversary o f the new “ Latin” invader. Even his helmet, accurately described from the French military, seems strangely Roman, as if borrowed from one ofVarus’s lost centurions. Perhaps there were even echoes in their respective weapons, for while the ancient Germans carried javelins and spears not much different from the lance that pierces the dragon, the Romans used swords, represented in Friedrich’s paintings by the weapon trailing clumsily beneath the chasseur's cape. And while St. George is set paral­ lel to the plane o f the forest, as if in consort with it, the hapless chasseur faces it dead-on, pulled into its interior by the relentlessly commanding path leading nowhere good. For where, in the Altdorfer, the vegetation is pierced by light, exposing a space beyond, in the Friedrich there is only blackness. Like Varus’s centurions, the chasseur is surrounded and dwarfed by the impenetrable line o f evergreens, the massed troops o f the reborn Germania. One year earlier, 1813, the year o f the victories o f the Austrian and Prus­ sian monarchs over Napoleon at Leipzig, the brothers Grimm had begun to publish their Altdeutsche W alder (Old German Forests): anthologies o f medieval poetry; legends and fables; anecdotes, jokes, proverbs, and songs; even guides to the folklore o f plants and flowers.71 They had been gathering this material for some years at the request o f the poet Brentano, who had two publishing projects in mind: the folk-song collection D a sK n a b e n W underhom and a book o f folktales. Since they were (with some cause) nervous that Brentano would turn the folk material into embellished romances, the Grimms retained copies for themselves. This was just as well since, taking the careless manner o f the Romantic poet rather too far, Brentano managed to lose the manuscripts in a church cloister in Alsace, no doubt while transported in a

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medieval reverie. From their own material the Grimms then began publishing the fables and fairy tales in 1812 as the volumes known as K in d e r - u n d H a u sm drchen, the anthologies that have come down to us as the “Tales o f the Broth­ ers Grimm.”72 Their suspicions o f Brentano had always arisen from his inability to understand the stories as the fulfilment o f Herder’s call for a rediscovery o f German authenticity. And they fretted lest his poetic inventions smother the essential documentation o f German culture that they believed to be embedded in the tales. Both their journal, the “ Old German Forests,” and the “Tales” were, then, at heart another patriotic weapon to throw in the teeth o f the Corsico-Gallic N ew Roman Empire. It is virtually impossible, as Jack Zipes and many others have noticed, to think o f the Grimm tales without immediately conjuring up a forest.73 And it is always a northern Germanic wood: a place o f firs and beeches and mon­ strously deformed oaks, gnarled and twisted like Kolbe’s devouring vegetable monsters; or the child-destroying “elf-king” o f the alders o f Goethe’s stunning poem “ Erlkonig.” It is also a place where Hansels and Lisels and Franzls, not to mention tailors and soldiers, face the perils o f being robbed, murdered, eaten, or physically altered, or any or all o f the above. But if the forest is a place o f terror it is also the great adjudicator. Roman rules do not apply: social sta­ tion and the force o f conventional law disappear down the dwindling path. Instead a form o f primitive and absolute redress takes place. An ungrateful girl who spurns the elves who brought her strawberries from the snow is severely punished. Toads, not words, drop from her mouth when she tries to speak. The woodland robber who wanted to rob, dismember, and salt his bride gets his comeuppance at the bridal banquet; the princess separated from her twelve brothers at birth is reunited. Ordeal precedes resurrection. Religion and patriotism, antiquity and the future— all came together in the Teutonic romance o f the woods. Figures asleep for centuries might stir into life, not least Germania herself. For the three hundredth anniversary o f Ulrich von Hutten’s Knights’ Rebellion in 1823, Friedrich produced a painting that anthologized all these themes. The figure who stands over Ulrich von Hutten’s forest tomb wears a peculiar combination o f nineteenth-century trousers and altdeutsch pseudo-Renaissance hat and coat. He is, and is not, o f his own time. The historically hybrid dress is supposed to be the costume worn by the citizen volunteers o f the wars o f liberation against Napoleon: self-consciously archaic, as if the fabric o f the older generation o f patriot humanists o f the age o f Celtis and Luther would literally rub o ff on their spiritual descendants. About the pil­ grim (who may be a representation o f Friedrich himself) are the graves o f mod­ ern heroes o f the German wars o f liberation, bringing together the most recent Liberatores G erm an iae with the most ancient, Arminius himself, and von H u t­ ten’s chosen historical doppelganger. And if the connection between ancient and modern Germania were not already sufficiently indicated, a livid blood-red

A rm in iu s Redivivus

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dawn light illuminates a young German oak rising from the tomb and a tall fir tree that provides the canopy o f the sepulchre: the images, respectively, o f national and spiritual resurrection. These images were not, o f course, politically neutral. In post-Napoleonic Europe, dominated by archconservative absolutist monarchies in the German states, even a muted summons to arms was not excused by its patriotic use o f history. But if the figure o f Arminius/Hermann could somehow be associated with the ambitions o f the very same princes, the campaign for national revival could be made more acceptably state-sponsored. And as the domination o f the Austrian Habsburgs began to falter, in the fourth decade o f the nineteenth cen­ tury, more projects for the celebration o f the Hermann-spirit were made pub­ lic. In 1839, for example, the most creative o f Germany’s neoclassical architects, Karl-Friedrich Schinkel, made a drawing for a monument o f Hermann, to be

Caspar David Friedrich, Ulrich von H u tten’s Tomb, 1823. Karl-Friedrich Schinkel, drawing for the Hermannsdenkmal.

set on the site o f his victory in the region that, since the seventeenth century, had been known as the Teutoburger Wald. It explicidy followed Friedrich in bringing together elements o f the native landscape with its mythic history. For Hermann, leaning on his sword, was to be mounted on a pedestal o f unfash­ ioned rock, the whole statue emerging, supernaturally, from the treetops o f the oakwoods that surrounded it. A H erm an n sd en k m a l would eventually be built at the Teutoburger Wald but it would not be to Schinkel’s design.74 Proposals for some sort o f heroic statue went back all the way to the humanist theologian and student o f Celtis, the Saxon Georg Spalatin, in the late fifteenth century, who had actually made a public pilgrimage to what he thought was the site o f the batde in the Teuto­ burger Wald.75 And in the aftermath o f the devastating wars o f the seventeenth century, the largely mythical figure o f the Saxon hero Irminsul was repeatedly

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suggested as a suitable model for a pan-Teutonic monument. In the 1780s there were at least two projects for landscaped pyramids, one o f them produced for the Landgrave o f Hesse-Homburg by his friend the H e rm a n n -dramatist Klopstock. But the most inventive (and fashionable) design was an entire memorial park created on the estate o f the Graf von Bruhl at Seifersdorfer Tal near Dresden. His wife, Christine, in particular, was o f the generation that wor­ shiped Rousseau, and may well have known and seen Rene de Girardin s land­ scaped park at Ermenonville, the center o f which was Rousseau’s tomb on an isle o f poplars.76 The Seifersdorfer Tal version creatively Germanized the pro­ gram to feature a stone altar set in the woods with a shield and banner sus­ pended from a “ Hermanns-oak” both converting the wood into a Teutonic sacred grove and invoking the allied tradition o f the hero-god who sleeps within the oak. In the end, a site just south o f Detmold,

near

Bielefeld,

between the Ems and Weser rivers, prevailed over its com­ petitors,

though

there

were

(and still are) disputes as to the exact location o f the batde. Tacitus had unhelpfully merely located the saltus Teutoburgiensis between the Rhine and the Elbe. The sculptor who offered himself for the work was the Bavarian loseph Ernst von Bandel, whose two years o f acade­ mic study in Rome had not dimmed his German ardor. Von Bandel’s version was in every way more prosaic and predictable than Schinkel’s and altogether more to the official taste o f the German courts.77 The roughcast pedestal (which von Bandel had retained in his early sketches) was now replaced by a circular temple made o f sandstone bricks with ten columns foliated at the capitals in a fanciful pseudo-Teutonic order and surmounted by a blind “cyclopean” or monopteroid cupola on which the hero stood. At the base o f the tem­ ple a flight o f steps would draw the pilgrim-visitor into a reverent darkness from which he could look out onto the dense German woods. Instead o f Schinkel’s brooding warrior resting on his sword, von Bandel’s Hermann brandished it aloft rather like a heldentenor in a Wagner opera. But in the light o f Bismarck’s military road to unification, the sword took on enormous emblematic significance in the eventual project. Bartholdi’s Statue o f Liberty

Kaiser Wilhelm 1 visits von Bandel studio.

A rm in iu s Redivivus would have the torch o f freedom; Bandel’s Hermann would have Nothung, the mystical and omnipotent sword o f the Nibelungen, steeled for heroes. N ot slow to make a point, the sculptured version, duly inscribed with martial epithets that equated the kaiser Wilhelm with Hermann, was supplied by the Krupp arma­ ments company, which had done very well hammering plowshares into swords. Von Bandel slogged away at the project for nearly forty years. Rejected by the Bavarian monarchy, he moved his workshop to the site o f the Groteburg hill just south o f Detmold, officially working for the Landgrave o f Hesse but perpetually delayed by the divisive politics o f nineteenth-century Germany and also by the steeply rising cost. The idea was for all the states o f Germany, includ­ ing Austria, to make contributions, and so they did, though unevenly and not

Workshop for the Hertnannsienkmal, Mew U lm , Minnesota.

always in proportion to their size or wealth. Stirred by the project, German patriotic enthusiasts from Chicago to Buckingham Palace (where Prince Albert eagerly chipped in) dutifully made contributions. But it was only when the issue o f German national leadership had been settled, in the crushing defeat inflicted by Prussia and its allies on Austria and the south German Catholic states in 1866, that von Bandel saw a new opportunity. Though he was Bavarian, he had done a good deal o f work in Berlin, not least a statue o f King Frederick William IV for the university. And now he would shamelessly promote the identifica­ tion o f the triumphant king (soon to be kaiser) William I as the new Arminius. In 1869 he was gratified by a visit from the king himself to inspect the work in progress in von Bandel’s atelier, where he lingered in admiration over the heroic features o f his ancient predecessor in the vast, helmeted head.

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D E R H O LZ W E G : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

And there was always another Rome to vanquish. In 1870 Napoleon I l l ’s empire perished on the battlefields o f Sedan and Metz, crushed by the Prussian army. In Louis XIV’s Hall o f Mirrors at Versailles, a new German Reich was ceremonially brought into being. The defeated French state had been merely the latest edition o f a “ Roman Empire” against which Germania was defined on the field o f battle, and reunited in triumph. Virtually every sketch o f a H erm annsdenkm al had included as an obligatory feature the fasces and/or eagles o f Rome trampled under the feet o f the hero, and now the detail seemed espe­ cially satisfying. So, in 1875, the fifth year o f the Second Reich, the monument was fin­ ished. T o mark the event, an official book o f colored lithographs and gushing poems o f praise was published, duly identifying Wilhelm I as the successor o f Arminius, indomitable war-chief, bringer o f unity and national freedom78 (color illus. 14). In mid-August the count o f Lippe had his hour o f glory play­ ing host to the kaiser for the official opening. It was orchestrated as a stupen­ dous imperial triumph, with hundreds o f banners and pennants flying the imperial colors and the arms o f the now elaborately obsequious dependent princes o f the empire. The Arminius Redivivus, Kaiser Wilhelm I, sat in an immense pseudo-medieval pavilion at the top o f the Groteburg listening to a Lutheran preacher fulminate passionately on German destiny. Three actors got up in Romano-Teutonic costume impersonated the hero, their swords held aloft in the August sunshine. The vast crowd could buy little replicas o f Hermann done in plaster or alabaster. Beer foamed; champagne bottles stood at attention in silver buckets; military brass oompahed over the hill and the summer air grew heavy with jubilation and the blue smoke that issued from thousands o f “Hermann” cigars.79 Von Bandel may not have been the most flamboyantly inspired o f monu­ mental sculptors but he evidently knew his public. He provided it with exactly the image o f the Wagnerian hero it expected: whiskery, wing-helmeted, flour­ ishing the invincibly tempered Nothung in the skies, a repatriated version o f Tacitus’s Arminius as “the liberator o f Germany.”80 And it was an image that literally went round the Germanic world, on Porto Rico tobacco tins; on the masthead o f the Sons o f H erm ann News in Texas; and not least in the monu­ ment, one hundred and two feet tall, created by Julius Berndt for the patriotic Sons o f Hermann in New Ulm, Minnesota.8? Von Bandel was rewarded for his perseverance by being portrayed in the memorial book as the human essence o f Teutonic simplicity, creating the fig­ ure o f the Cheruscan hero while living in a rustic H u tte quaintly decorated in the local peasant style, listening to “ birdsong, year in, year out.” He was a paragon, in fact, o f the ancient virtues that Germany’s sociologist o f “ field and forest”— Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl— extolled in his N a tu ra l History o f the G er­ m an P eople82

A rm in iu s R edivivus

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Riehl’s intellectual self-discovery ran parallel to his nation’s. H e was born in 1823, the year o f the von Hutten tercentenary, but his family background was classically Enlightened. Grandpa Riehl was devoudy Lutheran and doggedly loyal to the House o f Nassau, for whom he was a minor official. Papa Riehl, born in 1789, saw the light o f liberty and became infatuated with the Napoleonic brand o f raison d ’etat, residing for long periods in Paris and only returning to Wiesbaden with great reluctance. Perhaps he never got over Waterloo, for though (like so many bureaucrats) he managed to transfer his loy­ alty back to the old dynasty, he fell prey to deep depressions that ended with his suicide in 1839. Riehl was sixteen when his father died, but he went ahead with an education designed for his entry into the church. A t Marburg Univer­ sity the lectures o f the historian Friedrich Dahlmann and the grand old man o f patriotic poetry, Ernst Moritz Arndt, prompted him to change course. He became instead a Man o f Letters, with a bent for the more theoretical side o f politics and literature. Establishing himself in the genre o f learned journalism (not an oxymoron in Germany then or now), Riehl returned to Wiesbaden, where he edited the Nassauische A lleg em ein e Z eitu n g . During the failed revolutions o f 1848-49 he embraced a cautious political liberalism but was adamantly opposed to any kind o f social radicalism. The spectre o f social revolution, however fleeting and insubstantial, proved to be a crucial turning point for Riehl, as for so many oth­ ers in German intellectual life. Unlike Marx, with whom he has sometimes been compared, not wholly absurdly, Riehl became a great deal less, rather than more, radical. But his conservatism, which had been Romantic and instinctive before the revolution, was now self-consciously given the weight o f social sci­ ence. What he shared with the sociologists o f the left was a bitter hostility to industrial capitalism and metropolitan life, seeing both as corrosive o f the moral solidarity he thought inherent in traditional work and community. Riehl was, then, the first to elaborate what a later and much better known sociologist, Karl Tonnies, would define as the opposition between G em einschaft (an organically bonded community) and Gesellschaft (an aggregate o f individuals connected only by material interests). In his horror at the prospect o f a society dominated by the religions o f materialism and individualism, Riehl clearly belonged in the company o f Thoreau, Ruskin, and Carlyle, all o f whom were fierce critics o f contem po­ rary capitalism. But he was more than simply their German counterpart, for he was always enough o f Arndt’s student to have H e im a t at the very core o f his theory. And that H e im a t is for him much more than a patriotic sentiment: it is a physical topography with specific customs and idioms, in short the memories particular to Germany, embedded in its soil. His collective title for the three books published between 1851 and 1855, The N a t u r a l H istory o f the G erm a n People, was quite apt, for it represented an attempt to invent a

1 14

D E R H O LZ W EG : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

sociology o f habitat in that country, but in a language that was strikingly poetic. The second o f Riehl’s volumes was called L a n d u n d L eute (Land and Peo­ ple). It was organized around a series o f oppositions between those aspects o f the land shaped by the engine o f the market and those which had escaped its force. The “road” connected producers and consumers while the

path

con­

nected villagers and citizens. The most sharply opposed countryside worlds were those o f the open field and the forest— respectively, commercialized agri­ culture and the wilderness. They even produced different rural types. Foresters and woodcutters might statistically rank as the more impoverished o f the two populations. But it was the field-villagers who, according to Riehl, constituted a true “proletariat” since they felt themselves exploited and turned into “heart­ less skinflints.” Having to live on their wits, the woodlanders were more men­ tally spry than the “heavy-jowled” villagers, and while they were coarser, they were also better-humored. The forests were “the heardand o f [German] folk culture . . . so that a village without a forest is like a town without any histori­ cal buildings, theater or art galleries. Forests are games fields for the young, feasting-places for the old.”83They were, in short, the home o f community; the absolute opposite o f a Germany made over into one vast overupholstered, department-store-manufactured bourgeois parlor. If, in this scheme, the root­ less Jew was the purveyor o f this corrupted, citified society, the forester was his antithesis— the embodiment o f ethnic authenticity, rooted like his trees in the ancient earth o f the Fatherland. A great deal o f this, o f course, belongs more in the fabulous realm o f the brothers Grimm than the gritty social science Riehl was supposed to profess. But not all o f his observations lacked historical substance. When he boasted that Ger­ many had somehow preserved large areas o f woodland that elsewhere had gone under the axe, he knew very well that this miracle was a direct result o f the coun­ try’s relative economic and social retardation. Indeed he rejoiced in the good fortune o f backwardness. Renaissance princes like Duke Albert V o f Bavaria had, in the mid sixteenth century, established elaborate forest regulations, complete with a personnel answerable directly to the court and backed up with savage penalties for infringements.84 And these same laws, designed to protect the princely hunting preserves, had stayed on the statute books right through to the nineteenth century. Germany’s fragmentation into countless principalities, he knew, had also helped to maintain these splendid anachronisms from more rational and economically driven plans that might have been imposed by a greatstate bureaucracy. And it had been spared the voracious demands for naval tim­ ber which in the eighteenth century had denuded whole regions o f France and England. Germany’s impotence, then, had been its forests’ boon. This unearned good fortune, Riehl knew, was unlikely to last. Already, sub­ stantial tracts o f forests, especially those which had formerly belonged to the

A rm in iu s Redivivus

l 15

Catholic bishops and nobles o f southwestern Germany, had been invaded by light industry in the shape o f glass factories. And when he looked at Westphalia where the Teutoburger Wald itself was supposed to be located, and the sud­ denly burgeoning Ruhr, he saw the remnant o f woodland Germany in dire peril, a superb anomaly about to be consumed by the smelting furnace. Somehow he needed to show that their preservation was not simply a mat­ ter o f patriotic sentimentality but functionally important for the life o f the nation. And he was under no illusion that he alone would save the woodlands or the kind o f traditional social solidarity he thought they sheltered. But he aimed to write something that would bring past and present enthusiasms for the forest together so that its protection would come to be seen as a priority o f state. And he saw ways in which government might be induced to act, if necessary against private and market interests, as the protector o f the landscape patrimony. Paradoxically, the most traditional and authoritarian institutions— like the hunting prerogatives o f dynasts— might be redefined as a modem form o f social paternalism designed to uphold public rights against the invasive absolutism o f private property. Thus (as in so many other areas o f nineteenth-century German life) feudalism shaded into welfare statism, and the Landgrave o f Hesse’s ordinances governing birchbranch-gleaning and the prohibition on woodland hogs could now be made over as modem Forest Law. On the subject o f common rights to gather firewood from the forest floor, his views were indeed identical with those o f Karl Marx, who, in 1842, had published a fierce polemic on the subject in the Rheiniscbe Zeitunjj.*5 And Riehl rejoiced when the government o f Anhalt-Dessau in 1852 decreed that all oaks, whether on public or private land, were the property o f the sovereign and fell within the domain o f “forest.” Thus even solitary and ancient trees (of the kind whose execution Thoreau mourned so bitterly in Concord) could be declared legal “forest” and protected accordingly.86 Riehl was phenomenally successful, partly in ways that he could never have anticipated. The N a tu r a l H istory went through twelve editions, with many o f its axioms, including its anti-semitism, forming the core o f a whole array o f antiurban and anti-modernist ideologies.87 Riehl himself became an intellectual grandee, first at the court o f the Wittelsbach kings o f Bavaria in Munich, where he moved in the 1850s as press adviser to King Maximilian, with a professor­ ship at the university attached to the post. Embraced with equal fervor by the rest o f Germany, he was elevated to the knightly R ittersch a ft and even became a privy councillor at the court o f the kaiser. More specifically his influence helped establish forestry as a serious academic and scientific discipline at Munich University, where in 1878 no fewer than five chairs were created in all aspects o f the subject.88 By the time he died in 1897, covered with imperial honors and oak garlands, the Holzw eg that Riehl had cut through the forest had forked into two distinct paths, the practical and the mystical. One track had been marked out in the eigh­

1 16

D E R H O LZ W E G : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

teenth century by forbidding pedagogues o f state forestry like Gottfried Moser, whose G rundsatze der Forstokonomie taught budding German silviculturalists to treat the woods like a laboratory. Generations o f dutiful students followed, turn­ ing topping and lopping and dibbling and grafting into a high science, rising to the ultimate German eminence o f a university chair at Giessen or Munich. By 1827 Herr Professor Johann Christian Hundeshagen could deliver himself o f an entire encyclopedia o f the new science, bristling with tables, diagrams, charts, cross sections.89 So when the new Reich came into being in 1870, it could be greeted with an expanding empire o f German forestry, boasting learned journals, scientific communications on botanical diseases, arboreta, experimental nurseries, and training programs for serious bark-scratchers clad in green coats and hats. The highnesses o f the imperial forestry— Adam Schwappach at Eberswald, Kurt Michaelis at Bramwald, and Heinrich Mayr at Munich— not only com­ bined historical erudition with practical learning; they also were instrumental in committing the national and provincial governments to accept responsibili­ ties for woodland management. Every tree felled to create yet another o f their formidable tomes could be considered an investment in political education. Considerable areas that had been arbitrarily cleared depending on the vagaries o f the timber market were now maintained as “forest stock” by the state and in some cases replanted with oak and beech as well as the more commercially ver­ satile conifers. This was nothing that Green politics would now recognize as the ancestor o f “deep ecology,” that is to say, the supersession o f economic by ecological criteria o f forest maintenance, and it was quite unsentimental about old and mixed growths. But it had succeeded in persuading the state that the German woods were more than simply an economic resource: they were in some mysteriously indeterminate way an essential element o f the national char­ acter; they were, as Riehl put it, “what made Germany German.” Sometimes that woodland ethnicity surfaced even beyond the formal bor­ ders o f the Reich. In 1873 the painter Edmund Kanoldt discovered, to his hor­ ror, that the ancient oakwood o f La Serpentara at Olevano, east o f Rome, was doomed to be felled. Ever since it had been discovered by Joseph Anton Koch, the grove had been virtually annexed by generations o f German painters in Rome, as their forest home-away-ffom-home. Kanoldt himself had sketched and painted there, and such was his indignation at its fate that he recruited the German ambassador in Rome for its preservation. With the heavy guns o f offi­ cialdom weighing in, enough money was raised to buy the wood outright and it was presented to the kaiser, who established it in perpetuity as the “ Estate o f German Artists.” In appreciation for the patronage, a K aiser-Eiche was planted at La Serpentara to mark Wilhelm I’s ninetieth birthday. T o this day the prop­ erty remains the summer resort o f the German Academy in Rome. Though barely ninety oak trees survive, they still constitute a little outcrop o f the Ger­ man woods, in the very heart o f the Latin state.

A rm in iu s Redivivus The second path took D eu tsch tu m — Germanness— into darker and les innocent glades— though it would also be a mistake to assume that every for est tramper in lederhosen was a recruit for the Reich to come. The Wander vogel youth movement and the Ramblers who communed, Siegfried style around bonfires on forested hills, attracted not just those who saw them selves as the new generation o f H e rm a n n sk in d er, but also some on the left not least the young Walter Benjamin.90 Left and right, after all, shared th< contempt for bourgeois urban materialism proclaimed by Riehl and wen prepared to follow him in extolling nature, and especially the sublime Ger man portion o f it, as o f transcendent value. The craving was for some ideal

Celebrants at the Hermannsdenkmal.

ized, immutable rural community that had not been prostituted by industria modernity.91 Ultimately, though there may have been some leftist stragglers on the way the trail through the beechwoods led to terrible rehearsals o f the H erm anns schlacht. This time the enemy was not just the legions o f the hapless Varus bu the entire Enlightenment tradition o f humane liberalism. In August 1925, thi fiftieth anniversary o f the H erm an n sd en k m a l became an opportunity for fift thousand ultranationalists, organized in the Jungdeutschenordnen (Order o Young Germans) and the paramilitary Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet) brigades dressed in a variety o f historical costumes, to march on the Detmold monu ment in the woods as though they were marching on Weimar’s democracy Some evidently imagined themselves already as a new order o f Teutonic knight whose black-on-white cross banner they waved from beneath von Bandel’

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D E R H O LZ W EG : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

Germanic pillars.92 The bonfires o f the forest camps would, before long, come to the center o f town and their fuel would not be birch bark. Tacitus’s observation that their isolated habitat had made the Germans the least mixed o f all European peoples would o f course become the lethal obsession o f the Nazi tyranny. G erm anentum — the idea o f a biologically pure and inviolate race, as “ natural” to its terrain as indigenous species o f trees and flowers— featured in much o f the archaeological and prehistorical literature both before and after the First World War. The catastrophe o f defeat in 1918 seemed only to make this hunger for tribal reassertion more desperate. The linguist and ancient historian Gustav Kossinna, for example, in 1921 published his archaeological work (in which the German tribes were given an ominously expansive territory) as Germ an Prehistory: A Pre-em inently N a tio n a l D isci­ pline. And not surprisingly, Riehl’s complaint that Jews were disproportion­ ately represented in the commercial, urban, and cosmopolitan G esellschaftthzt he believed was eating away at the true Germany was adopted as prophetic by the founding fathers o f Nazi ideology like Alfred Rosenberg. And though it seems unlikely that Riehl would have welcomed their embrace any more than Nietzsche, Riehl was honored by the Nazis as one o f their progenitors, a fate which has guaranteed his subsequent total eclipse. But his imitators and vulgarizers multiplied like toadstools in the autumn rain, whether, like Otto Freucht, they insisted on the redemptive uniqueness o f woodland society, or, like Kurt Hueck, issued ringing calls to defend the integrity o f the woodland ecosystem.93 After 1933, forest themes invaded virtually every realm o f art and politics. The nineteenth-century novels o f Adalbert Stifter, which evoked woodland and mountain landscape with extraordinary immediacy and musical force, were vulgarly reinterpreted as catechisms against liberal modernity. Even modern writers like Alfred Doblin, exiled and alienated from the new dicta­ torship, consciously engaged with the legacy o f Romantic nature writing in their radically modern reinterpretations o f the woodland.94 Books that attrib­ uted German racial and national distinctiveness to its woodland heritage, like Karl Rebel’s 1934 D er W ald in der deutschen K u lt u r (The Forest in German Culture) and Julius Kober’s 1935 Deutscher W ald, Deutsches Volk (German Forest, German People), kept the presses busy and filled the bookstores. Music, film (and o f course the first act o f D ie W alkure, where the fate o f the hero Siegmund is sealed by his pulling Nothung from the heart o f an ash)— all ensured that the H e im a t had never seemed so leafy. Whenever possible, Hider, the Reichsforstmeister Goring, and Himmler were photographed in sylvan settings. And in 1934 Walther Schonichen, who was to occupy high office in the forestry and landscape administration o f the Reich, published his album o f the German primeval forests, where fir trees were made, once again, to resemble soldiers. In one o f the most extraordinary o f Schonichen’s pho­

A rm in iu s R edivivus

l l 9

tographs, an oak and a beech were locked together in the kind o f apparent copulation that was usually reserved for Nazi kitsch. Arguably, no German government had ever taken the protection o f the German forests more seri­ ously than the Third Reich and its Reichsforstminister Goring. Reluctant eleven-year-olds were turned into expert leaf-peepers through programs on forest ecology introduced into schools and were shown how the woodlands demonstrated the laws o f biological competition and survival from the earwig to the eagle. Conservation was institutionalized through the creation o f an entire administration run by the likes ofSchonichen (who lectured on the sub­ ject at Berlin University from 1934 to 1936).95 It is, o f course, painful to acknowledge how ecologically conscientious the most barbaric regime in modern history actually was. Exterminating millions o f lives was not at all incompatible with passionate protection for millions o f trees. This is not to make an obscene syllogism: to imply in any way that m od­ ern environmentalism has any kind o f historical kinship with totalitarianism. The American experience, as we shall see, demonstrates how, in a different cul­ ture, wilderness could be taken as an emblem o f democracy rather than its enemy (though even that history would expose deep and still unresolved con­ flicts about the kind o f role the state should play as protector o f the forest and the degree o f its authority).96 The long, undeniable connections between the mythic memory o f the for­ est and militant nationalism have created a zone o f great moral angst in Ger­ many. Since the war a distinctively right-wing nostalgic political ecology has appeared only in Austria, German Green politics being a virtual monopoly o f the left. But the fierce divisions between more and less militant wings o f the movement represent a painful argument about the price to be paid by the envi­ ronment for accepting the normal processes o f representative democracy. The more militant wing, in Germany as elsewhere, see their cause as a revolution­ ary contestation with bourgeois capitalism for the fate o f the earth, and crave the authority to impose salutary solutions for what they present as a crisis o f paramount importance. Those who seek more modestly to avert and correct its greatest damage are more uneasy about abridging individual liberties in the name o f the earth and much less sure o f the inherence o f rights in nonhuman organisms. Above all, though, Green politics is sited in the present and the future, with only the very remote past (at least in Europe) invoked as a sacred ancestor. There are merely peremptory and nervously embarrassed glances over the shoulder at the myth and memory o f the German landscape, as if to take the forest trail, the Holzweg, back through time, is to necessarily become disori­ ented, lost in its darkness. The very term H olzw ejj in German carries that sec­ ondary meaning: a lure for the unwary ending in front o f Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread cottage.

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Yet there have been, in postwar Germany, those who have been willing to re-enter the forest o f German history, not as innocent scouts but as woodland exorcists, determined to track down the ogres o f myth in their own lair. And o f these woodsmen none has been more single-minded in his pursuit o f land­ scape memory than Anselm Kiefer.

iv

Waldsterben

By the time Anselm Kiefer moved there in 1971 not much was left o f the Hercynian forest. He had come to live in the Odenwald, the handsome country between the Main and the Neckar that Sebastian Munster and the Renaissance geographers had identified as the southwestern bloc o f the great pan-Germanic woodland. In the early Middle Ages the Odenwald, resting on its crumbly sand­ stone bed, had resisted the kind o f clearance and setdement that had already affected much o f the woodlands in the rest o f northwest Europe. For centuries its only inhabitants practiced primitive slash-and-burn culture, and when monas­ teries like the great Benedictine establishment at Lorsch finally set about clear­ ing some o f the woods, they created a landscape in which there was an unusually abrupt boundary between the cultivated field and the dense forest.97 Since then the broadleaf hardwoods o f the Odenwald had surrendered to farmland, which was restocked in the nineteenth century with commercial conifers. Though it would not be until the 1980s that the German govern­ ment would begin to take systematic scientific surveys o f the damage done by sulfur dioxide emissions, and for the term Waldsterben— forest-death— to become the common coin o f Green environmentalism, it was already appar­ ent that the Odenwald, like other areas o f the ancient silva H ercynia (notably the Harz, the Bayerischer Wald, and the Schwarzwald), had suffered dread­ fully during the heyday o f uncontrolled industrialism.98 But even if there was precious little o f the sylvan piety o f the early German monks about the Oden­ wald o f the 1970s, Kiefer, who evidently had a thing about arboreal myth, cer­ tainly knew something o f its ancient and medieval history. Newly married, he moved with his wife into an old schoolhouse in the village o f Hornbach, about forty miles south o f Frankfurt, and converted its timbered attic space for his studio.99 Beyond the village the woodlands were broken by broad stretches o f agricultural land, orchards, and gently rolling hills and meadows.

Anselm Kiefer, Untitled, right half, 19 7 1.

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Did Kiefer take the morbidity o f the trees to heart? He had grown up in Donaueschingen, close to the Black Forest, and now the closest town o f any size was Buchen: “ the beeches.” He also had a weakness for puns which made him d ie Kiefer, the “ pine tree.” One o f his first Odenwald paintings has his own head inserted at the top o f a fir forest crowned with a nimbus o f sacred fire. Another, M a n in the Forest (1971), had him in geherically mysticoreligious robes, holding aloft a torch; yet another lying prone with a tree sprout­ ing from his loins like the medieval Jesses from whom grew the tree o f the Passion. Flirting with sacrilege, he was St. Anselm; a herald o f resurrection; an evergreen in the beechwood. But in its masculine form, der K iefer becomes something else, the “ maxilla” : the jawbone instrument o f speech. Kiefer was casting himself not just as the mustachioed messiah of the woods but as the carrier o f the

jawbone:

Samson

among the Philistines, the riddling speaker in the land o f the mute. Kiefer

was

born

in

M arch 1945, as Allied troops

Caspar David

w ere

Friedrich, Traveller Looking Over a Sea o f Fog.

discovering

another

b ee ch w o o d — B u ch enw ald — and w ere

A llied red ucing

warplanes the

cities

and the landscape o f the T h ird R eich to ashes. B u t Kiefer

has

vehem ently

denied that there ever was m eaning to w h at the G e r­ mans

called

“ G ro u n d

Z e r o .” T h e caesura, he has said, was a cultural co n v e­ nience, like the sudden onset o f collective amnesia. “ In 19 45, after the ‘ acci­ d e n t’ as it is so em phatically p u t, peop le th o u g h t n o w w e start from scratch. T h e past w as tab o o , [m y] dra g g in g it up o n ly caused repulsion and distaste.” 100 H e w as co m m itted to b eco m in g a cultural nuisance, w o rryin g aw ay at the scabs o f m em ory until they revealed open and livid w o un d s again. Kiefer’s first exhibited work consisted o f a series o f photographs o f himself in boots and breeches making the Nazi Sieg heil salute on different European sites. The title, Occupations, was unsubtle but it made its point, half parody, half sermon. If this was clowning around by a sixties dropout law student, the

l 23

Waldsterben

corners o f the clown’s mouth were turned down. And behind the posturing there was a studious, even bookish intellect, acutely aware o f the continuities o f German myths and icons. One o f the locations for Occupations was a rocky shore, quoted from the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich with Kiefer’s absurdly solitary Nazi substituted for Friedrich’s mystical sea-gazer seen from the rear. A t the core o f this strategy o f embarrassment was an obstinate deter­ mination to force together culturally acceptable elements o f the German heroic and mythic tradition with its unacceptable historical consequences. The next effort along these lines was a terrifying album o f images o f The F looding o f H e i­ delberg: the citadel o f traditional German culture engulfed through an act o f wilful lunatic destruction. The overflowing o f the banks o f the Rhine was a G otterd dm m eru ng that could only remind Kiefer’s parents’ gener­ ation o f their own historical version o f the catastrophe. Kiefer

was

provocative,

even brazen about his chal­ lenge to conventional deco­ rum,

confessing

that

to

understand fascism he needed

A.nselm Kiefer, Besetzungen

to some degree to re-enact its

[Occupations),

megalomania. The stance was

1969.

perverse, threatening, daring to be misunderstood, which it certainly was. But he was saved from

obscene

tomfoolery

about the crematoria by his aggressive historicism, born, I believe,

from

an

authentic

determination to explore the modern fate o f landscape myth. Early in the

1970s

he was

encouraged by the most creative and aggressively confrontational o f Germany’s postmodernistartists, Joseph Beuys, who in his manifold (and less ambiguous) fashion wasforcinghis countrymen to face

the reality o f their historical expe­

rience. In the same year that Kiefer had come to the Odenwald, Beuys had staged a theatrical (and brilliantly successful) demonstration in the Grafenberger Wald outside Diisseldorf against a proposed conversion o f part o f the woods into country-club tennis courts. Together with fifty students and disci­ ples Beuys swept the woods with birch brooms in a kind o f ritual exorcism o f the bourgeoisie, painting crosses and rings on die threatened trees as if he were

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affirming the ancient Teutonic religion ofwood-spirits. “ If anyone ever tries to cut down these trees,” he warned, “we shall sit in the branches.” Later he would run, flamboyandy and unsuccessfully, as a Green candidate for the Euro­ pean Parliament in Strasbourg, Germania yet again challenging the hegemony o f (the Treaty of) Rome.101 But Beuys was as uncomfortable with the prag­ matic processes o f politics as he was with the conventions o f modern art. Instead he sought, especially toward the end o f his life, to take some sort o f civic and historical action that would have direct public significance well beyond the norms o f artistic communication. So his contribution to the “ Documenta 7” show at Kassel in 1982 took the form o f the characteristically ambi­ tious project o f “Seven Thousand Oaks” to be planted in the center o f German cities. He wanted, so he said, to practice Verwaldung: afforestation as redemp­ tion. “ It suggests making the world a big forest, making towns and environ­ ments forest-like.” 102 At his death in 1986 more than five thousand had been planted, and a year later his son Wenzel planted the last o f the trees by way o f memorial.103 K u ltu rla ndschaft versus tennis; living oak against dead concrete. How could Kiefer resist this invitation to rediscover the organic materiality o f Ger­ man art? Like his guru (in this case, not too extravagant a term), Kiefer saw himself in revolt against what he took to be the bourgeois pabulum o f com­ mercial culture. And also like Beuys, he meant to reject the a historical and cos­ mopolitan modernism o f the art coming out o f New York. In fact, o f course, Pop Art was the obvious child o f American urban history and culture, but along with other versions o f the avant-garde, like color-field painting, it was seen by Beuys and Kiefer as uprooted from narratives o f time and place. What they minded most o f all was the narcissism o f the avant-garde, its insistence that the only interesting subject left for art was art. Hence the increasingly precious and reflexive variations on the venerable modernist theme o f the uncoupling o f painterly process and its ostensible objects, the endless pirouettes around the holy o f holies: representation theory. As he announced in a series o f self-consciously grandiose paintings, the Bilderstreit (The Dispute o f Paintings), Kiefer had more weighty things on his mind than silk-screened Marilyns. And to express those things, he needed a reinvention o f traditional forms; above all, landscape and history painting. What he did was to collapse the one into the other, exactly reversing abstrac­ tion’s metaphysical obligations to push the implications o f painting beyond and through the picture. Where Piet Mondrian had launched himself from the representation o f a tree toward abstract essence, Kiefer returned to mate­ riality, in one o f the Bilderstreit paintings literally nailing his palette to an enormously magnified trunk whose texture fills and overwhelms the whole picture surface (color illus. 15). Where Mondrian had transformed a tree into a grid whose lines extended toward infinity, Kiefer designed his paintings to

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D E R H O LZ W E G : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

return those co m p ositio n al lines back to their narrative fu n c tio n , a rebu ttal he cru d ely o verad vertised in P iet M on d ria n — H erm annsschlacht. A b stractio n p rized ligh tn ess, flatness, the airy, and the cerebral. V e ry w e ll, K iefer tu rn ed back to G erm an expressionism , for the raw textu re , the g ritty m ateriality, o f historical tru th. M o d ern ism u pen d ed the pictu re plane d e ad -o n to the b eh o ld e r, rejo icin g in the in teg rity o f flatness. B u t K iefer w as c o n c ern e d w ith a d ifferen t kind o f integrity: that o f the u n d isgu ised sto ryte ller, th e o rchestrato r o f a visual Gesamtkunstnverk: a total ex p erien ce, at o n ce o p era tic, p o etic , and epic. S o he pu shed the plane back d o w n , u sin g aggressively deep perspective to create the b ig o peratic spaces in w h ich his histories c o u ld be enacted .

A t the o utset those histories operated at the tan gen t o f m yth and gospel. A path th ro u g h a naked w inter forest m arked o u t by the b o d y o f a snake ends celestially beyon d the frame at the steps to K iefer’s w o o d e n attic; the em p ty w o o d en space holds Sieg m u n d ’ s fateful sw ord, N o th u n g , b lo o d ied and stuck into the floorboards. T h at same space is opened up to the im possibly m o n u ­ m ental dim ensions o f a tim ber hall o f the “ spiritual heroes” o f G erm any, their nam es (includ ing W agner, Beuys, and the R om antic “ n atu re” novelist A d albert Stifter) all in danger o f im m olation from the torches bu rn in g fiercely in the w o o d en cham ber. As a w o rk from 19 74 made explicit (M alen=V erbrennen [ P ainting = B u rn in g ]), Kiefer cam e to think o f his painting as an aggressive re­ enactm ent o f historical destru ction, literally as a “ b u rn in g .” S o w here R o m a n ­ tic art reiterated the sentim ental celebration o f native landscapes, his art did

W aldsterben

127

what history did: it burned them. (Later he would literally burn books in C a u ­ terization o f the R u r a l D istr ic t o f Buchen, where the Buchen beech leaves and the leaves o f the book share, as indeed they did under National Socialism, the same catastrophic fate.) The tree-lined hills o f Pomerania can be glimpsed at the top o f a painting whose surface is filled with a black-scorched field, flecked with red flame and white ash. The Brandenburg heathland is turned into a drab, barren waste relieved only by a pathetic group o f silver birch, the walking wounded o f war, staring down an interminable path that marks the perspective line o f the paint­ ing, through to the vanishing point and even beyond, a route march through the Brandenburg March o f unutterable desolation. Germany was not yet out o f the woods, and neither was Anselm Kiefer. In 1974 he drew on the national reverence for both wood carving and woodcut engraving to produce a series o f prints in which “ Germany’s facial types” were seen barely emerging from the grain o f timber. And at the same time, his title C ha rco a l f o r Two Thousand T ears suggested yet again that the racial archetypes that were proclaimed by the Third Reich to endure for two millennia would do so only as burned and blackened sacrifices. Tw o years later the artist made another, decisive engagement with the myth and memory o f the German past.104 In Varus (color illus. 16) the line o f

Anselm Kiefer, Germany’s

perspective leads the beholder along a wintry, blood-stained path, where the

Spiritual Heroes,

dirty snow seems mixed with ashes, into the depths o f the Teutoburger Wald,

973-

'

made dark and sinister. Kiefer had invoked Caspar David Friedrich before, almost parodically substituting himself for Friedrich’s own persona, seen from the rear, the R iickenfigur. N ow he quoted him again, specifically The “ C ha s­ seur” in the Forest. But instead o f the solitary French soldier, the generic impe­ rialist lost in the Teutonic woods, Kiefer has scrawled in the Roman’s name in burnt-charcoal black. And in place o f the overpowering, sacred fir forest, the emblem o f national resurrection, Kiefer has scraggly, weather-beaten trees, their tops invisible, their lower trunks scarred and denuded by the toils o f war; a forest filled with the filth o f death like Dante’s sanguinary, suicidal trees, a forest that is itself in the tormented throes o f Waldsterben. Spiked upper branches form an archway o f spears, literally a mock triumph, like an honor guard o f soldiers at a wedding. This, however, is a consummation o f slaughter, followed by a momentous birth: the historical beginning o f D eu tschtum , o f Germanness. Hermann and his wife, Thusnelda, lie in wait along the Holzweg. They too are unable to escape the blotchy spills o f blood, for they too would perish in the tangle o f tribal and family hatreds, Thusnelda’s father, Segestes, allying with the Romans to destroy his son-in-law. The hapless Varus, inscribed in deathly black, faces down the path o f Schicksal, his historical fate. He is there in name, not person, because his adop­ tion into the founding myth o f Germany requires that an actual historical actor

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D E R H O LZ W EG : T H E T R A C K T H R O U G H T H E W O O D S

be stripped do w n to a sym bolic essence— a sign , in this case, that R om an im p e­ rial hubris is abou t to m eet its com eupp ance at the hands o f w o o d lan d free­ d o m . O th e r nam es, im portant makers o f the A rm in ius m yth , ha n g from the branches o r are attached to the b atd e g rou n d by w hite tendrils o f m em ory. T h ere to o , perched in the tree o r tied to the battleg ro u n d b y w h ite tendrils o f m em ory, are all the m em orialists and decorators o f the primal m yth: the bards o f the Herm anns-Schlacht, K lo psto ck and Kleist; vo n E ich en d o rff, G ra b b e, and Schlegel. So the path d o w n w hich K iefer leads us is the track o f tim e. It is n o t, ho w ever, o p en-end ed. A n o th er tree trunk marks its closure at the vanishing point. Just as decisively as in the hall o f “ spiritual h eroes,” w e are m ade to feel enclosed, trapped in a tim bered vault; a forest cu l-de-sac, a Holzweg for V arus, for H erm ann, and for G erm an y .105

F o r a w hile K iefer h im self seem ed, like V arus (rather than A rm in ius), trapped in the T e u to b u rg e r W ald ’s forest o f m yth, returning again and again to the Herm anns-Schlacht as the primal sym bol o f G erm an y’s cultural identity. In three m ore versions o f the Wege der Weltweisheit— die Herm annsschlacht (W ays o f W orld ly W isdo m — A rm in ius’s B attle), the forest battle-site has receded in to the backgro u n d, w here the base o f the trees beco m es a funeral pyre o f bu rn ing logs. In the Am sterdam version snake-like roots coil from the lo gs, en tw in in g them selves abo u t figures w h o n o w include the engineers o f

Anselm Kiefer, Paths of the Wisdom of the World, Her­ mann’s Battle. 1978-80.

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German’s military myths— von Clausewitz and von Schlieffen— along with its cultural mythmakers like Schleiermacher and Fichte. “ I chose these person­ ages because power abused them,” he has said.106 For the version now in Chicago this family tree o f corrupted idealism becomes more literally wooden. Kiefer used the print-form most associated with native Germanic identity, the woodcut (which had been self-consciously re-created by expressionists such as Kirchner and Nolde),107 to create his pantheon. Unlike other pantheons, though, the figures memorialized are not unmixed heroes. For alongside philosophers o f the German Enlightenment like Immanuel Kant and poets like Holderlin are to be discovered artists o f death like the armaments magnate Alfred Krupp and the architect o f Prussian military supremacy, Helmuth von Moltke. In one way or another many o f the figures are, like Kiefer himself, cultural foresters: Adalbert Stifter, for example, the lyrical novelist o f the H ochw ald, and Carl Maria von Weber, whose opera D e r Freischiitz, populated with hunters and woodlanders, sent Richard Wagner into ecstasies over the Fatherland.108 And an almost obligatory presence is the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose inaugural address as rector o f the University o f Freiburg in 1934 was an infa­ mous vindication o f many o f the Third Reich’s most cherished dogma on will and the state. After the war Heidegger, whose deep engagement in the ambi­ guities that lie between language and act marked him out as the link between Nietzsche and modern phenomenology, retreated to the depths o f the Black Forest. There, for some years, he affected a kind o f sylvan hermitage, still implacably alienated from the technological twentieth century' and addressing the local villagers in what was purported to be the ancient “Alemannic” Ger­ man dialect. It was there, too, that Heidegger published his own ruminations under the tide Holzwege: the paths through the forest that led to a historical dead end. And it is in just such a wooden blankness, the darkest grove o f his­ tory, that Kiefer has his block-heads emerge from the grain o f German timber. For better or worse, Kiefer’s compression o f form and narrative is hard for a historian to resist. But it also sustains an expressly German tradition, going all the way back to Altdorfer’s parchment on limewood in which the organic material o f the art is referred back to the landscape from which it has been cut and which it now re-presents. Nowhere is this more dramatically embodied than in Kiefer’s H erm anns-Schlacht book, completed in 1977. Removing it from its standard museum case in the Boston Museum o f Fine Arts on a hot summer day was like freeing an unkempt forest animal from its hutch, for the thing is self-consciously coarse, mounted and printed on rag paper. O n a hot summer’s day, the dark ink glowed stickily as if made o f pine tar and the cura­ tor had trouble in safely drawing back the protective interleaves. “ It never dries,” she said, and it did indeed look more coagulated than completed, the pages scarred and torn where they had obstinately stuck.

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Waldsterben T o “ read” the B o sto n H erm anns-Schlacht is to be led b y K iefer’s iro n grip d o w n the Holzweg. It open s w ith a b lack -an d -w h ite p h o to g ra p h , taken b y the artist, o f the ed g e o f V aru s’ s forest: a screen o f w h ite birches, thin and ca g e ­ like, barring the entrance (and the exit). In fro n t is a grass v erg e w ith a single K erstin g-lik e felled stum p; beh in d the line o f birches, an infinity o f blackness. T o turn the page is to en ter the interior; the vertical p ro p o rtio n s reversed,

\nselm Kiefer, Die Hermannskhlacht, 1977.

im m ense and fo rb id d in g black trunks separated o n ly b y fragile co lu m n s o f lig h t pressing them selves against th e sigh t. K iefer seem s to have p rin ted these w ith w h o le planks so th at n o t o n ly the grain b u t the kn o ts and w rinkles o f the trees seem to rise fro m the k n u b b ly surface o f the p a ge. P age after p a ge fo llo w s in the sam e w ay, clau stro p h o b ica lly e n clo sin g the reader, and w h e n , at last, the forest seem s to ad m it so m e lig h t it d o e s so to reveal ye t again n o t the b o d ies o f

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An selm Kiefer,

Die HermannsSchlacht, 1977.

Waldsterben

l 33

centurions but the graveyard o f German heroic idealism. The forest becomes another portrait gallery o f the physiognomy o f national destiny, beginning with Arminius himself, moving through figures like the political philosopher Fichte, whose “Addresses to the German Nation” in 1809, at the nadir o f national for­ tunes in the Napoleonic wars, was meant as a summons to cultural revival, and drawing in Heidegger, whose compromised public rhetoric signified the wretched end o f that long enterprise. What they all share is a fateful implica­ tion in national, tribal myth: a force hard to resist, but which leads up the for­ est path, to a wooden grave. Evidently, Kiefer did not share the view, popular among empirical histori­ ans in the 1960s, that the Third Reich was a historical aberration that owed lit­ tle or nothing to long traditions o f German militarist authoritarianism. It would be convenient, o f course, if the violent myths o f blood and soil could be safely pigeonholed as peculiarly Nazi, and leave it at that. But Kiefer is too con­ scientious a cultural historian to tolerate such tidy classifications. Democracy, he seems to say, averts its face from these myths at its peril. T o exorcise their spell means, to some extent, understanding their potency at close quarters, even, perhaps, within contamination range. Needless to say, Kiefer’s unseemly willingness to play with fire has brought on him the accusation o f being the eager arsonist. In Germany he is still regarded with distasteful suspicion and a travelling exhibition in the United States in 1988-89 was not greeted with unmixed rapture, Arthur Danto going so far as to accuse him o f disingenuousness, o f wallowing in a kind o f crackpot Wagnerian cultism, propagating the very mystique o f “ blood and soil” he pro­ fesses to deplore.109 Anselm Kiefer is not, I am convinced, a closet fascist (or any other kind). But it is easy to see, notwithstanding all the awards bestowed in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, how the suspicion arises. For it has attached to countless artists and anthropologists who have parted company with Enlightenment skepticism about the cultural force o f myth and magic and who have seen in their com­ plicated symbolic elaboration something more than a hoax perpetrated on the naive by the unscrupulous. T o be sure, myths are seductive things. A truly dis­ concerting number o f those who have spent their lives codifying, narrating, and explicating them have not gone unbewitched by their spell. The two modern careers o f Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell are alarming cautionary tales. Campbell, the best-known mythographer in America thanks to public televi­ sion, was, it now seems, not only a student but a devotee o f heroic archetypes and decidedly impatient with the quotidian litdeness o f democracy.110 Eliade, without question the most distinguished scholarly interpreter o f myth, turns out to have been damningly implicated in the most brutal authoritarian poli­ tics in his native Romania.111 And behind them, o f course, stretches a long line o f devotees o f archetypes, from Carl Jung to Friedrich Nietzsche (the latter

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conspicuously missing from Kiefer’s wooden pantheon), whose embrace o f myth fired their hostility to natural-rights individualism, and the democratic politics that protects it. Carlo Ginzburg, a fearsome prosecutor in these matters, has recently uncovered the cautionary case o f the French anthropologist Georges Dumezil, whose book on German myths was published in 1939.112 Even though Dumezil explicitly connected the institutions and cultural fantasies o f the Third Reich with the tradition o f Germanic warrior cultures and failed to make a clear crit­ ical distance between himself and his subject, the book was praised in reviews by sociologists and historians including the Jewish founder o f the Annales, Marc Bloch, who joined the Resistance and whose life ended in a concentra­ tion camp. So how much myth is good for us? And how can we measure the dosage? Should we avoid the stuff altogether for fear o f contamination or dismiss it out o f hand as sinister and irrational esoterica that belong only in the unsavory mar­ gins o f “ real” (to wit, our own) history? Or do we have to ensure that a cordon sanitaire o f protective irony is always securely in place when discussing such matters? Should certifications o f ideological purity be published attesting under oath that we are not doing dirty business with the Devil under the pretense o f learned work, to pre-empt a working-over from Arthur Danto or Carlo Ginzburg? The real problem— what we might call the Kiefer syndrome— is whether it is possible to take myth seriously on its own terms, and to respect its coherence and complexity, without becoming morally blinded by its poetic power. This is only a variation, after all, o f the habitual and insoluble dilemma o f the anthro­ pologist (or for that matter the historian, though not many o f us like to own up to it): o f how to reproduce the “other,” separated from us by space, time, or cultural customs, without either losing ourselves altogether in total immer­ sion or else rendering the subject “safe” by the usual eviscerations o f Western empirical analysis. O f one thing at least I am certain: that not to take myth seriously in the life o f an ostensibly “disenchanted” culture like our own is actually to impoverish our understanding o f our shared world. And it is also to concede the subject by default to those who have no critical distance from it at all, who apprehend myth not as a historical phenomenon but as an unchallengeable perennial mys­ tery. As the great Talmudist Saul Lieberman said when he introduced Gershom Scholem’s lectures on the Kabbalah that became M ajor Trends in Jewish M ysti­ cism: “ Nonsense (when all is said and done) is still nonsense. But the study o f nonsense, that is science.” 113

CHAPTER

THREE

The Liberties o f the Greenwood

i

Green Men

D u r i n g the reign o f the Stuarts, when gentility might be surmised from the elaborate dip and flutter o f a deep bow, there dwelled in Dorset one Henry Hastings, second son o f the earl o f Huntingdon.1 Though his family had been painted by van Dyck, Hasdngs was technically, not culturally, a cavalier. A stranger to frills and furbelows, he was one o f the keepers o f the N ew Forest, his jurisdiction being the “walk” o f Christchurch. While others may have taken their duties with aristocratic carelessness, everything that is known about Henry Hastings suggests he took his walk seriously. Hastings’s house in Dorset was called, aptly enough, Woodlands. (He was also the landlord o f a farm at Little Piddle near Com be Deverel in the same county.)2 He made a point o f dressing only in green broadcloth, and enter­ tained guests in a chamber that had been built for him in die hollow o f an oak. Should any o f his company have ventured inside the house, they might well have wished they were back in the tree. Stepping into the great hall o f Wood­ lands meant grinding the heel o f one’s boot on a carpet o f half-gnawed mar­ rowbones,

while

the

evil-smelling

chamber

itself was

filled

with

an

inconceivable number o f hunting, pointing, and retrieving dogs— spaniels, ter135

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riers, and hounds o f every description. Hawks and falcons roosted from the sconces set in the panelled walls, spattering the floor with their droppings. At the upper end o f the room hung two seasons’ worth o f fox-skins with the occa­ sional polecat pelt mixed in among them. With his brick-red face and unkempt straw-colored hair, Henry Hastings must have looked as though he had more in common with the feral creatures of the woods than with an ancient noble line. He was also notorious for emulating their rutting, “there being not a woman in all his walks o f the degree o f a yeo­ man’s wife and under the age of forty but it was her own fault if he was not inti­ mately acquainted with her.” This “made him very popular,” John Hutchins, the eighteenth-century antiquarian of Dorset, implausibly claimed, “always speaking to the husband, brother and father who was very welcome to his house.”3 In respect o f its moldy beasdiness, the parlor at Woodlands was not much o f an improvement on the hall. Litters o f cats lay in the great chairs and supped with their master, only occasionally batted away by a fourteeri-inch white wand so “that he might defend such meat that he had no mind to part with to them.” Most often their dainties were oysters, carted in from the fishing port o f Poole twice a day for Hastings’s dinner (at three) and supper (at eight). But they were always supplemented with whatever he had killed and hung to an acceptable degree o f decomposing ripeness: venison, hare, or woodcock; roast, stewed or stuffed into pasties and pies. And should he still be peckish, he could walk to the end o f the room, through a maze o f little tables and desks overflowing with hawks’ hoods, fowling poles, ancient guns, hats with their crowns stoved in to make a nest for the eggs o f plover and partridge, past the chaos o f dice and cards and ancient, grimy pipes, black and green with crusted smoke, past the cobwebbed books o f martyrs and a single mildewed Bible, through a closet filled with bottles o f ale and wine and the syrup o f gillyflower with which he flavored his sack, and out the other side into his chapel. There, waiting for him in an old, intricately carved pulpit that had not heard a sermon for many years, would be a mighty chine o f beef, a welcoming rosy side o f gammon, or, most toothsome o f all, a great crown o f apple pie sweating sweet and spicy juices within its thick crust, “extremely baked.” Though he was given to yelling, “calling his servants Bastards and Cuckoldry knaves (in which he often spoke truth to his own knowledge),” Henry Hastings thought himself a moderate, sober sort o f fellow. He never drank more than a glass or two o f wine with his meals, preferring his small beer fla­ vored with rosemary. “He lived to be a hundred,” wrote William Gilpin admir­ ingly, “and never lost his eye-sight nor used spectacles. He got on horseback and rode to the death o f the stag till he was past fourscore.”4 It is virtually impossible to disentangle myth from reality in this portrait o f Henry Hastings. A century after his death, the squire o f the New Forest had become as much folklore as history: an emblem o f English incorrigibility,

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bloody-minded, freely fornicating earthiness, in all likelihood the model for Addison and Steele’s Sir Roger de Coverley and Fielding’s Squire Western. But Gilpin, who occupied the N ew Forest parsonage o f Boldre, celebrated Hast­ ings in the pages o f his R em a rks on Forest Scenery because he had become an emblem o f the English greenwood: a survivor o f an ancient forest knighthood; virtually a living extrusion o f the verdure; a piggy truffle-grubber; a specimen o f the tradition o f wild men o f the woods; an Arcadian prince o f Pan-ic, goat­ ish and greedy. And though the Claudes and Poussins which supplied Gilpin with his definition o f picturesque generally featured more comely types o f herders and hunters, the filthy terribilitas o f a Hastings, all crazed and blasted, a type in which ruined splendor and homely charm mixed in equal degrees, sat­ isfied the picturesque’s demand for irregularity. Besides, Hastings exuded a kind o f warty rustic integrity that was at the opposite extreme from Gilpin’s smooth aristocratic neighbors in the N ew Forest, with their obsessive interest in landscape “ improvements” : broad avenues o f elms and oaks or ornamental fishponds made from the damming o f perfectly good streams. Some, like Mr. Welbore Ellis at Paulton, who passed for a man o f good taste, had even com ­ pounded these affectations with the abomination o f a Chinese arched bridge. It was Sir William Chambers, whose D esigns o f Chinese B u ild in g s had been pub­ lished in 1757, whom he held accountable for such abominations. “Above all ornaments,” wrote Gilpin with his literary handkerchief to his nose, “we are disgusted with the Chinese.” 5 Chinese fences and bridges had no more business in the N ew Forest, thought Gilpin, than pagodas (which had arrived at Kew) replacing his own church at Boldre. For the forest was much more than his own parish. To Parson Gilpin (also the high priest o f the picturesque), it was the essential England— not just the abode o f ancient oaks and wild ponies but the seat o f English lib­ erty and its long resistance to despotism. That was why he rejoiced in the splendidly horrible anachronism o f Henry Hastings, who held the king’s office o f keeper o f the forest but who was so unlike the sinecure-holders who took the perquisites and kept clear o f the woods. That was also why Gilpin was proud to confess that he had befriended an ex-poacher who had confided to him in elab­ orate detail how he had taken (on average) a hundred bucks a year from right under the nose o f the royal gamekeepers.6 With considerable ingenuity, which Gilpin obviously admired, the poacher had constructed a special gun that could be unscrewed into three parts and concealed beneath his coat as he walked about the forest with the underkeepers, locating the best game. A t night he would remove his kill to a secret storeroom he had built behind a false wall in his house and, when it was safe, would sell it to marketmen who were happy enough to observe the old forest adage N on est in q u ir en d u m u n de v en it venison. As another exemplary forest type, Gilpin recounted the story o f an “ ancient” widow, living like many o f the poor woodlanders in a tumbledown

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cottage in the trees, much harassed by the forest officers who tried to remove them as “encroachers.” When the Whig duke o f Bedford had been lord war­ den o f the New Forest he had tried to have such folk cleared out wholesale. But when faced with the determined resistance o f two hundred o f the woodsmen, he had reluctandy backed away from using force. The widow’s husband had died young, leaving her with two small sons and an infant daughter but also with a carefully planted orchard at the back o f the cottage and a garden at the front. And though her old age was “oppressed with infirmity . . . and various [unnamed] afflictions in her family,” she was nonetheless pious and goodhearted, and her “litde tenem ent. . . the habita­ tion o f innocence and industry.” It was, in fact, very much the kind o f cottage Gains­ borough

liked

to

paint,

standing

“sweetly in a dell on the edge o f a for­ est,” the family subsisting modestly through virtuous labor. Such a place, though technically illegal, Gilpin thought, could hardly be considered an “injury,” produc­

“New Forest Scenery,” from and utility from a “petty trespass William Gilpin, Remarks on on waste.”7 The wondrous-crazy lord o f Forest Scenery, 1808. Woodlands and keeper o f the for­ ing as it did so much happiness

est,

the

bold

and

ingenious

poacher, and the innocent tres­ passer were all prime specimens o f what Gilpin believed to be English freedom set in the truest and most pic­ turesque

of

English

scenery:

forest

scenery. Yet he closed his long and superb account “with a sigh” because he did not think its unkempt splendors would be likely to survive the apparendy insatiable demand for naval timber that was leading to acre after acre being felled, or the threat o f mistaken embellishment in aristocratic parks. His pessimism would prove, in some respects, unfounded. The nineteenthcentury change in the construction o f naval vessels from wood to iron, and the replacement o f wood by coal for industrial processes, was to be the salva­ tion o f the royal forests. The market price for timber dropped steeply, reduc­ ing the incentive for subcontractors to lease off areas o f old forest for commercial exploitation. But in any case, Gilpin believed that his own advo­ cacy o f the picturesque might ultimately affect official and fashionable views

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o f what landscapes were worth preserving. What he was looking for was some sort o f grand patron who would share such a view. And it was not even com­ pletely out o f the question that England had such a prince in its reigning monarch. For on June 25, 1789, while Louis XVI and his ministers were plotting an armed march on insurrectionary Paris, George III arrived at the lodge o f his lord warden o f the N ew Forest at Lyndhurst.8 It was meant to be nothing more than a brief stop en route to the new sea-bathing resort o f Weymouth. But the king, who was the first monarch since Charles II to visit the most famous, ancient, and beautiful o f all his royal forests, was so taken with what he saw that he stayed five days, along with Queen Charlotte and three o f the royal princesses. In the same week that the Bourbons were putting up padlocks in Versailles, the farmer king and his daughters dined at the Lyndhurst lodge with the windows thrown open, or at wooden tables on the lawn before a cheering (though railed-off) public. It was a scene o f spontaneous and disorderly mer­ riment, right from the sketchbook o f Thomas Rowlandson, and only slightly marred when “ the populace became rather riotous in their joy [and] there was a necessity to exclude them.”9 As the vicar o f Boldre, no less than the advocate o f unadorned Britain, Gilpin rejoiced at seeing George III galloping around the N ew Forest villages, doffing his hat as he was huzzahed on his way, the very picture o f the bluff patriot king come among his loyal woodlander subjects. But then Gilpin had inherited a long memory o f the forest as a place where history and geography met: the seat o f greenwood liberty, a patrimony shared by both the polite and the common sort. I f he had been able to suspend all disbelief, he could have shown friends and visitors the very tree o ff which, it was said, the arrow o f Wal­ ter Tyrrell glanced before entering the body o f King William II, Rufus, in the year 1100. + IN T H E

LORE

+

o f the free greenwood, Rufus, the son o f William the C o n ­

queror, was a chief and singular villain inheriting his father’s lust for venery and his contempt for the traditional common woodland rights o f grazing and gleaning. To nourish the hart and the hind, it was said, whole parishes had dis­ appeared into the arbitrary jurisdiction o f the new royal forests, their “vert and venison” (the trees and the beasts) protected by the most despotic institutions ever seen in O ld England. But those who had committed this assault on the liberties o f the greenwood would not go unpunished. So the arrow intended for a red deer, loosed by an especially worthless sycophant, was somehow prov­ identially deflected in flight toward the body o f the Norman despot. Indeed the whole dynasty o f the Conqueror seemed to have been cursed for their crimes against greenwood liberty, for another o f William I’s sons, Richard, was also

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killed in the New Forest, as was a grandson (also called Richard), his brother Duke Robert died with an arrow in his neck, and his son hanged from an oak by his hair, a Norman Absalom.10 The eleventh-century monk Oderic, o f Saxon stock, was quite certain that Rufus had died unshriven amidst the oaks as punishment for his brutal and ungodly rule, and reported that the prelates and doctors o f theology had decreed he should remain unabsolved because o f his “filthy life and shameful deeds.” 11 The monk Eadmer similarly believed him jusdy killed for falsely accusing fifty men o f taking the king’s deer. Though they had been condemned to the ordeal o f the hot iron, he added, God had preserved their innocent hands from any scorching.12 According to this pious tradition, it would be another century before the true justice o f the greenwood returned embodied in the Charta de Foresta, signed just two years after the Magna Carta in 1217, and in the myth o f sylvan liberties, every bit as important. The legend o f ravening Norman despotism annihilating whole villages and parishes to create the private hunting reserve o f the New Forest was based on the claims o f medieval clerics like Oderic and Walter Map, archdeacon o f Oxford, who wrote that “the Conqueror took away much land from God and men and converted it for the use o f wild beasts and the sport o f his dogs for which he demolished thirty-six churches and exterminated the inhabitants.” 13 Passed on through the generations as far as the eighteenth century, it evolved into the farfetched claim (found, for example, in Voltaire) that the Conqueror and his heirs had been so determined to swathe Old England in woods popu­ lated only by boar and by buck that they had gone to the length o f planting good arable fields with trees. Gilpin rejected this assertion as transparently absurd and was skeptical about the magnitude o f parish destruction claimed in the canonical history o f the New Forest. Pruned o f its most improbable features, though, the mythic memory o f greenwood freedom survived into the nineteenth century as material for the historical novel, not least, o f course, Scott’s Ivanhoe. Before the Norman tyranny, it was supposed, Britain had been manded with the greenwood, a habi­ tat where lord and peasant, thane and churl co-existed in pre-feudal reciproc­ ity— the one exercising his hunting rights with moderation, the other allowed the freedom o f the woods to pasture his swine and collect the wood for his wat­ tle and hearth. The forests o f England— Arden (Eardene, north o f Worcester) and Sherwood, Dean and Epping— entered the popular imagination in a quite different style from the primeval woods o f Polish Lithuania or the German silva Hercynia. There, the hunt was the expression o f tribal community. In the idyll o f the English greenwood, though, the hunt was an alien despotism, the hoofs o f its horses trampling primitive liberties embodied, it was said, in the Saxon assembly, the witengamot, or the Scottish midsummer assembly at Glen Taner, where tribal chiefs met in their clan games. There were perhaps some links with

Green M en

l 4 l

the Germanic tradition o f martial woodland Gem einschaft. The Celtic king Caractacus was said to have made his last stand against the Romans from Clun Forest. But in the English greenwood, the blood pact turned into mere bloodymindedness: overbearing authority corrected by acts o f anarchic justice, the true law executed by the out-law. Greenwood was not, then, like Dante’s selva oscum , the darkling forest where one lost oneself at the entrance to hell. It was something like the exact opposite: the place where one found oneself. In the Arden o f A s You L ik e It, Shakespeare has the banished Duke Senior discard the vanities and corruption o f court life in favor o f woodland authenticity. “They say,” Charles tells Oliver, “he is already in the forest o f Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin H ood o f England. They say many young gentle­ men flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.” Greenwood, then, is the upside-down world o f the Renaissance court: a place where the conventions o f gender and rank are tem porarily reversed in the interest o f discovering truth, love, freedom, and, above all, jus­ tice. “You have said,” remarks Touchstone, “ but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge.” And so the forest does. A t the very end o f the play the usurping Duke Frederick— the urban condottiere— hea ring how th a t every day M en o f g r e a t w orth resorted to this forest, A d dress’d a m ighty power, which were on fo o t In his own conduct, purposely to take H is brother here, a n d p u t him to the sword; A n d to the skirts o f this w ild wood he came; Where, m eeting w ith a n old religious m an, A f t e r some question w ith him , was converted Both fr o m his enterprise a n d fro m the world, H is crown bequeathing to his banish’d brother, A n d a ll their lands restor’d to them a g a in .14 The “ old religious man” so abruptly and conveniently introduced by Shakespeare functions as both priest and judge o f the ancient forest: a w ood­ land magus. So too the trees o f Birnam Wood march relentlessly toward the usurper Macbeth in an act o f justice and redress. This being England, the greenwood generally votes conservative. Its reversals o f rank and sex are always temporary and its sentiments incurably loyal and royal. The grim slaughters o f Bialowieza and the Teutoburgwald are unthinkable in the sylvan habitat o f Merrie England: there it is forever green, always summer. The nightingales sing, the ale is heady, and masters and men are brought together in fellowship by the lord o f the jest: Robin Hood.

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ii

Living in the Woods: Laws and Oudaws

Behind this fantasy there was a real place. But it hardly resembled the unbroken summery-sylvan idyll o f the greenwood. To imagine early medieval England blanketed with vast and immemorially ancient deciduous forests, broken only by stretches o f scrubby moor and precarious patches o f grainfields and pasture, is to get things the wrong way round. By the time William the Conqueror arrived on the Sussex coast, no more than 15 percent o f English territory would have been wooded.15 According to Oliver Rackham, even the Romans, whom Joseph Conrad and others imagined shivering with fear at the dark British woods as they did at the German and Etruscan forests, would not have encoun­ tered a country uniformly dominated by woodland. O f the original primeval wildwood there was nothing at all left except perhaps a small acreage at the very center o f the New Forest. Well before the arrival o f the Romans, Britain’s earliest setded cultures, principally Celtic, had undertaken major clearances. The sophisticated demands o f Roman town life, not least for heated water in the chill and foggy climate o f Britain, certainly accelerated the denuding o f the woods. Extensive wood-fired iron smelting carried the process further and faster. By the time o f Anglo-Saxon kings, then, the essential familiar pattern of the English countryside— broad tracts o f cultivated field and pasture punctu­ ated with copses and limited stands o f trees— had already been established. There were still substantial areas o f woodland in counties like Middlesex and Warwickshire, but from the fifth to the eleventh century they were steadily shrinking as clay soils were taken for farming. By the time o f the Domesday Book in 1086, areas whose very names signified woodland, like the Kentish Weald, had been converted into pasture, orchard, and arable.16 And it would be equally mistaken to imagine the medieval English forests as vast green tanks o f silence: dense, impenetrable, and deserted places popu­ lated only by bandits and hermits. The expectation that there ought to be her­ mits in the woods was such that King Stephen went to the length o f setting one up in a customized rustic cell in Writtle Forest.17 The forest as the opposite o f court, town, and village— the sylvan remnant o f arcady, or what Shakespeare called the “ golden world”— was an idea that would lodge tenaciously in the poetic and the pious imagination. But in England (and in much o f France as well) the reality was different.18

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14 3

For there were people in the woods: settled, active, making a livelihood out o f its resources, a robust society with its own seasonal rhythms o f movement, communication, religion, work, and pleasure. Even the broadest forests were laced with cart tracks, footpaths, and trails which to its adepts were as familiar as Roman roads. The network o f tracks ran through a landscape in which town dwellers might become quickly disoriented, but to those who lived there it was mapped by distinctive landmarks: rocky outcrops wrapped in liverwort; ancient lightning-blasted trees; trunks and roots fallen and decayed into shapes sug­ gestive enough to earn nicknames; winding brooks, ponds, and bogs; hum­ mocks and slopes; the ruins o f older hearths and walls; the rubble o f fugitives; the cinders o f charcoal burners. And the trees themselves were not all o f a sameness, either in maturity or density (let alone species). Much o f the forest, even in the early Middle Ages, was already being managed as a special kind o f micro-economy for its inhabi­ tants. Hardwoods were cut at regular twelve-year intervals four to six feet from the ground, sufficiently high to prevent deer from eating the new shoots. The base “stool” would then be left to regenerate itself rapidly into the kind o f light timber that could be used to meet all manner o f essential needs: fencing, wat­ tling, tools and implements. The result was the underwood, or coppice, that was the distinctive mark o f the medieval forest and which in a very few loca­ tions, like Hatfield and Hadley Chase, can still be seen in England.19 In con­ trast to the most ancient forests o f Germany and Poland and to the conifer woods o f the Scottish Highlands and the oak forests o f the English aristocratic estates— all products o f the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crazes for pic­ turesque and Romantic “improvements”— these ancient woodlands seem thin­ ner and almost patchy, with swathes o f grassy meadow and wild flowers blooming between pollarded and truncated broadleaf trees. The exact oppo­ site o f what is now considered to be the ideal norm o f a forest habitat— the untended wilderness— they have light and space and variety: a working room for an authentic woodland culture. And the wild animals o f the chase often shared the woods with the domes­ tic livestock pastured by the cottagers. Cattle, horses, sheep, and even goats (though they were voraciously destructive o f saplings and young coppice shoots) grazed the underwood and any clearings caused naturally by the fall o f old trees. But the real lords o f the woods were pigs, especially in the “ pannage” season from Michaelmas to Martinmas, when they gorged themselves on acorns and beech mast. In the eighteenth century the silviculturalist William Ellis claimed that a peck a day o f acorns would increase hog weight by a pound a day (though he also thought the digestive sickness o f “ garget” could be pre­ vented by swinging a piss-pot over piles o f heaped-up acorns!).20 I f the elegant tapestries depicting medieval forests had been closer to the common truth (which was not, o f course, their point), they would have woven flocks o f con­

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tented porkers rooting about, together with the elegant fallow deer and deco­ rative unicorn. For the pig was a typical feature o f the forest landscape and the mainstay o f the woodsmen’s household economy. Medieval Frankish law devoted no less than nineteen o f its articles to pigs, carefully classified into sub­ groups. We know, for example, that the herd belonging to the monastic domain o f St. Remi at Longeville numbered four hundred and fifteen, and comprised one hundred and forty “young pigs,” ten “ great boars,” one hundred and sixty-five sows, and one hundred geldings. Autumn through to late November, when the fattened pigs would be slaughtered, was the busiest time in the woodland societies. As well as porkcuring, dead and fallen wood would be gathered and corded for fuel. Animals, illegal as well as legal, were turned into smoked sausage for the lean winter months. Fruit and berries were dried, honey was harvested from the wild hives, and the chestnuts that were one o f the staples o f medieval diet (mashed into porridge, ground into meal for primitive loaves) were carefully collected and stored. The mark o f these western woodland societies was not their separation from, but their connection with, the rest o f the world.21 Within the forest perimeter, charcoal was burned that would fire primitive ironworks. Bark was stripped for tanning, fuel drawn for glassworks and breweries, tall timber felled for beams and supports o f town houses. The greenwood, then, was not an imaginary utopia; it was a vigorous working society. And it was just because the English woods were home to all this busy social and economic activity that the imposition o f the Norman con­ cept o f the forest seemed so brutal. For even given the exaggerations o f medieval chroniclers, there is no doubt that, institutionally, the imposition o f forest law was a violent shock. Its fundamental principle, originating in Frank­ ish custom, was the creation o f huge areas o f special jurisdiction, policed at the king’s pleasure and by his direct appointment, for the preservation o f game. The nomenclature “ forest” that now replaced the older Latin terms o f saltus or silva was in all probability derived from foris, or “outside.” It signified not a particular kind o f topography but a particular kind o f administration, cut off from the regular codes o f Roman and common law. Such “forests” could and were imposed on large areas o f the English countryside, including the entire county o f Essex, that were not wooded at all, and which included tracts o f pas­ ture, meadow, cultivated farmland, and even town's.22 For the first century o f Norman rule these “forests” made up something like a quarter o f the entire territory o f the realm, and during this period the kings, especially Henry II, seemed eager to “afforest” lands at will. At this distance it is hard to imagine how vast areas o f the country could have been annexed simply to protect royal recreation— “the unspeakable in pur­ suit o f the inedible,” as Siegfried Sassoon put it. But for a warrior state, the royal

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hunt was always more than a pastime, however compulsively pursued. Outside o f war itself, it was the most important blood ritual through which the hierar­ chy o f status and honor around the king was ordered. It may not be too much to characterize it as an alternative court where, free o f the clerical domination o f regular administration, clans o f nobles could compete for proximity to the king. N ot surprisingly, the offices o f Masters o f the Horse and Hunt were fiercely competed for and jealously preserved within the family. And since the dominant weapon o f Norman arms was the mounted knight, the hunt served as an appren­ ticeship in martial equestrianism for young nobles. Since the very first treatise on hunting, Xenophon’s Cynegeticus (Hunting Man), riding to hunt had been the recommended way for aspirant knights to win their spurs.23 But this was more than an exercise in physical prowess. Observing the initiation rites o f the hunt required an elaborate display o f learning, from the formal presentation o f the “ fewmets,” or deer feces, to the prince, evidence o f the magnificence o f the pursued stag, to the complicated and minutely prescribed ceremonies o f evis­ ceration, or gralloching.24 The hunter performing this work was expected to know to whom specific parts o f the kill should be formally presented. Woe betide anyone mistakenly offering, say, the rectum o f the stag to anyone other than a high-ranked lord, or omitting to give the brisket to the hunter who had driven the deer from hiding. From beginning to end, then, the hunt was not merely a kill that gave potency and authority to the aura o f the royal warlord, it was also a ritual demonstration o f the discipline and order o f his court. N o wonder it became a form o f treason to spoil the king’s aim. N o t that this made forest law any more acceptable to many contempo­ raries, especially the churchmen forbidden from hunting and therefore excluded from the king’s mounted retinue. Its arbitrariness and the draconian penalties specified for offenses against “venison” (the game animals) or “vert” (the woods that sheltered them) were the object o f many popular complaints. The A n g lo -S a xo n Chronicle, for example, expressed what was probably a com ­ mon view o f William the Conqueror, that H e m ade g r e a t protection f o r the g a m e A n d imposed laws f o r the same T h a t who so slew h a r t or h in d Should be m ade blind. . . . H e preserved the harts a n d boars A n d loved stags as m uch A s i f he were their father?* The Normans put in place the essential elements o f the regime: the lord wardens o f each royal forest, with their keepers and “ gar^ons” appointed to

146

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D

apprehend malefactors against the vert and the venison; the “eyre

court that

heard serious cases and “swanimote” courts that heard the relatively more triv­ ial; and the “verderers” and “ regarders” (inspectors) elected every four years from among the local magnates.26 But it was under the Angevin kings that the forests reached their greatest extent territorially and their laws were most seri­ ously enforced. To read the digest o f laws published at the end o f the sixteenth century by the improbably named Lincoln’s Inn barrister Sir John Manwood is to have the impression o f a systematic tyranny: a state within a state whose unaccountable petty officials exercised justice by mutilation. The penalty, for example, for illegally killing a deer was the removal o f both sets o f soft organs: eyes and testicles.27 The bizarre system, codified in Manwood, at once petty and harsh, was exemplified by the elaborate instructions for expeditation, or “lawing.” This practice, originating in the reign o f the Saxon king Edward the Confessor, involved the declawing o f mastiffs and hounds belonging to forest dwellers, dis­ abling them from attacking the royal bucks and does. The expeditation code prescribed with loving detail the precise size o f the block o f wood (eight inches thick, one inch square) that was to be used, together with a mallet and chisel (two inches broad). Even the places at which the lawing was to be done were specified as the only sites traditionally authorized for the job. “ Mastiffs” came to mean any large hounds, but those that could wriggle through specially con­ structed iron stirrups like the one still preserved at Lyndhurst in the New For­ est were excused as only a minor threat to game. Unlucky dogs, on the other hand, had their forepaws set firmly on the aforesaid regulation-size block, claws out, where the sergeant would “with one blow smite them clean off.”28 Any mastiff found within the forest limits who had not been altered in the legally decreed way would incur for his owner a stiff fine.29 Taken as a literal document o f greenwood police, Manwood’s forestry statutes virtually presuppose a counter-force, a forest resistance, a Robin Hood. In fact, however, much o f Manwood’s text describes a system that existed only on paper. Writing in the last years o f Queen Elizabeth, he assumed that in cen­ turies gone by the provisions o f the forest laws had been rigorously enforced and only recendy fallen into neglect. But the records o f the eyre courts, where they survive, tell a completely different story: o f a system that was less an outand-out tyranny and more o f an officious interference in the busy world o f the woods. The penalties recorded in their books far more commonly list fines than mutilation or the gibbet.30 What we know o f the social reality o f the regime in the New Forest, for example, suggests that its practices were much less indiscriminate and arbitrary than a mere catalogue o f grisly penalties would indicate.31 And, contrary to die assertion o f some contemporary commentaries like Richard Fitznigel’s late twelfth-century D ialogue o f the Exchequer (uncritically repeated by Manwood),

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forest law did not supersede but supplemented common law. Offenses against “vert” like the illegal chopping o f brushwood were almost always punished by fines and those were very often made proportionate to the offender’s means. Taking the king’s deer was more serious and could indeed get the poacher hanged for a repeated conviction. To be caught “ red-handed” meant, literally, with hands still blood-stained from an illicit evisceration. But the penalties, sav­ age though they were, were neither more nor less harsh than those for compa­ rable property crimes outside the forest. A t any rate there is no doubt that however draconian the stipulated penalties, they failed to act as a deterrent, for poaching was endemic throughout each and every one o f the royal forests. Given the long intervals between the eyre courts and the modest manpower available for the forest police, the odds on getting away with shooting the smaller animals in particular— fallow deer, rabbits, and birds— must have been very high. This is not to say that there were not some dramatic and violent confronta­ tions between poachers and foresters which often ended in the death o f the lat­ ter. Sometimes the illegal hunters organized themselves in a large gang, H ood style, as in the N ew Forest in 1 270, when on St. Margaret’s Eve a small regiment o f around sixty men armed with bows and arrows and accompanied by hounds entered the forest and succeeded in taking fifteen hart and about the same num­ ber o f hind, then broke their way into the grange at Beaulieu for the night and drank and ate their way through its provisions before taking their leave.32 But the sheer brazenness o f this kind o f quasi-military expedition strongly suggests that the outlaws were not rags-and-tatters woodsmen taking the odd rabbit or pheasant along with wattle-sticks and faggots when the need arose. Rather, these were forest bravos: delinquent soldiers from a baronial retinue, or, as was often the case, led by a yeoman or even someone o f noble birth. This is important, for much o f the angriest hostility against the royal for­ est regime, especially under the Angevin monarchs, came not from the com ­ mon people, who somehow improvised ways and means o f living with it, but from the propertied elite. It was the nobility and the church that were most indignant at having their privileges and power subjected to the arbitrary exten­ sion o f “forest” that, as far as they were concerned, represented the unlimited power o f the king and his current gang o f favorites. A t its heart, then, the argu­ ment about the liberty o f the greenwood was as much political as social. And it was further complicated by the fact that, all along, the Norman and Angevin kings had permitted the existence o f islands o f private property w ithin the area o f the royal forests. The reason, o f course, was money. In exchange for a sub­ stantial fee that dropped straight into the royal treasury, the holders o f these “assarts” could do anything they wanted within its bounds. In practice this invariably meant exploitation: clearing the land for farming, establishing ten­ ants in hamlets and villages and taking the usual feudal rents.

1 48

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D The quarrel that culminated in the Magna Carta o f the woods

the Charta

de Foresta o f 1217 and 1225— was not a simple matter o f greenwood liberty defying sylvan despotism. It would be better thought o f as a competition between two parties, each o f which wanted to exploit the woods in their own way. And what decided its outcome, once again, was war. The dynastic mar­ riage alliance in 1152 between Eleanor o f Aquitaine and King Henry II which had created the enormous Angevin realm had also embroiled it in endless wars, from the Holy Land crusade to the Marcher frontiers o f Wales. Money was always short. Needs were either urgent or desperate. So that “afforestation”— the extension o f the forest jurisdiction well beyond anything that could remotely be thought suitable for hunting— turned into another license for extortion. The forest courts were now expected to be revenue enhancers for the king’s exchequer: fining away and trying to trap institutional or noble offenders, since their penalties could be especially lucrative. The law was now a business. And its businessmen were creative in coming up with all kinds of ways to raise more money. For example, “pardons” might be issued (even to woodsmen who were unaware they had done anything wrong) allowing, for a fat fee, the grazing o f animals in a specified area. Or customary practices, such as the taking o f fallen wood, might be “leased” back, for a hefty price, to those who had always freely exercised them.33 Increasingly, then, the royal forests were managed for business, not plea­ sure. But the business was run indirecdy, not by farming the produce o f the forests, but by taking a cut for “protection” through the courts. It seems like sylvan gangsterism, and it was. Some o f the most enthusiastic enforcers o f this business, like the Neville family, who ran the courts for King John, were busi­ nessmen o f the most grimly uncompromising kind. So when the barons had a chance to press their grievances on his successor, the nine-year-old Henry III, as a condition o f their allegiance, they leapt at it. The Charta de Foresta o f 1217 rolled back the “afforestations”— the limits o f these special jurisdictions— to what they had been before the reign o f Richard and John’s father, Henry II, a century earlier. It made the courts more accountable and regular. But it also took care not to do away with the system altogether. For, after all, today’s disaffected woodland baron might be tomorrow’s offi­ cer. The verderers, who heard cases o f forest “nuisances,” and the regarders, who inspected the woodland domain, were themselves drawn from the same class as the aggrieved. And as England became a more developed economy in the thirteenth century, the gentry and nobility began to see ways in which they, too, could make the forests pay. A lease from the Crown could be made lucra­ tive by establishing iron forges using timber fuel, or subletting to charcoal burn­ ers, tanners, and glassmakers. So that by the time o f the Plantagenet Edwards, in the fourteenth century, the forest, legal and topographical, had come to mean

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two glaringly contradictory things in English culture. As royal greenwood it was governed sternly but impartially for the hunt. (The most comprehensive man­ ual o f hunting would be written by the duke o f York as late as the fifteenth cen­ tury.) But the legal forest was also a place o f profit for noble entrepreneurs whose decision about whether to work with, or against, the royal system was governed essentially by hard economic calculation. Royal penury was their opportunity. The military restlessness o f the Plantagenets, exercised against the French or each other in the Wars o f the Roses, became an expensive addiction. The relentless need to pay for their soldiers dic­ tated the sale o f enormous areas o f forest, especially in the north o f England. The sales were leasehold so that the Crown allowed itself the illusion o f future recovery. But to make the deals attractive to buyers, the leases were framed to ignore old customs and “ liberties” o f pasture, and wood-gleaning: the prac­ tices which had sustained the whole forest world. N ow run by the newer and tougher regime o f the buying barons, the eyre courts— the travelling high courts o f forest justice— began to pick up rhythm again, extending their juris­ diction into deer parks that were more efficiently policed than under the old direct royal administration. And so it was that in 1308, at Wakefield in Yorkshire, one Robert H ood was obliged to make payment for wood he had gathered in the earl’s forest. We may have no clear idea who the model for Robin Hood actually was. But we certainly know his enemy. It is not the king (usually called “ Edward,” not Richard, in the early ballads), but the usurpers o f his good name. These include not just sheriffs, foresters, and their men but all the institutional types— unscrupu­ lous officeholders, corrupt abbots, encroachers and enclosers— who had deformed the original idea o f the forest and come between the direct administration o f royal justice and its subjects. It is this usurpation that entitles Robin to take the king’s deer as and when he pleases. Better the official rogue than the unofficial rogues who abuse royal authority to line their pockets! From the moment it appears, Robin’s greenwood is an elegy for a world o f liberty and justice that had never existed: one where the relation between leader and led is o f unsullied reciprocity and where the purest form o f fellowship is the open-air forest feast. It can hardly be an accident that the first cluster o f printed editions o f the Ly tell Geste o f Robyn H ode, including one published by the printer Wynkyn de Worde, appear at a disastrous moment in English history: the Wars o f the Roses in the late fifteenth century. Though the printed ballads and “speakynges” can be traced back to an earlier fourteenth-century manuscript, the H ood phe­ nomenon remains a product o f a time o f usurpation and chronic rebellion. J. C . Holt, who has written incomparably the best study o f the literature, leg­ end, and history o f Robin H ood, believes that it originated within the ranks o f the late feudal military retinues, was sung by minstrels first at the castle-courts

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1 50

o f the great barons, and then was transferred to the markets and fairs,

w here

it

entered

the

stream o f popu lar culture. In oth er w o rd s, it started highclass, end ed low-class. In all o f the earliest versions, how ever, R o b in is that perfectly interm edi­ ate figure: the yeom an. A n d th o u g h he m ay be an oud aw , he is n o rebel. In fact he is a passionate and nostalgic c o n ­ servative w h o yearns for the restoration o f a just, personal m onarchy and w h o wants a social o rder dislocated by ro gues and parvenus to be set right in its p roper ranks, stations, and portions. T h o se w h o m R o bin aids w ith the proceed s o f his o u tlaw ry are them selves the victim s o f illegitim ate dispossession o r persecution. Sir R ichard -at-L ee, the p o o r k n igh t w h o figures in all the early editions o f the Geste, has been forced to m o rtg a g e his estate to a rapacious a b b o t in o rd er to co m e up w ith bail for his son, u njusdy (it is im plied) accused o f m urder. R o b in provides him w ith the w herew ithal that the k n igh t then thro w s at the ab b o t at the ap pointed hour, qu ite ru ining the cleric’s happy anticipation o f eviction . A n d b eh ind R o b in the R ig h teo u s there w ere o th er m edieval o u tlaw stories, som e m ythical, som e m ere em bellishm ent on real histories, bu t all o f w h ich featured m en ben t o n redress. H ere w ard the W ake, for exam ple, in the reigns o f Ed w ard the C o n fesso r and W illiam the C o n q u ero r, pursued his guerrilla cam paign fro m the Isle o f E ly to repair his disinheritance. T h o u g h his grievances w ere personal, and began before 1066, the late m edieval stories o f H erew ard present him as a one-m an E nglish resistance against the N o rm an invaders. F ulk Fitz-W arin resorted to the forest w h en , d u rin g the reign o f John arou nd 1200, he lost a suit to keep his estate o f W hittin g to n . In on e o f the prose rom ances w ritten ab o u t FitzW arin’s exploits he captures the k in g w hile disguised in the charcoal bu rn er’s blackface, and by en ticin g him in to the deep w o o d s w ith the pro spect o f a stag. T h e k in g ’s ransom for his freed om is, o f cou rse, the restoration o f Fitz-W arin’s rightfu l estate.34 Sim ilar tales, especially in the n o rth o f E n glan d , w here the royal forests had been m ost extensively (and therefore m o st dam agingly) alien­ ated, circulated arou nd o th er legend ary figures like the M o n k Eustace. Eustace was yet another figure represented in the tales and ballads as a victim -turnedoutiaw. T h e son o f a k nightly family, he had qu it his m onastery in the 1 190s to avenge the m u rder o f his father and the expropriation o f his land. In the shel­ ter o f the forest he turned outlaw , taking captive his enem y the C o u n t o f B o u lo g n e , as F ulk F itz-W arin was said to have taken K in g John. Later Eustace seem s to have turned pirate in the C h an n el, and eventually, like m any o f the o u tlaw types, was betrayed and beheaded.

Thomas Bewick, woodcut illustration to Joseph Ritson, Robin Hood: A Collection o f A ll the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads, 1795.

Livin g in the Woods

l 5 I

Robin himself is no radical. He venerates the Virgin. He is elaborately chivalrous to women; and his archery with the yew longbow celebrates the most traditionally English weapon o f war at the dawn o f the gunpowder age. Above all else, Robin is a starry-eyed royalist. Guy o f Gisborne and the infa­ mous sheriff are his enemies precisely because they have desecrated the holy aura o f kingship by perverting it to their own interests. Pending the appearance o f the king himself, Robin serves as a surrogate monarch or at least a loyal deputy for the prince in absentia who can exercise redress and primitive justice under the oaks. A standard element o f the greenwood plot in all the early ver­ sions has King Edward show up in the forest in heavy disguise (sometimes as a monk), where he observes the virtues o f an ideal realm. Loyalty, honor, chivalry, brotherhood, magnanimity, hospitality, ceremony, courage, and even sometimes a brusque kind o f Franciscan piety are all practiced in the green­ wood, in painful contrast to their disappearance from the modern world o f court and state. In a later version (ca. 1600), The Greenwood Tree, which nonetheless preserves many o f the elements o f the original Geste, Robin takes King Edward’s horse and insists he abide for a while, for

We be yeomen o f this Forest U n der the Greenwood Tree We live by the K i n g }s decree O ther shift have not wee A n d ye have churches a n d rents both a n d good f u l l plenty G ive us some o f your spending fo r S a in t C ha ritie.

and a little later:

Today shalt thou d in e with me For the love o f our K in g U n der the trusty tree.35

The king then partakes o f his own deer, provided for him by his most faith­ ful follower. And this almost sacramental re-enactment o f the bond between monarch and subject is reinforced by a contest, sometimes quarterslaves, some­ times wrestling, but always lost by Robin (who otherwise is invariably victori­ ous against his social equals or superiors). After the beating the king reveals his identity, the outlaws fall to their knees, are pardoned, and taken into his ser­ vice. And no wonder, for it has not escaped the king that Robin’s relation to his men represents all the qualities that have been banished from the unscrupu­ lous Renaissance court.

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H ere is a wonder seemly sight M e thinketh me by Gods H is men are more a t his bidding Than my men be a t m ine F u ll hastily was their d in n er dight A n d thereto can they gone. . . . They served our K in g with a ll their m ight With R o bin a n d L ittle John

.36

It sh o u ld n o t surprise us, th en , to discover that b y the reign o f H e n ry V I I I , R o b in H o o d had beco m e a w h o lly acceptable part o f official T u d o r cu ltu re, rew ritten by the k in g ’s antiqu ary John Leland. H e and his g ree n w o o d , w here lib erty and lo yalty so m e h o w co n trived a p erfect fit, had also established th em ­ selves in the repertoire o f M aytim e plays, p erfo rm ed o n village greens to greet the spring and featuring the exploits o f leg en d ary heroes like St. G e o rg e .37 In their gallant co m p an y R o b in struts as the L o rd o f M isru le in the cou nter-realm o f the forest: the b ringer o f h ealin g havoc. B u t he poses n o serious threat to the established order, for he is the arbite w o rld tu rn ed tem porarily upside d o w n , better

to

co nso lid ate

it

right

side

u

R o b in ’s M aytim e is a kind o f o u tlaw Ea: tide, a gam e o f renewal: the R esurrection o f ju s­ tice. H is L in co ln green is the co lo r o f Christian h o p e. In the texts o f the Geste he even h olds o u t the particular ho pe o f a righteo u s conversion for the sh e riff him self. O b lig e d by R o b in to the n ig h t in the forest, the sh e riff is stripped o f his clo th es like St. Francis at the m o m en t o f his spiritual rebirth , and garbed instead in L in co ln g ree n , the clo th o f the arboreal cloister, as if he w ere a no vice prep aring for his vo w s. N eed less to say, the conversion is pu rely tem porary. W ith all these them es o f reinstated loyalty, sacred allegiance, and royal ju s­ tice in E n g la n d ’s resurrected M aytim e, it is n o t surprising to find the y o u n g H e n ry V III h im self participating in R o b in H o o d festivities in 15 1 5 . T w o h u n ­ d red archers dressed in green sh o t at butts u n der the leadership o f R o b in , w h o invited the k in g and qu een to co m e in to the g re e n w o o d to keep fellow ship w ith the outlaw s: T h e K in g dem an d ed o f the Q u e e n and her ladies, i f th ey durst ad ven­ ture to g o in to the w o o d w ith so m any o ud aw s. T h e n the Q u e e n said, that i f it pleased him , she was co n ten t. T h e n the ho rns b lew till th ey cam e to the w o o d u n der Sh o o ters H ill, and there was an arbo u r m ade o f b o u g h s, w ith a hall and a great ch am ber and an inner ch am ber very

Thomas Bewick, woodcut illus­ tration to Joseph Ritson, Robin Hood: A Collection o f Ah the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads,

1795-

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well made and covered with flowers and sweet herbs, which the King much praised. Then said Robyn hood, Sir, oudaws’ breakfast is veni­ son, and therefore you must be content with such fare as we use. Then the King and Queen sat down, and were served with venison and wine by Robyn hood and his men, to their great contentation.39 A recurring feature o f the artificial greenwood arbors in which the king sat was a “ trystel tree” : an adaptation o f the Maypole that stood for fecundity: the passage from spring to summer and the resurrection o f the fertile golden age.40 But it had also come to signify a tryst, or covenant: a pact between the sover­ eign and his subjects sealed in the English wood. And during the Tudor six­ teenth century, as the Robin H ood tales became more richly elaborate and filled Sherwood with the cast o f characters familiar to us today— Marian; the renegade friar; the minstrel Alan-a-dale— a portrait o f an idealized, chivalrous, hospitable merry greenwood England came into being. It was a place where the venison never wanted for a company o f free fellows whose thieving was, in the end, an expression o f loyalty to their sovereign and protector.

iii

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The greenwood was a useful fantasy; the English forest was serious business. At the same time that the Crown presented itself as the custodian o f the old, free greenwood, it was busy realizing its economic assets. Under the Tudors, freed by the Protestant Reformation from any residual allegiance to Rome, England began to envision itself as an empire. It was at this time, in the first half o f the sixteenth century, that court historians began to develop a literature o f the “ori­ gins o f Britain” and to emphasize the autonomous, peculiarly insular destiny o f its history. Wholly mythical or semimythical figures like the Trojan “ Brutus” and King Arthur began to feature prominently in such chronicles. “ England-as-Empire” was thus self-consciously conceived against the claims o f other empires: Holy Roman and Papal Roman. But to make that ambition more substantial than empty court propaganda, iron was needed for the arsenals o f the realm and timber for its shipyards. Counsellors to the throne advised that a truly independent realm ought not to rely on imports o f these strategic commodities, especially when they abounded in the forests. A whole

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range o f industries would make the kingdom prosperous if only the woodland “wastes” were open to development. Nor did England lack for gentlemen to step forward as entrepreneurs. They would be, gracious majesty permitting, the lords o f the blast furnace, iron barons in doublet and hose. Henry V III’s dis­ solution o f the monasteries provided them with the opportunity to buy choice land with both mineral wealth and the timber to process it. Thus the great woods o f Robertsbridge Abbey in Sussex, for example, made Sir William Sidney, the grandfather o f the poet, one o f the richest ironmasters o f the kingdom.41 In 1580 William Harrison lamented that he could ride for twenty miles and encounter virtually no woodland at all “ except where the inhabitants have planted a few elms, oaks, hazels or ashes about their dwellings” to protect them from the wind.42 Whole populations were transformed from habitual users and gatherers o f the woods into dispossessed consumers, required to purchase fire­ wood at market prices. The whole business seemed gratifyingly (or, depending on one’s point o f view, disastrously) self-propelling. Imperial politics generated industrial demand. Demand fuelled the rise in timber prices. Rosy prospects for large profits encouraged men for whom the greenwood was just so much min­ strelsy nonsense to move in with the axe. And the perpetual indebtedness o f the Crown made it expedient to grant them space in the forests in return for immediate cash. So, just at the time when Robin H ood’s Sherwood was appearing in chil­ dren’s literature, stage drama, and poetic ballads, the greenwood idyll was dis­ appearing into house beams, dye vats, ship timbers, and iron forges. Stimulated further by a rapidly expanding population, the urban economy o f England gen­ erated a new level o f industrial need for timber. While trying to serve (and indeed profit from) that demand, Tudor and Stuart governments still pretended to stand as guardians o f the woodland patrimony. This was, o f course, but another early instance o f the debate over the forest that would repeat itself over and again in the history o f the early modern state. Because o f the crucial and urgent role played by timber in both the logistics and weapons o f war, and the more general sense, developing at this time, that a powerful and growing econ­ omy was essential to military success, the forester-king was bound to be torn between exploitation and conservation. Arguments over the true responsibility o f a national forestry have not changed much since that time. The bitter argu­ ments between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot over the fate o f American forests at the beginning o f the twentieth century, the continuing soul-searching in the Pacific Northwest over the meaning o f “sustainable resources” in the forest, are only the latest edition o f debates that have been continuing for five centuries. For the Tudor monarchy, the issue was the transformation o f an ancient personal claim to the forest as a specially protected domain for the beasts o f the royal hunt into a more impersonal state-stewardship o f the national patrimony.

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Was the government to act merely as the managing director o f Imperial Eng­ lish Enterprises, Inc., husbanding those resources so that enterprising gentlemen might exploit them for their, and by extension the country’s, good? Or ought the Crown to take a loftier view o f its role as guardian, protecting the timber as long-term naval inventory, the “wooden walls” o f the kingdom, as the earl o f Coventry would put it in the seventeenth century.43 And as pater p atriae, the “ father o f his nation,” the king also had a duty to see to it that the common people did not suffer from a dearth o f fuel, and the price inflation that went with it. What was a conscientious monarch to do? Statutes for the protection o f timber could be enacted, and were. Lessees could be required to provide fences and ditches to keep animals o ff saplings, and to set aside a reserve o f a royal dozen for every hundred they felled. But this was official piety. Reality was Edward Seymour, earl o f Somerset, who became Lord Protector to his nephew, the child king Edward VI. As steward o f the greenwood, Somerset held inquiries into the riots that accompanied the wasting o f the southern wood­ lands. But as Seymour the ironmaster o f the forges o f the Kentish forests o f the Weald, the same man was, at least indirectly, responsible for the troubles he was investigating! By 1600 both conservationists and developers could invoke the funda­ mental interests o f the realm— prosperity, security, and liberty— to support both their respective positions. Under the first item, developers argued that the con­ version o f forest to farmland would make the lot o f the common people more bearable by increasing the supply, and thus lowering the price, o f food. C o n ­ servationists retorted that that would be offset by the shortage o f firewood. As for the strength o f the realm, developers believed that a strong industrial econ­ omy would make for a strong Protestant England, capable o f standing alone, if need be, against the Catholic empire o f Spain. Conservationists replied that nothing would avail an England whose navy had foundered for lack o f ship tim­ ber. And when the sacred myth o f greenwood liberty was raised, the baronial entrepreneurs had no hesitation in depicting the reassertion o f royal authority as some sort o f attempt to reinstitute the “Norman” despotism o f the forest. Royal counsellors responded by giving credence to the story that, in the wreck­ age o f the flagship o f the Spanish Armada, a note had been found in King Philip’s hand ordering the destruction o f the Forest o f Dean. Would the despoilers now do his work for him and put the liberties o f England to the axe by tearing out its Heart o f Oak?44 Such was the strength o f the royalist romance o f the greenwood that even when the monarchs themselves seemed to have abdicated direct responsibility for their forests, self-appointed champions o f the English oakwoods would undertake to remind them o f their patrimony. Arthur Standish, for example, gentleman knight living in south Lincolnshire, was one such self-appointed

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campaigner. In 1611 Standish addressed his Com m ons} C o m p lain t direcdy to King James I. The premise o f all such appeals was that the king had been mis­ led by poor or wicked counsel, that he could not possibly be indifferent to the fate o f his timber. And Standish obligingly supplied the king with arguments to refute those who claimed England would be better o ff with more arable and less woodland. Such assumptions, he insisted, had ignored the dung factor. Robbed o f local firewood, poor cottagers had had to burn straw or dung to see them through the winter. With the muck gone up in smoke, the fertility o f the fields had been reduced, thus pushing food prices up. It was an argument bizarre enough to appeal to James, who allowed the royal imprimatur to cover Standish’s second publication, New D irections f o r the P la n tin g o f Wood, in which a “ General Plantation” was urged to forestall the evil day when Eng­ land’s timber reserves would be entirely exhausted.45 The response o f the Stuart kings was all affectation and no substance. At the very same time that Charles I had van Dyck depict him as the new St. George, mounted beneath a great umbrageous oak o f the realm, he was busy selling off vast tracts o f the royal forests to noble entrepreneurs like the earls o f Pembroke and Warwick, who then cut them down. Whatever the rhetoric o f royal protection, it was always set aside by the next threat o f state bankruptcy. The Stuart genius for alienating virtually everyone reached right into the actually went into reverse and reafforested some areas, even reviving the old

Anthony van Dyck, Charles 1 on Horseback,

forest courts. The point o f this, though, was not to extend the royal shield

1635-40.

greenwood. For once he had realized funds from the first wave o f sales Charles

over the woods, but simply to confine sales and leases to a clientele o f his own choosing.46 N o family profited more from this dithering than the Winters o f Lydney. They had started well, Sir William Winter rising to be an admiral in the fleet o f Queen Elizabeth. But the next generation remained defiandy Catholic, Thomas Winter being among the conspirators who attempted to blow up Par­ liament in 1605. N ot all their improprieties were acts o f faith. Edward Winter was removed from his post as lord warden o f the forest for cutting and carting thousands more mature timber trees than his official allowance. But the Win­ ters always came back like suckers on a pollard. They knew their Stuarts well, and felt certain that the extravagance o f the court would make their offers o f cash advances for forest leases irresistible. They were right. By the end o f the 1620s Edward’s son John had enlarged the ironworks at Lydney in Glouces­ tershire and had become the dominating contractor o f the Crown in the Royal Forest o f Dean. Though he had been instructed to use only “dotards”— the superannuated trees that were useless for naval timber— for industrial charcoal, Winter imme­ diately embarked on wholesale enclosures and clearances. Monopolizing all supplies in the greatest o f all the royal forests, Winter was thus in a position to

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force woodland villagers (and even his own miners) to buy wood at exorbitant prices. The predictable result was a series o f violent riots.47 Though Crown pol­ icy was capable o f putting the brakes on wholesale exploitation when the peace and good order o f the realm was seriously jeopardized, the halt was never more than a temporary palliative. During the years o f Charles I’s “personal rule,” when Parliament had been suspended, in the 1630s, more and more acreage was sold off. The piecemeal liquidation o f the royal greenwood culminated in an auction for the Forest o f Dean itself, which, to nobody s surprise, went to the deep-pocketed and timber-hungry Sir John Winter for eighteen thousand pounds. Within one year he had managed to fell a third o f the entire forest, including its choicest and most ancient hardwoods. To those who noticed these things (and toward the end o f Charles’s reign their numbers were growing fast), it could not possibly be fortuitous that Win­ ter was secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria and, like her, an obstinate Catholic! Was his apparendy insatiable appetite actually a subterfuge for stripping the nation o f the timber needed for its navy, thus realizing the ambition o f the Spanish kings to restore the Catholic obedience that had prevailed when Queen Mary Tudor had been on the throne and her husband had been King Philip II? The liberties o f freeborn Englishmen, such alarmists argued, were falling with the greenwood. In 1642, with the authority o f the king collapsing, Winter was finally removed from his office in the forest, and his contract repudiated as “o f evil fame and disaffected to the public peace and prosperity o f the Kingdom.” To his credit, Winter did not shrink from the coming confrontation. Arrested and thrown into the Tower in 1643, he was no sooner set free than he raised an army on the Welsh borders for the king and used his own ironworks to turn the house at Lydney into an armed camp. With the king’s main armies vanquished, Winter would still not admit defeat, carrying on an extraordinary guerrilla campaign from the heart o f his forest. When all seemed finally lost and his back was literally to the Severn, he eluded capture by clambering down a two-hundred-foot cliff at Tidenham and jumping into a boat waiting for him on the river. In 1648 his estates were confiscated. Time and again he was given the chance to “compound” for them— paying a penal fine for their restoration. But evidently Winter did not care to pay for his own property, still less to make a penitent “submission” to Parliament, followed by safe conduct to exile. Instead he chose the Tower, and it was only in 1653 that the Commonwealth govern­ ment first allowed him the “liberty o f the Tower” and then a residence anywhere within thirty miles o f London. The Civil War merely substituted the spoliation o f the many for the spoli­ ation o f the few. The immediate result o f the wholesale abolition o f the royal forests during the Civil War was sylvan anarchy. After so many years o f being fenced o ff by contractors, whether parliamentarian or royalist, the woods were simply invaded by great armies o f the common people who whacked and

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hacked at anything they could find. Brushwood, standing timber, fallen limbs and boughs— anything and everything was taken before the next-door neigh­ bor or the next village could get to it. The chaos was so serious that Parliament inherited all o f the dilemmas, and all the expedients o f its royal predecessor. Once again sober regulation was followed in short order by sales to anyone and everyone who could guarantee advances o f money, ships, and guns. So the scene that John Evelyn surveyed when he presented Silva, or A D is ­ course o f Forest-Trees to the restored Charles II in February 1664 was o f unpar­ alleled desolation. The book had originated in a request to the Royal Society from the Crown commissioners o f the navy for a fresh plan for replanting tim­ ber trees. Evelyn was one o f four Fellows o f the Society approached for ideas, and asked to make a digest o f all their proposals along with his own. The learned editor, however, quickly turned author.48 For Evelyn, it was a perfect assignment. Already middle-aged, he had spent his prime publishing unrepentandy royalist pamphlets and representing Charles I’s interests in France. The more hopeless the cause became, the more tenacious was his loyalty. When the royalist court at Oxford dissolved, Evelyn served Charles’s embassy in Paris, where his fidelity was at least rewarded with a bride in the person o f Mary Browne, the daughter o f the king’s ambassador. And Evelyn compensated for political adversity with encyclopedic intellectual curiosity. Like Francis Bacon (beside whose mighty intellectual torch Evelyn was, in truth, but an elegant candle), there was no subject on which he felt disqualified from offering an opinion. Returned to England in the waning years o f the Commonwealth, he quickly produced books on children’s education and the art and history o f engraving. But it was in designs for the land that Evelyn always expressed his most acutely felt passions and principles. In 1658 he published The French G a r ­ dener and a year later had sent to the physicist Robert Boyle plans for the estab­ lishment o f a collegiate retreat, conceived as a self-sufficient Roman villa. In 1662 John Evelyn stared, heartsick, at whole woods cut clear to the ground, great timber trees uprooted altogether; acres o f scarred, mutilated, and burned underwood. For the sentimental royalist there could be no more terrible emblem o f revolution than the stand o f venerable elms on the royal walk at St. James’s amputated down to raw and grimy stumps. So Silva was conceived not just as a learned work on the techniques o f arboriculture but also as an act o f reparation and consolation: a walk through the ancient groves, a shower o f acorns for posterity. Silva may still be the greatest o f all forestry books ever published in Eng­ lish, and its author revelled in its immediate success. When the second edition was published in 1669, he boasted to Charles II that “ more than a thousand copies [had been] bought up o f the first impression . . . in much less time than two years.” According to the booksellers, this “was a very extraordinary thing in volumes o f this bulk.”49 Ten years later, however, he grumbled that “ I am

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only vexed that it proving so popular as in so few years to pass so many impres­ sions and (as I hear) gratify the avaricious printers with some hundreds o f pounds, there had not been some cause in it for the benefit o f our society.”50 Part o f the lasting appeal o f Silva is its marriage o f the practical and the fan­ tastic. Graft a pruner’s manual to The Golden Bough and you have a version o f Silva. Every page makes it clear that it was a labor o f love for the polymathic Evelyn. Evelyn’s first chapters are full o f meticulous technical advice on soil composition, sowing, dibbling, germinating, pruning, lopping, grafting, and trimming; on the cultivation o f each o f the major species o f hardwood and conifers; on the different techniques needed to produce stands o f mature tim­ ber trees, pollarded coppices, prolific nut and fruit orchards, or garden shrubs. In everything there should be the principle o f carefully understood taxonomic appropriateness: each variety treated after its own character. Scientific precision did not preclude poetry. Evelyn’s friend Abraham C ow ­ ley supplied a preface that mused, “We nowhere greater art do see/ Than when we graft or bud a tree.” And when Evelyn himself came to the hornbeams shel­ tering saplings o f orange and myrde in Brompton Park, his prose turned into an arcadian lyric. During the increasing heat o f summer they are so ranged, disposed as to adorn a noble area o f a most magnificent paradisian dining room— to the top o f Hortulan pomp and bliss, superior to all the artificial fur­ niture o f the greatest princes’ court— the golden fruit, the apples o f the Hesperides together with the delicious ananas gratify the taste while the cheerful ditties o f canorous birds recording their innocent amours to the murmurs o f the bubbling fountain delight the ear. A t the same time the charming accents o f the fair and virtuous sex, prefer­ able to all the admired composures o f the most skilful musicians, join in concert with hymns and hallelujahs to the bountiful and glorious Creator.51 But Silva was meant to be neither a botanical rhapsody nor a mere hand­ book o f husbandry. Like Standish before him, Evelyn had a higher political and national purpose in mind. Chapter 7, he immodestly insisted, “should consti­ tute part o f the political catechism o f all Statesmen” (advice that was taken more seriously across the Channel by the ministers o f Louis XTV). The restoration o f the king, he argued, should also announce the restoration o f the forests, so he addressed Charles as Cyrus, the restorer o f the Temple, and Hiram, the king o f the cedars o f Lebanon, the prince who “ by cultivating our decaying woods will contribute to your Power as to our Wealth and Safety.”52 Who better, after all, to effect this than the monarch whose life and reign was owed to the oak in which he sheltered after the defeat o f the Battle o f Worcester? Evelyn included

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lines from the Cavalier poets Waller and Cowley that made the association between the “phoenix-king” and the British oak even more emphatic, the trees depicted as faithful subjects in a country that had spurned its rightful sovereign.

The loyal Tree its w illin g boughs in c lin ’d, Well to receive the clim bing R oyal Guest, (In Trees more pity than in M en we fin d ) A n d in thick leaves into an arbour press’d.

A rugged Seat o f Wood became a Throne, T h ’ obsequious Boughs his Canopy o f State, W ith bowing Tops the Tree their K in g d id own, A n d silently ad o r’d him as he sate.S3

He even exploited the fashion, begun under the early Stuarts, o f imagining the Druids in their oak groves as the ancestors o f modern Britons, with himself per­ haps as a chief Druid, wise and holy man o f the sacred arbor. Quoting Cowley, Evelyn established the tree-priest as a royalist and patriot, the absolute opposite o f the pagan sorcerer Comus, whom John Milton, the Puritan and regicide, pre­ sented as a lord o f wickedness. The masque Com us had turned the forest into a place o f heathen and “ barbarous dissonance” populated by the wizard’s “rout o f monsters,” howling “ Like Stabled wolves or tigers at their prey,/Doing abhorred rites to Hecate.” 54In Cowley and Evelyn’s words, though,

O u r B ritish D ru id s not with vain in ten t O r w ithout Providence d id the O ak freq uen t, T h a t A lb io n d id that Tree so m uch advance N o r superstition was, nor ignorance Those priest d iv in in g even then bespoke The M ighty T rium ph o f the R oyal O ak.5S

Evelyn’s hope was that by identifying the policy o f spoliation with the Commonwealth, Charles would wholeheartedly embrace the idealized tradi­ tion o f the royal forester that his father and grandfather had betrayed. Evelyn dwelled on the damage that the confiscators and random vandalism had wrought, condemning “ the improvident wretches who gloried in the destruc­ tion o f those goodly forests” to “their proper scorpions and the vengeance o f the Druids.” But it was the masters o f the forges and furnaces who were the greatest villains o f all, for they “ had set steel in the bowels o f their Mother, Old England.” 56

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T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D Evelyn later told the king that his book “has been the sole occasion o f fur­

nishing your almost exhausted dominion with more . . . than two millions o f timber trees,” a meaningless figure that he reduced to a mere million in the preface to the third edition in 1679. In his old age he later embroidered the story even further, telling the countess o f Sunderland that the king him self h id complimented him that “by that book alone’ he had

incited a world o f

planters to repair their broken estates and woods which the greedy rebels had wasted and made such havoc of.”57 In point o f fact, it was the fifth edition, published in 1776, long after Eve­ lyn’s death, which, as we shall see, would truly revolutionize British sensibili­ ties about the woodlands. For all the erudition, eloquence, and careful science that went into the book, it had no more immediate success than Standish’s chimerical projects at converting the Stuarts into patrons o f the greenwood. By 1668 that nemesis o f the hardwoods, Sir John Winter, was back in the Forest o f Dean stripping it o f oaks at a faster rate than ever before. In theory, it ought to have been possible to inaugurate a serious debate about the husbanding o f the nation’s timber, as Charles IPs reign also marked a decisive shift toward an aggressive naval and colonial policy. England’s most formidable rival on the seas was the Dutch republic. It was rich enough to monopolize supplies o f Baltic timber by buying the production o f entire Nor­ wegian forests, years in advance, and economically ingenious enough to pro­ duce vessels through an extraordinary system o f prefabricated construction. When the hulls, masts, and sails had all been assembled in the Amsterdam dock­ yards, Dutch ships had cost a third o f the price o f their English equivalents and had been built in half the time. And while the first round o f hostilities in the 1650s had caught the Dutch relatively lightly armed, the second war, between 1664 and 1667, was an unmitigated disaster for the English, ending in the Dutch navy penetrating the Medway, burning the fleet, and carrying away The Royal Charles as prize to Amsterdam. The humiliation only made the architects o f maritime power more deter­ mined. But their emphasis, given the acute desire for revenge and reassertion, was on speed, convenience, and effectiveness o f supply for the royal dockyards. This in turn meant relying more on the aristocratic landowners who would sup­ ply the navy (and the growing merchant marine) directly, or work through long-term contracts from the royal forests.58 By the end o f the seventeenth century France had replaced the Dutch republic as Britain’s principal colonial and naval competitor. And it may have been awareness o f the measures enacted by Louis X IV’s great minister JeanBaptiste Colbert, for the strategic preservation o f French forests, that prompted some belated action on the other side o f the Channel. In 1698 King William III introduced in the royal forests (now much shrunken) the power o f “rolling enclosure,” by which two hundred acres o f the New Forest, for exam-

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pie, were to be set aside each year as a nursery for timber oaks. When six thou­ sand acres had matured sufficiendy to survive animal grazing, they could be opened to game and a new area closed o ff for more restocking. But in an age when enumerating national assets was the chief obsession o f the “political arith­ meticians” o f the Treasury and the Admiralty, little comfort would have been drawn from comparing the eighth o f the British land surface that remained wooded with the quarter o f France said still to be covered by forest. As if this gloomy prognosis were not enough, nature made its own brutal intervention. On November 26, 1703, a monstrously violent storm, described by some contemporaries as a “hurricane,” devastated the forests o f southern England. In a later edition o f Silva, Evelyn reported that no less than three thou­ sand great timber oaks had been uprooted in the Forest o f Dean, and four thou­ sand in the N ew Forest. He himself had some two thousand blown down, “several o f which, torn up by their fall, raised mounds o f earth near twenty feet high with great stones intangled among the roots and rubbish and this almost within sight o f my dwelling.” 59 The tragedy— for so it seemed to Evelyn, two years before his own death— was as much national as personal and led him instinctively to use political and even military language to describe its magni­ tude. In the first year o f the renewed war against the Sun King it was as though the country had suffered a terrible defeat before the troops o f the tyrant o f Versailles. Sure I am that I still feel the dismal groans o f our forests; that late dreadful hurricane having subverted so many thousand o f goodly oaks prostrating the trees laying them in ghastly postures like whole regi­ ments fallen in battle by the sword o f the Conqueror crushing all that grew beneath them.60 The damage from the gale o f 1703 set o ff another round o f dirges for the disappearance o f the oaks o f old England. N ow that the enemy was absolutist, Catholic France, the trees became fetishized as more than simply the con­ struction fabric o f the navy. In countless eighteenth-century broadsides, pam­ phlets, ballads, inn signs, and allegorical engravings, the “ Heart o f Oak” became the bulwark o f liberty, all that stood between freeborn Englishmen and Catholic slavery and idolatry. A t the victorious conclusion o f the war against Louis XIV, Alexander Pope, who had written Windsor-Forest as a sylvan his­ tory o f English freedom, had Father Thames confidently proclaim: “ Thy Trees, f a i r W indsor1, now shall leave their woods, A n d h a lf thy Forests rush into my Floods, B ea r B r it a in ’s T h u n d er a n d her Cross display, To the bright R eg ions o f the rising D a y . . . ” 61

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In 1743 James Wheeler, botanist and gardener, published The M odern D r u id with a frontispiece drawn and engraved by a friend o f Gainsborough and H o ­ garth and drawing master to Frederick, Prince o f Wales, John Joshua Kirby. No allegorical masterpiece, Kirby’s design nonetheless graphically anthologized these perennial anxieties. Britannia is shown seated, holding a twig o f the sacred national oak, beside both a broken stump and a tree thick with acorns. In the middle distance, the fruit o f prudent silviculture, in the shape o f fleets, martial and mercantile, sail beneath the reassuring Latin motto B rita n n ia e D ecus et Tutam en (The Glory and Protection o f Britain). Repeated

analogies

were

made between the character o f the timber and the character of the nation. The “heart” o f oak, the core o f the tree, was its hard­ est and stoutest wood, the most defiantly resistant to the worst natural infirmities: fungal dry rot within, teredine boring molluscs without. Even the quirkiness o f Ouercus robur, with its crooked, angular pieces crucial for the construction o f hulls, was con­ trasted with more predictably uniform “foreign” timber. The fact that Italian oaks were even more prone to produce crooked limbs was neither here nor there beside the fact that the English oak was thus characterized as the arboreal kingdom’s individualist: stag-headed, undisciplined, glo­ rying in its irregularity. “ It is a striking but well-known fact,” John Charnock, the historian o f naval architecture, insisted, that “the oak o f other countries, though lying under precisely the same latitude with Britain, has been invariably found less serviceable than that o f the latter, as though Nature herself, were it possible to indulge so romantic an idea, had forbad that the national character o f a British ship should be suffered to undergo a species o f degradation by being built o f materials not indigenous to it.”62 Batty Langley’s Sure Method o f Im proving Estates by Planta tions o f Oak, published in 1728, was meant to reconcile a reform in landscape architecture with patriotic self-preservation. Unless something was done, he predicted that in sixty years England’s timber would disappear altogether.

Frontispiece to James Wheeler, The Modern Druid, 1747.

H earts o f Oak and Bulwarks o f Liberty?

l 6 5

Indeed at this juncture we have very little building timber in our woods and forests to boast o f and are already much obligd to foreign­ ers for great quantities o f our civil uses. But should we ever happen (which God forbid) to be obligd to purchase some o f their timber for our Shipping (by want thereof at Home) ’tis to be feared that this glo­ rious Nation that governs the Seas must submit to every Invasion that’s made, for want o f its wooden Walls o f defence.63 The real problem, many observers felt, was less purely silvicultural than social. Though all surveyors agreed on the shrunken acreage o f great timber oaks, some, like Daniel Defoe, insisted that there were more than enough remaining trees to supply the country’s naval needs for the foreseeable future. Near Southampton he saw “ gentlemen’s estates . . . so overgrown, with their woods so full o f full-grown timber that it seemed as if they wanted sale for it.” Instead o f missing old trees, private forests were suffocating with them, rotting as they stood, “ ancient oaks o f many hundred years standing perishing with their wither’d tops advanced up in the air that could never get the favor o f being cut down and made serviceable to their country.”64 These arboreal graveyards had come about either through negligence or by the selfish design o f landowners deliberately limiting supply to sustain high prices. In either case, it was the want o f public and patriotic spirit in the prop­ ertied classes that accounted for the oak famine. But how might they be made more responsible? During the first half o f the eighteenth century a regulating role for the Crown seemed out o f the question. The Glorious Revolution o f 1688 had, after all, established a parliamentary monarchy presumed to support, rather than infringe on, the interests o f the propertied aristocracy. The very offices that had procurement power in the forests— the Treasury and the A dm i­ ralty— were the sinecures o f the Hanoverian magnates on which this constitu­ tional regime rested. So it was extremely unlikely that the state would act in such a way as to inconvenience its landowners. Should such a temptation arise, it would invariably be greeted with cries o f “Stuart despotism.” Parliamentary statutes were much more likely to reinforce, than to weaken, the property rights o f the W hig aristocracy, who had, after all, become the heirs o f the Norman and Angevin forester-hunters— their mastery o f the county hunts symbolizing their political and social supremacy. Instead o f medieval for­ est law, new parliamentary statutes imposed what on paper were draconian cap­ ital penalties for poaching. In turn a new generation o f outlaws, described in the punitive statute o f 1722 as “wicked and evil-disposed persons,” continued to thieve the W hig grandees’ deer and resist the final extinction o f common use rights. In some o f the most bitterly contested areas like Waltham Forest in Hampshire, a virtual woodland war broke out, fought between armed game­ keepers and gangs o f poachers disguised in the charcoal blackface o f rebellion 65

166

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D It was only the next wave o f anxiety for Britain’s naval future that per­

suaded a new generation to pass a series o f acts for the “encouragement and better preservation o f timber.” Ironically, this sense o f crisis followed direcdy on the brilliant string o f naval victories against the French dufing the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). For though the Royal Navy had triumphed, it had also sustained heavy losses, and by the end o f the war it was scrambling to find import substitutes for both hull and mast timber. Hard on the heels o f victory came the galling sense that the most recent generation o f ships was probably already obsolescent, superseded by even bigger, more heavily armed men-ofwar. Whatever the eventual design o f that next generation, no one doubted that its ships would consume even more oak than the last. If the imperial dream was to stay afloat, something had to be done (so patriotic souls thought) to revive the public spirit o f the oligarchs. “ Let each gen­ tleman . . . reflect upon horses and dogs, wine and women, cards and folly and then upon plant­ ing. Will not the last engross his whole mind and appear worthy o f employing all his attention?” asked William Hanbury,

the

Church

Langton

Oxfordshire

rector of

in

his

Essay on Planting.

in 1758 Appar­

ently not, since “those increas­ ing funds for future shipping [were] totally sunk,” a spectacle that “must sensibly affect every English heart who knows that his nation’s safety consists in her wooden walls.”66 Five years later, at the end o f the war, the Liverpool shipwright Roger Fisher confirmed the gloomy prognosis. Testifying before a parliamentary com­ mittee o f inquiry on the oak shortage (a report that was published in 1763 as H ea rt o f Oak: The British Bulw ark), Fisher set out an entire historical theory in which empires rose and fell depending on their prudent or reckless forestry. What gave his arguments unusual force was his detailed personal research. He had inquired from thirty-one timber dealers and shipwrights around the coun­ try (including Scotland) on the price and availability o f naval timber. And his conclusion was that the outlook for the liberties o f Old England was indeed desolate.67 The gentry and nobles o f Hanoverian Britain had pillaged their woods to provide for “horses and dogs, wine and women, cards and folly” with­

Engraving from William Boutcher, A Treatise on Forest-Trees, 1775*

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l 6 7

out a thought for posterity. “We are preying on our very vitals yet the bulk o f the nation is insensible to it and quite easily swimming in plenty, giving laws to the world yet careless o f our own inward security.” Fisher also noticed that while they were at this, they were also destroying the ancestral topography o f Britain. The hedgerow and the underwood were being cut and uprooted, dooming entire species o f British birds like the linnet. Fisher’s lament was colored by a sociological as well as an ornithological romanticism. In earlier and happier times, he claimed (not very accurately), noblemen had cleared only a narrow perimeter between their houses and the woods,

so that, properly speaking, they appeared at a distance in the midst o f a w ood and were only to be seen through the avenues leading to them. Thus situated they were sheltered from storms and tempests and had the pleasure o f viewing from every apartment the progress o f their labours still keeping in view the grand design, the naval power o f Britain. Shaded by their leafy canopies, these gentry had lived a life o f bosky patri­ otism, the cares o f man and bird alike soothed away by the pleasures o f their little greenwood arcadia. When a little cloyed with enjoyment, or to retire from business or for the sake o f meditation, a walk for the space o f a furlong or little more leads the wealthy inhabitant into a spacious wood. The variety o f the scene revives his drooping spirits. O n the branch o f a fiill-topt oak, at a small distance, the blackbird and thrush warble forth their notes, and as it were bless their benefactor. Variety o f changes draw on the pleas­ ing hour amongst the massy bodies o f the full-grown oaks and thriv­ ing plants. The prospects o f his country’s good warms his heart. He returns and beholds his little offspring round his board satiated with the views o f the provision made for their defence in the thriving nurs­ eries all around. He enjoys it a while and in good old age lies down and dies in peace.68 Such Arden-Edens, Fisher regretted, had all but disappeared, replaced by the “ new-built palaces and country seats o f our grandees” who deemed it “ unhealthful to live near a wood.” Who was to blame? Foreigners, o f course, and those impressionable gentlemen who had had their good oaken British common sense knocked out o f them on their Grand Tours. So the Messieurs and the Italianized architects between them had severed the nobility from their own better nature, from their past, and, worse, from the precious preservation

1 68

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o f native freedom. “ Down with the oaks from the front and wings is the mod­ ern cry,” and down with them, thought Fisher, would come the British con­ stitution. What could be done to remedy this dangerous situation? Even before the war, in 1755, a memoir by Edward Wade proposing a mass planting program had been presented to the recently established Royal Society for the Encour­ agement o f the Arts. And three years later the first prizes were offered to those proprietors, aristocrat and commoner alike, who had sown the most acorns, or had planted other trees (like Spanish chestnut, elm, and Scots fir) deemed use-

Thomas Gainsborough, John Plampin, ca. 1755.

ful for the navy. Acres o f ducal property were immediately studded with acorns, and fir saplings by the hundreds o f thousands began to sprout across the coun­ try. In 1761, for example, the duke o f Bedford claimed the society’s silver medal for planting eleven acres o f acorns at Woburn, and in 1763, for sixteen thou­ sand firs on his estate at Millbrook. This was nothing, though, compared to William Beckford’s gold for 61,800 Scotch firs at Fonthill or William Mellish’s 101,600 spruce and 475,000 larch on his estates at Blyth, Nottinghamshire. (The all-time six-medal winner, late in the century, must have been the lord lieutenant o f Cardiganshire, Colonel Thomas Johnes, an enthusiast o f the pic­ turesque, who between 1795 and 1801 planted over two million trees, and raised, according to his claim, 922,000 oaks.)69 So the massively spreading oaks

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l 69

that became almost an obligatory feature o f the portraits painted by Gainsbor­ ough now advertised not merely the substance but the patriotism o f the sitters. Some o f the propagandists o f the new planting looked to the new king for patronage and support. When the physician Dr. Alexander Hunter published a new edition o f John Evelyn’s Silva in 1776, he flattered George III (just as Evelyn had prematurely flattered Charles II) by emphasizing the royal “ munif­ icence” by which the king had ordered twenty acres o f the Forest o f Knaresborough in Yorkshire to be set aside as an oak nursery, to supply both the coppicing needs o f the local poor as well as the timber needs o f the navy. And it seemed auspicious that in 1770 the prime minister, Lord North, had appointed a professional forester, Andrew Emmerich (born in Hanau but nat­ uralized British), Forstm eister to Frederick II o f Prussia, as the deputy sur­ veyor-general o f the royal forests, chases, and parks.70 Besides being the founder o f the York Lunatic Asylum in 1772, Hunter was the author o f G eorgical Essays, tracts on the curability o f consumption; an Illu stra tio n o f the A n a lo g y Between Vegetable a n d A n im a l P a rtu ritio n ; and the C u lin a F o m u la tr ix M ed icin a e, possibly the first (but not the last) medical cookbook. Irrepressibly public-spirited, Hunter evidently thought o f the republication o f S ilv a as a political as much as a botanical event. (Indeed his tough Scottish Enlightenment temper made him impatient with Evelyn’s interminable and “ unnecessary digressions” on subjects like the tree species that constituted the timber o f the cross. “A superstitious Monk might be allowed to waste his time in investigations o f this nature, but a serious and practical Christian . . . will despise such ridiculous fooleries.” )71 Though Hunter looked to the Crown to rouse what was left o f the spirit o f patriotic planting, he was also enough o f a pragmatist to realize that the fate o f the British woods would be decided not by the king but by his aristocracy. “The loss o f tim­ ber would not have operated so severely,” he lamented, “ had the principal nobility and gentry been as solicitous to plant as to cut down their woods.”72 So he must have been gratified by the subscription list (at two guineas a copy), dominated as it was by the greatest and grandest among the W hig nobility. The duke o f Portland, whose gardener, William Speechly, was Hunter’s prin­ cipal source for new techniques o f intensive acorn-sowing, bought two copies, and the marquis o f Rockingham, usually associated with the opposition Whigs, proclaimed his oaken patriotism by ordering no fewer than five. Am ong the other subscribers were not only James Boswell and the AngloDutch banker James Hope but the dukes o f Argyll, Atholl, Buccleuch, Beau­ fort, Grafton, and Devonshire and the earls o f Egremont, Cholmondeley, Radnor, and Pembroke. Obviously, subscription to the Hunterian Silva was a requirement o f fashion. But among this roll call o f landed magnates and polit­ ical grandees were many who, as the Royal Society o f Arts’ prize lists indicate, had already become the pioneers o f planting programs on their estates.73

170

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D As Evelyn’s faithful disciple, Hunter repeated the author’s boast that the

effect o f the first edition had been to inaugurate a wave o f oak-planting, “ and there is reason to believe that many o f our ships, which in the last war gave laws to the whole world, were constructed from Oaks planted at that time.” 74 “ I flat­ ter myself,” he added, “that the present republication will be a means o f rais­ ing the same virtuous and patriotic spirit.”75 Evelyn’s original instructions about planting the great hardwoods were now supplemented by Hunter’s upto-date intelligence about modern methods o f silviculture. Advice was given on raising stands o f alternative hardwoods (Spanish chestnut as a substitute for oak, American Weymouth pine instead o f the fir). Every chapter was illustrated by spectacular engravings o f leaves, seeds, and keys, hand-colored in specially commissioned volumes (color illus. 17). And sewn in among the paragraphs o f briskly practical prose were plates cal­ culated to stir wonder and sentiment: engravings o f the Methuselahs o f the British woods. These were blasted patriarchs like the Greendale oak at Welbeck (that spread almost fifty feet from the bole) and the Cowthorpe oak on Lady Stourton’s estate, sesquicentenarians that were vegetable proclamations o f British immortality. A horseman, riding through one such heroically ruined trunk, came to seem like a personification o f the greenwood gentry, framed by the triumphal arch o f English immortality. Fifteen years on from the Hunterian plates, the poet William Cowper, his own mind much blasted by “raving melan­ choly,” would see in the equally venerable and ruined Yardley oak an entire his­ tory o f the British constitution, from its beginnings in the druidical woods, through great days o f state, to its present forlorn state, eaten by corruption and hacked about by the greedy. Even thus, he pictures the oak limbless but not life­ less, for deep in the crumbling mold Cowper discovers the renewal o f life. Embowell’d now, and o f thy a ncient self Possessing nought b u t the scoop’d rind, that seems A n huge throat calling to the clouds f o r d rink . . . Tet is thy root sincere, sound as the rock, A quarry o f stout spurs a n d knotted fangs, Which, crook’d into a thousand whimsies, clasp The stubborn soil, and hold thee s till erect. So stands a kingdom, whose found ations yet F a il not, in virtue an d in wisdom laid, Though a ll the superstructure, by the tooth P u lveriz’d o f venality, a shell Stands now, an d semblance only o f itself . . . Tet life still lingers in thee, a n d puts fo rth Proof not contemptible o f what she can, Even where death predominates. The spring

A. Rooker after S. H. Grimm, “A North West View of the Greendale Oak near Welbeck,” from John Evelyn, Silva,

1775-

H earts o f Oak an d Bulwarks o f Liberty?

l 7 l

172

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D Thee fin ds not less d iv e to her sweet force Than yonder upstarts o f the neighbour wood™ Poetic license aside, was the Hunterian Silva an elegy or a call to action?

Had the rebirth o f sylvan patriotism happened too late? The fact that it was published in 1776 was not, o f course, accidental. The choice nightmare o f the greenwood pessimists featured an unholy union between French absolutism and colonial rebellion, the M arine royale and the Minutemen: the oaken hulls o f Brittany sporting the pine masts o f New England, a true chastisement for generations o f improvidence. To the clear-sighted, though, it was apparent that the worst damage to the navy had been done not by the guns o f French or American warships, but by

William Burgh, “A Winter View o f the Cowthorpe Oak,” from John Evelyn, Silva, 1775.

fungi, specifically the great leathery growths o f Xylostroma gig a n teu m or the smelly, slimy white fistula o f the Boletus hybridus that luxuriated inside ships’ timber. No sea lord o f the Admiralty feared John Paul Jones half as much as he feared a rotting bottom. As early as 1742 William Ellis had warned against using “ Norway oak” for anything except elbow-pieces, the acutely bent timbers needed for the curved, lower sides o f the hull. Like other foreign and “exotic” (meaning American) oaks, he claimed, its proportion o f sap to wood was much higher, nourishing worm and encouraging rot and blight. Truly native English oak, on the other hand, was (like the population in general) tight-pored and tough-grained, inhospitable to pests, phenomenally watertight and long-lived.77 But naval pro­ curement had become desperate. According to William Marshall, writing at the

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end o f the eighteenth century, a seventy-four-gun ship o f the line needed one hundred and fifty feet o f elm (in twenty-five-foot lengths) for the keel alone, and would consume two thousand mature oaks o f around two tons each.78 And the oak panic had been further aggravated by the pine and fir neurosis. Doomsayers thought that the independent United States might well deny Britain the supplies o f precious hundred-foot softwood logs from which masts for the great thirty-foot ships o f the line were fashioned. In extremis the Royal Navy might have to resort to masts made from four or five pieces o f inferior pine, connected by iron rings. These pieced-together masts compromised maneu­ verability in battle by slowing the time needed to furl or unfurl sails, extra cau­ tion being needed to move rope over the joints. The advantage the British had enjoyed over the French thus shrank even further. It was not surprising, then, that in the frantic atmosphere o f Anglo-French competition following the American war, there was the temptation to cut corners and use whatever timber the royal yards could lay their hands on, no questions asked about provenance. Some o f these lots were greener than they should have been. Predictably, and to the huge satisfaction o f the prophets o f arboreal doom, disasters fol­ lowed. N one was more spectacular than the fate that befell the hundred-gun R o ya l George in 1782. “ Heeled over” for some minor repairs in Portsmouth Harbour, the timbers o f the vessel failed to take the strain and its entire bot­ tom fell out, sinking the huge ship immediately and drowning scores o f the crew, including a full admiral.79 Other vessels were so rotten from attacks o f fungus blight or shipworm molluscs that by the time they were ready for com­ missioning, the hull and keel needed rebuilding all over again. The Q u een C harlotte, originally built at Deptford in 1810 from Canada oak and pitch pine, had had warming stoves set in its hull to hurry the seasoning o f the green wood, with the result that within a year it was covered in growths o f boletus. By the time it had been retimbered a third time, the ship had cost the staggering sum o f £2 87,8 37.80 N o wonder that whenever Admiral Collingwood took shore leave he went about with his breeches pockets full o f acorns, from which handfuls would be surreptitiously strewn on his hosts’ land. N or that one o f the most eloquent propagandists for a consistent government policy o f conservation and planting was Horatio Nelson, who, in 1803, visited the Forest o f Dean and saw rotting dotards, or stands cut before maturity so that the men who ran the “ timber rings” could take a quick profit, while in the clearings “vast droves” o f hogs and sheep tore the shoots o f saplings. Even as he grieved over the landscape o f desolation, Nelson imagined the creation o f a wholly new corps o f foresters: incorruptible, zealous, and knowledgeable. The “ guardian o f the support o f our Navy must be an intelligent honest man who will give up his time to his employment. . . . H e must live in the Forest, have a house, a small farm and an adequate salary.”81

174

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D Pending this happy reformation, there were other short-term answers to

the timber famine, the most economic o f which was copiously supplied by Nel­ son himself, in the shape o f captured French ships. Thus it was that the oak o f the Pays Basque and the pines o f the Pyrenees were refitted to fly the white ensign o f the Royal Navy. But even while celebrating their triumphs and recy­ cling their spoils, jeering at the froggies puffed up with pride or sunk in desti­ tution, the sea lords were still nervously aware that it was much easier (so they thought) for the French state, whether Bourbon, Jacobin, or Bonapartist, sim­ ply to requisition naval timber by official fiat. Many had taken the diligence south on the Grand Tour, and had travelled through the forests o f Lower Bur­ gundy or even seen the endless pinewoods o f the Gascon landes, Provence, and the Pyrenees. They knew that the masters o f the French forestry corps could simply designate stands o f forest for the service o f the nation almost as if they were conscripting militia. And, not unnaturally, this sweeping authority made those, like Sir Charles Middleton, trying to establish a more rational procure­ ment system in England, wish occasionally that the greenwood were not quite so hedged with liberties. What were such rights but the right o f extortion freely practiced by the magnates o f the Timber Trust? Under such warrant, men like William Bowsher and John Larkin, who had managed to lock up the market, dictated outrageously low prices to the Crown.82 And Friends o f the Oak, con­ scientiously building a library o f silviculture, could not help but notice that their German volumes were now matched by an increasing number o f titles in French. No self-respecting forestry buff could be content with Silva if he did not also have the six volumes o f Duhamel du Monceau alongside. Which is not to say that an upstanding, beef-eating, bloody-minded, free born Englishman would ever publicly envy the craven, mincing French any­ thing, least o f all their trees. All the same, it did give one pause over the port.

iv

The Pillars o f Gaul

Had an English oak-fancier smuggled himself into a French forest on a day o f martelage, his anxieties would not have been much assuaged. It all looked so impressive, so orderly. There was even something decisive about the silver hatchet, the m arttau, for which the day was named, with its blade shaped like a fleur-de-lys, to mark the timber for the king. On the appointed date a little

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procession would make its way into the woods. A t its head would be the offi­ cers o f the royal forestry corps, the m aitrise, dressed in blue velvet su rto u t coats with gold vests and ffogging, cocked hats on their carefully bewigged heads. Behind them would follow the forest guards whose first responsibility was to see that the great timber trees reserved to the crown, the g ra n d e fu ta ie , were allowed to grow to their proper hundred-year maturity without being surrep­ titiously lopped or felled by unscrupulous local merchants or desperate woodlanders. Behind the guards in proper order would be notables and officers o f the local municipality and, bringing up the rear, the day laborers hired for authorized contract-logging. Using an official survey o f the forest, the ga rd e-m a rtea u would mark the designated young trunk with the royal sign, declaring it a ward o f the crown until, as a great centenarian, it would make its contribution to the glory o f the French Empire. These rites o f adoption would then be followed by a celebra­ tory woodland dinner for the officers and their ladies: game pies and white wine cooled in silver basins. A t a respectful distance, a table o f social inferiors would share (up to a point) the festivities, a country air sung by one o f the girls com­ peting with the wood pigeons and thrushes.83 This was how things were supposed to be, at least since the great “ refor­ mation” o f the forest administration in the 1660s. The direction taken by the French monarchy to ensure its maritime future was exactly the reverse o f its rival across the Channel. In England the medieval administration o f the royal forests had, over the centuries o f the Tudors and Stuarts, effectively abdicated real economic power to contractors and aristocratic landowners. As the ton­ nage o f the navy quadrupled between the reigns o f Charles II and George III, it was these private individuals, rather than the Crown, who controlled supply, and took the profit. But if the policy o f the British crown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a pragmatic abdication o f the control o f the state, its French counterpart was determined to assert its authority. In late medieval and Renaissance France, it had seemed on paper to be an imposing royal for­ est administration. But in reality it had been the creature o f the noble families who dominated the provinces and perpetuated civil war. The great forests o f Compiegne and Fontainebleau had been carefully preserved for the pleasure o f the royal hunt while oak and beechwoods up and down the country were plun­ dered by the same officers who were supposed to be guarding them for the king. The devastation o f the forests during the long religious wars o f the six­ teenth century had been so severe that well-meaning officers o f the crown drew up new statutes o f protection and even attempted some light enforcement. But at precisely the same time that the English crown was conceding effective power to the aristocracy, the French crown was taking it back. The oracular warning issued by Jean-Baptiste Colbert to Louis XTV, “ La France perira, faute de bois [France will perish for want o f w ood],” was no different from John Eve­

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lyn’s lament to Charles II. The difference lay in that the Bourbon king listened more attentively than the Stuart, and that his minister was given formidable

.84

powers to do something about the crisis

In carrying out his timber “ reformation,” Colbert could draw on a long tradition o f arboreal classicism. A century before, in 1567* the architect Phili­ bert de l’Orme had encapsulated its axiom by drawing a classical column in its rudimentary form as a tree trunk. He was, to be sure, only illustrating the famous passage on the arboreal origins o f building in the second book o f Vitruvius’s D e a r c h ite c tu r a l But de l’Orme’s treatise is imprinted with French classi­ cism’s axiom that nature should be made orderly and functional, and that the forests o f France were to be lined up awaiting their proper service to the state. Fifteen years earlier, the Valois king Henri II had ordered his subjects to plant elms alongside the highways o f his kingdom. His design was as much military as aesthetic, for they were supposed to provide timber for wagons and artillery mounts

.86And it seems unlikely that the

peasantry were massively mobilized in a campaign o f elm-planting. But eventually the great columnar avenues o f elms and poplars alongside the roads of France did become established like so many guards o f honor for a royal progress. Colbert certainly expected the officers o f the royal forestry to stand to attention. While the young king’s martial dreams took the form o f mil­ itary descents on Flanders or the Rhineland, C ol­ bert understood (as much as John Evelyn) that the kingdom’s imperial fate would be decided on the ocean. Despite all the waste o f past centuries, France still boasted great forests that covered, according to his surveyors, 25 percent o f its territory. The woods o f Normandy, Picardy, and (aside from Fontainebleau and the nearby forest o f Senart) the lie de France had been much reduced. But there were still immense reserves in the eastern and central regions o f Burgundy, Champagne, and the Auvergne. The softwood pine forests o f the Pyrenees had hardly been touched. And Louis XTV’s “War o f Devolution” waged on the east­ ern frontier o f the kingdom in 1667 had already added the thickly wooded hills and mountains o f the Franche-Comte to the inventory. Before long the forested hills o f the Vosges would be added to the realm.

Philibert de l’Orme, tree-column from Le Premier Tome de ^Architecture, 15 67.

The Pillars o f G a u l

177

After an initial period when Colbert allowed the incumbent masters and grand masters o f the royal forests the illusion that they would be allowed to reform themselves, the minister launched his inquisition. The inquisitors were his own men, sometimes indeed his own relatives. Their loyalty was unques­ tioned and they descended on the offices and tribunals o f the forestry— the mattrises— with no concern for rank or antiquity. What they found appalled Colbert: officers who routinely looted the woods they were appointed to pro­ tect; bishops who felled anything they wanted if the price was right; local counts who treated the forest o f the king as if it were their own private domain. Oaks that were supposed to be left to mature into tall timber were harvested every few years by merchants operating with illicit contracts. A ruthless purge followed. The m aitre o f the Champagne forests, Charles Fasnier, was condemned to death; others, especially in the west, where C o l­ bert’s brother was a particularly zealous inquisitor, were subjected to massive fines, evicted from their posts, and sometimes banished from the region or even the kingdom. In Poitiers the delinquent officer did public penance along with his subordinates, a rope about his neck, holding the torch o f contrition in a procession to the city gate. Accompanied by the hooded public executioner, the malefactor was required to make full confession o f all his crimes “ rashly and fraudulently and malevolently committed [thereby] causing the ruin o f His Majesty’s Forests for which [he] humbly beseeches pardon o f God, the King and his Justice.” 87 However traumatic, even this humiliation was probably envied by guards and sergeants convicted o f illegal sales who might receive sentences o f brutal flogging or even the galleys. But the culpable masters and grand masters were all themselves nobles for whom the treatment meted out by Colbert’s tribunals amounted to social death. Anything remotely comparable in England would, without question, have provoked cries o f the return o f Norman despotism and have precipitated another revolution. But matters were different in France, where the power o f the crown was unrestrained by parliamentary claims o f a share in legislative sovereignty. The extraordinary tribunals that would have been demonized in England as tyran­ nical were accepted in France as the proper arms o f absolutist authority. After the annihilation o f the old service Colbert installed his own men, recruited, he hoped, for competence as well as integrity. An ambitious survey was conducted o f the entire area o f woodland France. As well as royal forests, the “ communal woods” attached to villages and towns, and even private tracts, were surveyed when their proximity to rivers marked them down as potentially useful to the state. Carriage-loads o f men in long wigs and long coats, carrying surveying rods and spools o f horsehair twine, descended on the forests o f Normandy, Lower Burgundy, and the lie de France. By the end o f the 1660s Colbert had the data he needed to act.

178

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D The object, as always in Cartesian France, was to bring order to chaos. C ol­

bert thought o f the kingdom o f trees much as he thought o f the kingdom o f men: divided into distinctive orders, each with their own rank and use. A t the top were the noble oak and beech, on whose strength and longevity the defense o f the realm rested. Beneath them were the softwood conifers, the vegetable bourgeoisie, monotonous in their culture but indispensable for certain tasks. Even the artisans o f the woods— ash and lime, hornbeam and chestnut

had

their proper function. But just as an ill-tended forest concealed so much human canaille— brigands and smugglers and vagrants— so it sheltered the scraggly, misshapen good-for-nothing growths o f willow and bog alder, and white birch. The regime o f classical forestry designed to replace this monstrous jumble was encoded in the great ordinance o f 1669: five hundred articles, a hundred pages, the Bible o f French forestry until, and even beyond, the Revolution. In place o f the random cropping o f wood as need arose, the forests were to be divided into two stricdy separated resources: the ta illis compose' grown delib­ erately for regular harvesting, and the g ra n d e fu ta ie , the great stands o f timber trees planted in waves o f successive maturity. Space for these regiments would be created by clear-cutting everything down to stumps and then protecting the acorn-grown saplings from animals (and men) by a series o f defensive palings, earthworks, and fences that would have done credit to Vauban, Louis XIV’s expert at fortification. Some o f the articles o f the Code Colbert were merely vexing, like the requirement to bell animals so that illegal strays in the forest could be tracked from their telltale tinkle. Others, like the obligation to set aside a full quarter o f all communal woods for protected timber, were a bitter blow to French peas­ ants already struggling to survive in the woods. What did they know o f the king’s ships, built in some far-off port at the mouth o f the Loire? And what did they care? They needed acorns for their pigs and chestnuts for themselves to get through the winter. Most o f all they needed firewood. Now, with the scramble for what was left becoming desperate and the merchants opportunis­ tically raising prices, they would have to pay dearly to keep warm, to cook, to live. The colonnaded forest, neatly ordered by rank and purpose, was the dream o f a bureaucrat. But even the most rigidly scrupulous officials found it impos­ sible to ignore human reality. The predictable result was that after Colbert’s death, his code remained a paper monument to sylvan paternalism. The brutal winters o f the “little ice age” in the early years o f the eighteenth century per­ suaded officials to allow peasants to ignore the king’s q u a rt if their survival was at stake. Villages and timber merchants colluded to disguise illicit felling, set mysterious fires that reduced timber trees to “waste,” or, if nothing else worked, confronted the officers with violence. Whole regions o f the French forests in the 1730s were plunged into endemic woodland warfare.88 The royal

In Extremis

179

service decided to cut its losses, confining its serious attempts at enforcement to areas deemed strategically indispensable and leaving its foresters elsewhere to put up a good show on the days o f the little hatchet with the fleur-de-lys. I f local resistance cut one swathe through Colbert’s code, business cut another. As in Britain, the acceleration o f industrial development during the eighteenth century created a booming market for timber, both as fuel and con­ struction material. Their compliance eased with shares o f the profits; forestry officials often looked the other way while reserves set aside for the state were harvested and shipped to the saltworks o f the Jura, the Paris lumberyards on the Seine, or the iron forges o f the north and east. Just how tempting this busi­ ness was may be judged from the fact that the most famous botanist in Europe, Buffon, the author o f a comprehensive treatise on silviculture, was also the mas­ ter o f the ironworks o f Montbard. And though the co-existence o f industrial­ ist and botanist in one personality may shock our modern sensibility, Buffon actually rejoiced in the reconciliation o f silviculture and metallurgy. His work­ ers at the forge near Dijon in Burgundy were housed in model farm cottages, and in his view the whole enterprise was a single great chain o f productive energy, using the treasures o f earth, forest, and water that G od had so bounti­ fully provided.89

v

In Extremis

O n the eve o f the Revolution, and from apparently opposite corners, the French and British forestry states were in fact converging. For although the monarchy seemed to be in control in France, and the landowning class in Eng­ land, the battles being fought on both sides o f the Channel for the posterity o f their forests were virtually identical. In the oakwoods o f Sussex or the forests o f the Morvan and the Vosges, a triangular (and unequal) contest for precious timber was under way. A t one corner were those— merchants, contractors, stewards, tenant farmers— who had shrewdly bought up a piece o f woodland and who looked on the trees as so much standing capital, to be realized or rein­ vested as the market dictated. A t the other corner were the landless poor whose survival depended on the defense, violent if necessary, o f traditional rights to gleaning, gathering, and cropping. And at the apex o f the triangle were the offi­ cials o f the state, increasingly desperate about the shortage o f ship timber and

180

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D

suffering from nightmares o f the last pine and the last oak snatched by the Other Side. These were the realities o f the timber empires. But the French Revolution was less concerned with realities than with justice and retribution. Though the agents o f misery were more likely to be the woodland entrepreneurs than the officers o f the royal forest corps, it was the men in blue coats who bore the brunt o f popular fury in 1789. Except for a few paragons who actually heeded the Constituent Assembly’s request that they remain at their post while a new administration was organized, most o f the vulnerable personnel quiedy slipped off their uniform and melted into the citizenry. In the forests there was a gen­ eral and joyous slaughter o f game while herds o f cows and flocks o f pigs turned the preciously guarded reserves into a great green feeding trough. And now that the Revolution had abolished the right o f woodland owners to kill any goats that strayed among the trees, the southern half o f France saw armies o f goats, their numbers phenomenally multiplied, advancing on the woods, nib­ bling and grinding their way through the saplings.90 And while liberty trees— a political adaptation (via America) o f the tradi­ tional Maypole symbols o f fertility and rebirth— were going up all over France, Colbert’s precious gra n d e fu ta ie was coming down. Liberated from the cus­ tody o f the masters and grand masters o f the Eaux et Forets, the forests were virtually open to all comers; and facing winters at the end o f the eighteenth cen­ tury that were at least as brutal as those at the beginning, the poor o f the French woodlands helped themselves. “They take wood as though it were cabbages in their garden,” complained one local official. But the winters o f the Revolution were winters o f the wolf (and for the first time in many years the wolf-bounties o f the old regime were restored in earnest). Humanity and prudence dictated the blind eye. Great holes appeared in the dense forests where desperate gangs with axes and mattocks had hauled away everything they could, green or dry. What use was freedom, what use was bread, to the frozen? Even before Britain and France went to war in 1793, the revolutionary gov­ ernment, horrified at what had befallen the forests, determined to reinstate the state supervision that had collapsed in 1789. (In this chastened demotion o f lib­ erty to authority, they exactly repeated the experience o f the English govern­ ment o f Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth.) And with each ship o f the line blown out o f the water by the enemy’s broadsides, British lords o f the Admi­ ralty and Jacobin citizen commissioners searched desperately for the next two thousand oaks (complete with elbows or tortillards) that could replace it. From Brest and La Rochelle, provisioning agents made for the Basque cqast; Marseilles and Toulon (once Bonaparte had ejected the British fleet), Tuscany, Calabria, and his own native home o f Corsica were scoured for good timber. Whole ranges o f hills in Corsica were denuded to provide for the navy o f the Republic (and have never been reforested). Resourceful French agents

In Extremis

l 8l

even fetched up in Ottoman Albania as soon as they heard there might be oak to buy.91 A t the same time, their British competitors were combing the empire for supplies to make up the shortfall in native forests. Before the crisis o f the 1790s the huge expense o f shipping timber from the dense Canadian forests o f Nova Scotia and N ew Brunswick had seemed prohibitive. But such was the des­ peration o f the wartime navy that they were now prepared to swallow the price. Sources even further afield were considered. Some claimed that brazilwood was as hard and as watertight as the best English oak, or Cape stinkwood or N ew Zealand kauri or Sierra Leone teak. There was, though, a source o f timber much closer than these remote colo­ nial rain forests. Where the great rivers o f northeast Europe— the Oder and the Niemen— flowed into the Baltic, in port cities like Riga, Danzig, and Memel, English and Scots factors had established agencies, some o f them going as far back as the seventeenth century. With prices skyrocketing, these little colonies o f enterprise, run by canny, unforgiving men like William Moir or the firm o f Thomson and Pierson, cashed in. Living in timber houses washed with north­ ern stucco painted the colors o f rhubarb or pistachio creams, speaking broken but serviceable German or even Polish, their guts marinaded by years o f vodka, they knew exactly how to milk their windfall. Their operational system was already perfectly in place. They would first contract with the navy (preferably the British, but they were not above doing business with Bonaparte’s agents if the price was right) for gross lots o f mast and sometimes hull timber. Then they would meet with the heads o f the Jewish families— the Kaletzkys, the Simonowitzes, the Bontchewskys— men who carried with them an aroma o f piety and very old wool, and who offered them a price for guaranteed delivery o f prime Lithuanian or Podolian hardwoods and softwoods, floated down­ stream or sledded across the snow. Sometimes, too, they could come to an arrangement with the hard-pressed steward o f one o f the great Lithuanian noble estates, though there, too, it would be for the Jewish timber-men to deliver the lumber 92 I f the need was critical, emissaries would even be sent all the way from Lon­ don or Portsmouth, on shabby little buss-boats awash in vinegar and putrid with herring, or endlessly overland through the dun wastes o f the Brandenburg plains and the Pripet marshes to finish, somehow, on the granite quays o f the Baltic dockyards. And there, in the dominions o f the Prussian and Russian despots, with the sea wind slicing their cheeks raw, hard-boiled Scotsmen in freshly powdered wigs haggled with Polish Jews in sable-rimmed hats, corkscrew side-curls, and long black coats over the price o f oak and fir. So while my mother’s ancestors (blessed be their memory) were setding the fate o f English liberty, Major Heyman Rooke o f the 100th Regiment o f Foot (retd.) was prematurely grieving over its loss. Inspecting the ancient royal forests, he noted, gloomily, that it was Sherwood that had suffered most griev­

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D

182

ously between the time o f the surveys o f 1608 and 1783. In King James I s day, it had still numbered some 23,370 oaks; in King George III s time, they had shrunk to a mere 1,368. Rooke’s Sketch o f the A n c ie n t an d Present State o f Sher­ wood in the County o f N ottingham was a requiem for the greenwood. But Rooke was determined to reseed the torn greenwood with fables. Even as he wandered among the stumps, he speculated on the forest wanderings o f Robin Hood. Published along with his survey, the acorns o f his mythical geog­ raphy took sturdy root. No one worked harder in the plantation o f greenwood myth, though, than the antiquarian Joseph Ritson. In I

795>

published his

two-volume R obin Hood: A Collection o f A l l the A n c ie n t Poems, Songs, an d B a l­ lads, illustrated with woodcuts by Thomas Bewick and purporting to be an exhaustive anthology o f all the many versions o f the Geste. Walter Scott, who freely used the collection for Ivanhoe, both admired its compendiousness and scorned Ritson’s naivete as an editor. “The last volume,” he wrote, “is a notable illustration o f the excellence and defects o f Ritson’s system. Every extant allu­ sion to Robin Hood is printed and explained, but Ritson’s superstitious scrupu­ losity led him to publish many valueless versions o f the same

Thomas

ballad and to print indiscrimi­

Bewick, woodcut from Joseph Ritson, Robin

nately all the spurious trash that had accumulated about his name.”93 But Ritson was no mere credulous antiquary.

He was

determined to be the enduring memorialist o f the greenwood, and he was even more determined to make it, for the future, a vegetable democ­ racy. He had begun his career as a Jacobite, a fanatic for monarchy, and would end it as a Jacobin, a zealous supporter o f the revolutionary French Republic. He plainly thought o f himself as a literary outlaw committed to rescuing hum­ ble folk ballads and rhymes from oblivion. Since the language itself had been purloined by the mighty, he would revolutionize its spelling. Unhappily the phonetics he used were so peculiar that no one else could follow its conven­ tions. Disillusioned with revolutionary France, he planted his last banner in the kingdom o f plants, becoming a militant vegetarian and evicting family mem­ bers who refused to follow his orders to abandon meat. Just before his sanity gave out altogether, from what was described as “paralysis o f the brain,” feel­ ing desolate and suffocated by the vast foilage o f manuscripts with which he had surrounded himself, Ritson attempted a rebel’s fate. He barricaded him­ self in his room at Gray’s Inn, piled his papers high, and set light to them. Only a determined effort by a steward prevented Ritson from being incinerated along with his rhymes.

Hood: A Collec­ tion o f A ll the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads, 1795.

In Extremis

l 83

Those ashes merely fertilized the myths that Ritson and Bewick had already planted in word and image. Robin Hood, that arch-royalist, was turned into a radical and an egalitarian: the champion o f the poor. The greenwood became the forest o f English fellowship where English class magically dissolved into the moss. Skeptical though he was o f his working methods, Walter Scott took good care to summon Ritson to his house in 1800, three years before Ritson’s death, and extract from the bad-tempered eccentric the essence o f H ood the rebel. In Ritson’s uncompromising woodland hero, the Romantics had found their man and their place. Countless verse meditations on the lost and haunted greenwood found their way to the literary reviews. In February 1818, John Hamilton Reynolds produced his version, later published in The Yellow D w arf, in the form o f a long rhetorical question.

The trees in Sherwood forest are old a n d good The gra ss beneath them now is dim ly green; A r e they deserted a l l ? Is no young m ien W ith loose-slung bugle, m et w ithin the wood;— N o arrow fo u n d , f o i l ’d o f its a n tle r’d food, Stuck in the oak’s ru de side . . . ?94

“F o il’d o f its a n tle r ’d fo o d ” : Reynolds’s friend, John Keats, professed to like that, and was kind enough to say so in a letter thanking him for the poetic “ fil­ berts” he had sent. But Keats was in a H ood temper, determined to have done with the overbearing influence o f contemporaries such as Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt. Away with them, he told Reynolds. Let’s to the old greenwood o f our tradition instead, to Shakespeare and to the gest o f Robin Hood. So in a response, meant kindly but devastating in its superiority to Reynolds’s own effort, Keats sent back what he called “ some catkins,” playful in their emula­ tion o f seventeenth-century seven-syllable couplets but somber in their refusal o f sentimentality. Reynolds had answered his own question with a Romantic yes. Keats replied with an adamant negative. I f it ever had been, his England was greenwood no longer. Better clear o ff the deadwood, burn the brush, see things as they truly were. Enough o f the mead.

N o! those days are g o n e away, A n d their hours are old a n d gray, A n d their m inutes bu ried a ll U n der the dow n-trodden p a ll O f the leaves o f m any years M any tim es have w in ter’s shears, Frozen N orth, a n d ch illin g East, Sounded tempests to the fe a st

T H E L I B E R T I E S OF T H E G R E E N W O O D O f the forest’s whispering fleeces, Since men knew nor rent nor leases No, the bugle sounds no more, A n d the twanging bow no more; Silent is the ivory shrill Past the heath a n d up the hill;

Gone, the merry morris din; Gone the song o f Gamelyn; Gone, the tough-belted outlaw, Id lin g in the (< grene shaw”; A l l are gone away a n d past! A n d i f R obin should be cast Sudden fro m his turfed grave, A n d i f M arian should have Once again her forest days, She would weep, an d he would craze: H e would swear, fo r a ll his oaks, F a ll’n beneath the dockyard strokes, H ave rotted on the briny seas; She would weep that her w ild bees Sang not to her— strange! that honey C a n ’t b ego t w ithout hard m oney. . ,95

CHAPTER

FOUR

The Verdant Cross

i

Grizzlies

I t was Augustus T. D ow d’s big joke. O n a spring morning in 1852 he had been after a wounded grizzly, meaning to finish the brute o ff and provide the men o f the Union Water Company with fried bear for the rest o f the week. That was his job. As he was tracking the animal through the woods o f sugar pine and ponderosa, the flickering light dimmed. W ithout any warning Dowd abrupdy came face to face with a monster. It was maybe fifty feet round and, as close as he could guess, near three hundred feet high. It was a tree. O f course no one at Murphy’s Camp would believe him. They were more likely to credit a giant bear than a giant tree, he supposed. And so he told them the next day that the biggest grizzly there ever was was lurking right there, deep in the woods. And when he took them right up to the strange thing, a cinnamonbrown tower etched with deep furrows up its whole length, cavities a man’s arm could disappear into, not a branch below fifty feet and its crown invisible, he could point and jump about and crow and laugh: “ Boys, do you now believe my big tree story? That’s the grizzly I wanted you to see. N ow do you believe my yarn?” 1 They did, and were quick, too, to figure out some way to profit from it. For the magnitude o f what they beheld was not lost on a gang o f laborers stuck 185

186

THE VERDANT CROSS

out in the foothills o f the western Sierra Nevada, digging canals and ditches for the mining camps o f the Mariposa Estate. N o one in Yosemite Valley in 1852 was there for the scenery; o f that we can be sure. The miners who peo­ pled the shacks and cabins that straggled over the hillsides were forty-niners whose dreams had soured. Panning the streams in the drenching days o f spring, they survived by working for the soldier-explorer John C. Fremont, whose mill-machines smashed quantities o f quartz at the western end o f the valley in the hope o f extracting gold. It was not all high-altitude crazi­ ness. Some mines like Princeton and Pine-Josephine gave up real riches, for a few years at any rate. The Fremont workers would take the extracted ore, set it with quicksilver into bricks, and then transport them (with all due cau­ tion and security) to the bank vaults in San Francisco. From there they ended up, duly assayed, in the U.S. Mint. N ot much o f this good fortune trickled down to the scrambling, violent crowd o f Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, and Germans inhabiting the shacks and tents o f the Mariposa. Along with the miners were the usual camp followers and hangers-on: hunters, loggers, ditchdiggers, cooks, and whores, many o f them practicing more than one trade. But if their life was precarious it was nothing compared to the Ahwahneechee Indians. As tribal cultures went, the Ahwahneechee were relatively sedentary (and therefore particularly despised by the Europeans), subsisting on black oak acorns, grubs, and the trout scooped from the river, belly up, after they had poisoned the water with soapweed. The dazzling meadow-floor o f the valley which they called (in the Miwok tongue) Ahw ahnee, or “gaping mouth,” and which its white eulogists, like John Muir, supposed to be untouched and Edenic, actually looked the way it did because o f the Indians’ repeated set-fires, which cleared it o f brush and opened the space for grazing.2 The Indians hunted a little, too, and driven from their food sources by the guns o f the mining camps, they resorted to periodic raids to get some o f it back, and liquor and weapons as well, if they could. Sometimes there was shooting and cutting. After one o f these affrays, Major James D. Savage’s Mariposa Battalion would thunder o ff after them, guided by Mono Indian pursuers, hounding the wretched Ahwahneechee from valley to valley until there were no more to be seen. The few who sur­ vived dispossession and dislocation called their tormentors To-che-ma-te: “some among them are killers.” Naturally, a more picturesque account o f the etymology o f the valley’s name was needed. So the soldiers imagined that it derived from a Miwok term for “grizzly bear” : uzum a ti. And the Big Trees in what became known as the Calaveras Grove were almost immediately treated as trophy: skinned, mounted, and displayed for bragging and for cash. In the summer o f 1854 another ex­ miner, George Gale, who saw gold in wood, rather than water or rock, picked out the biggest specimen he could find, ninety feet round at its base and known

Grizzlies

187

as the Mother o f the Forest. N o sentimental respecter o f maternity, Gale stripped the tree o f its fragrant, dark-ridged bark to a height o f a hundred and sixteen feet and shipped the pieces east, where they were stitched back together and the hollow giant shown as a botanical marvel.3 But a public already skep­ tical about P. T. Barnum assumed this, too, to be a crude hoax, along the lines o f mermaids constituted from the head o f a manatee and the tail o f a salmon. The lines at the box office shrank and George Gale’s fortune turned to fool’s gold. Transcendentalists were delighted. While jaded, cynical N ew York was refusing to suspend its disbelief, the learned botanical community knew better. The discovery o f the Big Trees, orig­ inally reported in the Sonora H erald , was reprinted in the London A thenaeum and the English G ardeners’ C hronicle .4 Lectures were given in short order at the Royal Society and the Societe Botanique in Paris, British and French botanists (as usual) competing with each other to see who could come up with the clinching classification and nomenclature. The English, naturally, thought W ellingtonia gig a n tea would be fitting. But the French botanist Decaisne, believing it to be related to the California coastal redwood, the Sequoia sempervirens, decided instead on S eq uoiagiga ntea for the giant o f the Sierra. In actuality, the relation­ ship is less close than might be supposed from casual observation. After it gets to two hundred feet the Big Tree begins to expand its girth more than its height, while the redwood keeps on going well beyond an average three hundred feet. The former’s needles are blue-green scaly spikes; the latter’s are marked with white bands beneath. In fact “sequoia” was an eccentrically inappropriate label for either species, being the name o f a half-blood Alabama Cherokee (a.k.a. George Guess) who had invented a written language for the tribe. Its adoption by Asa Gray, the founder o f Harvard’s botanical garden, and his New York col­ league John Turrell, however, was o f more than purely taxonomic significance. As the author o f the official state Tosemite Book explained in 1868: It is to the happy accident o f the generic agreement o f the Big Tree with the redwood that we owe it that we are n o t now obliged to call the largest and most interesting tree in America after an English mili­ tary hero.5 The Big Trees were thus seen as the botanical correlate o f America’s heroic nationalism at a time when the Republic was suffering its most divisive crisis since the Revolution. To a skeptical Englishman who refused to believe that the bark he saw at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham was from a single tree, an Amer­ ican visitor took pleasure in “ assuring the Englishman that he had stood in the grove . . . that there were even larger trees in it than this one, that in spite o f the fact that the bark had been completely removed to the height o f a hundred feet the tree was as green as any o f the majestic fraternity.” (It would not remain

188

THE VERDANT CROSS

that way for very long.) “The Englishman gave one look o f rage,” the Ameri­ can tourist reported, “and bolted from the neighborhood.”6 The phenomenal size o f the sequoias proclaimed a manifest destiny that had been primordially planted; something which altogether dwarfed the timetables o f conventional European and even classical history. They were, their first observers thought (wrongly, again, for the less imposing bristle-cone pines o f the Sierras had not yet been dated), the oldest living things on earth. Even Horace Greeley, who saw them in 1859
freak show was already well established. Iron pump augers were used to drill holes in trunks selected for felling, though even after they had been severed from the base, a further series o f wedges levered the tree away from its upright, suspended position. The whole process could take five men three weeks (two and a half days alone for toppling). “In our estimation,” commented Hutch­ ings without much conviction, “it was a sacrilegious act.” But at the end was a half-million feet o f lumber and an instantaneous amusement park. A two-lane bowling alley was built (complete with protecting shed) along a planed-down surface o f a trunk; and the stump o f a felled sequoia was made into a dance floor for tourists where, Hutchings tells us, “on the 4th o f July, thirty-two persons were engaged in dancing four sets o f cotillion at one time, without suffering any inconvenience whatever.”8 By the end o f the decade, Hutchings had supplied the operational appara­ tus o f scenic tourism in the Calaveras Grove.9 Travellers could get from San Francisco to Stockton either by a new railroad or by steamboat up the San Joaquin River. From Stockton they would use coaches and wagons via Cop-

G rizzlies

189

peropolis and Murphy’s Camp. Hutchings could then accommodate them in the Mammoth Tree Cottage Hotel, a pretty building, five miles from the grove, boasting splashing fountains, a balustraded balcony, and appointments com ­ fortable enough for the ladies, who were already beginning to visit the fabled woods. Ironically, though, it was visitors (or, as they preferred to say, “pilgrims” ) from the East who transformed attitudes toward the sequoia groves, making them a place not just o f curiosity but o f veneration. The most important was the Boston Unitarian (and famous orator) Thomas Starr King, who in i860 was dispatched to the Barbary Coast o f California to minister to their First Church in San Francisco.10 Starr King was a natural missionary and part o f his vocation was to preach the virtues o f the Union to Californians who might have been tempted by the demons o f secession. But coming from the cradle o f Transcen­ dentalism in New England, he found

Charles C.

the lure o f the Sierra Nevada irre­

Curtis,

sistible, being both the visible

Quadrille on Redwood

face o f divinity' and the purest

Stump, albumen

American habitat. His sermon

print.

“ Living

Waters

Tahoe,”

for

from

Lake

example,

pro­

claimed that “this purity of

Thomas A. Ayres, The

nature is part o f the revelation

Mammoth

to us o f the sanctity o f God. It

Tree Grove,

is his character that is hinted at in the cleanness o f the lake and

Calaveras County, tinted

its haste to reject all taint.” More­

lithograph.

over, by the time Starr King took his vacation in the valley in the summer o f i860, a second and larger grove o f Big Trees had been discovered, south o f Calaveras, toward Mariposa itself, and Starr King along with his high-minded friends and colleagues determined that the “wretched drudgery o f destruction” that had overtaken the Calaveras trees should not be visited on the second forest. “The Mariposa stands,” he wrote in his articles to the Boston E v en in g Transcript, “ as the Creator fashioned it, unprofaned except by fire.” 11 The Big Trees, in short, were sacred: America’s own natural temple. “ I think I shall see nothing else so beautiful till happily I stand within the gates o f the Heavenly City,” wrote Sydney Andrews in the Boston Daily Advertiser.12 And while Starr King assigned pagan magic to the oak groves o f Greece and Germany, “ the evergreen,” he noted, was “so much softer in their stock and far deeper and more serious in their music. . . . The evergreen is the Hebrew tree.” 13 And the dizzying thought that their age could be measured in millen­ nia, and thus literally be coeval with the whole Christian era, only reinforced

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this sense o f native holiness. “Tell me,” Starr King imagined himself whisper­ ing to the Big Tree, “whether or not your birth belongs to the Christian cen­ turies; whether we must write ‘ B.C.’ or ‘A.D.’ against your infancy?” 14 And the correspondent o f the Boston Daily Advertiser, in a rapture usually associated with tabernacle revival meetings (many o f which, in mid-nineteenth-century New England, were being held in open-air groves), actually linked the nativity o f the trees to the birth o f the Savior: What lengths o f days are here! His years are the years o f the Christian era; perhaps in the hour when the angels saw the Star o f Bethlehem standing in the East, this germ broke through the tender sod and came out into the air o f the Upper World.15 The pious notion that the Big Trees were somehow contemporaries o f Christ became a standard refrain in their hymns o f praise. John Muir counted the rings on one martyr to the axe and discovered that “ this tree was in its prime, swaying in the Sierra winds when Christ walked the earth.” It was as if contemporaneity banished geographical distance; this immense botanical mys­ tery was part o f what Muir called the “ Holy o f Holies” in Yosemite. And like all things touched with divinity, the sequoias were immortal, never actually decaying as they stood, but falling only to the celestial forces o f lightningconducted fire, or the axes o f infidel loggers. The crowns that had been stripped away by lightning were proof o f the inconceivable antiquity that guaranteed that someday they would be struck by a bolt.16 It was one o f these blasted patriarchs that filled the frame o f one o f Carleton Watkins’s glass-plate stereographs.

More than any other images,

Watkins’s heroic prints shaped American sensibilities toward Yosemite and the Big Trees.17 They were not the first photographs o f the valley. To drum up business, the ever-enterprising Hutchings had hired both a painter, Thomas Ayres, and a photographer, Charles Weed, whose work was then engraved as promotional lures in H u tch in g s’ C a lifo r n ia M ag a zin e. Watkins had been working as a carpenter in San Francisco but had become known as an amateur daguerreotypist and photographer o f the Mariposa mines and landscape, which had also attracted pioneers o f the new medium like Robert Vance and Eadwaerd Muybridge. In 1861 he visited Yosemite and, using a “ mammoth frame,” created the icons o f the valley: H alf Dome, Cathedral Rock, El Capitan, along with parties o f gendemen and ladies in hooped skirts (including the widow o f the British Arctic explorer John Franklin), demurely dining o ff wooden tables in the great outdoors. His Big Tree stereographs posed tiny figures, probably including the Mariposa guide, Galen Clark, against the immense trunk and captured the heroically mutilated quality o f the

Grizzly Giant,

storm-racked but defiant and enduring; a perfect

G r iz zlie s emblem for the American Republic on the brink o f the Civil War: a botani­ cal Fort Sumter. Watkins’s pictures went on show at the Goupil Gallery in New York in 1862 and were a phenomenal success. Those who had ridiculed George Gale’s pieces o f bark were now converted to the stupendousness o f the sequoias. Oliver Wen­ dell Holmes, writing in the A tla n tic M onthly, extolled the pictures as fully the equal o f the greatest productions o f Western art and their subjects, the authen­ tic, living monuments o f pristine America. Suddenly Yosemite became a sym­ bol o f a landscape that was beyond the reach o f sectional conflict, a primordial place o f such transcendent beauty that it proclaimed die gift o f the Creator to his new Chosen People. Only the sense that Yosemite and the Big Trees constituted an overpower­ ing revelation o f the uniqueness o f the American Republic can explain Abra­ ham Lincoln, in the midst o f the Civil War, signing an unprecedented bill that on July 1, 1864, granted them to the State o f California “ for the benefit o f the people, for their resort and recreation, to hold them inalienable for all time.” The bill, creating the world’s first wilderness park, had been introduced by Cal­ ifornia’s senator John Conness, with the backing o f Governor Frederick Low and the influential state geologist Josiah Whitney. And there is no doubt that the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (then thwarted in his plans for Central Park and working as the superintendent-manager o f the Mariposa Mines) also had an important hand in its promotion. Named to the Yosemite Commission along with Galen Clark and Whitney, Olmsted issued his first report in 1865, which still contains the clearest articulation o f public, federal responsibility for denying areas o f natural beauty to the fate o f private enter­ prise.18 It was the aura o f heroic sanctity, the sense that the grove o f the Big Trees was some sort o f living American monument, a botanical pantheon, that moved Lincoln and the Congress to act as they did. The impression o f a pantheon was reinforced when the mightiest sequoias began to be baptized as “ Daniel Web­ ster,” “Thomas Starr King” (who also rated a mountain), and “Andrew Jack­ son.” (“ General Sherman” is still with us, the biggest vegetable in America.) The sequoias seemed to vindicate the American national intuition that colossal grandeur spoke to the soul. It was precisely because the red columns o f this sub­ limely American temple had not been constructed by the hand o f man that they seemed providentially sited, growing inexorably ever more awesome until G od’s new Chosen People could discover them in the heart o f the Promised West. There was another reason the Big Trees seemed an American godsend. A generation earlier the forest had been represented in the popular imagination as the enemy. The eastern woods, after all, had been the habitat o f the godless Indian. To make a godly settlement, then, required that both the wilderness and the wild men be comprehensively cleared. Beauty lay in clearance; danger

192

THE VERDANT CROSS

Grizzlies

i

93

and horror lurked in the pagan woods. The clearances were so extensive and so indiscriminate, though, that even as early as 1818 James Madison was protest­ ing the “ injurious and excessive destruction” o f timber.19 To a generation reared on Fenimore Cooper’s forest romances, the miraculous appearance of western woodlands seemed to be a sign o f G od’s forbearance, a second chance for America to understand the divinity inscribed in its landscape. It did not strike the artist Albert Bierstadt as particularly hypocritical to

Carleton Watkins, The Grizzly Giant, albumen print. Carleton Watkins, The Grizzly Giant, albumen print, 1861, Mariposa, California. Galen Clark is the figure at the base.

paint the Big Trees as embodying both national magnitude and spiritual redemption20 (color illus. 18). He had made his reputation as a landscapist largely as a result o f having produced huge, grandstanding panoramas o f the Rockies, based on sketches made on a western trip in 1859.21 Some were exhib­ ited at the Goupil Gallery, and it seems likely that it was Watkins’s stereographs that influenced Bierstadt and the popular writer and lecturer Fitz Hugh Lud­ low to make the trip to Yosemite in 1863. Ludlow’s articles for the A tla n tic M onthly perfecdy reflect the quizzical easterner dryly scrutinizing Eden, but

THE VERDANT CROSS

194

then surrendering to transports o f conversionary amazement. Describing the sequoias, he begins with a mere statistical report o f circumference but then confesses that “we cannot realize time images as we can those o f space by a ref­ erence to dimensions within experience, so that the age o f these marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact.” Accustomed as New Eng­ landers were to their own scaled-down version o f heroic botany, some o f the Mammoth Trees “had fulfilled the lifetime o f the late Charter Oak (at Hart­ ford) when Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the build­ ing o f the Temple.”22 By the same token he thought it impossible for his fellow travellers (Ludlow and Bierstadt were accompanied by two other painters, Vir­ gil Williams and Enoch Wood Perry) to convey anything but a pigmy repre­ sentation o f the sequoias. The marvellous size does not go into gilt frames. You paint a Big Tree and it only looks like a common tree in a cramped coffin. To be sure you can put a live figure against the butt for comparison; but unless you take a canvas o f the size o f Haydon’s your picture is likely to resemble Homunculus against an average tree and a large man against Sequoia g ig a n tea ,23 Perhaps it was these daunting technical problems which account for no Bierstadt Big Tree paintings surviving from this first trip to Yosemite. But when he returned from his second trip, 18 71-73, he evidendy felt that there would be a market for grandiose icons o f the veterans o f the ancient American woods, for at least six such paintings are known from this period.24 His star as a fash­ ionable painter was, however, already dimming and every exhibition o f new work was met with a merciless fusillade from the critic o f the Tribune, Clarence Cook, who upbraided Bierstadt for his addiction to vulgar, flashy, and visually meretricious effects. Directed at the immense light shows o f Yosemite, the crit­ icism had much merit. But Bierstadt’s Big Tree pictures were in fact aiming for something other than sheer magnitude. The diminutive figure set against one version o f The G rizzly G ia n t, for example, obviously established the immensity o f the scale for the beholder. But the pose was taken direcdy from Carleton Watkins’s plates, reshot for the official Yosemite survey and guidebook, in which Watkins posed Galen Clark in front o f that particular tree. Clark had been appointed “ guardian” o f the protected Mariposa Grove under the terms o f the 1864 California statute (and its niggardly budget o f two thousand dollars a year for the maintenance o f the entire area o f Yosemite). But he had also become, in the writing o f the period, a symbol o f the idealized affinities between American nature and American people: decent, hospitable, enduring, hardy, but also hiding great nobility and wisdom behind a weather­ beaten exterior: Natty Bumppo with a library. Olmsted wrote admiringly that

Grizzlies

195

he looked like the wandering Jew but spoke like a professor o f belles-lettres.”25 And Fitz Hugh Ludlow described him as

one o f the best informed men, one o f the very best guides I ever met in the Californian or any other wilderness. He is a fine looking stalwart old grizzly-hunter, a miner o f the ’49 days, wears a noble full beard hued like his favorite game, but no head covering o f any kind since he recovered from a head fever which left his head intolerant even o f a slouch. He lives among folk near Mariposa in the winter and in the summer occupies a hermitage built by himself in one o f the loveliest valleys o f the Sierra. Here he gives travellers a surprise by the nicest poached eggs and rashers o f bacon, homemade bread and wild straw­ berry sweetmeats which they will find in the State.26 Clark then was himself a grizzly, posed beneath the grizzly sequoia in the valley named for the grizzly bear. But the great column that towered above him, almost an extension o f his own heroic American personality, was deep red rather than gray, and above all it spoke o f an elemental chronology: not the chronol­ ogy o f classical European civilization, but the chronology o f wild nature, Amer­ ica’s own time scale, inherited direcdy from the Creator, without the supervening mediation o f human pretensions. The truly venerable nature o f American history, as the explorer Clarence King put it after seeing the Big Trees, could be measured in what he called, oxymoronically, “ green old age.”27 Earlier in the century, writers like Charles Fenno Hoffman, travelling in the Mississippi Valley, seemed to shame the American tourists who thronged Rome and Paris by comparing “ the temples which Roman robbers have reared” and “the tow­ ers in which feudal oppression has fortified itself” unfavorably with “the deep forests which the eye o f G od has alone pervaded and where Nature in her unvi­ olated sanctuary has for ages laid her fruits and flowers on His altar!”28 What was the Colosseum beside the immense and prehistoric Grizzly Giant, a nobler ruin than the Parthenon: the epitome o f heroic endurance over millennia: scarred, burned, ravaged by time and decapitated by lightning. And unlike those heaps o f stone, the Giant was yet alive with the vigorous green shoots o f a new age. It exacdy linked prehistorical antiquity to American posterity. N o wonder, then, that Bierstadt chose to exhibit his version o f The G reat Trees, Mariposa Grove at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where it could proclaim that the first hundred years o f the American Republic were but the political twin­ kling o f an eye. The Big Trees also proclaimed the sacredness o f American time. And it is conceivable that Watkins’s albumen print was not the only source for Bierstadt’s heroic treatment o f the ancient and weathered tree. For it is distincdy possible that he would have seen Caspar David Friedrich’s O ak Tree in W inter

THE VERDANT CROSS

196

in the National Gallery in Berlin, which he had visited between the two trips to Yosemite. In fact Bierstadt might well have had an immediate understand­ ing and particular sympathy for Friedrich’s own versions o f arboreal salvation. He himself had been born in Solingen, but had been taken to the United States as an infant and had grown up in the prosperous Massachusetts whaling port of New Bedford. But like others o f his generation, in particular the Hudson Valley painter Worthington Whittredge, he had returned to Germany for his studies. The center o f their training, it is true, was the Diisseldorf Academy, which boasted the least Romantic

and

studiously

naturalistic

techniques

in

most land­

scape. But as Barbara Novak has argued very persuasively,

it

seems

unlikely that the inten­ sity o f German Roman­ tic

idealism,

still

far

from moribund, would not have rubbed off on a group o f American artists who were, in any case, extremely prone to a kind o f visual Tran­ scendentalism.29 Both Bierstadt and Whittredge, during their time in Germany in the 1850s,

produced

a

number o f landscapes in which

great

trees

(usually oaks) figure as both heroic and spiri­ tual actors in the scenery. And it was not long after his return that Whittredge painted one o f the most successful and powerful o f all his landscapes, The O ld H u n tin g Grounds (color illus. 20). Backlit in exactly the Friedrichian manner, Whittredge’s birches rise like fluted columns to the arched, darker foreground trees that frame the composition. The effect is obviously architectural, almost an illustration o f the tradition which located the origin o f Gothic pointed arches and vaults in the spontaneous interlacing o f tree limbs. But die tide o f Whittredge’s forest interior was not casually given, for the painting is also

Caspar David Friedrich, Oak Tree in Winter, 1829.

Grizzlies

197

loaded with the spiritual associations standard to the Hudson Valley painters. A ruined canoe eaten with decay lies in pond water as a memorial to the Indi­ ans, banished and vanished, whose “hunting grounds” these once were. The broken stump and the trembling birch leaves, emblems o f death and new life, echo the canonical, anthem-like quality o f the painting. Along with two other equally famous American forest interiors, Whittredge’s painting became the lit­ eral visual expression o f the pious cliche o f the “cathedral grove.” In his own G ia n t Redw ood Trees o f C a lifo rn ia Bierstadt transposed this ecclesiastical reading o f the primordial woods to a sequoia forest (color illus. 19). In fact, the trees look more like the Sequoia sempervirens o f the coastal forests than the Big Trees, and the red light, reflecting o ff the bark, suggests the lumi­ nous dimness o f the much denser, darker redwoods o f Mendocino and Hum ­ boldt counties. But it reiterated all the standard motifs o f sequoia iconography: antiquity, reverence, and magnitude. And instead o f the sentimental, inanimate elegy for the vanished redwood redskin, Bierstadt includes three Indians, a brave with his son seated by the pool and a squaw returning with a basket on her back, a native American version o f the Georgic idyll. Most crucially, the tepee-like tri­ angular opening in the side o f the foremost tree is evidendy the Indians’ dwelling place. It is the most literal translation o f what John Muir (who himself underwent a kind o f theophany in Yosemite) meant when he wrote o f return­ ing to the American woods as “ going home.” Bierstadt’s painting is sylvandomestic: the ancient residence o f the most indigenous Americans. Both Bierstadt’s and Whittredge’s paintings paid homage to the patriarch o f all American forest interiors, Asher Durand. President o f the National Acad­ emy o f Design in N ew York, Durand was, in effect, the theologian o f the sec­ ond generation o f the Hudson Valley school. By his lights, the whole point o f landscape was expressive veneration. In 1840, during a trip to England, he had spoken o f his decision not to become a minister o f the church, “ the better to indulge reflection unrestrained under the high canopy o f heaven.” His famous “ Letters on Landscape Painting,” published in The Crayon, had appeared in the same year that he exhibited I n the Woods, which also featured birches bowed together in Gothic inclination. It was the exact illustration o f the diluted Tran­ scendentalism preached in his essays: American nature shaped as the archway to divinity. The external appearance o f this our dwelling place, apart from its won­ drous structure and functions that minister to our well-being, is fraught with lessons o f high and holy meaning, only surpassed by the light o f Revelation. It is impossible to contemplate . . . [them] with­ out arriving at the conviction that the Great Designer o f these glorious pictures has placed them before us as types o f the Divine attributes.30

198

T HE VERDANT CROSS

Asher Brown Durand, In the Woods, 1855.

Durand’s most famous painting— a virtual manifesto o f Hudson Valley sublimity— was K in d red Spirits, conceived as a memorial to Thomas Cole, the founding father o f the school, who had died in 1848. A fictitious composite o f two o f Cole’s favorite sites— the Kaaterskill Falls and the Catskill Clove, drenched in a radiant golden light— it was also a comprehensive inventory o f its stock symbols and emblems. The broken tree in the foreground signified Cole’s premature demise; the evergreens his immortality; the hanging rockledge the precariousness o f life; the eagle flying toward the horizon the libera­ tion o f soul from body; the river the voyage o f life, which Cole had himself made the theme o f one o f his most ambitious series o f allegorical paintings. The very composition o f the painting, a swooping circular route for the eye, some­ what reminiscent o f Bruegel, was surely a formal expression o f the cycle o f eter­ nity. Standing on the ledge are Cole himself, holding palette and maulstick, and the poet William Cullen Bryant, who had delivered the funeral eulogy for the dead artist at the Church o f the Messiah in New York and whose own work tes-

Grizzlies

199

tified not merely to kinship between like-minded souls but to the essential n a t­ uralness o f American identity.31 Bryant’s poems (immensely popular in their day, almost unreadably plod­ ding in ours) revealed the American forests as the birthplace o f the nation. To repair to the woods was to be reminded o f two features o f the national per­ sonality: its liberty and its holiness. An anthology published a year after Cole’s death had two important poems in which the primitive antiquity o f the forests was presented as a corrective to the national passion for novelty. In “The Antiq­ uity o f Freedom” the poet stands amidst “ old trees, tall oaks and gnarled pines . . . / . . . In these peaceful shades/Peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably o ld / M y thoughts go up the long dim path o f years/Back to the earliest days o f lib­ erty.” 32 Freedom was not “ as poets dream /A Fair young girl with light and del­ icate dreams,” but a hoary warrior, “ scarred with the tokens o f old wars,” in

Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849.

fact, a grizzly; cut about, blasted, and shaken, but always with the power to throw out new life. The woods, then, proclaimed the true natural constitution o f free America, beside which a manmade document was merely the sapling o f philosophical invention. Even more important, though, the forest supplied America with the visi­ ble form o f the primitive church. The groves were G od’s first temples. Ere m an learned To hew the shaft an d lay the architrave A n d spread the roof above them— ere he fra m ed The lofty vault, to g a th er a n d roll back The sound o f anthems; in the d arkling wood A m id st the cool a n d silence, he knelt down, A n d offered to the M ightiest solemn thanks A n d supplication.33 The idea o f the “venerable columns” and the “verdant roof” supplying both the original place o f worship and then suggesting the actual form o f spir­ itual architecture in the Gothic already had a long tradition by the time Bryant got around to giving it an American accent.34 But in the New World it had a

Frederick Edwin Church, Hooker and Company Journeying Through the Wildernessfrom Plymouth to Hartford, 1636, 1846.

Vegetable Resurrection

20 1

special resonance. Fenimore Cooper begins one o f his more successful LeatherStocking Tales, The Pathfinder, with the reader suspended like an angel and looking west above the rolling canopy o f the virgin forest: “an ocean o f leaves glorious and rich in the varied but lively verdure . . . the elm with its graceful and weeping top; the rich varieties o f the maple, most o f the noble oaks o f the American forest. . . forming one broad and seemingly interminable carpet o f foliage that stretched away toward the setting sun until it bounded the horizon by blending with the clouds as the waves and the sky meet at the base o f the vault o f Heaven.” 35 It is from this primordial vegetable matter, celestially sanctified and unspoiled as yet by the touch o f man, that America was born, so the writers and painters o f the first native generation proclaim.36 In so doing they self-con­ sciously turned their back both on the classical contempt for woodland bar­ barism and the long Puritan legacy that equated the forest with pagan darkness and profanity. Instead, for his first important painting the young Frederick Edwin Church chose for his American Moses the Reverend Thomas Hooker, in 1636 leading a flock westward, away from the heavy hand o f Old World authority represented by the Bay Colony government. And the Promised Land, it is apparent, is a dense woodland, not forbidding or packed with heathen ter­ ror, but a sanctuary in the literal sense o f holy asylum. Its foliage trickles with sunlight; its waters run sweet and clear. It is the tabernacle o f liberty, ventilated by the breeze o f holy freedom and suffused with the golden radiance o f prov­ idential benediction.

ii

Vegetable Resurrection

Frederick Church, though, was only Elisha. The mande he received (through their common patron, Daniel Wadsworth) had belonged for a whole genera­ tion to Thomas Cole. And throughout his life Thomas Cole had been one o f nature’s crusaders. Considering his background in Dissenter Lancashire, it seems very likely that as a child he would have been exposed to the kind o f Improving Literature that saw “sermons in stones” and parables in every twig and brook. John Bunyan would remain one o f the most powerful sources for his painting series that depicted life as a pilgrimage from innocence to experi­ ence to epiphany. Even the cycles o f history that made up the vast subject o f

202

THE VERDANT CROSS

Vegetable Resurrection

203

his Course o f Em pire were inscribed in landscapes that evolved from primitive arcadia through the dynamism and decadence o f civilizations before the ver­ dure sprouted once more through the fallen masonry. He must also have been familiar with the long European tradition o f nature emblems. His Landscape w ith D ea d Tree, for example, might almost have been painted as a direct homage to the same themes o f death and rebirth in the land­ scapes o f Jacob van Ruisdael and his more recent German interpreters. And although he could have had no premonition o f his own death, it was entirely in keeping with C ole’s resdessly evangelical character

that

im­

ages o f the cross fig­ ured so prominently in his last years o f Thomas Cole,

work.

The Course o f

those images were,

Empire: The

literally, seraphic vi­

Arcadian or

sions, as in the Bun-

Pastoral State,

Sometimes

yanesque series The

1833-36.

Cross a n d the World, unfinished

Thomas Cole,

death.

The Course o f

at

But

his

some­

Empire: Desola­

times, too, the cross

tion, 1833-36.

is

cunningly

grated Thomas Cole,

into

inte­ the

human and natural

Home in the

landscape. It appears

Woods, 1847,

surreptitiously

detail.

in

H om e in the Woods: a painting where the destruction

o f the

forest represented by broken

logs

and

stumps in the fore­ ground is made ac­ ceptable only by the rustic wooden virtue o f the log cabin and its occupants. Significantly (for everything in C ole’s woodland paintings is lumbered with sig­ nificance), the vine that climbs over the face o f the cabin, wreathing it with domestic virtue, is rooted at the base o f a piece o f fencing, angled to form the shape o f the cross. With the vine winding about its stem, the crosspiece thus becomes both support and benediction.

204

T H E V E R D A N T C ROS S

Vegetable Resurrection

205

For someone like Cole, obsessed with vegetable theology, mortality could only be a prologue to a new life. So it is not surprising to discover that some o f his valedictory crosses actually seem to be in a process o f depetrification. Nowhere does this seem more explicit than in a pair o f paintings done a year before his death, and from their identical formats, mountain horizons, and sun­ sets, evidendy meant as pendants. In one, Cole sets a young tree growing from the stone ruins o f a Gothic church so that the architectural form o f sacred Thomas Cole, Gothic Ruins

botany returns, as it were, to its true nature. In its pair, the huge cross domi­ nating the foreground seems, even when its unfinished condition is taken into

at Sunset,

account, deliberately fuzzed and scumbled at its edges, as if invaded by some

ca. 1844-48.

mossy, lichenous, irresistibly organic growth.37 Tw o years earlier, at about the time he was beginning to sketch ideas for The Cross a n d the World, Cole painted what he called “ one o f my happiest pro­ ductions,” a circular composition “ in defiance o f one o f the famous rules o f Art, viz. that the light should never be exactly in the middle o f the picture” 38 (color illus. 21). It was meant as a literal illustration o f the sentimental verses o f Mrs. Felicia Hemans that featured yet another mourning Indian brave seated before a hummock, “ his arms folded in majestic glo o m ./ . . . His bow lay unstrung beneath the m ound/W hich sanctified the gorgeous waste around/ For a pale cross above its greensward rose.” Through his theatrical illumination, the unnaturally brilliant light shining directly on the hidden face o f the cross, Cole has turned the grieving warrior into a pantheist (which he probably, in any case, was). But the garlanded stone seems not so much inserted as p la n ted on its tus­ sock, and, growing there, as much a piece o f the wilderness landscape as the autumnal trees, the migrating birds, and the grieving warrior. And it was, surely, that little painting that inspired C ole’s only pupil, Fred­ erick Edwin Church, to produce his own memorial in 1848, almost immedi­ ately after his teacher had unexpectedly died. Much less well known than Asher Durand’s memorial tribute, and only recently rediscovered, Church’s painting is nonetheless o f a substantial size and grandeur (color illus. 22). Even more explicitly than K in d r e d Spirits, Church’s To the M em ory o f C ole offers homage through reiteration, for all the sanctified Cole symbols are here, from the

Thomas Cole, Cross at Sunset, ca. 1848.

immortal evergreens to the river o f life. A t the center o f the painting is a cross, strikingly similar to C ole’s 1845 wilderness monument. But even more than in his master’s painting, the student has made it appear unnaturally isolated from all possible human agency. N o mason could seemingly have cut this object nor set it in such radiant meadow grass. N or could the blooms that climb exuber­ antly from the pasture and twine themselves about the stone have possibly been planted. What we encounter in this unpeopled, brilliantly lit meadow is the the­ ater o f another miraculous depetrification in progress, the transformation of dusty death into the vital shoots o f nature, a vegetable resurrection.

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THE VERDANT CROSS

Caspar David Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains, 1808. Caspar David Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains, detail. Caspar David Friedrich, Procession at Sunrise, ca. 1805.

Pathfinders

iii

HOW v e r y

UNORIGINAL,

207

Pathfinders

the vigilant art historian will object, this studied

approximation o f masonry and greenery. N ext slide please. Here we have, beside Frederick Church’s spontaneously blooming wreath, the tendrils o f the vine curling about the limbs o f the Savior in Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Cross in the M ou n ta in s, the altarpiece that so provoked the anger o f German critics by negating the difference between sacred art and landscape. Here, too, a dawn pilgrimage approaching the mystery o f the verdant cross. But originality is not the issue here; rather the opposite, in fact. For while American painters may have wanted to create something wholly fresh and rad­ ical, sparkling with the innocence o f their Edenic N ew World, they were actu­ ally involuntary legatees, conscious or unconscious, o f an ancient and persistent metaphorical tradition. And the veneration o f native holy groves is all the more remarkable since many o f those who put the woodland icons on their parlor walls were seldom wet-eyed sentimentalists. Patrons o f Cole and Church like Luman Reed and Daniel Wadsworth doubtless prided themselves on their taste, but they were N ew York and N ew England merchants whose capital, invested in a thousand fruitful enterprises, was busy obliterating precisely the kind o f woodland fetishes that they displayed on their walls. It was quite possible, though, for industrial capitalism and forest veneration to co-exist within the same personality. Bierstadt’s vast elegy for the redwoods o f the California coastal forest, complete with temple backlighting and Indian idyll, was com­ missioned to adorn the palatial residence o f Zenas Crane, Massachusetts paper magnate and manufacturer o f United States greenbacks. American modernity, even in its most aggressively imperial forms, then, has been no more depleted o f nature myth and memory than any other culture. Only blind obedience to the assumptions o f the Enlightenment claims science and capitalism to be necessarily incompatible with natural religion. Tw o cen­ turies o f American culture in which both have flourished in a constant state o f dynamic hostility— John Bunyan and Paul Bunyan lashed to the same steed— proves such assumptions unfounded. It is true, though, that at the beginning o f this century the anthropologists busy codifying the ritual practices and sym­ bols o f “primitive” religion were profoundly divided on the issue that lies at the heart o f this book: the persistence o f myth. On the threshold o f the age o f sci­

THE VERDANT CROSS

208

ence, it was left to art historians and psychologists to take seriously the possi­ bility that myth and magic might obstinately make themselves felt, encoded in symbolic forms, in a world where, as Rudolf Wittkower has put it, “our lives are fenced in by rituals sunk to the level o f conventions.”39 But a more domi­ nant and conventional view was the opposite: that the vitality and authority o f nature religions declined precisely to the degree that cultures were shaped by scientific, empirically derived knowledge. And none believed this truism, inher­ ited from the Enlightenment, more categorically, even while he was laboring in the forests o f myth and magic, than the anthropologist Sir James Frazer. A century after its original publication, it seems extraordinary that so few noticed that the descriptive richness o f The Golden Bough— the chaotic, fertile, proliferating quality o f the text— was at such complete odds with the philoso­ phy that underpinned it. In his brilliant biographical study o f Frazer, Robert Ackerman makes it clear that the Scottish rationalist was in most respects an uncreative disciple o f the sociologist Spencer and the anthropologist Tylor. Like them, he assumed that humanity’s progressive evolu­ tion could be measured by the degree to which it had cast off the myth and magic o f primitive religion.40 The first volume o f The Golden Bough appeared in 1890, at the apogee o f imperialist confidence. And even though he pitched his bivouac nowhere more exotic

than

Trinity

College,

Cambridge,

Frazer approached “primitivism” as a relic o f prehistory. As far as he was concerned, the chal­ lenge o f anthropological fieldwork lay in discovering splendid anomalies that, at the end o f the disenchanted nineteenth century, had miraculously preserved, in darkest jungles or frosty taiga, the living human reality o f archaic cults. It was not, o f course, lost on Frazer, any more than on the great German folklorist Mannhardt, on whom he depended for so much o f his information about tree worship and sacrificial cults, that elements o f pagan animism had indeed survived into Judeo-Christian theology. Indeed the demonstration o f such survivals was, for the ex-Calvinist rationalist, tantamount to discrediting the creeds altogether. And here, as Ackerman argues so persuasively, Frazer dif­ fered (in his obtuseness, one is tempted to add) from the work o f his friend and mentor Robertson Smith. It was not just that Smith remained a believer throughout his life. It was rather that his whole sensibility was open (in ways that were closed to Frazer) to the possibility that the survival o f myth actually lent greater; not lesser, power to the core o f religious belief. In this respect Robertson Smith took exception to the British empiricism that dismissed out

Sir James Frazer.

Pathfinders

209

o f hand the idea that myths might be highly complex systems o f understand­ ing, with the power to generate and determine social behavior, rather than the other way about. For Frazer, on the other hand, they were simply “mistakes” that primitives make about their world (and especially the natural world), mis­ takes committed in the grip o f ignorance and fear. This unexamined rationalism was not actually a condition o f Fellowship at Trinity. The great historian who became the college’s master, G. M. Trevelyan, while presumably unfamiliar with the German and French traditions o f cultural anthropology, nonetheless himself professed a nature religion that would have been wholly familiar to Coleridge and Friedrich von Schlegel, not to say Thoreau and John Muir.41 And a philosopher as wholly analytical as Wittgen­ stein expressed his impatience at Frazer’s crude positivism: his unreconstructed Enlightenment insistence that myths became elaborated only to help fright­ ened savages cope with their incomprehension o f natural process. The oddest thing o f all, as many readers and critics o f The Golden Bough and some o f Frazer’ s other books have noticed, is that the teeming compila­ tion o f information about sacrificial cults, drawn from cultures wholly discon­ nected in space and time, never seems to have led Frazer toward his desired conclusion. In fact, the quality o f which he was so rightly proud— the descrip­ tive vividness o f his ethnography— actually pulls the reader in precisely the opposite direction from its author’s intentions— toward the depths o f the mythic forest, rather than the brightly mowed pasture o f Frazer’s intellect. I f indeed The G olden Bough has escaped from its creator, it may have migrated toward exactly the kind o f cultural speculation that would have set Frazer’s teeth on edge. For even before the war to end all wars had finally interred the Enlightenment in a muddy, bloody grave, there were those (Nietz­ sche, for example) who thought myth and modernity not at all irreconcilable. Some, indeed, like Carl Jung, who before the war dreamed dreams o f vast oceans o f blood engulfing the whole landmass o f Europe up to the Alps, believed mythic archetypes to be necessarily imprinted on the deepest psychic structures o f the human persona. To embrace myth and to readmit primitive religion in social behavior was not, for Jung, to flee modernity but to face up to it. But not all those who acknowledged the fateful braiding together o f myth and modernity were so satisfied with its consequences. For those made most anxious by its implications, like the great art historian Aby Warburg, a recog­ nition o f the limits, if not the impotence, o f Enlightenment rationality was dis­ quieting.42 The predicament he got himself into, by taking myth as a serious vector o f historical sensibility, was the obverse o f Frazer’s complacent cultural imperialism. For while the Scot seemed serenely untroubled by the fact that the substance o f his empirical research was at odds with its theoretical rationale, Warburg came to agonize painfully over the fact that his greatest formal dis­ coveries betrayed terrible truths. The most terrible o f all was the truth that

THE VERDANT CROSS

2 10

brought him altogether too close to Nietzsche’s beetling brows and unsparing, unstable imagination. Beneath the smooth marble facade o f classicism, there was, Warburg had discovered early in his career, a primal energy, periodically suppressed and con­ trolled by rational discourse, but always capable o f boiling up from its deep sources and engulfing civilization. In terms o f the Greek myths, it was as though the troops o f Dionysus, bloody and orgiastic, were constandy threat­ ening to get the upper hand on the followers o f the deity o f music, poetry, and culture: Apollo. Even when that turbulent Dionysian energy had been con­ verted into something like the musical delicacy o f the fluttering drapery o f Bot­ ticelli’s and Ghirlandaio’s nymphs, Warburg believed it was still driven by ancient urgings, die ungebdndigte Lebensfulle, the unrestrained vitality o f the earlier rites. So the nymph that seemed so decoratively insubstantial, he real­ ized, was actually an “elemental sprite . . . a pagan goddess in exile.”43 At Bonn University in 1886 Warburg had studied with the scholar Hermann Usener, who had made a career out o f insisting on the survival o f paganism into Christian ritual and theology. And during the early stages o f his own scholarship on Botticelli, Warburg concerned himself with showing the comparable processes by which primitive myth and magic had evolved a symbolic repertoire expressed in Renaissance art and sculpture. But as time went on, the implica­ tions o f these insights began to be more troubling. For the surviving pagan motifs all seemed to disrupt the smoothness o f their integration into recogniz­ ably “civilized” works o f art. The middle tier in the famous frescoes o f the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, for example, appeared to be Greek, but Warburg recognized them instead as the time-demons o f ancient Egyptian religion that had survived into the Renaissance in the form o f astrological symbols. They would have been known to the patron o f the work through the anthologies o f pagan signs and emblems codified by such a scholar as Boccaccio. Increasingly Warburg became possessed by his own time-demons, plung­ ing more deeply into the social and psychological processes by which he thought the irrational and the primitive had become sublimated in art forms. If, after all, the merchant patricians o f Florence had allowed the irrational and the archaic a place within their own ostensibly rational, humanist culture, was it not as likely that his own world, perhaps even his own Warburg fa m ily o f merchant bankers, might harbor their own demons? Needless to say, Warburg was interested in Jung (though not in Freud). But it was from the social psy­ chologist Richard Semon that he had taken the idea o f an “engram” : a condi­ tioned nervous response to a particular, often alarming stimulus, biologically registered and transmitted but socially expressed in involuntary body language. (The instinctive, jerky extension o f hands and legs made by frightened infants— now known as the Moro reflex— seems to be roughly what Semon had in mind.) For Warburg the cultural equivalents o f these “engrams” were symbols:

17.

Quercus robur, English oak, from John Evelyn, Silva, or A Discourse o f Forest-Trees.

1 8.

A lb e r t B ie r s ta d t, The G r e a t Trees, M a r ip o sa G ro v e, 18 7 6 .

i q . A l b e r t B i e r s t a d t , G ia n t Redwood T rees o f C a lifo rn ia , 1 8 7 4 .

20.

W o r t h i n g t o n W h it t r o d g c , The O ld H u n tin g Grounds , ca. 18 6 4 .

2 1. T h o m a s C o le , The Cross in the Wilderness, ca. 1844. 22. F red erick E . C h u r c h , To the Memory o f Cole , 1848.

23.

C hrist

o n a tree-cross betw een M ary and John, E rm engau M aster, Breviary, T o u lo u se,

1354*

24.

M oses

before the bu rning bush, Lotharingian B oo k o f H o u rs, late fifteenth century.

2 5- H e n d ric k G o ltz iu s , Christ on the Tree o f Life , 1610 .

26. Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape, ca. 1 8 1 1 .

Pathfinders

2 11

devices that compressed within a visual shorthand ancient, indeed primeval beliefs and responses. So that what might to the incurious simply appear as styl­ ized conventions would reveal themselves to the uninhibited archaeologist o f culture as traces o f terror or ecstasy. Warburg called such symbols Leitfossils, and when he stared at their delicately petrified imprint, he could conjure up, all too easily, the primordial monsters. To look hard at those symbols, to acknowledge their endurance, was, then, a risky business. For it was to unravel the sublima­ tion o f these Dionysian instincts embodied in the symbol itself. To give the symbol its real due, thus, meant going beyond the habits o f the scholar, beyond classification and elucidation. It meant confronting, in their shapeless, fright­ eningly indeterminate form, the forces behind the device, all o f which were nec­ essarily unreasonable. In pursuit o f these imps, Warburg, in 1895, did something no self-respecting art historian o f the Italian quattrocento would have dreamed o f doing. He undertook an extraordinary journey into the desert o f N ew Mexico to observe Hopi Indian rituals and ceremonies, especially the snake dances, in which the Indians, each August, threw live snakes at serpentine images o f lightning to ensure the harvest rains.44 And there in the sagebrush, with his Stetson on his head and his bandanna about his throat, A by Warburg suddenly grasped the timeless universalism o f the way symbols operate in our cultural consciousness. For the moment he dealt with the problem, like many o f his contemporaries (not least Jung), in a relatively mechanical way, seeing them as devices that pro­ tected prescientific man from his fear o f the inexplicable. But as time went on, Warburg began to lose this conventional confidence that knowledge could supersede symbol as a way o f dealing with terror. Increasingly incapable o f adjudicating between the angels o f thought and the demons o f instinct, and prone at the best o f times to fits o f melancholy, Warburg gradually himself became a casualty o f the unrelenting struggle. As Europe slid toward war, he, like Jung, began to have nightmares o f the earth slopping in blood. This anguish, though, had not been preordained. As a young adult, A by had had no trouble at all in identifying patriotically with the German Empire o f Kaiser Wilhelm, serving as an officer-candidate in the army. Photographs survive o f him posing before a fake equestrian landscape, improb­ ably hoisted on a cavalry mount, his impeccable uniform completed by the pointed helmet. As Felix Gilbert has suggested, Warburg may even have seen the unapologetically martial state as an exemplar o f the creative tensions between reason and unreason 45 And when the conflict finally came in Sep­ tember 1914, he had no difficulty in viewing it as a struggle between the bar­ barian philistinism o f the British and the saving civilization o f the German Empire. The problem was Italy. Ostensibly an ally, the Italian kingdom was flirting with defection to the Entente powers. Warburg was alarmed enough at this

2 1 2

THE VERDANT CROSS

possibility to propose the only contribution he could make: establishing a learned journal in the Italian language in Germany as a way o f keeping the two cultures connected. A R ivista duly appeared under his editorship. But it was o f no avail. Italy became an enemy in the spring o f 1915 and Warburg, seething with a sense o f personal betrayal, exclaimed, “ It’s a pity that one can’t suddenly die from an attack o f nausea. . . . Incidentally I will help annihilate Italy how­ ever and when I can.”46 It was as though the shades o f Dionysus were deter­ mined to subvert his life’s work, closing the German Institute in Florence, the institution that symbolized Warburg’s efforts to reconcile “ magic” and “logic.” As the war dragged on, Warburg’s visions became sanguinary, as though all his pagan terrors had now sunk their fangs into the civilization he cherished. In 1918 the German military state was finally prostrated in defeat. Slaughter had consumed the world. And as Germany collapsed, so did Warburg, diving into a psychotic depression that landed him in a clinic for the mentally ill on the Swiss shore o f Lake Constance for five dark years.47 Paranoid that his research would be stolen, he would appear before his family in the sana­ torium, his jacket pockets overflowing with manically scribbled notes on the pagan Furies. And when his lucidity slowly came back, he proclaimed it by returning not to science but to magic, delivering a lecture in April 1923 before the inmates, clinical staff, and guests on the Hopi serpent rituals that he had studied almost thirty years before in New Mexico.48 But while Warburg had gone to the southwestern desert in 1895 with conventional ethnographic views on primitivism, notions o f the survival o f “living relics” o f the archaic past that were meat and drink to Frazer and his generation, his approach to the rituals after war and madness was quite dif­ ferent. Instead o f stressing the separation between primitivism and the modern condition, he implied its connection through what he called, perhaps for the first time, “ the archive o f memory” (A rchiv des Geddchtsnisses). The lecture must have been an astonishing moment: an affirmation to a clinic which pre­ supposed the incommensurability o f reason and unreason that they were, in fact, culturally inseparable. By declaring the permanence, the timelessness, o f delirium, Warburg won his release from the asylum. While he had been incarcerated his student Fritz Saxl had continued War­ burg’s work o f accumulating the great library that would demonstrate the endurance and universalism o f these symbolic types. The identification and classification o f the symbols inherited from antiquity and transmitted through the generations o f Western culture, safely summarized as the Nachleben der A n tike, the “ afterlife o f classicism,” became the official vocation o f the “War­

A b y W arburg.

Pathfinders

2 13

burg school,” first in Hamburg, later in London, where Mnemosyne, the god­ dess o f memory, is literally inscribed over the doorway. A t the level o f social psychology, Warburg probably believed in the universality o f a symbolic reper­ toire. But he was bored by the generalized banality o f archetypes. He would not have been a believing Jungian. What interested him most was the elo­ quence o f peculiarity. Which is why his famous epigram that “ God lies in the details” was a carefully considered oxymoron. An unconventional metaphor, a strikingly strange and recurring m otif (like a talking tree) could not be ade­ quately accounted for by lazy invocations o f “ historical background” nor a dumbly mechanical dictionary o f emblems. Tracking that motif from archaic sources through all the mutations and permutations o f form and meaning over time would not only yield the deep connections between past and present; it would also reveal, somewhere along that road, its cultural and cognitive sig­ nificance for human apprehension. This was not just art history, not even cul­ tural history. It was the pursuit o f truth, revealed not in some vast metaphysical Platonic design, but as a parti-colored mosaic o f discrete pieces o f our nature from which a coherent image might emerge. It was, in fact, like a stamp album. Warburg loved postage stamps and was a passionate collector. And since he believed that nothing was too picayune to carry the imprint o f an ancient motif, he was as likely to lecture on stamps (as well as heraldry, signs o f the zodiac, pageants) as on the repository o f his great stock o f memory. Unlike Frazer, whose own contemporary culture was defined by the complete absence o f primitivism, Warburg saw it lurking everywhere. Such was the sweetness o f his wisdom that, like a boy who has decided not to outgrow his terrors, he chose as his last project, called Mnemosyne, what was in effect a gigantic vertical stamp album (though he called it an adas): screens of photographs, organized by motif, and assembling (along with reproductions o f paintings, prints, and drawings) travel posters, advertisements, and news pho­ tographs that struck him as bearing, wittingly or not, the memory o f ancient lore. H e would, I think, have hated the scholarly classification o f such things as “ ephemera,” for in Warburg’s mind, that was precisely what they were not. They were in fact evidence o f longevity, o f endurance, o f an inescapable haunt­ ing. For where Frazer defined his own contemporary culture by the absence o f the primitive, Warburg saw it everywhere. The last screen o f Mnemosyne illus­ trated the survival o f the orgiastic nymph, the maenad, with a photograph o f a woman golfer following through with her nine iron. Frazer wrote thousands o f pages on the subjects o f tree cults and rituals o f sacrifice and resurrection, sited in the primitive grove. Warburg wrote, so far as I know, just one. But if I want to argue, against the grain o f much environ­ mental writing, that Western culture, even while it has been busy destroying forests, has been full, not drained, o f such myths, it is the assimilated German Jew, exemplifying what another German philosopher o f history, Wilhelm

THE VERDANT CROSS

2 14

Dilthey, called “the poetic imagination,” rather than the unproblematically lapsed Scottish Calvinist, who had better be my guide. Had Frazer ever set eyes on the Big Trees o f Mariposa and sampled the devotional literature that repre­ sented them as the pillars o f a Christian temple, he would doubdess have attrib­ uted this to the peasant demography o f American immigration. The verdant cross, on the other hand, a symbol o f death proclaiming the vitality o f organic life, would have been immediately recognizable to Aby Warburg as a felicitous oxymoron. We can assume as much, since the one page that he wrote on arbo­ real resurrection was, in fact, his last. He died o f a heart attack at the age o f sixty-three on October 26, 1929, in his house at Hamburg. When his wife, Mary, and his slavishly devoted assistant, secretary, and lover, Gertrud Bing, were going through his effects, they found a final entry in his diary, in verse, celebrating an apple tree in his garden which to all appearances had seemed dead, but which had, in the fall, suddenly burst into clouds o f white blossom: Maytime in October, a mysterious resurrection.49

iv

In the fourth century

a .d

The Verdant Cross

., in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, between

the basilica and the rotunda, the emperor Theodosius I had erected a large golden cross, encrusted in gems and in the form o f a burgeoning, flowering plant. And not long after, in fifth- and sixth-century Palestine, there appeared among pilgrims silver and terra-cotta ampoules supposedly containing drops o f oil pressed from the “wood o f life” that made up the Cross. Most o f the exam­ ples that survive show the cross in the form o f a living palm tree. But the specifically palmate form o f the tree-cross may also have a pagan source. The date palm, after all, was the very first fruit-bearing tree to be sys­ tematically cultivated five to six thousand years ago in ancient Sumeria and Mesopotamia. As the source o f life in arid places, producing honey, bread, and even, according to Pliny, a kind o f wine, it was venerated as exceptionally fecund.50 (It does, in fact, have a long harvest period from July to November and can produce fruit for sixty or even eighty years.) Pliny also repeated one o f the many stories o f palms that perpetually revived themselves, new leaves con­ stantly appearing at the site from which dead fronds had dropped. This gave the slender, prolific trees a magical aura o f immortality. There was one such marvel

The Verdant Cross

2 15

that was shown to travellers as a witness to the birth o f Apollo, much as the Mariposa Big Trees were said to have been contemporaries o f the Christian nativity. And since the words for “palm” and “phoenix” were interchangeable in both Greek and Egyptian C op­ tic, it was possible for the creator o f the early

H o ly oil

Christian mosaic in Santa Prassede in Rome to

am po ule,

show the haloed bird actually perched on a

sixth cen tu ry P alestine.

palm bough, the light o f his immortality illu­ minating the aposdes below.51 Within the structure o f the myth, then, it was neady economical for the engravers o f the ampoules to represent the adored Christ as a nimbused head atop a palm which becomes both his and the tree’s trunk. N ot surprisingly for an icon featuring a self-replenishing plant, the verso face usually represented the Resurrection. The botanical cross was rapidly translated into the iconography o f the Christian West, where it put out multiple shoots. But sometimes traces o f pagan prototypes hung on the branches. A decorated capital T (for Te Igitur) in a ninth-century M etz breviary in which the cross is formed from vines also includes a pair o f oxen at the base and twin sacrificial lambs at either end o f the crosspiece.52 Generally, this signified the victory o f the new faith over the old, and in time classical icons like the oxen were replaced at the base o f the cross by the serpent o f Genesis. The most austere and militant o f the early church fathers were certainly aware that using trees and flowers to symbolize the death-that-is-no-death might come perilously close to outright idolatry. Formidable iconoclasts like St. Eligius, the bishop o f N oyon, warned the faithful to obey scrupu­ lously the commandment o f D eu­ teronomy 12.2 to “ utterly destroy all the

places,

wherein

the

nations

which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and Breviary, ninth

upon the hills, and under every

century, Metz.

green tree.” 53 But tree cults were everywhere

in

barbarian

Europe,

from the Celtic shores o f the Atlantic in Ireland and Brittany, and Nordic Scandinavia, all the way through to the Balkans in the southeast and

TH E VERDANT CROSS

2 16

Lithuania on the Baltic. And since the latter province was thoroughly converted only in the fourteenth century, it is still possible to find starding “graveyards” where, instead o f conventional crosses, wooden totems, their forms unaltered from paganism, crowd together in antic disorder. A debate ensued between radical iconoclasts, intent on extirpating idola­ try root and branch, and pragmatists. Among the latter was the formidable pope Gregory the Great, who at the very beginning o f the seventh century wrote to the abbot Mellitus (then on a mission to heathen England) advising him to take a tolerant attitude toward pagan practices, since from obdurate minds it is undoubtedly impossible to cut out every­ thing at once, just as he who strives to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees and not by leaps.54 Armed with this kind o f authorization, many o f the shrewder proselytizers grafted Christian theology onto pre-existing pagan cults o f nature. In Ireland, for example, Lisa Bitel has discovered that monastic cells and hermitages were established on the ancient woodland pagan altars called bili. The idea was to graft, rather than uproot.55 Pope Gregory explicitly counselled Mellitus to establish churches on the site o f pagan groves. When this people see that their shrines are not destroyed, they will be able to banish error from their hearts and be more ready to come to the places they are familiar with, but now recognizing and worship­ ping the true God.56 In the Latin world, as Frazer reminded us, the ancient Roman cult o f Atys may have helped, rather than obstructed, the work o f evangelism. On the face o f it, Atys does not seem promising conversion material. Driven by the jealous and vindictive Cybele to a madness that ends in self-castration, Atys (in one of those interventions that Jupiter so enjoyed) is transformed into a pine tree. But the cult, celebrated in imperial Rome with Dionysiac abandon, was a ritual o f sac­ rifice and vegetable metamorphosis. Close to the spring equinox, dendrophors— ritual tree-carriers— were sent into the woods near Rome to cut a sacred pine. Garlanded with anemones signifying the blood o f the slaughtered Atys, the tree became the fetish o f festivities that also included flagellation and self-mutilation followed by a day o f hilaria, or rejoicing, to greet the divine resurrection on the day o f equinox itself. Pigs stood in for the martyr and their blood flowed to make the spring propitious. In some places the jlesh and blood o f Atys were consumed through the symbolic communion o f bread and wine.57 And throughout the whole area o f the cult the death o f Atys was associated with evergreen resurrec­ tion, celebrated in the season the Christians would call Easter.58

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217

Even the most dramatic acts o f evangelical tree surgery were ambiguous. None was more famous than that described in the monk Willibrord’s life o f St. Boniface. Relating the saint’s mission to the Hessians in 723, he reported that “some were wont secredy, some openly, to sacrifice to trees and springs, some in secret and others openly.” Boniface’s response seemed unequivocal: With the advice and counsel o f these last [converts] the saint attempted, in the place called Gaesmere (Geismar), while the servants o f God stood by, to fell an oak o f extraordinary size which is called by the old name o f the pagan oak o f Jupiter [almost certainly Wotan]. When, in the strength o f his steadfast heart he had cut the lower notch, there was present a great multitude o f pagans who in their souls were most earnestly cursing the enemy o f their gods. But when the front o f the tree was cut into only a little, suddenly the oak’s vast bulk, driven by a divine blast from above, crashed to the ground, shivering its crown o f branches as it fell, and as if by the gracious dispensation o f the Most High, it was also burst into four parts and four trunks o f huge size. . . . A t this sight the pagans who had cursed, now believed and blessed the Lord and put away their reviling. Then, moreover, the holy bishop, after taking counsel with the brethren, built from the timber o f the tree, a wooden oratory and dedicated it in honor o f St. Peter the apostle.59 It is often said that the source o f Boniface’s determination was his own native landscape o f Devon, dotted with obstinate tree cults, not least that o f the Celtic yew, which still decorates Devonian churchyards as an emblem o f immortality. But it’s at least as plausible to offer an opposite interpretation, namely, that his familiarity with local animism may have given him a healthy respect for its power. After all, Willibrord’s story, ostensibly a conversionary miracle, actually demonstrates the ways by which pagan beliefs could be turned to Christian ends. The “divine blast” that helped Boniface fell the oak is iden­ tical with the pagan lightning bolts which in Celtic and Germanic lore mark the tree as a tree o f life. According to Pliny, the Druids believed mistletoe to grow in precisely those places where lightning, dispatched by the gods, had struck the oak. In related traditions its interior was thought to be the abode o f the spirits o f the dead. So Boniface’s axe transformed rather than destroyed. The spiritually dead pagans were turned into living believers. The rotten (perhaps hollow) trunk o f the idolatrous tree was turned inside out to reveal four per­ fect, clean timbers, from which a house o f the reborn and eternally living Christ could then be constructed. Sometimes the hijacking o f pagan myths could be shameless. At Trier, where there had been a thriving Bacchic cult to go with its wine production,

TH E VERDANT CROSS

2 18

Bishop Nicetius, in the middle o f the sixth century, took the composite leafmask capitals from a nearby ruined Roman temple and set them on the piers o f his new cathedral.60 Green Men like the Trier mask grin and grimace from so many bosses, vault ribs, and piers in European churches that they somehow manage to become invisible to the casual gaze. So we fail to register the grotesque incongruous­ ness o f fertility fetishes, vomiting greenstuff from their stretched mouths into the house o f Christ. In Trier the church fathers may have become embarrassed by the intruders since the leaf-men were walled up in the twelfth century. But at exactly that time an even more spectacular example o f tree idols appeared in the projections over the south portal at Chartres Cathedral. There, the foliate heads seem to have been chosen by Abbot Thierry with an eye to their suit­ ability for Christian conversion. Thus the Bacchic vine, with bunches o f grapes hanging from his mischievous whiskers, served as the pious sign o f the eucharist; another head, disgorging acorn-loaded oak twigs, alluded to the Druid temple over which the church was said to have been built; and the frontal head o f acanthus (the phoenix-plant o f the Latins) represented yet another botanical icon o f rebirth and resurrection.61 Why should Christianity have denied itself the irresistible analogy between the vegetable cycle and the theology o f sacrifice and immortality? Had it been adamantly ascetic, Christianity would have been unique among the religions of the world in its rejection o f arboreal symbolism. For there was no other cult in which holy trees did not function as symbols o f renewal. Even a summary list would include the Persian Haoma, whose sap conferred eternal life; the Chinese hundred-thousand-cubit Tree o f Life, the Kien-mou, growing on the slopes o f the terrestrial paradise o f Kuen-Luen; the Buddhist Tree o f Wisdom, from whose four boughs the great rivers o f life flow; the Muslim Lote tree, which marks the boundary between human understanding and the realm o f divine mystery; the great Nordic ash tree Yggdrasil, which fastens the earth between underworld and heaven with its roots and trunk; Canaanite trees sacred to Astarte/Ashterah; the Greek oaks sacred to Zeus, the laurel to Apollo, the myrtle to Aphrodite, the olive to Athena, the fig tree beneath which Romulus and Remus were suckled by the shewolf, and, o f course, Frazer’s fatal grove o f Nemi, sacred to Diana, where the guardian priest padded nervously about the trees, awaiting the slayer from the darkness who would succeed him in an endless cycle o f death and renewal.62 It was to be expected, then, that Christian theology, notwithstanding its official nervousness about pagan tree cults, would, in the end, go beyond the barely baptized Yggdrasil o f a twelfth-century Flemish illumination where the boughs o f the world-tree support paradise.63 But it was only when the scrip­ tural and apocryphal traditions o f the Tree o f Life were grafted onto the cult o f the Cross that a genuinely independent Christian vegetable theology came into being.64

The Verdant Cross

2 l 9

The original source was the text in Genesis 2.9 that specified not one but two trees in the Garden o f Eden: the fatal Tree o f the Knowledge o f Good and Evil and the vital Tree o f Life. When Adam and Eve are evicted for having sam­ pled the fruit o f the former, the Lord God “ placed at the east o f the garden o f Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way o f the tree o f life.” 65 From the very beginning, then, they are planted together as necessary opposites; the Tree o f Life guarded so that, in the form o f the Cross, it could redeem the Fall. In chapter 7 o f the first-century apocryphal Gospel o f Nicodemus, Christ enters hell to liberate the dead from Satan and, taking Adam’s hand, announces: “ Com e with me all you who have suffered death through the tree which this man [Adam] touched. For behold I raise you all up again through the tree o f the cross.” Sometimes the tree announced its own destiny as it did in Anglo-Saxon to the tenth-century writer o f the D rea m o f the Rood. In his vision the forest tree describes its own physical fate— hacked, felled, and torn as if it were a surro­ gate for the torments o f Christ. So when it receives the body o f the Savior, the substance o f the tree and the Messiah dissolve into each other in a single organ­ ism o f death and redemption. Rightly could the tree say, “They pierced me with nails. . . . /T h e y marked us together/I was all bedewed with blood.”66 N o taxonomist, the tree o f the D rea m unhelpfully fails to identify just what kind o f tree it is. But perhaps this was just as well since an entire genre o f liter­ ature developed in which the varieties (oak, ash, holly, and yew in the Frankish north; olive, cedar, fig, and cypress in the south) dispute their respective claims to have constituted all or part o f the Cross. And the timber history o f Christ— born in a wooden stable, mother married to a carpenter, crowned with thorns and crucified on die Cross— helped elaborate an astonishing iconography. As a source, scripture was supplemented with the various versions o f the Legend o f the True Cross. In a twelfth-century version Adam, nine hundred and thirtytwo years old and (understandably) ailing, sends his son Seth to fetch a seed from one o f the Edenic trees. Returning, the son then drops the seed in Father Adam’s mouth, from where it sprouts into sacred history. It supplies a length for N oah’s ark (a first redemption), the rod o f Moses, a beam in Solomon’s temple, a plank in Joseph’s workshop, and finally the structure o f the Cross itself.67 The image o f the verdant cross, then, expressed with poetic conciseness the complicated theology by which the Crucifixion atoned for the Fall. And it imprinted itself on virtually every kind o f sacred article through the Christian Middle Ages from a ninth-century breviary in the Benedictine abbey o f Corvey, where the serpent snakes about the base o f a palmate cross, through the great

THE VERDANT CROSS

220

mosaic in the apse o f San Clemente in Rome, where the cross rises from a vast acanthus, to a fifteenth-century breviary by the Ermengau Master (color illus. 23), in which the bent boughs o f the palmate cross rhyme with the mortified rib cage o f the suffering Christ.68 There was more than one iconographic route to the vernal resurrection. In cathedral windows (at Chartres, for example), and in psalters, breviaries, and Books o f Hours, a tree sprouts from the loins o f Jesse and rises heavenward to the Passion, with the Father observing from its crown. So the wooden eleva­ tion rises from its carnal root to its celestial crown, from matter to spirit. Other holy plants were variations on the dead-and-alive theme. In a late medieval Lotharingian Book o f Hours, for example, Moses witnesses not one but two botanical miracles (color illus. 24). The bush that burns and burns but is not consumed is host not merely to the commanding voice o f God but to a riot o f flowers that defeat the licking flames. But beside it is the emblem o f paganism: an ancient, Germanic oak, eaten away with heathenism. Yet from the center o f its dead trunk the May-blooms o f resurrection rise in triumph; a spring blos­ soming that continues into the glorious paradise garden that decorates the mar­ gins o f the page. The miraculous transformation o f dead into living wood supplied one o f the most prolific motifs o f the Christian tradition. The Tree o f the Knowledge o f Good and Evil, for example, dry since the Fall, was said to have developed green shoots at the time o f the Resurrection. In Giovanni da Modena’s Mys­ tery o f the F a ll an d Redem ption o f M a n in the church o f San Petronio in Bologna, Adam and Eve stand in contrite atonement on the thorny side o f the tree cross while Mary, with a chalice to catch the vinous blood o f the Savior, stands beneath its leafy branches with the aposdes and fathers o f the church. Sacred plants and trees developed a reputation for blooming at Christ­ mas and rapidly developed their own cult o f veneration and pilgrimage. N ot far from Nuremberg, according to a fifteenth-century writer, an apple tree revealed itself on Christmas Eve to be heavy with both blossom and fruit, a miracle at once botanical and theological.69 A hawthorn tree that stood on a hill outside the town o f Glastonbury in Somerset was said to have grown in the precise place where Joseph o f Arimathea, on a mission to southwest Eng­ land, had planted his staff. On the next day the staff had taken root and was in full blossom, and from then on was expected to repeat the miracle each Christmas. And though the iconoclastic Puritans deliberately destroyed the Glastonbury Thorn during the Civil War in their campaign to uproot idola­ try, local royalists were said to have taken cuttings and replanted them else­ where, ensuring both the survival o f the tree and, no doubt, the survival o f the line o f Charles I, the martyr-monarch, who was said by pious loyalists to have inherited the Savior’s crown o f thorns. In 1752 the change from Julian

The Verdant Cross

22 l

to Gregorian calendars decreed by the government caused great uncertainty at Glastonbury as to which Christmas, the old or the new, would be pro­ claimed legitimate by the blooming o f the Thorn. O n the twenty-fourth o f December (new style), the tree’s failure to bloom seemed to vindicate the suspicions o f the calendrical conservatives that the change had been some sort o f diabolical conspiracy. And when, on the fifth o f January, the first lit­ tle white flowers opened, the thousands o f faithful who had gathered, hold­ ing lanterns and candles, determined to celebrate Christmas on the day consecrated by the tree. As

long

as

Christian Europe re­ mained relatively uni­ fied

during

the

Middle Ages, deadand-alive trees were rendered

within

a

single image or rit­ Giovanni da M odena,

ual. In Piero della Francesca’s

R esu r­

Mystery

rection at San Sepol-

o f the Fall and Redemption

cro, for example, the

o f Man.

holding the blood-

risen red

Christ cross

stands banner

between the dry and green

trees,

wonderfully

the

trans­

planted from Eden to Tuscany. But as the

fissures in the

congregatio fid eliu m began to open and gape, so the trees began to represent irreconcilable opposites: the Old and New Testaments; the synagogue and the church; sin and salvation; Satan and Christ; death and life. In Johannes von Zittau’s version o f the chastisement o f disobe­ dience, the two trees are still mysteriously braided together with the serpent. But Eve and the Virgin are counterpointed as sacred and profane fruit-pluckers. So while Mary presents the fruit o f her womb on the left, Eve offers hers as a death’s-head to a stubborn crowd o f pointy-hatted Jews on the right. In the Protestant art o f the next generation, these divisions actually shape the formal composition o f the paintings. Holbein and Cranach the Elder both

THE VERDANT CROSS

222

produced allegories o f the Fall and the Pas­ sion,

bisected

down

the center by a tree that is dead on one side, green

on

the

other.

Almost nothing in the engraving after a panel

P iero della

from Cranach’s work­

Francesca,

shop is without its sym­ bolic

opposite.

Resurrection, 1463.

The

lamb, the wound, and the Holy Spirit on the “ green” side are paired with the Fall and the descent

into

hell

(observed by the Jews) on the other. And

for

Reformation’s

all

the

hatred

o f Catholic icons, Lutheran printers were not above borrowing them for their own theology. Heinrich Vogtherr’s woodcut o f 1524 is a good example o f how the old Pauline tradition o f the “Tree o f Faith” (a variation on both the Tree o f Jesse and the Ages o f Man) could re-emerge from a great bath o f Lutheran wordiness as an impeccably orthodox Protestant image. The roots o f the tree are embedded in Gottes Wort, and, tended by apostolic gardeners, the tree ascends direcdy (without any pruning or grafting by the clergy!), via faith (the heart), to the mouth o f Understanding, and higher still to Christ crucified on a

palm

tree

mounted Holy

by

Spirit

sur­ the and

finally the Father. It

was stroke

of

genius, o f course, to brandish exactly the signs, symbols, mys­ tery,

and

Lucas C ranach, engraving,

the

Counter-Reforma­ tion’s

W orkshop o f

myths

Allegory o f the Fall and the Passion.

The Verdant Cross

Heinrich Vogtherr, Glaubensbaum , w oodcut, 1524.

which Protestant asceticism had ordered obliterated. So in the century betweei 1550 and 1650, a great forest o f holy trees and verdant crosses sprouted ii churches, chapels, and wayside shrines. And though the Jesuits were the stag< directors o f the new devotional theater, it was Franciscan tradition that gav< the church these sacred arbors. The lig n u m vitae had been the site o f St Bonaventure’s meditations on the Tree o f Life, and it reappeared in all man ner o f prints, paintings, and even sculptures. In the fourteenth century Taddec Gaddi had painted a spectacular Passion for the refectory o f Santa Croce ir Florence, in which the cross appears as a twelve-branched tree (for the apos ties), each laden with the fruit o f the Gospels. Nearly two centuries later the greatest graphic artist o f the Catholi< Baroque, Jacques Callot, etched two trees o f the living dead. They are not usu ally associated with each other. The horrifying print from the Petites miseres dt la gu erre, with its harvest o f hanging corpses, has been read, long after Calloi

T ad d eo Gaddi. The Tree o f the Cross (The Tret o f Life), mid ­ fourteenth century.

Jacques Callot, e tch ing, Tree o f St. Francis, ca. 1620. Jacques Callot The H anging Tree, etching from Les Petites miseres de la guerre, 1633—35

The Verdant Cross

225

was dead and forgotten, as a pacifist protest against the Thirty Years’ War. But Callot was a devout and ardent Catholic and it is much more likely that the moral behind the whole series was one o f Christian acceptance and stoicism rather than any kind o f radical dissent. I f we set it alongside his other tree, drawn and engraved at the same time, around 1635-36, their relationship seems to echo the ancient Christian traditions o f dead and living trees; o f the world and the spirit; o f knowledge and life. Callot’s Tree o f St. Francis modifies the Franciscan piety o f the Gaddi fresco to a more missionary form. Twelve aposdes venerate the tree in which the Trinity is seated and where the holy flame o f the evangel illuminates the gospel fruit. The figure o f Christ himself has osten­ sibly disappeared, like some pagan divinity, back into the substance o f the tree, where, however, it is unmistak­ ably present in the anthropo­ morphic trunk and branches. Because

of

the

saint’s

strong associations with Chris­ tianized

nature

worship,

the

Franciscans o f the seventeenth century seem to have produced Jacopo Ligozzi, The Beech Tree o f the Madonna

a particularly emphatic tradition o f Savior-Trees. For his series o f drawings

of

the

mountain

at La Verna,

retreat o f Monte Verna in Pied­

1607.

mont,

the

Florentine

artist

Jacopo Ligozzi drew The Beech o f the B ell, where the tree trunk plainly echoes the twisted form o f the crucified Savior. And in a still more startling image, a sec­ ond cruciform beech not only seats a vision o f the Virgin and child in its branches but uses a hollow cavity to suggest the tomb o f the Resurrection, neatly incorporating all three elements— Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection— within a single vegetable form. Verdant crosses were not the exclusive property o f the Counter-Reformation. The most beautiful and startling example I know was painted by the great Dutch humanist Hendrik Goltzius toward the end o f his life, in 1610 (color illus. 25). His whole career had uneasily straddled confessional allegiances, nei­ ther militantly Catholic nor formally Protestant. His teacher, the engraver and scholar Coornhert, had been Erasmus’s student, and in many ways Goltzius’s Tree is a typically Erasmian compilation o f motifs ancient and modern, pious

226

THE VERDANT CROSS

and secular, devotional and poetic. The living cross on which the crucified Christ hangs is specifically an apple tree in fruit. But the textual source is from the Old Testament, chapter 2 o f the Song o f Songs: As the apple tree among the trees o f the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. Jesus is, o f course, the fruit, the apple lying in Mary’s lap. But he is also the fruit plucked by the flying, apple-cheeked cherub whose face, in the Manner­ ist idiom o f the time, bears an expression o f such calculated sweetness that it almost convinces the beholder that the Passion was, after all, worth the pain. The scene is all the more astonishing in that while Goltzius has given Christ the head o f a human in the throes o f torment, his body goes well beyond the twist­ ing conventions o f Mannerist modelling. The arms are muscled to follow the natural knots and swellings o f the tree’s branches; the torso clings and covers the trunk as if it had indeed become indivisible from the wood. And the line that projects forward following Christ’s fluttering loincloth is extended back­ ward along the leafy sprig o f new growth. Is it possible, too, that this anthem to suffering and rebirth was not merely a theological allegory? Frima Fox Hofrichter, who first commented on the painting in 1983, added the intriguing historical footnote that Haarlem, where Goltzius presided over the founding generation o f northern Netherlands artists, had the dorre boom, the “ burnt tree,” as a civic emblem. In the siege and sack o f the city in 1572-73, Spanish troops had burned its woods and oudying orchards. And Goltzius’s patriotic sympathies are well known from his engrav­ ings. His own spectacular contribution to the verdant cross tradition might eas­ ily have functioned as a symbol o f civic as well as spiritual resurrection. The phoenix-tree had travelled a clear millennium from the crude little terra-cotta vessels o f sixth-century Palestine to the leafy apple tree o f Haarlem. But it still had some way to go.

v

Tabernacles

Eden was a garden, not a forest. It had just two trees, both assigned, as we have seen, ominous destinies. And for all the burgeoning, sprouting, budding, and

Tabernacles

227

leafing o f the verdant crosses, they are seen either alone or with their evil twin The Knowledge. Could a whole forest be a Christian place? To read the fulminations o f the fathers o f the early church against heathen groves one would suppose not. And some, to be sure, had inherited the Roman and Jewish dread o f the somber woodland depths. But as we have already seen, our impression o f early medieval Europe as marked by abrupt boundaries between cleared and wooded space is an anachronism. There were ail kinds o f intermediate zones where a coppiced understory supported a busy society o f men and animals. From at least the sev­ enth century, then, many monasteries were established in woodlands not as retreats but to take advantage o f the thriving natural economy, and left their marks on place names like Waldkirch and Klosterwald.70 Which is not to say that there were no true forest hermits. From Ireland to Bohemia, penitents fled from the temptations o f the world into the wood­ land depths. In solitude they would deliver themselves to mystical transports or prevail over the ordeals that might come their way from the demonic pow­ ers lurking in the darkness. The indeterminate, boundless forest, then, was Europe’s version o f the Hebraic desert wilderness (to which it was often com­ pared): a place where the faith o f the true believer would be put to the sever­ est tests. But it was also a site o f miracles where stags would appear bearing the holy cross in their antlers, and the leprous and the lame could be suddenly cured with a root or a bough.71 Alas, it was not easy to protect holy seclusion. Once established in anchorite solitude, many hermits became so famous that they attracted throngs o f pilgrims. A few attempted to shrug o ff this unfortunate popularity by retreat­ ing into still more remote sites. But others accepted their paradoxical fate by becoming charismatic preachers like Peter the Hermit, who, at the end o f the eleventh century, delivered fiery sermons before vast crowds that urged a great crusade for the H oly Land. Others institutionalized collective seclusion by founding monasteries o f penitents, trying, at least, to site them in the midst o f marshes or atop inaccessible mountains.72 Ultimately, though, the gardeners prevailed over the hermits. The hagiographies are full o f stories o f sainted holy men like Ermelande turning his eighth-century monastery on a forested island o f the Loire, “set in the densest and darkest woods,” into a virtual paradise.73 Such places had their wildness, barbarism, and paganism defanged so that savage beasts such as wolves, snakes, and bears became tame and even companionable and the grim habitat began to bloom with flowers and fruit. It was only in the late Middle Ages, though, that paradise turned sylvan. For at the same time that Dante was perpetuating, in the very opening stanzas o f the Inferno, the ancient Roman idea o f the dark wood as a place where one lost one’s way, the beckoning antechamber o f hell, the architects and decora­

228

THE VERDANT CROSS

tors o f Gothic churches in the north were busy creating a woodland version o f heaven. The nineteenth-century architect and advocate o f Gothic restoration Viollet-le-Duc seems to have been the first to notice that while early Gothic botanical ornament contented itself with buds and scrolled leaf-shoots, later centuries witnessed an extraordinary unfurling. In a magisterial essay the art historian Karl Oettinger documented this profuse fifteenth-century sprouting o f arborescent and vegetable forms on porches, pulpits, choir stalls, mon­ strances, and screens. The proliferation o f organic plant-forms— tendrils, leaves, twigs, boughs, and arbors— was not, he argues, simply a matter o f dis­ crete decoration but part o f a coherent program to make the church over into a paradise garden.74 The wooden door to the castle church at Chemnitz, for example, built around 1525, was actually fashioned to resemble tree branches bent over to form a natural archway.75 So at the same time that Conrad Celtis and his followers were reclaiming Germany from Italian cultural domination by reviving the traditions o f the ancient woodland, the abbeys and churches o f Germany and Austria were, in effect, depetrifying themselves. In both cases, the embowering was necessarily at the expense o f classicism. The great text on the origins o f building, Vitruvius’s D e architectura, probably written in the first century B .C ., provided the earliest narrative o f the way in which architecture had evolved from the primitive hut. According to Vitruvius, following the accidental discovery o f fire, savage men gradually fashioned rudi­ mentary shelters from mud and leaves and twigs in imitation o f the nests o f birds and beasts. He then cited tribes in Gaul and Spain which continued to use whole tree trunks to create a structure which, in its essence, was a primitive form o f the constituents o f classical architecture: columns, entablature, and pediment. And as Joseph Rykwert, Alain Jouffroy, and others have noticed, it probably is no coincidence that about the time that Vitruvius’s book was first being printed, Piero di Cosimo painted a series o f panels illustrating the habi­ tat and mythology o f primitive man. And in the background o f Vulcan and Eole, where fire is being harnessed to a forge, and an ancestral family group is seated on a woven cloth, another group o f men, naked except for loincloths, hammers out just such a timber building.76 This fascination with the timbered origins o f architecture is not to be con­ fused with nostalgia, though. A report written by a “pseudo-Raphael” for Pope Leo X recycled Vitruvius’s ur-history but also complained that the barbarian cultures that had invaded Rome had vandalized classical buildings and replaced them with versions o f their primitive buildings.77 These took the form o f bizarre and unsound structures, encrusted with crude and structurally mean­ ingless decorations o f leaves and animals. Graceless and architecturally miscon­ ceived though such structures were, they owed their pointed arches to the bowing together o f uncut tree branches.78 “ In their buildings,” wrote another aggrieved classicist, Vasari, “which are so numerous that the whole earth is

Tabernacles

229

infested with them, we see doors ornamented with slender columns, twisted like vines incapable o f supporting even the lightest weight. On every face of these buildings has been placed such a swarm o f little tabernacles. . . . May Heaven preserve every good country from following these detestable fancies whose ugliness forms so great a contrast with the beauty o f our works that they do not deserve to be spoken o f any more.” 79 This grudging interest in “ arboreal Gothic” in the hands o f contemporary German builders became a flamboyant boast. For whoever created the Sigmaringen Monstrance around 1505 or the arborescent rib-vaulting at Seefeld in the Tyrol proclaimed something like the opposite o f classical theory. Instead o f conceiving sacred space as a shelter closed o ff against the forest wilderness,

it was

meant to embody it.

Of

course,

pointed arches, rib vaults, and trefoil windows had been in

existence

centuries

for

before

Piero di

this highly self-con­

Cosim o,

scious turn toward

Vulcan and Eole,

a theory o f origins.

ca. 1495-1500.

But

the

rather

embrace, than

the

rejection, o f sylvan nature,

and

the

attempt to inscribe organicism into the features

of

the

building itself, to dissolve the boundaries between nature and architecture, was, as Oettinger implies, truly revolutionary. It was, in fact, the culmination o f the long process by which the ancient Germanic and Celtic pagan groves had become fully converted to Christian use. But what had happened here? Had the woods become subdued by the priesthood or had the cathedral gone green? Had, for that matter, the female incarnations o f the fecund earth— Gaia and Artemis— become absorbed into the fruitful Virgin? Even before the Refor­ mation Marian iconography had often set the Virgin in the center o f the par­ adise garden, surrounded by flowers, fruit, and leafy trees. But through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a true cult o f rustic pilgrimage developed, often marked by wayside shrines and chapels. Those shrines held images o f the Madonna and child carved from limewood and were sometimes themselves crudely fashioned out o f the trunk o f a tree.80 In Bavaria and the forested region

THE VERDANT CROSS

230

o f southern Germany and Austria, a whole chain o f Marian pilgrimage churches and hermitages were built. Jakob Balde, a Jesuit poet, wrote an ode to one of them, the Tyrolean Maria Waldrast (the Forest Rest), as if the woods and the chapel were extensions o f each other: benign, peaceful, a place where a foot­ sore palmer could rest, undisturbed by the least hint o f savagery from man or beast.81 So even during the period when Gothic architecture had fallen furthest from favor— from the mid seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century— sacred naturalism was preserved in the Baroque and rococo churches o f Catholic Ger­ many and Austria. Amidst flights o f gilded cherubs, massed hosts o f aerial saints, celestial swags, and scrolls and baskets laden with fruit, vine tendrils twine themselves about columns and delicate tree trunks reach for the dizzy ceilings. There is nothing o f the gloomy groves about such places. They pre­ sent instead a spectacle o f enchantment, a radiandy lit tabernacle ventilated by gusts o f spiritual good cheer. N o wonder G od’s greenery in such places seems so irrepressibly fertile. It was not a Bavarian monk, however, but a Whig bishop who provided the most powerful reinforcement for the connection between the forest and sacred architecture. In his 1751 edition o f the works o f Alexander Pope, Bishop Warburton chose Pope’s “ Epistle to Lord Burlington” as a prompt for an extraor­ dinary digression on the origins o f Gothic architecture. The choice o f text was not arbitrary. Burlington had been the leading exponent o f Palladian classicism in early eighteenth-century England. His villa at Chiswick was a slavish (if very beautiful) version o f Palladio’s Villa Rotonda at Verona, and his influence set the tone and taste o f Georgian country-house building for an entire genera­ tion. So Warburton’s history o f the origins o f Gothic architecture was more than an esoteric footnote. It was a pious dissent against the dictatorship o f the classical temple. “ Our Gothic ancestors had juster and manlier notions than modern mimicks o f Greek and Roman magnificence,” for they were more con­ cerned with spiritual exaltation than civic pomp. Warburton went on to supply a fantastic history in which the Visigothic conquest o f Spain, when brought into contact with Moorish arabesques and pointed arches, produced a wholly new kind o f architecture. With its soaring verticality and slender columns, these new buildings were conscious imitations o f the natural structure and appearance o f the ancient Germanic groves. “ Could the Arches be otherwise than pointed when the workman was to imi­ tate that curve which branches make by their intersection with one another? Or could the columns be otherwise than split into distinct shafts when they were to represent the stems o f a group o f trees?” Likewise, stained glass was said to imitate the openings between leaves, “concurring to preserve that gloomy light inspiring religious horror.” Even the warmest admirers o f Palladio, Warburton remarks (to Burlington’s shade), must concede that Gothic architecture, what-

Tabernacles

231

ever its qualities, had a nobler origin than classical.82 The Georgian in him came to the fore, however, when he concluded that the mark o f the success o f Gothic builders was that “ no attentive observer ever viewed a regular avenue o f wellgrown trees, intermixing their branches overhead, but it presendy put him in mind o f the long Visto through a Gothic cathedral.” A generation later, the merits o f Gothic would rest on the reversal o f those priorities! Warburton was by no means the first to offer these observations. In 1724, for example, William Stukeley’s Itin e ra riu m C u riosu m had cited the cloisters o f what would be the bishop’s own cathedral in Gloucester as suggesting the arboreal origins o f Gothic. But after Warburton, decorated Gothic attracted a

Paul Decker,

whole new generation o f defenders, and even those who tried to create a new

engraving from

rustic form o f building. In 1759, for example, Paul Decker’s G othic A rch itec­

Gothic Architec­

ture D ecora ted showed a “ Hermitic Retirement Chiefly Composed with Rock

ture Decorated,

Branches and the Roots o f Trees,” and we may owe the origins o f the rustic

*759 -

garden bench to the same author. Much o f the interest, though, was confined to trifles and follies. Houses touted as Gothic, like Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, were nothing but an aggregate o f decorative details superimposed on a conventionally classical pavil­ ion. And as long as a complacent rationalism prevailed, the arboreal affinity would only reinforce the view that Gothic was the architecture o f

supersti-

THE VERDANT CROSS

2 32

tion,” which fully deserved ignominy and oblivion along with the rest o f the rituals and theology o f the Christian cult. All this changed in the middle decades o f the eighteenth century. In 1753 the ex-Jesuit Marc-Antoine Laugier published his Essay on the Origins o f A r c h i­ tecture. Laugier recycled Vitruvius’s account o f the beginnings o f human habitation but represented primitive man as using tree timber only after becoming dissatisfied with the darkness o f the cave. Taking tree trunks for corners and columns, and inclined branches to form a sloping roof and pediment, was, then, a stage in human progress, a coming-into-the-light. Andperhaps it was Laugier’s Jesuitical habits that led him to emphasize the correspondence between the natural and the architectural order. For he assumed that true classicism would, with the progress o f civilization, have necessarily emerged from its wooden prototype. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins o f Inequality, on the other hand, pub­ lished two years after Laugier’s

evocation

o f the primitive hut, was

much

more

committed to recovering the natural from the classical; reversing modern conven­ tions by departing the stone temple for the wooden cabin.83 But while the theorists o f the origins o f classical architecture seldom went beyond the speculation o f their texts and engravings, those who championed Gothic as embodying in its characteristic forms— pointed arches, clustered columns and vaults— the forest glade were prepared to try to offer practical demonstrations o f their argument. And none among them was more determined or more literal in his passion than Sir James Hall.84 We all know someone like Hall. A walking repository o f esoteric knowl­ edge, he carries his learning with intense gravity. He is eager to impart his lat­ est discovery and does his best to persuade everyone within hearing range,

Paul Decker, engraving from Gothic Architec­ ture Decorated, 1759-

Tabernacles

233

especially over dinner, o f its self-evident historical significance. He invariably has a theory that, if properly heeded, will make the world a different place. He is a tremendous bore but no one can bring himself to dislike him for very long. His air o f sweet innocence precludes it. In Scotland, in the second half o f the eighteenth century, such a person would have been an antiquarian, his library crammed with enormous tomes purporting to be chronicles o f local clans and dynasts. James Hall was not merely an antiquarian but also a geologist because nothing fascinated him more than prime causes and the lore o f origins. To call such explorations “ myths” would be to trivialize the seriousness with which such provincial gentlemen, all over Europe, took their inquiries. It is a common misconception that the Enlightenment was exclusively, or even primarily, obsessed with novelty. Many o f its most impatient enthusiasts were indeed devotees o f modernity. But along with the prophets o f the new came the connoisseurs o f the antique, even the archaic. Far from thinking o f themselves as musty antediluvians, such explorers o f the mysteries o f the remote past fully expected, with a kind o f alchemical passion, to make some Great and General Discovery that would actually link past and future time and so truly astonish the universe. Geology was one such route to truths o f cosmic significance, and astrology another. By the last third o f the century such uni­ versal projectors would be flirting with Romanticism. James Hall is seldom classified among the Romantics, not least because cer­ tified upholders o f its truths, like Friedrich von Schlegel, thought he was an appalling booby; and though he went or. to preside over the Royal Society o f Scotland, he has never really recovered from their contempt. But no one who stumbled over the origins o f the Gothic while contemplating the wine harvest in the M edoc should be so summarily dismissed. It was 1785. Hall, who described the incident in his Essay on the Origins, H istory a n d P rincip les o f G othic A rchitecture, was then on the Grand Toui. Like everyone else with an interest in the subject, he had read Bishop Warburton and had duly noted that the resemblances between a Gothic nave and an “ alley o f trees” could not be fortuitous. (He remained skeptical, though, about the peculiar hybrid o f the German grove and the Saracen arch that Warburton sug­ gested as the starting point o f Gothic.) Offended by Vasari’s contemptuous dis­ missal o f Gothic as “ monstrous and barbarous, being void o f all order and rather deserving the name o f disorder and confusion,” Hall appointed himself its vindicator. His essay begins, interestingly, with a general defense o f ornamentation that spontaneously imitated natural forms. As if to refute the convention that classical architecture cleaved to universally ideal forms while Gothic was local and particular, Hall chose to make his point with the decorative patterning on

THE VERDANT CROSS

2 34

Tahitian canoes and Peruvian gourd vases as well as Greek urns. But it was in France, where he was sent into raptures by the Gothic cathedrals, that he hit on a way to demonstrate, empirically, just how their forms had “ naturally” evolved. As he watched the French vineyard laborers coming back from the vendange and bearing bunches o f grapes on long poles, it occurred to me that a rustic dwelling might be constructed o f such rods, bearing a resemblance to works o f Gothic architecture and from which the peculiar forms o f that style might have derived.85 Hall then went on a tour o f Gothic churches in the north o f England and Ireland to fortify his confidence before embarking on the experiment that would earn him, in rapid succession, renown and derision. While the rest of Europe was plunged into the turmoil o f revolution and war, James Hall, assisted by a local cooper, methodically set about planting two facing rows o f ash-tree rods in the ground, each about three inches in diameter. To the top o f each rod Hall then attached pliable willow rods and bent two together to form a “ natural arch.” His conviction was not only that he was reconstructing the original building method o f the first Gothic architects, but that his sticks would actually root and sprout James Hall, engraving, from Essay on the Origins, History and Principles o f Gothic Architecture.

leaves and stalks, thus creating a perfect union o f wooden nature and organic architecture. A year after he performed the experiment he was happy to discover that some o f the rods had indeed become rooted and

that

the

places

where they had begun to bud or rot or leaf corresponded to equiv­ alent irregularities

in

Gothic forms. Further

tours

of

British Gothic churches and extensive antiquar­ ian reading only rein­ forced the results o f his experiment.

At

the

church on St. Mary’s

L

Tabernacles

2 3 5

THE VERDANT CROSS

2 36

Isle in Galway a rail made o f fresh wood had actually struck roots, much like his own little structure. The gateway to Durham Cathedral’s cloister he thought had obviously been made o f rods and branches. Was it any wonder, then, that a Tree o f Jesse was to be found in the interior? And were not the rituals o f Palm Sunday, when green boughs were torn from trees together with their foliage and brought inside the church as decoration, a survival o f the same sylvan building? The earliest church o f all, Hall thought (and he supplied the illustration that is the magnificent crowning folly o f his entire book), was an entire wickerwork cathedral, perhaps the kind o f thing suggested in Dugdale’s Monasticon A n g lica n u m

built for the convert king Arviragus at

Durham. As far as he was concerned, Hall had demonstrated beyond all doubt the organic process by which “ Gothic” (a label he disliked as irremediably pejora­ tive) had evolved. “ In all its parts,” he concluded, it is “ nearly connected with nature.” “ Greek” architecture, by contrast, was “ much less flexible.” While the rigid forms o f classicism might be suitable as a habitation o f the gods, a church was meant to house a congregation and “therefore requires much room within and a great deal o f light whereas a temple has little need o f either.” Where there was Gothic form there was always light, Hall concluded. Take the Eddystone lighthouse, for instance, modelled on a great oak tree and a beacon in the darkness. A ch, Lieber G ott! chorused the Germans when they were made aware o f Hall’s Essay. Confident though he was o f his demonstration, Hall was not overhasty in broadcasting the results. His first reading to the Royal Society o f Scot­ land was five years after the first ash rods had been set, and it was another sixteen years before the Essay was published. It was the vulgar functionalism o f Hall’s efforts to reproduce the original construction o f Gothic that most offended critics like Friedrich von Schlegel. (Though he also unjustly ridiculed Hall for claiming to have made an original discovery— something Hall was actually at pains to disavow— it would not be unlike Schlegel to have written o ff the “ Englishman” without having actually read him.) But one can understand his pain at discovering a treatise which sub­ stituted a woodenly literal view o f the origins o f Gothic for the Romantics’ his­ torical view, which located it in an expressly Germanic, sacred and tribal history. What was even worse was that the affinities between the sacred grove and Gothic form, apprehended by Goethe and other high minds like Hegel, Georg Forster, and the Schlegels, had been reduced to a clumsy exercise in botanical utilitarianism. Twenty-two years before Hall had his inspiration in the vineyards, Goethe had stood before Strasbourg Cathedral in a transport o f celestial illumination. It was also in that city that he met, for the first time, Johann Gottfried Herder, an encounter o f profound significance for him.86 Herder was by far the most

Tabernacles

237

adamant and eloquent voice raised on behalf o f the sacred and tribal continu­ ities o f D eutschtum . He had stood all the pieties o f the Enlightenment on their head. Where the philosophes offered classical universalism and the triumph of rationalist modernity, Herder unapologetically countered with cultural nation­ alism and the sacred past. Indeed he had travelled from the far-eastern end o f the German world in Riga to the extreme west in Alsace. By the time they met, Goethe had almost certainly read Herder’s Silvae C ritica e ( K ritischen W alder), published just the year before and which set out his beliefs on the organic devel­ opment o f distinctive tongues and idioms. The architectural style that best embodied such organic truths was o f course medieval Gothic. And his influ­ ence may well have swayed the young Goethe, himself delicately poised between classicism and Romanticism, toward the latter. During Goethe’s long life he would veer back many times in the other direction. But for the moment he became an apostle, even plunging into the collection o f local folklore and ballads around Alsace in a burst o f Herderian zeal. In 1772 Goethe published his response to Strasbourg Cathedral (and reprinted it a year later in one o f Herder’s own anthologies). And two years after that he climbed the tower o f the cathedral again to write a poem to Erwin, the architect who was said to be buried beneath its pavement. But it was the initial impact that drew from him the most emphatic rejection o f the kind o f mechanical functionalism represented in Laugier and Hall. It was not the dependence o f walls on tree-trunk columns, but their freedom, that was the mark o f exalted architecture. In his famous lines directed to a new generation o f Gothic architects, Goethe wrote: Multiply, pierce the huge walls which you are to raise against the sky so that they shall ascend, like sublime, overspreading trees o f God, whose thousand branches, millions o f twigs and leaves . . . announce the beauty o f the Lord, their master.87 Was it the popularity o f this affinity, reproduced and vulgarized in count­ less versions, that prompted the architect Dauthe, in Leipzig, to rebuild the columns o f the Nikolaikirche as if they were palm trees? I f so, he missed the point, as much as Hall had. As if to correct these misconceptions, a great stream o f volumes on the distinctiveness o f German Gothic appeared in the decades that followed, virtually all o f which stressed its organic connection with the sacred U rw ald. The imperatives o f primitive habitat were now decisively replaced by the. freed om o f German spirituality, the conscious choice o f an archi­ tecture that embodied (rather than merely mimicked) the sublimity o f veg­ etable creation. Thus Goethe and Herder at Strasbourg were followed by Forster and Alexander von Hum boldt in Cologne, where they remarked that “ the group

THE VERDANT CROSS

238

o f slender columns, in their tremendous height, stand like the trees o f a primeval forest, splitting at their summit into a cluster o f branches.” And Forster’s Ansichten vom N iederrhein in turn prompted a pilgrimage to Cologne by Friedrich von Schlegel, whose six-volume G rund zu ge der Gothischen Baukunst was probably the most influential o f all these vindications o f Gothic sublimity. “The essence o f Gothic,” Schlegel declared, lay “in the power o f cre­ ating like nature herself an infinite multiplicity o f forms and flower-like deco­ rations. Hence the inexhaustible and countless decorative details, hence the vegetable element.”88 While the beds o f this holy vegetation, during the sixteenth and seven­ teenth centuries, had been in the Catholic south o f Germany, the Romantic search for the relics o f timbered prototypes for Gothic took them north. The artist Johann Christian Dahl, for example, who himself was capable o f produc­ ing paintings with storm-tossed heroic oaks at their center, was also an ethno­ grapher and historian o f folk-architecture in Scandinavia. His H olzbaukunst introduced a generation to the medieval Norwegian timber churches, o f fan­ tastic elaboration and protuberant towers and spires and hanging gables, that still survived from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And the artist who brought this entire history o f verdant crosses, forest groves, evergreen resurrections, and Gothic masonry together was likewise a northerner. Caspar David Friedrich’s roots were Baltic, his education princi­ pally Danish, and his chosen form o f piety the nature evangelism preached by the Copenhagen pastor Kosegarten. Stung by public criticism that his 1808 altarpiece, The Cross on the M ountains, had presumptuously muddied the strict distinctions between landscape and religious art, Friedrich went on the counter-attack, supplying the explicit meanings o f his symbols. We are left in no doubt, then, that in the ancient traditions o f vegetable Christianity, his evergreen trees were meant to signify the eternal life granted by the Resur­ rection. So it hardly seems loose guesswork to assume that the prominent firs in Friedrich’s W inter Landscape, painted three years later, likewise stand for the resurrection o f Christian hope from the dead o f winter89 (color illus. 26). The season is marked by another moment in the ancient Nordic and Germanic cal­ endar, linking the pagan with the sacred past. It is the winter solstice, close to Christmas, the feast which had only been invented in its modern form in sixteenthcentury Germany, as a baptized form o f the pagan Yuletide feast o f light. Death is present in the bleak cloak o f winter. But in the midst o f the snow cover stands the image o f vernal resurrection: the evergreen (indeed the Christmas tree!). A traveller who from his staff we are meant to recognize as a pilgrim has hobbled before the cross. But leaning against the rock (a standard emblem o f the church), he has discarded his crutches, as if some great thaumaturgic miracle is in process o f healing his infirmity. And so exhaustive is Friedrich’s recapitula­

Tabernacles

2 39

tion o f all the myths and symbols o f the living cross that he has set a “dry tree,” represented by a fir pole, strangely stripped o f branches and needles, parallel to, and just to the left of, the cross itself. A t the back o f the painting, the house o f paradise, the Gothic church, rises (indeed it does actually seem to levitate above the mist), its spires a precise linear echo o f the shape o f the fir trees. It is a moment when the year turns not merely from darkness to light but from death to life. Hope really does spring eternal and it is announced by something green, the tiniest blades o f grass pushing through the snow. It is hard to know why Friedrich in the years between 18 11 and 1812 was evidently so obsessed by these themes o f wintry despair and vernal rebirth. As we have already seen, he was an ardent German patriot and these years were precisely when the domination o f Napoleonic imperialism seemed heaviest, the years before the springtime o f the Befreiungskrieg. There may even be some suggestion o f the wounds o f battle in the traveller’s crutches, as if war-scarred Germany were itself experiencing the turn from wintry death to spring awak­ ening. But it would be crass to reduce Friedrich’s deepest spiritual convictions to the timetables o f war. Whether or not he had a presentiment o f the national springtime to come, he turned the W in ter Landscape into Easter with yet another variation on the same theme. But it is not just the season that has changed. For Friedrich has turned the profile crosses o f the Tetschen altarpiece and the W inter Landscape about, par­ allel to the picture plane, so that, together with the fir trees, they frontally face the beholder (color illus. 1). It is as if the vegetation and the cross constituted an altarpiece facing down the nave o f a cathedral, the very cathedral indeed which Friedrich has interpellated behind the screen o f trees. It is, in fact, its own altar and choir. And the anthem it sings is the concordance between nature and Gothic spirituality: a hymn o f resurrection. Beneath the cross itself, and scat­ tered about the massive rocks, is the dry wood o f the Fall that reaches up toward the crucified Christ like a claw. But the water that gushes from the foot o f the cross into a healing pool acts as the baptismal source o f atonement and redemption. The snow which dominates the earlier painting is now reduced to the merest touches o f white at the tips o f rocks and twigs. And where the grass had been beginning its springtime comeback, it is now rapidly turning, espe­ cially at the left o f the picture, from brown to green. Triumph is not merely pending as in the winter landscape. It is at hand, and within the cathedral the hallelujahs sound from the organic organ beyond. Its spires rise spikily like the thorns o f Christ’s crown, but also in fugal echo o f the triumph o f the ever­ greens, the death-that-is-no-death. The painting is in the Kunstmuseum Diisseldorf, where, surely, a half cen­ tury after it was painted, a group o f young Americans, among them Wor­ thington Whittredge, Albert Bierstadt, and Fitz Hugh Ludlow, stood stroking their chins and contemplating the mystery o f the verdant cross.

TH E VERDANT CROSS

240

vi

Volvos at the Sepulchre

Easter, 1990. There was still snow on the ground back home in Massachusetts. It was not the dry, fluffy stuff that bulb catalogues use as fetching backgrounds for the “heralds o f spring” : snowdrops, chionodoxa, and crocus. This was what we usually get in March and April: huge galumphing flakes, soggy with water, crash-landing on the delicate flowers, crumpling their petals, and burying hopes o f resurrection. What did we care? We were in northern California, visiting my mother-inlaw in a Mendocino valley that lay between hills dressed in the gorgeous green­ ery o f their springtime. To the west and north stood the redwoods o f the coastal-range forests massed in stands that were far denser and, for all the log­ ging, still more populous than the Big Trees groves o f the Sierras. Taller than the Mariposa sequoias, their trunks seldom reached their titanic diameter. But they were still big enough for tourist posts to boast the inevitable “ Drive Through Trees,” advertised in one old poster as “Nature’s Garage.” What was this thing my family seemed to have about forests? For while the Steinbergs were logrolling in Lithuania, my mother-in-law’s folk were felling redwoods in the deep woods o f northern California. The distance, in space and culture, between the great conifers o f the Niemen and Mendocino and the worlds they sheltered seemed immeasurably remote. But if you look at the cones o f the sequoias they are, when compared to the size o f their parent trees, comically small— almost indistinguishable, in fact, from the cones o f Baltic pines. And, as it turned out, our forest families were historically closer than first appearances suggested. For the homeland from which my mother-in-law’s log­ ging family departed to make the immense journey, ending up on the wooded shores o f the Pacific, was Lithuania. It was not out o f the question, then, that while Catherine the Great was sampling imperial jerky— the smoked bison dainties dispatched by her Polish lover— my in-laws were busy sawing down the trees which the Hassidic lumbermen o f my family floated downstream toward the great gray Baltic. It was high time, I thought, that my children were given a vision o f at least one o f these woodland homes. So on a brilliant Eastertide morning we set off for Montgomery Woods, at the southern end o f the coastal redwoods, close to

Volvos at the Sepulchre

24 l

the mineral waters o f Orr Springs. The children were merry. Sandwiches were packed. As we passed the occasional truck, hundred-foot-long flatbeds packed with tawny-red logs, their grandmother chatted to them o f the old logging days. A world returned in the back o f the car, rugged and noisy, chattering with the sound o f steam-donkeys and giant saws, but also with the music o f fiddles and bad songs. The women seemed always to be bringing lemon seedcake and beer to the campsite and tending wounds and broken bones. The grim poverty, terrors, and loss o f limb the children could learn about some other day in more bleakly exhaustive histories. In the meantime the beckoning forest seemed a playground for heroes. From a hilly ridge the road descended

steeply,

winding

through woods o f Douglas fir, the greenery packing the road verges and closing in on the car as the road narrowed. The sun dimmed, ‘ N a tu r e ’s G a ra g e ”

flaring

on

and

off

through the car windows like a strobe,

making

the

children

in the

wince and screw up their eyes.

R e d w o o d s.

Then it disappeared altogether, leaving us driving through a deep

tank

of

bottle-green

gloom. It was as though we had entered merely

a

passageway,

o f vegetation

but

not of

time. The sensation o f time warp in

the

vegetable

kingdom

became even more vivid when we arrived at Orr Springs. Parked outside the ramshackle little spa were Volvos and Volkswagens, bearing San Francisco license plates. Their bodies were gallandy scarred and bruised in the service o f a thousand good causes, all o f which were announced on bumper stickers, the heraldry o f the counterculture. Past the timber gates, we explored, tentatively, the peeling whitewash and scrubbed gray planking o f an empty kitchen where campers were invited, or rather instructed, to take their meals in common “in the spirit o f our healing com­ munity.” Kids with the stringy blond hair and unwiped noses that go with their assigned lot as children o f nature emerged from behind tree trunks looking bored or wicked or both. A t the end o f pathways where pine needles had been trodden into the wet mud, making a natural forest bath-mat, were gray stone

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tubs holding small pools o f dark, faintly evil-smelling water. In some o f them, a boulder or two had been set in a halfhearted attempt to suggest the healing cascades o f arcadia. A gende singsong chatter rose from one o f the unappealing troughs. And before we could take evasive action, large opal-colored forms rose from the waters, not saying or doing very much but turning on us disconcertingly invit­ ing smiles as we tried to mask our discomfort. Broad buttocks, slickly glisten­ ing and globular breasts, like large pale fruit about to drop to the forest floor, were hospitably presented to us: the offerings o f arcadia, to be followed, per­ haps, by acorn hash in the communal kitchen. We exited hastily into the sylvan darkness. It was now about noon and not only dark but seriously cold, as stone-chill as any Gothic cathedral. The chil­ dren were coaxed onward into the forest with promises o f stupendous treewonders to come. But when they suddenly saw the redwoods, these seemed more like monsters than marvels. Their vague discomfort and irritability turned into something like fear. For the sequoias— fragrant, feathery, and massive— are perhaps the most beautiful phenomena in all the vegetable kingdopi. But for very small children, their trunks were the torsoes o f dinosaurs and possibly o f the devouring, rather than the grazing, variety. Only when I looked at my six-year-old daughter beside the immense, wrinkled girth o f a burl did I real­ ize that she could barely apprehend it as a tree at all. The great plumy green fronds that made up its needles and branches were so impossibly high above her that they might as well have been invisible. What the children felt was what was closest to them: the urgent life o f the forest floor, primordially squishy-soft, packed with fungus and seething with the vast traffic o f countless beetles, ear­ wigs, and ants commuting this way and that, a ceaseless commotion o f eating, warring, colonizing, populating. Even the great trunks that lay half-submerged in ripe-smelling brackish pools seemed to deter clambering. And though the obligatory “cathedral grove” lay directly ahead, the children were deaf to the swelling diapason o f Gothic sublimity. They peered this way and that for a glimpse o f light like prisoners caught in an endless chain o f unlit caverns. If this was the Pook’s Hill o f ancient America, my children were not about to stand in for Dan and Una. They wanted out o f the reptilian tomb o f pre­ history. The Druids and wood nymphs o f Haight Ashbury could be left to their woodland ablutions. So we found our way out from blackness to radiance and finished our sandwiches on a hilltop above the ramparts o f the woods. Cooing to the deer and clutching meadow flowers in their hands, the children romped in the rinsing sunshine while we measured our distance from the forest primeval.

PART

TWO

Wa t e r

I was born in a country o f brooks a n d rivers, in a corner o f Cham pagne, called le V allagefor the g re a t num ber o f its valleys. The most bea u tifu l o f its places f o r me was the hollow o f a valley by the side offresh water, in the shade o f w illow s.. . . M y pleasure still is to follow the stream, to walk along its banks in the right direction, in the direction o f the flow ing water, the water that leads life towards the next v illa g e .. . . B u t our native country is less an expanse o f terri­ tory than a substance; i t ’s a rock or a soil or a n a rid ­ ity or a water or a light. I t ’s the place where our dreams m aterialize; i t ’s through that place that our dreams take on their proper f o r m .. . . D ream ing beside the river, I ga ve my im agination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadows green. I ca n ’t sit beside a brook w ithout fa llin g into a deep reverie, without seeing once again my happiness.. . . The stream doesn’t have to be ours; the water doesn’t have to be ours. The anonymous water knows a ll my secrets. A n d the same memory issues fro m every spring. G A STO N B A C H E LA R D ,

L ’E a u et les Reves. Essai sur I’im agination de la m atiere

CHAPTER

FIVE

Streams o f Consciousness

i

The Flow o f Myth

A U G U S T 179 7

I " I o w was the world governed? By machinery or by magic? Resolve this, Joel Barlow supposed, as he sat out his quarantine in the Mar­ seilles pesthouse, and you resolve everything: nature, revolution, freedom— everything.1 There were worse places than the la z a r e tto grapple with such weighty mat­ ters: a structure half sanitary, half military, but not, all things considered, dis­ agreeable. In 1723 Marseilles had been the center o f the last great outbreak o f bubonic plague in Europe. When the tide o f death had ebbed, the royal gov­ ernment had provided the port with the kind o f installation usually reserved for siege defense. A double line o f fifteen-foot-high walls ringed the compound, pierced only on the water-side to allow authorized cargo to be landed from lighters. Merchantmen, especially those arriving from Africa (and Barlow had come from Algiers), were required to dock at an inspection island farther out in the harbor while their crews and cargo were examined. The old regime, Bar245

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

246

low acknowledged, had known how to protect itself from everything but its own stupidity and brutality. Its walls, like the masonry o f many vanished pow­ ers, would remain even when its sovereignty had perished. And the lazaret, he admitted readily enough, was a decided improvement on the verminous holes that passed for pesthouses he had seen on the Barbary Coast. His purgatory was serene, the building cool and commodious, with ample room for a hundred residents (no women or children), housed in whitewashed rooms. Additional quarters were o f course provided for servants. The institu­ tion adhered to an orderliness seldom seen in these chaotic years o f revolu­ tionary liberty and Barlow was secretly grateful for the discipline. The cooks o f the establishment kept a sturdy Provencal kitchen that made few concessions to the broiling August heat. D aubes showed up frequently, rendered down to a turbid beef tea in which sour little black olives rested unappealingly at the bottom o f white earthenware

bowls.

But

there v

Spanish oranges and white chees< and garnet-colored wine poured from glazed terra-cotta jugs. And if the wine went undrunk it could usefully spoil into the vinegar which was swabbed on anything that

might

harbor

breeches, boots,

infection:

shifts, com­

modes. Even Barlow’s letters, exiting the lazaret for Paris, were punctured and liberally sprinkled with the sanitizing potion. The first impression that his wife, Ruth, c James Monroe, the American mini to France, must have had o f him when they broke the seal on his letters was o f a strong mari­ nade o f poulet au vinaigre. So he sat in his philosopher’s cell, the shutters throwing blue shadows on the wall, and filled coarse rag-paper notebooks with reflections on everything and anything, the quill scratching away in time with the agitations o f his rest­ less mind. Speculations, refutations, investigations filled the pages. What were the mythological origins o f the Swedish days o f the week? Ought one to assent to Robert Boyle’s claim that the mechanism o f the eye o f the bluebottle was superior to the whole anatomy o f the human? Everything flowed toward one great riddle: the operation o f nature and how man had apprehended it. In the iron stillness o f the Provencal heat, his mind seemed to be drawn to moisture as if by divination. Was it not the first element o f life? How had the great Xerxes

John Vanderlii

Portrait o f Joti Barlow, 1798.

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constructed his canal? What was the depth and form o f the bed o f the Hudson River, indeed o f the great waters— the Ohio and the Susquehanna— that con­ stituted the arteries o f his country? How, for that matter, did all the fluvial sys­ tems o f the world operate? He recalled reading, somewhere on his footslogging for democracy, the seventeenth-century treatise by Pierre Perrault on the ori­ gin o f brooks and rivers.2 Following a hypothesis first set out in antiquity, Per­ rault had argued that rivers were simply the product o f evaporated seawater condensed into rain and collected between the porous surface o f the earth and the impervious substrata o f bedrock. Supersaturation produced springs issuing from these aquifers, which then descended from hills and mountains toward the sea. M uch as he admired the tidy, self-sustaining economy o f this “ hydrolog­ ical cycle,” Barlow could not bring himself to believe that the whole volume and regularity o f rivers could be supplied entirely in this way. An alternative view had been suggested by the Elder Pliny, who asserted that the ocean pen­ etrated crevices in rock-walls and was carried thence through a vast system o f underground passages where it was filtered into fresh water before issuing again through the surface. Barlow knew that such a theory was discredited by the elementary laws o f physics which ruled out the possibility o f water flow­ ing uphill, even in the vacuous tunnels o f the earth. Suppose, though, that these subterranean bowels drew heat from fiery volcanic substrata, deep in the core, generating pressure that might indeed force water up and outward through cracks and fissures. H e had read the M u n d u s Su bterraneus o f the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who had let himself be low­ ered into the active crater o f Vesuvius to explore just such terrestrial fur­ naces.^3And perhaps it was from Kircher’s engravings that Joel Barlow could indeed imagine subterranean steam pumps powerful enough to blow water clear through limestone or granite. But there was another way in which he imagined the life o f rivers. Were they not figured as bodies o f water because, since antiquity, their flow was likened to the blood circulating through the body? Plato had believed the cir­ cle to be the perfect form, and imagined that nature and our bodies were con­ structed according to the same mysterious universal law o f circulation that governed all forms o f vitality. Barlow knew that to see a river was to be swept up in a great current o f myths and memories that was strong enough to carry us back to the first watery element o f our existence in the womb. And along that stream were borne some o f the most intense o f our social and animal pas­ sions: the mysterious transmutations o f blood and water; the vitality and mor­ tality o f heroes, empires, nations, and gods. None o f these insights, snatched at and scribbled down, ever resolved themselves into anything remotely like a coherent theory o f the ways in which human cultures imagined raw nature. Rather, they were flung down in brilliant

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gobbets o f erudition, as if Barlow had been dictating a pocket encyclopedia to his own right hand. But then Joel Barlow was a chronic breaker-off.4 The son o f a Connecti­ cut farmer, he had found schoolmastering too humdrum, Yale too sober; and a chaplaincy to a Massachusetts regiment o f the line during the American Rev­ olution had not survived his natural irreverence. To earn his bread, he had tried the law, but had needed to nourish his sensibility by writing poetry (some o f it witty). Both callings proved too meager for his wants. On the eve o f another revolution Barlow had arrived in France as an agent for an Ohio land company, but had failed to interest any o f the Paris plutocracy in acres o f densely forested upstream wilderness. In London he had been welcomed into the club o f liberal, even democratic tempers organized around the Society for Constitutional Information, agitating for parliamentary reform. So it was pre­ dictable that Barlow’s own naturally ardent spirits would catch light on return­ ing to France in 1789. The Revolution seemed to him (as to so many other Friends o f Liberty) to be the fulfilment o f a universal prophecy: the coming o f the Age o f Reason. All his tracts and treatises (most, alas, incomplete) were designed to demonstrate the necessary historical harmonies that linked the American and French revo­ lutions; uniting, across the Adantic, enlightenment and freedom. What Columbus had started, Mirabeau would consummate. So, along with John Paul Jones, Barlow appeared before the Constituent Assembly to offer the felic­ itations o f a free America to a France liberated from the chains o f despotism. Intoxicated with fraternal generosity, he rashly promised that his countrymen would supply the soldiers o f France with a thousand pairs o f shoes a month, the least they could do to pay their debt to Lafayette and Rochambeau. And while the lathes were turning in Boston and Philadelphia, he could put his busy pen to the service o f France. Together with his friend Tom Paine, Barlow composed a sharp refutation o f the criticism levelled by that erstwhile friend o f liberty, Edmund Burke, against the new revolution.5 And when war approached he hurled thunderbolts from his Anglophone press in the face o f the presumptu­ ous tyrants. Powered by patriotism and paranoia, the frontiers o f republican democracy were expanding, and Barlow did his best to push them further forward. In the autumn o f 1792 he had accompanied the ex-abbe Henri Gregoire on a mission from the National Convention to persuade the people o f Savoy that unimag­ inable happiness was theirs should they vote to “reunite” themselves with France. They did, but (alas) balked at expressing their gratitude to Barlow by electing him a deputy to the convention. And he had scarcely begun to enjoy his special status as “ Citizen o f Two Republics” when the Revolution turned feral. Under the Jacobin Terror in 1793, Tom Paine was taken before the rev­ olutionary tribunal and imprisoned for nothing more than voicing tacdess

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reservations about the execution o f Louis XVI. Barlow’s English women friends, enthusiasts o f republican liberty Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft, were hounded as suspects for their associations with the disgraced Girondins. To speak freely o f universal liberty had until recently been a public duty. N ow it could land one before the tribunals on a charge o f adventurism. In the winter o f 1793 Barlow retreated to a suburban villa at Meudon, where he did his best to resemble an inconspicuous eru d it, barricaded from disaster by his books. Living quietly in the republic o f knowledge, he returned to his unfinished history o f the American Revolution. Making sense o f the calamity, though, meant attempting a different history, one that dealt directly with the events in France. But that, too, became a rock o f Sisyphus which he regularly rolled up the slope o f his distressed reason, only to have it tumble down about his head. For years after the Terror had ended, Barlow remained haunted by the failure o f the French Revolution to realize all the blessings its beginnings had so expansively promised. The trouble, he thought, was that in its own way it had turned religious. It had ejected the old priests, only to ordain new ones in sec­ ular disguise who proved scarcely less dogmatic. Perhaps, who knows, they had all underestimated the tenacity o f cults and myths on the imagination o f mankind? They had imagined themselves inventors o f a new world when in reality they were tied by nature to the relics o f antiquity. This was the question to which all his most thoughtful friends returned over and over again as they nervously emerged from beneath the ruins o f the Jacobin republic. H ow could an edifice constructed according to the principles o f pure reason crumble in irrationality and fearfulness? H ow could the arch­ rationalist Robespierre turn into the H igh Priest o f the Cult o f the Supreme Being? Such questions were all the more acute because, before the Revolution, it had been assumed that myths and magic were the ways in which those igno­ rant o f science apprehended the forces o f nature. All religions thus could be thought o f as defensive responses to natural phenomena. One o f the savants Barlow most admired, the ex-aristocrat Constantin Volney, a deputy to the National Assembly, had published his R u in s precisely to demonstrate the truth o f such assumptions. And when Thomas Jefferson, the American minister to France, found himself unable to take on the translation, Joel Barlow offered to complete it.6 In the aftermath o f the Terror, the axiom that religion could be explained as the defective perception o f nature seemed less self-evident. In common with the scientists and philosophers who made up the new republican academy o f learning, the Institut, Barlow began to take myth more seriously as a compli­ cated order o f belief. He noticed that even Volney, who had spent four years in Egypt and Syria, and who had taught himself Coptic and Arabic, was at least half bewitched by the very mysteries he presented as specimens o f blindness.

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And as Barlow’s own ruminations turned archaeological and oriental, he turned, as did all the members o f the Institut, to the colossal peculiarity o f Charles Francois Dupuis. In 1794 Dupuis published his O rigine de tons les cultes; ou, L a R eligion u n iverselle (The Origin o f All Faiths; or, The Universal Religion), one o f the most extraordinary books o f the entire revolutionary epoch.7 Dupuis had made his reputation as a brilliant mathematician in a French generation rich in scientific genius. To all intents and purposes he had invented the telegraph and was its first user. But in the 1780s he had launched himself into astronomy and from there into an eccentric and ambitious project to understand the anthropologi­ cal origin o f religion in terms o f human apprehension o f the celestial bodies. But rather than dismiss such connections as so much foolishness, Dupuis actu­ ally offered them as if they represented some sort o f fundamental truth about the rhythms o f the universe. At the core o f his account were the perceived rela­ tionships between the conjunctions o f the stars and planets, and the cycle o f seasons and vegetation, which Dupuis believed to be the starting point o f mythical and religious explanations o f the universe. Instead o f assuming that a potent mind had cracked, Dupuis’s friends and contemporaries began to re­ examine their own beliefs about the world. Perhaps the universe was neither the lump o f indifferent matter that the materialists saw when they looked at the stars nor the dumb toy o f the Almighty, made in his image and manipulated according to his will, as the Christians had insisted. Perhaps divinity was Nature— its spirit self-embodied in natural forms like the greenery o f the world and its running water? This revelation turned the premise o f the Enlightenment’s mechanical explanation o f the universe on its head. Instead o f boasting o f a radically new, disenchanted way o f seeing the world, Dupuis’s admirers (including Barlow) wanted to become reconnected to ancient cosmologies. All religions, they were convinced, had been (at their essence) natural religions. Learn enough and it should be possible to expose the core beliefs from which they were descended: for example, the celebration o f resurrection in the springtime rebirth o f the world; or the ancient analogy between the circulation o f rivers and the blood­ stream o f the human body. Suppose, then, that the true fraternity o f men lay not in some rationally articulated political formula requiring universal assent, but in an immense and venerable stock o f responses to nature that had been culturally encoded as myth. Suppose also that a diligent investigator could uncover the connections between such myths across cultures and centuries. Would he not then be able to expose the fundamental unity o f mankind? Was it conceivable, after all, that the world was both machinery and magic? In the midst o f such giddy speculation, Joel Barlow got sent to Algiers. It was not his idea. But Thomas Jefferson, while still minister in Paris, had become exercised about the fate o f American captives taken from merchant ships in the

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Mediterranean by the Algerian corsairs. It was known that they were shackled in filthy cells, along with hundreds o f other European prisoners waiting in vain for their ransom to be paid. Even more Gothic stories circulated o f torture and mutilation. For th e dey o f Algiers this was just business; the principal com­ merce, in fact, o f the North African coast. Like his neighbors in Tripoli and Tunis, he lived by exacting protection tribute from vessels wanting to trade in the waters o f the southern Mediterranean. Those who failed to pay up were seized, their cargo taken as prize and their crews as hostages for ransom. And since almost a quarter o f all American exports at the time were shipped to the Mediterranean, their ships, unprotected by naval force, had become game for the corsairs. For the corsair princes it was an old pursuit, hallowed by time and certain understood conventions. For Thomas Jefferson it was an outrageous relic o f oriental despotism that had no right to survive into the age o f republi­ can democracy. O n becoming secretary o f state, Jefferson resolved to do something about it. Since 1785, when the first American hostages had been taken, emissaries had been sent to Algiers in predictably fruitless attempts to appeal to the dey’s nonexistent humanity. And because American naval force was so thinly stretched, threats were largely empty. To surrender to extortion was an indig­ nity which any republic must feel keenly, Jefferson thought. But to abandon American citizens was a worse betrayal. Jefferson had come to know Barlow well during the heady days o f the Paris revolution, even liked his poetry and encouraged him in his efforts to write some grand history that would link the destinies o f the French and American republics. As an experienced traveller, a practiced businessman, and, most important, a citizen o f both America and France, Barlow seemed well qualified for the unenviable task o f persuading the dey to release the captives, or at least o f trying to beat down his price. As expected, the mission to Algiers was no promenade. Every few weeks Barlow would be granted an audience with the dey and would be screamed at: “You are a liar, your government is a liar, and I will put you in chains in the marine and declare war.”8 Even bribery, the universal lubricant o f Levantine diplomacy, was tricky. What the dey wanted, it transpired, was not only money for himself, his relatives, ministers, and hangers-on, but an entire naval arsenal: timber, powder, cannon, a fully equipped American frigate. It must have occurred to both Barlow and Jefferson that to accede (as they did) was to award the dey a prize, rather than a penalty, for his accomplished life o f crime. It took more than a year before Barlow managed to persuade the Ameri­ can government to satisfy the pirate prince’s demands. Much o f it he spent in a Moorish villa in the countryside outside the plague-infested port o f Algiers. Beside a garden pool with a view o f olive groves, his big taurine head covered with a silk cap, Barlow got back to his real work: penetrating the mysteries o f the Orient.

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As usual, he began with the practical and graduated to the marvellous. Nothing escaped his attention: the history o f the Arab invasions; the progress and decay o f the Ottoman Empire; the ease (unfair, compared to the bitter toil o f New England) with which crops could be raised in the Maghreb sunshine; the peculiar mixture o f prurience and possessiveness with which the Algerian men treated their women. But it was also in Algiers that the other face o f the Orient began to captivate him: the rites and religion o f Egyptian antiquity, especially the great epic o f sacrifice and resurrection embodied in the myth o f Isis and Osiris. It was only when the business in Algiers was done with and he was back in France, confined to the white cell o f the Marseilles lazaret, that Barlow seems to have had a sudden vision o f how something as esoteric and remote as the myth o f Osiris was alive as a cult o f nature in his own time and place. In every square in the Republic, officials had planted “ Liberty Trees” as emblems o f the spring-like renewal o f life in the Revolution. They were, in effect, politicized Maypoles, bearing a promise o f fertility and freedom. Barlow’s old colleague on his mission to Savoy, Gregoire, had already published a learned paper trac­ ing their origin back to Celtic and Druid rituals o f rebirth.9 But with his Egyp­ tian illumination still strong in his imagination, Barlow knew better. Liberty was indeed rooted in a cult o f nature. But that cult had begun not in the oakwoods o f the foggy north, but on the great river o f the south, the mother o f all civilizations, the Nile. The Druid groves parted. Beyond them lay the ser­ pentine effluvium o f the sacred Nile, and Barlow’s imagination, inspired, let itself be carried along from the physical to the allegorical. On one matter he was categorical. The Liberty Tree, in its remote origins, was the amputated penis o f Osiris. He began with the assumption that the dying o f the sun in the autumn, “causing vegetation to cease,” had given rise to the ancient “fable” o f Osiris. Barlow had been reading Diodorus Siculus.10And he evidently had in mind the Greek version o f the myth in which the king and demigod who abolished can­ nibalism, brought civilization to Egypt in the form o f agriculture and wine, and invented writing and laws was murdered by his brother Set (known to the Greeks as Typhon). The wicked brother has a richly ornamented chest made, precisely to Osiris’s measurements, and tricks him into trying it for size by promising the coffer to anyone it might fit. The chest instantly becomes his cof­ fin, is sealed with molten lead and cast into the Nile. His widow (who is also his sister), Isis, then travels as far as the Phoenician shore at Byblos, where the coffin, washed ashore, has taken root and grown into a tamarisk tree. The tree has been made into a column supporting the house o f the Phoenician king, with the dead hero still locked inside. And only after many more ordeals (involving a metamorphosis into a grieving swallow) is Isis able to return the

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coffin to Egypt. There it is again seized by Set/Typhon, described by Barlow as the “power o f darkness,” who cut the body in pieces and threw the genitals into the Nile. Isis . . . collected all parts o f her husband’s body except the precious fragment left in the river. To supply what was wanting she caused new genitals to be formed o f wax and interred the body entire. But the gen­ itals cast into the Nile communicated a fecundating power to that river which from that time became the source o f life and vegetation to all Egypt. . . . To commemorate at once the tragical death o f Osiris and the great benefits that resulted to mankind from the posthumous power o f the organs o f generation, a solemn feast was instituted in which the phal­ lus in a posture o f strong erection was carried in a procession.11 Barlow then borrowed from friends like Volney and Dupuis the diffusion theory that accounted for the core myth recurring in other cultures where sacrifice, dismemberment, and the fertility o f vegetation were connected. And he listed exactly the related cults that James Frazer, a century later, would claim to be mere variations o f a single, original archetype: the castrated Atys, the dismembered Adonis, Persian Mythras, and so on. Barlow went even further by exploiting a traditional Greek identification between Osiris and Dionysus. The rites o f Bacchus— lord o f wine and lust— he continued, commemorated “ the generating powers,” celebrated by carrying around a ceremonial phallus. How, though, did the Bacchic-Osiriac phallus turn democratic? Ah well, Barlow went on, “ from the freedom and licentiousness that reigned in these nocturnal assemblies the God acquired the name o f Eleutheroi or Freedom and when these religious rites were carried to Rome Bacchus was known by the epi­ thet L iber so that the phallus became the emblem o f L ib e r ta s f Through the centuries these ancient fertility rites evolved into celebrations o f the coming o f spring. “ Men forgot the original object o f the institution, the Phallus, [which] lost its testicles and has been for many centuries reduced to a simple pole.” It amused Barlow no end to think that the villagers who danced about the Maypole had no inkling o f the “ antetype o f this curious emblem.” And equally he could proclaim the virility o f independence by noting that when the Liberty Pole passed over to America it assumed a more ven­ erable appearance; it grew to an enorm ous m ast and without regard to any particular day it was planted in the ground as a solid emblem o f p o litic a l liberty.

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From there it recrossed the Adantic to extend its blessings to its native continent where it has [again] assumed the form o f a tree. In this form it is now planted in the public places all over France, hung round with the three-colored ribbon, surmounted with the Cap o f Liberty [which, o f course, Barlow observed in an appendix, was “the head o f the Penis” ], inspiring enthusiasm in the host o f heroes who swell the triumph o f that victorious Republic.12 Was it serious, this priapic radicalism? Barlow was, after all, one o f the “ Hartford Wits” and the author not just o f The Conspiracy o f the K in g s but of The Hasty Pudding. Yet there is nothing in the text that suggests a porno­ graphic joke at the expense o f his orientalist friends, nor anything else in the notebooks indicating Barlow in a teasing mood. By the 1790s, there was already a substantial literature— both pretentious and erotic— on the history o f phallic cults. The antiquarian Baron d ’Hancarville, whom Barlow had probably met in Paris in 1789, was the pioneer o f the genre.13 But it seems likely that Barlow’s enthusiasm for the subject had been stirred by reading the Discourse on the Wor­ ship o f Priapus, published in 1786 by D ’Hancarville’s patron, Richard Payne Knight, and scandalously well known among Barlow’s liberal friends in Lon­ don.14 In Directoire Paris the modes were crotch-hugging breeches and gap­ ing decolletage, and chairs and desks were sprouting sphinxes and harpies. The wife o f Barlow’s own banker, Recamier, had been duly enthroned as the reign­ ing deity o f Greco-Egyptian style. So perhaps a fantastic little piece o f pedantry equating liberty and libertinism, and wrapping the whole speculation in a nature cult, was not so incongruous in the Year V o f the Republic: when the Jacobin Reign o f Virtue was just a queasy memory. O f course Barlow’s grasp o f myth was seriously pre-Egyptological. He could not possibly have known that the deity most associated with the fer­ tile inundation was Hapy rather than Osiris. And it was as sovereignguardian o f the dead rather than o f living vegetation that Osiris seems to have played a dominant role in ancient Egyptian religion. But the associa­ tions that Barlow naively made between fertility cults and the sacrificed king-god o f the Nile did, in fact, survive in some o f the major works o f Egyptology like E. A. Wallis Budge’s Gods o f the Egyptians and O siris a n d the Egyptian R esu rrection.1S

+ + + AT t h e v e r y

end

o f the princely library designed by Christopher Wren in

Trinity College, Cambridge, is a substantial steel vault where J. G. Frazer’s own collection o f archaeological and folklore sources is housed.16 It’s just possible to step inside (as if peering into Osiris’s tomb) and extract learned plunder: German, French, and English tomes o f nineteenth-century epigraphy and

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Egyptology, densely inscribed and reinscribed in Frazer’s controlled little Scot­ tish hand. From all these encyclopedic sources he produced Adonis-Atys-Osiris, which gathered together, as a single archetype, all the varieties o f myths and rit­ uals from Egypt, Greece, and Rome in which death and resurrection were sym­ bolically linked to the calendar o f nature.17 Joel Barlow o f Hartford, Yale, and the rue Vaugirard would doubdess have felt vindicated by Frazer o f Trinity. But, alas, discredited— the word that tolls the scholarly death knell— has been used in recent Egyptological writing to dis­ miss what remains o f Frazer’s hypothesis (though, to paraphrase a traveller to the Nile, Mark Twain, the death o f the thesis may be slighdy exaggerated, since Fifth Dynasty “ Pyramid Texts” and other sources do now appear to attest to Osiris’s identification with the fertilizing power o f the “ new waters” ).18 But what is not in any doubt at all is the endurance and power o f the Hellenized version o f the Osiris myth for the posterity o f Western culture. Doubtless the Ptolemies, the Hellenized rulers o f Egypt, from the time o f Alexander onward, embellished the myth precisely to make Egyptian and Greek traditions more compatible. “Sarapis” was invented as a pseudo-deity that would indeed seem a barely oriental version o f Dionysus. And there is no dispute that the most prominent feature o f Dionysian festivals was the display o f an imposing ritual phallus.19 Once established, the revised myth was a lasting success. It seems to have colonized established cults o f Osiris at Abydos and generated new temples, most famously at Philae, just below Aswan, at the boundary o f Nubia and Lower Egypt, and one o f the many sites claiming to be the last resting place o f the god. Rituals were elaborated that associated Osiris-Sarapis with the inun­ dations o f the fertile river, and the associations were strong enough for Seneca, in the first century A .D ., to attach significance to the fact that it was from the island o f Philae, close to the two crags known as “ the veins o f the Nile,” that the annual rise was first observed.20 And with Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, Strabo, and Diodorus, an entire genre o f Nile literature— a rich slurry o f myth, topog­ raphy, and history— inaugurated the Western cult o f the fertile, fatal river. Its power was such that even the austere Stoic Seneca could be swept away in its fantasy, giving credence to the belief that its fecundity could cure barren women; that its source and flood should be sought neither in the blast o f the “ Etesian winds” that Anaxagoras thought stopped its mouth nor yet in the melting o f the Ethiopian snows, but rather in the veins and passages o f under­ ground caves and channels deep in the heart o f Africa. Only on the Nile was it possible, thought Seneca, that fluvial gladiators— crocodiles from the south and dolphins from the north— could have engaged in massed mortal combat. Only on the meandering Nile could the canny dolphins, the animals o f peace and wisdom, have prevailed by tearing the reptile underbellies with their dorsal fins, salt water and fresh; mud and blood; life and death, tinting the sacred stream.21

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ii

Circulation: Arteries and Mysteries

Had he known o f a tomb effigy o f Osiris in the Ptolemaic temple at Philae, Barlow would doubtless have felt wholly vindicated. For there, as one nineteenthcentury Egyptologist reported, the god lay “on his bier in an attitude which indicates in the plainest way that even in death his generative virtue was not extinct but only suspended, ready to prove a source o f life and fertility to the world when the opportunity should offer.”22 But even without this archaeologi­ cal confirmation, he might have invoked the two most famous texts o f the Osiris myth: the first book o f Diodorus Siculus, probably written in the first century B.C. and based on his own travels through Egypt, and Plutarch’s D e Iside et Osiride, from the fifth book o f the Moralia, also grounded in firsthand experience o f the Nile valley. Though they disagreed on the precise number o f parts into which Osiris had been dismembered by his wicked brother (Plutarch scoring fourteen, Diodorus sixteen), both writers agreed that, according to tradition, not only had the demigod’s vital parts been cast into the Nile, but the oxyrhynchus, the “river pike,” and the phagrus, the “sea bream,” had eaten them, thus accounting for the dietary prohibition against those particular fish. The taboo on consuming bream was especially strict since, according to the Greek chronicler, it was the herald of resurrection, appearing in the Nile in late June as a “self-sent messenger. . . announcing to a happy people, the rise o f the river.”23 Mischievously elated to have traced the history o f the emblem o f republi­ can liberty to the (literally) seminal fable o f Osiris, Barlow overlooked altogether the essence o f Plutarch’s rich and beautiful account, in which the physical behav­ ior of the Nile was tied to the narrative o f the myth. Indeed their interpretations were divided by more than the centuries. For while Barlow treated the myth as an allegory o f nature, Plutarch, though affecting the voice o f a skeptic, actually moves from physical to metaphysical matters. Following a famous passage in Plato’s Timaeus, Plutarch claims that the workings o f the natural universe were so marvellously self-contained and interlocking that they must necessarily be the visible embodiment o f divinely originating principles o f perfection.24 But if the world was a perfectly harmonized and self-replenishing organ­ ism, the intelligibility o f its operation was not at all simple. And nowhere were

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the springs o f its machinery more teasingly mysterious than on the Nile. Since Herodotus in the fifth century B .C ., geographers had been perplexed by the two defining features o f the great river.25 First, its mysterious source was evidendy somewhere in the “ Ethiopian” south (though Egyptian religious practices held it to gush from the “caves o f Hapy” or the First Cataract). For the Greeks it seemed singular that it should thus flow from a more, to a less, torrid zone, rather than follow the universal rule o f beginning in a cooler mountain zone and ending in a hot plain or delta. And it was likewise peculiar that its seasonal inundation also reversed conventional expectations, being at its height in the parching summer, when all other known rivers were at their low point. Myths, Plutarch knew perfectly well, did not exp lain such natural marvels nor were explained by them. Rather, they were the poetic forms by which such myster­ ies were intricately symbolized. And that, to him, was almost as interesting as the topography itself.26 In such a metaphorical scheme, Plutarch tells us, Osiris functions as the personification o f fecundity: “the whole source and faculty o f creative mois­ ture,” and “the Nile . . . the effusion o f Osiris.” Conversely, Set/Typhon is his antithesis, the personification o f drought and famine: “ all that is dry, fiery and arid.”27 The sealing o f Osiris in his coffin thus “ means nothing less than the vanishing and disappearance o f water.” The elements mourned for the dead hero in all their qualities: the fading o f daylight, the dying o f the north winds, the retreat o f vegetation. As the waters abated, penurious anxiety returned. With the Osirian resurrection (or at least reconstitution) in the late spring, hope, prosperity, and verdure returned to the basin o f the Nile, born o f the embrace between the moist Osiris and the earthy Isis. The fruit o f their union, the child-god Horus, finally and conclusively dispatches Typhon, the destruc­ tive ocean, forcing it back to expose the alluvial silt that manures Egypt’s crops. Death and sacrifice, then, are the preconditions o f rebirth. Blood is miracu­ lously transubstantiated into water (and indeed into wine, the vital fluid o f Osiris-Sarapis-Dionysus). An Egyptian Book o f the Dead hailed Osiris thus:

The Nile appeareth at thy utterance, making men live through the effluxes that come forth from thy members, making all cultivated lands to be green by thy coming, great source o f things which bloom, sap o f crops and herbs, lord o f millions o f years, sustainer o f wild animals, lord o f catde; the support o f whatsoever is in the heavens is thine, what is in the waters is thine.28

The connection between sacrifice, propitiation, and fluvial abundance seems to have occurred in all the great river cultures o f antiquity. Recent archae­ ological evidence suggests that Akkadian civilization perished not at the hands

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o f any invaders but when the Tigris and Euphrates desiccated. So it is not sur­ prising to discover that the death and resurrection o f the harvest god, Tammuz, in Mesopotamian mythology is virtually identical with the Osirian contract where fertility is the reward o f martyrdom. It was also ritually re­ enacted. At the Babylonian New Year, a ram was ritually slaughtered, dismem­ bered, its blood smeared on the temple walls and the torso and head thrown into the Euphrates. When the river waters finally rose, a wooden figure o f the god was first launched in a funerary vessel that then sank to the fluvial under­ world.29 Even the Greek pri­ mordial river myth, that o f Acheloiis (who, according to Hesiod’s Theogony, was the brother o f Nilus, the progeny o f Oceanus and Thetis),30 preserved this fated connection between violence and prosperity. Fighting Hercules for the hand o f Deianira, Acheloiis transforms himself, first into a serpent and then into a bull. Bested in the struggle, one o f his horns is wrenched off and cast into the river by the nymphs. The vanquished Acheloiis then kills him­ self by drowning in the great river that henceforth carries his name. But the amputated horn, lying in the watery depths, begins to bear fabulous fruit as the Cornucopia: the Horn o f Plenty. All these fluvial myths embodied one o f the governing principles o f hydraulic societies: circulation. In the Tim aeus Plato had decreed the circle to be the necessarily perfect shape for creation as it alone formed a line o f com­ plete containment.31 The principle held good for the circulation o f blood about the human body and for waters about the earth. So the rhythms o f fluvial death and rebirth, the transmutability o f water, blood, and wine, described a cycle that, provided the proper remembrances were observed, would be self-regu­ lating. Which is why, in Plato’s dialogue, Critias describes the Nile as a “sav­ ior” river, rather than a destroyer, its waters gradually rising from below, unlike the Greek torrents which crashed down from a mountainous height, threaten­

Libation tables, Mendes, lower Egypt, secondthird century A.D.

Circulation: A rteries and Mysteries

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ing cities like Athens with destruction. This consistency o f behavior, Critias continues, was the essential reason why the temples and monuments o f Egypt were better preserved than anywhere else; what made the Nile, in fact, the river o f longevity, o f memory.32 On the Nile the life-assuring obligations o f reverence were ritually fulfilled by priests at stone libation tables, sited by the riverbanks. Eighteen o f these chiselled tables from the region o f Mendes survive, and have been carefully dis­ cussed by Vivian Hibbs.33 Displaying an ingenious symbolic economy, the wine ceremonially offered to Osiris or Hapy or Sarapis flowed through winding gut­ ters carved into the stone in imitation o f the course o f the sacred river. Depend­ ing on whether the wine was poured from above or from the table, it could be made either to “ inundate” a central basin or else flow serenely through the meandering “ maze” pattern o f the relief. Many o f the tables featured emblems o f fertility— ears o f corn, lotus pods, or bunches o f grapes— as well as sacred fauna o f the Nile, like crocodiles, dolphins, and lions. The meander itself, which we take for granted as a purely decorative border, had been named by the Greeks for the river Maeander, sacred to the Phrygians in Asia Minor, and then generalized as a m otif o f fluvial benevolence, turning this way and that, enclos­ ing within its bends and angles the produce o f the flood basin. It suited the Hellenized rulers o f Egypt, the Ptolemies, to propagate an emblem o f the winding river, dedicated to Nilus or to Sarapis, the pseudo-Osiris, attesting to the benevolence o f their rule. Even the color o f the wine flowing through the stone runnels celebrated the time just before inundation (in the third week o f July), when the river in Lower Egypt took on a reddish hue as the clay sedi­ ment o f the White Nile mixed with the waters o f the Blue Nile.34 And though the Book o f Exodus reversed the meaning o f this change o f hue from blessing to curse, the original sense o f the sanguine river as life-enhancing rather than life-destroying somehow survived. In 1610, for example, George Sandys, the traveller and translator o f Ovid who journeyed up the Nile in his early twen­ ties, tasted Nile water from his own libation cup and concluded that it “cureth the dolor o f the reines [kidneys]” for the waters thereof there is none more sweet being not unpleasantly cold and o f all others offers the most wholesome [draught]. So much it nourisheth, that the inhabitants think that it forthwith converteth into blood retaining that property ever since thereunto metamor­ phosed by Moses.35 The meandering libation table, with its offering to the fruitful wine-water o f the alluvial river, symbolized the benign version o f the Nile’s consistency. But the Nilometer gauges (dutifully visited by every traveller from Strabo to Florence Nightingale) represented the opposite, anxious aspect o f the great

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stream. For while the rivers o f the ancient world brought the principle o f cir­ culation to setded societies— the Osirian gifts o f harvests, exchange, law, and empire— they were, at the same time, seen as the carriers o f havoc and death. The Nilometers at Cairo and Elephantine were only auspicious if they regis­ tered exactly the right number o f cubits (sixteen, the same number o f parts into which Osiris had been sliced) as the river rose to its summer crest. Too little, and one o f Typhon’s curses, drought, would visit the valley, bringing with it half the plagues o f Old Egypt: the starvation o f livestock, depletion o f seed reserves, settled populations o f agriculturalists transformed into beggarly nomads. A whole literature o f “lamentation” dating from the end o f the third and beginning o f the second millennium B.C. coincided with one such prolonged period o f low water.36 Over two centuries the marshlands o f the Delta dried out. The dunes o f the desert advanced on areas o f intensive settlement and fierce khamsin winds brought sandstorms to croplands. The lamentations speak o f bodies rotting in the Nile, devoured by crocodiles; o f suicides and cannibal­ ism; o f the looting o f burial grounds and a time o f anarchy and brigandage.37 But Typhon’s other curse, high water, would bring yet other plagues in its wake. Severe floods could break the transverse dikes that were used to augment and distribute irrigation along the valley. Seed stocks would be saturated. Blight and parasite populations would grow to catastrophic proportions; granaries and food stores would have to be destroyed. And even sacred sites like the great temple at Karnak would be invaded by the flood. N o wonder, then, that one o f the Nilometers calibrated not just the measure o f the water but its correlates in human fortune and misfortune. Twelve cubits, it decreed, denoted famine; thirteen, hunger; fourteen, cheerfulness; fifteen, security; and sixteen, at last, delight.38 Egypt’s fluvial myth, o f the death and rebirth o f waters, promised, above all, regularity. But insofar as archaeologists have been able to reconstruct ancient hydraulic history, the Nile could behave with alarming unpredictabil­ ity, varying the amount o f alluvium deposited on the banks o f the basin and the Delta by as much as 30 percent over the course o f a century.39A prolonged fail­ ure o f the prevailing cosmology to perform according to expectations almost certainly had serious political consequences, and seems to have coincided with ruptures in the orderly succession o f the Pharaohs. What the river could autho­ rize, it could also take away. For while Joel Barlow thought he had found the origins o f the cult o f lib­ erty in the myth o f Osiris and Isis, a less eccentric view has tied together the behavior o f the Nile with the establishment o f absolutism. A long tradition of sociologists, from Karl Marx to Karl Wittfogel, have seen “hydraulic societies” and despotism as functionally connected.40 In naturally arid regions, they argued, only an absolutely obedient, virtually enslaved regime could possibly

C irculation: A rteries and Mysteries

26 1

have mobilized the concentrations o f labor needed to man and maintain the irrigation canals and dikes on which intensive agriculture depended. And Witt­ fogel, who went from being a devout Marxist to an equally impassioned antiMarxist, made no secret in the 1950s that he saw in the Chinese and Soviet regimes further evidence that it was as the arbiters o f water that tyrannies anointed themselves as legitimate. The colossal dam and the hydroelectric power station as emblems o f omnipotence were for modern despots what the Nile irrigation canals were for the Pharaohs. Steaming along the Volga-Don canal to which countless thousands o f slave laborers had been sacrificed, Stalin could proclaim himself the master o f the waters. Breasting his way down the Yangtze, at the head o f regiments o f the swimming proletariat, Mao Tse-tung could affirm (even as his master economic plan for China was foundering) that he was indeed the fluvial Emperor o f the Masses: unsinkable, indestructible, immortal. And by pressing ahead with the titanic project o f the Three Gorges Dam, flooding the most famous icon o f all China’s river landscapes, Deng Xiaoping tried to present himself in succession to the founder o f the very first dynasty, around 2 2 0 0 B .C ., the semilegendary emperor Yu (the Chinese Osiris), whose authority was established on his mastery o f the flood, and the establish­ ment o f intensive, irrigated agriculture.41 But the ideology professed by modern hydraulic despotisms— Marxist dialectical materialism— has been linear, not circular, pushing history relendessly downstream. So if the self-regulating arterial course o f the sacred river, akin to the bloodstream o f men, has constituted one permanent image o f the flow o f life, the lin e o f waters, from beginning to end, birth to death, source to issue, has been at least as important. It has, moreover, dominated the European and Western language o f rivers: supplying imagery for the life and death o f nations and empires and the fateful alternation between commerce and calamity. In clas­ sical Eastern and Near Eastern cultures, the great sacred rivers were seen as tem­ poral and topographical loops. In the Roman West, from a very early date, rivers were conceived as roads: highways that could be made straight; that would carry traffic and, if necessary, armed men; that defined entrances and stations. The model for the well-behaved watercourse was the aqueduct: the highest achieve­ ment o f Roman engineering. It was in Latin texts, too, that history was straight­ ened out in linear development so that rivers— not least the Tiber— might also be imagined as lines o f power and time carrying empires from source to expan­ sive breadth. A t the same time, though, Western writers often sensed a disturb­ ing paradox about these fluvial boulevards. For while the sight o f riverbanks seemed to assure a kind o f security (the sort denied, for example, to mariners who lost sight o f land), upstream explorers also appreciated that until they had mapped the course from end to end, they had litde control over their destina­ tion. The currents might end up taking them to places where they would be the captives, rather than the masters, o f the waters.

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The urge, then, from the outset, was to penetrate directly to the source, to possess and to master the headwaters. And it was precisely the denial o f this sovereign possession to Greeks, Romans, French, and British that made the Nile so tantalizing, so treacherous— in a word, so Cleopatran. Cleopatra, “her baleful beauty painted up beyond measure: covered with the spoils o f the Red Sea . . . her white breasts . . . revealed by the fabric o f Sidon,” presides over the classic encounter between a Western, linear determi­ nation to master the Nile and the circular artfulness o f those who protected its mysteries. The writer is Lucan, the nephew o f Seneca: mediocre as historian, epic poet, and conspirator (for he ended his life cutting his veins in a bath o f warm water in obedience to Nero’s sentence). But in book 10 o f The C iv il War Lucan paints a scene o f gorgeous Egyptian doom, Caesar surrendering his vig­ ilance to Cleopatra’s recumbent cunning.42 While “crystal ewers supplied Nile water for their hands” and “they drenched their hair with cinnamon,” Caesar rouses himself enough to ask the high priest, Acoreus, the secret o f the Nile’s source, promising that he would even abandon his wars were he ever to set eyes on its springs.43 Acoreus is as serpentine as Caesar is direct. He begins by appearing to promise to reveal the secret o f the river. But the further he sails upstream through rhe dark waters o f astrology, fable, and hearsay, the more cryptic and priesdy he becomes. “Certain waters,” he explains, long after the world was created, burst forth in consequence o f earth­ quakes, with no special purpose on the part o f the deity; but certain others [like the Nile], at the very formation o f the world, had their beginning along with the universe; and the latter the creator and arti­ ficer o f all things restrains under a law o f their own.44 In other words, the mysteries o f the Nile’s rise, fall, and source will remain perpetually unknowable and inexplicable. And Acoreus makes matters worse by reminding Caesar that before the Romans, the Persian and Macedonian kings were equally determined to possess the secrets o f the river but were, in the end, “defeated by its native power o f concealment.” Quick to dismiss the specula­ tions o f other ancients like Herodotus, Acoreus will only acknowledge that the Nile rises “on the Equator, boldly raising its channel in the face o f burning Can­ cer,” thence meandering to and fro between Libya and Arabia until reaching the cataracts and springs at the gate o f Egypt near Philae. This vexing mixture o f commonplaces and esoteric casuistry was unlikely to have satisfied Caesar. Certainly he was not persuaded to desist from his wars. He had asked for a map and had got a myth. He had planned on engineering and had been given poetry. He wanted a direct pathway through Nubia and Ethiopia, and had been fobbed o ff with meandering subterfuge. The secrets o f

Holy Confluences

26 3

the Nile remained tantalizingly elusive. There would come a time, many cen­ turies later, when a Roman ruler would set the Nile by the Tiber, but such an astonishing confluence would have to await the miraculous appearance o f something quite unimaginable to Caesar or his imperial successors: Christian hydraulics.

iii

Holy Confluences

It was odd, Father Felix Fabri thought, that the women o f the Nile valley applied crocodile dung as a cosmetic, and swore that it smoothed the wrinkles from their skin.45 But then Egypt, in the autumn o f 1483, was full o f marvels and monsters. He, and eighteen fellow pilgrims, who had plodded across the biblical wilderness on camels, had suffered much for their faith. They had been set upon by Bedouin brigands, stoned in the streets o f Gaza by Saracen urchins, tormented by gray biting fleas the size o f hazelnuts, frozen on the summit o f M ount Sinai, and burned in the red ravines o f southern Judea. In the “ Midianite” desert, estimated by Fabri to be “ bigger than all o f Germany,” they had lost their way and had wandered like the lost tribes as the whirling, winddriven grit peppered their faces unmercifully. In such extremity the deacon o f Mainz, Bernhard von Breitenbach, had lost his sight, and then his reason. In Cairo horrible, stinking sores appeared on their faces, but at least they were spared the plague which was carrying o ff untold thousands o f victims every day. And on the Nile itself Fabri was terrified by the sight o f wallowing hippos, lying in wait, he believed, to attack their boats and devour the passengers in their slick, pink maws.46 And yet, amidst such unholy terrors, Fabri managed to discover exotic pleasures, tentatively ventured, guiltily enjoyed: handfuls o f figs plucked from the tree; stone flagons o f black wine; the steaming waters o f a Moorish bath (a habit only explicable, he thought, by the uniquely horrible odor given o ff by the Turks). And then there was the great river itself, which, for all its anthropophagous hippos and fearsome serpents, he declared to be a true miracle o f G od’s cre­ ation, blessing everything it washed with abundance, even in the midst o f an arid wilderness.47 While other, faster rivers tear at the land, “eviscerating them,” he wrote, plagiarizing Seneca, “ the Nile does not take but gives,” supplying

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solidity to the soil, manuring the fields. Unlike the floods o f misery and destruction he had seen in Europe, the Nile’s inundation was a “flood o f joy.” Even the horrid things dwelling in the river’s muddy depths attested to its miraculous vitality. Nothing, for example, in all creation, could compare with the speed and magnitude o f growth that increased the crocodile hatchling to the thirty-foot adult reptile. Fabri’s conversion o f the Nile into a landscape o f blessings was at odds with tradition. For many generations the sacred river o f Christianity (as for Judaism) was, o f course, the Jordan.48 And as a site o f redemption and deliverance the Jordan was defined as the Nile’s opposite: a rushing, clear waterline, not a slug­ gish, turbid meander; a place o f purity in the desert, not the viscous, sinuous lubricant o f profane fleshpots. And the linear torrent was meant to carry the Chosen, or the Elect, from one historical epoch to the next: from slavery to freedom, paganism to theism, damnation to redemption. These were waters that would not turn back on themselves.49 The Jordan’s source in the snowy high Lebanon and its issue into the abysmal Dead Sea fed the sense o f its providential direction. It had slaked the thirst o f hermits, evangelists, prophets, men who shunned the common clay o f humanity and their vices, while the Nile had pandered to luxury and vanity. The whole epic o f Hebraic deliverance as described in Exodus had been a flight from the Nile to the Jordan; an idolatrous and enslaved past drowned with Pharaoh’s chariots, a new life o f freedom and holiness consecrated with the crossing o f the Judean river. These were Jehovah’s waters, not Osiris’s: fast, wrathful, cleansing, the waters o f the desert hills and the cascade. Anyone who has vis­ ited the remote sites o f the Essene cult near Qumran, from which early Chris­ tian belief seems to have been descended, can see the fastidious obsession with ablution rituals. On the shores o f the Dead Sea, walled in by the crimson ravines o f the desert o f Edom and Moab, channels o f bleached stone were constructed to run waste (of food and body) into the saltwater basin where it would be marinaded into saline white nothingness. N ot surprisingly, the earliest fathers o f the Egyptian church, notably St. Anthony, turned their back on the luxuri­ ous Nile and established their monasteries in the bitter, arid desert wastes between the Gulf o f Suez and the Sinai peninsula. It was the typology o f the Jordan torrent, not the Nile, then, that proba­ bly supplied the rudimentary rituals o f cleansing and redemption that evolved into baptism. But the distinction ought not to be too neat. The pilgrim Anthony o f Plaisance saw the rituals o f the Feast o f the Epiphany outside Jerusalem take the form o f a blessing o f the waters o f the Jordan. A t the pre­ cise site from which water was drawn for baptisms, a wooden obelisk had been planted in the river surmounted by a cross.50 But what seems, on the face o f it, to be a ritual proclaiming the advent o f a new life actually retained potent con­

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nections with the old. For the obelisk was the traditional Egyptian emblem o f the rays o f the sun; and by its being surmounted by a cross, Christ as Sol Invictus, the victor over death, became a peculiarly hybrid deity: water and light, old and new, Egyptian and Judean. Just as the official Christian policy o f uprooting pagan tree cults was belied by the pragmatic grafting practiced by missionaries like St. Boniface, so, too, ancient pagan traditions o f the sacred stream, a site o f death and resurrection, often diluted the severity o f the early church fathers. Scholars like Jean Danielou, E. O . James, and Per Lundberg have suggested that the conferring o f immortality through baptismal immersion must have owed something to pagan Near Eastern myths identifying the holy rivers o f the Nile and the Tigris as the abode o f the dead, ruled by a lord, Tammuz or Osiris, inhabiting an ambiguous zone between mortals and immortals, and vested with the power o f resurrection.51 The cult o f Isis was widespread throughout areas o f Latin Europe where Christian converts were being made.52 And since we know that, at the temple o f Isis in Pompeii, for example, the sprinkling o f water on the heads o f devotees was a regular afternoon practice, the approximation o f pagan and Christian water rituals does not seem too improbable. Seneca had reported the common belief that drinking Nile water could make barren women fertile, and throughout late antiquity and the early medieval period, phials o f the muddy solution were purveyed as miracle draughts.53 The early fathers o f the Near Eastern churches were certainly aware o f the continuing potency o f pagan river myths. Felix Fabri recalled the story o f the eager iconoclast Emperor Theodosius and his patriarch Theophilus, who in the year 391 ordered the destruction o f the “Serapeum” o f Alexandria and the burning o f statues o f the god. But at the same time he conceded the stub­ bornness o f pagan belief that connected the annual inundations to the offer­ ings made to the deities o f the river: Hapy, Nilus, and Sarapis. When the Nile floods failed, there was predictable consternation that it was a punishment for the emperor’s destruction o f the temples and desecration o f traditional sites. Theodosius is said to have replied that it was the pollutions o f idolatry that were to blame for the misfortune. But suicides and sacrifices thrown into the Nile continued in desperate attempts to appease the offended fluvial gods.54 As late as the sixth century, the emperor Justinian, who prohibited paganism through­ out the Roman Empire, was forced to tolerate the continuance o f obeisances to Isis and Osiris at Philae. Without specific associations with the Nile, quasi-pagan customs o f propi­ tiation and sacrifice persisted along riverbanks throughout Europe well into the late Middle Ages. On St. John’s Day, 1333, for example, Petrarch watched women at Cologne rinsing their arms and hands in the Rhine “so that the threatening calamities o f the coming year might be washed away by bathing in

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the river. Those who dwell by Father Rhine are indeed fortunate if he washes away their misfortunes”; he added, “ I fear that neither Po nor Tiber could ever free us o f ours.”55 For much o f the Middle Ages, the Muslim conquest o f Egypt put serious obstacles in the way o f those who still wanted to penetrate the mysteries o f the Nile. Even the more adventurous pilgrims confined themselves to the tradi­ tional Holy Land sites o f the Scriptures. But with the waning o f the Crusades, and the reopening o f trade routes in the Levant in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some hardy souls, like the Flemish nobleman Josse van Ghistele, did stray south toward the Red Sea and the Nile. And what was striking about the narratives o f that generation o f travellers was their obstinate conviction that the waters o f the Nile flowed, ultimately, from paradise. Van Ghistele, for example, was sure that it was the river “ Gihon” mentioned in Genesis 2.13, one o f the four streams into which the primal river o f Eden divided as it left the garden. And Felix Fabri went much further in con­ structing an entire fabulous geography that, in effect, made the Jordan and the Nile one single sacred stream. What allowed him to have this vision o f a holy confluence was the destruction o f Sodom and Gomorrah. Since they were sited in the deepest basin o f the Dead Sea rift, Fabri imagined the apocalypse as a kind o f saline earthquake in which the rocks gaped open, plunging the cities into the depression and creating the Dead Sea as their pool o f chastisement. Before this convulsion, he believed, the whole o f the valley o f Palestine from Galilee to Aqaba had been as verdant and fertile as the Nile; the Dead Sea had not existed at all, and the Jordan followed a stately course through to a junc­ tion with the great river o f Egypt.56 (Strangely enough, in geological rather than theological time, he was correct in assuming the Dead Sea as the northernmost extension o f the Nile rift.) Now Fabri’s own Dominican monastery at Ulm was sited at the junction o f the Iller and Danube rivers. So perhaps he had meditated on the spiritual sig­ nificance o f confluence. But his topographical speculations (while fantastic) brought together more than two otherwise remote and antithetical landscapes. They also revived Platonic theories o f the cosmic unities by insisting that, ulti­ mately, all the great waters o f the region could be traced back to the single stream that rose from the base o f the Tree o f Life within the paradise garden. Pious Dominican though he was, Fabri was not above recycling the ancient tra­ dition o f fluvial topography that supposed the waters o f paradise to have reached the remotest parts o f the earth through subterranean passages and con­ duits, from which they surfaced as the great rivers o f Greece, India, and Africa. In Fabri’s mental map, they were all part o f one vast, interconnected drain o f waters. And both the Nile and the Jordan were fed by two o f the four rivers expressly mentioned in Genesis, the Jordan by the Tigris. The Nile (even more improbably) was ultimately fed by the Ganges, thought to be “ Pison,” the first-

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mentioned o f the streams leaving Eden. So in their origin, the Nile and Jordan were, in fact, issues o f the same primal stream, “ and one may conclude, then, that pilgrims who have drunk from the Jordan and the Nile have drunk the waters o f the four rivers o f Paradise . . . which is no vain title o f glory.” 57 O f one thing we can be sure. Fabri was no original. In his caravan he brought a pack o f myths and fables about the shape o f the world, ancient and modern, that at the end o f the fifteenth century were commonplace. Like many other travellers o f his generation, he pieced together his cosmology from oral traditions; fragments o f classical texts, often garbled (like Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus); Ptolemaic geography; and the fantastic assertions o f late medieval explorers. In such visions there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, and both played a part in Fabri’s consideration o f the seasonal rise and fall o f the Nile beneath the signs o f Leo and Virgo. And his apparently untroubled assimilation o f pagan and sacred texts certainly owed something to the popular anthologies o f classical myth and lore exemplified by Boccaccio’s D eg e n e a lo g ia d eorum ,58 In these crazy-quilt cosmologies, two essential features stood out. The first, ultimately derived from Plato, was the fundamental unity o f the world, both in time and space. Whereas the early fathers o f the church had been at pains to stress the severance o f Christian from pagan worldviews, the antiquarians o f the early Renaissance effectively brought them together again. And though pagan myth was heavily mined for motifs that seemed to prefigure Christian myster­ ies, it often succeeded in breaking through the pious patterning, to establish an authority and coherence o f its own. So while for centuries the Nile had been perceived as the profane sister o f the holy Jordan, by the Renaissance it was beginning once again to be invested with the imperial magnitude which classi­ cal scholars and artists found irresistible. Secondly, the fluvial literature o f the late fifteenth and early sixteenth cen­ turies became obsessed with mystifying the Source. To return to primitive antiquity was, after all, to become bewitched with myths o f creation, and the ultimate origin was represented as a fountainhead. A contemporary o f Seneca, Philo Judaeus, commenting on the rivers o f paradise, had described a fo n ssa p ientiae: the mystically revealed union o f goodness, beauty, and wisdom, the clos­ est thing that could be apprehended, even metaphysically, to the secrets o f Creation. And from the early sixteenth century, this gush o f esoteric illumina­ tion was conceived, visualized, and eventually, in the gardens and parks o f Renaissance villas, actually designed as a basin o f moving water.59

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iv

Tons Sapientiae

There was at least one place where the Nile, in full spate, seemed to flow toward the Tiber. About fifteen miles southeast o f Rome, in the town o f Palestrina (known to the Romans as Praeneste), stood the ruined temple o f Fortuna Primigenia. Very often such temples were associated with the cult o f Isis, and since the date o f its foundation was obscure, the rites o f her veneration may have been very ancient. Statues o f the goddess that stood in these sanctuaries sug­ gest a conscious effort to make a Greco-Roman version o f the Nile deity. A sur­ viving example in the Vatican Museum holds a vase in her left hand and the drapery falls in a cascade, modelled as rivulets at her belly, from breasts to feet. It was in the reigns o f the emperors Hadrian and Septimius Severus, however, that the temple had been most elaborately embellished. Hadrian had spent more time in Egypt than any other Roman ruler, and it seems likely that it was under his authority that the two obelisks found amidst the ruins were brought to Praeneste. Was it Hadrian, then, who had diverted the sacred waters o f Egypt to flow through Latium? For on the floor o f the Aula Absidiata o f the temple was a spectacular mosaic o f the inundation o f the Nile, probably executed by GrecoEgyptian artists sometime around the end o f the first century B .C .60 Almost everything that Europeans had carried in their collective memory about the Nile was deposited in the swarming landscape: realistically depicted flora and fauna such as fearsome hippopotami and crocodiles as well as palms and lotus, monkeys and storks. Half-submerged rocks and trees suggest the rising flood, while little farms and meadows appear as islets in the overrunning stream. But the landscape may also be a topographical ideogram. For the highlands shown at the top o f the mosaic with scenes o f lion hunts atop extravagant crags resem­ ble descriptions o f the Nubian and Ethiopian highlands from which the river was supposed to rise. In the middle ground, left and right, are two genre scenes o f figures, apparendy gathered about a Hellenic temple, with obelisks (left) and a walled enclosure with giant statuary (right). The foot o f the mosaic suggests the destination o f the river before another temple. For it is there that the pri­ mal ceremony o f the birth o f life, with the sun’s fire impregnating the waters, is ritually observed with a candle plunged into a fountain. In celebration, the

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side o f a great arch spanning the flood is festooned with flowers celebrating the resurrection o f life in the teeming Nile. From 1484 onward, the great mosaic o f Praeneste was the responsibility o f the young prince Francesco Colonna.61 He had many reasons to take these responsibilities seriously. His noble family liked to boast o f its purported descent from the Julian dynasty o f the Roman emperors. So that made

Francesco

the

heir

of

two Egyptophile Romans: Julius and Hadrian. More important, though,

was

his

immediate

legacy. He was the great-nephew o f the

humanist scholar and

antiquarian

Cardinal

Prospero

Colonna, a leading figure in the retinue o f the popes Nicholas V and Pius II, both o f whom were deeply Isis-Fortuna,

engaged

in

exploring

comparative religion and plumb­

Greco-Roman,

ing the mysteries o f the birth o f

first century B.C.

nature. But with Pius II’s death a revolution o f sorts took place at Rome under the auspices o f the Borgias, and the Colonna fell out o f favor. Francesco’s father, Stefano,

retired

to

Palestrina

and, under the guidance o f Leon Battista Alberti, began the work o f restoring the ancient temple. So it was as political exile, archaeologist, the

connoisseur

of

esoteric, antiquarian, and

poet that Francesco continued the Colonna restoration o f Praeneste. He completed the work in 1493 and per­ haps once again covered the great Nile mosaic with the film o f water through which it was supposed to be seen, creating on site the illusion o f the sacred stream. W ithout any doubt, he was also fascinated by the mystery o f Egyptian hieroglyphs and had almostcertainly rediscovered

read the Hieroglyphica o f Horapollo,

inmanuscript on theGreek island o f Andros in 1418 and pub­

lished toward the end o f the fifteenth century. As the hybrid name suggests, this was a Greco-Egyptian treatise, possibly compiled as late as the fourth cen­ tury

a .d

. Known in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, it established the

Mosaic pave­ ment o f the Nile inundation, temple o f Fortuna Primigenia (Palestrina) ca. 80 B.C.

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272

m ystique o f hieroglyp hs as a unique lan gu age, en co d in g in its sym bols n o t m erely the functional characteristics o f things bu t their im m aterial essence.62 F ro m Plotinus o n w ard, neo-Platonists (w ith o u t actually u nderstan ding any­ th in g authentically E gyptian) ad opted hieroglyp hs as the vehicle o f transcen­ dental ap prehension, a langu age n o t sim ply deployed to describe the outw ard character o f things b u t w hich em bo d ied the inner Idea that Plato tau g h t was their deep reality. T o the initiate, open to intuitive and m ystical apprehension, such sym bols, opaqu e to those w h o relied o n reason alone, w o u ld o p en the w ay to the secrets o f C reation. Francesco’s great-uncle P rospero, and A lb erti him ­ self, subscribed to this m ystique, and w anted to create a synthetic language draw ing n o t on ly o n E gyptian bu t o n H ebrew , C h ald ean , and G reek to e m b o d y these cosm ic verities. C o lo n n a p robably u nderstood even less o f the authentic character o f hieroglyphs than the m any learned com m entators on H o ra p o llo . Yet as the likeliest au th or o f the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (T h e D ream o f Poliphilu s), first published in V enice in 1499, he was eager to o ffer a rich array o f

W oo d cu t,

im pressively enigm atic and pseudo-Egyptian

elephant and

devices.63 Prom inent am o n g them was an

obelisk, from

obelisk carried o n the back o f an elephant

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

that d rew w ater from its trunk to its m ou th. In the esoteric tradition, this was m eant as an elaborate allego ry o f the birth o f life on earth. T h e obelisk sto o d (as indeed it had for the Egyptians) for the divine light o f the sun; the elephant, by virtue o f its mass, for the earth w ithin w hose belly the dead lay e n to m b ed . A s the eleph ant carried fluid to its bo dy, so the dead seeds w ere b ro u g h t to resurrection b y the fertile u n io n o f lig h t and w ater. It m ig h t have been a virtu al co m m e n ta ry o n the m osaic p avem en t o f th e N ile at Palestrina. A il that w as m issing was the address to O siris fro m the B o o k o f the D ead. A n d a lo n g w ith the obelisks and eleph ants, C o lo n n a in clu d e d im ages and allusions to H erm es T rism egistus, the leg en d ary m agu s, m agical m ason, and law g iv er o f E g y p t, w h o se reign was said to have an ted ated M o ses and w ho se leg acy w as h idden w ith in a co d e o f sym bols accessible o n ly to his devo tees and initiates. N o reader o f the Hypnerotomachia w o u ld ever m istake C o lo n n a for D an te, bu t the m ed iocrity o f the text was com pensated for by the haunting peculiar­ ity o f the w o o d cu t illustrations, executed by an u nknow n artist. T h e em blem s, alo ng w ith im ages o f Poliphilus on his pilgrim age tow ard Illum ination thro u g h

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273

Love, gave the text exactly the quality o f esoteric strangeness that its author sought. Their effect is not, in any doggedly literal way, meant to be Egyptian, any more than the waters that play through the text were carried from the Nile. But they did bear the ancient associations o f life, death, and transcendental wis­ dom that the Egyptian myths had passed to the West. Like many other pilgrims for Truth and Beauty, Poliphilus is made to begin his journey, stumbling about in a sinister forest o f gnarled oaks. Even without reading Dante it would be obvious that such a place represents, in the symbolic topography o f Renaissance poetry, disorientation. And in precise contrast, it is flowing water that gives the dream-traveller direction. From the beginning, water takes over his experience. The crystalline brook from which he drinks after exiting the wood immediately sings to him “ dorical melodies” and from thence he proceeds through a progress o f waters, gushing from fountains, toward the yearned-for union with Love and Enlightenment. In one episode he comes on a sleeping nymph “ and out o f the round breast did sprout out small streamings o f pure and clear fresh water— from the right breast as if it had been a thread but from the left breast most vehemently”— the two rivulets joining to water a meadow bright with “ fragrant herbs and spring flowers” : tansey, oxeye, cowslips, and daisies. We will need to return to the idea o f the female body as the fo n s et origo o f verdant life. But Colonna’s scene was evidently meant as another variation on O vid’s celebration o f the

Woodcut, from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

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2 74

return o f the golden age. The narrator proceeds past fountains o f harpies sur­ mounted by the Graces (from whose breasts “water did spin out like silver twist” ), golden-scaled dragons, pissing putti, through cryptically inscribed doors until he finally arrives at the temple o f Venus. At this last fountain Poliphilus re-enacts a rite o f Isis, extinguishing fire in the water. Fertility assured, he is at last permitted his consummation with the incarnation o f truth and beauty: Polia herself. It is difficult for modern readers, trudging along in the footsteps o f the earnest Poliphilus, to grasp the impact that the work evidently had on con­ temporaries. This impact was delayed a generation, not least by the fact that Colonna’s reputation as a virtuoso o f pagan signs and symbols opened him to

charges o f heresy, brought by the Borgia pope, Alexander VI. Though acquit­ ted, with the charges dismissed as calumny, it proved harder for him to have enforced the judgement o f the court that restored his confiscated estates. Hardly had Francesco returned to Palestrina than a papal guard suddenly mate­ rialized to evict him. Expelled from the one place that meant most to his life, he spent his last years as a Dominican monk. Severed from his dreamworld o f enchanted groves and dorical waters, Colonna’s mythology nonetheless lived on through his book. For the fountains o f the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili con­ trived an effect that was somehow both erotic and philosophical, animal and ethereal. And it was this irresistible combination that cast a spell on the land­ scape architects o f the Roman and Tuscan villas o f the mid and late sixteenth century^4

Illustrations from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (left: from the French edition, 1546).

Fons Sapientiae

275

As in the Hypnerotomachia, fountains were conceived as stations en route to illumination, often connected by lines o f water that mapped the progress o f the visitor along a strictly predetermined and allegorically saturated path. That path was thus transformed into a river-road itself, navigated with the help o f mytho­ logical and poetic references. At the Villa Lante at Bagnaia, built for the archbishop o f Viterbo, for example, the Fountain o f Rivers, personified in colossal reclining figures o f the Tiber and Arno, was linked to the primal site o f the Fountain o f the Deluge by a “water-chain” down which water flowed through a channel o f stone crayfish. A t the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, the sides o f the water-stair were shaped as interlaced dolphins, the talismanic beast for a safe and blessed journey across water,

often

from

the

mortal to the immortal realm. These were no places for

casual

strolls.

The

creators o f the villa gar­ dens assumed their visi­ River-road at

tors to be learned in all

Villa L an te,

the indispensable texts—

Bagnaia.

O vid, Virgil, and even the popular anthologies o f pagan myths compiled by learned antiquarians. O nly

then

could

they

enter the enchanted uni­ verse o f titans and gods, nymphs and heroes, that they confronted in the fountains,

pools,

and

statues. A visitor to the Boboli Gardens o f the Pitti Palace, for example, was meant to grasp immedi­ ately the relationship o f Niccolo Tribolo and Giambologna’s great fountain statue o f Oceanus, the world-river, with the figures o f the Ganges, Nile, and Euphrates crouching beneath. And to participate fully in the experience designed by the landscape gardeners, the obedient walker was required to pro­ ceed from fountain to fountain, from watery births (such as Venus’s) to watery deaths (such as Adonis’s) in a particular order, sometimes moving from a wild to a “ civilized” classical setting, sometimes the reverse.65 From the middle o f the sixteenth century these carefully programmed progresses increasingly featured a journey toward a primal Source or (as at the

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2 76

Villa Aldobrand ini at Frascati) a Spring o f Initiation, concealed in a cave or g ro tto . Such places w ere sited at the sym bolic b o u n d ary betw een the visible and invisible w orld s, and often guarded by gro tesque o r gigantic figures, fre­ quently in the form o f reclining river-gods. W ith in , the pilgrim w o u ld step over polished pebbles and experience the dim iridescence o f an aqueous o r su bm a­ rine w orld . Walls o f volcanic tufa w o u ld give the im pression o f penetrating inside the w o rld ’ s crust, and stucco surfaces w o u ld be set w ith m other-of-pearl,

G iovanni B olo gn a, fountain o f O ceanu s, B ob oli Gardens, F lorence,

157^ 76.

shellw ork, o r strangely w ro u g h t enam el form s that seem ed to have petrified from slithering amphibians. A t the center, a fountain personification o f bathing deities Venus or D iana w o u ld reveal them selves as the Sou rce o f W isdo m , the Fountainhead. A t C a stello , built for D uk e C o sim o d e ’ M ed ici (Francesco C o lo n n a ’s son Stefano was an adviser), the g ro tto b ro u g h t the Praeneste mosaic in to three dim ensions, displaying a bestiary o f N ile animals— cam el, giraffe, and elephant

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277

(as well as the inevitable croc and hippo)— all, according to Ovid, the original creatures o f Creation. And while the initiate marvelled at these revelations, he would (like Poliphilus) hear strange and delicate music played by water organs concealed behind or beneath the statuary. A t Pratolino, built for Duke Francesco de’ Medici, the grotto even boasted moving automata that would complete the unearthly effect by making convincing sounds in the half-light. All this, o f course, required from the designers not merely easy familiarity with the grammar o f hydro-mythology but also a whole new technology of ornamental hydraulics. This too was thought, inevitably, to have a GrecoEgyptian origin in the treatises o f the School o f Alexandria, said to date from the third century B .C . F o n ta n ieri such as Tommaso Francini and Bernardo Buontalenti created the water marvels, automata, organ pipes, and giocchi d ’acqu a (water jokes) that would douse unsuspecting visitors who triggered its jets with an innocent footfall. Their new mechanics was built on a body o f the­ orems said to have been proposed by Alexandrian physicists and mathemati­ cians known to posterity as Ctesibius and Hero. These men had explored the expanding properties o f water under heat and had experimented with the effects o f air pressure and controlled vacuums. Mentioned by Vitruvius, their treatises were known during the Middle Ages from Latin and Arabic manu­ scripts and during the sixteenth century were published in Italian translations.66 Mastery o f these complicated and interlocking arts seemed to require not just mechanical skill but profound philosophical learning. The title o f “super­ intendent o f rivers and waters,” awarded to some o f the most famous o f the fo n ta n ie r i like Buontalenti, was much more than a certificate o f engineering. It signified true hydraulic virtuosity: the allied powers o f physics and meta­ physics. While the discipline began in Italy, it spread throughout Europe as the first generation o f water virtuosi were commissioned by princes from England to Austria to divert rivers and build underground conduits that would debouch in spectacular sprays in their palace parks. Tommaso Francini, for example, who had worked for the Medici dukes, was exported to Henri IV in France to repro­ duce the grottoes, automata, river statuary, and cascades that awed visitors to the villas near Florence. And for the most ambitious o f those rulers, there was the implicit hope not only that they would outdo their rivals in these water spectacles but that the polymathic f o n ta n ie r i would use their art to reveal the deep and occult principles o f creation. Absolute monarchs, after all, had a pro­ fessional interest in the revelation o f cosmic harmonies, the laws which dis­ closed

the

stable,

self-regulating

circularities

governing

the

universe.

Supposing the hydraulic philosophers were not charlatans or witches, they might provide the prince with the potent weapon o f metaphysical knowledge. It did no harm, o f course, that hydraulics could also be shown to have prac­ tical virtues. Princes were supposed to care as much for the salubrity o f their

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subjects as for philosophical riddles. Bernard Palissy, the Huguenot enamellist and potter patronized by Catherine de’ Medici and who created the ultimate grotto at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, studded with lustrous enamel crustaceans, also devoted himself to applying the principles o f Alexandrian hydraulics to the urban supply o f water. His book on rivers and fountains opens with an anec­ dote meant to declare his vocation. Travelling through a village in northern France on a hot day, Palissy inquired o f a peasant where he could find a foun­ tain to refresh himself, to which he replied that there was none in these parts and that the wells were all ruined because o f the drought and that there was only a litde brackish water at the bottom o f those wells. What he said made me sorely angry and astonished at the hardship under which the inhabi­ tants o f the village labored through the want o f water.67 Palissy’s vocation was thus defined by the necessary transformation o f stag­ nant, into flowing, water: the pond into the fountain; mortality into vitality. But even when these conscientious engineers were necessarily preoccupied with pipe corrosion or the design o f a new generation o f water mills, they ultimately saw themselves as magi: wise men to whom it would be given to discover the principles o f universal kinetics, including, perhaps, perpetual motion. And it may be that their very reputation as masters o f cryptic arts made them appear to flirt with heresy. To save his soul (and possibly his body), Francesco Colonna had retreated to the safety o f a Dominican monastery. But after his Medici patroness died, the Protestant Palissy found himself incarcerated in the ultimate anti-grotto, the Bastille, and never saw the light o f day again. These political perils failed to deter the most ambitious o f the water magi from attempting the impossible. None were more extravagant in their aims or their practices than the Caus family, father and son, Salomon and Isaac.68 Orig­ inating in northern France (pays de Caux), Salomon de Caus had worked under Buontalenti at the stupendous garden at Pratolino. And though, like Palissy, the family was Protestant, this seemed no impediment for Catholic patrons, even those as committed as the Habsburg archduke Albert, viceroy o f the Span­ ish Netherlands. Men as gifted as Caus were in short supply and the archduke longed for a truly Medician water garden (as well as a dependable engine to supply domestic water) for his palace near Brussels. It was in the England o f James I (who fancied himself the epitome o f Plato’s philosopher-king) that Caus found a circle obviously congenial to his expansive intellect. Caus swiftly built a reputation as the most ingenious o f water mechanics, pumping water from the Thames to feed the Parnassus he had created for the earl o f Arundel’s gardens at Somerset House. A t the base o f the artificial hill o f the Muses, four figures representing the rivers o f Britain held

Fons Sapientiae

279

vases fro m w h ich w ater flo w ed in to a central basin. T h u s the T h am es w as, in K in g Jam es’s heavenly A lb io n , p ro m o te d to o n e o f the rivers o f paradise. C a u s g ave lessons

in m athem atics

W ales, and his sister, E liz a b eth ,

and p erspective to H e n ry, Prince o f

and em ig rated w ith her to H e id e lb e rg w h en

she m arried F red erick, the e le c to r palatine. T h e re he created (as he had for H e n r y at R ic h m o n d ) gard ens o f fantastic intricacy, featu rin g w ater parterres, river-roads and statuary, and the en cru sted , lu m in o u s g ro tto e s p io n e ered at P rato lin o . B u t w h en the P ro testa n t cause w as d e stro y ed at th e B a td e o f the W h ite M o u n ta in in 1620 , C a u s m o v e d to F ran ce, perhaps seek in g the p ro te c­ tio n o f th e Q u e e n M o th e r M arie d e ’ M e d ici. T h is tu rn ed o u t to be a p o o r career m o v e since the Q u e e n M o th e r fell steep ly fro m favor in th e reig n o f h er so n L o u is X III. C a u s w as ru m o re d to have been lo ck e d u p b y C a rd in a l R ich elieu in th e terrifyin g p riso n -m ad h o u se o f B icetre.

.\n on ym ou s

B e fo re he d ie d , C a u s m an aged

p ortrait o f Salom on

to p ro d u c e o n e o f the m o st ex tra­

de C au s.

o rd in a ry w o rk s in the entire h isto ry o f h yd rau lics, Les R aisons des forces m ouvantes,

w h ic h

w as

reprinted

after his d eath in an E n g lish ed itio n b y his so n Isaac as an in tro d u ctio n to his o w n w o rk at the earl o f P e m ­ b r o k e ’ s g ard en s

at W ilto n ,

and

w h ic h w as translated in to virtu ally ev e ry E u ro p ea n

lan g u ag e

b efore

th e m id d le o f th e se ve n tee n th cen tu ry. In his in tro d u ctio n C a u s se lf-co n ­ scio u sly places h im se lf in the tra d itio n o f m asters o f th e fo n s sapientiae, w h ich b eg in s w ith P lato and A ris to d e and p ro ce ed s w ith th e S c h o o l o f A lexandria t h ro u g h

to

th e ph ilo so p h er-artists o f th e

R enaissance

like A lb e rti and

L e o n a rd o . B u t th e tru e w o n d e r o f th e b o o k is the co lle ctio n o f astonishing p lates, m an y o f th em m arvels o f tech n ica l fo u n ta in d e sig n a lo n g the lines o f M ed icia n an d R o m a n hydraulics. C a u s is at pains to ex p o se exactly the ph ysi­ cal m eans (u sin g steam pressure a c e n tu ry b efo re James W att) by w h ic h w ater m ig h t be m ad e to beh ave in o sten sib ly “ u n n atu ral” w ays. B u t in the m o st th e ­ atrical plates he co m m a n d s lig h t, fire, and w ater in the h eart o f ro ck y caverns w h e re birds are m ad e to w arb le, brilliant balls fly aro u n d o n illum in ated jets, an d th e secrets o f elem en tal m ech an ics are m astered at the v ery fou n tain h ead . N o w o n d e r he w as t h o u g h t d a n g ero u s, the P ro sp e ro o f H e id elb erg .

280

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

282

v

Nile Brought to Tiber

In 15 12 a colossal reclining statue was discovered in the rubble o f a late Roman temple o f Isis on the Monte Cavallo.69 In all respects it corresponded to the river-god types familiar from Greek statuary and Roman coins: bearded, mostly nude

but

with drapery that seemed to suggest the flowing waters, and, most impor­ tant for the classical tradition, holding a cornucopia, the Horn of Plenty that had been torn off Achelotis by Her­ cules. The fact that this particular sta­ tue group included the figures o f Rom­ ulus and Remus suckled by the she-wolf clinched its identification as the Tiber. And it was in this auspicious guise that it was brought to the collection o f antique statuary in the Vatican. By the sixteenth century the Tiber was noto­ rious for its mercurial unpredictability. Though it snaked between papal and civic Rome, it was decidedly unlike the Nile in its raging floods and torrents, which had the habit o f swamping the poor quarters o f the Trastevere. Later in the century the Jesuit writer Giovanni Botero would contrast such Ital­ ian torrents (for the Arno was even worse) with the slow and sedimentary rivers o f Flanders and northern Europe that, through solute density, were capable o f carrying heavier traffic and thus comporting themselves as vehi­ cles o f prosperity.70 But for all its bad temper, the Tiber was still the quintessential imperial river. Virgil has the river itself welcome Aeneas to the place where he founds the new Troy— Rome— and (like the Thames and the Seine) it was revered as

Reclining statue o f the Tiber, Greco-Roman, first century B.C.

Nile Brought to Tiber

2 8 3

the very bloodstream o f the state. The following year, 15 13 ,3 second reclining river deity was found on the same site, also bearded but festooned with sixteen putti clambering over its torso. Readers o f Pliny (and there were many) imme­ diately identified these as the personifications o f the sixteen cubits by which the Nile rose to its optimal flood-level. It seemed both logical and pleasing to popes like Julius II, who certainly had pretensions to establish a new spiritual empire in Rome, that the Nile should be brought together with the Tiber as emblems o f imperial succession. And the Borgia pope, Alexander V I, was even absurdly flattered by Annius o f Viterbo, who attempted to use Diodorus Siculus to prove that Alexander was actually descended, albeit remotely, from Osiris him­ self. Never one to shrink from comparisons with heroic divinity, Alexander had Pinturicchio celebrate the genealogy with a series o f paintings commemorating the life and death o f Osiris.71 By that time, Michelangelo (who had sculpted

Reclining statue o f the Nile, Roman copy o f Alexandrian original, second century

a .d

.

figures o f river-gods for the Medici tombs and planned a group o f the four rivers o f Hades) had designed a setting for the twinned river-gods o f the Nile and Tiber at the base o f the great staircase o f the Campidoglio. And there they remain as guardian deities o f fluvial empire. The enthronement o f the two rivers was more than just a gesture o f casual classical nostalgia. It announced the claim o f the Renaissance papacy to inherit not just the cultural legacy o f Old Egypt but the specific Roman imperial title to its possession. And nothing signified that claim more dramatically than the extraordinary program embarked on by Sixtus V in his brief papacy in the 1580s, o f re-erecting Egyptian obelisks on new, expressly Christian sites. The obelisks had been brought to Rome by a succession o f emperors, beginning with Augustus himself and including Hadrian, who had travelled to Egypt and coveted its antiquities. The act o f their removal, moreover, was meant to pro­ claim not appreciation (much less, reverence) for their antiquity or beauty but

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284

triumphal appropriation, much like the parades o f slaves and treasure that fol­ lowed a military victory. The Romans were aware that the obelisks were objects o f religious adoration for the Egyptians, rays o f the sun symbolized by pointed columns o f stone. Most o f them had been taken from temples at Thebes and Heliopolis where they had stood in pairs at the entrance to temples dedicated to Amun-Ra, the sun-god. It was relatively simple, then, for the Roman emper­ ors to transfer not only the obelisks themselves but their religious associations to their own domestic cult o f the sun, whose beams naturally irradiated their own imperial divinity. By the sixteenth century only one o f the thirteen known obelisks still stood upright at the spina o f the Vatican Circus. And like many o f the surviv­ ing Egyptian antiquities in and about Rome, it had been effectively baptized into the Christian tradition through a combination o f archaeological igno­ rance and rich local mythology. The Vatican obelisk, brought by Caligula from the Julian Forum in Alexandria where Augustus had erected it, was said to have witnessed the martyrdom o f St. Peter himself. It thus embodied a per­ fect symbolic connection between pagan antiquity and Christian posterity, the two histories o f Rome. So it made inspired sense for Pope Sixtus V to move the column to the site where the papacy’s ambitions to create a new and glo­ rious Christian regnum were concentrated: the piazza in front o f the Basilica o f St. Peter’s. The fact that daunting logistical obstacles stood in the way o f the enter­ prise only whetted the pope’s appetite. Doubdess he had read Pliny’s famous description o f the spectacular mechanics o f the emperors’ transport o f the obelisks from Egypt to Rome. What better way to demonstrate the succession from a pagan to a Christian empire than to carry out a comparable relocation. It helped, o f course, that in Domenico Fontana the pope had an engineer (in fact a hydraulic engineer) o f genius. Following some o f Pliny’s detailed account o f the original transportation o f the columns, Fontana had a huge wooden cra­ dle constructed, along with an elaborate system o f pulleys, to lower and then move the column over a long road o f wooden rollers toward its final resting place. The spectacle could not have been better designed to rouse the plebs R om ana, notoriously greedy for excitement. Eighty-three feet and three hun­ dred and twenty-six tons o f masonry trundling through the streets; the four bronze crabs which had ornamented the Roman setting, in the rear, all the way to St. Peter’s; a miracle o f urban logistics, wholly worthy o f the magnitude o f Sixtus’s ambitions. N o wonder that in the superb volume Fontana published to celebrate his work he congratulates himself for living up to his ancient Roman predecessors.72 On September 26, 1586, the obelisk’s conversion was completed when it was surmounted by a cross and Sixtus’s own emblem: the holy star. From then on the pope became a compulsive obelisk-hauler. With Fontana repeating his

Engraving from Domenico Fontana, Delle Trasportazione D ell} Obelisco Vaticano, 1590.

2 86

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

own mechanical system for transportation, three more columns were re-erected between 1587 and 1589. One had stood before the mausoleum o f Augustus; a second, lying shattered beneath layers o f rubble and masonry debris, had been brought by the son o f Constantine to Rome, and had originally stood in the temple o f Amun at Thebes. Over a hundred feet tall, it was hauled to San Gio­ vanni in Laterano. And the last o f the four also lay broken in the Circus Max­ imus and was set upright in the Piazza del Popolo in the spring o f 1589.73 But Sixtus was not yet finished with his ambitions as the engineer, literally, o f renovatio. Fontana belonged to the generation whose engineering creden­ tials would have been incomplete without a profound knowledge o f hydraulics. But for a Roman, the hydraulic tradition had a special significance. The ruins o f great aqueducts throughout the Latin world had survived as a reminder o f the imperial scale o f Roman waterworks. But they were merely the visible frag­ ment o f a system that, according to Pliny, numbered seven hundred basins, five hundred fountains, one hundred and thirty reservoirs, and one hundred and seventy free public baths. Litde wonder that he could boast: If we take into careful consideration the abundant supplies o f water in public buildings, baths, pools, open channels, private houses, gardens and country estates near the city, if we consider the distances traversed by the water before it arrives; the raising o f arches, the tunneling o f mountains and the building o f level routes across deep valleys, we shall readily admit that there has never been anything more remarkable in the whole world.74 In 1425 details o f the construction and maintenance o f the Roman system became available to the Renaissance engineers when Poggio Bracciolini (the tireless sleuth) discovered, in the monastery o f Monte Cassino, Sextus Julius Frontinus’s D e aquis urbis Rom ae, written around

a .d

. 97.75 Frontinus was

commissioner for hydraulics under the emperors Nerva and Trajan and, from what can be gathered from scanty sources, was the model o f a zealous public servant. By now it should not come as a surprise to learn that he acquired his skills in classical hydraulics from the School o f Alexandria (though he boasted that in comparison with Roman aqueducts, the pyramids were an insignificant achievement). And perhaps just because the engineers o f the Renaissance believed they were the heirs o f the ancient arts o f pressurized flow, the dis­ crepancy between ancient and modern supply o f water for the citizens o f Rome seemed painfully glaring. The renewal o f pure, flowing water, at once a sacred and a civic duty, thus became an essential part o f the program o f papal reform. In 1453 Nicholas V inaugurated the work o f repair and restoration o f one o f the eleven ancient ducts and rebaptized it the Acqua Virgo. The same year that Fontana moved

N ile B r o u g h t to T ib er

287

the Vatican obelisk he also supervised the restoration o f a decayed portion o f the old Acqua Alexandrina, which was also renamed as the Acqua Felice. C on­ scious o f the kind o f civic paternalism that Frontinus had described, Sixtus had grandiose ideas for the irrigation o f a greater Rome that would flower under his pontificate. The Acqua Felice would allow the hills outside the city walls to become populated once more and connect them with a freshly cleansed city. And while the popes could hardly reproduce the three hundred bronze and marble statues and four hundred marble columns that Pliny describes as orna­ menting the waterworks, Sixtus was determined to make at least some archi­ tectural expression o f his claim to refresh the imperial tradition. On the hilltop terminus

o f theAcqua Felice, Fontana built a great monumental castellum, embellished with

fountains and

statuary, that did recover some­ thing o f the nobility o f the Roman structures. During the brief quinquen­ nium o f Sixtus’s pontificate, ideas Detail, Jan and

for

H u go van Eyck,

from the Vatican— not just foun­

Roman

refreshment

gushed

Triptych o f the

tains and new pipes but public

Holy Lamb,

baths, mechanisms for waste dis­

Cathedral o f

posal, troughs for the rinsing of

St. Bavo, Ghent, completed 1432.

wool,

anything

that

could

be

piped, washed, flushed. And after his death the enthusiasm flowed on. Paul V repaired the old Acqua Trajana, which duly became the Acqua Paola, and had Jacopo della Porta build the most grandiose o f all

the

monumental

termini,

resembling a triumphal arch more than a fountain. But the pope took good care to see that the elaborate relief sculptures that decorated it all alluded to the spiritual and biblical warrants for the watery renovation: Joshua at the Jor­ dan; Aaron and Moses at the rock o f Horeb. For, quite apart from the imperial precedent for papal waterworks, foun­ tains had come to feature very prominently in the iconography o f the church militant.76 I f the Tree o f Life figured as the archetypal ancestor o f the cross, a river flowed from its roots into the world and was commonly represented in medieval illuminations as feeding the Well o f Life. In this guise a fountain occu­ pies a central position in the van Eyck brothers’ famous triptych o f the Sacred Lamb in Ghent. Very often, too, the fountain, or well o f life, marked the gath­ ering place o f the nations, believers and unbelievers; almost as if it were the

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288

w aters that flo w ed , like the N ile, betw een pagan and Christian w orlds. A n d the fluids that fed the fountain w ere, in keeping w ith the same ancient pre-C h rist­ ian tradition, co m p osed o f the m utable liquids o f b lo o d , w in e, and water. In the same C a th o lic city o f G h en t the Flem ish artist H o re n b o u t, for exam ple, p ro d u ced an extraordinary altarpiece o f m ultiple-tiered fountains. From C h rist’s body, posed very m uch like the antique statues o f O cea n u s, b lo o d spurts co pio usly from his w ound s into a chalice from w hich it overflow s into

Gerard H o ren b o u t,

Fountain o f Lift and Mercy, G h en t, 1596.

the cups o f the thirsty faithful, gathered abo u t the w ell (w hile the acolytes o f D am e W orld w orship elsew here).77 A ll the elem ents o f a n ew sacred hydraulics w ere co m in g tog e th e r: the C h ristian ized m em o ry o f the N ile and its cu lt o f vital fertility; the m ystique o f the So u rce o f C re a tio n , m ade visible th ro u g h the m iracu lou s m echanics o f the S c h o o l o f A lexandria; the renovatio o f the R o m an traditio n o f flo w in g w ater.

Bernini and the Four Rivers

289

Yet somehow the ensembles o f stone, light, and water remained inert. Fontana and Della Porta’s fountains sat importandy on their Roman hills, devoid o f any real kinedc animation. The obelisk stood to attention before St. Peter’s like a standard captured from the enemy. Together they all spoke o f authority, not mystery; not the secrets o f Egypt. What they needed was a magus. And in Gianlorenzo Bernini they would get one.

vi

Bernini and the Four Rivers

The fountains o f Versailles were in their infancy when Bernini told his French minder, Freart de Chantelou, that all his life he had been “ un amico dell’acqua.”78 He might have added that water was, as it were, in his blood, for in addition to a career as a mediocre sculptor, his father, Pietro, had been invested with the office o f superintendent o f the Acqua Vergine. From the outset, Bernini had wanted to liberate the kinetic qualities o f light and water from the rather stolid forms in which the fountain sculptors o f the High Renaissance had encased them. Where they had stressed the contrary properties o f stone mass and running water, Bernini wanted to bring them together in one fluid, musical sequence. To suc­ ceed in dissolving these substances in a glorious run o f light, sound, and motion seemed the great response to Michelangelo’s challenge o f difficoltd. Bernini had already risen to that challenge in the carving o f his namesake, San Lorenzo, writhing on the grill, licked by flames that seemed to transub­ stantiate themselves from stone to fire, just as the saint’s body underwent the metamorphosis from agonized, charred flesh to the ecstatic, fragrant sweetness o f martyrdom. And it was the stupenda o f such early works that caught the atten­ tion o f patrons like Sixtus V ’s nephew, Cardinal Montalto, who commissioned from him a Neptune with Tritons for his gardens. Bernini took one o f the most familiar o f Ovid’s myths, the moment when Neptune relents from the primal flood and, to the sound o f Triton’s horn, the waters recede into the forms they took on the reborn earth: lakes, seas, and rivers. Bernini’s genius was to com­ bine both the violence o f the original act o f destruction and its compensatory moment o f restoration. To do this he needed to break radically with the tradi­ tion o f representing Neptune in relatively static or reclining poses, and to aban­ don the formality o f figures posed erect standing in chalice fountains. Instead he coupled the figures against each other in a brutal, twisting contrapposto; the

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

290

enraged Neptune harrowing the waves with his trident while the Triton sounds the conch. Bernini already knew enough o f the new pressuredriven hydraulics to force the water through the shell, as if it were the liquid equiv­ alent

o f the

sound,

and

down into a great cascade. Aside

from

fulfilling

his

obligation to represent the

Bernini, Neptune and Triton, ca. 1620-21.

cardinal as the bringer o f order from chaos, Bernini produced an unprecedentedly

spectacular

piece

of

water-theater: full o f furious energy and mad, crashing noise.79 For his great patron and friend

Maffeo

Barberini,

Pope Urban VIII, Bernini cultivated a less flamboyant style o f fountain: more self­ consciously cerebral, learned, and witty.80The Fountain o f the Bee, completed in 1626, thus alluded to the ubiquitous emblem o f the Barberini. Three years later Bernini inherited from his father the post o f superintendent o f the Acqua Vergine and planned a similar conceit as its terminus, at the entrance o f the Piazza di Spagna. The form its basin took was that o f a boat which, when filled, looks strangely half-submerged. But to appreciate the marriage o f playfulness and gravitas that was uniquely Bernini’s approach to water requires looking from the fountain up toward the Church o f Santa Trinita on the hill that overlooks it. For even without the Spanish steps it seems likely that Bernini, who certainly knew the traditional metaphor o f the Church as a ship, meant to have the fountain and the church echo each other at the summit and the base o f the hill. And when he returned to the subject o f the Triton, in the center o f the propietary Piazza

Barberini,

Bernini

could hardly help but revert to his revolutionary inventive­ ness. In place o f the conven­ tional cup as a base for the figure, he opened a colossal

Bernini, Fountain o f the Barcaccia, 1627-29, Piazza di Spagna, engraving by G. B. Falda.

Bernini and the Four Rivers

29 1

shell, itse lf su p p o rte d o n the back o f d o lp h in s, d e co rated again w ith the Bar­ berini bees and ca rryin g the k n eelin g T rito n . T h u s , the em b lem o f security and fo r tu n a , the d o lp h in , is su rm o u n ted b y a fig u re s y m b o liz in g im m o rtality w o n th ro u g h art (fo r U rb an V I I I had serious preten sio n s as a p o e t); the w h o le ce l­ ebration ecstatically ex te n d e d th ro u g h brilliant, p ressurized jets sh o o tin g hydraulic hosannas in to the R o m a n sky. A rt historians so m etim es seem relu cta n t to take B e rn in i’ s fou ntains as seri­ ously, w h ich is to say, as playfully, as th ey deserve. O f B e rn in i’ s m asterpiece, the F o u n tain o f the F o u r R ivers in the P iazza N a v o n a , o n e o f his bio g rap h ers

co m ­

m en ts lo ftily that its o verall effe ct is c o m ­ p ro m ised b y features “ th at

b e lo n g

m ore

to a circu s-a ct” than B ern in i,

to

F o u n ta in o f

a

great

m en tal

th e T rito n ,

m onu­

scu lp tu re.81

P ia zza

B u t the F o u n tain o f

B arberin i,

the F o u r Rivers does,

R o m e , 16 4 2 -4 3 .

after all, stand in a circu s, fo r th e P iazza N a v o n a preserves in its o val shape the sta­ d iu m o f th e A g o n a le C irc u s , w h ere , d u r­ in g the reig n o f the e m p ero r

D o m itian ,

gam es w ere regu larly held . F ro m the late fifteen th cen tu ry, the p ia zz a w as the site o f a th riv in g W ed n esd a y m ark et, w h ere haw kers sold all kinds o f fo o d , w in e , h o u se h o ld w ares, and to o ls. A n d as w as o ften the case w ith such places, it rapidly d e ve lo p e d in to a k in d o f street fair, to o , w ith ju g g le rs and qu a ck s, street singers and actors o f th e com m edia d e ll’a rte jo stlin g for space am idst th e th ro n g .82 T h e P ia zza N a v o n a w as also a m arketplace o f p o w er w here p o litica l ideas, g o ssip , and scandal c o u ld b e traded b etw een the stalls o f fru it and ch eese. A n d b y th e se co n d h a lf o f the sixteen th cen tu ry, p alazzi o f the R o m a n n o b ility lo o k e d o n to th e o p e n space, so th at im p o rtan t days in the h o ly calen dar w o u ld be m arked b y th e o sten tatio u s p resence o f carriages and ret­ inu es o f the A ld o b ra n d in i, T o rres, O rsin i, and P am philj.

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

A n on ym ou s, Piazza N avona, ca. 1630, before the construction o f Bernini’s fountain.

Though one part o f Bernini’s personality was passionately devout and high-minded, another had the quality o f an exuberant showman: the writer o f satires and comedies, the composer and dramaturge. His uniqueness in the world o f the Catholic Baroque was precisely the seamlessness o f these quali­ ties— his innocence that devotion and theatricality could ever be considered incompatible. And for all the sheer ingenuity and sophistication o f both the concept and execution o f his works, it is this adamant refusal to divide play and veneration that accounts for the humanity o f so much o f his sculpture. In other words, Bernini took comedy seriously, even in the dramatic pieces he wrote for the theater o f the Palazzo Barberini, which combined light, music, and starding effects in a conscious attempt to negate the boundary between audience and performance. In one play called The Flooding o f the Tiber he went so far as to have water gush from the back o f the stage toward the front rows, only to be diverted at the last moment by a canal, hidden from the public sight line. For Bernini, then, the flow o f the rivers contained its own powerful drama. And to channel that drama into a fountain that would somehow both symbol­ ize and embody the sacred myths o f the rivers was an irresistible challenge. To say that he met that challenge theatrically is, in the terms o f the Baroque (or for that matter our own), to bestow on his achievement the highest accolade. For the Fountain o f the Four Rivers is a masterpiece in the same way that Bernini’s other great works o f sacred theater, like the Cornaro Chapel or the bm ccia o f St. Peter’s, are masterpieces: in demanding the suspension o f the

Bernini and the Four Rivers

29 3

beholder’s disbelief, the surrender to a vision o f the world in which profound cosmic mysteries are given visible, sensuous expression. And it is also the place where all the currents o f river mythology, Eastern and Western, Egyptian and Roman, pagan and Christian, flowed toward one great sacred stream. That it came to pass at all was something o f a miracle. With the death o f Urban VIII in 1644, after a disastrous and petty local war, the cause o f the Barberini collapsed in disgrace. The family clique o f cardinals fled, pursued by cred­ itors and enemies, and the reputation o f their favored sculptor-architect suddenly passed beneath the darkest o f clouds. Even his own works seemed to be conspiring against him. The first o f the two campaniles he had built at St. Peter’s had produced such serious cracks in the fabric o f the masonry that by 1646 it was ordered demolished. And to add insult to injury, it was Bernini who had to bear the expense o f the demolition. It seemed an apt symbol o f his abruptly overturned fortune. For more than a century the papacy had been a fiercely contested prize among the aristocratic clans o f Rome, rich, landed, ferociously Machiavellian, and merciless to their foes. The pope who profited from Urban V U I ’s disgrace, Innocent X, was from the native Roman Pamphilj family and, although notoriously stingy (especially in comparison with the spectacularly prodigal Florentine Urban V III), was con­ sidered the patron o f Bernini’s rivals, Alessandro Algardi and Francesco Bor. .

B ernini an d

romini. The family palazzo stood beside the church that Innocent wanted r

workshop

Borromini to enlarge and which became Sant’Agnese. But in the age o f sacred

F o u n ta in of th e

hydraulics, the way in which a papal dynasty effectively colonized a Roman

F o u r R ivers,

piazza was by creating a new fountain. Since Bernini had been forced by Urban

P ia zza N a v o n a.

V III’s death to abandon work on the Trevi Fountain, at the end o f the Acqua

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

294

Felice, Innocent took the opportunity to upstage his predecessor by bringing the Acqua Vergine (once the charge o f Pietro Bernini) all the way into the Piazza Navona, and completing it with a great show o f stone and water. Bor­ romini engineered the hydraulics that made this possible, and with Bernini pointedly excluded from the competition for the design, it seemed virtually cer­ tain that either he or Algardi would win the commission. But for once in his life, that most inventive and unorthodox artist produced an uncharacteristically austere design, with water falling from scallop shells at the base o f the obelisk that was to be the fountain’s centerpiece. It may well be that Borromini had in mind a simple treatment that would emulate the undec­ orated setting o f the St. Peter’s obelisk.83 If this was indeed the case, then Bor­ romini mistook the pope’s notoriously curmudgeonly temperament for aesthetic conservatism. In this case, it seems, Innocent (or perhaps his powerful

sister-in-law,

Mondalchini)

wanted

Olimpia a

grand

show. Two drawings by Algardi, in the Museo Correr in Venice and in the Louvre, suggest the evolving nature o f the commission. Borrow­ ing

from

his

fellow

Bolognese

Giambologna’s Fountain o f N ep­ tune, Algardi produced a multi­ tiered

structure,

flamboyantly

ornamented with lobate shellwork. In one version it was crowned with a reclining personification o f the river Tiber, complete with Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf. In a second drawing Algardi has four river deities surround the base (much as three monkeys were gathered about the base o f another Giambologna fountain in the Boboli Gardens). And one o f the river-gods, as Jennifer Montagu has astutely noticed, appears to gesticulate in the same exclamatory manner as Bernini’s figure o f the Rfo de la Plata.84 All o f which suggests that many o f the ideas that would coalesce in Bernini’s fertile mind were, in various forms, already circulating in 1646-47, when the pope was coming to a decision about the fountain. Yet even if the eventual master-idea for the Fountain o f the Four Rivers grew out o f these ini­ tiatives, the end result was undoubtedly pure Bernini in its audacious improb­ ability. Just how he won the commission away from his competitors varies accord­ ing to the source. One contemporary writer, Marini, claims that Bernini made

B ernini,

self-portrait.

Bernini and the Four Rivers

29 5

a m o d e l fo r th e p ro je ct in so lid silver and presen ted it to the p o p e ’ s fo rm id a ­ ble sister-in-law as a w ay o f g e ttin g In n o c e n t’s a tten tio n . B u t the m o re p o p u ­ lar versio n th at has b ec o m e a p erm an en t p art o f B erniniana w as su pplied b y the tw o b io g rap h ies w ritten b y his son D o m e n ic o and by F ilip p o B a ld in u cci. It is a tale o f c u n n in g and im p ulsiveness, p erfectly in k eep in g w ith B a ro q u e R o m e and , even i f u n tru e, o r at least ex ag g era te d , e ben trovato. S en sin g In n o c e n t’ s u n certain ty, N ic c o lo L u d o v isi, the p rince o f P io m b in o and V en o sa , a su p p o rte r o f B ern in i and m arried to In n o c e n t’ s niece C o n sta n z a , in terv en e d o n the sc u lp ­ to r ’ s beh alf. Early in 16 4 7 he en c o u ra g ed B ernini to p ro d u ce a d ra w in g fo r the F o u n tain o f th e F o u r Rivers. It to o k the basic idea o f th e T rito n fou n tain fu r­ th er b y m o u n tin g a figu re o n to p o f an irregu lar stru ctu re, p art sto n e, p art shell, fro m w h ic h w ater w o u ld p o u r in to a sh a llo w basin. T h e figure (w o n d erfu lly draw n b y B ernini) w as a varia­ tio n o n the standard b earded river

deity,

w h o se

flo w in g

w hiskers, rather than drapery, su g g ested the w ater and w h o se arm s

h eld

alo ft

the

papal

D ie g o

shields fro m w h ich the o b elisk

V e la z q u e z ,

arose.

Portrait o f

A se co n d d ra w in g , n o w in

Innocent X,

W in d s o r

d etail, 1659.

p ro je ct a lo n g to w a rd its ev en ­

C a stle ,

m o v ed

the

tual shape. In place o f the sin ­ g le fig u re , riv er-g od s, in the m an n er o f A lg a rd i’ s d esig n , w ere n o w seated at the corners of

the

o b elisk ,

and

the

e n cru sted shells o n w h ich th ey sat

(ab o ve

a n o th er

layer o f

sp o u tin g d o lp h in s) co n v e rg e d to create an irregu lar cavity th ro u g h w h ich lig h t p en etra te d . A brilliant sh e et o f sk etches sh o w s B ern in i teasin g o u t this paradox b y w h ic h a ro ck y mass c o u ld still appear p o ro u s , airy, and p u n ctu red w ith light: an o th er exercise in the m astery o f difficoltd. B ern in i has n o w dispensed w ith th e shells and d o lp h in s a lto g e th e r and co n cen trates o n a grea t k n o t o f rockslabs, p u sh ed and to rn and p ierced as th o u g h b y so m e e ru p tio n o f the e a rth ’s g e o lo g ic a l m o tio n . O n e o f the sk etches (at to p rig h t) sh o w s him p layin g w ith w h a t w o u ld b e c o m e th e b o ld est idea o f all, h a vin g th e o b elisk itself m inim ally su p p o rte d so th at it ap peared to be h o v e rin g o v er th e ro ck and the figures, rath er than firm ly g ro u n d e d o n any k in d o f p ed estal.85 B y the tim e he cam e to w o rk u p a m o d e l, presu m a b ly so m e tim e in the early au tu m n o f 16 4 7 , these basic co m p o n e n ts had co m e to g e th e r (a lth o u g h the fig-

296

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

Bernini, drawing for Fountain o f the Four Rivers.

Bernini, drawing studies for Fountain o f the Four Rivers.

Bernini and the Four Rivers

297

ures o f the rivers themselves were still a long way from their eventual charac­ terization). The rock from which the river-gods appeared almost naturally extruded, rather than posed, obviously owed much to the Mannerist rocks o f the fountain grottoes, but it could as well invoke scriptural precedents: the rock o f Horeb from which Moses struck water, as well as the traditional symbol o f the Church as rock. A t this point, according

to

the

D o m enico/B aldinucci version o f events, Prince Ludovisi smuggled the model into the palace o f Donna

Olimpia when

he knew the pope was being entertained there and set it at the end o f a passage which led to the Bernini, terracotta model for the Fountain o f the Four Rivers.

dining

area.

Innocent

must

suddenly

seen

There have it,

a

strange little thing sit­ ting on its advertising table; the huge power o f a great, living monu­ ment

crowded

with

writhing animate forms. Immediately taken with the model, and guess­ ing the identity o f the artist, Innocent spent a good “ quasi

half

an

estatico,”

hour in

thrall to “ the inventiveness, the nobility and the immensity” o f the sculpture. Describing the coup as “a trick o f Prince Ludovisi,” he nonetheless capitulated to it, much to the legendary chagrin o f Borromini. “Whoever does not wish to have Bernini’s designs executed,” the pope is said to have remarked, “ had bet­ ter not see his work.” 86 O f course these stories have an unmistakably self-congratulatory air about them. But apocrypha aside, Bernini triumphed because, in spite o f the appar­

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298

ent austerity o f the pope, he wanted something more elaborately triumphal than Borromini’s meager pedestal. What Innocent wanted was a glorification o f the obelisk he was re-erecting in the Piazza Navona in time for the Holy Year o f 1650. For these jubilees were occasions o f conspicuous sacred display in a city packed with pilgrims; confraternities and even the poor eager to have the rich (for a change) wait on them. It was the chance for Innocent to make his own permanent mark on a Rome already vastly altered by the ambitions o f the Baroque papacy. Innocent needed, then, a setting that would be simultaneously imperial and papal. Just as Sixtus had invoked the ghosts o f Augustus and Constantine to lend authority to his own works, Innocent saw himself as the heir to Domitian, who had had the obelisk brought to Rome and erected in the Agonale Circus, where the most spectacular games and theatricals had been staged. At some point in the reign o f Maxentius the column had been removed and in the seventeenth century lay prostrate and broken on the Via Appia near the monument o f Cecilia Metella. After going to see it in the spring o f 1647, Inno­ cent conceived its triumphal return and re-erection as a conversion ritual that would transform the pagan stadium into a sacred theater.87 Borromini’s pro­ jected Church o f Sant’Agnese (converting the pagan A gonale into the Chris­ tian Agnes) as well as the construction o f a great fountain, would complete this marriage between a princely Baroque cour d ’honneur and a sacred open-air theater. So the ensemble o f basilica-obelisk-fountain-palace would, in effect, constitute the site o f a new papal cathedra, St. Peter’s removed to the Piazza Navona. Even by his own standards o f inventiveness, Bernini’s master-concept was phenomenally bold. It seemed to defy the conventions o f matter, with Domitian’s obelisk set atop a rock that was itself pierced on both axes, almost as if the column had erupted from the stone, cracking its mass as it emerged, but then, like a jet o f water, leaving the realm o f the crag altogether. At its tip, the obelisk was surmounted by a dove holding an olive branch that was simulta­ neously the emblem o f the Pamphilj dynasty and the Holy Ghost. Thus the col­ umn o f the sun, at once light and matter, began in exploding rock and ended in the heavens, with its corporeal substance dissolved into the mystery o f Chris­ tian triumph. As if this were not enough, Bernini turned conventional fountain design upside down, both conceptually and structurally. Where fountains were assumed to situate mass in a solid-block base with jets o f water rising above it, Bernini concentrates all the kinetic energy in the elemental world o f animals, plants, and water in his Edenic rock pool. Above it lie his allegorical rivers, con­ tinuing the motion in titanic twists and turns, gesticulations, and muscular exertions, like the great motions o f the rivers they personify. And, as always with Bernini, the body language is not a mere dumb show. It is an act o f a sacred

Bernini and the Four Rivers

299

mystery, a response to something, and that something is the fixed, unyielding point in the whole tumultuous composition, the immutable obelisk; the ray o f the sun, Sol Invictus, the godhead o f Amun-Ra, the father o f Osiris, the fountainhead o f the whole Egypto-Romano-Christian tradition. N o other artist o f the Baroque approached Bernini’s intensely Catholic yearning for unity. Just as he was forever inventing new ways in which the uni­ fication o f matter and spirit, body and soul, could be visualized and physically experienced, so, as Irving Lavin has memorably demonstrated, he orchestrated his many skills in a uni­ fied

performance;

the

nearest the Baroque came to a sacred Gesam tkunstwerk ,88 In his fountain in the Piazza Navona, the four rivers o f paradise that divided the world are brought back to their single mysterious source: the rock o f Creation. Art

G . B. F alda, T h e F ou n tain o f

historians have

the F o u r Rivers.

back

and

whether

forth

argued as to

Innocent

X

wanted an expression of the global triumph o f his pontificate over the four continents

and

their

pagan cults.89 But this seems to sell short the subdety and seriousness o f the pope’s governing idea for the monument. It seems probable, for example, that Innocent, in common with many o f his contemporaries, was versed in the new generation o f Egyptology that had followed Sixtus V ’s obeliscomania. N ew finds o f Pharaonic and Ptolemaic antiquities had been made at the end o f the sixteenth century, and a modern generation o f scholars, such as Mercati and Lorenzo Pignoria, had attempted to make distinctions between authentic Egyptian hieroglyphs

and later, neo-Platonist reconstructions. Bas­

ing their work increasingly on true archaeology and some knowledge o f Egyp­ tian writing given by early church fathers, they were in the process o f turning their back on the fanciful, mystical, allegorical interpretations o f the Hypnerotom achia variety.90

300

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S To decode his obelisk, however, Innocent turned not to scholars work­

ing in this proto-Egyptological discipline, but to an unreconstructed neoPlatonist obsessed with hieroglyphs as an allegorical and esoteric crypt: Athanasius Kircher. At the time o f Innocent’s accession to the papacy, Kircher was a professor o f mathematics at the University o f Rome and an inex­ haustible philologist and geologist. He had a genuine knowledge o f Coptic and had published the first grammar o f that language and believed he could extend this expertise into decoding the hieroglyphs on the Pamphilj obelisk. Kircher’s Obeliscus Pam philius was the first o f a whole series o f publications claiming to reveal, at last, the wisdoms o f ancient Egyptian religion and phi­ losophy through its writing.91 Erik Iversen has lamented the long tradition which has made Kircher “the whipping boy o f Egyptology, his Egyptological lifework censured and ridiculed and he hii denounced as a fraud and a humbug.”92 A while his decoding has turned out to b< spurious, it is quite true that in terms o f his conviction that the hieroglyphs were

Athanasius

a Hermetic symbolic code embodying

Kircher.

certain cosmic relationships and affini­ ties, his reading had its own inner

I

coherence. Certainly it seemed persua­ sive to two popes (Alexander VII as well as Innocent X), to Bernini, and to a whole generation accustomed to believe that within Egyptian symbol and myth la) embedded universal, even sacred truths. I Kircher was certainly no relativist, but a father, devoted to the supremacy o f Catholic Chris­ tianity. Like Caus, the Huguenot, he did not have a crudely triumphalist view o f the relationship between pagan cults and Christian mysteries. He was much more adamantly committed to the view that the eventual revelation and victory o f Christianity had been prefigured by, and was immanent in, other systems o f belief. Thus its dominant symbols could find meaningful matches in Greek, Egyptian, and even Zoroastrian iconography. The news that in 1618 another Jesuit father, Pedro Pais, had actually visited the source o f the Nile with the emperor o f Ethiopia, assumed to be a Coptic Christian, only added credibility to these assumptions about the global unity o f a world faith. In such an ecumenical cosmology, though the waters o f paradise had indeed divided the world, they retained, at their ultimate source, the fans et origo, an issue from a single indivisible divinity. In Kircher’s world, then, sym-

Athanasius K ircher, plate from Obeliscus

Pamphilius, 1650.

Bernini and the Four Rivers

30 1

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

302

bolic codes disclosed the underlying harmonies that connected what would otherwise appear to be mere collections o f unrelated things— suns, moons, animals, plants, gods. And though it is difficult to trace the exact degree o f closeness between the sculptor and the Egyptologist, something like this belief— the revelation o f divinely ordained unities, tying together the differ­ ent elements o f living creation— is surely the controlling concept behind Bernini’s immense creation. The disposition o f the river personifications reflect these connections. So although the Danube carries with it the papal arms and the rushing horse, allud­ ing to the alliance, during the Thirty Years’ War, between the Church o f Rome and the Holy

Roman

Empire (with its center in Habsburg Vienna), it can only be seen with either

the

Nile,

the

source o f Kircher’s Her­ metic code, or the Rio de la Plata, the site o f the Counter-Reformation’s latest mission o f conver­

Bernini and

sion. And since the four

w o rksho p,

rivers symbolize the four continents o f the world (as well as, perhaps, the four elements), Europe is thus situated between the ancient site o f its wis­ doms in Africa, and the new world o f its proselytism in America.93 Although

four

of

Bernini’s assistants, Raggi, Fancelli, Claude Poussin, and Baratta, sculpted, respectively, the Danube, Nile, Ganges, and Bio de la Plata, they were merely the faithful executors o f Bernini’s own designs, worked into models. In the year and a half that followed his first drawings, Bernini trans­ formed his vision o f the figures. They no longer followed the conventional reclin­ ing pose o f the antique figures reproduced in most river-fountain sculptures, but instead responded dramatically to the ultimate source o f creation: the finger o f solar light radiating down the obelisk. The Nile’s head remains veiled to emphasize the mystery o f its, and the world’s source, while its animal attributes, like the crocodile, paddle the water below. But both the Danube and the Rio de

F ountain o f the F ou r Rivers, detail, D anu be.

Bernini and the Four Rivers

303

la Plata attest in their gestures to the irradiating brilliance o f the light o f faith. The head o f the Rio de la Plata is startlingly

different

from

any

fountain statuary that had gone before, and, while visi­ Bernini and workshop, Fountain o f the Four Rivers, Nile.

bly negroid in some features, seems also to be a prototype for the bust o f Constantine that Bernini would produce later. I f this is in fact the case, the theme o f conversion by the

overpowering

light

of

faith runs through both proj­ ects. As for the Ganges, the least animated o f the group, the tradition credited by trav­ ellers like Felix Fabri made it one o f the four rivers men­ tioned in Genesis, and thus connected

through

the

Edenic source with the other sacred world streams. Bernini was not con­ tent with a formal allegori­ cal grouping. From the huge slabs o f travertine, worked on site, he created a whole Bernini and

organic world,

workshop,

light, water, and air and the

alive with

Fountain o f

forms o f animals and plants:

the Four Rivers,

in effect, a grotto o f the

Rio de la Plata.

original source, turned inside out. Even the force o f a rush­ ing wind is present, blowing through the palm tree that, along with the crocodile, was one o f the standard attri­ butes o f the Nile and which Bernini

himself

probably

carved. As we have already

304

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

seen, a tradition handed down by Pliny among others made the date palm

Bernini and

symbolically interchangeable with the phoenix, as a tree believed to be vir­

w o rksho p,

tually immortal, an icon that was adopted by the early Christian Coptic, Syr­

Fountain o f

iac, and Egyptian churches as the primary form o f the cross, the site o f resurrection and renewal. At the rock-source, then, the Edenic grotto flow­ ing with light, air, and water, the beholder witnessed less a scene o f confes­ sional triumph, courtesy o f the Pamphilj pope, than a great synthesis o f matter and spirit, nature and faith, pagan and Christian cults; the mysterious transmutation o f one cosmology into another. The construction o f the Fountain o f the Four Rivers continued through the Holy Year o f 1650, with workmen busy not only carving but gilding the papal arms, coloring the palm tree and lilies. Shordy before its completion, the pope made an inspection along with a large retinue and asked Bernini if he

the F ou r Rivers, the G anges and palm tree.

Bernini and the Four Rivers

305

would turn on the water supply. Typically, the artist refused, claiming he had not been given enough notice, but as Innocent was about to leave, according to Baldinucci, “ he heard a loud sound o f water” and, turning round, saw it “ gushing out in great abundance.” A t that time it was surely the greatest water spectacle in any urban space in Europe: the ultimate consummation, not merely o f papal Rome’s hydraulic revival but o f the entire tradition o f fluvial vitality. Perhaps it was in the spirit o f paternal refreshment that a year later, in 1652, Innocent inaugurated the cus­ tom o f the p ia zz a alla gata , by opening the sluices at the base o f the fountain in the burning, dusty month o f August and allowing the waters o f the Acqua Vergine to flood the square. It was, in the first place, a boon to the parched throats and bodies o f the citizenry, but before long (and for two centuries) a Engraving o f the Piazza Navona Allagata, Giuseppi Vasi, Magnificenze

ritual had been created by which the most splendid carriages o f the Roman nobility would process through the waters, the horses splashing about the ancient stadium to the cheers o f the crowds. But when Innocent bid the waters rise in the long oval o f the Piazza Navona, he was, in effect, finally baptizing the pagan Circo Agonale, creating a sacred

di Roma antica e moderna,

river in the heart o f Rome, a stone’s throw from the Tiber bend.

1752, vol. II.

away, the Ottoman viceroys o f Egypt were performing the ancient ceremony

And did he know that at almost the very same time, thousands o f miles

306

S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

o f cutting the Nile dike at Cairo? It was a modern embankment, built to con­ tain the rising waters until cultivation had prepared their fields to receive the floodwaters. A little truncated cone o f earth, customarily known as “ the bride o f the earth,” a miniature Isis pyramid, had been built beside the dike, and propitiatory offerings o f millet and corn were strewn over it in offering to the goddess o f fertility. Some traditions called for a virgin, bedecked in muslin and flowers, to be thrown into the river, to re-enact with her body the union o f the fertile earth-goddess with Osiris. So while Bernini’s waters played around the Piazza Navona, workmen arrived to slowly breach the last retaining dike o f the Nile, and when only a final ridge remained, a boat with an officer aboard was propelled toward it, breaking the barrier. The little craft, like a waterborne coffin, carrying with it ancient mysteries o f vitality and mortality, flood and abundance, descended with a sudden rush into the new irrigation canal. And as it passed his elaborately decorated barge, the viceroy o f Cairo would toss a purse o f gold while his servants tried to stop swimmers from drowning in an attempt to catch the glittering coin; wealth and death, blood and water com­ mingling as they had forever in the human memory o f the meandering river.

CHAPTER

SIX

Bloodstreams

i

Sir Water Ralegh Loses His Drift

I t was the flirting queen, much taken with her own wit, who called him “Water.” So greedy was her thirst for Ralegh’s company that his distracted rival at court, Christopher Hatton, was driven to communicate his despair in the form o f a conceit. Three objects were presented to Elizabeth: a bucket, by which she was to understand her “water” ; a book, within which Hatton declared his torment in a pleasing trill o f desperation; and a bodkin, to use on his own breast should the queen persist in favoring Sir Walter Ralegh.1 So it pleased Her Majesty to relent, an economical note o f tenderness sounding through the royal decree. Peace, Sir Christopher, she allowed, “ there shall be no more destruction by water.” Self-destruction, though, was another matter. In the reign o f James I, when Ralegh was confined in the Tower (for thirteen years), it was commonly agreed that it had been his abundance o f sanguine, as much as the stratagems o f the envious, that had been the ruin o f him. For whatever view was offered on the poet-soldier-courtier, no one was likely to suggest that his humors were governed by bile or by phlegm. O f choler, Ralegh doubdess had an ample share, and if crossed, he could be transported with alarming rage. But it was 307

BLOODSTREAMS

308

sanguine— the quality that m ade him by turns am iable, u rgen t, fanciful, e lo ­ q u en t, w ilfu l, extravagant, reckless, infatuated, o bstinate, m en dacious, the san­ g uine that coursed abo u t the tubes and runnels o f his bo d y— that com m anded his action. T h a t it stoked the heat o f his energies was evid ent from the w ay his sw arthy beard and m ustachios curled o f their o w n accord , like paper before a fire. S o it was no surprise, h o w ever disagreeable, to view his face th ro u g h a mask o f dirty w hite sm oke, as the D ev il’s lea f sm ou ld ered in his stinking pipe. San­ guine had landed the bo y Ralegh in the F leet and the M arshalsea for brawls and duels. It fuelled the gro w n m an’s n o torio us lust, bu rn in g in the bed o f the q u e en ’s m aid-in-w aiting, Bess T h ro ck m o rto n , w ith a heat that m ade ashes o f R a le gh ’s place at co u rt. B u t w h enever disaster k n o ck ed him d o w n , up he rose again, like the Phoen ix o f his o w n verse, borne aloft, his dam nable optim ism bu b b lin g away in the blo od . Yet the q u e en ’s jest was nicer than she m eant, for R a legh ’s c o m ­ b ustible personality was indeed the p ro d u ct o f w ater tou ch ed by fire, just like the rites o f Isis and O siris, described in his co py o f P lutarch’s M oralia. A n d if his energies w ere steam -driven, like the

hydraulic

m achines o f A lexandria,

it was

alo n g rivers that he propelled his fortun es. H ad he n o t, follo w in g Plato, Seneca, and W illiam C axto n ’ s

M irrou r

of

the

World,

pro n o u n ced on the natural co rre­ spond ence betw een the channels that flo w ed abou t the b o d y o f man and those that w atered the earth? O u r “ b lo o d w h ich disperseth itse lf by the branches o r veins th ro u g h all the b o dy, m ay be resem bled to these w aters w h ich are carried by bro o ks and rivers overall the e a rth .” 2 A n d just as he b elieved h isto ry itse lf to be bo rn e a lo n g the cu rrents o f rivers, so there w as, he th o u g h t, a fluvial tide to his o w n fortun es. R alegh had g ro w n up by the banks o f the D evo n ian E x, th ro w in g stones w ith his half-brothers, the G ilberts, and his cousins, the G orges. A n d he should have end ed things peacefully in his park at Sherbo rn e, w here the litde Y eo ran th ro u g h grazin g m eadow s like the brooks o f o ld Arcady. B u t tw o o th er great floods had carried him o ff, as if in co n fluen t conspiracy. It was in his turreted ch am ber in D urh am H o u se o v erlo o k in g the T ham es that he first envisioned the great project o f the G uiana rivers, the w ater-road that w o u ld carry him

A n on ym ou s, portrait o f Sir W alter Ralegh.

Sir Water Ralegh Loses His D rift

309

directly to El Dorado: a place where the riverbed danced in the ripple o f gold light, and handsome fish caught the luster in their scales.3 In 1586 the Spanish governor o f Patagonia, the explorer-conquistador Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, was captured by one o f Ralegh’s privateers. And while he sat in a bare chamber in Plymouth, stoically awaiting his repatriation, Sarmiento de Gamboa decided to put a spell on his captor. The spell was a story and here is how it ran. Eighteen years earlier, the soldier Pedro Maraver de Silva had undertaken to find the land settled by fugitive Inca, somewhere east o f the Cordillera and north o f Peru. The journey was a stupendous undertaking covering many hun­ dreds o f miles o f brutal terrain, the worst that mountain, forest, or dust plain could offer. Somewhere among the drain o f tributaries that fed the upper Ama­ zon in the grasslands o f thc g r a n llano, the expedition had finally come to grief, dividing its survivors into small bands o f desperates. In one such company was a munitions man, like all his company from the badlands o f Spanish Estremadura, and called Juan Martin de Albujar. When the powder remaining to his band exploded, leaving them without shot, he was punished for his neg­ ligence by being set adrift in a rotting skiff somewhere in southern Colombia. The river, thick with cayman and anaconda, took him north and east. With his boat beaten by tropical tempests, his plight became pitiful. On the verge o f starving to death, Martin was captured by Indians. With a blindfold on his eyes, he was led mile upon mile farther upstream into the heart o f the river forest. When his sight was restored to him, it was immediately blinded again by the radiance that shone out from the jungle gloom: gold on the skin o f a great chief; gold on the glistening bodies o f his warriors; gold glowing from the arms and legs and breasts o f the Indians, from the temple vessels and statues; gold that seemed to throb from the rocks beneath his feet. He had found El Dorado. The spell worked. Ralegh was bewitched, for the rest o f his life, by what the Spanish themselves called engaho, the hot mist o f hallucination that could swal­ low reality. The truth about Martin’s fate was fantastic enough without embel­ lishment. As the sole survivor o f Maraver’s expedition, he had lived for twenty years, clad only in red and black tribal daubs, had taken Indian wives, learned their tongue, their art o f hunting, the secrets o f their poisons and physics, and the dangerous caprices o f their gods. But in the truly ensorcelled world o f tribal, Habsburg Spain, Martin had to be assigned the more glamorously epic role o f the Man W ho Met El Dorado. For El Dorado was a person, not a place. He was, literally, “ the Gilded O ne,” the native prince whose body was anointed with oil and then rolled in the gold dust that carpeted his dominion. Spanish fantasies o f an auric Cockayne were as old as the Conquest itself, a mess o f fables that confused Ovid’s lost A ge o f Gold with the craving for biteproven yellow metal. And since all the gold o f the Inca seemed barely enough to satisfy a few hundred Spanish soldiers, convictions multiplied promising an

BLOODSTREAMS

3 10

infinity o f bullion. Any stories related by the Indians themselves o f warriors crowned with parrot feathers or sporting golden pectorals were immediately taken as confirmation o f the travellers’ tales. And the discovery that the Guayana Caribs on the Caroni did indeed wear golden ornaments and would even trade some o f the pieces, made the possibility o f finding some great mine as the source o f the ore virtually irresistible.4So whether El Dorado was a place, a person, or a mine graduallybecame immaterial. Over the mountains and up the rivers went expedition after expedition; Spanish, Flemish, and German (working for the banking house o f the Welsers), each wrecked in its own way, some broken as they tried to ride the churning falls, others patiendy roasted on the scalding aridity o f the llano, others still smothered in velvet darkness as the creeping forest closed about them.5 In

fact there

had been enough disasters for a strain of

skepticism

to

establish itself even in

imperial

during third

Spain

the o f the

last six­

teenth century. But Ralegh, who

had

got much glory but little

gold

crusades the

in his against

Spanish,

was

deaf to dissuasion. He knew that an old soldier, Antonio de Berrio, who had himself launched two expeditions up the Orinoco, had established a fort on the island o f Trinidad, guarding the mouth o f the river. Apparendy, Berrio had been told by Caribs that there were men arrayed in crimson dwelling in the lake city called “Manoa,” somewhere in the Guiana Highlands beyond the junction o f the Orinoco with its tributary the Caroni. His conviction that he was within reach o f the realm o f gold had been so strong that on his second expedition Berrio had ordered the slaughter o f all the troop’s horses so that his men would have no exit except by water. But nothing yet had come o f all this ferocious deter­ mination. And the old man still sat and waited on his fever-ridden island, leashed to his poverty like a mad and hungry dog, ready to attack any who tres­ passed on his route.6 In his tower study in Durham House, Ralegh pored over charts showing Manoa as a lake island (topography borrowed from Aztec Tenochtitlan, nomenclature from the Amazon region o f Manaus), situated somewhere

Thomas Hariot, map of “Manoa" and its lake, from L. Hulsius, Travels, 1599.

Sir Water Ralegh Loses His D rift

3 11

between the Orinoco and the Amazon rivers. From his lofty vantage point on the north bank, where the Thames made a snaking, southern bend, Ralegh could survey the progress o f empire: the dipping oars o f the queen’s state barge as it made its way from Greenwich to Sheen; bunched masts o f pinnaces and carracks swaying at their berths; broad-sterned Dutch fly boats bouncing on the dock-tide; wherries taking passengers to the Southwark theaters; the whole humming business o f the black river. But through the miry soup o f refuse that slapped at his walls, Ralegh could see the waters o f the Orinoco, as seductively nacreous as the pearl he wore on his ear. Perhaps he imagined himself victori­ ous, vindicated, restored to favor, laying the tribute o f El Dorado at the feet o f Cynthia-Artemis-Isis-Elizabeth as if he were again playacting some ingratiating masque. The seat f o r your disport shall be O ver some river in a tree Where silver sand a n d pebbles sing E tern a l d itties with the sp r in g . .. F a la la, la la But his venture would warrant anthems, hosannas. Beside the treasure o f El Dorado all the marvels o f the Virginia plantation would seem but paltry gar­ dening. The potent Thames would embrace the fertile Orinoco, “ a maydenhead never sackt,” and its fruit would be a Great British Guyana. Ralegh and his fellowship o f geographers— Dr. Dee, Thomas Hariot, and the Balliol Latinist Laurence Keymis— had figured the Orinoco as a roadstead to fortune, an artery o f power. To discover that it was, in fact, not a cornucopiabearing Acheloiis, but Meander— a snaking beast o f indirection— would pro­ duce unease, and then, in short order, disorientation followed by consternation. Yet it was not as if he had set out for the journey ill-prepared. His captain, Jacob Whiddon, had returned from a reconnoitring trip to Trinidad confirm­ ing the truth o f Berrio’s fort, not least from the brisk attack he had received from its soldiers. And the papers o f another Spanish river explorer who had claimed to have seen the very ramparts o f El Dorado rising above the waters had also fallen into English hands. O n arriving at Trinidad, in April 1595, Ralegh wasted no time doing what he did well: attacking the Spanish garrison and capturing its commander, the septuagenarian Berrio. Whether it was from exhausted resignation or (as Ralegh liked to suppose) because he responded to the knighdy magnanimity o f his captor, Berrio confirmed the location o f “Manoa” upstream on the Caroni. Perhaps, too, Berrio’s ostensible fatalism was seasoned by anticipation o f the privations that would be Ralegh’s lot, just as they had been his.

BLOODSTREAMS

3 12

Trials there were in every imaginable form, so that the journey upstream became a kind o f fluvial pilgrimage, led by the waterborne knight-errant: a Quixote in a shallop. Or at least so it appears from Ralegh’s own account, pub­ lished on his return as The Discoverie o f the large, rich a n d b e autifull Em pire o f G u ia n n a , with a relation o f the g re a t a n d g olden citie o f M anoa (which the Spaniards ca ll E l D orado).7 O f course he had discovered no such thing. Nor had he returned with treasures such as would guarantee the good graces o f the queen. All that he had to show were some lumps o f spar, bearing traces o f gold, as proof that he had approached the very threshold o f El Dorado. Yet Ralegh’s first journey to Guiana did indeed produce gold: not the clinking metal o f his dreams, but a breathtaking narrative; the prototype o f all imperial upstream epics. It was, o f course, packed with lies, boasts, fables, and fancies, and Ralegh’s decision to pass o ff stories o f men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders was an instance o f his poetic sanguine once more get­ ting the better o f him. But the power and persuasiveness o f the epic lay in its candid recitation o f ordeals, as well as breathless ejaculation at wonders. Though in some details and structure it may have been based as much on the Spanish account o f one o f Berrio’s subalterns, Domingo de Vera, as Ralegh’s actual experience, the poet-warrior gave the text a voice that was wholly his own. And for better or worse, it passed down time like driftwood, as the myth o f thwarted imperial penetration, fetching up again in the imaginations o f Alexander von Humboldt, Joseph Conrad, John Huston, and many many more pilots o f delusion. Like all great poetic myths, Ralegh’s established definite stations o f the journey. First is the barred highway; then (station 2) the treacherous byway. Surviving these ordeals, the company o f knights arrives (station f ) at the gates o f tropical arcadia and is nourished by native hospitality. But they are still barely at the gates o f the Golden City, o f which {station 4 ), through the rushing spray o f impassable waterfalls, they barely attain a mocking glimpse as the rising, rushing waters bear them back to their starting point, clutching the talismans o f their quest: the glinting rocks o f spar. Or so structuralist lit. crit. would have it. Within Ralegh’s creeper-stran­ gled, monster-bloated, erotically lubricated, filmy, floating world, things are altogether more marvellous. And what the discoverers discover, right away, is that the great river is not for their taking. Instead it takes them. A t its mouth, the captain beholds his first wonder: oysters growing on trees. N o matter that these are mangroves with their tortuous roots planted in the water; such miracles augur wonders to come. Yet even before they have set o ff upstream, the conquerors are made to seem vulnerable. Reassuring com­ parisons between the estuary mouth and the breadth o f the Thames at Wool­ wich are made. But the pilotage very soon proves a great deal trickier. For the draught o f the Orinoco delta was so shallow that it precluded travelling in the

Sir Water Ralegh Loses His D rift

3 l 3

large vessels. The hundred men o f Ralegh’s band were thus distributed between five open boats, all powered by oars. The most imposing o f the boats was a con­ verted Spanish galley, but the commander himself took up position in a shal­ lop that held only ten men. Yet even these litde craft have difficulty in finding their way in the treacherous streams o f the delta, navigating between sandbars and then through the mud-clogged, liana-choked waterways, hopelessly bewil­ dered about the route to the Orinoco proper. Provisions dwindle and rot in the suppurating heat. Occasionally the men let o ff some shot with their fowling pieces directed at the brilliant, taunting birds and shrieking, crested monkeys that dart about the immeasurably high branches o f the trees. When heron and parrot are taken, they are gratefully and greedily devoured. But for the most part the men subsist on fish hauled from the rust-brown river. Though they are loath to swallow its waters, and their gul­ lets gag at the effort, they must do so in their plight. And even as they cast their lines, they are shiveringly aware o f the commonwealth o f terrors mobilized beneath the surface: serpents thirty feet long; great toothed la g a rto s(alligators) and sharp-snouted g u u ia n s (cayman) whose thrashing tails send the frail craft pitching wildly. O n the banks from time to time appear strange beasts that they suppose to be part pig, part deer, part giant cony. Attempts to slay them are comical. The shot falls uselessly into the water and the tapir and coati and capybara either disappear abrupdy behind the screen o f vegetation or else raise a contemptuous gaze and return to lapping the water. Sometimes it seems as if they are drowning in the very air; such is the weight o f its saturation. A week into these cursed waters and they start to mold and stink like rancid whey. Their English broadcloth glues itself to their bod­ ies, yet it is not stout enough armor against the stiletto-thrusts o f voracious mosquitoes and the industrious burrowing o f chiggers beneath their grimy der­ mis. Though the enclosing canopy chokes out the air, there is sun enough to scorch their necks and wrists so that their skin stripes with burns as if raked with martyrs’ coals. They are too hot to tell if they have fever. But they all shake and tremble with the river-palsy, rowing blind, their lids and corneal jelly stinging with sweat. In their wretchedness, they are sustained by alternations o f cursing and prayer. They piss into the river as if their waters might kill the malevolent Orinoco. And when the heat relents in the evening darkness, they evacuate their loathing and wrath in wild brawling, the oafish roaring answered antiphonally by the howling o f monkeys and syncopated with the juddering flight o f vampire bats. Then, an apparition: a flash o f paddles in the haze; a pursuit, a capture. Threatened, the Indian promises to take them to a village where they may get succor and thence to the true Orinoco. But he tells them they must divide their litde fleet, for only the small boats will pass through the shallow, narrow pas­ sages. After horns o f diligent rowing and poling through the viscid ooze, the

BLOODSTREAMS

3 14

men suspect foul play, perhaps the plot o f an upstream Spanish encampment. Ralegh would as good have hanged the native, as his men swore he should. But it was pitch-black night and the dread o f the forest was worse than the fear o f betrayal. At the point o f despair they are, o f course, saved. The village is found; fire in the darkness. The English are well treated and provendered, and in the morning their eyes are blessed by a landscape o f salvation, the open grassy plains o f the llano stretching down to the riverbank: some o f the most beautiful countrey that ever mine eyes beheld, and wherwithal that we had seen before was nothing but woods, prickles, bushes and thornes, here we beheld great plains o f twenty miles in length, the grasse shorte and greene and in divers parts groves o f trees by themselves as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world.8 Arrived at this equatorial arcadia, nature becomes suddenly less forbidding. Deer, as if charmed, approach their craft; the fish miraculously grow (or shrink) to edible proportions; enormous butterflies, as intensely blue as lapis lazuli, flit about their heads, dainty aerial masquers. Even the discovery that death is indeed also in Arcady, when one o f their company is eaten by a lagarto, fails to affect their transformation from hapless orphans o f the stream to sanguine-rich, dauntless voyagers. The further upriver they go, the more noble the natives appear, jadeite spleen stones plugging their upper lips, their torsoes less stunted, their spears and blowpipes more forbidding, as if in promise o f a true warrior-aristocracy in the Manoan heardand. And it is not just the men but the women whom Ralegh, the fabled satyr, the love poet, caresses with his anthro­ pology: “very young and excellendy favored which came to us without deceit starke naked.” And further on, lodged in the hut o f a chief, he drowns in admi­ ration o f the man’s wife: In all my life I have seldome seen a better favored woman. She was o f good stature with black eyes, fat o f body, o f an excellent countenance, her hair almost as long as her selve, tied up again in prettie knots and seemed she stood not in awe o f her husband as the rest for she spake and discoursed and dranke among the gentlemen and captaines and was very pleasant knowing her own comeliness and taking great pride therein. I have seen a lady in England so like her as but for the differ­ ence o f colour I would have sworne might have been the same.9 What memories was Ralegh combing for such a comparison, seeing that his copper Amazon was, o f course, naked? And in any event, the lover was deci­

Sir Water Ralegh Loses His D rift

3 l 5

sively curbed (so he tells us) by the responsibilities o f the knight, the protector, the Protestant. Nothing got us more love than thus usage, for I suffered not anye man to take from any o f the nations so much as a Pina [pineapple], or a Potato roote without giving them contentment, nor any man so much as to offer to touch any o f their wives or daughters which course, so contrarie to the Spaniards (who tyrannize over them in all things), drew them to admire her Majestie whose commandment I told them it was and also wonderfully to honor our nation.10 What better pioneer o f the repression o f the British imperial libido than its most famous Elizabethan fornicator: the Great Lucifer commissioned to fight against Sin! Strategic virtue seemed to pay off. A t the junction o f the Orinoco and the Caroni, Ralegh was presented with gold-plated gifts— pineapples and armadillo— by the old chief Topiawari, who appeared in a macaw-plumed crown, as though posing for an allegorical print o f America. To Ralegh’s delight, he delivered himself o f a tirade against the cruelties o f the Spanish and, still better, between much humming and clicking o f his tongue and shaking o f his head, spoke o f an upstream people, crimson-caped and formidably armed, who had descended down the Caroni to conquer local tribes. Thus El Dorado crooked his wicked finger in their direction, beckoning always upstream. Within sight o f the Guiana Highlands, the landscape turned into the suburbs o f Eden. Crane and flamingo rose from the water in dense clouds o f carnation and white, “ and every stone we stooped to take promised silver or gold.” 11 Yet even as they were scrabbling amidst the pebbles and pan­ ning the waters with outspread fingers and palms, the river was beginning to mutiny against their good fortune. Rains o f a torrential power crashed down on them like siege mortar. The river rose alarmingly, tossing the boats help­ lessly between needle-sharp rocks. And at the back o f the din was a yet more monstrous clamor, “ as if a thousand great belles were knoct against one another.” Around a bend the campanile that tolled the death o f their hope reared monstrously above them, “ like a Church towre o f exceeding height” : a colossal waterfall dropping great curtains o f foam down sheer walls o f brutal black rock. It was the cascade o f which old Berrio had spoken, the highest falls ever seen by man, a barrier that had defeated the concupiscent, larcenous Span­ ish and would inflict the same fate on the knights o f the Virgin Queen. In its waters, Berrio had told Ralegh, were to be found diamonds and other precious gems. But none among the crew dared trust their lives to so rash a gamble. The dispirited expedition returned downstream, its luggage heavier with stories than treasure. The Discoverie, together with the enticing maps drawn by

BLOODSTREAMS

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Thomas Hariot, was completed in record time, by November 1595. But though it was an immediate sensation, it did nothing to rouse the “ blockish and sloth full” spirits who were no more prepared to credit Ralegh’s claim that he had actually found El Dorado than his accompanying descriptions o f Ama­ zon warriors, as adamant in their habits as their Hellenic ancestors, though with their left breasts happily intact. As for the queen, her attention seemed else­ where, indeed wherever the earl o f Essex might also be. Undaunted by his indif­ ferent reception, Ralegh sent Laurence Keymis o ff on a further exploratory voyage around the Guiana coast. But even his additional relation o f the “Sec­ ond Voyage to Guiana” failed to rally the opinion and, more important, the funds needed to sustain a major new expedition. Before very long, Ralegh’s prospects o f realizing his fantastic dream disap­ peared into a prison cell. In 1603 Elizabeth died at Richmond, and Ralegh saw her coffin borne on the state barge to Whitehall. Her successor, James, lost no time in registering his displeasure at Ralegh’s doting loyalty and, in the same year, managed to have him implicated in a treason plot. Evidence o f any direct role in the Lady Arabella Stuart conspiracy was negligible, but, hungry for con­ victions, Lord Chief Justice Coke had ruthlessly extracted from one o f the plotters, and an erstwhile friend o f Ralegh’s, Lord Cobham, a statement of incrimination. Panicky lies, and stuttering retractions from Ralegh’s own mouth gave the suspicions weight where there had been only malevolent spec­ ulation. Condemned to execution and brought to the scaffold on Tower Green, Ralegh was reprieved at the last moment by the king’s magnanimous clemency. The view from Durham House was exchanged for a two-room apartment in the Bloody Tower. As incarcerations go, it could have been worse. Ralegh had the company and comfort o f his wife, Bess, visits from his children, and servants (including his waterman) to bring him necessities. He also had a view o f the river from his walk on St. Thomas’s Tower, and though his temperament scarcely fitted him for a life o f stoical immobility, he settled into an entirely new and reflective character. Slandered as an atheist, a diabolist, an accomplice o f darkness, he began to don the persona o f the magus; his prison a W underkam m er o f arts, both healing and philosophical; alembics, retorts, and tot­ tering folio volumes lining the damp walls. From his empirical knowledge of the Orinoco basin— its roots, its minerals, its waters— Ralegh concocted a new physic, better than gold. There was a stone which, when clenched properly, could make a man piss blood and so relieve his costive sanguine. There was the Guiana Balsam, and above all there was the Great Cordial, said to have been brewed from forty substances that included ambergris, red coral, and powder o f pearl. The potion became so renowned that Queen Anne herself sent from her little white house at Greenwich for a flask, and began to visit the man her husband had condemned as a traitor. Her son, Prince Henry, the flower o f

Sir Water Ralegh Loses His D rift

3 l 7

Protestant chivalry and an avid devotee o f Learning, became an acolyte o f Ralegh’s until he died o f a fever after swimming the Thames. In extremis, even the king consented to have the prince treated with the Guiana Balsam, though Ralegh warned that it would not prevail against any kind o f poisoning. But the association o f the prince with the old Elizabethan lasted long enough to transform Ralegh’s fortunes. In 1608 he even sponsored a new expe­ dition to Guiana to re-establish contact with the Indians and to scout Spanish positions. Tw o years later he was among those supporting Thomas Roe’s voy­ age to the eastern coast, venturing up the Wiapoco to see if there were not a back-door route to El Dorado. And while the map that he, Keymis, and Hariot had drawn was now laced with tributaries o f the Amazon, as well as the Orinoco, running in every direction, Ralegh turned his mighty imagination to the great flow o f time, nothing less than the History o f the World entire. Eight volumes took him only to 168

B .C .,

but this was enough, more

than enough, to establish his Grand View: an extraordinary pottage o f Aristotelian Frontispiece from Ralegh,

philosophy,

Lucretian

cosmology, learned scriptural exege­ sis, antiquarian ancient history (from

Newes o f Sir

Creation to the Punic Wars), and

Walter Ralegh,

exacting geography. Its tone is both

London, 1618.

rational and fantastic, humanist and metaphysical. Ralegh can scoff at the foolish tradition that believed the river called Pison in Genesis to be the Ganges, but he can assert, as if selfevident, that the founder o f Egypt, known

as

“ Mizraim,”

from

the

Hebrew word for the country, was in fact Osiris, who in turn was descended from Noah through the line o f Ham. Above all, he wants to give sacred topog­ raphy the linear clarity o f an explorer’s map. Armed with one o f these maps, a traveller could in fact find his way to the original Eden, somewhere, Ralegh was sure, in Mesopotamia. O f course the garden had deteriorated since Adam’s day, not to mention the universal Deluge. But Ralegh still provided his maps, laced with rivers, for it was still rivers— from the beauteous Indus to the Ethiopian Nile— that obsessed him.12 It was as though, between the Thames and the Orinoco, he finally under­ stood how the waters o f Eden had flowed through history, through the terri­ tory o f humanity; how they had irrigated empires and flooded their ruins. He understood, too, the essential distinction between nature’s circulation o f

BLOODSTREAMS

3 18

waters, running to the sea and thence back to the springs, and history’s flow, where the currents were irreversibly linear. Civilization’s course, he wrote, went downstream, away from the Edenic source, so that as it became less innocent and more tidal, the density o f population and the majesty o f state naturally increased. Thus it was with Babylon, thus with Nineveh, and with Egypt. To fight a way upstream, he now realized, was to pursue a sacred mystery: to move back in time toward some sort o f Edenic re-naissance. In Ralegh’s own analogy between the bloodstream o f the body and the waters o f the world, such a voyage was to go to the very heart o f the matter. But it was, alas, as a different kind o f philosopher that the king consented, in 1616, to Ralegh’s release from the Tower, the kind that could magic some­ thing from nothing. What James required, as the price o f Ralegh’s liberty (though not his innocence, for no mention was made o f setting aside his con­ viction), was the key to the realm o f gold, or at the very least a prolific Mine Royal. Should Ralegh succeed, James was the richer; should he fail, the axe would at last rid the king o f this ancient, stubborn inconvenience. Either way, there was much to profit and nothing to hazard. Still, it paid to be prudent. A busybody watch, accountable to the justices, was set to mind Ralegh wherever he went. The old man’s opportunity had only come about through the rise o f a rel­ atively anti-Spanish faction at court: the legacy o f Henry, Prince o f Wales, who had died at the age o f eighteen, robbing his admirers o f hopes o f a brilliant suc­ cession. But James was not so alienated from his old sympathies toward Madrid as to challenge the Habsburg court outright. Pressed by Philip I l l ’s ambas­ sador, the uninhibitedly fanatical count Gondomar, the king strictly forbade Ralegh from initiating any attack on Spanish setdcments in Guiana, and obliged Gondomar even further by secretly supplying exhaustive intelligence on the size, route, and armaments o f the whole expedition. Presumably meant as a gesture o f good faith, it was a folly that probably sealed Ralegh’s fate, since the likelihood o f finding El Dorado without some sort o f armed conflict with the Spanish was nil. Even without this knowledge, Ralegh seemed uncharacteristically somber about his chances. His sanguine was at last running thin; his fire and smoke extinguished in the chill dampness o f the Tower. His hair was gray; his years were three score, and his body was gaunt and stricken. But sober as he had become, he could have had no inkling that the search for the river-gold would yield a horror worthy o f the most dreadful productions o f the Jacobean stage. Already wasted by sickness and death, the expedition led by Ralegh’s flag­ ship, Destiny, arrived at the mouth o f the Orinoco in December 1617. He him­ self was so sick that for once his sanguine failed him. Unable to travel upstream himself, he appointed his old Oxford friend Laurence Keymis, in his office, with strict instructions to search for the mines, to molest no Spanish unless

Sir Water Ralegh Loses His D rift

3 19

molested, to use the Indians well, and to return, if not with all the ore o f El Dorado, then enough samples to maintain their credit with the court. O ff went the Balliol scholar-poet Keymis, Ralegh’s son Wat, his cousin George, and four hundred bravos whom the commander himself characterized, with scant amusement, as “ the scum o f the world.” It was a month later before Ralegh learned o f the sorry debacle that had unfolded at San Tome, the Spanish fort that Berrio had established at the junc­ tion o f the Orinoco and the Caroni. Instead o f sidestepping the garrison, Keymis had led his men right to it, where the soldiers, led by Wat Ralegh, had launched a chaotic night attack. Wat had been killed urging his men on to the stockade in a classic example o f Raleghesque noble futility. Keymis had then occupied the ruined fort with no clue as to how or where to search for the missing Mine Royal. After weeks o f ineffectual scrambling around, the E ng­ lish had burned the fort and retreated wretchedly to the mouth o f the Orinoco with nothing but a piece or two o f gold stolen from the Spanish to show for their pains. Abject, Keymis related the fiasco in all its misery to his captain, adding the wounding information that documents taken from San Tome proved beyond any doubt that the Spanish had been supplied in advance with every detail o f the expedition. Consumed with grief and rage, Ralegh turned on the miserable Keymis. “ I told him he had undone me and that my credit was lost forever,” he wrote to his wife. “ I know then, Sir, what course to take,” Keymis replied, retreating to his cabin. When a shot was heard, Keymis answered through the door that he had shot his pistol into the air. H alf an hour later he was discov­ ered lying in a pool o f blood, a stab wound to the heart providing the coup de grace, pathetically clumsy to the bitter end. Ralegh’s life was done, too. But where would it finish? To return to E ng­ land was to make an appointment with the block. He turned his ships due north toward Newfoundland, until his “scum” made their intention to mutiny so plain that he abandoned his wandering. Landed at Plymouth, the old river rat went through unseemly dramatics to stave o ff the inevitable, feigning madness and finally trying to elude arrest with an abortive flight downstream to the Thames estuary and a ship to France. It was at Greenwich that he was finally arrested, betrayed again by one o f his companions as the king’s boat loomed up astern in the darkness. A t the reach where the river bends again toward the sea, where he had supped with the queen, laid posies o f verse about her person, rejoiced obediendy in her ban­ ter, he was taken, humiliatingly disguised like a low comedian in a villain’s false whiskers. It was at Westminster, rather than the Tower, that he was interrogated, charged, condemned. Yet at the very moment o f death, on the twenty-ninth o f October, 1618, his famous sanguine returned, flowing with disconcerting vital­

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ity. For when, after a forty-five-minute protestation o f innocence, loyalty, and Christian stoicism, and an almost debonair insistence on running his finger on the axe’s edge, his head was struck off, witnesses reported that the unnaturally “large Effusion o f Blood, which proceeded from his Veins, Amazd. the Specta­ tors, who Conjecturd he had stock enough o f Nature to have survived many Years.” 13 Running over the block, it formed little ponds and streams between the cobbles, before draining finally into the moist, Thames-side earth.

ii

The Man in the Brown Paper Boat

The miracle o f it, really, was that it lasted so long. The water to the paper being g o t In one h a lf hour began to rot.14 Three miles further downstream, and the water had risen to their knees. The two boatmen, Roger Bird the vintner and John Taylor the self-designated “Water-Poet,” then tied eight inflated bullock bladders to the sides o f the wherry, and while one rowed, the other baled. Alas, “our rotten bottom all to tatters fell/And left our boat as bottomless as hell.” Somehow, “drenchd with the swassing waves and stewd in sweat,” the two men managed to stagger on in their foundering craft until they could land its remains at Queenborough Castle. Survivors, heroes, they were entertained “ as we had been lords,” though their plan to present the boat to the lord mayor as a Grand Memento came to nought when they discovered that the sodden pieces had been ripped apart by locals, eager to have their own fragment o f History. Nothing, though, could dampen John Taylor’s jubilation that he had Done It Again. The captain o f the Ship o f Fools, prince o f watermen, unstop­ pable rhymer, doggerel philosopher, had fashioned an event. Even by his stan­ dards, it was improbable. His poem on the manifold uses o f hempseed had ended with lines devoted to the stout paper made from its fiber. What better way, then, to celebrate its homely virtues than by making a boat out o f it, and row it down the Thames, using for oars unflattened stockfish tied with pack­ thread to the end o f canes. As usual, Taylor would take subscriptions from gen­ tlemen and commoners alike prepared to make a wager on the venture, which

The Man in the Brown Paper Boat

32 1

monies to be collected should the enterprise succeed. Defaulters (of which there were always many) knew that should they be tempted to perfidy, they would be mercilessly dealt with in the next o f Taylor’s ceaseless run o f publi­ cations.15 Even if he did not quite live up to his own grandiose billing as the boatsman’s bard, John Taylor was not simply some twopenny-ha’penny trickster spawned in the taverns o f Bankside. He was, in his way, truly unique: a self­ invented celebrity, a wicked parodist o f literary pretensions, the vox p o p u li o f the dockyards and alehouses that lined the south bank o f the Thames. The very awfiilness o f his rhymes instandy endeared him to a populace whose tastes were being written o ff as so much ruffian trash by the high-minded likes o f Inigo Jones. A clumsy if passionate royalist pamphleteer who never hesitated to put the Devil’s tongue into the mouths o f the Puritans and parliamentarians he so cordially detested, Taylor was also taken seriously as a guardian o f the rivers, commissioned to present proposals on the cleaning and dredging o f the Thames, Severn, and Avon. “ For as a monument o f our disgraces/The River’s too too fowle in many places.” But most o f all, he was, in the reign o f Kings James and Charles, a bona fide genius at every kind o f publicity. In our own time, he would be recognized, and exploited (though he was no man’s gull), as that most modern phenomenon: the lowbrow Public Talker, irate in his opinions, obstinate in his passions, saucy in their expression, selectively highminded, deeply politically incorrect, hugely entertaining. John Taylor would be (with a little coaching) a Star. None o f these sterling qualities would have revealed themselves to Sir Wal­ ter Ralegh and the earl o f Essex when they took Taylor on the expeditions to Cadiz in 1 596 and to the Azores the year after. He was just one o f the two thou­ sand or so watermen who were mobilized by the navy every summer, suppos­ edly (but not invariably) for the pay o f nine shillings and four pence a month. Taylor had been born in 1580, by the Severn in the cathedral city o f Glouces­ ter, where his father practiced as a barber-surgeon. But it was as a Thames waterman, ferrying passengers between the banks, that he acquired a trade. It was not, as he himself eloquently pointed out in a petition to the king, a good time to be a boatman. There were too many in the craft (though his own fig­ ure o f forty thousand seems fantastic). They had suffered from the encroach­ ments o f wagoners and coachmen and their fares and fees were still prescribed by a tariff that had been set half a century before, in the reign o f Queen Mary. Worst o f all, the construction o f theaters on the relatively polite north bank o f the Thames had robbed them o f a major staple o f their livelihood: the ferrying o f audiences across to the Southwark shows at the Rose, the Globe, and the Hope when the trumpets sounded and the flags waved on the riverbank. So John Taylor decided that the thing for an underemployed, underpaid wherryman to be was a poet. Just how this improbable course suggested itself

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to him we shall never know. Taylor himself waxed allegorical on the subject. Sitting in his boat one night reciting verses from Hero an d Leander (in which swimming, loving, and drowning feature in the tragedy), he was apparendy summoned by the Muse, who called him ashore and had him quaff the trans­ forming Helicon. The self-consciousness with which he depicted himself as the Plain Man drinking deep in Virgil and Ovid would become part o f his adopted role. Yet he took care to emphasize that he was the sculler, not the scholar. For these calculated contrasts between the dry pedant and the fluent rhymer became part o f his public personality. Calling himself the “Water-Poet,” he meant not merely to follow in the wake o f the official men o f letters who had written Thames poems, men such as William Camden and Michael Drayton; his own lines would somehow be more authentically amphibian. While the lyric poets would sing o f the Thames as the silver stream, Taylor, who made his liv­ ing on it, knew it to be toad-brown, and managed to convey its rich coarseness without robbing it o f heroic power. His oar would be his goose quill, Thames water his ink. A s they before these R ivers’ bounds d id show, Here I come after with my pen a n d row.16 In all likelihood Taylor imbibed something from the vitality o f the riverbank culture he claimed was passing away. He was the Jacobean counterpart o f the cabbie Man o f Letters: proudly autodidactic, gossipy, opinionated, addicted to bad jokes and long books, and a litde relendess. It’s not hard to imagine Taylor pulling away from the Whitehall Stairs toward the bear gar­ dens and bawdy houses o f Southwark, looking over his passenger in the slouch hat and millstone ruff and determinedly engaging him in conversation, thrust­ ing on the captive his views on Jonson’s latest play, the number o f carrion horses floating in the water, the temerity o f the king’s adversaries in Parlia­ ment, the relative merits o f ale and sack (on which he counted himself an expert), and finishing the passage off with a few ostentatiously well-chosen gobbets from the Aeneid . Perhaps someone on a fine night crossing laughed loudly enough at one o f his verses to make him believe in his own powers of entertainment. In any event Taylor must have acquired a reputation as something more than the common run o f watermen, however verbose. For in February 1613 he was given the job o f organizing part o f the festivities on the Thames to cele­ brate the marriage o f James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, with Frederick, the elector palatine. This was all the more weighty a responsibility since Elizabeth (and much o f the country) was still in deep mourning for her brother, Prince Henry, who, despite the administration o f Ralegh’s Great Cordial, had expired the previous November. But, as the poets (the real poets, that is) recom-

The Man in the Brown Paper Boat

Frontispiece from A ll the Workes ofJohn Taylor, London (>), 1630.

323

BLOODSTREAMS

324

mended, the betrothed couple had betaken themselves to the willow-wept waters for consolation, and perhaps it was on boat trips upstream to Putney and Hampton Court that Taylor might first have found favor. He also commanded a unique combination o f talents, based on his own experience. From Cadiz and the Azores he knew all about battles, the better to stage a thunderously spectacular mock version. From his dockyard comrades he could, if the coin was sound and the ale copious, muster crews. And his friends and neighbors, the players o f Southwark, could be put to use devising a brilliant piece o f theater. By the late afternoon o f February 11, he had already transformed the whole stretch o f the river between Westminster and the Tower— his stretch o f river— into a huge outdoor water-stage. Above London Bridge (from which the usual quota o f impaled heads had been removed for the festivities), a great throng o f ships and boats, from great pinnaces to little cogs and barges, all decorated and illuminated, rode at anchor. Opposite Whitehall Palace, from which the royal family watched the proceedings, a wood-and-paper version o f the port o f Algiers had been erected. Once dusk had fallen, a part o f Taylor’s “fleet” duly set about firing the lair o f the Mus­ sulman corsairs before the huge crowds gathered at the banks. The fusillades were satisfyingly deafening, the gunpowder copious, the fireworks dazzling, and pieces o f Algiers orange with flame tore into the night sky before floating gently into the Thames. Three days later, on St. Valentine’s Day, Taylor staged another mock ver­ sion o f Lepanto, featuring Turkish galleys and Venetian caravels, with the freely improvised addition o f a fleet o f fifteen English pinnaces deciding the out­ come.17 And whatever Taylor’s directions, the seamen and watermen must have thrown themselves convincingly into the action, since at least one was blinded, another lost his hands, and many more received wounds during the fray. James, the Prince o f Peace, seemed only delighted, not least by having the pseudoTurkish admiral brought to him in chains; the kind o f battle the king liked to fight, and win. It was just as well that Taylor’s watermen were on their mettle since other events were unpredictable. The great masque designed by Inigo Jones and writ­ ten by George Chapman went off well enough. Francis Bacon aimed to out­ shine his rivals by having the masquers o f Gray’s Inn and the Inner Temple arrive for their performance o f The M arriage o f the Thames a n d the R hine, in a flotilla o f illuminated boats. This was accomplished prettily enough, lilting madrigals floating over the candlelit water. But the play then became the vic­ tim o f its overture, as the crowds thronging toward the Whitehall galleries to see the boats trapped the first rank o f spectators attempting to get back to the banqueting hall to see the masque. By the time the traffic was sorted out, the king professed himself too weary to endure yet another entertainment and waved everyone away.18

The Man in the Brown Paper Boat

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Such fiascoes could only have helped Taylor’s reputation as the com­ modore o f river shows. Building on his reputation, he later took charge o f the water processions that celebrated the inauguration o f the lord mayor o f Lon­ don. Yet he evidently aspired to something grander than a reputation for lin­ ing up watermen in the right order; what he truly wanted were the laurels o f literature, a nook on Parnassus. But how to win that renown? From friends like George Wither he knew that nothing was likelier to attract attention than controversy, however spuri­ ously manufactured. For despite its professions o f virtue and refinement, the Jacobean world o f letters, he knew, was still lubricated by the poisoned oil o f malicious envy. So, a year after the water revels, Taylor transferred his skills at mock battle from pinnaces to poetry. H e publicly challenged William Fennor, a rival poet, to a poetry contest on a platform at Bankside, close by the Southwark theaters. A thousand handbills were printed at his expense advertising the contest, whip­ ping up public expectations o f a bardic tournament. The publicity worked only too well. H uge crowds materialized at the site, but the opposition, alas, failed to show. As soon as the crowd realized they were to be denied an afternoon’s bard-baiting, they got ugly and Taylor became the victim o f his own promo­ tion, pelted unmercifully with the usual savory array o f pillory projectiles. Yet he survived the ignominy and the bad eggs and even turned the fiasco to his own purposes by flaying the pusillanimity o f Fennor in another broad­ side. This time, his foe rose to the bait, offering a counter-tirade, and before long Taylor had exactly the public wrangle that he had always wanted. H e then turned to parodying other well-known figures in Jacobean letters like Thomas Coryate, the much-published traveller, as well as stock types whom he partic­ ularly abhorred (Puritans, coachmen, tax collectors, whores). The waterman had turned gadfly and he clearly enjoyed his sting. It may have been his skirmish with Coryate that gave Taylor an even bet­ ter notion. His self-presentation turned on the fancy that somehow he was the authentic yeoman type to which his more literary rivals merely pretended. Thus where Coryate passed o ff his travel writings as intrinsically notable, Taylor would go one better by reinventing the journey (by water or land) as a kind o f adventure in improbability: a Travel-Marvel. Thus he had bills printed up announcing his intention o f travelling from London to Edinburgh with no money to sustain him and a vow to abstain from either begging or thieving. He invited any interested parties to subscribe (or wager) a sum (not less than six­ pence) for the expedition and to pay up on his return. H e was, in effect, tak­ ing a leaf from the book o f all the grandiose colonial and merchant ventures. And after all, a trip from London to Scotland without funds was no less fool­ ish than the organized pursuit o f El Dorado. But with the chastening example o f Ralegh’s misfortunes still fresh in the country’s memory, Taylor decided,

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prudently perhaps, that his Orinoco would stretch from the Cotswolds to the Medway and his El Dorado would be mined from the purses o f London. In fact, Taylor’s journey from London to Scodand reversed the stereotypes o f gold-mad adventuring that lethally wounded Ralegh, even when he was about the king’s business. For the ostentatious poverty and simplicity in which Taylor cloaked himself suggested the innocence o f the medieval palmers, those who, Thoreau would remind us, saun-tered to the Saint-Terre, rather than the impatient greed o f the explorer. Taylor could thus play (and play brilliantly) the three parts o f the Holy Fool, Diogenes-on-the-road, in search o f an Honest Man, and Everyman, sustained by the three cardinal virtues. And the best part o f all was that this selectively assumed role o f modern pilgrim was rich in cash. Not only would he collect his dues on return but the publication o f Taylor’s Penniless Pilgrim age recruited more customers for the next trip. Not that the Water-Poet ever got rich from his travels. But he made a decent livelihood from his cultural invention, and he certainly reaped his small share o f renown. Much grander literary figures like Thomas Dekker were pre­ pared to endorse him, and by the time o f Charles I’s accession in 1625, Taylor had become a man to be reckoned with, at least on the London waterfront. It was precisely because he was the absolute opposite o f the Caroline courtier, someone who had chosen to produce the definitive guide to London pubs and the first comprehensive directory o f carriage services, The C a rrier’s Cosmogra­ phy, as well as popular chronicles o f the kings o f England (beginning o f course with the Trojan Brutus, reputed to have founded ancient Britain), rather than watered-down versions o f Italian court lyrics, that his standing as a royalist polemicist was so strong. And like the notoriously predictable rains o f England, it was always to the rivers that the Gypsy-Sculler returned. O f a ll the elements, the E a rth ’s the worst Because fo r A d a m ’s sinne it was accurst Therefore no parcel o f it w ill I buy B u t on the waterz fo r relief relie}9 Once established as a success, Taylor took the Penniless Pilgrim age to the water, travelling (dangerously as it turned out) by open bark from the mouth o f the Thames, up the eastern coast, to the river Ouse and the city o f York.20 And in an even more celebrated journey he went first from London to Christchurch in the New Forest and thence up the Avon River toward Salis­ bury. On the river-town o f Ringwood he had his little apotheosis when a quar­ tet o f “ His Majesty’s Trumpeters” regaled him with fanfares as he rowed by. For by this time, in addition to all his other roles, Taylor had become accepted as something o f an authority on the economic and social importance o f the

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rivers o f Britain. Though his purpose was still to entertain, he increasingly paid attention to the equation, as he made it, between navigability and prosperity, praising the Dutch whenever he could as the living proof o f such an axiom. Where rivers like the Avon and the Wye were clogged and silted, or where ripar­ ian rights had been privately engrossed, Taylor’s wrath on behalf o f the fluvial commonweal rained down on the culprits, the mightier the better. I truly treat, th a t m en m ay note a n d see W hat blessings navigable rivers are A n d how th a t thousands are debarrd those blessings By few m en ’s a m b itiou s h a rd oppressings.21 N o wonder that, during the 1630s and 1640s, aldermen, mayors, and local gentry made sure they entertained him with royal hospitality, for Taylor’s par­ tiality to the table and indeed to ale and claret was legendary. For all his pious professions against excess, the detailed relish with which he described guzzling and sousing in, for example, The G rea t E a ter o f K e n t, left no doubt about his own appetites. H e may well have been the first to coin the phrase “ the English dyet,” which was, o f course, crammed with good yeoman things, above all pud­ dings (Norfolk dumplings, Gloucester bag puddings, Hampshire hasty pud­ dings, Shropshire pan puddings), sweetmeats, custards, flapjacks, pancakes, fools, kickshaws, and gallimaufries and the harvest o f the waters, oysters, shrimp, fish, and above all else “ the mighty scarlet lobster,” without which Tay­ lor’s accounts o f his feasts always took on a kind o f discontented pallor.22 Drink was another and more complicated matter. The same streak o f disin­ genuousness ran through his copious writing on the subject. For in the same tract in which he railed against the horrid vice o f drunkenness he would offer an entire history and recipe for all known beverages served in the taverns o f the kingdom, not just beer, ale, claret, and sack but bragget, mead, pomperkin, and perry. Yet from his own life with the habitually marinaded fellowship o f water­ men John Taylor drew a solemn conclusion: that the drunkenness o f the nation and the salubrity o f its waters were in exactly reverse correspondence. The more drink circulated through the veins o f the people, the more foul would be the arteries o f their commerce. It was almost as if they had no option but to turn them into pismires. In the year o f King Charles’s crisis, 1645, the ills o f the realm could thus be diagnosed by Taylor as “ the Causes o f the Diseases and Distempers o f this Kingdom, found by Feeling o f her Pulse, Viewing her Urine and Casting her Water.” For the propagandist o f the virtuous kidney, cleansing the waters, making them clear, vigorous, and navigable, was to make a sound royal revolution. So while monarchists and parliamentarians quarrelled over niceties o f liturgy, the legitimacy o f imposts, and the authority o f royal tribunals, Taylor looked

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instead at the bloodstream o f the nation. In his mind’s eye, he saw something unspeakably grand: a great, single watercourse, running from west to east, con­ necting the three great rivers— his native Severn, the Avon, and the Thames— if necessary by portage canals. Had he drawn Leviathan, he would have traced it with Dr. Harvey’s vascular system transposed to the geography o f England: veins, arteries, little capillaries, busy carrying and exchanging the vital sub­ stances o f the body politic. It was not out o f the question that a reader as voracious as Taylor would have known the English translation o f the political theorist Giovanni Botero’s Treatise Concerning the Causes o f the Greatness a n d M agnificence o f C ities, pub­ lished in 1606. Reviving the classical tradition o f geographers like Strabo and Pliny, Botero tried to classify the topographical features that accounted not just for a state’s economy but its polity. Thus Italian turbulence was (in part) accounted for by the violence and unpredictability o f rivers that rose in the Apennines or Dolomites and rushed headlong to the sea. N ot for nothing, he believed, were the Tiber and the Arno notorious among the commonwealth o f waters as watery condottieri, children o f Acheloiis that could bring havoc along with abundance. Their principal defect was that the force o f their flow broke up what Botero’s translator rendered as “sliminesse” : the solute density and surface tension that he believed helped rivers carry maximum cargo-traffic.23 According to Botero, no rivers were more wondrously slimy than those o f Belgica (the Netherlands) and Gallia Celtica (northern France), where the Seine, “a meane river . . . beareth ships o f such bulke and carrieth burdens so great that he that sees it will not believe it.”24 For the most part they were calme and still and therefore they sail up and downe with incredible facilitie . . . by means whereof their course is not violent and they run not between mountains nor yet a short and little way [as in Italy] but many hundreds o f miles through goodly and even plaines.25 There was no arguing the benevolent sluggishness o f meandering, mud­ laden rivers like the Scheldt and the Seine. But along with his fellow river poets Taylor believed no stream was more fruitfully temperate than the Thames. Drayton’s Poly-Olbion summed up their idyll o f the river as the perfect via media, watering The sundry varying soyles, the pleasures infinite (Where heate kills not the cold, nor cold expells the h e a t . . . The Sum m er not too short, the W inter not too long)?6 Much o f this blessed sweetness o f temper could be explained by the river’s course from west to east. For at their origins in the Cotswolds, the tributaries

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o f the Thames, the Isis, and the Tame were “ British” waters, which is to say, mysterious, Celtic-Druidical. Like the Tudor dynasty, they were western-born but made their way toward England, not as conqueror but protector, benefac­ tor, fertilizer. Like as not, John Taylor, whose own life followed the same course from west to east, would have had no trouble in identifying with this trajectory. But by the time he wrote his own allegorical Thames-Isis, the genre o f a river progress, at once geographical and historical, was well established. From the start, the effort by Tudor chroniclers and apologists to create a new patriotic geography had been water-born. John Leland, Henry V H I’s antiquary, inau­ gurated the genre o f the English river poem in 1 545 with his Cygnea C a n tio (Swan Song). With twelve companions, the swan (a bird so powerfully royal that the Crown stricdy reserved to itself the right to kill and eat it) sets o ff from the junction o f the Tame and Isis at Oxford on a downstream progress. O n its way it passes sites that had already become sacred in the mythology o f the Eng­ lish imperium: Runnymede (where the Magna Carta had been signed) for libertas, Windsor (sounding much more imposing as Vindseloricum) for potestas. Eventually, at the union o f the Medway and the Thames, below Deptford, where the swans sail past Albion’s future in the shape o f the new Royal Navy, the birds, like their august sovereign, will expire. But their song was sung not just in elegy but as a gloria for the birth o f a brilliant new epoch through the line o f the Great Harry. Even if Elizabeth had not herself been born at Greenwich, she could hardly have escaped the fluvial line o f power that washed past her palaces. From the beginning o f her reign she showed every sign o f understanding the enormous psychological significance it was coming to have in the definition o f Englishness. O n St. George’s Day, 1559, in the second year o f her succession, after sup­ ping at Barnard Casde, the queen embarked on a river progress through her capital. She was “ rowed up and down the river Thames, hundreds o f boats and barges rowing about her, and thousands o f people thronging at the waterside to look at Her Majesty . . . for the trumpets blew, drums beat, flutes played, guns were discharged, squibs hurled up and down into the air as the Queen moved from place to place. And this continued till ten o f night when the Queen departed home.” 27 Using the river as a stage on which to embrace all o f her subjects was a brilliandy calculated triumph o f public relations at a time when Elizabeth needed to establish her legitimacy. “ By these means,” the chronicler went on, “ shewing herself so freely and condescending unto the people, she made herself dear and acceptable to them.” As time went on, alas, it became apparent that the proverbial fertility o f the Thames would not pass on its blessings to the sovereign. Those hopes, wither­ ing on the vine o f Elizabeth’s inscrutable vanity, may account for the develop­ ing obsession about marriage unions in the poetry o f her long reign.28 Both

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Edmund Spenser (who had entertained Walter Ralegh at his house on the Blackwater River in Ireland) and William Camden, Leland’s successor as anti­ quary-geographer, produced poems on the wedding o f Tame and Isis.29 Both works followed the birth and growth o f the Isis, set by Camden in a mysteri­ ous cavern roofed in pumice that was the spring not merely o f English waters but o f all the great rivers o f the world: “ Here rise in streams o f brother­ hood/Nile, Ganges and Amazonian flood.” Eden, it turns out, was located in the Cots wolds. Below Oxford, the wedding o f waters takes place, attended in Spenser’s Epithalam ion Tamesis by all the rivers o f England, personified as a gathering o f water nymphs. Its fruit is young Thames, already growing in rippling, muscu­ lar power as he rolls through Berkshire toward his metropolitan and imperial destiny. As Wyman Herendeen points out, English history itself is made to travel with the current.30 The confluence o f waters, moving irresistibly to the sea, seems to embody both the natural harmony o f the English landscape and an end to the strife that for centuries had torn the realm. And when Stuart pol­ itics proved that disquiet had not been banished for very long, poets like Michael Drayton used the progress o f the Thames to proclaim the victory of Concord over the warring contention o f “ British” and “ English” waters. Poems like Poly-Olbion and John Denham’s Cooper’s H ill managed to marry up more than different regions and dynasties along the royal river-road.31 They also tried to harmonize, as best they could, the pastoral and the mercan­ tile landscapes: worlds which in political realities were very often in conflict. Upstream, the union o f Tame and Isis (who, in keeping with her Egyptian namesake, is now feminine) takes place in a fleecy arcadian world where zephyrs puff over the smiling water. Once born, the stripling Thames passes below the guardian citadel o f Windsor, the mediator (which is to say, halfway point) between pastoral childhood and mercantile maturity. By the time he reaches Westminster, Youngblood Thames has accepted the crown o f his fortune and in Drayton’s lines is not above a little virile bragging: A s doe the bristling reeds, within his banks that grows There sees his crowded wharves a nd people-pesterd shores H is Bosome over-spread with shoals o f laboring oars With that most costly Bridge that doth him most renowne By which he clearly puts a ll other Rivers downe.32 The climax o f the journey is a second union: that o f Thames and Medway, from which another, still mightier pregnancy is conceived. For within the womb o f the swollen waters, salt and sweet, pastoral and commercial, floats the awesome embryo of the British Empire. Its birth upon the open sea is to usher in a new epoch o f historical power. And since it was an axiom o f the hydrolog­

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ical cycle that the vapors o f the sea would return again to the springs o f the British Grotto, the future o f that empire seemed self-fulfilling. Only one river poet could see anything in the way o f this impending glory. But when John Taylor saw it, he saw it from the tiller. Where Camden and Dray’ ton sailed past Windsor with their eyes raised to the noble mass o f the casde, Taylor was too busy frowning at the waterline and fretting at the impedimenta: Below the bridge a t W indsor (passing thus) Some needlesse piles stan d very perilous N e a r Eaton College is a stop a n d a weare Whose absence well the river may forbeare A stop, a weare, a dangerous sunke tree, N o t f a r fr o m D a tch et Ferry are a ll three.33 All these mischiefs and iniquities done to the river were committed, so the Water-Poet thought, from brazen cupidity. Only the disinterested prince, godly and upright, he supposed, could mend such ills. Yet his verses ended not with a glimpse o f a Whitehall Augustus, but a more fustian commonwealth where devotion to the civic good had checked the lust for private gain. Tis sa id the Dutchmen ta u g h t us d rin k e a n d sw ill I ’ m sure w egoe beyond them in th a t skill, I wish (as we exceed them in w ha t’s bad) T h a t we some p o rtio n o f their goodnesse ha d.3* O n his way to Heidelberg (courtesy o f Princess Elizabeth, whose nuptials had been blessed by his mock fusillades), Taylor had seen the Dutch republic firsthand, and again on a later trip to Bohemia. H ow could its watery virtues not stir his boatsman’s passions, for everywhere there were oars and sails, nets and cordage, biscuits and caulk, an amphibious republic. And by 1632, when he wrote Thames-Isis, Taylor might have noticed that, not content with their own world o f low horizons, the Dutch had begun to hop mud flats to the other side o f the North Sea. After the seawall at Dagenham had been breached in 1621, it had been the famous diker and drainer Cornelis Vermuyden who had taken charge o f its reconstruction, using Dutch capital and baked marsh-clay.35 Dutch laborers engaged on the works were then established on Canvey island in tenant farms, keeping sheep and even converting the salt marshes into work­ able arable fields. Other colonies o f Hollanders had settled at the river mouth and in colonies along the Medway at Sheerness and Rochester. In the lee o f the stinging wind they huddled together in little hamlets o f piety; the mynheers cloaked in black broadcloth, their hands (so their vexed English neighbors said) smelling o f herring; the m evrouws buxom and pallid, with bad teeth set in oval

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faces; the children enormous, caps pulled over butter-colored hair as they shouted and skated over the frozen winter marshes. And when they petitioned the king to build a Calvinist chapel, the fears o f the English rivermen that they were being colonized began to be voiced. Was there not, after all, something conspiratorial about the Dutch actually wringing out their waters so the Eng­ lish would be left: gasping on the dry mud flats? O u r smaller rivers are now dry lan d The eels are turned to serpents there A n d i f O ld Father Thames play not the m an Then farew ell to a ll good English beer.36 A mercy, then, that Taylor never lived to see the Year o f the Dutch, the sum and consummation o f all calamities visited on the sinning river. He had died in 1653, an obstinate old royalist railing against “the Dishonrable, Disworshipfull, Disloyall and Detestable he Rebells o f what Nation, Sex, Sect, Degree, Qual­ ity, Ranke, Age, Function and Condition whatsoever.” The “swarm o f sec­ taries” had come into possession o f the city; King Charles, whom he had served in his exile court upriver in Oxford, had been beheaded at Whitehall. The Devil, as he wrote, had turned Roundhead, and the whole world topsie-turvie. Perhaps after these revolutions nothing would shock the “Acqua-Muse,” as he liked to dub himself in his old age. Had he lived to witness the plague year o f 1665 he would have doubtless unearthed The F ea rfu ll Sum m er with its apocalypic vision o f a “ London filld with mones and grones/ . . . Like a Gol­ gotha of dead men’s bones/ . . . The very Water-Men give over plying,/Their rowing trade doth faile, they fall to dying.” And even the Great Fire o f 1666 that consumed the waterfront would not have surprised a survivor o f the Lon­ don Bridge fire o f 1632. But nothing, surely, could possibly have prepared Taylor for the Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667, for the spectacle o f the king’s navy, caught at anchor, burning in the river, and the pride o f the fleet, The Royal Charles, taken as prize to Amsterdam. All along the estuary there was smoking havoc. The barrier chain was broken. The city banks were besieged by depositors, frantic lest the Dutch sail unimpeded up the river. When John Evelyn saw the victorious Dutch ships at Chatham lying “within the very mouth o f the Thames, all from Northforeland, Mergate even to the Buoy o f the Nore,” he grieved bitterly at “a Dreadful Spectacle as ever any English men saw and a dishonour never to be wiped off.”37 It was as if a punishing wind had reversed the fluvial tide o f Eng­ lish history, building a great flood on its outer bank and ramming it back upstream, with the guns and canvas o f Admiral de Ruyter riding high on its gloating crest. It was as if, in mockery o f the Water-Poet’s whole life, the river itself had gone to the Devil.

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A blare o f brass by the edge o f the Bidassoa, so loud it shook the water, too loud for the gaunt old king o f Spain, whose eyes were rheumy and myopic but whose hearing was still acute. N o t loud enough for the strapping young king o f France, whose crowing triumph sounded in the fanfares just as it was inscribed in the Treaty o f the Pyrenees. But the proprieties, at least, were all observed. Resigned to his sacrifice, El Rey Planeta, Philip IV, he whom Quevedo and Lope de Vega had proclaimed could stop the stars in their tracks, permitted himself to be quiedy rowed to the island in the center o f the stream. Unfortunately, facing the French bank, he was forced to observe, as usual, the immense and gaudy show o f Bourbon gallantry: capes o f brocaded silk trimmed with silver and gold, overdressed horses, great plumes on the hats o f the cavaliers, scarlet boots, the fleur-de-lys pennants laughing on the pavilions, muskets and drums, sabers and sashes, heathen vulgarity. Just as it was in 1615. N othing had changed. But o f course everything had changed. Forty-five years before, the boy Philip had stood patiendy in a floating pavilion in sight o f the Isle o f Pheasants, while the dauphin Louis, the child o f Henry o f Navarre, had waited on his tented raft opposite, as their betrothed princesses drifted obediently toward them. They had pretended equality then, but what was poor, bloodied France, with its belly full o f heretics, to the stupendous empire o f Spain, which stretched from Peru to the Indies? It was Habsburg blood that had then deigned to be mingled with Bourbon in the midstream o f their common river. And how altered was his sister Anne, become the shrewd creature o f Cardinal Mazarin; the mother o f this new Louis, with his precocious Apollonian vani­ ties. H e preferred to recall her as she had been that earlier day on the river, a veiled and demure child. Certainly she had not been fortunate. Widowed early, Anne had been tossed about in the gales o f French faction and rebellion, chased from Paris, until Mazarin had made her court secure through an exquisitely cal­ culated work o f ruthlessness and corruption. Be that as it may, she had become

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a harpy, presuming, so the queen told him, to lay down the law to their daugh­ ter on what she might or might not wear, commanding her to dress in costume a la fr a n false for the marriage. So be it if God wills it thus. In his most stoically grave manner, Don Luis de Haro had come from the tent on the floating island last November and counselled the king that there was no alternative but to sign the peace and marry his daughter to Louis XIV. His treasury was exhausted, the American sil­ ver gone, his troops mutinous. The minister had made every effort to salve the wound. Such a family compact, signed, sealed, and sworn on the river separat­ ing their realms, would, he opined, finally bind up the terrible wounds o f their endless war. Yet even as he said this there was on his face the unmistakable look of a man obliged to drink sour wine down to the lees. What, the king had objected, if this marriage should produce an heir to

the

two

realms, as if the Pyrenees them­ selves had been levelled? But how could that be, the minister had

responded,

seeing

that

Infante Felipe Prosper was so robust, so clearly destined for the throne? But hardly had the paint on Diego

Velazquez’s

painting

dried than the little prince, not yet four, had perished, like so many o f his family before him. His old father, whose counte­ nance at the best o f times was mirthless, now composed itself into a funereal mask as he dragged his bones to the river in the jolting carriage. What did it matter? Very soon he would be gathered to his ancestors and to his Heavenly Father and like all his royal forebears needed to concentrate all the energies that remained to him in prayers o f atonement, imploring the Almighty that his countless sins would not be visited on his unhappy people. From the other bank o f the Bidassoa, which the French preferred to call the Dendaye, the prospect seemed a good deal fairer, always excepting his bride, o f course. Louis did not need to look at Marie-Therese to know the worst. It was enough (begging his mother’s pardon) that she was a Habsburg. So that he fully expected just what he got: the long fleshy nose, the threads o f fine blond hair, the large weak eyes, the alarming jaw. But along with that would be a becoming piety, a pleasing submissiveness, and, he fervently hoped, fecund blood, so that he would not have to spend undue time and

Diego Velazquez, Portrait of Philip IV, ca. 1655.

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effort producing an heir when his passions could be excercised in more agree­ able company. So the king put on his most amiable face and affected to enjoy everything that was presented to him: the noisy Te Deum, the long ballet in the Hotel de Ville featuring a painted galliot pulled across the stage, the interminable eulo­ gies. Surrounded by the noblesse de sang, attended by his personal guard, the Cent Suisses, as well as troops o f light horse, musketeers, and pikemen, more than a thousand in all, overwhelming the thinner ranks o f Spanish grandees and horsemen, the young king stood beneath his fleur-de-lys canopy as the princess was towed across the river in her boat. Nothing had to be done except the most

Anonymous, Exchange o f brides on the River Bidassoa, 1615.

formal exchange o f greetings and salutes, according to the exact protocol arranged by the respective masters o f ceremony.38 There were brief toasts, a bouquet o f poems, a most pleasing and delicate show o f tears by the princess and her mother, the usual speech from Philip, regretting the loss o f his daugh­ ter, consoled by her great destiny as the queen o f France, and so on and so on, an incongruously wan smile slowly creeping across his dolorous face like the moon at dawn just before it vanished in the sunlight. The next day their marriage was solemnized in the chapel at Saint-Jean-deLuz by the bishop o f Bayonne. That it took place firmly on the French side o f the border was meant to emphasize Louis’s claim, now conceded, to sover­ eignty over the frontier province o f Roussillon. The finesse o f these gestures

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across the little Bidassoa had a long history.39 In 1463 Louis XI o f France and Henry o f Castile had met on the river and in 1530 Francois I had ransomed two Spanish princes for his own return to France. Between 1564 and 1566 Charles IX, accompanied by his mother, the formidable Catherine de’ Medici, had deliberately toured the limits o f his kingdom, in an effort to assert their rights to the disputed territory o f Roussillon. Though the king went to the edge (but not over) his river border, Catherine exploited her family role as the mother o f the queen o f Spain to cross into that realm. So the significance o f the marriage itself taking place behind the common blood-and-waterline, on French soil, was not lost on contemporaries. From Saint-Jean-de-Luz the court travelled to Bordeaux, where they passed through arcs de triomphe and were required to listen to more loyal addresses o f felicita­ tion from the magistrates o f the Parlement. In Paris these gestures were repeated yet again (as they had been all along the route). But in addition there was a seventy-foot-long allegorical Ship o f State moored beside the Louvre upon which rested a great globe o f the world held aloft by two figures repre­ senting France and Spain, who managed at the same time to shower blessings on the throngs o f people on the riverbank.40 That same night a fireworks ver­ sion o f the same vessel exploded over the Seine as the great golden ship seemed to sail o ff into the night sky, trailing behind it a wake o f fire. *

*

*

A Y E A R l a t e r , on August 17, 1661, Louis XTV was presented with another

spectacle o f pyrotechnics, indeed another ship o f fire. But this time he drew no satisfaction from the divertissement. His host was the superintendent o f finances, Nicolas Fouquet, eager (mistakenly, as it turned out) to show o ff his spectacular chateau o f Vaux-le-Vicomte. Solicitous o f the king’s vanity, he had taken good care to order fireworks arrangements in which the king’s mono­ gram was interlaced with that o f the queen and Queen Mother, both in atten­ dance. But pyrotechnical hubris overcame him when he went so far as to display, for general amusement he supposed, a fiery version o f one o f his whal­ ing boats, complete with cetacean spouting flame. And if Louis had not been so out o f temper with the stunning display o f elegance he saw at Vaux, perhaps amusement might indeed have offset royal envy. But the more the king saw, the more he coveted and the more he fumed. And since Jean-Baptiste Colbert had been whispering constantly o f Fouquet’s malversations, o f his financing Vaux by raiding the royal treasury, the more con­ vinced Louis became that the palatial brilliance o f Vaux-le-Vicomte was itself proof o f a kind o f lese-majeste, if not o f outright treason. What were those whal­ ing ships moored at Fouquet’s private island o ff the coast o f Brittany for, if not to create a floating im perium in imperio?

Israel Silvestre, Vaux-leVicom te, cascade and reflecting pool.

Perhaps, too, there was another aspect o f Vaux which cut to the royal quick: its water. N o t content with razing an entire village, levelling the hills in which it was set, and planting a forest where there had been tilled fields, Fouquet had also diverted a local river to feed the spectacular pattern o f fountains, cascades, and reflecting pools that extended the design o f the house into the park. Surrounded by a graceful, ostentatiously dysfunctional moat, the house and gardens seem, as Vincent Scully has put it, to have been slipped over a taut skin o f water.41 Superficially, Fouquet’s great landscape gardener, Andre le Notre, retained the traditional Italian promenade o f waters, found at Bagnaia and the Villa d ’ Este that led to a grotto where river-gods reclined in rustic niches. And from the garden terrace o f the chateau, below the guardian busts o f Roman emperors (another detail unlikely to endear itself to Louis XIV), it did indeed appear that the visitor could proceed along another river-road toward the usual rendezvous with the Source, taking in along the way various allegorical

Israel Silvestre, Vaux-leVicom te, garden view toward the grotto and canal.

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representations o f water nymphs and deities. But the waters o f Vaux-leVicomte, in contrast to the Italian villa gardens, are still contained within cir­ cular or rectangular stone basins. Instead o f behaving with the kind o f elemental vitality liberated by Buontalenti or Bernini, the waters behave them­ selves, as decorously as a Cartesian proposition, an Alexandrine couplet, or a courtier’s epigram. They do not initiate anything; they reflect. And what they reflected at Vaux was the controlling intelligence o f their witty and elegant seigneur. Even the jokes are different. In the gardens o f the Renaissance Italian vil­ las the unsuspecting visitor, rounding a corner and confronted with another eccentrically wrought statue or gaping cave, might without warning trigger a jet that would soak him to the skin. General mirth. N ot for the likes o f Fouquet, for whom water was the material o f intelligent wit— esprit— not coarse ebullience. So that approaching the arched grotto at Vaux, the visitor would suddenly discover that the path was interrupted by a rectangular basin o f water, invisible at eye level, which inevitably framed another reflection o f the chateau. And on the very threshold o f the grotto, the ground suddenly and unpredictably drops away to a gentle cascade feeding a broad canal. Short o f being rowed across, the only way to reach the destination was to walk round its entire sycamore-ringed perimeter. And the reward for all this perseverance was to climb the balustraded stairs over the grotto to a raised terrace. Behind was a copy o f the Farnese Hercules proclaiming the power that had been exer­ cised on nature to produce grace. And before the inspecting gaze were the elegant pavilions o f Vaux, extended ninety degrees into the gardens through the careful, patterned composition o f the low-clipped boxwood broderies, the colored gravel walks, and the pools, all harmonizing in discreet selfcongratulation. Le roi ne s’amuse point. Within three weeks o f the fete at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Louis’ sour grapes had turned lethal. Fouquet was arrested for treasonable pec­ ulation. Though the charge that he had arrived in office poor and had enriched himself at the king’s expense was precisely the opposite o f the truth, the court was expected to return the required conviction and sentence. Yet the judges were sufficiently ashamed o f themselves to recommend banishment rather than the death sentence desired by Colbert and the king. Stung by their insubordi­ nation, Louis ordered a living death: incarceration at his own pleasure. Fou­ quet spent the rest o f his life immured in the terrible Haute-Savoie fortress o f Pignerol. But it was not merely the temerity o f his perfect taste that had brought about his downfall. In its calculated manipulations o f scale, distance, and opti­ cal angle, Vaux was the triumphant proclamation o f mechanics over nature. And as all the historians o f the seventeenth-century garden have noted, the arts that were put to work in order to create a place like Vaux were essentially mil-

27- J. M . W . T u rn e r, River Scene with Rainbow , 1805.

28. J. M . W . T u rn e r, England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday, 1819.

3 x. David Roberts, Hypaethral Temple, Philae. 32. Francis Frith, Dahabieh Moored under Pharoah’s Bed, Philae.

33- M o u n t Rushm orc National M o n u m en t. 34. P ierre-H enri dc V alenciennes, Mount Athos Carved as a Monument to Alexander the Great, 1796.

35- John R o b e rt C o z e n s , Cavern in the Campagna , 1786. 36. John R o b e rt C o z e n s , Entrance to the Grande Chartreuse.

, J. M . W . T u r n e r , Snowstorm: H a n n ib a l a n d H is A r m y C r o s sin g the A lp s , 1 8 1 2 .

38. John R o b e rt C o z e n s , Between Chamonix and Martigny , 1778 .

3y. J ohn R u s k i n , A F r a g m e n t of 'the A lp s, 1H54.

40. Jules l i c h e n , H c n r ic tt c r i'A n g e v ille in M o u n t a in e e r in g C o stu m e .

41. Albert Smith , pho tog rap h.

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itary. The same mathematics that was needed in the perfection o f siege artillery and fortifications was applied to the exact construction o f space within a gar­ den.42 Moreover, Etienne Binet, writing in 1629, explicidy compared the cre­ ator o f such gardens to a “little god.”43 But it was only absolutist monarchs in the Baroque who were supposed to describe themselves as earthly deities. So it may have been for his usurpation o f the roles o f both landscape marshal and hydraulic muse that Fouquet paid such a heavy price. The end o f Fouquet was, famously, the beginning o f Versailles. Egged on by Colbert, the king stripped Vaux o f all its treasures, or at least all o f those that could be moved. It was, at least, a backhanded compliment to Fouquet’s extra­ ordinary discrimination and generosity as a Maecenas o f the arts. For along with the great collection o f paintings, the bronzes, the tapestries, and the fur­ niture went the personnel— the architect (Le Vau), painter (Le Brun) and gar­ dener (Le Notre), not to mention pastry cooks, ballet masters, musicians, playwrights (Moliere), poets, and, not least, the hydraulic engineers, the freres Francini, who had created the great water grilles, reflecting basins, and foun­ tains o f Vaux. The only servants o f the arts not to desert their master were the sculptor Puget (who spent the rest o f his life in the naval dockyards o f Toulon) and La Fontaine, who not only made no secret o f his contempt for the judicial farce but published a D rea m o f the Waters o f V aux in which the fountains, bereft o f their water, weep to make good the loss. The Vaux make-over transformed a nondescript little hunting lodge at Versailles into the nonpareil o f all royal residences. But, to their credit, neither the king nor his trio o f builders were satisfied with mere transposition. And given the king’s absolutist temperament, the element o f caprice, so strongly felt at Vaux, was made strictly subject to the prospects o f grandeur. Even before the first chateau was built by Louis Le Vau, the park was made the set­ ting for entertainments that catered to the king’s hunger for self-aggrandize­ ment. Whether they were ostensibly performed in honor o f military victories, the king’s latest mistress, or both, they used bodies o f water as theatrical plat­ forms on which spectacles that flattered his omnipotence could be performed. Both in 1664 and 1668, fire and water were incorporated, as they usually were, into the divertissem ents that stretched over several days and in which the king often took part. In the 1664 f e t e o f the “ Pleasures o f the Enchanted Island,” for example, he took the leading role o f the knight Roger, who destroys a witch guarding a magic isle, the moment o f victory being celebrated in an immense detonation o f fireworks over a reflecting pool so that Louis could appear as a Lord o f Creation, the arbiter o f fire and water, a new Osiris or, rather, the Gallic Apollo. From the outset, the myth o f Apollo, as well as the absolutist gaze, deter­ mined much o f the design o f the park and its waters. Where the axis o f the allee at Vaux connected the stone Caesars with the river-gods reclining in the grotto,

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at Versailles the line o f inspection was moved east-west, in keeping with the progress o f the sun. From the uppermost terrace o f the garden side o f the palace Louis could look down a flight o f stone steps at a fountain group that bore immediate witness to the divinely royal power over the waters. Drawn from the sixth book o f Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it related the myth o f Latona, daughter o f the Titan Coeus, hounded by Juno for the usual misdemeanors with Jupiter. She is shown with her children, Diana and Apollo, appealing to the hostile peasants o f Lycia to be allowed to drink from a local pond. N ot only were the peasants unmoved and added curses and threats to their churlishness, but, Ovid tells us, they stirred up mud and dirt from the depths to make the waters foul and unappetizing. And it is at the point where the Titan’s daugh­ ter has had enough that the fountain offers its metamorphosis, with the peas­ ants suddenly turning into frogs, some still with human torsoes beneath their abrupdy bulging eyes and webbed limbs. What is, in any case, an unparalleled moment in amphibian myth was, for Louis XIV, also history: history political and history familiar. For the fountain alluded to the eviction o f Anne o f Austria and her two children, Louis and Philippe, at the time o f the uprising o f the Parisian Fronde. And whether or not the king actually disliked the capital as much as conventional histories claim, there is no doubt that the sovereign position o f the fountain o f Latona, direcdy beneath the chateau and pointing down the g ra n d e allee, was a royal retort, a proclamation o f the realm’s metamorphosis from anarchy to order.44At the end o f the allee is the equally extraordinary fountain o f Apollo, where the gilded sun-god can be seen rising from the waters at the beginning o f the day. Thus the two fountain groups— Latona and Apollo— were in poetic and historical correspondence with each other, adversity and ascendancy; back and forth down the line o f light and water. The visitor alert to all these meanings might then retrace his steps up the paths and steps to the north end o f Le Vau’s chateau, where he would find the grotto o f Thetis. Inside, Girardon’s sculptures showed Louis-Apollo flanked by his steeds, being refreshed by the nymphs o f the ocean at the end o f another hard day’s celestial charioteering. And it is inconceivable that Louis (who was pedantically learned in anything that flattered his divinity) was not aware that Thetis herself was the mother o f great Achilles, so that the king could now add that hero’s attributes to his gloire (always excepting, o f course, the fatally undipped heel). Though the interior walls o f the grotto were covered with the usual mate­ rials o f mother-of-pearl and polished pebbles, from the outside the triple­ arched building, with its grilles bearing the emblem o f the sun, hardly resembled a rustic grotto at all. And siting it close to the palace reversed the conventions o f the rustic Italian caves. Instead o f making the pilgrimage away from civility and through the sacro bosco, the “holy wood,” to the Source and

P ow er L in e s

Versailles, fountain o f Latona (Gaspar and Balthasar Marsy), engrav­ ing by Pierre le Pautre, 1678.

Spring, the Versailles courtier was obliged to approach the royal presence to share in its wisdom and mystery. And as the chateau expanded along with the park, so the grotto seems to have become considered a charming anachronism, even before it was finally demolished in 1681 to make way for Mansart’s end­ lessly elongated northern wing. Everything now seemed to proceed along the imperious direction given from the palace. The figure o f Latona was herself turned a hundred and eighty degrees so that instead o f looking imploringly up at the sovereign, she now joined him, like a staff officer with the general-in-chief, in staring down the line o f command. In fact the sloping lawn o f the tapis v ert controlling the prospect down to the fountain o f Apollo seems for all the world like a grassy extension

Versailles, engraving o f the interior o f the grotto o f Thetis, ca. 1668.

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o f the parade g ro u n d in fro n t o f the palace, a m anicured m uster-yard o n w hich the k in g co u ld inspect the o b ed ien t platoon s o f his co u rt. A n d th o u g h all these visual com m ands w ere sign alled b y the lines o f trees, h e d g es, and sanded paths that tracked th ro u g h the park, th ey w ere also p u n c­ tuated by p o o ls o f w ater and (b y the 1680s) a set o f allegorical b ro n zes repre­ sen tin g the rivers o f France. R ather than preserve the d ro w sy serenity o f V aux, the Francini brothers had created the astonishing spectacle o f the grandes j ean-Baptiste eaux, fed by an en o rm o u s hydraulic-pressure m achine at M arly and a sharp

Tuby, basin and

diversion o f the river E ure. It was surely revealing that w hile the careless F ou-

fountain o f

qu e t had chosen the device o f the squirrel a lo n g w ith the tactlessly w o rd ed

Apollo.

m o tto Q u o N on Ascendet (T o w h at h eig h ts m ay o n e n o t clim b?) to su g g est his o w n ascent, L o u is X IV ch ose the fou ntain as an em blem o f em inence. In a tapestry d esig n ed by C harles L e B ru n and represen tin g the elem ent o f w ater, the fou ntain sh o o tin g “ as h igh as its so u rce” is m eant to sign ify the k in g ’s equality, th ro u g h v irtu e and po w er, w ith his m o st illustrious ancestors, C h a rle­ m agne and St. L o u is.45 Fountains like the D rag o n (representing another royal v icto ry over the hideou s forces o f faction and disorder), and set o n n o rth -so u th transverse paths lead ing o f f from the main axis, w ere bu t interludes o n the m arch tow ard A p o llo . B u t by 1682, w hen Lou is officially transferred his residence from Paris

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to Versailles, it was possible to see beyond Apollo to a further body o f water that extended the sight line to the point where it seemed to vanish in the dissolving boundary between earth and sky, mortality and immortality. A t right angles lay another o f Le Notre’s great canals, six years in the making, much wider and longer o f course than its equivalent at Vaux and actually carrying some traffic. Plying their way up and down the water, as if regulated by some omniscient mercantilist majordomo, were versions o f the nautical and fluvial craft o f the world: ornately worked Venetian gondolas that had been hauled over the Alps so that they could be launched in the Sun King’s play-pond; Dutch flyboats and English frigates scaled down in size; French men-of-war, Colbertian prototypes that shot noisy broadsides o ff at their make-believe foes. There was a wealth o f commercial, as well as military, associations afloat on the grand canal o f Versailles. A t the same time that the great pile o f the palace was growing, royal engineers were cutting their way through ranges o f hills to create a spectacular network o f royal canals in the Midi and in Burgundy. Their purpose, o f course, was to provide the infrastructure necessary for the kind o f commercial revolution that Colbert had envisioned as necessary if absolutist France was to prevail over the greatest canal power o f the world: the Dutch republic. But the canal, along with the new generation o f aqueducts, like the aqueduct o f Maintenton, was the perfect expression o f absolutist control over the waters: linear, obedient, and free from the unpredictable ebbs and flows o f both history and geography. It was a true highway even if, in the end, it went (like absolutist France) nowhere. In reality, Louis X IV had difficulty in establishing the unchallenged supremacy that seemed to have been in his stars on the floating island in the river Bidassoa. But consolation for his frustrations was always available in the Hall o f Mirrors. O n the ceiling Charles Le Brun had provided the king with the most flattering representation o f fluvial mastery: the armored Apollo hurl­ ing his chariot across the Rhine (represented by the usual bearded deity, though looking more dejected than usual) while the awestruck Dutch bore impotent witness to his triumphant passage. A few strides to the window would then take the king to his absolutist line o f power: directly down th e g ra n d e allee, through a perfectly articulated ensemble o f water, light, and vegetation, toward the authentic Ludovician destination: infinity. Oddly enough, though, it was left to the Sun King’s great-grandson Charles to accomplish the most complete realization o f the river-road as a lin­ ear myth o f authority. And even odder, it was in the chaotic, impoverished Kingdom o f Naples that it would be constructed. A t least part o f the dynastic future anticipated by Louis and feared by Philip IV on the Bidassoa had indeed come to pass upon the extinction o f the Habsburg line in Spain with the tragic and demented Charles II. His successor had been Louis X IV ’s grandson Philip V, and thirty years o f bitter war between the Bourbons and the Habs-

344

BLOODSTREAMS

b urgs (suppo rted by their British and D u tch allies) had failed to d islod ge him. In Italy itself a nervous equilibrium was established betw een H absbu rgs and Bo u rbo n s and in 1734 , after one o f the cam paigns that periodically broke the stalem ate, Philip V ’s son Charles was en th ro n ed as the k in g o f N aples. A s G eo rg e H ersey has argued in a brilliant m onograph ,46 the creation o f a n ew palace at Caserta, north o f N aples, was m eant to stamp the new m onarchy w ith unquestionable legitimacy, n o t least by appropriating land from the local nobility that was m ost hostile to Charles’s accession. Fresh w ater was in desper­ ately short supply for the chronically w retched m etropolis o f three hundred th o u ­ sand souls. B u t, as H ersey points o u t, it was also an obsession o f local lore and m yth, not least for the royal historiographer and sociologist o f m yth G iam bat­ tista V ico . N aples, o f course, had its ow n version o f a fluvial m yth o f origins: the union betw een the Siren Parthenope, daughter o f the M use C alliope, and the river Sebeto. A n d it also had a lo n g tradition that im agined the waters coursing th ro ugh a labyrinth o f subterranean reservoirs and passages, perhaps forced w ith the infernal fire that from time to time erupted from Vesuvius. It w as an inspired d ecisio n , th en , to m ake the ap proach to the n ew palace run a lo n g a lo n g , canal-like river-road, p u n ctu a ted w ith sculptu re g ro u p s and

C aserta, cascade and fountain of Venus and A d o n is, G aetano Salom one and Lu igi Vanvitelli.

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fountains that commented on the royal power over the elements. And the benevolence o f that power was supposed to be exemplified by continuing the aqueduct that brought water to Caserta past the palace, on into the town, and all the way along the ancient line described by the Via Appia to Naples itself. That, at any rate, was the original plan o f its architect Luigi Vanvitelli and it certainly corresponded with the amiable paternalism o f the king, one o f the brighter and more conscientious members o f a dynasty whose supply o f both qualities was becoming dangerously depleted. Originally, the layout o f the gar­ den approach to the palace emulated (as did so many others o f this period) the dominating chateau o f Versailles. But as his plans developed, Vanvitelli seems to have chafed under the yoke o f that obligatory paradigm; he complained in his plans o f “Versaglia” and returned instead to the older river-roads o f the Ital­ ian villas for inspiration. But instead o f a water-journey to the Source, he reversed the direction o f the flow, moving from a mountain spring to the great controlling block o f the palace. Deploying an army o f laborers and engineering techniques worthy o f the Romans (whom he evidendy admired), Vanvitelli cut a cleft in the hillside fac­ ing Caserta from which poured a cascade, as if in literal demonstration o f the copious literature on the origin o f rivers. From there it flowed along a twomile stretch o f canal toward a series o f fountain groups, each o f which sug­ gested the relationship between water and the power over life and death. Their order, as Hersey has convincingly shown, was not at all random. The first fountain, heavily rusticated, illustrated the chapter o f savagery when the naked Diana has Actaeon turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds as the price o f seeing her bathing naked. The stream then dips below ground to re-emerge as the more harmoniously coupled Venus and Adonis, another hunting scene doomed to end badly at the waterside, but which pre­ sented a spectacle o f love rather than chastisement. As one moves closer to the palace, the language o f myth becomes more orderly and benevolent, with a statue o f the goddess o f agrarian abundance, Ceres, raised on a pedestal. A vast group, fifty-four figures in all, representing Juno ordering Aeolus to make the winds blow Aeneas toward Magna Graecia, was supposed to have decorated the great waterfall that pours over an arched structure, at once an aquatic palace and aqueduct. The statuary remained incomplete when Charles was called to Madrid to succeed his helplessly melancholic brother, but the palace o f Aeolus, with waters literally running through tunnels behind the cascade, was evidently meant as a kind o f anticipation o f the royal residence itself. For all the density and calculation o f its water allegories, there is one star­ tling fact about Caserta that instandy distinguishes it from Versailles. Its monarch never spent a single night under its roof, never went to sleep to the

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sound o f its water music, nor was wakened by the distant rumble o f the rocky cascade. And for once it is to the king’s credit that he was, unlike Louis, an absentee megalomaniac. For even while this phenomenal architectural compli­ ment to his omnipotence as the lord o f the waters was under construction, Charles was doing his best to fulfil the hopes invested in him in more quotid­ ian ways: building roads, hospitals, granaries; founding academies (always those!); adding to the city’s meager supply o f public fountains while repairing those that had become polluted or unusable. He was simply doing what enlightened despots were supposed to do: feed the poor, disabuse the ignorant, palliate injustice, silence the disaffected. It was not enough, o f course, especially in the boiling sewer o f Naples. For all the fixation with supplies o f fresh water, dysenteric fevers still took the biggest trawl o f the dead in the city. Four years after the king’s departure to Spain (where he came to enjoy a further reputation as about the best enlight­ ened despotism could offer), a revolt o f hellish proportions exploded in the filthy and ravenous alleys o f Naples. What the rioters wanted was bread, wine, and blood, in that order. And as the lazzaroni were energetically sacking the city, the waters o f Caserta continued to roll down from the mountain, past Diana, past Venus, past Ceres, toward the immovable, imperturbable palace.

* * + o rn a m e n ta l

f o u n t a in s

, however grandly conceived, would not alone

safeguard the royal line o f power. Besides measuring his authority by the height o f lesgrandes eaux, the monarch also had a duty to slake his subjects’ thirst. Even the mother o f Apollo knew something about this, for Ovid has Latona make a speech to the peasants declaring water “the pleasure o f everyone to drink. . . . Nature has not/M ade sun and air and vivacious gifts o f water/For a few alone.”47 And in the center o f Paris, on the very site that was often known as the “heart” and center o f circulation o f the whole city, the Pont Neuf, stood a contraption that symbolized the royal obligations o f charitable refreshment: the Samaritaine. Does the department store that has inherited its name, and its site, sell bot­ tled water? (That too was on offer in old regime Paris, the best coming from Bohemia; the worst, Seine water spuriously purified and sold as an elixir by enterprising charlatans.)48 But even if the products o f the sources o f France are on its shelves, it seems unlikely that the customers who pour through its doors give much thought to the woman who gave Christ water from the Samarian well. But it was she who gave her name to the most famous pumping mill in seventeenth-century Paris and she who featured in a lead relief-sculpture set into the side o f a wooden building housing the machine. The Samaritaine was the protegee o f a German-born Flemish engineer named Lintlaer who, in 1600, offered to provide Henri IV ’s palace o f the Louvre, and the town houses o f the

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nobility, with supplies o f fresh water. Into the bargain he was also prepared to conduct the water through a system o f pipes (most o f them hollowed tree trunks) to the badly depleted public fountains o f the city. The pumping energy was to be supplied by a five-meter-diameter wheel, inserted inside one o f the arches o f the Pont Neuf, revolving about three times a minute and producing a lift o f around two feet.49 The arrival o f the Samarian woman was not universally welcomed. The water vendors o f Paris who stood to lose from mechanical supply petitioned the king against it, and the head o f the Paris corporation, the prevot des marchands, bitterly resented the abridgement o f his own power to regulate water supply. But the king was determined, and was prepared to make the provision o f water a part o f his own royal prerogative. To attack the pump, then, was to question his legitimacy. The victory assured, the mill was established in a structure sufficiently imposing to cow the critics and deter saboteurs. Surrounded by a kind o f Flem­ ish donjon, it rose two stories from the end o f the bridge: its two pointed tur­ rets surmounted by a slate roof, it looked for all the world like a cross between a pilgrimage chapel (apt, given its sobriquet) and a castle gateway. Apart from the sculptured decorations, the Samaritaine was also supplied with a clock whose hours were struck by a mechanical figure wielding a hammer, and a car­ illon that supplied a pleasing chime above the familiar creaking sound o f the revolving wooden wheel. Together, the clock, the bell, and the wheel made up a kind o f watery chorus that, during the two centuries o f the pump’s existence, sang the virtues o f Henri IV (in other respects not an especially Samaritan fig­ ure), whose bronze statue stood in the center o f the bridge. Immediately below the king was his governor o f the pump. For since Lintlaer was reputed (not least by himself) to be the only man at the time with the expertise to maintain the machine, he was lodged on site. Originally, he and his family were housed in the wooden tower. But when fire repeatedly threatened the structure, he was moved to the interior o f the bridge itself, where he exca­ vated for himself and his heirs an extraordinary lodging. As his business (based on the quantity o f water delivered) prospered, so the pretensions o f the gover­ nor o f the pump grew with his fortune. Additional chambers carved inside the bridge created an entire apartment, sandwiched comfortably between the bridge and the Seine. By the end o f the seventeenth century the lodging was spacious enough to house collections o f gems and minerals, paintings, cameos, and bronzes: it was both a K u n stk a m m er and an urban grotto whose mirrored walls reflected the river that had made it all possible. The Samaritaine was finally demolished in 1813. But long before that, it had been judged inadequate to serve the water supply o f the rapidly growing city. Toward the end o f the reign o f Louis XIV, the pump’s lifting capacity was enhanced, and to celebrate another chapter in the royal line o f water supply,

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the Sam aritaine’s w o o d e n ho u sin g was refaced w ith a stone structure so that it co u ld face the Lo u vre o n o ne side and the statue o f H enri IV o n the o th er w ith ­ o u t any pictu resqu e em barrassm ent. A g eneration later a second pu m p was added o n the P o n t N o tre-D am e , th o u g h b o th the equ ipm en t and m ore par­ ticularly the stew ardship o f its superin tendent w ere fou n d w an tin g w h en it w as discovered that in an effo rt to em ulate the grand eu r o f the g o ve rn o r o f the Sam aritaine, M . M an ce, the custodian, had b u rro w ed his w ay th ro u g h the wall shielding the pu m p, sawed aw ay som e o f the p ilin g su pports, and had created a m iniature in d o o r Versailles, com p lete w ith little cascades and fou ntain jets. T o Bernard de B elid o r this w as a ca u tio n a ry tale: luxury, frivolousness, and

en vy literally u n derm in in g

the

establishm ent o f responsible

royal

hydraulics. D u rin g the R e ge n cy and in the reign o f L o u is XV, Belidor, professor o f m athem atics, m em ber o f the Royal A cadem ies o f Science (in Berlin as w ell as Paris), w as placed in ch arge o f the co m p re h en ­ sive reno vatio n o f the city ’s w ater supplies. T h e river-pum ps and the p ip in g system he set in place sur­ vived, m ore o r less, until the advent

Frontispiece portrait, Bernard de Belidor, I3Architecture hydraulique,

m i-

o f steam hydraulics at the end o f the eig h te en th century. B u t m ore than any actual im p rovem ents that he m ay have m ad e, B elid o r left b eh ind in his m o nu m ental

VArchitecture

hydraulique an extraordinary vision o f h o w a paternalist g o vern m en t ought

to

discharge

its

aquatic

responsibilities. T h e differences from the m iraculous refreshm ents and spectacles o f the B aroque popes are unm istakable. Belidor, co n tem p o ra ry o f W atteau, co u ld hardly have been altogether w ith o u t his epicurean streak. A n d at the very end o f his m u ltivolu m e b o o k he provides a fascinating lexico n o f the m an ifold types o f jet— “ ch am p ign on ” — the gerbe (sh ea f o f w aters); the cierges d ’eau x (candelabras o f w ater)— that w ere available to ornam ental engineers alo n g w ith the technical problem s involved in pro d u cin g ever m o re fantastic effects. B u t this is stricd y dessert. T h e substance o f his h u g e w o rk is altog eth er m ore serious, the hydraulic equivalent o f the proposals for refo rm in g the go vern m en t o f the m onarchy that w ere already co m in g from the pen o f the m ore pu blic-spirited m inisters o f L o u is X V like the m arquis d ’A rgenso n.

Belidor, fountain designs for villa parks and gardens.

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T h e re is n o d o u b t that B e lid o r k n ew the R enaissance g eo g rap h ers w h o had already associated F ren ch destin y w ith its rivers, in p a rticular F ran co is de B e lle forest and w riters like the C h a m p ie r b ro th ers, w h o in the sixteen th ce n tu ry p r o ­ d u ced a co m p reh en sive a n th o lo g y o f the m yths and leg en d s associated w ith the en tirety o f k n o w n stream s: the crystalline w aters o f the A u v e rg n e th at c o u ld w ash aw ay cataracts o f the eye; th o se w h ic h c o u ld naturally p olish p eb b les so that th ey sparkled like tru e brilliants. B u t B e lid o r’s sou rces o f a u th o rity w ere, inevitably, R o m a n . L ike the p o p e s’ su p erin ten d en ts, he had in d eed read F ro n -

tinus and P lin y and ha d m arv elled at th e sta g g erin g sco p e and o rg a n iza tio n o f th eir h yd rau lic reg im e. A n d th e ruins o f th eir g reatest a q u ed u cts, beside w h ich th e best effo rts o f th e B o u rb o n s se em ed b u t paltry, w ere there to rem ind him o f the desired scale o f a tru ly im perial system . B u t w h at seem s to have im pressed B e lid o r w ere th e pu n itiv e san ctio n s th at c o u ld be in v o k ed b y the m o st hydraulically m in d ed em p ero rs, w h o w o u ld n o t hesitate to co n fiscate the en tire land and p ro p e rty o f an y o ffic e r o f th e co rps fo u n d de relict in his d u ty (and w h o se possessions w o u ld be d istrib u ted to the n eed y). H e also ad m ired the th o u g h t-

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fulness that required avenues o f trees to be planted alongside the aqueducts to provide natural shade and coolness for the water flowing within the stone. And most admirable, most enviable o f all in fuming, putrid Paris was the great cloaca m axim a, whose vaults and cisterns and conduits were o f a grandeur unknown to man before or since. It seemed grimly fitting to Belidor that Versailles had managed to create as a feast for the eye the gra ndes eau x o f its fountains but still carried its excrement off to the Orangerie. Everywhere he saw work that had to be done: riverbeds to be dredged and made navigable; bridges to be flung across their span; new canals to be cut through hills; sawmills and gristmills constructed using the new knowledge of fluid mechanics that would put the old structures to shame. There were pub­ lic fountains to be purified, for in some regions o f the country the water was so filthy it caused chronic dysenteric fevers and was even blamed for the goiters that hung from necks and breasts. There were conduits to be relined; harbors to be enlarged; wells to be drilled; an entire regnum o f water to be made to flow and run with the energy and efficiency worthy o f the heirs o f the Sun King. Yet, in the midst o f this relentlessly virtuous, inexhaustibly exacting engi­ neering, Bernard de Belidor suddenly stops. He tells a story. It is a story that might have been written by that dynasty o f fabulists and fairy-tale inventors (as well as architects, fountain-builders, and river geologists) the Perraults. It is a story o f water, magic, death, and the power o f princes. But it was not a Perrault fairy tale. It was not even a fable by Fouquet’s companion o f the gardens and waters, La Fontaine. This story, so Belidor, the grave professor in the perruque, insists (and surely we, who cannot match his mathematics, must believe him), is true. It seems that in 1693 (how suspicious the precision o f this date is) there came to public attention in the Paris o f the Sun King one Jacques Aimar or Aymar. He was no more than yet another peasant from some mud-bath patch o f hovels in the Dauphine to have come to town in search o f something better than clawing subsistence from the thin dirt o f the mountains. And unlike the great, endless parade o f mountebanks who peddled their wicked follies on the Pont N eu f under the gaze o f le bon roi Henri, Jacques Aimar had something to offer: his hazel wand. It was like other water-diviners’ rods, coarsely cut as if by dull druidical blade, but it was, nonetheless, his baguette divinatoire, the rod that would twitch and shake and tremble its way to water. But who gave a fig for such poor follies except the credulous imbeciles o f the quais: the brawny flotteurs o f the Morvan and the Yonne who were so des­ perate and so widess that they found their living by heaving great floats o f logs all the way from the mountains to the sawmills o f Paris, standing neck-deep in freezing water while they pushed and lugged for a black loaf and a jug o f rouge ? Aimar, so M. le Prof Belidor tells us, made a living even so.

Power Lines

35 l

Then one day his life changed. H e was at work, guided by the twitching wand. The usual little crowd was faithfully following, perhaps imagining the sweet clear underground spring that flowed beneath the strata o f offal and mud under their feet. He held the rod at shoulder-height, pointing directly before him. Suddenly (it was always suddenly) it forced his arms down as though a great weight had fallen on his shoulders. He pointed, knelt, and dug. The smell rose to him. There was no water. In the slimy ditch he had excavated lay the rotted remains o f a female cadaver. Did he take good care to be surprised? M . Belidor does not tell us. But Jacques Aimar’s baguette d iv in atoire was suddenly reputed to do more than locate hidden springs. He knew, so he said, that the woman’s killer was her hus­ band, and his hazel wand would take him all the way to Lyon, where it would twitch accusingly at her murderer. The rod, it seemed, responded not just to water but to blood. And what, after all, was the difference? It could smell vital­ ity and mortality indifferently. M a is alors, fa respire! Aimar found the body. W ho found Aimar? W ho was the engine o f his sud­ den celebrity? For in a Paris where les G ran ds affected to comprehend the work­ ings o f the universe by elegantly deduced theorems and propositions, there was, o f course, a very low threshold o f hysteria. In no time at all Aimar was said to be able to identify all manner o f sub­ terranean things: crystals, veins o f gold, deep strata o f boiling minerals. But what most took the public fancy was his ability to point to criminals; most damning when his wand shook itself into a state o f wrath at the feet o f some wretched miscreant. It would not do, so the gentilshom m es o f the Royal Academy said, this char­ latan gulling the public, driving it into a foaming frenzy, usurping the appointed authorities o f science and justice. What had been done in the old days when wizards and witches had done their mischief? U ne petite epreuve; a little test. It was Louvois, the minister o f war, who arranged the proceedings; M. l’Abbe Gallois, who organized it on behalf o f the Royal Academy. The moun­ tebank Aimar was brought to the academy, asked again if with his wand he could identify a purse o f gold that would be buried in a garden. Doubtless he paled, stuttered and stammered. But what could he do? The comedy was staged in the courtyard o f the Bibliotheque du Roi, the palace o f Mazarin. After walk­ ing self-consciously hither and thither (courtiers tittering behind their jabots), Aimar came directly to the abb£, complaining that the purse had been set at the foot o f a wall where it was physically inaccessible. H ow unjust o f his judges! Well, perhaps, responded the abbe, with a dryly cracked smile, suddenly pulling something from the folds o f his coat, but, you see, monsieur, we did not hide it all! A draught o f cackling, rising to a gale. End o f the diviner?

BLOODSTREAMS

352

N ot exactly. For the great Belidor tells the story, o f course, as a cautionary tale, as only a scientist could. Yet what then follows, with all the fastidious detail that he brought to fluid mechanics and the engineering o f bridges, is an exhaus­ tive guide to water-divining.50 Use only switches o f hazel; cut them around June 22, when the sun enters the sign o f Cancer and there is a full moon; make them no more than eighteen to twenty inches long; read what the great Cicero and Agricola have to say about it; lie flat on the ground to search for telltale vapors or the presence o f clouds o f gnats to indicate subterranean moisture; then walk slowly with it, properly held at shoulder level, arms fully extended, and it will, verily it will, force its way to the soil, as surely as a willow tree bends its branches to the flowing water. For there is, so Belidor, master o f the king’s hydraulics, virtuoso o f the absolutist waterline, maker o f pumps and canals, conceded, a certain divinity about the moisture o f the world. For though we may measure it with our math­ ematics, it is the vital sap o f green trees and the pulse o f our blood that will, in the end, reveal its circulation.

iv

The Political Theory o f Whitebait

It was one o f my father’s firmest beliefs that no one could know real happi­ ness who had not, at some time, gorged on a plate o f crisply fried whitebait. The fact that this excluded much o f the world’s population was unfortunate, but merely another sign o f the elect position o f those wise enough, or blessed enough, to live by the Thames. For the poor fools who deluded themselves into imagining the flabby sprat or the bony smelt an approxima­ tion o f whitebait, he had only mirthful pity. As for the oleaginous jawworking scrapings passed o ff in the primitive London trattorie o f the 1950s as “ fritto misto,” these were barely worthy o f contempt. Only the herring fry that appeared in huge silver shoals in the springtime estuary between Woolwich and Gravesend could be accorded the proper veneration due to whitebait. And as the auspicious day when it would be featured on the menus o f the riverside restaurants and pubs approached, he would become noticeably restive, telephoning their kitchens or interrogating knowledge­ able porters at the Billingsgate Fish Market for communiques on the progress toward the deep fryer.

The Political Theory of Whitebait

353

On some brilliant day in May his prayers (and his telephone calls) would be answered. Trains and black sedans would speed us to the Trocadero or (business permitting) the Savoy for our appointment with fishy bliss. While my sister and I nibbled on peanuts, my father would order the proper hock and the proper brown bread and settle back in beaming anticipation. The aroma came first: a mighty wave o f salt-toasted, pungent splendor advancing toward the expectant table. Then followed, in short order, the spec­ tacle o f a mountain o f tiny fish, rising conically from a glittering charger, hun­ dreds upon hundreds o f them, a vast baroque tower o f coiled, curled fry, an entire corps de ballet o f fish suspended in batter; agonized in oil. The first time I saw them, when I was five or six, I couldn’t help flinching at the myriad tiny black eyes in the elegant silver heads that still seemed to be darting desperately about for directions. But even then, I impaled a trio on my fork with greedy brutality. We would gobble every last one up in a kind o f silent trance o f plea­ sure, slowing down as our plates began to show through the layers o f fish and reaching for slices o f heavily buttered bread to postpone the inevitable. We never ordered more. We never came back until the next spring. “ Dayenu [It suffices],” my father would decree, sacrilegiously borrowing a phrase from the Passover Haggadah. Had the Pharaohs only leavened our servitude with white­ bait, some o f us might still be living by the Nile. But my father knew there was a long historical alliance between the British constitution and the humble whitebait. Sitting on the Fenchurch Street train he would jab an angry finger at the Dagenham gasworks and splutter, “There, right there, not so long ago there were w hitebait.” “ N o t so long ago” meant, in fact, the reign o f the Hanoverian Georges, but Arthur Schama had this happy habit o f tacking anecdotally up and down the Thames as if it were indeed a breezy stream o f time. So he told me about the great flood defenses o f Dagen­ ham, built in the first decade o f the eighteenth century to protect the Essex coastal lowlands; the first native hydraulic engineering which replaced the mudand-reed dikes o f the Dutch. To celebrate the achievement, the king’s com­ missioners o f works had, it seems, held a great whitebait dinner every spring as if somehow the appearance o f the fish were a sign that God would indeed Save the Hanoverian King and his fishermen from the tides o f flood and war. During one o f the many wars with France, the feast was dignified by a visit from the prime minister, William Pitt. Thereafter, it became an obligatory rit­ ual o f government for the entire cabinet to descend on Dagenham to celebrate the impregnable security o f the Thames. Predictably, ministers eventually tired o f the tedious journey by coach along the north bank, and moved the feast to Greenwich. Uprooted from its original parochial home and transferred to the Ship Tavern, the whitebait dinner now became a ritual attached to the parlia­ mentary calendar, rather than a rite o f hydraulic thanksgiving. At the end o f the parliamentary term the grandees o f the currently ascendant political party

BLOODSTREAMS

354

would assemble and celebrate their fortune in mountains o f litde fish. Inevitably, the whitebait dinners evolved into more grandiose occasions, involving eels and crab and cudets, duck and beans. Home-brewed Essex ale gave way to champagne and Moselle, and the great fry-baskets indiscriminately harvested all kinds o f pseudo-whitebait— pricklebacks, gobies, weevers, pipefish, and stone-loach— along with the herring. Yet, by definition, it was impossible for a whitebait dinner to be an act o f aristocratic self-congratulation; nor was it ever so intended. By gorging on the common food o f the river, the politicians were demonstrating their virtual community with the People, even while they were obstinately resisting giving them the vote! As the constituency o f representation expanded with succeeding reform acts, so did the availability o f the Greenwich Dinner, famous by mid-century for its gargantuan gluttony. The D ictionary o f the Thames, written by Dickens’s son (also named Charles), comments that “the effect at the moment [of con­ sumption] was eminently delightful. The sensation experienced when the bill was produced was not so pleasurable and it has been said that there was no ‘next morning headache’ like that which followed a Greenwich dinner.”51 You can still get a Greenwich dinner, albeit on a suitably post-imperial shrunken scale, at the Trafalgar Tavern. But the parliamentary ritual died finally in 1894, along with Gladstone’s last Liberal administration. And long before that, the feast had lost much o f its original associations as a rite o f pro­ pitiation and consecration for the safety o f the Thames; the British equivalent o f the Venetian Marriage to the Sea, or the Cairene festival o f inundation. Yet in its gluttonous heyday, from the late eighteenth to the middle o f the nine­ teenth century, the annual whitebait feast in the week o f recess remained a cel­ ebration o f the immemorial virtues o f the British constitution. It was a parliamentary rite o f spring, a Pentecostal affirmation o f political continuity. As a member o f the Whig government that had passed the great parliamen­ tary reform bill o f 1832, Thomas Babington Macaulay shovelled down trenchers-full o f the little fish. And when he came to write the history o f what was claimed to be the uniquely successful evolutionism o f British politics, Macaulay saw in the river Thames itself a blessed alliance between abundance, liberty, and moderation.52 Macaulay had not always assumed that the tide o f progress flowed so sweetly on the waters o f the Thames. In an essay written for K nigh ts Quarterly in 1824 he had imagined two poets, the royalist Cowley and the regicide Mil­ ton, sailing on the river on a summer’s evening in the reign o f Charles II and debating the rights and wrongs o f the execution o f Charles I. To Cowley’s indignation at the “ river o f blood” that issued from the work o f the Whitehall axe, Macaulay has Milton respond that it was “ a blessed flood like the . . . over­ flowing o f the Nile which leaves fertility in its wake.” 53 But while the young radical Whig was eager to defend not only Milton but the Puritans o f Parlia­

The Political Theory of Whitebait

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ment as revolutionaries forced to act violently in a just cause, the older Macaulay— member o f Parliament, imperial legislator in India, and eventually historian o f constitutional evolution— is naturally more circumspect when it came to fluvial metaphors. In October 1838, on his thirty-eighth birthday, while travelling to Italy, Macaulay stopped to admire the river Rhone, “ blue, rushing, healthfiil-looking,” and was moved to ponder “ the singular love and veneration which rivers excite in those who live on their banks.” The reason, he thought, was that rivers have, in greater degree than almost any other inanimate object, the appearance o f animation, something resembling character. They are sometimes slow and dark-looking, sometimes fierce and impetu­ ous, sometimes bright and dancing and -almost flippant. The attach­ ment o f the French for the Rhone may be explained into a very natural sympathy. It is a vehement and rapid stream. It seems cheerful and full o f animal spirits, even to petulance.54 The Rhone, in other words, for Macaulay was a revolutionary stream, by turns capricious and exhilarating, about as far from the sluggish, fatalistic Hooghly he had seen in Calcutta as rivers could be. And though investing the river with the simple-minded generalizations o f national character was o f a piece with Victorian prejudices about Foreigners, Macaulay did actually echo some o f the impressions the French themselves had o f their most notoriously wilful river. N o t only had its great towns— Lyon, Saint-Etienne, Arles, Beaucaire, Tarascon, and Marseilles— seen some o f the most bloody and unsparing slaughters during the Revolution, but the river itself had a justly earned repu­ tation for frequent and severe floods. Its major tributaries like the Ardeche, the Garance, and the Drome that rose in the Alps might carry an unpredictable vol­ ume o f snowmelt toward the Rhone and with it a tremendous weight o f veg­ etable debris and rocky gravel that smashed past anything in its way. A t the time o f Macaulay’s journey in 1838, the boatmen and villagers along the banks still spoke mournfully o f the terrible flood o f 1825; but two years later, in 1840, the loss o f lives and property would be even worse.55 Even within French topographic lore, there were supposed to be affinities between rivers and peoples, so that the Garonne, the river o f the impetuous Gascons, was almost as savage in behavior as the Rhone, while the relatively well-behaved Seine, flowing decorously through Rouen and issuing to the sea at Le Havre, was equally supposed to reflect the stalwart virtues o f the N or­ mans. It

all, as Macaulay himself admitted o f his own reverie, a little “ fan­

ciful.” But from the prospect o f the Ship Tavern on whitebait day, the contrasts between the temperate Thames and the rushing streams o f the Gauls could hardly seem more apposite.

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Ever since the days o f the Tudor poets, the Thames was supposed to have been unique among rivers for being suited to commerce as well as courts, for combining along its course pastoral innocence and imperial power. James Thomson, who was born exactly a century before Macaulay, in 1700, in his long poem The Seasons looked down at the “silver Thames . . . calmly magnificent,” and saw vistas o f a “vale o f bliss” a . .. goodly prospect spreads around O f hills a n d dales a n d woods a n d lawns a n d spires A n d g litterin g towns a n d g ild e d streams, till a ll The stretching landscape into smoke decays! Happy B rita n n ia ! where the Q u een o f A rts, Inspiring vigour, Liberty abroad Walks, unconfined even to thy fa rthest cots A n d scatters plenty with unsparing h a n d ? 6 A hundred years o f war and revolution did nothing to dissuade the British panegyrists o f the Thames from this convention o f extolling the temperate har­ monies o f the river. In the midst o f the war with Napoleon, Thomas Love Pea­ cock’s G enius o f the Thames took pains to contrast the “polluted stream” o f the Seine, stained with “ the blood-red hours o f frantic freedom’s transient dream,” with the Thames, Where peace, with freedom hand-in-hand, Walks fo rth along the sparkling strand, A n d cheerful toil a n d glo w ing health Proclaim a p a triot n a tion ’s wealth. In the hands o f the most shameless celebrants o f Hanoverian imperialism, the Thames was not only a balm for political friction; it was also a winding rib­ bon that bound together all ranks and conditions, mean and mighty, plebeian and patrician, in a single, indivisible community. A poetic cruise along its course supplied scene after scene o f perfect social concordance: The tra n q u il cot, the restless m ill, The lonely hamlet, calm a n d still, The village spire, the busy town, The shelving bank, the rising down, The fisher’s boat, the peasant’s home, The woodland seat, the regal dome In quick succession rise to charm The m ind with virtuous feelings warm

The Political Theory of Whitebait

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T ill, where thy w idening cu rren t g lid es To m ingle w ith the tu rb id tides, Thy spacious breast displays u n fu rled The ensigns o f the assembled world T hroned in A u g u s ta ’s p o rt Im p eria l commerce holds her co u rt? 7 Needless to say, there was no place “ in Augusta’s port” for any view o f the gin rookeries and verminous hovels o f Shadwell and Wapping that lay just behind the “ unnumberd vessels” crowding its quays. The Thames seemed to have absorbed the challenges o f commercial modernity with perfect ease, swelling with power as it pushed its fleets downstream and out into the world, their sails filled with breezy imperial confidence. It was this kind o f drum-beating patriotism that led the artist James Barry to try to supply a visual equivalent o f the triumphal poetry o f the Thames. Dur­ ing exactly the period when Britain was losing its American colonies, Barry determined to produce, for the Great Room o f the Society o f Arts, Manufac­ turing and Commerce at the Adelphi, a grandiose series o f history paintings that would, as he put it, “ overcome the humiliation o f being a scoff and a byeword amongst nations.” 58 British artists were altogether too preoccupied, he thought, with “ inconsequential trash” : landscapes, portraits, and the like. Having read the German scholar Winckelmann’s treatise on the “ imitation o f the Greeks,” Barry aimed to give new life to the intermittent tradition o f British history painting that had begun, rather feebly, with the murals done by James Thornhill for the Greenwich naval academy, and had been continued in fits and starts by efforts like Francis Hayman’s T rium p h o f B r ita n n ia at Vauxhall Gardens. Barry has to be credited for aiming high. It was the effect o f Michelangelo (whose modelling is obviously responsible for the muscled reclining personifi­ cation o f the Thames) and Hayman’s beefy Britannia that he was after. But alas, his ambitions exceeded his painterly skills. While he echoed Joshua Reynolds (and Winckelmann) in asserting the classical maxim that “the principal merit o f painting as o f poetry is its address to the mind,” it was precisely in the concep­ tual department that he fell so woefully short. His Com m erce; or, The Trium ph o f the Thames, one o f six large paintings produced unsolicited for the society and exhibited in 1777, is a lamentable mishmash o f allegory, history, and fluvial land­ scape that topples over into unintended comedy. But if^^ titter (and it’s hard to resist), we should recognize that our chuck­ les are those o f the snob as much as the connoisseur. We patronize poor Barry precisely for his temerity in making his Nereids carry “several articles o f the commerce o f Manchester and Birmingham,” because to modern tastes the clas­ sicizing o f industry seems a grotesque oxymoron. Yet it was the superimposi­

358

BLOODSTREAMS

tion o f classical taste on industrial tech n o lo g y that m ade, for exam ple, Josiah

James Barry,

W ed g w o o d ’s jasper p o ttery such a phenom enal success. A n d i f there is a kind

Commerce; or, The Triumph if the Thames, 1777- 84.

o f unpalatable clum siness in B arry’s version o f the T h am es (O siris m ade o ver as com m ercial salesm an), it does at least exud e the earnest encycloped ism typ ­ ical o f Britain’s com m ercial and industrial revolu tions. O f course success in com pressing the traditional definition o f A rt into the m o dern usage o f “ A rts” (to de n o te tech n o lo g y) called for the talents o f artists as original as Joseph W right o f Derby. W hat the So ciety o f A rts g o t, alas, was James Barry. S o the painting offers us the M ich elangelesqu e T h am es carrying a m ariner’s com pass, pushed th ro u g h the waters (at w h at seem s a fairly laboring pace) by an assortm ent o f imperial w orthies: D rak e, C o o k , C a b o t, and R alegh , each dressed in the costu m e o f their period except for R alegh , w h o in one o f B arry’s m ore inspired inventions is show n naked. A b o v e the scene flies M e r­ cury, the g o d o f co m m erce, and in the backgro u n d an im m ense beaco n , em u ­ lating the classical lighthouse o f Alexandria, rises from the busy estuary, across w hich seems to have been slung the m odern L o n d o n B ridge. W h ich leaves the w ig g ed figure at the fro nt o f the w ater-car, seated at a su bm erged k eyboard , w h o m Barry reveals as Dr. Burney, the com poser, fou n d er o f a “ national school o f m u sic” at the L o n d o n F o u n d lin g H ospital and critic o f “ expense and atten­

The Political Theory of Whitebait

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tion” bestowed on Italian operas “ and other foreign musical entertainments in a language unintelligible to the many.” 59 History does not record the response to Barry’s unfortunate concoction, though the series certainly failed to make his reputation as a history painter o f modern Britain. Possibly the general reaction o f the public was exemplified by one lady at the Adelphi who commented that “she was by no means pleased with Mr. Barry for representing the Doctor [Burney] with a party o f girls dab­ bling in a horse pond.” 60 Barry’s failure was as much o f the imagination as o f technique. It was his uncritical subscription to the “ Happy Britannia” platitudes o f the river poets, from Leland to Thomson, that made it impossible for him to grasp that there might actually be some drama to observe in the incursions o f the industrial rev­ olution on the banks and wharves o f the modern Thames. The realization o f that drama would have to await the real genius o f Turner. But even that painter, to whom, more than any other, the Thames was truly home, took pains to preserve and embellish its ancient myths rather than directly confront their modern corruption.61 earliest appear

Even

views, to

be

his

which frankly,

almost naively naturalis­ tic, actually manipulate the riverscape to accom­ modate

some

prior

Romantic impression or the canon o f the Euro­ J. M. W.

pean

“schools”

he

so

Turner, London

much admired. Thus the

Bridge, with the

watercolor o f the river

Monument and

rushing

the Church o f

arches o f Old London

St. Magnus, K ing and Martyr, ca. 1794-95.

through

the

Bridge not only reversed the actual flow; it also monumentalized a struc­ ture

that

was

already

mostly a ruin and which would be entirely demol­ ished in 1832. Needless to say, Turner was not drawn to paint the new London larly,

his

Bridge.

Simi­

M oonlight,

a

Study a t M illbank, exhibited in the Royal A cadem y in 179 7, has a striking and

J. M . VV. Turner

realistically rendered nocturnal skyline glim m ering beneath a bu ttery m o o n. But

Moonlight, a Study at Millbank, 1797.

the scene o f fishing smacks and boats gliding along in die dark is straight o u t o f A ert van de N eer and the D u tch nocturnal tradition, so that the w hole riverscape is bathed in the Rom antic m o o n g lo w o f unhistorical tim e and place. T h is is n o t to say that T urn er was incapable o f seeing the nin eteen th-cen ­ tu ry river for w hat it w as, and finding a painterly and po etic langu age to em b o d y it. H e w as, after all, a true river rat— fisherm an, row er, sailor— w h o u n dersto o d the m ovem ent o f light and w ater and w in d , n o t to m en tion the practical business o f navigation , better than any o th er riverscape artist before o r since. A n d in a superb b o o k D avid H ill has co n vin cin gly show n h o w T u rn e r’s stay at Sion Ferry H o u se in Islew orth du rin g 1805 pro d u ced a series o f exquisite and com p ositionally daring w aterco lo r sketches that are am o n g the v ery greatest w onders o f his w h o le stupefying career.62 Yet T urn er k new w hat he was d o in g by calling the w h o le series Hesperides (m eaning the w o rld o f the H appy Isles) since he frames one o f its m ost beautiful scenes beneath a radiant rainbow and m anages to make K ew Bridge and Palace appear like Italian villas and a cam panile in an arcadian campagna (co lo r illus. 27).

The Political Theory o f Whitebait

36 1

For all the poetic license, there is in the watercolors a sublime fit between the medium and the objects, almost as if Turner had actually let Thames water itself (suitably purified) wash over his paper and spontaneously form the reflec­ tions o f light, air, and water that fill its space. But when he worked these obser­ vations into oil paintings, often for aristocratic patrons like the lord Egremont, they lost the freshness and spontaneity o f the sketches and were cozened instead into Anglicized versions o f a Claude Lorrain pastoral, or else a rather laborious visualization o f the standard mythology o f the Thames. His England: R ich m o n d H ill, on the Prince R eg en t’s Birthday, for example, exhibited in 1819, offers a vast panorama o f the river as it makes the classic bend to the south (color illus. 28). And there is even some plausibly rendered barge traffic making its way along the water. But the enormous painting is, as the title implies, some sort o f summation on Turner’s part o f the essential Albion, deliv­ ered by its heroes from the jaws o f Bonaparte, and reposing in the well-earned fruits o f peace and prosperity. As such, it never really escapes the oppressive styl­ ization o f its patriotic piety. The visual mnemonics o f tub-thumping Anglomania are there— the resting drum, the little cannon, the uniforms mingling with frock coats and Regency millinery. But they are all assembled, additively, by Turner, as though he were auditioning the cast o f a formal masque or ballet, also called “ England.” Indeed the three maidens facing the beholder, for all their fashion­ able dress, resemble nothing so much as the Graces, which, given Turner’s passion for myth, seems not implausible. And beyond Richmond, the river curves upstream toward an immense horizon, with the gentle range o f the Cheviots barely suggested at its edge. Beneath the late afternoon light, drenched in gold, a game o f cricket proceeds at its hallowed, leisurely pace. It is immortal England laid out on the stream. N o wonder the duke o f Wellington liked it enough to lend Turner and his friends his own shallop for a summer excursion on the Thames.63 Twenty years separate the scene on Richmond Hill from the two master­ pieces The F ig h tin g Tem eraire, tug gd to her L a st B erth to be broken up, 1838 (1839) and R a in , Steam a n d Speed— the G rea t Western R ailw ay { 1844) (color illus. 29). In both cases, the power o f the paintings comes directly from the degree to which Turner has internalized the great myth o f the Thames as the nation’s bloodstream, indeed has made it flow along with his own bodily pulse. But in the T em eraire the river is also the river o f history bearing the redundant hulk o f the man-of-war to its demolition at the hands o f ironclad modernity. It should not surprise us to learn that in reality the vessel was nothing like the magnificent, tragically timbered ghost-ship that sits stoically beneath the set­ ting sun. (Egi' that matter, as no art historian fails to point out, Turner makes his sun set in the east as the ship is being towed upstream to the Rotherhithe breakers.) The old ship, and the four-master in the distance, are witnesses to the whole backstream o f British history; the aggressive iron tug, powering its

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BLOODSTREAMS

way through the impossibly limpid water, is without question the force o f the new age, the past mastered by the future. At least, however, the ships are travelling along the same line o f time and space. R a in , Steam an d Speed— the G reat Western Railway, painted seven years before Turner’s death in the year o f the Great Exhibition (color illus. 30), offers a final glimpse o f the river-road decisively severed by a different line altogether. Commentaries on the extraordinary painting have differed sharply on the degree to which Turner intended another elegy on the passing o f the ancestral Thames or a vision o f the irresistible, heroic energy o f the railway age.64 The truth, as with all very great artists, is more ambiguous and unstable. And Turner has set himself in the scene in two places rather than one: in the little rowboat on the river, the kind o f craft in which he spent so much time, an d in the train itself, where he famously leaned out o f the window the better to seize the sensations o f the weather and the (not very tumultuous) burst o f speed. O f one thing we can be sure. Even though the ostensible setting for the painting is Maidenhead, a gentle little river-town newly crossed by Isambard Kingdom Brunei’s new railway bridge, Turner has taken the scene to some alto­ gether different and elemental place. The river itself has become an immense and ancient highway, a vast and unbounded space fed by the waters o f all the rivers he has ever painted— Loire and Rhine, Seine and Ex, Medway and Thames— flowing very slowly through a great shroud o f shimmering crepus­ cular light. But the very indeterminacy o f the water, its lake-like indirection, reinforces the unsparing decisiveness o f the railway, its usurpation o f the line o f power. Indeed Turner has artfully distorted the angle o f the old road bridge to the left, so that on its far side it actually seems to follow, rather than span, the river. But this is certainly a crossing: the broad avenues o f water and stone bisected by the line o f iron and smoke. Surely Turner didn’t need a whole new generation o f writers to tell him that while once the river had been the favored metaphor for the flow o f time, modern history was already being compared to the runaway force o f the locomotive.

v

Bodies o f Water

Ironically, the arrival o f steamboats on the great rivers o f Europe and America made possible a whole new generation o f makers and consumers o f fluvial

Bodies of Water

363

myth. From the railings o f a paddle steamer, the diligent tourist could bone up on the Lorelei, or read Heine’s version (if necessary in a translation by Mark Twain), while Rhineland castles, half-timbered villages, and vineyards drifted by. Cruising on the Loire by p rom enade a vapeur was set back by the notori­ ous combustibility o f the boats, culminating in a dreadful explosion aboard the V ulcain in 1837 that took the lives o f two families, including four small chil­ dren.65 Once, however, a new generation o f inexplosibles had been put into ser­ vice, passengers could sail from Angers to Nantes, past the chateaux that told their own stories o f French history. A two-day excursion from Oxford to Greenwich via Windsor, Hampton Court, and the Tower could provide an entire course o f gratifying instruction in the history o f the British constitution: potted Macaulay along with the potted shrimp teas. And since the ancient metaphor that rivers were the arterial bloodstream o f a people remained very much alive, it was natural for nationalist propaganda to project its obsessions onto their waters. The sheer length o f the Danube, for example, rising in Germany and flowing through Slav and Magyar lands, was a gift to the apologists o f the polyglot Habsburg Empire since they could pre­ tend that it bound the several nations together like an imperial ribbon.66 C on­ versely, the inventor o f a national music for a nation that as yet had no political existence, Bedrich Smetana, used the life cycle o f the river Vltava, flowing from the Tatras through “ Bohemia’s woods and fields,” as an emblem o f the auton­ omy o f Czech history.67 Fluvial geography did not, alas, always distribute national myths this neatly. Though the Rhine became the favorite river for Romantic tourism in the sec­ ond and third decades o f the nineteenth century, French and German passen­ gers had quite different notions o f how it figured in their own popular histories. For the French it had been a “natural frontier” since the time o f Louis XIV, with Strasbourg as the great citadel o f the east. But to German nationalists it was essential to imagine the Rhine as flowing through the body o f the Father­ land, a metaphor that presupposed both banks belonged entirely within the H e im a t. Alexandre Dumas, who loved the river (while detesting its steam­ boats), warned his compatriots that they would never comprehend “ the pro­ found veneration” that Germans had for its “ protecting divinity.” For them, he wrote, “ the Rhine is might; it is independence, it is liberty; it has passions like a man or rather like a God. . . . It is an object o f fear or hope, a symbol o f love or hate, the principle o f life and death.” 68 Modernity, it turned out, did not at all make the river myths redundant. O n the contrary, it gave them a whole new appeal. Even Turner, with all his misgivings afcout the industrial future, had a shrewd understanding o f this. In the 1820s he went into partnership with the publisher Charles Heath to pro­ duce on commission a number o f views o f the rivers o f France that were anthol­ ogized and sold in lithographic reproduction as T u rn er’s A n n u a l Tour.69 But

3 64

BLOODSTREAMS

he also knew that what his middle-class customers wanted were not faithful rep­ resentations o f industrial-barge traffic and dockyards. So he carefully selected sites on the Loire (the least commercially navigable o f the great French rivers) like Blois and Tours that had the most obvious picturesque appeal. Even the views o f the prosaically busy Seine were judiciously edited to display elements with the most dramatically romantic allure: crumbling towers looming over huddled villages; old stone bridges athwart a river travelled only by the occa­ sional fisher-boat. At the mouth o f the Seine, at Quilleboeuf, the river is dom­ inated by the huge, encrusted mass o f the Chateau Gaillard. Precious little steam, no rain, and certainly no speed. The French, it could be safely implied, were now part o f the picturesque past. What, though, were river artists to do in a country where none o f these conventional markers o f history were available? For the first generation o f American landscapists the issue was acute since, following the Lewis and Clark expedition up the headwaters o f the Missouri, it was evident that national des­ tiny was charted along the course o f the transcontinental rivers. The realization that there seemed, after all, to be no “great western river” that would connect the Missouri with the Pacific was one o f Jefferson’s bitterest disappointments. But the Hudson, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, in their different ways, still pro­ vided the extended lines o f circulation along which the busy commercial traf­ fic o f the new Republic streamed. The patrons o f the Hudson Valley painters— men like Luman Reed and Daniel Wadsworth— had made their fortunes largely from commerce and bank­ ing. But they also fancied themselves as patroons— connected with, or the nat­ ural heirs of, the Dutch knickerbocker class that had dominated the agricultural estates on either side o f the river.70 So they were not especially eager to have views o f the Hudson that celebrated its prosaic business: steamboats and coal barges chugging along the Hudson; wharves loaded with dry goods and backed with rickety taverns and warehouses. Paradoxically, the only commis­ sion that d id expressly request these views from Thomas Cole was from the English publisher o f Turner’s Picturesque Views o f E n g lan d a n d Wales. But his bankruptcy precluded discovering whether the sketches o f docks and steam­ boats that Cole conscientiously made in 1835 did actually correspond to the expectations o f “views o f the noble Hudson.” More typically, the Hudson Valley painters had to navigate carefully between the savagery o f “wild” scenery and the mechanical clutter o f the indus­ trial river. But while European painters could superimpose the garment o f his­ tory over the smokestack rivers, using “picturesque” sites that were old in associations but new in their construction (like the new London Bridge and the Gothic Revival houses o f Parliament), their American counterparts had noth­ ing to work with but a prospect o f the happy future. This, however, they did with gusto. Thomas Cole’s Essay on A m erica n Scenery, published in 1836,

Bodies o f Water

365

specifically co n trasted the “ casded crags . . . v in e-clad hills and ancient villages” o f the R hine w ith the “ natural m ajesty” o f the H u d s o n . “ Its shores are n o t besprinkled w ith v en era ted ruins o r the palaces o f princes; b u t there are flo u r­ ishing tow n s and n eat villas, and the hand o f taste has been at w o rk .” B u t it w as (sig n ifican d y) a d ifferen t river, the C o n n e c tic u t, that su pplied C o le w ith a de ta iled vision o f h o w a cu ltiv ated state o f grace w o u ld rise, alm ost sp ontaneously, fro m the “ trackless w ild ern e ss.” F o r in

View from Mount

Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) he

Thomas C o le ,

represents h im se lf p a in tin g an d , as th e Essay d escribes, lo o k in g “ d o w n in to the

Viewfrom

b o so m o f th at se clu d ed valley, b e g irt w ith w o o d e d hills th ro u g h enam elled

Mount Holyoke,

m ea d o w s and w id e -w a v in g fields o f g rain , [as] a silver stream w ind s lin gerin gly

Northampton,

a lo n g .” 71 A s an in v e n to ry o f details this seem s to be little differen t fro m the

Massachusetts, ifter a Thunder-

sto ck im a g e ry o f th e T h am es-sid e arcadias. B u t C o le has, in fact, im pressed a

itorm (The Oxbow), 1836.

p a rticularly A m e rica n stam p o n th e scene. D ia g o n a lly separated, the prim itive, storm -ravagg^1 w ild ern ess (th e past) is tra n sfo rm ed across the river in to neatly clea red fields*, o v e rh u n g w ith skies o f celestial-blu e clarity (th e fu tu re). Sh eep g e n tly g ra z e; w isps o f th e m o st d elicate sm o k e rise fro m u nassu m ing co tta g es; and th e hills (w h ich C o le has m ad e m o re p ro m in e n t than the to p o g ra p h y a llo w e d ) to w e r u n th re aten in g ly o n th e h o rizo n .

BLOODSTREAMS

Sanford Gifford, Hook Mountain, near Nyack, on the Hudson, 1866. George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, ca. 1846.

Bodies o f Water

367

As for the river itself, though, it lies peculiarly confined within the oxbow, not so much a dramatic meander as a wholly self-contained loop. And that, surely, is the problem. Though Cole has included details o f a rowboat and a sailboat, this river is not really going anywhere. And likewise the balance between settlement and pastoral innocence, between cultivation and wilder­ ness, has been magically frozen at a moment o f perfect equilibrium. For Cole, it was, in every sense, a moment o f enforced rest. His patron Luman Reed, for whom he was producing the vast history cycle The Course o f Em pire, had him­ self suggested that Cole take time o ff for a different kind o f painting.72 So that Cole deliberately stepped back from the inexorable march o f time that took all civilizations from Edenic innocence to imperial self-immolation to pause at an impossibly perfect place and moment. And following C ole’s cue, American artists became ingenious at finding ways to make the industry and enterprise an undisturbing presence in the American arcadia. George Inness managed to aestheticize the Lackawanna rail­ road so that it drove cheerfully at middle distance, through the verdant hills and dales, a far cry from the ominous oncoming machine on Turner’s bridge. And when Sanford Gifford painted H ook Mountain on the Tappan Zee stretch o f the Hudson, he took good care to choose a point o f view on the west bank that would look direcdy south, thus concealing the clutter o f sheds, brick ware­ houses, and jetties that stuck out from the port o f Nyack into the river. And George Caleb Bingham’s version o f the Missouri and Mississippi featured groups o f voyageurs, the flatboatmen and fur traders notorious for their hellion ways, doing virtually anything but labor. A t exacdy the period when the cot­ ton boom was at its height, Bingham’s protagonists were heroic anachronisms whose devotion to pleasure and mischief put them at serious odds with the great Yankee work ethic. Like the river on which they were easily floated, they were drifters.73 Back east, though, there was another way to make the river more welcom­ ing to the kiss o f modernity: change its sex.

+ + + IN 1809 the sculptor William Rush, who until very recently had specialized in

ships’ figureheads, carved an A lleg o ry o f the Sch uylkill R iv e r in the form o f a standing maiden holding a wading bird, specifically a bittern, on her shoul­ der. The statue was meant as a fountain, mounted on rocks, with water gush­ ing from the bird’s beak eight feet into the sky o f Center Square. And to both Rush and th^city that paid for the sculpture, the commission had more than ornamental significance. In this most practical o f all American cities, Rush was a member o f the Watering Com m ittee which, since the outbreak o f yellow fever in 1793, had been attempting to control its virulence by clean­ ing Philadelphia’s notoriously filthy water supplies.74 In 1799 the English

368

BLOODSTREAM S

engineer

and

architect

Benjamin

Henry

Latrobe proposed a solution that would use the new steam hydraulics to pump fresh water from the Schuylkill, which he believed to be o f exemplary purity. In 1801 he had installed two machines in Center Square and had housed them within an elegant Greek temple, very much to the neoclassical taste o f

Attributed to Rembrandt Peale, William Rush, before 1813.

the time. What better way to celebrate the success o f the enterprise than for Rush to create a fountain that not only would be in keeping with the marriage o f the modern and the antique but would also have the effect, much vaunted by Latrobe, o f refreshing the air around the display? By all accounts the fountain was a famous success, and when the water­ works had to be enlarged and moved to Fairmount Park, the Schuylkill and her bit­ tern went with it. The statue stayed there until 1872, when a bronze cast was taken to replace the rotted wood o f Rush’s original figures. But five years later a much more

John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth o f July in Center Square, 1810-12.

spectacular homage to the work was pro­ vided by Philadelphia’s most gifted artist, Thomas Eakins, in his painting W illiam R ush C a rvin g H is A llegorical Figure o f the Schuylkill River. Devoted as he evidendy was to the vin­ dication o f the largely forgotten William Rush as an authentically American artist, Eakins took one enormous liberty with the original history. He posed the model nude, when, as was plain, even from the carving in his own painting, the statue was repre­ sented as draped.75 But how much o f a liberty was this? The story that Philadelphia society was scandalized by seeing Louisa Van Uxem, the daughter o f the chairman o f the Water­ ing Committee, posing for the Schuylkill was, it is true, a pure invention o f Eakins.

William Rush, Allegory o f the Schuylkill River, or Water Nymph and Bittern, bronze cast o f wooden original, 1809.

Bodies o f Water

3 69

And it is also undeniable that he exploited the myth as an honorable precedent for his own difficulties when using live models in mixed classes at the Pennsyl­ vania Academy. Eakins has been taken to task for his disingenuousness in this. Yet a glance at the bronze version o f Rush’s sculpture actually makes the trans­ gression wholly understandable, if not altogether pardonable. For though we can be sure that William Rush, the ship’s carver, was unlikely to be at all daring in his representation o f the river as a water nymph,

it is also the case that he fully exploited the ambiguities o f neoclassical dress to suggest, as strongly as possible, the naked body, indeed the wet naked body, beneath the clinging drapery. Doubdess in the city that prided itself on its Greek name, Rush would have been aware that there was an alternative type o f antique riv^, sculpture to the reclining bearded male gods that had been adopted by the Romans and made the centerpiece o f the great Renaissance and Baroque fountains. That alternative was a standing (or occasionally seated) nymph or goddess often holding a vase from which the fresh waters o f a river issued. When the personification o f flowing water was the river goddess Isis,

370

BLOODSTREAM S

her garment seemed made o f a film o f moisture issuing from her body. In other words, if the great leaning river-gods represented, symbolically, the force and horizontal flow o f the river, the open vase o f the water nymph and the robe o f Isis represented the fertile copiousness o f the Source. So although there was not a whiff o f scandal surrounding Louisa Van Uxem’s pose, and although Rush himself could hardly have been happy at the popular misidentification o f the fountain group as “ Leda and the Swan” (the

bittern, after all, was a wading bird that lived in rushes), Eakins’s deliberate transgression sustained the conceit o f an affinity between the source o f pure water and the female body. Indeed how could Eakins, who more than any other Western artist registered the force o f male bodies upon, and in, American waters, not give expression to its sexual complement? What, after all, is the illuminated focal point of the composition? Not Rush himself, dressed as a yeoman artisan and, like the carving, shrouded in darkness;

Thomas Eakins, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure o f the Schuylkill River, 1877.

Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio, 1855 (detail of central group).

Bodies o f Water

BLOODSTREAMS

372

not the chaperone, though the fall o f her dress and bonnet are clearly meant as a wistful echo o f the nude. Where, in fact, is the light source? Notionally, there must be a window opening or lantern o f some sort beyond the picture space at left. But it lights selectively, first the throw o f clothes on the chair, and then the left outline o f the nude body. And by visually rhyming the two lines— of underclothes and glowing skin— Eakins has in fact created not a nude scene at all, but one o f undress. So Rush’s liquid drapery is present in Eakins’s interpretation after all. And we see immediately that there cannot possibly be any accident in the colors and

textures that the painter has brought together in the drop o f dress: blue hose, white fabric edged with lace. What he has created, in a sweetly poetic compli­ ment not just to Rush the artist but to the Fairmount waterworks and the Schuylkill itself, is a cascade. * e a k i n s

’s

p a i n t i n g

*

*

is not the only instance o f a meaningful discrepancy

between a model and its ostensible object. Twenty years before, Gustave

Bodies o f Water

373

Courbet’s P a in te r ’s Stud io had marked a much more starding difference between the standing nude and the work o f art in progress. In a brilliant read­ ing, to which this whole line o f discussion is indebted, Michael Fried responds to the assumption that the nude is not, after all, in the painting by insisting that, in fact, she is.76 Once seen, it is impossible to miss the relationship between the river water, issuing from the grotto in Courbet’s painting, and the cloth falling down the model’s body and, as we must say, cascading into the pool of her dress. As Fried notes, the flow is not necessarily in one direction. It works as well moving from painting to model to drapery, and perhaps spilling out from the whole picture space into the lap o f the beholder. But equally it is pos­ sible to paddle one’s gaze upstream, fighting the current, into the heart o f the painting’s painting, toward the dark, rocky crevice at its center.

Gustave Courbet, The Source o f theLoue, 1863. Gustave Courbet, The Origin o f the World, 1866.

All this becomes more compelling when set against Courbet’s passion for anthropomorphic landscape. In the 1860s he painted a series o f views o f water-caves, all sited in his native region o f the Franche-Comte. A t the cen­ ter o f each is a dark opening from which the waters o f the river Loue or the Puits Noir flow back and forth. And it doesn’t take a feverishly Freudian imagination to see them as vaginal orifices in the face o f the rock, especially when, at aBout the same time, Courbet also produced at least one explicit painting o f female pudenda, for the Turkish collector o f erotica Khalil Bey.77 The artist gave it the title o f The O rig in o f the World. And if we are indeed meant to think o f the water-caves o f the Franche-Comte as a site o f native origins— geological and prehistoric— it may be said that Courbet was indeed returning very far upstream.

BLOODSTREAMS

374

Is this where we have arrived, then, in the middle o f the industrial-impe­ rial century, back in the Renaissance river grottoes, the dimly glowing fans et origoy where the secret o f creation was promised in a fusion o f wisdom and love? Only instead o f the woman in the cave, Courbet has offered us the cave within the woman.

vi

The Waters o f Isis: The Thames and the Nile

When they pictured the Source o f the Nile, travellers imagined a cascade forc­ ing its way through a cleft in a solid wall o f rock. That is what George Sandys supposed he might find somewhere above Nubia in 1610; what “Abyssinian” Bruce hoped to have revealed in the Ethiopian Mountains o f the Moon in 1770. Those waters o f Isis, at the very core o f the mystery o f the earth’s mois­ ture, were imagined as the issue o f hidden places; the “coy fountains,” a secre­ tion o f dark bodies; an invitation to deep and deathly penetration. One o f the two Victorians who set o ff in 1863 in search o f the Source might have appreciated these compulsions. For Richard Burton had spent much o f his life investigating and codifying the sexual mores o f the Islamic and Indian worlds, staining his own already saturnine features so that he could pass unno­ ticed in the brothels o f Calcutta. His colleague in the overland expedition north to the Nile was, however, the blond-bearded, white-skinned bachelor John Hanning Speke. And o f the two geographers it was Speke who had the propen­ sity for losing his bearings, having his grip go distracted in the immensity of Africa. That immensity appeared to him one day in the camp o f King Rumanyika in the form o f a woman, the king’s sister-in-law, vast, oiled, and black. Even in the carefully repressed pages o f his memoir o f the expedition Speke cannot help but recall his horrified, enthralled fascination with her. She arouses the explorer in him. “ I was desirous to obtain a good view o f her and actually to measure her and induced her to give me facilities for doing so by offering to show her a bit o f my naked legs and arms.”78 An exchange typical o f imperial negotiation followed. For a glimpse o f freckled British limb, the Explorer was able to make a precise survey o f the subject body, all set down with precision worthy o f the Royal Geographical Society: two feet seven inches about the thigh, one foot eleven inches about the arm, and so on. And all the time this mapping was

The Waters o f Isis: The Thames and the N ile under way, Speke felt himself observed by the king’s daughter, “ a lass o f six­ teen, stark naked, sucking on a milk pot.” Emboldened, he “ [gets] up a flir­ tation with Missy and induced her to rise and shake hands with me. Her fea­ Richard Burton,

tures were lovely but her body was as

ca. 1863.

round as a ball.” Deeper in the

heart o f Africa,

indeed almost at its very geographical center, Speke reaches the city o f the notoriously murderous King Mutesa o f the Baganda. He watches (and is con­ scious that he is being watched by the amused tyrant) as thirty naked virgins, the daughters o f a defeated enemy, “ all smeared and streaming with grease,” are marched before him, ready for execution or concubinage. Speke is invited to inspect them at close quarters. He does so. The king then asks him “ if I would like to have some o f these women and if so how many.” Struggling to reconcile clemency with chastity, the Victorian bachelor graciously accepts but one and then immediately delivers her to his servant. Everybody is offended except the Explorer, who has surely done the Chris­ tian thing. A slippery thing is this colonial

geography!

The

fountains remain coy. The two mismatched explorers fight constantly and bit­ terly.

Burton

becomes

lame, Speke almost blind. John Hanning Speke.

His

legs

swollen

monstrously

with

infection,

Burton is left behind while the weak-eyed Speke stum­ bles on north, trembling like a divinmg rod, toward the waters. Only when his sight is virtually gone does he arrive at the Source itself, at the northern end o f Lake Victoria.

BLOODSTREAMS

376

Driven by the need to possess the Source for the empire, the geographers are themselves dispossessed. Back in Britain their feud turns lethal. Speke takes the sole credit for the discovery; Burton declares him deluded. A debate is called for a special meeting o f the Royal Geographical Society. But before it can convene Speke shoots himself, falling bloodily on a country stile. The wound, called accidental, is fatal. He is commemorated with an obelisk in Kensington Gardens. On bright days, the black shadow cast by the rays o f Amun-Ra, S.W.7, falls in the waters o f the Round Pond. It is not the most famous obelisk in London. That arrived in 1878, while the opera o f the Ethiopian captive Aida was playing at Covent Garden. Like most other trophies and sculptures o f imperial rivers, the obelisk had also undergone a sex change. It was one o f a pair that had been quarried from Aswan rose-granite, around 1450 B .C ., by the formidable conqueror Pharaoh Thutmose III. For fifteen centuries the two obelisks had stood before the temples o f the sun at Heliopolis, on the east bank o f the Nile. But the last o f the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, also the last Egyptian ruler to protect the traditional ven­ eration o f Isis and Osiris, had given orders for the columns to be moved to the Caesareum at Alexandria. This was the palace that the Egyptian queen had built to the memory o f her lover, who had himself been obsessed with the secret o f the Nile’s source. Around 18 A .D ., in the reign o f Augustus, the two columns were re-erected before the gates o f the Caesareum. Malicious tradition believed them to stand, priapically, in the tradition o f the licentious rites o f Isis and Osiris for the queen’s two Roman lovers, Julius and Antony.79 So it was as “Cleopatra’s Needles” that they came to be coveted by the two warring empires o f Britain and France. And by this time, eighteen centuries later, one o f the obelisks had fallen into the sand outside Alexandria. It was the eagerness o f the French to carry them off as trophies that first spurred British jealousy and emulation. And since the British victory at Alexandria in 1801 had resulted in the final expulsion o f Bonaparte’s troops from Egypt, the opportu­ nity was taken to “suggest” to the Turkish viceroy, Mehemet Ali, that his offer o f a gift o f gratitude for the liberation might take the form o f one o f the obelisks. The hope was that it might be re-erected somewhere in London as a memorial to the British troops, especially General Abercromby, who had died during the campaign. Then a terrible thing happened. Mehemet Ali (after a properly Levantine delay) made the offer, only to find the British hemming and hawing over the fifteen thousand pounds needed to transport the obelisk. Each time the offer was renewed, at the coronation o f George IV (1820) and William IV (1830), the same stingy objections were raised at Westminster. By this time, Mehemet Ali, nobody’s pawn, had turned into a formidable ruler in his own right and was brilliandy exploiting Anglo-French tension in the Middle East to assert his own power. An obelisk was offered to the government o f King Louis-Philippe;

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it was gratefully accepted. Even worse, when the French asked if they might instead have one o f the spectacular obelisks o f Luxor, no objection was made. In 1836 it duly went up on the Place de la Concorde, on the very site where the statue o f Louis XV had once stood and where his grandson Louis XVI had been beheaded. For London’s Egyptomanes this was a bitter blow. But in the parsimonious world o f Victorian liberalism, nothing was going to set it to right without pri­ vate philanthropy. It took the classic combination o f Scottish money (provided by the dermatologist Erasmus Wilson), the military patronage o f General James Alexander, and the engineering skills o f the brothers Waynman and John Dixon before the campaign to bring the needle to London could be properly launched. The enterprise was heroic engineering at its most dashing. The half-buried column was to be encased in an iron cylinder that would be prefabricated and assembled around the horizontal needle. It would then be rolled toward the shore, attached with hawsers to a steam-tug, and towed, very carefully, all the way to London. A t the end o f August 1877 the cigar-tube barge, containing the obelisk lying within, was launched into the Mediterranean. It was named the Cleopatra. But to the learned might it not have suggested an uncanny resemblance to that earlier, fatal coffin, with the body o f the dead lord Osiris nailed within that also bobbed and pitched about in the cobalt waters o f the Eastern sea? It was unlikely, o f course, that either the habitually drunken Maltese crew aboard the Cleopatra or its master, Captain Henry Carter, was especially famil­ iar with Plutarch or Diodorus Siculus. But when Carter dropped through the trap in his little turret and crawled on his belly, holding a lit candle between his teeth, when he burned his nose so badly in this position that he dropped the light and was obliged to palm his way along the hieroglyphs, his belly flat against the granite, did he then feel the slightest tweak from the God o f the Underworld, H e who Died and Sank and Rose and Died Again? Was it the breath o f Typhon that whipped the waves in the Bay o f Biscay into mountains? The Cleopatra , which even in moderate swells pitched at a peculiar angle, now bucketed insanely up and down, driving the crew into ter­ ror. Desperate signals o f distress were sent to the towing ship, the Olga, which launched a boat to try to take o ff the frantic sailors from the Cleopatra. Before they could get alongside, a wave o f monstrous height fell upon the rescuers, engulfing fium so completely that neither boat nor sailors were to be seen. They had all been swallowed entire by the deep. Eventually the crew was brought aboard the O lga and a decision taken to cut the Cleopatra loose and abandon it to the waters. Three days later, griev­ ing for their dead comrades and demoralized at the loss o f the obelisk, the O lga put in at Falmouth harbor. For a day, the abandoned iron coffin floated on the

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gale-whipped sea; the lookout cabin lying parallel to the waves. When the steamship Fitzm aurice spotted her, the Cleopatra was describing violent and crazy circles, like a harpooned whale in its death throes. But as the storm abated, lines could be attached and the famous tube with its recumbent mon­ ument was towed into a Spanish harbor. Refitted, it finally arrived at the mouth o f the Thames the following Janu­ ary, 1878. And while it lay moored at the East India docks, a captious debate ensued over where the needle should be erected. Its sponsors naturally wanted the maximum prominence. The general thought St. James’s Park would be best; the eminent dermatologist insisted Parliament Square was the most fit­ ting. But the commissioners o f the new Metropolitan Underground Railway were anxious lest the obelisk drop into the tunnel below, seriously inconve­ niencing passengers. So it was as a compromise that the embankment o f the Thames, at the Adelphi steps between the Savoy and Whitehall, was finally agreed upon. But once selected, the riverbank site seemed somehow the most fitting o f all, with the granite stone raised on a pedestal above the turbid sludge o f the great imperial river. While the elaborate preparations for the re-erection were being made, thousands came to inspect the column, docked by St. Thomas’s Hospital, pan­ els removed from the Cleopatra for better viewing. The Prince o f Wales did his duty and peered at it; Disraeli, Romantic novelist o f the Orient as well as prime minister, peered at its hieroglyphs and stroked his goatee; the queen, whom he had just exalted into an oriental empress, sent her earnest good wishes and made the dermatologist a Sir Erasmus. And on September 13, through the mir­ acle o f hydraulic power, the science that had been born on the banks o f the Nile Delta at Alexandria, the needle was lowered into place. Before the needle was set, a number o f memorabilia had been deposited within the supporting pedestal, in the manner o f votive offerings placed by the body o f dead kings in the Pyramids o f Egypt. They were, o f course, in the Vic­ torian rather than the Pharaonic manner, to wit, a standard “foot and pound” presented by the Board o f Trade; a bronze scale model o f the obelisk; copies o f Engineering printed on vellum with plans o f the transport and re-erection; a complete set o f British coins including an empress o f India rupee; Bibles in various languages; Bradshaw’s Railway Guide; a case o f cigars, pipes; a box o f hairpins “and sundry articles o f female adornment” ; and, courtesy o f Captain Henry Carter, “photographs o f a dozen pretty Englishwomen.”80 Would Osiris have found Bradshaw’s Railway G uide or the dozen pretty Englishwomen an acceptable votive offering on the banks o f the Thames? In any event Englishwomen o f all complexions, their imaginations stirred by obelisks, tablets, and the colossal head o f Ramses II that stared at them in the galleries o f the British Museum, were sailing to Egypt to encounter the gods and the Pharaohs at first hand. They were duly stupefied by the Pyramids o f

The Waters o f Isis: The Thames and the N ile

The Cleopatra cut adrift, cover, The Illustrated London News, October 27, 18 7 7.

379

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Gizeh, the “palace o f giants” at Karnak, and the heads o f Hathor at Dendera, where, reported Amelia Edwards in 1877, “a heavy, death-like smell as o f long imprisoned gases met us on the threshold.”81 But o f the places o f marvel and pilgrimage on the Nile, one above all others sent the women into a transport o f ecstasy: the temple island o f Philae, believed by an ancient if corrupt tradi­ tion to be the final resting place o f the remains o f Osiris. The homage to Philae was all the more improbable since its architecture, by Egyptian standards, was not at all ancient. Its oldest building was the tem­ ple o f Isis but this only dated from the late Ptolemies, and the colonnade along one bank o f the island was an even later, unfinished structure built during the reign o f Augustus. And as Florence Nightingale, who spent what she called her “ Holy Week” on the island in January 1850, bluntly observed, “everything in Philoe is ugly. The hypaethral temple is hideous; the sculptures (after what we have been accustomed to in Nubia, o f the times o f the great Rameses) would disgrace a child— ill-drawn, ill-cut, ill-painted.”82 What accounted, then, for the peculiar spell that Philae seemed to put on all who set foot on the “sacred isle,” as Florence Nightingale baptized it? Its situation, to be sure, was pure magic: set high on an island at the “ gates of Nubia.” Because it was sited just above the First Cataract, travellers were obliged to reach its stretch o f the Nile by mule or camel, and then embark on a boat south o f the rapids. This had the effect o f detaching them from their conventional responses to Egypt: learned wonder, mixed with European vexa­ tion at the flies, the baksheesh, the flat monotony o f the riverbanks. Abrupdy, as if by some enchantment, everything changed above the cataract. The river itself had altered color to a slightly less turbid hue. It flowed faster and beneath granite cliffs that towered hundreds o f feet high; then, before Philae itself, it suddenly pooled into a strange and beautiful calm, as though the Nile were try­ ing to become a lake. The palms were wilder, set against the great Golden Mountains, the Nubians darker and so, the Europeans always thought, some­ how more dignified and silent than the Arabs who had all but disappeared from the riverscape. The women, too, were tall, erect, their long black hair brilliant with castor oil, their bodies often exposed to view. If the Egyptomanes fanta­ sized about the “true” descendants o f the people o f the Pharaohs, surely these were they. But there was something else about Philae for which most o f its visitors were unprepared, however many times they had looked at the Romantic watercolors and engravings o f David Roberts (color illus. 31). For, however crude, the brilliant hieroglyphs o f Ptolemy XI (the father o f Cleopatra) were ennobled by their devoted preservation o f the old religion; o f the sun cult o f Ra; and above all the cult o f Isis and her son by Osiris, the great god Horus. And despite all the depredations o f the Copts and the Mamluks, the spirit o f the Egyptian gods o f the Nile breathed through the sandstone and granite. “This last failing

The Waters o f Isis: The Thames and the N ile

38 \

effort o f the failing nation to embody their spirit,” Nightingale wrote, “ makes it all the more affecting.”

It is like the last leaping up o f the light in the socket which shows the dying face you loved, o f which the spirit is beautiful, though the body is disfigured and agonising— it is like the last dying words, the farewell. I am not sure that I did not love Philoe better for her struggle to say one thing more to our watching ears, to teach us the great truths she felt so deeply.83

In her rapture, the exemplary Christian Florence even imagined that He W ho Sleeps in Philae, the lord Osiris, whose bed was said to be beneath the temple parapet, was actually identical with “ our Savior.” They had the same torn body, the same commingling o f blood and wine and water. “When I saw a shadow in the moonlight in the temple court, I thought perhaps I shall see him, now he is there.” Many others, less given to piety, had the identical experience o f transfigu­ ration beneath the moon o f Philae, a trembling disturbance beneath the skin that shook their composure. Lucie Duff-Gordon, who had been sent to Egypt to have her consumption cured, on a May night in 1864 slept beneath the stars, as she wrote, “ on the very couch o f Osiris himself.” The next day she woke at dawn and bathed in the Nile, tinted blood-red by the sunrise, and then went up and sat at the end o f the colonnade, looking up into Ethiopia, dreaming dreams o f “ Him W ho Sleeps at Philae” until the great Amun-Ra kissed my northern face too hody and drove me into the temple to breakfast on coffee, pipes and kieff.84 Five years later Lucie was dead, for, contrary to Victorian dogma, the cli­ mate o f Egypt did litde for tuberculosis but scour the lungs with sand. But forty years almost to the day after her Isis-like communion with great Osiris, her daughter Janet Ross arrived to see Philae. She too decided to escape the heat o f the temple by sleeping on the parapet. When she awoke, however, and walked about the isle, her spirits sank amidst the hordes o f chattering tourists who had come from Thomas C oo k’s tennis-court hotel at Elephantine, and the hordes o f beggars who came with them like the scavenging birds that fol­ lowed the boats. Osiris, who was supposed to see to these things, had been unable to prevent the Western engineers o f Lord Cromer’s Egypt from begin­ ning the project o f the Aswan Dam and submerging the temple for several months each year. “ Philae, beautiful Philae was no more,” she wrote. “ For a few minutes hatred o f the utilitarian science which had destroyed such loveliness possessed us.”85

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It was just the beginning o f the end. What the British Empire commenced, the Soviet Empire (which believed in great dams as if they were ordained by the dialectic) completed. Gamal Nasser’s Aswan High Dam supplied him with the political voltage in 1956 to defy the enfeebled powers o f Europe. But the rising waters would doom Philae, the temple o f Isis, and the couch o f Osiris to a drowning more final than anything imagined by Plutarch. The alternative was, o f course, dismemberment. In 1972 a barrier shield made o f steel corseted the island and millions o f cubics o f sand were dumped to prevent leakage. The tem­ ples were cleaned, photographed, and numbered. And then they were taken apart, stone by stone. Did Isis preside over the reconstitution? Was anything left behind in the Nile? Is that th e problem? That nothing was indeed left behind? Is this why, with Isis and Osiris reunited on the scrubby, muddy little island o f Agilkia, some­ thing is wrong with the Nile? Polluted, evaporated, exhausted, it is dying. And it is hard to have faith, this time, in the resurrection.

P A R T

T H R E E

Rock

M ou ntains are the beginning a n d the end o f a ll n a tu ra l scenery. JO H N R U S K IN ,

M odern Painters I should like the A lp s very m uch i f i t were not f o r the hills. J O H N S P E N C E , 1730

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Dinocmtes and the Shaman: Altitude, Beatitude, Magnitude

i

The Woman on Mount Rushmore

A n d why not, pray? To Rose Arnold Powell, who had campaigned for ten years to have Susan B. Anthony, the heroine o f the long crusade for women’s suffrage, up there on the granite with the four presidents, it was surely right and fitting, so long as America had any claim on the world’s attention to be a place where justice and equality were truly served. And hadn’t she explained all this to Mrs. Roosevelt, who had had the goodness to read her letters prop­ erly and to answer, not like some others in Washington who pretended to be fighters for the Women’s Cause, but who returned her nothing but patroniz­ ing smirks and knowing shakes o f the head back and forth as if she were simpleminded. She had paid them no heed. She had fought on and on and never minced her words any more than Miss Anthony herself would have done. “ I protest with all my being against the exclusion o f a woman from the Mount Rushmore group o f great Americans,” she had written the First Lady in 1934. “ Future generations will ask why she was left out o f the m emorial. . . if this big blunder is not rectified. The M ount Rushmore Memorial Commission can amend its present plan and include her if the gratitude o f women will rise 385

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as a flood and sweep away all objections.” 1 It had come to her in St. Paul, while she was laboring away for the Internal Revenue Service, that she had more important dues to col­ lect than income tax. The constitu­ tional amendment that had finally recognized women’s right to vote (she would never say g ra n ted ) was but a decade old. Americans— men

as

How could much

as

women— not think a great national

Gutzon Borglum, in harness on the cliff o f Mount Rushmore. Mount Rushmore, near completion.

monument should commemorate the woman who had saved Ameri­ can democracy from its sin o f omission? Was Miss Anthony not as worthy as Jefferson, who had given democracy its institutional design, or Lincoln, who had brought the freed Negroes within its walls? Was her nose not as aquiline, her jaw as craggy, her brow as determined, and her spirit no less magnificent? Why, nature might have designed her for a stone memorial. There was talk o f postage stamps. Postage stamps indeed. She would not be fobbed o ff with postage stamps; little pieces o f gummed paper, licked and forgotten. It was not such a paltry little thing she had in mind, but something mountainous in its scale o f honor. She would explain all this to the sculptor, Mr. Borglum. He seemed a man o f big vision who would surely under­ stand the rightness o f it. In 1927 she had seen pictures o f him swinging away in his harness contraption against the granite face o f the mountain, while President Coolidge, vacationing in the Black Hills, looking fool­ ish in cowboy boots and Sioux headdress, had let fly a surprisingly mighty gust o f speech on “the National Shrine to Democ­ racy.” Now, how could such a thing be truly n a tion a l and ignore half o f all Americans? She wrote to the president in this vein, but Silent Cal, alas, seemed to have reverted to type. In 1930 the head o f George Washing­ ton,

sixty

feet

high,

was

ceremonially

Rose Arnold Powell.

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unveiled. O n the movie-house news in St. Paul, five hundred miles east o f the mountain, Rose Powell saw a vast Stars and Stripes furl itself upward, as if moved by the hand o f Providence, revealing the noble Washingtonian nose (a foot longer than originally calculated), the majestic overhanging brow lit by the morning sun. Through the crackle o f microphones she heard Borglum proph­ esy that this was a face that would outlast all the civilization it represented. There was cheering, flights o f airplanes, salutations in rifle shots, and festive blasts o f dynamite spraying rubble high in the air like confetti. Rose made her mind up. What was to keep her in Minnesota? She had no family other than her mother, who would fuss but keep her peace. She knew Washington from her time there as secretary and treasurer o f the Susan B. Anthony League in the 1920s.2 And if the cause was to prevail, she had to be in the capital, writing to any and everyone who might show interest, knocking on doors, being a righteous pest. She knew well enough that it would be a lonely fight. “ Like Moses I felt utterly inadequate for the undertaking.” 3 But hadn’t Miss Anthony herself shown what sheer dogged tenacity, and belief in the rightness o f the cause, might accomplish?

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In November 1933 Rose Powell put on her best hat and stepped into the lobby o f the Willard Hotel, in Washington, D .C. A block away, men and women in worn coats stood vacandy in front o f the White House as if hoping for prophecy from the new president. In the Willard’s “ Peacock Alley” gold watches and silk scarves lay on satin cushions, catching highlights from the bril­ liant display lighting. The place smelled o f cigars and French perfume. It rusded with riches. Not for her, though, and, she told herself by way of encouragement, not for Gutzon Borglum either. For all his fame and his grand friends like Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst, he had the repu­ tation o f being constantly hard up, always getting into scrapes and squabbles over money. Years ago he had mortgaged his big Connecticut estate, Borgland, to help finance the Confederate monument on Stone Mountain when the Georgians got sting)'. Before his term was up Coolidge had managed to estab­ lish the Mount Rushmore Commission and had got a quarter o f a million dol­ lars from Congress for the work, conditional on its being matched from private funds. But with the Depression hitting Dust Bowl states like South Dakota so hard, and what with the banks full o f failed farms and businesses, most o f the philanthropic promises had come to nothing. Lately things seemed to have been going a little better. For all his renown as the Great Engineer, Herbert Hoover had shown no interest at all, maybe even something worse, toward the monument. The new president, though, was a different story; another Roosevelt, good for America, good for Borglum. Prompted by the senator for South Dakota, Peter Norbeck, he had squeezed fifty thousand from the grudging New Deal Congress. It was made acceptable as a works project to sponge up the local unemployed, though Borglum had his doubts they would be up to much except for maybe clearing dirt and scrub and boulders from the site. Perhaps somehow he could use the money to make good the disaster with Jefferson’s head, when one o f his cutters had bit too deep into the forehead with his drill, making old Tom look like he had a per­ manent migraine. Though the commission was now free to use federal money without waiting for matching grants, he had the National Park Service on his back, with some pinstripe giving him lectures about “ mutilating” mountains and as how National Memorials ought rightly to be the work o f Nature and God, and so forth. All this was evidently on Borglum’s mind when he stood up to shake Miss Powell’s hand. His sunburned brow was deeply creased; his blue eyes watery behind the pince-nez which went oddly with his fedora and silk scarf, half bohemian, half bank manager.4 Removal o f the hat exposed a dome o f brilliant baldness, and below it Borglum wore an expression that was somehow both impatient and importunate. He still needed funds. That, she assumed (rightly), was why he had agreed to see her at all. As she made the case for Miss Anthony as forthrightly and eloquently as she could, she felt his attention wander to any

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money that might drift across the lobby and be snared for the mountain. She was acutely conscious o f lacking Miss Anthony’s own famous eloquence, which could sweep aside cavils with an unanswerable epigram, with the adamant force o f its truth. She pulled out an old photograph, taken when the great suffragist had been president o f the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Perhaps the powerful nose and jawline would move the sculptor more than her awkward words? Borglum took a look, shrugged and grunted, with unneces­ sary discourtesy so she thought, and made his sense o f being put upon only too plain. Still, he did not reject her outright. And even when he took his leave of her, rather abrupdy, mumbling something about “ thinking it over,” she accepted the dismissal as though it were an invitation to persevere. And persevere she did, even when Borglum failed to respond to her many letters. There were no women’s organizations in Washington, in the country,

Adelaide Johnson, Portrait Busts o f Susan B. Anthony (center) with Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

that did not hear from Rose Arnold Powell about Mount Rushmore and Susan B. Anthony. And when even the Susan B. Anthony League found her relendess hammering a bit much to take, she upbraided the organization for its spine­ lessness and want o f large imagination, and resigned to found the Susan B. Anthony Forum . Never mind that the forum was mostly her, a handful o f likeminded devotees, and an old typewriter. It elbowed its way into the attention o f those who wielded some real political clout. And when the grandly titled National Federation o f Business and Professional Women’s Clubs signed on for the campaign, that “M ount Rushmore woman” stopped being a joke at Wash­ ington cocktail parties. Nineteen thirty-six was an election year. The women’s vote m ight count in tight races; no one knew for how much. Senators and congressmen who had

390

DI NOC R A T E S AND T H E SHAMAN

chuckled at the very idea now put their names to a bill supporting the inclu­ sion o f Susan B. Anthony on the Mount Rushmore monument, much to the horror o f Pete Norbeck. Eleanor wrote to Borglum; harassed Franklin. Franklin procrastinated and then offered the postage stamp as a sop. This only spurred the women’s organizations (orchestrated by Miss Powell) to swamp the White House with more mail. In the summer, doubdess moved by the distinct possi­ bility o f South Dakota going Republican, Roosevelt went to Mount Rushmore for the dedication o f the Jefferson head, using the occasion to identify himself and his party with the founding father o f American democracy. But any possi­ bility o f pressing the women’s cause was drowned out in the din o f Borglumania that attended the dedication— dynamited rocks tumbling down the mountain slope as yet another oversize Old Glory rose to reveal Jefferson’s properly corrected profile. In October of 1936, with her campaign evidently in the balance, Rose Pow­ ell stepped off the curb on Sixteenth Street and into the fender o f a speeding taxicab. Coming when it did, the accident was especially catastrophic. She had been planning a grand statement to send to the chairman o f the Mount Rushmore Commission before it made its report to Congress. Enduring savage pain from a battered spine, Rose dictated the long document to a halting stenogra­ pher. It was an appeal to take democracy seriously, to insist on giving “femi­ nine heroism” its rightful due, to make future generations o f young Americans understand that the country had not been built by men alone. The time that followed was bleak. The accident seemed to have mobilized a whole army o f discomforts that would no sooner pass from one region o f her body than it would show up in another. Demoralized, Rose Powell went back to Minnesota, knowing that from that distance she would be hard pressed to capitalize on all the work she had put in before 1936. The Anthony Bill was reintroduced, but with the election past it was little more than a gesture and died on the floor o f the House. Funds for her forum dwindled and dried up altogether, forcing its liquidation. A last meeting was held at the house o f the sculptor Adelaide Johnson, who had made a marble bust o f Susan Anthony, as well as two other founders o f American feminism, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. To Rose Powell, it seemed like a wake. “ I felt utterly crushed,” she wrote later, “by the thought o f failure o f my great mission with no-one interested to carry on the work as I had done.” 5 Even in her lowest moments, though, Miss Powell could not cut loose from her obsession. She soldiered on, as best she could, from Minneapolis, con­ verting the president o f the National Organization for Women and arguing over and over again with Borglum himself. He protested there was no room. She gave him the measurements o f the rock to show there was. He objected that Miss Anthony, however noble, was no president. The more the pity, said she, but women’s disgraceful exclusion from democratic representation was all

The Woman on M oun t Rushmore the m ore reason to make proper ato nem ent and recognition. N o one

39 1 he

shouted in his letters, no one had a greater regard for the w om en o f America. H a d he n o t risked scandal and ou trage w hen he had m ade his Atlas supporting the very g lo b e a w om an? T o Eleanor R oose velt he insisted that “ I have resented all m y life any and all form s o f d epend ence or second place forced on our m o th ­ ers, ou r w ives or ou r d aughters, as has been the history o f m en ’s civilization, bu t I feel in this proposal that it is a very definite intrusion that will injure the specific purpose o f this m em orial.” 6 A n d then, qu ite su d denly in the d arkening m onth s o f autum n 1939, with Eu rope at war, there arrived w h at R ose Pow ell to o k to be a capitulation. A let­ ter from B orglu m en closed another he had w ritten to the president o f N O W , propo sing the w estern w all o f M o u n t R u shm ore as a suitable site for a portrait o f Susan B. A n th o n y! H e w ro te as i f he had been in ten d in g this all along. C o u ld M iss Pow ell, M rs. R oosevelt, and oth er interested parties com e o u t to the m ountain to take a look? Surprisingly, n o one cou ld . B u t tw o further letters, in January and A pril 1940, seem ed to assume this c o m m itm en t w ou ld be h o n ­ ored. H e r likeness w o u ld stand n ext to the “ great inscription” (as yet unw rit­ ten) that was to be carved b e lo w the heads. A year later B o rg lu m was d ead, and the Susan B. A n th o n y project was buried a lo n g w ith him . H is son , L in co ln , w h o had w orked at the m onum en t, inherited the responsibility for its com p letion . B u t in w artim e there were no dollars for C o n g re ss to spend o n m o n u m en tal m ountains o u t in the m iddle o f now here, especially since T h e o d o r e R o o se velt’ s head, the last o f the four to be co m p leted (and, technically, perhaps the m o st accom plished), had been d ed i­ cated in the sum m er o f 1939. N eed less to say, M iss P ow ell w rote as earnestly and as fre qu en d y (tw o letters a w ee k, average five pages, single-spaced) to the son as she had to the father, shamelessly using filial m em ory as a call to fulfil w h at she unhesitatingly called G u tz o n ’s “ prom ise.” B u t th o u g h she herself lived o n to i9 6 0 and never failed to rem ind each su cceeding president and even V ic e President R ichard N ix o n o f their “ d u ty,” her m o m en t had passed and she was tolerated m erely as another harmless o ld crank, a relic from the ancient days o f the suffragettes. T h er e w o u ld be (at least in M in n e sota) a Susan B. A n th o n y Day. T here was ind eed a fifteen -cen t Susan B. A n th o n y stam p, and a fifty-cent Susan B. A n th o n y co in (in 19 4 7 ); and au tom atic ticket m achines at G rand Central n o w dispense Susan B. A n th o n y dollars as change. A delaide Johnson’ s fine bust stands in the C a p ito l rotunda. B u t that heroic jaw and set expression d o n ot lo o k d o w n from the Black H ills, inserted betw een the intelligent, concupiscent Jefferson and the rou ghridin g, bespectacled T e d d y Roosevelt. A n d the sad fact o f the m atter is that the head, as R ose P ow ell im agined it, w as never seriously cou n ten a n ced b y G u tz o n B orglum , m uch less by Franklin R oosevelt. In her elation at his apparent change o f heart M iss P ow ell glossed

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DI NOC R A T E S AND T H E SHAMAN

all too lightly over what in fact was the most crucial element in his letter: its specific identification o f the west wall as the site o f the “portrait.” What he meant was the back o f the monument, somewhere in the vicinity o f a planned (but never executed) “Hall o f Records” that was intended as a more inclusive pantheon o f American worthies. So Miss Anthony would have been in the com­ pany not o f Washington et al. but Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, as if she had been the inventor o f something as unlikely as women’s suffrage. Nor did Borglum ever make it clear what the dimensions o f the “portrait” were going to be. Miss Powell chose to imagine something on the same scale as the heads o f the presidents. But what he evidendy had in mind was something more akin to the relief figures o f Stone Mountain, but on a significandy smaller scale. What Gutzon Borglum really wanted more than anything, for all his protes­ tations o f championing the women’s cause, was to get the remorseless Rose Arnold Powell once and for all out o f his hair. Perhaps he supposed that by humoring her he might even be able to tap women’s organizations for the money desperately needed to complete the whole memorial, Hall o f Records, “great inscription,” and all. When a congressman asked him (incredulously) whether he took the Woman on Mount Rushmore Project seriously, his response was crisp. “ Pay no attention,” he wrote; should the foolishness ever come to any­ thing, “I would brush it aside as I would an annoying fly on a wet day.”7 “Nothing is hopeless that is right,” wrote Rose Powell, nearing the end o f her life in i960, in what might have been her epitaph. But had she known more o f Gutzon Borglum’s real character and purpose, even her formidable faith might well have wobbled, if not crumpled altogether. After all, someone who saw moun­ tain carving as a supremely masculine act o f possession was unlikely to welcome the addition o f America’s most famous suffragette to his rock-gallery o f heroes. Borglum had his own, peculiar women’s history. He was the son o f a Dan­ ish Mormon immigrant who had taken two sisters as his wives. When he was still an infant, his biological mother, Christina, was cast out, Hagar-like, from the Borglum household, and little Gutzon was reared by his aunt/stepmother. With this ghost o f the lost mother preying on him through adolescence and into adulthood, it comes as no surprise to learn that he married his art teacher, Lisa Putnam, eighteen years older than himself, nor that he found it impossi­ ble to say anything about her to his dreadful old father until after the marriage. Needless to say, once Borglum deserted his wife and married again, he obliter­ ated the memory o f Lisa from the family history. As Albert Boime has aptly put it, “as a creator o f monuments he was a destroyer o f his own personal history.”8 At the same time, Borglum felt himself moved by assertive, almost androg­ ynous women. In London and Paris, where he did his art studies, he became acquainted (so he claims) with Isadora Duncan and Sarah Bernhardt. And when he later professed the intensity o f his admiration for women to Rose Powell, it was these kinds o f women he had in mind— the sort that became his female Atlas,

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393

and the women-angels o f the Savior Chapel in the Cathedral o f St. John the Divine in Manhattan, rather than Susan B. Anthony. But the influence that imprinted itself most deeply on his early career as a sculptor was that o f Auguste Rodin, whom he had known well during his years in Paris and who was himself a long way from being a feminist sympathizer. For years Borglum surely fancied himself the American Rodin, a creator o f muscular heroics in bronze. And though Borglum never committed himself to anything approaching Rodin’s expressive erodes, he certainly identified with the masculine egotism o f the sculptor-as-god, kneading flesh to his own will. The trouble with modern art was that it had gone degenerate. The trouble with America was that it had gone limp. All these impulses were allowed exposure only once they had been given a bracing cold shower o f American patriotism. Rodin’s clinging calves and tensed thighs turned into the cavalryman’s boots and spurs holding fast to the fetlocks o f some military mare. Born a year after the Civil War ended, Borglum was still addicted to its Homeric epic and was naively impartial in his allegiance. His crudely romantic view o f heroic sacrifice made room for both Lincoln an d for Jefferson Davis, whose likeness he was going to carve on Stone Mountain along with Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Likewise, he could make sentimental figures o f Sioux warriors as well as their ruthless tormentor, General Phil Sheridan. It was not the historical meaning o f the cause that mattered for Borglum so much as the masculine vigor with which it was prosecuted. America’s real enemies were small-minded commerce and big-bellied cor­ porations. “ Because the acquisition o f money amounts to madness,” he declared, “civilization has failed.”9 And the more Borglum saw o f the century o f the com­ mon man, the less he liked it. Instead he clung to a vision o f redeeming heroes and roughriders: Nietzsches in Stetsons. He campaigned for Teddy Roosevelt, befriended the Wright Brothers, admired William Randolph Hearst, and extolled Benito Mussolini as the sort o f man who could really shake up the presidency.10 But there was another all-American bona fide genius who surely gave Bor­ glum his lifelong exhilaration for masculine magnitude: D. W. Griffith. That Borglum was besotted with the movies there is no doubt. He would later explain that the design o f the hundred-foot-long Hall o f Records, with its vast ceilings, polished granite floors, and twenty-foot-high doorway inset with lapis lazuli and gold mosaic, was drawn from the Griffith-like Hollywood epic o f Henry Rider Haggard’s She. But the portentous scale o f the hall also surely owed much to the colossal Babylonian fantasy-palaces o f Griffith’s epic Intolerance. And there was an earlier, more sinister connection between the horseplay o f the sculptor and the director. Griffith’s annus mirabilis, 1915, when The Birth o f a N ation , his racist romance o f the Ku Klux Klan, appeared, saw Borglum working at Stone Mountain. And there was an attempt to persuade the distributors o f the movie to donate funds from matinee performances to the monument. But the moun­ tain outside Atlanta was also the site o f the ceremonial reinauguration o f the

394

DI NOC R A T E S AND T H E SHAMAN

modern Klan where on Thanksgiving night that same year, “bathed in the sacred glow o f the fiery cross,” the Invisible Empire was reborn. Borglum’s patron, Helen C. Plane, a formidable octogenarian Confederate widow and the presi­ dent o f the United Daughters o f the Confederacy, actually asked him to include mounted Klansmen in the relief sculpture since, as she put it, “they had saved us from Negro domination and carpetbagger rule” (the great themes o f Grif­ fith’s film).11 And though he balked at this suggestion, he was prepared to incor­ porate an “ altar” to the Klan into his plan for the monument. By the time he began active work on Mount Rushmore, Borglum had him­ self become a member o f the Klan and was friendly with members o f its inner “ Kloncilium,” including the Grand Dragon o f the Northern Realm, D. C. Stephenson, to whom he wrote bilious letters complaining both o f the mongrelization o f America and the political feebleness o f the Klan’s leadership. His ardent hope was that, sooner or later, there would be a Knight o f the Klan in the White House. Enfolded in the cult o f racially pure horsemen-heroes, Bor­ glum railed against all the enemies o f True America, the little ant-people, bee­ tles, and parasites who were feeding o ff the marrow o f America: Jews, banks, stockbrokers; miscegenation; and Jews again. Though he wrote a whole paper on “the Jewish Question,” his most poisonous tirades were kept carefully away from the official and private sponsors o f “the National Shrine to Democracy.” But if Rose Powell was engaged in a lost cause, the Jewish community leaders who asked Borglum to carve scenes from Jewish history on the Hudson River Palisades could hardly have dreamed how incongruous their suit was. And although, in the end, Borglum’s patriotism got the better o f his racial obses­ sions— enough, at any rate, for him to attack Hitler— his own architectural gigantism was close to that o f Albert Speer. The peculiar thing was that although Borglum had the temper and preju­ dices o f a naive fascist, he sincerely supposed himself to be a democrat. So that when he ranted in language that could have been taken directly from the favorite speeches o f Mussolini or Hitler that “we are at the spearhead o f a mighty world movement— an awakened force in rebellion against the worn and useless thought o f yesterday,” he then went on to add that “we are reaching deep into the soul o f mankind and through democracy building better than has ever been built before.” Perhaps the democracy in Borglum’s nationalist democracy was no more coherent than the socialism in National Socialism. It never seems to have occurred to him that democracy was more valuably represented in the drab, often picayune wranglings o f Congress than in four granite colossi carved from the side o f a mountain. Indeed one o f his favorite indicators o f the heroic m ag­ n itu de o f his work (and the incapacity o f humdrum politicians to appreciate it) was that his head o f George Washington alone could fit over the entire dome o f the Capitol. For Borglum, bigness was bigger than just big: it was endurance,

The Woman on M oun t Rushmore

395

magnificence, the spiritual awesomeness without which Angkor Wat and the heads o f Easter Island would have barely merited notice. The ideological grandeur o f America demanded something on the same scale as “ the thick vol­ umes o f American writers,” the “vast ranches o f the West.” 12 His passion for magnitude was necessarily mountainous, continental in scale. Urban culture, he felt in his bones, was (skyscrapers honorably exempted) puny, pallid, enervated. N o wonder its art was raving, a degenerate celebration o f deformity. America had been created to escape the metropolitan sickliness that had infected the O ld World. So its greatest and truest monument had to be sited in the western heardand o f the great continent, high in the cleansing skies, hewn from its heroic geology. To date, all the memorials to great Amer­ icans had betrayed America’s singularity by being obsequiously derivative. What was the Washington Monument except “ another Egyptian obelisk” ; the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, Greco-Roman pseudo-temples? Only in the Black Hills, on the very spine o f the continent, could something be built that would celebrate America’s true essence: its territorial expansiveness. A letter to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1936, when Borglum was being pressed by the congressional sponsors o f the Anthony Bill, revealed that his reasons for choosing the four presidents were not as self-evident as might be supposed. Jef­ ferson, for example, was included less for his authorship o f the Declaration o f Independence, or his reaffirmation o f a decentralized democratic republican­ ism, than for “ his taking the first step towards continental expansion” with the Louisiana Purchase. South Dakota was a perfect site for such a statement, Bor­ glum explained, because it was at the center o f the territories acquired in the Purchase and because the original French “ tablet” claiming the western lands, had been “ discovered” near the old fort Pierre.13And Jefferson’s head had been turned to face due west, in the direction he sent Lewis and Clark, for the same reason. Lincoln was there for the more obvious reason o f the “preservation o f the Union.” But Teddy Roosevelt’s price o f admission was his success in “ breaking the political lobby that had blocked for half a century every effort to cut the Isthmus.” The Panama Canal, he declared, “ accomplished the purpose o f Columbus’s entrance into the western hemisphere.” 14 O f the nine dates Borglum wanted inscribed on a giant “entablature,” no fewer than seven concerned the acquisition o f territory. Preferring 1867, the date o f the purchase o f Alaska, to any reference to the Civil War might have struck a modern visitor as quixotic, had the entablature actually been realized. But to Borglum, as the inscription would make clear, these dates constituted “The History o f the United States o f America.” Only from the heights, he believed, could this essential, imperial truth be properly appreciated. To grasp magnimde requiied altitude. The reference to Columbus, the man “who did more for mankind than any man since Christ,” was less bizarre than it seems. One o f Borglum’s earliest and

DINOCRATES AND THE

396

SHAMAN

m ost enthusiastic patrons was Jessie B en to n F rem o n t, the w id o w o f the m ountaineer-explorer John Charles F rem o nt, w h o had set the Stars and Stripes on the sum m it o f the C o n tin en tal D ivide. F o r B o rg lu m , F rem o nt was the ideal type o f A m erican hero, and, as A lb ert B oim e points o u t, it is inconceivable that he did n o t k n o w o f the proposal for a colossal statue o f C o lu m b u s m ade by Jessie’s father, Sen ator T h o m as H a rt B e n to n , in 1849. T h e figure w as to o v er­ lo ok the great transcontinental high w ay that w o u ld unite A m erica and w o u ld be “ hew n from a granite mass o r a peak o f the R o ck y M o un tain s . . . p o in tin g w ith o utstretched arm to the w estern h o rizo n and saying to the flying passen­ gers— ‘T h ere is the East; there is In dia.’ ” 15 T h e face in the rock was thus fu r­ ther exalted from a continental to a g lobal significance: the w o rld , east and w est, tied to g e th e r at the kn o t o f the great cordillera. (As o f this w ritin g, a colossal

th ree-h un dred -fo ot

statue o f C o lu m b u s,

frater­

nally sculpted by a Russian, from

other

the

em pire, Z u rab

landmass

K. T sereteli,

languishes in a F o rt L aud er­ dale w arehouse w hile the citi­ zens

of

decide

C o lu m b u s, w hether

O h io ,

they

can

afford so m ethin g so titanically T o m ake o ver a m ountain in to the form o f a hum an head is, perhaps, the u ltim ate c o lo ­ nizatio n o f n ature by cu ltu re, the alteration o f landscape to manscape. R aw top ographical after

all,

seem s

to

declare the littleness o f m an in nature. B u t this is to reckon w ith o u t w h at was inside those heads: the force o f in g e n u ity and w ill. T h e exer­ cise o f those hum an qualities, so the m ountain-m asters b elieved, m ig h t co r­ rect for scale, and the tem erity o f the peaks be transform ed in to a co m p lim en t to the m o u n tain o u s suprem acy o f m an. O f all landscapes, th en , m ou ntain alti­ tudes w ere fated to provide a rule against w h ich men (fo r this was a distinc­ tively m asculine obsession) w o u ld m easure the stature o f hum anity, the reach o f em pire. Sir Francis Y ou n g h u sb an d , the British im perial co n q u ero r o f T ib e t and the chairm an o f the E verest C o m m ittee that sponsored the g reat ex p ed i­ tions o f the 1920s, pu t the m atter in term s B o rg lu m w o u ld u n d o u b ted ly have endorsed:

B orglu m , head o f T ho m as

in c o rrect.)16

scale,

Gutzon

Jefferson,

Mount R ushm ore.

The Woman on M oun t Rushmore

397

Both man and mountain have emerged from the same original Earth and therefore have something in common between them. But the mountain is the lower in the scale o f being, however massive and impressive in outward appearance. And man, the punier in appearance but the greater in reality, has that within him which will not let him rest until he has planted his foot on the topmost summit o f the high­ est embodiment o f the lower. He will not be daunted by bulk.17 Mountain carving, o f course, went one better than mountain climbing, for it proclaimed, in the most emphatic rhetoric imaginable, the supremacy o f humanity, its uncontested possession o f nature. But it was not given to all cul­ tures to accomplish such feats. For Gutzon Borglum, only in the N ew World empire o f America— the most heroic, the most m asculine since the Greeks’— could such a thing be imagined, let alone executed. And that it had been left to white American manhood to realize this ancient Columbian vision o f girdling the earth was o f a piece with Borglum’s theory o f imperial succession. This, too, he borrowed from one o f the craziest and most influential o f all the scriptures o f American Manifest Destiny: Colonel William Gilpin’s Mission o f the N orth A m e r ica n People, first published in i860 and reprinted many times thereafter.18 Gilpin, a peculiar hybrid o f the wild-eyed prophet and the hardboiled engineer, had a favorite crackpot theory that located all serious civiliza­ tions along a single global belt aligned about the fortieth degree o f latitude, north o f the Equator. But earlier forty-degree powers like Britain and France had now atrophied beyond hope o f revival and had been succeeded by a New World empire, secured through the “ immortal railroad.” This was even better than Benton’s transcontinental highway, for as it rushed invincibly along the fortieth, binding vast territories to its iron tracks, the moribund “ pigmy” empires o f the O ld World would be forced to acknowledge their geographical (which was to say, historical) insignificance. They would be replaced by the vast new American Empire, watered by the great rivers that rose in the sheltering mountain chains, east and west, Appalachians and Rockies. And since this impregnable America was now realigned along the Rockies, Gilpin, who had been governor o f the Colorado Territory, could make the confident prediction that a great metropolis would arise, to dwarf N ew York or Philadelphia, at the precise geopolitical center o f the continent. The future, without question, belonged to Denver. H alf a century later, beleaguered by money fights over Stone Mountain, Borglum was brooding about an escape to some primordially free place: somewhere in America, in or near the Rockies, backbone o f the con­ tinent, removed from succeeding, selfish, coveting civilizations and out o f the path o f greed, an acre or two o f stone should bear witness,

398

D I NO C R A T E S AND T H E SHAMAN carrying likenesses, a few precious words pressed together, an appraisal o f our civilization, telling o f the things we tried to do, cut so high, near the stars, it wouldn’t pay to pull them down for lesser purposes.19 Such a place suddenly came to mind when Doane Robinson, the state his­

torian o f South Dakota, wrote to Borglum suggesting some sort o f carving, perhaps o f Lewis and Clark, on the needles o f the Black Hills. Both men had an emotional investment in the vision— Borglum because he had first seen the Hills on his second honeymoon; Robinson because his notion had been voted, then repudiated a week later, by a South Dakota women’s club.20When, in the company o f Robinson and his own twelve-year-old son, Lincoln, Borglum saw the cliff o f Mount Rushmore, he experienced an immediate rush o f exhilara­ tion, as though he had identified a celestial platform from which America’s Manifest Destiny could be surveyed. And since it had fallen to America to realize the god-like potential o f humanity, it was entirely fitting to perpetuate the likenesses o f its greatest men on an Olympian scale. O f course Borglum knew full well that the mountains he had chosen for this triumphalist act were also the site o f the bloody dispos­ session o f the Sioux to whom they had been granted in perpetuity by formal treaty in 1868. While Borglum was growing up in his unhappy Mormon house­ hold in St. Louis, George Custer had set o ff the gold rush that violated the integrity o f the Black Hills Reservation. Defeat at the Litde Big Horn had only postponed the inevitable eviction to which the genocidal slaughter at Wounded Knee in 1890 was but a tragic coda. N ot that Borglum’s hearty racism encom­ passed the Indians. On the contrary, he allowed them the kind o f native dig­ nity he denied the incorrigibly inferior races— Jews, Asians, Negroes. And when he discovered that the Lakota at the Pine Ridge Reservation were in terrible distress during the worst years o f the Depression, he went out o f his way to have federal and state agencies provide them with blankets and adequate pro­ visions to see them through the bitter winter. Playing the Great White Father, and dressing up in a feathered war bonnet as honorary chief Stone Eagle, did not, however, mean that Borglum paid much attention to Indian protests at the desecration o f what, for them, was a sacred place. Talk o f Great Spirits was so much childish superstition, exactly the kind o f foolishness that was being properly swept aside by the onward rush o f American technology. If the Great Spirit was bothered by his pneumatic jackhammers, let him do something about it. It was all very simple, really. If you couldn’t see it, feel it, touch it, it wasn’t there. But to a Lakota shaman, o f course, invisibility was the sign o f presence, not absence. And for that matter there was something to be seen: the mountain itself, in which the Great Spirit, Wakonda, was indistinguishably embedded with the rock and the scree. To feel its presence and that o f all the ancestors

Dinocrates a nd the Shaman

399

buried in such a place required o n ly a kind o f respectful annihilation o f the hum an self. W h ich is w h y Indian cam paigns, from the 1930s onw ard, to have the face o f C r a zy H orse or S ittin g Bull inscribed o n R ushm ore or another m ountain in the Black H ills (even had th ey n o t been brushed aside) have been tragically self-defeating. E m u la tin g the w hite obsession w ith visible possession, w ith self-inscription, w ith c u ttin g the m ountain heights to the scale o f the hu m an head, w o u ld , in the m ost p o ig n a n t w ay im aginable, be to accept the terms o f the conqueror. It w o u ld be as i f Siou x religion were merely a d um b ech o o f the anth ropocentric fixation su ggested b y Frank L lo yd W right’s reported remark that the heads o n R ushm ore m ade it look as th o u gh the m ountain had resp ond ed to hum an prayer.21

ii

D inocrates and the Sham an

O n e o f the b est o f G u tz o n B o r g lu m ’ s scu lptu res w as his early Mares o f Diomedes, represen tin g th e horses, fed o n h u m an flesh, w h o m H ercules tam ed after sla yin g their ow ner. A n d for B o r g lu m , it w en t w ith o u t saying, A m erica w as either h e ro ic or it w as n o th in g . H e had b e g u n as a painter, but on e o f the irresistible attractions o f scu lptu re had always been its m uscular physicality. “ A m an sh o u ld d o e v e r y th in g ,” he d eclared, “ b o x in g , fencing, ho rse b a ck -rid in g . . . tu rn h an d sprin gs.” 22 A n d w h at co u ld be m ore truly H e rcu le an , after all, than m o u n tain -carvin g? N o d ed ication cerem ony was co m p lete w ith o u t a carefully sta ge d and lit perform ance o f the Sculptor-asS tu n t-M a n , d a n g lin g from the rock -w all in his harness, as alarm ing to behold as any circus trapeze act, b u t, because o f the strength and technical ingenu ity o f the d evice, p e rfec d y safe. W h en e ver a grandee appeared at the m o n u m en t— C a lvin C o o lid g e , Franklin R o o se velt, or, in 193 9, the c o w b o y m ovie star W illiam S. H a r t— B o r g lu m m ade sure that he w o u ld be p h o to gra p h e d b y his side. ( T h o u g h w h e n H a r t w as so presu m ptuou s as to use the occasion to make a p u blic appeal for justice to the L ak ota S io u x, he fo u n d that his m icrophone had su d d en ly d ie d .)23 S o tireless was B o r g lu m ’s self-prom otio n that it is n o t to o m uch to su ggest that, som ew here hi his m ind , there was always m eant to be a fifth head up there o n the m ountain. A n d it was n o t Susan B. A n th o n y ’s bu t his ow n. H e proba ­ bly w o u ld n o t have been em barrassed b y the hierarchy o f im portance suggested

DINOCRATES AND THE SHAMAN

4 0 0

in the funeral eulogy spoken by the poet laureate o f South Dakota, one Bad­ ger Clark: He did not die, this artist, engineer and dreamer. He will live longer than the monument he created. Coming generations, five thousand years hence, will not ask who the characters on the mountain are, but who carved them?24

Gutzon Borglum, M ares o f D io m e d e s,

bronze, ca. 1906.

In his heroic solitude, Borglum sometimes compared himself not just to his heads, but to the granite wall o f Rushmore, isolated from the range, indomitably separate. For he too had towered over the tribes o f the smallminded: the pettifogging bureaucrats; fastidious Park Service men; intriguing politicians; the arbiters o f modern taste in their carpeted galleries who sneered at his honest classicism; the government cutpurses; the milquetoast patrons, scared o ff by a poor quarter’s profits. He had stared them all down and exploded their doubts off the cliff face. And when he considered it historically (as he often did), it had not been the pneumatic “ bumpers” shaving o ff gran­ ite to his design that had powered the creation o f the heads. It had been the sheer scale o f his Great Idea. In 1934 an astute cartoonist for the Washington H erald shrewdly exposed Borglum’s secret obsession that he was himself a kind o f man-mountain, by cre­ ating a portrait that was all slopes and overhangs, crowned by an unmistakably geological dome. That this seemed barely a caricature at all was borne out by

Dinocrates an d the Shaman

40 l

the ca p tio n , ev id en tly a re p o rt o n B o rg lu m ’s o w n pro m o tio n al pitch , co m p ar­ in g h im se lf to M ich e la n g e lo and to A lex an d e r the G re at, w h o “ w an ted to c o n ­ v ert the O lym p ian m o u n ta in s in to sc u lp tu re .” 25 It w as typical o f B o rg lu m th at he b o th k n ew o f his m o st im p ortan t ances­ to r in m o u n ta in ca rvin g , and th at he carelessly g arb led the so u rce. F o r it was n o t A lex an d e r w h o set th e p rec ed en t, b u t D in o crates. H a d he g o t the sto ry rig h t,

B o rg lu m

w o u ld

su rely have a ckn o w led g ed his M aced o n ian pred eces­ sor.

For

the

leg en d

of

D in o crate s is also a sto ry o f a B ig T h in k er, fig h tin g his w ay past o fficio u s u n d er­ C aricature

lings to fire the im agination

o f B org lu m ,

o f his patro n . In the preface

Washington

to b o o k 2 o f his D e archi-

Herald, M arch

tectura the R o m an V itr u ­

19>1934.

vius, w ritin g in the reign o f A u g u stu s , o ffers the sto ry MOUNT RUSHMORE COMMITTEE, SAYS Of THE MEMORIAL t ----“ ALEXANDER THE GREAT WANTED TO CONVERT THE OLYMPIAN MOUNTAINS INTO SCULPTURE----MICHAEL ANGELO WISHED TO CARVE COLOSSAL

1

FIGURES ON CARRARA MOUNTAINS AMERICA ALONE IS ACHIEVING IN A NATIONAL MEMORIAL THE DREAMS OF THESE GREAT MEN. * *

as

p art

inspiration,

part

ca u tio n . B u t fro m his first w o rd s, “ D in o crate s architectu s

co g ita tio n ib u s

so llertia

fre tu s,”

we

et can

re c o g n ize already the p o r­ trait

of

the

archetypal

y o u n g arch itect, “ co n fid e n t in his ideas and his sk ill,” se ttin g o u t to im print his d a rin g o n th e im a g in atio n o f th e p o w e rfu l, in this case A lex an d e r the G reat, “ m aster o f the w o r ld .” 26 A rm e d w ith co m m e n d a tio n s fro m his native M a c e ­ d o n ia , he arrives at A le x a n d e r’s cam p m ea n in g to m ake an im pression: native so n w ith g ran d ideas. A n d perh aps his su n n y op tim ism m elts the reserve o f the co u rtiers an d co u n sello rs, fo r th ey receive him w ith po liteness, even w ith c o r­ diality, rea d in g th e letters fro m the u n cles, in q u irin g a b o u t his h o m e , his w o rk , his family. T h e k in g w o u ld su rely see h im ju st as so o n as the rig h t m o m en t o ffe re d its e lf fo r an in tro d u ctio n . It w o u ld n o t d o , o f co u rse, to press h im self o n th e lo rd A lex an d e r, n o t w ith his tem per. N o , as so o n as the o ccasio n was r ig h t, he w o u ld m o st assuredly be b ro u g h t forw a rd . B u t th e tim e never seem ed to be p erfec tly ripe, and architects, especially y o u n g arch itects, se ld o m c o u n t p a tien ce a m o n g th eir m any virtues. A ll those cu ps o f w in e and sm iles, D in o crate s rea lized , w ere d esig n ed to u nm an his w ill. V e ry w e ll, th en , he w o u ld display it.

402

DI NOC R A T E S AND T H E SHAMAN First he took off his clothes, all o f them, revealing his “ample stature, pleas­

ing countenance and the highest grace and dignity.” Then he oiled his body, top to toe, rubbing the grease well in so that his muscles shone in the sunlight. He set a wreath o f poplar on the crown o f his head and slung a lion’s skin over his left shoulder. A great club completed the transformation from hometown boy into, o f course, Hercules. Even Borglum would have envied the brazenness o f the self-promotion. And, needless to say, it worked. In his Herculean fancy dress Dinocrates simply made himself visible “opposite the tribunal where the king was giving judge­ ment,” and was called over to account for himself. He wasted no time in propos­ ing a project o f Herculean presumption, an idea “worthy o f you, illustrious prince.” The plan was to carve Mount Athos, all o f it, “into the figure o f a statue o f a man,” the implication, moreover, being not any man but the king himself. Nor would this be merely the Hellenic Rushmore but an entire habitat. In the left hand Dinocrates sketched the ramparts o f “a very extensive city” ; in the right, “ a bowl to receive the water o f all the rivers which are in that mountain.” Though he was much taken with the sheer audacity o f the project, Alexan­ der was not so disarmed as to overlook its weaknesses. Was there, for example, an adequate supply o f corn to feed such a city? N ot as such, the terrain being, well, mountainous, responded Dinocrates, on the defensive for the first time. But food could o f course be shipped in. The king, charmingly confirmed in his wisdom, then allows himself a little homily. The young man is congratulated for his originality and chastened for his woolly logistics, “ for if anyone leads a colony to that place his judgement will be blamed. For just as when a child is born, if it lacks the nurse’s milk it cannot be fed, nor led up the staircase of growing life, so a city without cornfields and their produce abounding within its ramparts, cannot grow or become populous.”27 Given an alpha for imagination and a gamma for experience, Dinocrates is nonetheless hired. The mountain-man-city remains a brilliant fantasy, and Dinocrates goes off on his next assignment: the survey and design o f Alexandria.28 As a parable o f the temptations o f hubris in architectural psychology, it would be hard to improve on the myth o f Dinocrates. Resisting censoriousness, Vitruvius acknowledges the egotism in the vocation, the role that “dignity o f body” may play in advancing a career. As for himself, he concedes wistfully that “ nature has not given me stature, my countenance is deformed by age, and ill health has sapped my virility.”29 All that he could offer, he adds with disingen­ uous humility, is science and his writings. See the next eight books. And running through the next eight books is Vitruvius’s great theme o f pro­ portionality, not least in the underlying harmonies that informed the structure o f both architecture and the human body. It was Dinocrates’s manifest offense against that fundamental principle, as much as his jejune indifference to economy, that marked him as the first o f architecture’s callow Prometheans. To demon-

Dinocrates a n d the Shaman

Pietro da Cortona, Pope Alexander V II Shown Mt. Athos by Dinocrates, ca. 1655.

403

404

DI NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

strate his heroic contempt for difficulty, Dinocrates had taken the most inacces­ sible o f all landscapes, the mountainous abode o f gods, and had subjected it, simultaneously, to the use and the likeness o f Sovereign Man. It is hard to con­ ceive, until Mount Rushmore, o f a more drastic correction o f natural scale, nor a more categorical statement o f nature made admirable by being made human. Though the story o f Dinocrates was believed by some later commentators, not least Goethe, to be historically plausible, it functioned principally as a mythi­ cal touchstone for architectural theorists like Alberti, exercised about the relation­ ships between balance and hubris, between conceptual daring and structural practicality.30 A commentator such as Buonaccorso Ghiberti was so embarrassed by the legend that he had Dinocrates (altogether against the grain o f Vitruvius’s Hercules) withdraw the whole idea after second thoughts, offering elaborate explanations o f its impracticability. But as much as these generations o f writers invoked Dinocrates as a negative model, the fantasy o f a mountain colossus haunted the dreams o f the superegotistical. Ascanio Condivi’s life o f Michelan­ gelo, for example, relates that the most prodigious o f all sculptor-architects wanted to carve a colossus into the towering marble cliffs o f Carrara. But Michelangelo was no Borglum o f the Renaissance, and marginalia that seem to be in his hand ruefully confess the ambition to be “a crazy idea that came to me because I was young.” Yet, says the artist, reverting to the realm o f the impossible desire, “had I been sure o f living four times as long I would [still] have embarked on it.”31 The vulgarity of the vision did not prevent artists shamelessly invoking Mount Athos to flatter the egotism o f their patrons. Pietro da Cortona, for example, depicted himself genuflecting before Pope Alexander VII in the company of Dinocrates (represented here as a mature professional rather than as a brash youth). The new pope’s vanity was meant to be tickled by the implication that his choice o f name was a worthy echo of the Alexander o f antiquity, especially since he had ambitions to be the very greatest o f Baroque Rome’s builders and renovators. The Dinocratic vision seemed to surface whenever a new generation of architects or sculptors imagined their buildings as a metaphorical vision o f the reordering o f states and societies. Thus the most prolific and learned o f all Baroque architects o f the second generation, Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach, included in his Sketch o f H istorical Architecture (1721) a spectacular engraving o f the Mount Athos city-colossus, as it might have been actually con­ structed.32 And in 1796 Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes painted a tranquil arcadia overlooked by the Alexandrian mountain (color illus. 34). A group of figures in the foreground observe the mountain-king who stares calmly back from the summit. The painting is a benevolent reworking o f Poussin’s Polyphe­ mus, whose Cyclopean eye is hidden by the rear view o f the geological giant, and had first been tried out by Valenciennes in a chalk drawing done during his obligatory trip to Italy almost twenty years before.33 The painting was shown at the salon o f the Republican Year VIII, when enthusiasms were running high

Dinocm tes a n d the Shaman

405

J. B. Fischer von Erlach, engraving, “The Mount Athos Colossus,” from Sketch o f Historical Architecture, 17 2 1 .

fo r b o th H e lle n ic “ p u rity ” and th e cu lt o f n atu re. S h re w d ly m arry in g the tw o to g e th e r, V alen cien n e s p ro d u c e d th e p erfec t ic o n o f b e n e v o le n t rep u b lica n so v ­ ere ig n ty , w h e re th e im p ossib ly ex q u isite land scape, v erd a n t and g e n tly w atered , is sh o w n d irectly d e p e n d e n t o n th e m o u n ta in o u s a u th o rity o f th e paternal state. F o r all th e richness o f th e D in o c ra tic tra d itio n , n o m o u n ta in co lo ssi had actu ally b ee n ca rv e d in th e W est (g iv in g B o rg lu m an ea g erly se ize d o p p o r tu ­ n ity to claim h e had surpassed th e an cien ts). F isch er v o n E rlach re p o rte d , as th o u g h it w ere c o m m o n k n o w le d g e , th at Sem iram is, th e em p ress o f th e M ed e s, h a d ca rve d M o u n t “ B a g ista n e ” in h e r likeness. A n d t h o u g h th ere w ere v a g u e

Athanasius Kircher, The MountainGod of Tuenchuen,” from Sina Illustrata.

DI NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

406

reports o f Egyptian colossi, carved from

sandstone,

somewhere

in

Upper Egypt, the great colossi o f Abu Simbel were not discovered until 1813. Predictably, though, it was

the

ubiquitous

Athanasius

Kircher who, in his Sina Illustrata, reported

his

Jesuit

colleague

Father Martini as having seen the “ mountain-god” o f “Tuenchuen.” Whether

this

was

a

naturally

Rock face Buddha, Ling Ying Su, Fukien Province.

anthropomorphic mountain or a figure actually carved in the rock the Jesuits were not sure. What Father Martini probably saw was one o f the many Buddhas carved into the hillsides o f the southern province o f Fukien by Sung

dynasty

monks

sometime

during the ninth century A.D. If they resembled the few survivors at Ling Ying Su, they represented the Buddha in the pose o f sublime meditation during which he sought illumination through

D r e a m in g o f Im m o r ta lity in

resisting the temptations o f the world. In which case the image on the rock face

the M o u n t a in s ,

was meant to evoke a sense o f natural ^em bodiment rather than the reverse.34

tenth century.

Dinocrates and the Shaman

4 0 7

The older Taoist tradition was even more hostile to the idea o f mountains as a site o f human triumph and possession. The five sacred mountains o f ancient China were features o f a vision o f the world that was, in its essence, spiritual rather than physical. Taoist teaching emphasized the pure vacuum from which the mate­ rial world had been created and toward which its adepts always had to concentrate their meditations. “A thing confusedly formed, born before heaven and earth, silent and void,” as the Tao-te C h in g has it.35 The high sacred mountains, then, were places from which to survey not the panorama o f the earth, but the mysteri­ ous immaterial essence o f its spirit. Four were located at each corner o f the uni­ verse, with a fifth at its center, and together they were axial pillars connecting the celestial with the terrestrial and infernal realms. Each newly established dynast was required to make a pilgrimage to all five (or at the very least the eastern Mount Tai) to receive the heavenly mandate. As the “ Lower Capital” o f the Heavenly Sov­ ereign, the August Personage o f Jade, ruled by his deputy, the Queen Mother, the western mountain “ K’un Lun,” perhaps because it was the most remote from the capitals o f classical China, was thought to be the most celestially connected o f all. The peaks were also the abode o f the Immortals, persons who, while not fully divine, had added some centuries to their existence through diligent pursuit o f the way o f Tao. Such was their success at transcendence, in dissolving themselves into the vital breath o f ch% that they could materialize on the backs o f storks or, as in one spectacular Taoist mountain painting, travel through the thin, vaporous air. Needless to say, such a realm was patrolled by fierce monsters assuming the form o f dragons or tigers, against the trespass o f presumptuous, earthly mor­ tals. Only the true adepts o f Tao, solitary shamans, could climb or descend the

408

D I N O C R A T E S AND T H E S HAMAN

Han dynasty mountain-form censer. Single standing rock, Yua Hua Yuan.

peaks, and then only in the mystical trance that came from exercises o f ascetic self-abnegation. On the mountains themselves, they perched on rock-ledge hermitages where they gathered the mushrooms and secret herbs that consti­ tuted the potent elixirs o f immortality. It was possible, o f course, for the earthbound to represent such places and, by so doing, receive some o f their spiritual benefits, even if they were unable to ascend to them. In solid form, during the Han dynasty from the third century B.C. to the third century A .D ., the sacred mountains took the form o f incense

burners, their peaks stylized into the writhing, heaped, and layered forms that suggested the dynamic, erupting spirit within them, rather than so many slabs o f inert stone. Or they might be introduced in gardens in miniature form as fantastic, columnar rocks. In both cases what was sought was the compressed essence o f mountain sacredness, comparable to the herb-and-fimgus reduc­ tions from which elixirs o f immortality were concocted by the shaman.36 When the sacred mountains were drawn or painted, the cosmic relationship between the massively piled celestial pillars and the minute humans, perched on a ledge, was made unequivocally clear. Even the act o f painting itself was thought of as a Taoist exercise, imitating an arduous ascent. The late Han artist Gu Kaizhi, for example, left an instruction on “how to paint Mount Yun-tai” in Szechuan, the place where the master Zhang Ling took his pupils to test their faith. To con­ vey the impression o f “a great vital energy concentrated into a mass and perpetu­ ally ascending,” the peak, wrote Gu, had to be painted, bottom to top, the master and novices seated on the westward, “watered” (and thus living) face of the moun­ tain, with the cliffs writhing upward like the coils o f a tremendous dragon. Even allowing for the millennium and a half that separated them in time, there seems to be an unbridgeable distance between the mountain sensibilities o f a Tao master like Zhang Ling and a Dinocratic egotist like Gutzon Borglum.

Dinocrates and the Shaman

Fan K’uan, Scholar Pavilion in the Cloudy Mountains, early eleventh century.

4 0 9

4 10

DI NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

While the shaman concentrated on dematerializing his bodily substance into the receiving rock, the Herculean sculptor banged at it with his jackhammer to effect the likeness o f Teddy Roosevelt’s whiskers. So it’s tempting to construct a simple dialectic in the cultural history o f the mountain: occidental and orien­ tal, imperial and mystical, Dinocratic and shamanic. Even with the obvious acknowledgement that the Judaic, Christian, and Muslim traditions are full o f mountain epiphanies and transfigurations— on Horeb, Ararat, Moriah, Sinai,

T h e A d o r a t io n o f the Shepherds,

illuminated manuscript, School o f Reichenau, eleventh century.

Pisgah, Gilboa, Gibeon, Tabor, Carmel, Calvary, Golgotha, Zion— the earliest medieval representations o f such events are in the starkest possible contrast to their Taoist or Buddhist equivalents. Where the Chinese paintings minimize the human presence, investing the mountains themselves wit& vast, omnipotent vitality, the Ravenna mosaics or manuscript illuminations show hulking great

Elevations

4 11

patriarchs and saviors bestriding absurdly shrunken peaks, little more, as Ulrich Christoffel has suggested, than gathered heaps o f pinecones.37 But, o f course, nothing is quite this tidy. While the Chinese spiritual tradi­ tion represented mountains as staircases to the celestial, or crumbly aerial plat­ forms on which to concentrate on the dissolution o f the bodily self, some emperors were not beyond turning entire cliff faces into calligraphic sheets on which their greatness might be inscribed for posterity. And conversely, there was a strong strain o f ascetic world denial in the Christian retreat to the mountaintops. Instead o f being a place that would testify to the loftiness o f human ambition, to the devout a holy mount might still be a place o f terror and awe, the trial chamber o f the spirit.

iii

Elevations

Nothing illustrated the difference between Eastern and Western attitudes to the high mountains more clearly than their respective feeling toward dragons. For, to be sure, there were dragons up there in the European cliff-caves. But while Chinese tradition venerated the creatures as lords o f the sky, guardians o f esoteric, celestial wisdom, Christianity deemed them winged serpents, and as such, the embodiment o f satanic evil. O n the rock-ledge they were the demonic opposition for holy cave-dwellers, anchorites, and hermits. To slay such an abomination was to exorcise the mountain for the Lord. According to the friar Salimbene, King Pedro III o f Aragon, “ a valiant knight o f stout heart,” in the year 1280 was moved to try to climb the Pic Canigou, nine thousand feet high, on the frontier o f his realm with Provence. “ N o man ever lived, nor did any son o f man dare to scale it, on account o f its excessive height and the toil and difficulty o f the journey.” 38 Some way up the ascent, “horrible thunder-claps” were heard, together with hail and lightning, the effect together being so unnerving that Pedro and his knights “ threw themselves on the ground and lay there, as it were, lifeless in their fear and apprehension o f the calamities that had overtaken them.” Rallied by the king, the knights were eventually so fatigued and discouraged that they turned back. So Pedro with great labor made the ascent alone and when he was on top o f the mountain he found a lake there; and when he threw a stone

4 12

D I NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN into the lake a horrible dragon o f enormous size came out o f it and began to fly about in the air and to darken the air with its breath.39 The king’s achievement in braving (though not slaying) the monster and

getting back safely to the foot o f the mountain was so extraordinary, thought the friar, that it could only be compared to the feats o f Alexander. A winningly naive tale o f Christian knighdy zeal, straight from the reper­ toire o f the Spanish reconquista, where chivalry had a long afterlife, Pedro’s fleeting but memorable encounter with the dragon o f Pic Canigou has an inad­ vertent eloquence. The truth was that, even by thirteenth-century standards, the mountain was not an especially daunting climb. But as a satanic serpent, the dragon obligingly supplied the ambitious king with certification as an authen­ tic Christian warrior. On Chinese sacred mountains the batdes are mosdy fought between the internal contentions o f flesh and spirit. On the needles of Europe, the forces o f good and evil are externalized into holy men and mon­ sters and the batdes are in deadly earnest. This had been the way o f it, ever since the first diabolical temptadon, recorded in St. Matthew 4.8, where Jesus is taken by Satan “to an exceeding high mountain” and is shown “all the king­ doms o f the world, and the glory o f them.” As a sign o f their diabolical contamination, mountain ranges like the Alps were thought to be densely infested with dragons. As late as 1702 Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, a professor o f physics and mathematics at Zurich Univer­ sity and a correspondent o f Isaac Newton, collected evidence o f dragon sight­ ings, canton by canton, into a comprehensive dracology. There were cat-faced dragons, and serpentine dragons, inflammable dragons and non­ combustible dragons. There were fliers and slitherers; malodorous dragons and cacophonic dragons; scaled and feathered; bat-like and bird-like; crested and bald; fork-tailed and fork-tongued. There were even relatively friendly dragons like the dragon o f the Val Ferret who sported a diamond-encrusted tail and the ouibra o f the Valais who lived in a crevass guarding the liquid gold in its depths. A peasant whose cupidity had got the better o f him and who had fallen into the lair swore that he had lived there perfecdy well for seven years, though he had never managed to retrieve the gold! As for Mons Pilatus, near Lucerne, with a name like that a resident dragon was only to be expected. (Though in fact the mountain was originally called, simply, Mons Pileatus, referring to the capped peak for the clouds that contin­ ually draped its summit. Only later did it somehow turn into the burial site o f Pontius Pilate.) But once the execrated Roman was thought to be entombed under its rock, he generated a dragon o f distinctive repulsiveness, whose pres­ ence was formally attested to, in 1649, by no less an authority than the sheriff o f Lucerne. Its head “terminated in the serrated jaw o f a serpent,” and “when flying it threw out sparks like a red-hot horseshoe, hammered by the black-

Elevations

4 l 3

smith.”40 Scheuchzer had no hesitation in giving the story credence, seeing as how the local cabinet o f curiosities at Lucerne

contained

a “ dragon-stone”

said to cure all manner o f maladies from headaches to dysentery. The specimen had been conveniently dropped by the local dragon en route from Rigi to Mons Pilatus, which was just as well since Scheuchzer counselled that the most reliable way to secure these panacea was to cut them from the living head o f a sleeping dragon, taking the precaution, o f course, to strew soporific herbs about hisnest. Whatbetter abode for a dragon than the mountain lake where Pilate himself laymany fathoms deep, surfacing only on G ood Friday, clad in ‘Dragon o f Mons Pilatus,” from J. J. Scheuchzer, I tin e r a p e r H e lv e tia e

the blood-red robes o f his judgement?41 So while an ascent, in the Taoist tradition, pointed the way toward celes­ tial transcendence, in the Christian West, it was as likely to bring the doughty climber into the presence o f evil as o f good. This did not mean, however, that the pious shunned the high places o f the world. Many local images o f St.

A lp i n e s ,

Bernard on M ont Joux showed the saint standing on the body o f a dragon: the

1702-n.

symbol o f a successful exorcism. And even without this Manichean element o f

D I NOCRAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

4 14

a high-altitude combat, the mountain traditions o f epiphany were so strong that from the very beginnings o f Christianity anchorites and holy men sought out remote desert hilltops and mountains as their favored site o f self-purifica­ tion. When the most austere o f the Benedictines sought remoteness to seal themselves off from the fleshpots o f the world, they established monasteries like Montserrat in the Pyrenees or the Grande Chartreuse on Mont Cenis, behind bastions o f inaccessible mountain rocks. And as the tempo o f pilgrimage and trade picked up in the High Middle Ages, those same places became famous as hostelries that would shelter the anxious traveller from dragons and brigands and the countless other terrors that lurked in the crags. Following the First Crusade, it became possible to construct an entire pil­ grimage o f peaks, hopping from holy mount to holy mount. The adventurous Fulcher o f Chartres, in the army o f Baldwin o f Flanders, went all the way south to the Wadi Musa to see Mount Horeb, where Moses struck the rock for water, and at Petra visited another “ Moses monastery” on Mount Hor.42 The Russian abbot Daniel, inexhaustible in the desert, witnessed the miraculous preserva­ tion o f Saints Euthymius, Aphroditian, Theodore o f Edessa, and John Dama­ scene, all embalmed in mountain tombs and giving off the delectable perfume o f perpetual sanctity.43 Deeper into the wilderness were the cave-cells o f St. Sabas, chiselled into the vertical cliff and, as Daniel wrote, “attached to the rocks by God like stars in the sky,” and the mountain that miraculously opened to shelter St. Elizabeth and the child John from the wrath o f Herod. While most pilgrims sensibly stayed within the confines o f Crusader Pales­ tine, the twelfth-century writer o f a geographical Descriptio provided elaborate information for the seriously intrepid zealot who was prepared to slog the eigh­ teen-day journey through the middle o f the Sinai peninsula to the monastery o f St. Catherine. The short o f breath and halt o f limb were severely cautioned by the writer o f the D escrip tion The only way up was via three thousand five hundred steps. And be prepared, he warned, for the presence o f angels, habitues o f Sinai since the time o f Moses, and generally announced by “smoke and flashing o f lightning.” O f Sinai it is stated (and it is true) that each Sabbath a heavenly fire surrounds it but does not burn it, and whoever touches it is not harmed. It appears many times, like white blankets going round the mountain with an easy motion, and sometimes it descends with a ter­ rible sound which can hardly be tolerated and the most holy servants o f Christ hide themselves in caves and cells o f the monastery [of St. Catherine].45 Yet the monks o f St. Catherine’s seem to have been able to transcend their terror, since the author o f the Descriptio also suggests a shaman-like ascetic

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4 l 5

quality on Mount Sinai. They were, he wrote, “ free from the passions o f the body . . . and only fight for God . . . so famous that from the borders o f Ethiopia to the furthest bounds o f Persia, they are spoken o f with respect.”46 The most famous o f all Christian shamans was, o f course, the fourth-cen­ tury saint Jerome, who for a time lived as an anchorite hermit. It was a liber locorum , a book o f distances between places, attributed to Jerome, that seems to have provided the writer o f the D escriptio with many o f his anecdotes o f holy mounts. The most compelling o f all concerned the (essentially mythical) “ M ount Eden” in the district o f Hor, sometimes called the “ Mount o f Sands.” It is hard to climb and amazingly high and in natural form like a high tower with the steep part as if it had been cut by hand. The way round it takes more than one day. O n the sides o f the mountain trees are scarce. Many birds o f various kinds fly round the mountain in flocks, but the mountain itself would seem to be without plants or moisture, and is far from any living growth in the desert.47

One day two pilgrims decided to climb this wilderness mount. “ One o f them was nimble and energetic and easily climbed the hidden parts o f the mountain but the other hardly managed to come up half way, and there, tired and breathless, sat down.” This was his misfortune since, on the peak itself, the first climber beheld an astonishing miracle in the midst o f the desert: a place alive with fragrant flowers, gushing fountains, heavily laden fruit trees, and bril­ liant pebbles spied on the bed o f crystalline brooks. “There he decided and promised for himself, should G od see fit, the joy o f living and dying.” Suddenly aware o f being alone, he came to the brink o f the peak, clapped his hands, and called to his friend, relating the beauty o f the place, that it was like eternal spring, a veritable paradise. But the man below, “whether frightened by the dif­ ficulty o f the mountain or deterred by G o d ’s prohibition, refused to ascend and enter.” He minded what had been said to him, though, and, when he went down, told everyone what he had seen and heard. It is the archetypal parable o f the Christian holy mount, repeated in images and narratives o f ascent all the way through to the High Renaissance, and well beyond that, indeed to the Western infatuation with Shangri-La.48 The associ­ ations with Jerome can hardly be fortuitous, since many o f the representations o f the desert saint, especially in the fifteenth-century Netherlandish mountain art o f Joachim Patinir and Herri met de Bles, feature precisely the kind o f bizarre, stalagmite-like rock-towers mentioned in the Descriptio as the topog­ raphy o f M ount Eden.49 H o w could the art o f the L ow Countries produce such high places, and more particularly these grotesquely petrified termite-towers rising straight up from the earth? The printed homilies o f Jerome were immensely popular in

D I NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

4 16

the N eth erlan d s in the fifteenth cen tu ry, ap pealing especially to those sects o f the so-called D e v o tio M o d ern a like the B reth ren o f the C o m m o n L ife, w h o so u g h t to revive the spirit o f ascetic u nw orldliness w ith o u t traditional m onastic co n fin em en t. S o alth o u g h J ero m e’s o w n life had n o particular asso­ ciations w ith the herm itages o f the H o ly L a n d , sitin g his cell o r chapel in the ero d ed cavities o f ro ck form s, o r at the fo o t o f som e u nearthly stand ing arch, was a w ay o f id en tifyin g him as a sacred ex o tic, the archetypal w ilderness F ather, the tru e inh eritor o f the rig h teo u s so litu d e o f the desert saint John the B a p tist.50 A n d then there w ere the rocks o f D inant. T u cked into a narrow, cliff-girt g o rg e o f the M eu se, the m edieval clo th tow n was the birthplace o f Patinir.51 D inant is seldom visited by tourists (b ein g to o far sou th for the Flem ish paint­ ings tou r and to o far n o rth for the A rd en n es’s hikers and bikers), and those w h o d o stum ble u pon it are treated to a startlingly u n-N etherlandish landscape. A little w ay upstream from the tow n is a gro u p o f strange, freestanding gray lim estone outcrops, rising erect from the riverbed as if they had so m eh o w been deposited there from an o verflying asteroid. T h eir m arvellous deform ities and protuberances w ere surely the m odel for Patinir’s holy rocks. Yet their signifi­ cance is less in the care w ith w hich they w ere draw n than in their transform a­ tion in the finished paintings from a dom estic to an exotic spirituality. For that m atter the C hinese painters o f the H an and Su n g also had available to them extraordinary g eo lo g ica l form s on w hich to m odel their sacred m ountains. B u t

Joachim Patinir, L a n d sca p e w ith

conveying the sense o f a cosm ic axis, exten din g from regions deep belo w the

St. Jerom e,

bow els o f the earth’s crust, th ro u g h its vegetable surface, and up tow ard

ca. 1515.

Elevations

4 17

the celestial regions o f immortals and gods, required much more than literal transcription. In the same way, the discontinuousness o f the Dinant rocks with the con­ ventional scenery o f the Netherlands made its blessed unearthliness more pow­ erful. Once the Netherlandish Jeromes made their way to Italy in the late fifteenth century, they were evidendy successful enough to have produced local variants, none more fantastic than the painting by Jacopo da Valenza, now in the Museum o f Fine Arts in Boston.52 Technically, the panel is a crudely additive composition, archaic in the stylization o f its details o f flora, fauna, and figures. But that is precisely its point. Without being at all self-consciously “ Gothic,” its primitivism recalls exactly the Byzantine icons and early Christian illuminations that equated altitude with beatitude. Yet instead o f oversize patriarchs in danger o f impaling themselves on pinnacles, Jacopo’s column is really a cosmic staircase that, in defiance o f topographical reality, becomes more lush and paradisiacal the higher it extends. It is, in fact, very like the “Mount Eden” o f the twelfth-cen­ tury Descriptio, the fleecy sheep grazing among the fleecy clouds. And it is also very much like Dante’s Purgatorio. Having emerged from what the mountaineer-poet Wilfred Noyce winningly described as the “ gigan­ tic pot-hole which forms Hell,” 53 Dante has Virgil take him to a mountainous island where daunting cliffs rise sheer from the seashore. The labor o f atone­ ment is then characterized as an arduous climb, the angle o f ascent often steep enough to require scrambling up the stone face on hands and knees. And in keeping with the tradition o f spiritual mountaineering, the going gets easier as it gets higher, until, at the very summit o f purgatory, when “ I felt the force within my wings growing for the flight,” the terrestrial paradise is discovered. Though it is washed by cool brooks and is brilliant with pasture and flowers, this is not, o f course, the true Paradiso, but merely the place o f self-purifica­ tion that completes the work o f heavenly eligibility.54 There is even a dragon lurking amidst the fountains and trees. But the radiant Beatrice, who has replaced Virgil as the guardian o f the poet’s soul, leads Dante safely through these final perils, interrogating him constantly on his past transgressions. The top o f the hill is revealed as the place where innocence is restored. And it is, at least, a more agreeable waiting room than the “purgatories” o f American geol­ ogy, which are almost always identified as arid ravines, with little maneuver­ ability for the doubtfully penitent. In the late medieval imagination, then, the high mountain slopes were imagined as a cloud-wreathed borderland between the physical and the spiri­ tual universe. Arbitration was necessarily made in favor o f the latter (with the scenery becoming more ravishing the closer one approached lofty disembodi­ ment), partly, at least, because no one did any actual climbing. Once real ascents (rather than anxious journeys through the mountain passes) were attempted, and the “ kingdoms o f the world” were displayed from the heights,

4 18

DI NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

Elevations

4 19

the conflict between the exhilaration o f the body and the repose o f the soul became more urgent. The tension between physical and metaphysical exertion is, for example, at the heart o f the most famous o f all early climbing narratives: the poet Petrarch’s ascent o f M ont Ventoux in April 1336.55 Some scholars continue to speculate whether Petrarch’s letter to the Augustinian friar Dionigi di San Sepolcro might not be an elaborate parable o f the transcendence o f the soul over the body (in the Dantean manner), rather than a report o f a real event.56 The con­ sensus now seems to be that Petrarch did actually clamber up the six thousand feet o f the mountain near Carpentras in the Vaucluse. But it is impossible to read his letter without noticing how carefully he has crafted the excursion as a cultural history, for all his artless profession that his “only motive was to see what so great an elevation had to offer.” To begin with, the event was framed between two texts: the Roman histo­ rian Livy’s H istory o f R o m e and the Confessions o f St. Augustine, uphill and downhill, ambition and contrition. Living at Avignon, “ cast here by that fate which determines the affairs o f men,” Petrarch tells us that the mountain was “ever before my eyes.” But the spur came with Livy’s account o f the ascent of M ount Haemus by Philip o f Macedon, none other than Alexander the Great’s Jacopo

father. King Philip’s object was to discover whether from the summit in the

da Valenza,

Balkans he could see both the Aegean and the Adriatic, and thus be possessed

St. Jerome in

o f a royally farsighted vision: omniscience. Drawn to a good squabble, Petrarch

the Wilderness,

is struck by the fact that Livy and the cosmographer Pomponius Mela disagreed

ca. 1509.

as to whether Philip was actually granted this strategic omniscience. The impli­ cation is that the issue was unresolvable since the two disputants were unable to see the view for themselves. Though he had no plan to climb Philip’s moun­ tain, Petrarch in turn wonders whether from the top o f M ont Ventoux he might himself be able to see both the western Mediterranean at the Pyrenean border, and east to the Tyrrhenian Sea and his native Italy. Even before his climb gets under way, though, the narrative becomes densely allegorical. Like Dante, Petrarch uses the humanist device, also drawn from antiquity, o f a set o f choices confronting the hero, as a way o f comment­ ing on the moral significance o f his action. The first decision concerns his choice o f companions for the ascent. None o f his friends seemed to have “just the right combination o f personal qualities: this one was too apathetic, that one over-anxious, this one too slow, that one too hasty; one was too sad, another over-cheerful.” In the end, “Would you believe it? I finally turned homeward and proposed the ascent to my only brother.” Leaving the village o f Malaucene, the two brothers are intercepted by the obligatory bearer o f cautionary tidings, a grizzled shepherd who warns them that fifty years before, he too had attempted the climb and had got only “ fatigue, regret, and clothes and body torn by the briars” for his pains. Seeing

420

D I NO C RA T E S AND T H E SHAMAN

they are undeterred, he offers them advice on the route and receives all the objects and clothes which the brothers consider would slow them down. They are, in other words, already casting off their worldly impedimenta. As they begin their climb, another decision looms direcdy. Should they take the difficult route straight up the rock face, or the apparendy less toilsome way that snakes about the mountain? The younger brother, Gherardo, as befits his energetic and resolute disposition, opts for the harder, swifter path. Petrarch, o f course, takes the procrastinators’ trail, winding deviously about the mountain, and is duly punished for his evasiveness by having to work twice as hard to catch up with his brother. After being frequently misled in this way, I finally sat down in a valley and transferred my winged thoughts from things corporeal to things immaterial, addressing myself as follows: “What thou hast repeatedly experienced today in the ascent o f this mountain happens to thee, as to many, in the journey toward the blessed life. But this is not so read­ ily perceived by men, since the motions o f the body are obvious and external while those o f the soul are invisible and hidden. Yes, the life which we call blessed is to be sought for on a high eminence, and strait is the way that leads to it. Many also are the hills that lie between and we must ascend by a glorious stairway from strength to strength.” His burden, he explained to Father Dionigi, was that he had not yet attained the necessary (shaman-like) lightness o f being. While those who were pure o f soul could leap like a goat to the summit “in a twinkling o f the eye,” he was weighed down by his clumsy limbs and failing trunk. Arrived, finally, on top o f Mont Ventoux, all thoughts o f Philip, Livy, and the rest disappear in the mountain mist. Instead Petrarch is flooded with elated dizzi­ ness, the clouds curling beneath his feet. For a moment he thinks of celestial places, o f Olympus and great Athos, before turning toward Italy and feeling a double pang o f homesickness and lovesickness, the one stirred by the other. To his Augustinian friend he now invokes the saint and his Confessions for the first time as an exemplar o f the high-altitude combat to be fought out between the pure and the impure, body and soul, holy men and dragons. It is ten years, he recalls, since he had left Bologna, but only three since he had managed to renounce his carnal pas­ sion. He is, in other words, at the purgatory summit, residually impure, but at some measurable distance from the base o f his original transgression. Petrarch’s attention now wanders distractedly between terrestrial and celes­ tial things. He picks out the Rhone, flowing south from Lyon toward Marseilles. Then he turns to the Mediterranean coast, toward Catalonia, his body revolv­ ing on the windy hilltop, finally facing west into the slowly setting sun. This was not a neutral time o f day for a conscience-stricken Christian humanist.

Elevations

42 l

And it is at this precise moment that the real climax o f the ascent occurs. Petrarch takes the copy o f Augustine’s Confessions that Father Dionigi had given him and opens it at random, as if he were consulting an oracle. And— m irabile d ic tu — the book falls open at:

And men go about to wonder at the heights o f the mountains and the mighty waves o f the sea and the wide sweep o f rivers and the circuit o f the ocean and the revolution o f the stars but themselves they consider not.

Suspiciously apt, the passage nonetheless touches the most acute dilemma for humanists o f Petrarch and Dante’s generation: the problematic relationship between empirical knowledge and devout introspection. Could the survey o f the outer world (and what better place to seize its form than from the prospect o f a mountaintop?) ever disclose essential inner truth? Was such a lofty view a faith­ ful picture o f the world or was it merely a moral mirage, a shadow o f the eter­ nal verities that were, in their nature, unavailable to the scrutiny o f the senses? Whether the visible, outer garment o f the world was its true substance or a deceiving illusion was an ancient question, inherited from Plato’s Republic, and it would be passed on to the mountaineers o f the Renaissance, the Enlighten­ ment, and beyond. But as the two brothers made their way down the mountain slope, Petrarch surrendered to a stream o f holy associations, triggered by the pas­ sage from the Confessions; Augustine in his time opening the Bible and reading a passage from St. Matthew which told him to put aside whoring and drunkenness; St. Anthony being instructed by the Gospel to divest himself o f his worldly goods. A s the inky dusk came on over the Monts de Vaucluse, the contest was decided. And suddenly the peak over Petrarch’s shoulder shrank to a moral molehill. H ow many times, think you, did I turn back that day to glance at the summit o f the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range o f human contemplation— when it is not immersed in the foul mire o f the earth? With every downward step I asked myself this: I f we are ready to endure so much sweat and labor in order that we may bring our bodies a little nearer heaven, how can a soul strug­ gling toward G od up the steeps o f human pride and human destiny fear any cross or prison or sting o f fortune? Five years after their climb Gherardo would enter the monastic order o f the Augustinians, and Petrarch himself, in the margins o f a text o f the natural his­ torian Pliny, would make a drawing o f a mountain o f the Vaucluse, surmounted by a church.57 Such expressive projections o f the mind’s eye would recur over and over again to future generations o f mountaineers, even when they lacked

D I NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

422

the fortitud e o f Christian faith. A n ascent tow ard a p erfecdy u n o bstru cted view co u ld be co n fo u n d ed by w hat was actually seen— or sensed— from the sum m it. Instead o f a clear prospect, there m igh t be o bscured vision, a loss o f balance, an abruptly altered grasp o f scale. O n M o n t B lanc, this high -altitude disorien­ tation w o u ld make the p o et Shelley feel close to madness. A n d the confident n ineteenth-century A lpinist Edw ard W hym per w o u ld be startled by a prophetic vision o f o m inou s phantom crosses standing in the M atterh orn “ fo g b o w .” T o the soldier and H im ­ alayan m ountaineer Francis

Y ounghus-

band,

w ho

had

m o w ed

do w n

the

Dalai Lam a’s troops for the greater g o o d o f the Raj, it daw ned that he m ust hence atone for the b lo od in

the

snow,

Him alayan by

seeking

the Inner W ay via anthroposoph y

and

mystical self-interro­ gation.

For

all

of

them , the panoram a show ed n o th in g so clearly as the scenery o f their inner selves. Even

the

first

explicit political an­ n exation o f a m o u n ­ tain

ended

revelation In

late June

A n to in e

in

a

o f piety. de

1492 V ille,

cham berlain to K ing Charles V III o f France, lord o f D om pju lien and Beaupre, and captain o f M o ntelim ar, en route to cam paign in Italy, was ordered to scale the w ell-nam ed M o n t Inaccessible, abo u t tw enty-five miles sou th o f G ren o ble. As late as the nineteenth centu ry the French Alpine C lu b estim ated the daunting seventho usan d-fo o t peak as an eleven-hour clim b, up and do w n . B u t the sum m it was reputed to have untold natural w onders, and in a decade w hen Spanish and P ortu guese m onarchs w ere laying claim to far-flung tracts o f the earth through

Edward Whymper, “The Fog-Bow on the Matter­ horn,” from

Scrambles in the Alps, 1871.

Elevations

42 3

their licensed surrogates, doubtless Charles thought o f the ascent as an exer­ cise in vertical colonialism. He already knew what would become a common­ place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: that the possession o f a mountaintop was a title to lordship. To a truly absolute prince, nothing, cer­ tainly not a pile o f rock, should be “ inaccessible,” beyond the reach o f his sov­ ereignty. Antoine de Ville, then, was the king’s rock-face Columbus. Along with Antoine de Ville went a party o f six, including three clerics, the King’s Preacher, a carpenter, and, very sensibly, “ a ladder-man to the King.” All that they could have had, to get a purchase on the sheer rock, were the instruments o f siege warfare: ladders, ropes, perhaps hammers. And given the obvious perils o f the ascent, it is hardly surprising that the party decided to stay put for six days before attempting the descent. In the meantime news o f the expedition had reached the royal court o f the Parlement at Grenoble. And it was thought so extraordinary that a group o f its officers was sent to verify the claim. Discovering the ladders propped against the cliff, the usher made an attempt to scale the rock but gave up in a state o f exhausted fright while his companions, including the cream o f local chivalry, refused even to approach the mountain, much less climb it. From his ledge, halfway up the usher had seen Antoine de Ville and his men perched on the little plateau, and that was good enough to provide them with the required attestation. The official relation o f the event, provided for the Parlement o f Dauphine, is an odd mixture o f legal and sacred language.58 Antoine de Ville’s almoner, Francois de Bosco, duly confirmed that Antoine de Ville had baptized the peak (equally appropriately) M ont Aiguille (Needle Mountain) in the name o f the Father, Son, H oly Ghost, a n d (bearing in mind his royal authorization) “ Saint Charlemagne.” A Te Deum and a Salve Regina had been sung and three crosses had been set up (as if on Calvary) which would be visible for miles around. A primitive chapel had been built and masses said each day. But most striking is the description o f the fauna and flora atop the flattened peak which, from the predictable meadows to the wild sparrows (in three hues), the bounding chamoix, and the intensely fragrant flowers (described as lilies, fleur-de-lys, o f course, by the royal chaplain o f France), all conform to the standard expecta­ tions o f the Alpine purgatory, a.k.a. the terrestrial paradise. The lord o f Dompjulien and Beaupre, after all, was no original, not even a poet. Doubtless he had seen such landscapes before, woven into tapestries in the Burgundian-Netherlandish style or on painted panels. Perhaps he had read Dante’s purgatorial climb. N o wonder he too believed himself to be atop the pillar that connected the celestial to the earthly realms. In any event, when a curious party o f climbers made it to the top (with great difficulty) more than three centuries later, in 1834, they found absolutely no sign o f any animal life whatsoever except for flocks o f shrieking, scrawny crows perched on the bald rock.59

42 4

DI NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

iv

Exorcising Pilate

W hile A n to in e de V ille, in the com p any o f the royal ladder-m an, his carpenter, and alm oner, was ascending into Lilyland, Renaissance artists like L eo n ard o da V in ci w ere m aking unprecedented ly scrupulous studies o f rocks, cliffs, and m ountains. O n e o f the m ost rem arkable o f all da V in c i’ s draw ings records the Alpine ho rizo n , seen from Lake M a g g io re, w ith virtually the entire foregro un d elim inated, as if the artist’s eye had risen aloft in his im agined aerial m achine. In their painted versions, th o u g h , technically exactin g draw ings o f rocks were co n verted into backgrounds for familiar sacred histories. In a justly fam ous essay Sir Ernst G om brich p o in ted o u t L e o n a rd o ’s disarm ing celebration o f the landscape artist’s conceptual im agination as a self-conscious act o f creation scarcely less p o ten t than its original m o d e l.60 M o re recently A . Richard T urner has noticed that som e o f L e o n ard o ’s ostensibly m eticulous descriptions o f the physiognom y o f m ountains w ere actually the pro d u ct o f his fertile im agina­ tio n .61 H is account o f M o u n t T au rus, for exam ple, describes first a lush co u n ­ tryside, then fir and beech forests, and finally “ sco rching air w ith never a breath o f w in d .” T h e bare top ograp h y o f the peak is at least a w elco m e and realistic

Leon ardo da V in ci, studies o f M ountains, ca. 1 5 1 1 . Leon ardo da V in ci, G r e a t A lp in e L a n d sca p e w ith S to rm ,

ca. 1500.

Exorcising Pilate

42 5

DI NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

426

departure from the cliches o f the Alpine paradises. But it is nonetheless a kind o f fiction, for Leonardo, it turns out, had never been anywhere near Mount Taurus. In another ostensibly “Alpine” drawing in Windsor Casde, Leonardo fur­ ther muddies the boundary between fantasy and nature by delivering a rain­ storm from incongruous puffballs that, with wind-swollen cheeks, would better belong on a Renaissance portolano navigation chart. Beyond the foreground hills, as if layered in his imagination, lie successively improbable landscapes: a turreted town; sharply rearing cliffs; and finally, at the very top, a piled range o f cloud forms which, by rhyming with the mountains, serve to lift the whole composition entirely out o f the realm o f the terrestrial world. Conversely, when a Renaissance artist made a conscientious effort to insert a prosaic topographical record o f a mountainscape into an otherwise conven­ tional history, the effect could be disjointed. In Konrad Witz’s M iraculous D rau ght o f Fishes, painted as early as 1444, where Lac Leman, seen from Geneva, stands in for the Sea o f Galilee, the Apine horizon (including the first representation o f Mont Blanc) seems perpendicularly attached to the middle and foreground, as if it were a cutout cartographical addendum rather than a natural extension o f the narrative space. So when sixteenth-century artists who were both genuine landscapists and history painters (like Abrecht Atdorfer or, a generation later, Pieter Bruegel the Elder) used mountains as rhetorical elements in their narratives, the temptation to stylize was irresistible. As many commentators on Atdorfer’s Battle o f A lex a n ­ der and D arius on the Issus have pointed out, the apocalyptic defeat o f the Per­ sian king Darius by Aexander is not only registered in the magnitude of the brutal mountain that looms over the fray, but extended into the heavens, where the con­ tours o f the rocks are echoed in the swirling cloud forms.62 As well as performing as actors in these dramas, mountains could be con­ structed as platforms o f hubris. Even though Pieter Bruegel the Elder had travelled over the St. Gotthard to Italy in the 1550s, and had had his draw­ ings o f the Apine peaks and passes etched at the Antwerp print shop o f Hieronymus Cock, the kind o f mountainscapes he used for The Suicide o f Sau l or The Conversion o f St. P a u l owed more to his poetic imagination than to faithful topographical recall. In both cases the fearful precipices and abysmal chasms are stage prompts for holy drama— descents into perdition or sublime elevations. And yet, for all these acts o f creative license, something had evidently changed in the Western vision o f mountains. Apprehension had been over­ taken by perception. Even though mountains, unlike the arboreal garden and the sacred stream, had gone unmentioned in the account o f Creation given in Genesis, they were at last admitted to the universe o f blessed nature. Which is only to say that by the lights o f the Renaissance fathers, nothing

Exorcising Pilate

Konrad W itz,

Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 1444.

Albrecht Altdorfer,

Battle of Alexander and Darius on the Issus, 1529.

4 2 7

42 8

DI N O C R A T E S AND T H E S HAMAN

w as to be ex clu d ed . B y the m id dle o f the fiftee n th ce n tu ry there had o cc u rre d , in the literature o f C hristian hu m anism , o n e o f th o se p erio d ic c o n v erg e n ces b etw een the visible and the in effable. S o the in fo rm ed c o n ­ tem p latio n o f nature becam e n o t m erely compatible w ith aw e o f the C re a to r bu t a w ay to affirm his o m n iscien ce. R e sp ected , inspected, reg a rd ed w ith p iou s attentiveness, the sheer d iversity o f the o u tw ard slopes o f the w o rld attested to the inexhaustible creativity o f G o d . T h e m o re fantastic the te r­ restrial form s, the m ore p ro d ig io u s m ust be his po w er. T h e system atic in v es­

tig a tio n o f the e a rth ’ s structu re n o lo n g er seem ed to in frin ge o n the sacrosan ct m ysteries o f the C re a to r, b u t rather to o ffe r a g lim pse o f his in g e ­ nuity. N o feature o f this m arvel, even the blistered m o u n tain s, co u ld po ssi­ bly have been an u n sig h tly o v ersig h t. A n d th eo lo g ica l w o rks like De

Venustate M undi et de Pulchritudine Dei ( O f the M ag ic o f the W orld and the B eau ty o f G o d ), by the D u tch C arthu sian m o n k D io n ysu s van R ijkel, expressly in clu d ed m ou ntains a m o n g naturally beautiful form s that w ere the p ro d u ct o f divine b en e vo len c e.63

Exorcising Pilate

4 2 9

The possibility that mountain peaks and valleys might not be the accursed places o f the world coincided with the recovery o f classical texts o f natural his­ tory, especially the many congested volumes o f Pliny the Elder. To the first gen­ eration o f Renaissance fossil-hunters and mineralogists, mountains began to seem as if they had their own histories to tell. A t the same time, topographical illustra­ tors, like the prodigious Frans Hogenberg, offered views o f populated mountain valleys: villages and little towns set amidst neat pasture, rather than cowering below demon-haunted rock piles

jg f

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.64By the end o f the sixteenth century printed

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guides indicated the location o f hospices, inns, chapels, and mountain paths. This was no longer wilderness, but a recognizable human society. In 157®

^rst

detailed map o f the High Alps, prepared by the Berne physician and geographer Johannes Stumpf, was published. For the first time, the literate world was given the names o f peaks hitherto known only in the oral culture o f the villages: Eiger and Bietschhorn, Jungfrau and the alarming-sounding Schreckhorn

.65

Swiss humanists in particular, living in Lucerne, Basel, and Zurich, felt the need to exorcise their mountains o f their demonic fables before they could

DI NOC R AT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

430

properly claim them as patriotic topography. In 1555 the great naturalist Con­ rad Gesner walked straight up the notorious Mons Pilatus overlooking Lucerne, expressly to lay to rest the absurd legend o f its malevolent ghost, said to be responsible (among other things) for violent disturbances o f the weather. A fourteenth-century local edict prescribing the death penalty for anyone vis­ iting the haunted lake and raising old Pilate by recklessly flingirig rocks into his marshy grave Gesner found preposterous. And he was aghast that a party of ostensibly sage and scholarly men, led by Vadianus— the professor o f medicine and burgomaster o f St. Gall, Joachim von Watt— should have taken the non­ sense seriously enough to visit the lake in 1518 and declare the whole matter an open question! Gesner, by contrast, was boldly categorical in his dismissal o f the myth. “This belief, having no raison d’etre in the laws o f nature, com­ mands no credence from me. . . . For my own part I am inclined to believe that Pilate has never been here at all, and that even had he been here he would not have been accorded the power o f either benefiting or injuring human kind.”66 Gesner was not so bold as to deny the presence o f evil spirits in the world altogether, nor even that they might haunt remote and disagreeable places. But the Alpine peaks and valleys, he believed, could not possibly qualify as their abode, for they were unquestionably a blessing, not a curse. In an earlier letter written to a friend in 1543, and published as a dedicatory episde to his treatise C oncerning M ilk, Gesner had already extolled mountain climbing as essential not only for the pursuit o f botany but “for the delight o f the mind and the exer­ cise o f the body.”67 And in his account o f the climb on Mons Pilatus he goes into ecstasies over the clarity o f the mountain water, the fragrance o f the wild flowers, the restful sweetness o f the hay on which he slept, the verdant brilliance o f the mountain pastures, the purity o f the air, the richness o f the milk, the ingenious stoutness o f the alpenstock, and even the Alpine horn which the learned doctor sent bellowing and booming over the slopes. What is so striking about much o f Gesner’s eulogy is its concreteness. Instead o f the kind o f rapture that assumed a sort o f mystical disembodiment on the peaks, Gesner’s senses tingle with the altitude. Unlike Petrarch’s divided sensibility, Gesner’s body and soul seem perfectly companionable in the light, thin air. By the last quarter o f the sixteenth century the well-prepared Alpine traveller had a rich variety o f maps and guides to help his body over the more than a hun­ dred passes between northern Europe and Italy. From Aegidius Tschudi he could learn something o f the local history and politics o f the Swiss cantons. If his route took him through the Bernese Oberland he could follow Johannes Stumpfs route, taken in 1544, inn by inn, flagon by flagon, cheese by cheese, and, if he felt so inclined ^chapel by chapel. From the solicitous counsel offered by Josias Simler, professor o f theology at Zurich, he might think to equip himself with simple

Exorcising Pilate

43 1

snowshoes and ropes to guard against crevasses; to have his horse and himself shod with protruding spikes for the icy trails; to guard against frostbite by enfold­ ing himself with garments o f hide and parchment, and against snow blindness by wearing the strangely darkened spectacles recommended by Simler.68 This was all well and good for the Swiss. But for many foreign Alpine trav­ ellers, the mountain passes remained more o f an ordeal than an opportunity to sample the “work o f the Sovereign Architect,” as Gesner called him. Cellini was terrified, Montaigne depressed, Fynes Morison repelled, by negotiating a pre­ carious track between threatening overhangs and vertiginous Alpine ravines. And while some o f Gesner’s readers may have responded to his exhilaration at the variety o f scenery (“ ridges, rocks, woods, valleys, streams, springs and meadows” ), the suddenly changing microclimates and flickering alterations o f light and shade that could be experienced from a single summit point o f view, many more might have preferred to digest this comprehensive view o f the uni­ verse in the comfortable, proxy form o f a print or a painting. The aesthetic regurgitation o f geological awfulness was exacdy what Karel van Mander meant when he described Pieter Bruegel the Elder as swallowing whole mountains and rocks and vomiting them up again on canvases and pan­ els. Leonardo’s god-like shaping hand set on the awesome mountainside now became the, Fleming’s gift o f making mountains palatable. For while many o f those who bought the etchings made from Bruegel’s Alpine drawings were (like the patron o f his famous landscapes o f The M onths) merchants, we can be sure that they were not drawn to the images as souvenirs o f the road. In fact they were something like the very opposite: an idealized composite o f the world taken in at a single Olympian glance. For the point o f view o f Bruegel’s D a rk D a y (February), for example, is not so much mountainous as avian. The prospect hangs from an elevation so impossibly high that it can travel, pushed by Bruegel’s fiercely strong lines o f composition, through a whole succession o f arbitrarily stitched together, discrete landscapes: Flemish cottages, Mediter­ ranean river mouth, and Alpine needle-peaks. As Walter Gibson, who has writ­ ten perceptively about these so-called “world paintings” has observed, they came to be a painterly equivalent o f the extensive maps that were produced as a speciality in Antwerp and later in Amsterdam.69 And the scenes, painted a decade after Gesner’s descriptions, certainly correspond to his exhilaration that from high altitudes an entire cosmography might be surveyed and vicariously possessed. Even Bruegel, though, refrained from attempting to convey Ges­ ner’s claim that from a mountaintop one might “ observe . . . on a single day . . . the four seasons o f the year, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter [as well as] the whole firmament o f heaven open to your gaze.” 70 According to this Olympian vision, it was possible, from the heights, to grasp the underlying unities o f nature in a way denied by the doseup inspec­

D I NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

432

tion o f incompatible details. Such a normatively charged view from above antic­ ipated our own intuitive compassion for the whole earth, seen in satellite pho­ tographs not as an arrangement o f continents divided by oceans, but as a whole and indivisible planet. In one respect, at least, though, the painter’s eye sur­ passed the orbiting lens. For by combining close figures with far-off prospects,

Pieter B ruegel the Elder,

Bruegel managed to suggest a sense o f the working fit between raw nature and

The D a r k D ay,

human habitat, even when the February wind was biting and ships were

1565.

foundering in the bay. If these landscapes belonged to the diligent labor o f Vir­ gil’s Georgies rather than the dreamy arcadia o f the Eclogues, they were at least a populated place. This is not to say that mountain scenery had yet been exorcised o f all its demons and dragons, nor that painted mountainscapes were now disenchanted heaps o f stone. Bruegel’s views were, in their way, every bit as informed by reli­ gious conviction as the late medieval hermitscapes. And Gibson has even sug­

Exorcising Pilate

43 3

gested that the iconographic origin o f Bruegel’s cycle o f The M onths is to be found in the prayer-book miniatures o f Simon and Alexander Bening.71 So it is hardly surprising that the first artist to have been described (in an engraved por­ trait by van Dyck) as the p ictor m o n tiu m (painter o f mountains), Josse de Momper the Younger, should have sustained into the seventeenth century all the archetypal Bruegelesque themes. This becomes even less surprising con­ sidering that de Momper was born in Antwerp and that his father and grand­ father were friends o f Bruegel’s son Jan.72 In many o f his works de Momper actually returned to the older Nether­ landish tradition o f mountain scenes featuring pilgrims, palmers, rock-grottoes, and hermitages. He had worked in the Catholic world o f Counter-Reforma­ tion Antwerp, where the church had resolved to glory in precisely the extravagandy theatrical images that the Reformation had proscribed as idolatrous. For this sacred propaganda o f awe, mountain scenery was perfect. So de Momper brought anchorite saints like Jerome and Fulgentius back to his bare, wild rockscapes. In one other respect, too, de Momper from the Catholic south and Her­ cules Seghers from the Protestant north returned to a sharply vertical angle o f vision. In their canvases and panels (in Seghers’s case, imagined entirely with­ out direct experience), sheer cliff walls once again rear up over the heads o f puny travellers winding along a perilous path, quite without the benefit o f Josias Simler’s crampons and crevass ropes. In the spectacular painting in Vienna the figure o f a beggar (left foreground) is picked out in scarlet while another pair o f vulnerable travellers is seen from the rear, making their way toward hostile crags. In the bottom right corner, de Momper squeezes a diminutive hermit seated beneath a crag, almost as if barring the way to the pre­ sumptuous and foolhardy wayfarers. But as in many paintings o f this genre, the figures are dwarfed by the colossal drama being played out by the geology itself. For the rocks themselves have become combatants in some enormous cosmic confrontation: the vast talon-like boulders at right lean intimidatingly into the bowl o f the lit valley. All that stands between them and the road is the dark­ ened mass o f the forested hill at center, itself sheltering the church on which the travellers converge. The sixteenth-century humanist vision, from the heights, o f an intelligible, harmonized universe has been superseded, yet again, by the more histrionic view up from the dale where expendable man is trapped between the horrid crag and the rock o f faith.

4 3 4

DINOCRATKS

AND

THE

SHAMAN

Exorcising Pilate

Josse de M o m p e r the Y o u n g e r, Great

Mountain Landscape.

436

D I NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

I: v

Calvaries o f Convenience

It was not only through paintings that the Catholic church exploited moun­ tains as sacred spectacle. In a stroke o f great audacity, the Franciscans actually managed to convert the mountains themselves into inspirational theater. They took their cue from the founder o f the order. In 1224, two years before his death, Monte Verna, just outside Varallo, in Piedmont, had been selected by St. Francis for a forty-day retreat o f fasting and prayer. The hagiographical anthology o f stories called the Fioretti (The Little Flowers o f St. Fran­ cis), compiled a century later, recorded that while he was standing by his rocky cell, considering the form o f the mountain and marvelling at the exceeding great clefts and caverns in the mighty rocks, he betook himself to prayer and it was revealed to him that those clefts . . . had been mirac­ ulously made at the hour o f the Passion o f Christ when, according to the gospel, the rocks were rent asunder. And this, God willed, should manifesdy appear on Mount Verna because there the Passion o f our Lord Jesus Christ was to be renewed through love and pity in the soul o f St. Francis.73 Since the saint also received the stigmata on the same mountain from a ser­ aph carrying the crucified Christ, Monte Verna became, for his devotees, an alternative Calvary: not simply a place that would remind the faithful o f the Pas­ sion but the place where it had been mysteriously re-enacted in the Franciscan miracle. The very fissures o f its rocks, as the Fioretti made clear, bore the mark o f that mystery, just as surely as Francis himself bore the mark on his palms. To the most fervent it became known from its angelic presence as the Monte Serafico, or the “Seraphic Theater o f the Stigmata o f Christ.” In i486 the Franciscan friar Bernardino Caimi, who had seen the real Mount Zion while acting as patriarch o f the Holy Land, determined to create a more available version on Monte Verna.74 His “New Jerusalem,” five hun­ dred feet above the river Mastallone, would reproduce the Stations o f the Cross, but in a more theatrical, Franciscan vernacular, using life-size tableaux

Calvaries o f Convenience

437

from the lives o f Christ and St. Francis, housed in their own individual chapels dotted over the hillside. As the pilgrim ascended the steep but terraced slopes, he would pause at the chapel o f “ Nazareth” o f “ Bethlehem” for moments o f contemplation, prayer, and engagement with the groups o f figures. By the time he had reached “ Calvary” and the “ Holy Sepulchre” he would feel himself close to the site o f the Passion and, through his journey up the slopes, to the agony and exaltation o f the Savior. A century later, in 1586,

the

sainted

zealot o f the Milanese Counter-Reformation, Carlo Borromeo, re­ treated to the sacred mountain at Varallo. Thereafter its popular­ ity as a place o f pilgrim­ age was guaranteed. Raffaele

Even

Schiaminossi after Jacopo

half o f the seventeenth

Ligozzi,

The Bed of St. Francis, 1612.

in the second

century tens o f thou­ sands o f pilgrims were said

to

climb

the

mountain, congregat­ ing in large numbers during And

Holy

Week.

for those who

were unable to make the journey, an extra­ ordinary

group

of

twenty-six prints, en­ graved after drawings by

the

Florentine

artist Jacopo Ligozzi, who had visited Monte Verna in 1607, were published to approximate the experience. First published in Florence in 1612, they were reis­ sued in 1620, and again fifty years later, in Milan, from which publishing his­ tory one deduces the volume was not a spectacular success.75 Perhaps the prints were simply too grandly Baroque for the pilgrims o f St. Francis, or too expensive, or simply too startling. Because while some o f the Ligozzi designs were content merely to reproduce the interior o f the chapels o f M ount Verna, others, especially those engraved by Raffaele Schiaminossi, used astonishing effects (including movable paper flaps and hinges) to suggest

438

DI NO C R AT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

Calvaries of Convenience

439

the precipitous experience o f the saint on the mountain. N o two-dimensional photographic reproduction can do justice to the vividness and power o f the R affaele Schiam inossi after Jacopo L ig o z z i,

The Temptation

originals, with vast slabs o f rock mysteriously opening to reveal the stone bed o f the saint; Francis moving dangerously forward on his paper parapet, tempted by a Satan-like Christ on the High Place. Pop-up pieties, the prints offered Cal­ vary at fourth hand since they were an approximation o f an approximation o f

o f St. Francis,

a repetition o f the Passion. But in terms o f the vastness o f the scale, the pro­

1612.

duction o f a shocking sense o f the vertiginous, o f the mysterious disorientation

Anonymous,

o f the senses, alternating between elevations and abysses, the Schiaminossi/

engraving,

Ligozzi prints represent one o f the most stupendous achievements in the tra­

Profit du Mont

dition o f the holy mountain.

Valerien, mid­ seventeenth century.

Before long, sacri m o n ti sprouted throughout mountainous northern Italy, at Locarno, Varese, Arona, and Domodossola, each with its own saintly or miraculous theme chapels, all with some sort o f culminating Calvary at the peak. In Spain a holy mount was superimposed on the site o f the old Muslim citadel o f Granada, paradoxically by Moriscos, Christianized Arabs who pro-

440

DI NOC R AT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

duced specious evidence to suggest that St. Cecilio, the first bishop o f Granada, had actually himself been an Islamic convert.76 Others were built at Braga in Portugal, where impious figures o f Diana and the allegorical representations o f the five senses were inserted among the saints and martyrs, and on Mont Valerien, just west o f Paris in the faubourg o f Suresnes.77

J(

In many respects Mont Valerien followed the original design o f the Ital­ ian Franciscans. It used an impressive (but not too daunting) hill for the usual arrangement o f inspirational chapels and tableaux. And hillside Calvaries had already been established in the more fervent regions o f France, Brittany in par­ ticular. What made Mont Valerien different, though, was that from the begin­ ning it was a Paris fashion, with a serious following among the noble elite o f the city. Its founder was another frontier evangelist, Hubert Charpentier, grand vicaire o f the diocese o f Auch in the Pyrenees, where he had also estab­ lished an order o f “the priests o f Calvary.” Just how the idea came to him to preach a mission to the sinners o f the metropolis is uncertain, but in 1633 he had acquired from Cardinal Richelieu the rights to construct his chem in de

^

croix on the hill at Suresnes. There were to be fifteen chapels (though only five

«pourtrait^

^

^

seem to have been built by the end o f the century), and nine “Stations” : the j^ont Valerien betrayal by Judas in Gethsemane, Christ before Caiaphas, the flagellation, and

dit a Present

so on, leading to the climactic peak where three crosses arose from a roughly

le Calvaire....”

Calvaries o f Convenience

44 1

shaped rock. The print by Moncornet representing the plan, rather than its execution, shows a strangely humped tumulus swelling into the sky, with the “ Calvary” site o f the three crosses themselves surmounted by a further two sanctuaries, the uppermost Church o f the Ascension, haloed by little cells where those moved by the spectacle could retire for additional contemplation and prayer. After Louis XIII and Anne o f Austria had made the pilgrimage, Mont Valerien became enormously popular with grandees, especially the women o f the court, who by patronizing the chapels could advertise their piety. Such was the competition to have a chapel named for its benefactors that the upper ter­ races began to resemble a kind o f spiritual salon led by Mme de Guise, who was also abbess o f Montmartre. O n one flank o f the hill was a Liancourt chapel; on the other, a Mme la Princesse de Guiemenee chapel (donation: fifteen hundred livres). But the aristocratic tone did not at all constrain the excitements o f ostentatious self-mortification. Self-flagellation with ropes became common­ place, whacking the shoulders and back with wooden crosses a positive obli­ gation. The higher the breeding, the fiercer the whacks. As a site o f penitential demonstrations, M ont Valerien became such a fervent place (in spite o f the fact that only five o f the planned fifteen chapels were actually built) that rival orders to the Calvarians, in particular the Jacobins, attempted to seize it with a show offrocked force in H oly Week, 1664. Inevitably, the slightly savage atmosphere o f primitive faith that hung over the holy hill attracted throngs o f the usual charlatans: faith healers, miracle workers, hot-tongued prophets, and swarms o f rogues and beggars, all eager to profit from the gullibility o f the mighty and the humble alike. To help stoke the fires o f the faith, taverns and g u in g u ettes crowded about the foot o f M ont Valerien, and, according to the critics o f the Parisian Calvary, there was enough bawdiness to ensure that the penances along the Way o f the Cross would not be in vain. By the end o f the seventeenth cen­ tury the holy hill had such a reputation for disorderliness, especially in Holy Week, that the archbishop o f Paris, Cardinal de Noailles, ordered the chapels shut on G ood Friday. During the long, skeptical eighteenth century, the chapels o f Mont Valerien gradually succumbed to neglect. Yet as the gilt-painted aposdes became veiled with a film o f grime, the very decay o f the place lent it a pic­ turesque allure for a generation much drawn to the melancholy o f ruins. In 1766 the autodidact painter Simon Mathurin Lantara found his way to Suresnes to sketch what he called, with picturesque exaggeration, “ the Church o f the Hermits,” surrounded by bucolic, rather Franciscan scenes o f goatherds and rustic cottages. The combination o f mournful innocence and fading fervor was, o f course, irresistible to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who climbed the hill with his botanizing friend Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.78 Brought to the “ hermitage,” they trembled with emotion at the liturgy and listened raptly to a sermon deliv-

442

DI NO C R AT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

ered on “the unjust complaints o f Men; God who has raised them from Noth-

De Monchy after

ing owes them Nothing.” “ O h,” sighed Rousseau, dropping one o f his suspi-

Simon Mathurin

ciously lapidary epigrams, “how happy it must be to believe!” Walking in the

Lamara,

cloister gardens and taking in the view o f far-off Paris, the French Jerusalem enSravinB> wreathed in dark clouds, Rousseau made his own vow that he would return to , . . . . the holy mountain to immerse himself in silent meditation.

vi

The Last Sacro M onte)79

Notoriously inconsistent, Jean-Jacques seems not to have returned to the Holy Mount o f Suresnes. But his apostles, dressed in the garb o f French revolution­ ary zealots, certainly did. There had always been a sharp genre o f anti-monas­ tic satire directed at the misty pieties o f Mont Valerien, and in the Revolution

Valenen, 1766.

The Last Sacro Monte P

44 3

it turned into ferocious iconoclasm. The chapels were ransacked, the statuary and paintings mutilated and burned. Only the vegetable gardens by the clois­ ter were spared for their republican usefulness and their conformity to the sole acceptable cult: that o f nature. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre would have been pleased. Busily substituting bureaucratic paternalism for monastic superstition, the authorities o f the Napoleonic Empire in 1811 replaced the Order ofTrappists, then acting as custodians o f the sole surviving church at the top o f the hill, with the Order o f the Legion o f Honor. That order had the responsibility o f turn­ ing the building and site into a state orphanage that would reflect modern social morality, decently rational and demonstrably utilitarian. But the ecstasies o f M ont Valerien were not quite obliterated, merely entombed. Com e the Bourbon Restoration, a fervent cult o f the cross swept the traditionally Catholic regions o f France, and Paris’s own holy mount became, for the last time, a place o f public expiation, not least for the manifold sins o f the regicidal Revolution and the usurping emperor. It may have been precisely because o f the notoriety o f Parisian republicanism that the “ mission­ aries” shown in a print o f 1819, at the height o f the Ultra-Catholic reaction, ‘Les Missionaires au M ont

were committed to preaching their own Sermons on the Mount against the iniquities o f the World’s Fleshpot. Am ong the incompletely convinced,

Valerien pres

though, may have been the anonymous artist who managed to smuggle into

Paris.”

the scene all kinds o f subversive details, not least the formidably sanctimonious

D I N O C R A T E S AND T H E S HAMAN

444

expression o f the preacher and the ferociously unreconciled invalide, bottom left, reduced from the splendor o f the imperial armies to pitiful begging and impotent rage. Doubdess the old veteran (along with most o f his colleagues) cheered on the July Revolution o f 1830 that disposed o f the Bourbon monarchy for good, and with it whatever remained o f the odor o f sanctity on Mont Valerien. The church and chapel were razed yet again, and in 1840 an edifice more typical of the secular century was erected: a barracks. This “ Fort du Mont Valerien” still dominates the hill at Suresnes, perched above the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne, gloomily facing down the miserable collection o f tower-blocks planted on the slopes o f the hill. Below the barracks there are still crosses, grimy and untended. But they belong to the American war cemetery on the boule­ vard Washington.

+ + + a f t e r

1945 martyred Europe could have no further use for artificial Calvaries.

But in America, Italian Catholics, not at all unlike the first pilgrims to Monte Verna, conceived o f a new “New Jerusalem” that would fend o ff the inexorable march o f humanism, secularism, and, o f course, Communism. The latter-day Father Caimi was John Greco, a small-town attorney in Waterbury, Connecti­ cut, who gazed at the scrubby Pine Hill overlooking his hometown and saw “ Holy Land, USA” rising on its summit. It began, o f course, with a cross, thirty-two feet high, made o f stainless steel and lit with neon, the illumination o f choice in the 1950s. But as Cristina Mathews has pointed out in her perceptive essay on the Waterbury sacro monte, this “ Cross o f Peace,” while imposing, was too stripped-down and austere to serve the evangelical purposes o f the men who built Holy Land, USA.80 It had, in fact, been constructed by a group known as the Retreat League, who seem to have been, culturally and socially, a cut above the blue-collar parishioners who made up John Greco’s circle o f enthusiasts. They were nearly all first-gen­ eration Italian immigrants, many o f them from the south, where a popular tra­ dition o f life-size, vividly painted, and heavily decorated sacred sculpture still flourished. Greco’s own church, for example, located just below Pine Hill, was Our Lady o f Lourdes, and some o f the statues he brought to Holy Land were shipped in directly from Italy. If they worked miracles like the Madonna o f Scafati, whose painting, it was said, had parted the lava stream from a local vol­ cano, so much the better. What the makers o f Holy Land added to this native appetite for religious spectacle, was pure 1950s candy-colored theme-park theology. But this was, both o f necessity and choice, a low-tech sacred mountain. Unlike the corpo­ rately funded, industrially constructed, electronically switched-on theme parks o f the 1980s, Holy Land USA, was actually built by Greco and his friends, from

The Last Sacro Monte P

445

DI NOC R AT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

446

the primitive carpentry to the concrete scalehouses, to the repainting o f dis­ carded church sculptures and architectural details, rescued from the ecclesias­ tical junkyard. It was chicken-wire evangelism in earnest. In 1958

h o ly lan d

USA, announced by giant capital letters— the beatific

rebuttal o f the H o l l y w o o d sign— opened for business. It combined the Fran­ ciscan fervor and innocent literalism o f Monte Verna with the inspired hucksterism o f Mont Valerien. For a hill in industrial Connecticut it did turnstile trade. At its peak, in the late fifties and early sixties, about two thousand visi­ tors a day wandered round the hundred-odd quarter-size buildings represent­ ing Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Nazareth. And in 1969 they could extend their visit to “The Garden o f Eden” and “The Tower o f G od” (not Babel) as well. For that extra touch o f immediacy Greco added “small stones and dust” which he said he had collected on a “ research trip” to Italy (Varallo was not specified) and the Other Holy Land.81 History moves fast in twentieth-century America. It took nearly a century for Mont Valerien to crumble into the shabby ruin that brought a catch to Rousseau’s throat. Fifteen years after its opening, Holy Land USA had already passed its peak. John Greco had died; his friends o f the Campaign were latemiddle-aged or older. The ardor o f Catholic Action that had promoted an active mission to the laity retreated before the all-conquering pleasure princi­ ples o f the 1960s. And though the archbishop o f Hartford had originally blessed the project, much o f the official Catholic hierarchy outside Waterbury were embarrassed by the fairground tone o f the place, a low-rent biblical Disneyland. Before very long the concrete manger and the NO VACANCY Bethlehem nativity motel were peeling. Rust invaded the lean-to Garden o f Eden. And it was the American equivalent o f the French Revolution, an interstate freeway, that delivered the coup de grace to the expiring mid-Connecticut Jerusalem. I-84 freeway devoured chunks o f Pine Hill for its lanes, the backhoes entirely consuming Greco’s replica o f the Roman catacombs (authentic dust included). Concrete to concrete; dust to dust. As if in memorial, a second Cross o f Peace was erected on site in 1968, the industrial studs masked by the neon-emitting panels. On a murky afternoon it still casts a holy pallor over the few remaining statues, now cared for by the Sis­ ters o f the Holy Land Convent, and down the hill to the town, brutally bisected by the freeway. A little further west, a second, more modest cross has been applied to the wall o f an institution, perhaps a hospital, that has turned its back to the trucks. Together they have scarcely turned I-84 into a Via Crucis. But they are, at the very least, a beacon in the wasteland. And, as it approaches the millennium, Waterbury, the “ Brass Capital” o f America, could probably use, like the rest o f us, all the blessings it can get.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

i

Delightful Horror

I t was when his lapdog, Tory, got eaten by a w olf that Horace Walpole began to have serious reservations about M ont Cenis. Swathed in beaver furs, he had been lumbering up the mountain path on a chaise carried by four sweating porters.

I had brought with me a little black spaniel o f King Charles’s breed, but the prettiest, fattest, dearest creature! I had let it out o f the chaise for the air, and it was waddling along, close to the head o f the horses, on top o f one o f the highest Alps, by the side o f a wood o f firs. There darted out a young wolf, seized poor dear Tory by the throat, and before we could possibly prevent it, sprung up the side o f the rock and carried him off. The postillion jumped o ff and struck at him with his whip, but in vain; for the road was so narrow that the servants that were behind could not get by the chaise to shoot him. What is the extraor­ dinary part is, that it was but two o ’clock and broad sun-shine. It was shocking to see anything one loved run away with so horrid a death.1

447

VE RTI CAL EMPI RE S, CER E B R AL CHASMS

448

His shock was understandable. Whoever would have imagined that when the poet James Thom ­ son populated the Alps with “ assembling wolves in ranging troops descend,” he knew what he was talking about?2 Shaken, Wal­ pole’s

travelling

companion,

Rosalba

Thomas

C a m e ra ,

Gray, commented that perhaps Mont

Portrait o f Horace Walpole.

Cenis “carries the permission mountains have o f being frightful rather too far.” 3 And Walpole decided that the cursed mountain was indeed a devilish place. On its narrow path, “scarcely room for a cloven foot,” their porters had begun a brawl that nearly tipped the travellers from their chairs over the cliff. And even before the lupine ambush the

scenery

had stopped

being

agreeable:

“What

uncouth rocks and such uncomely inhabitants!”4 How different from the mountains o f French Savoy, where, the friends agreed, the frightfulness had been a heady tonic for the senses. “N ot a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry,” wrote Gray o f the scenery east o f Grenoble.5 It was just the sort o f thing they had hoped for when planning their Grand Tour to Italy. Walpole was the son o f the formidable Whig prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, and until the la­ mentable encounter with the wolf had obviously enjoyed having a silk-eared, sycophantic “Tory” in his lap. At Eton he had made friends with the witty and articulate Gray and along with two other equally precocious and literary com­ rades, Richard West and Thomas Ashton, had formed what they were pleased to call, in gende parody o f Sir Robert’s diplomacy, “The Quadruple Alliance.” In 1739 Horace was an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, enjoying an income from an exchequer sinecure thoughtfully pro­ vided by his father, and making occasional vis­ its to the library when not being told by his blind professor o f mathematics that he was

J. G . Eckhardt,

unteachably obtuse. Mournfully contem­

Portrait of Thomas Gray,

plating the murky damp o f an East Anglian

174 7-48 .

March, Walpole issued an invitation to Gray to join him on the trip over the Alps and into the vales o f sunlit antiquity. Destined to be the most famous and widely read English poet o f the eighteenth century,

D e lig h t fu l H o rro r

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Thomas Gray was then himself restively shackled to the law in the chambers o f the Inner Temple. He had gone down from Peterhouse, Cambridge, the pre­ vious year without taking a degree, complaining that “ the Masters o f the C o l­ leges are twelve gray-haired gendefolk who are all mad with Pride and the Fellows . . . sleepy, drunken, dull illiterate things.” (The harshness o f this judgement did not, however, preclude the poet from becoming Professor o f Modern History in 1767, nor from adding to the inglorious reputation o f the despised faculty by failing to deliver a single lecture during his three-year tenure.) Summoned by Horace Walpole, he seized the chance to escape from the drudgery o f the law chambers. So the “ litde waddling Fresh-Man o f Peter­ house,” as Gray described himself, and the “ long ungainly mortal o f King’s” set o ff together on the journey that would provide the first unequivocally Romantic account o f mountain sublimity, nearly two decades before Edmund Burke’s Philosophical In q u iry in to the O rig in o f O u r Ideas o f the Su blim e a n d B e a u tifu l. The most histrionic versions o f seventeenth-century sacred mountains had presented them as spectacles o f holy terror. The expected response to a toiling ascent up an artificial Calvary, or toward a de Momper painting o f a rock-cell saint, was devout and uncritical prostration: the crushing o f the human ego beneath the rock o f faith. For Gray and Walpole, though, the mountain expe­ rience was different. Intellectually skeptical, they could m ake themselves rever­ ent as a form o f aesthetic play. What they were interested in, along the high mountain passes, was not a true epiphany with the omnipotent Almighty, but an experiment in sensation. Their journey was designed to take them close to the edge, to toy with disaster. Where earlier mountain travellers had recoiled from mountain terror, Walpole and Gray revelled in it. They might have taken as their text the revealing remark by one John Dennis, who, on crossing the Alps in 1688, thought he had “walkd upon the very brink in a literal sense, o f Destruction. . . . The sense o f all this producd in me . . . a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy and at the same time that I was infinitely pleasd, I trembled.”6 With the prospect o f so much delectable horror before them, their pace was deliberately unhurried. They enjoyed spring in Paris, where, wrote Gray to his mother, “you have nothing to drink but the best champagne in the world.” Following the effervescence they spent the summer in Rheims purporting to improve their French. And in September, with Geneva as an eventual destina­ tion, the two friends took a long, looping excursion southeast from Lyon, pre­ cisely so that they could visit St. Bruno’s famously isolated monastery o f the Grande Chartreuse, up on its mountain eyrie between Chambery and Greno­ ble. From the village o f Echelles, just to the north, the road ascended for six miles o f “magnificent rudeness . . . on one side the rock hanging over you, & on the other a monstrous precipice, in the bottom runs a torrent, called Les Guiers morts, that works its way among the rocks with a mighty noise, & fre­

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quent Falls. You here meet all the beauties so savage & horrid a place can pre­ sent you with.”7 When they finally arrived at the Grande Chartreuse they found a Carthu­ sian idyll, a place o f “wonderful decency” : a hundred monks, cowled in silence, and three hundred servants to minister to them! Two brothers, absolved from silence to care for travellers, supplied them with the sort o f simple, wholesome fare that Romantic preconceptions about mountain hostelries assumed: pickled salmon, dried fish, conserves, cheese, butter, grapes, eggs, and figs. And the views around the monastery were so breathtaking that, Gray wrote, “ I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation, that there was no restraining.” Worldly as they were, the experience they surrendered to at the Grande Chartreuse was at least pseudo-religious. “There are certain scenes,” Gray conceded, “that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help o f other argument. . . . I am well persuaded St. Bruno was a man o f no common genius, to choose such a situation for his retirement; and perhaps should have been a disciple o f his, had I been born in his time.”8 But even though he would become famous for lines written in a country churchyard, Thomas Gray was no more cut out for the ascetic life than Horace Walpole. They affected monkishness rather than submitted to the Rule. And they declined the insistent offer o f the brothers that they stay the night in a cell. What the religiosity o f their mountain narratives suggested, though, was a thirst for the awe-ful, the shivering pleasure o f being half scared to death, a roller coaster by mountain-chair. Born from the oxymoron o f agreeable horror, Romanticism was nursed on calamity. While the eighteenth century is conventionally thought of as the epoch o f light— the Enlightenment, led by what the French called their lumieres— Edmund Burke set himself up as the priest o f obscurity, o f darkness. To be pro­ fo u n d was to plumb the depths. So it would be in shadow and darkness and dread and trembling, in caves and chasms, at the edge o f the precipice, in the shroud o f the cloud, in the fissures o f the earth, that, he insisted in his Inquiry, the sublime would be discovered. And how much more important, he argued, to face such dreadful sublimity than bathe in the glow o f complacent illumina­ tion. And if the quest for the sublime took one right over the top (as Burke was quite consciously essaying in the manner o f his own rhetoric), so be it. Decades before the publication o f Burke’s Inqu iry in 1757, though, as Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s brilliant book M ou ntain Gloom, M ou ntain Glory suggested over thirty years ago,9 mountain scenery had already become associ­ ated with the ruin, chaos, and catastrophe on which Romanticism thrived. And if mountains were now perceived as the landscape o f violence, eighteenthcentury connoisseurs credited two figures, above all others, with being respon­ sible for that disturbing and exciting vision: the theologian Thomas Burnet and the painter Salvator Rosa.

Delightful Horror

45 I

In truth, neither was exactly what his enthusiasts took him to be. Salvator was not the artistic bandit that William Gilpin, one o f his most passionate devo­ tees, supposed. And Burnet was only involuntarily the aposde o f mountain con­ vulsions. That Burnet’s book T elluris Theoria Sacra (The Sacred Theory o f the Earth), first published in 1681, had the effect o f making mountains more fas­ cinating, rather than more repulsive, was itself a paradox. For he had been argu­ ing ag ain st the complacent view o f Platonists at Cambridge, that even if mountains appeared to be erupted carbuncles on the face o f the earth, the mere fact o f their inclusion in the Creation necessarily meant they must have been intended by the Almighty for some benign purpose. Optimistic and pragmatic natural historians like John Ray managed to produce a list o f twenty reasons why mountains were truly useful for mankind, and a sign o f “ the wisdom of G o d ” (as his book was titled). N o t least was their role in the hydrological cycle, transforming evaporated salt water from the sea into condensed fresh water of rain, evidence o f this benevolence.10 But, unlike many o f those who pontifi­ cated on the subject, Thomas Burnet had actually seen the Alps, when he had accompanied the young earl o f Wiltshire on his Grand Tour in 1671. And he was not so much impressed as appalled by what he saw. The sight o f those “vast undigested heaps o f stone” struck him so powerfully that “ I was not easy until I could give myself some tolerable account o f how that confusion came in nature.” Instead o f averting his gaze and accepting the inscrutable ways o f the Almighty, Burnet stared directly at the brutality o f the earth’s mountain ranges. In fact he actually complained about the distortions o f conventional globes and atlases, urging instead what he called “ rough globes” with raised, contoured surfaces “ so we should see what a rude Lump our world is which we are so apt to dote on.” Like Ruskin, a century and a half later, Burnet wanted to shake up lazy conventions, to revel in the profound eloquence o f the earth’s irregu lar­ ity. “So much is the world drownd in stupidity and sensual pleasures and so lit­ tle inquisitive to the works o f G od ,” he complained irritably, “ that you may tell them that mountains grow out o f the earth like Fuzzballs or that there are Monsters that throw up Mountains like Moles do Mole-Hills, they will scarce raise one objection against your doctrine.” What Burnet offered in place o f a neatly well-ordered cosmology was a stu­ pendous primordial drama. Instead o f the providential clockmaker, the Jeho­ vah who had made mountains was a sublime, if infuriated, dramaturge. Mountains, Burnet explained, had not been mentioned in Genesis for a very good reason. They were not, in fact, contemporary with the Creation at all. The original, paradisiacal earth had been a “ Mundane E g g ,” smooth and unwrinkled, “ not a scar or fracture in all its body, no rock, Mountain nor hol­ low cavern.” Its rivers had all run from the poles toward the torrid zones, where they ran dry. And as Stephen Jay Gould reminds us, Burnet imagined this per­

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fectly spherical g lo b e to revolve “ bo lt u p rig h t” w ith E d en , at m id-latitude, thus en jo yin g a “ perpetual spring.” 11 B u t w hen the G reat D elu g e had co m e to wash away iniquity, it had perm anend y shattered this unblem ished sphere. T o cover the face o f the earth, he argued, required a vo lu m e o f w ater the equivalent o f eig h t oceans, a liquid mass that co u ld n o t have been supplied alone from forty days o f rain, h o w ever torrential. Su ppose, th o u g h , that beneath the shell o f this eg g -w o rld lay a w et yo lk o f subterranean w ater. A n d suppose, to o , that the c o n ­ stant heat o f the sun dried o u t the shell and generated pressure below. W hy, then, it w o u ld take no m ore than a scow l o f the A lm ig h ty to crack the thing o p en , releasing a vast flo o d from the w atery abyss. T h e drainage o f those waters into the rifts and fissures pro d u ced the great river g o rg es, lakes, and oceans on w hat had been a featureless g lob e. A n d the m ost vio lent scars o f the calam ity w ere “ w ild, vast and ind igested heaps o f stone— the ruins o f a broken w o rld .” As preposterous as all this m igh t seem to a m odern sensibility, B u rn et’s th e­ sis,

accom panied

by

stard in g

and

haunting im ages o f his geo lo g ica l a p o c­ alypse, had a phenom enal im pact, n o t just on scholars d ebatin g the ancient history o f the earth b u t on makers o f taste. A ll seventeenth -centu ry co sm o l­ ogy, after all, was to som e degree deductive, and w hat B u rn et’s vision missed by w ay o f em pirical substance it m ore than m ade up for in sheer p oetic coherence. T h e great essayist Joseph Ad dison, w h o had read Telluris Theoria. Sacra as a y o u th , w ro te a Latin o d e to B urnet. H is friend and co lleagu e at The Spectator, Richard Steele, com pared Bu rnet to Plato, C icero , and M ilto n as a transcendent genius. T h a t, he assuredly was not. H is argu m ent was certainly original en o u g h to make o p p o ­ nents, as w ell as disciples, lo o k w ith n ew and g o g g lin g eyes at a landscape that had been h ith erto regarded as fit on ly for scraw ny herm its. Burnet did w ell e n o u g h by the controversy to beco m e K in g W illiam I l l ’s chaplain after the G lo rio u s R evolution o f 1688. A n d his m uch m ore po w erful nam esake, G ilbert Burnet, bishop o f Salisbury, w h o travelled th ro u g h the A lps a year after the translation from Latin to English o f Telluris Theoria Sacra, paid its author the com p lim ent o f describing it as “ ingenious co n jectu re.” “ W hen one considers the H e ig h t o f these H ills, the Chain o f so m any o f them together, and their E xtent b o th in L e n g th and Breadth . . . these cannot be the Prim ary P ro d u c­ tions o f the A u th o r o f N ature bu t are the vast R uines o f the First W orld.” 12 N eith er G ray nor W alpole may have subscribed to the letter o f B u rnet’s theory. Bu t they had been bro u g h t up, in a generation educated by A d dison,

“ T h e M undane E g g ,” from T hom as Burnet, T e llu r is T h eo ria S a cra .

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453

Steele, and the third earl o f Shaftesbury, to invest mountains with archaic mag­ nificence, glorious precisely because o f their primordial dreadfulness and sav­ age irregularity. In The M oralists, published in 1 7 1 1, Shaftesbury thought the true magnificence o f “ Nature was better served by the rude rocks; the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought grottoes and broken falls o f water, the horrid graces o f wilderness itself” than “ the formal mocking o f princely gardens.” 13 A year later Joseph Addison commented that “ the Alps are broken into so many steps and precipices that they fill the mind with an agreeable kind o f horror and form one o f the most irregular and mis-shapen scenes in the world.” 14 And if this still seems unintelligible, think o f petrified dinosaurs: vast, frightening, prehistoric, but somehow also ances­ trally connected to our own world. An obscure theologian at Christ’s College, Cambridge, however notori­ ous, could not by himself generate the psychology “ The Opening o f the Abyss and Creation o f the

o f Gothic

geology,

the

peculiar taste for brutally jagged rock pinnacles

and

unfathomably

deep

ravines. Horace Walpole’s shorthand,

Mountains,”

to his friend West, for the scenery o f

from Thomas

pleasing terror was: “precipices, moun­

Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra.

tains, torrents, wolves [this was before the misfortune with the spaniel], rum­ blings, Salvator Rosa.” 15 And when he went on to describe himself and Gray as “ lonely

lords

of

glorious

desolate

prospects,” what he had in mind were the paintings o f the seventeenth-century Neapolitan artist who had become the object o f a cult among the collecting aristocracy o f Whig England. Shaftes­ bury, who died in Salvator’s native town o f Naples, owned a Salvator, and Horace’s own father, Sir Robert, acquired no less than four for his collection at Houghton. N o wonder that in his catalogue o f Walpole Senior’s collection Horace went out o f his way to sing the praises o f “the greatest genius Naples ever produced . . . the great Salvator Rosa. His Thought, his Expression, his Landscapes, his knowledge o f the Force o f Shade, his masterly management o f Horror and Distress have placed him in the very first class o f Painters.” 16 What his greatest admirers had actually invented for themselves was a “Sal­ vator effect” rather than anything resembling the truth about the artist. To read Horace Walpole or William Gilpin one would imagine that his repertoire con-

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sisted alm ost entirely o f desolate mountainscapes w here brigands set upon u nfortunate travellers. B u t such scenes w ere actually o n ly a small part o f Salva­ to r’s o u tp u t, w hich was dom inated, like any B aroque artist w h o so u ght to be taken seriously, by histories, sacred and classical, and by portraits. A t som e point tow ard the end o f the seventeenth century, the dram atically grim acing etchings him self invested w ith the qualities o f a w ild man. T urned into a Rom antic out-

Salvator Rosa, Bandits on a Rocky Coast,

cast, he was said to have roam ed the hills and m ountains o f his native A b ru zzi

ca. 1656.

as a child and to have kept com pany w ith the very banditti he later painted. T his,

Salvator Rosa, Empedocles Throwing Himself into Mount Etna, drawing, late 1660s.

Salvator called his “ Figurines” cam e to be know n as banditti, w hich Salvator

G ilpin insisted, m eaning the remark as a com plim ent, was w hy he succeeded so w ell in “ views entirely o f the horrid kind.” 17 A t the b o tto m o f this fantasy w as, how ever, an undeniable truth about Sal­ vator: his obsessive self-presentation as a genius governed by his ow n muse and freed from subservience either to classical conventions o r the tastes o f patrons. Perhaps it was his N eapolitan background, w ith its pleasure in the flam boyant

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and the macabre, and his Spanish training amidst the circle o f Jusepe de Ribera, who had settled in Naples, that pointed Salvator toward darkness and craggy solitude. There is no doubt, at any rate, that his portraits o f the figures from antiquity who disdained the conventions o f polite society— like the misanthrope Diogenes, who spurned the attention o f Alexander— were meant as personal utterances. And he appears in his extraordinary self-portraits either with half his face shadowed by melancholy or else writing Stoic inscriptions on a death’s head. Nor is there much question that Salvator did indeed celebrate the brutal, rocky wildernesses that French classicists like Claude Lorrain preferred to keep on a misty horizon. He seemed, almost perversely, to delight in exactly the scenery that convention rejected as savage: the steep, bare granite hills near Volterra, or the high Apennines. In a justly famous letter o f May 1662 to his fellow poet and friend G. B. Ricciardi, describing his journey form Ancona to Rome through Umbria, Salvator goes out o f his way to celebrate the “wild beauty” ( orrida bellezza) o f the scenery, “a river falling down a half-mile precipice and throwing its foam up again almost as high.” 18 In keeping with his cultivation o f a person­ ality o f hermit-like loneliness (totally at odds with his earlier, sociable life as street actor and public poet in Florence and Rome), Salvator cherished this landscape o f turbulence as the right kind o f setting for his adamant genius. There was, moreover, at least one painting by Salvator, executed toward the end o f his life, that was both brilliant and influential in promoting the cult o f agreeable terror. It depicted the rash Empedocles hurling himself into the mouth o f Etna to test his presumption o f divinity. The daring o f the composi­ tion is seen to better effect in the chalk drawing in the Pitti Palace, where the disruption o f conventional expectations o f space and depth is genuinely disori­ enting. (It is rather as though the suspension o f gravity common in Baroque and rococo decoration o f church ceilings had been turned upside down to sug­ gest infinite depth.) Spread-eagled (in exacdy the way later generations o f Alpine illustrators would represent the unfortunate victims o f falls), the over­ confident Empedocles is, just momentarily and optimistically, airborne, sus­ pended over the terrible chasm that will give him his answer. All that would remain o f his arrogance would be a bronze sandal, hiccoughed up from the belly o f the crater. And it is through conveying the hang-gliding trice before freefall that Salvator proved his metde as a virtuoso o f suspense. The Empedocles was bought in Rome by one o f the very grandest o f the Whig grandees, Lord Chancellor Somers. Engraved, it became the English icon o f the vogue for terribilita. By the early eighteenth century there were at least a hundred Salvators in England (even more than the number o f Claude Lorrains). A thriving industry o f Salvator engravers like Hamlet Winstanley, John Hamilton Mortimer (who became known as the “Salvator o f Sussex” ), and Joseph Goupy had brought what were invariably complimented as “savage” scenes to a public rapidly developing a taste for measured doses o f fearsome-

D e lig h t fu l H o rro r

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ness. Goupy’s Robbers, an engraving after a genuine Salvator mountainscape, complete with blasted tree and soaring peaks, was produced around 1740_ precisely the moment when Walpole and Gray set o ff on their journey.19 N o wonder, then, that when Walpole wrote to his friend West “ from a hamlet among the Mountains o f Savoy,” he described a scene that was directly drawn from the efforts o f Salvator’s imitators and engravers. But the road, West, the road! winding round a prodigious mountain . . . all shagged with hanging woods, obscured with pines, or lost in clouds! Below, a torrent breaking the rough cliffs, and tumbling through frag­ ments o f rocks! Sheets o f cascades forcing their silver speed down chan­ nelled precipices, and hasting into the roughened river at the bottom! N ow and then an old foot-bridge, with a broken rail, a leaning cross, a cottage, or the ruin o f an hermitage! This sounds too bombast [sic] and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one that has. If I could send you my letter post between two lovely tempests that echoed each other’s wrath, you might have some idea o f this noble roaring scene, as you were reading it. . . . We staid there two hours, rode back through this charming picture, wished for a painter, wished to be poets!20 Twenty years on, Gray would in fact write some o f his best lines on the scenery o f the English Lake District, less uncompromisingly rugged than Savoy but more accessibly picturesque. But Walpole’s letter to West, with its forced onomatopoeia and repeated exclamations, is the writing o f someone working hard at hyperbole. Good-naturedly, Richard West teased Horace a little by see­ ing through the affected spontaneity o f his descriptions and repeating them as though they were verse: Others a ll shagg’d w ith h a n gin g woods, Obscured in pines or lost in clouds.21 Walpole’s groping toward a poetic diction o f the sublime is not altogether sur­ prising. The same year that the two young men o f letters went on their tour saw the translation by William Smith o f the Greek writer Longinus’s treatise on rhetoric, chapter 35 o f which was devoted entirely to the sublime.22 The work had been parodied by Augustan classicists like Pope as the epitome o f bathos. So, by embracing the very literary effects rejected by polite opinion as unseemly, Walpole was ostentatiously throwing his allegiance in the direction o f the wild men, o f whom he imagined Salvator to be the wildest and most uncompromising o f all. I f mountains were now seen not as inert heaps o f rocks but as active forces o f nature, protagonists o f calamity, their prehistoric role in the upheaval o f the earth was complemented by the most famous disasters o f antiquity: Hannibal's passage

VE RTI CAL EMPI RE S, CE RE BRAL CHASMS

458

over the Alps. To relive that history as he journeyed through its landscape, Gray had brought along in his baggage another epic o f overwriting: the verse history o f the Second Punic War by Silius Italicus.23 As he was jolted along on the chairlitter, Gray managed to read the better-known (and better-written) account by Livy. But there was precisely something in Silius’s crude fury, especially when it came to the famous crossing o f the Alps by Hannibal and his elephants, that appealed to the young men’s taste for the extreme. And although Gray may not have known this at the time, in choosing Silius as his liter­ ary companion he was con­ necting himself to one o f the most compulsive

memory-

merchants in the Latin tradi­ tion. For besides writing the longest Latin poem o f all, Sil­ ius Italicus, who had been consul in the Roman province o f “Asia” during the reign o f Nero, and a famous legal ora­ tor, had spent a fortune buy­ ing up any available properties

Frontispiece of Gray’s copy of Silius Italicus,

that had historical or literary

D e S e cu n d o

significance

B e llo P u n ic o

and

restoring

them. The most famous but by no means the only such estates were Cicero’s Tusculan villa and Virgil’s tomb at the grotto o f Posilipo outside Naples. Silius clearly meant his poem on the war to be a Virgilian epic, and apparently would read it aloud, relent­ lessly, to captive guests at his dinner parties. But if he fell short o f Virgilian elegance, the poem, as Gray discovered, was something more than mere “catalogues and carnage.”24 Though indebted to Livy for the historical outline, Silius creates a memorable picture o f Hannibal, the daundess hero, confronting a monstrous realm o f ice that never melts, the “earth rising to heaven, shutting out the sky with its shadow,” a place without seasons; the multiply heaped peaks, “Athos added to Mount Taurus, Rhodope united to Mimas, Pelion piled on Ossa.”25

(Amsterdam, 1631).

D e lig h t fu l H o rro r

459

Aware that only Hercules himself had ever conquered these mountains, “ he forced a passage where no man had passed. . . . And from the crag’s top called his men to follow.” Innumerable horrors follow this fatal act o f hubris. Avalanches “swallow men in their jaws” ; a violent northwester “strips the men o f their shields and rolls them round and round, whirls them aloft in the clouds.” “ Half-savage men, peeping from the rocks,” attack the Carthaginian soldiers, “ their faces hideous with filth and with the matted dirt o f brisding locks.” Frostbite is so merciless that arms and legs are left behind in the snow. Only the warm blood o f dying warriors can melt the unforgiving ice. Though he is unlikely ever to be rescued from his reputation as a secondrate Livy, Silius’s rousing verse with its chariot-full o f low effects certainly appealed to the first generation o f Romantic Alpinists for exacdy its clumsy ruggedness. And its core themes: the Herculean lure o f the mountains, the fate o f the peaks under martial assault, the disasters that befell the overconfident, the fate o f great empires on the wintry slopes— all were to become the obses­ sion o f mountaineers, generation to generation. From the top o f M ont Cenis, terrible and tremendous, minus his fat litde black dog, Walpole wrote to his mother about Hannibal confronting “ the dreadful vision” o f the peaks, “ all nature animate and inanimate, stiff with frost.” It was natural, then, for Gray to regret that the great Salvator had not him­ self painted a Hannibal “passing the Alps, the mountaineers rolling rocks on his army, elephants tumbling down the precipices.” Gray took pleasure in seeing the mountains as a chastiser o f human vanity, the natural saboteur o f those who, lit­ erally, got above themselves. This fondness for mountains as instigators o f polit­ ical hubris seemed to find its locus classicus in the Hannibal history, so that, throughout the eighteenth century, the tale was rehearsed over and again by poets and painters, the formidable Alps always featuring as the downfall o f the high and mighty. The shudder o f personal danger that Gray and Walpole enjoyed feeling, close to the brink, could be expanded into a mischievous schadenfreude, a sort o f gloating at empires coming to grief on Monte Rosa. Gray’s letter to his mother connecting Livy’s scene-painting with Salvator had been published in William Mason’s edition in 1775, so it was possible for another young artist to have taken the Neapolitan artist’s omission as a challenge.26 In 1776 the twentyfour-year-old John Robert Cozens submitted to the Royal Academy A L a n d ­ scape w ith H a n n ib a l in his M arch over the A lps, Showing to his A rm y the F ertile P la in s o f Italy. Since it was, in effect, his debut piece, Cozens must have assumed that the grandeur and moral implications o f the subject would appeal to the elders o f the Academy. As befitted these ambitions, he executed the work in oils for the first and last time in his career. The painting is, alas, lost, but it is evident from the title alone that it depicted the moment when, to raise the morale o f his men, beset by the bestial montagnards, Hannibal shows them, from the high mountaintop, the fruits o f their perseverance.

460

VE RTI CAL EMPI RE S, CERE BRAL CHASMS

Delightful Horror

46 1

What survives o f the painting are three very discrepant pieces o f evidence as to its appearance. The first is a roundel drawing by Cozens in which the hor­ rid Alps are barely suggested by a projecting crag from which the general points toward the Italian valley. But the painting was seen later by Turner, who made a pencil sketch suggesting a much more dramatic and much more mountain­ ous scene, with soldiers toiling up massed and jagged peaks. And a third draw­ ing is the most ambitious, and surely the work o f both John Robert and his father, Alexander, who had invented a whole new pictorial language o f “ blots” : the visual expression o f the sensationalism o f the sublime.27 These “ blots” were deliberately random impressions meant to express, rather than to slavishly out­ line, the natural heaping o f rock forms. The impulsiveness and spontaneity of their production served to reinforce the new idea— so appealing to the early Romantics o f Gray’s generation— that mountains were dynamic, even turbu­ lent things. But the way they built into great block-like structures also seemed a practical application o f Edmund Burke’s doctrine in the In q u iry (published two years before Alexander’s Essay to F a cilita te the In v en tin g o fL a n d sk ip C o m ­ position) that irregular sublimity was to be shown in dark and massive forms. The colossal Alpine cliff o f the Cozenses’ H a n n ib a l sketch is pure Burkean sublime; frighteningly jagged and vertiginous, it was almost certainly executed by the blot-making Alexander. The delicately misshaped fir trees that act as a repoussoir in the foreground and the lighdy inked-in figures o f soldiers are surely the work o f his son, John Robert. In compliance with Gray’s posthu­ mous instructions, there is even the obligatory elephant falling down a crevass. Though it failed to earn the young Cozens a place in the academy, the painting, according to a contemporary, “ astounded everyone” and was evidendy a huge success.28 And if the Victoria and Albert Museum drawing is indeed a reliable guide, then it certainly obeyed father Cozens’s doctrine (much influenced by Burke) that “ landskips” were essentially expressive projections o f specific sensory and nervous states. According to this scheme, “ the tops o f high mountains” were supposed to represent “surprize, terror, superstition, silence, melancholy, power, strength.” And the edge o f a “ mountain that’s near” would convey (among other feelings) “ admiration from contemplating a great expanse o f Sky, fear, terror.”29 Put all these sensations together and they clearly correspond to the kind o f rhetoric used by the Latin historians in describing the mountains as accomplices in luring Hannibal toward his fatal act o f overconfidence. And there was another subtext to the H a n n ib a l that may have lent the painting immediacy, indeed may have tnade it controversial as well as spectacular. The Cozenses moved in the cir­ cle o f some o f the most outspoken critics o f the American war, including Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, and the notorious republican Thomas Hollis. So it is not inconceivable, as Kim Sloan has suggested, that John Robert’s painting was meant as a critical comment on the fate o f the British Atlantic Empire.

VERTI CAL EMPI RES, C ERE BRAL CHASMS

462

Cautionary sermons on imperial overreach were not lost, at any rate, on Turner, who accompanied his own extraordinary version o f the Livy/Silius his­ tory with his poem “The Fallacies o f Hope,” as if in combined homage to Gray and Cozens30 (color illus. 37). According to one nineteenth-century source, Turner learned more from John Robert’s painting “than anything he had seen.” 31 While certainly more tumultuous than anything ever attempted by either father or son, Turner’s debt to the Cozenses was twofold. The drama o f the precipices and the subject itself may have been prompted by their famous H a nnib al, but the violent atmospherics o f Turner’s livid sky seems directly drawn from one o f John Robert’s most Salvator-esque works (sketched, more­ over, in a place where Salvator himself spent a great deal o f time): the Coastal Scene between Vietri and Salerno. The year, moreover, was 1812. The fate o f Napoleon’s Grande Armee in Russia was not yet known, and Turner’s narrative emphasis on the fateful sun seducing the Carthaginians to their trans-Alpine doom has been associated with a caution against British imperial hubris. But how much more likely (and how much more satisfying) to imagine the patriot Turner lunging at the canvas and building the immense, howling storm, the black squall that hovers over Han­ nibal’s army like a monstrous bird o f prey, waiting to enfold and devour. At the very compositional center o f this gathering calamity, seen in minute silhouette against the horizon, is a tiny figure. Suppose (as is likely, considering the many engraved versions o f it) that Turner knew o f David’s Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard (1804). Suppose, too, that he knew (and who did not?) o f Bonaparte’s famous address to the army o f Italy in 1796, urging them on over the Alps with happy prospects o f plunder from the dreaming cities o f the Italian plain. Sup­ pose, then, that some such ghasdy tempest as this awaits the new Hannibal, lured by the “Fallacies o f Hope” to a richly merited doom. If we can suppose all this, the Lilliputian generalissimo, astride his micropachyderm, may be the most devastating image o f Napoleon ever executed. Turner’s H a nnib al, then, is the culmination o f a tradition that made mountains the dreadful judges o f human delusions about omnipotence and invincibility. The reinvented Salvator who cast himself as rejecting Alexander; the Burnet-enthusiasts who imagined mountains as the result o f the punishing Deluge; the Romantic travellers through the landscape o f the outcast, the her­ mit, and the brigand; and the Hannibalists who rejoiced at the overthrow o f arrogance— all contributed to the cult o f moralized mountaineering. And at the end o f it was Turner’s doomed commander, hanging on to his elephant amidst the roaring horror o f the storm. The drastic reduction o f his pretensions is at the opposite extreme from Dinocrates: the hero made minuscule by the mountain.

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

ii

46 3

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

Hubris, fatalism, and somber melancholy were not obligatory travelling com­ panions over the Alps in the middle o f the eighteenth century. Tw o years after Gray and Walpole went in search o f horror, another pair o f Englishmen, William Windham and Richard Pococke, undertook a journey to the glacier o f M ont Blanc in a quite different frame o f mind. Where the Romantic friends had relished the demolition o f empires, Windham and Pococke sought to affirm their vigor, as if the fatal mistake that Hannibal had made was in not, Jean-Etienne Liotard,

alas, being British. When a French writer looked back on their climb up Mont Blanc in the summer o f 174 1, he conceded that “ only an Englishman or a

Portrait o f

Knight Errant could have done it,” a verdict with which the objects o f his admi­

Richard Pococke

ration, Windham and Pococke, would have heartily concurred.

in Oriental Dress, ca, 1739.

They were a wonderful combination o f brawn and brains. Windham came from a powerful family o f Norfolk aristocrats and, as his nickname o f “ Boxing Windham” suggests, had an early reputation for rowdy athleticism. In Geneva, where his tutor Ben­ jamin Stillingfleet was supposed to be fortifying the soundness o f his Protestant education prior to the Grand Tour o f Italy, he boxed his way into trouble, charged by the magistrates with repeated acts o f assault, battery, wanton shooting, and general hellraising on the property o f sober citizens o f the repub­ lic.32 Pococke, for his part, had managed to channel his own restlessness into less notorious pursuits. The son o f a grammar school headmaster, he had only reconciled himself to the career in the church his father had organized for him by embarking, in his late twenties, on a series o f ambitious and scholarly voyages purporting to test the geographers o f antiq­ uity. Together Windham and Pococke represented exacdy the union o f patriotic muscle and curiosity that sent the British about the globe in the Hanove­ rian eighteenth century.

464

VE RTI CAL EMPI RE S, CER E B R AL CHASMS Standing on the gelid green spikes o f one o f Mont Blanc’s glaciers, the two

men uncorked a bottle o f wine and drank “to the success o f British arms,” and in particular to the health o f Admiral Vernon, the hero o f Portobello in Walpole Senior’s naval war against Spain.33 It was a war that Walpole had been pressed into waging by London merchants intent on wrecking Spain’s claim to control the Atlantic trade with its own colonies in South America. By toasting Vernon, the two young empire-builders were celebrating the admiral who had made the prime minister look weak and foolish. For the year before Windham and Pococke made their ascent, Admiral Vernon had fought the Westminster election o f 1740 as a red-blooded patriot and had managed to provoke riotous enthusiasm among the London mobs that cheered him while they burned Walpole’s effigy. It was a knowing toast, then, that brought together patriotism, pugilism, liberty, and the Alps. But over the next century there would be many more paths o f glory leading up the high mountains, and not all, contrary to Gray’s greatest poem, would lead to the grave. For the Romantics who saw in the mountains the refutation o f imperial ambition coexisted with hearty patriots for whom the peaks represented an occasion to demonstrate imperial strength. In Windham’s claim, published in his account o f the climb, that he had “long” desired to scale the alarming peak near Chamonix known for centuries as Mont Maudit (The Cursed Mount) we can already hear the authentic voice o f throwaway British dauntlessness. There was, too (as there would be for future generations), some genteel scientific ambition. But the mathematician selected by Windham from his Geneva circle to make the climb declined the honor. In fact none o f the group o f milords that included his tutor, the natu­ ralist and musician Benjamin Stillingfleet, Thomas Hamilton, the seventh earl Haddington, and Robert Price o f Foxley appeared especially eager to follow Windham to the remote and probably dreary little hamlet o f Chamonix. Per­ haps they wrote off the whole idea as a folly typical o f a blood like Windham, who had become notorious for shocking the Calvinist fathers o f Geneva with his theatricals, and for wallowing in the kind o f drunken routs that were sec­ ond nature to young English gentlemen abroad. In any event, the prospects for the expedition were looking dim when sud­ denly there appeared a perfect comrade for Boxing Windham. Exhibiting “a solemn air, wild manners and primitive simplicity,” Richard Pococke was one o f those irrepressible adventurers, half scholar, half lunatic, on whose existence whole empires are predicated. Windham’s laconic comment says it all. “ Dr. Pococke arrived at Geneva from his voyages into the Leva nt and Egypt which countries he had visited with great exactness.”34 “ Exactness” may not be quite right since Pococke had been sailing up the Nile with only the craving to find the ruins o f ancient Thebes and Memphis to guide him. But he had certainly covered distances, having explored Baalbek and bathed in the Dead Sea to test Pliny’s propositions on its salinity.

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To a man who still wore the sunburn acquired from climbing the Pyramid o f Gizeh, not to mention Vesuvius and the holy mounts o f Athos and Ida, what was a mere Alp? Nor was Pococke especially shy about displaying his exotic streak. A t Sallanches, a few days into the expedition, the party decided to bivouac, military style, on the meadows, rather than spend the night in some grubby little hostelry. While the servants were preparing dinner, Pococke dressed himself in full oriental finery, turban, flowing kaftan, and sandals, and appointed two o f the men to mount guard before his tent with drawn swords. Word spread, o f course, that a caliph or sultan had pitched tent at Sallanches, and the shepherds crept toward this Arabian vision with wonder and dread. Within the tent Boxing Windham and Pasha Pococke chuckled at the credu­ lous Switzers. The remainder o f the journey to M ont Blanc is, in fact, narrated as a vic­ tory o f imperial confidence over timorous native superstition. Toward Cha­ monix a well-meaning prior tries to dissuade the mad Englishmen from their goal. Like Petrarch’s shepherd, like all the fussing wise men since Tiresias, he is a fretful ancient. The peasants who were persuaded to act as guides only by lavish payments were themselves so skeptical that they carried stores o f candles and tinder to strike a fire when the party would be so exhausted that they would have to spend the night on the mountain. Over scenes o f old havoc, where avalanches had destroyed everything in their path, the party clambered upward, conceding that, at least at one point, the view was “ terrible enough to make most people’s heads turn.” 35 All the effects o f mountain Gothic were anticipated in Windham’s description: the bare peaks compared to ruined architecture, “ the Tops o f which being naked and craggy Rock, shoot up immensely high; something resembling old G othic Buildings or Ruines, nothing grows on them, they are all the Year round cov­ ered with Snow.” Marvels and horrors continued. The surface o f the glacier on which they trod so rent with gaping fissures that it could swallow the local crystal-miners, “ their bodies generally found again after some days perfectly well preserved.” 36 The nervous peasant guides told stories o f witches who emerged at night to dance on the thirty-foot pinnacles o f the glacier. But what Windham and Pococke could see with their own eyes was fantastic enough: a turquoise-cream lake whipped into fifty-foot conical waves and then frozen, to u t a coup. “ Greenland” was how the English spoke o f it. But in the elegant French account o f the expedition which Windham published the following year in the M ercu re de Suisse, the place was permanently baptized the Mer de Glace. In the middle o f the previous century the great engraver Matthaus Merian had published the first image o f a glacier: that o f Grindelwald. But none before Windham had dwelled so intensely on its profoundly paradoxical nature: a solid body o f ice, to casual appearances inert but which was nonetheless in slow and

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inexorable motion, advancing like some remorseless, omnivorous animal (to which it was often compared) eating up woods and meadows. When the two heroes finally descended from their conquest o f “ Green­ land,” the locals were, o f course, gratifyingly astonished and “owned to us that they thought we should not have gone through with our undertaking.”37 Another celebration was laid on, perhaps the first in what would become a rit­ ual o f Alpinism: the victory supper.

4* TH E r e a c h

of

e m p ir e

was not yet truly Alpine. But for the restless Eng­

lish there were mountain ranges closer to hand which invited subjugation, sur­ vey, and appreciation, very much in that order. In some circumstances altitude was not merely a challenge to imperial energy; it could also be a strategic requirement. Following the final defeat o f the Stuart pretender at the battle o f Culloden in 1746, the Scottish Highlands were not only scourged o f Jacobites; they were also colonized by political arithmeticians from Westminster and Edinburgh. So that in post-Culloden Scotland the conquest o f the mountains was not so much a figure o f speech as a military fact. The brothers Sandby exemplified this peculiar alliance between drawing and subjugation. Thomas, the elder brother, was attached to the camp o f the “ Butcher” o f the Jacobites, the duke o f Cumberland, throughout his bloody campaign in the Highlands, and through the duke’s influence won an appointment in the Ordnance Office in London, drafting maps and surveys o f the conquered territory. He in turn found a place for his younger brother, Paul, who, following a spell in the Lon­ don office, was sent to Scotland in 1747. He was just sixteen years old, skilled enough to act as draughtsman to the official survey o f the country organized by Lieutenant Colonel David Watson, the deputy quartermaster-general o f North Britain. The survey was supposed to provide information to support an extension o f the system o f strategic forts, roads, and bridges that had originally been built by General Wade after the first Jacobite uprising o f the “Old Pre­ tender” in 1715.38 Whether from prudence or audacity, Watson, a Lowland Scot, had resolved that the survey (which continued for nine years) would begin in the Highlands and work its way south. From the beginning o f his tour o f duty, then, Sandby penetrated the remoter fastnesses o f Argyll, Moray, and Inver­ ness, sketching for his own pleasure while wielding his theodolite for the king. And though his vision necessarily reflects the obedient topography o f pacifi­ cation, its delicate and decidedly unfearsome aspect may have advanced a more sympathetic view o f the Highlands. How was it possible to regard the coun­ try around Drumlanrig Castle or the valley o f Strathtay as so much barbarian waste when it looked, from Sandby’s drawings, to be so many undulations, so very English?

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

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Once the sense o f threat was removed, a more positive appreciation became possible. Linda Colley has described the several processes by which the Paul Sand by,

Survey Party at Kinnloch

Scottish elite was actively co-opted into a reminted Hanoverian union.39 C on­ fiscations and cross-border marriages resulted in the transfer o f substantial

Rannoch, Perthshire,

Scottish real estate, not just to English dynasties but to aggressively acquisitive

w atercolor,

teenth century there began to be a market for more picturesque depictions o f

1749.

Highland scenery by Scottish artists like Jacob More, Alexander Runciman,

Lowland magnates. N o wonder, then, that by the third quarter o f the eigh­

and John Clerk, whom Sandby had met in Edinburgh. Sandby himself responded to this tentative exploration o f Scottish sublimity by drastically alter­ ing his survey drawings for the engraver. The identical view o f Strathtay which had looked so innocuous in 1747 was made more dramatic, with loftier peaks and crags; the upland meadows replaced by the suggestion o f gorse and heather; and, most significant o f all, the inclusion o f a kilted Highlander, unthinkable in the earlier period, when wearing the tartan was itself a criminal offense.40 It may have been his experience in another region o f British mountains that gave Sandby the confidence to adjust his image o f them from tame hills to

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

469

picturesque heights. In 1771 he went on a sketching tour o f northern Wales with Sir Watkins Williams-Wynn (accompanied by four other gentlemen artists, nine servants, and thirteen horses). The result was an album o f views o f rocky cascades and ruined castles like Dolbadern, where the masonry seems a pure outcrop o f the mountains. Together with views from a second sketching tour, Sandby published them in 1778, where they supplied a new route-map o f the Celtic picturesque. Williams-Wynn’s own house at Wynnstay, set in an arcadian vale, became a favorite subject o f Welsh Romantic painters like Richard Wilson, who drenched it in improbably Italian sunlight. The makeover o f Wynnstay into a Celtic idyll was eloquent o f an impor­ tant change in the way the metropolitan center o f Britain was beginning to see its mountain periphery. The starkness o f Welsh scenery had long been imag­ Paul Sandby, View in

ined in London as the epitome o f barbaric rudeness, and the language spoken by the natives the phonetic equivalent o f the landscape. But the massive pull o f

Strathtay,

centralization that came with revolutionized communications in print and

pen drawing,

transport in Hanoverian England made possible a kind o f hybridization o f Eng­

1747-

lish and Celtic cultures. Earlier Williams-Wynns had been notorious for their

Paul Sandby,

ostentatious gesture o f burning George II’s portrait in public. But Sandby’s

defiant provincialism, the third baronet actually declining a peerage with the “View in Strathtay,” engraving from Sandby, 150 Select Views in

patron, the fifth baronet, actively cultivated the persona o f a squire o f sublim­ ity, so that before long Wynnstay became an obligatory stop for tourists o f the picturesque.41 The process o f making Welsh scenery desirably Romantic had been devel­

England, Wales,

oping for some time before Sandby took his own turn to exploit it. In the same

Scotland and

year, 1757, that Burke’s Philosophical In q u iry into the O rig in o f O u r Ideas o f the

Ireland, 1780.

Su blim e a n d B e a u tifu l appeared, Thomas Gray went to a recital in Cambridge given by the blind Welsh harpist John Parry, whose patron, predictably, was Sir

Paul Sandby, Sir Watkins Williams-Wynn Sketching, 1777.

Watkins Williams-Wynn. The per­ formance, which “scratched out such ravishing blind harmony,” sent him back to his own ode “The Bard,” on which he had been laboring, fitfully, for two years. Now, with the “ tunes o f a thou­ sand years old”

ringing in his

increasingly melancholy brain, he finished the poem.

Set in the

craggy ruin o f Conway Casde, “ On a rock, whose haughty brow / Frowns o ’er old Conway’s foam­ ing flood,” a bard confronts the invading English king Edward I:

470

VERTI CAL EMPI RES, C ERE BRAL CHASMS Robed in the sable ga rb o f woe, With haggard eyes the Poet stood; (Loose his beard, and hoary hair Stream ’d, like a meteor, to the troubled air) A n d with a M aster’s hand, and Prophet’s fire, Struck the deep sorrows o f his lyre. Defiantly summoning revenge, prophesying doom to the Plantagenet line,

the bard announces his own fate o f triumph and death, “and headlong from the mountain’s height / Deep in the roaring tide he plung’d to endless night.”

With Welsh and Scottish troops serving in the British army, the Union could survive Gray’s ancient and suicidal guerrilla. Thanks to the ode there was a sudden rage in fashionably sublime circles for druidical harpists, preferably blind. On the eve o f his ascent of Snowdon in 1770, for example, Joseph Cradock hired a druidical harpist (as well as a number o f “ blooming country girls” ) to sing and dance for himself and his clergyman climbing friend. “It gave me infinitely more pleasure,” he wrote of the evening, “to hear this rustic con­ cert than the finest airs o f the Italian opera.”42

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

47 1

Attentive as always to public enthusiasm, in this case for the living relics o f druidical antiquity, Sandby produced what, by all accounts, was his best and certainly most acclaimed painting: The B a rd (also, alas, lost). But Gray’s poem became one o f the most illustrated narratives o f the late eighteenth century, with Thomas Jones, Henri Fuseli, and Philippe de Loutherbourg all weighing in with their increasingly Romantic versions. I f literary relics were unavailable they could always be manufactured by the shrewder entrepreneurs o f the sub­ lime. The most successful was James Macpherson, the Glaswegian school­ teacher and the manufacturer o f F in g a l and the predictably blind Ossian. In 1760 he published his F ragm ents {they always had to be frag m en ts, to suggest ruined authenticity) o f A n c ie n t Poetry Collected in the H ig h la n d s o f Scotland a n d T ranslated fr o m the G a elic or Erse L a n g u a g e to instant and phenomenal popular adulation.43 Touring books o f mountainous Britain were beginning to be popular. If Dr. Johnson’s tour o f the Highlands and islands is full o f dyspeptic com ­ plaints

about

the

barbaric filth, des­ titution, and ugli­ ness o f the region, Boswell

Thomas Jones,

the

The Bard, 1774.

defends

Hebrides

as

best he can against Joseph Wright

the torrent o f iras­

of Derby,

cibility.44 And the

Matlock Tor,

Welsh

1772.

naturalist

Thomas Pennant’s Tour and

in

Scotla nd

Voyage to the

Hebrides,

travers­

ing much the same route, but which offered a benign view o f the scenery precisely opposite from Johnson’s, was its equal as a best seller.45 In 1765 the ailing Gray actually went on a Highland tour to recover his health, something inconceivable a genera­ tion before, and stayed at Lord Strathmore’s Glamis Castle, where his insom­ nia could keep company with Lady Macbeth. It was possible, o f course, to encounter the sublime in the very heart o f England. Gray’s f o u r n a l o f the Lakes was published in 1769, two years before his death, and transposed much o f the vocabulary o f “ horrid beauty” that he had coined on his Alpine journey thirty years before. Its prose-pictures o f “ tur­ bulent chaos o f mountain behind mountain” coupled with the “ shining purity” o f the lakes immediately and permanently established the Lake District as the definitively sublime English landscape. But it was in the Derbyshire Peak Dis­

472

VE RTI C AL EMPI RE S, C E R E B R AL CHASMS

trict, for example, that some o f the earliest and boldest attempts to produce a new pictorial language to represent the rocky heights were attempted. In 1 7 7 2 Joseph Wright o f Derby, for whom landscape had hitherto featured principally as a pastoral setting for aristocratic portraits (but who had long been a Salva­ tor enthusiast), suddenly produced a shockingly direct image o f Madock Tor, with the point o f view pushed right against the cliff face, the rock itself painted in thick, scumbled, Rembrandtesque pigment. (Seven years later, on the Grand Tour, he would paint Silius Italicus at the tomb o f Virgil.) And it was in the Derbyshire Peak District, praised in the 1770s as the “ English Vale o f Tempe,” that John Robert Cozens first began to experiment with his father’s “system” o f landscape sensations. While some o f his views o f the country around Mat­ lock are tamely pretty, two drawings o f bald masses o f rocks climbing brutally up the page suggest some sort o f revelation impending. In the valley of the river Arve, whose turbulent waters had intimidated even Boxing Windham, Cozens’s vision suddenly cleared. A few months after his H a n n ib a l v/zs exhibited in the Royal Academy to general (but not universal) acclaim, Cozens had an opportunity to see the Alps for himself. He was invited to go on the Grand Tour with the young antiquarian Richard Payne Knight, future author of A Discourse on the Worship o f Priapus and pontificator on the picturesque. As befitted a connoisseur o f antiquity, Payne Knight insisted that true sublimity came wrapped in a garment o f memories and associations. The sublime was not, he thought, simply an apparition that imprinted itself on the untutored senses. On the contrary, the force o f its emotional effect depended on the beholder responding through a veil o f remembered phenomena: stories, myths, histories, views natural, views pictorial, poetry, and music. The artist who would do most justice to the power of mountain glories, then, would make sure he evoked these memories in his landscapes. Though they seem to have got on reasonably well, it was his father Alexan­ der’s voice, rather than Payne Knight’s, that John Robert was hearing when he produced his astonishing watercolors o f the Alps. Nothing that had been previ­ ously seen, and especially not William Pars’s laboriously conscientious views o f the Rhone glacier, could possibly have prepared the way for Cozens’s version o f the same scenery. It seems likely that he had read Marc Theodore Bourrit’s books on the Mont Blanc peaks and glaciers. Bourrit was precentor, leading tenor, and choirmaster o f the Cathedral o f St. Pierre in Geneva. But he had trained as an enamellist and painter and nursed ambitions to become the first great publicist and illustrator of Mont Blanc. His efforts in this line, alas, were woefully anecdotal and amateurish. But the introduction to the English translation by the Reverend Charles Davy and his brother Frederick, published in 1776, was virtually a commentary on Alexander Cozens’s intuitive sensation­ alism. And one observation o f Bourrit’s spoke a powerful truth, namely, that the spectacle o f Mont Blanc was so astonishing that “the mind is almost lost in

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

473

the sublimity o f its own idea.”46 Payne Knight, speaking (inappropriately) o f Sal­ vator, had written something similar in a letter to George Romney when he spoke o f mountain scenery as leading “ the mind beyond what the eye sees.”47 It was this super-optical, transcendental self-absorption that John Robert Cozens somehow managed to convey in his monochromatic drawings and watercolors. Impossible to reproduce adequately on the printed page, they are eerie achievements o f the highest order, instantly recognized as masterpieces by Constable, who celebrated John Robert as “ the greatest artist who had ever touched landscape.” Cozens avoided anything like a slavish transcription o f his father’s blot-rocks, but adhered to the principle that the vision o f mountain

Alexander Cozens, A Rocky Landscape.

scenery was something conceived cerebrally, as if the artist’s imagination inter­ ceded between retinal observation and the impression dispatched to the brain. So instead o f the sharply delineated views o f more conventional watercolorists like William Pars, or the more predictably “ sublime” rockscapes o f Francis Towne, C ozens’s Alpine world is frozen in time-warp Romanticism, mantled with a surreal, hallucinated stillness. M ont Blanc’s jagged aig u illes have been transformed into pinnacle spires piercing thin-stretched, numinous clouds (color illus. 38). Horizons are interrupted or completely masked by walls o f rock that rise sheer and parallel to the picture plane. Everything seems strangely flattened and stretched as if in a dream where the processes o f nature have been unaccountably decelerated. In the most disconcerting pictures the traditional rules o f perspectival depth have been thrown away altogether, with the delib-

474

VE RTI CAL EMPI RES, C ERE BRAL CHASMS

erate sacrifice o f middle distance. In place o f the classical markers o f depth and space, Cozens disrupts the expected relationships between sky, water, and rock, inserting the beholder into crevice-like spaces between suffocating rock-walls, or lifting him aloft in a kind o f optical hot-air balloon to drift without benefit o f sandbags amidst the capricious Alpine winds. Vegetation is stripped down to the most minimal indication o f wispy, wind-beaten pines protruding from the rock like a thin beard. As for human figures, the bandits and travellers o f Sal-

Robert Cozens

vator’s landscapes, or for that matter the shamans o f the Han and northern Sung masters, are lumbering colossi compared to the insects that creep through

an^ ^

the valley o f Chamonix. Bourrit’s description o f his own attempt to climb the

Arve near

fearsome aiguilles comes to mind: “a small worm stuck on a prickly plant.”48

Sallenches.

In Italy, where painters conventionally basked in sunlight, Cozens o f course went underground. Even when he did sketch the northern lakes, they were made to resemble watery craters surrounded by rearing cliffs, and the Colosseum was painted, fantastically backlit, swimming in unearthly, shimmer­ ing light. The most astounding images, though, penetrate the earth itself, as if sucked through some Virgilian vortex at the mouth o f hell (color illus. 35). Mere slits and scoops o f light, the more agonizing for being painted brilliant cerulean blue, are all that penetrate the Stygian gloom. These are the Alps inverted: the same loss o f balance, the disorientation o f depth and space, the same scrambling o f perception. It is not just that we are much closer to Turner than to Salvator in these paintings. That is not it at all. We have, in fact, been

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

475

pulled into a universe o f representation where som ething has got in the way between art and its ostensible object. Superficially, it may seem that the older rather than the younger Cozens’s works are the bolder. For once we have got over our shock, we have no difficulty in recognizing in Alexander Cozens’s blots the startling ancestry o f abstract expressionism. But it is in fact John Robert’s vision that is the more bewilderingly powerful. For it is precisely because his Alpine watercolors assume the mask o f naturalism that their cre­ ative disordering is so potent. It is less the art o f abstraction than o f distraction. What Cozens was trying to convey in these “ distract” paintings was exactly what Percy Bysshe Shelley described to Thomas Love Peacock when he first saw M ont Blanc, precisely forty years later, as “ a sentiment o f ecstatic wonder, not unallied to madness.”49 Oddly enough, when Cozens returned to the Alps

J ohn R o b e rt C ozen s,

The Colosseum from the North, 1780.

and Italy six years later in the company o f a bona fide ecstatic, his father’s old pupil and friend William Beckford, Cozens’s watercolors, while still dramatic, lost the weirdly narcotic quality that had made them so distinctive. They are still very beautiful but they are more conventionally Romantic. Perhaps it was the overbearing influence o f the excessively sublime Beckford, who declared in a letter to Alexander that as he stared at the mountains he was “ filled with Futu­ rity.” A few years back, Beckford had written a manuscript romance full o f mountain Brahmins and visions o f caves turned inside out. John Robert’s cliffs that wall the Italian lakes, smothered in brooding Romantic weather, are oblig­ ingly Beckfordian (though their more liberated passages anticipate Turner). And the little house where Petrarch lived atop the Monte della Madonna is lit by a gloriously washed sunbeam filtered through the clouds. But the psycho-

476

VERTICAL

EMPIRES, CEREBRAL CHASMS

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

477

logical obliqueness, the brave and perverse distortions o f scale and depth, the sheer pictorial madness o f the earlier work seem to have vanished. There are, however, two exceptions. The first purports to be a painting o f John Robert Cozens, A Ravine. John Robert

the Castle o f St. Elmo, Naples, but it seems more like some monstrous manmade Alp. A colossal concave wall, pierced only by random, half-blocked aper­ tures, rises up through virtually the whole picture space, dwarfing the minuscule shepherd and his flock. Cutting the shallow box o f space from the

Cozens,

right is the black line o f a natural cliff whose relationship to the tyrannical cas-

Castle o f St.

de wall is impossible to read. Despite the opening to the sky the overall effect

Elmo, Naples.

is crushingly claustrophobic.

The St. Elmo painting was probably based on a drawing made for Beckford while they were staying with the volcano-loving Sir William Hamilton at Naples. But it was worked up some years later, and, not surprisingly, Beckford did not care for it. There may have been more community o f feeling, though, about Cozens’s E n tra n ce to the G ra n d e Chartreuse, a place Beckford had visited in 1778 and which he venerated as the sacred site o f mountain mystery (color illus. 36). But Beckford’s Gothic hyperbole is utterly eclipsed by Cozens’s stupendous profile. N o abbey, no monks, no summit, no pastoral paradise; only a layering o f sharply sheared rocks, saturated in the purple radiance o f a sinking sun, seen sideways with the eye o f a hovering hawk. Because the base and summit o f the

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cliff are unseen, the depth and height o f the rock-wall appear extended to infin­ ity. And beyond the scrubby fringe o f firs clinging to the mountain, there is yet another beak o f stone, wreathed in clouds, with the implication o f endlessly repeated precipices separated by measureless purple chasms. John Robert Cozens had arrived at his uniquely unsetding vision o f the mountains through an arduous eighteenth-century ascent. The pioneers o f Alpine sublimity, Gray and Walpole, had played with sensory brinkmanship, urging those who came after them to move close to the edge. While he had been his father’s good student, John Robert had got no closer to that edge than to blot his way up the passes, piling up the masses that would serve the moral o f their HannibalweW . But all this had been from afar. When John Robert actu­ ally faced the mountain summit from the ledges, the imperial prospect that ought to have been yielded up to any confident eighteenth-century enlight­ ened mind rushed past him. His head swam. His brush floated vaporously over the page. His art soared. And when his masterpieces had been accomplished, he went mad.

iii

The Seat o f Virtue

The Swiss Alps were not just the temple o f sublimity. To their growing band o f admirers and mythmakers in the eighteenth century, they were also the seat o f virtue. As early as 1710 Joseph Addison had published an essay in The Tatler together with an allegorical emblem o f liberty enthroned amidst the moun­ tains. As much as he had mixed feelings about the Alps, Addison believed they should at least be praised for protecting a well-nigh perfect society. Like the traveller come upon a political Shangri-La, Addison professed to be wonderfully astonished at the Discovery o f such a Paradise amidst the Wildness o f those cold hoary landskips which lay about it, but found at length that the happy Region was inhabited by the Goddess o f Lib­ erty; whose Presence softened the Barrenness o f the Soil and more than supplied the Absence o f the Sun.50

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The myth o f a mountain utopia was not invented, so much as reinvented, in the eighteenth century. In the homegrown sixteenth-century eulogies o f city Swiss like Conrad Gesner, extolling the frugal robustness and artless virtue o f the montagnards, there was already the making o f an Alpine idyll. Simler’s D e A lp ib u s C o m m en tarius, which related the stirring history o f the fourteenthcentury rebellion o f the three cantons against the Habsburgs, and which described the direct democracy practiced in the annual open-air meetings at Glarus and Appenzell, was in all self-respecting humanist libraries the length and breadth o f Europe. It was the eighteenth-century obsession with primitive virtue, though, that made over the Alpine Swiss in its image. The earlier texts had given the Swiss themselves the necessary myths for a patriotic topography and history. The sixteenth-century writers had done their best to make montagnards and low­ land Swiss as similar as possible: part o f a community o f cantons. But now it was the Alpine difference that was celebrated as Swiss virtue. And those natural qualities, grown in the high meadows (for an A lp literally was a field), became an international cult in the eighteenth century. In an age o f increasingly im pe­ ria l dynastic states, it was the obstinately modest, self-sufficient republican can­ tons that appealed to self-styled Friends o f Liberty. The founding text o f the Helvetic myth o f liberty was Albrecht von Haller’s long poem D ie A lp e n , first published in 1732 and rapidly translated into all the major European languages, and which went through countless edi­ tions before the end o f the century. By any definition Haller was Enlighten­ ment man: a native Bernese, he was both scientist and poet, mathematics professor at Gottingen, physician to King George II, botanist, geologist, engi­ neer, and director o f the great saltworks at Bex, at the western end o f the Bernese Oberland. His poem achieved the kind o f international fame reserved in the eighteenth century only for the likes o f James Thomson and Thomas Gray and generated stories like the one about the pirates who, discovering a chest o f books addressed to him, delivered them without more ado to the next port with instructions to deliver them prompdy to Dr. Haller!51 D ie A lp e n was the fruit o f a long journey taken with Johannes Gesner, a mathematician colleague at Zurich. It was in Haller’s plodding meter that what turned out to be the indelible portrait o f the redoutable Alpine peasant was sketched. Protected from lowland greed, fashion, and luxury by the blessed barrier o f his mountains, he drank the cold, clear water that gushed from mountain brooks, inhaled the pure Alpine air untainted by the stinking miasma o f metropolitan life. His food was given to him by his habitat: the milk o f goats and cows, the fruits and herbs o f the upland orchards. His dwelling was a rus­ tic timber chalet, his clothes made from the skins o f mountain animals. His wants were simple, his speech candid and economical, his morals mercifully free

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from urban debauchery. He was governed by the laws o f nature, not the lega­ cies o f Rome. Blessed was he! The Hallerian fantasy immediately took hold in the imagination o f Euro­ pean culture and never really lost its grip. Just as the natives o f Tahiti became nature’s lovers and the clans o f Corsica became nature’s warriors, bound to a code o f honor, so the herdsmen o f the Alps were transfigured into nature’s primitive democrats. They were, in fact, everything Enlightenment Europe was not: pious rather than witty; fanatically attached to democratic localism rather than ruled by a centralized bureaucratic monarchy; obstinately traditional rather than crazed with novelty. No matter that the leading lights in the acad­ emies and universities in Geneva and Zurich yearned to be accepted by their peers in Paris and Berlin and chafed at the stuffy parochialism imposed on them by the remnants o f Calvinist authoritarianism. Never mind that the Genevans, if left alone, might well have welcomed the theatricals that William Windham had brought to the city and which Voltaire would defend against Rousseau’s censorious passion. Never mind, even, that if they looked carefully at the inhab­ itants o f the Alpine villages, what observant European travellers saw (and often remarked on in their manuscript journals and letters) were miserably impover­ ished peasants, reduced, in the case o f the villagers o f the valley o f the Arve, for example, to hunting chamois or scraping at the sides o f caverns for the quartz crystals they sold to dealers for decorating shoe buckles and snuffboxes. And as for the vaunted salubrity o f the Alps, those who looked with a clear eye saw the strange phenomena o f the throat goiters and excrescences that seemed inexplicably common in mountain hamlets, as did the conspicuous concentra­ tion o f imbeciles. But though it was mentioned all the time, somehow the goitered idiot was not the portrait o f the Alpine Swiss that immediately came to mind when talk o f gentians and William Tell drifted over the porcelain cups o f chocolate in Paris salons. This was Rousseau’s doing, o f course. His own fantasies about the austere virtue o f his native Geneva had been nourished largely in exile, and in the over­ wrought fabrications o f his memory. Geneva was the severe, virtuous watch­ maker father he never actually had, but whose memory he worshipped. Barely understanding the complicated evolution o f Geneva’s domestic politics and the profound social changes that had taken place, Rousseau only wanted his assumption about its exceptionalism to remain unsullied by vile modernity: fashion, theater, cosmopolitanism. In other words he wanted Geneva to be more Genevan than it was, than in fact it had ever been. And he wanted it badly enough for the bitter dispute over the theater to wreck what was left o f his old friendship and alliances with the philosophes, d’Alembert and Voltaire. They were, he thought, not merely misguided but recklessly wicked in imposing their alien notions o f civility on the one place in the world where liberty and moral­ ity were institutionally, as well as socially, reconciled.

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The classic expression o f the stubborn virtue o f those who dwelled on the slopes by Lac L£man was the twenty-third letter o f the lovelorn tutor SaintPreux to his forbidden love, Julie, in Rousseau’s N ouvelle Heloise, perhaps the most influential bad book ever written. The Alps are extolled by Saint-Preux in standard Hallerian cliches. They are the “dike” separating the honest Swiss from the rapacious vices o f other nations. The “ honest hunger” o f their hills and vales “seasons the wild fruit,” and though the mountains have nothing to offer their inhabitants but the crudest iron ore, “yet Peru envies you this indi­ gence, for all hardships vanish where liberty reigns and the very rocks are car­ peted with flowers.” 52 By the time the complete oeuvre, including the Confessions, had been published in 1783, the countryside around Geneva had become a site o f pil­ grimage at least as sacred as visits to Rousseau’s tomb on the Isle o f Poplars at Ermenonville.53 In June 1816 Shelley and Byron sailed together on Lac Leman to Vevey, where L a N ou v elle H eloise had been conceived. The idea was to approximate, as best they could, what Shelley called “ the divine beauty” o f Rousseau’s imagination. His “ Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” composed on the trip, was plainly an act o f homage to the shade o f JeanJacques.54 Throughout the eight-day boat trip Shelley sat immersed in the book and, like the most dogged literary tourist, read passages aloud when the scenery had specific associations. A t Meillerie, the site o f Saint-Preux’s “ exile” from Julie, the two poets ate honey that Shelley declared “ the best I have ever tasted, the very essence o f the mountain flowers and as fragrant.” Learning that Marie-Louise, N apoleon’s second empress, had slept in their inn moved Shelley to consider that even though she owed her power to Rousseau’s “ democracy which her husband had outraged,” it somehow reflected well on her that she had come to a place sanctified by the philoso­ pher’s memory. The pilgrimage proceeded with dogged literalism. A violent storm on the lake near Saint-Gingolph that almost capsized the boat reminded the gleeful Byron (who had to take charge to stabilize the bark) not only that had Rousseau’s lovers also barely escaped a watery death from a Leman tempest but that the crisis had happened at exactly the sam e place on the lake as their ow n! A t Clarens, Julie’s home, Shelley reflected that “ a thousand times . . . have Julie and St. Preux walked on this terrassed road, looking towards these mountains which I now behold; nay treading on the ground where I tread.” They stroll in “ Julie’s w ood,” only to find that the particular spot in which the heroine was transported by rapture had been cut down by the monks o f St. Bernard, thereby confirming Shelley in his militant, atheistical anti-clericalism. Rousseau country was also freedom country. A t the grim chateau de Chillon, mentioned, o f course, in L a N ou velle Heloise, the two apostles o f republican liberty cursed the horrors o f despotism they found in the dungeons,

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including an evil sluice gate that could be opened to drown the manacled pris­ oners. And when they briefly crossed the border into Evian, Shelley saw a pop­ ulation which, notwithstanding the mineral water they drank, was “ more wretched, diseased and poor than I ever recollect to have seen.” The reason was obvious. They were the subjects o f the king o f Sardinia, while their happy neighbors gathering roses in Julie’s garden were citizens o f “the independent republics.”55 And in the same spirit, Shelley could not quite bear to follow Byron in plucking acacia leaves from the desolate garden o f Gibbon’s old sum­ mer house at Lausanne lest he desecrate the memory o f the much greater genius o f J.-J. After all, how could the “cold and unimpassioned spirit” o f a mourner for the Roman Empire possibly compare with the immortal prophet o f liberty and equality? A generation before this summer o f Romantic exile on the Alpine lake, there was already a lively competition between English and French eulogists o f Helvetic liberty. Sometimes, in fact, the lines o f transmission were interestingly crossed. After Rousseau, the most powerful contribution to the myth o f Alpine virtue was the French translation o f an English travel book. The text was Sketches o f the N a tura l, C iv il and Political History o f Switzerland, originally published by the tireless traveller William Coxe, later archdeacon o f Salisbury, who had already produced comparable works on Germany, Russia, and Poland. In the summer o f 1776, while John Robert Cozens was revolutionizing the imagery o f the western Alps, Coxe took the son o f the earl o f Pembroke into the high mountains o f the northeast ranges. The itinerary was itself significant in that it was not, for once, a mere stage en route to Italy, but rather was delib­ erately organized as a Swiss mountain circuit, a more spectacular version o f the Welsh, Scottish, and Lake District tours that were already crowded with excited devotees o f the sublime. As the title o f Coxe’s book suggests, he constructed the tour for his pupil as an education in the politics o f liberty as much as the aesthetics o f the pic­ turesque or the rudiments o f geology. “Nature designed Switzerland for the seat o f freedom,” he announces, echoing Addison, and to observe its practices Coxe took his protege to northern cantons like Glarus and Appenzell that were reputed to have best preserved direct democracy. He was, himself, no radical, but rather a perfectly conventional Whig, the biographer o f Sir Robert Walpole and generally confident that there could be no better system devised for the governance o f mankind than the British constitution. But, like many o f his gen­ eration, Coxe was also painfully aware o f its corruptions, and in lofty Helvetia he hoped to show the young aristocrat a portrait o f social virtue. What they would see would not be a model for the future so much as a noble anachro­ nism: Greek democracy in chamois leggings. So far as I know, history does not record what the pupil thought o f all this. But the instruction o f the teacher, on the printed page, does not make for an

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exhilarating read. Whether he is writing about the rural Landsgem eintle, assem­ bled in Alpine meadows, or the towns o f Lucerne and Zurich, or about the mountains themselves, Coxe seldom raises his evenly pleasant voice above the platitudes o f Hallerian idealism or the stock vocabulary o f the picturesque. “The country is singularly wild and romantic,” he says o f the throat-catching region between St. Gall and Appenzell, “ consisting o f a series o f hills and dales, vallies and mountains, the tops o f which are crowned with luxuriant pasture.” Yes. When he crosses the frontier at the Falls o f Schaffhausen (already estab­ lished as one o f the Wonders o f the Romantic Universe) and “ breathes the air o f liberty,” the most extravagant ment

he

compli­ can

pay

Alpine Switzerland is that “ I could almost think for a moment that I am in Eng­ J. M . M o rea u

land.”

le Jeune,

His French trans­

“ Julie and

lator, Louis Ramond

Sain t-P reu x in the S to r m ,” fro m J.-J. R o usseau ,

de Carbonnieres, who went to Switzerland a year later, fleeing, like

C o lle c t io n

so many other Helve-

c o m p le t d e s

tophiles, a miserable

O e u v r e s,

love affair, and in the

1774-83.

company without

(it

goes

saying)

of

the blind poet Pfeffel, believed

he

under­

stood the reason for this exasperating even­ ness o f temper. The author,

he

forth-

righdy declares in his preface, knew not a word o f Schweizerdeutsch (or for that matter any other kind o f Deutsch), much less Romansch and the many sub-patois o f the Alpine valleys which he assiduously catalogues. All that Coxe had to inform himself about such crucial matters as glaciation were dated works in French and Eng­ lish. Ramond himself could afford this churlishly dismissive remark since he himself had grown up bilingual in Alsace, and had added fluent Russian and English (as well as the fashionably pseudo-aristocratic “ de Carbonnieres” ) dur­ ing his education at Strasbourg and Colmar. The son o f an official in the army

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484

paymaster-general’s office, like countless other hacks in the French Grub Street chronicled by Robert Darnton, Ramond had tried, with little success, to make a living from essays submitted to precarious journals, the most promising o f which was the J ou rnal des dames. In 1780 he had all but resigned himself to fol­ lowing his father as a minor functionary when he discovered the English edi­ tion o f Coxe’s Switzerland. Lesser men might have been instandy deterred by Coxe’s blandness. But Ramond, a genius after his own fashion, saw it as the opportunity o f a lifetime. His route in 1777 had been much the same as Coxe’s, though he had sought out (or thrust himself on) the luminaries o f Swiss intellectual life from Lavater to Voltaire, whose wit, he observed, “was still intact within the ruins o f his body.” “You see before you,” Voltaire had told him, “an old man o f eightythree years and eighty-three maladies.”56 Ramond had always meant to publish these observations on the people and geography o f the Alps, especially because he too thought them a living museum o f a “natural” society. In the guise o f a conventional translation, then, Ramond decided to pig­ gyback his own book on the shoulders o f the unfortunate archdeacon. This augmented book would not only be drastically different in tone but incompa­ rably better informed than its ostensible text. Like an adhesive literary parasite, it would invade, usurp, and ultimately overwhelm its unwitting host. Distanc­ ing himself from the outset from the hapless Coxe, Ramond shamelessly exploited the already established French fiction o f the haughty and dunderheaded “gentleman” occasionally dismounting from his carriage or horse to condescend to the natives, and planning his route along a chain o f agreeable hostelries. He, Ramond, on the other hand, presented himself as a rambler, in the most solitary tradition o f Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, travel­ ling everywhere on foot, botanizing meadow by meadow, Alp by Alp, staying in the most squalid hovels, and sharing the curds, whey, and goat cheese o f the shepherds. Thus it was that the mischievous Ramond de Carbonnieres came to invent a fresh kind o f mountain writing. In its attempt to marry poetic and scientific observation it owed something to the Genevan Horace Benedict de Saussure’s famous Voyages dans les Alpes and the genuinely remarkable work o f Jean Andre Deluc on the ascent o f Mont Buet. But Ramond’s writing aimed to be some­ thing more oblique. In virtually the literary equivalent o f Cozens’s painting, he tried to go beyond mundane observation to record sensory distraction, but to do so with the full force o f Romantic expressiveness. But besides providing the opportunity to exercise this craft for the first time, the Swiss book represents another sort o f new genre, one frighteningly close to the most self-conscious experiments o f twentieth-century structural­ ists. In the guise o f footnotes, Ramond actually provides a counter-text antiphonally addressed to Coxe’s text. The effect is like two badly matched

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touring companions endlessly arguing with each other at the back o f the bus, the poor Englishman always hobbled by a prior agreement to conduct the debate in high-tone French. Ramond’s italicized comments modify, edit, crit­ icize, and even denounce the “ father-text.” Sometimes, indeed, the interven­ tions escape their grudging confinement as footnotes and climb mountainously up the paper, driving C oxe’s wan generalizations right o ff the page. When he discovered the travesty, the archdeacon was understandably livid. But in a lit­ erary culture where piracy was virtually unstoppable, there was little he could do about it. In fact it got worse. In 1803 Coxe suffered the ultimate indignity o f having “ Coxe-Ram ond” (or, we should more accurately say, “ RamondC oxe” ) retranslated back into English, immediately supplanting his own orig­ inal version. The effect o f the hybrid is richly impertinent, Coxe indulged as the straight man to Ramond’s wicked interlocutor. Coxe utters some generalization about the hospitality o f the Swiss peasants. Ramond observes that the locals o f Uri and Z u g are among the rudest, most grasping, and least hospitable people he has ever had the misfortune to meet. It is Ramond’s ground-level discrimina­ tion, in ethnography as in topography, that lets him get away with the murder o f Coxe and come out crowing at the bier. Where Coxe is content to skim the surface, Ramond plunges into such arcane folklore as the granite boulder lying in a meadow near Gastinen, said by the villagers to have been flung there by that old Helvetic, the Devil, in an attempt to destroy the famous bridge he had built on conditions the locals had flouted. Where at the mountain abbey o f Einsiedeln the latitudinarian Coxe sees “ a pavement continually covered with pros­ trate sinners wrapt in meditation and happy to have attained the end o f their pilgrimage,” Ramond sees a sacred place where the image o f the Church as Rock is actually embedded in its site and architecture. Coxe mentions pastoral ballads, but Ramond knows virtually all the varia­ tions o f the cowherd’s song, the ra n z des vaches, that had no standard melody or measure but which was altered, village to village, depending on parochial traditions. Made more conventionally melodic, the ra n z des vaches became, for Helvetophiles, the anthem o f Swiss liberty and found its way to the Paris Opera House in the overtures o f Gretry’s, and then Rossini’s, W illiam Tell (as well as Schubert’s “Shepherd on the Rock” ). Ramond is equally knowledgeable about cowbells and costumes, flora and fauna. But there is nothing he knows more about than the paramount matter o f cheese. Coxe eats Swiss cheese. Ramond eats sweet, fat Unterwalden cheese; dry, aromatic Bernese Oberland cheese; a great sixty-year-old cheese at Lauterbrunnen “ much like a cake o f yellow wax” ; even the ghastly pickled, putrid cheese o f Lucerne. He understood that cheeses were, in fact, important historical sources, since it was customary in many com ­ munities to inscribe on the great fifty-pound wheels the names and dates o f sig­ nificant family events: births, deaths, marriages, avalanches, floods, miracles.

486

VE RT I C AL EMPI RE S , C E R E B R A L C HASMS To be fair to Coxe (and one could scarcely be less fair than his perfidious

translator), there are many passages where the worst that Ramond can do is to complement rather than contradict the author. The most important o f these joint efforts describes the famous annual open-air assembly o f the inhabitants of Glarus on their mountain meadow. About forty miles southeast o f Zurich, flanked by the peaks o f Glarnisch and Magereu, Glarus had been adopted by Helvetophiles as the cynosure o f Swiss democracy, not just because o f the Landsgem einde but because its village church was actually shared between Catholics and Calvinists. Coxe, o f course, thought this mutual tolerance charmingly typ­ ical o f Switzerland as a whole; Ramond knew that it was unique. Ramond describes the solemnities in the field: the city sheriff, the Landam m ann, leaning on the archaic sword which, it was said, had laid about the Austrian soldiers in the fourteenth century revolt. But Ramond understood that Glarus was not just a glorious survival o f primitive democracy. It was also a tight little town with all the backbiting and atavistic nastiness to be expected o f such places, especially when fenced in between the Glarnisch and the Magereu. So, as he reports it, the grandiose assembly rapidly degenerates into abusive bickering between clans and neighbors, culminating in a heated discussion as to whether two sixty-year-olds should be allowed to marry near relatives, notwithstanding the infraction o f per­ mitted degrees o f consanguinity (not to mention the near certainty that the idiot ratio at Glarus would take a turn for the worse). The issue was settled, Ramond tells us, when an exasperated speaker declared that if the old men were in that much o f a hurry to marry, it was better they did the damage to their own fam­ ilies rather than inflict it on anyone else.57 When he comes to sum up the Glarus proceedings, Ramond abandons his skepticism for a disarmingly passionate voice. For all its human failings, this was indeed still a true republic in miniature: a meeting o f free men, assembled to debate on their common inter­ ests, sitting on the soil that gave them birth, which feeds them and which they have already defended against despotical usurpation; hav­ ing before them their children, animated with a love o f liberty which they are taught to cherish. . . . It is a grand and awful spectacle.58 After this testimony to political sublimity it comes as a disappointment to learn that in the short term Ramond not only failed to devote himself to the cause o f liberty and virtue but actually went about as far from it as anyone could go: namely, to a post with the lecherous, indiscreet, and credulous car­ dinal de Rohan. It was on the strength o f the smashing popularity o f the Swiss book (and partly through his Strasbourg connections) that the erstwhile lit­ erary struggler was appointed secretary to the cardinal. Being who the cardi­ nal was, this could mean anything. Ramond went along with him to Geneva,

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where he became entangled in one o f Rohan’s affairs that managed to include both adultery and accusations o f incest. And before Ramond knew it, he was caught up in the infamous Diamond Necklace Affair, in which the cardinal was fooled into buying and presenting the jewelry to someone he supposed was the queen. The whole farcical business was made to symbolize the irretrievable rot­ tenness o f the O ld Regime. So instead o f communing with mountain virtues, Ramond got himself mired in metropolitan vices. Instead o f watching the meadow democrats, he was obliged to indulge the antics o f the great charlatan Cagliostro, who was in Rohan’s retinue. Instead o f searching for the spirit o f liberty, he had to waste time with the Spitalfields fences looking for shady goods. Unlike France, he got over it. But he needed the help o f the mountains to recuperate from the notoriety. By now, sublimity tourism on the roads to the Alps was so popular that Ramond decided to explore a different and much lessknown wilderness: the Pyrenees. There he discovered ranges that, while pos­ sessing all the heart-stopping majesty o f the High Alps, were refreshingly free o f jaded associations. He climbed the terrifying Pic du Midi and lost himself in the rain, fog, and silence. When the mists cleared he wandered over the rocks feeling, as he later wrote, that he had stumbled on some immense primordial convulsion, like a rambler who loses his way and strays onto some battlefield where the bones o f fallen soldiers are still strewn about. The truth was, though, that for many years there were two Ramonds: the solitary prose-painter o f the mountains and the gregarious man o f society. The Revolution gave him the opportunity o f pretending to reconcile the two per­ sonalities since it seemed to call for N ew Men whose very zeal was the product o f their estrangement from urbanity. And it may have been the fervor with which his old Strasbourg friends threw themselves into the fray that encour­ aged him to do likewise. It was not, however, as a Rousseauite republican but as a moderate constitutional monarchist that he was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791. Imprudendy implicated in the failed coup attempt by G en­ eral Lafayette in the spring o f 1792, he saw his public position become even more dangerous with the overthrow o f the monarchy in August o f that same year. As quietly as he could, Ramond went back to the little Pyrenean town o f Tarbes, from where he went climbing with a peasant botanist he had befriended, his “ ben Jacou.” But he was too unusual in such a place to escape attention, especially since he publicly adopted incorrect positions, opposing, for example, the prosecution o f priests who refused to swear oaths o f allegiance to the Republic. In 1794 he was duly detained by the local revolutionary tri­ bunal, first under house arrest and then in ominous solitary confinement. Liberated at the fall o f Robespierre, Ramond became another provincial notable, living with his sister, helping to found, and then teaching at, the local Central School, climbing whenever he could (in particular the deservedly

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named Mont Perdu), collecting geological and botanical specimens. But among the luminaries and scientists who made up the ranks o f the Institut in Paris and who had been his colleagues in the Legislative Assembly, Ramond had not been forgotten. His austerely scientific measurements in the Pyrenees gen­ erated the kind o f papers (read in 1802) which guaranteed an invitation to join them. He accepted his rehabilitation with grace; though flattered by Napoleon, he refused, admirably, to keep his mouth shut about the deficiencies o f the regime. Happily for him, Bonaparte took this as a sign o f integrity rather than sedition and made him a prefect o f the Puy. This enabled him to return often to the Pyrenees, where he continued to climb and record, in elaborate detail, the effect o f height on the sense faculties. To those who knew him at Tarbes, Ramond must have seemed a rather remote and saturnine character, not unlike the arid peaks for which he sustained an inexplicable passion. But to read the pages o f the Voyages a u M ont-Perdu is to encounter the most interestingly peculiar mountain writing o f its generation. Ramond’s aim (like Ruskin’s a half century later) is not just to characterize the sensory disorientation o f very high altitudes but to describe them with as much scientific precision as he can command. Yet he also wants to give his account the visionary power o f poetry. The result is an extraordinary melange o f opti­ cal effects and sensuous responses: vertiginous empiricism. He is as fascinated by the subtle alterations o f color produced by mica in the granite as by the illu­ sions o f color changes in the dark blue skies overhead; by the fogs that seem to be “vomited from the mountains,” the impression that the valleys are multi­ plying themselves beneath the cloud layers.59 He sees an eagle flying against the wind at what seems to be full velocity and, virtually at the same time, attempts a calculation about the bird’s flight mechanics relative to the wind speed, a nd meditates on the violent battles he has seen between ravens and eagles, tearing at the same carcass. At the heart o f it all is his perverse insistence that mountains not only seem to be moving when one loses middle distance; in the very long-term view, they are. Spend any time in their company, Ramond warned, and you will be robbed o f your conventional grip on time. Human history, human revolutions will sud­ denly seem a momentary blink against the immense scroll o f eternity embed­ ded in the rock. At a particular geological fault line, “one world ends; another begins, governed by laws o f a wholly other existence.”60 In another passage in the Voyages au M ont-Perdu he is more dramatic still: “Traversing the mountain, one travels from life to death.”61 As one ascends or descends different strata, whole epochs, millennia, with their shells and fossils enclosed within the rock, pass by. So that mountaineering for him becomes akin to time travel: a way to access the perspectives o f the planet, if not the universe. In another respect, too, the essential faculty o f Enlightenment man, rea­ son, seemed to fail the mountaineer on Mont Perdu. For when the climber is

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surrounded both above and below by cloud, mist, and granular snow, his power o f m easurem ent, o f relative scale, is alarmingly disrupted. And “ suddenly” the “earth disappeared.” N o t only the earth, actually, but Ramond’s spectacles, when, on the horrendous face o f Mont Perdu, they fall into a crevass. Short­ sighted as he is, and only able to crawl along very carefully, Ramond sees a horsefly and a mountain earwig maneuvering with careless ease over the rock. So much for our god-like omniscience, he thinks. “A feeble insect plays about here where I have to hang on for dear life.” When all the soundings had been taken, the barometric pressures recorded, altimeter readings made, flags planted on peaks, sketches taken to immortalize the moment, something still seemed to have gone wrong with the picture. In the passages that deal with this out-of-kilter dislocation Ramond seems almost like the astronaut diligently performing his assigned duties, only to discover that he is in some sense more than merely a matter o f physics, weightless. Lost in exterior space, he is disconcerted to see a whole new prospect open up: the endless space o f our interior self. Petrarch had thought this the landscape o f his soul. Ramond envisaged it as the frighten­ ingly roomy contours o f the mind. The designer o f “Space Mountain” for Dis­ ney World must have understood this perfectly, even without benefit o f reading the forgotten Pyrenean. For inside the concrete Matterhorn there is total darkness save for the shrieks o f victims thrown up and down the pitchblack precipices o f its indeterminate space. Would Shelley have taken the ride? His last letter to Thomas Love Peacock from Chamonix, which spoke o f “ extatic wonder not unallied to madness” at the sight o f M ont Blanc, is not a song o f rapture. The approach through the val­ ley he found daunting, the mountain walls seeming to bear down on the path, an avalanche exploding in muffled thunder, the snow pouring down the slope like smoke. The brilliant glacier raised in fifty-foot spikes from the bed, crush­ ing the trees in its path, had Shelley imagining some future ice-apocalypse when the whole world would again be covered by glaciation. And the White M oun­ tain itself called from him one o f his very darkest and most disturbing poems.62 “M ont Blanc” begins and ends in the caverns o f Shelley’s own mind, where “The everlasting universe o f things/Flows . . . and rolls its rapid waves.” And unlike all other conventional mountain poems, it is the gaunt inevitability o f natural process that grinds its way through the bleak and beautiful poem: “The chainless winds still come and ever came.” It is the impersonal imperturbabil­ ity o f the mountain, the pitiless continuity o f geological time, against which the “works and ways o f man” are impotent, insignificant. “The glaciers creep / Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, / Slow rolling on.” And though, in a brief burst o f optimism, Shelley hails the “ great Mountain” as having “ a voice . . . to repeal / Large codes o f fraud and woe,” the real les­ son o f M ont Blanc is its adamant inaccessibility, guarding the “ secret strength

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o f things . . . the infinite dome.” And the “ Dizzy Ravine” produces in the poet (as it seems to have done to Cozens the painter and Ramond the writer) a trance sublime a n d strange To muse on my own separate phantasy, My own, my hum an m ind, which passively Now renders a n d receivesfa s t influencings, H olding an unrem itting interchange With the clear universe o f things around.

iv

Conquests

It was not his mind that was bothering Saussure; it was his forty-seven-year-old body. For two-thirds o f that life he had devoted body a n d mind, heart and soul to the ascent o f Mont Blanc. And now that he had done it he did not feel at all well. In fact he was overcome by a tide o f nausea that made it impossible to glide into the state o f exalted contemplation that the prospect required. For a man o f science, it was bad enough to lose control o f one’s faculties without quite understanding why. For a man o f sensibility, the theft o f the Life-Moment was almost too much to bear. “ I was like a gourmet invited to a superb ban­ quet,” he wrote later (when his stomach had calmed down), “whose utter revulsion prevented him from enjoying it.”63 Saussure stayed on top o f the mountain for three and a half hours before beginning the weary and painstaking descent. The dread o f going down might have been less acute had he felt at least some o f the sense o f elation incumbent on a conqueror o f what he had now calculated, beyond any dispute, to be the highest mountain in all Europe. But (as many other climbers o f Mont Blanc would confirm) the prospect from the peak, even when not cloud-shrouded, somehow never quite lived up to expectations. Despite the vast expanse o f view, stretching from the Lombard plain to the French Jura, the elevation was, as one might have supposed, too high to see very much. Even on bright days, all sense o f detail below was blurred by the film o f mist that hung over the minor peaks. Later Saussure even confessed to a sense o f petulant anger with the mountain, stamping his blistered feet on the snow as if he could punish it for some o f the discomfort it had cost him to get to the top.64

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O f course there had been nothing in his science to tell Saussure, when he had gazed up at the mountain for the first time from the valley in 1760, what standing atop it would feel like. He had only the lines o f his friend and mentor Haller, his own certainty that it would feel like the perfect melting together o f art and science, poetry and data. It would be the ultimate conquest o f the Enlightenment because it would enact, simultaneously, both senses o f A u f kldrung: spiritual illumination a n d profound comprehension. He was a decent, rational Genevan Christian, o f course, but he had always secredy supposed that the feeling would be god-like. But Saussure had never felt so mortal. He went about the planned scien­ tific tasks, studying barometric pressure, taking careful altitude surveys, using the hygrometer to measure the dryness o f the air (though his cracked and burn­ ing skin told him all he needed to know about that). He could feel his heart feathering through his breast; his head throbbed from the cruel alternation o f insomnia and narcolepsy that had overtaken him above seven thousand feet; his legs were leaden, his respiration so labored and so painful that it felt as though splinters o f ice had pierced the raw cavities o f his lungs. And it is, o f course, this candid record o f human frailty that makes Saussure’s account o f his climb so compelling, and its author so endearing. It was the Voyages d ans les Alpes, put into the hands o f the fifteen-year-old Ruskin, that converted him to the cult o f mountains for the rest o f his life, precisely because, unlike the modern mountaineering epics that he despised, it did not presume to be a chronicle o f a superman engaged in a military campaign over the enemy— height. And there is even something engaging (at least to me, in my fiftieth year) about the fact that what is still the very best book about M ont Blanc was written by a middle-aged intellectual whose climb was the second to reach the summit. Saussure was too decent to have been particularly jealous on this score. Indeed it was he, in 1783, who had actually offered a premium to the first man to scale the mountain. H e might even have given it to the relentlessly self-promoting Bourrit had he actually been able to accomplish the feat him­ self. And Bourrit had tried a number o f times, between 1775 and 1783, but had never made it much beyond the pinnacles o f the Grands Mulets, even though he had consciously organized his expeditions, as the Englishman H ervey had told him to, according to “ the rules o f a soldier.” In 1786 it had been Dr. Michel Paccard and the guide Jacques Balmat who had finally reached the top. A nd no sooner had they done so than their climb was poi­ soned'by controversy, notwithstanding (or possibly because of) the fact that Paccard was married to Balmat’s sister. As Claire Eliane Engel shrewdly points out, it was all very well, so far as Bourrit was concerned, that an unlet­ tered crystal-digger like Balmat would take the laurels for the “ conquest.” But that a doctor, a bourgeois like himself, should share the glory was galling.

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So, as all historians o f the climb have noted, Bourrit invented a version o f the event which, by featuring Balmat as the hero, would appeal to the fashion­ able cult o f the common man and leave Paccard as the fumbling academic, crawling terrified on his belly and lugged to the top by his put-upon partner. This was the version that posterity accepted, including very important mes­ sengers to posterity like Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, who inter­ viewed the old Balmat in his seventieth year. But the irascible Bourrit’s malice failed him when it came to Saussure, whom everyone loved. A mine o f information about new approaches to the summit, Bourrit had even encouraged Saussure when they met in 1785. But it wasn’t until the summer o f 1787, with the Paccard-Balmat controversy still rag­ ing, that Saussure arrived with his wife, sister, and two sons at Mme Couteret’s inn at Chamonix to prepare for an ascent. It was his fifteenth journey to the valley and he was well aware o f the dangers. Another o f their Genevan circle, the young banker and son o f Saussure’s colleague at the university Ami Lecointe, had died three years earlier in a hor­ rible fall right into the moraine off one o f the aiguilles o f Charmoz.

Chez Mme

Couteret there was, despite the usual tor­ rential rain o f the Genevan summer, keen expectation among her guests. One o f them was the English painter Hodges, who

had accompanied

Captain James

Cook to the other ends o f the world in the Endeavour, and his conversation filled Saus­ sure with the sense that he too was about to occupy, command, analyze, and describe one o f the great vacant spaces o f the earth. His generation demanded as much and he would oblige them, not for his own glory, o f course, but for the greater good o f human understanding. And it was almost a shipload that Saussure took with him when he started up the mountain on August 1: cases o f scientific instruments including three barometers; suitable reading for the epic (Homer above all); the substantial provisions, wine, and spirits that were the norm for the time; and a team of eighteen guides, porters, servants, and various hangers-on. It was about as dif­ ferent as could be from Ramond’s silent, knuckle-shredding climbs alone or with Jacou, “no library but my memory and no scientific instruments but my senses.” Saussure was in no danger o f perishing from solitude, and he rapidly discovered that it was possible to overdo military preparation. The next day, on the glacier o f des Bossons, the crevasses were so wide that there was nothing for it but to climb down one side o f the pinnacles and up the other, with rudi-

Ambroise Tardieu, after St. Ours, Horace Benedict de Saussure.

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mentary steps hacked in the ice. The enormous load carried by the expedition made this a numbingly slow business. Camped in the snow the next night, he woke after midnight, panicked that he would die o f suffocation from the sheer numbers sleeping together in the tent. He got up, his body drenched with per­ spiration, throat like sand, temples pounding, and walked out into the Alpine night. Under a milky, lunar glow an avalanche was beginning to roar down the facing slope. In fact Saussure was extraordinarily fortunate not to have encountered a similar peril on his chosen route. Some o f those who followed were not so lucky, in particular the Hamel expedition o f 1820, which failed to judge the freshness o f snow newly deposited by an avalanche and lost five members o f the

Saussure ascending M ont Blanc, August 3, 1787.

party in a crevass. But for Saussure himself, his pains brought him enormous celebrity. His “ Relation” o f the climb was translated into English and Italian; his Voyages d ans les A lpes, while less o f a literary tour de force than Ramond’s best writing, was the Alpine book for two generations. And the climbers who followed— Poles, Russians, Dutch, Danes, even an American, Mr. van Rensselaar, who collected mountains and saw no reason not to add M ont Blanc to Etna and Vesuvius— all sang Saussure’s praises as someone who had miracu­ lously combined the roles o f Man o f Knowledge and Man o f Action.65

S A U S S u R E had barely finished enjoying his triumph when a young Englishman,

Mark Beaufoy (later the colonel o f a London company o f militia), showed up at

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Chamonix. With an almost vexing insouciance he was up to the top and back again with a speed and agility that stunned even the guides. Later Beaufoy explained that he had been moved by nothing more subtle than “the desire everyone has to reach the highest places on earth.” That sort o f axiomatic voice would be heard again, speaking clipped English on the peaks. Increasingly, the complicated and cumbersome apparatus o f measurement was being left behind and with it the pretension that high ascents were contributing to the sum o f human knowledge. The real scientists o f the period now wielded the geologist’s mallet and they could do their work as walkers rather than climbers. Sketch pads and flags, on the other hand, became commonplace. By 1827, when the Scots­ man John Auldjo made his ascent, a muscular, quasi-military determination had replaced the reveries and fatalistic spells o f self-annihilation that had assailed the Romantic generation. Though when, at the summit, Auldjo rather decently decided to drink “to the prosperity o f the inhabitants o f the world,” he discov­ ered that high altitude, super-effervescent champagne was not such a wonder­ ful idea. “The rapid escape of the air it still contained produced a choking and stifling sensation which was very unpleasant and painful while it lasted.”66 Despite the surprises that the mountains could spring on even experienced climbers, Alpine tourism had become big business. By 1830 a diligence or a berline left Geneva three times a week (in 1840 it would be daily) for the trip to Chamonix, which took about eighteen hours, including stages by horses, mules, and portered chairs.67 Napoleon’s stupendous Simplon Pass ought to have made the initial passage over the Alps a great deal less arduous had not the nervous and despotic Sardinian monarchy blocked up the tunnels again for exacdy that reason. But tourists came in droves anyway. Mme Couteret’s inn, with lodgings for perhaps three travellers, was transformed into the Hotel d’Angleterre by the end o f the eighteenth century, and before long, guides like the Tairraz family cashed in on the growing tourist boom by building their own hotels. By the time the Shelleys were at Chamonix, two thousand travellers would find their way during the “season” between the end o f the spring avalanches and the begin­ ning o f serious fall snow. Coxe-Ramond had made the cantonal Landsgemeinden so popular that Ebel’s Traveller’s G uide through Switzerland was suggesting all-democratic tours that would begin with Appenzell in April and end up with Glarus in mid-May. There were enough mineralogists and botanists arriving to warrant their own section o f the guide, and the country was so packed with watercolorists that Ebel had to warn that in some parts o f the Alps sketching was thought o f as a kind o f larceny, das L a n d abreissen, the seizure o f the mountains through their representation. Leonardo would surely have loved this, but, Ebel solemnly counselled, “as soon as you perceive these suspicions to rise in their mind, you had better leave off immediately.”68 Offering comprehensive and up-to-date explanations o f avalanches and glaciers, Ebel was full o f precautions for mountain walkers and climbers. Do

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not, he insisted, “eat a great deal o f fat cheese, especially o f that which has been toasted, for it occasions . . . violent colics.” D o remember to take some Kirschwasser along, “ for although you had eaten a copious breakfast before you started, a few hours o f painful walking in the subtil air o f the mountains will create an appetite and you will be tormented by hunger.” Make sure you have a piece o f green or black crepe to tie over the eyes against snow blindness, and never cut your blisters with a scissor but run a thread through them as close as possible to the flesh without touching it. The very best thing for feet tortured by a hard day’s slog up the glacier was, o f course, a good soak in a tub o f neat brandy, “ nothing more refreshing or strengthening.” By 1836 Mariana Starke’s guide was assum ing that a considerable number o f those who came to Chamonix to explore the mountains would be ladies.69 She gave them prudent advice about the seven-hour trip up to Montanvert to see the Mer de Glace and they were told that “ persons who venture to walk on its surface should be especially careful to avoid the cracks and chasms upon which it abounds.” O n precipices, the guidebook writers evidendy believed in the cure o f familiarity, telling the ladies that it would be a good idea to stare as much as possible over the edge so that the imagination would be so glutted with terror “ that you become capable o f beholding it with sang-froid.” For those whose terror quotient was unlimited, however, whose “ eyes cannot get accustomed to contemplate the precipice without fear, you had better give up the pursuit!” 70 It was precisely to repudiate any lingering notion that women were, in fact, any more prey to terror than men that Henriette d ’Angeville climbed to the top o f M ont Blanc in 1838, where she cut her motto, Vouloir; c’est pouvoir (To will it, is to be able to do it), into the ice. There was, in any case, not much that could scare Henriette.71 She had been born at the height o f the French revo­ lutionary Terror, which had imprisoned her father and guillotined her grand­ father. It was only after Bonaparte came to power that the family was freed from all further liabilities, though they never recovered the bulk o f their fortune. She had visited Geneva many times and by her own account had followed the almost annual news o f climbs in the mountains o f Savoy. So it was natural, after her father died in 1827 and there was the usual bitter fight over inheritance with her brothers, that she moved to Geneva. Alpine climbs by marginalized aristocrats were common enough to suggest that it was indeed becoming a form o f surrogate campaigning, akin to fencing or hunting. And it may have been the first ascent o f M ont Blanc by a French­ man, the comte de Tilly, in 1834, that spurred on Henriette’s own determina­ tion to follow. In 1838 she was forty-four years old and unmarried. A t the time, and since, it has been implied that Henriette was a typically repressed, tough old maid for whom the adventure was some sort o f way o f acting out her quasi­ masculinity.

496

VE RT I C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L C HASMS A mere glance at her portrait ought to be enough to dispose o f that claim:

vivacious, dancing eyes, dark hair, a strong nose and jaw. N ot a great beauty perhaps, but without question attractive. And Henriette made it particularly difficult for herself by refusing to compromise her femininity and still be adamant about the climb. In fact, with amazing courage for 1838, she made her sex an issue. In her “ green notebook,” which was published a year later (with, however, significant omissions), she reports the shock and disgust that greeted her announced intention.

“ In a city o f twenty-five thousand

[Geneva],” she wrote, “ I was supported by exacdy three,” which together with her brother Adolphe and another female friend made five allies. Everyone else, from her horrified physician to virtually all her friends and acquaintances, and the guides at Chamonix whom she contacted, assumed it was some sort o f “female vanity” that put the idea into her head. She was, however, in absolute earnest, going ahead with detailed prepara­ tions, walking at least a dozen miles a day, toughening her body for the trials ahead. She also designed and made her famous and extraordinary costume, which, although she described it as “peu coquette,” was in fact a stunning cross between elegance and practicality (color illus. 40). She knew that layering mate­ rials, with silk next to the skin and wool on top o f that, would make for the best combination o f comfort and warmth, especially on her legs and feet. Her trousers were made o f stout Scottish wool, lined with fleece and in a fashion­ able tartan plaid. On top o f these she wore a nearly full-length dress, with the same material belted at the waist. And she already knew enough about the vagaries o f the weather to be prepared for both cold and heat, taking, for exam­ ple, a straw Chamonix sun hat and a full-fur bonnet. But Henriette was also unapologetic about the items which simply pleased her as a woman: the black feather boa, the snow-blind mask not in crepe but in black velvet, the silk foulard, and the one item which she insisted on precisely because it was not strictly necessary, the bone shoehorn. In the same spirit, as well as the phial o f vinegar, the folding pocketknife, the thermometer and telescope, Henriette made sure she brought along cucumber cream for her face and hands; a decent cafetiere; a bottle o f eau de cologne; and a looking glass, as she wrote, a truly fem in in e article, which I would none the less recommend most strongly to anyone contemplating an expedition at altitude (even a captain o f dragoons!). For one may use it to examine the skin to see what ravages the mountain air has wrought and remedy them by rub­ bing gendy with cucumber pomade.72 It was not, then, that Henriette pretended to be indifferent about what would happen to her woman’s body on the mountain. On the contrary, she

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actually rehearsed its responses and sensations. What did take her by surprise, though, was the physical strength o f the passion she felt in the frustrating weeks o f bad weather that kept her from what she called her “wedding” to her “ frozen lover.” When the sun came out she suddenly felt “ des elans du coeur” (catches o f the heart) when she thought o f M ont Blanc, and was so overcome by the emotion that coursed through her body that it sent her to the erotic Song o f Solomon to describe her confused and trembling state:

It seemed to me that I was in exile in Geneva and that my real country was on that snowy, golden peak that crowned the mountains. . . . I was late for my wedding, for my marriage with the face o f Israel . . . for the delicious hour when I could lie on his summit. Oh! when will it come?73 It was, she confessed (in a passage from the green notebook that is usually omitted from published versions), a m onom anie d u coeur, a true passion, even if it was only a passion that whirled in her head for an icy lover. “ La curieuse chose que nous. [What strange things we are.]” In the Romantic manner, her lover both teased her and dealt roughly with her before succumbing to her determination. Moving smartly along, Henriette quickly won the admiration o f the guides who had been deeply skeptical o f the whole expedition, especially when she refused to be carried over difficult ter­ rain, and crossed glacier crevasses with ladders, ropes, and sticks like an old Alpine hand. But she was no more exempt from the hardships o f M ont Blanc than anyone else. Ferocious winds cut at the small area o f her face that was exposed; she experienced the same burning, unslakable thirst, the same palpi­ tations, nausea, and sleeplessness that had affected Saussure. A t one point she was so ill that she made her guides promise that if she died they would carry her body to the summit. But that, she insisted, was the only circumstance in which they could think o f carrying her. O n the summit, though, she was sud­ denly taken by surprise when Couttet and another guide crossed their hands and lifted her up into the royal blue sky, proclaiming that “you are now higher than M ont Blanc!” It was all right. It was sheer jo ie de vivre, and she, too, did not have much stomach for the champagne, not to mention the leftover gigot. In Chamonix, Henriette was instantly crowned the “ Queen o f the Alps.” But she was more interested in publicly declaring that she was actually a “ sis­ ter in Alps” with Marie Paradis, who had been the first woman to get to the top exactly thirty years before, in 1808. Henriette was evidently no feminist in the modern sense, but her climb was not simply undertaken to demonstrate her fitness for admission to the world o f men climbers. Though, like Susan B. Anthony’s rejection o f conventional female attire, Henriette’s replacement o f voluminous skirts with trousers scandalized polite opinion, it was not at all

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meant as an effort to seem manly, and therefore fit to climb. It was emphati­ cally as a woman, and on a woman’s terms, that she embarked on the adven­ ture, and her trousers did what similar gear would do for the many other women climbers who came after her: they gave her liberty. Equally, for Henri­ ette the ascent was not the “conquest” that men climbers habitually described; it was a consummation. It gave her what many modern mountaineers, male and female, have sought from the experience o f a climb, a dizzyingly heightened sense o f self-awareness, a sudden and acute vision o f the scale o f one’s faculties— a peculiar mixture o f self-affirmation and self-effacement. Had Marie Paradis had a glimpse o f the same self-knowledge? Henriette made a point o f seeing the old lady, entertaining her and insisting she be invited to the dinner held in her honor. The fact that Marie Paradis, an illit­ erate peasant woman, explained that it had all been a mistake, a joke, a bet, that her friends had told her she would make money from the tourists if she did it, and that she had suffered so much they had had to drag her to the top, made absolutely no difference to Henriette. In fact one has the strong impression that it intensified the bond the aristocrat felt for the peasant. This, too, was a woman’s lot: that something so extraordinary should have been a source o f private shame and embarrassment rather than pride and pleasure. Before Henriette returned to Geneva, in the full flush o f triumph she went to visit Marie Paradis in her dark and smoky chalet at le Bourgeat and dis­ covered that a little collation had been laid out, as best as Marie could, on a red tablecloth, everything just as neat and hospitable as it could be. There was nothing much the two could say to each other, .but in their parting embrace, with tears pricking and brimming, Henriette made sure to say again, “Au revoir, dear sister,” to reaffirm how the mountain had truly made them kin in flesh and blood.

v

Albert the Great

There was not much wrong with Albert Smith’s appetite when he got to the top o f Mont Blanc. Which is just as well, since he had brought along four legs o f lamb, four shoulders o f mutton, six “pieces” o f veal, one side o f beef, eleven fowl, and thirty-five chickens, to say nothing o f the twenty loaves o f bread, sixpound bars o f chocolate, ten cheeses, and (for this was, after all, an English­

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man o f Queen Victoria’s reign) the vital four packets o f prunes. All o f which Albert carefully lists for the pleasure o f the readers o f rI h e Story o f M o n t B la n c.74 H e is not alone in publishing these elaborate lists o f victuals. It is as if, in con­ trast to the feeble guts and nervy imaginations o f the Romantics, the Victori­ ans wanted to advertise the imperial splendor o f their bowels. They had a constitution, political and alimentary, for this kind o f thing: the stomach to take on the world. N o one more than Albert, even though he could not have been less typi­ cal o f the kind o f Oxbridge-educated lawyers, parsons, and medics who made up the gentlemen o f the Alpine Club. It is in fact in the ways in which Albert Smith was self-invented that his glory resides. N o t that Albert was, in the universal scheme o f things, such an original fel­ low. N o t a bit o f it. H e was, as he unblushingly tells us right off, a showman who liked having a “ hit” (his word, apostrophized in all its lovely, vulgar nov­ elty). But for his day Albert was something, all right. And from the very start he knew he would come to something, and that the rest o f the world would pay attention. It was reading The Peasants o f C h a m o u n i, with its history o f the awful fate o f Dr. Hamel’s climb on M ont Blanc, that got him going. He would go to the litde hummock at Chertsey called St. Anne’s Hill and pretend that he too was a climber. As his French primer he used Saussure’s Voyages d ans les Alpes. And his first trip to Chamonix was in 1838, just before Henriette’s ascent. Smith was then in his early twenties, a medical student in Paris, and was en route to Italy, like Napoleon, via the Great St. Bernard Pass. “ Reports o f continental distur­ bances should never keep anyone at home,” he insists with wonderful V icto­ rian indifference to the mayhem o f foreigners. “ O n the mountains the glacier will be equally wonderful and the valley equally picturesque whether a repub­ lic or a monarchy.” And the dinginess o f the hotel, all a medical student could afford, was incapable o f spoiling the view, “which we must all rave about when we have seen it for the first time. Every step I took that day on the road was as on a journey to fairy-land.” 75 It seemed only right that others should be nudged toward fairyland, even if they were ever so far away. So, back in England, where his medical vocation petered out, Smith divided his time between writing for P u n ch and giving lec­ tures, with illustrations pirated from John Auldjo’s wonderful ripping-yarn nar­ rative, painted three feet high and lit with the livid, purple alpenglow everyone expected. Thus equipped with what he called his “Alps in a box,” Smith trudged the home countries circuit from Guildford to Richmond, Staines to Southwark. From the heights o f his fame and fortune in 1853, he looks back (like the star who was once a spear-bearer) on the days when he and his brother drove their four-wheeled chaise “with M ont Blanc on the back seat,” and tells “how we were received, usually with the mistrust attached to wandering pro­

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fessors, generally by the man who swept out the Town Hall or the Athenaeum.”76 Those places were generally at the back o f the pub, “up dirty lanes,” or, worst o f all (as he dolefully recollects), in a “ ‘committee room’— a sort o f condemned cell in which the final ten minutes before appearing on the platform were spent with its melancholy decanter o f water and tumbler before the lecture and a plate o f mixed biscuits and bottle o f Marsala afterwards.”77 Only the fact that the audiences were so grateful not to have to hear about the physiology o f the eye or watch incandescent charcoal burn in botdes o f oxygen again saved him. And there was always a good response when, by mistake, the heat o f his oil lamps would melt his images and produce spontaneous avalanches at quite the wrong time. It was, o f course, the Americans who showed him how really to do it. One o f them, Robert Burford, used long dioramas unrolled across a wide stage in Leicester Square and parked his plaster and papier-mache Mont Blanc on a wagon in Oxford Street to advertise the show. The place to do this sort o f thing, Smith reckoned, was the faded Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly. After a rapid trip to the Middle East he produced drawings o f river journeys from the Nile to the Mississippi, which, together with alarming images o f crocodile and buffalo and snatches o f exotic music, made up the evening’s entertainment called “The Overland Mail.” The public loved it. With the show doing brisk trade, fairyland was looking increasingly like Piccadilly rather than the valley o f Chamonix. But 1851, with the Great Exhi­ bition at hand, was a good year to get it over with, exploiting the maximum possible publicity. With the profits from “The Overland Mail” he hired himself an artist, William Beverley, made sure his contacts with the Genevan and Eng­ lish press were in place, and set off for the Mer de Glace on the morning o f August 12 with all that meat, a platoon o f guides, three other Englishmen including the Honorable William Edward Sackville-West, who seemed not at all abashed by the publicity, sixty bottles o f vin ordinaire, ten Nuits-SaintGeorges and three great flasks o f cognac, none o f which were going to serve as a footbath. Up he went and down he came, on his rear, in fact, clinging to the back o f a partner in the quasi-toboggan, quasi-luge position practiced by the guides on slopes that were slippery but safe. (What Albert would have done with the industrial organization o f winter sports is beyond imagining.) By a stroke o f the kind o f luck he kept on having, who was back at the hotel to greet him but the ex-prime minister and hero o f the repeal o f the corn laws, Sir Robert Peel. This was not bad for publicity, nor was the grand festive supper held to cele­ brate the “conquest.” Within days Albert had completed his story o f the climb. In fact the account was finished so quickly that it seems highly probable most o f it was written before the climb. Dispatched to Geneva, it appeared in The Times on August 20, eight days after he had come o ff the slope.

Albert the Great

50 1

This was just the beginning o f the real adventure. Seven months later, in March 1852, Albert opened “The Ascent o f M ont Blanc” at the Egyptian Hall in London, where a pasteboard Swiss chalet at the entrance announced the show. Girls in Swiss costumes showed the public to their seats. This was no Lit­ erary Institute lecture at Twickenham. Under dramatic gaslights Albert, in resplendent evening dress, and his outsize muttonchop whiskers, narrated in his high tenor voice as Beverley’s dioramas rolled by. Naturally there were some adjustments to the scale and the steepness o f the scenery, all by way o f adding interest to the story, which itself, o f course, was occasionally embroidered. For the same reason, the Mur de la Cote, for example, was said to be an all but perpendicular iceberg. You begin to ascend it obliquely— there is nothing below but a chasm in the ice. Should the foot slip or the baton [alpenstock] give way, there is no chance for life. You would glide like lightning from one frozen crag to another and finally be dashed to pieces hundreds o f feet below in the horrible depths o f the glacier.78 In fact, one o f the gentlemen, C. E. Matthews, was obliged to point out, “ the Mur de la Cote, though one o f the steepest bits o f the journey, is perfectly safe and the traveller, if he fell upon it, would be landed on soft snow at the bottom .” Albert was not one to let the dullness o f the truth get in the way o f plea­ sure and profit. H e was, after all, the Hannibal o f the Alpine business, the mae­ stro o f mixed-media sublimity. Special music was composed for the show, including the Chamonix Polka and the M ont Blanc Quadrille. Both became instant hits. In 1855 his old friend the guide and hotelier Tairraz sent him a pair o f chamois which went straight onstage to lend an even greater odor o f authen­ ticity. And when one o f the St. Bernards (hitherto unknown in England) that lay before the stage during performances obliged Albert with puppies, he was able to present the litter to the queen. Needless to say, Victoria was delighted. Three months after opening, a command performance was laid on for the Prince o f Wales, his brother Alfred, and the other Albert, the prince consort. Tw o years later Smith was brought to Osborne for the queen, who was sufficiently amused to present him with a dia­ mond scarfpin, exactly the kind o f loud bauble he loved. Predictably, the Prince o f Wales went back to Piccadilly more than once and it was Albert who intro­ duced him to the pleasures o f Chamonix, and the glaciers in 1857, thereby win­ ning even more friends among the hotelier community. Dickens, who had been in Chamonix in 1846, immediately recognized in Albert a virtuoso, charlatan, and genius: his sort o f man. “The Ascent o f M ont Blanc” ran for six years, taking thirty thousand pounds and making Albert Smith, before he died in i860, a seriously rich V ic­

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torian. By the next decade Thomas Cook was regularly taking tours to Cha­ monix and the Bernese Oberland; train and ferry and train to Geneva; char-abanc to the mountains.79 At Chamonix they could pay a franc to fire a cannon and make the Alps echo, and then go, in parties o f fifty, up to the Mer de Glace, where, scarcely more than a century before, Boxing Windham and Richard Pococke had sat and sipped their wine in the absolute silence o f the glacial rift.

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Thus began what the members o f the Alpine Club, and Leslie Stephen in par­ ticular, mourned as the “ cocknification” o f the sacred peaks. It was not so much that they were snobs in the technical sense o f pure social contempt. Only nine­ teen o f the original two hundred and eighty-one members who made up the first cohort o f the club, from 1857 to 1863, came from the landed classes. Far more were from the genteel upper-middle-class professions, especially the law, with clergymen and Oxbridge dons like Leslie Stephen well represented, and some were even in banking and “ trade.”80Edward Whymper, famous for “con­ quering” the Matterhorn in 1865 (and for having four members o f the party killed in a spectacular accident on its descent), was the son and apprentice o f a Lambeth engraver. It was only as an artist hired to execute illustrations for the club’s regular anthology, Peaks, Passes, a n d Glaciers, that he initially found him­ self in the Alps at all. The club was even prepared to admit the garish Smith, for all the damage they felt his vulgar entertainment had done to their ideals. He had, after all, made the thirty-seventh climb o f Mont Blanc. Socially mixed, the clubmen nonetheless did think o f themselves as a caste apart, a Spartan phalanx, tough with muscular virtue, spare with speech, seek­ ing the chill clarity o f the mountains just because, as Leslie Stephen, who became the club’s president in 1865, put it, “there-we can breathe air that has not passed through a million pairs o f lungs.”81 The lawyers and parsons and dons who made up the membership were always much more than a dining club, convening to reminisce endlessly about hanging from a crag on the Schreckhorn or narrowly avoiding a crevass on the Jungfraujoch. They constituted a n atural aristocracy (the only one worth preserving, they would have said) that turned its back on the industrial world o f gutta-percha shoddiness. They under­

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stood the ennobling compulsion o f struggle; as George Leigh-Mallory, who lost his life on Everest, would put it, “ One must conquer, achieve, get to the top; one must know the end to be convinced that one can win the end.”82 In their moral histories o f climbing, the mountain turns headmaster, teaching its students the virtues that were supposed to make them truly men: brotherhood, discipline, selflessness, fortitude, sangfroid. And like the far-flung regiments o f empire, like the missionaries under palm and pine, like the explorer toiling up the tropical river, they were the true guardians o f the patriotic flame. “While all good and wise men necessarily love the mountains,” Stephen wrote, “ those love them best who have wandered longest in their recesses and have most endangered their own lives and those o f their guides in the attempt to open out routes amongst them.” It never much occurred to the climbers to ask why any­ one should need a route over the Rothorn or the Eiger if, at the same time, they wished to hold encroaching modernity at bay. Writing o ff Chamonix and Edward Whymper, “ The Accident on the M atterhorn,”

the Valais as a tourist swarm, they adopted Zermatt instead, where an appropriately squat little Eng­ lish church immediately arose to

lithograph,

take their supplications and com ­

from Scrambles

miserate with their disasters. The

in the Alps.

Matterhorn replaced M ont Blanc as the emblem o f their uncom­ promising ambition; their will­ ingness to take risks, prepare for sacrifices. The quartet who fell from

the Matterhorn

and are

memorialized in the churchyard perfecdy exemplified the elements o f their community: a clergyman, a younger son o f the nobility, an undergraduate, and a veteran guide. The Alpine Club bard, A. G. Buder, invested their deaths with mythic qualities. They warred w ith N a tu re, as o f old with gods, The Titans; like the T ita n s too they fe ll, H u r le d fro m the s u m m it o f their hopes, a n d dashed Sheer down p recipitous trem endous crags. . . . Such sons s till hast thou Eng land ; be thou proud To have them .63

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The more impossible the peak appeared, the more important it was to master it (to use one ofWhymper’s favorite verbs). The great monsters o f the Oberland— Wetterhorn, Jungfrau, Eiger— were all in their sights, and “ by 1865,” as a mod­ ern writer in sympathy with the clubmen puts it, “more than a score o f the major Alpine summits which had defied the native Swiss were beaten into sub­ mission by the carefully swung axes o f British climbers and their guides.”84And when those had surrendered, the most ardent climbers gave themselves gratu­ itous difficulties, the better to test their metde: guideless climbs (much disap­ proved o f by Queen Victoria) or midwinter ascents.85 Apart from the mountains themselves, the clubmen had two sets o f adver­ saries to contend with: the vulgarians and the sentimentalists. For the vulgari­ ans, Smith and his type had already done the damage. The best that could be expected was that the hordes— “kings, cockneys, persons travelling with couri­ ers, Americans doing Europe against time . . . commercial travellers and espe­ cially that variety o f English clergyman which travels in dazzling white ties and forces services upon you by violence in remote country inns”— might be con­ fined to places like St. Moritz “to amuse or annoy each other.”86 It was near St. Moritz, in 1869, that fastidious Leslie Stephen beheld “the genuine British cockney in all his terrors,” unmoved by “the soft beauty o f an Alpine valley in a summer evening,” haranguing the guests and the waiters about the “devilish bad” quality o f the Cognac and offering “ a few remarks upon the scenery o f the country extracted with more or less fidelity from Murray or Baedeker.”87 And the sight o f “ladies in costumes, heavy German professors, Americans doing the Alps at a gallop, Cook’s tourists” traipsing over the Grindelwald gla­ cier made him feel sorry for the frozen river, as if it were “the latter end o f a wretched whale, stranded on a beach, dissolving into masses o f blubber and hacked by remorseless fishermen.”88 The sentimentalists (closely allied to the mystics and metaphysicians) were an altogether more serious problem because they included among them overarticulate, self-appointed enthusiasts for the mountains like Ruskin who sup­ posed that they could actually register the authentic mountain experience just by looking. The presumptuousness o f this (even though Ruskin was too impor­ tant to be excluded from membership in the Alpine Club) struck them as absurd, if not actually offensive. To Stephen, only firsthand experience o f climbs, the more dangerous the better, actually conferred the right to describe “mountain truth,” as Ruskin arrogantly called it. The premise o f the Alpine Club aesthetic was that only traversing the rock face, inching his way up ice steps, enabled the climber, at rest, to see the mountain as it truly was. And once he had experienced all this, it became imprinted on his senses in ways totally inaccessible to the dilettante, low-altitude walker. Leslie Stephen, who, in The Playground o f Europe, wrote one o f the most enduringly profound and remarkable o f all mountaineering books, returned to

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the perennial obsession with mensuration— measurement— when he attempted to sum up the deepest value o f climbing. To gauge the magnitude o f a moun­ tain by “ the vague abstract term o f so many thousand feet,” as “the ordinary traveller” or the armchair climber might from his wicker chair on a hotel ter­ race, was to perpetrate a folly and a delusion. Worse, it was to make such mea­ surement banal. Only the climber who measures its size “ by the hours o f labour, divided into minutes— each separately felt— o f strenuous muscular exertion,” could actually provide a true account o f its magnitude. The steepness is not expressed in degrees, but by the memory o f the sensation produced when a snow-slope seems to be rising up and smit­ ing you in the face; when, far away from all human help, you are cling­ ing like a fly to the slippery side o f a mighty pinnacle in mid-air. And as for the inaccessibility, no-one can measure the difficulty o f climbing a hill who has not wearied his muscles and brain in struggling against the opposing obstacles.89

It was this confident belief that physical experience yielded the tru th about the relative scale o f mountains and men that most separated Stephen’s genera­ tion o f climbers from the Romantics. Though they anticipated Stephen’s awareness o f the peculiar intensification o f the senses experienced at high alti­ tude, for Ramond, Cozens, Saussure, and Shelley access to the summit was a kind o f pyrrhic victory, a d e n ia l o f omniscience. Instead there was an infection o f the semicircular canals, a disruption o f balance, the unhinging o f all the usual markers that fixed bodies in space. That mental grip might be lost just as physical grip held tight to the rock face was something that the clubmen would never concede. On the contrary, they insisted, it was only on the peaks that their faculties could actually be fully in play and where the true elements o f the mountain scenery could be coher­ ently resolved. It was only from some “torn parapet,” Stephen believed, that one could make sense o f the geographical function o f mountains and glaciers, “ the vast stores from which the great rivers o f Europe are replenished,” and properly register the “ incredible convulsions” from which the earth was made 90 Against what they took to be Ruskin’s pretentious obscurantism, his mud­ dleheaded mysticism, and especially his claim that a non-climber could appre­ hend the “ truth” o f the mountains, the club mounted an impassioned attack. They held their own art shows, published their own illustrators like Whymper, and congratulated each other on showing mountains as they really were, by which they meant an additively constructed assembly o f details, each one dis­ cretely verifiable 91 They could never quite grasp the implication o f what Ruskin was saying about Turner: that while accuracy o f detail is important to absorb

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5 06

by way o f preparation, what he called the “truth” o f mountain art could never lie in their literal transcription. Rather, it was in finding a visual idiom to con­ vey the essence o f the thing: the beautiful whateveritwas that drew men to mountains in the first place.

+ + * it

i s h a r d to decide which is more amazing: that the Alpine Club ever asked

John Ruskin to be a member, or that he consented to join. In the year that Whymper and Charles Hudson climbed the treacherous Aiguille Verte o f Mont Blanc, Sesame an d Lilies erupted with wrath against all those who had dese­ crated Ruskin’s sanctum sanctorum. Lumping together the climbers with the tourists (and certainly knowing how much that wounded), he indicted the lot o f them. You have despised nature; that is to say, all the deep and sacred sen­ sations o f natural scenery. The French revolutionists made stables o f the cathedrals o f France; you have made racecourses o f the cathedrals o f the earth. Your one conception o f pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat o ff their altars. You have put a rail­ road bridge over the falls o f Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs o f Lucerne by Tell’s chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore o f the Lake o f Geneva. . . . The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb, and slide down again, with “shrieks o f delight.” When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the qui­ etude o f their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption o f conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccoughs o f self-satisfaction.92 It was extreme. But then, for Ruskin, everything was at stake. He had first seen the Alps from the Falls o f Schaffhausen in 1833, on a trip with his parents. In his wonderful autobiography, Praeterita, rightly characterized by Kenneth Clark as the only book Ruskin ever wrote for pleasure, he described that moment as his “ blessed entrance into life.” Ruskin had roamed over Herne Hill as a child, and had been taken by his parents to the Peak District and to the Lakes. But this was different— different from his anticipation, different from the laborious rep­ resentations he had seen o f the Alps in paintings other than Turner’s, different from the poetic cliches that ran together summits and clouds. There was no thought in any o f us for a moment o f their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already

Prospects of Salvation

John Ruskin, Self-portrait with Blue Neck­ cloth, 1873.

5 07

508

V E RTI CAL EMPI RE S, CER E B R AL CHASMS tinged with rose by the sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought or dreamed,— the seen walls o f lost Eden could not have been more beautiful to us; not more awful, round heaven, the walls o f sacred Death.93 One o f the few accounts o f the Alps that Ruskin had admired was Saus-

sure’s (surely the only thing he had in common with Albert Smith). He espe­ cially endorsed Saussure’s reproaches against those who only gather the details o f the Alps, flora and geology; who were only concerned with measurement and the relative scales o f men and mountains, without pausing to contemplate the irreducible whole. And in that summer o f his Alpine ordination, 1833, Ruskin did his best to capture, in a pen drawing, the “whole” o f Mont Blanc, producing, alas, only a fantastically exaggerated pile o f pinnacles like beaten egg whites.94 Starting with the 1842 vacation from Oxford, Ruskin went back to the Alps almost every other year, his technique becoming more Turnerian with each trip. But unlike Turner’s, his watercolors and pen drawings seldom suc­ ceeded in marrying the profound and elaborate knowledge o f natural processes and forms (on which Ruskin spent the most painstaking study) with the explo­ sively poetic impressions o f his hero. “Mountains are the beginning and the end o f all natural scenery,” he would categorically declare in volume 4 o f M odern Painters, published in 1856, a year before the establishment o f the Alpine Club. “ I find the increase in the calculable sum o f elements o f beauty to be steadily in proportion to the increase o f mountainous character” (which is why he called Dutch art the “school o f the dead flats” ). “The best image which the world can give o f Paradise is in the slope o f the meadows, orchards, and corn-fields on the sides o f a great Alp, with its purple rocks and eternal snows above.”95 Purple rocks? Unquestionably, Ruskin would reply, for he set himself to confound conventional assumptions about the look o f mountains through the most exacting and fastidious draw­ ing. Two years before publishing part 5 o f M odern Painters, which he called “ O f Mountain Beauty,” he produced a watercolor o f a single large boulder, and called the fantastic, polychrome composition A Fragm ent o f the A lp s (color illus. 39). At the time, he was wretched. His marriage to Effie Gray had been unconsummated, it was said, because o f his irrecoverable shock on discovering her pubic hair, an odd surprise for someone who claimed to celebrate the dec­ orative glories o f irregularity. In 1849 Ruskin deserted her (not for the first time) to travel to Switzerland, where he made loving studies o f whole moun­ tains and single rocks. In 1853 Effie and the artist John Everett Millais, who had joined them on a sketching tour o f Scodand, fell in love, and the follow­ ing year she demanded an annulment. Ruskin, o f course, went direcdy to Cha­ monix with his parents, sketched every day, and worked on the ideas that would culminate in the stupendous prose o f “ O f Mountain .Beauty.”

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The F ra g m en t o f the A lp s is a Ruskinian manifesto on mountains. It reflected Ruskin’s passion for the rich parti-colored, broken decoration that he treasured in stained glass, tapestry, and medieval church sculpture, and which he also saw in natural form in mountains “ broider’d with flowers.” And it was meant as an attack on lazy images o f geological formation, not only in respect o f their brilliant color but, even more critically, in respect o f their essential shape. Perhaps the greatest o f all the revelations that had come to Ruskin, the one that seemed to him to signify how paramount the place o f rocks was in cre­ ation, was their waviness o f deep form. Though their edges might be arbitrar­ ily sharp, their surface was figured with the whorls, loops, braids, and ropes o f mineral matter that revealed the dynamic heaves and pressures o f geological change. So when the tastemakers o f the sublime had eulogized the brutal jaggedness o f mountain scenery and the impaling spikes o f its summits, he argued, they had merely been indulging in callow sensationalism. They had not been looking at all. Contrary to the climbers’ assertions that scaling great heights, in condi­ tions o f danger, afforded a knowledge o f both the reality and beauty o f mountains, Ruskin retorted that climbing was the least likely activity to yield the truth o f the matter. It was Turner’s vision o f great waves and humps that were the true revelation, not Whymper’s painfully literal sketches o f ice stair­ cases. A true report was available to a child or an old man in the revelatory forms o f a single rock. Since man’s own equipment for measurement was so manifesdy inadequate to the scale o f whole ranges, why should the under­ standing o f geological processes not be as well expressed in a boulder as an entire mountain? Those processes had always been at the core o f what he called naturalist religion. His guiding light had been William Buckland, the reader o f geology at Oxford, whose traditional account o f the earth’s development in a succes­ sion o f cataclysms m ight be more easily squared with the Bible than those who thought o f its evolution proceeding in a much longer and steadier process. By the time Ruskin wrote M od ern P a in ters he had accepted more o f the truth o f the second view and had incorporated it into his own account o f the structure and forms o f mountains. The essential thing to understand, he declared, was that all mountains, even the most apparently spiky o f them, were, in their essential structure, curved. The Alpine Club might well have called their self-congratulatory anthologies Peaks, Passes, a n d Glaciers, but the fact o f the matter was that there were hardly any mountains in the Alps that could accurately be described as “ peaks.” What appeared to be pyrami­ dal “ spires” from one angle o f approach were actually distorted by perspec­ tive. Proper inspection actually revealed the mountaintops to be what Ruskin preferred to call “ crests,” and because o f the continual action o f moisture were necessarily far more rounded than the received wisdom assumed. This

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was even true, as he tried to show in an entire chapter o f M odern Painters, o f the Matterhorn. Though the view from Zermatt, reproduced on all the penny prints and postcards, made the summit appear brutally angular and hooked, if observed correctly, at its highest elevation, its slopes could be seen to be gracefully curved. These relatively soft and gentle lines documented the continual shifts and folds to which the earth had been subjected, and which were merely overlaid with the splinters and shreds o f sharp-ended rocks. The dynamics o f glaciation,

explained in the work o f J. D. Forbes (whom he had met in the Hotel de la Poste on the Simplon in 1844), seemed to reinforce this perception, and Ruskin’s drawings o f the glaciers almost always distort the angle o f their cur­ vature into a great flowing convexity. Even the formidable aiguilles that posed the greatest test to mountain climbers, when seen edge on, revealed the “writhing folds o f sinewy granite.” And it was this perpetual abrasion down to curved and sloped forms that demonstrated to Ruskin’s satisfaction Nature’s abhorrence o f brutally straight lines.

John Ruskin, Junction of the Aiguille Pourri with the Aiguille Rouge.

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She is here driven to make fracture the law o f being. She cannot tuft the rick-edges with moss or round them by water or hide them with leaves and roots. She is bound to produce a form admirable to human beings, by continual breaking away o f substance. And behold— as soon as she is compelled to do this— she changes the law o f fracture itself. “ Growth,” she seems to say, “ is not essential to my work, nor con­ cealment nor softness; but curvature is and if I must produce my forms by breaking them, the fracture itself shall be in curves.”96

Ruskin did not mean to go out o f his way to offend the Matterhorn climbers by characterizing its peak as curved rather than jagged, for he had come to this conclusion long before Whymper and Hudson launched their “ assault” on the mountain. But his insistence on the delicate grace and round­ ness o f mountains certainly undercut the military and athletic rhetoric o f climb­ ing, which understandably liked to stress the perils o f the ascent. If they had to, Ruskin implied, they could play about on the crags to their hearts’ content. But let them not suppose for a moment that their vision o f the mountains was thereby enhanced. “ Believe me, gentlemen,” he told an audience o f Oxford undergraduates, “your power o f seeing mountains cannot be developed either by your vanity, your curiosity or your love o f muscular exercise. It depends on the cultivation o f the instrument o f sight itself.”97 Such shortsightedness, moreover, was not limited to the rock-huggers. Ruskin was equally dismayed by the principle, set forth by the French restora­ tion architect Viollet-le-D uc, that all mountain granite could be reduced to rhomboid or trapezoidal forms.98 Once these primary forms were grasped, Viollet-le-D uc argued, it would be possible to lay out the basic engineering structure o f the mountain, much as one would with a massive building. V iollet-le-D uc was living in a chalet at the foot o f M ont Blanc in the 1870s while he worked on the restoration o f Lausanne Cathedral, and had deco­ rated its walls with a trompe l’oeil fresco o f the mountain. A tireless walker, and an admirer o f Ruskin, he assumed that their mutual passion for the G othic would create a sympathetic bond. He was profoundly in error. But he should have known that Ruskin would have been repelled by his structural determinism. N or was the author o f “The Mountain G loom ” any more likely to warm to V iollet-le-D uc’s extraordinary paintings o f the M ont Blanc gla­ ciers which attempted an imaginative “ reconstruction” o f the advance and retreat o f the ice streams. As it turns out, Viollet-le-D uc, extrapolating from scars down the face o f the Chamonix valley walls (much as he would have extrapolated from ruined vaults and buttresses to the original building), was remarkably close to the truth in his estimate o f glacial history. But for Ruskin this was a sacrilegious trespass on the rights o f the Creator to present us with geological surprises.

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VERTICAL EMPIRES, CERE BRAL CHASMS For while Ruskin was indeed fond o f making analogies between architecture

and the mountain, it was the ruined form o f the architecture, its pleasing tendency to crumble, that for him proclaimed the mark of divinity. One would no more spend time in painting a “before and after” version o f the glaciers than glue back the great chunk o f the Matterhorn which seemed to have been sheared away to make the “sublime fragment” o f the present mountain. The profound egregious­ ness o f Viollet-le-Duc’s fantasy, Ruskin thought, lay in his supposition that there was some sort o f irreducible geological structure to which the mountain might, even notionally, be returned. There was none such. For the secret o f mountains, the quality that made them truly the most blessed o f all forms o f nature, was their perpetual motion, their inner, ancient pulse working away over the eons. Under­ stand that, and the grim aspect of mountains as the most inert, brutally unyield­ ing extrusion o f the earth would fade. This conviction— among the most passionate he held— drew from Ruskin’s pen what is, even by his standards, one o f his most breathtaking pieces of writing— the passage on “slaty crystalline” : As we look farther into it [the rock], it is all touched and troubled like waves by a summer breeze; rippled far more delicately than seas or lakes are rippled; they only undulate along their surfaces— this rock trembles through its very fibre like the chords o f an Aeolian harp— like the stillest air o f spring with the echoes o f a child’s voice. Into the heart o f all those great mountains, through every tossing o f their boundless crests and deep beneath all their unfathomable defiles, flows that strange quiver­ ing o f their substance. Other and weaker things seem to express their subjection to an Infinite power only by momentary terrors; as the weeds bow down before the feverish wind. Not so to the mountains. They which at first seem strengthened beyond the dread o f any violence or change are yet also ordained to bear upon them the symbol o f a per­ petual Fear: the tremor which fades from the soft lake and gliding river is sealed, to all eternity, upon the rock; and while things that pass visi­ bly from birth to death may sometimes forget their feebleness, the mountains are made to possess a perpetual memorial o f their infancy." As poetically extravagant as all this is, it is also profoundly subversive. For if mountains were not indomitable peaks, then millennia o f obsession with their subjugation seemed little other than an exercise in imperial vanity. If their slopes were delicate and graceful, then the hyperbole o f the Romantics about “horrid crags” was so much self-indulgent sensationalism. If mountains were soft and giving things, why not as well carve an image o f woman as much Of man into their side? At times Ruskin imagined his mountains as the Almighty’s guffaw at the comically masculine presumption to god-like powers. For the truth was that the hills were, like nature, unexpectedly feminine in their creativity, their curved

Prospects of Salvation

5 13

abundance, their benevolence. Like Henriette d’Angeville, Ruskin addressed M ont Blanc as “ M ount Beloved,” and he reserved for the mountains a tender­ ness and intensity o f feeling he only managed for women late in his life. And as if the hills were indeed his best beloved, he would boil with rage were they to be churlishy dismissed as so much inert mineral deposit. When he looked at the veins o f glistening matter encased in a boulder, Ruskin saw a living thing. How could it be otherwise when all the natural energies that made the earth live depended on the generative work o f mountain ranges? Mountains regulated the cycle o f rain and river without which the land would be desert; mountains moved the “change in the currents o f and nature o f aiP '\ and mountains cre­ ated the “perpetual change in the soils o f the earth .” Only a dullard could not see, then, that mountains, not man, were at the heart o f the life o f the world. “Their operations,” he wrote, were

to be regarded with as full a depth o f gratitude as the laws which bid the tree bear fruit or the seed multiply itself in the earth. And thus those desolate and threatening ranges o f dark mountain which, in nearly all ages o f the world, men have looked upon with aversion or terror and shrunk back from as if they were haunted by perpetual images o f death are, in reality, sources o f life and happiness far fuller and more benefi­ cent than all the bright fruitfulness o f the plain. The valleys only feed; the mountains feed and guard and strengthen us. We take our idea o f fearfulness and sublimity alternately from the mountains and the sea; but we associate them unjustly. The sea wave with all its beneficence is yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave o f the blue mountain is lifted toward heaven in a stillness o f perpetual mercy; and the one surge, unfathomable in its darkness, the other unshaken in its faithfulness, for­ ever bear the seal o f their appointed symbol: “ Thy righteousness is like the g r e a t m ountains. Thy judgements are a g r e a t deep.” ™

John Ruskin, “T he M atterhorn,” from Modern Painters, vol. IV.

Wo o d , Wa t e r , R ock

Thus I sang o f the care offields, o f cattle, a n d o f trees, while g re a t Caesar thundered in war by deep Euphrates. V ir g il,

Georgies

CHAPTER

NINE

Arcadia Redesigned

i

E t in A r c a d ia Ego

T h e r e have always been two kinds o f arcadia: shaggy and smooth; dark and light; a place o f bucolic leisure and a place o f primitive panic. I was about ten when I discovered both o f them, not two miles from my doorstep. We had moved, unhappily, from the big house by the sea to a small house in London. “ Just a bit o f bother” was my father’s explanation, but it didn’t seem to explain very much, especially not the accusations and counter-accusations that flew across the dinner table. I took to roaming the ten-year-olds’ circuit. In my own resort o f delight, the local suburban park, two strange-looking grassy mounds, about twenty feet long and ten high, invited occupation, fortification, and defense against all comers. T h ey had to be, we reckoned, funeral barrows left by the A ngloSaxons, Egberts and Athelstans whose dates we were being ordered to memo­ rize at school. It stood to reason, since there was a similar hummock on Parliament Hill which everyone called “ Boadicea’s Grave.” Sir Hercules Read had excavated it in 1894, hoping to discover ancient British remains, but had failed to find a single solitary spearhead. We all agreed he hadn’t looked hard enough. 5 17

5 18

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D One day I scraped my ankle on something sharp beneath the tufts o f dan­

delions and thisdes covering the grass ridge. The offending object turned out to be a protruding, rusty iron plate, the size o f a manhole cover, but squared off and secured with an equally rusty chain. It took a week for someone in the gang to liberate a file from a paternal toolbox, and another week o f furtive after­ school filing, before we got the chain off. Taking turns to saw away at the flak­ ing chain made us feel happily wicked, though we couldn’t exactly put our finger on what we were doing wrong: tomb-robbery, perhaps; at the very least, a grave infraction o f the borough bylaws? When we finally heaved up the iron door, a fearsome smell at once rose from the darkness and punched us in the face. It seemed to have been brewed from rancid mud and ordure, and was o f a vileness that not even the most bar­ baric funeral customs o f the ancient Britons could possibly have produced. With grimy handkerchiefs pressed to our faces, we shone bicycle lamps down a set o f iron steps and onto an empty dirt floor. It took weeks for us to get up enough courage to penetrate the space, where we were sure we would find something unspeakable, something (we shuddered to imagine) not quite dead. Alas, we had no better luck than Sir Hercules, at least as far as Celtic or Saxon remains went. But the abandoned air-raid shelter did contain a cornucopia o f refuse which we instantly invested with the aura o f hallowed antiquity. There were empty cigarette packs o f glamorously extinct brands; a single lonely sock o f uncertain age; a dirty bottle that had once held Tizer, the amber-colored soda pop that still did incredible things to one’s innards; a half-buried nine o f diamonds that must, we thought, have been concealed up some villain’s sleeve when he falsely claimed victory in an air-raid game o f gin rummy.

N icolas Poussin,

Et in Arcadia Ego, ca. 1639. G u ercino (Francesco G iovanni B arbieri), Et in Arcadia Ego, ca. 1618.

Et in Arcadia Ego

5 19

We gathered up all this fabulous rubbish and like good archaeologists scrupulously labelled every item, using no more than the usual quota o f archae­ ological deduction, as in: “ B U T T O N R IPPED F R O M SH IR T A T H E IG H T O F H IT L E R ’S H E L L IS H B L IT Z .” Word got out and the secret hoard turned into a travelling exhibition, moving surreptitiously from house to house to avoid detection by the borough authorities. One day a pile o f bones was mysteriously added to the show. To my suspicious eye they looked distinctly like something rescued from the back o f the butcher’s shop. But Gerry, that week’s temporary curator, swore he had found them in a second shelter and that someone must have forgotten their dog on the day the war ended. We gave him the benefit of the doubt and labelled it accordingly. It seemed right that there should have been some sort o f sacrifice in our Allied bunker; the bones beneath the playground.

E T IN A R C A D I A E G O .

The first time I encountered the phrase was not in a pas­

toral painting or poem, but as an object in Evelyn W augh’s Brideshead R ev is­ ited. It was inscribed across the pate o f the skull that sat in ostentatious splendor in Charles Ryder’s Oxford rooms. When the great art historian Erwin Panofsky came to write his article on the two meanings o f the classi­ cal m otto, he congratulated Waugh for both grasping and exploiting its ambi­ guity.1 For who, exactly, was the “ I ” in “And I too was in Arcady” ? Read innocently, the tom b inscription discovered by Poussin’s shepherds seems to be a wistful epitaph for a pastoral idyll enjoyed and then lost. The monstrous skull in Guercino’s earlier version, though, was unequivocal in its declaration that “ even in Arcady, I, Death, am present.” The cunning o f W augh’s con­ ceit is to lure the reader into assuming that Ryder’s revisitation o f Brideshead speaks an elegy for a golden age when in fact it turns into a long graveside oration for the death o f faith, love, dynasty, England itself. . Five years on from my descent into the air-raid shelter, my little patch

of

the

English

arcadia

seemed

more

golden

than

gloomy.

From

H ighgate

Hill

looking south toward the gray city, it coincided precisely with the view that Henry Peacham chose in his G m p h ic e (1612) as one o f the three fairest in all England.2 (The

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

520

other two were the view from Windsor and the gendy hilly countryside around Royston.) Arcadian Hampstead, though, was also a divided territory. On one side lay the great Palladian villa o f Kenwood, home, during the late eighteenth century, to William Murray, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, a colos­ sus o f judicial rectitude whose least rustle o f periwig made malefactors trem­ ble. The house, though, was sweetness itself. Robert Adam had supplied it with graceful Ionic columns (on the north side) and pilasters on the garden facade beneath an elegant pediment. At the end o f the century Humphrey Repton had pushed back the straggling copses o f trees and had created a park

that swept down to an ornamental lake. In 1789 Mansfield snapped up “the Singularly Valuable and truly desirable Freehold and Tithe Free Estate,” Millfield Farm. The advertiser in The M orning H erald shamelessly played to the arcadian market: The beautifully elevated situation o f this estate, happily ranks it above all others round London, as the most charming spot where the Gen­ tleman and the Builder may exercise their taste in the erection of Villas, many o f which can be so delightfully placed as to command the richest home views o f wood and water and the distant views of the Metropolis, with the surrounding counties o f Essex, Surrey and Berkshire.3

Et in Arcadia Ego

52 1

In no time at all, Mansfield had the estate stocked with fashionable breeds o f cattle. Sheep safely grazed not ten miles from where the objects o f the lord chief justice’s attention danced on the Tyburn gallows. The sheep were still there in i960, tucked away to the southeast o f the park, separated from the rhododendron-fanciers and concertgoers by rustic stiles and fences as if they were grazing the pasture o f the Cotswolds or the Dales. The house, extended by Mansfield’s son, the second earl, was full o f paintings o f itself, or o f similar estates that testified to the elegant pastoral taste o f the rul­ ing class. In the graceful Orangery a Gainsborough couple posed before their park, beaming with self-satisfaction. Facing them, through the windows and down the grassy slope, crowds gathered on drowsy summer evenings to hear

George Robertson, A View o f Kenwood, 1781. J. C. Ibbetson, Long-horned Cattle at Kenwood, 1797.

music played from a pavilion on the far side o f the lake, spanned by one o f the Chinese bridges Gilpin thought “ above all, disgusting.” Summer music was, o f course, standard arcadian practice, though the typical offering on Saturday night in Hampstead ran to Mendelssohn on massed strings rather than M o n ­ teverdi on a plaintive lute. And even Berlioz and Bizet sometimes failed to hold their own against the lusty mallards and the incoming jets. Only one important ingredient o f the idyll was missing. And by the time I was fifteen I had a better chance o f completing the picture. Hampstead was, after all, one o f Romanticism’s holy places. You could walk to Kenwood along the path where nightingales perched in the beeches and where Keats listened as Coleridge’s huge, unstoppable vox h u m a n a drowned them out. Reclining on a blanket on a musical evening beside a crisply shirtwaisted girlfriend, I affected the regulation arcadian manner (as indicated by Titian), leaning non­ chalantly on one elbow, a pose that guaranteed paralysis after fifteen minutes.

522

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

But what was a little peripheral numbness when the air was thick with the scent o f cow parsley and Hampstead lay before us like the golden cam pagna itself? On the walk home it was an easy thing to stray into the other arcadia: a dark grove o f desire, but also a labyrinth o f madness and death. By the North End there was a wild garden, conscientiously allowed to choke itself with bindweed, above which wild foxgloves poked their freckled faces. On the gar­ den wall the conventional blue plaque tells the passerby that the Elder Pitt, ele­ vated to be earl o f Chatham, once lived in a mansion next to the overgrown yard. It does not, however, say that, in 1767* the deposed prime minister had shut himself away in this Wildwood House, and dropped into a raving melan­ choly. His paranoia would admit no one across the threshold, so the earl of Chatham had his meals delivered through a hatch at the other end o f which his gouty hands snatched at the food. The asylum had been given him by an ambi­ tious parvenu, Charles Dingley, who had made money from Russian sugar beets and Limehouse sawmills and who now meant to ingratiate himself into place and profit. But the madness pursued Dingley all the way to the Brentford hustings, where he made the terrible mistake o f allowing himself to be put up as the government’s election candidate against the idol o f the mob, John Wilkes. When the inevitable brawl broke out, Dingley was so badly roughed up

.4

that he died o f his injuries some months later

I doubt that the squire o f Wildwood House would have had many mourn­ ers among the squatters and sand-diggers o f Hampstead Heath. At night, espe­ cially, it took little imagination to repopulate the hollows with the carters and footpads who lived there through much o f the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­ turies. The wild heath that I knew in the 1950s had already been extensively reforested, so that, on its northwest side, I could make my way through a dense wood, remembering the route from natural signposts: a big hollow oak, a brackish ditch, an embankment carpeted in lily o f the valley. But for most o f its history it was a wild, open space where only the most tenacious shrubs and bushes would root in its windblown, sandy soil. John Gerard, the Elizabethan botanist, on one o f his rustic excursions, found not only brooms and gorses but bilberry and juniper and “wild cow-wheat” growing between the covers. The primitives o f wild arcadia gobbled acorns and kept goats, at least according to Herodotus and Pausanias. All that Hampstead Heath had were bilberries and rabbits and not enough o f either to support a settled population. But from the seventeenth century, when its wells and spring were tapped for London’s new water supply, the scruffy hills and hollows attracted a shifting, transient population. Sheltered in windowless huts with dirt floors, they lived with an animal or two kept in pens on a scrap o f adjacent land. It was then diat the heath developed a reputation for lawlessness and drunken riot. Many o f the stories were apocryphal. The famous pub on the crest o f the North End is sup­ posed to have been named for one o f the leaders o f the Peasants’ Revolt against

Et in Arcadia Ego

52 3

Richard II, Jack Straw, but the story remains as much o f a fable as Hampstead’s other notorious tavern, the Spaniards Inn, sheltering infamous outlaws like Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wild. It certainly was true, though, that Francis Jackson’s gang o f oudaws fought a pitched batde on the heath in 1674 against the King’s Men and that the survivors were hanged on a gibbet between the two great elms that marked the brow o f the North End. And if Hampstead waters were supposed to run with salubrity (like the brooks o f old Arcady), many o f the local population depended on stronger stuff. They subsisted, after all, by digging for sand meant to be thrown on the floors o f London’s taverns, so many that even John Taylor could not count them all. And their own parish was rich in drinking haunts and pleasure gardens. During the Gordon Riots in 1780, demagogically incited against attempts in Parliament to relieve Catholics o f their legal disabilities, a mob sacked Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury Square. It was moving on Kenwood when the shrewd landlord o f the Spaniards Inn slowed the rioters down with such quantities o f ale and porter that they were no match for the troopers who eventually arrived on the scene. Further up the road, another platoon o f rioters was enjoying ale from Ken­ w ood’s own cellars, ladled directly from barrels set by the roadside. Here, then, was a confrontation between the two tribes o f suburban arca­ dians. In the same year as the riot, George Robertson painted a scene o f bucolic contentment that precisely illustrated the rustic paternalism o f a Mansfield or his neighbor Fitzroy, who also owned a Palladian villa and attached farm estate. With the dome o f St. Paul’s in the distance, a harvest is in progress, the thresh­ ers and reapers laboring diligently while a couple takes time o ff from their work to dally in the afternoon shade. This was the sort o f arcadia being anxiously defended with the ladles o f ale and (if need be) musket shot. U p from the sand­ pits and rookeries o f quite another arcadia rose the brutish hordes o f cottars and squatters, brawling, drinking, and fornicating their way over the heath, without benefit o f lute or lyre. From time to time the poor o f the heath would take to arms— usually noth­ ing more than a pitchfork or a hunting gun— and march on whichever great gentleman was threatening to abridge their customary rights.. But although the colonization o f the heath by the polite and the fashionable was irreversible, it remained a favorite pleasure site for the common people o f north London. With their horse races banned by the residential judges, they turned to don­ keys. And the annual fair brought together gypsy wagons from the county with the tinkers and peddlers o f the city. Neither arcadia nor bohemia, exactly, it was this wilder place that was the object o f one o f the first great preservation cam­ paigns in urban history. For when, in 1829, the proprietary “ Lord o f the Manor,” Thomas Maryon Wilson, proposed to enclose part o f the heath and turn it into a picturesque park, complete with “ ornamental walkways,” an immediate hue and cry went

524

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

up against the despoiler. It was a classic confrontation between developer and conservationists. Thwarted in the plans for his own property, Wilson began to carry out his threat to build extensively over the heath, with his real estate office erected at its most conspicuous point, beside the flagpole on Whitestone Pond. Dickensian in his brazenness, Wilson boasted o f his brickworks and precut fenc­ ing that would annex the developed land. The response was a legal campaign that ended in two hundred acres o f the heath being taken into the public own­ ership o f the London metropolitan authority. But what made the debate extra-

ordinary was the insistence on the part o f the campaigners that the great city needed a wilderness for its own civic health. London, o f course, was already abundantly supplied with parks, not least Regent’s Park, almost immediately to the southeast. But it was precisely the unkempt and uncultivated nature o f the heath that was said to be its special gift to the people. Even its scrubby wastes, pockmarked by relentless digging so that the vales resembled a battlefield cratered by mortars, were lovingly represented as London’s cherished wilder­ ness. The Hampstead Heath Act o f 1871 stipulated that the Metropolitan Board o f Works “shall at all times preserve, as far as may be, the natural aspect

G e org e R o bertso n ,

A North View o f the Cities of London and Westminster with part o f Highgate, 1780.

Et in Arcadia Ego

52 5

o f the Heath and to that end protect the turf, gorse, heather, timber and other John Constable, Branch

trees, shrubs and brushwood thereon.” 5 The urban context o f this little drama is important. Arguably, both kinds o f arcadia, the idyllic as well as the wild, are landscapes o f the urban imagination,

Hill Pond,

though clearly answering to different needs. It’s tempting to see the two arca-

Hampstead,

dias perennially defined against each other; from the idea o f the park (wilder­

1824-25.

ness or pastoral) to the philosophy o f the front lawn (industrially kempt or

drifted with buttercups and clover); civility and harmony or integrity and unruliness? The quarrel even persists at the heart o f debates within the envi­ ronmental movement, between the deeper and paler shades o f Greens. But as contentious as the batde often seems, and as irreconcilable as the two ideas o f arcadia appear to be, their long history suggests that they are, in fact, mutually sustaining. Doubdess Thoreau was quite right to insist that “ in Wildness is the preservation o f the World.” But he was also right to press his passions on the zealous Lyceums and sober academies o f picket-fence N ew England.6

526

ARCADI A RE D E S I G N E D

ii

Primitives and Pastorals

You would never know it from the languid nymphs and shepherds that popu­ late the pastoral landscapes o f the Renaissance, but the mark o f the original Arcadians was their bestiality. Their presiding divinity, Pan, copulated with goats (as well as anything else that came his way) and betrayed his own animal nature in his woolly thighs and cloven feet. Out o f pity for his unrequited love o f the nymphs Echo and Syrinx he was taught how to masturbate by his father, Hermes. Nor was he the only man-beast. For the crime o f offering Zeus a child sacrifice, Lykaon, the son o f the first Arcadian ruler, Pelasgus, was transformed into a wolf and driven from the table o f the gods. Abstention from eating human flesh for nine years would restore his original form. But the uncertainty o f Lykaon’s conduct doomed him to a marginal existence between the world o f beasts and the world o f men. As for the common run o f Arcadians, they shel­ tered from the elements in caves or the rudest huts, and subsisted on acorns and the meat and milk of their goats. In these oral traditions and myths, col­ lected the

by

Pausanias,

brutishness

of

the

Arcadians was explained by their great antiquity. As Philippe

Borgeaud

has

reminded us in a brilliant study, they were consid­ ered autochthons, original men sprung from the earth itself,

“pre-selenic,”

or

older than the moon.7 In an unexpected way, then, the Greek myth o f Arcadian

origins

antici­

A p h ro d ite, E ros and Pan, sculpture grou p, D elos.

Primitives and Pastorals

527

pated the theory o f evolution in its assumption o f continuities between animals and men. The quality that softened the brutishness o f Arcadian life was not so much language as music. But the music was that o f Pan’s pipes, the syrinx, and he could use its woodland and wilderness melodies to bewitch the hearer into states o f pan-ic or pan-demonium. In this archaic tradition, though, the wild­ ness o f Arcadia and its creatures was not imagined as abhorrent. O n the con­ trary, it was equated with the fecundity o f nature. Pan’s own name signified “ everything.” And on some occasions he was needed to stir life from barren­ ness. When Hades abducted Persephone into the underworld, her mother, Demeter, the corn goddess, went into grief-stricken seclusion in a cave. The fruits o f the earth withered and the soil became sterile. It was Pan who broke the dearth by discovering Demeter in his rocky terrain and reporting her hid­ ing place to Zeus. The result o f the eventual reconciliation is that the earth, which was condemned to sterility, is once again able to bear fruit and grain.8 The Arcadians themselves, though, are never imagined by the Greeks as farm­ ers. Hunters and gatherers, warriors and sensualists, they inhabit a landscape notorious for its brutal harshness, trapped between arid drought and merciless floods. This is not how we usually imagine the Arcadian landscape. It is much more likely to resemble the sort o f place described by the Greek lyric poet Theocri­ tus in the third century B.C. In the seventh o f his bucolic poems the shepherd Lycidas takes the poet to a harvest festival where they lie on “ deep green beds o f fragrant reeds and fresh-cut vine-strippings.” M any an aspen, many an elm bowed and rusded overhead, and hard by, the hallowed water welled purling forth o f a cave o f the Nymphs, while the brown cricket chirped busily amid the shady leafage, and the tree-frog murmured aloof in the dense thornbrake. Lark and goldfinch sang and turtle moaned, and about the spring the bees hummed and hovered to and fro. All nature smelt o f the opulent summer-time, smelt o f the season o f fruit. Pears lay at our feet, apples on either side, rolling abundantly, and the young branches lay splayed upon the ground because o f the weight o f their damsons.9 N o t all features o f the primitive arcadia have been eliminated in Theocri­ tus’s idyll. Pan, the nymphs, and the goatherds are still in residence, but the wild notes o f the syrinx have been replaced by melodious fluting and endless song contests. The goat-footed god still disports himself but has already gone a long way to becoming the custodian o f flocks and amiable prankster the Romans would recognize. The lyrics are evidently the product o f a sophisti­ cated, even urbane taste. And since Theocritus was originally from Cos, spent much o f his life in the Alexandria o f the Ptolemies, and ended his days in Sicily,

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

528

it is no wonder that the landscape is a rich composite o f Aegean olive groves, Egyptian cornfields, and Sicilian vineyards. And it is in this ripely abundant southern earth that Virgil plants his dras­ tically reinvented arcadia. Pan’s indiscriminate insemination has now become the spontaneous fecundity o f nature itself. In the climactic fourth eclogue the return o f the age o f gold is heralded as a time o f effordess rustic prosperity. The soil produces fruit and grain without tillage; “uncalled, the goats . . . bring home their udders swollen with milk”; and wool changes hue while still on the backs o f rams. From this perfect pastoral state, all savage things have been ban­ ished. Serpents have died and the herds are invulnerable against the lion.10And in the next eclogue the shepherd Daphnis is mourned as the strong softener, the man who “taught men to yoke Armenian tigers beneath the car.” 11 The Georgies, written by Virgil a little later, takes a much more austerely realistic view o f the effort needed to produce this agrarian bounty. In its detailed descriptions o f the soils suited to different husbandry, and the proper seasons for the various tasks o f farming, the book resembles a farmer’s calen­ dar o f work. But while the Eclogues and the Georgies offer contrasting views o f the leisured and the laborious countryside, they both presuppose, not so very far away, the presence o f state and city, the very world o f human affairs, in fact, from which they are ostensibly in flight. When he wrote the Eclogues the memory o f dispossession must still have been sharp in Virgil’s mind. Said to have been brought up “in bush and for­ est,” he had seen his own estates confiscated as the penalty for choosing the wrong side in the civil war that followed the assassination o f Caesar. He had, however, successfully appealed their restitution from Octavian (later Augus­ tus). So it is hardly a surprise that the first eclogue takes the form o f a dialogue between the bitter exile Meliboeus and the happy Tityrus, who blesses Augus­ tus, “a god he shall ever be for me,” for his good fortune. The outcast is offered “ripe apples, mealy chestnuts and pressed cheese” to console himself for the misery o f having to part forever from his goats and vines. The perfect Georgic scene is likewise conditional on a sense o f order which is the social invention o f humanity rather than the pure work o f nature. After putting in the thankless hours, the husbandman is rewarded by a spectacle o f domestic bliss: His dear children hang upon his kisses; his unstained home guards its purity; the kine droop milk-laden udders, and on the glad sward, horn to horn, the fat kids wrestle.12 This was the life, Virgil continues, that “the old Sabines” once lived: antique, in other words, but certainly not brutally archaic. And when he turns to the ideal rustic creatures in the following book, they turn out to be the cow

Primitives and Pastorals

529

and the bee: the one placidly dutiful, the other a real paragon o f social and even political virtue. Passing their lives “ under the majesty o f law,” the bees alone “ know a fatherland and fixed home, and in summer, mindful o f the winter to come, spend toilsome days and garner their gains into a common store.” Their division

o f labor

is

admirable:

“Some

watch

over

the

gathering

of

food . . . some, within the confines o f their homes, lay down the narcissus’ tears and gluey gum from tree-bark as the first foundation o f the comb. . . . To some it has fallen by lot to be sentries at the gates.” The seniors take responsibility for the overall building o f the hive; the juniors labor and return home, “ their thighs freighted with thyme,” to a well-earned rest “ in their chambers.” We are at the very opposite pole from the pre-selenic original Arcadia, where there were men who looked, and behaved, like beasts. In Virgil’s arcadia there are animals that, at their best, conduct themselves like citizens o f a perfect political economy. And in the thinly disguised allegory (itself inherited

E lev ation o f P liny’ s villa at La u re n tin u m from R o b e rt C astell, A ncient

Villas, 1728 .

from Athenian fables) we can already see the elements o f the landscape o f Renaissance humanism: diligent labor, placid, meaty livestock, and bounteous fields and orchards, all overseen, politically and visually, by the hilltop fathers o f the city-state. The same mutuality between town and country was at work when the poetic oxymoron o f a well-groomed arcadia took the form o f a country villa.13 O f course, the ancient ideal o f country life as a corrective to the corruption, intrigue, and disease o f the town was always a spur to rustication in a locus am oenus, a “ place o f delight.” But it was not accidental that Pliny the Younger cited the closeness o f his seaside villa at Laurentinum, seventeen miles from Rome, as one o f its chief virtues. In the translation o f Robert Castell, who reproduced Pliny’s famous letters for the benefit o f a new generation o f eigh­ teenth-century villa builders: “ Having finished the Business o f the C ity one may reach it [Laurentinum] with Ease and Safety by the Close o f the Day.” 14 Laurentinum-by-the-sea was unapologetically a weekend place for Pliny, “ large enough to afford a convenient though not sumptuous reception for my friends.” It had a breezy atrium, hot tubs, a well-stocked library, figs and mul­ berries in the garden, terrific views over the water, and a steady supply o f fresh

5 30

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

seafood. It was, in fact, perfecdy equipped as a place o f otium — leisure— through which one might refresh oneself for the next, inevitable round o f negotium. And, as James Ackerman points out, it was criticized by more Georgic advocates o f the rustic life, like Varro and Columella, as being altogether too suburban. Pliny’s second villa in Tuscany would have answered their criti­ cism by being more stricdy organized around its farm estate. But virtually a ll Roman villas that we know o f were places devoted to the productive ordering o f nature, rather than the contemplation o f its pristine beauty. Pliny presents his Tuscan house, tucked into the side o f the Apennines (close to the modern Citta di Castello), as a more remote and serious place than the opulent and seductive Laurentinum. Its climate was harsher in winter (when, evidently, its owner was seldom there), the terrain more rugged. These relatively bracing conditions were, however, merely a challenge to Georgic application. So the fields were submitted to “the largest oxen and the sturdiest ploughs.” Vine­ yards and walking paths, lined with boxtrees, appeared from the stony ground. And though it made a serious effort to be a self-sustaining villa rustica, it was nonetheless as much a place o f systematic cultivation as the more frankly epi­ curean resorts, a valley o f fruit and wine shut off against the rigors o f the wolfrun hills. And, just as at the villa rustica o f another Latin gentleman farmer, Columella, there was, in all likelihood, gated security— custodians and dogs— to protect the house and farmyard from robbers. Arcadia redesigned, then, was a product o f the orderly mind rather than the playground o f the unchained senses. When Vitruvius writes o f paintings o f “rivers, springs, straits, temples, groves, hills, cattle, shepherds,” it is as wall decoration for the exedra— the portico or vestibule area meant for seated con­ versations.15 “Satyric” landscapes, featuring caves, mountains, and woods, were on view as stage sets for the Roman theater. And the best recommendation that Pliny can think o f for the hilltop view at his Tuscan villa is that the countryside around appears, from a height, “not as a real land but as an exquisite paint­ ing.” 16 In all these instances there is a conscious element o f artifice at work, simultaneously evoking natural forms but making sure they are corrected to eliminate the unsightly or disturbing. The ubiquitousness o f temples in the pas­ toral was the sign o f this aesthetic colonization (much like the clubhouse on the twentieth-century golf course). Such places were not required to represent natural forms except in the faintest and most abstracted echo. Vitruvius plainly loathes the corrupt fashion o f embellishing columns or candelabra with slen­ der stalks and tendrils since “such things neither are, nor can be, nor have been.” 17 Buildings like temples or villas should correspond to nature only inso­ far as their ideal forms demonstrated the harmonies and symmetries governing the structure o f the universe. Once printed editions o f Virgil became available after the middle o f the fif­ teenth century, the scenery o f the unbeastiy pastoral became the model around

42. T h e o d o r e R o u sse au , The Forest o f Fontainebleau. 4 3. N arcisse D ia z d e la P en a, The Forest o f Fontainebleau.

44-

N ic o las P o u ssin , Landscape with Man lieing Killed by a Snake, ca. 1648.

45. One o f the dotards among the Burnham beeches.

Primitives and Pastorals

53 I

which villa estates were designed. And by the time Sir Philip Sidney came to invent a poetic A r c a d ia for his sister, the countess o f Pembroke, its original land­ scape and manners had become unrecognizably altered. “The countrey Arca­ dia” apparendy had been singular among all the provinces o f Greece not for its wildness and poverty but for the “ sweetness o f the ayre” and the “well-tempered mindes o f the people.” Being so fortunately provided for by nature, they were the least war-like o f the Greeks, “giving neither cause nor hope to their neigh­ bors to annoy them.” 18 It was, in fact, England in perpetual Maytime. The Renaissance prototype o f these heavily sweetened pastorals was Jacopo Sannazaro’s Italian-language A r c a d ia , first published in Venice in 1519. San­ nazaro’s fortunes, like his model’s, had suffered from the vicissitudes o f war and exile. His patron in Naples, King Frederick o f Aragon, had been forced into exile and Sannazaro had himself been obliged to sell his estate (though not his villa). His poetic A r c a d ia recycled all the familiar themes o f the Eclogues: o f thwarted love in settings o f impossible sweetness; the golden age when the fields were in common and plenty was invariable and there was no iron, war, or destruction. But to know what this arcadia was actually supposed to look like, Sannazaro has his shepherd Sincero approach a mysterious temple where the pediment is p a in ted , like Vitruvius’s exedra, with a landscape o f “woods and hills, very beautiful and rich in leafy trees and a thousand kinds o f flowers.” Inside, instead o f some satyrical devotee o f Pan worshipping an ithyphallic statue o f the goat-god, a pious old gentleman burns incense and lamb entrails and prays that “ fell hunger be removed from us; may we have abundance always o f grass and foliage and clear water for drinking and may we at all times abound in milk.” 19 It was not all birdsong, wild honey, and nosegays in the moonlight, though, in Sannazaro’s A r c a d ia . Much o f the appeal o f his landscape was that, beside the more purely pastoral passages, he introduced a more sensational scenery to express darker emotions. There were the occasional waterfalls (invariably white-spumed) and precipices from which lovelorn shepherds threatened to hurl themselves. A mountain towered above Arcadia, “ not very difficult to climb,” on which giant cypresses and pines grew. There was the erotic landscape that appeared on the body o f the nymph Amaranth, between whose budding breasts a path described a trail that descended toward deep and shady groves. So when recumbent nudes appear in the pastorals o f Titian, Gior­ gione, and Dom enico Campagnola, the swellings and hollows o f their body become a further locus am oenus, a “ place o f delight.” In one o f his caves, “ mar­ vellously smoothed within,” Sannazaro has a wooden image o f the “ forest Deity, leaning upon a great long sta ff. . . and on his head he had two horns, very straight and pointed toward heaven; with his face as ruddy as the ripened strawberry.” 20 But whether he was meant to be Bacchus, Silvanus, or Pan him­ self, this creature was evidently more o f a flirt than a rapist.

Primitives and Pastorals

Jan van Lo n d ersee l, after D a vid V in c k b o o n s ,

Susanna and the Elders in a Garden, e n g ra vin g .

ARCADI A R E DE S I GNE D

5 34

Renaissance humanists evidently enjoyed playing games with the teasingly indistinct boundary between the sacred and the profane. The Christian monastery “paradise garden” had been defined by its strong enclosing walls; the emblem both o f Eden’s prelapsarian self-sufficiency, and o f the Virgin’s immaculate conception: fertility without beasts or beastliness. Anne van ErpHoutepan has traced the etymology o f both yard and ga rd en back to the Old English word for a wattle fence: geard. In the first instance the defense was against animals, but in medieval Europe the enclosed garden within an already walled and moated castle or manor became the most protected o f all places.21 The piercing o f this green cordon sanitaire, then, had serious implications for the separation o f the wild and cultivated arcadias. When David Vinckboons, early in the seventeenth century, set the story o f Susanna and the elders in a glorious garden ornamented in the late Renaissance style, with pergolas and formal terraces, the barriers to the wild animals were made deliberately flimsy (and in some places were actually pierced), the better to reinforce the heroine’s naked vulnerability. And though the copulating rabbits and the pair o f goats and peacocks remain just outside the garden, Susanna’s victimization takes place by the side o f a fountain supported by satyrs and surmounted by a piss­ ing putto.22 Though the Vinckboons garden o f lust was a fantasy, the boldest designs for villa gardens created places o f wood, water, and rock that could be pene­ trated by straying from, or passing through, more formal areas. They might take the form o f a sacro bosco, or “ holy grove,” not a forest but a carefully untended area on the fringe o f the garden. The imprecise boundary between rough country and smooth would be marked by guardian herms: satyr-like heads and trunks, usually armless and mounted on square columns. (In the Vinckboons drawing they appear at the entrance and exit o f the love arbor immediately behind Susanna.) Sometimes the figure was that o f Pan’s father, Hermes, and often it smiled in an intriguing expression o f both deterrence and invitation. Alternatively,

the

place

o f pagan pleasure

might

be

a splashing

nymphaeum, secreted at the rear o f a house or park. For example, near Asolo, at the Villa Maser, where Caterina Cornaro, the Venetian aristocrat who had once been the “ Queen o f Cyprus,” convened her own poetic arcadia, the visi­ tor would walk past Veronese’s frescoes extolling the robust virtues o f the bucolic life, to the nymphaeum, where erotic sweetness poured from the foun­ tain basins. And Venus herself would often be revealed in grottoes where the floors were made from polished pebbles and the walls glowed with iridescent shells. To discover any o f these places was, in effect, to travel backward from the second, pastoral arcadia, to the first, archaic site o f raw, unpredictable nature. And implicit in the journey was the comforting notion that the route could be immediately reversed.

Primitives and Pastorals

535

There was one famous exception: the extraordinary sacro bosco at Bomarzo, near Viterbo, created, for once, in the midst o f a genuine forest and where the ground was littered with monstrous heads, and figures either in tortured com ­ bat or threatened by wild beasts. It was the nightmare vision o f Vicino Orsini, a member o f an old Roman aristocratic family and a professional soldier. It has been recently argued that the grotesque stone figures, whose precise meaning has long eluded expla­ nation, may all be con­ nected with Ariosto’s great

epic

O rlando

poem,

Furioso,

in

which the hero goes mad with unrequited love.23

Impassioned

debate has raged over the war elephant doing terrible things with his trunk to a Roman sol­ Nicolas Poussin,

dier, though Hannibal

Bacchanalian

can hardly have been

Revels Before a

far from Orsini’s mind.

Herm o f Pan,

It seems most likely

detail, early

that this is a deliber­

1630s.

ately jumbled

night­

mare,

motifs

with

picked and scrambled from

the

Renaissance

standard antholo­

gies o f pagan lore and myth.

But

if it was

meant to suggest civi­ lization overrun by the demons,

beasts,

and

monsters o f the first world, the fantasy was meant to entertain as much as terrify. Visitors startled by the gaping mouth o f hell might have noticed the significant amendment to Dante’s “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter,” which at Bomarzo has become “Abandon all thought.” And this invita­ tion to happy mindlessness became further apparent on entering, where a pic­ nic table was thoughtfully set up so that visitors could enjoy a little cold collation in hell.

5 36

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D The

same

ambiguous

effect, half playful, half myste­ rious, was evident in other projects for fantastic gardens, where the idea was to bring the elements o f the primal world into the shelter o f the garden. At the height o f the

Sacro B osco, B om arzo, the m ou th o f hell.

French Wars o f Religion in the

late sixteenth century,

B om arzo,

hydraulic engineer but a nat­

interior o f the

uralist and chemist) designed

m o u th o f hell,

a garden o f “ natural secrets” where

adepts and

initiates

could comprehend the pri­ mordial structures o f cration. The

severely

rectangular

shape suggested the enclosed hortus conclusus o f the Christ-

ian garden. But in emulation of Eden’s rivers, four hydraulically pumped streams were to course from grottoes situated at each corner.

Inside,

brick

furnaces

would melt enamel inserted into unpolished rocks so that the liq­ uefied ceramic would then sug­ gest

primitive

organic

forms,

wriggling their way through the stone. In the “green” cabinet, primitive tree columns would likewise suggest the sylvan origin o f architecture,

while

in

the

marine grotto, ceramic salaman­ ders and lizards would writhe inside the rocks which formed a salt pool for the real reptiles to crawl in and swim.24

Sacro B osco,

Bernard Palissy (not merely a

d raw ing, G iovanni G uerra.

Primitives and Pastorals

537

Palissy was no wild man. O n the contrary, he was a Protestant Platonist who thought that the whole world o f creation conformed to sublimely inter­ locking but mysterious laws. The variety o f natural form ought, if correcdy dis­ cerned, to correspond to the many faces o f God. So if the right formulae o f inquiry were applied, those laws (and the countenance o f Divinity) could be revealed to the learned. It might then be expressed in symbolic, exemplary form. His secret garden was a route to knowledge that was simultaneously sci­ entific and mystical. But for that very reason it was also dangerous: a wizard’s maze rather than a gardener’s patch. N o wonder, then, that Palissy’s project went unrealized and that he himself (one o f the most fascinating and universal Bernard

minds o f his generation) died in destitution during the days o f carnage and cru­

Palissy, lizard

elty that overran France at the end o f the sixteenth century.

in enameled earthenware.

Palissy’s master-plan was to create a garden where the totality o f creation could be represented in its essentials, rather like the reduction o f liquids to per­

fect crystals. But there was another way to gather in all the diversity o f the nat­ ural world, the better to expose its underlying regularity. That was the botanical garden. Some years ago John Prest, in a beautiful and brilliant study, explained that the creators o f those gardens were driven by the desire to re-create the botanical totality o f Eden.25 The walled-in paradise had, o f course, been the stan­ dard form o f the monastic garden, where Cistercian monks, for example, were each given their own little allotment o f Eden to tend. But the exploration o f the N ew World, with the discovery o f a marvellous range o f hitherto unknown species, had created a rich new topography o f paradise. Eden, it was speculated, not least by Columbus himself, might be in the Southern Hemisphere. I f these wonders o f the tropics and the Orient could be shipped home, collected, named, and arranged within the confines o f the botanical garden at Padua or Paris or Oxford, an exhaustive, living encyclopedia o f creation could be assembled that would again testify to the stupendous ingenuity o f the Creator. The projectors o f the botanical gardens were less sure about the zoology o f Eden. Ideally, they reasoned, just as the affinities and relations between differ­ ent species o f herbs, flowers, and trees would be clarified in the encyclopedic gar­ den, so the harmony that had reigned between beasts in the original Eden might also be re-established. The practical problem o f wildness, though, remained daunting. The best that John Evelyn, a keen projector o f a British Eden or “ Ely-

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

5 38

sium,” and an admirer o f Turkish menageries o f big cats, felt he could do, was a petting zoo o f genteel English creatures like tortoises and squirrels.26 Eden-behind-walls was, then, the very opposite o f Pan’s Arcadia. It was, in fact, a way o f bringing wildness to heel by sending it to school, making it under­ stand its kinship with the tame and the temperate, making its medical useful­ ness apparent through the physick that could be drawn from its essence. To the universal optimists o f this generation there was one power that could withstand all o f the seductions and demons that Pan could mobilize, and that was the power o f knowledge.

iii

Rudeness and Confusion

When “rudeness” and “confusion” became terms o f appreciation for land­ scapes, it was evident that old Arcadia was becoming visible again. It had never been completely effaced by the clipped formality o f royal gardens like Versailles, merely banished to their outer edge and concealed by tall hedges. And when those topiary walls gave access, past the herms, to a “sacred grove,” it was usu­ ally a carefully contained, and cosmetically preserved, form o f wilderness. The only beasts that lurked amidst the elms were stone lions and panthers, carved for their heraldic nobility rather than their savagery. A reaction against this stifling conformity was predictable. “When a Frenchman reads o f the garden o f Eden, I do not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching that o f Versailles, with dipt hedges and trellis work,” sneered Horace Walpole in his History o f the M odern Taste in G arden­ in g 27 But much earlier in the eighteenth century, when Addison’s Spectator began its campaign on behalf o f pleasing irregularity and “horrid graces,” it was English “Neatness and Elegancy” which were thought less “entertaining to the Fancy” than the “mixture o f garden and forest” found in France and Italy.28 A succession o f remarkable landscape gardening books, beginning in 1700 with Timothy Nourse’s Cam p a nia Foelix and continuing with Stephen Switzer’s Ichnographia R ustica and Batty Langley’s New Principles o f G ardening, all extolled the virtues o f what were designated as “rude wildernesses.”29 But when they were actually created, like the “Elysium” at Castle Howard, featur­ ing a sixty-acre forest dotted with Ionic temples, it was the Virgilian, rather than the archaic, idea o f arcadia that the gardeners had firmly in mind. It was wilder­

Rudeness and Confusion

5 39

ness, up to a point, the sort o f thing seen in paintings by Claude and Poussin, as the poem dedicated to Casde Howard prescribed: Buildings, the proper points o f view adorn O f Grecian, Roman and Egyptian form Interspersed with woods and verdant plains Such as Possessd o f O ld T h ’Arcadian Swains.30

So when the fences and walls that had closed o ff formal gardens from the rural estate were removed, the unbroken view enjoyed by the magnate was a very polite kind o f rudeness. The patrons served by William Kent had all admired the rustic repose embodied in Robert Castell’s A n c ie n t V illas (1728), where the life enjoyed by Pliny at Tuscum was presented as a model for the Hanoverian country gendeman. Their new arcadias were really poetic lies about their relationship to land and labor, just like the sunken, brick-lined “haha” : the trench that made the garden and the park seem continuous while keep­ ing animals o ff the lawn. Horace Walpole was only being true to his class and his political family when he celebrated William Kent as the obliterator o f boundaries between garden and nature. It was what the English ruling elite liked to think o f as freedom. And since they also liked to imagine themselves to be the new Romans (with an expanding empire to match), their parks were packed with Virgilian structures— temples and obelisks— each o f which, as John Dixon Hunt has reminded us, carried specific associations, mythic, literary, and historical. Tem ­ ples o f Worthies adorned lakesides and hilltops where Britannia’s most august men o f power and letters were figured as Roman senators (albeit usually, in Rysbrack’s busts, betraying a certain degree o f becoming Hanoverian plumpness). Brought to perfection at estates like Stowe and Stourhead, British Virgilian became a truly international style, reproduced as far west as Virginia and as far east as Nieborow, where the gifted architect Szymon Bogumil Z u g built a Pol­ ish arcadia for his patroness, Princess Helena Radziwilt, complete with a flat­ tering temple o f Diana. For the next generation o f sublimity-seekers, weaned on Burke and Rousseau, though, the studied counterpointing o f copses, columns, and cupolas had become placidly formulaic. The Prince de Ligne, yawning behind his jabot, complained that English monotony had driven out French monotony: “They are all the same— a Greek temple, surrounded by a few trees, a hilltop. They bore me.” 31 The signposts to yet another reinvention o f arcadia, though, did not all point the same way. There was an English way, advocated by Thomas Whately and adopted by Lancelot (“ Capability” ) Brown, that wiped the landscape clean o f all its allegorical clutter and classical quotation. Just as Alexander Cozens’s Netv M ethod argued that intuitive impressions o f bare rocks or heaped clouds

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

540

could themselves express particular moods, from terror to ecstasy, so Whately and Brown saw unembellished topography as the tool o f emotive expression. So although Capability Brown allowed Lord Cobham to keep his Temple o f Virtue and the Gothic Temple o f Liberty (which was, after all, patriotically pic­ turesque), the rest o f William Kent’s elaborately designed moral itinerary was done away with. Lake vistas were now purged o f Palladian bridges, and mead­ ows were made to sweep right up to the park facade o f country houses with­ out diversions into vales o f Venus or temples o f Diana. For those, like the Prince de Ligne, who chose to follow another way, this affectation o f naturalism was English hypocrisy at its most insolendy self-deluding. For in order to achieve the effect o f “pure” landscape, whole hills had to be levelled (or raised), lakes dug, and mountains o f manure carted to the estate. If art and artifice had to be used, then why not revel in it? This was, after all, a time when the mechanical arts were being brought to the highest degree o f ingenuity in the name o f profit or pleasure. And the embellishment o f landscape through mechanical devices and contrivances for a while became all the rage. As Monique Mosser has pointed out, the namt f a b r iq u e given to the synthetic landscapes o f terror and sublimity cre­ ated by these spectade-machines perfectly captured their air o f unapologetic artificiality.32

Coplestone Warre Bamfylde, A View of the Garden at Stourhead with the Temple of Apollo, 1775.

Rudeness and Confusion

54 1

By 1780 connoisseurs o f the frightful and the terrific, if they had been so enterprising, could have constructed an entire Grand Tour around the arcadian theme parks o f the ancien regime. They could have gone to see the mechanical vol­ cano at Worlitz, courtesy o f Prince Leopold o f Anhalt-Dessau, timing their trip to see a nighttime “eruption” so that, amidst the genuine fire and smoke, they would not notice that the “ lava” pouring down its sides was actually water flowing over internally illuminated red glass panels. As the Prince de Ligne found to his delight, visitors were actually encouraged to enter the innards o f the island volcano through a labyrinth o f “caves, catacombs and scenes o f fearsome horror.”33 If they were stirred by underground encounters they would certainly proceed on to Sir Francis Dashwood’s estate at West Wycombe, where (if they had the right intro­ duction) they could penetrate the subterranean hellfire caverns gouged from the chalk hill beneath the manorial church and follow the “river Styx” all the way to the “ Cursing Well.” 34 I f they hankered after the erotic rather than the macabre, they could explore the Temple o f Venus, ornamented with stone nymphs, satyrs, and monkeys, before passing into the cave below through an entrance fashioned as vagina.35 Those with less libertine tastes might have preferred the lakeside grot­ Francis Vivares after Thomas Smith, The Cascade at Belton House, 1769.

toes o f “pre-diluvian stone” (actually pockmarked tufa) built for Charles Hamil­ ton at Painshill in Surrey or the cascade at Belton in Lincolnshire ornamented by Viscount Tyrconnel with handsome piles o f giant rocks and boulders. N o t surprisingly, freemasons were in the forefront o f both the admirers and the fabricators o f these spectacles o f awe and trembling. They could fantasize

542

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

initiation rites in the Egyptian rooms o f the Mniejszy Palace at Warsaw before moving through chambers dedicated to “ Horror, Pleasure and Hope. 36 Or if their orientalism was Far, rather than Near, Eastern, they could experience one o f the Chinese gardens that had been inspired by Sir William Chambers’s Designs o f Chinese Buildings, published in 1757. There were pagodas, o f course, not least the ten-roofed pavilion built for the princess Augusta at Kew. But the best Chinese gardens, like the due de Choiseul’s at Chanteloup, tried to real­ ize Chambers’s formula o f “ laughing,” “enchanted,” and “ horrible” land­ scapes, using statuary o f monstrous birds and dragons, and trees carefully

carved to appear as though they had been blasted by lightning. Just outside

“ T h e P ag o d a ,”

Paris there was even a park featuring an artificial thunderstorm machine which

from W illiam

could produce downpours on demand, and where through the heavenly din

C ham bers,

could also be heard “the howls o f ferocious animals” and “ cries o f men in tor­ ment.”37 For those who were more drawn to the enchanted than the horrible, there were Chinese gardens where the visitor could wander in a dream-like,

Plans, Eleva­ tion . . . in the Gardens of Kew, Surrey, 1763.

shamanic state among waterfalls, bridges, and hanging rock faces beneath which lotus and lilies floated in carp-filled pools. Edmund Burke, the godfather o f the aesthetic o f awefulness, insisted that anything that threatened self-preservation was a source o f the sublime. And

Lo u is D enys C am u s, “ T h e P agoda,

sites like Hawkstone in Shropshire omitted nothing, mechanical or natural, in

C h a n telo u p ,”

their assault on self-preservation.38 Sir Richard Hill, the resident Pan, provided

I773-78-

Rudeness and Confusion a ten-mile tour that included a figure o f Neptune sitting between two whale ribs, a ravine called “The Dungeon,” a “ Gulph calculated to inspire solemnity,” a

Scene in Switzerland” where a precarious Alpine bridge crossed a craggy

pass, a heather hermitage, the (genuine) ruins o f a red sandstone casde, and even a Tahitian scene modelled

544

ARCADI A RE D E S I G N E D

been holding up too well. “He that mounts the precipice at Hawkstone,” the

R o ck entrance

doctor warned, “wonders how he came hither and doubts how he shall

to the “ D esert

return.”39

de R e tz ,” from

An elemental landscape produced by contrivance was bound, in the end, to collapse under the weight o f its own contradictions. Just because o f their whimsical nature ruins and follies have seemed to invite further ruin, inflicted on them by vandals. Several years ago the cave o f the Druid at Hawkstone, for example, was badly trashed by a group o f cyclists who had been refused tea at the local hotel, plainly not a company to be trifled with. But the harder such places worked at the wildness effect, the more likely they were to offend purists devoted to Rousseau, for whom nothing could possibly improve on nature’s own sublimity. So when Rousseau’s last patron and friend, the mar­ quis Rene de Girardin, laid out his grounds at Ermenonville as a moral and spiritual promenade, he did his best to avoid the trickery o f the most egre­ gious fabriques. Nonetheless, Ermenonville ended up as an encyclopedia o f all and every arcadia.40 Wilderness was represented by a desert o f rocks and sandy waste covered only with heather and broom. Ovid’s golden world took the form o f a specifically designated “Arcadian meadow.” Virgilian senten­ tiousness was provided with a Temple o f Modern Philosophy, and other scenes within the park were picturesquely designed as living paintings by

G e o rg e Lou is le R o u g e , Details

de nouveaux jardins d la mode, 1785.

Rudeness an d Confusion

54 5

Claude and the Dutch land­ scapist Jacob van Ruisdael. And there was, o f course, a tumulus that Girardin had always liked to think o f as Celtic until, alas, workmen inadvertendy dug it up and discovered remains consider­ ably more recent. Initially

Rene

de

Girardin had meant to add Poussin to his living land­ scapes by re-creating, in the middle o f the arcadian meadow, the tomb bearing the inscription E t in A r c a ­ d ia ego, on which the tourists, like the shepherds, might soulfully meditate. H e seems to have rejected the idea in favor o f the reed hut o f Philemon and Baucis, the aged couple who, according to Ovid, were the only inhabitants o f Phrygia to offer hospitality to the disguised Jupiter and Mercury. For their kindness they were spared the flood that drowned their churlish neighbors, and were granted vegetable immortality by being transformed into trees at the moment o f their death. Mortality, alas, came anyway. In December 1787, as France itself began to crack apart, a great storm that evidendy paid no heed to O vid destroyed the cottage o f Philemon and Baucis and reduced the meadow to a muddy waste. Swept up in the Revolution, Girardin never did get around to restoring arcadia.

J. M erigot, “ The Arcadian Meadow, Ermenonville,” from Rene de Girardin, Promenade ou itineraire des jardins d ’Ermenonville (1788).

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

546

iv

An Arcadia for the People: The Forest o f Fontainebleau

From Virgil to Girardin all these arcadias, primitive or pastoral, had been lordly possessions. And even when the liberal marquis encouraged the public to visit his park, it was with the air o f an aristocratic host providing an open-air Acad­ emy o f Sensibility. It was ironic, then, that the first truly popular arcadia was cre­ ated in the heart o f the royal forest o f Fontainebleau, a place saturated in memory. For centuries, through the reigns o f Valois and Bourbon kings, it had been the greatest o f the royal hunts. But, as painted by the artists o f Barbizon— Corot, Diaz de la Pena, Millet, and Theodore Rousseau— its glades are realms away from the rout o f kings (color illus. 42 and 43). The drowsy darknesses are unmistakably arcadian. Instead o f nymphs and satyrs, Romany mule-drivers, itinerant herders, and light-flecked lovers move quietly through the dells; and instead o f goats, dappled brindle cows slurp contentedly from woodland ponds. It is an arcadia that seems, somehow, to have been annexed by bohemia. So it is right that the most bohemian o f Pan’s accomplices, Silvanus, is the g eniu s loci, the “spirit o f the place.” He was an original, pelagic Arcadian, all right, even though he appears more often in Latin than Greek. The Romans had grafted him onto a cult associated with Mars and he had done service in their mythology as Custos, the protector o f flocks, his dense trees sheltering the fat sheep and pigs o f the campagna 41 Transplanted by the legions to the wooded regions o f the empire, Silvanus became less pastoral and more arbo­ real, a forest-god whose veneration was practiced from England to Dacia, but was especially revered in Gaul. Inscriptions proclaim him to be Silvanus the August, the Celestial, the Invincible. Boys were named Dendrophorus or Sil­ vester in his honor. And if you went to the forest o f Fontainebleau on a Sun­ day afternoon in the 1850s, according to Theophile Gautier and Auguste Luchet, you might actually catch a glimpse o f him. At the top o f a hill there would suddenly appear a little man, simply dressed, with a big hat and spectacles, holding the holly branch that serves him as a walking stick clambering down the slope taking care with his footing, his eyes to the sky, his nostrils flared, his breath robust, his manner that o f a truly happy being.

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I f you looked more closely still, Gautier wrote, you would begin to notice that his coat was the color o f wood, his trousers the hue o f nutwood stain; his hands were ribbed like the trunk o f an oak; his cheeks had the broken red veins o f early autumn leaves; his feet bit the dirt like roots; his fingers divided like twigs; his hat was crowned with foliage— in short, he seemed altogether a veg­ etable presence.42 He had a mortal name, this faun o f the oakwoods, and it was not Silvestre but Claude, Claude Francois Denecourt, d it le Sylvain. By 1855, when Gau­ tier’s impression o f him was published, he had become adopted by the Roman­ tics as the guardian spirit o f the forest o f Fontainebleau. The book that celebrated his life and the forest was a virtual W ho’s W ho o f Romanticism, with contributions in verse (some o f it truly dreadful) and prose by Victor H u go, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Jules Janin, Gerard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine, Arsene Houssaye, even the distincdy un-bucolic Charles Baudelaire! For all o f these arch-Romantics, Denecourt was the epitome o f an anti-bureaucrat who had wrested the most famous woodland in all o f France from both its royal his­ tory and the imperial state, and had given it back to the Claude Francois

people. N o t the People, o f course, and certainly not the

D enecourt in

woodcutters, charcoal burners, and pig-grazers who

1867, p hoto­

fought pitched battles with the state foresters in the

graph.

Vosges and the Pyrenees, but rather the Romantics’ kind o f people, the people who show up in Barbizon arcadian scenery: gypsies, fetchingly picturesque cot­ tagers, the occasional herdsman. Above all, he had made it possible for themselves— urban bohemians— to escape he crushing m onde o f bourgeois Paris and rediscover their own nature and the world’s, amidst the peace and solitude o f the forest.43 H o w had he done this? Why, by an extraordinary inven­ tion, all his very own: the woodland trail. For Claude Francois le Sylvain (as he himself stoudy believed) had a claim to immortality. He was The Man W ho Invented Hiking. There was not much in his background to suggest such originality. His family had been w ooden-bowl vineyard laborers in the forested eastern uplands o f the Haute-Saone. Denecourt’s father had married into a family o f waggoners and coachmen and produced eleven children, beginning with Claude Francois. His Romantic biographers liked to picture the unlettered boy being read to by his mother, his imagination stirring to tales from Perrault’s M other Goose, romances from the Bibliotheque Bleue, and even popular books about military strategy. As he drove the carts and coaches over the green hills o f the Vosges,

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his mind roamed afar and he learned, place by place, to read the only book that, in the end, counted: the book o f nature. There was one institution that could offer him both travel and instruction, but Claude’s stature failed to meet the improved standards o f Louis XVI’s army. Napoleon Bonaparte seems to have looked more kindly on the short, for Denecourt was able to enlist in the Eighty-eighth Regiment o f Light Infantry. So the sergent-voltigeur tramped from the Danube to the Tagus, and in 1809, at one o f the most spectacular disasters o f the Spanish Peninsula War, the bat­ tle o f Merida, took a slice through a leg which left him with a permanent and marked limp. Like thousands o f Napoleon’s m utiles de guerre who hobbled back to France, unrealistically proud o f their livid gashes and cicatrices, Denecourt could not bear the thought o f relinquishing the imperial colors. But the uni­ formed bureaucracy was expanding fast enough to accommodate these obsti­ nate patriots, and Denecourt opted for a job in the imperial customs service, no sinecure at a time when Napoleon was attempting to seal o ff his continen­ tal empire from British manufactures. Though his childhood on France’s forested eastern frontier (a famous smuggling route) should have suited him perfectly for the role, he seems to have made a halfhearted douanier. “ His idea o f himself as a free child o f the mountains did not sit well with the duties o f the customs-man,” wrote Luchet. It was probably in

1814 that Denecourt first saw the forest of

Fontainebleau. The times were desperate enough that even the lame and the halt might be re-enlisted to defend France against the Coalition armies bear­ ing down fast on what little remained o f the Napoleonic Empire. Denecourt was wounded yet again at Verdun, and retreated westward along with his reg­ iment to the wooded plains o f the Brie. At what point he left active service is hard to say, but before his comrades could reach the chateau, Fontainebleau had already been occupied by Austrian troops. A regiment o f Cossacks had taken up position on the heights overlooking the woods, and it was to the ham­ let o f Barbizon that local women and girls, terrified, it was said, o f being raped or murdered by the Russians, had fled for safety. Bitter skirmishes broke out inside the woodland just coming into its Maytime leaf. Hot orange shells and sprays o f shot sent traces o f fire spitting through the ferny forest floor. After some weeks Fontainebleau reverted to the French, while the rest o f the empire was giving up the ghost. On a gray morning Napoleon announced his abdication in the very court­ yard o f the chateau and bade a tearful farewell to the imperial guard. Rather than surrender their colors, one regiment burned them, each soldier swallow­ ing a draught o f eau-de-vie in which the ashes o f the flag had been dissolved. For Denecourt, Fontainebleau was forever fixed as the site o f this patriotic drama. But he had to live, somehow. After the first abdication he supported

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himself as a jeweller, not o f priceless but o f artificial and semiprecious stones, the trinkets o f ballroom glitter: marcasites and garnets pretending to be dia­ monds and rubies. He must have had some aptitude, as he employed a group o f young journeymen and apprentices in his workshop. Hearing o f the emperor’s return in February 1815, he set out with his litde band o f baublemakers for the barracks at Montereau, near Melun, hot and brilliant with impe­ rial ardor. But before he could reach his Waterloo, the history o f the empire written on his body betrayed him. The march was hard enough to open his wounds from the campaign o f France, and Denecourt hobbled and oozed, grimly conceding his incapacity and watching his lads march o ff to their famous calamity. Denecourt had done enough, though, to make himself suspect to the Restoration authorities in the painful years that followed the great fiasco o f 1815. Threatened with legal proceedings, he wandered about the lie de France, sometimes employing others, more often employed, until somebody or other who had caught him making indiscreedy Bonapartist remarks in a tavern would bring his name up with the police and force him to move on. His war wounds hurt him. His life seemed without point or purpose. He seemed doomed like tens o f thousands o f his old comrades-in-arms to drag out his days as a lame and shabby fugitive in his own country. For a while he managed to get work as janitor o f the army barracks at Melun. But prudence required he change even this menial job every few years. So from Melun he went to Versailles and from Versailles to Fontainebleau. The July Revolution o f 1830 that brought the “citizen king,” LouisPhilippe, to the throne seemed to promise better things. Yet the Orleanist gov­ ernments, especially those run by ex-Napoleonic marshals, were even less hospitable to those classified on some police list as “ dangerous Bonapartist” than the Bourbons. It was during the ministry o f Marshal Soult, Denecourt’s old commander in Spain, that in 1832 he was again ejected from his job. In the celebratory anthology, Gautier and Luchet would claim it was this final, bitter blow that sent Denecourt to the forest. In fact, he seems to have made a tolerable, if not handsome, living for himself as a merchant o f Cognac in the town o f Fontainebleau. But Sylvanian apocryphas aside, it was certainly at this time that he began to spend a great deal o f time wandering about the woods to what must have seemed, to his wife, no apparent purpose at all. Why had he gone there? What was he up to among the deer and the polecats, the charcoal burners and ruffians who frequented the ruins o f ancient monasteries? N one o f his biographers offer much o f an explanation and Denecourt was him­ self laconic, but the answer, surely, lay in a literary encounter. Denecourt, the boy-bookworm o f the mountains, had discovered Senancour. For it was in 1833 that Etienne Pivert de Senancour published a new edi­ tion o f his epistolary pseudo-autobiography, O berm an. Senancour was a self­

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conscious apostle o f Rousseau and, like his model, in double revolt against both the traditional authority o f the classical and the Enlightenment rationality that claimed to supersede it. Like Rousseau, his sources o f truth and understanding were to be nature and his own sentient self, preferably put into direct commu­ nion with each other, the better to grasp at the Infinite. But where Rousseau had run away from Geneva toward France in search o f revelation, Senancour ran in the opposite direction. So in 1789* while the youth o f France was on the road to Paris to behold the birth o f Liberty, Senancour escaped from his sem­ inary eastward to Switzerland, where he insisted on climbing, guideless, some o f the most daunting Alpine peaks (the Dents du Midi and the Great St. Bernard). Sure enough, the Infinite showed up at around fifteen thousand feet, and Senancour attempted to describe the indescribable in the two volumes o f Oberm an which he published in 1804. The book enjoyed a modest success, but it lacked the essential ingredient for Romantic popularity— a seriously tragic hero— a flaw which doomed it to disparaging comparisons with Goethe’s Werther and Chateaubriand’s Rene. Condescended to by the younger genera­ tion o f writers, and habitually short o f cash, Senancour lived on in Paris until 1846 in that worst o f all possible Romantic twilights: acceptable mediocrity.44 Yet for all his disappointments, there must have been enough demand for mountain epiphanies to warrant a reprinting. And there is no doubt that the second coming o f Oberman was more o f an event than the first. It could boast a preface by Sainte-Beuve. And it was Senancour’s writing about the forest o f Fontainebleau, where he had spent adolescent summers, that attracted as much attention as his Alpine threnodies. It may have been the woodland letters that prompted George Sand, for example, to take her small son o ff to the forest for several weeks in the summer o f 1837. And it was surely the Fontainebleau let­ ters that gave Claude Francois Denecourt a model with whom to identify (much as Senancour himself had obviously identified with the solitary prom eneur Jean-Jacques). It is in Letter 9 that Senancour describes his first penetration o f the forest: his tingling sensation of “peace, freedom and wild joy,” predictably mixed with the balancing feeling of melancholy. He performs the obligatory Romantic rite o f entering the woods before dawn, where “ I scrambled up the slopes that were still covered in darkness; soaked myself in the dew-drenched heather, and when the sun finally appeared I was saddened by the gathering brightness that pre­ cedes the dawn. I loved best the hollows, the dark valleys, the thickest woods.”45 It was this determined retreat into the shadows that so appealed to the Romantic generation. Desert (wilderness) is the word used by Senancour to characterize the forest, echoing the peculiar affection King Francois I was said to have had for his “chers deserts.” It was not just the denseness and darkness of the vegetation but the geology o f the forest landscape which suited his tern-

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per: sandstone outcrops and escarpments; loosely packed, sandy soil in which one’s feet could slither and slip— a place that might be rugged or treacherous. “ I f scarcely picturesque,” wrote Senancour, then the silence and the sterility sufficed, the “ mute waste” corresponding nicely to the state o f his soul. N o wilderness, o f course, was complete without its arcadian hermit. And Senancour was led to his hermit, as if in a Mother Goose tale, by the appear­ ance o f two does pursued by a wolf. The deer seemed to make their escape through a dense patch o f high bracken. When Senancour tried to follow them into one o f the old, disused quarry-hollows, he found himself confronted by a dog guarding the mouth o f a subterranean cave-dwelling. But this was not the Cerberus o f Fontainebleau. “ He looked at me silently and only barked when I walked away from him.” Seemingly invited in, Senancour took a look at the strange abode. Its walls and roof were partly the result o f the natural erosion o f the soft rock, but their tenant had completed them by adding piles o f stones, twigs, and branches o f underbrush and clumps o f turf and moss. Inside the cave was a crude bed and cupboard cut from forest timber but no table, for it was apparent that the lodger ate o ff a rock. Between the rocks was a scrawny but conscientiously tended patch that provided some vegetables to go with the ample game supplied by the forest. Summoned by the barking (when Senancour tried to leave), the cave dweller turned out to be a retired quarry-worker who had lived in the woods for thirty years. Originally he had lived there with his long-suffering wife and two sons. But his obstinacy had been too much for them. The wife had died young, her life cut short, it was said, by her pitilessly austere subsistence. One son joined the army; another had drowned while trying to cross the Seine. Left alone, the hermit had decided to remain there in Jerome-like purity, dying amidst the scrub and sandstone rather than face the wretched humiliation o f the Paris poorhouse.46 “ So there he lived with his cat and his dog, on bread, water and liberty. ‘I have worked hard,’ he told me, ‘and I have had nothing, yet in the end I am content and I will die soon.’ ”47 The hermit may not have been a figment o f Senancour’s imagination, but he certainly belonged to Fontainebleau’s well-established cast o f fabulous char­ acters. Some chroniclers thought the ancient foret de Biere had been the site o f ancient druidical rites, and that through the ages lords o f the hunt had shared its woodlands with reclusive sages and holy men. Periodically kings would be unhorsed by an Intervening Hand and chastened toward a right and pious reform. Pursuing a stag, St. Louis had been thrown and was only rescued from certain death at the hands o f robbers by a timely call on a hunting horn. In grat­ itude he built a chapel on the site o f his rescue. A more emphatically correctional apparition suddenly loomed up in front o f Henri IV in the huge, black, and for­ bidding form o f the phantom “ Grand Veneur” (also known as the “ Chasseur noir” ) bellowing to the starded king, “Amendez-vous [Reform yourself].”48

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ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D Fontainebleau forest, then, was a contested place where the sport o f

princes and the culture o f hermits and peasants jostled (albeit unequally) for space. What the people lacked in force they made up for in the aggressive rich­ ness o f their woodland lore. The Mathurin monks, for example, established in the seventeenth century, had given some credence to the cult o f La RocheQui-Pleure, “the weeping rock,” out on the Gorges de Franchard, whose waters were said to cure afflictions o f the sight. Every Pentecost saw a pilgrim­ age to the miraculous leak, which by the early eighteenth century had become a rowdy annual festival, altogether too much like the Maytime woodland bac­ chanals for the authorities’ liking. Their censure was complicated by the aristocratic fashion for rustic amuse­ ment. Rousseau’s one-act opera, Le D evin du village, was rehearsed for Mme de Pompadour at Fontainebleau, and the “village soothsayer,” who brought together a duet o f star-crossed lovers, was evidendy modelled on the woodland wizards reputed to live in the area. In his (admittedly self-serving) Confessions Rousseau casts himself as the contemptuous rebel, refusing to truckle to required politeness, showing up for the rehearsal with a growth o f alienated stubble, and breaking off the charade to flee (into the woods?) in pursuit o f freedom and self-respect. A generation later the Romantics would become obsessed with the landscape painter Simon Mathurin Lantara, who had grown up around the forest village o f Oncy. Habitually in debt, reputed a great drinker, bartering his paintings for a glass and a crust, Lantara was adopted by the Romantics (long after his death in a Paris poorhouse) as a vanguard bohemian, yet another child o f nature ruined by the city.49 On the eve o f the Revolution, the forest served as backdrop scenery to imagined acts o f defiance against polite culture. In fact, it was also home to a population that lived on (or over) the edge o f the law: some thousands o f poachers, woodcutters, charcoal burners, and any combination o f the above, some o f whom certainly supplemented their subsistence from plundering trav­ ellers or huntsmen who had strayed from the pack. Some, like the seventeenthcentury bande Gautier, had become famous before their leader was caught, tortured, and hanged in front o f the church at Fontainebleau.50 Though the maitrise o f the Eaux et Forets at Melun had sixteen guards patrolling the for­ est, eight on horse, eight on foot (by the standards o f the old regime police, a sizable detachment), it was never enough to root out the tough and awesomely armed bands who camped in the ruins o f old priories and convents. To take shortcuts away from the royal roads was to court peril. If the bandits didn’t attack, the diamond-head vipers, said to populate the woodland floor in great swarms, surely would. The royal state did not simply surrender the forest interior to the lawless. Between 1683 and his death in 1715, Louis XIV, that famous lover o f state

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geometry, had straightened the old winding forest avenues, and had new and broader paved roads constructed with side ditches and grass verges wide enough to thwart the sudden ambush o f men appearing from the curtain o f trees.51 And the old network o f stone and wooden crosses, marking directions and distances from village to village, was increased, with nobles o f the court paying for their erection (and, naturally, marking the donation with their names engraved on the sign). And Fontainebleau had the occasional loyal forester determined to subdue its many dangers. With a name like Bois d’Hyver, how could the royal forester at Melun n o t make it his mission to recover the woods for the king, and at least to curb the large-scale illegal cutting and selling o f timber that went on with impunity? The Revolution saw him off, and the destruction o f the woods (for profit and necessity) by gangs as large as two hundred men became serious enough in 1791 to require calling in troops from the Melun barracks. Like so many o f the old forestry officials o f the monarchy, Bois d’Hyver was restored to his old post during the Bonapartist consulate, defeating a brief challenge from an old enemy, a M . N oel, when it was discovered that the latter had made a large fortune in the Revolution trading the wood he was supposed to be pro­ tecting. Faced with public disgrace, the malefactor blew his brains out in the woods, and his accomplice, the “ adjudicator” o f brushwood, hanged himself. M . Bois d’Hyver returned in triumph. In 1832 his son, Achille Marryer Bois d ’Hyver, succeeded to the post o f inspector-general o f the forest, determined to restore the ragged woodlands to their ancient fame and glory. But in the same year, Denecourt entered the woods o f Fontainebleau with quite a different notion in mind. What struck him was that no one except himself really knew the forest interior. There was the network o f crosses, to be sure, and even maps and guides. But the maps were absurdly rudimentary, showing merely the main roads that cut through its cen­ ter, running from Orleans to Paris, and occasionally the paths used by birdhunters. And the few guides to the forest that had been published reflected the fact that their authors (like Charles Remard, librarian o f the chateau, whose booklet appeared in 1820) were conventional, unimaginative antiquarians, for whom the woods were nothing much more than a rustic annex o f the palace. Moreover, these authors showed precious little evidence that they had actually walked through the forest. For on their plans it was charted indiscrim­ inately with the scallop-edged green lines used to denote impenetrable woods. Denecourt had resolved that they would be penetrated, measured, surveyed, mapped. This would not be done statistically, as by the surveyors o f the state who were interested only in an inventory o f assets, but descriptively, even poet­ ically. A nd in this task he did have one ally, the carpenter-poet Alexis Durand,

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whose Foret de Fontainebleau was published in 1836. An autodidact like Denecourt (though a more authentic artisan), Durand had been discovered by a local crown attorney, Clovis Michaux, while he was doing some woodwork on his house, and in no time at all had become a minor literary celebrity, the latest exemplar o f the honnete homme o f the woods.52 And it was his friendship with Durand that led another local writer, Etienne Jamin, a clerk at the chateau, to launch his own little guide to “Four Promenades in the Forest of Fontainebleau.” Denecourt clearly drew inspiration both from Durand’s odes to the oaks and from Jamin’s initial excursion routes. But the scale o f his own exploration was much more ambitious. He would give fresh names to rocks, hills, declivi­ ties; ponds and swamps; even the greatest and grandest o f the trees. And enough classical French education had rubbed off on him for Denecourt to know that to name things was to possess them. From the shapeless, indetermi­ nate mass o f topography he would carve routes determined only by the plea­ sure it would give to the senses, the uplift it could supply for the spirit, jaded by the polluted vanities o f the city. Had he known o f Thoreau’s definition of sauntering, with its etymological nostalgia for the medieval palmers who were walking to the “Saint-Terre,” Denecourt would surely have approved. For he too, he thought, was a pilgrim. So Claude Francois walked and walked and walked, winding his way through the densest and darkest areas, treading gingerly past the sleeping vipers, counting the much depleted population o f deer and pig, laying down marks so that he could recognize the way back. For in one respect he did not mean to fol­ low Senancour’s euphoria at getting lost.53 Perhaps he did not altogether believe it. At any rate ^frplan was to supply the maximum solitude consistent with guar­ anteed lack o f terror, calculating, as if he were an engineer o f the picturesque, how to produce the most strikingly various and pleasing prospects. Sometimes he thought he could even improve on what nature offered. One night, as he lay on a sandstone ledge, the crumbly soil gave under him and he fell into a small cavern. Crawling along a narrow natural tunnel, he emerged into another space. The experience was at once frightening and, in a not dis­ agreeable way, exciting. But would it not be more enthralling if the little hol­ lows could be made more cavernous, in the proper Salvator Rosa manner? What would be wrong with taking up nature’s suggestions and supplying, here and there, a little picturesque improvement? So Denecourt, with a friend, Bournet, who had joined him, took his pick and chisel and made crevices into caves and caves into splendid “grottoes” and caverns, wetting the walls to encourage moss and mushrooms, letting the perfectly sour smell o f earth and leafmold fill the dank interior. Gradually the activities o f an eccentric ex-soldier tramping around the woods began to arouse the suspicions o f M. Bois d’Hyver and his guards.

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What exactly was this man up to? There was nothing he had done to infringe the forest laws. N o one had seen him taking wood illegally or sneaking in and out with an unlawful pig or goat. But there were the painted blue arrows that kept mysteriously appearing on rocks and trees in different parts o f the woods. Those blue arrows were the syntax o f Denecourt’s grammar o f woodland walks: what gave it direction and coherence. He would go out at night with a covered lamp, and a pot

of

blue

paint

beneath his coat, and apply them to the pre­ cise places where he anticipated his walkers would need direction. He was inventing the trail.

It

was

simple

Claude

enough. But no one

Franfois

had

Denecourt,

ever

done

it

before.

ca. 1855, tinted photo­

He published his first

graph.

in d ica teu r

Fontainebleau.

to The

idea was to persuade those

tourists

came

to

who

see

the

chateau (for which he provided

an

expert

guide, room by room) to experiment with a brisk

ten-kilometer

walk along a path indicated by the first trail o f blue arrows. Tw o years later the second in d ica te u r had greatly expanded the menu o f offerings to five walks. And for the first time he provided a detailed topographical map o f the forest with his circuits inked in in different colors: green for Promenade Number One westward to the Apremont hill and the Gorges de Franchard; red, northward to the marshy reed-pond o f the Mare aux Oevees (known colloquially as the Mare aux Fees, the “ Fairy B og” ) and the little “ Calvary” hill; and orange, blue, and yellow, east, south, and southwest. By 1837 Denecourt was ready to go public with his plan. Though, like Jamin, he called these walks prom enades, they were anything but leisurely strolls through the glades. Each was between ten and fifteen kilometers long, and deliberately designed to offer the hiker the variations o f dense woods: gende

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scrambles over rocky slopes, strolls in open meadows and beside brooks and streams. And on the analogy o f a tour o f ancient monuments, Denecourt was careful to break up the walk with “notable sights” : spectacularly venerable trees which he renamed for celebrated writers, or kings, like the “ Charlemagne” oak on the green walk, and the “ Clovis” on the red, each with their own apocryphas set out in the little guide. Denecourt was already an unofficial one-man arbo­ real pantheon, bestowing honors on the heroes o f his choice. The Bonapartist poet and balladeer Beranger (who had walked the woods with the carpenterpoet Durand) was thus rewarded for his Bonapartism with an oak, and like hon­ ors went to Voltaire and (to show his ideological neutrality) Chateaubriand. Along with cultural celebrity went historical fable and myth, so that at the Gorges de Franchard, the courageous hiker could explore the “ Druid’s Cav­ ern” (carefully excavated by Denecourt and made to look appropriately ancient-mystical). His poet friend Durand even made up a completely fictional tale o f romance between the chevalier Rene and Queen Nemerosa, so that a particular glade could serve as the setting for rehearsals o f the story. And the program was completed with moments o f recent history, so that visitors could shudder in the grotto o f the Barbizonnieres as they imagined the terror o f the women and girls from the village hiding from the horny hands o f the rapehappy Cossacks. During the first decade Denecourt’s walks seem to have attracted a select group o f enthusiasts: writers, poets, and artists as well as hangers-on from that social oxymoron, the Romantic bourgeoisie. And he astutely flattered their own sense o f guild tradition by naming some oaks for their guild heroes, like Rubens and Primaticcio, with one specially Romantic specimen given to the fig­ ure they most venerated as the tree-painters’ painter: Jacob van Ruisdael. The first o f the landscape painters actually to live in the forest, Theodore Rousseau, arrived in 1846 and found himself a cottage at the hamlet o f Barbizon near the Fontainebleau-Paris road. His paintings o f the deep woods o f the Bas Breau and the oaks o f Apremont (both features o f Walk Number One), exhibited at the biennial salon in Paris, had the effect o f bringing more enthusiasts o f the promenade solitaire to the woods, among them George Sand’s soi-disant sec­ retary, Alexandre Damien Manceau, and Felix Saturnin Brissot de Warville, the son o f a guillotined Girondin.54 By the mid-1840s Denecourt was himself edit­ ing albums o f lithographs that would publicize the charms o f the forest to those who had not seen the first efforts o f the Barbizon painters. In 1846 a group o f painters and poets presented a verse bouquet to their “host and friend” M. Ganne, who was now advertising himself as “hotelier des artistes.” A year later the journal V A b e ille de Fontainebleau fulsomely praised the Denecourt trails that “call the prom eneur solitaire to meditation and the poet to reverie.”ss Everything changed in the last two years o f the decade. The advent o f the Second Republic in 1848 brought violence and a wave o f random felling back

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to the forest. It also brought the artist Millet, fleeing from both cholera and bloodshed in the capital. When the smoke cleared, Denecourt’s program was brilliandy positioned to appeal to a whole new democracy o f hikers. What was more, the Lyon-Paris railway was now able to bring to Fontainebleau a class o f Sunday walkers for whom a private carriage had been prohibitively expensive and laborious. Denecourt shifted to a higher promotional gear, setting up a stall at the railway station to sell his guides. On the site o f the ruined monastery o f Franchard there was now a pleasant cafe run by the brothers Lapotaire (“ confort, elegance, proprete” ) where those who took the most arduous walk could refresh themselves before pressing on. N ew editions o f the in d ica teu r appeared almost every year; some were specialized for artists, advising them just where the most picturesque vistas were located; others speeded up the vertical integration o f forest tourism by actually making the artists and their haunts one o f the prime spectacles o f a visit! (M. Ganne was pleased.)

Fontainebleau, juniper w ood owl.

J

A special p etit-in d icateu r, designed to slip into the pocket o f a hacking coat, was more aggressively commer­ cial, guiding tourists to the best cafes, patisseries, restau­ rants, and hotels (of which there were now nine in the little town, the grandest being the Grand Hotel de la Ville de Lyon). Ancillary trades had begun to spring up around Denecourt’s project, run, in particular, by Mme Cudot, whose stores sold anything and everything connected with Fontainebleau, from books, maps, and guides to M

" la juniper w ood souvenirs, cigar boxes, ladies’ necessa

appointment-book covers, visiting-card holders, and

even scented waters purporting to come from the purest forest brooks, eau de F o n ta in eb lea u and the more patently seductive eau de D ia n e de Poitiers. By the middle o f the 1850s there were a hundred and fifty kilometers o f

twenty marked trails in the forest, guided and unguided, with over a thousand new “sites” identified and “ explained” by the omnipresent Sylvain. And at last Denecourt was beginning to recoup some o f the twenty thousand francs he had invested in his extraordinary enterprise. So that even as he was being eulogized by Gautier as the g e n iu s loci and guardian faun o f the forest, Denecourt had become a rather different kind o f phenomenon: the entrepreneur o f seclusion. That seclusion was becoming increasingly difficult to protect did not much bother him. A hundred thousand tourists a year were said to roll o ff the Sun­ day trains by i860, and as the crowds grew, so Denecourt invented new ways to process them through the forest. For those who were ill-disposed to walk at all, horse- or open-carriage tours along selected forest routes could be arranged at modest rates. There was even an “ all-in” tour providing a quick trot through the chateau before lunching {yin d discretion) and being bundled into coaches to alight at selected three-star sites along the trail. Those who had even less time

558

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

could be taken directly to the viewing platform that Denecourt had erected on a two-storied tower, at the site where Louis XIV had provided a medieval folly for the queen to survey the hunt. It was high enough to take in the entire expanse o f the trees, and on a clear day the western horizon would even reveal the Paris skyline. Since Louis-Napoleon had come to power there was nothing to stop Denecourt from calling it “ La Tour de l’ Empereur.” Under his com­ mand Fontainebleau had exorcised the ghosts o f 1814. Not that the imperial foresters were any more well disposed toward le Sylvain than had been the officials o f King Louis-Philippe. From a silvicultural point o f view, he was a pest who had taken an entire forest that was supposed to be off limits to those not properly trained and licensed, and turned it into one enormous open-air resort o f public amusement. It was the trespass to end all trespasses: a violation o f the monopoly o f public trust assumed by the classical forestry-state. Exception was also taken to his constant criticism o f the state’s efforts to establish coniferous plantations in the forest, trees that Denecourt deprecated as aesthetically and botanically inferior to his great hardwood mon­ uments. And as Denecourt became virtually the unofficial ch ef o f the park o f his own invention, so the rumors and calumnies began to fly. He was accused by some o f setting fires; by others o f taking money from those who wanted a tree or a rock named after them; of, in effect, merchandising the forest. But Denecourt survived both the official vexation o f M. Bois d’Hyver and his foresters and the envy o f frustrated competitors. Napoleon’s sergeant had built himself a little empire; in the reign o f “ Napoleon le Petit” he had become an institution— even, as his guide became translated into English, an interna­ tional institution. Painters from Holland, Germany, and America began to show up to work close to the Barbizons, and there was a constant traffic o f Eng­ lish tourists in particular, from milords to stockbrokers. But for all this celebrity and despite dispatching personal petitions and addresses to Napoleon III, Denecourt was still denied the Legion d’honneur to which he felt wholly enti­ tled, having in his view done far more for the woods than any o f the state foresters in their blue coats and gold frogging. He had, after all, closed the area o ff to all but huntsmen and brigands and had given it back to the people o f Paris. Had not Gautier himself described him as a man who had claimed a ter­ ritory where there had been u n neant, “a nothing,” and made it instead terre frangaise. It had been a true mission civilisatrice, an act o f benign colonization, and he was compared to a Columbus o f the woods, a Captain Cook, and even, in the fractured English verse o f Theodore de Banville, a Moses. Thine, Denecourt, was the chosen hand By whom each w inding maze was traced A s Moses to the promised land Led fo rth the Hebrews thro the waste?6

A n A rca d ia fo r the People: The Forest o f Fontainebleau

559

Finally, however grudgingly, the government appointed him to an ad hominem curatorship, a corner v ateur-en-chefof the woods, with a nine-thousandfranc partial repayment for the expenses he had incurred in his enterprise. Denecourt immediately began to organize an entire cadre o f rangers, and to design uniforms for them complete with coats, oakleaf badges, and kepis. This little act o f official recognition, coming after years o f hostility or grudging tolerance, must have pleased Denecourt enormously, perhaps even more than being celebrated as the Romantics’ bosky hero. For le Sylvain had never thought o f himself as a one-man opposition to the state foresters, much less as a Wild Man o f the Woods. On the contrary, he was, in his way, as much part o f the classical French culture o f data collection, engineering, and strate­ gic topography as any graduate o f the Nancy college. To appropriate, name, classify, and map places and spaces, to produce an order among things, was Denecourt’s great passion. But he was also a promotional genius. He understood, intuitively, the need o f the modern city dweller for designed excitement. His picturesque prome­ nades were meant to be a tonic for urban enervation. They would supply just enough remoteness for the illusion o f wilderness, without any o f the danger o f real disorientation. And this hunch about calculated exertion, protected expo­ sure, even measured doses o f alarm would prove to be the great business prin­ ciple o f mass popular recreation. That Denecourt had a shrewd grasp o f the psychology o f protected terror is suggested by his presentation o f The Man Who Kissed Vipers. His name was Guerigny, and before he had become famous (“ Messieurs, je suis bien connu, j ’ai ete inscrit dans les journaux, moi!” )57 he had simply been one o f the downand-out local woodcutters who like so many others practiced other trades to keep himself in bread and wine. He painted houses and he also learned to catch vipers for the two-franc bounty that Louis-Philippe’s regime offered in an effort to rid the woods o f the pests. But he became so good at his special skill that he was able to sell surplus live specimens to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and to

the Venom

Research Laboratory that had been established in

Fontainebleau with the aim o f producing effective antidotes. When the railway came to Fontainebleau, Guerigny sold beer and spirits at the station, and Denecourt began to realize his potential as a major tourist attraction. Before long a special stop at the Gorges d ’Apremont in a dark and scary cave, to watch the “ Chasseur des Viperes,” became a major feature o f Walk Number One. Guerigny, dressed in a grimy shirt and oiled cap, would take the snakes from a box on his back and wind them around his neck. Dressed thus, he would tell cautionary tales o f rash folk who presumed to gather the vipers without adequate understanding and paid the predictable penalty; even o f his own snakebite histories en route to Paris asleep in a carriage when the basket opened and eight snakes slithered among the terrified passengers, bit­

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ARCADI A RE D E S I G N E D

ing him when he attempted to return them to safety. Finally he would reassure his audience that “if one doesn’t bother them or impede them they are the most inoffensive and affectionate [ caressantes] creatures in the world.” The trick was to know how to hold them, not on a stick, but with the bare thumb and index finger secured firmly at the back and base o f the neck. And Guerigny made his point by grasping a viper in each hand in the prescribed manner, smiling sweetly at them and planting a tender kiss on the tips o f their snouts. Applause was not advised, Guerigny told his thunderstruck tourists, since it made his reptiles nerveux, not just the vipers but the scores o f lizards and grass snakes he kept in sacks around the cave. It was a perfectly calculated spec­ tacle o f horror and pleasure, drama and comedy, guaranteed to send the walk­ ers on their way treading gingerly along the trail, cautious lest they ever stray from the path marked by the reassuring blue arrows. But Denecourt was Silvanus, not the great Lord o f Panic, and he no more wanted his hikers to get lost in arcadia than he wanted them to die o f fright when they saw a grimy, evil­ smelling old man plant a kiss on the nose o f a diamond-head. His woods were not trackless wastes, but ribboned with trails, like Ariadne’s thread, that guar­ anteed to deliver the walker from savagery and get him back to the station in time for the next train to Paris.

v

Arcadia under Glass

Poussin had posed the riddle. Poussin supplied the answer. To the curious who wondered just what form the mortal “ego” assumed in arcadia, a quick look at a painting in London’s National Gallery would make this horribly dear (color illus. 44). In the midst o f arcadia, the prostrate body o f a man is being engulfed in the coils o f an enormous serpent. But it is not just the victim that has been captured by a snaking form. At his most artful, Poussin has caught the eye o f the beholder in a serpentine ribbon that winds its way through the painting, binding together the arcadia o f light with the arcadia o f darkness. From the serene obliviousness o f the fishermen, the path o f vision leads to the uncom­ prehending dismay o f the woman in the middle ground, and onwards to the horrified consternation o f the witness. Poussin had also painted a Landscape with M an Pursued by Snake in which the slithering reptile seems to be a viper, his head poised to strike another understandably terrified traveller. The histo-

A rcad ia under Glass

56 l

rian and belletrist Andre Felibien, who knew Poussin well, had no hesitation in describing these scenes as representing “ the effects o f fear.” And the retention o f the usual features o f the soft arcadia— umbrageous trees leaning over a glassy lake, towers and walls harmonizing with the gentle hills on which they stood— Nicolas Poussin,

on^ enhances the sense o f incongruous dread. Something has gone terribly

Landscape with

wrong with the picture. Arcadia I has found a way into Arcadia II.

Man Pursued by Snake.

Almost exacdy two hundred years after Poussin painted his picture, the situation had been completely reversed. Arcadia II had swallowed Arcadia I. It

would take Londoners not much more than twenty minutes by hackney to go from the National Gallery to the brand-new Reptile House (the first o f its kind in the world) at the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park. With comforting sheets o f glass separating them from the snakes, they could view not only boa constrictors even bigger than the one squeezing the life out o f Poussin’s unfor­ tunate traveller but also pythons, puff adders, ratdesnakes, and poison frogs.58 It had always been the mark o f the habitable arcadia to banish wild creatures

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

5 62

from its territory; hence the peculiar h o rro r o f Poussin’s scene, w here these assum ptions have collapsed. B u t the tech n olo g y o f imperial Britain had taken care o f all that. Industrially heated piped w ater and plate glass m ade it possible for the exotic and the savage to be im p orted right in to the midst o f city life. N o t on ly w o u ld the citizenry not be inconvenien ced by this; they w o u ld actually th ro n g to it as a locus amoenus, a resort o f delight: a true zo o lo g ica l garden. N o th in g , in fact, co u ld keep them away. W h en , in 1852, the first “ keeper o f serpents,” o ne Edw ard H oratio G irling, su ccum bin g to Pan’s tem ptation, d o w n ed three pints o f ale w ashed do w n by g in , and, blind d ru nk, began to w ave a cobra abo u t, it n o t unreasonably bit him . T w o hours later, at the U niversity C o lle g e H ospital, he was dead. A n d w hile the sensational accident gave rise to a great deal o f predictable serm onizing in the newspapers abo u t the drinking habits o f the w o rkin g classes, it w as, o f course, phenom enally g o o d for the tu rn ­ stiles th ro u g h w hich crow ds passed, lining up to view the m urderous reptile peacefully curled abo u t his branch beh ind the glass. F eed in g tim e, every Fri­ day,

w as

another

popular

attraction. Live w hite m ice and rabbits w o u ld be fed to the b o a before appreciative cro w ds that inclu ded a large pro p o rtio n o f V icto rian ch il­ dren.

T h ere

(in clu d in g

w ere

D ickens)

those who

w ere appalled by the public spectacle and said so in let­ ters to The Times.59 T h e unsentim ental responded that it w as hypocritical cant to com p lain ab o u t natural predators w hile m en co n tin u ed to fatten them selves o f f the m eat o f anim als, and o n e co rrespo n den t even claim ed that “ the little victim s” w ere n o t at all scared at the im m inence o f their painless end , the birds “ flittering and flu ttering all aro u n d .” T h e o n ly gestu re that the head keeper, B artlett, m ade to the agitation was (fo r reasons best k n o w n to him self) to su b ­ stitute hou se m ice for the w hite m ice he had h ith erto used. T h is turned o u t to be a serious m istake, since if n o t eaten right away, the house m ice gnaw ed their w ay th ro u g h the enclosure, p ro vidin g a neat exit for the vipers and cobras.60 Sensationalism had certainly n o t been the idea beh ind the fou n d in g o f the L o n d o n Z o o in the 1820s. Like the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, it had b eg u n as a learned enterprise, and originally adm ission was granted o n ly to m em bers o f the Z o o lo g ica l Society. B u t just as the Renaissance botanical gardens w ere driv­ en by the imperial desire to reconstitute the w h o le w o rld in a w alled enclosure, so the n in eteen th -cen tury zo o s also o w ed their fou ndation to another dramatic

Decimus Burton, “ Elephant Stables, London Zo o ,” in C. F. Partington Natural History and Views of London, 1835.

A rcad ia under Glass

563

extension o f imperial outreach. The two founders o f the London Z oo were per­ fect exemplars o f this alliance between geographical aggrandizement and tech­ nological invention. Stamford Raffles had been the conqueror o f the East Indies, the source o f many o f the exotic species that were shipped by sail and steam to London. And his partner, Humphry Davy, the entrepreneurial engi­ Anthony Salvin, “ Elephant and Rhinoceros House,

neer and inventor o f the miner’s helmet lamp, represented the industrial tech­ nology that made possible the heating systems, and the glazed and barred cages in which the animals were housed.

London Z o o ,”

From its beginnings, though, the London Z oo seems to have wrapped the

The Illustrated London News,

exoticism in cozy domesticity. The first generation o f animal houses, built by

June 26, 1869.

English village, or gingerbread suburb, where (shades o f Dr. Dolittle) the

Decimus Burton, as an ensemble resembled nothing so much as an eclectic

inhabitants just happened to have extremely long necks or ivory tusks. The first Elephant House was a little thatched pavilion

with

Gothic

win­

dows, and when it was even­ tually

replaced,

Anthony

Salvin built for the rhinos and elephants something which from the outside looked like a terrace row o f gabled country cottages: almshouse

a

sort

of

rustic

for pachyderms.

Burton’s Camel House was an ornate villa surmounted by a clock tower, and the 1864 Monkey House was a Beaux Arts pavilion boasting ornamental arched windows. Only the Giraffe House, o f necessity, was practical enough to have sixteen-foot doors, though they led into the type o f Tuscan barn, complete with broken pediment, that the arcadian villa owners o f the Venetian Renaissance would have immediately recognized. The social treatment o f the animals was also Victorian paternalism at its most unctuous. They were often given names like “ Daisy” that belonged either to domesticated farm animals or to the bourgeois nursery. And when the apes, from the 1830s onward, were dressed up in nursery clothes and made to have tea parties, their kinship with humanity was simultaneously suggested and ridiculed. Queen Victoria, who saw the orangutan “Jenny” drink her Darjeel­ ing like a good monkey in May 1842, could not forbear from adding in her diary, “ He [sic] is frightful and painfully and disagreeably human.”61 A great one herself for family gatherings in the parlor, the queen took her own children

ARCADIA R E DE S IG NE D

5 64

to the zoo many times, especially when any newborn animals were to be seen, like the infant giraffe born in May 1852. It had been her uncle William IV who had given the Crown’s menagerie at Windsor and the Tower o f London (where a few beasts were kept in barbaric confinement) to the London Zoological Society. Nothing could be more elo­ quent o f the domestication o f savage arcadia than the surrender o f the royal beasts o f Europe to metropolitan public gardens. When the first giraffe, pre­ sented by Pasha Mehemet Ali o f Egypt to King Charles X o f France, arrived in its new country, it sported a cape embroidered with the fleur-de-lys and the crescent moon. But this was as much to protect it from the cold during the fivehundred-mile journey from Marseilles to Paris as for any lingering heraldic bravura. Charles X, Louis X VI’s youngest brother and the last o f the Bourbon kings, however, had all his life been romantically gallant and so insisted on feed­ ing the giraffe rose petals from his own royal palm before the animal was taken to the Jardin des Plantes. The bolder zoo-designers, in the middle o f the nineteenth century, were not content merely with shipping and showing wild animals housed in various types o f European domestic architecture. Their zoological imperialism aimed at reproducing tropical micro-environments, complete with running water, artifi­ cial rock, and, above all, the vegetation that would give the displays an appear­ ance o f authenticity. And the most ambitious o f all was Carl Hagenbeck, who at his own zoo in Stellingen, near Hamburg, adapted the pastoral ha-ha to create trenched enclosures and paddocks for the wild animals he had brought from the tropics. The effect was meant to be identical to Bridgeman’s eighteenth-century country-house park, with an illusion o f continuity established between the landowner (or in this case the European zoo spectator) and his herds (in this case wildebeest and leopards rather than sheep and cattle).62 It was o f a piece with this design o f actually bringing whole savage landscapes into the world of bourgeois-imperial Germany that Hagenbeck also mounted displays o f human savages, from Inuits to Hottentots, along with his animal paddocks. The pseudo-naturalization o f the zoos could only have happened with an ample supply o f tropical plants. And what went for the fauna o f the wild arca­ dia certainly went for the flora. The difference between the attempts o f the Renaissance botanists to encompass the world in a garden and the imperial tropical gardening o f the nineteenth century was simply the industrial marriage o f glass panes and iron ribs. Once these had been successfully fitted through the ridge-and-furrow engineering devised by John Claudius Loudun, the lim­ its imposed by masonry or wooden-framed windows on the traditional conser­ vatory disappeared in a great blaze o f light. When forced hot-water heating was added, whole forests o f exotic vegetation could luxuriate beneath the glass. And since iron columns could bear the load o f the glass on relatively slender piers, the material could itself be cast or worked to disguise its own solidity.

Arcadia, under Glass

555

S o m e co lu m n s even sp ro u te d tendrils and garlands; o th ers acted as trellises for creepers and vines. In 1842, a F rench design er o f glasshouses, su g g estin g h o w far this illusion o f a tech n o lo g ic a lly p ro d u ce d E d en co u ld g o , u rg ed gardeners to im itate “ the rich diso rd er o f the prim eval fo re st.” T h e m iraculous space Decimus Burton and Richard

w ith in w o u ld n o lo n g e r sim ply be an arrangem en t o f tropical plants b u t an en tire land scape o f w o o d , w ater, and rock: the original arcadia w ith its v en o m

Turner,

dra in ed o ff.

Palm House,

p o p u la te d w ith tro p ical fish, m u rm u rin g its w ay betw een rocks, then spreading

Kew Gardens,

o u t placid and still in to a w id e stream b o rd ered w ith sand and p eb b les.” 63

photograph, 1849.

In the m id st o f carefully ch osen lig h tin g a stream m ust m eander,

Initially, su ch im perial arcadia w ere available o n ly to the rich and aristo­ cratic. It co st the d u k e o f D evo n sh ire th irty tho usand po u nds for his gard ener

Joseph P ax to n to b u ild the “ G re at S to v e ,” nearly three h u n d red feet lo n g and sixty-seven feet h igh . T h is colossu s o f p alm houses used e ig h t coal-fired fu r­ naces to send h o t w ater th ro u g h seven m iles o f pipes, all carefully co n cea led b en eath a sto n e flo o r lest the illusion o f p arad ise-co m e-to -D erbysh ire be sp o iled fo r the d u k e. Su b-trop icals like hibiscus and b o ugain villea th rew bo m b s o f brilliant co lo r w ith in the dense g ree n ery o f palm s and dracaena. Brilliant birds flew a b o u t in the steam y radiance. In the bleakest m o m en t o f the year, D e c e m b e r 18 43, Q u e e n V icto ria cam e to see b o th the G re at S to ve and the spe-

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ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

cial glasshouse that Paxton had built solely to house the d u k e’s gigantic w ater lilies, o bed ien tly nam ed the Victoria regia. T w elve thousand gas lamps lit the crystal; a fountain, driven by a concealed steam pum p (the ultim ate legacy o f the great Salom on C a u s), sent a spray fifty feet high , and the duke o f W ellin g­ ton pro n o u n ced the w h o le thing the m ost “ m agnificent coup d ’oeiV he had ever seen.64 T h e C h atsw o rth conservatory was open to the public gratis. B u t even w hen railway travel shortened distances, access was still necessarily lim ited. A n d som e

o f the

m ost

spectacular collections o f palms and tropical plants, birds and fish w ere private reserves of

the

European

m onarchies, like the palm conservatory the k ing o f Prussia, F red ­ erick

W illiam

III,

built on the Pfaueninsel at the southern end o f the W annsee in 1830. Predictably, the m ost private o f all was

also

the

m ost

fantastic: the realm o f gro tto es, jungles, and o rchids built for L u d ­ w ig II o f Bavaria, set (incongru ously) in a painted setting o f the H im alayas and acces­ sible only through the king’s private apart­ m ents. T here, beneath the peaks and palms, the king w ould sit dream ing on a rock, drifting his hand in the warm water while a servant dressed as Lohengrin (or possibly the Swan) w ould periodically cruise past.65 In 1845 the repeal o f the glass tax in Britain dropped construction prices so steeply that grandiose glasshouses made from prefabricated units built expressly for the public became possible. T h e R egent’s Park conservatory, built by the Royal Botanical Society, was com pleted in 1846. But the atmosphere inside was still that o f a genteel botanical seminar. T h e Paris W inter Garden, the Jardin d ’H iver, all six hundred feet o f it, was quite another matter. Built by H ecto r

Palm House, Herrenhausen, Germany, 1879.

A rca d ia under Glass

567

Horeau during the Second Republic, in 1849, it was designed as an exotic plea­ sure garden, an arcadian palace for the people. So among the sixty-foot palms and the banks o f camellias (two hundred thousand o f them, for they were definitely the flower o f the hour in Dumas’s France) were also orchestras, several restau­ rants, bowling alleys, billiard rooms, dance floors, and a great swathe o f lawn. At night, with the moonlight pouring through the glass (helped at strategic points by discretely placed gas lamps), the garden became a real Elysian Field (as the avenue outside was called), swimming in the perfumes o f a perpetual spring. A t least eight thousand could be easily accommodated in the Jardin d’Hiver at one time. And the more learned jungle o f Richard Turner and Decimus Bur­ ton’s Palm House at Kew was visited by seventy thousand in 1841 and one hun­ dred and eighty thousand thirty years later. They were, in effect, little empires, patrolled by white Europeans without the usual inconveniences o f raging fevers and hostile indigens. In fact, the equation between glass-and-iron architecture and the extension o f the tropics was so axiomatic that it deluded even experi­ enced horticulturalists into supposing that all orchids, for example, would thrive in the hot and humid conditions o f the greenhouse. The secretary o f the Royal Horticultural Society, John Lindley, for example, expressly recommended such conditions in 1830 for orchid cultivation, with the result that hundreds o f thou­ sands o f specimens that actually needed cool, relatively dry conditions perished after a few weeks in the greenhouses.66 None o f these setbacks dampened the enthusiasms o f the most determined zealots o f the glazed arcadias. N o t content with the staggering achievement o f the Crystal Palace, built entirely o f prefabricated parts for the Great Exhibition o f 1851, Paxton dreamed up a Great Victorian Way winding around London, glazed over throughout its entire nine-mile route. Instead o f weedy poplars and scabby sycamores, the road could be lined with palms as befitted a triumphal imperial boulevard.67 These visions o f frond-brushed crystal danced in the mind o f Andrew Jack­ son Downing, the greatest landscapist o f his generation, when he considered the proposed park in N ew York. In The H o rticu ltu r a list for 1851 he imagined a site big enough to house a Crystal Palace “where the whole people could lux­ uriate in groves o f the palms and spice trees o f the tropics, at the same moment that sleighing parties glided swiftly and noiselessly over the snow covered sur­ face o f the country-like avenues o f the wintry park.”68 Like Frederick Law O lm ­ sted and Calvert Vaux, who, six years later, won the competition to design Central Park, Downing saw the project as therapy for the sickness, chaos, dirt, and violence o f the modern metropolis. But his landscaped solution, set out in the article, was a peculiar mixture o f modern entertainment and pastoral sen­ timentality. As well as the glasshouses to be set in the park, Downing envisaged shows o f industrial arts, a glazed zoo, and a Virgilian pantheon to American worthies. The park would offer solitude to the Rousseaus o f Manhattan who

568

ARCADI A R E D E S I G NE D

m ig h t seek solitude, and gaiety to the gregarious. A n d “ the th o u g h tfu l d enizen o f the tow n w o u ld g o o u t there in the m o rn in g to h o ld converse w ith the w h is­ p ering trees, and the w earied tradesm en in the evening, to en jo y an h o u r o f happiness by m ingling in the open spaces w ith ‘ all the w o rld .’ ” 69 O n e m igh t have expected O lm sted to propose so m ethin g like the standard English “ pastoral,” w ith its reputation for turning a brutalized w o rkin g p o p u ­ lation in to paragons o f family morality. B u t he had also seen the m unicipal park at Birkenhead near Liverpool. A n d that su ggested a different approach to park design than expanses o f grass cu t by straight avenues. Birkenhead’s designer,

Lithograph by J. Bachmann, Central Park,

1863.

A rca d ia under Glass

569

Joseph Paxton, had taken care to create a chain o f irregularly shaped ponds, and paths that meandered around rocky outcrops, exposed during construc­ tion.70 And this may have emboldened Olmsted and Vaux to create their own metropolitan arcadia in N ew York. His “ Conception o f the Plan,” submitted to the commissioners (who would cause him so much grief), is still a document o f star ding independence and integrity. He begins with a principle: “The Park throughout is a single work o f art, and as such subject to the primary law o f every work o f art, namely, that it shall be framed upon a single, noble motive.” And then he proceeds to a prophecy: that “ but for such a reservation,” the whole o f the island o f N ew York would . . . be occupied by build­ ings and paved streets; that millions upon millions o f men were to live their lives upon this island, millions more to go out from it, or its immediate densely populated suburbs, only occasionally and at long intervals, and that all its inhabitants would assuredly suffer, in greater or lesser degree, according to their occupations and the degree o f their confinement to it, from influences engendered by these conditions.

It was a brilliant, brave, anti-pastoral, A m e rica n solution that Olmsted imagined. Summer recreation for those who could afford it already meant the wildernesses o f the Adirondacks or the White Mountains o f New Hampshire. But for the “ hundreds o f thousands o f tired workers” who had no means and no time to enjoy such pleasures, something o f N ew York’s own original wilder­ ness ought to be preserved.

The time will come when N ew York will be built up, when all the grad­ ing and filling will be done, and when the picturesquely-varied, rocky formations o f the Island will have been converted into formations for rows o f monotonous straight streets, and piles o f erect buildings. There will be no suggestion left o f its present varied surface, with the single exception o f the few acres contained in the Park. Then the priceless value o f the present picturesque outlines o f the ground will be more distinctly perceived. . . . It therefore seems desirable to interfere with its easy, undulating outlines, and picturesque, rocky scenery as little as possible.71 Exactly the features which would have led European landscapists to reject the site or to transform it into the standard civic pastoral— lawns and copses— challenged Olmsted to a more rugged and natural design. He rejected low meadows because the sight lines over the grass would be too brutally inter­ rupted by the “ Great Wall o f China” o f high buildings that already surrounded the park. Instead woods, little hills, and outcroppings would produce a local horizon with no definite sense o f what might lie beyond it. And wherever pos­

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sible he wanted to protect “picturesque” areas that would contrast with softer and more open scenery. This is not to suggest that Olmsted was all wild arcadian, and that he wished to pretend that Central Park was some sort o f urban Yosemite. Throughout his plan he was concerned to make carriage and pedestrian access as convenient as possible. But traffic was not to dominate the sovereign idea o f the park, and he, too, used a modernized version o f the ha-ha, to sink his roads, and enclose them with brick and stone, so that from the ground surface o f the park they would be virtually invisible, offering no interruption o f a single, con­ tinuous landscape. It was this uncompromisingly unified vision that produced inevitable quarrels over, for example, the zoo that the commissioners wished to install and which Olmsted fought tooth and nail to prevent, finally coming up with a plan so fantastically and expensively grandiose as to make it impractical. By this time he had seen Yosemite for himself and had been instrumental in commending its protection to President Lincoln. One has the impression, read­ ing his agitated protests against the low-budget park zoo, that what he most detested was the cheapening o f the authentically natural landscape with ersatz wildness. His vision o f the park was o f a heroic urban arcadia, a place that would be grand as long as it was allowed to be true to its own native topography. (Though a trip to Panama in 1863 had him fantasizing about covering the island in the lake with banana plantains and subtropical creepers!) His repeated letters o f resigna­ tion from the superintendence o f the park always insisted that what he called his “creative fancy” had been violated by political compromises and wrangles that had eaten into the original design, turning the heroic into the merely prettified. But even when he had finally severed his relations with the commissioners, Olmsted still believed, with good reason, that he had created something as noble as any authentic American landscape. In its wilder aspects, along the Ramble, it was a place to scramble over mossy rocks or wander among wild flowers and ferns. In its more cultivated and open areas, children could kick balls or race along the paths. Central Park was always supposed to answer to both arcadian myths that have survived in the modern memory: the wild and the cultivated; the place o f unpredictable exhilaration and the place o f bucolic rest. Olmsted could have had no inkling, o f course, how the very features that made his park unique— the sunken roads, the gullies and hollows that closed o ff views to the streets— would shelter a savagery at which even Pan himself might have flinched. The woods and trails o f Upper Manhattan are certainly not the only lair where ancient myths and demons, best forgotten, or left to academic seminars, have returned to haunt the modern polis. In fact Central Park divides its arcadian life by the hours o f the clock. By day it is all nymphs and shepherds, cupids and fetes champetres. But at night it reverts to a more archaic place, the realm o f Pelasgus where the wolf-men o f Lykaon prowl, satyrs bide their time unsmil­ ing, and feral men, hungry for wilding, postpone their music.

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57 1

The Wild, Hairy Huckleberry

Returning to the cabin in the woods by Walden Pond, a catch o f fish tied to his pole, Henry David Thoreau was seized with an overwhelming urge to eat raw woodchuck. It was not that he was particularly hungry. And he already knew the taste o f woodchuck, at least cooked woodchuck, for he had killed and eaten an animal that had been complacendy dining o ff his bean field. It was simply the force o f wildness he suddenly felt possessing his body like an ancient rage. “ Once or twice . . . I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind o f venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me.” 72 So when the woodchuck shambled across his path, it was merely the “wildness which [it] represented” that tempted Thoreau to grab it and tear it apart. “ I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns or satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures o f appetite.” 73 Thoreau fea re d the resurgence o f the predator-animal in him because he was, in fact, deeply ambivalent about the primitive instinct within humanity. In W alden he agonized about the “ animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies.”74 Drinking water from the brooks and eating berries, he was never pure enough for his own conscience; a virgin, he was never chaste enough for the content o f his soul. As much as he fled from the conventional pieties o f N ew England soci­ ety, he was manifesdy part o f it in his remorseless attack on his own creatureinstincts. And his direct encounter with a true wilderness, in the Maine woods around M ount Ktaadn in 1846, was a distinctly mixed experience. The forest was so damp and mossy he felt as though he were journeying through a per­ petual swamp; the slopes o f the mountain, pockmarked with bear dens, were “ the most treacherous and porous country I ever travelled,” the bare rock o f the summit desolate and savage: “This was that Earth o f which we have heard, made out o f Chaos and O ld Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. . . . It was Matter, vast, terrific.”75 When, however, he strode the boards o f the Concord Lyceum to give his famous lecture entitled “Walking,” Thoreau presented himself as an uncom­

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prom ising w ild man. T o the assembled bonnets and whiskers he decreed that “ in W ildness is the preservation o f the W orld.” T o becom e tam e, he cautioned , is to invite atrophy, for w hen the Rom an descendants o f R om ulus and Rem us w ere n o lo n ger “ suckled by the w o lf . . . they w ere co n qu ered and displaced by the children o f the northern forests w h o w ere.” Since the skin o f the antelope was said to em it perfum e, he w o u ld have “ every m an so m uch like a w ild ante­ lope, so m uch a part and parcel o f N ature, that his very person shou ld thus sw eedy advertise ou r senses o f his presence, and rem ind us o f those parts o f N ature w hich he m ost haunts.” A n d against the genteel tinkling o f Spohr sonatas, T ho reau avow ed his preference for “ the sou nd o f a bu gle in a sum m er n ig h t,” w hich rem inded him “ o f the cries em itted by w ild beasts in their native forests.” 76 In his public appear­ ances,

then,

T horeau

found it necessary to repress

his

conflicted

feelings abo u t the c o ­ existence o f the savage and

the

prophetic

social. posture

The of

the first generation o f ecologists, especially in A m erica, dem anded a rejection o f eq u ivo ca­ tion as so m uch m oral slurry. F or, like all rev o ­ lutionaries, jo iced

in

they

re­

seeing

the

w o rld upside d o w n , in p roclaim ing culture the w ho re and nature the v irgin. John M uir, the guardian-father o f Y osem ite, w h o co u ld find his w ay th ro u g h hundreds o f miles o f unm apped w ilderness, professed to g e t lost in h otel corridors in San Francisco. W hen he w as in N e w Y ork , signs o n the side o f om nibuses m ade him w ant to see O lm sted ’s Central Park. B u t, “ fearing that I m igh t n o t be able to find m y w ay back, I dared n o t make the ad ventu re.” 77 H e w as, o f course, unfair to the park’s landscape in su pposing that he m igh t be sw allow ed up by its urbanity, for O lm sted , as w e have seen, had go n e to great lengths to m ake such as M uir feel at hom e alo ng the R am ble. (A n d Y osem ite was actually o n ly a third as large again as Central Park.) It was o ne o f the b it­ terest disappointm ents o f M u ir’s life that w hen Ralph W aldo Em erson cam e to Yosem ite in 18 7 1, he failed to persuade the old m an to cam p o u t o vernight.

Frank Jesup Sc o tt, The A rt

o f Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, 1881.

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You are a sequoia yourself,” he told Emerson. “Stop and get acquainted with your big brothers.” 78 But Emerson, at this late moment in his life, probably did not feel much like a sequoia and even less that he would rival their longevity. Muir would have better luck with the dauntless Teddy Roosevelt in 1903, dig­ ging him out o f five-foot snowdrifts. Battles over turf between wild men and gentlemen, hunters and garden­ ers, ancient Arcadians and Virgilian pastorals, wilderness forests and city parks, continued through the nineteenth century, becoming more serious as the world became more industrial. Turf, acre after acre after acre o f it, became the landscape o f settled civility: turf on the bowling greens o f urban parks where working men who, said the city fathers, would otherwise have squandered their earnings on drink and lechery were made peaceable. Tu rf on the heavily rolled cricket pitches o f the British Empire from the Caribbean to Singapore was the landscape on which class and racial divisions between Gentlemen and Players and Natives and Masters were supposed to be batted away with willow and leather.79 And turf began its supremacy in the suburban yard in the middle o f the nineteenth century, according to the dictates o f Frank Jesup Scott, the cat­ egorical author o f The A r t o f B ea u tifyin g Su bu rban H om e G rounds™ A decent lawn, Scott insisted, must run down flush to the street, lest anything “ unchris­ tian and unneighborly . . . narrow our and our neighbor’s views o f the free graces o f Nature.”81 But precisely because the grass occupied an unbroken space in front o f the house, where it was also thought unseemly for the family to disport itself in public view, the lawn rapidly turned into a dead space, an empty green rug stretched before the dwelling. It was this phantom suburban meadow, patrolled by relentless clipping, weeding, and mowing in the yards o f America, that made the likes o f Muir and Thoreau howl with chagrin and head for the woods. N o amount o f “wild gar­ dening” o f the sort proposed by William Robinson, with lawns freckled with randomly naturalized bulbs, could compensate for the fact that the sacro bosco had shrunk to the isolated maple or chestnut standing alone on the greensward, or that the ancient balm o f Arcadia for tempers inflamed by city evils had become, in F. J. Scott’s words, “our [suburban] panacea for the town-sick busi­ ness man who longs for a rural home, whether from the ennui o f business life or from the higher nature that is in him.” Even this panacea, moreover, ought to be ladled out, Scott thought, in strictly rationed doses, lest the patient gag on an overdose o f rustication. “ One half to four or five acres will afford ground enough to give all the finer pleasures o f rural life.”82 I f this was where historical sentimentality had brought us— to Ruskin’s nightmare o f cities draped in “pleasure parks” featuring pagodas and bastard Italianate bandstands; to row upon row o f tasteful villas, each one a dwarfish par­ ody o f Gothic or Palladian style— then history be damned. “ He is blessed over all mortals,” declared Thoreau, “who loses no moment o f the passing life in

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remembering the past.”83 What he often urged was a sort o f blessed amnesia, a liberation from the burden o f the dead in order to see what was truly and natu­ rally alive. To renounce transgression, o f course, often requires that we unflinch­ ingly survey our past and find it an unrelieved record o f folly and infamy. Thoreau’s rejection o f history was based on the fierce conviction that it was irreconcilable with nature. Civilization’s habitual way with the natural world, he thought, was to make it meek and compliant, a thing o f herbaceous borders and bedding annuals rather than the “impervious and quaking swamp.” I have spent these many pages o f Landscape a n d M emory begging to dif­ fer, attempting to piece together a different story. For it seems to me that nei­ ther the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack o f myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrarch’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resent­ fully. For within its bag are fruitful gifts— not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though it may some­ times seem that our impatient appetite for produce has ground the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil o f its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam o f memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalist supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum o f our pasts, generation laid over gener­ ation, like the slow mold o f the seasons, forms the compost o f our future. We live o ff it. Thoreau lived off it, too. When he walked toward the “stately pine wood” by Spaulding’s Farm, he saw that the “golden rays” o f the setting sun had “straggled into the aisles o f the wood as into some noble hall.”84 Consciously or not, he was remembering the ancient tradition that saw the forest roof as a holy, vaulted chamber. Throughout his writing he evoked memory, even when he believed himself to be dismissing it. He went to Concord to see “a panorama o f the Rhine”— the sort o f thing that Albert Smith popularized— and let him­ self be sweedy borne along, down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each o f which was the subject o f a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz. . . . There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as o f Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell o f enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmo­ sphere o f chivalry.85

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Even the fearsome bald dome o f Mount Ktaadn put him in mind o f “ the creations o f the old epic and dramatic poets, o f Adas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus. Such was Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound. Aeschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this.”86And when he walked in the

universally stern and savage” woods o f Maine, he conjured up, as if he

Herbert

were on an American Pook’s Hill, the ghosts o f “ the Northmen, and Cabot,

Gleason,

and Gosnold . . . and Raleigh” stumbling through the primeval forest.87

Walden Pondy ca. 1906.

Myth, Thoreau readily acknowledged, could supply a library o f nature’s memory commensurate with its raw power and beauty. But, unorthodox as he

was in most things, he was entirely o f his time in assuming history and culture to be sheared away from myth. “ Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted,” he asserted, beginning a lament which con­ tinues to our own day. Yet he hoped that while “ the valleys o f the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine [had] yielded their crop,” the great rivers o f America— the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Mississippi— might replenish the depleted stock o f myth. “ Perchance, when, in the course o f ages, American liberty has become a fiction o f the past,— as it is to some extent a fiction o f the present,— the poets o f the world will be inspired by American mythology.”88 Archaeology was the enemy o f mythology, for it presupposed a stale con­ tinuity o f human habitation. The very idea o f culture layered over culture on

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the same site turned Thoreau’s stomach, and he rejoiced that, as he imagined, the three acres Emerson had given him on Walden Pond had never seen any form o f human settlement. Whether or not there had been Indian cultures by the deep, clear waters o f the pond made no difference, since they were some­ how exempt from the kind o f social exploitation o f nature he attributed to civ­ ilizations. Thoreau, like Muir, believed Indians to have led a life perfecdy continuous with nature, with “the wolf and the beaver.” “The wildness o f the savage,” he insisted, “is but a faint symbol o f the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.” So even if Indians had once lived by the pond, they could never have contaminated its innocence. But what did W alden do to Walden? What did Thoreau expect would hap­ pen to his sanctuary o f birch and pine should his book be successful? He never had the luxury o f finding out, since it took five years to sell the two thousand copies o f the first edition. Thoreau went to his early grave in 1862, bitterly grieved at its failure. His obituaries prompted a brief period o f attention, but it was only in the 1880s that Walden became internationally known and a second American edition was finally published. Suppose, though, that it had been a success. Would that not have immediately turned the pond into a looking glass for Thoreau’s celebrity? For there can be no question now o f the loss o f inno­ cence o f the place, since it is impossible to go there without being over­ whelmingly aware o f his ghostly presence. But why should one want to avoid it? The archaeology o f his habitation remains in the vestigial cairn o f stones that represent his hearth, regularly added to by the countless pilgrims and devotees o f his memory who have worn the path by the pond smooth with their homage. And whether Thoreau would actually have been displeased by their attention is moot. He was, as Edward Hoagland has pointed out, a more companionable and social person than his journals and books make him appear.89 He would perhaps have flinched at the clatter and moan o f the commuter train behind the sheltering rim o f the hill that overlooks the pond, and the incessant rumble o f freeway trucks barely a mile away would have been a torment. Worst o f all, perhaps, might have been the joggers pounding the trails, for Thoreau often decreed that the best walk­ ing was a slow saunter\ emulating the camel, the only beast, he thought, that could ruminate and walk at the same time. Bathers splashing in the summer shallows, the occasional fisherman in a rowboat, might not have bothered him at all, nor the sense that Walden is less that “savage, howling mother o f ours, Nature,” than a suburban refuge— the two arcadias, wild and tender, folded together in the bowl o f the same gentle landscape. For although we generally think o f Thoreau as the guardian of wilderness, one o f his most powerful passions was for the local and the intimate; hence the force o f his wonderful oxymoron: “ I have travelled a good deal in Concord.” He had indeed, and it is from the close familiarity o f those “trav­

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els that the unparalleled vividness and precision o f his nature writing arises. In 1840, three years after graduating from Harvard, the pencil-maker’s son pon­ dered whether he ought not, like many o f his contemporaries (Melville and Parkman, for example), satisfy his urge for the wild by undertaking a long jour­ ney in its pursuit. He perused the career o f Sir Walter Ralegh upstream on the Orinoco. And on March 21 he daydreamed like a child. Might he be, he won­ dered in his journal,

a mail carrier in Peru— or a South African planter— or a Siberian exile

or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia river— or a

Canton merchant— or a soldier in Florida— or a mackerel fisher off Cape Sable— or a Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific?

His answer was that he would do none o f these things, for “ our limbs indeed have room enough but it is our souls that rust in a corner. Let us migrate interiorly without intermission, and pitch our tent each day nearer the western horizon.”90 Even this urge toward the west was more a state o f mind than a command to travel. For his grandest epiphanies always came locally. A year later he sat on his boat in the middle o f the pond at twilight, playing the flute, watch­ ing the perch “ and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom— and feel[ing] that nothing but the wildest imagination [could] conceive o f the manner o f life we are living. Nature is a wizard. The Concord nights are stranger than the Ara­ bian nights.”91 In one sense at least, I have tried to keep faith with Thoreau’s aversion to running after the esoteric, and with his conviction that the whole world can be revealed in our backyard if only we give it our proper attention. But the back­ yard I have walked through— sauntered through, Thoreau might exclaim— is the garden o f the Western landscape imagination: the little fertile space in which our culture has envisioned its woods, waters, and rocks, and where the wildest o f myths have insinuated themselves into the lie o f our land. For that matter, there are places even within the boundaries o f a modern metropolitan sprawl where the boundaries between past and present, wild and domestic, col­ lapse altogether. Below the hilltop clearing where my house stands are drystone walls, the remains o f a vanished world o f sheep-farming and dairying, made destitute a century ago. The walls now trail across a densely packed forest floor, hidden from view by a second growth canopy o f tulip trees, white ash, and chestnut-leaf oak. From the midst o f this suburban wilderness, in the hours before dawn, barely a fairway away from the inevitably manicured country club, coyotes howl at the moon, setting o ff a frantic shrieking from the flocks o f wild turkey hidden in the covers. This is Thoreau’s kind o f suburb. H e never changed his mind about the necessary intimacy o f wildness. On August 30, 1856, six years before his death, he declared in his journal that he

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had finally “reached a new world.” He meant, o f course, that he had stayed in the same place. But in that place he had discovered a spot so wild that the “huckleberries grew hairy and were inedible.” The discovery made him shud­ der with pleasure, as if he had suddenly been transported to “ Prince Rupert’s Land” in Labrador. Holding the things in the palm o f his hand, he began, sud­ denly, to be carried through time and space: “ Here grows the hairy huckleberry as it did in Squaw Sachem’s day and a thousand years before, and concerns me perchance more than it did her. I have no doubt that for a moment I experi­ ence exacdy the same sensations as if I were alone in a bog in Rupert’s Land, and it saves me the trouble o f going there; for what in any case makes the dif­ ference between being here and being there but many such little differences o f flavor and roughness put together? . . . I could be in Rupert’s Land and sup­ ping at home within the hour! This beat the railroad.” Or the eco-trip to Belize. For this is what the unappetizing litde fruit, finally, had to tell Thoreau, and us. It is in vain to dream o f a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor o f Nature in us, that inspires that dream.92

NOTES

In tro du ctio n 1 . F o r a n e x t r a o r d in a r y a c c o u n t o f th e fir e - w e lc o m in g p ro p e r tie s o f th e e u c a ly p tu s , see S t e p h e n J. P y n e , B u r n i n g Bush: A F irestick H isto ry o f A u s t r a lia ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 9 1 ) , ch a p . 1. 2. F o r th e E d e n ic a s so c ia tio n s o f Y o s e m it e , s ee J o h n F . S e a rs, Sa cred Places: A m e r ic a n T o u r is t A t t r a c t i o n s i n th e N in e t e e n th C e n tu r y ( O x f o r d , 1 9 8 9 ), 1338?". 3. J o h n M u i r , T h e M o u n t a in s o f C a lifo r n ia ( N e w Y o r k , 18 9 4 ), 3.

4 . A n s e l A d a m s , O n O u r N a t io n a l P a r k s ( B o s t o n , T o r o n t o , a n d L o n d o n , 19 9 2 ), 1 1 3 —17 . 5. F o r a d is c u s s io n o f th e e t y m o lo g y , s ee th e essay b y J o h n B r in c k e r h o f f J a ck so n in D i s ­ co v e r in g th e V e r n a c u la r L a n d sca p e ( N e w H a v e n , 1 9 8 4 ), 3 - 8 ; a lso J o h n R . S t ilg o e , C o m m o n L a n d s c a p e o f A m e r ic a , 1 5 8 0 - 1 8 4 5 ( N e w H a v e n a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 8 2 ), 3 - 4 . A s o p h is tic a te d a n d p e r s u a s iv e a c c o u n t o f th e e m e r g e n c e o f th e id e a o f n a tu r e ca n b e f o u n d in N e il E v e m d e n , T h e S o c ia l C r e a t io n o f N a t u r e ( B a ltim o r e a n d L o n d o n , 19 9 2 ). A t e llin g c r itiq u e o f th e a s s u m p tio n s b e h in d c o n c e p t s o f n a tu r e is o ffe r e d in L u c F e rr y , L e N o u v e l O r d r e ecologique: L ’A r b r e , P a n i m a l e t P h o m m e ( P a r is , 1 9 9 2 ). F o r a t h o u g h tf u l, co m p a r a tiv e v ie w o f th e c o n ­ c e p t u a liz a t i o n o f la n d s c a p e , s ee A u g u s t in B e r q u e e t a l., “ A u - d e la d u p a y s a g e m o d e r n e ,” L e D e b a t6 5 (M a y -J u n e 19 9 1): 4 -13 3 6 . H e n r y P e a c h a m , M in e r v a B r it a n n ia ; or, A G a r d e n o f H e r o ic a l D evices, fu r n is h e d a n d a d o r n e d w ith E m b lem e s a n d Im presa s o f su n d r y n a tu res, N ew ly devised, m o ra lised a n d p u b lish ed (L o n d o n , 16 12 ). 7 . I b id . , 1 8 5 . 8. C i t e d in S a r a W h it f ie ld , M a g r itt e ( L o n d o n , 19 9 2 ) , 62 . 9. S e e t h e in tr o d u c to r y e ssays b y S im o n C u t t s a n d D a v id R e a s o n in T h e U n p a in te d La n d sca p e ( L o n d o n , 19 8 7 ). 10 . D a v id R e a s o n , “ A H a r d S in g i n g o f C o u n t r y , ” in o p . c i t., 2 4 - 3 4 , r e c o g n iz e s th e d ile m m a a n d , a l o n g w it h m a n y o f th e a rtists r e p r e se n te d in th e e x h ib it io n , m a k e s n o p re te n se o f a to t a l a b s o r p t io n o f th e artist w it h in th e la n d s ca p e .

5 79

NOTES

580

1 1 . S te p h e n J. P y n e , The Ice: A Jou rney to A n t a r c tic a ( A m e s , I o w a , 19 8 6 ); W illia m J. C r o n o n , C h a n g es in the L a n d : In d ia n s , Colonists, a n d the Ecology o f N ew E n g la n d ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 8 ); D o n a ld W o r s te r , R iv e r s o f E m pire: W ater, A r id it y a n d the G row th o f the A m e r ic a n West ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 6 ; O x f o r d , 19 9 2 ). F o r a r e v ie w o f th e p rin c ip al issu es m o v in g e n v ir o n ­ m e n ta l h is to ry as w e ll as th e p ro b le m s o f its m e t h o d o lo g y , see D o n a ld W o r s te r e t al., “ E n v i­ r o n m e n ta l H isto r y : A R o u n d T a b le ,” sp e cial n u m b e r o f J o u r n a l o f A m e r ic a n H istory, M a r c h 1990: 1 0 8 7 - 1 1 4 7 . 12 . O n th e s cie n tific r e v o lu tio n an d th e e n v ir o n m e n t, see C a r o ly n M e r c h a n t, R a d ic a l Ecology: The Search f o r a L iv a b le W o rld ( N e w Y o r k an d L o n d o n , 19 9 2 ), 4 1 - 5 9 ; id e m , Ecolog­ ic a l R ev o lu tio ns: N a tu r e , G e n d e r a n d Science in N ew E n g la n d ( C h a p e l H ill, 19 8 9 ). V ic t o r F erk iss, N a tu r e , Technology, a n d Society: C u l t u r a l R o o ts o f the C u r r e n t E n v ir o n m e n ta l C r is is ( N e w Y o r k an d L o n d o n , 19 9 3 ) is a m o re d isp assio n ate h is to r y o f th e p o la r iz a tio n b e tw e e n te c h n o lo g y an d n a tu re . D a v id R o t h e n b e r g , H a n d ’s E n d : Technology a n d the L im it s o f N a tu r e ( B e r k e le y a n d L o s A n g e le s , 19 9 3 ) p ro v id e s a p ersu asiv e an d s u b tle criticis m o f th e s ta n d ard o p p o s itio n b e tw e e n scie n c e an d n a tu re . 13 . L y n n W h it e , Jr., “ T h e H isto r ica l R o o t s o f O u r E c o lo g ic a l C r is is ,” Science 1 5 5 , n o . 37 6 7 (M a r . 10 , 19 6 7 ): 1 2 0 3 - 1 2 0 7 . T h e cla ssic, m o n u m e n ta l a c c o u n t o f th e rela tio n sh ip b e tw e e n h u m a n s e lf-p e r c e p tio n an d n a tu re is C la re n c e J. G la c k e n , Traces on the R h o d ia n Shore: N a tu r e a n d C u lt u r e in W estern T h o u g h tfr o m A n c i e n t T im es to the E n d o f the E ig h teen th C e n tu r y ( B e r k e le y a n d L o s A n g e le s , 1 9 6 7 ) ; see a lso th e b rillia n t d is cu s sio n in K e ith T h o m a s , M a n a n d the N a t u r a l W orld: C h a n g in g A tt it u d e s in E n g la n d , 1 5 0 0 -18 0 0 ( L o n d o n , 19 8 3 ). 14 . M a x O e ls c h la e g e r , The Id e a o f W ilderness ( N e w H a v e n , 1 9 9 1 ) , 1 - 6 7 a n d p assim . 1 5 . D a v id M id d le t o n , A n c i e n t Forests (S a n F r a n c is c o , 1 9 9 2 ), 13 . 16 . T h e u se o f lan d sca p e in th e cre a tio n o f n a tio n a l m y th o lo g ie s has b e e n at th e h ea rt o f m u c h r e c e n t w r itin g in th e fie ld o f cu ltu r a l g e o g r a p h y . S e e in p a r ticu la r D e n is C o s g r o v e an d S tep h e n D a n ie ls, e d s ., T he Iconography o f Landscape: Essays on the Sym bolic R ep resen ta tio n , D esig n a n d Use o f P a st E n v ir o n m en ts ( C a m b r id g e , 19 8 8 ); S te p h e n D a n ie ls, F ield s o f Vision: Landscape Im ag ery a n d N a t io n a l Id e n tity in E n g la n d a n d the U n ite d States (P r in c e to n , 19 9 3 ); an d essays b y W . J. T . M itc h e ll, A n n Jen sen A d a m s , A n n B e r m in g h a m , a n d E liz a b e th H e ls in g e r in W . J. T . M itc h e ll, e d ., L a nd sca pe a n d P o w er ( C h ic a g o , 19 9 4 ). 17 . A la n R id in g , “ E l E s co ria l Jo u rn al; H o l y W a r: V ir g in ’ s D e v o t e e s vs. D o u b t i n g M a y o r ,” N ew T o rk Tim es, M a r . 1 5 , 19 9 4 , A 4 . 18. S ee E. H . G o m b r ic h , A b y W arburg: A n In te lle c tu a l Biography (C h ic a g o , 1 9 7 0 ), 2 67. Se e also th e p re c e d in g c h a p te r , 2 39ff.

PART

ONE:

WOOD

Prologue: The D etou r 1. N e a l A sc h e r so n has w r itte n a fin e e ssay a b o u t th e lite ra ry tra d itio n s a n d p re s e n t r ea l­ ities o f th e p u szcza , “ B o r d e r la n d s ,” o r ig in a lly p u b lis h e d in G r a n ta 20 ( 1 9 9 0 ) , an d r ep rin te d in Th e Best o f G r a n ta T r a v e l ( L o n d o n , 1 9 9 1 ) , 3 0 5 -2 7 . L ik e A s c h e r so n , I , t o o , m e t fo re sters at B ia to w ie za w h o h ad fo u n d a n cie n t m ilita ry d e b ris o n th e fo r e st flo o r. 2. T h e se are th e o p e n in g lin es, th e fa m o u s “ In v o c a tio n ” o f th e g rea te st o f all P o lish epic p o e m s , A d a m M ic k ie w ic z ’ s P a n Ta deu sz. T h e tra n sla tio n h is to ry o f this e x tra o rd in a ry w o r k is its e lf a v e x e d an d fascin atin g to p ic , m o st P o lish sch o la rs p r o n o u n c in g it d e fin itiv ely un tran s­ latab le. B u t an au th o rita tiv e p ro se tra n sla tion b y G e o r g e ' N o y e s w as p u b lish e d in 18 8 4. T h e best m o d e r n v erse r e n d erin g is b y K e n n e th M a c k e n z ie ( L o n d o n , 19 6 4 ) an d this is th e v ersion I f o llo w an d cite . S o m e e x ce p tio n a lly liv e ly an d cre ativ e ren d erin g s o f p assages an d frag m e n ts are a n th o lo g iz e d in C la rk M ills , e d ., A d a m M ickiew icz, 1 7 9 8 - 1 8 5 5 : Selected Poem s (N e w Y o r k , 19 5 6 ). F o r an in te res tin g co m m e n t o n th e L ith u a n ia n id y ll, see Jola S ch a b e n b e c k -E b e r s ( to w h o m I am p erso n ally g rate fu l fo r h elp o n this s u b je c t), “ L ith u a n ia as a M e ta p h o r : T h e C a se o f M ic k ie w ic z , M ilo s z an d K o n w ic k i,” Baltisches Ja hrbu ch, 19 8 5 : 12 2 -3 0 .

N OTE S

58 1

3. M i c k ie w ic z , P a n Ta d eu sz; or, The L a s t Foray in L it h u a n ia , 2. 4. E l z b ie ta M a t y n ia o f th e N e w S c h o o l is n o w p re p a r in g a d e ta ile d s tu d y o f th e K o s c iu s z k o m o u n d a n d its tw e n tie t h - c e n tu r y r e p lic a , th e P ils u d sk i m o u n d b u ilt a fe w m iles fu r th e r w e s t f r o m K r a k d w . I am m o s t g r a te fu l t o M s . M a ty n ia fo r d r a w in g m y a tte n tio n t o th e m o u n d s a n d f o r o t h e r g e n e r o u s h e lp in th e c u ltu r a l h is to r y o f P o lis h la n d sca p e . 5 . S e e t h e b r illia n t a n d m o v in g a c c o u n t o f th is rela tio n s h ip g iv e n b y A le k s a n d e r H e r t z , T h e J e m i n P o lish C u lt u r e , tra n s. R ic h a r d L o u r ie (E v a n s t o n , 111., 19 8 8 ). T h e b io g r a p h ic a l f o r e w o r d b y C z e s l a w M i l o s z m a k es it c le a r th a t H e r t z c o u ld w r ite s o p o w e r fu lly a n d s u b d y a b o u t t h is issu e b e c a u s e h is o w n s e lf-c o n sc io u s n e ss w a s th a t o f b o t h a P o lis h p a trio t a n d an u n e q u iv o c a l J e w . 6 . I b id ., 6 o ff. 7 . T h e b e s t a c c o u n t o f M ic k ie w ic z ’ s rela tio n s h ip , d o m e s tic an d literary, w ith th e w o r ld o f P o lis h Je w s is in Jo a n n a R o s tr o p o w ic e C la rk , “ Jew s an d Ju d aism in P o lish R o m a n tic L ite ra tu re ” ( P h .D . d is s ., U n iv e rs ity o f P en n sylv an ia, 19 9 0 ). I am m o st g rate fu l t o D r . C la rk fo r p o in tin g m e t o w a r d asp ec ts o f th is issu e th a t I h a d ce rta in ly o v e rlo o k e d . S e e also H e r tz , o p . c it., 29ff. 8. K o n r a d W a lle n r o d a n d O th e r W r itin g s o f A d a m M ick ie w icz, trans. J e w e ll P arish , D o r o t h e a P r a ll R a d in , a n d G e o r g e R ap all N o y e s ( B e r k e le y , 1 9 2 5 ) , 16 7 . 9 . A s t o n i s h in g ly , th e o v e r t a n ti-se m itism o f th e b o o k d id n o t p re c lu d e its tra n sla tio n in t o H e b r e w b y th e R o m a n J e w M o is e A sc a r e lli, w h o u s e d A r m a n d L e v y ’ s F r e n ch e d itio n as h is t e x t. S e e A b r a h a m D u k e r , “ M ic k ie w ic z in H e b r e w T r a n s la tio n ,” in W a c la w L e d n ic k i, e d ., M ic k ie w ic z i n W o r ld L it e r a t u r e ( B e r k e le y , 1 9 5 6 ) , 6 5 7 n. 25. 10 . M i c k ie w ic z , P a n T a d e u sz, 8 0 - 8 1 . F o r a fa s c in a tin g d is cu s sio n o f th e s y m b o lic p o ss i­ b ilitie s o f t h e in n , a n d w h e t h e r M ic k ie w ic z m e a n t it t o h a v e M a s o n ic o r S o lo m o n ic c o n n o ­ ta t io n s , s e e C la r k , o p . c i t ., c h a p . 1 , 4 o ff. 1 1 . M i c k ie w ic z , P a n T a d e u sz, 2 76. 1 2 . I b id . , 2 7 9 . 1 3 . S e e A d a m Z a m o y s k i, T h e P o lish Way: A T h o u s a n d -T e a r H isto ry o f the P oles a n d T h e ir C u l t u r e ( L o n d o n , 1 9 8 7 ) , 2 56 . 1 4 . S e e J a d w ig a M a u r e r , “ C e lin a S z y m a n o w s k i as a F r a n k ist,” P olish R e v iew 34, n o . 4 (1 9 8 9 ) . 1 5 . S e e A d a m M i c k ie w ic z , C o u r s d e litte r a tu r e slave, professe a u C o lleg e d e F r a n ce (P a n s , i8 6 0 ) ; c ite d — a n d in te r e s t in g ly d is cu s se d — b y C la r k , o p . c it., 3 8 -3 9 .

C h a p ter One: I n the R ea lm o f the L ith u a n ia n Bison 1 . S e e B a r o n J. v o n B r in c k e n , M e m o ir e d e s c r ip tifs u r l a fo r e t im p e r ia le d e B ia lo w ie z a en L ith u a n ie (W arsaw ,

18 2 8 ) , a c r u c ia l s o u rc e fo r th e e c o lo g y , z o o l o g y , a n d fo lk lo r e o f

B i a lo w ie z a a n d t h e first b o o k t o p u b lis h e n g ra v in g s o f th e h u n ts . 2. T a c i t u s , G e r m a n ia , tra n s. M . H u t t o n , rev . E . H . W a r m in g t o n ( C a m b n d g e , M a s s ., 19 8 0 ) , c h a p . 4 6 ( p . 2 1 3 ) . . . i F o r a r ic h a n d le a r n e d d is c u s sio n o f t h e s e c o m p e t in g a c c o u n ts o f o n g i n s , see N o r ­ m a n D a v ie s , G o d ’s P la y g r o u n d : A H isto ry o f P o la n d , 2 v o ls . ( N e w Y o r k 4

19 8 2 ) , 1 :3 8 - 4 5 .

N i c o l a i H u s s o v ia n u s , C a r m in a , e d . Jan P e lc z a r ( K r a k 6 w , 1 8 9 4 ), xm xiv .

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a n tlv c o m p a r e d M a r c in K r o m c r 's s ix t e e n th - c e n t u r y a c c o u n t o f

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t h e r itu a l fo r m a litie s o f a S p a n ish c o r r id a , n o , le a st b e c a u s e o f

582

NOTES

th e use o f a red ca p e t o r o u se e x h a u s te d an im als t o fu r th e r e x h ib itio n s o f sav ag ery. S e e M a r c in K ro m e r, P oloniae; sive d e situ , populis, moribus, m a g istra tib u s e t r epu blica re g n i P o lo n i lib r i d uo, 2 v o ls. ( C o l o g n e , 15 7 8 ). 10. H u s so v ia n u s , o p . c it., lin es 8 8 5 -9 0 0 (p . 4 1 ) . 1 1 . S ig ism u n d u s v o n H e r b e r ste in , R e r u m M o sco v itaru m C o m m e n ta riu s (B a se l, 1 5 7 1 ) ; see also K ro m e r, o p . c it., 1 :489f. 12 . S e e th e le tte r fro m S o b ie sk i t o his w ife , S e p te m b e r 13 , 16 8 3 , q u o t e d in D a v ie s , o p . c it., 1:4 8 4—86. 13 . V o n B r in c k e n , o p . c it., 8 1. 14 . T h e co m p le te list o f h u n te rs is g iv e n in v o n B rin c k e n , o p . c it., 8 4 -8 5 . 15 . I b id ., 84. 16 . S e e J 6 z e f B r o d a an d A n t o n i Z a b k o - P o t o p o w ic z , “ E w o lu c ja le sn ictw a w P o ls c e ,” in id e m , e d s., W G la d u L a su (W arsaw , 1 9 8 5 ), 1 6 - 1 7 . 1 7 . F o r a d e ta ile d h is to ry o f th e p e r io d o f th e p a r titio n s a n d th e N a p o le o n ic w a rs , see D a v ie s , o p . c it., v o l. 2; also A d a m Z a m o y s k i, The P olish Way: A T h o u s a n d -T e a r H istory o f the Poles a n d T h e ir C u lt u r e ( L o n d o n , 1 9 8 7 ), 2 2 3 -8 7 . 18. F o r L ith u a n ia n tre e c u lts, see J. G . F r a z e r , T he G o ld en B o u g h ( L o n d o n a n d N e w Y o r k , 19 5 0 ) , 1 2 7 - 2 8 . 19 . S e e M o n ik a M . G a r d n e r , A d a m M ickie w icz, the N a t io n a l P o et o f P o la n d ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 1 ) , 8 0 -8 3 . 20. L u d w ik K rz y z a n o w s k i, “ C o o p e r a n d M ic k ie w ic z , a L ite r a r y F r ie n d s h ip ,” in M a n fr e d K rid l, e d ., A d a m M ickiew icz, P o et o f P o la n d ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 5 1 ) , 2 4 5 - 5 7 . 2 1 . T h e r e is an e n o r m o u s an d d is tin g u is h e d lite ra tu r e o n C o o p e r ’ s u se a n d d e fin itio n o f th e fo r e st la n d sca p e . S e e in p a r ticu la r H . D a n ie l P e c k , A

W orld by Itself: The P a sto ra l

M o m e n t in C o o p er’s F ictio n ( N e w H a v e n a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 7 7 ) , esp . ch a p s. 3 a n d 5; S te p h e n R a ilto n , F en im o re Cooper: A S tu d y o f H is L ife a n d I m a g in a tio n ( P r in c e t o n , 1 9 7 8 ) ; R . W . B . L e w is , T he A m e r ic a n A d a m : Inn o cen ce, Tragedy, a n d T r a d itio n in the N in e te e n th C e n tu r y ( C h ic a g o , 19 5 5 ) ; B la k e N e v iu s , C o o p er’s Landscapes: A n Essay on the P ictu r esq u e V ision (B e r k e le y , 19 7 6 ). 2 2. A d a m M ic k ie w ic z , P a n T a d e u sz; or, The L a s t Foray in L it h u a n ia , trans. K e n n e th M a c k e n z ie ( L o n d o n , 19 6 4 ), 76. 2 3. Ib id ., 6 7. 24. I b id ., 6 8 -6 9 . 25. Ib id ., 77 . 26. Ib id ., 90. 2 7. I b id ., 98. 28. T a d e u s z K o n w ic k i, The Polish C o m p lex , tra n s. R ich a rd L o u r ie ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 2 ), 84—85. 29. I am g ra te fu l t o m y s tu d e n t K e ith C r u d g in g t o n fo r th e in fo r m a tio n y ie ld e d b y h er rich research o n W itk ie w ic z an d th e Z a k o p a n e s c h o o l as w e ll as o n th e in flu e n ce o f R u sk in in P o la n d . 30. B r o d a an d Z a b k o - P o t o p o w ic z , o p . c it., 24. 3 1 . T h e a n n e x a tio n o f L ith u a n ia an d th e N ie m e n fo r e st r e g io n in c lu d in g G r o d n o an d W iln o , t o g e t h e r w ith th e cr e a tio n o f a satellite “ K in g d o m o f P o la n d ,” w as a firm ly e stab lish e d fe atu re o f G e rm a n w a r aim s b y 1 9 1 6 . S e e F r itz F is ch e r, G e rm a n y ’s A im s in the F ir st W orld W ar, in tr o d u c tio n b y H a jo H o lb o r n an d Jam es Joll ( L o n d o n a n d N e w Y o r k , 1 9 6 7 ), 2 5 2 - 5 3 , 2 78 , an d 3 1 3 - 1 6 . 32. S e e le tters fro m L o r e n z H a g e n b e c k t o A la r ik B e h n , S e p t. 1 9 1 5 . I am m o st g ra te fu l t o N ig e l R o th fe ls , w h o is p re p a rin g a d o c to r a l d issertatio n o n th e H a g e n b e c k s a n d th e im p e ­ rial G e rm a n z o o s , fo r th is in fo r m a tio n an d arch ival so u rc es . 33. S tefa n Z e r o m s k i, P u szcza Jodlow a ( K ra k o w , 19 2 6 ), 28 . 1 am g r a te fu l t o A n n a P o p ie l fo r h e lp in g m e w ith th e tra n sla tio n o f Z e r o m s k i’ s e x tra o rd in a ry an d h a u n tin g little b o o k . 34. W a ld e m a r M o n k ie w ic z , B ia lo w ie za w c ie n iu sw astyki ( B ia lo w ie z a in th e S h a d o w o f th e S w astik a) (B ia ly s to k , 19 8 4 ), 36.

NOTES 35.

583

For the Third Reich’s policy of remodelling the Polish landscape according to the

Wolschke R l h T l ^ T ’ SCC a SCrieS ° f artideS by Gert GroninS Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, notably i September 1939, Der Oberfall auf Polen also Ausgangspunkt to ta J e r L a n d e s p f le g e ,

R a u m P l a n u n g 4 6 / 4 7 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 4 9 - 5 3 ; id e m , “ P o litic s, P la n n in g an d

th e P r o t e c d o n o f N a tu r e : P o litic a l A b u s e o f E a rly E c o lo g ic a l Id e as in G e rm a n y , 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 4 5 ,” P l a n n i n g Perspectiv es 2 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 2 7 - 4 8 ; J o a ch im W o ls c h k e - B u lm a h n , “ T h e F e a r o f th e N e w L a n d s c a p e : A s p e c t s o f th e P e r c e p t io n o f L a n d sc a p e in th e G e rm a n Y o u t h M o v e m e n t B e t w e e n 19 0 0 a n d 19 3 3 a n d Its I n flu e n c e o n L a n d sc a p e P la n n in g ,n J o u r n a l o f A r c h ite c tu r a l a n d P l a n n i n g R e se a r ch 9 , n o . 1 ( S p r in g 19 9 2 ): 3 3 - 4 2 . I am m o st g r a te fiil t o m y c o lle a g u e J o h n C z a p l ic k a f o r b r in g in g th e s e im p o r ta n t a rticle s t o m y a tte n tio n . F o r an a stu te d is cu s ­ s io n o f t h e d eu tsch e T ie rsch u tzre ch t, s ee F e rr y , o p . c it., 1 8 1 - 8 6 . 3 6 . G r o n i n g a n d W o ls c h k e - B u lm a h n , “ P o litic s , P la n n in g a n d th e P r o te c t io n o f N a tu r e ”

13 3 3 7- I n t e r v ie w w it h th e B ia lo w ie z a fo r e s te r W t o d e k P ir o z n ik o w , Ju n e 5 , 19 92 . 38. A vra h a m

T o ry ,

S u r v iv in g the H o lo ca ust: The K o v n o G h etto D ia ry ; trans. Je rzy

M i c h a io w i c z , e d . M a r t in G ilb e r t ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 9 0 ), 4 9 7 . 3 9 . I b id . , 300. 4 0 . I n t e r v ie w w it h W l o d e k P ir o z n ik o w , Ju n e 6 , 19 9 2 .

C h a p ter Two: Der Holzweg: The Track Through the Woods 1 . F r a n z L ic h te r f e ld , “ D e r A u e r o c h s ,” D ie N a tu r : Z e itu n g z u r V e r b r e itu n g n a tu n v iss e n sch a ftlich e r K e n n t n is u n d N a tu r a n s c h a u u n g f i i r L eser a lle r S ta n d e ( O r g a n d e s D e u ts c h e n H u m b o l d t - V e r e i n s ) , 18 7 8 : 5 2 7 . 2. T h e n a rr a tiv e t h a t fo llo w s is b a s e d o n th e a c c o u n t g e n e r o u s ly p ro v id e d in c o n v e r s a ­ t io n s w it h G io v a n n i B a ld e s c h i- B a lle a n i a n d h is siste r, F ra n c es ca . I am d e e p ly g r a te fu l t o th e B a ld e s c h i- B a lle a n i fa m ily f o r t h e ir h e lp in r e c o n s tr u c t in g th is s to r y , as w e ll as w ith d e sc rip ­ t io n s o f t h e p a la z z i in a n d n e a r Ie si; t o Jam es H a n k in s an d G in n y B r o w n fo r in tr o d u c in g m e t o t h e e p is o d e , a n d t o M ic h a e l S is so n s a n d S e re n a P a lm e r fo r p u tt in g m e in c o n ta c t w it h th e f a m ily . 3. S e e M ic h a e l H . K a te r , D a s “A h n e n e r b e ” d e r SS, 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 4 5 : E in B e itr a g z u r K u lt u r p o lit ik d es D r i t t e n R e ic h e s (S tu ttg a r t, 19 7 4 ) . 4 . T a c i t u s , G e r m a n ia , tra n s. M . H u t t o n , rev . E . H . W a r m in g t o n ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 8 0 ) , c h a p . 3 7 ( p . 1 8 9 ). F o r th e p a ssa g e s t h a t f o llo w I h av e o b s e r v e d H u t t o n ’ s tra n sla tio n s e x c e p t w h e r e t h e y s e e m t o m e t o g lo s s o v e r th e fo r c e o f T a c itu s ’s d e sc rip tio n s. T h u s , fo r e x a m p le , I tra n s la te p a lu d ib u s fo e d a as “ fo u l b o g s ” r a th e r th a n th e s lig h tly m o re d e c o r o u s “ u n h e a lth y m a r s h e s .” 5. I b id . , c h a p . 13 ( p . 1 5 1 ) . 6 . I b id . , c h a p . 1 4 ( p . 1 5 3 ) . 7 . I b id . , c h a p . 22 (p . 1 6 5 ) . 8. L u d w i g K r a p f, G e r m a n e n m y th u s u n d R eich sid eolog ie: F riih h u m a n istisch e R e ze p tto n sw eisen d e r ta cite isc h en “ G e r m a n ia ” ( T u b i n g e n , 1 9 7 9 ) , 4. 9 . I a m m o s t g r a te f u l t o D r . R o s a m u n d M c K it t e r ic k o f N e w n h a m C o l l e g e , C a m b r id g e , f o r h e r k in d h e lp in c la r ify in g th e c o m p lic a te d h is to r y o f th e c o d e x . T h e v e r s io n g iv e n in R . P . R o b i n s o n , T h e G e r m a n ia o f T a c itu s ( A C r i t i c a l E d itio n ) ( M id d le t o w n , C o n n . , 1 9 3 5 ), w h ic h in sists t h a t th e C o d e x A e s in a s c o u ld n o t b e a d ir e c t c o p y o f th e H e r s fe ld m a n u s c r ip t, h a s n o w b e e n s e r io u s ly c h a lle n g e d b y m o r e c ia an d R . H 10

r e c e n t s ch o la r sh ip . S e e , fo r e x a m p le

C . E. M u r­

R o d g e r s , “ A T a le o f T w o M a n u s c r ip ts ,” C la ss ica l Philology 7 9 (1 9 8 4 ):

14 5 53.

S e e t h e c la ss ic ( t h o u g h c o n tr o v e r s ia l) a c c o u n t o f th e R e ze p tio n in E d u a rd N o r d e n ,

D ie g e r m a n is c h e U rg esch ichte in T a c itu s G e r m a n ia ( B e r lin , 1 9 2 3 ) , 3" 4 i a lso K ra p f, o p . a t . ; K e n n e t h C . S c h e llh a s e , T a c it u s i n R e n a iss a n ce P o lit ic a l T h o u g h t ( C h ic a g o , 1 9 7 6 ), ch a p s. 2 a n d 3; J. P e r r e t, R e c h e r c h e ss u r le te xte d e la G e r m a n te ( P a n s , 19 5 0 ). 11. F o r th is h is to r y , s ee L u c ia n o C a n f o r a , L a G e r m a n ia d i T a ctto d a E n g els a l n a ztsm o ( N a p le s , 1 9 7 9 ) , 6 4 - 8 1 .

584

NOTES

12. T a c itu s , G e r m a n ia , ch ap . 4 (p p . 1 3 4 - 3 6 ) . 13 . O n th e fo u n d in g o f th e A h n e n e r b e , see K a te r, o p . c it., x 1 - 3 7 ; a n d o n th e im p o rta n ce o f n atu ral h is to ry an d to p o g r a p h y in th e p ro je c t, id e m , 21 if f . 14 . T h is e d itio n is rare, ce rta in ly o u tsid e G e rm a n y , an d I am m o st g r a te fu l t o m y H a r ­ v ard co lle a g u e (an d n e ig h b o r in W id e n e r L ib ra ry ) W e n d e ll C la u se n fo r b e in g s o k in d as t o a llo w m e to read his c o p y o f th e T ill H a n d sch r iftlic h e U n tersuch u n g en z u T a c itu s A g r ico la u n d G e r m a n ia ( B e r lin , 19 4 3 ). F o r th e d e ta ile d h is to ry o f th e T ill e d itio n , see C a n fo r a , o p . cit., 7 7 -8 2 . 15 . T h e d a m a g e fr o m w a te r stains is h ap p ily co n fin e d t o th e o p e n in g fo lio s o f th e G e r ­ m a n ia . 16. T a citu s , G erm a n ia , ch ap . 2 (p . 1 3 1 ) . N o r d e n , o p . c it., 3 0 9 -1 0 , h ad also d raw n a tte n ­ tion to th e relationship b e tw e e n th e fo re st Um rvelt o f th e G e rm an s an d th e ir ch aracte r as a race. 17 . S e e , fo r e x a m p le , W a lth e r S c h o e n ic h e n , U rw a ld w ild n is in deutschen L a n d e n (N e u d a m m , 1934)18. O n D a r r e , see A n n a B r a m w e ll, B lood a n d Soil: R ic h a r d W a lth er D a r r e a n d H i t le r ’s aG reen P a r ty ” ( A b b o t s b r o o k , B o u r n e E n d , an d B u c k in g h a m s h ir e , 19 8 5 ). 19. T a c itu s , G e r m a n ia , ch a p . 2 (p p . 1 3 0 - 3 1 ) . 20. Ib id ., ch ap . 4 (p p . 1 3 5 - 3 7 ) . 2 1. The E p ic o f G ilgam esh, trans. M a u re e n G a lle r y K o v a cs ( S ta n fo r d , 19 8 9 ), 4 5 . 22. L iv y , History, trans. B . O . F o s te r ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 2 ), 9 .2 5 - 3 6 (p p . 2 9 9 - 3 0 1 ). 23. C a esar, D e bello G a llico . S e e th e a c c o u n t o f th is an d o t h e r classical tex ts o n G e rm a n p rim itivism in c lu d in g S e n e c a ’ s D e p r o v id e n tia in A r th u r O . L o v e jo y an d G e o r g e B o a s, P r im ­ itivism a n d R e la te d Id ea s in A n t iq u ity (B a ltim o r e , 19 3 5 ) , 362ff. 24. C a es a r, The G a llic W ar, trans. H . J. E d w a rd s ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 6 ), 6 .2 5 (p p .

350 - 5 1 ). 25. P lin y , N a t u r a l History, trans. H . R a c k h a m ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 6 ), 3 .1 0 .6 7 (p p . 3 7 6 -7 7 ). 26. Ib id ., 16 .2 (p . 3 9 1 ). 2 7. S e n cca , D e pr o v id e n tia , 1 4 .1 5 , in L o v e jo y an d B o a s, o p . c it., 3 6 4 -6 5 . 28. T a c itu s , G e r m a n ia , ch a p . 1 6 (p p . 1 5 4 - 5 5 ) . 29. Ib id ., p . 15 5 . 30. T h e e v id en ce o f ritu ally k ille d b o d ie s p re serv e d in p e a t b o g s d o e s s ee m t o b ea r o u t s o m e o f th e R o m a n e th n o g r a p h e r s ’ a ssertion s a b o u t th e p ra ctic es o f h u m a n sacrifices a m o n g th e early G e rm an s (as w e ll as C e lt s ) . A c c o r d in g t o th e g e o g r a p h e r S tr a b o , th e fo rm id a b le n o rth e rn C im b r i trib e , w h o in v a d ed th e R o m a n fro n tie rs in th e s e c o n d c e n tu r y B .C., also p ra cticed th e t re e -h a n g in g sacrifice o f p riso n e rs ta k e n in b a ttle . S e e M a lc o m T o d d , T he E a rly G erm a ns ( O x fo r d an d C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 9 2 ), 1 1 2 - 1 3 . 3 1 . T a c itu s , G e rm a n ia , ch ap . 39 (p . 19 5 ). 32. Ib id ., ch ap . 20 (p . 1 6 1 ). 33. Ib id ., ch ap . 12 (p . 14 9 ). 34. Ib id ., ch ap . 27 (p . 1 7 1 ) . 35. S e e th e in tr o d u c tio n t o th e G e r m a n ia b y E . H . W a r m in g to n , p. 120. 36. S e n ec a , D e p ro v id en tia ( D ia lo g u es, b o o k 1 ) , cite d also in G e ra ld S tra u ss, Sixteen thC e n tu r y G erm any, Its Topography a n d Topographers ( M a d is o n , W is ., 19 5 9 ) , 1 5 6 - 5 7 . 37. V e lle iu s P atercu lu s, C o m p e n d iu m o f R o m a n History, e d . an d trans. J o h n S e lb y Jack­ so n ( L o n d o n , 18 8 9 ), 536. 38. T a c itu s , A n n a ls, trans. Jo h n Jackson (C a m b r id g e ,'M a s s ., an d L o n d o n , 19 7 9 ), 1 .5 1 (p . 329). 39. Ib id ., 1.62 (p . 349). 40. Ib id ., 1.6 5 (p . 3 55 ). 4 1 . Ib id ., 2 .1 4 (p p . 4 0 3 -4 ). 4 2 . Ib id ., 2 .2 1 (p p . 4 1 3 - 1 5 ) . 4 3. S ee S ch ellh ase, o p . c it., 3 2 -3 3 .

NOTES

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4 4 . S e e S tra u ss , o p . c i t ., 9. 45.

D e N o c t e e t O s c u l o H a silin a e E r o t ic e ,” in Selectio ns fr o m C o n r a d C e ltis , 1 4 5 9 - 1 5 0 8 ,

e d . L e o n a r d F o r s t e r ( C a m b r id g e , 1 9 4 8 ) , 2 6 - 2 7 . F ° r th e o r ig in a l v e r s io n , a n d th e m a n y o t h e r p o e m s d e v o t e d t o H a s ilin a , s ee C o n r a d u s C e lt e s , C o n r a d is C e lt is P r o t u c i j . . . q u a ttu o r lib r i a m o r u m se c u n d u m q u a t t u o r la te r a G e r m a n ia e fe l i c i t e r i n c ip iu n t ( N u r e m b e r g , 1 5 0 2 ). 4 6 . O n C e lt is , s ee L e w is W . S p it z , C o n r a d C e ltis , T h e G e r m a n A r c h - H u m a n is t ( C a m ­ b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 5 7 ) , e sp . c h a p . 10 ; a n d S c h e llh a s e , o p . c it., 3 5 - 4 0 . 4 7 . S e le ctio n s f r o m C o n r a d C e ltis , e d . F o r s t e r , 4 7 , 53 . 4 8 . M ic h a e l B a x a n d a ll, T h e L im ew o o d S cu lpto rs o f R e n a iss a n ce G e r m a n y ( N e w H a v e n , 19 8 0 ), 13 6 . 4 9 . S e e S c h e llh a s e , o p . c i t., 3 5 - 4 0 ; S p it z , o p . c it., e sp . ch a p . 10 ; F r a n k L . B o r c h a r d t , G e r ­ m a n A n t iq u i t y i n R e n a iss a n ce M y th ( B a ltim o r e a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 7 1 ) , 1 0 6 - 9 . 50. S c h e llh a s e , o p . c i t ., 4 7 . 5 1 . C o n r a d is C e lt is P r o tu c ij; s ee a ls o A . W e r m in g h o f f , C o n r a d C e lt is u n d sein B u c h iiber N u r n b e r g ( F r e ib u r g , 1 9 2 1 ) , 1 1 2 . 5 2 . C h r is t o p h e r S . W o o d , A lb r e c h t A lt d o r fe r a n d the O r ig in s o f L a n d sca p e ( C h ic a g o , I 9 9 3 )> I 2 8 ff. P r o f e s s o r W o o d a n d I h a v e b o t h b e e n w o r k in g o n th e r e la tio n s h ip b e t w e e n G e r m a n t o p o g r a p h y a n d th e T a c ite a n rev iva l a n d I a m in d e b t e d t o h im fo r th e ric h s c h o la r ly in s ig h ts h e h a s g e n e r o u s ly s h a r e d w it h m e o v e r th e y e ars. A s p e cific a t t e m p t t o lin k th e a n c ie n t H e r c y n ia n fo r e s t w it h c o n te m p o r a r y g e o g r a p h y c a n b e f o u n d , fo r e x a m p le , in A n d r e a s A l t h a m e r ’s c o m m e n t a r y o n th e G e r m a n ia , C . C o m e l i i T a c iti: D e M o r ib u s et P o p u lu s G erm a n o r u m L ib e r ( 1 5 8 0 ) , i4 o f . 5 3 . P u b lis h e d in M u n s t e r , o p . c i t ., 3 3 7 - 3 8 . S e e th e q u o t a tio n in S tra u ss , o p . c it., 13 0 . 5 4 . S e b a s t ia n M u n s t e r , C o sm o g r a p h e y . . . b i s a u f f d a s 1 5 6 4 j a r . . . (B a s e l, 1 5 6 4 ) , 5 8 6 - 8 7 . 5 5 . I a m m o s t g r a te f u l t o N ic h o la s B a rk e r o f th e B r itish L ib ra ry fo r p o in tin g th is o u t . S e e J o a c h im C a m e r a r iu s t h e Y o u n g e r , H o r tu s m e d icu s e t p hilosophicus: in qu o p lu r im a r u m stir p i u m breu es d e s c r ip t io n s , n o u a e ic o n e s . . . in d ic a tio n e s lo co ru m n a t a liu m . . . nec n o n p h ilo lo g ic a q u a e d a m c o n t in e n t u r . . . I te m Sylva H er cy n ia : sive ca ta lo g u s p la n a t a r u m sponte n a s c e n tiu m i n m o n tib u s & lo cisp le r isq u e H e r cy n ia e Sylvae ( F r a n k fu r t a m M a in , 15 8 8 ). 5 6 . L a r r y S ilv e r , “ F o r e s t P r im e v a l: A lb r e c h t A l td o r f e r a n d th e G e r m a n W ild e r n e s s L a n d ­ s c a p e ,” S im io lu s 1 3 , n o . 1 (1 9 8 3 ) : 4 - 4 3 . I t w ill b e a p p a r e n t h o w in d e b t e d I a m t o S ilv e r ’ s rich a n d im p o r ta n t a r tic le . 5 7 . T h e cla ss ic s tu d y is R ic h a r d B e r n h e im e r , W ild M e n in the M id d le A ges: A S tu d y in A r t , S e n t im e n t a n d D e m o n o lo g y ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 5 2 ) . S e e a ls o th e e x c e lle n t e x h ib it io n c a t a lo g u e b y T i m o t h y H u s b a n d , w it h th e a ssistan ce o f G lo r ia G ilm o r e - H o u s e , T he W ild M a n : M e d ie v a l M y th a n d S ym bolism ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 0 ). 58 . C o n r a d C e lt is , L i b r i O d a r u m Q u a t t u o r , e d . F . P in d t e r ( L e ip z ig , 1 9 3 7 ) , o d e 1 , 16 . 5 9 . A s tra n s la te d b y F r e d A . C h ild s in H u s b a n d , o p . c i t ., a p p e n d ix B , 204. 6 0 . J o h a n n e s B o e m u s , O m n i u m G e n t iu m M o res . . . ( A u g s b u r g , 1 5 2 0 ) , iv ; a lso c ite d in S tra u s s , o p . c i t ., 14 8 . 6 1 . K a r l O e t t i n g e r m a k e s th e f a s c in a tin g o b s e r v a t io n t h a t d u r in g th is p e r io d th e w o r d L a u b s ig n ifie d b o t h “ f o lia g e ” a n d “ t a b e r n a c le ,” o r “ h o ly s a n c tu a r y .” S e e O e t t i n g e r , “ L a u b e , G a r t e n u n d W a ld : Z u e in e r T h e o r ie d e r s u d d e u t s c h e n S a k r a lk u n s t, 1 4 7 0 - 1 5 2 0 , ” in id e m , e d ., F e stsc h r ift f u r H a n s S e d lm a y r ( M u n i c h , 1 9 6 2 ) , 2 0 1 - 2 8 . 1 a m g r a te fu l t o J o se p h L e o K o e r n e r f o r b r in g in g th is im p o r ta n t a r tic le t o m y a t t e n t io n . 6 2 . B a x a n d a ll, o p . c i t., 3 1 . 6 3 . F o r a n e x t r a o r d in a r ily p o w e r f u l a n d se n sitiv e r e a d in g o f th e St. G eorge, s ee W o o d , o p . c i t ., 1 38fF. 6 4 . S e e R ic h a r d K u e h n e m u n d , A r m in iu s ; or, T he R is e o f a N a t i o n a l Sym bol i n L ite r a tu r e , f r o m H u t t e n to G r a b b e ( C h a p e l H i l l, 1 9 5 3 ) , 7 7 ff6 5 . F o r t h e im p lic a tio n s o f th e K lo p s t o c k t r ilo g y o n th e c u lt o f th e n a tio n a l w o o d la n d , s e e t h e e x h ib it io n c a ta lo g u e e d it e d b y B e r n d W e y e r g r a f, W a ld u n g en : D i e D e u ts ch e n u n d ih r W a ld ( B e r lin : A k a d e m ie d e r K u n s t e , 1 9 8 7 ) , 6 3 .

NOTES

584

12 . T a c itu s , G e r m a n ia , ch ap . 4 (p p . 1 3 4 - 3 6 ) . 13 . O n th e fo u n d in g o f th e A h n e n e r b e , see K a te r, o p . c it., 1 1 - 3 7 ; an d o n th e im p o r ta n ce o f n a tu ral h is to ry an d t o p o g r a p h y in th e p ro je c t, id e m , 21 if f . 14 . T h is e d itio n is rare, ce rta in ly o u tsid e G e rm a n y , a n d I am m o st g r a te fu l t o m y H a r ­ v ard co lle a g u e (an d n e ig h b o r in W id e n e r L ib ra ry ) W e n d e ll C la u se n fo r b e in g s o k in d as t o allo w m e t o read his c o p y o f th e T ill H a n d sch r iftlic h e U n tersuch u n g en z u T a c itu s A g r ico la u n d G e r m a n ia ( B e r lin , 19 4 3 ). F o r th e d e ta ile d h is to ry o f th e T ill e d itio n , see C a n fo r a , o p . c it., 7 7 - 8 2 . 15 . T h e d a m a g e fro m w a te r stains is h ap p ily co n fin e d t o th e o p e n in g fo lio s o f th e G e r ­ m a n ia . 16. T a citu s , G erm a nia , ch ap . 2 (p. 1 3 1 ) . N o r d e n , o p . c it., 3 0 9 -1 0 , h ad also d raw n a tte n ­ tio n t o th e relationship b etw e en th e forest U m w elt o f th e G e rm an s an d th e ir c h aracter as a race. 17 . S e e , fo r e xa m p le , W a lth e r S c h o e n ic h e n , U n v a ld w ild n is in deutschen L a n d e n ( N e u d a m m , 19 3 4 ). 18. O n D a rre, see A n n a B r a m w e ll, Blood a n d Soil: R ic h a r d W a lth er D a r r e a n d H i t le r ’s aG reen P a rty ” (A b b o t s b r o o k , B o u r n e E n d , a n d B u c k in g h a m s h ir e , 19 8 5 ). 19. T a c itu s , G e rm a n ia , ch ap . 2 (p p . 1 3 0 - 3 1 ) . 20. Ib id ., ch ap . 4 (p p . 13 5 —3 7 ). 2 1.

The E p ic o f G ilgam esh, trans. M a u re e n G a lle r y K o v a cs ( S ta n fo r d , 19 8 9 ), 4 5 .

22. L iv y , H istory, trans. B . O . F o s te r ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 2 ), 9 .2 5 - 3 6 (p p . 2 9 9 - 3 0 1 ). 23. C a es a r, D e bello G a llico . S e e th e a c c o u n t o f th is an d o t h e r classical te x ts o n G e rm a n p rim itivism in c lu d in g S e n e c a ’s D e p r o v id e n tia in A r t h u r O . L o v e jo y an d G e o r g e B o a s, P r im ­ itivism a n d R e la te d Id ea s in A n t iq u ity (B a ltim o r e , 1 9 3 5 ) , 362ff. 24. C a es a r, The G a llic W ar, trans. H . J. E d w a rd s ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 6 ), 6 .2 5 (p p .

35 «>-5 0 25. P lin y , N a t u r a l History, trans. H . R a c k h a m ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 6 ), 3 .10 .6 7 (p p .

37 <5- 7 7 )26. Ib id ., 16 .2 (p . 3 9 1 ). 27. S e n ec a , D e pro v id e n tia , 1 4 .1 5 , in L o v e jo y an d B o a s , o p . c it., 3 6 4 -6 5 . 28. T a c itu s , G e r m a n ia , ch ap . 16 (p p . 1 5 4 - 5 5 ) . 29. Ib id ., p. 15 5 . 30. T h e e v id en ce o f ritu ally k ille d b o d ie s p re serv e d in p e a t b o g s d o e s se e m t o b ea r o u t s o m e o f th e R o m a n e th n o g r a p h e r s ’ a ssertion s a b o u t th e p ra ctic es o f h u m a n sacrifices a m o n g th e early G e rm an s (as w e ll as C e lt s ) . A c c o r d in g t o th e g e o g r a p h e r S tra b o , th e fo r m id a b le n o rth e rn C im b r i trib e , w h o in va d ed th e R o m a n fro n tie rs in th e s e c o n d c e n tu r y B .C., also p ra ctic ed th e t re e -h a n g in g sacrifice o f p riso n e rs ta k e n in b a ttle . S e e M a lc o m T o d d , T he E a rly G erm a n s ( O x fo r d an d C a m b r id g e , M as s ., 19 9 2 ), 1 1 2 - 1 3 . 3 1 . T a c itu s , G e rm a n ia , ch ap . 39 (p . 19 5 ). 32. Ib id ., ch ap . 20 (p . 16 1 ) . 33. Ib id ., ch ap . 12 (p . 14 9 ). 34. Ib id ., ch ap . 27 (p . 1 7 1 ) . 35. S e e th e in tr o d u c tio n t o th e G e r m a n ia b y E . H . W a r m in g t o n , p . 120. 36. S e n ec a , D e p ro vid en tia (D ia lo g u es, b o o k 1 ) , cite d also in G e ra ld S tra u ss, S ixteenthC e n tu r y G erm any, Its Topography a n d Topographers ( M a d is o n , W is ., 19 5 9 ) , 1 5 6 - 5 7 . 37. V e lle iu s P atercu lu s, C o m p e n d iu m o f R o m a n History, e d . an d trans. Jo h n S e lb y Jack ­ s o n ( L o n d o n , 18 8 9 ), 536. 38. T a c itu s , A n n a ls, trans. Jo h n Jackson ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., an d L o n d o n , 19 7 9 ), 1.5 1 (p . 329). 39. I b id ., 1.62 (p . 349). 40. I b id ., 1.6 5 (p . 3 55 ). 4 1 . I b id ., 2 .1 4 (p p . 4 0 3 -4 ). 4 2 . I b id ., 2 .2 1 (p p . 4 1 3 - 1 5 ) . 4 3. S ee S ch ellh a s e, o p . c it., 3 2 -3 3 .

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4 4 . S e e S tra u ss , o p . c i t ., 9. 4 5 . “ D e N o c t e e t O s c u l o H a siiin a e E r o t ic e ,” in S e le ctio n sfr o m C o n r a d C e ltis, 1 4 5 9 - 1 5 0 8 , e d . L e o n a r d F o r s t e r ( C a m b r id g e , 1 9 4 8 ) , 2 6 - 2 7 . F o r th e o r ig in a l v e r s io n , a n d th e m a n y o t h e r p o e m s d e v o t e d t o H a s ilin a , s ee C o n r a d u s C e lt e s , C o n r a d is C e ltis P r o t u c i j. . . q u a ttu o r lib r i a m o r u m se c u n d u m q u a t t u o r la te r a G e r m a n ia e f e l i c i t e r i n c ip iu n t ( N u r e m b e r g , 1 5 0 2 ). 4 6 . O n C e lt is , s ee L e w is W . S p it z , C o n r a d C e ltis , The G e r m a n A r c h - H u m a n is t ( C a m ­ b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 5 7 ) , e sp . c h a p . 10 ; a n d S c h e llh a s e , o p . c it., 3 5 -4 0 . 4 7 . S electio n s f r o m C o n r a d C e ltis , e d . F o r s t e r , 4 7 , 53 . 48 . M ic h a e l B a x a n d a ll, T h e L im e w o o d S cu lp to rs o f R e n a iss a n ce G e r m a n y ( N e w H a v e n , 19 8 0 ) , 1 3 6 . 4 9 . S e e S c h e llh a s e , o p . c i t., 3 5 - 4 0 ; S p it z , o p . c i t ., e sp . c h a p . 10 ; F r a n k L . B o r c h a r d t , G e r ­ m a n A n t iq u i t y i n R e n a iss a n c e M y th ( B a ltim o r e a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 7 1 ) , 1 0 6 - 9 . 5 0 . S c h e llh a s e , o p . c i t . , 4 7 . 51.

C o n r a d is C e lt is P r o tu c ij; s e e a ls o A . W e r m in g h o f f , C o n r a d C e lt is u n d sein B u c h iiber

N iim b e r g (F re ib u rg , 1 9 2 1 ) , 11 2 . 5 2 . C h r is t o p h e r S . W o o d , A lb r e c h t A lt d o r fe r a n d the O r ig in s o f L a n d sca p e ( C h ic a g o , 1 9 9 3 ) , I2 8 ff. P r o f e s s o r W o o d a n d I h a v e b o t h b e e n w o r k in g o n th e rela tio n s h ip b e tw e e n G e r m a n t o p o g r a p h y a n d th e T a c i te a n r ev iv a l a n d I a m in d e b t e d t o h im fo r th e rich s ch o la r ly in s ig h ts h e h a s g e n e r o u s ly s h a r e d w it h m e o v e r t h e y e ars. A s p e cific a t t e m p t t o lin k th e a n cie n t H e r c y n ia n fo r e s t w it h c o n te m p o r a r y g e o g r a p h y c a n b e f o u n d , fo r e x a m p le , in A n d r e a s A lt h a m e r ’ s c o m m e n t a r y o n t h e G e r m a n ia , C . C o m e l i i T a c iti: D e M o r ib u s e t P o p u lu s G erm a n o r u m L ib e r ( 1 5 8 0 ) , i4 o f . 5 3 . P u b lis h e d in M u n s t e r , o p . c i t ., 3 3 7 - 3 8 . S e e th e q u o t a t i o n in S tra u ss , o p . c it., 130. 5 4 . S e b a s t ia n M u n s t e r , C o s m o g r a p h e y . . . b i s a u f f d a s 1 5 6 4 j a r . . . (B a se l, 1 5 6 4 ), 5 8 6 - 8 7 . 5 5 . I a m m o s t g r a te f u l t o N ic h o la s B a rk e r o f th e B r itish L ib ra ry fo r p o in tin g th is o u t . S e e J o a c h im C a m e r a r iu s t h e Y o u n g e r , H o r t u s m e d icu s e t philosophicus: in qu o p lu r im a r u m stirp i u m breu es d escriptio nes, n o u a e ico nes . . . in d ic a tio n e s lo co ru m n a t a liu m . . . nec n on p h ilo lo g ic a q u a e d a m c o n t in e n t u r . . . I t e m Sylva H e r cy n ia : sive ca ta log u s p la n a t a r u m sponte n a s c e n tiu m i n m o n tib u s & lo c isp le r isq u e H e r c y n ia e Sylv ae ( F r a n k fu r t am M a in , 15 8 8 ). 5 6 . L a r r y S ilv e r , “ F o r e s t P r im e v a l: A l b r e c h t A lt d o r f e r a n d th e G e rm a n W ild e r n e ss L a n d ­ s c a p e ,” S im io lu s 1 3 , n o . 1 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 4 - 4 3 . I t w ill b e a p p a r e n t h o w in d e b t e d I am t o S ilv e r ’ s rich a n d im p o r ta n t a r tic le . 5 7 . T h e c la ss ic s tu d y is R ic h a r d B e r n h e im e r , W ild M e n in the M id d le A ges: A S tu d y in A r t , S e n t im e n t a n d D e m o n o lo g y ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 5 2 ) . S e e a ls o th e e x c e lle n t e x h ib itio n c a t a lo g u e b y T i m o t h y H u s b a n d , w it h th e a s sista n ce o f G lo r ia G ilm o r e - H o u s e , The W ild M a n : M e d ie v a l M y th a n d S y m bo lism ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 0 ). 5 8 . C o n r a d C e l t is , L i b r i O d a r u m Q u a t t u o r , e d . F . P in d t e r ( L e ip z ig , 1 9 3 7 ) , o d e 1 , 16 . 59 . A s tra n s la te d b y F r e d A . C h ild s in H u s b a n d , o p . c i t ., a p p e n d ix B , 204. 60 . J o h a n n e s B o e m u s , O m n i u m G e n t iu m M o r e s . . . ( A u g s b u r g , 1 5 2 0 ) , iv ; a ls o c ite d in S tra u s s , o p . c i t ., 14 8 . 6 1 . K a r l O e t t i n g e r m a k e s t h e fa s c in a tin g o b s e r v a t io n t h a t d u r in g th is p e r io d th e w o r d L a u b s ig n ifie d b o t h “ f o lia g e ” a n d “ t a b e r n a c le ,” o r “ h o ly s a n c tu a r y .” S e e O e t t i n g e r , “ L a u b e , G a r t e n u n d W a ld : Z u e in e r T h e o r ie d e r s iid d e u t s c h e n S a k r a lk u n s t, 1 4 7 0 - 1 5 2 0 ,” in id e m , e d ., F estsc h r ift f u r H a n s S e d lm a y r ( M u n i c h , 1 9 6 2 ) , 2 0 1 - 2 8 . 1 a m g r a te fu l t o J o se p h L e o K o e r n e r f o r b r in g in g th is im p o r ta n t a r tic le t o m y a t t e n t io n . 6 2 . B a x a n d a ll, o p . c i t ., 3 1 . 6 3 . F o r a n e x t r a o r d in a r ily p o w e r f u l a n d se n sitiv e re a d in g o f th e St. G eorge, see W o o d , o p . c i t ., 1 38fF. 6 4 . S e e R ic h a r d K u e h n e m u n d , A r m in iu s ; or, T h e R is e o f a N a t i o n a l Sym bol i n L ite r a tu r e , f r o m H u t t e n to G r a b b e ( C h a p e l H i l l, 1 9 5 3 ) , 77 ^6 5 . F o r t h e im p lic a tio n s o f t h e K lo p s to c k t r ilo g y o n th e c u lt o f t h e n a tio n a l w o o d la n d , s e e th e e x h ib it io n c a ta lo g u e e d it e d b y B e r n d W e y e r g r a f, W a ld u n g en : D i e D e u ts ch e n u n d ih r W a ld (B e r lin : A k a d e m ie d e r K u n s t e , 1 9 8 7 ) , 6 3.

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66 . F o r a t h o u g h tfu l d iscu ssio n o f this sen sib ility, see H u b e rtu s F is ch e r, “ D ic h te r-W a ld : Z e its p r iin g e d u r ch S ilv a n ie n ,” in W e y e r g r a f, e d ., o p . c it., 6 - 2 5 . M a n y o f th e essays in this s u p e rb c o lle c tio n are essen tial r ea d in g fo r an u n d e r sta n d in g o f th e fo re st m y th in th e h is to ry o f m o d e r n G e rm a n y . 6 7 . R . E . P r u tz , D e r G o ttin g e r D ich te rb u n d z u r G eschichte d e r deutschen L ite r a tu r ( L e ip z ig , 1 8 4 1 ) , 2 2 7 -2 8 . I am m o st g ra te fu l t o P ro fes s o r G e rh a r d B ru n n fo r th is s o u rc e , as w e ll as fu r th e r in fo r m a tio n o n th e “ o a k ” cu lts o f th e e ig h te e n th an d n in e te e n th ce n tu rie s. 68. O n o a k cu lts in th is p e r io d , see th e e x c e lle n t e ssay b y A n n e m a rie H u r lim a n n , “ D ie E ic h e , h e ilig e r B a u m d e r d e u ts c h e r N a tio n ,” in W e y e r g r a f, e d ., o p . c it., 6 2 - 7 3 . 69. S e e A n n e d o r e M u lle r - H o fs t e d e , D e r La n d sch a ftsm a ler Pa scha J o h a n n F ried rich W eitsch 1 7 2 3 - 1 8 0 3 (B r a u n sc h w e ig , 1 9 7 3 ) , 1 7 4 - 9 1 . 70. S e e H a n n e lo r e G a r tn e r, G eorg F ried rich K er s tin g ( L e ip z ig , 19 8 8 ), 1 0 2 - 3 ; 2150 H u r li­ m a n n , o p . c it., 6 4 - 6 5 . It can h ard ly b e m e re c o in c id e n c e th a t A m Vorposten, th e K e r s tin g s e n ­ try p a in tin g , has b ee n p aid th e u ltim a te c o m p lim e n t o f b e in g tra n s fo rm e d in to a p o sta g e s ta m p f o llo w in g th e u n ific a tio n o f th e G e rm a n D e m o c ra tic R e p u b lic w ith th e F e d era l R e p u b ­ lic a fe w years a g o . M y th an k s are d u e t o A n n e tte S c h la g e n h a u ff fo r s h o w in g m e th e stam p ! 7 1 . T h e r e is n o w a facsim ile e d itio n o f th e A ltd e u tsc h e W d ld er in th r e e v o lu m e s w ith an e x ce lle n t in tr o d u c tio n b y W ilh e lm S c h o o f (D a r m s ta d t, 19 6 6 ). 72 . S ee G a b r ie le S e it z , D ie B r iid e r G r im m — L e b e n - W e r k - Z e it ( M u n ic h , 19 8 4 ). 73. Jack Z ip e s , “ T h e

E n c h a n te d F o re st o f th e B r o th e r s G r im m : N e w

M odes o f

A p p r o a c h in g th e G r im m s ’ F airy T a le s ,” G e r m a n ic R e v iew 6 2 , n o . 2 ( S p rin g 19 8 7 ): 6 6 -7 4 ; see also R o b e r t P o g u e H a rris o n , Forests: The Shadow o f C iv iliz a t io n ( C h ic a g o , 19 9 2 ), 1 6 4 - 7 6 . 74 . F o r th e h is to ry an d ic o n o g r a p h y o f th e D e tm o ld H e r m a n n s d e n k m a l a n d its f o r e ru n ­ ne rs, see th e e x ce lle n t v o lu m e o f essays E in J a h r h u n d e r t H e r m a n n s d e n k m a l 1 8 7 5 - 1 9 7 5 ( D e tm o ld , 1 9 7 5 ) , esp. th e b rillia n t essay b y T h o m a s N ip p e r d e y , “ Z u m J u b ilau m d e s H e r m a n n s d en k m a ls ,” n - 3 2 ; o th e r co n tr ib u tio n s b y A r n o F o r c h e r t o n A rm in iu s op e ra s; an d G e r d U n v e r fe h r t o n th e ic o n o g r a p h y o f th e v o n B a n d el sta tu e . 7 5 . E ric h S a n d o w , “ V o r la u fe r d es D e tm o ld e r H e r m a n n s d e n k m a ls,” in E in J a h r h u n d e r t H e r m a n n sd e n km a l, 10 7 - 8 . 76 . F o r t h e s ig n ifica n ce o f th e p ark , see S im o n S ch a m a , C itize n s: A C h r o n ic le o fth e French R e v o lu tio n ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 9 ), 1 5 6 - 5 9 . 7 7 . S e e H . E. M itt ig , “ Z u Jo seph E rn st v o n B a n d els H e r m a n n s d e n k m a l im T e u t o b u r g e r W a ld ,” in Lippische M itte ilu n g e n a u s Geschichte u n d L a n d e sk u n d e 3 7 (19 6 8 ): 20off. 78 . W . K lin k e n b e r g , e d ., D a s H e r m a n n s -D e n k m a l u n d d e r T eu to bu rg er W a ld ( D e tm o ld , 18 7 5 ). 79 . S e e th e illu stra tio n s an d r e p o rt in th e jo u rn a l D ie G a rten la u b e , 18 7 5 . 80. T a c itu s , A n n a ls, 2.88 (p . 5 1 9 ) . 8 1 . F o r d e ta ils o f th e co n str u c tio n o f th e N e w U lm m o n u m e n t, see H e r m a n n , fr o m L e g ­ e n d to Sym bol (N e w U lm , M in n .: B r o w n C o u n ty H isto rica l S o c ie ty , n .d .) ; an d E r ic h S a n d o w , D a s H e r m a n n s d e n k m a l in N ew U lm , M inneso ta , U S A : E in B e itr a g z u m 8 o ja r ig e n Bestehen des bandelschen H e rm a n n sd e n km a ls ( L ip p e , 19 5 6 ). 82. A n a b r id g e d an d tra n sla te d versio n has b e e n p u b lish e d as The N a t u r a l H istory o f the G e r m a n People, e d . an d trans. D a v id J. D ie p h o u s e ( L a m p e te r , W a le s, 19 9 0 ), w ith a u sefu l b io g ra p h ica l in tr o d u c tio n b y th e tra n sla tor. 83. W ilh e lm H e in rich R ie h l, L a n d u n d L e u te ( S tu ttg a r t, 1 8 6 1 ) , 63. 84. S e e J o s e f N ik o la u s F o r ste r, “ D ie B a ye risch e F o r s to r d n u n g v o n 15 6 8 ,” in W ald, M ensch, K u lt u r (B e rlin an d L o n d o n , 19 6 7 ) , 1 0 0 - 1 2 . 8 5. “ D e b a te s o n th e L a w o n T h e fts o f W o o d , ” M a y 2 5, 18 4 2 , in K arl M a r x a n d F r e d ­ e rick E n g e ls, C o llected Works ( L o n d o n , N e w Y o r k , an d M o s c o w ) , v o l. 1 , K a r l M a r x, 1 8 3 5 - 1 8 5 5 , 2 2 4 -6 3 . I am g ra te fu l t o P ro fes s o r D a n ie l B e ll fo r r e m in d in g m e o f th e le n g th s t o w h ic h M a rx w e n t (in c lu d in g a c ita tio n fro m The M e r ch a n t o f Venice) t o p ress his a tta ck o n th e r ep la c em en t o f c u s to m a r y b y a b s o lu te p ro p e r ty rig h ts , an d th e c r im in a liz a tio n o f cu s to m . 86. R ie h l, o p . c it., 59.

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8 7 . S e e A n d r e w L e e s , R e v o lu tio n a n d R e fle ctio n : In t e lle c tu a l C h a n g e i n G e r m a n y D u r ­ i n g th e 18 5 0 s ( T h e H a g u e , 1 9 7 4 ) . 8 8. J o s e f N ik o la u s F o r s t e r , “ D ie E in g lie d e r u n g d e r F o r stw is s e n sc h a ft in d ie U n iv e rs ita t M u n c h e n , in o p . c i t ., i6 6 f f . 8 9.

Joh^in Christian Hundeshagen,

E n z y k lo p d d ie d e r Forstw issenschaft

(Giessen,

18 2 7 ).

90. F o r B e n ja m in ’ s y o u th f u l e n g a g e m e n t w it h th e W a n d e r v o g e l, s ee J o h n M c C o l e , W a l­ te r B e n ja m in a n d the A n t in o m ie s o f T r a d it io n ( It h a c a , 19 9 3 ) . I am m o s t g r a te fu l t o P r o fe s ­ s o r M c C o l e f o r s h a r in g h is k n o w le d g e o n th is im p o r ta n t issu e w ith m e . 9 1 . S e e J o a c h im W o ls c h k e - B u lm a h n , “ T h e F e a r o f th e N e w L a n d sc a p e : A s p e c ts o f th e P e r c e p t io n o f L a n d s c a p e in th e G e r m a n Y o u t h M o v e m e n t B e t w e e n 19 0 0 a n d 19 3 3 a n d Its In f lu e n c e o n L a n d s c a p e P la n n in g ,” J o u r n a l o f A r c h ite c t u r a l a n d P la n n i n g R e se a rch 9 , n o . 1 ( S p r in g 19 9 2 ) : 3 3 - 4 7 . 9 2 . S e e P e t e r V e d d e le r , “ N a tio n a le F e ie rn am H e r m a n n s d e n k m a l in fr iih e r e r Z e i t , ” in E i n J a h r h u n d e r t H e r m a n n s d e n k m a l, 1 7 7 . 9 3 . O t t o F r e u c h t , D e r W a ld a ls L e b e n s g e m e in s c h a ft( O h r in g e n , 1 9 3 6 ) ; K u r t H u e c k , M e h r S ch u tzg e b ie t! ( N e u d a m m , 1 9 3 6 ) . F o r m a n y o t h e r title s in th e s a m e v e in , see th e e x h a u s tiv e b ib lio g r a p h y c o m p ile d b y M ic h a e l G la s m e ie r fo r W e y e r g r a f, e d ., o p . c it., 3 1 2 - 2 0 . 9 4 . A lf r e d D o b l in , D e r n e u e U rw a ld (A m s te r d a m , 1 9 3 8 ). 9 5 . S e e G e r t G r o n i n g a n d J o a c h im W o ls c h k e - B u lm a h n , “ P o litic s , P la n n in g a n d th e P r o ­ t e c t i o n o f N a tu r e : P o lit ic a l A b u s e o f E a rly E c o lo g ic a l Id e a s in G e r m a n y , 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 4 5 , ” P l a n ­ n i n g P erspectiv es 2 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 2 8 - 2 9 . 96. S e e ch ap . 4. 9 7 . S e e C h r is W ic k h a m , “ E u r o p e a n F o r e sts in th e E a rly M id d le A g e s : L a n d sc a p e a n d L a n d C le a r a n c e ,” in U a m b ie n te veg eta le n e ll’a lto m edioevo ( S p o le t o : C e n t r o ita lia n o d i s tu d i s u ll’ a lt o m e d i o e v o , 1 9 9 0 ) , 5 1 5 - 2 0 . 9 8 . O n t h e in d u s tr ia lly g e n e r a t e d p h e n o m e n o n o f W a ld sterben in th e G e r m a n fo r e sts, see K a r l F r ie d r ic h W e n t z e l , “ H a t d e r W a ld n o c h e in e Z u k u n f t ? ” in W e y e r g r a f, e d ., o p . c it., 10 2 -12 . 9 9 . F o r K ie f e r ’s e a r ly c a re e r , s e e th e e x c e lle n t e x h ib it io n c a ta lo g u e b y M a r k R o s e n th a l, A n s e lm K ie f e r ( C h i c a g o a n d P h ila d e lp h ia , 1 9 8 7 ) , 1 2 - 3 0 . 10 0 . T h e artist q u o t e d in G o t z A d r ia n i, Th e Books o f A n s e lm K ie fe r ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 9 1 ) , 28. 1 0 1 . S e e H e in e r S t a c h e lh a u s , Joseph Beuys, tra n s. D a v id B r itt ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 9 1 ) , 1 0 9 - 1 0 . 10 2 . J o s e p h B e u y s , in te r v ie w b y R ic h a r d D e m a r c o , “ A r t in to T im e : C o n v e r s a tio n s w ith A r t is t s ,” S t u d io I n t e r n a t io n a l, 1 9 5 , n o . 9 9 6 ( S e p t. 19 8 2 ): 4 7 . 10 3 . S e e R ic h a r d F l o o d , “ W a g n e r ’ s H e a d , ” A r tF o r u m 2 1 ( S e p t. 19 8 2 ): 6 9 - 7 1 . 10 4 . F o r a s e r io u s a n d p r o v o c a t iv e d is c u s s io n o f K ie f e r ’ s in te r e s t in “ c u lt u r a l m e m o r y ” a n d o f h is in s is t e n c e o n t h e im p o r t a n c e o f its m y t h ic c o m p o n e n t , s e e J o h n C . G il m o u r , F ir e o n th e E a r th : A n s e lm K ie f e r a n d th e P o stm o d e r n W o r ld ( P h ila d e lp h ia , 1 9 9 0 ), e sp . c h a p s . 5 a n d 6 . W h il e G i l m o u r ’ s d is c u s s io n o f K ie f e r ’ s p la c e in p o s t m o d e r n i s m is a lw a y s s t i m u l a t in g , it d o e s s e e m t o m e t h a t h e is t o o d e t e r m i n e d t o s e e h is w o r k as s h a p e d b y th e “ c la s s ic a l” lin e o f p o s t m o d e r n t h e o r e t ic ia n s f r o m N i e t z s c h e t o H e i d e g g e r a n d L y o t a r d . K ie f e r ’ s a t t it u d e t o w a r d m a n y o f t h e s e c a n o n ic a l f ig u r e s , e s p e c ia lly t h e u n a v o id a b le H e i ­ d egger, w h o

a c t u a ll y a p p e a rs as o n e

o f th e w o o d e n

b lo c k - h e a d s in t h e

W ege d e r

W e ltw e ish e it, s e e m s t o m e m u c h m o r e a m b ig u o u s a n d o f t e n d o w n r i g h t h o s t ile . K ie f e r ’ s s e n s ib ilit y is , i t s e e m s t o m e , o r ig i n a l a n d in t e r e s t in g p r e c is e ly b e c a u s e h e fo r c e s a m u t u a l a d d r e s s b e t w e e n t h e o r y a n d h is t o r y in w a y s d e lib e r a t e ly e v a d e d b y m u c h ( n o t a ll) p o s t s tr u c t u r a lis t a r g u m e n t . 1 0 5 . J o s e p h L e o K o e r n e r h as s o m e p r o f o u n d ly illu m in a tin g rem a rk s o n th e th e m e o f th e H o lz w e g a p r o p o s o f C a s p a r D a v id F r ie d r ic h ’s w o o d la n d la n d s ca p e s in C a s p a r D a v i d F r ie d r ic h a n d th e S u b je c t o f L a n d s ca p e ( L o n d o n , 1 9 9 0 ) , 1 59ff10 6 . A n s e lm K ie fe r , q u o t e d in R o s e n th a l, o p . c i t., 5 5 . 1 0 7 . S e e S t e p h a n ie B a r r o n e t a l., G e r m a n E xp ressio nist P r in ts a n d D r a w in g s ( R o b e r t G o r e R ifk in d C e n t e r f o r E x p r e s s io n is t S t u d ie s , L o s A n g e le s C o u n t y M u s e u m o f A r t , 19 8 9 ).

NOTES

588

108. I o w e th e a c c o u n t o f W a g n e r ’ s resp on se t o a p e r fo r m a n ce o f D e r F reisch iitz t o th e k in dn ess an d sch o la rly g e n e r o s ity o f T im B la n n in g . 109. In th is v e in , see , fo r e x a m p le , A rth u r D a n to ’s r e v ie w o f th e 19 8 9 A m e r ic a n e x h ib i­ tio n s o f K ie fe r ’s w o r k in The N a tio n , Jan. 2 ,1 9 8 9 , 2 6 - 2 8 , w h e r e h e a c cu ses th e artist o f e la b ­ o rate d is in g e n u o u s n e s s an d p e r p e tr a tin g “ W a g n e ria n w a r m u s ic . . . a h e a v y -h a n d e d c o m p o s t o f s h a llo w id eas an d f o g g y b e lie fs .” n o . M a r y L e fk o w it z , “ T h e M y th o f Jo seph C a m p b e ll,” A m e r ic a n Scholar 5 9 , n o . 3 (19 9 0 ): 4 2 9 -3 4 . i n . S e e N o r m a n M a n e a , “ H a p p y G u ilt ,” N ew R e p u b lic, A u g . 5 , 1 9 9 1 , 2 7 - 3 6 . 1 1 2 . C a r lo G in z b u r g , “ G e rm a n ic M y th o lo g y an d N a zism : T h o u g h ts o n an O ld B o o k b y G e o r g e s D u m e z il,” in C lu es, Myths, a n d the H isto r ica l M ethod, trans. Jo h n a n d A n n e T e d e s c h i ( B a ltim o r e an d L o n d o n , 19 8 9 ), 1 2 5 - 5 5 . 1 1 3 . T h e s to r y c o m e s t o m e fro m m y frie n d L e o n W ie s eltie r.

Chapter Three: The Liberties o f the Greenwood 1. T h e a c c o u n t th a t fo llo w s is b ased o n th e b io g r a p h ica l s k e tch in J o h n H u t c h in s , The H istory a n d A n t iq u itie s o f the C o u n ty o f Dorset, 2 v o ls. ( L o n d o n , 1 7 7 4 ) , 2 :6 3 - 6 4 . 2. N o t su rp risin gly , a v illa g e w ith th is n a m e n o lo n g e r e xists. B u t fo r th e h is to r y o f th e farm an d its s e q u e str a tio n , see H u tc h in s , o p . c it., 1:4 89 . 3. Ib id ., 2:63. 4. W illiam G ilp in , R e m a rks on Forest Scenery a n d O th e r W o o d la n d Views, 2 v o ls ., 3d e d . ( L o n d o n , 18 08 ), 2:26. 5. Ib id ., 2 17 . 6. Ib id ., 44. 7. Ib id ., 4 7 . 8. Ib id ., 2 18 . 9. F o r th e im p o rta n ce o f G e o r g e I I I , e sp e cia lly to w a r d th e e n d o f th e e ig h te e n th c e n ­ tu ry , as an e m b le m fig u re o f p a trio tic p o p u la r ity , see th e b rillia n t a c c o u n t g iv e n b y L in d a C o l ­ le y, Britons: F o rg in g the N a tio n , 1 7 0 7 - 1 8 3 7 ( N e w H a v e n , 19 9 2 ) , in p a rticu la r ch ap . 5. 10. See F ran k B a rlo w , W illia m R u fu s ( L o n d o n , 19 8 3 ) , 1 2 1 . 1 1 . Ib id ., 429. 12 . See C h a rle s Y o u n g , T he R o y a l Forests o f M e d ie v a l E n g la n d (P h ila d e lp h ia , 1 9 7 9 ), 7. 13 . C ite d in B rian V e s e y F itz g e r a ld , P o r tr a it o f the N ew Forest ( L o n d o n , 19 6 6 ), 79. 14 . A s T o u L ike It, ac t 5, sce n e 4. 15 . O liv e r R a c k h a m , Trees a n d W oodlands in the B ritish L a nd sca pe ( L o n d o n , 19 9 0 ), 48. “ R e a d in g th e A n g lo - S a x o n ch arters, o n e has th e im p re ssio n th a t E n g la n d . . . w as d e fin ite ly n o t a v e r y w o o d e d p lace. . . . T h e g r e a t su rv e y o f 108 6 m a k es it cle a r th a t E n g la n d w as n o t v e ry w o o d e d .” S e e also id e m , A n c ie n t W oodland: Its H istory, V eg eta tion a n d Uses i n E n g la n d ( L o n d o n , 19 8 0 ); P e te r M a r r e n , B r it a in ’s A n c ie n t W o o d la nd ( L o n d o n , 19 9 0 ), 5 3 , also c o n ­ clu d e s th a t “ b y R o m a n tim es , th re e q u arte rs o f th e w ild w o o d h ad g o n e .” 16 . H . C . D a r b y , “ T h e A n g lo -S c a n d in a v ia n F o u n d a tio n s ” an d “ D o m e s d a y E n g la n d ,” in id e m , e d ., A N ew H isto r ica l Geography o f E n g la n d before 1600 ( C a m b r id g e , 19 7 6 ) , 3 4 - 3 5 an d 5 3 ff.; also C h a r le s H ig o u n e t , “ L e s F o re ts d e l’ E u r o p e o c c id e n ta le d u V e au X le si£ cle,” in A g r ic u lt u r a e m ondo ru r a le in occidente n e ll’a lto m edioevo (S p o le to : C e n t r o ita lia n o d i s tu d i s u ll’ a lto m e d io e v o , 19 6 6 ), 353. 17 . R a c k h a m , Trees a n d W oodlands, 18 3. 18. F o r a u sefu l a c c o u n t o f th e m e d iev al fo re st in F ran ce as w e ll as E n g la n d , see R o la n d B e c h m a n n , Trees a n d M a n : Th e Forest in the M id d le A ges, trans. K ath ary n D u n h a m ( N e w Y o r k , 19 90 ). In co m p a ris o n w ith th e m o st re c e n t w o r k , B e ch m a n n p erh ap s ov e re m p h a s iz es th e starkness o f th e c o n tr a s t (ra th e r th an th e co n tin u itie s ) b e tw e e n c u ltiv a te d a g ric u ltu re an d th e fo re st h ab itat. S e e also th e t w o im p o r ta n t articles b y C h a rle s H ig o u n e t , “ L e s F o re ts d e

N OTE S

5 89

l’ Europe occidentale du Ve si£cle a l’an mil,” in A g r ic u ltu r e , e m on d o ru r a le , and “ Les Forets de l’ Europe occidentale.” 19. See Rackham, Trees a n d W oodlands. 20. William Ellis, T h e T im b e r -T r e e Im proved ; or, T h e B est P r a c t ic a l M etho d s o f Im p r o v in g L a n d s w ith T im b e r , 2 vols. in 1, 3d ed. (London, 1742), 2:26. 21. This is a point very well made in a superb article by Chris Wickham, “ European Forests in the Early Middle Ages: Landscape and Land Clearance,” in L ’a m b ie n te vegetale n e ll’a lto m ed io ev o (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1990), 480-548. Wickham does draw attention to the differing degrees o f separation or connection between forested and non-forested economies in different areas o f Europe. (The Odenwald, for exam­ ple, emerges as an area where the opposition between the two societies was more abruptly delineated.) 2 2. The best account o f the institutions and administration o f the forest is Young, op. cit. 23. See M att Cartmill, A V iew to a D e a t h in the M o r n in g : H u n t i n g a n d N a tu r e thro ugh H isto r y (Cam bridge, M ass., 1993), 30-31. Cartmill’s brilliant study appeared too late for me to integrate its rich insights into my own account, but I am still indebted to the book for its suggestive reading o f hunting lore as a way o f understanding cultural ambivalence toward the natural world. 24. See Barbara Hanawalt, “ M en’s Games, King’s Deer: Poaching in Medieval England,” J o u r n a l o f M e d ie v a l a n d R e n a iss a n ce S tu d ie s 18, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 175-93, f ° r the initiatory aspects o f the hunt. Hanawalt’s article principally concerns evidence on poaching and is drawn from case histories presented in the forest courts, but many o f its insights could equally well be applied to the licit practices o f the royal hunt. See also Cartmill, op. cit., 64. 25. T h e A n g lo - S a x o n C h r o n ic le , ed. and trans. Dorothy Whitelock (London, 1961), 164-65. 26. For details o f their respective jurisdiction, see N . D. G. James, A H isto ry o f E n g lish Forestry (O xford, 1981), i8ff.; Young, op. cit., 18-59. 27. John M anwood, A trea tise o f the la w s o f the fo rest; w herein is d ecla r ed n o t only those la w s a s they a r e now i n fo r ce , b u t also th e o r ig in a l a n d b e g in n in g o f fo rests a n d w h a t a fo r e st is

. . . (London, 1598). 28. See Jam es, op. cit., 17. 29. M anwood (abridgement), in Nicholas C ox, T h e g e n t le m a n ’s r e c r e a t io n .. . t o w hich is now a d d e d a p e r fe c t a b s tr a ct o f a l l the fo re st-la w s (London, 1697), 35. 30. See G. J. Turner, S elected P lea s o f the Forest (London, 1901). 31. See the introduction by J. F. Stagg to N e w F orest D o cu m en ts, 2 vols. (Hampshire County Council Records Series, 1979) i:ix; see also Young, op. cit., 30-31. 32. Stagg, op. cit., 1:98. 33. The operation o f these profitable loopholes is described in Young, op. cit., 37,1 i6ff. 34. J. C . H olt, R o b i n H o o d (London, 1982), 62-63; see also Maurice Keen, T h e O u tla w s o f M e d ie v a l L e g e n d (1961; London, 1977), though Keen differs sharply from H olt in his argu­ ment that the Robin H ood tales are an authentic product o f popular culture and represent in its ow n p r o p e r n a t u r e

the real stirring o f social rebellion. 35. T h e G r een w o o d T ree (n.p., n.d.). 36. Ibid. 37. See David Wiles, T h e E a r ly P lay s o f R o b in H o o d (Cam bridge, 1981). 38. There is now a vast literature on the “ world turned upside down” rituals o f the Renaissance and especially on carnival. For an introduction to many o f these issues, see Emm anuel Le Roy Ladurie, C a r n i v a l i n R o m a n s , trans. Mary Feeney (New York, 1979). 39. Q uoted in H olt, op. cit., 161; see also Wiles, op. cit., 17. 40. Wiles, op. cit., 48. 41. See the excellent account o f these developments given in John Perlin, A F orest J o u r ­ (New York, 1989), 167. 42. Cited in F. V. Emery, “ England about 1600,” in Darby, ed., op. cit., 273.

ney: T h e R o le o f W ood in the D e v e lo p m e n t o f C i v i li z a t io n

590

NOTES

43. Cited in James, op. cit., 139. 44. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Forests a n d Sea Power: The T im b e r Problem o f the R o y a l (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), 107; see also Perlin, op. cit., 208. 45. The principle o f the “ General Plantation” was to set aside forty o f every thousand acres o f the realm for replanting, with trees set at ten-yard intervals for optimal growth. 46. See George Hammersley, “ The Revival o f the Forest Laws under Charles I,” H istory 45, no. 154 (June i960): 85-102 . 1 am most grateful to Mark Kishlansky for this source. 47. See Buchanan Sharp, In C o n te m p t o f A l l A u th o rity : R u r a l A r tis a n s a n d R i o t i n the West o f E n g la n d , 1 5 8 6 - 1 6 6 0 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), 249 and passim. 48. For details o f the publishing history o f S ilv a, see Blanche Henrey, B r itish B o ta n ica l a n d H o r tic u ltu r a l L ite ra tu r e before 1800 (Oxford and New York, 1975), i:io2ff. 49. Cited in Henrey, op. cit., 1:103. 50. Letter o f Evelyn, July 11, 1679, at the time o f the third edition, cited in Henrey, op. cit., 1:106. 51. John Evelyn, Silva, 5th ed., ed. Alexander Hunter (York, 1776), 147. 52. Ibid., “ Epistle Dedicatory,” n.p. 53. Ibid., 617. 54. John Milton, “ Comus, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, Before the Earl o f Bridgewater, Then President o f Wales,” in Douglas Bush, ed., The P o rta b le M ilto n (London, 1977), 92, lines 534-35. 55. Ibid., 616. 56. Ibid., 643, 577. 57. Cited in Henrey, op. cit., 1:106. 58. The most exhaustive scholarly account o f this perennial problem is still Albion, op. cit. 59. Evelyn, op. cit., 634. 60. Ibid., 633. 61. The Poem s o f A le x a n d e r Pope: A R e d u c e d Version o f the T w ick en h am T ext, ed. John Butt (New Haven and London, 1963), 209. 62. John Charnock, A n H istory o f M a r in e A r c h ite c tu r e , 3 vols. (London, 1800-2), 3:171. 63. Batty Langley, A S u re M etho d o f Im p ro v in g Estates (London, 1728), i-ii. 64. Cited in Fitzgerald, op. cit., 97. 65. E. P. Thompson, W higs a n d H u n te r s (New York, 1975). 66. Cited in Henrey, op. cit., 2:559-60. 67. Fisher’s book and his correspondence with shipwrights was reprinted in 1771 by spe­ cial order o f the House o f Commons committee o f inquiry, who had also called him as an expert witness. For a discussion o f arboreal patriotism, see Stephen Daniels, “The Political Iconography o f the Woodland in Later Georgian England,” in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography o f Landscape: Essays on the Sym bolic R epresen ta tio n , D esig n a n d Use o f P a st E n v iro n m en ts (Cambridge, 1988), 43-81. 68. Roger Fisher, H e a r t o f O a k: The B ritish B u lw a r k (n.p., 1772), chap. 37. 69. See Sir Henry Wood, A H istory o f the R o y a l Society o f A r ts (London, 1912), 143-51. 70. See Andrew Emmerich, T he C u lt u r e o f Forests; w ith a n a p p e n d ix in w hich the sta te o f the royal forests is considered, a n d a system f o r th e ir proposed im p ro v em en t (London, 1789). 71. Alexander Hunter, in Evelyn, op. cit., 111. 72. Ibid., 557. 73. The subscription list is printed with the frontispiece to the Hunterian edition. For some other sources o f aristocratic tree enthusiasm in the latter half o f the century, see Keith Thomas, M a n a n d the N a t u r a l W orld: C h a n g in g A tt it u d e s in E n g la n d , 15 0 0 -18 0 0 (London, 1983), 220-23. 74. See the subscription list printed with Hunter’s edition o f S ilv a, preface, n.p. 75. Ibid., 101. N avy, 1 6 5 2 - 1 8 5 2

NOTES 76. William Cowper, “ Yardley Oak,” in 1984), 72. 77. Ellis, op. cit., 2:23. 78. William Marshall, P la n ti n g 79. Albion, op. cit., 395-96. 80. Ibid., 396.

S elected Poem s,

59 1 ed. Nick Rhodes (Manchester,

a n d O r n a m e n ta l G a r d e n in g

(London, 1785).

81. H is report is printed in Cyril E. Hart, R o y a l Forest: A H isto ry o f D e a n ’s W oods as P r o ­ (Oxford, 1966), 312-14. 82. For the operation o f the ring (and its unbreakability), see Albion, op. cit., 58ff. 83. See the account given in Louis Badre, H isto ir e d e la f o r e t fr a n g a ise (Paris, 1983), 60-64. A beautiful series o f panels illustrating the ceremonies, painted for a timber merchant in the eastern forests o f the V osges, are preserved in the m a ir ie o f Raon-l’Etape. 84. The exhaustive history o f forestry in old regime France is a superlative monograph by Andrde Corvol, L ’H o m m e e t I ’a rb re sous I’A n c i e n R e g im e (Paris, 1984). The most important manual for the training o f French foresters was Duhamel du Monceau, D e I ’E x p lo ita tio n des bois, 2 vols. (Paris, 1964). 85. Vitruvius, D e a r c h ite c tu r a , trans. F. Granger (Cambridge, M ass., and London, 1983), 2.1 (p. 81). 86. Louis Badr£, L e s E a u x e t le sfo r e ts d u n e a u l o e siecle (Paris, 1987), 91. 87. John Croum bie Brown, T h e F r e n ch F orest O r d in a n c e o f 1669 (Edinburgh, 1883), 33; see also Badr6, H is to ir e d e la f o r e t fr a n g a ise , 73. 88. See Corvol, op. cit. 89. See Serge Benoit, “ Les Forges de Buffon,” in the commemorative volume B u ffo n (Paris, 1988), 136-57. 90. See Daniel Solakian, “ De la multiplication des chevres sous la Revolution,” in D. W oronoff, ed., R e v o lu tio n e t espaces fo r e stie r s (Paris, 1988), 53-62. This volume is indis­ pensable for an understanding o f the effects o f the French Revolution on forests. 91. Paul Walden Bam ford, Forests a n d F r e n ch Sea Pow er, 1660-1789 (Toronto, 1956), 112. 92. F or one (unflattering) description o f the Jewish timber trade, see Robert Johnston, T r a v e ls th r o u g h P a r t o f the R u s s ia n E m p ir e a n d P o la n d (New York, 1876), 68, 368f. 93. T h e D ic t io n a r y o f N a t i o n a l B io g ra phy (London, 1917), 16:1125. 94. For the complete text, see Maurice Buxton-Forman, ed., L etters o f Jo h n K e a t s ( Oxford, Lon don , and Toron to, 1947), 95, n. 1. 95. P o em s by J o h n K e a ts, ed. Walter Raleigh (London, 1897), 295-96. d u ce r s o f T im b e r

C h a p ter Four: The V erda nt Cross 1. The story is told in James H utchings’s Scenes o f W o n d e r a n d C u r io s ity i n C a lifo r n ia , 3d ed. (New York and San Francisco, 1875), 10-12. 2. See Alfred Runte, Yosem ite: T he E m b a ttle d W ild ern ess (Lincoln, N eb., and London, 1990), 8-9; also Elizabeth Godfrey, Y o sem ite I n d ia n s , rev. James Snyder and Craig Bates (Yosemite N ational Park: Yosemite Natural History Association, 1977), 3. 3. H utchings, op. cit., 45. 4. F or the initial reception o f the news, see the account given in J. D. Whitney, The Y o s em ite Book (San Francisco, 1868), iozff. Whitney was the state geologist appointed under the terms o f California’s reservation o f the valley in 1864 to conduct a thorough geological and topographical survey. 5. Ibid., 103. 6. Cited in Thom as Starr King, A V a ca tio n a m o n g the Sierras, ed. John A. Hussey (San Francisco, 1962), 31. The text was also printed in one o f Starr King’s articles on Yosemite sent to the B oston E v e n in g T r a n s c r ip t in 1861.

592

NOTES

7. Horace Greeley, A n O v e r la n d Journey fr o m N ew Y o rk to S a n F rancisco in the S u m ­ m er o f 18 5 9 (New York, 1964), 264. 8. Hutchings, op. cit., 43. For more details on the commercialization o f the trees, see the excellent essay by Nancy K. Anderson “The Kiss o f Enterprise,” in William H. Truettner, ed., The W est as A m e r ic a : R e in ter p re tin g Im ag es o f the F rontier, 18 2 0 - 1 9 2 0 (Washington and London, 1991), 268-77. 9. For nineteenth-century landscape tourism in America, see the excellent book by John F. Sears, S acred Places: A m e r ic a n T o u rist A ttr a c tio n s in the N in e te e n th C e n tu r y (Oxford, 1989). Chapter 5 is devoted to the Big Trees. 10. See Arnold Crompton, A postle o f Liberty: S ta r r K in g in C a lifo r n ia (Boston, 1950). 11. King, op. cit., 32. 12. Whitney, op. cit., 41. 13. Cited in William Day Simonds, S ta r r K in g in C a lifo r n ia (San Francisco, 1917), 84-85. 14. Ibid., 35. 15. Boston D a ily A d v ertiser, Nov. 3, 1869; also cited in John K. Howat et al., A m e r ic a n Paradise: The W orld o f the H u d so n R iv e r School (New York: Metropolitan Museum o f Art, 1987), 297 n. 9. 16. See, for example, John Muir’s comment to this effect in his essay “The Sequoia and Gen­ eral Grant National Parks,” in O u r N a tio n a l Parks (San Francisco, 1991), 207; on the “immor­ tality” o f the trees,see Muir, The M o u n ta in s o f C a lifo r n ia (New York, 1894), 181-82. “The Holy o f Holies o f the Woods” occurs in A fo o t to Yosem ite (1874; reprint, San Francisco, 1924), 10. 17. See Pauline Grenbeaux, “ Before Yosemite Art Gallery: Watkins’ Early Career,” C a l ­ ifo r n ia History, special issue (Carleton E. Watkins) 57, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 220-41. 18. For Olmsted’s report and his part in the Yosemite reservation, see Laura Roper, F L O : A Biography o f F rederick La w O lm sted (Baltimore, 1973), 233-90. 19. Cited in the extraordinarily learned and perceptive book by Michael Williams, A m e r ­ ica n s a n d T h eir Forests: A H isto r ica l Geography (Cambridge, 1989), 144. 20. For the chronology and documentation o f Bierstadt’s journeys, see Gordon Hen­ dricks, “The First Three Western Journeys o f Albert Bierstadt,” A r t B u lle tin 46, no. 3 (Sept. i 9 <*4 )> 333-6721. For more details o f his career and an extremely helpful chronology and documenta­ tion, see the superb exhibition catalogue by Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, A lb e r t Bierstadt: A r t a n d Enterprise (Brooklyn Museum, 1990), esp. 146-244. 22. Fitz Hugh Ludlow, “Seven Weeks in the Great Yo-Semite,” A t l a n t i c M onthly 13 (June 1864): 745. 23. Ibid. 24. See the inventory compiled by Hendricks, op. cit., 354-65. N ot all o f these paintings have, however, survived and they are o f widely varying size. 25. Quoted in Roper, op. cit., 265-66. 26. Ludlow, op. cit., 744. 27. Clarence King, M o u n ta in e e r in g in the S ierra N e v a d a (Boston, 1872), 43. 28. Quoted in Roderick Nash, W ilderness a n d the A m e r ic a n M in d (New Haven, 1967), 73 - 7 4 -

29. Barbara Novak, N a tu r e a n d C u ltu r e : A m e r ic a n La nd sca pe a n d P a in tin g , 1 8 2 5 - 1 8 7 5 (New York, 1980), 266-71. 30. Asher Durand, “ Letters on Landscape Painting,” no. 2, Th e Crayon, Jan. 17,1855,34. 31. Bryant’s address was subsequently published by the National Academy o f Design as A F u n e r a l O r a tio n O ccasioned by the D e a th o f Thom as C ole, D e liv e r e d before the N a tio n a l A ca d em y o f D esig n, N ew -Y o rk, M a y 4 th , 18 48 .

32. William Cullen Bryant, “The Antiquity o f Freedom,” in (New York, 1849), 227. 33. Bryant, “A Forest Hymn,” in Poems, 88.

A r r a n g e d by the A u th o r

Poems, C o lle cted a n d

NOTES

593

34. See pages 226-40. 35. Jam es Fenimore Cooper, T h e P a th fin d e r (New York: Signet Classic, 1981), n . 36. F or more on this subject, see the classic survey by Roderick N ash, W ildern ess a n d

the

A m e r ic a n M in d .

37. Cole had, in fact, been experimenting with ruins overrun by greenery in a number o f paintings and drawings made during his stay in Italy. 38. Thom as Cole to Henry Pratt, cited in Ellwood C. Parry III, T h e A r t o f T h om a s Cole: A m b i t i o n a n d I m a g in a t io n (Cranbury, N .J.; London; and Mississauga, O nt., 1988), facing plate 17, n.p. For a brief discussion o f the painting, see 313-14. 39. R ud o lf Wittkower, “ The Interpretation o f Visual Symbols,” in A lle g o r y a n d the M ig r a tio n o f Sym bols (London, 1977), 186. 40. Robert Ackerman, J . G . F ra zer: H i s L ife a n d W ork (Cambridge, England, and New York, 1987). For more penetrating criticism, see Mary Douglas, “ Judgements on James Frazer,” D a e d a lu s (Generations) 107, no. 4 (Fall 1978): 151-64. 41. On Trevelyan’s mystical communions with landscape, see the brilliant biography by David Cannadine, G . M . T revely a n (London and New York, 1993). 42. O n W arburg, see E. H . Gombrich, A b y W a rbu rg : A n In t e lle c tu a l B io g ra phy (C hicago, 1970), esp. chap. 13, “ The Theory o f Social M emory” ; also the extremely impor­ tant essay by C arlo G inzburg, “ From Aby Warburg to E. H . Gombrich: A Problem o f M ethod ,” in C lu e s, M yths, a n d the H is t o r ic a l M e th o d , trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Bal­ timore and L on don , 1989), 17-59. G inzburg is himself much interested in the eloquence o f peculiarity and has profound things to say o f its value for the historian in the introduc­ tion to Ecsta cies: D e c ip h e r in g th e W itch e s’ S a bba th , trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1991). 43. Gom brich, op. cit., 123-24. 44. F or an account o f the trip, see Ron Chernow, T h e W a rbu rg s (New York, 1993), 64—66. 45. Felix Gilbert, “ From Art History to the History o f Civilization: Aby W arburg,” in H isto ry : C h o ic e a n d C o m m it m e n t (Cambridge, M ass., 1977), 434. 46. Cited in Chernow, op. cit., 176. 47. F or an account o f Warburg’s sickness, see the version by Warburg’s student Carl G eorg H eise, P e rso n lich e E r in n e r u n g e n a n A b y W a r b u r g (New York, 1947); also Chernow, op. cit., 203-6, 254-61. 48. On the original trip, see Gombrich, op. cit., 88ff.; on the lecture, 216-27. 49. Chernow, op. cit., 286-87. 50. Pliny, N a t u r a l H isto ry , trans. H . Rackham (Cam bridge, Mass., 1986), book 16. For a discussion o f the phoenix-palm, see also Jacques Brosse, M y tholog ie d es (Paris, 1989), i63ff. 51. See Wittkower, op. cit., 90. 52. See Chiara Frugoni, “ Alberi (in paradiso voluptatis),” in L ’a m b ie n te veg eta le n e ll’ a lto m ed io ev o (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1990), 762-63, illus. 14. 53. F or the attacks on forest cults and the subsequent assimilation o f sacred groves to the Christian tradition, see Reginald G regoire, “ La foresta come esperienza religiosa,” in L ’ a m b i­ e n te veg eta le, 662-703. x > 54. C ited in Valerie Flint, T h e R is e o f M a g ic i n M e d ie v a l E u ro p e {Pnnceton, 1991). Flint s richly docum ented book makes a wholly persuasive case for the conscious co-option o f pagan

cults and

rites in the service o f Christian conversion.

5 5 / Lisa M Bitel Isle o f the S a in ts: M o n a s tic S e ttle m e n t a n d C h r is tia n C o m m u n it y in Early I r e la n d (Ithaca. 1990), esp. see also Susan Power Bratton, “ O aks, Wolves, and Love: Celtic Monks and Northern Forests,” J o u r n a l o f F orest H isto r y 33, no. 1 (Jan. 1989), 4-20. 56. F lin t , o p . c i t ., 76. 57. Brosse, op. cit., 143-44-

594

NOTES

58. J. G. Frazer, The G o ld en Bough, Part IV, A d o n is, A ttis , Osiris: S tu d ie s i n the H istory o f O r ie n t a l R e lig io n , 2 vols. (London, 1914), 1, 268ff. It strikes me as possible that the even­ tual popularity o f evergreens as Christmas trees (from the Renaissance onward) may also have transferred elements o f the cult o f Atys not just from paganism to Christianity but from the season o f Hilary to that o f the winter Saturnalia. 59. The L ife o f St. B o n ifa ce by W illib a ld , trans. George W. Robinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1916), 63-64. See also David Keep, St. B o n ifa ce a n d H is W orld (Exeter, 1979). 60. William Anderson, The G reen M a n (London and San Francisco, 1990), 48. 61. Ibid., 85. 62. Besides Frazer and Mannhardt, there is a huge literature on tree mythology. The most recent and comprehensive guide to the whole subject is Jacques Brosse, M ythologie des arbres (Paris, 1989). See also Alexander Porteous, Forest, Folklore, M ythology a n d R o m a n c e (London, 1928). 63. Lambert, o f Saint-Omer, L ib e r flo r id u s (Ghent); see Anderson, op. cit., 92. For this and other examples o f the iconographic evolution, see Frugoni, op. cit. 64. See Stephen J. Reno, “The Sacred Tree as an Early Christian Literary Symbol: A Phe­ nomenological Study,” in Forschungen z u r A n th ro p o lo g ie u n d Religionsgeschichte, vol. 4 (Saarbriicken, 1978); also Jean Dani&ou, “*Das Leben das am Holz hangt,” in K ir c h e u n d U berlieferu ng (Freiburg, i960); and a typically learned and beautifully crafted essay by Marina Warner, “ Signs o f the Fifth Element” in the exhibition catalogue The Tree o f Life: N ew Im ages o f a n A n c i e n t Sym bol (London: South Bank Arts Centre, 1989), 7-47. 65. Genesis 4.24 (King James Version). 66. The D r e a m o f the R o o d in The Poem s o f Synew ulf, trans. Charles W. Kennedy (New York, 1949), 307-08. See also Michael Swarton, ed., The D r e a m o f the R o a d (Exeter, 1987), for a discussion o f its authorship and cultural context. 67. Rab Hatfield, “The Tree o f Life and the Holy Cross: Franciscan Spirituality in the Trecento and the Quattrocento,” in Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, eds., C h r is tia n ­ ity a n d the R ena issan ce: Im a g e a n d R e lig io u s Im a g in a tio n in the Q u a ttr o ce n to (Syracuse, 1990), 135-36, points out that the most famous version o f the legend, Jacopo Varagine’s G o ld en Legend, has the seed drop from the Tree o f the Knowledge o f G ood and Evil, not the Tree o f Life; an oddly incongruous variation. But some versions o f the story have survived which sustain the more theologically coherent myth. 68. See Kurt Kallensee, D e r B a u m d esL eb en s (Berlin, 1985), 104-5;see O tto Mazal, D e r B a u m : E in Symbol des Lebens in d er B u c h m a ler e i (Graz, 1988); Gabrielle Dufour-Kowal­ ska, L ’A r b r e d e vie et la croix: Essai su r P im a g in a tio n visio n n a ire (Geneva, 1985). 69. J. H. Philpot, The Sacred Tree (London, 1897), 167. 70. See Chris Wickham, “ European Forests in the Early Middle Ages: Landscape and Land Clearance,” in L ’a m b ien te vegetale n e ll’a lto medioevo, 515-20. 71. Gr^goire, op. cit., 697. 72. On forest hermitages, see Gr£goire, op. cit., 677-92; Etienne Delaruelle, “ Les ermites et la spiritualite populaire,” in L ’erem itism o i n O ccid e n te n e is e c o liX le X I I (Milan, 1965); Jean Heuclin, A u x origines m on astiques d e la G a u le d u N ord : E r m ite s e t reclus d u Ve a u X l e siecle (Lille, 1988). 73. Gregoire, op. cit., 689. 74. Karl Oettinger, “ Laube, Garten und Wald: Zu einer Theorie der siiddeutschen Sakralkunst, 1470-1520,” in idem, ed., Festschrift f u r H a n s S ed lm a yr (Munich, 1962), 201-28; see also Gerhard Ladner, “Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept o f Renaissance,” in Millard Meiss, ed., D e A r tib u s O p u scu la 40, no. 1 (Essays in Honor o f Erwin Panofsky). 75. See Jurgen Baltrusaitis, A b e r r a tio n s (Paris, 1983), 101. 76. For a brilliant account o f this tradition in architectural writing and practice, see Joseph Rykwert, O n A d a m ’s H ou se in Paradise: The Id e a o f the P r im itiv e H u t in A r c h ite c ­ tu r a l H istory (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). On the Vulcan and Aeolus, see Sharon Fermor, P iero d i Cosim o: F ictio n , In v e n tio n a n d F a n ta sia (London, 1993), 62-63.

NOTES

595

78. Ibid., 100.

&mym th‘ ° r'S,m' Hia" yl,nd^ t t e o f G M c A r d n 80.

See the discussion on these wooden shrines and chapels in Michael Baxandall, The

ITuT Z ia^ T 5 0f^ einatssance Germany (New Haven, 1980), and Christopher S. W ood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Chicago, 1993) 8x. See Karsten Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Asceticism (N ew Haven and London, 1983), 190-92. ... 8t ',y Vlll‘am W arburton» “An Epistle to Lord Burlington,” in Alexander Pope, Collected Works (London, 1751), 3:267-68. 83.

See Rykwert, o p . cit., 4 3 - 4 7 .

84. O n H all, see Rykwert, op. cit., 82-87; also an excellent discussion in Jurgen Baltrusaitis s brilliantly suggestive book, Aberrations, 96-97. 85. Cited in Hall, op. cit., 18. 86. On this meeting, see Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1, The Poetry o f Desire (O xford, 1991), 92ff. 87. Johann W olfgang von Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, ed. Ernst Beuder, 24 vols. (Zurich, 1948-1954), 13:19-20. See also Rykwert, op. cit., 89. For a discussion o f Goethe’s eulogy, see Harald Keller, Goethe’s Hymnus aufden Strasburger Munster und die Wiederweckung der Gotikim 18 Jahrhundert 1772-1972 (Munich, 1974). 88. Friedrich von Schlegel, Grundzilge dergothischen baukunst: Aufeiner Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einer Teil von Frankreich in der Jahren 1804 und 1805, in Poetisches Taschenbuch aufden Jahr 1806 (Berlin, 1806), 177-78. See the dis­ cussions in Frankl, op. cit., 460, and W. D. Robson Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford, 1965), 134. 89. F or an excellent discussion o f the painting, see the essay by John Leighton in the exhi­ bition catalogue Caspar David Friedrich: Winter Landscape (London: National Gallery, 1990), 34-51. PART

T W O :

WATER

C h a p ter Five: Stream s o f Consciousness 1. Barlow’s n otebooks, letter books, and memoranda from the spring o f 1796, when he sailed for Algiers, to the winter o f 1797, when he returned to Paris, are preserved in the H oughton Library, Harvard University. They make up a rich and fascinating collection o f sources on an extraordinary episode. The chronology o f these observations is far from defin­ itively established since a number o f his memoranda and articles on sundry matters are undated. But I have tried to reconstruct their order through entries that follow directly from his notes on Algiers, commentaries that were certainly made during his diplomatic residency there, or immediately afterward in the lazaret ax. Marseilles. I am immensely grateful to Carla M ulford for first pointing me toward Barlow’s Genealogy o f the Liberty Tree. H er excellent article on Barlow’s politics and poetry, “ Radicalism in Joel Barlow’s The Conspiracy of Kings (1792),” is published in Leo Lemay, ed., Deism, Masonry and the Enlightenment: Essays Hon­ oring Alfred Owen Aldridge (Newark, Del., 1987), 137-57. Ms. Mulford also believes, on the strength o f the internal evidence o f the notebooks, that the Genealogy was written around the time o f the Algiers mission. Barlow’s correspondence on various Algerian mat­ ters with the Abb6 G regoire, who had also written a tract on the Liberty Tree, makes this even more likely. 2. Pierre Perrault, “ Trait6 de l’origine des fontaines,” in idem, Oeuvres divers de physique etde micanique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1721), 2:717-848.

NOTES

596 3. Athanasius Kircher,

M u n d u s su bterra neu s in quo u niversa e n a tu r a e m ajestas e t d iv i-

(Amsterdam, 1665). 4. For Barlow’s career, see Samuel Bernstein, Jo el Barlow : A C o n n e c tic u t Y a n k e e in a n A g e o f R e v o lu tio n (Cliff Island, Maine, 1985); M. Ray Adams, “ Joel Barlow: Political Roman­ ticist,” A m e r ic a n L ite ra tu r e 9, no. 2 (May 1937): ” 3- 5 2i James Woodress, A Y a n k e e ’s Odyssey: Th e L ife o f J o el Barlow (Philadelphia, 1958). 5. For a discussion o f Barlow’s Con spiracy o f K in g s and A d v ic e to the P riv ile g ed Orders, see Mulford, op. cit. 6. Constantin Volney, Les R u in e s; ou, M e d ita tio n su r les rev o lu tio ns des em pires (Paris, 1791). Barlow’s translation appeared in 1802. 7. Charles Francois Dupuis, L ’ O r ig in e de tous les cultes; ou, L a R e lig io n u niverselle (Paris, tia e d em o n stra n tu r in X I I libros digestus

179 4 )-

8. Barlow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 9. Gregoire, Essai historique et p a tr io tiq u e su r les arbres de la lib erte (Paris, 1794). On Gregoire, see Ruth Necheles, The A b b e G regoire, 1 7 8 7 - 1 8 3 1 : T h e Odyssey o f a n E g a lita r ia n (Westport, Conn., 1971). 10. Barlow’s Algerian and Marseilles diaries mention Diodorus in other connections, as well as the poem o f Osiris by Nonnus. The relevant passages in Diodorus Siculus, trans. C. H. Oldfather (Cambridge, Mass., 1970-1989), are books 1 and 14-23. 11. Genealogy o f the Liberty Tree, Barlow Papers. 12. Ib id .

13. On the Baron d’Hancarville, see Francis Haskell, “The Baron d ’Hancarville: An Adventurer and Art Historian in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” in idem., P a st a n d P resent in A r t a n d Taste: Selected Essays ( N e w Haven and London, 1987), 30-45. 14. On Payne Knight, see G. S. Rousseau, “ The Sorrows o f Priapus: Anticlericalism, Homosocial Desire and Richard Payne Knight,” in idem and Roy Porter, eds., The S e xu a l U n d erg ro u n d o f the E n lig h te n m e n t (Chapel Hill, 1988), 101-53. See also the forthcoming book by John Brewer. 15. See, for example, John Gwyn Griffiths, T h e O r ig in s o f O siris a n d H is C u l t (Leiden, 1980); also Walter Burkert, A n c i e n t Mystery C u lt s (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 82-88. E. A. Wallis Budge, The G od s o f the Egyptians: S tu d ie s in E g y p tia n Mythology, 2 vols. (London, 1904); idem, O siris a n d the E g y ptian R esu rrectio n , 2 vols. (London and New York, 1912). 16. A typical example is A. Wiedemann, R e lig io n o f the A n c i e n t Eg yptian s (trans. 1897). 1 am extremely grateful to Dr. David McKittrick, the librarian o f Trinity College, for allow­ ing me this extraordinary vision o f the encyclopedic Frazer at his most compulsive, and for many generous and learned suggestions on the themes o f this chapter and book. 17. Frazer, op. cit. 18. See, for example, the evidence cited in the important monography by Vivian A. Hibbs, The M en d es M a ze: A L ib a tio n T a b le f o r the In u n d a t io n o f the N ile (7 - 7/7 A .D . ) (New York and London, 1985), 121-22. 19. See Burkert, op. cit., 105; M. P. Nilsson, G eschichte d e r g riechisch en R e lig io n (Munich, 1961), 2:590-94. 20. Seneca, N a tu ra lesqu a estio n es, trans. T. H. Corcoran (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 2.27. 21. Ibid., 31-32. 22. Wiedemann, op. cit. 23. Plutarch, in fact, opens his account as if it were an anthropological explanation o f cus­ toms like the abstention from eating the oxyrhynchus and other fish. M o r a lia , trans. Frank Babbitt, vol. 5 (Cambridge, M ass., 1984), chap. 7 (p. 19). For an astute critical commentary, see John Gwyn Griffiths, ed., P lu ta r c h ’s D e Isid e et O sirid e (Cardiff, Wales, 1970). 24. Plato, T im a e u s a n d C r itia s , trans. and ed. Desmond Lee (London, 1965), 30-31 (pp. 42-43). For further discussion, see Burkert, op. cit., 84ff. 25. Herodotus, H istories, trans. A. D. Godley (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1920), 2 I 9 " 3 4 (PP- 29 7 ff-)-

NOTES 27 28.

Ibid

f° r C X am p le’ Plutarch> s D e Isid e e t O sirid e ,

Budge,

O siris,

597 chaps. 35 (p. 81) and 39 (p. 95).

2:387-88.

nthlr' n f J ? T can’ ° f Fear (New York, 197 9 ), 5 8 ; for the Tammuz myth and other related N ear Eastern myths, see Eleanor Follansbee, “The Story o f the Flood in the Light o f Comparative Semitic Mythology,” in Alan Dundes, ed., T h e F lood M y th (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 75-88. 30. H esiod, Theogony, 335-40. 31. Plato, T tm a e u s a n d (PP- 53 - 5 4 )32. Ibid., 22 (p. 35).

C r it ia s ,

trans. Desmond Lee (London and New York, 1977), 30 9 / / '> 3 9

33. I am indebted to the complete account given in H ibbs, op. cit. 34. Hibbs, op. cit., 182. 35. G eorge Sandys, A R e la tio n o f a Jo u r n e y B e g u n in A . D . 1 6 1 0 (London, 1637), 99. 36. See Karl Butzer, E a r ly H y d r a u lic C i v i li z a t io n i n Eg y pt (Chicago, 1976), 54. 37. See Barbara Bell, “ The First Dark Age in Egypt,” A m e r ic a n J o u r n a l o f A rcha eolog y 75:1-26. 38. Hibbs, op. cit., 61. 39. See Butzer, op. cit., 33. 40. Karl W ittfogel, O r ie n t a l D esp o tism (New Haven, 1957; New York, 1981). For an excellent discussion o f the implications o f Wittfogel’s “ thesis” for the history o f American rivers and water resources, see Donald Worster, R iv e r s o f E m p ire: W a ter, A r id i t y a n d the G r o w th o f th e A m e r ic a n W est (New York, 1986; Oxford, 1992), 22-48. 41. O n the Three G orges Dam , see the report by Nicholas D. Kristoff in T he N e w Y o r k T im es, June 22, 1993. 42. Lucan, T h e C i v i l W a r, trans. J. D . D u ff (London and Cambridge, M ass., 1988), 10.104-331 (pp. 597-615). 43. Ibid., 10.130-93 (pp. 603-5). 44. Ibid., 10.263-67 (pp. 609-11). 45. For what follows I have relied on the edition translated and edited by Jacques M as­ son, S .J., L e Voyage e n Egypte d e F e lix F a b r i (Cairo, 1975). 46. Fabri, op. cit., 640. 47. Ibid., 621. 48. Wyman H . Herendeen, F r o m L a n d sca p e to L ite ra tu r e : T he R iv e r a n d the M y th o f G eo g ra p h y (Pittsburgh, 1986), a superb book in general and one to which I am much indebted for m ethodology, is particularly good on the Nile-Jordan antithesis in medieval typologies; see esp. pp. 31-34. 49. F or a powerful discussion o f the dichotomy between linear and circular concepts o f historical time, see Stephen Jay G ould, T im e ’s A r r o w , T im e ’s Cycle: M y th a n d M e ta p h o r in the D isco v ery o f G e o lo g ica l T im e (Cam bridge, M ass., 1987). I should also record here my great debt to Professor G ould for any number o f insights into the relationship between the history o f nature and the history o f culture, not least his important and ongoing discussion o f con­ tingency. O n the issue o f circularity in fluvial and hydrological history, see also Yi-Fu Tuan, T h e H y d r o lo g ic a l C y cle a n d th e W isd o m o f G o d (Toronto, 1968), passim. 50. Per Lundberg, L a Typologie ba p tism a le d a n s I ’a n c ie n n e eglise (Leipzig and Uppsala, 1942), 167. Jean Dani&ou, P r im itiv e C h r is tia n Symbols, trans. Donald Attwater (Baltimore, 1964). 51. F or a full discussion, see Lundberg, op. cit.; also E. O. James, C h r is tia n M y th a n d R i t u a l (Gloucester, M ass., 1973). 52. See the introduction to J. R. Harris, ed., The Leg a cy o f E g y pt (Oxford, 1971), 4. This volume has many valuable essays on the transmission o f Egyptian antiquities to Western cul­ ture. 53. Seneca, op. cit., 1.263.

NOTES

598 54. F a b r i, o p . c it., 6 3 1 - 3 2 .

55 . P e tr a r ch , E pistolae fa m ilia r e s , A a c h e n , Ju n e 2 1 , 13 3 3 . 56. F a b r i, o p . c it., 6 4 5 . 5 7 . I b id ., 6 1 1 ( fo r th e fo u r rivers) an d 6 35 ( fo r F a b r i’ s co n c lu s io n ) . 58 . S e e Jean S e z n e c , The S u r v iv a l o f the P a g a n G ods, trans. B a rb a ra S e ssio n s (P r in c e to n , 19 7 2 ). 59. S ee E lisab e th B . M a c D o u g a ll an d N a o m i M ille r , Eons Sa pien tia e: G a r d en F o u n ta in s in Illu str a ted Books, fr o m the S ixteenth to the E ig hteen th C e n tu r ie s (W a s h in g to n , D .C ., an d D u m b a rto n O a k s , 19 7 7 ) ; fo r w ate rc o u rse s in R e n aissan ce g a rd en s, M . F a g io lo , “ II s ig n iiic a to d e ll’ ac q u a e la d ia lettica d e l g ia r d in o ,” in id e m , e d ., N a tu r a e a rtificio ( R o m e , 1 9 8 1 ), 14 4 - 5 3 . See also o n this s u b je c t T e r r y C o m it o , “ T h e H u m a n ist G a r d e n ,” in M o n iq u e M o s se r an d G e o r g e s T e y s s o t, e d s., The A r ch ite ctu r e o f Western G a rd en s ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 9 1 ) , 42 ; fo r th e V illa L a n te p ro g r a m , C la u d ia L a z z a r o - B r u n o , “ T h e V illa L a n te at B a gn aia : A n A lle g o r y o f A r t an d N a tu r e ,” A r t B u lle tin 4 , n o . 59 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 5 5 3 -6 0 ; an d fo r th e p lace o f th e g ard en s in R e n aissan ce cu ltu r e , D a v id C o f f in , The V illa in the L ife o f R ena issan ce R o w e ( P r in c e to n , 19 7 9 ). 60. C la ir e P rea u x , “ G r a e c o - R o m a n E g y p t ,” in H a rris , e d ., o p . c it., 3 4 0 - 4 1 , classes th e P rae n este m o saic as an “ escap ist” la n d sca p e , sim ilar t o th e N ile m o sa ic at A in T a b g h a o n th e sh o re o f L a k e T ib e ria s . S e e also H ib b s , o p . c it., 9 1 , 10 7 ; Iv e rse a, o p . c it., 340; H e r e n d e e n , o p . c it., 52. 6 1 . S e e E m a n u e la K re tz u le s c o - Q u a ra n ta , Les J a r d in s d u songe: P olip h ile e t la m ystique de la R en a issan ce (P aris, 19 8 6 ). 62 . O n th e h ie ro g ly p h ic tra d itio n , see A . A . B a rb , “ M y ste r y , M y th a n d M a g ic ,” a n d E rik Iv e rs e n , “ T h e H ie r o g ly p h ic T r a d it io n ,” b o t h in J. R . H a rris , e d ., o p . c it., 1 3 8 - 9 7 . 63. T h e id e n tity o f th e a u th o r o f th e H y pnerotom a ch ia h as b e e n h o d y d is p u te d , n o t least b ec au se th e re w e re , in fa c t, two F ra n c es co C o lo n n a s , th e o t h e r b e in g an e ld e r ly friar (1 4 3 3 —15 2 7 ) . O n in te rn al g r o u n d s an d th e s tr o n g ly p a g a n c o lo r o f th e p o e m , b o t h K r e t ­ z u le s c o - Q u a r a n ta an d M a u riz io C a lv e s i, II Sogno d i P o lifilo P ren estin o ( R o m e , 1 9 8 3 ), a rg u e fo r th e y o u n g e r C o lo n n a ’s a u th o rs h ip , th e v ie w e m b o d ie d in m y a c c o u n t. 64. O n th e se g a rd en s an d th e im p o r ta n ce o f fo u n ta in s a n d “ w a te r-c h a in s ” an d b asin s, s ee th e essays b y T e r r y C o m it o , L io n e llo P u p p i, an d G ia n n i V e n t u r i in M o s s e r a n d T e y s s o t, e d s., o p . c it.; also C o f f in , o p . c it.; T . C o m it o , The Id e a o f the G a r d en in the R en a issa n ce ( N e w B r u n s w ic k , 19 7 8 ). O n th e ro le o f w a te r in p articu lar, see F a g io lo , o p . cit. 6 5 . O n th e p ro g r e ss io n fro m w ild n ess t o o r d e r, see L a z z a r o - B r u n o , o p . c it.; o n P r a to lin o , see D a v id W r ig h t, “ V illa M e d ic i at P r a to lin o ,” I T a t t i S tu d ie s (E ssa ys in H o n o r o f C r a ig S m y th e ), 19 85. 66. S e e R o y S t r o n g , T he R en a issan ce G a r d en in E n g la n d ( L o n d o n , 1 9 7 9 ) , 7 1 - 7 6 . 6 7 . Bernard Palissy, D iscours adm irables, de la n a tu re des e a u x etfo n ta in es, ta n t naturelles q u ’artificielles, d esm eta u x, des selset salines, despierres, desterres, d u f e u etd e s e m a u x (Paris, 1580). 68. T h e r e is still n o m a jo r s tu d y o f th e C a u s fam ily in th e d e ta il th e ir ca re e r ce rta in ly d eserves. T h e b est d iscu ssio n is in S t r o n g , o p . c it., 7 3 ff.; an d th e re is a b r ie f b io g r a p h y b y C . S . M a k s , Sa lom on d e C a u s ( P aris, 19 3 5 ). F o r Isaac d e C a u s , see th e s h o r t b u t h e lp fu l in tr o ­ d u c tio n b y J o h n D ix o n H u n t in his facsim ile e d itio n o f I. d e C a u s , W ilto n G a rd en : N ew a n d R a r e In v e n tio n s o f W ater-W orks ( L o n d o n an d N e w Y o r k , 19 8 2 ). 69 . S e e R u th R u b in ste in , “ T h e R e n aissan ce D is c o v e r y o f A n t iq u e R iv e r G o d P erso n ifi­ c a tio n s ,” in S cr itti d isto r ia d e ll’a rte in onore d i R oberto S a lv in i ( F lo r e n c e , 19 8 4 ), 2 5 7 - 6 3 ; also F rancis H a sk e ll a n d N ic h o la s P e n n y , Taste a n d the A n tiq u e : Th e L u r e o f C la ssica l S culpture ( N e w H a v e n , 19 8 2 ). 70. S e e H e r e n d e e n , o p . c it., 1 4 7 - 4 8 . 7 1 . Iv e rs e n , o p . c it., 18 3. 7 2. D o m e n ic o F o n ta n a , D e lla trasportatione d e ll’ obelisco V a tica n o e t d elle fa b r ich e d i N os­ tro Signore P a p a Sisto V ( R o m e , 15 9 0 ). 73 .

S e e P e te r A . C la y t o n , The Rediscovery o f A n c i e n t Egypt: A r tis ts a n d Travellers in the

N in e te en th C e n tu r y ( L o n d o n , 19 8 2 ), n .

N OTE S

599

7 4 . P lin y , N a t u r a l H istory , tra n s. H . R a c k h a m ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 8 6 ), 36 .2 4 . 7 5 . S e e S e x tu s Ju liu s F r o n t in u s , T h e S trateg em s a n d The A q u e d u c ts o f R o m e , tra n s. C h a r le s B e n n e t t , e d . M a r y B . M c E lw a in ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 0 ). 7 6 . S e e , f o r e x a m p le , th e d is c u s sio n in J o h n B a p tis t K n ip p in g , Icon ography o f the C o u n te r R e fo r m a t io n in th e N e th e r la n d s: H e a v e n on E a r th ( N i e u w k o o p , 1 9 7 4 ) . 7 7 . F o r a c o m m e n t a r y o n th is e x tra o r d in a ry p a in tin g , see K n ip p in g , o p . c it., 2:468 . 7 8 . S e e F r a n c o B o r s i, B e r n in i a r ch itetto ( M ila n , 19 8 0 ), 1 7 4 . 7 9 . A ll o f w h ic h is lo s t in th e a u g u s t s ile n ce o f th e V ic t o r ia a n d A lb e r t M u s e u m ’s d isp lay. W h a t is n e e d e d is a t le a st th e s o u n d o f th e o r ig in a l i f it is t o b e r e m o t e ly tru e t o B e r n in i’s in te n t io n s . 80. F o r t h e R o m a n fo u n t a in s , s ee C . d ’ O n o f r io , L e fo n t a n e d i R o m a ( R o m e , 19 6 2 ). 8 1 . H o w a r d H i b b a r d , B e r n in i ( L o n d o n , 1 9 6 5 ) , 23. 8 2 . S e e S e r g i o B o s t ic c o e t a l., P i a z z a N a v o n a : L o la d e i P a m p h i l j( R o m e , 19 7 8 ). 8 3 . I m u s t t h a n k m y c o lle a g u e J o se p h C o n n o r s f o r s u g g e s t in g th is e x p la n a tio n fo r B o r ­ r o m in i’ s s u p e r fic ia lly c o n s e r v a tiv e r e s p o n s e t o th e c o m m is s io n , as w e ll as fo r d r a w in g th e A lg a r d i d e s ig n s t o m y a t t e n t io n . 8 4 . J e n n ife r M o n t a g u , A le s sa n d r o A lg a r d i ( N e w H a v e n , 1 9 8 5 ) , 8 7 - 9 0 . 8 5 . F o r t h e e v o lu t io n o f th e d e s ig n s in th e d r a w in g s , s ee H e in r ic h B r a u e r a n d R u d o l f W i t t k o w e r , D i e Z e ic h n u n g e n des G ia n lo r e n z o B e r n in i ( B e r lin , 1 9 3 1 ) , 4 7 ff. 8 6 . D o m e n i c o B e r n in i, V ita d e l C a v a lie r e G io .L o re n z o B e m in o ( R o m e , 1 7 1 3 ) , 8 6 -8 8 . 8 7 . O n t h e o b e lis k ( a n d its p re d e c e s s o r s ) , s ee C e s a r e d ’ O n o f r io , G l i obelisci d i R o m a (R o m e , 19 6 7 ), 2 2 2 -2 9 . 88. I r v in g L a v in , B e r n i n i a n d the U n ity o f the V is u a l A r t ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 0 ). 8 9. S e e , f o r e x a m p le , W it t k o w e r , o p . cit. 9 0 . S e e Iv e r s e n , o p . c i t., 1 8 9 - 9 0 . T h e w o r k s in q u e s t io n w e r e M . M e r c a t i, D e g l i obelisc h i d i R o m a ( R o m e , 1 5 8 9 ) ; L . P ig n o r ia , V etu stissim a e T a b u la e A e n e a e . . . E x p l i c a t i o n s n ic e , 1 6 0 5 ) ; a n d in th is a r c h a e o lo g ic a l sp irit, J o h a n n e s G e o r g iu s H e r w a r t a b H o h e n b u r g , T h e ­ sa u r u s H ie r o g ly p h ico r u m ( M u n i c h , 1 6 1 0 ) . 9 1 . I n p a r tic u la r , th e t h r e e - v o lu m e O e d ip u s A eg y p tia cu s ( 1 6 5 2 - 5 4 ) , A d A le x a n d r u m V I I O b elis ci A e g y p tia c i ( 1 6 6 6 ) , a n d S p h in x M y stagoga ( 1 6 7 6 ) . 9 2 . Iv e r s e n , o p . c i t ., 1 9 1 . 9 3 . O n t h e s p e c ific s y m b o lic p r o g r a m o f th e fo u n t a in , s ee N o r b e r t H u s e , G ia n lo r e n z o B e r n i n i ’s V ie r str o m e b r e n n e n ( M u n i c h ,

1 9 6 7 ) ; a n d H a n s K a u ffm a n n , G io v a n n i L o ren zo

B e r n in i: D i e f i g iir lic h K o m p o s itio n e n ( B e r lin , 1 9 7 0 ) , 1 7 4 - 8 9 .

C h a p ter Six: Bloodstreams 1. T h e e p is o d e is n a rr a te d b y R o b e r t L a c e y in h is o u t s t a n d in g b io g r a p h y , S ir W a lte r R a le g h ( L o n d o n a n d N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 4 ) , 4 6 . 2. W a lt e r R a le g h , W orks ( L o n d o n , 1 8 2 9 ) , b o o k 1 , c h a p . 2 , s ec. 5 ; see a lso th e d is c u s ­ s io n in W y m a n H

H e r e n d e e n , F ro m L a n d sca p e to L ite ra tu r e : T he R iv e r a n d th e M y th o f G eo g ­

ra phy ( P it t s b u r g h , 1 9 8 6 ) , i 3 5 ff.; a ls o Y i- F u T u a n , T h e H y d r o lo g ic a l C y cle a n d the W isdom o f G o d ( T o r o n to , 19 6 8 ), 2 9 -3 0 . 3. F o r t h e d e v e lo p m e n t o f R a le g h ’ s c o lo n ia l a d v e n tu re s , s ee D . B . Q u in n , R a le g h a n d the B r itis h E m p ir e ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 6 2 ) . _ 4 . S e e J o y c e L o r im e r , E n g lish a n d Ir ish S ettle m e n ts on the R iv e r A m a z o n , 1 5 5 0 - 1 6 4 6 ( L o n d o n , 19 8 9 ) 10 n . 3. • • 5 J o h n H e m m in g ’ s S earch f o r E l D o r a d o ( N e w Y o r k , 19 7 8 ) is a b e a u tifu l a n d g r ip p in g a c c o u n t o f t h e s e a d v e n tu re s . S e e a ls o V . S . N a ip a u l, T he Loss o f E l D o r a d o ( L o n d o n , 19 6 9 ). 6 . I b id ., 1 5 1 —597 . P u b lis h e d in L o n d o n , 1 5 9 6 . 8. W a lt e r R a le g h , T h e D isco v erie . . . , 48 .

9- I b id ., 54. 10. I b id ., 5 1 - 5 2 . 1 1 . I b id ., 63. 12 . W a lte r R a le g h , The H istory o f the W orld ( L o n d o n , 16 8 7 ). T h e first e d itio n w as p u b ­ lish e d in 1 6 1 4 an d at fr e q u e n t in terva ls th e rea fte r. R a le g h ’s lo n g a n d fa s cin a tin g d isq u isitio n s o n th e rivers o f G e n e sis o c c u r p rin cip ally in ch ap s. 2 a n d 3. 13 . The L ife o f S ir W a lter R a leg h , b o u n d t o g e t h e r w ith The H istory o f the W orld, 40. 14 . The P ra ise o fH e m p -S ee d w ith the Voyage o f M r. R o g e r B ir d a n d the W riter H ereof, in a boat o fb ro w n e p a p er fr o m Lo n d o n to Q u in b o r o u g h in K e n t . . . , in Works o f John Taylor, The W a ter-P oet (16 3 0 ; S p en se r S o c ie ty facsim ile e d ., L o n d o n , 18 6 9 ), 5 4 4 - 5 9 . 15 . S u rp risin g ly little has b ee n w r itte n o n Jo h n T a y lo r . O n e o f th e fe w v iv id im p ression s o f h im is in W allace N o te s te in , F o u r Worthies: J o h n C h a m b e rla in , A n n e C liffo r d , John T a y ­ lor, O liv e r H eywood ( L o n d o n , 19 5 6 ) , 16 9 -2 0 8 . 16. P refa ce t o Tham es-Isis, 4. 17 . S e e Jo se p h in e R o s s, The W in te r Q u e e n : The Story o f E liza b e th S t u a r t ( L o n d o n ,

1 9 7 9 ). 4 i18. Ib id ., 46. 19. The Praise

of the

E le m e n t

of W ater,

18.

20. A very merry Wherry voyage fr o m L o n d o n to Y o rke w ith a P a ir o f Oares. 2 1. John Taylor’s L a st Voyage ( 1 6 4 1 ) . 22. The G r e a t E a te r o f K e n t ; or, P a r t o f the A d m ir a b le Teeth a n d Stom achs E xp lo its o f N icholas Wood, o f H a rriso n in the cou nty o f K e n t. 23. G io v a n n i B o t e r o , A Trea tise C o n c e r n in g the C a u ses o f the M a g n ijice n cie a n d G r e a t­ ness o f C ities, trans. R o b e r t P e te r so n ( L o n d o n , 16 0 6 ), 22. 24. Ib id ., 23. 25. Ib id ., 22. 26. M ich a e l D r a y t o n , P oly-O lbion; or, A C h o ro g ra p h ica ll D escrip tio n o f Tracts, R ivers, M o u n ta in es, Forests, a n d other P a r ts o f th is renow ned Isle o f G r e a t B r ita in e ( L o n d o n , 1 6 1 3 ) , in M ich a e l D ra yton, H is Works, 10 v o ls ., e d . J. W . H e b e i ( O x f o r d , 19 3 3 ) , 4 :1 . 2 7. Jo h n N ic h o ls , Th e Progresses a n d P u b lic Processions o f Q u e e n E liza b eth , 3 v o ls. ( L o n ­ d o n , 18 2 3 ), 1 :6 7 - 6 9 . 28. S e e Jack B . O r u c h , “ S p en se r, C a m d e n an d th e P o e tic M a r r ia g e o f R iv e rs,” S tu d ie s in Philology 6 4 , n o . 4 (Ju ly 19 6 7 ): 6 0 6 - 2 4 ; fo r fu r th e r d is cu s sio n o f S p e n se r a n d C a m d e n , see th e e x ce lle n t a c c o u n t g iv e n in H e r e n d e e n , o p . c it., 2 0 3 -9 . 29. E d m u n d S p en se r, E p ith a la m io n Tam esis; W illia m C a m d e n , D e C o n n u b io T a m a e et Isis, later in c o r p o r a te d in to his m o n u m e n ta l to p o g r a p h ic a l-h isto r ic a l p o e m , B r ita n n ia . 30. I b id ., 208. 3 1. O n D e n h a m , see Jam es T u r n e r , The P o litics o f L a nd sca pe ( O x f o r d , 1 9 7 9 ) , esp . ch ap . 4 , w h ich e m p h a size s th e m y th s o f th e “ h a p p y la n d ” in to p o g r a p h ic a l p o e tr y . 32. D r a y to n , o p . c it., 3 3 1 - 3 2 . 33. T a y lo r , Tham es-Isis, 25. 34. I b id ., 2 7. 35. S e e Basil C r a c k n e ll, C a n v e y Isla nd : The H istory o f a M a r sh la n d C o m m u n ity ( L e ic e s ­ ter, 19 5 9 ), 2 1. 36. I b id ., 23. 37. C ite d in P . G . R o g e rs , Th e D u t c h in the M edw ay ( O x f o r d , 1 9 7 0 ), 1 2 1 . 38. T h is a c c o u n t o f th e flo a tin g island o n th e B id asso a , th e “ c o n fe r e n c e ,” an d th e m a r­ ria ge o f L o u is X I V an d M a ria T h e r e s a o f S p ain is b ased o n [ C o lle t e t ] , L a S u itte d u voyage des d e u x roys de F ra n ce e t d ’Espagne et le u r rend ez-vou s d a n s I’Isle d e la C o n fe r e n c e . . . (P aris, 16 60 ); also L a Pom pe et m a g nificence f a i t e a u m a ria g e d u roy e t d e I’ in fa n te d e I’E sp a g n e . . . (P aris, 16 60 ). 39. S e e D a n ie l N o r d m a n , “ D e s L im ite s d ’e ta t au x fr o n t iir e s n a tio n a le s,” in P ie rre N o r a , e d ., Les L ie u x d e m em oire, v o l. 2, L a N a tio n (P aris, 19 8 6 ), 3 5 - 6 1 . F o r th e e v o lu tio n o f th e

NOTES

60 1

c o n c e p t o f “ n a tu r a l f r o n tie r s ” a n d th e r iv e r fr o n t ie r in p a r tic u la r , s ee th e fa s c in a tin g a n d w e lla r g u e d a r tic le b y P e t e r S a h lin s , “ N a tu r a l F r o n tie r s R e v is ite d : F r a n c e ’ s B o u n d a r ie s S in c e th e S e v e n t e e n t h C e n t u r y , ” A m e r ic a n H is to r ic a l R e v iew 9 5 , n o . 5 ( D e c e m b e r 19 9 0 ): 14 2 3 - 1 4 5 2 . 4 0 . S e e Je an T r o n 5 o n , L ’E n tr e e tr io m p h a n te d e L e u r s M a jestes L o u is X I V , roy d e F r a n ce e t d e N a v a r r e , e t M a r ie Therese d ’A u s tr ic h e son espouse, d a n s la v ille d e P a r is (P a r is , 16 6 2 ). 4 1 . V i n c e n t S c u lly , A r c h ite c tu r e : T h e N a t u r a l a n d the M a n - m a d e ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 9 1 ) , 2 2 6 - 6 6 . I t w ill b e a p p a r e n t t h a t I o w e m u c h n o t ju s t t o S c u lly ’ s d is cu s sio n o f th e u se o f w a te r in F r e n c h g a r d e n s , b u t t o h is ce n tr a l th e sis c o n c e r n in g th e c o n s c io u s a n d u n c o n s c io u s r e la ­ t io n s h ip b e t w e e n t o p o g r a p h y a n d h u m a n d e s ig n . 4 2 . S e e H e le n e V e r in , “ T e c h n o l o g y in th e P ark : E n g in e e r s a n d G a r d e n e rs in S e v e n ­ t e e n t h - C e n t u r y F r a n c e ,” in M o n iq u e M o s s e r a n d G e o r g e s T e y s s o t, e d s ., The A r c h ite c tu r e o f W estern G a r d e n s ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 9 1 ) , 1 3 5 - 2 0 1 . 4 3 . Essay d es m erv eilles d e n a tu r e e t d e p lu s nobles a rtifices ( R o u e n , 1 6 2 9 ) , c ite d in V e n n , o p . c i t ., 1 3 6 - 3 7 . F o r m o r e in th is v e in , s ee a ls o Ja cq u e s B o y c e a u d e B a ra u d i£ re, T r a ite d u ja r d in a g e selon les ra iso n s d e la n a t u r e e t d e P a r t ( P a r is , 16 3 8 ). 4 4 . F o r a p e r s u a s iv e a n d e l o q u e n t r e a d in g o f th e f o u n t a in , s ee N a th a n W h it m a n , “ M y th a n d P o litic s : V e r s a ille s a n d th e F o u n t a in o f L a to n a ,” in J o h n C . R u le , e d ., L o u i s X I V a n d the C r a f t o f K in g s h ip ( C o l u m b u s , O h i o , 1 9 6 9 ) , 2 8 6 - 3 0 1 . 4 5 . S e e E d o u a r d P o m m ie r , “ V e r s a ille s , l ’ im a g e d u s o u v e r a in ,” in N o r a , e d ., o p . c i t ., 2 1 5 . 4 6 . G e o r g e L . H e r s e y , A r c h ite c tu r e , P oetry, a n d N u m b e r in the R o y a l P a la c e a t C a ser ta ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 8 3 ) . T h e a c c o u n t w h ic h fo llo w s is h e a v ily in d e b t e d t o H e r s e y ’ s s u p e r la t iv e r e a d in g , e sp . c h a p . 5 , p p . 9 8 - 1 4 1 . 4 7 . O v i d , T h e M etam orphoses, tra n s . H o r a c e G r e g o r y ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 8 ) , b o o k 6 (p . 1 7 3 ). 4 8 . S e e S im o n L a c o r d a ir e , L es I n c o n n u s d e la S e in e ( P a r is , 1 9 8 5 ) , 2 9 2 -9 4 . 4 9 . I b id . , 2 4 1 ff. 50. B e r n a r d F o r e s t d e B e lid o r , A r c h ite c t u r e h y d r a u liq u e; ou, L ’A r t de co n d u ir e d ’elever et d e m e n a g e r les e a u x p o u r les d iffe r e n t besoins d e la vie, 3 v o ls. ( P a r is , 1 7 3 7 ) . F o r B e lid o r ’s a c c o u n t o f d iv in in g r o d s a n d t h e ir lo r e , see v o l. 2 , b o o k 4 , p p . 3 4 i f f . 5 1 . C h a r le s D ic k e n s , D ic tio n a r y o f the T h a m es ( L o n d o n , 1 8 9 3 ) , 64. 5 2 . I t w a s M a c a u la y ’ s b io g r a p h e r , m y fr ie n d th e late J o h n C l i v e , w h o t o ld m e a b o u t th e h is to r ia n ’ s la s tin g p a s sio n f o r w h it e b a it, as w e o u r se lv e s e n jo y e d th e m a t th e T r a fa lg a r o n a s u m m e r e v e n i n g in 1 9 7 9 . 5 3 . T h o m a s B a b i n g t o n M a c a u la y , “ A C o n v e r s a tio n b e t w e e n M r . A b r a h a m C o w l e y a n d M r . J o h n M i l t o n t o u c h in g th e G r e a t C iv il W a r ,” in Works, 1 1 :3 1 0 - 2 2 ; th e essay is d is cu s se d in J o h n C l i v e , M a ca u la y : T h e S h a p in g o f the H is t o r ia n ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 4 ) , 8 2ff. 5 4 . S ir G e o r g e O t t o T r e v e ly a n , T h e L ife a n d L e tter s o f L o r d M a ca u la y , 2 v o ls . ( N e w Y o r k , 1 8 7 7 ) , 2 :2 3 -2 4 . 5 5 . S e e P h ilip p e B a rr ie r , L a M e m o ir e d e sfle u v e s d e F r a n ce ( P a r is , 1 9 8 9 ), 9 5 - 9 6 . 56 '

T h o m so n ’s P o e t ic a l W orks, w ith L ife , C r i t i c a l D iss e r ta tio n a n d E x p la n a to r y N otes, e d .

G e o r g e G illia m ( E d i n b u r g h , 1 8 5 3 ) , 80. 5 7 . T h o m a s L o v e P e a c o c k , T h e G e n iu s o f the Tham es: A L y r ic a l P o em in Tw o P a r ts ( L o n ­ d o n , 1 8 1 0 ) , n .p . . 5 8 . J a m e s B a r r y , A n A c c o u n t o f a S eries o f P ic t u r e s in th e G r e a t R o o m o f th e Society o f A r ts

( L o n d o n , 1 7 8 3 ). T h e fo r m a l c o m p o s itio n o f B a rr y ’ s p a in tin g w a s b a s e d o n F ra n c is

H a y m a n ’ s e a r lie r T r iu m p h o f B r i t a n n i a ( 1 7 6 9 ) , e x e c u t e d fo r th e V a u x h a ll G a r d e n s . 5 9 . I b id . , 6 3 . 6 0 W illia m L . P r e s sly , J a m es Barry: T h e A r t i s t a s H e r o ( L o n d o n , 1 9 8 3 ) , 83. 61

F o r a s u p e r b ly d e ta ile d a n d p e r c e p tiv e a c c o u n t o f T u r n e r ’ s T h a m e s p a in tin g s , see

D a v id H i l l, T u r n e r on the Tham es: R i v e r Jo u rn ey s i n the Y e a r 18 0 5 ( N e w H a v e n a n d L o n d o n , 19 9 3 ). 62

H ill o p . c i t ., c h a p . 2 ( “ Im a g in a tio n F l o w in g ” ), p p . 2 4 - 5 1 .

6 3 ! F o r a p e r c e p tiv e c o m m e n t a r y , s e e J o h n G a g e , / . M . W . T u rn er : aA W o n d e r fu l R a n g e o f M i n d ” ( N e w H a v e n , 1 9 8 7 ) , 1 7 8 ; s ee a ls o H i l l, o p . c i t ., 1 5 0 - 5 1 .

NOTES

602

64. F o r th e la tte r v ie w , see th e essay b y S te p h e n D a n ie ls, “ T u r n e r a n d th e C ir c u la tio n o f

Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States ( P r in c e to n , 1 9 9 3 ), w h e r e D a n ie ls d raw s a tte n tio n t o T u r n e r ’s earlie r r e n d e r ­

S t a te ,” in h is

in g s o f th e in d u strial c ity o f L e e d s. S e e also th e ric h ly le a rn e d m o n o g r a p h b y J o h n G a g e ,

Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed ( L o n d o n ,

19 7 2 ).

6 5 . B a rrier, o p . c it., 250. 66 . S e e C la u d io M a g r is , Danube, trans. P a trick C r e a g h ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 9 ). 6 7 . Ju lien T ie r s o t , S m eta n a (P aris, 19 2 6 ), 24. 68. A le x a n d r e D u m a s, 1 9 9 1 ) , 2 3 9 -4 0 . 69. E r ic S h a n e s, e d .,

Excursionssur lesbordsdu Rhin, e d .

Les Fleuves de la France (P aris,

D o m in iq u e F e rn a n d e z (P aris,

19 9 0 ).

70. T h is is a p o in t w e ll m a d e b y S te p h e n D a n ie ls in h is e ssay “ T h o m a s C o l e a n d th e C o u r s e o f E m p ir e ,” in o p . c it., 1 5 1 . 7 1 . C ite d in American Paradise:

The World of the Hudson River School ( N e w

Y ork: M e t­

r o p o lita n M u s e u m o f A rt, 19 8 8 ), 12 7 . 7 2 . S e e th e ca ta lo g u e n o te b y O s w a ld o R o d r ig u e z R o q u e in ib id ., 12 5 . 7 3 . H e n r y A d a m s , “ A N e w In te r p r e ta tio n o f B in g h a m ’ s

souri,” Art Bulletin,

Fur Traders Descending the Mis­

1983: 6 7 5 - 8 0 , m a k es s o m e im p o r ta n t p o in ts a b o u t th e rela tio n s h ip o f

B in g h a m ’s river g en re s t o th e tra je c to r y o f A m e r ic a ’s n a tio n a l a n d e c o n o m ic d e v e lo p m e n t. B u t I still fin d it d ifficu lt t o fin d th e a n xie tie s an d in se cu rities t h a t A d a m s sees in B in g h a m ’s p ain tin g s w ith th e im p e r tu rb a b ly a r r o g a n t fla tb o a tm e n . 74. Y e llo w fe ve r is, o f c o u r s e , s p re ad b y m o s q u ito e s ra th e r th a n ta in te d w a te r, b u t th e p ro visio n o f fresh w a te r t o P h ila d e lp h ia c e r ta in ly d id th e c ity n o h arm . O n R u s h , see th e e x h i­ b itio n ca ta lo g u e

William Rush: American Sculptor (P h ila d e lp h ia :

P en n sylv an ia A c a d e m y o f

F in e A rts , 19 8 2 ), esp . 1 9 - 2 1 a n d 1 1 5 —1 7 ; an d o n th e c ity ’ s w a te r, see J o h n L . C o t t e r , D a n ie l G.

R o b e r ts , an d M ic h a e l P a r tin g t o n ,

phia ( P h ila d e lp h ia ,

The Buried Past: An Archaeological History of Philadel­

1 9 9 2 ), 53ff.

7 5 . T h e r e is a co n sid e r a b le lite ra tu re o n E a k in s ’ s p a in tin g a n d o n h is m o tiv e s fo r th e m e a n in g fu l an ach ro n ism o f th e n u d e m o d e l, b u t v e r y little o n th e r e la tio n s h ip b e tw e e n th e d isca rd e d c lo th e s an d th e h y d ra u lic th e m e s o f th e p a in tin g an d R u s h ’ s o w n fo u n ta in -s ta tu e .

Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modem Life ( P r in c e t o n , 1 9 8 3 ), 8 2 - 1 1 3 ; Thomas Eakins: His Life and A rt ( N e w Y o r k , L o n d o n , a n d Paris, 19 9 2 ), 9 3 - 9 7 ; L lo y d G o o d r ic h , Thomas Eakins, 2 v o ls. ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 2 ), 1 :1 4 5 - 5 7 . T h e m o st p erce p tiv e o f all an alyses o f E a kin s is t o b e fo u n d in M ic h a e l F r ie d , Realism, Writ­ ing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane ( C h ic a g o , 1 9 8 7 ) , an d w h ile F rie d S e e E liza b e th J o h n s,

W illia m In n es H o m e r ,

d o e s n o t d iscu ss th e R u sh p a in tin g s, it is im p o ss ib le n o t t o b e ca rried fr o m his a c c o u n t o f th e e x te n sio n o f th e river lan d sca p e in C o u r b e t ’s

Studio ofthe Artist to w a r d

a c o m p a r a b le in stan ce

in Eakins. 76. M ic h a e l F r ie d ,

Courbet’s Realism (C h ic a g o , 19 9 0 ), ch ap s. 8 a n d 9. The Origin of the World, see th e e x h ib itio n c a ta lo g u e Courbet

7 7 . F o r a d iscu ssio n o f

Reconsidered ( B r o o k ly n

G a lle r y o f A r t , 19 8 8 ), 1 7 6 - 7 8 . O t h e r d iscu ssio n s o f th e rela tio n sh ip

b e tw e e n th e p a in tin g s o f th e s o u rc e o f th e L o u e an d th e im a g e o f fe m a le g e n ita lia m a y be fo u n d in N e il H e r tz ,

The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime ( N e w

Y ork ,

19 8 5 ), 2 0 9 - 1 4 . O n K h alil B e y , see F ran cis H a sk e ll, “ A T u r k an d H is P ic tu re s in N in e te e n th -

Rediscoveries in A rt {Ith a ca , 19 7 6 ). H a n n in g S p e k e , Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile ( E d in b u r g h

C e n t u r y P aris,” in 78. J o h n

an d

L o n d o n , 18 6 3 ), 35 7 .

Cleopatra’s Needles ( L o n d o n , 19 7 8 ) , 15 . Illustrated London News, S e p t. 2 1 , 18 78 ; also cite d in H a y w a r d , o p . c it., 12 6 . A m e lia E d w a rd s , A Thousand Miles up the Nile ( L o n d o n , 1 8 7 7 ) , 12 4 . F lo r e n c e N ig h t in g a le , Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849-1850,

79. See R . A . H a yw ard , 80. 8 1. 82.

ed.

A n t h o n y S a ttin ( L o n d o n , 1 9 8 7 ), 1 1 4 . P hilae h a d , in fe et, b e e n th e o b je c t o f l o n g an d p as­ s io n a te in te res t b y W e ste rn travellers. R ich a rd P o c o c k e , la ter b is h o p o f O s s o r y a n d H e a th , w e n t th e re in 17 3 7 an d w r o te u p his a c c o u n t fo r th e k in g o f D e n m a rk te n years later. S e e

NOTES

6 o3

Peter A. Clayton, The R ed isco very o f Egypt: A r tis ts a n d T ra v ellers in the N in e te e n th C e n tu r y , ; ? n’ Il9 )’ I,3_I4- Phllae appears prominently in the great D e scr ip tio n d e PEgypte, pubhshed by the scholars and engineers o f Napoleon’s expedition in 1798-99. See Charles C. Gillispie and Michel de Wachter, M o n u m e n ts o f Egypt, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1987), vol. 1, plates 3-28. 83. Nightingale, op. cit., 114. 84. Lucie D uff Gordon, L e tter s fr o m 85. Cited in Anthony Sattin, L i f t i n g don, 1988), 259.

PART

Eg y pt

(London, 1983), 170.

the Veil: B r itish Society in Egypt, 1 7 6 8 - 1 9 5 6

THREE:

(Lon-

ROCK

C h a p ter Seven: D inocrates a n d the Sham an: A ltitu d e , Beatitu de, M a g n itu d e 1 . R . A . P . t o E le a n o r R o o s e v e lt , M a r . 2 8 , 1 9 3 4 , R o s e A r n o ld P o w e ll P a p ers, S c h le s in g e r L ib r a r y , H a r v a r d U n iv e r s it y . 2. S e e “ N o t e s o n th e M o u n t R u s h m o r e S t r u g g l e ,” th e a u t o b io g r a p h ic a l essay b y R A . P . in t h e P o w e ll P a p e r s , p . 1. 3. I b id . 4 . T h e d e s c r ip t io n is fr o m h is s o n a n d d a u g h te r - in - la w , L in c o ln B o r g lu m a n d Ju n e C u lp Z e it n e r ,

Borglum’s Unfinished Dream

( A b e r d e e n , S . D a k ., 1 9 7 6 ) , 1 0 1 .

5. R . A . P ., “ N o t e s o n th e M o u n t R u s h m o r e S t r u g g l e ,” P o w e ll P a p e rs , p . 3. 6 . G u t z o n B o r g lu m t o E le a n o r R o o s e v e lt , M a y 1 3 ,1 9 3 6 , c o p y t o R . A . P ., P o w e ll P ap ers. 7 . C i t e d in R e x A la n S m ith ,

The Carving o f Mount Rushmore ( N e w

Y o r k , 1 9 8 5 ), 3 1 .

8. A l b e r t B o i m e , “ P a tria r c h y F ix e d in S t o n e : G u t z o n B o r g lu m ’ s M o u n t R u s h m o r e ,”

American A rt

5 , n o s . 1 - 2 ( W in te r - S p r i n g 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 4 7 .

9 . Q u o t e d in B o r g lu m . a n d Z e it n e r , o p . c i t ., 10 7 . 10 .

I n 1 9 3 1 h e w r o t e t o h is fr ie n d L e s te r B a r lo w t h a t o n ly s o m e o n e “ w ith g u t s ” w h o h ad

“ v is io n a n d c o u r a g e ” a n d th e p o w e r t o c a rr y it o u t lik e M u s s o lin i c o u ld ta k e c h a r g e o f g o v ­ e r n m e n t a n d m a k e t h e A m e r ic a n p re s id e n c y w o r k . B o r g lu m t o B a r lo w , A u g . 2 9 , 1 9 3 1 , B o r ­ g l u m P a p e r s , L ib r a r y o f C o n g r e s s . C i t e d in B o i m e , o p . c it., 15 3 . 1 x . O n B o r g l u m ’ s a s s o c ia tio n w it h , a n d la te r m e m b e r s h ip in , th e K u K lu x K la n a n d his d e e p - s e a t e d a n ti- s e m itis m , s ee H o w a r d a n d A u d r e y K arl S h a ff,

Six Wars at a Time

( S io u x

F a lls , S . D a k . , 1 9 8 5 ) , i o 3 f f . S e e a ls o A l e x H e a r d , “ M o u n t R u s h m o r e : T h e R e a l S t o r y ,”

Republic,

New

J u ly 1 5 a n d 2 2 , 1 9 9 1 , 1 6 - 1 8 .

12 . Q u o t e d in B o r g lu m a n d Z e it n e r , o p . c i t ., 1 1 1 . 1 3 . G u t z o n B o r g l u m t o E le a n o r R o o s e v e lt , M a y 1 3 ,1 9 3 6 , c o p y t o R .A .P ., P o w e ll P ap ers. 1 4 . I b id . 1 5 . C i t e d in B o i m e , o p . c i t ., 15 3 . 1 6 . D o n T e r r y , “ C o l u m b u s D iv id e s O h i o ’ s C a p ita l C i t y , ”

New York Times,

D e c . 2 6,

1 9 9 3 , p p . 1 a n d 20. 1 7 . S ir F r a n c is Y o u n g h u s b a n d , 18 . W illia m G ilp in ,

Political

The Epic o f Mount Everest ( L o n d o n , 1 9 2 6 ) , 19 . The Mission o f the North American People; Geographical, Social, and

( P h ila d e lp h ia , 1 8 7 3 ) . O n G ilp in , s e e th e in te r e s t in g d is c u s sio n in c o n n e c t io n w ith

la n d s u r v e y in g in th e R o c k ie s a n d T h o m a s M o r a n ’s p a in tin g o f th e M o u n ta in o f t h e H o l y C r o s s , L in d a H u l t s , “ P ilg r im ’ s P r o g r e s s in th e W e s t , M o r a n ’ s M o u n ta in o f th e H o l y C r o s s ,”

American A rt 5 ,

n o s . 1 - 2 ( W in te r - S p r i n g 1 9 9 1 ) : 74 .

1 9 . Q u o t e d in B o r g lu m a n d Z e it n e r , o p . c it., 28. 2 0. B o r g l u m a n d Z e it n e r , o p . c i t ., 26. 2 1 . A c c o r d i n g t o B o r g l u m , F r a n k L lo y d W r ig h t h a d a g r e e d t o w o r k w it h h im o n th e d e s ig n o f t h e H a ll o f R e c o r d s . B o r g lu m a n d Z e it n e r , o p . c i t ., 68. 2 2 . Q u o t e d in D o n a l d D a le J a c k so n , “ G u t z o n B o r g l u m ’ s O d d a n d A w e s o m e P o r tr a its in G r a n i t e ,”

Smithsonian

2 3 , n o . 5 ( A u g . 1 9 9 2 ): 6 4 - 7 7 .

2 3 . S m ith , o p . c i t ., 3 7 1 .

NOTES

604 24. Q u o t e d in ib id ., 388.

25. Washington Herald, M a r. 19 , 19 3 4 , p . 326. V itru v iu s , De architectura, trans. F . G r a n g e r (C a m b r id g e , M ass., an d L o n d o n , 19 8 3 ), b o o k 2 (p p . 7 3 - 7 7 ) . D in o cra tes is also m e n tio n e d in P lu ta rc h ’s

History as th e

Moralia an d

P lin y’s

Natural

arch ite ct o f A lex an d ria an d perh ap s o f th e w o n d r o u s tem p le o f D ia n a at E p h esus.

2 7. I b id ., 7 5 . 28. P lin y , Natural

History,

b o o k 7 , m e n tio n s th e sam e a r c h ite c t, k n o w n u n d e r th e v a r i­

ab le n a m e o f “ D in o c h a r e s ,” as th e s u rv e y o r o f A le x a n d r ia . H e w a s also r e p u te d b y less r e li­ ab le a u th o ritie s t o h ave b e e n th e d e sig n e r o f th e t o m b o f D ia n a at E p h es u s. 29. T h is is m y tra n s la tio n , sin ce G r a n g e r ’ s v e r s io n , tra n s la tin g , fo r e x a m p le ,

deformavit

as “ u n c o m e ly ,” see m s s o m e w h a t d e m u r e . 30. O n this tra d itio n , see th e a rticle b y W e rn e r O e c h s lin , “ D in o k ra te s — L e g e n d e u n d

Daidalos 4 (Ju ly 19 8 2 ): 7 - 2 6 . The Life of Michelangelo, trans. A lic e S e d g w ic k ,

M y th o s m e g a lo m a n e r A rc h ite k tu s s tiftu n g ,” 3 1 . Q u o te d in A sc a n io C o n d iv i,

e d . H e l­

m u t W o h l (B a to n R o u g e , 19 7 6 ) , 2 9 -3 0 .

Entwurjf einer historischen Architektur in Abbildung unterscheidener beriihmten Gebaude, des Altertums und fremder Volker ( V ie n n a , 1 7 2 1 ) , 1 :1 8 . O n th e P ie tro d a C o r t o n a d r a w in g , see R ich a rd K ra u th e im e r , The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655-1667 ( P r in c e to n , 19 8 5 ), 10. 33. S e e th e ca ta lo g u e e n try in Claude to Corot: The Development of Landscape Painting in France ( N e w Y o r k , 19 9 0 ), 2 5 6 -5 8 . 32. J. B . F isch e r v o n E rla c h ,

34. F o r a b r ie f d iscu ssio n o f th e se fig u r e s, see th e e x c e lle n t in tr o d u c to r y b o o k b y M a g ­

The Chinese Garden: History, Art and Architecture ( L o n d o n , 19 7 8 ) , 1 7 5 . Tao Te Ching, trans. D . C . L a u ( L o n d o n a n d N e w Y o r k , 1 9 6 3 ), 8 2; see M u n ik a ta , Sacred Mountains in Early Chinese Art (Illin o is , 1 9 9 1 ) , esp . 4 - 3 9 .

g ie K es w ic k ,

35. L a o T z u , K y o h ik o

also

36. F o r th e fan ta stic ro ck s o f th e H a n an d S u n g g a r d e n s, see K e s w ic k , o p . c it., 1 5 5 - 6 2 . 3 7. U lr ic h C h ristofF el,

La Montagne dans la peinture ( G e n e v a , 1 9 6 3 ), 19 . The Early Mountaineers ( L o n d o n , 18 9 9 ), 1 4 - 1 6 ; see a lso (an d La Montagne a

38. S e e F rancis G r ib b le ,

fo r m a n y o th e r a c c o u n ts o f early m o u n ta in n a rrativ es) J o h n G r a n d - C a r te r e t ,

travers les ages ( G r e n o b le - M o u t ie r s ,

19 0 0 - 1 9 0 4 ) , 1 :1 n .

39. S ee G r ib b le , o p . c it., 15 . 40. J. J. S c h e u c h z e r,

1702-1711

Helveticus, sive Itinera per Helvetiae Alpinas Regiones Facta Annis

(L u cern e, 1 7 1 1 ) .

4 1 . S c h e u c h z e r in tu rn relied o n W a g n e r ’ s

Historia Naturalibus Helvetiae Curiosa

(16 8 0 ). 42 . Jo h n W ilk in so n , e d ., w ith Jo yce H ill an d W . F . R y an , Jerusalem Pilgrimage,

1099-1185

( L o n d o n , 19 8 8 ), 8. 4 3 . Ib id . 4 4 . I b id ., 18 6 -8 7 . 4 5 . I b id ., 18 6. 4 6 . Ib id . 4 7 . I b id ., 1 8 6 -8 7 . 48 . O n th e cre a tio n o f S h a n g r i-L a m y th s fro m th e e ig h te e n th c e n tu r y o n w a rd , see th e

The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing, and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (B e r k e le y a n d L o s A n g e le s , 19 8 9 ).

fa s cin a tin g b o o k b y P e te r B ish o p ,

49. F o r a fu r th e r d iscu ssio n o f th e Je ro m e s an d o t h e r “ m o u n ta in p ro s p e c t, w o r ld p a in t­

Mirror of the Earth: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting (P r in c e to n , 19 8 9 ), 7ff. 50. S e e G e o r g e W illia m s , Wilderness in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience o f the Desert in the History of Christianity ( N e w Y o r k , 19 6 2 ).

in g s ,” see W a lte r G ib s o n ,

5 1 . S e e G ib s o n , o p . c it., 2 7. 52. I b id ., 2 1. 53. W ilfr e d N o y c e ,

Scholar Mountaineers ( L o n d o n ,

19 5 0 ), 25.

NOTES 54.

D a n te ,

Purgatorio,

l ln n la P ^ ^ ( K w Y n r f % nCeS'

605

c a n to s 2 7 - 2 8 .

“ * pr° dfucedin David Th°m p«>n , ed. and trans., Petrarch: A HumanA n *h°lo0 y o f Petrarch’s Letters and of Selections from His Other Works lnd} ° ndon’ >9 7 1 ), 27 - 3 6 . It is taken from Petrarch, Epistolaefami-

U aZ

IZ Z h e t Z Z ? l g ' d a B o r g ° S an S e P ° l c r o - T h e le tt e r is said b y T h o m p s o n a n d o t h e r s t o h a v e b e e n “ o s te n s ib ly w r it te n fr o m M a la u c e n e o n A p r il 2 6 , 1 3 3 6 , ” b u t th e d a t ­ in g h as p r o v e d c o n te n t io u s . 56 .

F o r a d is c u s s io n o f th e s ta tu s o f th e le tte r as th e r e p o r t o f an e v e n t, a n d o f its p r o b ­

le m a t ic d a t in g , s ee H a n s B a r o n , From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Political Literature ( C h ic a g o a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 6 8 ), 1 7 - 2 0 .

Studies in Humanistic and

5 ?i/-fjeC-th S b n ,,i a n t re a d in g o f m o u n ta in ic o n o g r a p h y o ffe r e d b y Ja ce k W o z n ia k o w s k i, (F r a n k fu r t am

Die Wtldnts: Zur Deutungsgeschichte des Berges in der europdischen Neuzeit M a in , 1 9 8 7 ) , 7 8 - 7 9 . 5 8 . S e e t h e d o c u m e n ts p r in t e d in G r ib b le , o p . c it., 29—35. 5 9 . I b id ., 3 7 .

6 0 . E . H . G o m b r i c h , “ T h e R e n a iss a n ce T h e o r y o f A r t a n d th e R ise o f L a n d s c a p e ,” in

Norm and Form: Studies in the A rt o f the Renaissance ( L o n d o n , 1 9 6 6 ) , 1 0 7 - 2 1 . 6 1 . A . R ic h a r d T u r n e r , Inventing Leonardo ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 9 3 ) , 1 6 2 - 6 3 . 6 2 . S e e , f o r e x a m p le , C h r is to f f e l, o p . c it.; a n d C h r is to p h e r S . W o o d , Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins o f Landscape ( C h ic a g o , 1 9 9 3 ) , 22. 6 3 . S e e W o z n ia k o w s k i , o p . c i t ., 9 5 . 6 4 . F o r m o r e o f th e s e v ie w s , s ee th e in te r e s tin g ic o n o g r a p h ic a n th o lo g y c o m p ile d b y A lf r e d S t e i n it z e r ,

Der Alpinismus in Bildem

( M u n ic h , 1 9 2 4 ).

6 5 . O n e a r ly A lp in e c a r t o g r a p h y , see th e b r ie f d is cu s sio n in P h ilip p e J o u ta r d , 19 8 6 ), 63.

L ’Invention

du Mont Blanc (P a r is ,

6 6 . S e e G r ib b l e , o p . c i t ., 5 9 ; th e o r ig in a l s o u r c e is G e s n e r ,

Montis Pilati, iuxta Lucemam in Helvetia

Descriptio Montis Fracti sive

( Z u r ic h , 1 5 5 5 ) .

6 7 . I b id ., 5 1 . 6 8 . Jo sias S im le r ,

Vallesiae Descriptio et de Alpibus Commentarius ( Z u r ic h ,

1 5 7 4 ).

6 9 . T h e b e s t s tu d y o f th e se im a g e s is G ib s o n , o p . cit. 70 . G r ib b l e , o p . c i t ., 5 5 - 5 6 . 7 1 . G ib s o n , o p . c i t ., 70. 7 2 . K la u s E r t z ,

Josse de Momper der Jungere,

7 3 . Q u o t e d in th e im p o r ta n t a r ticle

1 5 6 4 - 1 6 3 5 ( F r e r e n , 1 9 8 6 ), 4 3 .

SacroMonte o f V a ra llo : Monasticism and the Arts (S y r a ­

b y W illia m H o o d , “ T h e

R e n a is s a n c e A r t a n d P o p u la r R e l ig io n ,” in T . V e r d o n , e d .,

c u s e , 1 9 8 4 ) , 30 5 . M y a r g u m e n t h e r e is in d e b t e d t o H o o d a n d t o th e g e n e r o u s h e lp o f G e r a l­ d in e J o h n s o n o f H a r v a r d U n iv e r s it y , w h o first a le r te d m e t o th e r ic h s o u rc e s o n th e tra d itio n o f th e

sacro monte.

7 4 . S e e G e o r g e K u b le r , “ S a c re d M o u n ta in s in E u r o p e a n d A m e r ic a ,” in T i m o t h y V e r ­

Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imag­ ination in the Quattrocento (S y r a c u s e , 1 9 9 0 ) , 4 1 3 - 4 1 . 7 5 . L i n o M o r o n i , Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Verna ( n .p ., n .d .; F lo r e n c e / V e n i c e , ca . 1 6 2 0 ) . F o r a c o m m e n t a r y o n th e b o o k , s ee L u c illa C o n ig l ie l l o , Jacopo Ligozzi: Le vedute del Sacro Monte della Verna, i dipinti di Poppi e Bibbiena ( P o p p i, 1 9 9 2 ). d o n a n d J o h n H e n d e r s o n , e d s .,

7 6 . S e e K u b le r , o p . c i t ., 4 1 8 - 2 2 . 7 7 . I a m g r a te fu l t o A n n e t t e S c h la g e n h a u f f fo r p e r s o n a lly in v e s tig a tin g th e m o d e r n fate o f M o n t V a le r ie n a n d fo r u n e a r t h in g a g r e a t tro v e o f d o c u m e n ts o n its h is to r y . S e e , f o r r e f­

Suresnes: Notes historiques (P a r is , 18 9 0 ); Ja cq u e s H e r is sa y , Le Mont-Valerien: Les Pelerinages de Paris revolutionnaire (P a r is , 19 3 4 ) ; a n d s u m m a r y in G e r ­ Aleijadinho et la sculpture baroque en Bresil (P a r is , 1 9 6 3 ) , 2 0 0 -2 0 2 . e r e n c e , E d o u a r d F o u r n ie r ,

m a in B a z i n ,

78 . S e e F o u r n ie r , o p . c i t ., 7 3 - 7 4 . 7 9 . I a m m o s t g r a te fu l t o C r is t in a M a t h e w s f o r p e r m is sio n t o c o n s u lt a n d q u o t e fr o m h e r fa s c in a t in g 1 9 9 1 S e n io r E s sa y fo r th e D e p a r t m e n t o f R e lig io u s S tu d ie s a t Y a le U n iv e r s it y , a n d

NOTES

606

t o V ir g in ia B la isd e ll fo r a s e le c tio n o f p h o to g r a p h s fr o m th e p o r tfo lio she m a d e t o illustra te M s . M a t h e w s ’ s s tu d y . 80.

I b id ., 8 -9 .

Chapter Eight: Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms 1. H o r a c e W a lp o le t o R ich a rd W e st, N o v . n , 17 3 9 ,

pole, West and Ashton, 1734-1771,

The Correspondence o f Gray, Wal­

e d . P a g e t T o y n b e e ( O x f o r d , 1 9 1 5 ) , 2 5 5 - 5 6 . F o r a n o th e r

a c c o u n t o f th e in cid e n t, see G r a y ’s le tte r t o h is m o th e r , N o v . 7 , 1 7 3 9 ,

Thomas Gray,

Correspondence of

e d s. P a g e t T o y n b e e an d L e o n a rd W h ib le y ( O x f o r d , 1 9 3 5 ) , 1 2 5 - 2 6 . T h e d o g

h ad b e e n g iv e n t o W a lp o le b y L o r d C o n w a y d u r in g his sta y in P aris an d w as n a m e d “ T o r y ” afte r a d ie -h a rd T o r y relative. It p re s u m a b ly a m u se d th e s o n o f th e g r e a t W h ig p rim e m in is­ te r t o h ave a T o r y in his lap. A n in e te e n th -c e n tu r y e d it o r o f W a lp o le ’ s le tters ad d s , rath e r u n fe e lin g ly , h o w ap t it w o u ld have b e e n fo r G r a y t o h av e c o m p o s e d an o d e o n th e d o g ’s u n tim e ly d e ath s e e in g as h e w o u ld w rite a p o e m o n a p e t c a t d r o w n e d in a g o ld fis h b o w l. T h e p o e tic im m o rta liza tio n o f T o r y w o u ld h ave t o w a it fo r th e m u c h lesser ta le n t o f E d w a rd B u rn a b y G r e e n e in 1 7 7 5 . 2. Jam es T h o m s o n , “ W in te r ,” fr o m

The Seasons,

in

Thomson’s Poetical Works,

ed .

G e o r g e G ilfillan (E d in b u r g h , 18 5 3 ), 14 5.

Correspondence of Thomas Gray, 128 . 17 3 9 , Correspondence, 2 5 4 - 5 5 . 1 7 3 9 , Correspondence, 2 59. N ic o ls o n , Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory

3. G r a y to W e st, N o v . 16 , 1 7 3 9 , 4. W a lp o le t o W e st, N o v . 1 1 , 5.

G r a y t o W e st, N o v . 16 ,

6.

C ite d in M a rjo rie H o p e

7.

T h o m as G ray,

8.

G r a y t o W e st, N o v . 16 ,

277 -

Journal;

Correspondence o f Thomas Gray, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, 12 8 .

also c ite d in 17 3 9 ,

(Ith a c a , 19 5 9 ), 122 n . 1.

9. S e e n o te 6 a b o v e .

The Hydrological Cycle and the Wisdom of God ( T o r o n t o , 19 6 8 ). Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 7 ) , 32. T h e lite ra tu re o n T h o m a s B u r n e t is c o n ­ 10. S e e Y i F u - T u a n ,

1 1 . S te p h e n Jay G o u ld ,

sid era b le. See in p articu lar D o n C a m e r o n A lle n , “ S c ie n c e a n d th e U n iv e rs a lity o f th e F lo o d ,”

The Flood Myth (B e r k e le y a n d L o s A n g e le s , 19 8 8 ), 3 5 7 - 8 2 . 12 . G ilb e r t B u r n e t, Some Letters Containing an Account of what seemed Most Remarkable in travelling through Switzerland, Italy. . . and Germany in the years 1685 and 1686 ( L o n ­

in A la n D u n d e s , e d .,

d o n , 1 7 2 4 ) , 15 . 13 . C ite d in M a lc o lm A n d r e w s ,

Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800

The Searchfor the Picturesque Landscape: Aesthetics and

(S ta n fo r d , 19 8 9 ), 44.

14 . C ite d in N ic o ls o n , o p . c it., 305.

Correspondence, 244. Aedes Walpolianae ( L o n d o n , 1 7 4 3 ) , xx v ii. S e e also E liz a b e th W . Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England ( 1 9 2 5 ; N e w Y o r k , 19 6 5 ). W illiam G ilp in , Essay on Prints ( L o n d o n , 1 7 9 2 ) , 2:44. S alv ato r t o R icciard i, M a y 1 3 ,1 6 6 2 , Lettere inedite di Salvator Rosa a G. B. Ricciardi,

15 . W a lp o le t o W e s t, S e p t. 2 8, 1 7 3 9 , 16 . H o r a c e W a lp o le , M a n w a r in g , 17 . 18.

ed . A ld o d e R in ald is ( R o m e , 19 3 9 ), 13 5 . S e e also th e in tr o d u c to r y essay b y M ic h a e l K itso n

Salvator Rosa ( L o n d o n : H a y w a r d G a lle r y , 1 9 7 3 ) , 15 ; an d F ra n ­ Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations Between Italian A rt and Society in the Age of the Baroque ( N e w H a v e n an d L o n d o n , 19 8 0 ), 1 4 4 - 4 5 an<^ p assim . 19 . S e e R ich a rd A . W a lla c e , Salvator Rosa in America (W e lle s le y , M a s s ., 19 7 9 ),

in th e e x h ib itio n ca ta lo g u e cis H a sk e ll,

9 0 -9 1. 20. W a lp o le t o W e st, S e p t. 30, 1 7 3 9 , 2 1. W e s t t o W a lp o le ,

Correspondence,

Correspondence,

2 4 6 -4 7 .

2 5 1.

22. F o r a d iscu ssio n o f its e ffects o n travel w r itin g , see th e th o u g h tfu l e ssay b y C h lo e

NOTES

607

C h a r d , “ R is in g a n d S in k in g o n th e A lp s a n d M o u n t E tn a : T h e T o p o g r a p h y o f th e S u b lim e in E i g h t e e n t h - C e n t u r y E n g la n d ,” 6 1-6 9 .

Journal o f Philosophy and the Visual Arts

i , n o . i (1 9 8 9 ):

2 3. G r a y ’ s o w n c o p y is n o w p re s e r v e d in th e H o u g h t o n L ib ra ry , H a rv a r d U n iv e rs ity . 2 4. T h is is th e d is m iss iv e s u m m a r y o ffe r e d b y th e tra n s la to r a n d e d it o r J. D . D u f f in h is 19 3 3 L o e b L ib r a r y e d it io n . 2 5 . S iliu s I t a lic u s ,

Punica,

tra n s. J. D . D u f f ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 3 3 ) , 3-49 4 (p- 1 5 1 )-

Hannibal a n d an e x c e l­ Alexander and John Robert Cozens:

26. F o r a d is c u s s io n o f t h e cir c u m s ta n c e s s u r r o u n d in g th e lo s t le n t c r itic a l m o n o g r a p h o n th e C o z e n s e s , see K im S lo a n ,

The Poetry o f Landscape ( N e w

H a v e n a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 8 6 ), 1 1 0 - 1 1 .

2 7 . T h e r e is s till a s u rp r is in g ly s c a n ty lite ra tu r e o n th e C o z e n s e s . A . P . O p p e ’ s

and John Robert Cozens ( C a m b r id g e ,

Alexander

M a s s ., 19 5 4 ) is n o w s e r io u sly o u t o f d a te , a n d th e in tr o ­

The A rt of Alexander and John Robert Cozens

d u c t io n b y A n d r e w W ilt o n t o h is e x h ib it io n

( N e w H a v e n : Y a le C e n t e r f o r B ritish A r t , 1 9 8 1 ) is t a n t a liz in g ly b rie f. I t a ls o a r g u e s a g a in s t a c lo s e s ty lis tic c o n n e c t io n b e t w e e n th e w o r k o f fa th e r a n d s o n , a p o s itio n d is p u te d b y K im S lo a n (s e e n . 2 6 a b o v e ) . 2 8. T h o m a s G r im s t o n t o h is fa th e r , J o h n , M a y 1 1 , 1 7 7 6 , c ite d in S lo a n , o p . c i t ., 109. 2 9. C i t e d in S lo a n , o p . c i t., 56 . 30. T h e t e x t is r e p r o d u c e d in J o h n G a g e ,

J. M. W. Turner: “A Wonderful Range of Mind ”

( N e w H a v e n , 1 9 8 7 ) , 19 2 . 3 1 . C i t e d in S lo a n , o p . c i t ., 10 9 .

The Early Mountaineers ( L o n d o n , 18 9 9 ), 12 3 . F o r t h e fu ll a c c o u n t, s ee A n account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps of Savoy in two Letters ( L o n d o n , 17 4 4 ).

3 2. F ra n c is G r ib b le , W illia m W in d h a m ,

3 3 . W in d h a m ’ s a c c o u n t w a s p u b lis h e d in 1 7 4 4 a n d is r e p r o d u c e d in m a n y h is to rie s o f e a r ly A lp in is m , f o r e x a m p le , G . R . D e B e e r ,

Early Travellers in the Alps

( L o n d o n , 19 3 0 ),

9 9 -1 14 . 3 4 . I b id . , 10 0 . 3 5 . I b id ., 1 0 7 . 36 . I b id . , 10 9 . 3 7 . I b id . , h i . 38 . F o r S a n d b y ’ s r o le in S c o t la n d , as w e ll as f o r a s u rv e y o f th e b e g in n in g s o f “ S c o ttis h ta s te ” in E n g la n d , s ee Ja m es H o l l o w a y a n d L in d s a y E r r in g t o n ,

The Discovery of Scotland

( E d i n b u r g h , 1 9 7 8 ) , 33ff. 39 . L in d a C o l l e y , Britons {N e w H a v e n a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 9 2 ) , 1 1 7 - 3 2 4 0 . H o l l o w a y a n d E r r in g t o n , o p . c it., 3 7. 4 1 . S e e A n d r e w s , o p . c i t ., 1 0 9 - 5 1 . I a m in d e b t e d t o D r . A n d r e w s ’s s u p e r b a c c o u n t o f W e ls h to u r is m f o r m y in te r p r e t a tio n . 4 2 . C i t e d in A n d r e w s , o p . c i t ., 13 0 . S e e a ls o J o se p h C r a d o c k ,

Utters from Snowdon: Descriptives o f a Tour through the Northern Counties o f Wales ( D u b lin , 1 7 7 0 ) . 43

S e e F io n a J. S t a ffo r d , “ T h e S u b lim e S a v a g e : A S t u d y o f J am es M a c p h e r s o n a n d th e

P o e m s o f O s s ia n in R e la t io n t o th e C u lt u r a l C o n t e x t in S c o t la n d in th e 17 5 0 s a n d 1 7 6 0 s ”

(D.Phil. diss., Oxford University, 19 8 6 ). 44. Ja m e s B o s w e U , Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LLD I ? 8 ^ ’ T h o m a s P e n n a n t,

(L o n d o n ,

A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides ( 1 7 7 4 ) . L ’Invention du Mont Blanc ( P a r is , 19 8 6 ).

4 6 . F o r B o u r r it , s ee P h ilip p e J o u ta r d ,

4 7 . C i t e d in A n d r e w s , o p . c i t., 1 1 3 . 4 8 . M a r c T h e o d o r e B o u r r it , Description (G T

^

I

U

S w itz e r la n d , G e r m a n y , a n d H o lla n d 50. J o se p h A d d is o n , 51.

desglacieres et amas de glace du duche de Savoye

a n d P . B . S h e lle y , H isto r y o f a S ix W eeks’ T o u r th r o u g h a F u n o f F r a n ce ,

Gribble, op. cit.,

Tatler, 116 .

(1817; re p r in t,

O x fo r d , 19 8 9 ), 1 5 1 .

n o . 1 6 1 , A p r . 2 0 ,1 7 1 0 .

NOTES

608 52. Jean -Jacqu es R o u s se a u ,

Oeuvres completes

I 3 I ~4 5 53. O n th e cu lt o f R o u s se a u ’ s p o ste rity, see m y

(P aris, 18 2 6 );

La Nouvelle Heloise,

1:

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Rev­

olution ( N e w

Y o r k , 19 8 9 ), 1 5 6 - 6 1 . 54. S h e lle y ’s a c c o u n t o f th e v o y a g e is in his le tte r t o T h o m a s L o v e P e a c o c k , Ju ly 1 2 , 1 8 1 6 .

It w as p rin ted in fu ll in S h e lle y an d S h e lle y, o p . c it., 10 6 -3 9 . F o r th e s to r y o f this e x tra o r d i­ nary R o m a n tic su m m er, see C la ire E lian e E n g e l,

Byron et Shelley en Suisse et en Savoie ( C h a m ­

b er)', 19 30). 5 5 . S h e lle y an d S h e lle y , o p . c it., 11 6 . 56 . C ite d in C u t h b e r t G ir d le sto n e , Louis Franfois Ramond (P aris, 19 6 8 ), 66. 5 7. W illiam C o x e [an d L o u is R a m o n d d e C a rb o n n ie r e s ] ,

de Carbonnieres, 1733-1820

Travels in Switzerland .

. ., 2

v o ls. (P aris, 18 0 2 ), 1:60. 58. I b id ., 1:58. 59. C ite d in G ir d le sto n e , o p . c it., 460. 60. L o u is R a m o n d d e C a rb o n n ie r e s , Voyages au

Mont-Perdu (P aris,

18 0 2 ), 1 1 3 - 1 4 . F o r

R a m o n d ’s m o re u n in h ib ite d ly ro m a n tic w r itin g o n P yre n e an d e so la tio n , in c lu d in g s p e c ta c ­ ular d e scrip tio n s o f m o u n ta in sto rm s, see his

Observationsfaites aux Pyrenees ( L o u r d e s

an d

Paris, 17 8 9 ). 6 1 . Ib id ., 235. 62. P erc y Bysshe S h e lle y, “ M o n t B lanc: L in e s W r itte n in th e V a le o f C h a m o u n i,” ( N e w Y o r k , 19 9 3 ), 1 1 2 - 1 7 . 63. H o r a c e B e n e d ic t d e S au ssu re,

Blanc{\y%i\

Poems

Journal d’un voyage a Chamouni et a la cime du Mont

rep rin t, L y o n , 19 2 6 ), 26.

64. S e e P au l P a y o t,

Au royaume du Mont Blanc ( C h a m o n ix , 19 5 0 ), 238. Histoire de I’alpinisme des origines

65 . O n th e su cce sso r clim b s , see C la ire E lian e E n g e l,

a nos jours (P aris,

19 5 0 ), 55.

66. Jo h n A u ld jo , A Narrative of an Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc on the 8th and gth of August, 1827 ( L o n d o n , 18 30 ), 6 7 -6 8 . 6 7 . P a y o t, op . cit., 4 1 . 68. M . J. G . E b e l,

The Traveller’s Guide through Switzerland, s u p p le m e n t

b y D a n ie l W all

( L o n d o n , 18 18 ). 69. M arian n a S tarke ,

Travels in Europe for the Use of Travellers on the Continent (P aris,

18 3 6 ), 35 - 3 <>70. E b e l, o p . c it., 44. 7 1 . F o r h er b io g r a p h y , see E m ile G aillard , Une Ascension romantique en 1838: Henriette d’Angeville au Mont Blanc (C h a m b e r y , 19 4 7 ). 72. H e n r ie tte d ’A n g e v ille , My Ascent of Mont Blanc, p re fac e b y D e rv la M u r p h y , trans. Jenn ifer B arn es ( L o n d o n , 19 9 2 ), 32. 73. C ite d in G aillard , o p . c it., 42 ff. 74. A lb e r t S m ith ,

The Story of Mont Blanc ( L o n d o n ,

1 8 5 3 ), x 5 9 -

7 5 . Ib id ., 30. 76. Ib id ., 33. 7 7 . Ib id ., 3 3 -3 4 . 78. Ib id ., 19 8 -9 9 . 79. E d m u n d S w in g le h u rs t, The Romantic Journey: Y o r k an d L o n d o n , 19 7 4 ), 4 9 -6 4 .

The Story of Thomas Cook and Victo­

rian Travel ( N e w

80. F o r a clo se s tu d y o f th e m e m b e rsh ip o f th e A lp in e C lu b as w e ll as an im p o r ta n t in te r ­ p re ta tio n o f th e social an d im p erial h isto ry o f B ritish m o u n ta in e e r in g , see th e 19 93 H a rv ard P h .D . d issertation b y P ete r H a n se n o n V ic to r ia n A lp in ism . I am im m e n s e ly g ra te fu l t o th e au th o r fo r th e m a n y in sigh ts o n this s u b jec t w h ich h e has sh are d d u r in g o u r d iscu ssion s o f this to p ic d u r in g his years as a g rad u ate s tu d e n t at H a rv ard . H is fo r th c o m in g b o o k w ill take his h istorical in sigh ts fu rth e r in to th e “ H im a la y a n ” p erio d o f B ritish c lim b in g .

NOTES 81.

609

The Playground of Europe ( L o n d o n , 1 9 2 4 ) , 68. G . I r v in g , The Mountain Way ( L o n d o n , 1 9 3 8 ) , 8 5.

L e s lie S t e p h e n ,

8 2. C i t e d in R . L .

8 3 . R e p r in t e d in I r v in g , o p . c i t ., 4 9 7 . 8 4. R o n a ld W illia m C la r k ,

The Victorian Mountaineers ( L o n d o n ,

19 5 3 ), 6 1.

8 5. T h e a t m o s p h e r e o f c o m p e t it iv e d a u n tle ss n e ss o n t h e m id - V ic to r ia n c lim b s is w o n ­ d e r fu lly c o n v e y e d in th e a n th o lo g ie s p u b lis h e d b y th e A lp in e C l u b as ciers ( L o n d o n , 1 8 5 9 ) .

Peaks, Passes, and Gla­

8 6. S t e p h e n , o p . c i t ., 19 5 . 8 7 . I b id ., 1 9 2 - 9 3 . 8 8. I b id . , 32 8 . 8 9. I b id . , 3 2 1 . 90 . I b id . , 3 3 6 - 3 7 . 9 1 . F o r a n e x c e lle n t a c c o u n t o f A lp in e C l u b a e s th e tic s , s ee H a n s e n , o p . cit. 9 2 . J o h n R u s k in , Y o rk , 18 6 5 ), 5 3 -5 4 .

Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures delivered at Manchester in 1864

Praeterita, in tr o d u c tio n b y K e n n e t h C la r k ( L o n d o n , S e e P a u l H . W a lt o n , The Drawings o f John Ruskin ( O x f o r d , 1 9 7 2 ) , J o h n R u s k in , Modem Painters, 5 v o ls . ( B o s t o n , 1 8 7 5 ) , 4 :4 2 7 .

(N ew

9 3 . J o h n R u s k in ,

1 9 4 9 ) , 10 3 .

94.

15 .

95.

9 6 . I b id ., 246. 9 7 . C i t e d in C la r k , o p . c i t ., 38. 9 8 . O n t h e d is p u te , s ee t h e b r illia n t a r tic le b y R o b i n M i d d le t o n , “ V i o l l e t - l e - D u c e t le s A lp e s : L a D is p u t e d e M o n t B la n c ,” in th e c a ta lo g u e o f t h e e x h ib it io n

naire de sa mort a Lausanne

Viollet-le-Duc: Cente-

( L a u s a n n e , 1 9 7 9 ) , 1 0 0 - 1 1 0 . S e e a ls o , in th e s a m e c a ta lo g u e ,

J a c q u e s G u b l e r , “ A r c h i t e c t u r e e t g l o g r a p h ie : E x c u r s io n s d e le c t u r e , ain si q u e d e u x m a n ife s te s d e V i o l l e t - l e - D u c , ” 9 1 - 1 0 8 . S e e a ls o th e essay s in P ie r re A . F r e y , e d .,

etle massif du Mont Blanc, 1868-1879 ( L a u s a n n e , 9 9 . R u s k in , Modem Painters, 4 :4 8 6 - 8 7 .

E. Viollet-le-Duc

19 8 8 ).

10 0 . I b id . , 1 3 3 - 3 4 .

C h a p ter N in e: A r c a d ia R edesigned 1 . E r w in P a n o f s k y , “ E t in A r c a d ia E g o : P o u s s in a n d th e E le g ia c T r a d it io n ,” in id e m .,

Meaning in the Visual Arts ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 5 5 ) , 2 9 5 - 3 2 0 . 2. H e n r y P e a c h a m , Graphice; or, The Most Ancient and Excellent A rt o f Drawing and Limning ( L o n d o n , 1 6 1 2 ) , 4 4 . 3. Morning Herald, J u ly 8 ,1 7 8 9 ; c ite d in A la n F a r m e r , Hampstead Heath ( N e w B a r n e t , 19 8 4 K 4 7 4 . F a r m e r , o p . c i t ., 1 3 2 . 5. I b id . , 10 4 . 6 . T h e f a m o u s p h r a s e is fr o m h is e ss a y “ W a lk i n g ,” d e liv e r e d as a le c t u r e t o th e C o n c o r d L y c e u m , a n d r e p r in te d in R a lp h W a ld o E m e r s o n ,

ing ( B o s t o n ,

Nature, a n d

H e n r y D a v id T h o r e a u ,

Walk­

19 9 1).

7 . P h ilip p e B o r g e a u d ,

The C ult o f Pan in Ancient Greece,

tra n s. K a th le e n A tla s s a n d

J a m e s R e d f ie ld ( C h i c a g o , 1 9 8 8 ) , 9 - 1 0 a n d p assim . 8. I b id . , 5 7 - 5 8 . 9 . T h e o c r it u s , in J 9 7 7 ), i ° 5 10 . V i r g i l ,

The Greek Bucolic Poets,

Eclogues

and

Georgies,

tra n s. J. M . E d m o n d s ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s .,

tra n s . H . R u s h t o n F a ir c lo u g h ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s .,

19 8 6 ), 3 1 . 11.

I b id . , 3 7 .

1 2 . I b id . , 1 5 3 . 1 3 . S e e t h e im p o r ta n t d is c u s s io n o f t h e s e issu es in J a m e s S . A c k e r m a n ,

and Ideology o f Country Houses ( P r in c e t o n ,

The Villa: Form

1 9 9 0 ) , c h a p . 1 . 1 a m a lt o g e t h e r m u c h in d e b t t o

NOTES

6 10

this book, as well as to conversations with Professor Ackerman-on the themes of this and other chapters. 14 . S e e R o b e r t C a ste ll, A n c ie n t V illa s ( L o n d o n , 17 2 8 ). 15 . V itr u v iu s , D e arch itectu ra , trans. F . G r a n g e r ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., an d L o n d o n , 19 8 3 ), 7 .10 0 .5 .2 (p . 10 3 ). F o r his cla ssification o f sta g e lan d sca p e s, see id e m , 5.10 0 .6 .9 . 16 . S ee C a ste ll, o p . cit. 1 7 . Vitruvius, o p . cit., 7 .1 0 0 .5 .4 (p . 10 5). 18. P h ilip S id n e y , The C oun tess o f P em broke’s A r c a d ia (1 6 3 3 ) , 9. 19 . Ja co p o S a n n a z a ro , A r c a d ia , trans. R alp h N a sh ( D e tr o it, 19 6 6 ), 4 2 - 4 4 . 20. Ib id ., 102. 2 1. S ee A n n e van E rp - H o u te p a n , “ T h e E ty m o lo g ic a l O r ig in o f th e G a r d e n ,”

Garden History 6,

Journal of

n o . 3 (19 8 6 ): 2 2 7 - 3 1 . I am also m o s t g r a te fu l t o D r . E r p - H o u te p a n fo r

h er g rea t k in dn ess in le ttin g m e read ch ap ters o f h e r th esis o n c h a n g in g a ttitu d e s t o fe n ce s an d b o u n d aries in lan d sca pe g a r d e n in g . O n th e im p lica tio n s o f th e se d e fin itio n s , see th e b r il­ liant an d p ro vo c a tiv e d iscu ssion in S im o n P u g h ’ s r e a d in g o f W illia m K e n t ’ s g a r d e n at R ousham ,

Garden, Nature, Language (M a n c h e s te r ,

19 8 8 ), esp . ch a p . 5.

22. See th e c a ta lo g u e n o te o n th e e n g ra v in g a fte r V i n c k b o o n s b y Jan v a n L o n s e r d e e l, in K ahren Jo nes H e lle r s te d t,

Gardens of Earthly Delight: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century

Netherlandish Gardens {P itts b u rg h :

F rick A r t M u s e u m , 19 8 6 ), 3 4 - 3 5 .

23. M arg are tta D arn a ll an d M a r k S . W e il, “ II s a cro b o s c o d i B o m a r z o : Its S ix te e n t h - C e n ­

Journal of Garden History 4 ,

n o . 1 ( 19 8 4 ): 1 - 9 4 ; b u t

see also th e critical r ev iew essay b y J. B . B u r y , “ B o m a r z o R e v is ite d ,”

Journal of Garden His­

tu ry L ite rary an d A n tiq u a ria n C o n t e x t ,”

tory 5 ,

2 (A p r il-J u n e 19 8 5 ): 2 1 3 - 2 3 .

24. S e e A n n e -M a r ie L e c o q , “ T h e G a r d e n o f W is d o m o f B e r n a r d P alissy,” in M o n iq u e M o s se r an d G e o r g e s T e y s s o t, e d s.,

The Architecture o f Western Gardens ( C a m b r id g e ,

M a s s .,

19 9 1 ) , 6 9 -8 0 . 2 5. Jo h n P rest,

The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation ofParadise

( N e w H a v e n an d L o n d o n , 1 9 8 1 ) , p assim . 26.

Ib id ., 52.

2 7. H o r a c e W a lp o le ,

ing in England,

The History of the Modem Taste in Gardening, in Anecdotes of Paint­

5 v o ls., 2d e d ., ( L o n d o n , 17 8 2 ) , 4 :2 3 5 .

The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting and Gar­ dening during the Eighteenth Century ( B a ltim o r e an d L o n d o n , 19 8 9 ), 65 . 28. C ite d in Jo hn D ix o n H u n t ,

29. T h e r e is a h u g e lite ra tu re o n th e se r e v o lu tio n a r y d e v e lo p m e n ts in E n g lish lan d sca p e g a rd en in g . T h e g u id in g lig h t in th e d e b a te , fo r m a n y ye ars, has b e e n J o h n D ix o n H u n t ,

The Figure in the Landscape, Gar­ dens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture ( C a m b r id g e , M as s ., 19 9 2 ), an d his b io g r a p h y o f W illiam K e n t, William Kent: Landscape Garden Designer; An Assessment and Catalogue of His Ideas ( L o n d o n , 1 9 8 7 ), m a y b e e sp e cia lly r e c o m m e n d e d . M y

a m o n g w h o se m a n y rich ly le arn e d an d p e rce p tiv e b o o k s

d e b t t o h im t h r o u g h o u t this c h a p ter w ill b e e v id en t. 30. C h r is to p h e r H u s se y , 19 6 7 ).

The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View ( H a m d e n ,

3 1 . C ite d in M o n iq u e M o s se r, “ P arad o x in th e G a rd e n : A B r ie f A c c o u n t o f

C o n n .,

Fabriques,”

in M o s se r an d T e y s s o t, e d s., o p . c it., 2 6 6 -6 7 . 32. Ib id . 33. F o r th e “ S te in ” at W o r lit z , see C h r is to p h e r T h a c k e r , “ T h e V o lc a n o : C u lm in a tio n o f

British and Amer­ ican Gardens in the Eighteenth Century ( W illia m s b u rg , 19 8 4 ), 7 4 -8 2 . 34. S ee B arb ara Jo n es, Follies and Grottoes ( L o n d o n , 19 8 9 ), 1 0 1 - 6 . 3 5. See th e ca ta lo gu e n o te b y G ervase Jack so n-S top s, An English Arcadia: Designsfor Gar­ dens and Garden Buildings in the Care of the National Trust, 1600-1990 ( L o n d o n , 19 9 2 ), 94.

th e L a n d scap e G a r d e n ,” in R o b e r t P . M a c c u b b in an d P e te r M a r tin , e d s.,

36. S ee M o s se r, o p . c it., 2 6 9 -7 0 . 3 7. S ee D o r a W ie b e n so n ,

The Picturesque Garden in France ( P r in c e to n ,

19 7 8 ).

NOTES

6 11

38 . S e e M a lc o lm A n d r e w s , “ T h e S u b lim e as P a r a d ig m : H a f o d a n d H a w k s t o n e ,” in M o s s e r a n d T e y s s o t , e d s ., o p . c i t ., 3 2 3 - 2 6 .

Country Life, A Description of Hawk­

3 9 . I b id ., 3 2 5 ; s ee a ls o A . O s w a ld , “ B e a u tie s a n d W o n d e r s o f H a w k s t o n e ,” J u ly 3 , 19 5 8 , p . 18 ; s ee a ls o J o n e s , o p . c it., 7 8 - 8 5 ; T . R o d e n h u r s t ,

stone, the Seat o f Sir Richard Hill, Bart. 40. S ee

A n t o in e t t e

Le

( L o n d o n , 17 8 4 ) .

N orm an d

R o m a in ,

“The

‘ Id eas’ o f R en e

de

G ir a rd in

at

E r m e n o n v ille ,” in M o s s e r a n d T e y s s o t , e d s ., o p . c it., 3 36—39.

Les Forets de la France dans Pantiquite et au Moyen

4 1 . L o u i s F e r d in a n d A lf r e d M a u r y ,

Age

(P aris: A c a d e m ie d e s I n s c r ip tio n s e t B e lle s - L e tt r e s , 1 8 4 3 ) , 13 .

Fontainebleau: Paysages, legendes, fantdmes; Hommage d Denecourt (P a r is , 1 8 5 5 ) , 5 a n d 3 4 6 . 4 3 . S e e N ic h o la s G r e e n , The Spectacle o f Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France ( M a n c h e s t e r , 19 9 0 ) , 8 4 - 1 2 0 . 4 4 . F o r S e n a n c o u r , s ee th e h a g io g r a p h y b y Ju le s L e v a llo is , Un Precurseur, Senancour (P a r is , 1 8 9 7 ) , a n d t h e b e t t e r , cr itic a l s tu d y o f th e w o r k s b y M a r c e l R a y m o n d , Senancour: Sen­ sations et revelations (P a r is , 1 9 6 5 ) . 4 5 . S e n a n c o u r , Oberman (B r u s s e ls , 1 8 3 7 ) , 1 :8 7 - 8 8 . 4 6 . I n t h e v e r s io n o f t h is e n c o u n t e r t h a t p r e fa c e d S e n a n c o u r ’ s Libres meditations (P a r is , 4 2 . T h e s e e x tra c ts are t a k e n fr o m A u g u s t e L u c h e t , e d .,

1 8 1 9 ) h e r e c o r d s t h e a c tu a l fate o f th e o l d m a n , d e s p e ra te ly s ic k , t a k e n fr o m h is f o r e s t c e ll b y fr ie n d s , a n d d y i n g b e f o r e h e c o u ld b e b r o u g h t s a fe ly t o th e t o w n . 4 7 . I b id . , 9 4 . 48 . S o m e a c c o u n t s o f th e s to r y m a in ta in e d t h a t w h a t t h e G r a n d V e n e u r said w a s “ E n te n d e z - v o u s [ D o y o u h e a r / u n d e r s t a n d m e ] , ” b u t th e se n se o f a d m o n is h m e n t w a s th e sa m e . 4 9 . E m ile B ilie r d e la C h a v ig n e r ie ,

peintre Lantara 51.

Rechercheshistoriques, biographiques et litterairessur le

( P a r is , 18 5 2 ) .

50 . T h is , in 1 6 4 5 ; s ee P a u l D o m e t ,

Histoiredela foret de Fontainebleau (P a r is ,

1 8 7 3 ) , 86.

I b id ., 2 4 4 ff.

5 2 . O n D u r a n d , s e e G r e e n , o p . c i t ., i6 2 f f . 5 3 . S e e in p a r tic u la r th e p a s sa g e in

Oberman,

p . 9 2 , w h e r e S e n a n c o u r s p e c ific a lly re je c ts

o r ie n t a t io n : “ I t r y t o r e ta in n o in fo r m a t io n w h a ts o e v e r ;

not t o

k n o w th e fo r e s t , s o as alw a ys

t o h a v e s o m e t h in g e lse t o d is c o v e r .” 5 4 . F o r a lis t o f t h e e a r lie s t d e n iz e n s o f B a r b i z o n , s ee F e lix H e r b e t ,

torique et artistique de la foret de Fontainebleau

Dictionnaire his-

( F o n t a in e b le a u , 1 9 0 3 ) , 1 9 - 2 2 .

5 5 . C i t e d in G r e e n , o p . c i t ., 3. 5 6 . T h e o d o r e d e B a n v ille , in L u c h e t , e d ., o p . cit. 5 7 . C h a r le s V in c e n t , “ L e C h a s s e u r d e s vip fcres,” in L u c h e t , e d ., o p . c i t ., 2 3 2 -4 2 . 58 . F o r t h e b u ild i n g o f th e R e p tile H o u s e a n d its s u c c e s s o r in th e 18 8 0 s, s e e P e t e r G u U le r y ,

The Buildings o f London Zoo ( L o n d o n , 1 9 9 3 ) , 5 - 9 ; f o r th e r e p tile s a n d t h e ir p erils , The Ark in the Park: The Zoo in the Nineteenth Century ( L o n d o n , 1 9 7 6 ) ,

see W ilf r id B lu n t , 2 2 0 -3 1.

59 . S e e B l u n t , o p . c i t ., 2 2 4 - 2 5 . 6 0 . I b id . , 2 26 . 6 1 . I b id . , 38. 6 2 . F o r H a g e n b e c k , s e e N i g e l R o t h f e ls , “ B r in g ’ E m B a c k A liv e : C a r l H a g e n b e c k a n d th e E x o t i c A n im a l a n d P e o p le T r a d e in G e r m a n y , 1 8 4 8 - 1 9 1 4 ” ( P h . D . d is s ., H a r v a r d U n iv e r s it y , 19 9 4 ). 6 3 . C i t e d in G e o r g K o h lm a ie r a n d B a rn a v o n S a r t o r y ,

Century Building Type ( C a m b r id g e ,

Houses o f Glass: A Nineteenth-

M a s s ., 1 9 8 6 ) , 2 7 - 2 8 . T h is is a r ic h a c c o u n t o f th e im p li­

c a tio n s o f ir o n a n d g la s s t e c h n o lo g y fo r th e r e a liz a t io n o f a n c ie n t d r e a m s o f v e r d a n t u to p ia s . S e e a ls o M a y W o o d s a n d A r e t e W a r r e n ,

and Conservatories ( L o n d o n , 6 4 . I b id ., 1 2 4 - 2 5 . 6 5 . I b id ., 3 1 .

Glass Houses: A History o f Greenhouses, Orangeries

19 9 0 ), 1 1 2 - 3 6 .

6 12

NOTES

66 . S e e Jack K ra m e r,

The World Wildlife Fund Book of Orchids ( N e w

Y o r k , 19 8 9 ).

6 7 . K o h lm a ie r an d v o n S a rto ry , o p . c it., 34. 68. S ee F red e ric k L a w O lm s te d , Jr., an d T h e o d o r a K im b a ll, e d s.,

scape Architecture: Central Park ( C a m b r id g e ,

Forty Tears of Land­

M a s s ., 1 9 7 3 ) , 27.

69. Ib id . 70. S e e H a z e l C o n w a y ,

Britain

People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in

( C a m b r id g e , 1 9 9 1 ) , 8 9 -9 0 . T h e d e b a te b e tw e e n a d v o ca te s o f a m o re “ u r b a n ”

d e sig n e d p lace o f e n terta in m e n t an d su p p o rters o f th e “ n a tu ra list,” “ G r e e n s w a r d ” a p p ro a ch is v iv id ly d iscu ssed in th e s u p e rb h is to ry b y R o y R o s e n z w e ig a n d E liz a b e th B la ck m a r ,

Park and the People ( N e w

The

Y o r k , 19 9 3 ), esp. 9 5 - 1 5 0 .

7 1 . O lm ste d an d K im b a ll, e d s., o p . c it., 46. 7 2 . H e n r y D a v id T h o r e a u ,

Walden ( P r in c e to n ,

1 9 7 3 ) , 2 10 .

73. Ib id ., 220. 74. I b id ., 2 19 . 7 5 . H e n r y D a v id T h o r e a u ,

The Maine Woods,

in tr o d u c tio n b y E d w a rd H o a g la n d ( N e w

Y o r k , 19 88 ), 94. 76. T h o r e a u , “ W a lk in g ,” 96 an d 106. 7 7 . C ite d in W a lte r L . C r e e s e ,

The Crowning of the American Landscape

(P r in c e to n ,

19 8 5 ), 102. 78. Ib id ., 12 6. 79. O n th e so cia l an d im p eria l im p lic a tio n s o f c r ic k e t , n o t h in g h as e v e r im p r o v e d o n C . L . R . Jam es’s w o n d e r fu l

Beyond a Boundary {L o n d o n ,

19 6 3 ).

Crabgrass Frontier: The Subur­ banization of the United States ( N e w Y o r k a n d O x f o r d , 19 8 5 ). 8 1. F . J. S c o tt, The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds^N e w Y o r k , 18 7 0 ), 6 1 . 80. O n th e e m p ire o f th e la w n , see K e n n e th T . J a ck so n ,

82. Ib id ., 29. 83. T h o r e a u , “ W a lk in g ,” 1 1 9 - 2 0 . 84. Ib id ., 11 6 . 85. Ib id ., 9 3 -9 4 . 86. T h o r e a u ,

The Maine Woods,

85.

8 7. Ib id ., 109. 88. T h o r e a u , “ W a lk in g ,” 105. 89. E d w a rd H o a g la n d , in tr o d u c tio n t o 90. H e n r y D a v id T h o r e a u , 1 8 3 7 - 1 8 4 4 , p p. 1 1 8 - 1 9 .

Journal,

The Maine Woods, x x v .

e d . J o h n C . B r o d e r ic k (P r in c e to n , 1 9 8 1 ) , v o l. 1 ,

9 1 . Ib id ., 37 ( M a y 2 7 , 18 4 1 ). 92. R o b e r t L . R o th w e ll, e d ., 1 9 9 1 ) , 12 6 - 2 7 .

Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape ( N e w

Y ork,

A

B I B L I O G R A P H I C

G U I D E

( F o r p rim a ry s o u r c e s , s e e th e n o t e s a n d r e fe r e n c e s in in d iv id u a l c h a p te r s .)

O ne

Landscape history; methods a n d approaches

A l l p a t h s t o la n d s c a p e h is to r y m u s t le a d t h r o u g h t w o e n d u r in g ly im p o r ta n t a n d p o w e r fu l w o r k s , v e r y d if f e r e n t in th e ir s c o p e a n d g o a ls b u t a lik e in t h e ir in te n s e s e n s itiv ity t o th e r e la ­

Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thoughtfrom Ancient Times to the End o f the Eighteenth Cen­ tury ( B e r k e le y a n d L o s A n g e l e s , 1 9 6 7 ) , a n d R a y m o n d W illia m s , The Country and the City ( L o n d o n , 1 9 7 3 ) . O f g r e a t s ig n ific a n c e t o th is p e r e n n ia l d e b a te is K e ith T h o m a s , Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1300-1800 ( L o n d o n , 1 9 8 3 ). M y o w n

t io n s h ip b e t w e e n c iv iliz a t io n a n d n a tu r e : C la r e n c e J. G la c k e n ,

a p p r o a c h t o th e s u b je c t h as b e e n s h a p e d , t h o u g h n o t , I h o p e , d e te r m in e d , b y t w o im p o r ta n t

La Poetique de Pespace (P a r is , 1 9 5 7 ) , a n d th e cla ssic w o r k La Memoire collective ( P a r is , 19 6 8 ) — a n d e n c o u r a g e d b y th e c o n v e r ­

F r e n c h t e x ts — G a s t o n B a c h e la r d , o f M a u r ic e H a lb w a c h s ,

g e n c e o f h is to r y , g e o g r a p h y , a n d ic o n o l o g y e m b o d ie d in th e r e m a r k a b le serie s o f v o lu m e s e d it e d b y P ie r re N o r a ,

LesLieuxde memoire ( P a r is ,

1 9 8 5 - 1 9 9 2 ) . A n im p o r ta n t c o lle c t io n o f

essay s o n c h a n g i n g c u lt u r a l d e fin itio n s o f la n d s c a p e ( in c lu d in g a m a jo r c o n tr ib u t io n b y J o h n D ix o n H u n t o n th e d is t in c tio n s b e t w e e n E u r o p e a n a n d A m e r ic a n la n d s c a p e n o r m s ) is o ffe r e d in a s p e c ia l n u m b e r o f

Le Debat 6 5

( M a y - A u g u s t 1 9 9 1 ) : 3 - 1 2 8 . A s im ila r d is c u s sio n ( in c lu d ­

in g a r tic le s b y J o h n D ix o n H u n t , R o b e r t R o s e n b lu m , a n d J. B . J a c k so n ) is c o lle c t e d in S t u ­ a r t W r e d e a n d W illia m H o w a r d A d a m s , e d s .,

the Twentieth Century

Denatured Visions: Landscape and Culture in

( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 8 ).

T h e in te r p r e t a tio n o f la n d s c a p e w a s r e v o lu t io n iz e d b y th e w o r k o f J o h n B r i n c k e r h o ff J a ck ­

Landscapes: A Choice o f Texts, e d . E . H . Z u b e Discovering the Vernacular Landscape ( N e w H a v e n , 1 9 8 4 ). J a c k s o n ’s

s o n . S e e in p a r tic u la r h is

( A m h e r s t, 1 9 7 0 ) , a n d f o r m e r p u p il J o h n R .

S t il g o e h as b e c o m e an e x t r a o r d in a r y in te r p r e t e r o f la n d s c a p e in h is o w n r ig h t. S e e , fo r e x a m ­

Common Landscape of America, 1380-1843 ( N e w o f the American Suburb, 1820-1939 ( N e w H a v e n a n d

p le ,

H a ve n , 19 8 2 ) an d

Borderland: Origin

L o n d o n , 1 9 8 8 ). T h e r e is an e x c e lle n t

a c c o u n t o f t h e im p o r ta n c e o f J a c k s o n ’ s w o r k b y D . M e in ig in id e m , e d .,

The Interpretation 6 13

614

BIBLIOGRAPHY

of Ordinary Landscapes ( O x fo r d

an d N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 9 ); see also his essay “ T h e B e h o ld in g

E y e ” in th e sam e v o lu m e . T h e o t h e r p a tria rch o f la n d s ca p e h is to r y a n d in te r p r e ta tio n is Y i- F u T u a n , t o w h o se e le g a n t synthesis o f p s y c h o lo g y an d natu ral an d arch ite ctu ra l h is to r y I

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience ( M in ­ Landscapes of Fear ( N e w Y o r k , 19 7 9 ). T h e in d is so lu b le c o n n e c tio n

o w e a g rea t d eal. S ee in p articu lar his n e ap o lis, 19 7 7 ) an d

b e tw e e n th e lay o f th e lan d an d th e h an d o f m an is th e fu n d a m e n ta l m o t i f o f m u c h o f th e

Architecture: The Natural and the Man-made ( N e w The Experience of Place ( N e w Y o r k , 19 9 0 ), also w h ile p rim a rily c o n ­

w o r k o f V in c e n t S cu lly , in p articu lar his Y o r k , 19 9 1 ) . T o n y H iss,

ce rn e d w ith th e co n te m p o ra ry A m e rica n lan d sca p e , has v a lu a b le in sigh ts in to th e r e la tio n ­ ship b e tw e e n social h ab it an d natu ral h ab itat. T h a t cu ltu ral g e o g r a p h y is o n c e again th riv in g in B ritain as a field o f in q u ir y o w e s a g r e a t d eal t o tw o scho lars in p articu lar (w h o , h o w e v e r , h ave q u ite d is tin c t an d e v e n o p p o site m e th o d o lo g ie s ): Jay A p p le to n an d D e n is C o s g r o v e . S e e A p p le to n , The Experience ofLandscape (L o n d o n an d N e w Y o r k , 19 7 5 ) , The Poetry of Habitat ( H u ll, 19 7 8 ) , an d The Symbolism of Habitat: An Interpretation of Landscape and the Arts (Seattle an d L o n d o n , 19 90 ). S e e C o s ­ g r o v e , Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape ( L o n d o n an d S y d n e y , 19 8 4 ). S e e also th e e x ce p tio n a lly in te restin g v o lu m e o f essays e d ite d b y C o s g r o v e an d S te p h e n D a n ie ls, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Envi­ ronments (C a m b r id g e , 19 88 ); an d S te p h e n D a n ie ls, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States ( P r in c e to n , 19 9 3 ). S ch o la rs w h o s e w o r k has rec en tly e n rich e d land scape history' th r o u g h th e in sig h ts o f lite ra ry an d critical stu d ies in clu d e S im o n P u g h , Garden, Nature, Language (M a n c h e s te r , 19 8 8 ) an d Reading Land­ scape: Country, City, Capital (M a n c h e s te r , 19 9 0 ); an d S te p h e n B a n n , w h o s e a rticle s o n la n d ­ scape fo rm an d m e a n in g h ave ap p ea re d in th e Journal of Garden History 1, n o . 2, an d in M o n iq u e M o s se r an d G e o r g e s T e y s s o t, e d s., The Architecture of Western Gardens ( C a m ­ b r id g e , M ass., 1 9 9 1 ) , 5 2 2 -2 4 . T h e p e c u lia r im p o r ta n ce o f lan d sca p e fo r t w e n tie th -c e n tu r y G e rm an p olitics an d c u ltu re is p e r ce p tiv e ly d iscu sse d in a series o f articles b y Jo ach im W o lsch k e -B u lm ah n (fo r sp e cific refe re n ce s, see th e n o te s t o c h a p te r 2). T h o u g h m y co n ce rn s in this b o o k g o b e y o n d tw o -d im e n s io n a l r ep re se n ta tio n s o f la n d ­ scape, it g o e s w ith o u t s ayin g th a t th e a p p ro a ch o ffe r e d h ere has b e e n fu n d a m e n ta lly g u id e d by th e lo n g an d rich tra d itio n o f art h isto rical lite ra tu re o n th e c o n c e p t an d p ra ctic e o f la n d ­ scape art. W o rk s o n in d iv id u a l artists are listed in th e ap p ro p riate n o te s , b u t w o r k s th a t have b een p articu larly im p o rta n t in clu d e E . H . G o m b r ic h ’ s classic e ssay “ T h e R e n aissan ce T h e o r y

Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance Landscape into Art (L o n d o n , 19 4 9 ), o n th e e v o lu tio n o f lan d sca p e is ch a lle n g e d b y W . J. T . M itc h e ll e d ., Landscape and Power (C h ic a g o , 19 9 4 ). F o r im p o rta n t e xam p le s o f a m o re self-co n sc io u s ly

o f A rt and th e R ise o f L a n d sc a p e ,” in

( L o n d o n , 19 6 6 ), 1 0 7 - 2 1 . G o m b r ic h ’ s a r g u m e n t, as w e ll as th a t o f K e n n e th C la rk ,

h istorically g r o u n d e d ap p ro ach t o th e s u b je c t, see th e essays o f A n n Jensen A d a m s o n D u t c h land scapes, A n n B e rm in g h a m o n e ig h te e n th - c e n tu ry E n g lish lan d sca p e d r a w in g s , an d E liz ­ ab eth H e lsin g e r o n T u r n e r an d “ th e r ep re se n ta tio n o f E n g la n d ” in th e sam e v o lu m e . T h e m o st in n ov ativ e s tu d y o f all re c e n t in te rp re ta tio n s o f E n g lish lan d sca p e p a in tin g is Jo h n Bar-

The Dark Side of the Landscape ( C a m b r id g e , 19 8 0 ); an d see also A n n scape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (B e r k e le y , rell,

B e r m in g h a m ,

Land­

19 8 6 ).

A m erica n art h istory is esp ecially rich in th o u g h tfu l discu ssions o f th e e v o lv in g form s an d ob jects o f landscape p ain tin g an d I am esp ecially in d eb ted t o th e brilliant w o r k o f Barbara N ovak,

Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1823-1873 ( N e w Y o r k , 1980). Empire of the Eye: Landscape, Representation and American Cultural Politics,

A n g ela M ille r’s

1823-1873

(Ith a ca, 19 93) is an im p o rtan t recen t ad d itio n t o this literatu re, an d m a jo r d iscu s­

Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (W ash in g to n , D .C ., 19 8 8 ), an d th e essays in three e xh ib itio n catalo gues: American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School; Jo hn W ilm e rd in g e t al., American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1830-1873 (P rin c eto n an d W a s h in g to n D .C ., 19 89 )! and W illiam H . T r u e ttn e r et al., The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier (Wash­ sions o f A m erica n landscape can b e fo u n d in Franklin K elly,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

6 15

Views of Ameri­ Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions

in g t o n , D . C . , 1 9 9 1 ) . S e e a ls o M ic k G id le y a n d R o b e r t L a w s o n -P e e b le s , e d s .,

can Landscapes ( C a m b r id g e , 19 8 9 ). J o h n F . S e ars, in the Nineteenth Century ( O x f o r d , 19 8 9 ) is a v iv id

a n d e n g a g in g s tu d y o f th e re lig io s ity o f

A m e r ic a n lan d sca p e . M a n y o f th e se w o r k s th e m s e lv e s o w e a d e b t t o L e o M a r x ’ s classic s tu d y ,

The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America ( O x f o r d ,

19 6 4 ).

T h e lite ra tu r e o n th e h is to r y a n d p ro s p e c ts o f th e e n v ir o n m e n ta l m o v e m e n t is, o f c o u r s e , a b u n d a n t a n d g r o w in g . F o r w o r k s o f p a r tic u la r in te r e s t t o th e a r g u m e n t m a d e h e r e , s ee th e n o t e s t o t h e I n t r o d u c t io n .

Two R o b e r t P o g u e H a r r is o n ,

The history a n d cu ltu re o f the forest

Forests: The Shadow o f Civilization ( C h ic a g o ,

19 9 2 ) is a la n d m a r k in

th e c u lt u r a l in te r p r e t a tio n o f th e fo r e s t. W h ile it a p p e a re d as I w a s c o m p le t in g m y o w n w o r k o n f o r e s t m y t h o lo g ie s , m y o w n u n d e r s t a n d in g o f th e t o p ic h as b e e n e n r ic h e d b y H a r r is o n ’s b r illia n t d is c u s s io n o f V i c o ’ s h is to r ic a l m y t h o l o g y a n d D a n t e ’s tre a t m e n t o f th e s ylv an m o tif. T h e a n t h r o p o lo g i c a l f a s c in a tio n w it h w o o d la n d im a g e r y in h e r it e d fr o m V i c o p r o d u c e d t w o

Wald- und Feldkulte, The Golden Bough: A Study in

cla ss ic te x ts o f n in e te e n th - c e n t u r y e t h n o g r a p h y : W ilh e lm M a n n h a r d t ’ s 2 v o ls . ( B e r lin , 1 8 7 5 - 1 8 7 7 ) , a n d S ir Ja m es G e o r g e F r a z e r ’s

Comparative Religion

( L o n d o n , 18 9 0 ).

F o r t h e c u lt u r a l h is to r y o f th e G e r m a n fo r e s t , s ee th e e ssays in B e r n d W e y e r g r a f e t a l., Waldungen: Die Deutschen und ihr Wald ( B e r lin , 1 9 8 7 ) , a n d J o s e f N i k o la u s F o r s t e r , Wald, Mensch, Kultur ( B e r lin a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 6 7 ) . T w o e x tra o r d in a ry w o r k s o f art h is to r y are o f p a r a m o u n t im p o r ta n c e in u n d e r s t a n d in g th e r e s o n a n c e o f f o r e s t im a g e r y in G e r m a n c u ltu r e : C h r is t o p h e r S . W o o d , Jo sep h L e o K o ern e r,

Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins o f Landscape ( C h ic a g o , 1 9 9 3 ), a n d Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape ( L o n d o n , 19 9 0 ).

A l s o im p o r ta n t in t h e d is c u s s io n o f F r ie d r ic h ’ s fo r e s t ic o n o g r a p h y , s a c r e d a n d p a t r io t ic , is H.

B o r s c h - S u p a n , “ L ’A r b r e a u x c o r b e a u x d e C a s p a r D a v id F r ie d r ic h ,”

Revue du Louvre

26,

n o . 4 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 2 7 5 - 9 0 ; a n d C . J. B a ile y , “ R e lig io u s S y m b o lis m in C a s p a r D a v id F r ie d r ic h ,” in

Bulletin o f the John Rylands Library 7 1 , n o . 3 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 5 - 2 0 ; a n d id e m ( w it h J o h n L e ig h t o n ) , Caspar David Friedrich: Winter Landscape ( L o n d o n , 1 9 9 0 ). O n th e h is to r y o f th e w ild m a n , s e e R ic h a r d B e r n h e im e r , Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment and Demonology ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 5 2 ) ; T i m o t h y H u s b a n d ( w it h th e a ssistan ce o f G lo r ia G il m o r e - H o u s e ) , The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 0 ); a n d L a rr y S ilv e r , “ F o r e s t P rim e v a l: A l b r e c h t A lt d o r f e r a n d th e G e r m a n W ild e r n e s s L a n d s c a p e ,” Simiolus 1 3 , n o . 1 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 4 - 4 3 . O n G e r m a n to p o g r a p h ic a l w r it in g , s ee G e r a ld S tra u ss , SixteenthCentury Germany, Its Topography and Topographers ( M a d is o n , W is ., 1 9 5 9 ) ; a n d fo r an u n d e r s t a n d in g o f t h e c o n t i n u in g t r a d itio n s o f s a c r e d a r b o r e a lis m in G e r m a n y , s ee M ic h a e l B a x a n d a ll,

The Limewood Sculptors o f Renaissance Germany

( N e w H a v e n , 19 8 0 ); a n d K a rl

O e t t i n g e r , “ L a u b e , G a r t e n u n d W a ld : Z u e in e r T h e o r ie d e r s iid d e u t s c h e n S a k r a lk u n s t, 1 4 7 0 - 1 5 2 0 , ” in id e m , e d .,

Festschrift fu r Hans Sedlmayr ( M u n i c h ,

19 6 2 ), 2 0 1-2 8 . O n v e r­

d a n t cr o s s e s s e e S t e p h e n J. R e n o , “ T h e S a c re d T r e e as an E a rly C h r is tia n L ite r a r y S y m b o l: A P h e n o m e n o lo g ic a l S t u d y , ” in

Forschungen zur Anthropologie und Religionsgeschichte,

v o l. 4

( S a a r b r iic k e n , 1 9 7 8 ) ; a n d R a b H a tf ie ld , “ T h e T r e e o f L ife a n d th e H o l y C r o s s : F r a n c is ca n S p ir it u a lity in t h e T r e c e n t o a n d th e Q u a t t r o c e n t o , ” in T i m o t h y V e r d o n a n d J o h n H e n d e r ­

Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quat­ trocento ( S y r a c u s e , 1 9 9 0 ).

s o n , e d s .,

F o r th e s u s t a in e d f a s c in a tio n in W e s t e r n c u lt u r e w it h th e “ a r b o r e a l” o r ig in s o f th e G o t h i c ,

On Adam ’s House in Paradise: The Idea o f the Primitive H u t in Architectural History ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 8 1 ) ; a n d J u r g e n B a ltru s a itis, Aberrations: Legendes des formes (P a r is , 1 9 8 3 ) , 9 0 - 1 1 3 . S e e a ls o P a u l F r a n k l, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries ( P r in c e t o n , i9 6 0 ) .

see in p a r tic u la r t h e b r illia n t s tu d y b y J o se p h R y k w e r t,

T h e r e is an e x c e p tio n a lly r ic h a n d im p o r ta n t c o lle c t io n o f e ssays o n th e s a cr e d ic o n o g r a p h y o f th e fo r e s t in

L ’ambiente vegetale nell’alto medioevo

( S p o le t o : C e n t r o ita lia n o d i s tu d i

BIBLIOGRAPHY

6 16

s u ll’ a lto m e d io e v o , 19 90 ). F o r o th e r im p o rta n t co n tr ib u tio n s t o th e m e d iev al h is to ry o f th e fo re st, see C h a r le s H ig o u n e t , “ L e s F o re ts d e l’ E u r o p e o c c id e n ta le d u V e au X le sifccle,” in

Agricultura e mondo rurale in occidente nell’alto medioevo (S p o le to :

C e n t r o italian o d i stu d i

s u ll’ a lto m e d io e v o , 19 6 6 ), 3 4 3 -9 7 ; an d C h r is W ic k h a m , “ E u r o p e a n F o re sts in th e E a rly M id ­ d le A g e s : L a n d scap e an d L a n d C le a r a n c e ,” in

L’ambiente vegetale (as

ab o ve ), 4 7 9 -5 4 8 . F o r

an e x ce lle n t g en eral a c c o u n t o f m ed iev al fo re st c u ltu re (p rin c ip ally F r e n c h ), s ee R o la n d B e ch m ann,

Trees and Man: The Forest in the Middle Ages, trans. K ath ary n D u n h a m ( N e w Y o r k , A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization

19 90 ). John P erlin ,

( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 9 ) is an e x ce lle n t h istorical narrative o n th e m a teria l h is to ry o f W e s t e r n forests fro m an tiq u ity to th e n in e te e n th ce n tu ry. F o r m o re specialized histories o f the forest, see, o n E n glan d : N . D . G . Jam es,

English Forestry (O x fo r d ,

A History of Treesand Woodlands in the British Landscape The Royal Forests of Medieval England (P h ilad elp h ia ,

19 8 1); O liv e r R ack h a m ,

( L o n d o n , 1990); and C h arles Y o u n g ,

19 79 ). T h e great oak panic o f th e e ig h te en th ce n tu ry is still b est treated in R o b e r t G ree n h a lg h A lb io n ,

Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1632-1832

( C a m b r id g e ,

M ass., 1926). See also S tep h e n D an ie ls, “ T h e P olitical Ic o n o g r a p h y o f th e W o o d la n d in L a te r G e o rg ia n E n g la n d ,” in C o s g r o v e an d D an ie ls,

The Iconography of Landscape, 4 3 - 8 1 .

O n F rance: th e field is d o m in a te d b y t w o m o n u m e n ta l stu d ies b y A n d rd e C o r v o l,

L ’Homme et Parbre sous VAncien Regime (P aris, 19 8 4 ) an d L ’Homme aux bois: Histoire des relations de Phomme et de la foret, X lle XXe siecles (P aris, 19 8 7 ). S e e also th e u sefu l s tu d y b y L o u is B a d re , Histoire de la foret franfaise (P aris, 19 8 3 ) an d Les Eaux et lesforets du i2e au 2oe siecle (P aris, 19 8 7 ). F o r th e C o lb e r t re g im e , see J o h n C r o u m b ie B r o w n , The French For­ est Ordinance of 1669 (E d in b u r g h , 18 8 3). T h e F r e n ch sid e o f th e o a k p a n ic is c o v e r e d in P aul W ald e n B a m fo rd , Forests and French Sea Power, 1660-1789 ( T o r o n t o , 19 5 6 ). F o r th e r e v o ­ lu tio n a ry h isto ry o f th e F ren ch fo re sts, see D e n is W o r o n o f f , e d ., Revolution et espacesforestiers (P aris, 1988 ); an d o n th e rela tio n sh ip b e tw e e n th e B a rb iz o n artists an d th e fo re st o f

The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (M a n c h e s te r , 19 9 0 ). T h e Groupe d’Histoire des Forets Frangaises (45 ru e d ’ U lm , 750 0 5 P aris) r e g u la r ly p u b lish e s im p o r ta n t research

F o n ta in e b le a u , see th e e x ce lle n t s tu d y b y N ic h o la s G r e e n ,

results o n th e h isto ry o f th e F ren ch fore st. F o r th e m aterial an d cu ltu ra l h is to ry o f th e A m e r ic a n fo re sts, see th e e n c y c lo p e d ic w o r k b y M ich ael W illiam s,

Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography ( C a m b r id g e ,

19 8 9 ).

M a n y o f th e w o rk s th a t have d e a lt w ith th e w ild e rn e ss p assion in A m e r ic a n life also , o f c o u r s e , discuss the cu ltu ral issues in v o lv e d in A m e r ic a ’s lo n g , a m b iv a le n t rela tio n sh ip w ith its forests. See in p articu lar R o d e r ick N a sh ,

Wilderness and the American Mind ( N e w

estand Conservation History, th e

e x c e lle n t jo u rn a l o f th e F o r e st H is t o r y S o c ie ty o f th e U n ite d

H a v e n , 19 6 7 ).

For­

S tates, is a w o n d e r fu l so u rc e o f sch o la rly an d research d a ta o n o n e o f th e liv e lie st an d m o st fascin atin g o f all fields o f e n v iro n m en ta l h isto ry.

Three

Rivers an d hydraulic history

T h e tw o m o st im ag in ativ e w o r k s o n flu vial cu ltu r e also rep re se n t o p p o site p o les o f m e t h o d ­ o lo g y : th e n u m in o u s essay o f G a s to n B a ch e la rd ,

la matiere (P aris, 19 4 2 ), an d K arl W it t f o g e l’ s Oriental Despotism ( N e w H a v e n ,

an tiq u ity ,

L ’Eau et les reves: Essai sur Pimagination de

a m b itio u s t y p o lo g y o f th e h yd ra u lic c u ltu res o f 19 5 7 ) . O f fu n d a m e n ta l im p o r ta n ce in u n d e r ­

The Hydrological Cycle and the Wisdom of God ( T o r o n to , 19 6 8 ). D e n is C o s g r o v e an d G e o fF P e tts , Water, Engineering and Landscape is an im p o r ta n t re c e n t c o lle c tio n o f essays o n th e h is­

s ta n d in g th e p eren n ial d e b a te in W e ste rn cu ltu r e o n th e o r ig in o f rivers is Y i- F u T u a n , e d s.,

to ry an d cu ltu ral g e o g r a p h y o f w a te r, in c lu d in g a b rillia n t essay b y C o s g r o v e , “ P lato n ism an d P racticality: H y d r o lo g y , E n g in e e r in g an d L a n d sc ap e in S ix te e n th - C e n tu r y V e n ic e ,” 3 5 - 5 3 . A w o rk th at tran scen d s in s ig n ifica n ce its im m e d ia te to p ic o f th e R en aissan ce river p o e m an d to w h ich I am m u c h in d e b te d is W y m a n H . H e r e n d e e n ,

River and the Myth of Geography ( P itts b u r g h ,

19 86 ).

From Landscape to Literature: The

BIBLIOGRAPHY

6 17

Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt ( C h i c a g o , 1 9 7 6 ) ; a n d V iv ia n A . H i b b s , The Mendes Maze: A Libation Table for the Inunda­ tion o f the Nile (I-IIIA .D .) ( N e w Y o r k a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 8 5 ) . E . A . W aU is B u d g e , Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, 2 v o ls . ( L o n d o n a n d N e w Y o r k , 1 9 1 2 ) , a n d From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt ( L o n d o n , 1 9 3 4 ) , t h o u g h m u c h c r i ti c iz e d , s till r e m a in f u n d a m e n t a l f o r a n y O n a n c ie n t E g y p t ia n h y d r a u lic s , s ee K a rl B u t z e r ,

u n d e r s t a n d in g o f th e r e la tio n s h ip b e t w e e n c u lt s o f s a c r ific e , im m o r t a lity , a n d th e t o p o g r a ­ p h y o f t h e N i le . F o r a c r itic a l v ie w o f P lu ta r c h ’ s v e r s io n o f th e Isis a n d O s ir is m y th , s ee J o h n G w y n n G r if f ith s ,

Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride

( C a r d i f f , W a le s , 1 9 7 0 ) . F o r r e la te d v e r s io n s

o f in u n d a t io n m y th s , s e e th e c o l l e c t io n o f essay s e d it e d b y A la n D u n d e s ,

The Flood Myth

( B e r k e le y a n d L o s A n g e l e s , 1 9 8 8 ). F o r th e tra n s m is s io n o f E g y p t ia n c u lt u r e t h r o u g h th e

The Legacy o f Egypt ( O x f o r d , 1 9 7 1 ) ; E r ik I v e rs e n , The Myth o f Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition ( C o p e n h a g e n , 1 9 6 1 ) ; a n d id e m , Obelisks in Exile, v o l . 1 , The Obelisks o f Rome ( C o p e n h a g e n , 19 6 8 ) . T h e s p e c t a c u la r e x h ib it io n c a ta ­ lo g u e Egyptomania: L ’Egypte dans Part occidental, 1770-1930 u n f o r t u n a t e ly a p p e a r e d t o o

c e n t u r ie s , s e e J. R . H a r r is , e d .,

la t e f o r m e t o t a k e a d v a n ta g e o f its w e a lth o f in s ig h t s b u t is e ss e n tia l r e a d in g o n th is t o p ic . O n t h e f a t e fu l jo u r n e y o f th e b a r g e

Cleopatra,

Cleopatra’s Needles ( L o n ­

see R . A . H a y w a r d ,

d o n , 19 7 8 ). F o r R e n a iss a n ce h y d r a u lic s, fo u n ta in s , a n d g r o tt o e s , s ee M . F a g jo lo , “ II s ig n ific a to d e ll’ a c q u a e la d ia le ttic a d e l g ia r d in o ,” in F a g io lo , e d .,

Natura e artificio

(R o m e, 19 8 1 ), 14 4 -5 3

1 7 6 - 8 9 ; C la u d ia L a z z a r o - B r u n o , “ T h e V illa L a n te at B a gn aia : A n A lle g o r y o f A r t a n d N a tu r e ,”

A rt Bulletin 4 ,

n o . 5 9 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 5 5 3 - 6 0 ; D a v id C o f f in , The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome Fons Sapientiae: Garden Foun­ tains in Illustrated Books, from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (W a s h in g t o n , D . C . , a n d ( P r in c e t o n , 1 9 7 9 ) ; E lisa b e th B . M a c D o u g a ll a n d N a o m i M ille r ,

D u m b a r t o n O a k s , 1 9 7 7 ) ; a n d essays b y T e r r y C o m it o , L io n e llo P u p p i, B r u n o A d o r n i, a n d A n n e - M a r ie L e c o q in M o n iq u e M o s s e r a n d G e o r g e s T e y s s o t, e d s .,

Gardens. T h e r e is a n tomachia Poliphili. I

The Architecture of Western Hypnero-

in te n s e d e b a te o v e r th e id e n tity a n d ca re e r o f th e a u th o r o f th e

h a v e fo llo w e d , I h o p e , w it h a critical e y e , th e h isto rical r e c o n s tr u c tio n o f

E m a n u e la K re t z u le s c o - Q u a r a n ta ,

LesJardins du songe: Poliphile et la mystique de la Renaissance II Sogno di Polifilo Prenestino (R o m e , 19 8 3 ) , t h o u g h I c e r ­

(P a ris , 19 8 6 ) , a n d M a u r iz io C a lv e s i,

ta in ly d o n ’ t s u b s c r ib e t o th e n o t io n t h a t F r a n c e s c o C o lo n n a w a s , in fa c t, L e o n B a ttis ta A lb e r ti. T h e o n ly fu ll- le n g t h s tu d y o n th e p r o d ig io u s S a lo m o n C a u s is b y C . S . M a k s ,

Salomon de Caus The Renais­

(P a ris , 1 9 3 5 ) , b u t th e ca re e r o f th e C a u s fa m ily is d is cu s se d in d e ta il in R o y S t r o n g ,

sance Garden in England ( L o n d o n ,

19 7 9 ) .

T h e lit e r a tu r e o n B e r n in i a n d h is fo u n t a in s is c o p io u s . F o r th e s p e c ific h is to r y o f th e F o u n ­ ta in o f th e F o u r R iv e r s , s ee th e n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5. O n th e im p o r ta n c e o f th e r iv e r as a v e h ic le o f p o litic a l a n d n a tio n a l id e n tity , see H e r e n d e e n

The Politics of Landscape ( O x f o r d , 1 9 7 9 ) . O n th e F r e n c h tra d itio n , La Memoire desfleuves de France (P a r is , 19 8 9 ); a n d fo r th e e x tra o r d in a ry Architecture, Poetry, and Number in the Royal Palace at Caserta ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 8 3 ) , a w o r k t h a t a ls o in c lu d e s

( a b o v e ) a n d Ja m e s T u r n e r , s ee P h ilip p e B a rr ie r ,

r iv e r- r o a d o f t h e B o u r b o n k in g o f N a p le s , s ee G e o r g e L . H e r s e y ,

o n e o f t h e m o s t in te r e s t in g d is c u s sio n s o f th e “ N e w S c ie n c e ” o f G ia m b a ttis ta V i c o . O n e o f t h e m o s t re m a r k a b le w o r k s e v e r w r it te n a b o u t th e im p o r ta n c e o f th e R h in e fo r G e r m a n n a tio n ­ a lism w a s b y A le x a n d r e D u m a s ,

Excursions sur les bords du Rhin,

in tr o d u c tio n b y D o m in iq u e

F e r n a n d e z (P a r is , 1 9 9 1 ) . F r o m th e a b u n d a n t lite ra tu r e o n T u r n e r ’ s riv e r p ie c e s , s ee in p a r tic ­ u la r D a v id H i ll,

Turner on the Thames: River Journeys in the Tear 1803 ( N e w

H a ve n an d L o n ­

Fields of Vision, 1 1 2 - 4 5 ; E r ic S h a n e s , Turner’s Human Landscapes (London, 19 8 9 ); a n d J o h n G a g e , J. M. W. Turner: "A Wonderful Range of M ind” (New H a v e n , 19 8 7 ) . T h e lite ra tu re o n E a k in s d o n , 1 9 9 3 ) ; S t e p h e n D a n ie ls , “ J. M . W . T u r n e r a n d th e C ir c u la t io n o f S t a te ,” in

is a ls o s u b s ta n tia l. T h e m o s t a c u te c o m m e n t a r y o n his p a in tin g o f R u s h c a rv in g th e a lle g o r i­ c a l f ig u r e o f th e S c h u y lk ill is E liz a b e t h J o h n s ,

Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modem Life

( P r in c e t o n , 1 9 8 3 ) , 8 2 - 1 1 4 . A n d I a m as a lw a ys in d e b t t o th e b r illia n t in sig h ts o f M ic h a e l F r ie d , in th is ca se in h is

Courbet’s Realism ( C h ic a g o , 19 9 0 ) , as w e ll as t o essays b y L in d a Courbet Reconsidered (B r o o k ly n , 19 8 8 ).

o t h e r s in th e e x h ib it io n c a ta lo g u e

N o c h lin a n d

6 I8

BIBLIOGRAPHY Four

M ountains

T h e m o st p o w e r fu l an d p ro fo u n d cu ltu ral h is to ry o f m o u n ta in sen sib ility an d rep re se n tatio n s is Jacek W o z n ia k o w s k i, D ie W ildnis: Z u r D eutun gsgeschichte des Berges in d e r europdischen N e u z e it ( F ran k fu rt am M a in , 19 8 7 ). It shares th e e m in e n ce w ith a n o th e r w o r k o f e n d u r in g b rillia n ce an d so p h istica tio n : M a rjo rie H o p e N ic o ls o n , M o u n ta in G loom , M o u n ta in Glory ( Ith a c a , 19 5 9 ). R e ce n tly th e re has b ee n a rev ive d in te rest in art h isto rical sch o la rsh ip in th e issues o f a ltitu d e an d om n iscien ce . S e e , fo r e x a m p le , W a lte r G ib s o n , M ir r o r o f the Ea rth: The W orld Landscape in S ixteen th -C en tu ry F lem ish P a in tin g ( P r in c e to n , 19 8 9 ), a n d th e e n o r ­ m o u sly s tim u la tin g w o r k b y A lb e r t B o im e , The M a g iste r ia l G aze: M a n ife st D estin y a n d A m e r ­ ica n Landscape P a in tin g , c. 1 8 3 0 -1 8 6 3 (W a s h in g to n , D .C ., 1 9 9 1 ) . A n im p o r ta n t essay o n A m e rica n v iew s o f m o u n ta in s, in c lu d in g th e a n th r o p o m o r p h ic “ S t o n e F a c e ” o f N e w H a m p ­ s h ire, has b ee n w ritte n b y G r a y S w e e n e y , “ T h e N u d e o f L a n d sc a p e P a in tin g : E m b le m a tic P erso n ifica tio n in th e A r t o f th e H u d s o n R ive r S c h o o l,” S m ith so n ia n S tu d ie s in A m e r ic a n A r t (F all 1989): 4 3 - 6 5 . See also th e typ ica lly s u g g e stiv e e ssay b y Y i- F u T u a n , “ M o u n ta in s , R u in s an d th e S e n tim e n ts o f M e la n c h o ly ,” Land sca pe ( A u tu m n 19 6 4 ): 2 7 - 3 0 . A t th e o t h e r e x tre m e o f m o u n ta in o u s co m p re h en sive n e ss is th e e n c y c lo p e d ic J o h n G r a n d - C a r te r e t, L a M o n ta g n e d travers les ages (G r e n o b le - M o u tie r s , 1 9 0 0 -19 0 4 ). O n th e ic o n o g r a p h y o f m o u n ta in s, see U lrich C h r is to ffe l, L a M o n ta g n e d a n s la p e in tu r e ( G e n e v a , 1 9 6 3 ), an d A lfre d S te in itz e r , D e r A lp in ism u s in B ild e m ( M u n ic h , 19 2 4 ). F o r th e o r ie n ta l tra d itio n , see K y o h ik o M u n ik a ta , Sacred M o u n ta in s in Early C hinese A r t ( Illin o is , 1 9 9 1 ) ; an d fo r a d iffe r e n t p ers p e ctiv e o n th e relationship b e tw e e n W e ste rn an d E a stern r ep re se n ta tio n s o f m o u n ta in sce n e ry , see Jam es C a h ill, The C o m p ellin g Im age: N a tu r e a n d Style in S e ven teen th -C en tu ry C h in ese P a in tin g ( C a m b r id g e , M ass., 19 8 2 ), esp . 1 - 6 9 . T h e r e is a su bstantial litera tu re o n M o u n t R u s h m o r e , b u t th e e x tra o rd in a ry s u b je c t a n d th e career o f its a m a z in g s cu lp to r h ave n o t at all b e e n e x h a u s te d . A lb e r t B o im e h as d o n e m u c h to rek ind le critical in te rest in th e m o n u m e n t in , fo r e x a m p le , “ P a tria rch y F ix e d in S to n e : G u tz o n B o r g lu m ’s M o u n t R u s h m o r e ,” A m e r ic a n A r t ( W in te r - S p r in g 1 9 9 1 ) ; an d t w o stu d ies o f B o r g lu m are im p o rtan t: R e x A la n S m ith , The C a r v in g o f M o u n t R u sh m o re ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 5 ), an d H o w a rd an d A u d re y K arl S h a ff, S ix W ars a t a Tim e: Th e L ife a n d T im es o f G u tzo n Borg lu m , Sculptor o f M o u n t R u shm o re (S io u x F alls, S. D a k ., 19 8 5 ). T h e e ssen tial s o u rc e s fo r a full h isto ry o f th e p ro je c t an d its cr e a to r are th e B o r g lu m P ap ers in th e L ib ra ry o f C o n g r e s s , M an u scrip t D iv isio n , an d fo r his c o r r e sp o n d e n c e w ith R o s e A r n o ld P o w e ll, th e S c h le s in g e r Library, H arvard U niversity. O n th e “ D in o cra tic tra d itio n ,” see W e rn e r O e c h s lin , “ D in ok ra te s— L e g e n d e u n d M y th o s m e g a lo m a n e r A rc h ite k tu s s tiftu n g ,” D a id a lo s 4 (Ju ly 19 8 2 ): 7 - 2 6 . F o r M ic h e la n g e lo ’ s fan tasy an d P ie tro d a C o r t o n a ’ s, s ee , r e s p ec tiv ely , A sc a n io C o n d iv i, The L ife o f M ichelangelo, trans. A lic e S e d g w ic k ( B a to n R o u g e , 1 9 7 6 ) ; a n d R ich a rd K ra u th e im e r , The R o m e o f A le x a n d e r V II: 1 6 3 3 - 1 6 6 7 (P r in c e to n , 19 8 5 ), 1 0 - 1 1 . T h e r e is an in te r e s tin g d is cu s ­ sion o f L e o n a r d o ’s m o u n ta in d ra w in g s in A . R ich a rd T u r n e r , In v e n tin g L eona rd o ( N e w Y o r k , 19 93). S acred m o u n ta in s are d iscu sse d in t w o im p o r ta n t article s, G e o r g e K u b le r , “ S ac re d M o u n ta in s in E u r o p e an d A m e r ic a ,” in V e r d o n an d H e n d e r s o n , e d s., C h r is tia n ity a n d the Renaissance, 4 1 3 - 4 1 ; an d W illia m H o o d , “ T h e Sacro M o n te o f V a r a llo : R en aissan ce A r t an d P o p u lar C u lt u r e ,” in T . V e r d o n , e d ., M o na sticism a n d the A r ts (S yra c u se , 19 9 0 ). O n th e M o n te V e r n a p rin ts, see L u c illa C o n ig lie llo , e d ., Jacopo L ig o zzi: L e v ed u te d e l Sacro M o n te della Verna, i d ip in ti d i P oppi e B ib b ie n a ( P o p p i, 19 9 2 ), 4 7 - 5 6 . F o r R en aissan ce a c c o u n ts o f clim b s, see G . R . d e B e e r, Ea rly Travellers in the A lp s ( L o n d o n , 19 3 0 ), an d F ran cis G r ib b le , The Early M o u n ta in eers ( L o n d o n , 18 99 ). O n th e taste fo r S a lv a to r R o sa, th e im p o rta n t s tu d y is still E liz a b e th W . M a n w a r in g , I t a l ­ ia n Landscape in E ig h tee n th -C e n tu ry E n g la n d ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 2 5 ), t h o u g h a fu ll s tu d y o f th e E n glish p rints after R o sa is d e sp e ra te ly n e e d e d . S a lv a to r’ s le tters o n sav ag e b e a u ty m a y b e fo u n d in Lettere in e d ite d i S a lvato r R osa a G . B. R ic c ia r d i ( R o m e , 1 9 3 9 ), e d . A ld o d e Rinaldis; an d th e re is a h elp fu l in tr o d u c tio n b y M ich a e l K itso n t o th e 19 73 e x h ib itio n “ S a l­ v ato r R o sa ” at th e H a y w a rd G a lle r y , L o n d o n . F o r th e a u th en tica lly p re -R o m a n tic co n n e c-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

6 19

tdons b e t w e e n S a lv a t o r ’ s s en se o f a rtis tic is o la t io n a n d h is s c e n e ry o f is o la t io n , see F ra n c is H a s k e ll, P a tr o n s a n d P a in te r s: A S tu d y i n the R e la tio n s B etw een I t a l ia n A r t a n d Society in the A g e o f th e B a r o q u e ( N e w H a v e n a n d L o n d o n , 19 8 0 ). T h e b u d d in g e n th u s ia s m fo r m o u n ta in s c e n e ry in e ig h t e e n th - c e n t u r y B r ita in is s u p e r b ly a n a ly z e d b y M a lc o lm A n d r e w s , T h e S earch f o r the P ictu r es q u e L a nd sca pe: A es th etics a n d T o u r is m in B r it a in , 1 7 6 0 - 1 8 0 0 ( S t a n fo r d , 1 9 8 9 ); a n d th e c h a n g e in p e r c e p tio n s o f S c o t t is h s c e n e r y fr o m r e v u ls io n t o a d o r a t io n is n e a tly c h a r t e d in Ja m es H o llo w a y a n d L in d s a y E r r in g t o n , T h e D isco v ery o f S c o tla n d ( E d i n b u r g h , 19 7 8 ) . T h e m o s t d e ta ile d a c c o u n t o f s u b lim e ae s ­ th e tic s

is W a lt e r

J.

H ip p ie ,

J r.,

The B e a u t if u l,

the S u b lim e

and

the P ictu r es q u e

in

E ig h te e n th - C e n tu r y B r itish A e s th e tic Theory ( C a r b o n d a le , 111., 1 9 5 7 ) . O n th e g r o w in g F r e n c h a p p r e c ia t io n o f m o u n ta in s u b lim ity , s ee D . G . C h a r lt o n , N e w Im a g e s o f the N a t u r a l in F r a n ce : A S tu d y i n E u r o p e a n C u l t u r a l H istory , 1 7 3 0 - 1 8 0 0 ( C a m b r id g e , 1 9 8 4 ); th e cla ssic s tu d y b y D a n ie l M o r n e t , L e S e n t im e n t d e la n a tu r e en F r a n ce d e J - J R o u sse a u a B e r n a r d in d e S a in t- P ie r r e (P a r is , 1 9 0 7 ) ; a n d N u m a B r o c , L e s M o n ta g n e s v u e s p a r lesg eo gra phes e t les n a t u r a listes d e la n g u e fr a n g a is e a u X V I I e siecle (P a r is , 1 9 6 9 ). A r g u a b l y , n o d e m o n s t r a b ly g r e a t E n g lis h artist h as b e e n m o r e n e g le c te d th a n J o h n R o b e r t C o z e n s , p e r h a p s a c o n s e q u e n c e o f th e fa c t t h a t h is m o s t p o w e r f u l w o r k s w e r e e x e c u t e d in w h a t is still t h o u g h t o f as th e w e a k g e n r e o f w a t e r c o lo r . T h e b e s t m o n o g r a p h o n h is w o r k a n d t h a t o f h is fa t h e r is K im S lo a n , A le x a n d e r a n d J o h n R o b e r t Co zen s: T he P oetry o f L a n d ­ scape ( N e w H a v e n a n d L o n d o n , 19 8 6 ). T h e r e is a ls o an e x h ib it io n c a ta lo g u e w it h an in t r o ­ d u c t io n b y A n d r e w W il t o n , T h e A r t o f A le x a n d e r a n d J o h n R o b e r t C o z e n s ( N e w H a v e n , 1 9 8 1 ) ; a n d in te r e s t in g a n e c d o ta l e v id e n c e o f th e s k e tc h ily d o c u m e n te d life ap p ea rs in A . P . O p p e , A le x a n d e r a n d J o h n R o b e r t C o z e n s ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 5 4 ) . T h e r e is a n e x p a n d in g a n d a b u n d a n t lite ra tu r e o n e ig h t e e n th - a n d n in e te e n th - c e n t u r y A lp in is m , m u c h o f it w r it te n b y th e c lim b e rs th e m s e lv e s a n d t o a s u rp r is in g d e g r e e ( t o a n o n ­ m o u n ta in e e r in g r e a d e r ) c o lo r e d w it h g r e a t p o e tic in te n s ity . O n s o m e g e n e r a l t h e m e s c o l o r ­ in g t h e ta s te f o r s u b lim ity , s ee th e s tim u la t in g e ssay b y C h l o e C h a r d , “ R is in g a n d S in k in g o n th e A lp s a n d M o u n t E tn a : T h e T o p o g r a p h y o f th e S u b lim e in E ig h t e e n t h - C e n t u r y E n g ­ la n d ,” J o u r n a l o f P hilosophy a n d the V is u a l A r t s 1 , n o 1 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 6 1 - 6 9 ;

th e e x h ib it io n c a t ­

a lo g u e D e co u v e r te e t s e n t im e n t d e la m o n ta g n e , 1 7 4 0 - 1 8 4 0 ( A n n e c y , 19 8 6 ). A n e x e m p la r y w o r k o f t h e n e w H e lv e t o m a n ia is J e a n - B e n ja m in d e L a b o r d e , T a b le a u x to p o g r a p h iq u e s. . . de la Suisse, 2 v o ls . (P a r is , 1 7 8 0 - 1 7 8 6 ) . S a u s su r e is m o s t a c c e ss ib le in h is J o u r n a l d ’ u n voyage a C h a m o u n i a la cim e d u M o n t B la n c ( 1 7 8 7 ; r e p r in t, L y o n , 19 2 6 ) . I m u s t th a n k A lix C o o p e r f o r a llo w i n g m e t o s ee h e r u n p u b lis h e d p a p e r o n D e o d a t d e D o lo m ie u : “ F r o m th e A lp s t o E g y p t ( a n d B a c k A g a in ) : D o l o m ie u , S c ie n tific V o y a g in g a n d th e C o n s t r u c t io n o f th e F ie ld in L a te E i g h t e e n t h - C e n t u r y F r a n c e .” For

R am ond,

see

C u th b e rt

G ir d le s t o n e ,

L o u is F ra n g o is R a m o n d d e

C a r b o n n ier e s,

1 7 3 3 - 1 8 2 ° ( P a r is , 1 9 6 8 ) , a d e ta ile d w o r k t h a t a ls o o ffe r s r ic h s a m p le s o f R a m o n d ’s o w n m a n y w r it in g s ty le s , f r o m th e d r ily s c ie n tific t o th e e c s ta tic a lly R o m a n t ic . T h e R o m a n t ic p o e t s ’ e n g a g e m e n t w it h S w it z e r la n d is tr e a t e d in C la ir e E lia n e E n g e l, B yron e t S helley en Suisse e t en S a v o ie ( C h a m b & y , 1 9 3 0 ). E n g e l h as a ls o w r it te n m a n y v o lu m e s o n th e A lp in e a e s th e tic , in p a r tic u la r L a L it t e r a t u r e a lpestre e n F r a n c e e t en A n g le t e r r e a u X V I I I e t a u X I X e siecles ( C h a m b e r y , 1 9 3 0 ) , n e c e s sa r ily o m it t i n g , h o w e v e r a r g u a b ly , th e g r e a te s t o f all R o m a n t ic A lp i n e n o v e ls , A d a lb e r t S t if t e r ’ s B e r g k r ista ll ( 1 8 5 2 ) , b u t a v a ila b le in a n e x c e lle n t n e w e d it io n ( F r a n k fu r t a m M a i n , 1 9 8 0 ). I t s h o u ld b e re a d t o g e t h e r w it h th e e x tra o r d in a ry o u t p o u r i n g o f t h e n o n - c l im b in g R o m a n t ic h is to r ia n Ju le s M i c h e le t , L a M o n ta g n e (P a r is , 18 6 8 ). F o r an e x a m p le o f A lp i n e t o u r is t lit e r a tu r e , s ee J o h n M u r r a y , A G la n c e a t S om e o f the B e a u tie s a n d S u b lim it ie s o f S w itz e r la n d ( L o n d o n , 18 2 9 ). C la ir e E lia n e E n g e l h as a ls o w r it te n a n e x c e lle n t H isto ir e d e P a lp in is m e d es o r ig in e s a nos jo u r s (P a r is , 1 9 5 0 ) . M o r e r e c e n t a c c o u n t s in c lu d e P h ilip p e J o u ta r d , L T n v e n t io n d u M o n t B la n c (P a r is , 1 9 8 6 ) , a n d Y v e s B a llu , A la co n q u e te d u M o n t - B la n c (P a r is , 1 9 8 6 ). F o r H e n r i­ e tt e d ’A n g e v i ll e , s ee E m ile G a illa r d , U n e A sce n s io n r o m a n tiq u e e n 18 3 8 : H e n r ie tt e d ’A n g e v ille a u M o n t B la n c ( C h a m b e r y , 1 9 4 7 ) . T h e r e is a ls o a r e c e n t tra n s la tio n o f H e n r ie t t e ’s a c c o u n t

620

BIBLIOGRAPHY

o f th e clim b , M y A sce n t o f M o n t B la n c, trans. Jenn ifer B a rn es ( L o n d o n , 19 9 2 ). T h e r e are m a n y s tu d ies o f V ic to r ia n c lim b in g , fo r ex a m p le , R o n a ld W illia m C la r k , The V icto ria n M o u n ­ ta in eers ( L o n d o n , 1 9 5 3 ), b u t th e literatu re is d o m in a te d b y t w o im m e n s e ly im p o r ta n t w o r k s, th e first p o p u la r , th e s e c o n d p ro fo u n d : E d w a rd W h y m p e r , Scram bles a m o ng st the A lp s in the T ea rs 18 6 0 -1 8 6 9 ( L o n d o n an d E d in b u r g h , 1 8 7 1 ) , an d L e slie S te p h e n , The P lay g ro u n d o f Europe ( L o n d o n , 19 2 4 ). S u rp risin g ly , there is as y e t n o m a jo r s tu d y o f A lb e r t S m ith , o n e o f th e m o st extra o rd in a ry o f all V icto ria n s an d w h o is b est a p p ro a ch e d t h r o u g h his w o n d e r fu l Story o f M o n t B la n c ( L o n d o n , 18 53 ). P ete r H a n se n ’ s o u tsta n d in g ly im p o r ta n t w o r k d iscusses th e ca re e r o f S m ith in d etail an d is th e b est analysis o f th e s ocia l w o r ld o f V ic to r ia n A lp in is m , “ B ritish M o u n ta in e e rin g , 1 8 5 0 - 1 9 1 4 ” ( P h D - diss > H a rv a rd U n iv e rs ity , 19 9 3 ). T h e literatu re o n R u sk in is, o f co u r s e , as im m e n se as his o w n o u t p u t . A m o n g th e m o re rec en t stu d ies o f p articu lar in te rest w ith res p ec t t o R u s k in ’ s p e r c e p tio n o f m o u n ta in s is E liz ­ ab e th K . H e lsin g e r , R u s k in a n d t h e A r t o fth e B eholder ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 8 2 ) ,an d R o b e r t H e w is o n , John R u skin : The A r g u m e n t o f the Eye ( P r in c e to n , 19 7 6 ). S e e also th e e x ce lle n t s tu d y b y P aul H . W a lto n , The D r a w in g s o f John R u s k in ( O x f o r d , 1 9 7 2 ). F o r V io lle t - le - D u c ’s A lp in e ca rto g ra p h y an d g e o lo g y as w e ll as R u s k in ’s a r g u m e n t w ith h im , see P ierre A . F rey , E. V io llet-le-D u c et le m a ssif d u M o n t B la n c, 1 8 6 8 - 1 8 7 9 (L a u sa n n e , 19 8 8 ); a n d R o b in M i d ­ d le to n , “ V io lle t- le - D u c e t les A lp e s: L a D is p u te d e M o n t B la n c ,” in th e e x h ib itio n ca ta lo g u e Viollet-le-D uc: C e n te n a ir e de sa m o rt a L a u s a n n e ( L a u sa n n e , 19 7 9 ).

Five

Arcadia,

It w o u ld be red u n d an t (an d h o p e le ss ly in v id io u s ) t o m a k e a s e le c tio n fr o m th e e n o r m o u s lit­ eratu re o n th e pastoral tra d itio n in p o e tr y an d th e v isu al arts. I list h ere o n ly th o s e w o r k s I have fo u n d h elp fu l in c o n sid e r in g th e s h iftin g b o u n d a r y b e tw e e n th e w ild an d th e o r d e re d in arcadian lan d scapes, g a rd en s, an d p arks. F o r th e orig in al arcad ian m y th s , see th e b rillia n t w o r k b y P h ilip p e B o r g e a u d , The C u l t o f P a n in A n c ie n t Greece, trans. K a th le e n A d a ss an d Jam es R e d fie ld ( C h ic a g o , 19 8 8 ). A n u m ­ b er o f essays in M o s se r an d T e y s s o t, e d s., The A r c h ite c tu r e o f W estern G ard en s, are exp ressly co n ce rn ed w ith th e p a ra d o x o f d e sig n e d w ild n ess; see in p a rticu la r L io n e llo P u p p i, “ N a tu r e an d A rtifice in th e S ix te e n th - C e n tu r y G a r d e n ,” 4 7 - 5 8 ; A n n e - M a r ie L e c o q , “ T h e G a r d e n o f W isd o m o f B ern ard P alissy,” 6 9 -8 0 ; L u ig i Z a n g h e r i, “ T h e G a r d e n s o f B u o n ta le n t i,” 9 6 -9 9 ; S im o n P u g h , “ R e ce iv e d Id e as o n P a s to r a l,” 2 5 3 -6 0 ; an d th e s u p e rb essay b y M o n iq u e M o sse r, “ P arad ox in th e G a rd e n : A B r ie f A c c o u n t o f F a briqu es,” 2 6 3 -8 0 . T h e sacro bosco at B o m a r z o has b ee n e x h a u s tiv e ly an d in g e n io u s ly rea d b y M a r g a r e tta D a rn a ll an d M a r k S. W e il as a p ro gram r e p re se n tin g A r io s to ’ s O r la n d o Furioso, “ II sacro b o s c o d i B o m a r z o : Its S ix ­ t e e n th -C e n tu r y L ite rary an d A n tiq u a ria n C o n t e x t ,” J o u r n a l o f G a r d en H istory 4 , n o . x (19 8 4 ): 1 - 9 4 ; b u t this v ie w has b e e n ch a lle n g e d b y J. B . B u r y , “ B o m a r z o R e v is ite d ,” J o u r ­ n a l o f G a rd en H istory 5 , n o . 2 (19 8 5 ) : 2 1 3 - 2 3 . T h e b o ta n ica l g a r d e n is th e s u b je c t o f th e e x tra o rd in a ry b o o k b y J o h n P r e s t, T he G a r d e n o f E d en: T h e B o ta n ic G a r d e n a n d the R e C r e a tio n o f P a rad ise ( N e w H a v e n an d L o n d o n , 1 9 8 1 ). O n pastoral p a in tin g an d th e arca d ian tra d itio n , see D a v id R o s a n d , “ G io r g io n e , V e n ic e an d th e P astoral V is io n ,” in R o b e r t C . C a f r it z , e d ., P laces o f D elig h t: Th e P a sto ra l La ndsca pe (W a s h in g to n , D .C ., 19 8 8 ), 2 1 - 8 3 . O n S a n n a z a r o , see W illia m J. K e n n e d y , Jacopo S a n n a za ro a n d the Uses o f P a sto ra l ( H a n o v e r , N . H . , an d L o n d o n , 19 8 3 ). O n P o u s sin ’ s arca d ian p a in t­ in gs, see E rw in P a n o fsk y, “ E t in A rc a d ia E g o : P ou ssin an d th e E le g ia c T r a d it io n ,” in M e a n ­ in g in the V isu a l A r ts ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 5 5 ) , 2 9 5 -3 2 0 . T h e g rea t a u th o rity o n e ig h te e n th - c e n tu ry g ard en s an d th e ir rela tio n sh ip t o lite ra ry so u rces an d c o n v e n tio n s is th e p ro lific Jo h n D ix o n H u n t . S e e in p a rticu la r T he F ig u re in the L a n d ­ scape: Poetry, P a in tin g a n d G a rd en s d u r in g the E ig h teen th C e n tu r y ( B a ltim o r e an d L o n d o n , 19 89 ). O n A n g lo - C h in e s e taste an d o th e r e ig h te e n th - c e n tu ry fan ta stic d e sig n s, see B a ltru saitis, A berrations, 9 7 - 1 2 6 ; E le a n o r v o n E r d b e r g , Ch inese In flu e n c e on E u ro pea n S tructures ( N e w Y o r k , 19 8 5 ); B arb ara Jo n es, Follies a n d Grottoes ( L o n d o n , 19 5 3 ). T h e o n ly a tte n tio n

BIBLIOGRAPHY

62 1

t h a t h as b e e n p a id t o D e n e c o u r t h as b e e n b y N ic h o la s G r e e n , T h e Specta cle o f N a tu r e . T h e a n t h o l o g y o f e ssays fo r a n d a b o u t h im is A u g u s t e L u c h e t , e d ., F o n ta in eb lea u : Paysages, leg en des, fa n td m e s ; H o m m a g e a D e n e c o u r t ( P a ris, 1 8 5 5 ) . S e e also P a u l D o m e t , H isto ir e d e la fo r e t d e F o n ta in e b le a u (P a r is , 1 8 7 3 ) . O n g r e e n h o u s e s a n d w in te r g a r d e n s , see M a y W o o d s a n d A re te W a r r e n , G lass Houses: A H isto ry o f G reenhouses, O r a n g e r ies a n d C o n serva to ries ( L o n d o n , 19 9 0 ), a n d th e s u p e r b e x h ib i­ t io n c a ta lo g u e e d it e d b y G e o r g K o h lm a ie r a n d B a rn a v o n S a r to ry , H ou ses o f Glass: A N i n e ­ te e n th -C e n tu r y B u i ld i n g

( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 19 8 6 ). O n th e iro n ie s a n d ecsta sies o f “ w ild ”

a n d “ t a m e ” g a r d e n in g in th e c o n te m p o r a r y w o r ld , th e r e is n o t h in g b e tte r th a n M ic h a e l P o l ­ la n ’s w o n d e r f u l b o o k S eco n d N a tu r e : A G a r d e n e r ’s E d u c a tio n ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 9 1 ) . O n th e h is ­ t o r y o f th e la w n , see K e n n e t h T . Ja ck so n , C ra b g ra ss F ro n tier: T he S u b u r b a n iz a tio n o f the U n it e d S ta te s ( N e w Y o r k a n d O x f o r d , 1 9 8 5 ) ; a n d F . H e r b e r t B o r m a n n , D ia n a B a lm o r i, an d G o r d o n T . G e b a lle , R e d e s ig n in g the A m e r ic a n L a w n ( N e w H a v e n an d L o n d o n , 19 9 3 ).

S ix

M yths a n d memories

I n th e v a s t lite ra tu r e o n n a tu r e m y th s a n d t h e ir p e r s is te n c e , th e f o llo w in g w e r e e sp e c ia lly h e lp ­ fu l in c la r ify in g th e p rin c ip a l t h e m e s o f th is b o o k : W a lt e r B u r k e r t , A n c i e n t M ystery C u lt s ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 8 7 ) ; E . H . G o m b r i c h , “ l e o n e s S y m b o lic a e ,” in S y m bo lic Im a g e s ( L o n d o n a n d N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 2 ) , 1 2 3 - 9 5 ; S ir Jam es G e o r g e F r a z e r , T h e W orship o f N a t u r e ( L o n d o n , 1 9 2 6 ); A r t h u r O . L o v e jo y a n d G e o r g e B o a s , Essays o n P r im itiv is m a n d R e la te d Id e a s in the M id d le A g e s ( B a ltim o r e a n d L o n d o n , 19 3 0 ); M ir c e a E lia d e , “ M y t h o l o g ie s o f M e m o r y a n d F o r g e t t i n g ,” in M y th a n d R e a lit y ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 6 3 ) , 1 1 4 - 3 8 ; id e m , M yths, D r e a m s a n d M ysteries ( N e w Y o r k , i9 6 0 ) ; E la in e P a g e ls , A d a m , E v e a n d th e S e r p e n t ( L o n d o n , 1 9 8 8 ); a n d G e o r g e L . H e r s e y , T h e L o st M e a n in g o f C la ss ica l A r c h ite c t u r e

( C a m b r id g e ,

M a s s .,

1 9 8 8 ).

O f all

p re s e n tly

p r a c t ic in g

h is to r ia n s ,

C a r lo

G in z b u r g h as w r it te n m o s t im a g in a t iv e ly , c o u r a g e o u s ly , a n d r ig o r o u s ly o n th e o p p o r t u n itie s a n d p e r ils o f t r a c k in g t h e e v id e n c e o f s o c ia l m e m o r y , a n d o n th e in te lle c tu a l h is to r y o f th a t m e t h o d o lo g y . S e e in p a r tic u la r “ C lu e s : R o o t s o f an E v id e n tia l P a r a d ig m ,” in G in z b u r g , C lu e s, M yths, a n d th e H is t o r ic a l M e th o d , tra n s. J o h n a n d A n n e T e d e s c h i ( B a ltim o r e a n d L o n ­ d o n , 1 9 8 9 ) , 9 6 - 1 2 5 ; a ls o in th e s a m e v o lu m e , “ F r o m A b y W a r b u r g t o E . H . G o m b r ic h : A P r o b le m o f M e t h o d , ” 1 7 - 5 9 . O n W a r b u r g , s ee a ls o E . H . G o m b r i c h , A b y W a rbu rg : A n I n t e l­ le c t u a l B io g ra p h y ( C h i c a g o , 1 9 7 0 ) . F o r W a r b u r g ’ s c a re e r a n d p e r s o n a lity , s ee th e in t r o d u c ­ t io n b y G e r t r u d B i n g t o W a r b u r g , G e sa m m elte S ch r ifte n , 2 v o ls . ( L e ip z ig a n d B e r lin , 1 9 3 2 ) , a n d r e v is e d in t h e J o u r n a l o f th e W a r b u r g a n d C o u r t a u ld In s titu te s 2 8 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 2 9 9 - 3 1 3 ; C a r l G e o r g H e is e , P e rso n lich e E r in n e r u n g e n a n A b y W a r b u r g ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 4 7 ) . T h e r e is a g o o d d e a l o f n e w a n d c a n d id in f o r m a t io n a b o u t W a r b u r g ’ s b r e a k d o w n in R o n C h e r n o w , T he W a r ­ b u r g s ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 9 3 ) ; a n in te r e s t in g d is c u s s io n in P e t e r B u r k e , “ A b y W a r b u r g as H i s t o r ­ ic a l A n t h r o p o l o g is t ” in H o r s t B r e d e k a m p e t a l., A b y W a rb u rg , A k t e n d es In t e r n a t io n a le n Sym posions H a m b u r g 19 9 0 ( H a m b u r g , 1 9 9 1 ) , 3 9 - 4 4 ; a n d a ch a r a c te r is tic a lly a c u te a n d h u m a n e s k e t c h b y F e lix G ilb e r t , “ F r o m A r t H is t o r y t o th e H is t o r y o f C iv iliz a t io n : A b y W a r ­ b u r g , ” in H istory : C h o ic e a n d C o m m it m e n t ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., 1 9 7 7 ) , 4 2 3 - 4 0 .

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

L a n d s ca p e a n d M e m o r y is an e x p a n d e d v e r s io n o f le c tu re s d e liv e r e d , in o n e fo r m , as th e C h r is ­ t ia n G a u s s S e m in a r s o n C r itic is m a t P r in c e t o n U n iv e r s it y in th e s p r in g o f 1 9 9 1 , a n d in a n o th e r f o r m as th e G e o r g e M a c a u la y T r e v e ly a n L e c t u r e s a t C a m b r id g e U n iv e r s it y in th e w in te r o f J9 9 3 — ° n

la t te r o c c a s io n , a t e x t c o lo r e d b y T r e v e ly a n ’ s o w n d e e p b e l i e f in th e c o m m u ­

n i o n b e t w e e n la n d s c a p e a n d h is to r y . I m u s t th a n k m y h o s t a t P r in c e t o n , P r o fe s s o r V i c t o r B r o m b e r t , a n d a t C a m b r id g e , P r o fe s s o r P a tric k C o lli n s o n a n d th e F a c u lt y o f H is t o r y , fo r m a k in g t h o s e o c c a s io n s s o r e w a r d in g . V e r s io n s o f s o m e ch a p te r s h a v e a ls o b e e n d e liv e r e d as le c t u r e s a n d s e m in a r s a t th e N e w S c h o o l , B o s t o n U n iv e r s it y , P e n n s y lv a n ia S t a te U n iv e r s it y , a n d t h e E c o le d e s H a u te s E t u d e s e n S c ie n c e s S o c ia le s in P aris. M y th a n k s are d u e t o P r o fe s ­ s o r J a c q u e s R e v e l f o r h is in te lle c tu a l a n d p e r s o n a l h o s p it a lity in P aris in 1 9 9 2 , t o P r o fe s s o r P ie r re N o r a f o r h is w a r m e n c o u r a g e m e n t a n d c o n s t r u c t iv e c o m m e n t s o n th e p r o je c t , a n d t o M m e G a b r ie lle v a n Z u y le n fo r h e r k in d n e s s d u r in g m y s ta y in P aris. O f all t h e r e s e a r c h p ro je c t s I h a v e u n d e r ta k e n in th e p a s t tw e n ty -fiv e y e a r s , n o n e h as b e n ­ e f it e d m o r e f r o m th e e x t r a o r d in a r y g e n e r o s it y a n d u n s e lfish h e lp o f in n u m e r a b le c o lle a g u e s a n d fr ie n d s w h o re fr a in e d f r o m v o c a l d is b e li e f at th e sca le o f th e ta s k I s e t m y s e lf a n d in ste a d g a v e s o fr e e ly o f th e ir c o u n s e l a n d le a r n in g . In p a r tic u la r I w a n t t o th a n k A n n J e n se n A d a m s , D a n ie l B e ll, M ir k a B e n e s , T o m B is s o n , T i m B la n n in g , G in n y B r o w n , G e r h a r d B r u n n , P e t e r B u r k e , J o a n C a s h in , W e n d e ll C l a u s e n , J o s e p h C o n n o r s , J o h n C z a p l ic k a , N o r m a n D a v ie s , C a r o li n e F o r d , M ic h a e l F r ie d , Ja m e s H a n k in s , P e t e r H a n s e n , B ill H a r r is , P a tric e H i g o n n e t , G e r a ld in e

Jo hn son ,

M ark

K is h la n s k y , J o se p h

Leo

K o ern er,

L is b e t

K o e r n e r , M ic h a e l

M c C o r in i c k , D a v id M c K it t e r i c k , R o s a m u n d M c K it t e r ic k , C h a r le s M a ie r , E l z b ie ta M a t y n ia , A n d r e w M o t io n , C a r la M u l f o r d , S u sa n P e d e r s e n , S ir J o h n P l u m b , R o s a m u n d P u r c e ll, T a d e u s z R o l k e , P e t e r S a h lin s , E la in e S c a r r y , Y o l a S c h a b e r b e c k - E b e r s , T r u d i e S c h a m a , Q u e n t i n S k in n e r , N a o m i W it t e s , C h r is to p h e r W o o d , a n d M a r in a v a n Z u y le n . I a m d e e p ly g r a te fu l t o G io v a n n i B a ld e s c h i- B a lle a n i f o r h is a c c o u n t o f th e o r d e a ls o f th e C o d e x A e s in a s 8 d u r in g 19 4 3 a n d f o r a llo w in g m e t o p u b lis h th e s to r y .

62 3

624

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T h e P o lish ch ap ters o f th e b o o k c o u ld n o t h ave b ee n w r itte n w it h o u t research h e lp fro m K e ith C r u d g in g t o n , tra n sla tion assistance fro m A n n a P o p ie l, an d th e p h o to g r a p h ic flair an d h istorical m e m o ry o f T a d e u s z R o lk e , t o w h o m I am also g r a te fu l fo r p erm issio n t o p u b lish h is p h o to g r a p h ic r ec o rd o f o u r jo u rn e y to B ia lo w ie z a an d P u n sk . T h e P r o lo g u e w as o r ig i­ na lly p u b lish e d in a s lig h tly d iffe re n t fo rm in The N ew R ep u b lic. M y th an k s are also d u e t o an extra o rd in a ry g r o u p o f research assistants. B e th D a u g h e r ty to o k o n th e H e r cu le a n task o f lo c a tin g an d a c q u ir in g p erm issio n s fo r th e illu stra tio n s, w ith th e h elp o f P ete r L in d se th an d A n n e W o o lle tt. M a ia R iga s has b e e n a r ig o r o u s tra ck e r o f fu g i­ tive referen ces an d cita tio n s , an d an y th a t h ave s o m e h o w e lu d e d h e r s cr u p u lo u s a tte n tio n are ce rta in ly m y resp on sib ility . F o r th re e years A n n e tte S c h la g e n h a u ff w as m u c h m o re th an m e re ly m y b est an d m o st en terp risin g research assistan t; she w as also a fu n d a m e n ta l an d in e x ­ h au stib le so u rc e o f id eas, a tru e p artn er in th e m a k in g o f th e b o o k . I also o w e h er a special d e b t o f g ra titu d e fo r a research trip t o S u resn es in p u rs u it o f a p h a n to m s acre d m o u n ta in h a u n tin g th e su b u rb s o f Paris. Landscape a n d M em ory has also b e e n m a d e in to a series o f five tele v is io n p ro g r a m s fo r B B C 2.

It is im p ossib le to o v e re m p h a s iz e ju s t h o w ric h ly re w a r d in g th e e x p e r ie n ce o f w r itin g an d

p re s en tin g these p ro gram s has b ee n . F o r th e p lea su re an d e x h ila ra tio n o f cr e a tin g an o rig in a l fo rm o f th e a rg u m e n ts in this b o o k I m u s t th a n k th e p ro d u c e rs Jane A le x a n d e r an d T o n y C a sh , w h o h ad , fro m th e b e g in n in g , u n w a v e r in g fr ith in th e p ro je c t; K im E v a n s, d ir e c to r o f m u sic an d arts at B B C 2, fo r sh arin g th a t faith a n d s e e in g it t h r o u g h ; an d th e d ire cto rs G e o f f D u n lo p an d F ran k H a n ly fo r fin d in g b rillia n tly o rig in a l v isu al fo rm s in w h ic h t o c o m m u n i­ ca te b o th th e ideas an d th e p assions o f th is w o r k . T h r o u g h th e years o f research an d w r itin g th is b o o k I h ave as u su al sham e le ssly e x p lo ite d th e lo v e an d g o o d ch e e r o f m y clo s e st frie n d s as I m a r ch e d , m e a n d e r e d , o r s ta g g e re d th r o u g h th e land scapes o f th e W e ste rn m in d . F o r th e ir su sta in ed b e li e f in th e w h o le p ro je c t an d th e ir co n tr ib u tio n s to its u n a p o lo g e tic p ec u lia rity I w a n t t o th a n k e sp e cia lly S v etla n a B o y m , Jo h n B re w er, T a n y a L u h r m a n n , R ich a rd S e n n e tt, S tella T illy a r d , a n d L e o n W ie s eltie r. O v e r e n d ­ less cu p s o f tea an d vats o f h a p p y cla re t, R o b e r t an d Jill S lo t o v e r h av e c a lm e d m e d o w n o r ch e ere d m e as o cc a s io n req u ire d . Jill, w h o rea d th e m a n u s crip t, c o u n te r e d m y w av e s o f d o u b t an d k vetch ere i w ith a d e lig h t so s tu b b o r n an d s o in fe c tio u s th a t sh e alw a ys g a v e m e ren e w e d heart to see th e e n terp rise t h r o u g h . A s u su al, m y a g e n ts an d d e a r frie n d s, P e te r M a ts o n a n d M ic h a e l S isso n s, h ave a sto n ish e d m e b y n e v er w a v e rin g in th e ir b e lie f n o t o n ly th a t th is b o o k c o u ld b e w ritte n b u t th a t I w as actu a lly th e h istorian t o w rite it. M y frie n d s at A lfre d A . K n o p f— N a n c y C le m e n t s , Iris W e in ­ ste in , an d R o b in S w a d o s — h ave all b e e n , as alw a ys, pillars o f s tr e n g th w h e n e v e r sig n s o f t o t ­ te r in g w e re d e te c te d in th e a u th o r, an d in sp ire d co lle a g u e s in th e d e sig n an d p r o d u c t io n o f th e b o o k . M y e d ito rs, S tu art P ro ffitt at H a rp e rC o llin s an d C a r o l B r o w n Ja n ew ay at A lfre d A . K n o p f, h ave b ee n e v e r y th in g an a u th o r c o u ld w a n t: e x a c tin g , p er fe c tio n is t in th e ir d e m a n d fo r cla rity , tireless in th e ir a tte n tio n t o th e m e a n in g , te x tu r e , an d id io syn cra sies o f this b o o k . T o C a r o l, w ith w h o m I first m o o te d th e id e a o f L a nd sca pe a n d M em ory o v e r a b o w l o f b r o th in M u n ic h , I o w e a d e b t d ifficu lt to r eg ister in th e co n v e n tio n a l p ie tie s o f a u th o r ’ s a c k n o w l­ e d g e m e n ts . T h r o u g h all th e sta ge s o f its research an d w r it in g , sh e has b e e n a co n sta n t an d d e v o te d g u ard ia n o f its p ro gre ss; a creativ e p a rtn er in its rev isio n an d an u n sh a k ea b le b eliev e r in its fru itio n . F o r five years, m y w ife , G in n y , an d m y ch ild r e n , C h lo e an d G a b r ie l, h av e e n d u r e d a g rea t d eal m o re th an th e r e g u la tio n d o s e o f au th o rial p e tu la n c e , s e lf-a b s o r p tio n , an d g en era lly im p o ssib le tem p e r. T h e y h ave s o m e h o w s o a k e d u p th e sea son al sto rm s a n d stresses th a t c a m e w ith a b o o k r o o t e d in th e cu ltu ral p s y c h o lo g y o f n a tu re. In r etu rn fo r all this h ea vy w e a th e r th e y h ave g iv e n m e o n ly p a tie n ce , s u c c o r , an d s w ee tn ess. M o r e th an a n y th in g else this b o o k is m e an t as an o ffe r in g t o m y w ife fo r o u r sh ared p assion fo r th e lan d sca p es w e h ave to g e t h e r see n , te n d e d , an d r em e m b e re d . A n d t o m y ch ild re n t o w h o m it is d e d ic a te d , I m u s t a p o lo ­ g iz e fo r g iv in g th e m a p re sen t b u lk ie r th an th e m o st cu m b e r s o m e o f th e ir s c h o o l t e x tb o o k s . B u t th e y , t o o , are ch ild re n o f n a tu re , an d p erh ap s o n e d a y , w h e n th e rain is d r u m m in g a g ain st th e w in d o w s, th e y w ill fin d s o m e p lea su re in it an d rea d th e fu ll m easu re o f th e ir fa th e r 's lo v e.

Index

A b u S im b e l, c o lo s s i o f , 4 0 6

A lg a r d i, A le s s a n d r o , 2 9 3 , 2 9 4

A c h e l o i is m y th , 2 58

A lg ie r s , 2 5 0 - 1

A c k e r m a n , J a m e s, 5 2 9

A lle g o r y o f the S c h u y lk ill R i v e r ( R u s h ) , 3 6 7 ,

A c k e r m a n , R o b e r t , 208

illu s. 3 6 8

A c o r e u s , h ig h p rie s t, 262

A l l th e W orkes o f J o h n Taylor, illu s. 3 2 3

A c q u a F e lic e , 2 8 7

A lp e n , D i e ( H a lle r ) , 4 7 9 - 8 0

A c q u a V e r g in e , 2 8 9 , 2 9 0 , 2 9 4

A lp in e C l u b , 5 0 2 - 6

A d a m , R o b e r t, 520

A lp s

A d a m s , A n s e l, 9 a n d U lus., 12

“ b e n e v o le n t ” p e r s p e c tiv e o n , 4 2 9 - 3 1

A d d is o n , J o s e p h , 4 5 2 , 4 5 3 , 4 7 8

C o z e n s ’ s p a in tin g s o f , 4 7 2 - 5 , illu s . 4 7 4 ,

A d o r a t i o n o f th e Shepherds, The, illu s . 4 1 0

4 7 9 , 4 7 6 , 4 7 7 - 8 , illu s. 4 7 7

a g r ic u ltu r e , 13

d rag on s an d , 412

A h w a h n e e c h e e In d ia n s , 7 , 9 , 1 8 6

H a n n ib a l’ s p a s sa g e o v e r , 4 5 7 - 9 , illu s.

A im a r , J a c q u e s , 3 5 0 -2

460, 4 6 1 -2

A k k a d ia n c iv iliz a t io n s , 2 5 7 - 8

h o rro rs o f, 4 4 7 -5 0

A lb a n ia , 18 1

R u s k in ’ s e x p e r ie n c e o f , 50 6 , 5 0 8 - 1 3 ,

A l b e r t , H a b s b u r g a r c h d u k e , 2 78

illu s. 3 1 0 , 3 1 3

A l b e r t , P r in c e , 1 1 1

as t o u r is t a r e a , 4 9 4 - 5 , 502

A l b e r t V , d u k e o f B a v a ria , 1 1 4

“ v ir t u o u s ” p e r s p e c tiv e o n , 4 7 8 - 8 6

A l b e r t i , L e o n B a tt is ta , 2 6 9 , 2 7 2 ,4 0 4

see also M a t t e r h o r n ; M o n t B la n c

A l e m b e r t , Je an d \ 4 8 0

A ltd e u ts c h e W a ld e r ( G r im m ) , 1 0 6 - 7

A le x a n d e r , J a m e s, 3 7 7

A lt d o r f e r , A lb r e c h t , 9 6 - 7 , 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 10 6 ,

A le x a n d e r I I ( t h e G r e a t ) , k in g o f M a c e d o ­ n ia , 4 0 1 - 2

4 2 6 , illu s. 4 2 7 a m p o u le s , t e r r a - c o tt a , 2 1 4 , 2 1 5 a n d illu s.

A le x a n d e r V I , P o p e , 2 7 4 , 283

A n c i e n t V illa s ( C a s t e ll) , 5 3 9

A le x a n d e r V I I , P o p e , illu s. 4 0 3 , 4 0 4

A n d r e w s , S y d n e y , 18 9

625

INDEX

626 A n g e v ille , H e n r ie tte d \ 4 9 5 - 8 A n g lo -S a xo n C hro nicle, The, 14 5 A n n a ls ( T a c itu s ) , 8 7 , 89 A n n e , q u e e n o f E n g la n d , 3 1 6

p rim itiv e b u ild in g s , 2 2 8 - 9 , 2 3 2 see also G o t h ic a rch ite ctu re a rch itectu re hy d ra u liq u e, L ’ ( B e lid o r ),

348-52

A n n e o f A u stria , 3 3 3 - 4 , 3 4 0 ,4 4 1

A r io s to , 535

A n n ib a ld i, C e s a r e , 78

A ris to tle , 39

A n n iu s o f V ite r b o , 283

A rm in iu s , p rin c e o f th e C h e ru s c i, 8 7 , 88,

A n sich te n vom N ied errh ein (F o r ste r), 238

8 9, 90, 9 5 , 10 9 , 1 2 7 - 8

A n t h o n y , S t., 264 A n t h o n y , S u sa n B ., 3 8 5 -9 2 , illus. 389, 4 9 7

A r n d t, E rn st M o r itz , 1 1 3

A n t h o n y o f P laisan ce, 264

A r t o f B e a u tify in g S u b u r b a n H o m e

“ A n tiq u ity o f F r e e d o m , T h e ” (B ry a n t),

A r n o R iv e r , 328 G rou nd s, The ( S c o t t ) , illu s. 3 7 2 , 573 A s h to n , T h o m a s , 448

19 9 -2 0 0 A n to in e d e V ille , 4 2 2 -3

A sw a a n H ig h D a m , 3 8 1 - 2

A p o llo fo u n ta in , 3 4 1 - 2 , illus. 342

A s T o u L ik e I t (S h a k es p ea re ), 14 1

a q u e d u cts, 286

A ty s c u lt , 2 1 6

arcadia arch ite ctu re an d , 530 , 536

A u g u s t in e , S t ., 4 1 9 ,4 2 0 , 4 2 1 A u g u s tu s II (th e S tr o n g ) , k in g o f P o la n d , 4 4

B ia lo w ie z a fo re st as, 4 8 -9

A u g u s t u s I I I , k in g o f P o la n d , 4 3 - 5

C h in es e g ard en s, 542 a n d illu s., illus.

A u ld jo , J o h n , 4 9 4 ,4 9 9 A y r e s , T h o m a s , 19 0

543 en clo s e d g ard en s, illus. 3 3 2 -3 , 5 3 4 - 8 ,

B a cc h a n a lia n R evels B efore a H e r m o f P a n

illus. 336, 562 in E n g la n d , 5 1 7 - 2 5 , 53 8 -4 0

( P o u s sin ), illus. 33 3

et in a rca d ia ego, 5 1 9

B a c h m a n n , J., illus. 368

fa b r iq u es (syn th e tic lan d sca p es w ith

B a c o n , F ran c is, 15 9 , 324

m ech an ica l d e v ice s), 5 4 0 -5 , illus. 3 4 1 ,

B a ld e , J a k o b , 230

542, 543>544>545

B a ld in u c c i, F ilip p o , 2 9 5, 305

glassh ou ses, 5 6 4 - 7 , illus. 363 , 3 6 6

B a lle a n i, A u r e lio , 78 , 7 9 , 80

G r e e k c o n c e p t o f, 5 2 6 -8

B a lle a n i, F ra n c es ca , 80

orig in al A rc ad ia n s, 5 2 6 -8

B a lle an i fa m ily , 78

parks, 52 5 , 5 6 7 - 7 0 , illus. 368

B a lm a t, J a cq u e s, 4 9 1 ,4 9 2

p o p u la r arcad ia, ^

B a m fy ld e , C o p le s t o n e W a r r e , illu s. 340

F o n ta in e b le a u fo re st

R enaissan ce c o n c e p t o f , 5 3 0 - 1 , 5 3 4 -8 R o m an c o n c e p t o f , 5 2 8 -3 0

B a n d e l, Jo se p h E rn s t v o n , 1 1 0 - 1 1 , illus. n o , 11 2

ru d e w ild e rn e ss, 5 3 8 -4 0 , illus. 340

B a n d its on a R o ck y C o a st (R o s a ) , illus. 43 4

tro p ical g a rd en s, 5 6 4 - 7 , illus. 363, 3 6 6

b a n d itti, 4 5 4

t w o typ es o f ( w ild an d id y llic ), 5 1 9 - 2 5 ,

B a n v ille , T h e o d o r e d e , 558

5 6 0 - 1 , 5 7 0 , 57 6 villa e states, 5 2 9 - 3 1 , illus. 330 z o o s , 5 6 1 - 4 , illus. 362 , 363, 570

b a p tism , 2 6 4 -5 “ B a rd , T h e ” ( G r a y ) , 4 6 9 - 7 0 , 4 7 1 B a rd , The (J o n es ), illus. 4 7 0

A r c a d ia (S a n n a z a ro ), 53 1

B a rlo w , J o el, 1 7 , 2 4 5 - 5 4 , d lu s. 246, 256

A r c a d ia (S id n e y ), 531

B a ro q u e an d r o c o c o c h u r c h e s , 230

A r c a d ia Ego, E t in ( B a rb ie r i), illus. 3 1 9

B a rry , Jam es, 3 5 7 - 9 , illus. 33 8

A r c a d ia Ego, E t in ( P o u s sin ), illus. 3 1 8

B a ttle o f A le x a n d e r a n d D a r iu s on the Issus

a rch itectu re

( A ltd o r fe r ) , 4 2 6 , illu s. 4 2 7

arcadia an d , 530 , 536

B a u d ela ire, C h a r le s, 54 7

B a ro q u e an d r o c o c o ch u r ch e s , 230

B a xan d all, M ic h a e l, 9 3 , 99

classical a rch ite ctu re , 228 , 2 32 , 236

B e a u fo y , M a r k , 4 9 3 - 4

D in o c r a tic tra d itio n a n d , 4 0 4 - 5 , illus.

b ea v ers, 52

40 5 forests an d , 5 8 -9 m o u n ta in s an d , 5 1 1 - 1 2

B e c k fo r d , W illia m , 1 6 8 , 4 7 5 ,4 7 7 B e d o f St. Fra ncis, The (S ch ia m in o ss i), illus.

431

INDEX B eech o f th e B e ll, T h e ( L i g o z z i ) , 2 25 a n d illu s.

627 h e r o ic n a tio n a lism o f A m e r ic a a n d , 1 8 7 - 8 , 1 9 1 , 19 5

B e lid o r , B e r n a r d d e , 3 4 8 - 5 2 , illu s. 3 4 8

n a m in g o f in d iv id u a l tre e s , 1 9 1

B e lle f o r e s t, F r a n c i s d e , 349

as n o v e lty a t t r a c t io n , 1 8 6 - 7 , * 8 8 - 9 , Ulus.

B e lto n H o u s e c a s c a d e , 5 4 1 a n d illu s.

188

B e n i n g , S im o n a n d A le x a n d e r , 4 3 3

S c h a m a ’ s e x p e r ie n c e o f , 2 4 0 -2

B e n ja m in , W a lt e r , 1 1 7

“ s e q u o ia ” n a m e , 18 7

B e n n ig s e n , B a r o n v o n , 48

s tu d y o f , 18 7

B e n t o n , T h o m a s H a r t , 396

v e n e r a t io n o f , 1 8 9 - 9 0 , 1 9 1 , 1 9 3 - 4

B e r n a r d , S t ., 4 1 3

W a t k in s ’ s p h o t o g r a p h s o f , 1 9 0 - 1 , illu s.

B e m d t , J u liu s, 1 1 2

1 9 2 , 19 3

B e r n h a r d t, S a r a h , 392

B ild e r str e it ( K ie f e r ) , 12 4

B e r n in i, D o m e n i c o , 2 95

B in e t, E t ie n n e , 3 39

B e r n in i, G ia n l o r e n z o , 2 8 9 - 9 2 , illu s. 290,

291

F o u n t a in o f th e F o u r R iv e r s , 2 9 1 , 2 9 2 - 5 , illu s . 2 9 3 , 2 9 6 , 2 9 7 - 9 , d lu s. 2 9 7, 3 0 2 - 5 , illu s . 3 0 2 , 3 0 3 , 3 0 4 , 3 0 3 s e lf- p o r tr a it, illu s . 294

B in g , G e rtru d , 2 14 B in g h a m , G e o r g e C a l e b , illu s. 3 6 6 , 3 6 7 B ir d , R o g e r , 32 0 B ir t h o f a N a t io n , T h e ( film ) , 3 9 3 - 4 B iso n A tt a c k e d by H o u n d s ( S a v e ry ), illu s . 4 0 b is o n o f L ith u a n ia , 3 7 - 8 , illu s. 38 , 4 0 , 72

B e r r io , A n t o n io , 3 1 0 , 3 1 1 , 3 1 5

e x p o r t o f , 65

b e s tia lity , 5 2 6

e x t in c tio n o f w ild b is o n , 6 5 - 6

B e u y s , J o s e p h , 1 2 3 - 4 , d lu s. 1 2 3 , 12 6

G o r in g a n d , 68

B e u y s, W e n z e l, 12 4

h u n tin g o f, 4 4 , 45

B e v e r le y , W illia m , 500

lo r e o f , 3 8 -4 2

B e w ic k , T h o m a s , illu s . 19 0 , 1 3 2 , 18 2 a n d illu s ., 18 3 B e y , K h a lil, 3 7 3 B i a lo w ie z a f o r e s t , 3 7 , 7 5 as a r c a d ia , 4 8 - 9 c o m m e r c ia l e x p lo it a t io n , 4 5 - 6 , 4 9 - 5 0 , 6 4, 6 6 -7

r e p a tr ia tio n o f , 6 7 s c ie n tific m a n a g e m e n t o f , 5 0 - 2 , 53 t a x o n o m ic cla ss ific a tio n , 3 9 , 5 1 - 2 , 75 B ite l, L isa , 2 1 6 B la c k F o r e s t , 96 B la c k H ills , 3 9 8 - 9 B le s , H e r r i m e t d e , 4 1 5

c o n s e r v a tio n e f f o r ts , 5 3 , 6 7

B l o c h , M a r c , 13 4

G e rm a n o c c u p a tio n o f, 7 1 - 2

B o a d ic e a ’ s G r a v e , 5 1 7

G o r in g a n d , 6 7 - 7 0 , 73

B o h e m u s , J o h a n n e s , 98

h u n t i n g in , 4 3 - 5 , 6 4

B o i m e , A l b e r t , 3 9 2 , 3 96

“ n a tio n a l m o n u m e n t ” o a k s , 5 7 R u s s ia n t a k e o v e r o f , 4 7 - 8

B o is d ’ H y v e r , A c h ille M a r r y e r , 5 5 3 , 5 5 4 ,

558

S c h a m a ’ s e x p e r ie n c e o f , 7 3 - 4

B o is d ’ H y v e r ( e ld e r ) , 55 3

s c ie n t ific m a n a g e m e n t o f , 4 5 , 4 7 , 4 8 ,

B o l o g n a , G io v a n n i, 2 7 5

4 9 - 5 i » 53 S o v ie ts a n d , 7 2 - 3

B o m a r z o sacro bosco, 5 3 5 , illu s . 3 3 6

as u n iq u e e n v ir o n m e n t f o r w ild lif e , 52

B o n a v e n tu r e , S t ., 223

B o n a p a r te , N a p o le o n , 1 8 0 , 4 6 2 , 4 8 8 , 548

B id a s s o a R iv e r , 3 3 3 , illu s . 3 3 3 , 3 3 6

B o n if a c e , S t ., 2 1 7

B ie r s ta d t, A l b e r t , 7 , illu s . 8 , 1 9 3 , 1 9 4 ,

Books o f the P o lish P ilg r im , T h e ( M ic k -

1 9 5 - 6 ,1 9 7 , 20 7, 239 B i g T r e e s , illu s. 18 9 , 2 4 1 a g e o f , 18 8 , 1 8 9 - 9 0 B ie r s ta d t ’ s p a in tin g s o f , 1 9 3 , 1 9 4 , 1 9 5 - 6 , 19 7

ie w i c z ) , 3 0 - 1 , 55 B o r g e a u d , P h ilip p e , 5 2 6 B o r g lu m , G u t z o n , illu s. 3 8 6 , 4 0 1 M o u n t R u sh m o re m o n u m e n t, 386, 387, 3 8 8 -9 , 3 9 0 - 2 , 3 9 4 - 5 ,3 9 7 - 8

C h r is tia n ity a n d , 1 8 9 - 9 0

p e r s o n a l q u a litie s , 3 9 2 - 4 , 3 9 9 - 4 0 1

c o n e s o f , 2 40

s c u lp tu r e s , 3 9 9 , illu s. 4 0 0

d is c o v e r y o f , 18 5 f e llin g p r o c e s s , 18 8

S t o n e M o u n t a in m o n u m e n t , 38 8 , 3 9 3 - 4 B o r g l u m , L i n c o ln , 3 9 1 , 398

INDEX

628 B o r r o m e o , C a r lo , 4 3 7

C a m p a n o , G io v a n n i, 9 1 - 2

B o r r o m in i, F ra n c es co , 293, 2 94, 2 9 7, 298

C a m p b e ll, J o se p h , 133

B o s w e ll, Jam es, 1 6 9 ,4 7 1

C a m u s , L o u is D e n y s , illus. 343

b o ta n ica l cro ss, see v erd a n t cross

ca n als, 343 C a ra cta cu s , k in g o f th e C e lt s , 14 1

b o ta n ica l g a rd en s, 5 3 7 - 8 , 562 B o t e r o , G io v a n n i, 282, 328 b o t tle d w a te r, 346 B o u r r it, M a rc T h e o d o r e , 4 7 2 , 4 7 4 , 4 9 1 - 2

C a r m e n d e S ta tu r a , F e r ita te a c V en a tion e B iso ntis ( H u s so v ia n u s ), 3 8 -4 0 C a ro n i R iv e r, 3 1 0 , 3 1 5

B o w s h e r , W illia m , 17 4

C a r r ie ra , R osalb a, illu s. 4 4 8

B o y le , R o b e r t, 15 9 , 246

C a rta r i, V i n c e n z o , 275

B ra c cio lin i, P o g g io , 7 7 , 286 Bra n ch H i l l P ond , H a m p stead (C o n s t a b le ) ,

C a rte r , H e n r y , 3 7 7 , 378

illus. 323

C a sca d e a t B elto n H ouse, The (V iv a res after S m ith ) , illu s. 3 4 1

B r e ite n b a ch , B e rn h ard v o n , 263

C a se r ta p a la c e, 3 4 4 -5 , illu s. 3 44

B r e n ta n o , C le m e n s , 10 6 -7

C a s te ll, R o b e r t, 52 9 , 539

B re th ren o f th e C o m m o n L ife , 4 1 6

C a s d e o f S t. E lm o , 4 7 7 a n d illus.

Brideshead R evisited ( W a u g h ), 5 1 9

C a s to r iu s , 83

B rin ck e n , Julius v o n , 17 , 38 a n d illus., 4 3 ,

c a th ed ra l g r o v e , 19 7

4 8 -5 3 B rissot d e W arv ille , F elix S a tu rn m , 55 6

C a th e rin e II (th e G r e a t) , em p ress o f R ussia,

B ritain , see E n g la n d

C a th e d r a l R o c k , 7 , illus. 8 38 , 4 5 , 4 6 , 4 7

B r o w n , L a n ce lo t ( “ C a p a b ility ” ), 5 3 9 -4 0

C a u s , Isaac d e , 2 78 , 2 79

B r o w n e , M a ry , 15 9

C a u s , S a lo m o n d e , 2 7 8 - 9 , illu s. 279 , 280,

B ru ce , Jam es, 374 B ru e g e l, P ie ter, th e E ld e r, 4 2 6 , illus. 428 ,

4 3 I . 4 3 2~ 3 > Ulus. 4 32

2 8 1, 56 6 C a u t e r iz a t io n o f the R u r a l D is tr ic t o f B u ch en (K ie fe r ) , 1 9 , 12 7

B ru h l, G r a f v o n , n o

C e llin i, B e n v e n u t o , 4 3 1

B rya n t, W illiam C u lle n , 19 8 -2 0 0

C e lt ic y e w , 2 1 7

B u c k la n d , W illia m , 509

C e lt is , C o n r a d , 39 , 9 2 - 4 , illus. 9 2 , 95

B u d d h a hill ca rv in g s, 406 a n d illus.

C e n tr a l P ark , 5 6 7 - 7 0 , illu s. 3 6 8 , 572

B u d g e , E. A . W allis, 2 54

C h a m b e r s , S ir W illia m , 1 3 7 , 542 a n d illus.

B u ffo n , G e o r g e s -L o u is , 5 1 , 17 9

C h a m p ie r , C la u d e a n d S y m p h o r ie n , 349

B u n yan , J o h n , 201

C h a n te lo u p e sta te , 54 2 , illus. 343

B u o n ta len ti, B e r n a r d o , 2 77

C h ap m a n , G e o rg e , 324

B u rfo rd , R o b e r t, 500 B u rk e , E d m u n d , 2 4 8 ,4 4 9 ,4 5 0 ,4 6 1 , 542

C h a r co a l f o r Tw o T ho u sa n d T ea rs (K ie fe r ),

I2 7

B u rk m a ir, H a n s, illus. 93

C h a r le s I , k in g o f E n g la n d , 15 6 , illus. 13 7 ,

B u rn e t, G ilb e r t, 452 B u rn e t, T h o m a s , 4 5 0 -2

1 5 8 , 33 2 C h a r le s I I , k in g o f E n g la n d , 1 5 9 ,1 6 0 , 162

B u r to n , D e c im u s, 5 6 3 , illus. 3 6 2 , 3 6 3 , 56 7

C h a r le s I I I , k in g o f S p a in , 3 43, 344 , 3 4 5 - 6

B u r to n , R ich a rd , 3 7 4 , 3 7 5 - 6 , illus. 3 7 3

C h a r le s V , H o ly R o m a n e m p e ro r , 95

B u d e r , A . G ., 503

C h a rle s V I I I , k in g o f F ra n c e, 4 2 2 -3

B y ro n , G e o r g e G o r d o n , L o r d , 4 8 1 - 2

C h a r le s X , k in g o f F r a n c e , 56 4 C h a r n o c k , J o h n , 16 4

C a e c in a , 9 0 -1

C h a r p e n tie r , H u b e r t , 440

C a esar, Ju liu s, 39, 7 5 , 8 3, 2 6 2 -3

C h a r ta d e F o r e sta , 14 0 , 148

C a im i, B e rn a rd in o , 4 3 6

C h a r tre s C a th e d r a l, 2 18

C a lav eras G r o v e , 18 6 , 188 C a llo t, Ja cq u es, 2 23 , illus. 2 24 , 225

“ Cha sseu r0 in the Forest, The (F r ie d r ich ), 10 6 , 12 7

C a m b r id g e U n iv e rs ity , 44 9

C h a ts w o rth c o n se r v a to ry , 566

C a m d e n , W illia m , 3 2 2 , 330

ch e eses, 485

C a m e rariu s, Jo ach im , th e Y o u n g e r , 96

C h e m n itz ca sd e c h u r c h , 228

C a m p a n ia F o elix ( N o u r s e ) , 538

C h in a , 2 6 1, 4 0 6 - 8 , 4 1 0 - 1 1 , 4 1 2 , 4 1 6

INDEX

629

C h in e s e g a r d e n s , 5 4 2 a n d illu s ., illu s. 5 4 3

C o l l e y , L in d a , 4 6 7

C h r is tia n ity

C o l l i n g w o o d , A d m ira l C u t h b e r t , 17 3

b a p tis m , 2 6 4 - 5

C o l o n n a , F r a n c e s c o , 2 6 9 , 2 7 2 - 4 , 2 78

B ig T re e s a n d , 18 9 -9 0

C o l o n n a , P r o s p e r o , 2 6 9 , 2 72

d rag on s an d , 4 1 1 - 1 4 , 4 1 7

C o l o n n a , S t e fa n o , 269

E g y p t ia n a n tiq u ity a n d , 2 8 3 -4 , 2 8 6 ,

Colosseu m fr o m the N o r th , T he ( C o z e n s ) ,

29 9 -3 0 0

illu s. 4 7 3

fo r e sts a n d , 2 2 7

C o l u m b u s , C h r is to p h e r , 3 9 5 - 6 , 5 3 7

fo u n t a in s a n d , 2 8 7 - 8 , illu s. 2 8 7 , 288

C o lu m e lla , L u c iu s , 5 2 9 , 5 30

h e r m its a n d , 2 2 7

C o m m erce; or, T h e T r iu m p h o f th e T h a m es

M a r ia n ic o n o g r a p h y , 2 2 9 - 3 0 m o u n ta in s a n d , 4 1 1 - 1 7 , 4 2 0 - 1 , 4 2 3 , 4 2 6 , 4 2 8 ,4 3 3

(B a r r y ) , 3 5 7 - 9 , illu s. 3 3 8 C o m m o n s’ C o m p la in t ( S ta n d is h ) , 1 5 6 C o n d it io n h u m a in e , L a ( M a g r it t e ) , 12

p a g a n r e lig io n s a n d , 208

C o n d iv i, A s c a n io , 4 0 4

p ilg r im a g e s , 4 1 4 - 1 5

C o n fessio n s ( A u g u s t in e ) , 4 1 9 , 4 2 0 , 4 2 1

riv e rs a n d , 2 6 3 - 6

C o n fessio n s ( R o u s s e a u ) , 552

sa c r i m o n ti t r a d it io n , 1 6 , 4 3 6 - 7 , illus.

C o n g r e s s o f V ie n n a , 48

4 3 7 , 4 3 8 , 4 3 9 - 4 4 , illu s . 4 3 9 , 4 4 0 , 4 4 2 ,

C o n in x l o o , G illis , 100

443 >445 .

C o n n e c t ic u t R iv e r , 365 a n d illu s ., 3 6 7

446

sham ans, 4 1 4 - 1 5

C o n n e ss , Jo h n , 19 1

t im b e r h is to r y o f C h r is t , 2 1 9

C o n r a d , Jo seph , 4 - 5 ,1 4 2

t re e w o r s h ip a n d , 2 1 6 - 1 8

C o n s t a b le , J o h n , 4 7 3 , illu s. 3 2 3

see also G o t h i c a r c h it e c t u r e ; v e r d a n t cro s s

C o n t i , N a ta le , 2 7 5

C h r is tm a s , 2 2 0 - 1

C o n v er sio n o f St. P a u l, T h e ( B r u e g e l) , 4 2 6

C h r is t o f fe l, U lr i c h , 4 1 1

C o o k , C la r e n c e , 1 9 4

C h u r c h , F r e d e r ic k E d w i n , illu s. 2 0 0 , 2 0 1 ,

C o o k , T h o m a s , 502

2°5 C im in ia n fo r e s t , 8 2 - 3

C o o l i d g e , C a lv in , 3 8 6 , 388 C o o p e r , Ja m es F e n im o r e , 5 4 , 5 5 , 201

C i o l e k , E r a s m u s , 38

C o o p er ’s H i l l ( D e n h a m ) , 330

c ir c u la t io n , 2 4 7 , 2 5 8 - 9 , 3 1 7 - 1 8

c o p p ic e , 14 3

C i v i l W a r , T h e ( L u c a n ) , 262

C o r n a r o , C a te r in a , 5 3 4

C la r k , B a d g e r , 40 0

C o r n u c o p ia , 258

C la r k , G a l e n , 19 0 , 1 9 1 , 1 9 4 - 5

C o r o t , J e a n - B a p tis te , 5 4 6

C la r k , K e n n e t h , 50 6

C o r s ic a , 18 0

c la ss ica l a r c h it e c t u r e , 2 2 8 , 2 3 2 , 2 3 6

C o r y a t e , T h o m a s , 325

C la u d e - g la s s , 1 1 - 1 2 C l a u s e w it z , C a r l v o n , 12 9 C le o p a t r a , q u e e n o f E g y p t , 2 6 2 , 3 7 6 C le o p a tr a ( b a r g e ) , 3 7 7 - 8 , illu s. 3 7 9 C le o p a tra ’s N e e d le , 3 7 6 -8 C le r k , J o h n , 4 6 7 C lu v e r i u s , P h ilip , illu s . 84, 86, 90 , 1 0 1 a n d illu s. C o a s ta l S cen e betw een V ie t r i a n d S a lern o ( C o z e n s ) , 462 C o b h a m , H en ry, 316 C o d e x A e s in a s , 7 8 - 8 1 C o k e , S ir E d w a r d , L o r d C h i e f J u s tic e , 3 1 6 C o l b e r t , J e a n - B a p tis te , 1 6 2 , 1 7 5 - 6 , 1 7 7 - 8 ,

3 3 d . 3 3 8 , 3 3 9 . 343 C o l e , T h o m a s , 1 9 8 , 2 0 1 , illu s . 2 0 2 , 203 a n d

Cosm og ra phey ( M u n s t e r ) , illu s. 8 3 , 9 6 a n d illu s. C o u r b e t , G u s ta v e , illu s. 3 7 1 , 3 7 2 - 4 , illu s.

31 *' 313 C o u r se o f E m p ir e, T h e ( C o l e ) , 2 0 1 , illu s. 2 0 2 ,2 0 3 C o w l e y , A b r a h a m , 16 0 , 1 6 1 C o w p e r , W illia m , 1 7 0 , 17 2 C o w t h o r p e o a k , 1 7 0 , illu s. 1 7 2 C o x e , W illia m , 4 8 2 - 3 , 4 8 4 , 4 8 5 - 6 C o z e n s , A le x a n d e r , illu s. 4 6 0 , 4 6 1 , 4 7 5 ,

539 C o z e n s , J o h n R o b e r t , 4 5 9 , illu s. 4 6 0 , 4 6 1 - 2 , 4 7 2 - 5 , illu s . 4 7 3 , 4 7 4 , 4 7 3 , 4 1 6 ' 4 7 7 - 8 , illu s. 4 7 7 C r a d o c k , Jo seph , 4 70

illu s ., illu s . 2 0 4 , 2 0 5 , 3 6 4 - 5 , illu s.

C r a n a c h , L u c a s , th e E ld e r , 2 2 1 - 2 , illu s. 222

3*5* 367

C r a n e , Z e n a s , 207

INDEX

630 C r im e a n W a r , 3 3 - 4

D e u ts c h e r , Isaac, 2 9, 36

C r o n o n , W illia m , 13

D eu tsch er W ald, D eutsches Volk (K o b e r ), 11 8

Cross a n d the W orld, The ( C o l e ) , 203

D e V en u state M u n d i e t de P u lc h r itu d in e

Cross a t Sunset, The ( C o l e ) , illus. 204 cro ss im a g e ry , see v e r d a n t cross Cross on the M o u n ta in s, The (F rie d rich ), illu s. 206, 2 0 7, 238

D e i (R ijk e l), 428 D e v in d u village, L e ( R o u s se a u ), 552 D ia lo g u e o f the E xch eq u er ( F it z n ig e l), 14 6 D ia z d e la P e n a , N a rc is se -V irg ile , 546

C te s ib iu s , 2 77

D ic k e n s , C h a r le s ( e ld e r ), 562

Cygnea C a n t io ( L e la n d ) , 329

D ic k e n s , C h a r le s ( y o u n g e r ) , 3 5 4

C z y z , S tan islas, 66

D ictio n a ry o f the Tham es, Th e ( D ic k e n s ), 354 D ilt h e y , W ilh e lm , 2 1 3 - 1 4

D a h l, Jo h an n C h r is tia n , 238

D in a n t, ro ck s o f , 4 1 6 - 1 7

D a h lm a n n , F rie d rich , 11 3

D in g le y , C h a r le s, 522

D a n ie l, a b b o t , 4 1 4

D in o c r a te s , 4 0 1 - 2 , illus. 4 0 3 , 40 4

D a n id lo u , Jean , 265 D a n te , 2 2 7 ,4 1 7

D in o c r a tic tra d itio n , 4 0 2 ,4 0 4 - 6 , illus. 403, 406

D a n to , A r t h u r , 133

d in o sa u rs , 453

D a n u b e R ive r, 363

D io d o r u s S ic u lu s, 2 5 2 , 256

D a r k D a y ( B r u e g e l) , 4 3 1 ,4 3 2 a n d illus.

D io n ig i d i S an S e p o lc r o , 4 1 9

D a r r e , R u d o lf, 82

D iscourse on the O r ig in s o f In e q u a lity

D a s h w o o d , S ir F ran cis, 541 d ate p alm s, 2 1 4 - 1 5 , 304 D a u t h e , 237 D a v id , J a cq u e s-L o u is, 462 D a v y , C h a r le s an d F re d e r ic k , 4 72 D a v y , H u m p h r y , 563

( R o u s se a u ), 232 D iscourse on the Worship o f P r ia p u s ( K n ig h t) , 2 54 D iscoverie o f the large, rich a n d b e a u tifu ll E m p ire o fG u i a n n a , The (R a le g h ), 3 1 2 ,3 1 5 -1 6

D e a d S e a, 2 64, 266

D is ra e li, B e n ja m in , 378

D e A lp ib u s C o m m e n ta riu s (S im ler), 4 7 9

D ix o n , J o h n , 3 7 7

D e a q u is u r b is R o m a e (F r o n tin u s ), 286

D o b lin , A lfr e d , 1 1 8

D e a r ch itec tu r a (V itr u v iu s ), 228, 4 0 1 ,4 0 2

D o w d , A u g u s t u s T . , 18 5

D e bello G a llic o ( C a e s a r ), 83

D o w n in g , A n d r e w Ja ck so n , 5 6 7

D e c a isn e , J o se p h , 18 7

d r a g o n s , 4 1 1 - 1 4 , illus. 4 1 3 , 4 1 7

D e c k e r , P a u l, 231 a n d illu s., illus. 232

D r a y t o n , M ic h a e l, 3 2 2 , 328 , 330

D e e , D r. Jo hn , 3 11

D r e a m Book f o r O u r T im es ( C z y z ) , 66

D e f o e , D a n ie l, 16 5

D r e a m in g o f Im m o r ta lity in the M o u n ta in s,

D e Isid e et O sir id e ( P lu ta rc h ), 256

illus. 4 0 6 - 7

D e k k e r , T h o m a s , 326

D r e a m o f the R o a d , 2 1 9

D e lu c , Jean A n d r e , 48 4

D r u id s , 1 6 1 , 2 1 7 , 4 7 0

D e n e c o u r t, C la u d e F ra n c o is, 1 7 , illus. 347,

D u f f G o r d o n , L u c ie , 381

555

D u m a s , A le x a n d r e , 3 6 3 ,4 9 2

b ack g ro u n d o f, 5 4 7 -9

D u m e z il, G e o r g e s , 13 4

F o n ta in e b le a u fo re st a n d , 5 4 6 - 7 , 5 5 3 - 6 0

D u n c a n , Is a d o ra , 392

p ro m o tio n a l g e n iu s , 55 9

D u p u is , C h a r le s F ra n c o is , 250

S e n a n c o u r ’s in flu en ce o n , 5 4 9 - 5 1

D u r a n d , A le x is , 5 5 3 - 4 , 55 6

D e n g X ia o p in g , 2 61

D u r a n d , A s h e r , 1 9 7 - 9 , dlu s. 198, 19 9

D e n h a m , J o h n , 330

D u r h a m C a th e d r a l, 236

D e n n is, J o h n , 44 9

D u t c h r e p u b lic , 10 , 16 2 , 3 3 1 - 2

D e rb y sh ire P ea k D is tric t, 4 7 1 - 2 D e reru m n a tu r a (L u c re tiu s ) , 83

.

D esig ns o f C hin ese B u ild in g s (C h a m b e r s ) ,

137 542 d e sp o tis m , 2 6 0 -1

E a d m e r, m o n k , 14 0 E a kin s, T h o m a s , 3 6 8 -7 0 , illus. 3 7 0 , 372 E b e l, J. G . , 4 9 4 -5 E c k h a r d t, J. G . , illus. 4 4 8

INDEX

63 1

E clo g u es ( V i r g i l) , 52 8

E r m e n o n v ille e s ta te , 5 4 4 - 5 , illu s. 3 4 3

E d w a r d s , A m e lia , 380

E rp -H o u tep an , A n n e van , 534

E g y p t ia n a n tiq u ity , 2 6 2 , 3 7 6 ,4 0 6

Essay on A m e r ic a n Scenery ( C o l e ) , 3 6 4 - 5

C h r is tia n ity a n d , 2 8 3 -4 , 2 ®6, 2 9 9 - 3 0 0

Essay o n P la n ti n g ( H a n b u r y ) , 16 6

h ie r o g ly p h s , 2 6 9 , 2 7 2 , 2 9 9 - 3 0 0

Essay on the O r ig in s, H isto r y a n d P r in cip le s

K ir c h e r ’ s s tu d y o f , 300, 302 N ile r itu a ls , 2 5 9 N i l e ’ s p o lit ic a l im p o r ta n c e , 260 O s iris m y th , 2 5 2 - 3 , 2 5 4 , 2 5 5 , 2 5 6 , 2 5 7 , 2 8 3 , 3 1 7 ,3 8 0 - 2 P h ila e t e m p le is la n d , 3 8 0 -2 E l D o r a d o , s e a rc h f o r , 5 , 3 0 8 - 1 6 , 3 1 7 , 3 18 -19 E le a n o r o f A q u i t a in e , 14 8 E lia d e , M ir c e a , 1 5 , 13 3 E lig iu s , S t ., 2 1 5

o f G o th ic A r c h ite c t u r e ( H a ll) , 2 3 3 - 4 , illu s. 2 3 4 , 2 3 3 , 2 36 Essay o n the O r ig in s o f A r c h ite c tu r e ( L a u g ie r ) , 232 E s se n e c u lt , 2 6 4 E tr u s c a n s , 82 E t z la u b , E r h a r d v o n , illu s. 9 4 E u s ta c e , m o n k , 15 0 E v e ly n , J o h n , 1 5 9 - 6 2 , 1 6 3 , 1 6 9 - 7 0 , illu s. 1 7 0 ,1 7 2 , 332, 5 3 7 -8 e v o lu t io n , t h e o r y o f , 5 2 7

E liz a b e t h I , q u e e n o f E n g la n d , 3 0 7 , 3 1 6 ,

3 2 9 " 3°

F a b iu s , M a r c u s , 82

e lk s , 52

F a b r i, F e lix , 2 6 3 - 4 , 2 d 5 , 2 6 6 - 7 , 3 °3

E llis , W e l b o r e , 1 3 7

fa b r iq u e s (s y n t h e t ic la n d s ca p e s w it h

E llis , W illia m , 1 4 3 , 17 2 “ E ly s iu m ” a t C a s t le H o w a r d , 5 3 8 - 9 E m e r s o n , R a lp h W a l d o , 5 7 2 - 3 , 5 7 6 E m m e r ic h , A n d r e w , 1 6 9

m e c h a n ic a l d e v ic e s ) , 5 4 0 - 5 , illu s. 3 4 1 , 3 4 2 , 3 4 3 , 34 4 , 3 43 F a ld a , G . B ., illu s. 299 “ F a lla c ie s o f H o p e , T h e ” ( T u r n e r ) , 462

E m p e d o c le s , illu s . 4 5 5 , 4 5 6

F a m ily o f Satyrs ( A ltd o r f e r ) , 9 6 - 7

E m p e d o cles T h r o w in g H i m s e lf in to M o u n t

F a s n ie r , C h a r le s , 1 7 7

E t n a ( R o s a ) , illu s . 4 3 3 e n c lo s e d g a r d e n s , illu s . 3 3 2 - 3 , 5 3 4 - 8 , illu s.

536 E n g e l , C la ir e E lia n e , 4 9 1 E n g la n d , 15

F e lib ie n , A n d r e , 5 6 1 F e lip e P r o s p e r , In fa n t e , 3 3 4 fe m a le b o d y , a s so c ia tio n w it h p u r e w a t e r , 2 7 3 , 3 6 7 - 7 0 , illu s. 3 6 8 , 3 6 9 , 3 7 0 , 3 7 1 , 3 7 2 - 4 , illu s . 3 7 2 , 3 7 3

a r c a d ia in , 5 1 7 - 2 5 , 5 3 8 - 4 0

F e n n o r , W illia m , 32 5

D u t c h r e p u b lic , c o n flic t s w it h , 1 6 2 , 332

F ic h t e , J o h a n n , 1 2 9 , 13 3

g la s s h o u s e s , 5 6 5 - 6 , illu s . 3 6 3 , 5 6 7

F ig h tin g T e m er a ir e, tu g g d to h e r L a s t B e r th

m o u n ta in p e r ip h e r y , 4 6 6 - 7 , illu s . 4 6 7 , 468, 4 6 9 -7 2 s h i p - b u ild i n g crisis o f la te 1 7 9 0 s , 1 7 2 - 4 t im b e r im p o r t i n g , 18 1 see a lso g r e e n w o o d ; L o n d o n ; T h a m e s R iv e r E n g la n d : R ic h m o n d H i l l , o n the P r in c e R e g e n t ’s B ir th d a y ( T u r n e r ) , 3 6 1

to be bro ken u p, 18 3 8 , ( T u r n e r ) , 3 6 1 - 2 F io r e tti ( L itt le F lo w e r s o f S t. F r a n c is ), 4 3 6 F is c h e r v o n E r la c h , J o h a n n B e r n a r d , 4 0 4 , 4 0 5 a n d illu s. F is h e r , R o g e r , 1 6 6 - 8 F it z n ig e l, R ic h a r d , 14 6 F it z - W a r in , F u lk , 15 0 F lo o d in g o f H eid elb er g , ^ ( K i e f e r ) , 12 3

“ e n g r a m s ,” 2 1 0 - 1 1

F lo o d in g o f the T ib er, T h e ( B e r n in i) , 292

E n o c h o f A s c o l i, 7 7

f o n s sa p ie n tia e, 2 6 7 , 2 79

E n t r a n c e to th e G r a n d e C h a r tr e u se ( C o z ­

F o n t a in e b le a u fo r e s t , 5 4 6 - 7

en s), 4 7 7 -8

h ik in g , 5 4 7 , 5 5 4 - 6 , 5 5 7

e n v ir o n m e n ta l h is to r y , 1 2 - 1 3

lo r e o f , 5 5 1 - 2

e n v ir o n m e n ta lis m , 1 1 9

o u t la w s o f , 552

“ E p is t le t o L o r d B u r l in g t o n ” ( P o p e ) , 2 30

p o p u la r arca d ia, tra n s fo rm a tio n t o , 5 5 3 - 6 0

E p it h a la m io n T a m esis ( S p e n s e r ) , 330

royal m a n ag e m e n t o f, 5 5 2 -3

E r m e la n d e , 2 2 7

S e n a n c o u r ’ s w r it in g s o n , 5 4 9 - 5 1

E r m e n g a u M a s t e r , 2 20

w a rfa re in , 548

I NDEX

632

F o n ta n a , D o m e n ic o , 284, illus. 2 8 3 , 2 8 6 -7

ca n als, 343

fo n ta n ie r i, 2 7 7 - 9

fo re st a d m in istra tio n , 16 2 , 1 7 4 - 9 , 18 0 - 1

F o r b e s , J. D ., 5 I 0

L o u is X I V ’ s m a rria g e, 3 3 3 - 6

Forefathers’ Eve ( M ic k ie w ic z ) , 55

M o n t V a l6 rie n , illus. 4 3 9 , 4 4 0 - 4 , illus.

fo re st-d ea th ( W aldsterben), 120

4 4 0 ,4 4 2 ,4 4 3

fo re st la w , 1 3 9 - 4 0 , 1 4 4 - 7

rivers o f , 3 5 5 , 3 6 3 -4

F o re st o f D e a n , 15 6 , 15 8 , 16 3 , 173

V a u x - le -V ic o m t e an d V e rsa ille s, 3 3 6 -4 3 , illus. 3 3 7 , 3 4 1 , 342

fo re stry, 4 7 B r in ck e n ’s w ritin g s o n , 50 E v e ly n ’ s w ritin g s o n , 15 9 -6 2

see also F o n ta in e b le a u fo re st; F ren ch R e v o lu tio n ; P aris

F ren ch C o d e C o lb e r t, 1 7 8 - 9

F ran c in i, T o m m a s o , 2 7 7

S o v ie t a p p ro ach t o , 73

F ran c in i b r o th e rs , 342

fo re sts, 5 - 6 A m e rica n attitu d e to w a r d , 1 9 1 , 19 3 , 19 9 -2 0 0 arch ite ctu re an d , 5 8 - 9 , 228, 229 , 2 3 0 -2 , illus. 2 3 1, 232 C h ristia n ity an d , 227 in F ran c e, 16 2 , 1 7 4 - 9 , 18 0 -1

F ran c is, S t ., 4 3 6 , illu s. 4 3 8 ,4 3 9 F r a n c i s I, k in g o f F r a n c e , 55 0 F ra n c o is d e B o s c o , 423 F ra n k e n th a l c ir cle , 100 F r a n z F e rd in a n d , a r ch d u k e o f A u str ia , 66 F r a z e r , S ir Jam es, 6 , 2 0 8 -9 , d lu s. 2 08 , 2 1 3 - 1 4 ,2 1 6 ,2 5 3 ,2 5 4 - 5

G e rm an ic trib es an d , 8 3 -7

F rd art d e C h a n te lo u , 289

G e rm a n y ’ s co n se rva tio n o f fo re sts, 10 2 ,

F re d e ric k I (B a rb a ro s s a ), H o l y R o m a n

1 1 4 - 1 6 ,1 1 9

e m p e ro r , 103

G e rm an y’s cultural reafforestation, 9 5 -1 0 0

F red erick I I , e m p e ro r o f G e rm a n y, 76 , 80, 81

see also B ia lo w ie z a forest; F o n ta in e b le a u

F r e d e r ic k W illia m I I I , k in g o f P ru ssia, 566

forest; g r e e n w o o d ; p u szcza w ild e r ­

free m a so n s, 5 4 1 - 2

ness; specific forests

F r d m o n t, Jessie B e n t o n , 396

Foret d e F o n ta in eb lea u ( D u r a n d ) , 5 5 4

F r e m o n t, Jo h n C . , 18 6 , 396

F o rste r, Jo han n, 2 3 7 -8

F ren ch G a rd en er, The ( E v e ly n ) , 15 9

F o rtu n a P rim ig en eia te m p le , 2 6 8 -9 , d lus.

F r e n ch R e v o lu tio n B a rlo w a n d , 2 4 8 -9

2 7 0 -1 F o u n ta in o f L ife a n d M ercy ( H o r e n b o u t ) , illus. 288 F o u n tain o f th e B e e (B e r n in i) , 290 F o u n tain o f th e F o u r R ivers (B e r n in i), 2 9 1 ,

fore sts a n d , 18 0 M o n t V a le r ie n a n d , 4 4 2 - 3 R a m o n d a n d , 48 7 F r e u c h t, O t t o , 11 8

2 9 2 -5 , illus. 293, 296, 2 9 7 - 9 , illus. 297,

F r ie d , M ic h a e l, 373

3 0 2 -5 , illus. 302, 3 0 3, 304, 309

F r ie d r ich , C a sp a r D a v id , 1 4 , 10 6 , 10 7 , illus.

F o u n ta in o f the F o u r R iv e r s ( F a ld a ), illus. 299

10 8 , 10 9 , illu s. 1 2 2 , 1 2 3 , 1 2 7 , 1 9 5 - 6 , illus. 19 6 , 206, 2 0 7, 2 3 8 -9

fo u n tain s, 2 7 5 - 8 , illus. 273 , 2 7 6

F rie n d s o f th e O a k , 1 7 4

B e lid o r ’ s d e sig n s, illus. 349

F r o n tin u s , S e x tu s Ju liu s, 286

B ern in i’ s d e sig n s, 2 8 9 -9 2 , illus. 290, 2 9 /;

F u lc h e r o f C h a r tre s , 4 1 4

see also F o u n ta in o f th e F o u r R ivers o f C a se rta , 3 4 4 -5 , illus. 344 C a u s ’ s d e sig n s, 2 7 8 - 9 , illus. 280, 2 8 1

F u r Tra d ers D e sce n d in g the M issouri ( B in g ­ h a m ), illus. 3 6 6 F u s eli, H e n r i, 4 7 1

C h ris tia n ity a n d , 2 8 7 - 8 , illus. 287, 288 o f V a u x - le - V ic o m t e , 3 3 7 - 9 , illus. 3 3 7

G a d d i, T a d d e o , 2 2 3 , illus. 224

o f V ersa ille s, 3 3 9 -4 2 , illus. 3 4 1 , 342

G a in s b o r o u g h , T h o m a s , illus. 16 8 , 16 9

F o u q u e t, N ic o la s , 3 3 6 -7 , 3 3 8 -9 , 342

G a le , G e o r g e , 1 8 6 - 7

F ou rth o f Ju ly in C e n te r Squ a re (K rim m e l),

G a n g e s R ive r, 2 6 6 - 7

illus.

369

F r a g m e n t o f the A lp s, A ( R u s k in ) , 508 , 509 F ran c e, 15

G a r d e n o f E d e n , 6 , 2 1 9 , 3 1 7 , 53 7 g ard en s C h in e s e g a rd en s, 542 a n d illu s., illus.

543

INDEX e n c lo s e d g a r d e n s , illu s. 3 3 2 - 3 , 5 3 4 - 8 , illu s . 3 3 6 , 56 2 tr o p ic a l g a r d e n s , 5 6 4 - 7 , illu s . 3 6 3 , 366 v illa g a r d e n s , 2 7 5 - 9 , Ulus. 2 7 3 G a u t ie r , T h 6 o p h ile , 5 4 6 - 7 , 5 4 9 , 5 5 7 , 55 8 G e n e v a , S w it z e r la n d , 4 8 0

633 R o m a n t ic m o v e m e n t , 1 0 1 - 7 , 1 0 9 s o c io lo g y o f h a b ita t, 1 1 3 - 1 5 , 1 1 6 T h ir t y Y e a r s ’ W a r , 10 1 W a ld sterben ( fo r e s t - d e a th ) , 12 0 z o o s in , 5 6 4

G e r m a n y ’s S p ir itu a l H ero es ( K ie f e r ) , illu s. 12 6

G e n iu s o f th e T h a m es ( P e a c o c k ) , 3 5 6 - 7

G esn er, C o n ra d , 430, 4 3 1 , 479

g e o lo g i c a l t h e o r y , 4 5 1 - 2 , illu s. 4 3 2 , 4 3 3

G e s n e r , J o h a n n e s, 4 7 9

G e o r g e I I I , k in g o f E n g la n d , 1 3 9 , 16 9

G h erard o , 4 19 -2 0 , 421

G eo rg ies ( V i r g i l ) , 5 2 8 - 9

G h ib e r t i, B u o n a c c o r s o , 4 0 4

G e r a r d , J o h n , 52 2

G h is te le , Jo sse v a n , 266

G e r m a n ia ( T a c i t u s ) , 1 0 0 - 1

G i a n t R e d w o o d Trees o f C a lifo r n ia (B ie r -

C e lt is a n d , 9 3 , 9 4

s ta d t ) , 19 7

C o d e x A e s in a s , 7 8 - 8 1

G ib s o n , W a lt e r , 4 3 1 , 4 3 2 - 3

o n G e r m a n ic tr ib e s , 7 6 - 7 , 7 9 , 8 1 - 2 , 8 4 ,

G ib y , P o la n d , 2 3 , 2 4 - 5

8 5—6

G iff o r d , S a n fo r d , illu s. 3 6 6 , 3 6 7

o n G e r m a n la n d s c a p e , 81

G ilb e r t , F e lix , 2 1 1

h is to r y o f m a n u s c r ip ts , 7 7 - 8 , 9 1 - 2

G ilg a m e s h , 82

G e r m a n ia e A n t iq u a e ( C lu v e r iu s ) , illu s . 84, 86, 90 , 1 0 1

G ilp in , W illia m , 1 3 6 , 1 3 7 - 9 , Ulus. 1 3 8 , 14 0 ,

397, 451. 453.454

G e r m a n ia g e n e r a lis ( C e l t is ) , 9 5

G in z b u r g , C a r l o , 13 4

G e r m a n ic tr ib e s , 1 5 , illu s . 84, 83, 86, 1 0 1

G io v a n n i d a M o d e n a , 2 2 0 , illu s. 2 2 1

c o m m u n a l liv in g , 86

G ir a r d in , R e n 6 d e , 5 4 4 - 5 a n d illu s.

f o r e s t h a b it a t , 83

G ir lin g , E d w a r d H o r a t io , 562

h ero p ro d u ce d b y, 87

g la c ie r s , 4 6 5 - 6 , 5 1 0

in n o c e n t v it a lit y , 85

G la r u s , S w it z e r la n d , 48 6

as in s p ir a tio n f o r la t e r G e r m a n s , 9 2 - 5 ,

g la s s h o u s e s , 5 6 4 - 7 , illu s. 3 6 3 , 3 6 6

9 7 -8 , 10 1-2 m e m o r ia ls t o , 1 0 9 - 1 2 , illu s . 10 9 , 1 1 0 ,

h i

G la u b e n sb a u m ( V o g t h e r r ) , illu s. 223 G le a s o n , H e r b e r t , illu s. 3 7 3 G o e t h e , J. W . v o n , 2 3 6 , 2 3 7 , 4 0 4

n a tu r e , c lo s e n e s s t o , 8 3 - 4 , 8 6 - 7

G o ld e n B o u g h , T h e ( F r a z e r ) , 6 , 2 0 8, 209

N a z i s ’ in te r e s t in , 7 6 , 7 8 - 9 , 82

G o ld s w o r t h y , A n d y , 12

r e lig io n o f , 8 2 , 8 4 - 5

G o l t z i u s , H e n d r ik , 2 2 5 - 6

T a c i t u s ’ s d e s c r ip t io n s o f , 7 6 - 7 , 7 9 , 8 1 - 2 ,

G o m b r i c h , S ir E r n s t, 4 2 4

8 4 ,8 5 —6 , 8 9 w a r fa r e w it h R o m a n s , 8 7 , 8 8 - 9 1 G e r m a n ic u s , 8 7 , 8 9 - 9 1 G e r m a n P reh isto ry ( K o s s in n a ) , 1 1 8 G e rm an y c o l o n iz a t io n o f P o lis h p u s zc za , 7 0 - 2 c o n s e r v a tio n o f fo r e s t s , 1 0 2 , 1 1 4 - 1 6 , 119 c u lt u r a l r e a ffo r e s t a tio n , 9 5 - 1 0 0 g la s s h o u s e s in , 5 6 6 a n d illu s. G o t h i c a r c h it e c t u r e a n d , 2 3 6 - 8 m e m o r ia ls t o G e r m a n ic t rib e s , 1 0 9 - 1 2 , illu s . 10 9 , n o n a tio n a lis m o f t w e n tie t h c e n t u r y , 1 1 7 - 1 9 o a k - fe t is h in a r t a n d lit e r a tu r e , 1 0 3 , illu s. 10 4

G o n d o m a r, C o u n t, 318 G o r d o n R io ts o f 1 7 8 0 , 52 3 G o r in g , H e r m a n n , illu s. 6 8 , 7 0 , 1 1 8 , 1 1 9 B ia lo w ie z a f o r e s t a n d , 6 7 - 7 0 , 73 G o t h i c a r c h it e c t u r e , 1 9 6 , 2 2 7 - 8 , illu s. 2 3 3 as e m b o d im e n t o f f o r e s t w ild e r n e s s , 2 2 8 , 2 2 9 , 2 3 0 - 2 , illu s. 2 3 1 , 2 32 G e r m a n p e r s p e c tiv e o n , 2 3 6 - 8 H a ll ’s p e r s p e c tiv e o n , 1 7 , 2 3 2 - 4 , illu s. 2 3 4 , 2 36 G o th ic A r c h ite c t u r e D e co r a te d ( D e c k e r ) , 2 3 1 a n d illu s ., illu s. 232 G o th ic R u i n s a t S u n s e t ( C o l e ) , illu s. 204 G o u l d , S t e p h e n Ja y, 4 5 1 G o u p y , J o s e p h , 4 5 6 ,4 5 7 g r a in t r a d e , 4 6

p a p a l R o m e , b r e a k w it h , 9 2 - 5

G r a n d C h a r t r e u s e m o n a s te r y , 4 4 9 , 4 5 0

R h in e R iv e r , 363

G r a p h ice ( P e a c h a m ) , 10 , 5 1 9

INDEX

634 G r a y , A sa , 18 7

G r u n d sd tz e d e r Forstokonom ie ( M o s e r ), 1 1 6

G r a y , E ffie , 508

G r u n d z iig e d er G othischen B a u k u n st

G r a y , T h o m a s , 4 4 8 - 5 0 , illu s. 4 4 8 , 4 5 2 - 3 ,

457. 458, 459. 469-70.47i. 478

G r e a t A lp in e L a nd sca pe w ith Storm (d a V in c i) , illus. 4 2 3 G r e a t B rita in , see E n g la n d

( S c h le g e l) , 238 G u a r n ie r i, S te fa n o , 7 7 G u e r c in o , 5 1 9 a n d illus. G u 6 r ig n y ( T h e M a n W h o K isse d V ip e r s ), 5 5 9 -6 0

G r e a t E a te r o f K e n t, The (T a y lo r ) , 327

G u ia n a B a lsam , 3 1 6 - 1 7

G r e a t M o u n ta in La nd sca pe (d e M o m p e r

G u K a iz h i, 408

th e Y o u n g e r ) , illus. 4 3 4 -3

G u y o f G is b o r n e , 15 1

G r e a t S to v e (g la s sh o u se ), 5 6 5 - 6 G r e c o , J o h n , 4 4 4 ,4 4 6

H a d d o c k , R ic h a r d , 4

G r e e k m y th o lo g y , 2 58 , 5 2 6 -8

H a d r ia n , e m p e ro r o f R o m e , 268, 283

G r e e le y , H o r a c e , 188

H a d r ia n V I , P o p e , 39

G r e e n d a le o a k , 17 0 , illus. 1 7 1

H a g e n b e c k , C a r l, 56 4

G r e e n w ic h d in n e r, 3 5 3 -4

H a g e n b e c k , L o r e n z , 65

g r e e n w o o d , 15

H a lf D o m e , 9

a n arch y fo llo w in g C iv il W a r , 1 5 8 - 9

H a ll, S ir Jam es, 1 7 , 2 3 2 -4 , illu s. 2 3 4 , 236

a n cie n t tre e s, 17 0 , illus. 1 7 1 , 17 2

H a lle r , A lb r e c h t v o n , 4 7 9 - 8 0 ,4 9 1

a risto cra c y’ s d o m in a tio n o f , 1 6 5 - 8 , 16 9 ,

H a m ilt o n , C h a r le s , 5 4 1

174. 175

H a m ilt o n , T h o m a s , 4 6 4

E v e ly n ’s w r itin g s o n , 15 9 -6 2

H a m ilt o n , S ir W illia m , 4 7 7

e x e m p la ry fo re st typ es, 1 3 5 - 8

H a m p ste a d H e a t h , 5 1 9 - 2 5 , illu s. 324, 323

fo re st la w , 13 9 - 4 0 , 1 4 4 - 7

H a n b u ry , W illia m , 16 6

h e d g e r o w an d u n d e r w o o d , 16 7 in c o m e g e n e r a tio n fo r roya l g o v e r n ­ m e n ts , 1 4 7 - 9 in d u strial e x p lo ita tio n o f , 1 5 3 - 6 , 15 8 , 1 6 1 ,1 6 2

H a n ca r v ille , B a ro n d ’ , 2 5 4 H a n n ib a l, 4 5 7 - 9 , illu s. 4 6 0 , 4 6 1 - 2 H a n n ib a l ( T u r n e r ) , 462 H a r io t, T h o m a s , illus. 3 1 0 , 3 1 1 , 3 1 6 H a r o , L u is d e , 334

in h a b ita n ts o f, 143

H a rr is o n , W illia m , 15 4

liv e sto c k in , 1 4 3 - 4

H a r t, W illia m S ., 399

m a n a g e m e n t o f, 143

H a ss id is m , 29

m y th ic m e m o r y o f , 1 4 0 - 1 , 1 8 2 - 4

H a s tin g s , H e n r y , 1 3 5 - 7

n a tu ral d isasters, 163

H a tt o n , C h r is to p h e r , 307

o a k s h o r ta g e , 1 6 5 - 8 , 1 7 2 - 4

H a w k s to n e e sta te , 5 4 2 - 4 , illus. 343

o u tla w s o f , 1 4 9 - 5 3 , *65

H a y m a n , F ran c is, 3 57

p o a c h in g in , 14 7

H e a r t o f D a rkn ess ( C o n r a d ) , 4 - 5

p re s erv a tio n o f , 1 3 8 - 9

H e a r t o f O a k: The B r itish B u lw a rk (r e p o r t),

real fo r e st c o n d itio n s in m e d iev al p e r io d , 14 2 -4

16 6 H e a t h , C h a r le s, 363

r e s to r a tio n o f , 15 9 , 1 6 0 - 3 , 1 6 8 -7 0

H e id e g g e r , M a r tin , 1 2 9 , 133

as s y m b o l o f E n g lish n a tio n alism , 1 6 3 - 4 ,

H e m a n s , F e licia, 205

17 0 t ria n g u la r c o n te s t fo r tim b e r , 17 9 - 8 0 G reenw ood Tree, Th e ( p o e m ) , 1 5 1 - 2

H e n r i I I , k in g o f F r a n c e , 17 6 H e n r i I V , k in g o f F r a n c e , 346 , 3 4 7 , 5 5 1 H e n r y I I , k in g o f E n g la n d , 14 4 , 148

G r e g o ir e , H e n r i, 248 , 252

H e n r y I I I , k in g o f E n g la n d , 148

G r e g o r y I (th e G r e a t) , P o p e , 2 16

H e n r y V I I I , k in g o f E n g la n d , 152

G r iffith , D . W ., 3 9 3 -4

H e n r y , P rin c e o f W a le s, 3 1 6 - 1 7 , 318

G r im m b r o th e rs , 1 0 6 - 7

H e r b e r ste in , R itte r S ig ism u n d v o n , 4 1

G r izz ly G ia n t, The ( B ie r s ta d t), 19 4

H e r cy n ia n fo r e st, 8 3, 12 0

G r iz z ly G ia n t , The ( W a tk in s ) , illu s 1 9 2,

H e r d e r , Jo h an n G o t tfr ie d , 1 0 2 - 3 , 2 3 6 - 7

*93 G r o t tg e r , A r t u r , 6 2 - 3 , illus. 63

H e r e n d e e n , W y m a n , 330 H e r e w a rd th e W a k e , 15 0

INDEX H e r m a n n s d e n k m a l, illu s. 1 1 7 , m e m o r ia ls , 1 0 9 - 1 2 , illu s . 10 9 , n o , i n H e r m a n n s -S c h la c t, D i e ( K ie f e r ) , 1 2 9 , illu s. 1 3 0 , 1 3 1 a n d illu s ., illu s. 1 3 2 , 13 3

635

H u d s o n , C h a r le s , 50 6 H u d s o n R iv e r , 3 6 4 - 5 , illu s. 3 6 6 , 3 6 7 H u d s o n V a lle y p a in te r s, 1 9 6 , 1 9 7 - 8 , 3 6 4 - 5 H u e c k , K u rt, 118

H e r m a n n s sc h la c h t ( K le is t ) , 10 4

H u g o , V ic to r , 4 9 2 , 547

H e r m a n n th e G e r m a n , see A r m in iu s , p rin c e

H u m b o l d t , A le x a n d e r v o n , 2 3 7 - 8

o f th e C h e r u s c i

H u n d e s h a g e n , J o h a n n C h r is tia n , 1 1 6

H e r m e s T r is m e g is t u s , 2 72

H u n t , J o h n D ix o n , 5 3 9

h e r m it s , 2 2 7 , illu s. 5 4 5 , 5 5 1

H u n t e r , A le x a n d e r , 1 6 9 - 7 0

H e ro , 277

h u rr ic a n e o f 1 7 0 3 , 16 3

H e r o d o tu s , 2 57

H u s sa rs o f Israe l p la n , 3 3 - 4

H e r s e y , G e o r g e , 3 4 4 , 345

H u s s o v ia n u s , N ic o la u s , 3 8 - 4 0 , 4 1

H e r t z , A le k s a n d e r , 29

H u t c h in g s , Ja m es M a s o n , 1 8 8 - 9 , I 9 °

H e r z l , T h e o d o r , 34

H u t c h in s , J o h n , 13 6

H e s i o d , 258

H u t t e n , U lr ic h v o n , 9 5 , 10 7

H e sp erid e s ( T u r n e r ) , 360

h y d r a u lic e n g in e e r in g , 2 7 7 - 9 , d lu s. 280,

H i b b s , V iv ia n , 2 5 9 H ie r o g ly p h ica ( H o r a p o l l o ) , 2 6 9 , 2 72 h ie r o g ly p h s , 2 6 9 , 2 7 2 , 2 9 9 - 3 0 0 h ik in g , 5 4 7 , 5 5 4 - 6 , 5 5 7 H i l l, D a v id , 360

2 8 1 , 286 “ H y m n t o I n t e lle c tu a l B e a u t y ” ( S h e lle y ), 481 H y p n e r o to m a ch ia P o lip h ili ( C o l o n n a ) , 2 7 2 - 4 , illu s. 2 7 2 , 2 7 3 , 2 7 4

H i l l, S ir R ic h a r d , 5 4 2 - 3 H i m m le r , H e in r i c h , 7 0 , 7 8 , 7 9 , 1 1 8

I b b e t s o n , J. C . , illu s 3 2 1

h is to r y , 5 7 3 - 4

Ich n o g r a p h ia R u s tic a ( S w it z e r ) , 538

H isto r y o f th e M o d e m T a ste in G a r d e n in g

im p e r ia lis m , 4 6 3 - 6

( W a lp o le ) , 53 8

in c e n s e b u r n e rs , 40 8 a n d illu s.

H itle r , A d o lf, 6 7 , 78 , 7 9 , 11 8

In fe r n o ( D a n t e ) , 2 2 7

H o a g la n d , E d w a rd , 5 7 6

In n e s s , G e o r g e , 3 67

H o d g e s , W illia m , 4 9 2

I n n o c e n t X , P o p e , 2 9 3 - 4 , d lu s. 2 9 3 , 2 9 7 ,

H o f f m a n , C h a r le s F e n n o , 19 5

2 9 8 ,2 9 9 , 300, 3 0 4 - 5

H o f r i c h t e r , F r im a F o x , 2 2 6

I n th e W oods ( D u r a n d ) , 1 9 7 , illu s. 1 9 8

H o g e n b e r g , F r a n s , 4 2 9 a n d illu s.

In to le r a n c e ( f ilm ) , 393

H o l b e in , H a n s , 2 2 1 - 2

Io g a ila , g r a n d d u k e o f L ith u a n ia , 4 0 ; see

H o l d e r li n , F r ie d r ic h , 12 9 H o l m e s , O li v e r W e n d e ll , 1 9 1

also W la d is ta w I I , k in g o f P o la n d Ir e la n d , 2 1 6

H o l o c a u s t , 26

I s is - F o r tu n a , illu s . 269

H o l t , J. C . , 14 9

Is r a e l, tre e s fo r , 5 - 6

H o l y L a n d , U S A , 1 6 , 4 4 4 , illu s . 4 4 3 , 4 4 6

I t in e r a r iu m C u r io s u m ( S t u k e le y ) , 2 3 1

H o lz b a u k u n s t ( D a h i ) , 238

Iv a n h o e ( S c o t t ) , 18 2

H o m e i n th e W oods ( C o l e ) , 203 a n d illu s.

I v e rs e n , E r ik , 300

H o o k e r , T h o m a s , illu s . 2 0 0 , 2 0 1

I z m ir , 34

H o o k e r a n d C o m p a n y J o u r n e y in g T h r o u g h th e W ild ern ess f r o m P ly m o u th to H a r t ­

J a c k so n , F r a n c is , 52 3

f o r d ( C h u r c h ) , illu s . 200

J a c o p o d a V a le n z a , 4 1 7 , illu s. 4 1 8

H o o k M o u n t a in , n e a r N y a ck, o n th e H u d s o n ( G if f o r d ) , illu s . 3 6 6

J a c o p o d e lla P o r ta , 2 8 7 J a d w ig a , q u e e n o f P o la n d , 2 8 , 40

H o o v e r , H e r b e r t , 388

Ja m e s, E . O . , 2 65

H o p e , J a m e s, 16 9

Ja m es I , k in g o f E n g la n d , 1 5 6 , 2 7 8 , 3 0 7 ,

H o p i In d ia n s , 2 1 1

3 1 6 ,3 1 7 ,3 1 8 ,3 2 4

H o r a p o l l o , 2 6 9 , 2 72

J a m in , E t ie n n e , 5 5 4

H o re a u , H e cto r, 5 6 6 -7

J a n in , J u le s , 5 4 7

H o r e n b o u t , G e r a r d , 288 a n d illu s.

Jan S o b ie s k i, k in g o f P o la n d , 4 2 , 43

H o u s s a y e , A rs £ n e , 5 4 7

Ja rd in d ’ H iv e r , 5 6 6 - 7

INDEX

636 Je ffe rson , T h o m a s , 2 49, 2 5 0 - 1 , 364 , 395, illus. 3 9 6 Je ro m e , S t., 4 1 5 - 1 6 , illus. 4 1 6 , 4 1 7 , illus. 418

K o c h , Jo sep h A n t o n , 1 1 6 K o lb e , K arl W ilh e lm , 10 3 , illu s. 10 4 K o m pleks P olski ( K o n w ic k i) , 62 K o n r a d W a llen ro d ( M ic k ie w ic z ) , 55

Jesus C h r is t, 2 1 9 , 4 1 2

K o n w ic k i, T a d e u s z , 2 4, 62

Jew ish ce m e te r y (P u n s k ), 3 5 - 6

kopiec, 26

Jew s, 6

K o rn e r , T h e o d o r , 105

B o r g lu m an d , 394

K o s c iu s z k o , T a d e u s z , 2 6, 4 7

H u ssa rs o f Israel p la n , 3 3 - 4

K o ss in n a , G u s ta v , 11 8

o f P o la n d , 2 6 - 3 3 , illus. 28

K ra k 6 w , P o la n d , 26

W o r ld W a r I I , 70, 72

K rim m e l, J o h n L e w is , illu s. 369

Jo h n e s, T h o m a s , 168

K ru p p , A l f r e d , 12 9

J o h n s o n , A d e la id e , illus. 3 8 9 , 390, 391

K u K lu x K la n , 3 9 3 -4

J o h n s o n , S a m u el, 4 7 1 , 5 4 3 - 4 Jo nes, In ig o , 3 2 1 , 324

L a k e V ic t o r ia , 375

Jo nes, John P au l, 248

L a m a r tin e , A lp h o n s e d e , 54 7

Jo nes, T h o m a s , illus. 4 7 0 , 4 7 1

“ la m e n ta tio n ,” lite ra tu re o f , E g y p tia n , 260

Jord an R iver, 2 64, 2 6 6 -7 Jo se lew icz , B e rek , 32

“ L a m e n t o f th e W ild F o r e s t- F o lk a b o u t th e P e r fid io u s W o r ld ” ( S a c h s ), 9 7 - 8

Joseph o f A rim a th e a , 220

lan d sca p e s, 6 - 7 , 9 - 1 2 , 1 4 , 1 8 - 1 9

Jo u ffro y , A la in , 228

L a n d sca pe w ith D e a d Tree ( C o l e ) , 203

Jo u rn a l o f the Lakes ( G r a y ) , 4 7 1

L a n d sca pe w ith H a n n ib a l i n his M a r ch over

Julius II, P o p e , 283 Ju n ctio n o f the A ig u ille P o u r r i w ith the A ig u ille R o u g e ( R u s k in ), illus. 3 1 0 Ju n g, C a rl, 1 5 , 18 , 13 3 , 209, 2 10 , 2 1 1 Justinian, e m p e ro r o f R o m e , 265

the A lp s, A ( C o z e n s ) , 4 5 9 , illus. 460 , 461 L a nd sca pe w ith M a n P u r su e d by S na ke (P o u s sin ), 5 6 0 - 1 , illus. 3 6 1 Landscape w ith St. Jerom e (P atin ir), illus. 4 1 6 L a n d u n d L e u te ( R ie h l) , 1 1 4

K a ise rb e rg , G e ile r v o n , 97

L a n g le y , B a tty , 1 6 4 - 5 , 53 ^

K a n o ld t, E d m u n d , 1 1 6

L a n ta ra , S im o n M a th u rin , 4 4 1 , 552

K a n t, Im m a n u e l, 12 9

L a rk in , J o h n , 17 4

K ea ts, Jo h n , 18 3 - 4

L a S e rp e n ta ra o a k w o o d , 1 1 6

K e n t, W illiam , 5 3 9 , 540

L a to n a fo u n ta in , 340, 341 a n d illus.

K e n w o o d e sta te, 5 2 0 -2 , illus. 320, 3 2 1, 523

L a tr o b e , B e n ja m in H e n r y , 368

K e rs tin g , G e o r g F rie d rich , 1 0 4 - 5 , Ulus. 103

L a u g ie r , M a r c - A n t o in e , 232

K ey m is, L a u re n c e , 3 1 1 , 3 1 6 , 3 1 8 - 1 9

L a u re n tin u m , v illa a t, 52 9 a n d illus.

K h ru sh ch e v , N ik ita , 73

L a v in , Ir v in g , 299

K ie fer, A n s e lm , 19 , 12 0 , illus. 1 2 1 , 1 2 2 - 3 ,

“ la w in g ,” 14 6

illus. 1 2 3 , 12 4 , 1 2 6 - 9 , illus. 12 6, 128 ,

law n s, 1 6 , 5 2 5 , 573

13 0 , 13 1 a n d illu s., illus. 13 2 , 1 3 3 - 4

L e B r u n , C h a r le s , 3 4 2 , 343

K in d e r - u n d H a u sm d rchen (G r im m ) , 107

L e c o in t e , A m i, 492

K in d r e d S pirits ( D u r a n d ) , 19 8 - 9 , illus. 19 9

L e g e n d o f th e T r u e C r o s s , 2 19

K in g , C la re n c e , 195

L e ig h , E n g la n d , 4

K ip lin g , R u d y a rd , 3

L e ig h - M a llo r y , G e o r g e , 503

K irb y , Jo h n Jo sh u a, 16 4

L e la n d , J o h n , 1 5 2 , 329

K irch er, A th an a siu s, 1 7 , 2 4 7, 300 a n d illus.,

L e o X , P o p e , 38 , 39

illus. 3 0 1 , 302, illus. 4 0 3 , 406 K irch n e r, E rn s t, 12 9

L e o n a rd o d a V in c i, 4 2 4 a n d illu s., illus. 4 2 3 , 42 6

K le ist, H e in rich v o n , 104

L e o p o ld , p rin c e o f A n h a lt- D e s s a u , 5 4 1

K lo p s to c k , F rie d rich G o t d ie b , 10 2 , n o

le R o u g e , G e o r g e L o u is , illus. 344

K o b e r , Ju liu s, 11 8

“ L e tte rs o n L a n d sc a p e P a in tin g ” ( D u r a n d ),

K o b y lin s k i, 71

197

INDEX

637

L e V a u , L o u i s , 33 9

L u c r e t iu s , 83

L 6 v y , A r m a n d , 3 3 , 34

L u d l o w , F it z H u g h ,

lib a t io n ta b le s , illu s . 2 3 8 , 2 59

L u d o v is i, N i c c o ld , 2 9 5 , 2 9 7

L ib e r A m o r u m ( C e l t is ) , 92

L u d w i g I I , k in g o f B a v a ria , 56 6

L ib e r t y T r e e s , 1 7 , 2 5 2 - 4

lu m b e r m e n , 2 7 , illu s. 28

L ic h te r f e ld , F r a n z , 75

L u n d b e r g , P e r , 265

L ie b e r m a n , S a u l, 13 4

L u t h e r , M a r t in , 95

L i g n e , P r in c e d e , 5 3 9 , 5 4 1

L y k a o n , 52 6

L i g o z z i , J a c o p o , 2 25 a n d illu s ., 4 3 7 a n d

L y te ll G este o f R o b y n H o d e , 14 9 , 15 2

193-4, I95»239

illu s ., illu s. 4 3 8 , 4 3 9 lim e tre e s , 29

M a c a u la y , T h o m a s B a b i n g to n ,

L i n c o l n , A b r a h a m , 1 9 1 , 395

M a c k e n s e n , H a n s G e o r g v o n , 79

L in d le y , J o h n , 5 6 7

M a c p h e r s o n , J a m e s, 4 7 1

L i n g Y i n g S u B u d d h a c a r v in g s , 4 0 6 a n d

M a d is o n , J a m e s, 193

illu s.

354-5

M a g r it t e , R e n 6 , 12

L in n a e u s , C a r o lu s , 5 1

M a le n -V e r b r e n n e n ( K ie f e r ) , 1 2 6 - 7

L in t la e r , 3 4 6 , 3 4 7

M a m m o th T ree G rove, T h e (A y r e s ), illu s.

L i o ta r d , J e a n - E tie n n e , illu s . 4 6 3

18 9

L ip s k i, J 6 se f, 6 7

M a n c e a u , A le x a n d r e D a m ie n , 5 5 6

L ith u a n ia , 2 4 , 25

M a n d er, K arel van , 4 3 1

a n c ie n t la n d o f , 28

M a n ife s t D e s t in y , 39 7

c o n v e r s io n t o C h r is tia n ity , 26

M a n in the F orest ( K ie f e r ) , 122

u n io n w it h P o la n d , 2 8 , 4 0 - 1

M a n n h a r d t, W ilh e lm , 208

L ith u a n ia n f o r e s t , see B i a lo w ie z a fo r e s t; p u s z c z a w ild e r n e s s

M a n o a la k e is la n d , 3 1 0 - 1 1 , illu s. 3 1 0 M a n w o o d , S ir J o h n , 14 6

L it w a ( G r o t t g e r ) , 6 2 - 3 , illu s . 63

M a o T s e -tu n g , 261

L iv y , 8 2, 4 1 9 , 458

M a p , W a lt e r , 14 0

London, 4

M a r a v e r d e S ilv a , P e d r o , 309

E g y p t ia n o b e lis k , 3 7 6 - 8

M a res o f D io m e d e s ( B o r g lu m ) , 39 9 , illus. 400

z o o , 5 6 1 - 4 , illu s . 3 6 2 , 3 63

M a r ia J o z e fa , q u e e n o f P o la n d , 4 3 , 4 4

L o n d o n B r id g e , w ith th e M o n u m e n t a n d the C h u r c h o f St. M a g n u s , K i n g a n d M a r ty r ( T u r n e r ) , illu s. 3 3 9 L o n g - h o m e d C a t t le o f K e n w o o d ( I b b e t s o n ) ,

M a r ia n ic o n o g r a p h y , 2 2 9 - 3 0 M a r ie - T h e r £ s e , q u e e n o f F r a n c e ,

336

334-5,

M a r in i, A n g e l o , 2 9 4 - 5

illu s . 9 2 1

M a r s e ille s , F r a n c e , 2 4 5 - 6

L o n g in u s , 4 5 7

M a r s h a ll, W illia m , 1 7 2 - 3

L o r r a in , C l a u d e , 4 5 6

M a r t in d e A lb u ja r , J u a n , 309

L o t h a r in g ia n B o o k o f H o u r s , 220

M a r x , K a r l, 1 1 3 , 1 1 5 , 260

L o u d u n , J o h n C la u d iu s , 5 6 4

m a ss p o p u la r r e c r e a tio n , 5 5 9

L o u i s , S t ., 5 5 1

M a t h e w s , C r is t in a , 4 4 4

L o u is X I I I , k in g o f F r a n c e , 4 4 1

M a t l o c k T o r , illu s. 4 7 1 , 4 72

L o u is X I V , k in g o f F r a n c e

M a t t e r h o r n , 4 2 2 a n d illu s ., 503 a n d illu s .,

F o n t a in e b le a u f o r e s t a n d , 5 5 2 - 3

5 1 0 - 1 1 , illu s. 9 1 3

f o r e s t a d m in is t r a t io n , 1 7 5 - 6

M a t t h e w , S t ., 4 1 2

m a r ria g e o f , 3 3 3 - 6

M a t t h e w s , C . E ., 5 0 1

V a u x - l e - V ic o m t e a n d , 3 3 6 , 338

M a x im ilia n I , H o l y R o m a n e m p e r o r , 9 4 , 95

V e r s a ille s a n d , 3 3 9 , 3 4 0 , 3 4 2 , 343

M a y r , H e in r ic h , 1 1 6

L o u t h e r b o u r g , P h ilip p e d e , 4 7 1

M a z a r in , J u le s, 333

L o w , F r e d e r ic k , 1 9 1

M e d ic i, C a th e r in e d e ’ , 3 36

L u c a n , 262

M e h e m e t A l i, 3 7 6

L u c e r n e , S w it z e r la n d , 4 1 2 - 1 3

M e la , P o m p o n iu s , 7 6 , 4 1 9

L u c h e t, A u g u s te , 5 4 6 , 548 , 549

M e llis h , W illia m , 16 8

INDEX

638 M e llitu s, a b b o t , 2 16

M o n te V e r n a , 4 3 6

M e r c a ti, M ic h e le , 299

M onths, Th e ( B r u e g e l) , 4 3 1 ,4 3 3

M e r c e d R iv e r , 7

M o n t In a cce s sib le , 4 2 2 -3

M e r ia n , M a tth a u s, 465

M o n t P e r d u , 4 8 8 -9

M e so p o ta m ia n m y th o lo g y , 258

M o n t V a le r ie n , illus. 4 3 9 , 4 4 0 - 4 , illus. 440,

M e tz b rev ia ry, 2 15 a n d illus. M e y e r , K o n r a d , 70

44 * ' 443 M o n t V e n to u x, 4 1 9 -2 1

M ich a e lis, K u rt, 1 1 6

M o o nlig h t, a S tu d y a t M illb a n k (T u rn e r ),

M ic h a u x , C lo v is , 55 4

3 5 9 - 6 0 , illus. 360

M ic h e la n g e lo , 283, 2 89, 3 5 7 , 404

M oralists, The (S h a fte s b u r y ), 453

M ic k ie w ic z , A d a m , 24, 25, 2 9 ,4 7 - 8 , illus. 33

M oran , T h om as, 7

d e a th o f , 34

M o r e , J a co b , 4 6 7

Jew s a n d , 2 9 -3 4

M o r is o n , F y n es , 4 3 1

lite ra ry id e n tity , 55

M o r tim e r , Jo h n H a m ilt o n , 4 5 6

p o litic a l a ctivitie s, 54

M o s e r, G o t tfr ie d , 1 1 6

see also P a n T a d eu sz

M o s s e r , M o n iq u e , 540

M id d le t o n , S ir C h a r le s, 17 4

M o t t , L u c re tia , illus. 3 8 9 , 390

M illa is , Jo h n E v e re tt, 508

m o u n ta in ca rv in g , 399

M ille t, Je a n -F ra n ? o is, 54 6 , 55 7 M ilo s z , C z e s la w , 24 M ilto n , J o h n , 16 1 M in e r v a B r ita n n ia ( P e a ch a m ), 10 M ir a cu lo u s D r a u g h t o f Fishes ( W it z ) , 4 2 6 , illus. 4 2 7 M ission o f the N o rth A m e r ic a n People ( G ilp in ) , 397

as c o lo n iz a t io n o f n a tu re b y c u ltu r e , 3 9 6 -7 D in o c r a tic tra d itio n , 4 0 2 , 4 0 4 - 6 , illus. 4 0 3 ,4 0 6 S t o n e M o u n ta in m o n u m e n t, 388, 3 9 3 -4 see also M o u n t R u s h m o r e m o n u m e n t m o u n ta in c lim b in g , 4 1 7 , 4 1 9 A lp in e C l u b a e s th e tic , 5 0 2 -6

m is d e to e , 2 1 7

e n te rta in m e n ts b ased o n , 4 9 8 -5 0 2

M nem osyne ( W a r b u r g ) , 2 13

im p eria lism an d , 4 6 3 - 6

M o d e m D r u id , Th e (W h e e le r), 16 4 a n d

m a p s an d g u id e s , 4 2 9 , 4 3 0 - 1

illus. M o d e m P a in te r s ( R u s k in ), 508 , 509 , 51 0

M o n t B la n c , 4 6 3 ,4 6 4 - 6 , 4 9 0 - 4 , illus.

M o ir , W illia m , 18 1

493 , 4 9 5 -8 P e tr a r ch ’s e x p e r ie n ce s, 4 1 9 - 2 1

M o lt k e , H e lm u th v o n , 12 9

as to u r is t a c tiv ity , 4 9 4 - 5 , 502

M o m p e r , Josse d e , th e Y o u n g e r , 4 3 3 , illus.

434-5 M o n c e a u , D u h a m e l d u , 17 4 M o n c o r n e t, B a lth asar, illus. 4 3 9 ,4 4 0 , 4 4 1 M o n d a lc h in i, O lim p ia , 294 M o n d ria n , P ie t, 12 4 M o n r o e , Jam es, 246

“ v is io n s ” at s u m m its, 4 2 1 - 3 , illus. 42 2 b y w o m en , 4 9 5 -8 M o u n ta in G loom , M o u n ta in G lory ( N ic o ls o n ), 450 “ m o u n ta in -g o d ” o f “ T u e n c h u e n ,” illus. 4 0 3 , 406 m o u n ta in s

M o n s P ilatu s, 4 1 2 - 1 3 , illus. 4 1 3 , 430

a rch ite ctu re a n d , 5 1 1 - 1 2

M o n ta g u , Je n n ife r, 294

artists’ s ty lize d r ep re se n ta tio n s o f, 4 2 6 ,

M o n ta ig n e , M ic h e l d e , 4 3 1 M o n ta lt o , C a rd in a l, 289 M o n t B la n c, 4 2 2 , 4 7 2 - 3 , 4 7 5 , 4 8 9 - 9 0 ascents o f , 4 6 3 , 464-H6, 4 9 0 -4 , illus. 4 9 3 , 4 9 5 -8 R u s k in ’s d r a w in g o f, 508 S m ith ’s s h o w a b o u t, 4 9 8 -5 0 2

illus. 4 2 7 ,4 2 8 “ b e n e v o le n t” p e rs p e ctiv e o n , 4 2 6 , 4 2 8 - 3 3 , illus. 4 2 9 , 4 5 1 as ch astise r o f h u m a n v a n ity , 4 57-9 , 4 6 1-2 C h r is tia n ity a n d , 4 1 1 - 1 7 , 4 2 0 - 1 , 4 2 3 , 4 2 6 ,4 2 8 ,4 3 3

“ M o n t B la n c ” (S h e lle y ), 4 8 9 -9 0

C o z e n s ’ s p a in tin g s o f , 4 7 2 - 5 , illus. 4 7 4 ,

M o n t B la n c a n d the A r v e n e a r Sallenches

475' 476, 477 - 8 , illus. 4 7 7 cu ltu ral h is to ry o f , 4 0 8 , 4 x 0 - 1 1

( C o z e n s ) , illus. 4 7 4 M o n t C e n is , 4 4 7 - 8 ,4 5 9

d ragon s an d, 4 1 1 - 1 4 ,4 1 7

INDEX h o rro rs o f, 4 4 7 -5 0 , 4 5 3 - 4 ,4 5 6 - 7 ,4 6 1 , 465

639

M u y b r i d g e , E a d w a e r d , 7 , 19 0 Mystery o f the F a ll a n d R e d e m p tio n o f M a n

L e o n a r d o ’s d r a w in g s o f , 4 2 4 a n d illu s., illu s. 4 2 3 , 4 2 6 m in ia tu re re p r e se n ta tio n s o f , 408 a n d illus.

( G io v a n n i d a M o d e n a ) , 2 20 , illu s. 2 2 1 m y t h o lo g y , 1 3 - 1 4 , 1 5 e n d u r a n c e o f c o r e m y th s , 16 o f G re e c e , 258 , 5 2 6 -8

n a tu r e o b s e r v e d f r o m , 4 3 1 - 2 , illu s. 4 3 2 o r ig in s o f m o u n ta in s , th e o r ie s o n , 4 5 1 - 2 , illu s . 4 3 2 , 4 3 3

o f M e s o p o t a m ia , 258 O siris m y th , 2 5 2 - 3 , 2 5 4 , 2 5 5 , 2 5 6 , 2 5 7 , 2 8 3 ,3 1 7 ,3 8 0 - 2

R o m a n t ic is m a n d , 4 5 0

o f riv e rs , 2 5 6 - 8

R o s a ’ s p a in tin g s o f , 4 5 0 - 1 , 4 5 3 - 4 , illu s.

s o c ia l m e m o r y a n d , 1 7 - 1 8

454 . 455' 4 5 6 - 7 R u s k in ’ s e x p e r ie n c e o f , 5 0 6 , 5 0 8 - 1 3 ,

s tu d y a n d an alysis o f m y th s , 1 3 3 - 4 , 2 0 7 - 9 see also p a g a n r e lig io n s

illu s . 3 1 0 , 3 1 3 s a c r i m o n ti t r a d it io n , 1 6 , 4 3 6 - 7 , illu s.

431 ' 4 3 8' 443 , 4 4 3 ,

4 3 9 - 4 4 , U lus. 4 3 9 , 4 4 0 , 4 4 2 , 446

T a o is m a n d , 4 0 7 - 8

N a d a r , illu s. 33 N a p le s , 3 4 4 , 346 N a p o le o n C r o ssin g the St. B e r n a r d ( D a v id ) , 462

“ t r u t h ” o f m o u n ta in art, 50 4 , 50 6 , 5 0 8 - 1 3

N a r e w , P o la n d , 7 1

“ v ir t u o u s ” p e r s p e c t iv e o n , 4 7 8 - 8 6

N a s h , D a v id , 12

v u lg a r ia n a n d s e n tim e n ta lis t a ttitu d e s

n a tio n a l id e n t it y , 1 5 - 1 6

to w a r d , 504 see a lso m o u n t a in c a r v in g ; m o u n ta in

N a t u r a l H isto ry o f the G e r m a n People ( R ie h l) , 1 1 2 , 1 1 3 - 1 5

c li m b in g ; sp ecific m o u n ta in s a n d

n a tu r a list r e lig io n , 50 9

ra n g es

“ n a tu r a l s e c r e t s ,” g a r d e n o f , 5 3 6 - 7

M o u n t A t h o s c ity - c o lo s s u s , 4 0 2 , 4 0 4 , illu s. 403 M o u n t “ B a g is t a n e ,” 4 0 5

n a tu r e r e lig io n s , 2 0 7 - 9 N a z is m , 7 6 , 7 8 - 9 , 8 2 , 1 1 8 - 1 9 , J 33 N e ls o n , H o r a t io , 1 7 3 - 4

M ou n t E den, 415

N e p tu n e a n d T r ito n (B e r n in i) , illu s. 290

M o u n t K ta a d n , 5 7 1 , 5 7 5

N e r v a l, G 6 r a r d d e , 5 4 7

M o u n t R u s h m o r e m o n u m e n t , 1 5 - 1 6 , illu s.

N e t h e r la n d s , see D u t c h r e p u b lic

3 s 7' 396' 3 9 9 -4 0 0 A n th o n y ’ s a d d itio n , p ro p o s e d , 38 5 -9 2 c h o ic e o f p r e s id e n ts f o r , 39 5 f u n d i n g f o r , 3 8 8 , 392 I n d ia n s a n d , 3 9 8 - 9

N e v ille fa m ily , 14 8 N e w D ir e c tio n s f o r the P l a n t i n g o f W ood ( S t a n d is h ) , 1 5 6 N ew es o f S ir W a lte r R a le g h , illu s. 3 1 7 “ N e w J e r u s a le m ,” 4 3 6 - 7

m a g n it u d e is s u e , 3 9 4 - 5

N e w P r in c ip le s o f G a r d e n in g ( L a n g le y ) , 538

o r ig i n o f , 3 9 7 - 8

N i c c o li , N ic c o lo , 7 7

M o u n t S in a i, 4 1 4 - 1 5

N ic e tiu s , B is h o p , 2 18

M o u n t T a u ru s, 424, 426

N ic h o la s V , P o p e , 7 7 , 2 6 9 , 286

M o u n t Y u n - t a i , 408

N ico d e m u s , G o s p e l o f, 2 19

M u i r , J o h n , 7 , 8 - 9 , 1 2 , 1 5 4 , 1 8 6 , 19 0 , 1 9 7 ,

N i c o l s o n , M a r jo r ie H o p e , 4 5 0

5 7 2- 3 . 57 6 “ M u n d a n e E g g ” t h e o r y o f g e o lo g y , 4 5 1 - 2 ,

N ie m e n R iv e r , 25

illu s . 4 3 2 , 4 3 3 M u n d u s S u b te r r a n e u s ( K ir c h e r ) , 2 47

N i e t z s c h e , F r ie d r ic h , 1 8 , 1 3 3 - 4 , 2° 9 N i g h t in g a le , F lo r e n c e , 38 0 , 38 1 N ile R iv e r

M u n s t e r , S e b a s tia n , illu s. 8 3 , 9 6 a n d illu s.

C h r is tia n v ie w o f , 2 6 3 - 4

M u r a v y e v , M ik h a il, 63

c ir c u la t io n a n d , 2 5 8 - 9

M u r d e la C o t e , 5 0 1

d e a th o f , 382

M u r r a y , W illia m , 5 2 0 - 1

d ik e - c u t tin g c e r e m o n y , 3 0 5 - 6 , illu s. 3 0 6

M u s s e t , A lf r e d d e , 5 4 7

d r o u g h t a n d , 2 5 9 -6 0

M u s s o lin i, B e n i t o , 7 9 , 393

f e r t ility b e lie fs r e g a r d in g , 2 5 5 , 265

M u t e s a , k in g o f t h e B a g a n d a , 3 7 5

f lo o d i n g b y , 2 5 7 , 260

I NDEX

640 N ile R ive r ( co n tin u e d )

O r ig in o f the W orld, The ( C o u r b e t) , 373 a n d illus.

life -e n h a n cin g n a tu re , 259 m o saic o f , 2 6 8 -9 , d lus. 2 7 0 -1

O r in o c o R iv e r, 3 1 1 , 3 1 2 - 1 4

O siris m y th a n d , 2 52 , 2 5 3 , 2 56, 2 57

O r la n d o Furioso ( A r io s to ) , 535

red d ish h u e , 259

O r m e , P h ilib e rt d e P , 1 7 6 a n d illus.

R en aissan ce v ie w o f, 267

O rs in i, V ic in o , 535

R o m a n s a n d , 2 6 2 -3 , 2 6 8 -9

O siris m y th , 2 5 2 - 3 , 2 54 , 2 5 5 , 2 56 , 2 5 7 , 2 8 3 ,3 1 7 ,3 8 0 - 2

so u rc e o f, 2 5 7 , 2 6 2 -3 , 2 6 6 - 7 , 3 7 4 "6 T ib e r R ive r a n d , 283

O v id , 346

N ix o n , R ich a rd , 391 N K V D , 2 5, 26, 72

P a cc a rd , M ic h e l, 4 9 1 - 2

N o a ille s, C a rd in a l d e , 4 41

P a d e re w s k i, Ig n a c e , 66

N o ld e , E m il, 129

p a g a n re lig io n s

N o r b e c k , P ete r, 388, 390

o f G e rm a n ic trib es , 8 2, 8 4 -5

N o r d e n , E d u a rd , 78

m o d e r n ity a n d , 2 0 9 - 1 4

N o r t h , L o r d , 169 N o rth View o f the C itie s o f L o n d o n a n d

p h a llic c u lts, 2 5 2 - 4 , 255

W estm inster w ith p a r t o f H ig h g a te (R o b e r ts o n ), illus. 324 N o t r e , A n d r e le , 3 3 7 , 343

n a tu re r e lig io n s , 2 0 7 -9 tre e w o r s h ip , 1 4 - 1 5 , 50, 2 1 6 - 1 8 ve r d a n t cro ss a n d , 2 1 4 - 1 5 see also m y th o lo g y

N o u rs e , T im o th y , 538

p a g o d a s , 542 a n d illu s., illus. 343

N ou velle Heloise, L a ( R o u s se a u ), 4 8 1

P ain e, T o m , 2 4 8 -9

N o v a k , B arb ara, 19 6

P a in te r ’s S tu d io ( C o u r b e t) , illus. 3 7 1 , 3 7 2 -3

N o y c e , W ilfre d , 4 1 7

P ais, P e d r o , 300

N u rem b erg a n d the Forests o f St. L o r e n z a n d

P a le rm o , S ilv ia , 7 8 , 80

St.

( E t z la u b ) , illu s. 94

P alissy, B e r n a r d , 2 78 , 5 3 6 - 8 , illu s. 3 3 7

N u r e m b e r g , G e rm a n y , illus. 9 4 , 95

P alm H o u s e at K e w , illu s. 3 6 3 , 56 7

n y m p h a eu m , 534

P a n , 52 6 a n d illu s., 52 7 P a n a m a C a n a l, 395

O a k Forest N e a r Q u e r u m w ith S e lf-p o rtra it (W e itsc h ), illus. 104 O a k Tree in W in ter (F r ie d r ic h ), 1 9 5 - 6 , illus. 19 6 Obeliscus P a m p h iliu s (K ir c h e r ) , 300, illus. 301 ob elisks o f L o n d o n an d Paris, 3 7 6 -8 ob elisks o f th e V a tic a n , 2 8 3 -4 , d lu s. 2 83, 286, 2 99-30 0 O b erm a n ( S e n a n c o u r ), 54 9 , 5 5 0 - 1 O ccu pa tions ( K ie fe r ), 1 2 2 - 3 , dlu s. 12 3

P a n o fsk y , E r w in , 5 1 9 P a n Ta d eu sz (M ic k ie w ic z ), 3 1 - 2 , 4 7 - 8 , 5 5 -6 lan d sca p e in , 5 6 -6 0 p ap al w a te rw o r k s , 2 8 6 - 7 p a p er b o a t e x p e r im e n t, 3 2 0 -1 P arad is, M a r ie , 4 9 7 ,4 9 8 Paris E g y p tia n o b e lis k , 3 7 6 - 7 Jardin d ’ H iv e r , 5 6 6 - 7 w a te rw o r k s o f, 3 4 6 -8 p ark s, 5 2 5 , 5 6 7 - 7 0 , illus. 368

O c e a n u s , fo u n ta in sta tu e o f , 2 7 5 , illus. 2 7 6

P arry, J o h n , 46 9

O d e n w a ld , 120

P ars, W illia m , 4 7 2 ,4 7 3

O d e r ic , m o n k , 140

P a th fin d er, Th e ( C o o p e r ) , 201

O d y n ie c , A n t o n i, 30

P atin ir, J o a ch im , 4 1 5 , 4 1 6 a n d illus.

O e ls ch la e g e r , M a x , 13

P au l V , P o p e , 287

O e t tin g e r , K arl, 228 , 229

P au sanias, 52 6

“ O f M o u n ta in B e a u ty ” (R u s k in ) , 508

P a u tre , P ie rre le , illus. 3 4 1

O ld H u n t in g G rounds, The ( W h ittr e d g e ),

P a x to n , J o se p h , 5 6 5 , 5 6 7 , 569

19 6 -7 O lm s te d , F red e ric k L a w , 1 9 1 , 1 9 4 - 5 , 5 6 7 - 7 0 , 572

P ayn e K n ig h t, R ich a r d , 2 5 4 , 4 7 2 ,4 7 3 P e a ch a m , H e n r y , 1 0 - 1 1 , illus. 1 0 , 5 1 9 P e a c o c k , T h o m a s L o v e , 3 5 6 - 7 ,4 7 5 , 4 8 9

O n Sentry D u ty (K e r s tin g ), illus. 103

P ea le, R e m b r a n d t, illus. 3 6 8

O rig in e de tous les cultes (D u p u is ) , 250

P e d r o I I I , k in g o f A r a g o n , 4 1 1 - 1 2

INDEX

641

P e e l, S ir R o b e r t , 500

r e v o lu t io n o f 18 3 0 s, 5 3 - 4

P e n n a n t, T h o m a s , 4 7 1

r e v o lu t io n o f 18 6 0 s, 6 1 - 4

P e r r a u lt , P ie r r e , 2 4 7

S a r m a tia n h is to r y , 38

P erry, E n o c h W o o d , 19 4

S ta lin ist p u r g e s , 2 5 , 26

p esth o u se s, 2 4 5 -6

W o r ld W a r I, 6 4 - 6

P ete r th e H e r m it, 227

W o r ld W a r I I , 6 9 - 7 2 , 73

P e tite s m iseres d e la g u e r r e ( C a l lo t ) , 2 2 3 ,

see also B ia lo w ie z a fo r e st; p u s zc za w ild e r ­

illu s . 2 2 4 , 1 1 5

ness

P etrarch , 2 6 5 -6 , 4 1 9 - 2 1

P o lo n ia ( G r o t t g e r ) , 6 2 - 3

p h a llic c u lt s , 2 5 2 - 4 , 2 5 5

P o ly -O lb io n ( D r a y t o n ) , 3 2 8 , 330

P h ila d e lp h ia , w a te rw o r k s o f , 3 6 7 - 8 , illus. 3 69

P o p e , A le x a n d e r , 1 6 3 , 2 30 , 4 5 7

P h ila e t e m p le is la n d , 3 8 0 -2 P h ilip I I , k in g o f M a c e d o n , 4 1 9 P h ilip I V , k in g o f S p a in , 3 3 3 - 4 , illu s. 3 3 4 ,

335

P h ilip V , k in g o f S p a in , 3 4 3 - 4

Pope A le x a n d e r V I I S how n M t . A th o s by D in o c r a te s ( d a C o r t o n a ) , illu s. 403 p o ta s h , 4 6 P o u s s in , N ic o la s , illu s. 5 1 8 , 5 1 9 , illu s. 5 3 5 , 5 6 0 - 1 , illu s . 5 6 1

P h ilo J u d a e u s , 2 6 7

P o w e ll, R o s e A r n o ld , 3 8 5 - 9 2 , illu s. 3 8 6

P h ilo s o p h ica l I n q u ir y in to the O r ig in o f O u r

P r a e n e s te m o s a ic , 2 6 8 - 9 , d lu s. 2 7 0 - 1

Id e a s o f th e S u b lim e a n d B e a u t if u l

P r a e te r ita ( R u s k in ) , 5 0 6 , 508

(B u rk e), 44 9 , 450 , 461

P r e s t, J o h n , 5 3 7

p i a z z a a lla g a t a c u s t o m , 305

P r ic e , R o b e r t, 4 6 4

P ia z z a N a v o n a ( R o m e ) , 2 9 1 , illu s. 2 9 2 ,3 0 5

Procession a t S u n r ise ( F r ie d r ic h ) , illu s. 2 06

P ic d u M i d i, 4 8 7

P u c k o f P o o k ’s H i l l ( K ip lin g ) , 3

P ie r o d e lla F r a n c e s c a , 2 2 1 , illu s. 2 22

P u n s k , P o la n d , 3 5 - 6

P ie r o d i C o s i m o , 2 2 8 , illu s. 2 29

P u r g a to r io ( D a n t e ) , 4 1 7

P i e t M o n d r ia n - H e r m a n n s s c h la c h t ( K ie fe r ) , 12 6 P ie t r o d a C o r t o n a , illu s. 4 0 3 , 4 0 4

P u sz c z a Jo d lo w a ( Z e r o m s k i) , 6 6 p u s z c z a w ild e r n e s s , 2 4 , 2 7 , 4 4 E n g lis h a c ce ss t o t im b e r , 18 1

P ig n o r ia , L o r e n z o , 299

G e r m a n c o lo n iz a t io n p r o g r a m , 7 0 - 2

p ig s , 1 4 3 - 4

as p a t r io t ic la n d s c a p e , 6 1 - 3 , 6 6 , 72

P ila t e , P o n t iu s , 4 1 2 , 4 1 3 , 4 3 0

p o e tic p o r tr a it o f , 5 6 -6 0

p ilg r im a g e s , 4 1 4 - 1 5

v a r ie ty o f p la n tlife , 58

P ils u d s k i, J 6 se f, 6 6

W o r ld W a r I , 6 4 - 6

P in c h o t , G if f o r d , 1 5 4

W o r ld W a r I I , 6 9 - 7 2 , 73

P in t u r ic c h io , 283

see also B ia lo w ie z a fo r e s t

P it t, W illia m , th e E ld e r , 522

P u tn a m , L isa , 392

P iu s I I , P o p e , 9 1 , 2 6 9

P y n e , S t e p h e n , 13

P la m p in , J o h n (G a in sb o ro u g h ), illu s. 1 6 8

P y r e n e e s , 4 8 7 , 48 8

P la n e , H e l e n C . , 39 4 P la t e r , E m ilie , 5 4 P la t o , 2 4 7 , 2 5 8 - 9 , 2 6 7 , 2 72 P la y g r o u n d o f E u ro p e, T h e ( S t e p h e n ) , 50 4

Q u a d r i lle on R e d w o o d S tu m p ( C u r t is ) , illus. 18 8 Q u e e n C h a r lo tte ( s h ip ) , 17 3

P lin y t h e E ld e r , 3 9 , 4 0 , 8 3 , 2 1 4 , 2 1 7 , 2 4 7 , 284, 286, 287, 429

R a c k h a m , O li v e r , 142

P lin y t h e Y o u n g e r , 5 2 9 - 3 0

R a d z iw ill, H e le n a , 5 3 9

P lu ta r c h , 2 5 6 , 2 5 7

R a d z iw itt , K a r o l, 4 6

P o c o c k e , R ic h a r d , 4 6 3 - 6 , illu s. 4 6 3

R a ffle s , S t a m f o r d , 563

P o la n d , 2 3 - 6 G r e a t P o la n d p e r io d , 4 2 - 3 h u n t i n g in , 43 J e w s o f , 2 6 - 3 3 , illu s. 28 L ith u a n ia , u n io n w it h , 2 8 , 4 0 - 1 p a r titio n in g o f , 4 6 , 4 7

R a i n , S tea m a n d Speed— the G r e a t W estern R a ilw a y ( T u r n e r ) , 3 6 1 , 362 R a iso n s des fo r ce s m o u va n tes, L e s ( C a u s ) , 2 7 9 , illu s. 280 , 2 8 1 R a le g h , S ir W a lt e r , 3 0 7 - 8 , illu s. 308 , 3 1 7 ,

330, 577

INDEX

642 R a le g h , S ir W a lte r (continued) E l D o r a d o , sea rch fo r , 3 0 8 - 1 6 , 3 1 7 , 3 18 -19

W e ste rn p ers p e ctiv e o n , 2 61 see also specific rivers Robbers ( G o u p y ) , 4 5 7

e x e c u tio n o f, 3 1 9 - 2 0

R o b e r ts , D a v id , 380

h is to ry o f th e w o r ld , 3 1 7 - 1 8

R o b e r ts o n , G e o r g e , illus. 52 0 , 5 2 3 , illus.

im p riso n m e n t o f , 3 1 6 - 1 8

5*4

R a le g h , W a t, 3 1 9

R o b in H o o d , 1 4 1 , 1 4 9 - 5 0 , 1 5 1 - 3 , 18 2 , 183

R a m o n d d e C a r b o n n iir e s , L o u is, 4 8 3 - 9 ,

R o b in H ood: A C o lle ctio n o f A l l the A n c ie n t

492 r a n z des vaches, 485

Poems, Songs a n d B a lla d s (R its o n ), illu s. 15 0 , 1 5 2 , 1 8 2 - 3 , Ulus. 182

R a u w , Jo h an n e s, 9 5 -6

R o b in s o n , D o a n e , 398

R a v in e , A ( C o z e n s ) , illus. 4 7 3

R o b in s o n , W illia m , 573

R a y , Jo h n , 4 5 1

R o c h e - Q u i- P le u r e , c u lt o f , 552

R e a d , S ir H e r c u le s, 5 1 7

R ocky Land sca pe, A ( C o z e n s ) , illus. 4 7 3

R e b e l, K arl, 11 8

R o d in , A u g u s t e , 393

r e c lin in g sta tu e o f th e N ile , 283 a n d illus.

R oe, Thom as, 317

r e c lin in g sta tu e o f th e T ib e r , 282 a n d illus.

R o h a n , ca rd in al d e , 4 8 6 - 7

“ r e d -h a n d e d ,” c a u g h t, 14 7

R o m a n s , 572

r e d w o o d s, 18 7 , 2 4 0 -2 , illus. 2 4 1

arca d ia o f, 5 2 8 -3 0

R e e d , L u m a n , 207, 364 , 367

A ty s c u lt , 2 16

R e g e n ts ’ P ark co n se rv a to ry , 566 r elig io n as d e fec tiv e p e r ce p tio n o f n a tu re , 249

fo re sts a n d , 8 2 -3 N ile R iv e r a n d , 2 6 2 - 3 , 2 6 8 -9 w arfare w ith G e rm a n ic trib es , 8 7 , 8 8 -9 1

n atu ralist r e lig io n , 509

R o m a n w a te rw o r k s , r e s to r a tio n o f , 2 8 6 -7

see also C h ris tia n ity ; p ag an r elig io n s

R o m e , o r ig in s o f , 83

R e m a rd , C h a r le s, 553

R o m n e y , G e o r g e , 473

R em a rks on Forest Scenery ( G ilp in ) , 1 3 7 - 8 ,

R o ok e, H eym an , 18 1-2

illus. 13 8

R o o s e v e lt, E le a n o r, 38 5, 390, 3 9 1 , 395

R e p to n , H u m p h r e y , 520

R o o s e v e lt, F ran k lin D ., 388, 390 , 39 1

R esu rrection (P ie ro d e lla F ra n c es ca ), 2 2 1 ,

R o o s e v e lt, T h e o d o r e , 3 9 5 , 573

illus. 222 R e tre at L e a g u e , 44 4

R o s a , S a lv a to r , 4 5 0 - 1 ,4 5 3 - 4 , illu s. 4 5 4 ,

455 .

456-7

R e y n o ld s , Jo hn H a m ilto n , 183

R o s e n b e r g , A lfr e d , 78 , 1 1 8

R e y n o ld s , Jo sh u a, 357

R o s s, J a n e t, 381

R h in e R ive r, 2 6 5 - 6 , 363 R h o n e R ive r, 355

R o u s se a u , Je an -Jacq u e s, 2 3 2 ,4 4 1 - 2 , 4 8 0 - 2 ,

544. 55°. 55*

R ib e ra , Jusepe d e , 4 56

R o u s se a u , T h e o d o r e , 5 4 6 , 55 6

R icciard i, G . B ., 4 5 6

R o u s sillo n p ro v in c e , 3 3 5 -6

R ie h l, W ilh e lm H e in ric h , 1 1 2 - 1 5 , 1 1 6 , 1 1 8

R o y a l G eorge (s h ip ), 17 3

R ijk el, D io n y s u s v a n , 428

ru d e w ild e rn e ss , 5 3 8 - 4 0 , illus. 540

R its o n , Jo sep h , 18 2 -3

R u d o l f I I , H o l y R o m a n e m p e ro r , 100

rivers

R u d o l f o f F u ld a , 7 7

B a rlo w ’ s ru m in atio n s o n , 247

R u in s ( V o ln e y ) , 249

C h r is tia n ity an d , 2 6 3 -6

R u isd a e l, Ja co b v a n , 203

c ru isin g o n , 36 2 -3

R u n c im a n , A le x a n d e r , 4 6 7

d e sp o tis m an d , 2 6 0 -1 fe m ale b o d y , asso cia tio n w ith , 2 73, 3 6 7 - 7 0 , illus. 368 , 369 , 370 , 3 7 1 , 3 7 2 - 4 , illus. 3 7 2 , 37 3 m a n k in d ’s lo v e fo r , 355 m y th o lo g y o f , 2 5 6 -8

R u r a M ih i e t S ile n tiu m ( P e a c h a m ), illus. 10 , 11 R u s h , W illia m , 3 6 7 , 368 a n d illu s., 369 , illus. 3 7 0 R u s k in , J o h n , 4 5 1 , 4 9 1 , 50 4 , 5 0 5 - 6 , illus. 5 0 7 , 5 0 8 - 1 3 , illus. 5 1 0 , 5 1 3

n a tio n alism a n d , 3 6 3 -5 , 367

R y k w e r t, Jo se p h , 228

“ sin g le s tre a m ” th e o r y o f , 2 6 6 - 7

R y z t o n ic , H a silin a , 92

INDEX Sachs, H ans, 97-8 S a c k v ille - W e s t , W illia m E d w a r d , 500 s a c r i m o n ti tr a d it io n , 1 6 , 4 3 6 - 7 , illu s. 4 3 7 , 4 3 8 , 4 3 9 - 4 4 , illu s. 4 3 9 , 4 4 0 , 4 4 2 , 4 4 3 , 445, 446 sa cro bosco ( h o l y g r o v e ) , 5 3 4 , 5 3 5 , Ulus.

536 S a d ik P a s h a , 3 3 , 34

643

S c o t t is h H ig h la n d s , 4 6 6 - 7 , illu s. 4 6 7 , 4 6 8 ,

47i

S c u lly , V i n c e n t , 3 3 7 Seasons, 77«r ( T h o m s o n ) , 3 5 6 S e g h e r s , H e r c u le s , 43 3 S e ife rs d o r fe r T a l m e m o r ia l p a r k , n o S e in e R iv e r , 3 6 4 S e m ir a m is , e m p res s o f th e M e d e s , 40 5

S t. C a th e r i n e , m o n a s te r y o f , 4 1 4 - 1 5

S e m n o n e s , 8 4 , 85

St. G eo rge ( A lt d o r f e r ) , 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 10 6

S e m o n , R ic h a r d , 2 10

St. J e r o m e in the W ild ern ess ( d a V a le n z a ) ,

S e n a n c o u r , E t ie n n e P iv e rt d e , 5 4 9 - 5 1

illu s . 4 1 8 S a in t -P ie r r e , B e r n a r d in d e , 4 4 1 - 2

S e n e c a , 8 6 - 7 , 2 5 5 , 265 s e q u o ia s , see B ig T r e e s

S a lim b e n e , fr ia r, 4 1 1 - 1 2

Sesam e a n d L ilie s ( R u s k in ) , 50 6

S a lm o n , R o b e r t , 4

“ S e v e n T h o u s a n d O a k s ” p r o je c t ( B e u y s ) ,

S a lo m o n e , G a e t a n o , illu s. 3 4 4

1 2 4 , illu s. 1 2 5

S a lv in , A n t h o n y , 56 3 a n d illu s.

S e v e n Y e a r s ’ W a r , 16 6

S a m a r it a in e , th e , 3 4 6 - 8

S e y m o u r , E d w a r d , 15 5

S an d , G e o rg e , 54 7 , 550

S h a fte s b u r y , th ird e arl o f , 4 5 3

S a n d b y , P a u l, 4 6 6 , 4 6 7 a n d illu s ., illu s. 4 6 8 ,

S h a k e s p e a re , W illia m , 1 5 , 1 4 1 , 142

4 6 9 a n d illu s ., 4 7 1 S and b y, T h om as, 466 S an d y s, G e o r g e , 2 59 , 374

sham ans, 4 0 7 - 8 ,4 1 0 , 4 1 4 - 1 5 S h e lle y , P e r c y B y s s h e , 4 2 2 , 4 7 5 , 4 8 1 - 2 , 4 8 9 -9 0

San n azaro, Jacop o, 531

S id n e y , S ir P h ilip , 5 3 1

S a p ie h a , A n n a J a b to n o w s k a , 4 7

S id n e y , S ir W illia m , 1 5 4

S a p ie h a , p r in c e o f L ith u a n ia , 43

S ig m a r in g e n M o n s t r a n c e , 2 29

S a r m a tia n s , 38

S iliu s Ita lic u s , 4 5 8 - 9 a n d illu s.

S a r m ie n to d e G a m b o a , P e d r o , 309

S ilv a , o r A D isco u rse o f F orest-Trees ( E v e ­

S a s s o o n , S ie g f r ie d , 1 4 4 S atan , 4 12 S a u s s u r e , H o r a c e B e n e d ic t d e , 4 8 4 , 4 9 0 - 1 , 4 9 2 - 3 , illu s . 4 9 2 , 4 9 3 , 508

ly n ) , 1 5 9 - 6 2 , 1 6 3 , 1 6 9 - 7 0 , illu s . 1 7 0 , 17 2 a n d illu s. S ilv a e C r it ic a e ( H e r d e r ) , 2 3 7 S ilv a H e r c y n ia ( C a m e r a r iu s ) , 9 6

S a v a g e , J a m e s D . , 18 6

S ilv a n u s , 54 6

S a v e r y , R o e la n d , 3 9 , illu s. 4 0 , 10 0

S ilv e r , L a rr y , 9 6

S a v io r - T r e e s , 2 2 5 a n d illu s.

S im le r , Jo sias, 4 3 0 - 1 , 4 7 9

S a x l, F r it z , 2 1 1 - 1 2

S in a I llu s t r a t a ( K ir c h e r ) , illu s. 4 0 5 , 40 6

S c h a c h t , H ja lm a r , 72

S in a i p e n in s u la , 4 1 4 - 1 5

S ch am a, A rth u r, 3 5 2 -3

S io u x In d ia n s , 3 9 8 - 9

S c h a u f e le in , H a n s L e o n h a r t , illu s . 9 7

S ix tu s V , P o p e , 2 8 3 , 2 8 4 , 2 8 6 , 2 8 7

S c h e r p in g , U lr i c h , 6 8 , 7 1

Sketches o f the N a t u r a l, C i v i l a n d P o lit ic a l

S ch eu c h ze r, Johan n Jacob, 4 1 2 ,4 1 3 a n d illu s .

H isto r y o f S w itz e r la n d ( C o x e R a m o n d ), 4 8 2 -6

S c h ia m in o s s i, R a ffa e le , 4 3 7 a n d illu s ., illu s.

S ketch o f H is t o r ic a l A r c h ite c t u r e ( F is c h e r

438 ' 4 3 9 S c h in k e l, K a r l-F r ie d r ic h , 10 9 a n d illu s.

S lo a n , K im , 4 6 1

S c h le g a l, F r ie d r ic h v o n , 2 3 3 , 2 3 6 , 238

S m e t a n a , B e d r ic h , 363

S c h le ie r m a c h e r , F r ie d r ic h , 12 9

S m ith , A lb e r t , 4 9 8 - 5 0 2

S c h lie f fe n , A lf r e d v o n , 12 9

S m ith , R o b e r ts o n , 2 0 8 -9

S c h o n g a u e r , M a r t in , illu s . 9 7

S m ith , T h o m a s , I llu s. 5 4 1

S c h o n i c h e n , W a lt h e r , 7 0 , 1 1 8 - 1 9

S m ith , W illia m , 4 5 7

Sch w ap pach , A d am , 116

s o c ia l m e m o r y , 1 7 - 1 8

S c o t t , F r a n k J e s u p , 1 6 , illu s. 5 7 2 , 5 7 3

s o c io lo g y o f h a b it a t , 1 1 3 - 1 5 , 1 1 6

S c o t t , S ir W a lt e r , 5 4 , 1 8 2 ,1 8 3

S o m e r s , J o h n , L o r d C h a n c e llo r , 4 5 6

v o n E r la c h ) , 4 0 4 , illu s . 4 0 5

I NDEX

644

T a o is m , 4 0 7 -8

S o m e r se t H o u s e , 2 7 8 - 9 Source o f the Loue, The ( C o u r b e t) , illus. 3 7 2

T a o-te C h in g , 40 7

Source o f the W orld, The (C o u r b e t) , illus. 373

T a r d ie u , A m b r o is e , illus. 492

S o u t h e n d , E n g la n d , 4

T a y lo r , J o h n , illus. 32 3

S o v ie t U n io n , 7 2 - 3 , 261

d e a th o f, 332

S o w in sk i, G e n e ra l, 53

o n e a tin g an d d r in k in g , 32 7

“ S p a ce M o u n ta in ” a ttra ctio n , 48 9

p a p er b o a t e x p e r im e n t, 3 2 0 -1

S p ain , 3 3 3 - 6

p o e tr y o f , 3 2 1 - 2 , 3 2 5 , 3 2 9 , 331 s in g le w a te rc o u r se in E n g la n d , v is io n o f,

S p a la tin , G e o r g , 109

3 2 7-8

Sp an iard s In n , 523 S p e e c h ly , W illia m , 16 9

T h a m e s fe stiv ities, 3 2 2 , 3 2 4 -5

S p e k e , Jo h n H a n n in g , 3 7 4 -6 , illus. 3 7 5

travels o f , 3 2 5 - 7

S p en se r, E d m u n d , 330

'

sta in e d g lass, 230 S ta lin , J o se p h , 7 2 - 3 , 261 S ta n d is h , A r t h u r , 1 5 5 - 6 S tanislas II A u g u s tu s P o n ia to w sk i, k in g o f P o la n d , 3 8 ,4 5 , 46 S ta n to n , E liz a b e th C a d y , illus. 3 8 9 , 390

T e llu r is Th eo ria S a cra (B u r n e t ) , 4 5 1 - 2 , illu s. 4 5 2 , 4 5 3 T e m p ta tio n o f St. F ra ncis, The ( S ch ia m in o ss i), illu s. 4 3 8 T e u t o b u r g F o r e st m a ssacre, 8 7 , 8 8 -9 0 T e u t o n ic K n ig h ts , 4 1 T h a m e s fe stiv ities ( 1 6 1 3 ) , 3 2 2 , 3 2 4 -5

S ta rk e , M a ria n a , 495

Tham es-Isis ( T a y lo r ) , 3 2 9 , 331

S tarr K in g , T h o m a s , 7 , 18 9 -9 0

T h a m e s R iv e r , 3 - 5

ste a m b o a ts, 3 6 2 -3

E n g lish n a tio n a l id e n tity a n d , 3 2 8 -3 1

S te e le , R ic h a r d , 452

m e a n d e r in g n a tu re , 3 2 8 -9

S te llin g e n z o o , 56 4

p a in tin g s o f , 3 5 7 - 6 2 , illus. 3 58 , 3 5 9 , 360

S te p h e n , k in g o f E n g la n d , 142

p o e tr y o n , 3 2 2 , 328 , 3 2 9, 330 , 3 3 1 ,

S te p h e n , L e s lie , 50 2 , 50 3 , 5 0 4 -5 S te p h e n s o n , D . C . , 394

35<>-7

w h ite b a it a n d , 3 5 2 - 4

S tifte r , A d a lb e r t, 1 1 8 , 12 6 , 12 9

T h e o c r it u s , 5 2 7 - 8

S tillin g fle e t, B e n ja m in , 4 6 3 ,4 6 4

T h e o d o s iu s , e m p e ro r o f R o m e , 265

S to lc z m a n , Jan, 67

Theogony ( H e s io d ) , 258

S to n e M o u n ta in m o n u m e n t, 388, 3 9 3 -4

T h e o p h ilu s , p atria rch , 265

Story o f M o n t B la n c, Th e ( S m ith ), 49 9

T h e tis , g r o tt o o f , 3 4 0 - 1 , illus. 3 4 1

S tra sb o u r g C a th e d r a l, 2 36, 237 S tra w , Jack , 5 2 2 -3

T h icket w ith A n t iq u e F ig u re s ( K o lb e ) , illus. 104

S tu a r t, L a d y A ra b e lla , 3 1 6

T h ie r r y , a b b o t , 2 18

S tu k e le y , W illia m , 231

T h ir t y Y e a rs ’ W a r , 1 0 1 , 225

S t u m p f, J o h an n e s, 4 2 9 ,4 3 0

T h o m s o n , Jam es, 3 5 6 ,4 4 8

S u icid e o f S a u l, The ( B r u e g e l) , 4 2 6 , illus.

T h o r e a u , H e n r y D a v id , 7 , 1 5 , 32 6, 5 2 5 ,

428 S u re M eth o d o f Im p r o v in g Estates by P la n ta tio n s o f O a k ( L a n g le y ) , 1 6 4 - 5 Survey P a rty a t K in n lo c h R a n n o c h , Perthshire ( S a n d b y ), illu s. 4 6 7

571 - 2 . 5 7 3 - 8 T h o r n h ill, Jam es, 3 57 T h r o c k m o r to n , B e ss, 308 T ib e r iu s , e m p e ro r o f R o m e , 8 9, 90 T ib e r R iv e r , 2 8 2 - 3 , 328

S u san B . A n t h o n y F o r u m , 389

T ill, R u d o lp h , 79

S u sa n n a a n d the E ld ers in a G a r d en ( L o n -

T illy , c o m t e d e , 495

d e rse el afte r V in c k b o o n s ) , illus. 5 3 2 - 3

T im a e u s (P la t o ) , 2 5 8 -9

S w itz e r , S te p h e n , 538

T o n n ie s , K a rl, 1 1 3

S w itz e r la n d , 4 7 9 - 8 6

T o p ia w a r i, c h ie f, 3 1 5

s y m b o lic typ es, 2 0 9 - 1 4

T o r y , A v r a h a m , 72

S zy m a n o w sk a , C e lin a , 33

To the M em ory o f C o le ( C h u r c h ) , 205

T a c itu s , C o r n e liu s , 38 , 7 5 , 8 7 , 8 9, 9 1 , see

“ T o w ia n is t ” m essian ism , 33

“ T o th e P o lish M o t h e r ” ( M ic k ie w ic z ), 54 also G e r m a n ia

T o w n e , F ran cis, 473

INDEX T r a v e lle r L o o k in g O v e r a S ea o f F og ( F r ie d r ic h ) , illu s . 12 2 T r a v e lle r ’s G u id e th r o u g h S w itz e r la n d ( E b e l), 4 9 4 -5 T r e a tise C o n c e r n in g th e C a u s es o f the G r e a t ­

645

V a n d e r lin , J o h n , illu s. 2 4 6 v a n D y c k , A n t h o n y , 1 5 6 , illu s. 1 5 7 v a n E y c k b r o th e rs , 2 8 7 a n d illu s. v a n L o n d e r s e e l, Ja n , illu s. 5 3 2 - 3 V a n U x e in , L o u is a , 368

ness a n d M a g n ific e n c e o f C it ie s

V a n v it e lli, L u i g i , illu s. 3 4 4 , 345

( B o t e r o ) , 328

V a r a llo , s a cre d m o u n ta in a t, 4 3 7

T r e a tise o n F orest-Trees, A ( B o u t c h e r ) , illus. 16 6

V a r u s , P u b liu s Q u in t iliu s , 8 8 - 9 V a r u s ( K ie fe r ) , 1 2 7 - 8

T r e b lin k a c o n c e n t r a tio n c a m p , 26

V a sa ri, G io r g i o , 2 2 8 - 9 , 233

T re e o f L ife ( G o l t z i u s ) , 2 2 5 - 6

V a u x , C a lv e r t, 5 6 7 , 56 9

T re e o f St. F r a n c is ( C a l lo t ) , illu s. 2 2 4 ,2 2 5

V a u x - le - V ic o m t e , 3 3 6 - 9 , illu s. 3 3 7

T re e o f th e Cross, T h e ( G a d d i ) , illu s. 2 24

V e l a z q u e z , D ie g o , illu s. 2 9 5 , 3 3 4 a n d illu s.

t r e e w o r s h ip , 1 4 - 1 5 , 5 0 , 2 1 6 - 1 8

V e l d e , E saias v a n d e , 10

T r e v e ly a n , G . M . , 209

V e lle iu s P a te r c u lu s , M a r c u s , 88

T r i b o l o , N i c c o lo , 2 7 5

V e n u s a n d A d o n is fo u n t a in , illu s. 3 4 4 , 345

T rip ty ch o f th e H o ly L a m b { v a n E y c k ) , illu s.

V e r a , D o m in g o d e , 3 1 2

287

v e r d a n t c r o s s , 2 1 4 , illu s. 2 2 1

T r iu m p h o f B r i t a n n i a ( H a y m a n ) , 3 5 7

C h r is tia n o r ig in s , 2 1 8 - 1 9

tr o p ic a l g a r d e n s , 5 6 4 - 7 , illu s . 5 6 5 , 5 6 6

C h r is tm a s a n d , 2 2 0 - 1

T s c h u d i, A e g i d i u s , 4 3 0

in C h u r c h ’ s p a in tin g s , 205

T s e r e t e li , Z u r a b K ., 3 9 6

in C o l e ’ s p a in tin g s , 203 a n d illu s ., illus.

T u b i- S h e v a t , fe stiv a l o f , 6 T u b y , J e a n - B a p t is te , illu s. 3 4 2 t u m u li, 26 T u r n e r , A . R ic h a r d , 4 2 4 T u r n e r , J. M . W . , 3 5 9 - 6 2 , illu s. 3 5 9 , 360 ,

2 0 4 , 205 in F r ie d r ic h ’ s p a in tin g s , illu s. 2 0 6 , 2 0 7 , 2 3 8 -9 in ic o n s , 2 1 5 a n d illus. id o la tr y is s u e , 2 1 5 - 1 6

3 6 3 - 4 ,4 6 1 , 4 6 2 ,5 0 5 ,5 0 9

p a g a n r e lig io n s a n d , 2 1 4 - 1 5

T u r n e r , R ic h a r d , illu s . 5 6 5 , 5 6 7

S a v io r - T r e e s , 2 25 a n d illu s.

T u r n e r ’s A n n u a l T o u r ( T u r n e r ) , 363

s y m b o lic u s e s , 2 2 1 - 3 , ^ u s- 2 2 2 > 2 2 3>

T u r r e ll, J o h n , 1 8 7 T y r c o n n e l, V is c o u n t, 5 4 1

224, 2 2 5 - 6 , illu s. 2 2 5 u b iq u it y in C h r is tia n a r t, 2 1 9 - 2 0

T y r r e ll, W a lt e r , 13 9

V e r m u y d e n , C o r n e lis , 33 1

T y z e n h a u s , A n t o n i, 4 5 , 4 6 , 4 7

V e r n o n , A d m ira l E d w a r d , 4 6 4 V e r s a ille s , 3 3 9 -4 3 , U lus. 3 4 1 , 3 4 2

U lr ic h v a n H u t t e n ’s T o m b ( F r ie d r ic h ) , illu s. 10 8 U n it e d S t a te s , 15

V i c o , G ia m b a t t is ta , 3 4 4 V i c t o r ia , q u e e n o f E n g la n d , 5 0 1 , 50 4 , 5 6 3 -4 , 5 6 5 -6

C e n t r a l P a r k , 5 6 7 - 7 0 , illu s . 5 6 8 , 57 2

V i e n n a , lib e r a t io n f r o m T u r k s , 4 2 - 3

fo r e sts as s y m b o l o f n a tio n a l p e r s o n a lity ,

V iew fr o m M o u n t H olyoke, N o r th a m p to n ,

19 9 -2 0 0 H o l y L a n d U S A , 1 6 , 4 4 4 , illu s . 4 4 5 , 4 4 6

M a ssachusetts, a fte r a T h u n d er sto r m ( C o l e ) , 36 5 a n d illu s ., 3 6 7

M a n if e s t D e s t in y , 3 9 7

V iew o f K en w o o d , A ( R o b e r ts o n ) , illu s. 52 0

riv e rs o f , 3 6 4 - 5 , illu s. 3 6 5 , 3 6 6 , 3 6 7

V iew o f the G a r d e n a t S to u r h ea d w ith the

w ild e r n e s s c le a r a n c e , 1 9 1 , 19 3 see a lso B i g T r e e s ; M o u n t R u s h m o r e m onum ent U n tit le d ( K ie f e r ) , illu s. 1 2 1

T em p le o f A p o llo , A ( B a m fy ld e ) , illu s. 540 v illa e sta te s , 5 2 9 - 3 1 , illu s. 5 3 0 V illa F a r n e s e , 2 7 5

U r b a n V I I I , P o p e , 2 9 0 , 2 9 1 , 293

v illa g a r d e n s , 2 7 5 - 9 , ^ us-

U se n e r, H e rm a n n , 2 10

V illa L a n te , 2 7 5 a n d illu s.

*15

V i n c k b o o n s , D a v id , illu s. 5 3 2 - 3 , 5 3 4 V a le n c ie n n e s , P ie r r e - H e n r i d e , 4 0 4 - 5 V a n c e , R o b e r t , 19 0

V i o l l e t - l e - D u c , E u g fc n e - E m m a n u e l, 2 2 8 ,

511-12

INDEX

646 V ir g il, 8 3, 282, 5 2 8 -9

W h it tr e d g e , W o r t h in g to n , 1 9 6 - 7 , 239

V itr u v iu s , 228 , 2 7 7 , 4 0 1 , 4 0 2 , 530

W h y m p e r , E d w a rd , 422 a n d illu s., 502,

V iv a res , F ran cis, illus. 5 4 1

illus. 50 3 , 504 , 50 6 , 509

V lta v a R ive r, 363

w ild e rn e ss , 7

V o g t h e r r , H e in ric h , 2 22 , illus. 223

w ild m e n a n d w o m e n , 9 7 - 8 , illus. 9 7 ,

V o ln e y , C o n s t a n tin , 249

5 71-2

V o lt a ir e , 14 0 , 4 8 0 ,4 8 4

W ild w o o d H o u s e , 522

Voyages a u M o n t-P e rd u ( R a m o n d ) , 4 8 8 -9

W ilh e lm I, K aise r, illus. n o , i n , 11 2

Voyages d a n s l e sA lp e s (S a u ssu re ), 4 9 1 ,4 9 3

W ilk e s, J o h n , 522

V u lca n a n d Eole (P ie r o d i C o s im o ) , 228,

W illia m I (th e C o n q u e r o r ) , k in g o f E n g ­

illus. 229

la n d , 14 5 W illia m I I , R u fu s , k in g o f E n g la n d , 13 9 ,

W a d e , E d w a rd , 168

140

W a d s w o r th , D a n ie l, 2 0 1, 2 0 7, 364

W illia m I I I , k in g o f E n g la n d , 162

W a g n e r , R ich a r d , 1 2 6 , 12 9

W illia m I V , k in g o f E n g la n d , 56 4

W a ld en (T h o r e a u ) , 5 7 1 , 576

W illia m R u s h C a r v in g H is A lle g o r ic a l

W a ld e n P o n d , 5 7 1 , illus. 5 7 5 , 57 6 W a ld in d er deutschen K u lt u r , D e r ( R e b e l) , 11 8 W a ld m a n n (th e m an o f th e w o o d s ) , 100 W aldsterben ( fo re s t- d e a th ), 120

F ig u re o f the S chu y lkill R iv e r (E a k in s ), 3 6 8 - 7 0 , illus. 3 7 0 , 372 W illia m s , H e le n M a r ia , 249 W illia m s, V ir g il, 19 4 W illia m s -W y n n , S ir W a tk in s, 4 6 9 a n d illus.

W a le s, 46 9

W illib ro r d , m o n k , 2 1 7

W a lle r , E d m u n d , 16 1

W ils o n , E rasm u s, 3 7 7 , 378

W a lp o le , H o r a c e , 4 4 7 - 5 0 , illus. 4 4 8 , 4 5 2 - 3 ,

W ils o n , R ic h a r d , 46 9

457. 459. 478, 538. 539

W ils o n , T h o m a s M a r y o n , 5 2 3 - 4

W a lp o le , S ir R o b e r t, 4 4 8 , 4 5 3 , 4 6 4

W im p h e lin g , J a co b , 93

W a lth a m F o r e st, 16 5

W in c k e lm a n n , J o h a n n , 10 2 , 3 57

W a r b u r g , A b y , 1 7 - 1 8 , 2 0 9 - 1 4 , illus. 2 12

W in d h a m , W illia m , 4 6 3 - 6 ,4 8 0

W a r b u r to n , W illia m , B ish o p , 2 3 0 - 1 , 233

W in sta n le y , H a m le t, 4 5 6

W ars o f th e R o s e s, 149

W in te r fam ily , 1 5 6 , 15 8 , 162

W arszaw a ( G r o t tg e r ) , 6 2 -3

W in te r L a nd sca pe ( F r ie d r ic h ), 2 3 8 -9

w a te r-d iv in in g , 3 50 -2

W ir th , H e r m a n n , 79

W a tk in s, C a r le t o n , 7 , illus. 8, 12 , 1 9 0 - 1 ,

W ith e r , G e o r g e , 325

illus. 19 2 , 19 3, 19 4

W it o ld , P r in c e , 4 1

W a ts o n , D a v id , 4 66

W it t f o g e l, K a rl, 260, 261

W a t t , Jo ach im v o n , 430

W ittg e n s te in , L u d w ig , 209

W a u g h , E v e ly n , 5 1 9

W it t k o w e r , R u d o lf, 208

W a y n m a n b r o th e rs , 3 7 7

W it z , K o n r a d , 4 2 6 , illus. 4 2 7

W e b e r , C a rl M a ria v o n , 12 9

W la d isla w I I , k in g o f P o la n d , 4 1 ; see also

W e d g w o o d , Jo siah , 358

Io g a ila , g r a n d d u k e o f L ith u a n ia

W e e d , C h a r le s, 190

W o lls to n e c ra ft, M a r y , 249

W eed , L ean der, 7

W o o d , C h r is to p h e r , 95

Wege d er W eltw eisheit-die H erm a nnssch la cht ( K ie fe r ), 1 2 8 - 9 , illus. 12 8

w o o d e n b o o k s , 19 W o o d la n d s (m a n o r ) , 1 3 5 - 6

W e itsc h , P asch a, 10 3 , illus. 104

W o r d e , W y n k y n d e , 14 9

W e llin g to n , d u k e o f, 566

W o r ld W a r 1, 6 4 - 6 , 2 1 1 - 1 2

W e st, R ich a rd , 4 4 8 , 4 5 3 , 4 5 7

W o r ld W a r I I , 6 9 - 7 2 , 73

W h a te ly , T h o m a s , 5 3 9 -4 0

W o r s te r , D o n a ld , 13

W h e e le r, Jam es, 16 4

W r ig h t, F ran k L lo y d , 399

W h id d o n , Ja co b , 3 1 1

W r ig h t, J o se p h , 358 , illus. 4 7 1 , 472

W h ite , L y n n , Jr., 13 w h ite b a it, 3 5 2 - 4

Y a rd le y o a k , 17 0 , 17 2

W h itn e y , Jo siah, 19 1

Y e llin , C h a im , 72

INDEX Y o s e m it e , 7 - 9 , illu s. 8, 9, 1 8 6 , 1 9 1 , 5 7 0 , 5 7 2 - 3 , see a lso B i g T r e e s

647

Z h a n g L i n g , 408 Z ip e s , Ja ck , 10 7

Y o u n g h u s b a n d , S ir F r a n c is , 3 9 6 - 7 ,4 2 2

Z i t t a u , J o h a n n e s v o n , 2 21

Y u , e m p e r o r o f C h in a , 2 6 1

z o o s , 5 6 1 - 4 , illu s. 5 6 2 , 5 6 5 , 5 7 0 Z u g , S z y m o n B o g u m il, 5 3 9

Z d a n k i e w ic z , M i c h a l, 7 0

Z y g m u n t A u g u s t , k in g o f P o la n d , 5 7

Z e r m a t t , S w it z e r la n d , 503

Z y g m u n t t h e G r e a t , p r in c e o f L ith u a n ia ,

Z e r o m s k i, S t e f a n , 6 6

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS Black a n d white (by page num ber) A c h e n b a c h K u n s t h a n d e l, D iis s e ld o r f , G e rm a n y : 1 2 5 . A . C . L . , B ru s s e ls , B e lg iu m : 288. A n s e l A d a m s P u b lis h in g R ig h ts T r u s t , C a r m e l, C a lifo r n ia : 9. A l in a r i / A r t R e s o u r c e , N e w Y o r k : 2 2 1 , 2 2 4 ( t o p ) , 2 7 6 , 2 8 2 , 2 8 3 , 30 2 , 303 ( t o p a n d b o t t o m ) , 3 0 4 , 3 4 1 , 34 4 . A m is d e la F o r e t d e F o n t a in e b le a u : 5 4 7 , 5 5 7 . A r t i D o r ia P a m p h ilj: 2 9 5 . A r t I n s t it u te o f C h ic a g o : 12 8 ( A n s e lm K ie fe r , G e r m a n , b .1 9 4 5 , P a th s o f the W isdom o f the W orld: H e r m a n ’s B a ttle , w o o d c u t , a d d itio n s in a c ry lic a n d s h e lla c , 19 8 0 , 3 4 4 .8 x 52 8 .3 c m , R e s t r ic te d g if t o f M r . a n d M r s . N o e l R o t h m a n , M r . a n d M r s . D o u g la s C o h e n , M r . a n d M r s . T h o m a s D it t m e r , M r . a n d M r s . R a lp h G o l d e n b e r g , M r . a n d M r s . L e w is M a r u lo w , a n d M r . a n d M r s . J o se p h R . S h a p ir o ; W ir t D . W a lk e r F u n d , 1 9 8 6 .1 1 2 . P h o t o ­ g r a p h b y c o u r t e s y o f th e artist. P h o t o g r a p h © 19 9 4 , T h e A r t I n s titu te o f C h ic a g o , A ll R ig h ts R e s e r v e d .) A r t R e s o u r c e , N e w Y o r k : 2 22 ( t o p ) . A s h m o le a n M u s e u m , O x f o r d , E n g la n d : 2 9 4 , 4 7 1 , 4 7 3 , 5 1 0 . H e r z o g A u g u s t B i b li o t h e k , W o lf e n b ii t t e l, G e r m a n y : 9 3. A u t h o r ’ s c o lle c t io n : ii, 2 2 4 ( b o t t o m . P h o t o © A n t h o n y H o lm e s ) . A v e r y L ib r a r y , C o l u m b ia U n iv e r s it y , N e w Y o r k : 2 3 1 - 5 , 54 4 . B a n c r o f t L ib r a r y , U n iv e r s it y o f C a lifo r n ia , B e r k e le y , C a lifo r n ia : 18 8 . B a y e ris c h e s S t a a t s b ib lio th e k , M u n i c h , G e r m a n y : 4 1 0 . B a y e r is c h e S t a a t s g e m a ld e s a m m lu n g e n , M u n i c h , G e rm a n y : 4 2 7 ( b o t t o m ) . B ib li o t h e q u e N a ti o n a le , P aris: 2 1 5 ( b o t t o m ) , 4 3 9 - 4 0 ,4 4 2 - 3 . B ir m in g h a m C i t y A r t G a lle r y , B ir m in g h a m , E n g la n d : 4 7 6 . V i r g i n ia B la is d e ll: 4 4 5 (a ll). B o r o u g h o f C a m d e n , L o c a l H is t o r y L ib r a r y , L o n d o n : 5 2 4 . B r itis h L ib r a r y , L o n d o n : 3 1 0 , 3 1 7 , 4 6 7 , 4 6 8 ( b o t t o m ) . B r itis h M u s e u m , L o n d o n : 4 0 3 , 4 7 0 , 4 7 4 , 4 7 7 . C o l l e c t io n o f th e E li B r o a d F a m ily F o u n d a tio n : 12 6 ( P h o t o © D o u g la s M . P a r k e r ). B r o w n C o u n t y H is t o r ic a l M u s e u m , N e w U lm , M in n e s o ta : 1 1 1 . P a r r o c h ia d i S . G io v a n n i B a ttis ta , M u s e o d e l D u o m o , M o n z a , Ita ly : 2 1 5 ( t o p ) . C le v e la n d M u s e u m o f A r t : 5 2 5 ( L e o n a r d C . H a n n a , Jr., F u n d ) . C o l u m b ia U n iv e r s it y , N e w Y o r k : 542 ( P h o t o : D r a w in g s & A r c h iv e s , A v e r y L ib ra ry , C o l u m ­ b ia U n iv e r s it y ) .

649

650

ILLUSTRATI ON CREDITS

C o n c o r d F ree P u b lic L ib ra ry , C o n c o r d , M assach u se tts: 5 7 5 ( P h o t o © H e r b e r t G le a so n ). E le cta B o o k s , M ila n , fro m F ra n c o B o rsi, B e r n in i A r ch ite tto ( 1 9 8 0 ): 293 ( P h o t o © B r u n o B a lestrin i). F a irm o u n t P ark A r t A ss o c ia tio n / P h ila d e lp h ia M u s e u m o f A r t , P en n sylv an ia: 368 ( b o t to m ). Ru ss F in le y , N a tio n a l P arks S e rv ic e , M o u n t R u s h m o r e N a tio n a l M o n u m e n t: 396. T h e F o r w a r d A ss o c ia tio n , N e w Y o rk : 28 (fr o m The V a nished W orld, N e w Y o r k : 19 4 7 ). F ratelli A lin a ri, 1 9 9 3 / A r t R e so u rc e , N e w Y o r k : 2 7 0 - 1 . G a lin e tta F o to g ra p h ic a , R o m e : 5 1 9 . G e rm a n is ch e s N a tio n a lm u se u m , N iir n b e r g , G e rm a n y : 94. G ir a u d o n / A r t R e so u rc e , N e w Y o rk : 2 87, 337 (t o p an d b o t to m ) , 3 42 , 543 . G r e a te r L o n d o n P h o to g r a p h ic Library': 520. H a rv a rd C o lle g e L ib ra ry , C a m b r id g e , M assach u se tts: 38, 6 3 , 90 , 1 1 7 , 16 4 , 16 6 , 1 7 6 , 2 22 , 2 23 , 2 4 1, 2 43, 2 74 (le ft an d r ig h t), 290 ( b o t to m ) , 2 9 9 , 306, 349 , 3 7 9 ,4 3 7 - 8 , 503. B y p erm issio n o f th e H o u g h to n L ib ra ry , H a rv a rd U n iv e rs ity , C a m b r id g e , M assach u se tts: 10 , 8 4 , 8 5 , 8 6 , 9 6 , 1 0 1 , 1 5 0 , 1 5 3 , 1 7 1 , 1 7 2 , 1 8 2 , 18 4 , 2 7 2 , 2 7 3 , 280, 2 8 1 , 2 85 , 300, 3 0 1 , 305, 3 4 8 ,4 0 5 ( to p an d b o t t o m ) , 4 1 3 (to p an d b o t to m ) , 4 2 9 , 4 5 2 ,4 5 3 , 4 5 8 ,5 1 3 , 5 3 0 , 5 4 5 ( b o t ­ t o m ) , 5 6 2 ,5 7 8 . T h e L u t o n H o o F o u n d a tio n ( T h e W e rn h e r C o lle c t io n ) : 5 2 1 . Im p e ria l W a r M u s e u m , L o n d o n : n . I n d e p e n d e n c e N a tio n a l H isto rica l P ark , P h ila d e lp h ia , P en n sylv an ia: 368 (to p ) . In s titu t R o y a l d u P a trim o n e A rtistiq u e , B ru sse ls, B e lg iu m : 40. Is titu to C e n tr a le p er il C a ta lo g o e t la D o c u m e n ta z io n e , M ila n , Italy: 2 97. K e n n e y G a lle rie s, N e w Y o rk : 204 (to p ) . M a g g ie K esw ic k : 4 0 6 ,4 0 8 . K u n sts a m m lu n g e n z u W e im a r, W e im a r , G e rm a n y :

206 ( b o t to m ; P h o to : L o u is H e ld ,

W e im a r). K u n sth a lle , H a m b u r g , G e rm a n y: 122 (P h o t o : E lk e W a lfo r d , H a m b u r g ) . K u n sth a u s, Z u r ic h , S w itze rla n d : 372 . K u n sth isto risch e s M u s e u m , V ie n n a , A u stria: 4 2 8 ,4 3 2 , 4 3 4 - 5 . K u rp falz isch es M u s e u m , H e id e lb e r g , G e rm a n y : 279. L ib ra ry o f th e G r a y H e r b a r iu m , H a rv ard U n iv e rs ity , C a m b r id g e , M assach u se tts: 19 2 - 3 . M e tr o p o lita n M u s e u m o f A r t , N e w Y o r k : 8 ( b o t to m ; T h e E lish a W h itte lse y C o lle c t io n , T h e E lish a W h itte lse y F u n d , 19 2 2 ), 9 7 ( to p ; H a rris B risb a n e D ic k F u n d , 19 2 8 ), 198 (G ift in m e m o r y o f Jo n ath a n S tu rg e s b y his c h ild r e n , 18 9 5 ), 2 2 5 , 258 (P u r ch a se , 19 6 9 , G ift o f D u la n e y L o g a n , 1 9 6 7 - 6 9 ) , 365 ( G if t o f M rs. R u ssell S a g e , 19 0 8 ), 366 ( b o t to m ; M o r r is K . Jessup F u n d , 19 3 3 ), 400 ( G ift o f Jam es S tillm a n , 19 0 6 ), 408 (le ft; G if t o f E rn e s t E r ic k ­ s o n F o u n d a tio n , In c ., 19 8 5 ), 4 5 4 ( C h a r le s B . C u r t is F u n d , 1 9 3 4 ), 5 3 2 - 3 ( T h e E lish a W h itte lse y C o lle c t io n , T h e E lish a W h itte lse y F u n d , 19 4 9 ). M I T P ress, C a m b r id g e , M assach u se tts: 2 75. M u s e e C a rn a v a le t, Paris: 537. M u s e e d ’ art e t d ’ h is to ire, G e n e v a , S w itze rla n d : 4 2 7 ( t o p ) , 463 ( D e p o t F o n d a tio n G o ttfr ie d K n elle r; P h o to : M . A e s e h im ). M u s e e d e la F o r e t d e F o n ta in e b le a u , F o n ta in e b le a u , F ran ce: 5 5 5 . M u s e e d e L o r a in e , N a n c y , F ran ce: 224. M u s6 e d ’ O rs a y , Paris: 3 7 1 ( P h o t o © A g e n c e P h o to g r a p h iq u e d e la R e u n io n d e s M u sd es N a tio n a u x ). M u s e e d u L o u v r e , Paris (R e u n io n d e s M u s le s N a tio n a u x ): 4 1 6 , 5 1 8 . M u s e e M ic k ie w ic z , Paris: 55 ( P h o to : F elix N a d ar). M u s e o d i R o m a , Italy: 292. M u s e u m d . b ild e n e n K iin ste , L e ip z ig , G e rm a n y: 296 ( b o t to m ) . M u s e u m o f F in e A rts , B o s t o n , M assach u se tts, D e p a rtm e n t o f P rin ts a n d D r a w in g s , S a rg en t F u n d : 1 3 1 , 132 ( to p an d b o t to m ) , 4 1 8 . M u s e u m o f F in e A rts , M o n tr e a l, C a n a d a : 5 6 1.

IL L U S T R A T IO N

C R E D IT S

65 1

N a tio n a l A r c h a e o lo g i c a l M u s e u m , A th e n s , G r e e c e : 5 2 6 . N a tio n a l G a lle r y o f C a n a d a , O tt a w a : 229. N a tio n a l G a lle r y , L o n d o n : 1 5 7 , 1 6 8 ,4 4 8 ( t o p a n d b o t t o m ) , 5 3 5 . N a tio n a l G a lle r y o f S c o t la n d , E d in b u r g h : 4 7 5 . N a tio n a l G a lle r y o f W a le s , C a r d iff: 468 ( t o p ) , 4 6 9 . N a tio n a l M u s e u m , N a p le s / A lin a r i , A r t R e s o u r c e , N e w Y o r k : 2 69. N a tio n a l P a la c e M u s e u m , T a iw a n , R e p u b lic o f C h in a : 409 . N a tio n a l P a r k S e rv ic e : 38 6 ( t o p ) , 3 8 7. N a tio n a l P o r tr a it G a lle r y , L o n d o n : 308. N a tio n a l P o r tr a it G a lle r y , S m ith s o n ia n I n s t it u t i o n / A r t R e s o u r c e , N e w Y o r k : 2 46. N a tio n a l T r u s t , E n g la n d : 54 0 ( H o a r e C o l l e c t io n , S t o u r h e a d , W ilt s h ir e ) , 5 4 1 ( B r o w n l o w C o l ­ le c t io n , B e lt o n H o u s e , L in c o ln s h ir e ) . G e m a ld e g a le r ie N e u e M e is te r , D r e s d e n , G e rm a n y : 206 ( a b o v e le ft a n d r ig h t) . N e w - Y o r k H is t o r ic a l S o c ie t y : 202 ( t o p a n d b o t t o m ) , 56 8. N e w Y o r k P u b lic L ib r a r y , P r in t C o lle c t io n : 18 9 ( M iria m a n d Ira D . W a lla c h D iv is io n o f A r t , P r in ts a n d P h o t o g r a p h s , A s t o r , L e n o x a n d T i ld e n F o u n d a tio n s ) . N ie d e r d e u t s c h e r V e r b a n d fu r V o lk s - u n d A l te r tu m s k u n d e L i in e b e r g M u s e u m : 1 1 0 . O a k la n d M u s e u m , O a k la n d , C a lifo r n ia : 8 ( t o p ) . P a l a z z o P it ti, F lo r e n c e , Ita ly : 4 5 5 . P a t r im o n ia l N a c io n a l, M a d r id , S p a in : 3 35 . P h ila d e lp h ia A c a d e m y o f F in e A i t s , P h ila d e lp h ia , P e n n s y lv a n ia : 3 69 (P e n n s y lv a n ia A c a d e m y P u r c h a s e f r o m t h e E s ta te o f P a u l B e c k , Jr.). P h ila d e lp h ia M u s e u m o f A r t , P h ila d e lp h ia , P e n n s y lv a n ia : 3 70 ( G iv e n b y M r s . T h o m a s E a k in s a n d M is s M a r y A d e lin e W illia m s ) . P ie r p o n t M o r g a n L ib r a r y , N e w Y o r k : 5 0 7 . P o w e ll P a p e r s , S c h le s in g e r L ib r a r y , H a r v a r d U n iv e r s it y , C a m b r id g e , M a s s a c h u se tts : 386 (b o tto m ). P r a d o M u s e u m , M a d r i d , S p a in : 3 34. P r iv a te c o lle c t io n : 1 2 1 , 1 2 3 , 1 3 0 ,4 8 3 , 4 9 3 . P r iv a te c o l l e c t io n , P aris: 373 ( P h o t o © M u s 6 e G u s ta v C o u r b e t , O r n a n s ) . R e s e a r c h L ib r a r ie s , N e w Y o r k P u b lic L ib ra ry : 19 9 . R e y n o ld a H o u s e , M u s e u m o f A m e r ic a n A r t , W in s t o n - S a le m , N o r t h C a r o lin a : 203. R o y a l B o t a n ic a l G a r d e n s , K e w G a r d e n s , L o n d o n : 5 6 5 . R o y a l C o l l e c t io n , W in d s o r C a s t le , L o n d o n , E n g la n d : 2 9 6 ( t o p ) , 4 2 4 - 5 (© H e r M a je s ty Q u e e n E liz a b e t h I I ) . R o y a l G e o g r a p h ic S o c i e t y , L o n d o n , E n g la n d : 3 7 5 ( t o p a n d b o t to m ) . R o y a l S o c i e t y o f A r t s , L o n d o n : 358 ( P h o t o : C o u r t e s y o f th e P a u l M e llo n C e n t e r fo r S tu d ie s in B r itis h A r t ) . S h r o p s h ir e R e c o r d s R e s e a r c h , E n g la n d : 5 4 5 ( t o p ) . S m ith s o n ia n I n s t it u tio n , W a s h in g t o n , D .C .: 4 0 7 - 8 ( b o t t o m ; c o u r t e s y p f th e F r e e r G a lle r y o f A r t, W a s h in g to n , D .C .) . S p e n c e r S o c i e t y P u b lic a tio n s , L o n d o n : 323 ( fr o m A l l the W o r k e s o fjo h n Ta ylor, 16 3 0 . B u t le r L ib r a r y , C o l u m b ia U n iv e r s it y . P h o t o : A n t h o n y H o lm e s ) . S t a a t lic h e K u n s t s a m m lu n g e n , S c h lo s s m u s e u m , W e im a r , G e rm a n y : 10 8 ( P h o t o : F o t o a t e lie r L o u is H e l d , W e im a r ) . S t a a t lic h e K u n s t h a lle , K a r ls r u h e , G e r m a n y : 10 4 ( t o p ) . S ta a tlic h e M u s e e n z u B e rlin : 9 7 ( b o t to m ; P r e u fiis ch e r K u ltu r b e s itz K u p fe r stic h k a b in e tt ( P h o t o : J o r g P . A n d e r s P h o to a te lie r , B e r lin ) , 105 (P r e u flisch e r K u ltu r b e s itz N a tio n a lg a le r ie ; P h o t o : J o r g P . A n d e r s P h o to a te lie r , B e r lin ) , 19 6 (P reu G isc h e r K u ltu r b e s itz N a tio n a lg a le r ie ). S t a d tis c h e s M u s e u m , B r a u n s c h w e ig , G e r m a n y : 10 4 ( b o t t o m ) . J o s e p h S z e s z fa i: 200. T a t e G a lle r y , L o n d o n / A r t R e s o u r c e , N e w Y o r k : 3 5 9 , 360. C o u r t e s y M u s e o T h y s s e n - B o r n e m is z a , M a d r id : 204 ( b o t t o m ) .

652

ILLUS TRATI ON CREDITS

T r in ity C o lle g e , O x f o r d , E n g la n d : 208. U niv e rsit£ e d e G e n e v e , S w itze r la n d (B ib lio th fc q u e P u b liq u e ): 492 . U n iv e rs ity o f L o n d o n , th e W a r b u r g In stitu te : 2 1 1 . T h e B o a r d o f T ru s te e s o f th e V ic t o r ia & A lb e r t M u s e u m , L o n d o n : 290 ( t o p ) , 2 9 1 ,4 6 0 (to p an d b o t to m ) . V O A K C o lle c t io n , H o ffm a n n A rc h iv e s , V ie n n a : 68. C o u r t e s y M a r k S . W e il: 536 (t o p an d b o t to m ) . W id e n e r L ib ra ry , H a rv ard U n iv e rs ity , C a m b r id g e , M assach u se tts: 5 6 3 , 5 6 6 , 572 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity A r t G a lle ry , N e w H a v e n , C o n n e c tic u t: 366 ( to p ; G ift o f M iss A n n e tt I. Y o u n g , in m e m o r y o f P ro fesso r D . C a d y E a to n an d M r. In n is Y o u n g . P h o t o © J o seph S za szfai).

Color (byfigure num ber) 1. K u n stm u se u m , D iiss e ld o rf. 2. N a tio n a l G a lle r y , W a s h in g to n , D .C . 3. P h o to g r a p h b y th e artist. C o u r t e s y o f G a le r ie L e lo n g , N e w Y o r k . 4. C o u r t e s y R o s a m u n d P u rce ll. 5. P rivate co lle c tio n . 6. C o u r t e s y o f th e a u th o r. 7 - 9 . C o u r t e s y T a d e u s z R o lk e . 10. C o u r t e s y G io v a n n i B a ld e sch i-B a lle an i. 1 1 . A lte P in a k o th e k , M u n ic h . 12 . S ta a d ich e K u n sth a lle, K arlsru h e , G e rm a n y . C o u r t e s y G a lle r y v a n H a e ft e n , L o n d o n . P h o to g r a p h © J o h n n y van H a e fte n , L t d ., L o n d o n . 13 . P riv ate c o lle c t io n , B ie le fe ld , G e rm a n y . 14 . B y p erm issio n o f H a rv ard C o lle g e L ib ra ry . 15 . S o n n a b e n d G a lle r y , N e w Y o rk . 16 . S te d e lijk v an A b b e m u s e u m , E in d h o v e n , N e th e r la n d s . 17 . B y p erm issio n o f th e H o u g h to n L ib ra ry , H a rv a rd U n iv e rs ity , C a m b r id g e , M assach u se tts. 18 . 25. P riv ate co lle c tio n . 19 . B erk sh ire M u s e u m , Z e n a s C r a n e C o lle c t io n , P itts fie ld , M assach u se tts. 20. R e y n o ld a H o u s e , M u s e u m o f A m e r ica n A r t , W in s to n - S a le m , N o r t h C a ro lin a . 2 1. M u s e e d u L o u v r e , Paris. 22. D e s M o in e s W o m e n ’s C l u b , D e s M o in e s , Io w a . 2 3 - 4 . A u stria n N a tio n a l L ib ra ry , V ie n n a . 26. 2 9, 30. N a tio n a l G a lle r y , L o n d o n . 2 7. C lo r e C o lle c t io n , T a te G a lle r y , L o n d o n . 28. C lo r e C o lle c t io n , T a te G a lle r y , L o n d o n (P h o t o : A r t R e s o u rc e , N e w Y o r k ) . 3 1 . A v e r y L ib ra ry , R are B o o k s , C o lu m b ia U n iv e rs ity , N e w Y o r k . 32. G r a p h ic A rts C o lle c t io n , D e p a rtm e n t o f R are B o o k s an d S p ec ial E d itio n s , P r in c e to n U n iv e rs ity L ib ra ry . 33. N a tio n a l P ark S e rv ice. 34. A r t In s titu te o f C h ic a g o . 35. C o u r t e s y o f th e B o a r d o f T ru s te e s o f th e V ic t o r ia & A lb e r t M u s e u m , L o n d o n . 36. A sh m o le a n M u s e u m , O x f o r d , E n g la n d . 37. T a te G a lle r y , L o n d o n . 38. B r id g e m a n A r t L ib ra ry , L o n d o n . 39. C o u r t e s y o f th e F o g g A r t M u s e u m , H a rv ard U n iv e rs ity A r t M u s e u m s, G if t o f S a m u el Sachs. 40. C o u r t e s y H a rp e rC o llin s P u b lis h e rs, L o n d o n . 4 1 . C o u r t e s y A lp in e C lu b , L o n d o n . 4 2 . M u s e e d ’ O rs a y , Paris. 4 3. T o le d o M u s e u m o f A r t , T o l e d o , O h io . 44. N a tio n a l G a lle r y , L o n d o n . 4 5. C o u r t e s y o f th e a u th o r.

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Citizens

A Chronicle of the French Revolution A brilliantly conceived recounting o f the French Revolution and the transformation that permanendy altered the face o f Europe, changing “ subjects” into “ citizens.” “ C itiz e n s, like the great 19th-century narratives it emulates, makes entertainment and eru­ dition work hand in hand. . . . As no other recent historian o f the revolution, Schama brings to life the excitement— and harrowing terror— o f an epochal human event.” H is to r y / 0 - 6 7 9 - 7 2 6 1 0 - 1

Newsweek

Patriots and Liberators

Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813 This scrupulously researched, compulsively readable work o f history explores how the Dutch Republic changed from being the powerful cash till o f Europe to become an impoverished and despised appendage o f the French empire. “An outstanding work o f historical scholarship . . . an extraordinary achievement.” / , * History/0-079-72949-0

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H- Plumb

D e ad Certainties

(Unwarranted Speculations) In this dazzling work o f historical imagination, Simon Schama reconstructs— and at times reinvents— two ambiguous deaths: the first, that o f General James Wolfe at the battle o f Quebec in 1759; the second, in 1849, that o f an eccentric Boston brahmin whose murder was a grisly reproach to the moral sanctity o f his society. “An infinitely beguiling book . . . a mind-teasing delight.” — The N ew Y ork T im es Book R eview H istory/0 - 6 7 9 -7 3 6 1 3 -1

A v a ila b le a t your local bookstore, or ca ll toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).