The View From the Train Read Online Free PDF

evidence for this supposition, and its connotations are in this location pinpointed by the feudal sounds of leather on willow and so on.
    The society of the Dee valley is very much that of the Cheshire ‘county’. It is their creation, in as much as all landscape is the result of human interference. It is where the Cheshire hunt still hunts, now with the support of non-landed bourgeois money from nearby metropolitan areas. In short, the connotations of both its imagery and its inhabitants are more or less disgraceful, and yet its representation remains moving. The experience of landscape not only transcends individual suffering (the boys’ capture), but even that very general tragedy of which the landscape itself is a result.
    This combination of the tragic and the euphoric is a dominant quality in innumerable depictions of landscape, especially when these are from above, and so supply implications of pattern, understanding or explanation, and hence compassion not available to observers on the ground.
    It is a view that probably dates only from the nineteenth century, and is in any case not universal. Notwithstanding the difference in motive, those paintings of various of Napoleon’s battles, seen from a nearby hill, contrast with battle scenes from a similar viewpoint in
Birth of a Nation
. The paintings display a disciplined efficiency, while Griffith, with a comparable lack of technical sophistication in visual matters, manages to present his war in a far more complex picture of chaos, squalor and pain.
    Daniel Defoe, writing in 1724, says of the Dee valley: ‘The soil is extraordinary good, and the grass they say, has a peculiar richness in it, which disposes the creatures to give a great quantity of milk, and that very sweet and good.’ 1
    Already the butter commercial is imminent, but here beauty is synonymous, rather than simultaneous, with productivity or prosperity. In any case Defoe may be said to pre-date the sense of the picturesque. In the rare instances where he describes landscape itself, that of the Yorkshire Dales for instance, his purpose is to discuss the disposition of industry upon it. 2 For him the Lake District was a barren wasteland.
    In Richard Wilson’s painting
Holt Bridge on The River Dee
(before 1762), the picturesque is already well established, not so much a result of easier travel or burgeoning industrialisation, but the concurrent desire for a Virgilian idyll in which to set the then present-day. In the painting, which echoes a Venetian sensibility as well as that of Claude, elements of the scenery are stressed for their classical comparability: the sandstone cliff; the (church) tower; the flat plain and distant hills; the ‘peasants’ and the bridge. All these elements are interpreted in terms of Wilson’s repertoire of elements of classical
mise-en-scène
collected in his sketchbooks while in Italy. Most important, because invisible, is the historical significance of the bridge itself as the link between England and Wales, and the aura of antiquity which this bestows.

    Richard Wilson,
Holt Bridge on the River Dee
(before 1762)
    This metaphorical transposition of landscape – seeing somewhere as somewhere else – and the consequent effect on the landscape are widely encountered in art, life and the relations between these. In the simplest sense, in Chris Petit’s
Radio On
(1979), photographed by Martin Schäfer, the journey along the A4 is converted by the cinematography into one across some unspecified but definitely East European plain. Blea Tarn, which lies at the top of a pass between the two Langdale valleys in the Lake District, was the inspiration and subject of a passage in Wordsworth’s
The Excursion
. A later sensibility, aroused perhaps by Wordsworth’s poem, but informed more by Chinese and Japanese scenes, was inspired in the unknown landscape-gardening landowner who planted rhododendrons around the tarn, which still thrive despite the altitude, and parallel the