The View From the Train Read Online Free PDF Page B

domestication of Wordsworth’s vision. This is not so much ‘seeing somewhere as somewhere else’, but ‘seeing somewhere in terms of a picture of somewhere else’.
    By the time Thomas De Quincey passed through the Dee Valley, he too a runaway schoolboy in 1802, the sensibility of Wilson’s generation had had its effect:
    The Vale of Gressford, for instance … offered a lovely little seclusion … But this did not offer what I wanted. Everything was elegant, polished, quiet, throughout the lawns and groves of this verdant retreat: no rudeness was allowed here; even the little brooks were trained to ‘behave themselves’; and the two villas of the reigning ladies … showed the perfection of good taste. For both ladies had cultivated a taste for painting. 3
    The last sentence tells all. De Quincey moved on into the mountains in rehearsal for his sojourn as the Wordsworths’ neighbourat Grasmere. Earlier in the same journey, he pinpoints the phenomenon:
    an elaborate and pompous sunset hanging over the mountains of North Wales. The clouds passed slowly through several arrangements, and in the last of these I read the very scene which six months before I had read in a most exquisite poem of Wordsworth’s … The scene in the poem (‘Ruth’), that had been originally mimicked by the poet from the sky, was here re-mimicked and rehearsed to the life, as it seemed, by the sky from the poet. 4
    Poe was familiar with this mechanism of romanticisation, but such ephemeral effects do not satisfy him: the landscape gardener is produced to cement the cyclical relationship between poetic experience and the material world, to conduct
    ‘its adaption to the eyes which were to behold it on earth’: in his explanation of this phraseology, Mr Ellison did much toward solving what has always seemed to me an enigma: — I mean the fact (which none but the ignorant dispute) that no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvas of Claude. In the most enchanting of natural landscapes there will always be found a defect or an excess … In all other matters we are justly instructed to regard nature as supreme … In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true. 5
    The supposition may be said to rest on misconceptions, but in the end it probably holds true. Landscapes that do not result from human intervention – rain forests, uninhabited islands – are no less susceptible to criticism than those that do, and still life and portraiture generally involve a far greater degree of verisimilitude, and consequently less idealisation, than depictions of landscape. The relation between the idea and the reality of landscape really is different.
    The reasons for this lie in the rather obvious distinction between, say, a sheep, as a thing, and a landscape, as perhaps also a thing, butmore usefully a general disposition of things (one of which may be the sheep), and in the further distinction between the relationship of a viewer and the sheep, objects of more or less equal status, and that between this viewer and the landscape, in which the viewer and the sheep are constituents in the general disposition.
    In the first distinction, the general disposition of things is much more susceptible to alteration (landscape gardening) than any single thing (the sheep), and is corollary-wise much more likely to be at variance with any imagination of it (a picture) than would be the case with the sheep. Thus the possibility of and the desire for landscape gardening both stem in the very same way from the nature of landscape itself, and the cyclical relationship between the imagination of it and its reality is permitted: the real appearance of Tuscany gives rise to an imagination of landscape which gives rise to an alteration of the real appearance of England. This relationship is not confined to visual matters: every landscape has