From the top of Beechen Cliff

One thing that connects the last two postings here is that Jacquetta Hawkes quotes 'The Ruin' in her book. Another rather more tenuous link is Jane Austen - an admirer of George Crabbe, a visitor to Bath. On being told that Mrs. Crabbe had died, Jane Austen imagined being able to "comfort him as well as I can'. Crabbe's poem 'The Parish Register' provided the name for Austen's heroine Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, one of the novels in which Jane Austen refers to landscape gardening and the Picturesque. The wealthy but dull Mr Rushworth talks about improving his estate: "Your best friend upon such an occasion," said Miss Bertram calmly, "would be Mr. Repton, I imagine." This seems to be a dig at Humphry Repton's landscape garden design, although Colin Winborn (The Literary Economy of Jane Austen and George Crabbe) has argued that Repton's approach in the Red Books, seeking to create freedom within boundaries, is consistent with the views of both Austen and Crabbe.

In Northanger Abbey, the heroine Catherine is given a lecture on the Picturesque by an admirer and the reader is led elegantly from aesthetics to politics in a way that has made this, I would think, one of the most frequently quoted passages in histories of landscape:

'... a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances--side-screens and perspectives--lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape. Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.'

A Land

Jacquetta Hawkes' A Land can be seen as one manifestation of the widespread interest in Britain's landscape pursued by artists, composers, film makers and writers in the 1940s. It is a consciously poetic history of the land, opening with the author lying in her back garden imagining the earth's strata beneath her. Throughout the book she emphasises her feeling of connectedness with deep time. She describes the formation of rocks, the evolution of animals and finally the influence of people on the landscape - initially good, increasingly malign. The book ends with 'A Prospect of Britain', from the city streets round her home in Primrose Hill to the different landscapes of Britain described in the order they were created: the chalk Downs, the Costswolds, the West Riding, the Lake District. She says of these places that 'their poetry, the images rising from the darkness of unconscious memory, seem to be as much a part of the growth of that countryside as the distinctive plants and animals which it more directly supports. Hardy's poems grew from the Wessex downlands, Clare's from the tiny stretch of the Midlands in which alone he felt at home; Crabbe's are the bitter fruit of the Norfolk Coast: 'There poppies, nodding mock the hope of toil, / There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil.'

The philosophy of A Land can be read in condensed form in the description of her immediate surroundings: 'the York Stone paving, worn by footsteps into attractive miniature landscapes, survives in the side streets but has recently been replaced in Fitzroy Road itself by lifeless cement slabs.' Like W. G. Hoskins, whose The Making of the English Landscape appeared in 1955, she was no fan of the modern city. Indeed, in a passage impossible to imagine someone writing today, she explicitly locates 'one of the best of times to have been alive in this country' for 'all classes' in Queen Anne's reign and contrasts life then with the materialism of modern Britain. 'It is idiocy to pretend that to live in a lovely countryside, to handle only comely things, and to know that only comely things will issue from your hands is of no importance when set beside the amount of cash in your purse'.

Jacquetta Hawkes moved in artistic circles and was friendly with Henry Moore. In A Land she waxes lyrical about his use of native stones: 'it is hardly possible to express in prose the extraordinary awareness of the unity of past and present, of mind and matter, of man and man's origins which these thoughts bring to me. Once when I was in Moore's studio and saw one of his reclining figures with the shaft of a belemnite exposed in the thigh, my vision of this unity was overwhelming.'

There are hints of a rather overheated imagination in A Land, but it was her 1980 novel A Quest for Love that combined archaeology and sex in a mixture that alienated many of her admirers. Christine Finn has written an entertaining account of this affair. She wonders of Hawkes, 'are her manuscripts, set down in her hard-to-read handwriting, meant to be entirely serious? Her script for Figures in a Landscape, an experimental film, starts: "Cornwall, a horn of rock, Cornwall is England's horn, Its point thrust out into the sea, Smooth or ribbed with waves . . ."' The photograph of Hawkes on the Penguin paperback doesn't give much hint of volcanic sexual passion, but her lover J. B. Priestley described her in elemental terms to a friend: "What a woman — ice without and fire within!"

A Nocturnal Reverie

The verse anthology I’m clutching here, English Scottish and Welsh Landscape, edited by John Betjeman and Geoffrey Taylor, with lithographs by John Piper, was published, like Geoffrey Grigson’s The Poet’s Eye during the Second World War. It is a strange book, the product of a unique moment and a particular sensibility. What is so strange about it? Well the whole book begins with an apology rather than a preface in which the editors explain why they seem to have deliberately omitted the most exciting English nature poetry in favour of modest verse written about particular places.

‘You must visualize the earlier part of the book at any rate, as a series of views of this island rendered by oil, water-colour or engraving. Cunningham’s conventional landscapes have been well described by Mr. Grigson in The Romantics as ‘like a cast oil on a dining-room wall in an eighteenth-century mansion – the kind that goes with the house because it is too big for the auctioneer to sell’. The wooden passage from Dodsley is like an inn signboard : Bampfylde is a Morland : Goldsmith is some not very good picture, but so famous that it could not be omitted : Crabbe has the freshness of a Cotman water-colour : many of the lesser-known writers round the turn of the [19^th] century are like the copper-engravings or Bewick cuts which, no doubt, adorned some of their works...’

So rather than stick to poems that retain a ‘freshness’, like Crabbe’s, the editors have deliberately chosen a ‘not very good’ Oliver Goldsmith (an extract from ‘The Deserted Village’), a ‘wooden passage’ from Robert Dodsley, and so on. The reason for this approach becomes clear when they describe as ‘the reason for the book’ the chance to include ‘quiet Georgian rectors, village schoolmasters, peers in their libraries looking across the park, Victorian drunks and reformers and escapists’. ‘They were recording landscape from the distant view to the cascade in a wet cart rut, with a love and observation men are just beginning again to appreciate. Theirs may be ‘pedestrian’ verse, but it is written by pedestrians or, at the fastest, travellers on a cob, for pedestrians.’ Even without this explanation, it is clear from a glance at the index of authors that there are a disproportionate number of Reverends: Rev. Henry Alford, Rev. William Barnes, Rev. Robert Blair, Rev. William Lisle Bowles, Rev. Moses Browne etc. And of course George Crabbe was among their number: he was the Rector of Trowbridge.

 

I was looking for a brief example to include here, but a lot of this poetry is not available on the web (although it was out of copyright when the book was published back in 1944). However, here are a few lines from the book’s opening poem, dating from the start of the eighteenth century. It describes a night scene in Wiltshire viewed (or imagined?!) by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, in her poem ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’:

...Whilst Salisb'ry stands the Test of every Light,
In perfect Charms, and perfect Virtue bright:
When Odours, which declin'd repelling Day,
Thro' temp'rate Air uninterrupted stray;
When darken'd Groves their softest Shadows wear,
And falling Waters we distinctly hear;
When thro' the Gloom more venerable shows
Some ancient Fabrick, awful in Repose,
While Sunburnt Hills their swarthy Looks conceal,
And swelling Haycocks thicken up the Vale...

‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ is printed next to a John Piper sketch of Pistyll Cain in North Wales – his illustrations are not linked to specific poems: the one below shows the Approach to Gordale Scar.

Sandy Flora

As you can see, I have borrowed a copy of The Poet's Eye (1944), Geoffrey Grigson's anthology which I mentioned a few weeks ago. Of course it is John Craxton's lithographs that strike the reader immediately, ranging from small black and white images of shells, stones and trees to full page landscapes in colour, like the illustration below. But the writings themselves are also fascinating, bringing together 'visionary' poems and prose and covering 'generalised vision, descriptive vision cut from its application, vision conceived simply for its own sake, and vision of the intense kind...’ It is full of surprising choices, from its opening version of Rabelais’ ‘Inscription Above the Entrance to the Abbey of Theleme’ by Sir Thomas Urquhart, to the short extract from Moby Dick which closes the book. In between there are many landscape poems and descriptions. The writers who feature most often are William Barnes, John Clare, George Crabbe, R.W. Dixon, John Dryden, Coventry Patmore and Walt Whitman. It is an eclectic and very individual selection, although clearly in sympathy with the period’s Neo-Romantic sensibilities: poems and prose by both William Blake and Samuel Palmer are included.

Of course it’s quite impossible to convey the pleasures of such an anthology with just one example, but I’ll try anyway. At one point there is a little cluster of George Crabbe ‘visions’, starting with part of his poem, ‘The Ancient Mansion’. Then, after an extract from William Barnes, Grigson moves to some more of Crabbe’s verse, a description of ‘Sandy Flora’ taken from ‘The Village’ (1783) which I’ve reproduced below. And then he moves immediately to a third piece, prose this time, headed ‘Seaside Fen’ and apparently a footnote to ‘The Lover’s Journey’ (from Crabbe’s Tales). There are various other Crabbe selections dotted through the book (I like, for example, ‘Moonlight and Jelly-Fish or Sea Nettles’, which describes them: ‘Soft brilliant, tender, through the Wave they glow, / And make the Moon-beam brighter where they flow...’) Grigson says in the introduction that ‘all the truest and deepest poets, if they do not always remain there, go, at least, through a stage of vision in the very straightforwardness of the word: they have good eyes.’ George Crabbe, it is safe to say, never lost his ‘good eyes’.

Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its wither'd ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye.
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil,
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf,
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;
O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade.
With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound,
And a sad splendour vainly shines around.