Wanderlust: A History of Walking

by Rebecca Solnit

  The formal garden, with its patterns made of clipped hedges, geometric pools, and trees in orderly ranks, had suggested that nature was a chaos on which men imposed order (though starting in Italy in the Renaissance, paintings of unaltered landscapes, if not the unaltered land itself, were appreciated). In England the garden would become less and less formal as the eighteenth century progressed, and this idea of naturalistic landscaping that would be called the jardin anglais, the English garden, or the landscape garden is one of the great English contributions to Western culture. As the visual barrier that separated it from its surroundings vanished, the design of the garden became less distinctly separate too. In 1709 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, had effused, “O glorious Nature! Supremely Fair, and sovereignly Good! . . . I shall no longer resist the Passion growing in me for Things of a natural kind where neither Art nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoiled their genuine Order, by breaking in upon that primitive State. Even the rude Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grottos and broken Falls of waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness itself, as representing Nature more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery of Princely Gardens.” Rhetoric raced ahead of practice. It would be many more decades before princely gardens gave way to wilderness. But Shaftesbury’s optimistic view of nature as inherently good joined with the optimism that men could appropriate, improve upon, or invent nature in their gardens.

  “Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the science of Landscape, will forever by men of Taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn nature,” famously declared Horace Walpole, the wealthy aesthete who did much to inculcate romantic tastes in his peers. One of the premises of this declaration is that gardening is as much an art as the more traditionally respected practices of poets and painters, and the period was a sort of golden age for attention to gardens—or a kind of age of incubation, in which the taste for nature was hatched out of those gardens, poems, and paintings. Another premise is that nature needs to be dressed and adorned, at least in the garden, and paintings suggested some of the ways in which this could be done. Among the influences on the emerging English landscape garden were the seventeenth-century Italian landscapes of Claude Lorrain, Nicholas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa, with their rolling ground stretching toward far horizons, their clumps of feathery trees framing the distance, their serene bodies of water and their classical buildings and ruins (and, in Rosa’s case, the cliffs, torrents, and bandits that made him the most gothic of the three). Pillared temples and Palladian bridges were added to make English gardens resemble the Italian campagna of these paintings and to suggest that England was heir to Rome’s virtues and beauties. “All gardening is landscape painting,” said Alexander Pope, and people were learning to look at landscape in gardens as they had learned to look at landscape in paintings.

  And though architectural items—ruins, temples, bridges, obelisks—continued to be sprinkled over gardens for many decades, the subject of gardens was becoming nature itself—but a very specific version of nature, nature as a visual spectacle of plants and water and space, a serene thing to be contemplated serenely. Unlike the formal garden and the painting, which had a single ideal point of view from which they could be regarded, the English landscape garden “asked to be explored, its surprises and unsuspected corners to be discovered on foot,” writes garden historian John Dixon Hunt. Carolyn Bermingham adds, in her history of the relations between class and landscape, “Whereas the French formal garden was based on a single axial view from the house, the English garden was a series of multiple oblique views that were meant to be experienced while one walked through it.” To use anachronistic terms, the garden was becoming more cinematic than pictorial; it was designed to be experienced in motion as a series of compositions dissolving into each other rather than as a static picture. It was now designed aesthetically as well as practically for walkers, and walking and looking were beginning to become linked pleasures.

  There were other factors in the increasing naturalization of the garden. Perhaps the most important was the equation of the landscape garden with English liberty. The English aristocrats cultivating a taste for nature were, in a sense, politically positioning themselves and their social order as natural, in contrast to French artifice. Thus their pursuit of country pastimes, their penchant for portraits of themselves in the landscape, their creation of naturalistic gardens, their cultivation of a taste for landscape, all had a political subtext, as Bermingham has so brilliantly pointed out. Yet other influences include reports of Chinese gardens, in which the paths and waterways were sinuous and winding, the overall effect celebrating rather than subduing natural complexity. Neither the early chinoiseries nor the imitations of nature bore much resemblance to their originals, but the intent was there, and evolving. Finally, this changing taste manifests an extraordinary confidence. The formal, enclosed garden and the castle are corollaries to a dangerous world from which one needs to be protected literally and aesthetically. As the walls come down, the garden proposes that there is already an order in nature and that it is in harmony with the “natural” society enjoying such gardens. The growing taste for ruins, mountains, torrents, for situations provoking fear and melancholy, and for artwork about all these things suggests that life had become so placidly pleasant for England’s privileged that they could bring back as entertainment the terrors people had once strived so hard to banish. Too, private experience and informal art were blooming elsewhere, notably in the rise of the novel.

  The exemplary garden for this evolution is Stowe in Buckingham. Stowe itself went through most of the phases of the English garden in the eighteenth century and stands now as a kind of lexicon of eighteenth-century gardening, from its temples, grotto, hermitage, and bridges to its lake and landscaping. It had some of the earliest chinoiserie and Gothic-revival architecture in England. Its owner, Viscount Cobham, had replaced the formal “parlour garden” made in 1680 with a far larger formal garden that he slowly revised and erased as the new century advanced. First the Elysian Fields, with their Temples of British Worthies and of Ancient and Modern Virtue, mentioned in the preceding chapter, were transformed into something with softer, more undulating lines, and the rest of the garden eventually followed. Straight walks became serpentine, and their walkers no longer promenaded but wandered. Christopher Hussey describes Stowe, the political capital of the Whigs, as transforming politics into garden architecture, loosening the formal landscape design “into harmony with the age’s humanism, its faith in disciplined freedom, its respect for natural qualities, its belief in the individual, whether man or tree, and its hatred of tyranny whether in politics or plantations.” Most of the great landscape architects of the age worked for Cobham, and many of the great poets and writers were among his guests. And the gardens continually expanded, annexing dozens of acres at a time. “Within thirty years,” summarizes one of the garden’s historians, “his taste had moved from a preoccupation with regular arrangements of terraced lawns, statues and straight paths . . . to an essay in three-dimensional landscape painting, the creation of an ideal landscape.”

  Celebrated in many poems, pictures, and journals, Stowe was a central site in the cultural foment of the era, both as a subject and a retreat. “O lead me to the wide-extended walks / The fair majestic paradise of Stowe . . . While there with th’ enchanted round I walk / The regulated wild,” wrote James Thomson, a guest during most of 1734 and 1735, in the “Autumn” section of his poem The Seasons. This enormously successful poem with its blank verse describing the changing year and minor dramas in the landscape probably did more than any other literary work to inculcate a taste for scenery; in the nineteenth century J.M. W. Turner was still appending big chunks of the poem to his paintings. Pope wrote at length of Stowe’s glories too, and in a letter described a typical day at Stowe in the 1730s: “Everyone takes a different way, and wanders about till we meet at noon.” Walpole visit
ed Cobham’s heir at Stowe in 1770. After breakfast, the party spent the day walking in the gardens “or drove about it in cabriolets, till it was time to dress” for dinner. It had become enormous, a place it takes a whole day to explore on foot, and no clear boundary but a ha-ha separates it from the surrounding countryside.

  That year, the Gothic architect Sanderson Miller walked there with various people, including Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the landscape architect who was to complete the revolution in garden design with his unadorned expanses of water, trees, and grass. Brown created the Grecian Valley in Stowe, the largest and plainest stretch of the garden (and though it looks wholly natural, the valley itself was dug by hand by many laborers, whose views of landscape gardening do not survive). The Brownian garden, having largely banished sculpture and architecture, no longer commemorated human history and politics. Nature was no longer a setting, but the subject. And the walkers in such a garden were no longer being steered toward ready-made reflections on virtue or Virgil; they were free to think their own thoughts as they followed the meandering paths (though those thoughts might well be about nature, or rather Nature, as taught by myriad texts). From being an authoritarian, public, and essentially architectural space, the garden was becoming a private and solitary wilderness.

  Not everyone was ready to accept the landscape garden as realized by Brown. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, wrote, “Gardening, as far as Gardening is an Art, or entitled to the appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then no longer be a garden.” Reynolds was onto something. The garden, in the course of becoming more and more indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape, had become unnecessary—Walpole had said of the landscape architect William Kent that he had “leapt the fence and saw all nature was a garden.” If a garden was nothing more than a visually pleasing space in which to wander, then gardens could be found rather than made, and the tradition of the garden walk could expand to become the tourist’s excursion. Rather than looking at the work of man, the scenic stroller could look at the works of nature, and to look at nature as a work of art completed a momentous revolution. In Shaftesbury’s terms, princely gardens had finally given way to wilderness; the nonhuman world had become a fit subject for aesthetic contemplation.

  The aristocratic garden had begun as part of the fortified castle, and slowly its boundaries had melted away; the melting of the garden into the world is a mark of how much safer England had become (and to a lesser degree, much of western Europe, where the fashion for the English garden soon caught on). Since about 1770, England had undergone a “transportation revolution” of improved roads, decreased roadside crime, and cheaper fares. The very nature of travel changed. Before the mid-eighteenth century, travel accounts have little to say about the land between religious or cultural landmarks. Afterward, an entirely new way of travel arose. In pilgrimage and practical travel, the space between home and destination had been an inconvenience or an ordeal. When this space became scenery, travel became an end in itself, an expansion of the garden stroll. That is to say, the experiences along the way could replace destinations as the purpose of travel. And if the whole landscape was the destination, one arrived as soon as one set out in this world that could be looked at as a garden or a painting. Walking had long been recreational, but travel had joined it, and it was only a matter of time before traveling on foot would itself become a widespread part of the pleasures of scenic travel, its slowness finally a virtue. The point at which a poor poet and his sister might travel across a snowy countryside for the pleasure of looking and walking was drawing near.

  Afterward, Wordsworth himself was moved to write a guidebook to the Lake District, in which he summarized the history traced here. “Within the last sixty years,” he wrote in 1810, “a practice, denominated Ornamental Gardening, was at that time becoming prevalent over England. In union with an admiration of this art, and in some instances in opposition to it, had been generated a relish for select parts of natural scenery: and Travellers, instead of confining their observations to Towns, Manufactories, or Mines, began (a thing till then unheard of) to wander over the island in search of sequestered spots, distinguished . . . for the sublimity or beauty of the forms of Nature there to be seen.”

  III. INVENTING SCENIC TOURISM

  The unhappy German traveler Carl Moritz, who felt rejected at many points on his pedestrian journey, in fact encountered a plethora of walkers, though neither he nor his modern readers made much of them. He takes little note of the many people he saw walking from Greenwich to London, but he does say of London’s St. James’s Park that what “greatly compensates for the mediocrity of this park, is the astonishing number of people who, towards evening, in fine weather, resort here; our finest walks are never so full even in the midst of summer. The exquisite pleasure of mixing freely with such a concourse of people, who are for the most part well dressed and handsome, I have experienced this evening for the first time.” Moritz, in fact, is suggesting that walking is more genteel a pastime, or more public a genteel pastime, in England than in Germany, even if traveling on foot is not (he is also revealing that he is a snob, which may be why he resented road-walking’s plebeian status). During his time in London, he also visited Ranelagh and Vauxhall Gardens. Cousins of the country fair and the modern amusement park, these popular sites offered music, spectacles, strolls, and refreshments in a garden atmosphere, and both the gentry and the middle class flocked there for evening amusements. Like modern strollers in Latin American plazas and parks or any carnival or mall now, they were there to look at each other as well as the scenery, and the scenery was often augmented with orchestras, pantomimes, refreshments, and other diversions. Social promenading was another aspect of a thriving culture of walking, whose more solitary moments developed in the private garden and park. “The People of London are as fond of walking as our friends at Pekin of riding,” wrote Oliver Goldsmith in the guise of a Chinese visitor describing Vauxhall. “One of the principal entertainments of the citizens here in summer is to repair about nightfall to a garden not far from town, where they walk about, shew their best cloaths and best faces, and listen to a concert provided for the occasion.”

  Another significant aspect of Moritz’s travels was his visit to the famous cavern in the Peak District of Derbyshire in northern England, not far from the Lakes. Significantly, there was already a guide in place to collect a fee and show him its marvels. Scenic tourism was coming into existence in the Peak District, the Lake District, Wales, and Scotland. And just as the development of the English landscape garden had been surrounded by a flurry of descriptive poems and epistles, so the growth of tourism was encouraged and informed by guidebooks. Like modern guidebooks and travel narratives, these tell of what is to be seen and where to find it. Some of them—notably the work of the clergyman William Gilpin—also tell how to see. A taste for landscape was a sign of refinement, and those wishing to become refined took instruction in landscape connoisseurship. One suspects that the contemporaries who made Gilpin so influential a writer consulted him much the way later generations consulted guides on which fork to use or how to thank a hostess, for Gilpin wrote when the middle class was acquiring the hitherto aristocratic taste for landscape. A landscape garden was a luxury that only a few could create or use, but the unaltered landscape was available to virtually everyone, and more and more middle-class people could travel to enjoy it as the roads became safer and smoother and transportation became cheaper. A taste for landscape was something to be learned, and Gilpin was many people’s guide.

  “She would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree,” remarks Edward of the romantic Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Critic John Barrell writes that “there is a sense in which, in late eighteenth-century England, one can say that the simple contemplation of landscape, quite apart from its expression in pa
inting, writing or whatever, came to be regarded as an important pursuit for the cultivated and almost in itself the practice of an art. To display a correct taste in landscape was a valuable social accomplishment quite as much as to sing well, or to compose a polite letter. The heroines of a number of late eighteenth-century novels are made to display this taste with an almost ostentatious virtuosity, and not only the simple fact of having a taste for landscape or not, but also variations of taste within the general one, are regarded by some novelists as legitimate indications of differences in character.” Marianne Dashwood is asserting her romanticism with her taste for old twisted trees, though she apologizes for the fashionability of the taste: “It is very true . . . that admiration of landscape scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was.” She too is speaking of Gilpin, who brought into common usage the word picturesque, which originally meant any landscape that resembled or could be perceived as a picture and eventually came to mean a wild, gnarled, rough, intricate kind of landscape.