A C C L A IM

FOR

Sim on Scham as Landscape and Memory

An extraordinary book. . . . Schamas 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 Schamas

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

o n e

Wood

The Detour

chapter

one

23

In the Realm o f the Lithuanian Bison

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

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

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

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 wasnt 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, Kiplings 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 Pucks help you could time-travel
by standing still. O n Pooks 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

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.

Yosemites 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 earths 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, Peachams 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, Peachams 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 Peachams 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, Pans 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 earths 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 Friedrichs 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 sculptors 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 Is
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 landscapes 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 Osiriss 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 Kiefers book, history is written in
letters o f fire, and the optimism o f the eighteenth centurys 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 ont 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 theyve 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 wasnt 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 dont 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 historys 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 , Stalins 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 minds 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 nations 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 heros 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, Kosciuszkos 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; deaths-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 Polands 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 minds 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 mothers 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 Elis 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
Londons Jewish East End, retains just the scraps and shreds o f her fathers and
uncles 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, thats 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
ilys 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 Sztajnbergs 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 Chmielnickis 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 mans 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 Mickiewiczs class moved swiftly through
the swishing coat-hems and the prodding fingers with their eyes averted and
noses in the air. But Mickiewiczs 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 others 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 Polands martyrdom
with the Passion o f Christ: The Books o f the Polish Pilgrim . Book 15 features a
Christian forester who declines a highwaymans 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
Mickiewiczs 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 Mickiewiczs 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 Jews dulcimer thus becomes a musical weapon, unsheathed to turn a
wedding party into a patriotic communion. And Jankiels performance
becomes a musical history o f Polands sorrows and defiance: beginning with
the polonaise o f May 3; the anthem o f Kosciuszkos 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 Kosciuszkos 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 Mickiewiczs plunge into
the cult o f Towianist messianism that prophesied the convergence o f Chris
tianity and Judaism, have argued that it was his wifes 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 Michelets 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 Mickiewiczs children after the poets 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
enemys 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 Mickiewiczs 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 Jews dulcimer thus becomes a musical weapon, unsheathed to turn a
wedding party into a patriotic communion. And Jankiels performance
becomes a musical history o f Polands sorrows and defiance: beginning with
the polonaise o f May 3; the anthem o f Kosciuszkos 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 Kosciuszkos 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 Mickiewiczs plunge into
the cult o f Towianist messianism that prophesied the convergence o f Chris
tianity and Judaism, have argued that it was his wifes 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 Michelets 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 Mickiewiczs children after the poets 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
BAv, 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
enemys 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 Mickiewiczs 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 fathers fathers family lived in Izmir
while my mothers fathers 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 Mickiewiczs 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 grandfathers 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 cars 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 youve
had your innings, youve 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

The Royal Beasts o f Biatowieza

P lease, try the bison, said Tadeusz. Really, its very good.
So I did, and had to admit that it tasted better than it looked crimson and
stringy arranged vividly on the huntsmans platter between the wild boar
and the elk venison. In fact it tasted like nothing Id 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

yo u n g

POLE

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

scholars 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 forests 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 Saverys 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 countrys 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

40

IN 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

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 Christianitys 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 Magnuss 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 Hussowskis 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 nations 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,

42

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

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 emperors 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

44

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

(who had, doubtless to the kings 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 days 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 Stanislass 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 Lithuanias 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,

46

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

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 kings 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 Catherines 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 Polands
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,

48

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

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 Kosciuszkos 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 Is 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 huntsmans 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

49

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
enments cult o f reason. His profession as official forester, not to mention the
academic literature and the prosperity o f the tsars 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.

50

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 minds 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
admirers passion. When he ate them, savoring the special delicacy o f smoked
bisons 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 huntsmens 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
latters 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,

52

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 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 wasnt 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 Brinckens 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 Pauls characteristically eccentric determination to outfit his Russian cav
alry in elk-skin breeches. Happily for the elk, the ape-like tsars 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 Brinckens
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 tsars 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.

54

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

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 Khlustines salon Mickiewicz met James Fenimore Cooper, already
Americas 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 Lithuanias
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 Mickiewiczs 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

Mickiewiczs

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 fathers 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 Pushkins 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. Mickiewiczs 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 lords 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 Tadeuszs 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 others 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 itolds 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 Tadeuszs uncles 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
Tadeuszs 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,/Thats like a peasant weeping for
her son. Telimena, grasping the point only too accurately, retorts, Soplicas,
its 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 mans 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-mans-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
mens quarry. The two young men the count and Tadeusz

fire and miss the

charging animal. He is about to scalp the counts 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 seneschals 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, Tadeuszs
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
cauldrons 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 Polands 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

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

62

Bialowiezas 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, Konwickis 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 Mickiewiczs 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
woodsmans 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 woodsmans twitching Ups that
question which is always with us:
Was it worth it?28
But Konwickis 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 Polands

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 foresters 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,
Grottgers

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

64

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

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 Hagenbecks
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,
Bialowiezas 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

66

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

exploitation o f the forest in the years leading up to the war, as well as from the
tsars 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 afternoons 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 zyzs 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 Mickiewiczs 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 Zeromskis 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 wont 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 forests 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 countrys 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 Germanys 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 Gorings 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-

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

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

Gorings own bison. For
what to the Poles was
Lithuanias

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 aviators 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 Gorings 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 tsars 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 Gorings
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 Alexanders
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
Scherpings German forest guards, the same protection was not extended to

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IN 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

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 Biatowiezas 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 Bocks 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 Germanys African colonies that contained tracts o f primeval rain forest.
Now he was able, with Gorings 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 tsars hunting apartments while the rest o f the palace
was filled up with officers, Gorings 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 commanders 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
Reichs 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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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

hung on Gorings 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
seneschals bison horn and Jankiels 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 woodsmens 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 ones
speech was different, the way one walked was different, ones 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 Polands 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, Khrushchevs 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 Peoples 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 Gorings 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
dont 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

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

76

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

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
Mussolinis dictatorship. Now, his Roman Empire is open to barbarian occu
pation, the Germans obeying Hiders 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 SSs 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 Trajans
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 Tacituss 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
Tacituss 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

The H u n t fo r G erm ania

77

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, Tacituss 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
monasterys 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 Tacituss 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 Tacituss 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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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

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 chancellors 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 sisters 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 Giovannis, 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 Partys principal ideologue; Heinrich Himmler,
who prided himself on his classical cultivation; and not least, Adolf Hider.

The H u n t fo r Germ ania

79

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, Himmlers 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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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

tal. Himmlers 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 Mussolinis 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 counts 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 Guarnieris 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 ones fatherland. 16

82

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 Romans 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 Gilgameshs 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. Livys 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 herdsmans
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 <pliotn: T.ulcus/ K oik e.

8. Puszca Biaiowieza

(photo: Tadcusz Rolkc).

9. Punsk: the Jewish cemetery

(photo: Tadeusz Rolkc).

io. T he Codex Aesinas, First Folio, Tacituss 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 Tacituss 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 es 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.
Tacituss 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. Tacituss Germans are,
for sure, less idyllic and more barbaric, but the barely worked fabric o f their

84

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

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 ss 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

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
ituss 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 Tacituss 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 Tiberiuss 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 historys 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 Varuss 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 Velleiuss account, Varus courts hubris precisely because he is a speci
men o f everything that was wrong with the Roman Empire o f Tiberius.
(Velleiuss 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 Velleiuss 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 Tiberiuss brother, Drusus, and thus the grandson o f
Augustus. N o t only does Germanicus more than make up for Varuss 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 Varuss 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 Varuss 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 ss 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 ss 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 iuss

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 Germanicuss 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 Arminiuss own book o f forestfighting. First he disguises himself as a Cheruscan tribesman in a wild-animals
pelt to spy out the enemys 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 enemys 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 Varuss 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
dePiccolomini, 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 Silvios correspondents, the poet G io
vanni Campano, attending the diet o f German princes at Regensburg in 1471

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

(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 asas

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,
Celtiss 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 Celtiss 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
Celtiss debt to Tacitus was unmistakable, both in his account o f
Arminiuss 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.

94

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

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.
Celtiss 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
Celtiss 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 Celtiss
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 Altdorfers 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 Celtiss 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

96

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

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 unsters 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 ss 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 orfers 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

98

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

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 Celtiss 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 whats 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 well 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.
Altdorfers 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 Altdorfers 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
dorfers 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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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 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 Saverys 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, Saverys 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 Tacituss text could alone

Arminius Redivivus

l o

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 Celtiss 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

102

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

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

A rm in iu s R edivivus

103

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 Klopstocks 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 Klopstocks 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 Kerstings 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, Korners 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.

106

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 Friedrichs 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 Friedrichs 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 Altdorfers Silva H ercynia are lit with
the illumination o f a sacred triumph, in Friedrichs 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 ofVaruss 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 Friedrichs 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 Varuss
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

A rm in iu s R edivivus

107

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 Herders 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 Kolbes devouring vegetable
monsters; or the child-destroying elf-king o f the alders o f Goethes 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
Huttens Knights Rebellion in 1823, Friedrich produced a painting that
anthologized all these themes. The figure who stands over Ulrich von Huttens
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
tens 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

l 09

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 Germanys neoclassical architects,
Karl-Friedrich Schinkel, made a drawing for a monument o f Hermann, to be

Caspar David
Friedrich, Ulrich
von H u ttens
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 Schinkels 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

110

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

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 Rousseaus 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
Bandels version was in every way more prosaic and predictable than Schinkels
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 Schinkels brooding warrior resting on his sword, von Bandels
Hermann brandished it aloft rather like a heldentenor in a Wagner opera. But in
the light o f Bismarcks military road to unification, the sword took on enormous
emblematic significance in the eventual project. Bartholdis Statue o f Liberty

Kaiser Wilhelm 1
visits von Bandel
studio.

A rm in iu s Redivivus
would have the torch o f freedom; Bandels 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 Bandels atelier, where he lingered in admiration over the
heroic features o f his ancient predecessor in the vast, helmeted head.

112

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 XIVs 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
Tacituss 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 Germanys 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

l l 3

Riehls intellectual self-discovery ran parallel to his nations. 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 Arndts 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 Riehls 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
trys 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. Germanys 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. Germanys 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 Hesses 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 Is 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 Weimars 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

1 18

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.
Tacituss 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, Riehls 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 Rebels 1934 D er W ald in der deutschen K u lt u r (The Forest in German
Culture) and Julius Kobers 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 Schonichens 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 Gretels
gingerbread cottage.

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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

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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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

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.
Kiefers 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 clowns 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 Kiefers
absurdly solitary Nazi substituted for Friedrichs 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 Kiefers 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 Germanys

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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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

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
tions 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

126

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 iefers 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 Germanys 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,
Germanys

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 Friedrichs 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 Romans 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 Dantes 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, Thusneldas 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

128

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 ys 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 iuss 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
manns Battle.
1978-80.

W aldsterben

129

Germans 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 Reichs 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, Kiefers 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 Altdorfers 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 Kiefers 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
summers 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.

130

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

Waldsterben
T o read the B o sto n H erm anns-Schlacht is to be led b y K iefers 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

132

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

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, Kiefers 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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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

conspicuously missing from Kiefers 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
Scholems 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

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.
Hastingss 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 ones 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

136

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

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
mans 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 Hastingss 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,

Green M en

137

bloody-minded, freely fornicating earthiness, in all likelihood the model for

Addison and Steeles Sir Roger de Coverley and Fieldings 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 picturesques demand for irregularity. Besides, Hastings exuded a
kind o f warty rustic integrity that was at the opposite extreme from Gilpins
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 kings 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

1 38

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

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 widows 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

Green M en

139

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 fathers 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 Is sons, Richard, was also

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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

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 kings 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, Scotts 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 Dantes 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 dressd 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 banishd brother,
A n d a ll their lands restord 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.

1 42

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

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, Britains
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

L ivin g in the Woods

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

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

144

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 woodsmens 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
kings 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

Livin g in the Woods

145

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, Xenophons 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 kings 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 kings 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

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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

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 Lincolns 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, Manwoods forestry
statutes virtually presuppose a counter-force, a forest resistance, a Robin Hood.
In fact, however, much o f Manwoods 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 Fitznigels late
twelfth-century D ialogue o f the Exchequer (uncritically repeated by Manwood),

L ivin g in the Woods

147

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 offenders means.
Taking the kings 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. Margarets 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 kings 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 Johns 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, todays disaffected woodland baron might be tomorrows 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

Livin g in the Woods

149

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 earls 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 kings
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,
Robins 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

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

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 clerics 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 arins exploits he captures the k in g w hile disguised in the charcoal bu rn ers
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 arins
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 Edwards 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 Robins relation to
his men represents all the qualities that have been banished from the unscrupu
lous Renaissance court.

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

1 52

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

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-

H earts o f Oak and Bulwarks o f Liberty?

l 53

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

Hearts o f Oak and Bulwarks o f Liberty?

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

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

154

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 IIIs 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 ones 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 oods Sherwood was appearing in chil
drens 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.

H earts o f Oak and Bulwarks o f Liberty?

l 55

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 countrys, 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
Philips 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

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

1 56

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
Standishs 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
lands 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 Edwards 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

158

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

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 Is 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 Charless 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 kings 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

H earts o f Oak and Bulwarks o f Liberty?

159

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 Is interests in France. The
more hopeless the cause became, the more tenacious was his loyalty. When the
royalist court at Oxford dissolved, Evelyn served Charless 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 kings 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 childrens 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. Jamess 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

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

160

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 pruners 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. Evelyns 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. Evelyns 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

H earts o f Oak and Bulwarks o f Liberty?

l 6 l

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 pressd.

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 rd 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 wizards rout
o f monsters, howling Like Stabled wolves or tigers at their prey,/Doing
abhorred rites to Hecate. 54In Cowley and Evelyns 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

Evelyns 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
lyns 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 Standishs
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 nations timber, as Charles IPs reign also marked
a decisive shift toward an aggressive naval and colonial policy. Englands 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 Britains principal colonial and naval competitor. And it may have
been awareness o f the measures enacted by Louis X IVs 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-

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

16 3

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

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

164

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, Kirbys 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 kingdoms 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 Langleys 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 Englands 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
thats 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 countrys naval needs for the foreseeable future.
Near Southampton he saw gentlemens 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 witherd 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 Britains 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 nations 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*

H earts o f Oak and Bulwarks o f Liberty?

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.
Fishers 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 countrys 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

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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

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 societys 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 Beckfords gold for 61,800 Scotch firs at Fonthill or William Mellishs
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

H earts o f Oak and Bulwarks o f Liberty?

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 Evelyns 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 Evelyns
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 Hunters 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

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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
As Evelyns faithful disciple, Hunter repeated the authors 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 Evelyns original instructions
about planting the great hardwoods were now supplemented by Hunters 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
Stourtons 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.
Embowelld now, and o f thy a ncient self
Possessing nought b u t the scoopd 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, crookd 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 lverizd 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

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

l 73

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

The Pillars o f G aul

175

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

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

176

lyns 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 lOrme 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 Vitruviuss D e a r c h ite c tu r a l But de
lOrmes treatise is imprinted with French classi
cisms 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 kings 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
kingdoms 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 XTVs 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 lOrme,
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
berts 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
Majestys 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 Colberts 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 XIVs
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
kings 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 Colberts
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 kings 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 Colberts 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

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 Assemblys 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,
Colberts 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 Cromwells Commonwealth.) And with each ship o f the line
blown out o f the water by the enemys 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 Bonapartes 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 mothers 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. Rookes 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 Ritsons naivete as an editor. The last volume, he wrote, is a notable
illustration o f the excellence and defects o f Ritsons system. Every extant allu
sion to Robin Hood is printed and explained, but Ritsons 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 rebels fate. He barricaded him
self in his room at Grays 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 Ritsons death,
and extract from the bad-tempered eccentric the essence o f H ood the rebel.
In Ritsons 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 rd food,
Stuck in the oaks ru de side . . . ?94

F o ild o f its a n tle r d fo o d : Reynoldss 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. Lets 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 Reynoldss 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 ters 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 forests 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 lln 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

Grizzlies

I t was Augustus T. D ow ds 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 Murphys 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 mans 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? Thats 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. Savages 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 valleys
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 Gales fortune turned to fools
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 formers needles are blue-green scaly spikes; the latters 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 Harvards 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 Americas 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 <md tried hard not to be
impressed, was startled by the thought that they had stood upright when
David danced before the Ark; when Theseus ruled Athens; when Aeneas fled
from the burning wreck o f Troy.7
In the first instance, though, it was the commerce o f novelty, not the cult
o f antiquity, that took up the Mammoth Trees. By the time James Mason
Hutchings, the English-born publisher o f H u tchings C a lifo rn ia M agazine,
took the first party o f tourists to the Calaveras Grove in 1855, the botanical

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 Murphys 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: Americas 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

THE VERDANT CROSS

190

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 Watkinss glass-plate stereographs.

More than any other images,

Watkinss 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.
Watkinss pictures went on show at the Goupil Gallery in New York in 1862
and were a phenomenal success. Those who had ridiculed George Gales 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 worlds first wilderness park, had been introduced by Cal
ifornias 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 ods
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

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 Coopers forest romances, the miraculous appearance of
western woodlands seemed to be a sign o f G ods 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 Watkinss stereographs
that influenced Bierstadt and the popular writer and lecturer Fitz Hugh Lud
low to make the trip to Yosemite in 1863. Ludlows 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 Haydons 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 Bierstadts 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
Watkinss 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
icas 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 Watkinss albumen print was not the only source for Bierstadts heroic treatment o f the ancient and weathered tree. For it is distincdy
possible that he would have seen Caspar David Friedrichs 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 Friedrichs 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

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,
Whittredges 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
Whittredges 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, Whittredges 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. Bierstadts painting is sylvandomestic: the ancient residence o f the most indigenous Americans.
Both Bierstadts and Whittredges 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.

Durands 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 Coles 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
Coles 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
Bryants 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 Coles
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 ods 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
natures 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 oles
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 oles 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 oles 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
Durands memorial tribute, and only recently rediscovered, Churchs painting
is nonetheless o f a substantial size and grandeur (color illus. 22). Even more
explicitly than K in d r e d Spirits, Churchs 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 oles 1845 wilderness monument. But even more than in
his masters 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.

206

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 Churchs spontaneously blooming wreath, the tendrils o f the
vine curling about the limbs o f the Savior in Caspar David Friedrichs 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. Bierstadts 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 humanitys 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 colleges 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 Frazers 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 authors intentions toward the depths o f the
mythic forest, rather than the brightly mowed pasture o f Frazers 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
Frazers 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 Frazers 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 Nietzsches 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
ticellis and Ghirlandaios 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, Its a pity that one cant 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 lifes work, closing the German Institute in Florence, the
institution that symbolized Warburgs efforts to reconcile magic and logic.
As the war dragged on, Warburgs 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
burgs 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 Warburgs 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 trees 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

The Verdant Cross

217

Even the most dramatic acts o f evangelical tree surgery were ambiguous.
None was more famous than that described in the monk Willibrords life o f St.
Boniface. Relating the saints 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. Bonifaces 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 oaks 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 Bonifaces 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 its 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, Willibrords 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 Bonifaces 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, Frazers 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 Adams 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
Adams mouth, from where it sprouts into sacred history. It supplies a length
for N oahs ark (a first redemption), the rod o f Moses, a beam in Solomons
temple, a plank in Josephs 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 Modenas 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 Saviors 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 trees 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

single image or rit

Giovanni da
M odena,

ual. In Piero della

Francescas

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 Zittaus 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 deaths-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 Cranachs 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

Reformations

all

the

hatred

o f Catholic icons, Lutheran printers were not above borrowing them for their
own theology. Heinrich Vogtherrs 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
tions

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
Bonaventures 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, 163335

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. Callots 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

saints

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 Erasmuss student, and in many ways Goltziuss
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 Marys 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 trees 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 Christs 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 Goltziuss 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.

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
Europes 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 ones 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, Vitruviuss 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 Vitruviuss 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 Vitruviuss 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 ods 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 Popes 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 Palladios Villa Rotonda at Verona, and his influence set
the tone and taste o f Georgian country-house building for an entire genera
tion. So Warburtons 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 Burlingtons 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 Stukeleys Itin e ra riu m C u riosu m had cited the cloisters
o f what would be the bishops 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 Deckers 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 Walpoles 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 Vitruviuss 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 Laugiers 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
Rousseaus Discourse on the
Origins o f Inequality, on
the other hand, pub
lished two years after
Laugiers

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 Vasaris 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. Marys

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 Cathedrals 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 Dugdales 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
Halls 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 Halls 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 Herders 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 Goethes 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 Herders 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
Forsters 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 Friedrichs 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
Friedrichs 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 Friedrichs 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 travellers 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 Friedrichs 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 Christs 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 Natures Garage.
What was this thing my family seemed to have about forests? For while the
Steinbergs were logrolling in Lithuania, my mother-in-laws 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-laws 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

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

THE VERDANT CROSS

242

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 Pooks 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 doesnt have to be ours;
the water doesnt 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 Iim agination de
la m atiere

CHAPTER

FIVE

Streams o f Consciousness

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 Barlows 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 philosophers 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 Boyles 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.

The Flow o f Myth

247

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 Kirchers 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

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

248

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 Barlows 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

The Flow o f Myth

249

reservations about the execution o f Louis XVI. Barlows 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.

250

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

And as Barlows 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, Dupuiss 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 Enlightenments 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, Dupuiss 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

The Flow o f Myth

25 l

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 deys
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 princes 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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2 52

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. Barlows 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 Barlows 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 Osiriss 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

The Flow o f Myth

253

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 husbands 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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254

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 Barlows
enthusiasm for the subject had been stirred by reading the Discourse on the Wor
ship o f Priapus, published in 1786 by D Hancarvilles patron, Richard Payne
Knight, and scandalously well known among Barlows 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 Barlows 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 Barlows 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 Budges 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. Frazers own

collection o f archaeological and folklore sources is housed.16 Its just possible
to step inside (as if peering into Osiriss tomb) and extract learned plunder:
German, French, and English tomes o f nineteenth-century epigraphy and

The Flow o f Myth

255

Egyptology, densely inscribed and reinscribed in Frazers 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 Frazers 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
Osiriss 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

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

2 56

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 Plutarchs 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 demigods 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 Plutarchs 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
Platos 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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257

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 Egypts 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

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

258

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 Hesiods 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 Platos 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

259

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 Niles 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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260

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 Typhons 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 Typhons 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
Egypts 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 Chinas 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.

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

262

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 Neros 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 Cleopatras 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 Niles
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 Niles 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 ods 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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S T R E A M S OF C O N S C I O U S N E S S

solidity to the soil, manuring the fields. Unlike the floods o f misery and
destruction he had seen in Europe, the Niles inundation was a flood o f joy.
Even the horrid things dwelling in the rivers 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.
Fabris 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 Niles 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 Jordans 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 Pharaohs
chariots, a new life o f freedom and holiness consecrated with the crossing o f
the Judean river. These were Jehovahs waters, not Osiriss: 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

Holy Confluences

265

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

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 Fabris 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 Fabris 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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267

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 Fabris 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
Boccaccios 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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268

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 suns fire impregnating the waters,
is ritually observed with a candle plunged into a fountain. In celebration, the

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269

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 IIs 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. Francescos 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.

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

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. Francescos 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

Fons Sapientiae

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 Colonnas
scene was evidently meant as another variation on O vids celebration o f the

Woodcut,
from
Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili.

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

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
Colonnas 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, Colonnas 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 Giambolognas 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 Venuss) to watery
deaths (such as Adoniss) 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

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

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

Fons Sapientiae

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

278

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

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
Palissys 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
Platos 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 Arundels 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 ess 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

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

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

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 papacys ambitions to create a new and glo
rious Christian regnum were concentrated: the piazza in front o f the Basilica
o f St. Peters.
The fact that daunting logistical obstacles stood in the way o f the enter
prise only whetted the popes appetite. Doubdess he had read Plinys 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 Plinys 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. Peters; a miracle o f urban logistics, wholly worthy o f the magnitude o f
Sixtuss 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 obelisks conversion was completed when it
was surmounted by a cross and Sixtuss 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
Frontinuss 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 Sixtuss 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

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

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 rists 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 Portas fountains sat importandy on their Roman hills,
devoid o f any real kinedc animation. The obelisk stood to attention before St.
Peters 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 dellacqua.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 Michelangelos 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 saints 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 Ovids myths, the moment when Neptune relents from the primal
flood and, to the sound o f Tritons horn, the waters recede into the forms they
took on the reborn earth: lakes, seas, and rivers. Berninis 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 Berninis 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

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 lla 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 Berninis
fountain.

Though one part o f Berninis 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
Berninis other great works o f sacred theater, like the Cornaro Chapel or the
bm ccia o f St. Peters, are masterpieces: in demanding the suspension o f the

Bernini and the Four Rivers

29 3

beholders 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.
Peters 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 Berninis 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 SantAgnese. 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 IIIs 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 fountains centerpiece. It may well be
that Borromini had in mind a simple treatment that would emulate the undec
orated setting o f the St. Peters obelisk.83 If this was indeed the case, then Bor
romini mistook the popes 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

Giambolognas 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
Berninis figure o f the Rfo de la Plata.84
All o f which suggests that many o f the ideas that would coalesce in
Berninis 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 ts 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,

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 Berninis 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

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

298

ent austerity o f the pope, he wanted something more elaborately triumphal

than Borrominis 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 Borrominis pro
jected Church o f SantAgnese (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. Peters removed to the Piazza
Navona.
Even by his own standards o f inventiveness, Berninis master-concept was
phenomenally bold. It seemed to defy the conventions o f matter, with Domitians 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 Berninis 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

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 popes 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 Innocents 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.
Kirchers 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

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 Kirchers 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
Berninis 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 Kirchers Her

metic code, or the Rio
de la Plata, the site o f the
Counter-Reformations
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

Berninis 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 Berninis 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 Niles head remains veiled to
emphasize the mystery o f its, and the worlds 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 Romes 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 stones 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 Berninis 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

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 Raleghs 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 ils 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 ans 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 lutarchs
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 Raleghs 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 Martins fate was fantastic enough without embel
lishment. As the sole survivor o f Maravers 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 Ovids 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 troops 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 queens 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 Berrios 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, Berrios ostensible fatalism
was seasoned by anticipation o f the privations that would be Raleghs 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 Raleghs 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 Raleghs 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 Raleghs 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 Berrios subalterns, Domingo de Vera, as Raleghs
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, Raleghs 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 Raleghs 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 Raleghs 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 mans 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 Raleghs 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

3 16

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 Raleghs 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, Raleghs 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 Raleghs 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 Raleghs, Lord Cobham, a statement of
incrimination. Panicky lies, and stuttering retractions from Raleghs 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 kings 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. Thomass 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

Raleghs 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 Raleghs 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 Roes 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 explorers 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 Adams 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 natures circulation o f

BLOODSTREAMS

3 18

waters, running to the sea and thence back to the springs, and historys flow,
where the currents were irreversibly linear. Civilizations 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 Raleghs 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 Raleghs release from the Tower, the kind that could magic some
thing from nothing. What James required, as the price o f Raleghs 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 mans 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 Raleghs 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 Raleghs 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, Raleghs 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.
Raleghs 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 kings 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 villains 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

BLOODSTREAMS

320

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 axes 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 Taylors 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 Taylors ceaseless run o f publi
cations.15
Even if he did not quite live up to his own grandiose billing as the boatsmans bard, John Taylor was not simply some twopenny-hapenny 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 Devils 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 Rivers
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 mans 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

BLOODSTREAMS

322

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. Its 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 Jonsons latest play, the number o f carrion
horses floating in the water, the temerity o f the kings 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 Jamess 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 Raleghs 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 Taylors 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. Valentines 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 Taylors 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 Taylors 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 Grays 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

325

Such fiascoes could only have helped Taylors 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 afternoons
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 Raleghs misfortunes still fresh in the countrys memory, Taylor decided,

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326

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, Taylors journey from London to Scodand reversed the stereotypes
o f gold-mad adventuring that lethally wounded Ralegh, even when he was
about the kings 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 Taylors
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 Is 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 rriers 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 Majestys 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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327

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, Taylors 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 Taylors 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
lors 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 Charless 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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328

instead at the bloodstream o f the nation. In his minds 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. Harveys 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 Boteros
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 states 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 Boteros 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.
Draytons 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 rivers
course from west to east. For at their origins in the Cotswolds, the tributaries

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329

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 Is 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 Albions 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. Georges 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 Elizabeths 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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330

Edmund Spenser (who had entertained Walter Ralegh at his house on the
Blackwater River in Ireland) and William Camden, Lelands 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 Spensers
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 Denhams Coopers 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 Draytons 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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33 1

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 ts 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 boatsmans 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

BLOODSTREAMS

3 32

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 mens 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 kings 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-Poets whole life, the river
itself had gone to the Devil.

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iii

333

Power Lines

JUNE 8, 1660

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

BLOODSTREAMS

3 34

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

Velazquezs

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 mothers 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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335

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 Louiss claim, now conceded, to sover
eignty over the frontier province o f Roussillon. The finesse o f these gestures

3 36

BLOODSTREAMS

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 kings vanity, he had
taken good care to order fireworks arrangements in which the kings 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 Fouquets
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 Fouquets 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, Fouquets 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.

BLOODSTREAMS

338

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
courtiers 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 samuse 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 kings 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 Regents Birthday, 1819.

3 x. David Roberts, Hypaethral Temple, Philae.

32. Francis Frith, Dahabieh Moored under Pharoahs 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.

Power Lines

3 39

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 Fouquets 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 kings 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 kings hunger for self-aggrandize
ment. Whether they were ostensibly performed in honor o f military victories,
the kings 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,

BLOODSTREAMS

340

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 Ovids 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 Titans 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 realms 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 Vaus chateau, where he would find the
grotto o f Thetis. Inside, Girardons sculptures showed Louis-Apollo flanked by
his steeds, being refreshed by the nymphs o f the ocean at the end o f another
hard days 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 heros 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 Mansarts 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.

BLOODSTREAMS

342

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

Power Lines

34 3

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 Notres 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 Kings 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 Kings 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 Charless 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.

Power Lines

345

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

BLOODSTREAMS

346

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 kings 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 citys 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 kings 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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347

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 pumps 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 pumps lifting capacity was
enhanced, and to celebrate another chapter in the royal line o f water supply,

BLOODSTREAMS

348

the Sam aritaines 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.

Power Lines

349

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 rs 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-

BLOODSTREAMS

350

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 Fouquets 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 Aimars baguette d iv in atoire was suddenly reputed to do more than
locate hidden springs. He knew, so he said, that the womans 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.
lAbbe 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 kings 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 fathers 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 worlds 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 couldnt 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 kings 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 Dickenss
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 Gladstones 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 summers evening in the reign o f Charles II and
debating the rights and wrongs o f the execution o f Charles I. To Cowleys
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

355

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 Macaulays 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.

BLOODSTREAMS

356

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
cocks 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 freedoms 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 fishers boat, the peasants 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

357

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 Augustas 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 Winckelmanns 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 Haymans 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 Haymans 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 its 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 arrys 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 Britains 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 ariners 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 arrys 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

359

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 Barrys 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
Barrys 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,

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 rs 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 ts 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 Turners 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 Turners 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
nations 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

362

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 Turners 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 Bruneis 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 didnt 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.

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 Heines 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 Bohemias 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 ers 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 Jeffersons 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 Turners 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 Coles 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 oles 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 Turners 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 Binghams 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, Binghams 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 birds 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 Philadelphias 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 Rushs 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 Philadelphias 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 Rushs sculpture actually makes the trans
gression wholly understandable, if not altogether pardonable.
For though we can be sure that William Rush, the ships 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
Uxems 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), Eakinss 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 Painters
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 Rushs liquid drapery is present in Eakinss 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

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

Courbets 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 Courbets painting, and the cloth
falling down the models 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 ones gaze upstream, fighting the current, into the heart o f the
paintings 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 Courbets 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 doesnt 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 earths 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 kings 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 kings 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 Niles 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 queens two Roman lovers, Julius and Antony.79
So it was as Cleopatras 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 Bonapartes 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, nobodys 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;

The Waters o f Isis: The Thames and the N ile

377

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 Londons 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

BLOODSTREAMS

378

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. Jamess 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. Thomass 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; Bradshaws 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 Bradshaws 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

BLOODSTREAMS

380

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 ks 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 Cromers 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

BLOODSTREAMS

382

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 Nassers 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

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 womens
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 worlds attention to be a
place where justice and equality were truly served. And hadnt 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 Womens 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

D I NO C RAT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

386

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 womens 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.

The Woman on M oun t Rushmore

387

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
hadnt Miss Anthony herself shown what sheer dogged tenacity, and belief in
the rightness o f the cause, might accomplish?

DI NOC R AT E S AND T H E SHAMAN

388

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 Willards 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 Jeffersons 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 Borglums mind when he stood up to shake Miss
Powells 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

The Woman on M oun t Rushmore

389

money that might drift across the lobby and be snared for the mountain. She
was acutely conscious o f lacking Miss Anthonys 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 womens 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 Womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 Jeffersons
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 womens 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

392

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 womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 Borglums 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 Americas most famous suffragette to his rock-gallery o f heroes.
Borglum had his own, peculiar womens 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,

The Woman on M oun t Rushmore

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 Rodins 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. Rodins clinging calves and tensed
thighs turned into the cavalrymans 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.
Americas 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
Haggards She. But the portentous scale o f the hall also surely owed much to the
colossal Babylonian fantasy-palaces o f Griffiths epic Intolerance. And there was
an earlier, more sinister connection between the horseplay o f the sculptor and
the director. Griffiths 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. Borglums 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
fiths 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 Klans 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, Borglums 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 Borglums 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 Americas 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 Americas 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 Jeffersons 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 Roosevelts 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 Columbuss 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 Borglums 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
Jessies 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 Borglums 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 Gilpins 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 Bentons 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 wouldnt 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 womens 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 Americas
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 Borglums 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
couldnt see it, feel it, touch it, it wasnt 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 rights
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 quarters 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
Borglums 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

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 rs 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 lions 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 nurses 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 Vitruviuss 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 Dinocratess manifest offense
against that fundamental principle, as much as his jejune indifference to economy,
that marked him as the first o f architectures 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 Vitruviuss
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 Condivis 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 popes 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 Romes 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 Poussins 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

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 Kun 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 Kuan,
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 Roosevelts whiskers. So its 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 kings 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, Pedros
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. Catherines seem to have been able to transcend their
terror, since the author o f the Descriptio also suggests a shaman-like ascetic

Elevations

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 es 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 ess 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 Patinirs 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 earths 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, Jacopos 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 Dantes 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 poets 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 Petrarchs
ascent o f M ont Ventoux in April 1336.55 Some scholars continue to speculate
whether Petrarchs 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 Livys 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 Livys account o f the ascent of
M ount Haemus by Philip o f Macedon, none other than Alexander the Greats
Jacopo

father. King Philips 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 Philips 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.
Petrarchs 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 Augustines 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 Dantes 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 Platos 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 Petrarchs 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 minds 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 as 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

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 kings rock-face Columbus.
Along with Antoine de Ville went a party o f six, including three clerics, the
Kings 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 Villes 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 Dantes 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 artists 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 artists 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 Witzs 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 Atdorfers 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

1 a

.64By the end o f the sixteenth century printed

\ .y $ r / > f Y p ;

^^ficCJvetUrisJocictatcni nrijumn
P :r

w4nno Saliiris, M. CCC. X V

--i

P ie t e r B r u e g e l
t h e E ld e r ,
T h e S u ic id e
o f S a u l, 1 5 6 2

F ra n s
H ogen b erg,
S v ic ia , f r o m
C i v i t a t u s O r b is
T erra ru m .

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 detre 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 Gesners eulogy is its concreteness.
Instead o f the kind o f rapture that assumed a sort o f mystical disembodiment
on the peaks, Gesners senses tingle with the altitude. Unlike Petrarchs divided
sensibility, Gesners 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 Gesners 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. Leonardos god-like shaping hand set on the awesome mountainside now
became the, Flemings gift o f making mountains palatable. For while many o f
those who bought the etchings made from Bruegels 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 Bruegels 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 Bruegels 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 Gesners 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
ners 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 painters 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
gils 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. Bruegels 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 Bruegels 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 Bruegels 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 Segherss 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 Simlers 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 Pariss 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 Worlds 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 Grecos 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. Grecos 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
Rousseaus 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 Grecos 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

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 Charless 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
poles

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 Roberts diplomacy, The
Quadruple Alliance.
In 1739 Horace was an undergraduate at
Kings 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

449

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 Kings
set o ff together on the journey that would provide the first unequivocally
Romantic account o f mountain sublimity, nearly two decades before Edmund
Burkes 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. Brunos 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

450

V E RT I C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L C HASMS

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 Burkes Inqu iry in 1757, though, as
Marjorie Hope Nicolsons 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 Burnets 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 earths 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 earths 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

452

VE RT I C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L CHASMS

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 ets 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 ets 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 rnets
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 .

Delightful Horror

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 Christs
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 Walpoles 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 Salvators native town o f Naples, owned a Salvator, and
Horaces own father, Sir Robert, acquired no less than four for his collection at
Houghton. N o wonder that in his catalogue o f Walpole Seniors 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-

454

VE R T I C AL EMP I RE S , C E R E B R A L C HASMS

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 rs 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

456

VE R T I C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L C HASMS

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 deaths 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

457

ness. Goupys 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 Salvators 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 others 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 Walpoles 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 shaggd w ith h a n gin g woods,
Obscured in pines or lost in clouds.21
Walpoles 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 Longinuss 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 Siliuss crude fury, especially when it
came to the famous crossing o f the Alps by Hannibal and his elephants, that
appealed to the young mens 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 Grays 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 Ciceros Tusculan villa and Virgils 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 crags 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, Siliuss 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. Grays letter to his
mother connecting Livys scene-painting with Salvator had been published in
William Masons edition in 1775, so it was possible for another young artist to
have taken the Neapolitan artists 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 Grays 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 Burkes doctrine in the In q u iry (published
two years before Alexanders 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 Grays 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 Cozenss 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 thats 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 Roberts 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 Roberts painting than anything he had
seen. 31 While certainly more tumultuous than anything ever attempted by
either father or son, Turners 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 Turners livid sky seems directly
drawn from one o f John Roberts 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 Napoleons Grande Armee in
Russia was not yet known, and Turners 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
nibals 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 Davids Napoleon Crossing the St.
Bernard (1804). Suppose, too, that he knew (and who did not?) o f Bonapartes
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.
Turners 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 Turners 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 Blancs 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
Seniors naval war against Spain.33 It was a war that Walpole had been pressed
into waging by London merchants intent on wrecking Spains 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 Walpoles 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 Grays
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 Windhams 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. Windhams 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
Plinys propositions on its salinity.

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

465

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 Petrarchs 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 peoples heads turn. 35 All the
effects o f mountain Gothic were anticipated in Windhams 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

VE RT I C AL EMP I RE S , C E R E B R A L C HASMS

466

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 dukes 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 Sandbys drawings, to be so many undulations, so
very English?

Vertical Empires, Cerebral Chasms

467

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-Wynns 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 IIs portrait in public. But Sandbys

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 Burkes 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 Conways 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 asters hand, and Prophets 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 mountains height / Deep in the roaring tide he plungd to endless night.

With Welsh and Scottish troops serving in the British army, the Union
could survive Grays 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 Grays 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. Johnsons 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 Pennants
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
Johnsons, 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 Strathmores 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. Grays 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 fathers 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, Cozenss 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
ders voice, rather than Payne Knights, 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 Parss laboriously conscientious views o f
the Rhone glacier, could possibly have prepared the way for Cozenss version o f
the same scenery. It seems likely that he had read Marc Theodore Bourrits
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 Cozenss intuitive sensation
alism. And one observation o f Bourrits 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
fathers 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 artists 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 ozenss Alpine world is frozen in time-warp Romanticism, mantled
with a surreal, hallucinated stillness. M ont Blancs 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

vators 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. Bourrits 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 Cozenss works are the bolder. For once we have got
over our shock, we have no difficulty in recognizing in Alexander Cozenss
blots the startling ancestry o f abstract expressionism. But it is in fact John
Roberts 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 fathers old
pupil and friend William Beckford, Cozenss 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 Roberts 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
Cozenss 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 Beckfords Gothic hyperbole is utterly eclipsed by Cozenss 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

478

VE RTI C AL E MPI RE S , C E RE B RAL CHASMS

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 fathers 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

The Seat o f Virtue

479

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. Simlers 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
Hallers 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 Hallers 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

480

VE RTI C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L CHASMS

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
natures lovers and the clans o f Corsica became natures warriors, bound to a
code o f honor, so the herdsmen o f the Alps were transfigured into natures
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 Rousseaus
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 Rousseaus 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 Genevas 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, dAlembert 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.

The Seat of Virtue

48 l

The classic expression o f the stubborn virtue o f those who dwelled on the
slopes by Lac Lman was the twenty-third letter o f the lovelorn tutor SaintPreux to his forbidden love, Julie, in Rousseaus 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 Rousseaus 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 Rousseaus 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-Preuxs
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 apoleons second empress, had slept in their
inn moved Shelley to consider that even though she owed her power to
Rousseaus democracy which her husband had outraged, it somehow
reflected well on her that she had come to a place sanctified by the philoso
phers 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
Rousseaus 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, Julies 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 Julies 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,

482

VE RTI CAL EMPI RES, CERE BRAL CHASMS

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 Julies 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 Gibbons 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 Coxes 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

The Seat of Virtue

48 3

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

VE RTI C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L CHASMS

484

paymaster-generals 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 Coxes Switzerland.
Lesser men might have been instandy deterred by Coxes 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 Coxes, 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 Saussures
famous Voyages dans les Alpes and the genuinely remarkable work o f Jean Andre
Deluc on the ascent o f Mont Buet. But Ramonds writing aimed to be some
thing more oblique. In virtually the literary equivalent o f Cozenss 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 Coxes text. The effect is like two badly matched

The Seat o f Virtue

48 5

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. Ramonds 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 oxes 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 Ramonds 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 Ramonds 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 cowherds 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 Gretrys, and then Rossinis, W illiam Tell (as well as
Schuberts 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,

The Seat o f Virtue

48 7

where he became entangled in one o f Rohans 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 Rohans 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

488

VERTI CAL EMPI RES, C ERE BRAL CHASMS

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.
Ramonds aim (like Ruskins 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 birds 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

The Seat o f Virtue

489

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 Ramonds 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 Shelleys 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

490

VE RT I C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L C HASMS

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 ones 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

Conquests

49 l

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 Saussures 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 Balmats 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.

492

VE RTI C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L CHASMS

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 Bourrits 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
wasnt 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 Couterets
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
Saussures 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 Ramonds 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.

Conquests

49 3

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 Ramonds
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 Saussures 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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VERTI CAL EMPIRES, CERE BRAL CHASMS

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 geologists
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 Napoleons 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 Couterets inn, with lodgings
for perhaps three travellers, was transformed into the Hotel dAngleterre 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 Ebels Travellers 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

Conquests

49 5

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 days 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 Starkes 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; cest 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 Henriettes 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 womans body on the mountain. On the contrary, she

Conquests

497

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.
Anthonys rejection o f conventional female attire, Henriettes replacement o f
voluminous skirts with trousers scandalized polite opinion, it was not at all

498

VE RT I C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L C HASMS

meant as an effort to seem manly, and therefore fit to climb. It was emphati
cally as a woman, and on a womans 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 ones 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 womans 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.

Albert the Great

There was not much wrong with Albert Smiths 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

Albert the Great

499

man o f Queen Victorias 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. Hamels climb on M ont Blanc, that got him going. He would go to the
litde hummock at Chertsey called St. Annes Hill and pretend that he too was
a climber. As his French primer he used Saussures Voyages d ans les Alpes. And
his first trip to Chamonix was in 1838, just before Henriettes 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 Auldjos 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

VE RTI CAL EMPI RES, CE RE BRAL CHASMS

500

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 evenings 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 Beverleys 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

502

VE RT I C AL E MPI RE S , C E R E B R A L CHASMS

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.

vi

Prospects o f Salvation

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
clubs 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 clubs 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

Prospects of Salvation

503

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

504

VE RTI CAL EMPI RE S, CERE BRAL CHASMS

The more impossible the peak appeared, the more important it was to master it
(to use one ofWhympers 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, Cooks 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

Prospects o f Salvation

505

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 Stephens genera
tion o f climbers from the Romantics. Though they anticipated Stephens
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 Ruskins 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

VE RTI CAL EMPI RES, CE RE BRAL CHASMS

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 Ruskins 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 Tells 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 Turners, 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-

sures (surely the only thing he had in common with Albert Smith). He espe
cially endorsed Saussures 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 Turners, 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.

Prospects o f Salvation

50 9

The F ra g m en t o f the A lp s is a Ruskinian manifesto on mountains. It

reflected Ruskins 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 broiderd 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 Turners vision o f great waves and humps that
were the true revelation, not Whympers 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 mans 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 earths 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

5 10

VERTI CAL EMPI RE S, C ERE BRAL CHASMS

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
Ruskins 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 Ruskins satisfaction Natures
abhorrence o f brutally straight lines.

John Ruskin,
Junction of
the Aiguille
Pourri with the
Aiguille Rouge.

Prospects of Salvation

5 1j

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 loeil 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 ucs 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.

5 12

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-Ducs 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 Ruskins 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 childs 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 Almightys 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 dAngeville, 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

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 fathers explanation, but it didnt 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 Boadiceas 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 hadnt 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 couldnt 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 ones innards; a half-buried nine o f
diamonds that must, we thought, have been concealed up some villains 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 butchers shop. But Gerry, that weeks 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 aughs Brideshead R ev is

ited. It was inscribed across the pate o f the skull that sat in ostentatious
splendor in Charles Ryders 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 Poussins shepherds seems to
be a wistful epitaph for a pastoral idyll enjoyed and then lost. The monstrous
skull in Guercinos earlier version, though, was unequivocal in its declaration
that even in Arcady, I, Death, am present. The cunning o f W aughs con
ceit is to lure the reader into
assuming that Ryders 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 justices 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 Mansfields 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 Romanticisms holy places. You could walk to Kenwood along
the path where nightingales perched in the beeches and where Keats listened
as Coleridges 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 governments 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
Londons 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 Hampsteads
other notorious tavern, the Spaniards Inn, sheltering infamous outlaws like
Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wild. It certainly was true, though, that Francis
Jacksons gang o f oudaws fought a pitched batde on the heath in 1674 against
the Kings 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 Londons 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 Mansfields 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 oods 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. Pauls 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 Regents 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 Londons 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. Its 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 Lykaons 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 Pans 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. Pans 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
tuss 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. Pans 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 farmers 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 Virgils 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 Virgils 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 Plinys 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. Plinys 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
Sannazaros Italian-language A r c a d ia , first published in Venice in 1519. San
nazaros fortunes, like his models, 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 Vitruviuss 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 Sannazaros 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 Edens prelapsarian self-sufficiency, and o f the Virgins
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 heroines
naked vulnerability. And though the copulating rabbits and the pair o f goats
and peacocks remain just outside the garden, Susannas 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 Pans 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 Veroneses 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 Ariostos
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 Orsinis 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 Dantes 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

Edens 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 wizards
maze rather than a gardeners patch. N o wonder, then, that Palissys 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.

Palissys 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 Pans 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 Addisons 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 Nourses Cam p a nia Foelix and continuing with Stephen Switzers
Ichnographia R ustica and Batty Langleys 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 Castells 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 Britannias most august
men o f power and letters were figured as Roman senators (albeit usually, in Rysbracks 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 Cozenss
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 Kents 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 Dashwoods 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 Chamberss
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 Choiseuls at Chanteloup, tried to real
ize Chamberss 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
natures own sublimity. So when Rousseaus 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. Ovids 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 Pans 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.

A n A rca d ia fo r the People: The Forest o f Fontainebleau

547

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
tiers 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 hos 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 worlds, 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. Denecourts 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 Perraults 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,

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

548

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 Claudes stature failed to meet the improved standards o f Louis XVIs 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 Napoleons 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 Frances
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
emperors 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, Denecourts
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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550

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 Goethes
Werther and Chateaubriands 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 Senancours 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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551

per: sandstone outcrops and escarpments; loosely packed, sandy soil in which
ones 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 Senancours imagination, but
he certainly belonged to Fontainebleaus 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. Rousseaus 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 didnt
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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553

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 dHyver, 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 dHyver 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 dHyver 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,

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

5 54

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 Durands odes to the oaks
and from Jamins 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 Thoreaus 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 Senancours 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 natures 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 dHyver and his guards.

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555

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 Denecourts 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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ARCADIA RE D E S I G N E D

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 Druids 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 Denecourts 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 Sands 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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557

to the forest. It also brought the artist Millet, fleeing from both cholera and
bloodshed in the capital. When the smoke cleared, Denecourts 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.

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
Denecourts 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

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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 states
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 dHyver and
his foresters and the envy o f frustrated competitors. Napoleons 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 dhonneur 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
Denecourts 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-Philippes 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

5 60

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 doesnt 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 Ariadnes 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.

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 Londons 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 Regents 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 Poussins 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 Poussins 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 Pans 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 miners 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

sort

of

rustic

for pachyderms.

Burtons 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 Crowns 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 VIs 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 Bridgemans 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-

566

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 es 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
kings 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 egents 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 Dumass 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 dHiver
at one time. And the more learned jungle o f Richard Turner and Decimus Bur
tons 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. Birkenheads 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 Yorks 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

ARCADI A R E D E S I G N E D

5 70

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.

The Wild, H a iry Huckleberry

vi

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 mans 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

ARCADI A R E DE S I G N E D

572

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 parks 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 irs 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.

The Wild, H a iry Huckleberry

573

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 neighbors 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. Scotts 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 Ruskins
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

ARCADI A RE D E S I G N E D

574

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.
Thoreaus rejection o f history was based on the fierce conviction that it was
irreconcilable with nature. Civilizations 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 Denecourts trail; we climb Petrarchs
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 Spauldings 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

The Wild , H airy Huckleberry

575

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 Pooks 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 natures

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

5 76

ARCADIA R E DE S IG NE D

the same site turned Thoreaus 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 Thoreaus 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

The Wild, H airy Huckleberry

577

els that the unparalleled vividness and precision o f his nature writing arises. In
1840, three years after graduating from Harvard, the pencil-makers 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 Thoreaus 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 Thoreaus 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

578

ARCADIA RE DES IG NE D

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 Ruperts
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 Sachems 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 Ruperts 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 Ruperts 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 .

5'. N i c o la u s

H u s s o v ia n u s ,

C a r m e n N .H . d e S ta tu r a fe r it a t e a c v e n a tto n e B isontts

< - an<1 e d ' D ' M - B a lm ' <C i m b r i d 8 e ' M a s s "

8 4 5 P C aesar,

W *

G M c W * r , t m s . H . J. E d w a rd s ( C a m b r id g e , M a s s ., i 9 8 ), 6 .2 8 (p .

3 5 3 ) 8. C o n r a d C e lr is , r i x o r t t

.............:i<S8; s ee a ls o H u s s o v ia n u s , o p . c i t ., P rae fa-

d o ( p . MU).

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

an

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 8 486.
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 ers 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 ers 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 ),
8485.
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 Reichs 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

585

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 .

NOTES

585

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.

NOTES

586

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.

NOTES

587

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 lla 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 lla 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 sicle a lan 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 lla lto m ed io ev o (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sullalto 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. Cartmills 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 ens Games, Kings 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. Hanawalts 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. Fishers 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 Hunters 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-lEtape.
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 IA 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 utchingss 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 Californias 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 Kings 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 Muirs 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 Olmsteds 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 Bierstadts 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. Bryants 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 Trevelyans 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),
6466.
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 Warburgs sickness, see the version by Warburgs 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 sullalto 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 Varagines
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 lla lto medioevo, 515-20.
71. Gr^goire, op. cit., 697.
72. On forest hermitages, see Grgoire, 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 Vlllam 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 Goethes
eulogy, see Harald Keller, Goethes 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. Barlows 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 Barlows Genealogy o f the Liberty Tree. H er excellent
article on Barlows politics and poetry, Radicalism in Joel Barlows 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. Barlows 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 lorigine 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 Barlows 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 Barlows 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). Barlows 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. Barlows 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 dHancarville, 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 Wittfogels 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 lla 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 is
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 Taylors 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 IIsle 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 IE 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 ,

Courbets 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 .

Cleopatras 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 Napoleons 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 ,

Borglums 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 ys

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 Thm p>n , ed. and trans., Petrarch: A HumanA n *hlo0 y o f Petrarchs 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., 2935.
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

Thomsons 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 ).

Times Arrow, Times 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

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 dun 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 Ialpinisme 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 Travellers 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
dAngeville 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 brokes 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 3639.

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

Peoples 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 ess 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,

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 rs

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 nellalto 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 nellalto 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

Lambiente 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 dHistoire 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 ,

Plutarchs 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,

Cleopatras 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 , Turners 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

Courbets 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

25
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 ys 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 56

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, I95239

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, 77r ( 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.

l s o

b y

i m o n

c h a m a

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

-J

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).