John Thelwall and the Politics of the Picturesque
Mary Fairclough
University of Huddersfield
John Thelwall was, for E. P. Thompson, one of the most remarkable figures and
“considerable theorists” of the British reform movement in the 1790s (
Making 172-73). But Thompson asserts that Thelwall’s
achievements were not sustained in the sequel to the metropolitan radical phase of
his career, in which between 1798 and 1801 he published a series of articles in the
Monthly Magazine,
“A Pedestrian Excursion
through Several Parts of England and Wales during the Summer of 1797” and “The
Phenomena of the Wye, During the Winter of 1797-8.” For Thompson, Thelwall’s
“Pedestrian Excursion” “is unremarkable, being largely devoted to conventional
rehearsals of the ‘romantic and picturesque’” (“Hunting” 105). Thompson criticises
Thelwall’s apparent failure to sustain the progressive social and political tenets of
his earlier publications and lectures, reading the pedestrian tour as evidence of the
“success” of attempts by the authorities to “drive” Thelwall “out of the reform
business” (104). Thelwall’s love of the “romantic and picturesque” is, for Thompson,
incompatible with his political activism, which demands interaction and co-operation,
rather than detached contemplation. This essay will reassess the grounds of
Thompson’s censure, and will argue that Thelwall’s engagement with the picturesque
should be read not as a retreat from political engagement but as an attempt to
rethink and recalibrate such engagement in the face of extreme pressure. Thelwall’s
treatment of the picturesque demonstrates his sustained if evolving dedication
to
his reformist principles. It also reveals the under-acknowledged ways
in which Thelwall adapts and modifies aesthetic conventions in order to temper their
political implications.
Eighteenth-century aesthetic modes do generate certain reactionary political
effects. Thompson’s critique of Thelwall echoes critical censure of the damaging
results of aesthetic spectatorship. John Barrell and Ann Bermingham have argued that
the aesthetic observer tends to mimic the position of a privileged landowner who
disdains active intervention in the lives of the poor (Barrell,
Dark 70-76,
Pandora 96-98; Bermingham
68-69).
This condemnation has been revised
by critics who argue for the indeterminate, playful quality of the picturesque
(Michasiw 76-100; Jarvis 54; de Bolla 119-20). Elizabeth Bohls notes that
such spectatorship produces a “powerful abstracting impulse” which reinforces a
“symbolic connection between material particulars and groups of people traditionally
thought of as trapped in them, defined by their bodies, as opposed to their minds:
the labouring classes and women” (13). The focus of Thelwall’s political activism
during the mid-1790s had been the broadening of the intellectual franchise and the
diffusion of knowledge to such groups, and his early scientific training had armed
him with a sophisticated sense of the importance of material analyses of physical and
political structures (
Tribune 102). Thelwall’s engagement
with aesthetic forms appears to work against his own political practice.
Michael Scrivener has recently defended Thelwall’s “Pedestrian Excursion” against
Thompson’s charges, asserting that Thelwall’s frustration with the working people he
encounters is a direct result of the political pressures under which he was
struggling, which the text of the “Pedestrian Excursion” carefully suppresses
(74-75). Scrivener argues that the essay is not restricted to accounts of the
picturesque, but rather offers detailed analysis of the effects of agricultural
monopoly and war on the condition of the poor. But in order to argue for this
politically engaged Thelwall, Scrivener plays down the significance of his use of
aesthetic conventions in the “Pedestrian Excursion,” noting that though it “has a
minor aesthetic connoisseur dimension, the essay’s most distinctive feature is its
sociological focus” (77). Thelwall’s landscape description is presented as a
digression from rather than a component of the “sociological” work of the essay, and
Scrivener does not engage with the reactionary implications of the picturesque
itself.
However, Thelwall’s exploration of the “romantic and picturesque” does not represent
a marker of his disillusionment with political activism, but rather arms him with a
new means of articulating his social and political goals of intellectual enquiry and
sympathetic co-operation. Long before his excursion of 1797 Thelwall had explored in
print whether aesthetic contemplation and political activism could prove productive
partners.
The Peripatetic, Thelwall’s novel, travel
narrative and reformist tract, published at the outset of his political career in
1793, makes repeated use of visual conventions. However,
The
Peripatetic’s radically mixed mode does not lend itself to sustained
engagement with aesthetic tropes, and the passages in which Thelwall evokes the
picturesque are characterised by an ironic tone. Thelwall’s “Pedestrian Excursion”
and “Phenomena of the Wye” engage in more detail with the picturesque; however, they
are no mere “conventional rehearsals” of the discourse. In these essays Thelwall
demonstrates a sophisticated appropriation of and deviation from aesthetic
conventions to suit his political aims. As Judith Thompson has suggested, Thelwall
challenges the distinction between an aesthetic and a sociological approach to
landscape by emphasising the material basis of both (“Citizen” 79). For Thelwall the
ideal viewing consciousness is never a disembodied, abstracting entity, but rather
one which maintains a material connection with the landscape of which it forms a
part.
As Lamb and Wagner suggest, an
interesting comparison piece to Thelwall’s “Pedestrian Excursion” is Mary
Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and
Denmark (15). Bohls describes how Wollstonecraft unsettles standard
aesthetic viewpoints and “works toward a corporeally and political situated mode
of perception” (142, 152). His ongoing engagement with the picturesque
demonstrates his gradual steps to overcoming the abstracting effects of aesthetic
contemplation and toward synthesising the representation of landscape with his
political activism.
I.
In the preface to
The Peripatetic, Thelwall declares his
“design of uniting the different advantages of the novel, the sentimental journal,
and the miscellaneous collection of essays and poetical effusions” (72). Despite
the heterogeneous form of the work, structural coherence is conferred through the
walking tours which Thelwall’s protagonist Sylvanus Theophrastus undertakes to
Saint Albans in Hertfordshire, and to Rochester in Kent. So, like Thelwall’s
essays for the
Monthly Magazine,
The
Peripatetic describes the practice of “pedestrian excursion” (115).
Sylvanus states the advantages of such excursions, declaring that he and his
companion will “compare our remarks on such monuments of antiquity, and such
picturesque benefits of art and nature, as the road, or its environs might
present” (115). But Thelwall differentiates the pedestrian excursions undertaken
in
The Peripatetic from the practice of picturesque
tourism set out in the publications of William Gilpin: “It was not to be a mere
excursion of pleasure: for nothing is, in general, more delusive or insipid.
Information and improvement were to constitute the principle feature of our
expedition” (115). Though sensitive to its “benefits,”
The
Peripatetic maintains a sceptical attitude to aesthetic tourism;
therefore, the aesthetic value of landscape is rarely considered in isolation.
Sylvanus admits that his “observations” on the beauties he encounters “may perhaps
be neither very original nor profound,” but he insists on their social value,
generated by and recorded in “those conversations, that . . . stole the miles so
imperceptibly away” (115). For Thelwall, pedestrian travel should be the occasion
not for isolated spectatorship, but for conversation and interaction, prompting
both individual and collective “information and improvement.” As Judith Thompson
notes, Thelwall’s commitment to “friendly converse” is reflected in the “dialogic
form” of
The Peripatetic, in which contrasting discourses
are juxtaposed and combined to create an “intergeneric” conversational mode
(Introduction 38-39, 41).
Thelwall’s “intergeneric” discursive method ensures that though
The Peripatetic makes many references to the picturesque, the
descriptions that follow are rarely purely aesthetic. Rather, Thelwall adopts a
topographical approach, describing the historical, economic and agricultural
condition of the landscape, though, as Thompson notes,
The
Peripatetic appropriates this discourse to “reorient” the reader’s
political preconceptions (Introduction 33). Descriptions of picturesque scenes at
Greenwich, Shooter’s Hill and Rochester thus digress swiftly to the “historical
allusions” or “flights of fancy” that they prompt (99, 162-64, 257-74). In several
episodes Sylvanus praises gothic ruins for their picturesque effect, but these
ruins are not pure “objects of art” as Gilpin would have it (
Essays 46). Instead they are physical reminders of the “instability of
grandeur” as well as relics of “ancient political institutions” (158, 199). The
ruins of Rochester castle “mingle” different effects to produce “one grotesque
picture of sylvan nature, of horticulture, and antiquities” (260). The aesthetic
effects of the ruins are inseparable from the intellectual stimulus prompted by
the castle’s antiquarian significance, and the social effects of the horticulture
practiced in its grounds. The picturesque is merely one component of the political
“information” to be derived from the peripatetic tour.
The Peripatetic does not seek a comfortable synthesis of
such diverse responses to visual scenes. Immediately after praising “the
picturesque varieties of a British horizon,” Sylvanus notes that “the scene is
changed; and the topographer must, for a while, take the place of the sentimental
admirer of picturesque beauty” (142). So sudden are the changes of “scene” in
The Peripatetic that they often serve an ironic
function, undercutting Sylvanus’s rhapsodic response to visual landscapes (151).
The enjoyment of visual scenes in
The Peripatetic is
never a simple “pleasure.” Thelwall’s mixed mode generates ironic juxtapositions
which undercut the assumed authority of the aesthetic observer, and question
whether visual observation alone can stimulate “information and improvement.”
The Peripatetic’s sceptical attitude to aesthetic
observation complicates those scenes which come closest to the conventions of the
picturesque tour. Sylvanus’s descriptions never generate the authority of a
commentator such as Gilpin. Rather, an ironic distance between Sylvanus’s voice
and Thelwall’s authorial presence is implied. At Shooter’s Hill Sylvanus praises
the “picturesque beauties” around him, but he actually describes a “prospect of
the widening Thames, the rich champaign, the villages and villas which lay before
me” (163). Thelwall is perhaps amusing himself at Sylvanus’s lack of aesthetic
connoisseurship here. But Sylvanus’s failure to distinguish between the
conventions of the prospect view and the picturesque has significant political
consequences. As Barrell has shown, the metaphor of the prospect was a means
through which an eighteenth-century gentleman could demonstrate his suitability
for a life of public virtue (Barrell,
Pandora 52; Labbe
xi-xii). Though a culturally powerful viewing position, the prospect view is
anathema to Thelwall’s participatory political agenda. The “bird’s eye prospect”
eradicates all specificity from the landscape, which compromises the activist
strain of
The Peripatetic (
Peripatetic 150, 163). At times Sylvanus seems aware of the damaging
effects of the prospect view, and posits the picturesque as a more wholesome
alternative, declaring: “Let us turn, then, from this overgrown Metropolis, its
spreading streets and rising palaces; the trophies . . . of public misery and
oppression; and contemplate the picturesque home scenery with which this garden of
a heath abounds” (153). The intimate scale of a picturesque scene and its focus on
material objects mitigates the abstracting effect of the prospect. But the fact
that Sylvanus often fails to distinguish between these two discourses signals the
dangerous effects of such spectatorship.
Despite its defence of the picturesque over the prospect view on political
grounds,
The Peripatetic demonstrates clear suspicion of
the abstracting effects of all aesthetic tropes. Reformist sentiments are
articulated through the adoption of the mixed mode signalled in Thelwall’s
preface, rather than through a treatment of the aesthetic in isolation. Though the
picturesque has the potential to represent the interests of the humblest members
of society, Thelwall demonstrates the dangers of aestheticising the lives of any
group. He takes gypsies as his example, perhaps because Gilpin had asserted their
picturesque effect (
Observations II 44, 46). Thelwall
appears to agree when he notes that for “a hunter of the picturesque,” gypsies
“contribute, in no small degree, to the embellishment of rural scenery” (196). But
he interrogates this statement over a course of digressions which end with
Sylvanus’s recollection of encountering another group of gypsies. Sylvanus
declares an aesthetic appreciation of “the yellow misty light that gleamed over
the southern horizon,” but when describing the gypsies themselves, adopts a
vocabulary of social configuration: “I saw . . . the cheerful family of vagrants
sitting on the grass, around their crackling fire, and enjoying their repast, and
to me unintelligible conversation; with their rude, lowly tents in the rear . . .
and the patient 'mute companions of their toils' grazing in social familiarity by
their sides” (208). These people do not merely “embellish” the scene; indeed,
Thelwall rejects aesthetic appreciation altogether. The scene includes “none of
that marvellous novelty necessary to fix the demure, half-vacant eye of reverend
Gravity” (208-09). For Thelwall these “vulgar objects” do not
elicit aesthetic admiration but stimulate “a concatenation of ideas” encompassing
imaginative engagement, antiquarian investigation and social and political
activism (209). Thelwall rejects the distancing effect of the aesthetic gaze and
instead asserts the gypsies’ historic bonds with societies from which they are now
ostracised. Aesthetic “pleasure” is dismissed as Thelwall reiterates his aim of
promoting “information and improvement” in order to better the lives of
marginalised groups.
Despite
The Peripatetic’s repeated engagement with the
picturesque, the models of political and social improvement that Thelwall
advocates often reject visual forms altogether. Thelwall is adamant that visual
scenes alone are not sufficient to prompt the sympathetic sociability that enables
social improvement (121). An important lyric declaring lavish admiration of the
natural landscape ends with the assertion that “nor all the pleasures of the
ravish’d sight, / Like
friendly Converse wake the raptur’d glow!”
(115-16). Such “converse” is the stimulus for a material investigation of the
physical and by extension the social and political landscape, which does not rely
on the abstracting forms of visual observation but incorporates different “ways of
seeing” (Jarvis 44). Thelwall’s political activism and his training in physiology
provide the basis for his exploration of modes of vision which challenge the
distance between the observer and the landscape. Thelwall declares in a political
lecture delivered the year after the publication of
The
Peripatetic that “This is a season for inquiry and instruction, not for
pastime and jocularity; and it is therefore that I . . . stimulate you to enquire
into the nature of your rights as Britons and as men; and to investigate the
nature and causes of that unhappiness which we cannot but feel too sensibly”
(
Political 2).
The
Peripatetic, too, demands a material engagement with the conditions of
social life. In a “Digression for the Anatomists,” which draws on Thelwall’s
physiological training, though enquiry is prompted by the splendours of nature,
“the scientific eye” reveals “wider fields of wisdom and delight” than those
presented by the aesthetic gaze (146).
Several episodes in The Peripatetic which begin with
the contemplation of the visual landscape end with Thelwall advocating an
alternative “scientific view” (226-27).
The Peripatetic reveals the limitations of the “pleasure”
of picturesque tourism. Rather than celebrating the picturesque in isolation,
Thelwall suggests that it should form part of a multifaceted critical
investigation of the landscape.
The Peripatetic posits
the kind of material critique that Bohls finds in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft,
which establishes a “connection between aesthetic practices and the material,
social, and political conditions of human experience” (9). However,
The Peripatetic, structured by ironic juxtaposition and
shifts of “scene,” has no interest in synthesising its diverse elements. As a
result
The Peripatetic tends to regard aesthetic effects
as limited and potentially deceptive. The picturesque does not yet have a positive
political function in Thelwall’s work.
II.
“A Pedestrian Excursion through Several Parts of England and Wales during the
Summer of 1797” describes a walking tour from London to the West Country, which
Thelwall undertook during the summer in which his metropolitan radical career
seemed finally to have been crushed (Scrivener 74-75). The “Pedestrian Excursion”
is undoubtedly a politically engaged text, but one in which Thelwall adapts his
methods to a new form, the picturesque tour. In doing so, he imbues that form with
renewed political significance. In contrast to the mixed mode of
The Peripatetic, Thelwall’s “Pedestrian Excursion” is a sustained
interrogation of the picturesque which seeks to find a means to reconcile and even
integrate an analysis of visual forms with his political activism. While
The Peripatetic makes only glancing allusions to Gilpin’s
work, the “Pedestrian Excursion” develops a self-conscious response to the
strictures of the picturesque, making reference not only to Gilpin’s schema, but
also those of the picturesque’s arch-theorists, Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale
Price.
Thelwall investigates the power
of the picturesque to elicit “curiosity,” an important term for Price and Payne
Knight. Thelwall declares himself one of the “pedestrian hunters of the
picturesque and sentimental,” but the picturesque is no mere fashionable object of
scorn (52). Rather, the opening of the “Pedestrian Excursion” suggests a function
for picturesque tourism which seems to achieve a synthesis between political and
aesthetic concerns. Thelwall notes that “circumstances [have] produced another
species of curiosity well calculated to go hand in hand with a passion for the
picturesque and romantic. Every fact connected with the history and actual
condition of the laborious classes had become important to a heart throbbing with
anxiety for the welfare of the human race” (17). The physiologically situated
fellow feeling urged in
The Peripatetic recurs here, but
Thelwall now aligns it with “a passion for the picturesque.” In contrast with the
distrust of the abstracting effects of spectatorship in
The
Peripatetic, the “Pedestrian Excursion” advocates the appreciation of
landscape as a means of generating sociability.
The “Pedestrian Excursion” develops
The Peripatetic’s
suggestion that the picturesque should be valorised over the prospect view, adding
a technical rigour to those conjectures. At East Knoyle in Wiltshire, Thelwall and
his companion are conducted to a “commanding eminence” from which “we commanded
one of the most pleasant views I had ever seen.” Thelwall praises the hills which
“dimly descried through mists, bounded the prospect and mingled with the horizon”
(44-45). But this “bird’s-eye prospect” cannot compare to that which follows when
the travellers descend from the hilltop and indulge in “the enjoyment of the
picturesque, and the beauty and fertility of the home-scene, in the lowlands, with
their embowered and scattered cottages” (45). The “home-scene” of the picturesque
is valued for its humble, inclusive qualities. Thelwall emphasises this point in
an earlier episode which praises “the solemn grandeur and shady sequestration of
[the] descending path” from the summit at Richmond Hill: “That pomp of scenery,
that expanse and publicity of prospect . . . fascinate, indeed the occasional
observer: but in the picturesque of nature, as in the intercourses of life, it is
principally in the lowly vales and shades of sober sequestration we must seek the
pleasures that cloy not on repetition” (18-19). Thelwall’s enthusiasm for the
occluded viewpoint of “lowly vales” echoes Gilpin and his successors (Gilpin,
Observations 186; Price 33; Knight 30). However, his
alignment of “the picturesque of nature” with the social “intercourses of life” is
original (18-19). Thelwall uses landscape description to support his assertion
that the social “pleasures which cloy not on repetition” must be cherished and
protected from the destructive effects of political and economic monopoly.
Thelwall’s preference for the picturesque over the prospect view is not merely a
marker of an unrealised social ideal, but forms part of his critique of actual
institutions. His speaker describes the “scene of fertility” visible from the road
from Shepperton, and notes that “from every eminence the mansions of opulence
overlook the prospect with exultation. But man, aggregate man, seems little
benefitted by this abundance . . . everything has the appearance of that
desolating monopoly which makes fertility itself a desert” (20). Thelwall
demonstrates that this “prospect” is not only myopic but deliberately
exploitative. He demands that the observer instead adopt the perspective of “man,
aggregate man” and engage with the material particularities of social
existence.Several critics note the
political implications of detail in landscape description (Bohls 13, Labbe
38). Thelwall’s call for the recognition of “aggregate man” enlists
aesthetic description for a democratic cause, echoing as it does the rhetoric of
his 1796 tract
The Rights of Nature, in which the
“aggregate reason” of obscure individuals establishes a common interest, and forms
the basis of civil society (459-60).
However, the “Pedestrian Excursion” also suggests an alteration in Thelwall’s
social and political objects since the high water mark of his metropolitan
radicalism. The term to which Thelwall returns again and again when advocating
picturesque “intercourses of life” is “sequestration.” This echoes the opening of
the “Pedestrian Excursion” in which Thelwall reveals the object of his journey to
be an “immediate and intimate communication of sentiment” with his friend Samuel
Taylor Coleridge in Somerset (17). Thelwall’s poem “Lines Written at Bridgwater,”
written just after his abortive stay with Coleridge during the tour described in
the “Pedestrian Excursion,” demonstrates the endurance of this ideal:
Ah! let me, far in some sequester’d dell,
Build my low cot; most happy might it prove,
My Samuel! Near to thine, that I might oft
Share they sweet converse, best-belov’d of friends! (Poems 129)
Commentators have emphasised a lyric turn in the “Pedestrian
Excursion” which expresses Thelwall’s understandable desire for retreat in the
face of harassment (Jarvis 35-36; Scrivener 76). However, it is important to
scrutinise any critical narrative which, like E. P. Thompson’s, polarises
Thelwall’s engagement with the picturesque and his political activism. Another
poem dating from the summer of 1797 “On Leaving the Bottoms of Gloucestershire”
asserts that “sequester’d musings” must be “tho sylvan, yet not solitary” (
Poems 136). Even in rural “sequestration,” Thelwall’s social
ideal and the basis of his political commitment is “converse,” which enables
“Culture and the Arts” and “social decoration” (136). But this community is too
secluded, untouched by “Factory” or associated commercial “Opulence” (137).
Thelwall’s preference for “sequestration” in “Pedestrian Excursion,” as in the
poems written during that summer, does not nullify the text’s political
engagement, but does complicate that engagement. Though Thelwall declares a
universal social sympathy as his political aim, the picturesque generates
intimate, rather than inclusive social relations.
In certain episodes, the “Pedestrian Excursion” articulates a fully-formed
account of sympathetic sociability prompted by the picturesque landscape, but not
alienated by the distancing effect of the aesthetic gaze. Passing through a
village on the edge of Salisbury Plain, Thelwall’s speaker views a “range of
villages scattered along the valley, that opens in a long perspective to the
right.” He notes that “the hour was favourable to the emotions these objects were
calculated to inspire . . . the light was softened, and the shadows were
lengthening: circumstances that cherish a pensive serenity, and pre-dispose the
heart to the social sympathies of our nature” (39). The picturesque scene itself
awakens “social sympathies” in the travellers, but this state is not sustained.
Thelwall’s speaker then bemoans the “jealous caution” of working people he
encounters, which deadens any social intercourse (39). Thelwall’s sense of
alienation lies at the root of Thompson’s objections to the “Pedestrian
Excursion.” However, Thompson separates Thelwall’s treatment of the picturesque
from his political activities too starkly. Thelwall’s engagement with the
picturesque in the “Pedestrian Excursion” is itself a political move prompted by
the inequalities and hostility that he meets on his tour. But though Thelwall
finds the picturesque an effective means of articulating protest in the face of
political adversity, the “Pedestrian Excursion” struggles to articulate how it
might contribute to widespread political amelioration.
III.
“The Phenomena of the Wye, During the Winter of 1797-8” continues and develops
Thelwall’s engagement with the picturesque. Thelwall wrote the essay after the
completion of his pedestrian tour of summer 1797 but it appeared in the
Monthly Magazine before the “Pedestrian Excursion.” Since the
publication of Gilpin’s
Observations on the River Wye
(1789), the Wye Valley had “acquired a due celebrity” as a picturesque tourist
destination, as Thelwall acknowledges in “The Phenomena of the Wye” (3). But
Thelwall clearly distinguishes his account from that of Gilpin. Thelwall writes
not as a tourist but as a resident of the Wye Valley, having moved with his family
to a riverside farm at Llyswen in Breconshire during the autumn of 1797. In his
memoir of 1801, Thelwall declares that the chief reason for “the election of this
spot” was “the wild and picturesque scenery of the neighbourhood” (
Poems xxxv). Thelwall’s memoir presents Llyswen as the
realisation of the secluded “retreat” to which the “Pedestrian Excursion” seems at
times to gesture, a place in which “the agitations of political feeling might be
cradled to forgetfulness” (xxxvi). But “The Phenomena of the Wye” presents a very
different account of the picturesque at Llyswen, which complicates this narrative.
Thelwall’s speaker is not an isolated spectator of the landscape, but rather a
situated, embodied participant in the scenes that surround him. As a result of
this material engagement with the landscape, Thelwall adopts a new vocabulary in
his treatment of the picturesque.
Thelwall’s speaker rejects the touring seasons of summer and autumn to recount the
beauties of the Wye in winter, and in doing so offers a novel account of the
picturesque. Thelwall’s focus is not the surfaces and shades of the landscape, but
rather its “anatomy,” revealed in “the leafless grove, the dismantled hill, nay,
the very gloom of night itself, when nothing is discernible but the mere outline
of surrounding mountains” (3). Such anatomical observation “is as essential to the
landscape painter, as that of the human form to the historical branch of the art”
(3). Thelwall’s “Digression for the Anatomists” in
The
Peripatetic had declared that the anatomical insights of the
“scientific eye” were vital even for “the elegant votary of the polite arts,”
namely portrait and historical painting (146). But here for the first time
Thelwall connects anatomical study with the analysis of landscape. In contrast to
Gilpin, who makes human figures decorative appendages to the landscape, Thelwall
asserts that the landscape can only be understood through analogy with the
investigation of the “human form.” The material analysis of physical forms
suggests a means of overcoming the gulf between Thelwall’s political aims and the
abstracting conventions of aesthetic contemplation. What this formal comparison
lacks is a sense of the social exchange fundamental to Thelwall’s political aims.
Thelwall suggests the means to make analysis of the picturesque a socially and
politically engaged phenomenon in the next passage of the “Phenomena of the Wye,”
which sustains his assertion that the appreciation of landscape is informed by the
material analysis of physical forms, but also suggests that social configurations
might be understood in the same way. The “bold and prominent” features of the Wye
valley are particularly suited to examination during winter because:
Scenery of this description may be compared to those superior orders of
shape and feature which constitute the perfection of the human form; in which
transparent tints and the most perfect symmetry are graces of inferior
magnitude, and beauty itself is the smaller part of loveliness—where the
whole countenance beams expression, every feature has its animation and
character, every line is descriptive of some kind or elevated passion, and
every glance, every gesture, every motion is eloquent of sympathy and
intelligence. (4)
This passage begins with a comparison between the
form of the landscape and that of the human figure. But the landscape changes from
a static object of contemplation to an active, co-responding companion. Thelwall
employs a vocabulary of reciprocal exchange of energy and emotions that echoes his
most engaged political lecturing.See for
example Thelwall’s lecture of 6 November 1795 (Tribune
327). Vitally, it not only recalls Thelwall’s investigations of
alternate “ways of seeing” in
The Peripatetic, but also
anticipates his engagement with a related form of material “inquiry” in his
elocutionary practice of the next decade. In his 1805 tract
An
Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary
Science Thelwall notes that language must be incorporated into the
body’s physical expression: “Language alone is not sufficient: nature’s epitome,
like nature’s self, must sympathize through every element: motion and look and
attitude must manifest the inspiration of genuine feeling; and every portion of
the frame must be vital with expressive eloquence” (24). The “Phenomena of the
Wye” sustains and develops Thelwall’s critique of visual forms dating back to
The Peripatetic. But here Thelwall demonstrates that a
formal appreciation of landscape is not separable from other kinds of material
analysis, of physiological, social, or political forms, and even suggests that the
aesthetic might encourage the conditions for political engagement rather than
isolated abstraction.
I am sympathetic to
Terry Eagleton’s assertion that the later eighteenth century is a moment at
which the material particularity of aesthetic forms enables a “dangerously
radical” “ideal of compassionate community” (60).
In the close to this passage Thelwall demonstrates that such inclusive forms of
investigation can assimilate the distinct discourses of aesthetic contemplation
and social and political activism: “Such are the forms that owe not their
attraction to the wardrobe—the charms that never cloy—that fade not
even in the winter of old age—the sublime of human nature!” (4). Here
landscape description and social interaction are so profoundly synthesised as to
be inseparable. Thelwall echoes his assertion in the “Pedestrian Excursion” that
picturesque “sequestration” produces “pleasures that cloy not on repetition.” But
despite the sheltered location of his “little cottage,” Thelwall’s speaker in the
“Phenomena of the Wye” does not demand seclusion (5). In contrast to the often
isolated protagonist of the “Pedestrian Excursion,” Thelwall’s speaker exchanges
stories with “my predecessor in this little farm” (5). As Scrivener notes, the
“grand” natural phenomena that the speaker witnesses are discussed in terms of
their effects on the social and economic conditions in the valley (Scrivener 82;
“Wye” 6-7). Through the language of material analysis and sympathetic social
engagement, Thelwall ensures that the “romantic and picturesque” scenes of the Wye
do not represent pure “retreat” but rather gesture forward to Thelwall’s renewed
engagement in public life in the next decade.
Acknowledgment
This article was written during a
postdoctoral research fellowship funded by the Government of Canada’s Department
of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and I gratefully acknowledge DFAIT’s
support.
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