Lakes that inspired literary giants

Press, 19 February 1983, Page 15

Lakes that inspired literary giants

MELVYN BRAGG

is editor and presenter of

Britain’s outstanding television arts programme, “The South Bank Show”; and a distinguished critic and novelist whose books include “The Hired Man”, “The Silken Net”, and “Kingdom Come”. In this article he discusses the literary associations of the English Lake District which influenced his early writing aspirations.

if you are born in the English Lake District, as I was. and begin to write, as I did. then you immediately discover that the landscape and feelings which you thought belonged to you alone have, in effect, been well described, and often wonderfully described, by some of the finest authors in the language. The Lake District, that ancient geological phenomenon in the top left corner of England, has been taken over by its authors. As you walk the hills or row the lakes, as you swim in the rivers or amble up the long deep valleys, you remember not the Vikings or the Normans. not the Romans, the Celts or the Beaker Folk, not Iron Age man or Bronze Age man — although there are magnificent reminders of them all: you remember the Lake poets. .They came, they wrote, they occupied the "place in verse and prose which still haunts the locality and has travelled around "the world. The first mountain of a poet you look back on. said Ted Hughes — himself one of Britain's finest contemporary poets — is Wordsworth, almost 200 years ago. Wordsworth's genius was seeded, nurtured, and finally matured in that small complex of fells, crags, and tarns. The accurate naming of places, incidents and features of his home base infuses his poetry: wherever you go, you tread on his chronicled word-ways. If you are sufficiently energetic you can retrace his extensive outings: De Quin-

cey reckoned that Wordsworth negotiated 290,000 Lakeland kilometres on foot in his lifetime. To be in the Lake District is to be in English Literature. Wordsworth grew up and later settled there: Coleridge and De Quincey came to join him: Lamb. Hazlitt, Shelley, Keats, and Walter Scott went to visit him. Southey trawled up there with his wife, sister of Coleridge’s wife: literary families bred rapidly in the lush rainsodden landscape. Great literary men felt obliged to ride and. later, to steam north from the metropolis to see what Wordsworth and friends saw, and walked where Wordsworth and Dorothy so often walked. Dickens breezed up and. in hilarious prose, affectionately undermined the overmarketed solemnities of lake and Jiill worship. Longfellowpaid his respects, as did Hawthorne. Famous fictional characters made plans to visit the Lake District even if, as in the case of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, the plan did not materialise. But Charlotte Bronte got there - rather amazed she was not allowed to descend from her host’s coach and

test the ground for herself. It is pleasant to record the newly minted discovery that Wordsworth’s chief precursor in the Lake District was a local man. John Brown. Even more delightful for me is to discover that he came from my own town. Wigton. Brown did two things: he turned attention to the splendour and enjoyable perils of the place and, just as originally, he pointed to the idea that nature could give off moral values — just looking at it, thinking into it, becoming ‘-part of it," could make you a better man. It was something I felt keenly as an adolescent and can still feel after long, peaceful, lonely days on the fells. I am sure that many people feel the same about their own beloved landscape. Brown’s originality was to remark on this — in writing. Wordsworth’s greatness was to turn it into poetry and a philosophy which entered the consciousness of the British-educated class and remains there to this day, remarkably unimpaired. There are the cohorts still who go to the Lakes for spiritual refreshment through contact with the landscape: and their progeny

roam the globe to seek uncivilised spots for unpolluted natural concourse in a Wordsworthian manner of thinking and feeling. Just as original, in its way, was Brown's description of the landscape — again an element amplified and’transformed by Wordsworth. As De Quincey points out in his wonderful essay on the poet, there had been so very little detailed, accurate, knowledgeable poetry about nature before Wordsworth that he could be said to have invented an entire new planet of material both for himself and for future writers.

While the landscape he describes is so often so very particular that when you live in it, as I do for some of the year, you move about the place accompanied by the comfortable rise and fall of Wordsworth's blank verse. Or Dorothy’s Journals. Those Journals, daily jottings, notes to herself, commonplaces, tender confessions, have now taken their place as gems in the distinguished chronicles of diarists. Wordsworth wrote: “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, and humble cares and delicate fears . . And, on the most-obvious level, we can see again and again in the Journals, the sketches in prose that were to turn into her brother’s poetic portraits. If Dorothy gave him eyes and ears. Coleridge, "the great talker and thinker of the day, gave him intellectual ambition. Some of Coleridge's fire burned in the Lake District and — among other riches — we find in his

writings the first account of a rock climb.

It is, in truth, a shimmering description of his foolhardy descent of the greatest mountain in England — as much a psalm to his Creator as an account of a feat of amateur mountaineering. But nevertheless it is the premier piece of writing on what became another well scripted area of the Lakelands — the mountains.

As the nineteenth century strolled on. classical scholars, generally from Cambridge, would go to the Lakes to read Greek and Latin and climb the mouh-

tains with the help of local guides. The result — ‘a new sport, a golden age of rockconquest, and an impressive literature. Literature, though, has never ceased to spring from the district. It is as if Wordsworth tapped a great spring whose lesser spoutings have sprayed across the pages ever since. Wordsworth’s time coincided with a great move towards the English countryside, a fashion for the picaresque, a passion for the tamed wilderness, a love for artificial simplicity. Hacks and geniuses of all disciplines went to the Lakes to see this natural pheno-

menon: print-makers by the score went and returned to fudge a set of prints back in London and sell the charms and “horrors” of Lakeland for town drawing rooms — but also Turner. Constable, Gainsborough, Wright of Derby. It is as if the concentrated power of that time in that area unleashed such an almighty force that it has ever since generated writers. Walpole chose the districts for his epic "Herries Chronicles"; Arthur Ransome situated his "Swallows and Amazons" there; most important of all — since the time of the Lake poets — Beatrix Potter planted her

ravishing and enduring world of Peter Rabbit in the Lakes. If you look closely at some of the drawings (especially Jemima Puddleduck) you will see the Lake District making a perfect background.

What Wordsworth found to love — the landscape — is still to be seen: what he admired, the people, are still there. To write as well as him is impossible. To attempt to imitate him would be unadventurous. It is enough to write in the same place and try to see it with new eyes. — London Press Service.