Lakes--claims our attention for its influence on the progress of the
national literature. Of all the isolated tracts of higher ground in
these islands, that of the Lake District is the most eminently highland
in character. It is divisible into two entirely distinct portions
by a line drawn in a north-easterly direction from Duddon Sands to
Shap Fells. South of that line the hills are comparatively low and
featureless, though they enclose the largest of the lakes. They are
there built up of ancient sedimentary strata, like those that form so
much of the similar scenery in the uplands of Wales and the South of
Scotland. But to the north of the line, most of the rocks are of a
different nature, and have given rise to a totally distinct character
of landscape. They consist of various volcanic materials which in early
Palaeozoic time were piled up around submarine vents, and accumulated
over the sea-floor to a thickness of many thousand feet. They were
subsequently buried under the sediments that lie to the south, but, in
after ages uplifted into land, their now diversified topography has
been carved out of them by the meteoric agents of denudation. Thus pike
and fell, crag and scar, mere and dale, owe their several forms to
the varied degrees of resistance to the general waste offered by the
ancient lavas and ashes. The upheaval of the district seems to have
produced a dome-shaped elevation, culminating in a summit that lay
somewhere between Helvellyn and Grasmere. At least from that centre
the several dales diverge, like the ribs from the top of a half-opened
umbrella.
The mountainous tract of the Lakes, though it measures only some
thirty-two miles from west to east by twenty-three from north to south,
rises to heights of more than 3,000 feet, and as it springs almost
directly from the margin of the Irish Sea, it loses none of the full
effect of its elevation. Its fells present a thoroughly highland type
of scenery, and have much of the dignity of far loftier mountains.
Their sky-line often displays notched crests and rocky peaks, while
their craggy sides have been carved into dark cliff-girt recesses,
often filled with tarns, and into precipitous scars, which send long
trails of purple scree down the grassy slopes.
Moreover, a mild climate and copious rainfall have tempered this
natural asperity of surface by spreading over the lower parts of the
fells and the bottoms of the dales a greener mantle than is to be seen
among the mountains further north. Though the naked rock abundantly
shows itself, it has been so widely draped with herbage and woodland as
to combine the luxuriance of the lowlands with the near neighbourhood
of bare cliff and craggy scar.
Such was the scenery amidst which William Wordsworth was born and
spent most of his long life. Thence he drew the inspiration which did
so much to quicken the English poetry of the nineteenth century, and
which has given to his dales and hills so cherished a place in our
literature. The scenes familiar to him from infancy were loved by him
to the end with an ardent and grateful affection which he never wearied
of publishing to the world. No mountain-landscapes had ever before
been drawn so fully, so accurately, and in such felicitous language.
Every lineament of his hills and dales is depicted as luminously and
faithfully in his verse as it is reflected on the placid surface of
his beloved meres, but suffused by him with an ethereal glow of human
sympathy. He drew from his mountain-landscape everything that
'Can give an inward help, can purify
And elevate, and harmonize and soothe.'
It brought to him 'authentic tidings of invisible things'; and filled
him with
'The sense
Of majesty and beauty and repose,
A blended holiness of earth and sky.'
For his obligations to that native scenery he found continual
expression.
'Ye mountains and ye lakes,
And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds
That dwell among the hills where I was born,
If in my youth I have been pure in heart,
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
With God and Nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires--
The gift is yours.'
Not only did his observant eye catch each variety of form, each passing
tint of colour on his hills and valleys, he felt, as no poet before
his time had done, the might and majesty of the forces by which, in
the mountain-world, we are shown how the surface of the world is
continually modified.
'To him was given
Full many a glimpse of Nature's processes
Upon the exalted hills.'
The thought of these glimpses led to one of the noblest outbursts in the
whole range of his poetry, where he gives way to the exuberance of his
delight in feeling himself, to use Byron's expression, 'a portion of
the tempest'--
'To roam at large among unpeopled glens
And mountainous retirements, only trod
By devious footsteps; regions consecrate
To oldest time; and reckless of the storm,
... while the mists
Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth,
... and while the streams
Descending from the region of the clouds,
And starting from the hollows of the earth,
More multitudinous every moment, rend
Their way before them--what a joy to roam
An equal among mightiest energies!'
In this passage Wordsworth seems to have had what he would have called
'a foretaste, a dim earnest' of that marvellous enlargement of the
charm and interest of scenery due to the progress of modern science.
When he speaks of 'regions consecrate to oldest time,' he has a vague
feeling that somehow his glens and mountains belonged to a hoary
antiquity, such as could be claimed by none of the verdant plains
around. Had he written half a century later he would have enjoyed a
clearer perception of the vastness of that antiquity and of the long
succession of events with which it was crowded.[51]
It is curious to remember that three of the poets whom I have singled
out as illustrations of the influence of our lowland, upland, and
highland scenery upon our literature have held up the geologist to
ridicule. Cowper put that votary of science into the pillory among
the irreligious crowd, about whose ears the poet loved to 'crack the
satiric thong.'[52] Wordsworth treated the geological enthusiast with
withering scorn.[53] Scott, with characteristic good humour, only poked
fun at him.[54] It was reserved for a poet of our own day to look below
the technical jargon of the schools, and to descry something of this
wealth of new interest which the landscape derives from a knowledge of
the history of its several parts. But Tennyson only entered a little
way into this enlarged conception of nature. There remains a boundless
field for some future poetic seer, who letting his vision pierce into
the past, will set before the eyes of men the inner meaning of mountain
and glen.
And thus, while we recognise the potent influence which the scenery
of the country has exerted on the progress of our literature, we can
look forward to a fresh extension of this influence as the outcome of
geological investigation. Already the result of this widening of the
outlook has made itself felt alike in prose and verse. The terrestrial
revolutions of which each hill and dale is a witness; the contrasts
presented between the present aspect and past history of every crag
and peak; the slow, silent sculpturing that has carved out all this
marvellous array of mountain-forms--appeal vividly to the imagination,
and furnish themes that well deserve poetic treatment. That they will
be seized upon by some Wordsworth of the future, I cannot doubt. The
bond between landscape and literature will thus be drawn closer than
ever. Men will be taught that beneath and behind all the outward
beauty of our lowlands, our uplands, and our highlands there lies an
inner history which, when revealed, will give to that beauty a fuller
significance and an added charm.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] _Types of Scenery and Their Influence on Literature_, the Romanes
Lecture, delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, June 1, 1898.
[21] See the preceding essay for a fuller discussion of this part of
the subject.
[22] See p. 24.
[23] _The Task_, bk. i. 154-176.
[24] _Ibid._, i. 177.
[25] _The Task_, iii. 357.
[26] _Ibid._, iv. 246.
[27] _Ibid._, vi. 112.
[28] _Winter_, 8.
[29] _Summer_, 192.
[30] _Ibid._, 89.
[31] _Autumn_, 476.
[32] _Spring_, 381, 400, 402; _Summer_, 13.
[33] _Autumn_, 337.
[34] _To William Simpson_, stanza 15.
[35] _Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson._
[36] _Poem on Pastoral Poetry._
[37] _Winter, a Dirge._
[38] _A Winter Night._
[39] _The gloomy night is gathering fast._
[40] _To Mary in Heaven._
[41] This was remarked by Wordsworth in the prefatory note to his lines
on Mossgiel.
[42] _The Vision._
[43] Scott was familiar with this natural trait. '"That's the Forth,"
said the Bailie, with an air of reverence, which I have observed the
Scotch usually pay to their distinguished rivers. The Clyde, the
Tweed, the Forth, the Spey, are usually named by those who dwell on
their banks with a sort of respect and pride, and I have known duels
occasioned by any word of disparagement.'--_Rob Roy_, vol. ii., chap.
xi.
[44] Arnold, _On the Study of Celtic Literature_, 1867, p. 152.
[45] The quotations here given are from Dr. Clerk's translation of
Macpherson's Gaelic version of the Poems. The question has been much
disputed whether his English or Gaelic is the original. There can
be no doubt that, on the whole, the Gaelic shows greater vividness
and accuracy in the description of landscape than the more vague and
bombastic English of Macpherson. Dr. Clerk, who has given a literal
rendering of the Gaelic line for line, remarks: 'I believe that a
careful analysis would resolve very much of Ossian's most weird imagery
into idealised representations of the ever-varying and truly wonderful
aspects of cloud and mist, of sea and mountain, which may be seen by
every observant eye in the Highlands, and it is no fancy to say that
the perusal of these poems, as we have them, may be well illustrated
by travelling a range of the Highland mountains.'--_Poems of Ossian_,
Dissertation, vol. i. p. lxv.
[46] _Fingal_, iii. 3.
[47] _Fingal_, i. 211.
[48] In Burt's _Letters_, which give so graphic a picture of the
condition of the Highlands of Scotland between the two risings of 1715
and 1745, the general impression made at that time on the mind of an
intelligent stranger by the scenery of the region may be gathered from
the following quotations: 'I shall soon conclude this description of
the outward appearance of the mountains, which I am already tired of,
as a disagreeable subject.... There is not much variety, but gloomy
spaces, different rocks, heath, and high and low, ... the whole of
a dismal gloomy brown drawing upon a dirty purple; and most of all
disagreeable when the heath is in bloom. But of all the views, I think
the most horrid is, to look at the hills from east to west, or _vice
versa_; for then the eye penetrates far among them, and sees more
particularly their stupendous bulk, frightful irregularity, and horrid
gloom, made yet more sombrous by the shades and faint reflections they
communicate one to another.'--_Letters from a Gentleman in the North of
Scotland to his Friend in London._ Fifth edit., vol. i. p. 285.
[49] In writing to Mason he says: 'I am returned from Scotland charmed
with my expedition: it is of the Highlands I speak; the Lowlands
are worth seeing once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought
to be visited in pilgrimage once a year. None but those monstrous
creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much
horror. A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen,
that have not been among them, their imagination can be made up of
nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet
ditches, shell-grottoes, and Chinese rails. Then I had so beautiful
an autumn; Italy could hardly produce a nobler scene, and this so
sweetly contrasted with that perfection of nastiness and total want of
accommodation, that Scotland only can supply.'--Gray's _Works_, edit.
E. Gosse, vol. iii. p. 223.
[50] _Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland_, 1775, p. 84.
[51] Sedgwick did his best to enlighten the poet by his famous _Four
Letters on the Geology of the Lake District_; but these came too late.
They were published at Kendal in 1846, and Wordsworth died in 1850.
[52]
Some drill and bore
The solid earth, and from the strata there
Extract a register, by which we learn,
That He who made it, and revealed its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age.
--_The Task_, bk. iii. 150.
[53]
You may trace him oft
By scars which his activity has left
Beside our roads and pathways, though, thank Heaven,
This covert nook reports not of his hand--
He who with pocket-hammer smites the edge
Of luckless rock or prominent stone, disguised
In weather-stains or crusted o'er by Nature
With her first growths, detaching by the stroke
A chip or splinter--to resolve his doubts:
And, with that ready answer satisfied,
The substance classes by some barbarous name,
And hurries on; or from the fragments picks
His specimen, if but haply interveined
With sparkling mineral, or should crystal cube
Lurk in its cells--and thinks himself enriched,
Wealthier, and doubtless wiser, than before!
_The Excursion_, bk. iii.
[54] _St. Ronan's Well_, chap. ii. The passage is quoted postea p. 166.
IV
The Origin of the Scenery of the British Islands[55]
The insular position of these islands, which we are apt to regard as
an essential and aboriginal feature, is merely accidental, and has
not always been maintained. The intimate relation of Britain with
the Continent is well shown by the Admiralty charts. If the west of
Europe were elevated 200 feet--that is, the height of the London
Monument--the Straits of Dover, half of the North Sea, and a large part
of the English Channel would be turned into dry land. If the elevation
extended to 600 feet--that is, merely the united heights of St. Paul's
and the Monument--the whole of the North Sea, the Baltic, and the
English Channel would become land. There would likewise be added to
the European area a belt of territory from 100 to 150 miles broad,
stretching to the west of Ireland and Scotland.
With an uprise of 600 feet a vast plain would unite Britain to
Denmark, Holland, and Belgium, and would present two platforms,[56] of
which the more southerly would stretch from what are now the Straits of
Dover northward to the northern edge of the Dogger Bank, where a steep
declivity, doubtless a prolongation of the Jurassic and Cretaceous
escarpments of Yorkshire, descends to the northern or lower platform.
This submarine escarpment is trenched towards the west by a magnificent
valley through which the united waters of the Rhine and Thames would
flow, between the Dogger Bank and the Yorkshire cliffs. Another gap
further east would allow the combined Elbe and Weser to escape into the
northern plain. Possibly all these rivers would unite on that plain,
but, in any case, they would fall into a noble fjord which would then
be revealed following the trend of the southern coast line of Norway.
Altogether an area more than thrice that of Britain would be added to
Europe. By a total rise of 1800 feet, Britain would be united to the
Faroe Islands and Iceland; while the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans would
be separated.
GEOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF BRITAIN.
From its position on the oceanic border of a continent, Britain has
been exposed to a great variety of geological change. In such a
position marine erosion and deposit are most active. A slight upheaval
or depression, which would have no sensible effect in the interior
of a continent, makes all the difference between land and water on
the coast-line. Moreover, there appears to be a tendency to special
disturbance along the edge of an ocean. America affords the most
marked proofs of this tendency, but in the structure of Scandinavia and
its prolongation into Scotland and Ireland there appear to be traces of
similar ancient ridging up of the oceanic border of Europe.
There is a remarkable convergence of geological formations in
Britain, each carrying with it its characteristic scenery. The rugged
crystalline rocks of Norway reappear in the Scottish Highlands; the
fertile chalk, with its smooth downs and gentle escarpment, stretches
across to us from the north of France; the great plain of North
Germany, strewn with the debris of the northern hills, extends into our
eastern lowlands; even the volcanic plateaux of Iceland and Faroe are
prolonged into the Inner Hebrides and the north of Ireland.
The present surface of Britain is the result of a long, complicated
process in which underground movements, though sometimes potent,
have only operated occasionally, while superficial erosion has been
continuous, so long as any land has remained above the sea. The order
of appearance of the existing features is not necessarily that of the
chronological sequence of the rocks. The oldest formations have all
been buried under later accumulations, and their re-emergence at the
surface has only been brought about after enormous denudation. In its
general growth, Britain like the rest of Europe has, on the whole,
increased from the north by successive additions along its southern
border. Some early upheavals ridged up the Palæozoic rocks into folds
running north-north-east and south-south-west, as may yet be seen in
Scotland, in the Lake Country, and in Wales. By a later series of
plications the younger Palæozoic rocks were thrown into north-and-south
and east-and-west ridges, the latter of which still powerfully affect
the topography in southern Ireland, and thence through South Wales and
Belgium. An east-and-west direction was followed by the more important
subsequent European disturbances, such as those that upheaved the
Pyrenees, Jura, and Alps.[57] Some of the latest movements that have
powerfully affected the development of our scenery were those that
gave the Secondary rocks their general tilt to south-east. It is very
doubtful if any part of the existing topography can be satisfactorily
traced back beyond Middle or Older Tertiary time.[58] The amount of
erosion of some of the hardest rocks of the country since that date has
been prodigious, as may be seen in the fragmentary condition of the
volcanic plateaux of the Inner Hebrides.
GENERAL TOPOGRAPHY.
The main topographical features of Britain may be arranged as
mountains, tablelands, valleys, and plains. All our Mountains are the
result of erosion on areas of land successively upheaved above the sea.
In the development of their forms, the general outlines have been
mainly determined by erosion, independent of geological structure;
while the details have been chiefly guided by structure, but partially
also by the rate and kind of erosion. Ruggedness, for example, has
resulted primarily from structure, but has been aggravated by greater
activity of erosion. The mountainous west, with a greater rainfall and
steeper slopes, is more rugged than the mountainous east.
The Tablelands of Britain are of two orders--1, those of Deposit, which
may be either (_a_) of sedimentary rocks, horizontal or nearly so, as
in the Millstone Grit and Jurassic plateaux of Yorkshire, or (_b_) of
volcanic rocks, as in the wide plateaux of Antrim, Mull, and Skye; 2,
those of Erosion, where, as the result of long-continued degradation,
a series of plicated rocks has been cut down into a more or less
uniformly level surface, as in South Wales. By the elevation of such
a surface into a high plateau, erosion becomes more active, and the
plateau is eventually trenched into a system of ridges and isolated
hills, as has happened in the Highlands.
The Valleys of Britain are the result of erosion either (_a_) guided by
geological structure, as in what are called longitudinal valleys, that
is, valleys which run along the strike or outcrop of formations, as
the Great Glen and Glen Spey in Scotland and the valleys of the Trent
and Avon in England; or (_b_) independent of geological structure, as
in the transverse valleys which embrace the great majority of British
examples.
Our Plains are due to prolonged erosion, as in the Weald; to the
deposit, of _detritus_, as in river-terraces and alluvial plains; to
the action of the sea, as in raised beaches; and to ice, as in the
drift-covered lowlands.
The existing Watershed of Britain is profoundly significant, affording
a kind of epitome of the geological revolutions, through which the
surface of the country has passed. It lies nearer the west than the
east coast. The western slope being thus the steeper, as well as the
more rainy, erosion must be greater on that side, and consequently
the watershed must be slowly moving eastward. Probably the oldest
part of the watershed is to be found in the Highlands, where its
trend from north-north-east to south-south-west was determined by the
older Palæozoic upheaval. Its continuity has been interrupted by the
dislocation of the Great Glen. After quitting the Highlands it wanders
across the Scottish Lowlands and Southern Uplands, with no regard to
the dominant geological structure of these districts, as if, when its
course was originally determined, they had been buried under so vast
a mass of superincumbent rock that their structure did not affect the
surface. Running down the Pennine Chain, the watershed traverses a
region of enormous erosion, yet from its general coincidence with the
line of the axis of elevation, we may perhaps infer that the anticline
of the Pennine Chain has never been lost under an overlying sheet of
later undisturbed rocks. The remarkable change in the character of the
watershed south of the Pennine Chain carries us back to the time when
the great plain of the Secondary rocks of England was upraised with a
gentle inclination to east and south-east. The softer strata between
the harder escarpment-forming members of the Jurassic series and the
Palæozoic rocks of the Pennine Chain were worn away, and two rivers
carrying of the drainage of the southern end of that chain flowed
in opposite directions, the Avon turning south-west and the Trent
northwards. By degrees these streams moved away across the broadening
plain of softer strata, as the escarpments emerged and retreated. At
the same time, streams collected the drainage from the uprising slope
of Secondary rocks and flowed south-eastward. Successive lines of
escarpment have since been developed, and many minor watersheds have
arisen, while the early watershed has undergone much modification,
these various changes pointing to the continuous operation of running
water.
THE MOUNTAINS AND TABLELANDS.
A true mountain-chain is the result of plication of the earth's crust,
and its external form, in spite of sometimes enormous denudation,
bears a relation to the contours produced by the original uplift.
Tried by this standard, hardly any of the heights of Britain deserve
the name of mountains. With some notable exceptions in the south of
Ireland, they are due not to local but to general upheavals, and their
outlines have little or no connection with those due to underground
movement, but have been carved out of upheaved areas of unknown form
by the various forces of erosion. In the course of their denudation,
the nature of their component rocks has materially influenced the
elaboration of their contours, each well-marked type of rock having its
own characteristic variety of mountain forms.
The relative antiquity of our mountains must be decided not necessarily
by the geological age of their component materials, but by the date of
their upheaval or of their exposure by denudation. In many cases they
can be shown to be the result of more than one uplift. The Malvern
Hills, for example, which from their dignity of outline better deserve
the name of mountains than many higher eminences, bear internal
evidence of having been upheaved during at least four widely separated
geological periods, the earliest movement dating from before the time
of the Upper Cambrian, the latest coming down to some epoch later
probably than the Jurassic period.