APPENDIX
EXTRACT FROM "LANDSCAPE," BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
A traveller who did not set out with the intention of word-painting, but to see how men of English race fared wherever they had settled, said that 'travellers soon learn, when making estimates of a country's value, to despise no feature of the landscape.' If Sir Charles Dilke wrote that rather from the political than the artistic point of view, it is not the less accurate in any case, for the landscape, however uninteresting it may seem, or even ugly, is never without its great influence on human happiness and destiny. The interest in human affairs which Sir Charles Dilke has in common with most men of any conspicuous ability, does not prevent him from seeing landscape-nature as well as if his travels had no other object. His description of the Great Plains of Colorado is an excellent example of that valuable kind of description which is not merely an artful arrangement of sonorous words, but perfectly conveys the character of the landscape, and makes you feel as if you had been there.
"Now great roaring uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony and yet continual change. Sometimes the distances are broken by blue buttes, or rugged bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze; the air is bracing even when most hot, the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, the boundless prairie swell conveys an idea of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the Plains…. The impression is not merely one of size. There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe; no patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveller wishing here to end his days.
"To those who love the sea, there is here a double charm. Not only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect of which is that we are always expecting to hail it from the top of the next hillock….
"The colour of the landscape is, in summer, green and flowers; in fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers ever." [Footnote: Greater Britain, p. 80 (popular edition).]
If the reader will take the trouble to analyze this description, he will perceive that, although powerful, it is extremely simple and sober. The traveller does not call in the aid of poetical comparisons (the only comparison indulged in is the obvious one of the Atlantic), and the effect of the description on the mind is due to the extreme care with which the writer has put together in a short space the special and peculiar characteristics of the scenery, not forgetting to tell us everything that we of ourselves would naturally fail to imagine. He corrects, one after another, all our erroneous notions, and substitutes a true idea for our false ones. The describer has been thoroughly alive; he has travelled with his eyes open; so that every epithet tells. The reader feels under a real obligation; he has not been put off with mere phrases, but is enriched with a novel and interesting landscape experience.
In a good prose description, such as these by Kingsley and Sir Charles Dilke, the author has nothing to do but to convey, as nearly as he can, a true impression of what he has actually seen. The greatest difficulties that he has to contend against are the ignorance and the previous misconceptions of his readers. He must give information without appearing didactic, and correct what he foresees as probable false conceptions, without ostentatiously pretending to know better. His language must be as concise as possible, or else important sentences will be skipped; and yet at the same time it must flow easily enough to be pleasantly readable. It is not easy to fulfil these conditions all at once, and therefore we meet with many books of travel in which attempted descriptions frequently occur, which fail, nevertheless, to convey a clear idea of the country. A weak writer wastes precious space in sentimental phrases or in vain adjectives that would be equally applicable to many other places, and forgets to note what is peculiarly and especially characteristic of the one place that he is attempting to describe.