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Landscape and Character
‘Published inthe New York Times Magarine section. June 12, 1960.
“You write’, saysa friendly critic in Ohio, ‘asf the landscape were more
important than the characters. If not exactly true, this is near enough
the mark, for I have evolved a private notion about the importance of
landscape, and I willingly admit to seeing ‘characters’ almost_as
functions ofa landscape. This has only come about in recent years after
a good deal of travel—though here again I doubt if this is quite the
word, for I am not really a ‘travel-writer’ so much as a ‘residence-
‘writer’. My books are always about living in places, not just rushing
through them. But as you get to know Europe slowly, tasting the
wines, cheeses and characters of the different countries you begin to
realize that/the important determinant of any culture is after all—the
spirit of place /Jast as one particular vineyard will always give you a
special wine with discernible characteristics so a Spain, an Taaly, a
Greece will always give you the same type of culture—will express
Atself through the human being just as it does through its wild flowers.
We tend to see ‘culture’ as a sort of historic pattern dictated by the
hhuman will, buefor me this is no longer absolutely tru. I don’t believe
the British character, for example, or the German has changed a jot
since Tacitus first described its and so long as people keep getting born
Greek or French or Italian their culture-productions will bear the
unmistakable signature of the place./
"And this, of course, is the target of the travel-writers his task is to
isolate the germ in the people which is expressed by their landscape.
Strangely enough one does not necessarily need special knowledge for
the job, though of course a knowledge of language is a help. But how
few they are those writers! How many can write a Sea and Sarlinia oF
a Twilight in ley to match these two gems of D. H. Lawrence? When
he wrote them his Italian was rudimentary. The same applies to Nor-
(156)
“Almond, Languedoc, France (chareoal)
UEP RE
has
eeeLANDSCAPE AND CHARACTER
‘man Douglas? Fowaitains in the Sand—one of the best portraits of North
Aftica.
We travel really to try and get to grips with this mysterious
quality of ‘Greckness’ or ‘Spanishness’; and it is extraordinary how
unvaryingly it remains true to the recorded picture of it in the native
literature: true to the point of platitude. Greece, for example, cannot
havea single real Greek left (in the racial sense) after so many hundreds
of years of war and resettlement; the present racial stocks are the fruit
of countless invasions. Yet if you want a bit of real live Aristophanes
you only have to listen to the chaffering of the barrow-men and ped-
dlers in the Athens Plaka. Ie takes less than two years for even a
reserved British resident to begin using his fingers in conversation
without being aware of the fact. But if there are no original Greeks left
‘what is the curious constant factor that we discern behind the word
“Greckness "ft is surely the enduring faculty of self-expression inhering,
in landscape. At least I would think so as I recall two books by very
different writers which provide an incomparable nature-study of the
place /One is Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and the other Miller’s
Colossus of Marousi.
believe you could exterminate the French at a blow and resettle
the country with Tartars, and within two generations discover, to
your astonishment, that the national characteristics were back at
norm—the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness for good
living and the passionate individualism: even though their noses were
now flat. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordi-
nary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass
of wine in a Pars bistrot. He may not be able to formulate it very clearly
to himself in literary terms, but he will taste the unmistakable keen
knife-edge of happiness in the air of Paris: the pristine brilliance of a
national psyche which knows that artis as important as love or food.
He will not be blind either to the hard metallic rational sense, the
irritating coeur rairomable of the men and women. When the French
want to be malin, as they call it, they can be just as we can be when we
stick our toes in over some national absurdity.
{Yes, human beings are expressions of their landscape, but in order
to touch the secret springs ofa national essence you needa few moments
of quiet with yourself: Truly the intimate knowledge of landscape, if
developed scientifically, could give us a political science—for half the
ts ~LANDSCAPE AND CHARACTER
political decisions taken in che world are based on what we call national
‘charactes/ We unconsciously acknowledge this fact when we exclaim,
“How typically Irish’ or ‘It would take a Welshman to think up some-
thing like that. And indeed we al of us jealously guard the sense of
minority individuality in our own nations—the family differences. The
great big nations like say the Chinese or the Americans present 3
superficially homogeneous appearance; but P've noticed that while
‘we Europeans can hardly tell one American from another, my own
“American friends will ease each other to death at the lunch-table about
the intolerable misfortune of being born in Ohio or Tennessee—a
recognition of the validity of place which we ourselves accord to the
Welshman, Irishman and Scotsman at home/It i a pity indeed to travel
and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a
sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe
softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all
landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. ‘I am watching
‘you—are you watching yourself in me® Most travellers husry too
much. But try just for a moment sitting on the great stone omphalos,
the navel of the ancient Greek world, at Delphi. Don’t ask mental
questions, but just relax and empty your mind/Tt lies, this strange
amphora-shaped object, in an overgrown field above the cemple.
Everything is blue and smells of sage. The marbles dazzle down below
you. There are two eagles moving softly softly on the sky, like distant
‘boats rowing across an immense violet lake.
“Ten minutes of this sort of quiet inner identification will give you
the notion of the Greek landscape which you could not get in twenty
years of studying ancient Greek texts. But having got it, you will at
‘once get al the rest; the key is there, soto speak, for you to turn. After
that you will not be able to go on a shopping expedition in Athens