Grammars of Approach

Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque

Cynthia Wall

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226467979
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of "approach." In architecture, the term "approach" changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate "through the most interesting part of the grounds, " as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it. The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the "lesser parts of speech". The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers' manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines—new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.

CHAPTER 1

The Architectural Approach

Landscape gardening depends greatly on the form of the ground, and therefore to shape that, is the first object.

James Elmes, Dictionary of the Fine Arts (1826)

The form of this ground—eighteenth-century landscape gardening—is well trodden, but I would like to do some reshaping of a feature that has not received much attention. My argument begins with the term “approach,” which became a noun somewhere in the second half of the eighteenth century—a specifically architectural noun describing that “ROAD peculiar to a house in the country,” in the words of landscape gardener John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843).1 As the tour of the country house became increasingly popular for a wider range of people, the approach was conceptualized as a carefully designed series of changing perspectives from the entrance of the estate, winding “through the most interesting part of the grounds,”2 to the entrance of the house itself. The approach should “form new combinations on every movement of the spectator” (Loudon, Treatise 2:591). Of the spectator—not simply the family’s visitor but also the estate’s tourist. The changes in perspective were not simply of house and grounds but about house and grounds, about subject and object, center and periphery, and, most importantly for my purposes, about what lies in between.

“In the ancient style,” Loudon explains, “the grand object is, to obtain a straight line,” while “in the modern style, a winding line is preferred, as being more easy and natural, and [. . .] displaying a greater variety of scenery.”3 The older approach to the great house focused on the great house; the approach was a grand avenue, a straight line, dominated by its terminus, the “power house,” in Mark Girouard’s words.4 On the avenue, at each step the house (and its implied owner) looms larger, essentially unvarying, perforating even peripheral vision in a sideways glance. The “modern” approach is an architectural means to engineer a different kind of viewing, specifically of the landed estate, the house in the context of its grounds. This idea of landscape gardening as both coming out of and promoting different ways of seeing, viewing, looking, observing, has been a fairly standard and richly varied debate going back a ways, from Richard Payne Knight’s contention that the picturesque represented “modes and habits of viewing,” to Raymond Williams’s observation that the “very idea of landscape implies separation and observation,” to John Barrell’s argument that a “way of looking” became a “way of knowing” the landscape, to Stephen Daniels’s “field of vision,” to Peter de Bolla’s “looking as a cultural form,” to David Marshall’s question, “What does it mean [. . .] to look at the world through the frame of art?”5 It is part of what Peter Collins calls the eighteenth-century architectural interest in parallax, or “the apparent displacement of objects caused by an actual change in the point of observation.”6 That is, in architecture, things (objects, buildings, views) are designed to produce the perception of movement in the observer. What is at least temporarily displaced by the new approach is the House (landowner); it is the observer (and his or her individual experience) who is focalized here. With carriages and heads turning this way and that, and the Great House remaining hidden (by design) for part of the journey, the weight of the experience thus shifts from that House to the route to the house and so, necessarily, to the viewer, the visitor, the tourist, on the route. The nominalization of “approach” in a sense codifies the importance of the in-between, the on-the-way, the prepositional—a concept that has a literal undergirding in the history of grammar, as will be argued in chapter 4. The view, we might say, shifts to the viewer, away from the ultimately viewed. De Bolla argues that the “changing positionalities in the activity of viewing landscape occur at precisely the same moment as changes in the organization of land and property ownership” (de Bolla 106). What this chapter will begin to argue is that this moment of changing positionalities toward landscapes is also reshaping the grounds of text and narrative.

This chapter opens with the oddly spare etymology of “approach” and its evolution from verb to noun. Its life in dictionaries and encyclopedias is skeletal, but the etymology etches the change from the “ancient” style of the straight line of Palladian symmetry to the “modern” style of winding patterns and linguistic picturesque. The second section will look at the word and concept from the point of view of the English landscape designers of the late eighteenth century, as they adapted, rejected, or otherwise responded to the man who relandscaped most of England: Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716–83). The concept is formally articulated by Thomas Whately (1726–72), Humphry Repton (1752–1818), and Loudon, and their descriptions and definitions share lexical and syntactical patterns that demonstrate what I call the linguistic picturesque—the ways that narrative patterns are designed, syntactically, grammatically, and even to some extent typographically, to replicate the landscaped experience. Then follow a few representative travel writers and novelists to show, first, the more lively lifestyle of the term “approach” in those genres, and then something of the narrative phenomenology of the approach, as their discursions enact the patterns of their excursions. The syntactical architecture of the paragraphs maps onto the stages of the approach, and the language of the descriptions is definitively prepositional: the whole point of the exercise is to go over, under, around, through, and finally up to the house, with the emphasis on the process, on what lies between the entrance and the end.

The etymology of “approach” (n. s.)

The term “approach” as a noun in landscape architecture led a double life. It was almost invisible in dictionaries and encyclopedias, the linguistic houses of verbal change. Its nominalization was recorded only as a sort of husk; the older form of “avenue,” from which it descended, is given center stage. (Its contemporary cousin, the “circuit-walk” or “belt,” does not appear at all.) Its real life was carried out in more popular discourse: the treatises of landscape theorists, the records of travelers, the settings of novels. The first three sections will trace its surface official life; the last two will watch it incarnate itself in other media and ponder the difference.

The first monolingual English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French. &c., defines “approch” only and quite simply as a verb: “come nigh.”7 Throughout the seventeenth century, the term remains only a verb in the dictionaries, sometimes not even defined (e.g., it is simply divided “ap-proach” in the 1676 England’s Perfect School-Master), sometimes not appearing at all (Edward Phillips’s 1658 New World of English Words lists “Apprentice. / Appretiation. / Approbation. / Approperate. / Appropinquate. / Approver”).8 The 1706 edition of Phillips’s New World of Words (continued by lexicographer John Kersey [fl. 1720]) expands the term to include an adjectival version:

To Approach, to draw Nigh, to come Near.

Approachable, that may be Approached.

Kersey’s own Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum of 1715 appropriates these definitions, which remain the standard pattern for definitions through most of the eighteenth-century dictionaries as well, as in Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), Thomas Dyche’s New General English Dictionary (1740, 1759), and the Pocket Dictionary (1765). Some, like Bailey’s in 1730 and John Ash’s in 1775, point to the French root “approacher [sic] to come Near.”9

“Approach” as a noun appears in the early eighteenth century in a military capacity: “APPROAʹCHES [in Fortification] the several Works made by the Besiegers for advancing or getting nearer to a Fortress or besieged Place” (Bailey 1730). (That remains its most constant nounal existence through the century.) Ephraim Chambers, in the 1751 Cyclopædia, gives the term more personality (it “cause[s] some sweat among analysts”) and a wider appearance in the public sphere (in mathematics and physics), as well as a more detailed description of its life as fortification:

APPROACH. See ACCESS and APPROXIMATION.

The curve of equable Approach, Accessus æquabilis, first proposed by M. Leibnitz, has caused some sweat among analysts.—The business is to find a curve, wherein a body descending by the sole power of gravity shall approach the horizon equally in equal times.—This curve has been found by Bernouilli, Varignon, Maupertuis, and others, to be the second cubical parabola, so placed as that its point of regression is uppermost. [. . .]

APPROACHES, in fortification, the several works made by the besiegers for advancing or getting nearer to a fortress, or place besieged. [. . .]

APPROACHES, or Lines of APPROACH, are particularly used for trenches cut in the ground, and their earth thrown up on the side next the place besieged; under shelter or defence whereof the besiegers may approach, without loss, to the parapet of the covered way; and plant guns, &c. wherewith to cannonade the place.

The lines of approach are to be connected by parallels or lines of communication.

The besieged frequently make counter-approaches, to interrupt and defeat the enemies approaches.10

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary gives us:

To APPROʹACH. n. s. [from the verb]

1. 1. The act of drawing near. [. . .]
2. 2. Access.

Honour hath in it the vantage ground to do good; the ap-

proach to kings and principal persons; and the raising of a

man’s own fortunes. Bacon’s Essays.

1. 3. Hostile advance. [. . .]
2. 4. Means of advancing.

Against beleagur’d heav’n the giants move,

Hills pil’d on hills, on mountains mountains lie,

To make their mad approaches to the sky. Dryden’s Ovid.11

The definitions remain the same through at least the 1799 edition. In short, in the dictionaries and encyclopedias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the life of “approach” was lived largely as a verb or as a military substantive. Even James Elmes’s 1826 General and Biographical Dictionary of the Fine Arts gives no separate definition of “approach,” incorporating the term instead into the definition of “avenue.” And in the twenty-first century, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term of our interest as: “5.a. A means or way of approach; an access, passage, avenue. Also fig.,” with contextual examples from George Herbert (“¶ Dulness”) and William Cowper:

1633 G. Herbert Temple: Sacred Poems 108 Where are my lines then? my approaches? views?

1791 W. Cowper tr. Homer Odyssey in Iliad & Odyssey II. vii. 109 Mastiffs in gold and silver lined the approach.

Even here, the examples of “approach” from Herbert and Cowper do not actually match up with the modern domestic meaning of a “variety of ROAD peculiar to a house in the country.”12 Herbert’s “approaches,” embedded between “lines” and “views,” keeps the word tied to the military meanings: the 1720 edition of Phillips’s New World of Words identifies “Lines of Approach or of Attack” as “the Ways of Trenches dug along in the Earth, toward a Town that is besieged, in order to gain the Moat and the Body of the Place”; and to “View a place, (in the Art of War) is to ride about it before the Siege is laid, observing the strength or weakness of its Situation and Fortification, in order to attack the weakest part.”13 The example from Cowper’s translation of the Odyssey suggests the Johnsonian “access” (Bacon’s “approach to kings”), as the dogs of your garden-variety eighteenth-century English country estate were not typically lining the local approach in their gold and silver collars.

“Approach road” is the term used by the OED. It cites the first use as: “1833 J. C. Loudon Encycl. Cottage Archit. 463 The approach-road to the house.” The actual term “approach” for the “ROAD peculiar to a house in the country” was in regular use by the 1770s, as we will see. But throughout the eighteenth century, the more usual term for “approach road” to appear in the dictionaries and encyclopedias is “avenue”:

AVEʹNUE [avenue, F.] a Passage, Entrance or Way lying open to a Place.

AVENUE [in a Garden] a Walk or Row of Trees, &c. or a Walk planted on each Side with Trees. (Bailey, 1730)

AʹVENUE (S.) an entrance, passage, path, or way, to, or from a castle, or other building; with the Gardeners, it is called a walk. (Dyche, 1740)

AVENUE, in gardening, is a walk, planted on each side with trees, and leading to some place.

All avenues, Mortimer says, should lead to the front of an house, garden-gate, highway-gate, or wood, and terminate in a prospect.—In an avenue to an house, whatever the length of the walk is, it ought to be as wide as the whole breadth of the front; and if wider, it is so much the better. (Chambers, 1750)

AʹVENUE. n. s. [avenue, Fr. It is sometimes pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, as Watts observes; but it is generally placed on the first.]

1. 1. A way by which any place may be entered. [. . .]
2. 2. An alley, or walk of trees before a house. (Johnson, 1755)

AʹVENUE (S.) 1. A passage to a place,

1. 2. A walk or visto of trees. F. (Pocket Dictionary, 1765)

AVENʹUE, (Avenue, F. Quo licit venire ad) a Passage or Way lying open to a Place.

AVENʹUE, (among Gardener’...