observer's horizon.'^ Memory and personal connection with the landscape appear to be at the core of true inhabitation:
To become 'dwellers in tire land'... to come to know the earth, fully and honestly, the crucial and perhaps only and aU- encompassing task is to understand the place, the immediate, specific place, where we live... We must somehow live as close to it as possible, be in touch with its particular soils, its waters, its winds; we must leam its ways, its capacities, its limits; we must make its rhythms our patterns, its laws our guide, its fruit our bounty. That, in essence, is bioregionalism.^
Coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1869 to denote 'all the various relations of animals and plants to one anotiier and to tire outer world' (its Greek components literally mean 'house study'), tire word 'ecology' was not yet in common currency in Stevenson's time, but ite theoretical propositions of interconnectivity and interdependence, not to mention its basis in evolutionary theory, would not be entirely alien to nineteenth-century culture. 7 Bate's extended study of the application of ecological thought to literature. The Song of the Earth, theorises tire significance of 'ecopoetics', which asks 'in what respects a poem may be a making (Greek poiesis) of the dwelling-place'. ® Considering the vast numbers of his Scottish contemporaries emigrating to North American and other global destinations during this period, as well as tire significance of the
3 Jonathan Bate. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2001 p.l8
6 Jonathan Bate. 'Poetry and Biodiversity', p.57.
7 OED
Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs 104
wilderness to North American culture and environmentalism, it is interesting to consider Stevenson's own writings on American landscape and culture in tire context of questions about 'dwellmg' and travel.
Stevenson once remarked that I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly'.^ Stevenson admired William Hazlitt, and this remark is based on Hazlitt's essay, 'On Going a Journey', in which Hazlitt asserts that tire 'soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel and do just as one pleases'C ertainly, this dual search for reality and romance can take its place among the other schisms in Stevenson's psychological profile. But this impulse to travel appears to privilege the journey over the destination, not quite the same sense of home and travel which Bate tireorises. A sense of place or of home, tire possession of 'local knowledge', is surely central to the work of any writer. However, in Stevenson the question of living aird locality appears particularly important, given his life of change aird travel cormningled with the desire to find a suitable destination. Ecological sensibility emphasizes connection and community, and above all a sense of place. But how far does a locality extend? To the bottom of the garden? A
^ Robert Louis Stevenson. ‘Travels with a Donkey in tlie Cevennes’. The Works of Robert
Louis Stevenson. Vol. I. Chatto & Windus: London, 1911. p.l79
30 William Hazlitt. 'On Going A Journey'. The Lore of the Wanderer: An Open-Air
Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs 105
county, country or continent? Stevenson's life and imagination moved between all of these. So, while it is arguably reasonable to place Wordsworth in Iris Lake District, Heidegger in his Bavarian forest, and Thoreau in his hut at Walden Pond, Stevenson is a different matter. A Scottish writer by birth, certainly; his self-caricature addressed to J.M. Barrie owns up to his habit of 'Given to explaining the universe. Scotch, sir, Scotch.', and his writing demonstrates a lasting albeit equivocal relationship with his homelaird, revisiting Scottish scenes hr his imagination even while his globetrotthrg life was leading Irim to the South S e a s . ^3 p- though, difficult to pin Stevenson down to a defining
locale. His life and his writhrg were characterised above aU by change and travel, a curious mix of nearby places and far-off destinations, of alternating sick-room confinements and health-seeking holidays. His travelling brought him new homes; temporary residences at Davos hr the Alps and Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, the abandoned miner's cabin in California, the wished-for houses in the south of France, aird ultimately Vailima and his 'martins nest' study in Samoa. However, as Stevenson himself ackirowledges, travelling is a mental, as well as a physical process, and he suggests that in many ways it is a characteristic of the
33 Robert Louis Stevenson. 'Letter 2550 To J.M, Barrie.' Vol. 8. The Letters of Robert Louis j
Stevenson. Ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew. 8 vols. New Haven & London: Yale |
University Press, 1995. pp.44-48; p.44
Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs 106
writer or poet himself, who 'must study his fellow-countrymen and himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for his book of t r a v e l s ' . ^2
Stevenson read widely, and among his catalogue of early influences, he lists Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, devoting separate essays to each writer in Familiar Studies of Men and Books.'^^ Stevenson's essays make it possible to read tliese Americans as it were 'over his shoulder', and they reveal his burgeoning interest in the culture and landscape of the United States, before he had the opportunity to experience the country and its landscape at first hand. Thoreau, whose Walden, or Life in
the Woods, explored the aesthetics and economies of a life lived close to
nature, has since been hailed as one of the founding fathers of modern environmentalism, and much has been written on his ecological and political significance in modern thought from his day o n w a r d s . ^ ^ Both
writers are in many ways representative of the strongly-felt potentialities of nineteenth-century America, their works linking together ideals of democracy, liberty and landscape. Thoreau's Walden is both a partial biography and a write-up of his extended experiment in natural living - a
32 Robert Louis Stevenson. 'Walt Whitman'. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. London:
Chatto & Windus, 1920. pp.63-88; p.69.
33 Robert Louis Stevenson. 'Hemy David Thoreau'. Familiar Studies of Men and Books.
London: Chatto & Windus, 1920. pp.89-117.
34 See Gretchen Legler. 'Body politics in American nature writing: "Who may contest for
what the body of nature will be?"' Richard Kerridge & Neil Sammells (Eds.) Writing the
Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs X07
life somewhat self-consciously stripped of possessions and complexities, focused on the day-to-day experience of a particular place, a local environment. Uioreau explained that he 'went to the woods because ... [he] wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of Hfe' - an objective which emphasises simplicity, certainly, but also ideals of personal and political independence - tlie sort of political and societal ideals which led him to publish On the Duty of Civil Disobedience in 1849.^^ He chose to live on the edge of society, sustaining himself on home grown crops, living in a shelter of his own making. His is a peculiar example of 'domestic individualism', an experiment in practical living which parallels other North American experiments of the time.^^ From the mid-nineteenth century onwaids, a number of experimental 'utopian' communities sprang up, allied with the transcendentalist movement and putting tlie theory of 'Communitarian Socialism' into practice. Robert Owen, George Ripley, Bronson Alcott and others began tlieir ideal communities, which attracted devotees from the Old world as well as the New. Indeed, one of Walt Whitman's friends, the Scottish photographer Alexander Gardner, emigrated to the States with tlie purpose of joining one of these utopias in mind (although he joined a photography company instead and was later to be instrumental in cataloguing the landscape of
33 Henry David Tlioreau Walden or. Life in the Woods and 'On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience'. New York and London: The New American Library, 1960. p. 66
33 Gillian Brown. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth Century America.