Adventures in Form: The Hebrides and the Romantic Imaginary

Abstract

In 1807 Byron was to write to Elizabeth Pigot of a projected trip to Scotland's Highlands and Islands:On Sunday next I set off Highlands ... we shall purchase shelties, to enable us to view places inaccessible to vehicular conveyances. On coast we shall hire a vessel, and visit most remarkable of Hebrides; and, if we have time and favourable weather, mean to sail far Iceland, only 300 miles from northern extremity of Caledonia, to peep at Hecla. This last intention you will keep a secret, my nice mamma would imagine I was on a Voyage of Discovery, and raise accustomed maternal warwhoop.1This projected adventure was to occasionally obsess poet from year 1805 (when he first wrote of idea to his half-sister Augusta) onwards, but it was doomed to become no more than a joke between his friends and family. However, Byron's letter to Elizabeth Pigot displays all spirit of adventure, excitement and intrepidity that surrounded travel to Hebrides in early 1800s, enhancing links between Hebrides and artistic imagination, travel and literary. Links with artistic imagination had blossomed out of publication of James MacPherson's Ossian poetry in mid-1700s,2 and links between travel and literary from what Margaret Cohen calls maritime of sixteenth century onwards, which was to reach its zenith in adventure fictions from Scott to Stevenson. Cohen writes that as global ocean travel grew up together with printing press, armchair sailors combed sea voyage literature, factual and fictional, strange, surprising adventures well information about world-altering developments and events.3 The literatures that emerged from this trend demonstrated an uncanny mixture of Cartesian rationality and an expression of the senses, intuitions, experience, feelings, and body of those writers who thrive at edges.4The island may be seen epitome of dynamic edge, being even etymologically, Gillian Beer points out, composed of two elements - isle, meaning watery, or watered, and land -the idea of water is thus intrinsic to word, essential that of earth.5 The island represents idea of liminality par excellence. And, indeed, this period of modernity was to see a change in representation and figuration of island in western literature and arts; a change which in many ways ran counter to prevailing artistic trends of time, and saw island not only a scientific, but also a literary and artistic laboratory experimentation in ideas and formal innovation. Between years of 1800 and 1835, islands of Inner Hebrides (in particular Mull, Staffa and Iona) bore witness to a flourishing in artists' adventure and artistic engagement and experimentation. The impression of island phenomena, rather than their rationalized description and contextualization, bears most effective artistic fruit. Cartesian rationality was to be replaced almost entirely by an expression of senses, an acute awareness of perceptual effects. However, and we will see, impression rather than description, although most effective, is rarely used in earlier years of Hebridean travel: Keats, Wordsworth, and even Scott himself, all of whom admit to having been greatly moved by their experiences on these islands, fail to provide a coherent overall impression in their related artwork.Up until beginning of nineteenth century, journeying even within British Isles to Hebrides was a daunting undertaking, a route not often travelled except by members of merchant navy, fishermen, and lighthouse keepers, or, Byron's own project highlights, by private voyagers. The art inspired by Hebrides in this period may thus justifiably be considered an art of the edges.6 Indeed, although Johnson and Boswell had in 1773 successfully charted inclement seas and weather of West coast, years later barriers such language remained - John Keats, on arrival on West coast of Scotland in 1818, wrote that he was for first time in a country where a foreign language is spoken. …