The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature by Richard Bevis

Abstract

ESC 27, 2001 mitment, qualities that, rather than being private matters, are important aspects of the public man, especially when publicly honoured. From Arabye to England is a finely integrated exploration of mediaeval intercultural permeation, nicely put together, enter­ taining, and very informative— in short, an entirely appropri­ ate homage to one of Canada’s most distinguished academics. DAVID WILLIAMS / McGill University Richard Bevis. The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. xv, 409. $75.00 cloth. This book takes its origin from Thomas Hardy’s discussion in the first chapter of The Return of the Native (1878) of what he considered a major shift in aesthetic attitudes to the natu­ ral world. The traditional idea of the Vale of Tempe—a gentle pastoral world of fields, woods, and streams —was giving way to a very different landscape represented by Hardy as “a gaunt waste in Thule,” a harsher world of mountain-peaks, deserts, boundless seas, and infinite space. “The time seems near,” he wrote, “if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sub­ limity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.” Richard Bevis, now professor emeritus of En­ glish at the University of British Columbia, decided to explore the intellectual and historical background to this proposition, and The Road to Egdon Heath is the result. This ambitious quest led him, as we might expect, into philosophical discussions of the sublime and the beautiful from Longinus to Burke, although Bevis prefers “the Great,” a term employed by Addison, which he finds more useful and less con­ fusing. Citing English, continental European, and North Ameri­ can examples, he also tracks down the germ of such an aesthetic response in earlier poetry, fiction, and travel-literature, and fol­ lows less familiar but intriguing paths, including the gradual description of the geological record; he even dips into the liter­ ature of Alpinism. (It is no coincidence, by the way, that Leslie 512 REVIEWS Stephen, Hardy’s friend and literary adviser, was an enthusias­ tic mountain-climber.) All this involves what Bevis himselfcalls “a sprawling mass of material” (xiii), so he wisely established a cut-off point at the date of Hardy’s novel. An exploration of the twentieth-century cult of the wasteland is promised in a sequel. The Road to Egdon Heath, then, is “a history ofideas book” (xiii); indeed, it is the twenty-fifth volume in the McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History ofIdeas. Now it needs to be acknowledged at once (although professors are not supposed to say this kind of thing) that “history of ideas” all too often becomes an excuse for lack-lustre academicism and dryasdust pedantry. It is, there­ fore, a pleasure to report that Bevis writes lucidly and freshly. He inevitably has to deal with a mixture of familiar and un­ familiar material, and is able to explain the latter clearly and bring new insights to the presentation of the former. Unlike many academics, he knows how to limit himself to the relevant parts of a text and avoid unnecessary digression. As a result, he succeeds in making “the road to Egdon Heath” (which might otherwise threaten to be as meandering as G.K. Chesterton’s rolling English road) both direct and well-signposted. What is most endearing about Bevis’s approach is his hon­ esty: he does not try to fake a response he cannot feel. Thus of Ossian he writes: “The narrative and speeches use Great and barren landscapes as backdrops, but it is all much of a piece, and a little goes far. To me it reads like a bad translation or imitation of Homer, with less plot and more decoration” (69). Knowing that his subject could become tedious when traced in such detail, he is careful to vary his stylistic tone. He can be pithy: “[Richard] Savage had a vivid imagination with a low flashpoint” (61). He can be suave: “[Benoît de Maillet] clearly tries to reason from his evidence and tiptoe around Genesis” (76). He...