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.As Byronwrites, around him grew / A sylvan tribe of children of the chase, / Whose young,unwakened world was ever new. This newness is conditioned on the absence ofhistorical forces understood as political and military events. Nor sword nor sorrowyet had left a trace on this natural scene (VIII:65, 1 4).And as I have argued above,this state is natural, not savage.The green woods were their portions.No sinking spirits told them they grew grey.No Fashion made them apes of her distortions.Simple they were, not savage & (VIII:66, 4 7).But this escape from history is brief, dismissed as an unrealistic alternative to aworld that is too much with the poet and his subjects. So much for Nature, by wayof variety, he writes:Now back to the great joys, civilization,And the sweet consequence of large society:War, pestilence, the despot s desolation,The kingly scourge, the lust of notoriety,The millions slain by soldiers for their ration,The scenes like Catherine s boudoir at three-score,With Ismail s storm to soften it the more (VIII:68, 1 8).And Byron s brief speculations in letters about exiling himself to America aredismissed in language that shows he understands his fantasy of a natural state ofexistence is just that.In October of 1817 he writes that in Italy I have no debts, andI could leave it when I choose.The Anglo-Americans are a little too coarse for me, 111Savagery and Civilityand their climate too cold, and I should prefer the others. 62 Washington may havebeen a heroic individual, and he and Daniel Boone may have been able to inspiregreatness, or at least felicity, among Americans.But in the end, Byron must admitthat the state of nature remains a philosophical place, and the Americans are just ashistorical a people as the Europeans.62 Byron, Letters, pp.355 7. This page intentionally left blank Chapter FourA Breed Apart:The Traveler as EthnographerCaptain Basil Hall experienced America as if he were traveling through the historyof civilization.The retired British naval officer visited the United States with hiswife and child in 1827 28 with the intent, he claimed, to see the progress of the newnation with unbiased eyes.What he saw was a nation in every imaginable state ofdevelopment. In the course of 50 miles travelling, in upstate New York, we camerepeatedly in sight of almost every successive period of agricultural advancementthrough which America has run, or is actually running & The towns he sees have a dreary aspect & much heightened by the black sort of gigantic wall formed of theabrupt edge of the forest, choked up with underwood, now for the first time exposedto the light of the sun. 1 He notes that the area has progressed from barbarism to adecent level of civilization in a rapid period of time. The village of Utica standsa step higher in this progressive scale of civilisation because it has churches anda college.But what with towns and cities, Indians, forests, cleared log-houses,painted churches, villas, canals, and manufactories, and hundreds of thousands ofhuman beings, starting into life, all within the ken of one day s rapid journey, therewas plenty of stuff for the imagination to work on. 2Plenty of stuff indeed.Through the early decades of the nineteenth century manyEnglish observers would come to America to exercise their imaginations.The resultis a comparative ethnology that created the American as Other more firmly thanprevious works had done.They were slovenly, sullen, intemperate, ill-educated, andinsensible to artistic as well as natural beauty.They spoke an English so corruptedthat it was hardly recognizable in certain regions.They were greedy and inhospitable.Most of all, they were a they, an unmistakably separate breed from the Englishparticularly, and Europeans more generally.The emerging methods of anthropology,and more specifically, ethnography, were used in numerous works by travelers whoset out to explain an egalitarian people to an England trying to come to terms withdecades of repression, and approaching the reformation of its own political systemalong more democratic lines.Defining the Other in the first three decades of thenineteenth century resulted in an ethnographic distancing that did more to establishwho the Americans were for the English than any of the works written from the1770s through the end of the eighteenth century, when it became apparent that suchdistancing and definition was necessary.1 Basil Hall, Travels in North America in the years 1827 and 1828 (2 vols, Edinburgh,1829), vol.1, p.128.2 Ibid., vol.1, p.131. 114Americans in British Literature, 1770 1832Hall s depiction of upstate New York in the 1820s offers a tableau of humanityin its various stages according to economic and cultural development as theorizedby French and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers from the middle of the eighteenthcentury through the early years of the nineteenth century.His depiction of the areaplaces the Indians who, as I have argued in the previous chapter, typified the firstage of humanity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings in a landscape thatincluded every successive stage of development.This chapter will briefly examinethe theories developed by French philosophes and Scottish thinkers to explain theprogressive evolution all human societies were thought to travel.Figures such asAdam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and William Robertson identified four successivestages hunting and gathering, the pastoral, the agricultural, and the commercialwhich they considered an unvarying pattern in the course of human societies.I willthen go on to explore the possibility of an untheorized but discursively rich fifthstage, which amateur ethnography posited beyond these four.This fifth stage notan economically determined one, but a socially developmental one I have identifiedin the works of this period emerges clearly in Frances Trollope s DomesticManners of the Americans (1832).Trollope suggests that beyond these theories thatfocus entirely on the mode of a society s subsistence and its effect on its culture, liesthe stage of refined manners which the Americans, because of their simultaneousinvolvement in all of the stages that precede it, have not entered [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.As Byronwrites, around him grew / A sylvan tribe of children of the chase, / Whose young,unwakened world was ever new. This newness is conditioned on the absence ofhistorical forces understood as political and military events. Nor sword nor sorrowyet had left a trace on this natural scene (VIII:65, 1 4).And as I have argued above,this state is natural, not savage.The green woods were their portions.No sinking spirits told them they grew grey.No Fashion made them apes of her distortions.Simple they were, not savage & (VIII:66, 4 7).But this escape from history is brief, dismissed as an unrealistic alternative to aworld that is too much with the poet and his subjects. So much for Nature, by wayof variety, he writes:Now back to the great joys, civilization,And the sweet consequence of large society:War, pestilence, the despot s desolation,The kingly scourge, the lust of notoriety,The millions slain by soldiers for their ration,The scenes like Catherine s boudoir at three-score,With Ismail s storm to soften it the more (VIII:68, 1 8).And Byron s brief speculations in letters about exiling himself to America aredismissed in language that shows he understands his fantasy of a natural state ofexistence is just that.In October of 1817 he writes that in Italy I have no debts, andI could leave it when I choose.The Anglo-Americans are a little too coarse for me, 111Savagery and Civilityand their climate too cold, and I should prefer the others. 62 Washington may havebeen a heroic individual, and he and Daniel Boone may have been able to inspiregreatness, or at least felicity, among Americans.But in the end, Byron must admitthat the state of nature remains a philosophical place, and the Americans are just ashistorical a people as the Europeans.62 Byron, Letters, pp.355 7. This page intentionally left blank Chapter FourA Breed Apart:The Traveler as EthnographerCaptain Basil Hall experienced America as if he were traveling through the historyof civilization.The retired British naval officer visited the United States with hiswife and child in 1827 28 with the intent, he claimed, to see the progress of the newnation with unbiased eyes.What he saw was a nation in every imaginable state ofdevelopment. In the course of 50 miles travelling, in upstate New York, we camerepeatedly in sight of almost every successive period of agricultural advancementthrough which America has run, or is actually running & The towns he sees have a dreary aspect & much heightened by the black sort of gigantic wall formed of theabrupt edge of the forest, choked up with underwood, now for the first time exposedto the light of the sun. 1 He notes that the area has progressed from barbarism to adecent level of civilization in a rapid period of time. The village of Utica standsa step higher in this progressive scale of civilisation because it has churches anda college.But what with towns and cities, Indians, forests, cleared log-houses,painted churches, villas, canals, and manufactories, and hundreds of thousands ofhuman beings, starting into life, all within the ken of one day s rapid journey, therewas plenty of stuff for the imagination to work on. 2Plenty of stuff indeed.Through the early decades of the nineteenth century manyEnglish observers would come to America to exercise their imaginations.The resultis a comparative ethnology that created the American as Other more firmly thanprevious works had done.They were slovenly, sullen, intemperate, ill-educated, andinsensible to artistic as well as natural beauty.They spoke an English so corruptedthat it was hardly recognizable in certain regions.They were greedy and inhospitable.Most of all, they were a they, an unmistakably separate breed from the Englishparticularly, and Europeans more generally.The emerging methods of anthropology,and more specifically, ethnography, were used in numerous works by travelers whoset out to explain an egalitarian people to an England trying to come to terms withdecades of repression, and approaching the reformation of its own political systemalong more democratic lines.Defining the Other in the first three decades of thenineteenth century resulted in an ethnographic distancing that did more to establishwho the Americans were for the English than any of the works written from the1770s through the end of the eighteenth century, when it became apparent that suchdistancing and definition was necessary.1 Basil Hall, Travels in North America in the years 1827 and 1828 (2 vols, Edinburgh,1829), vol.1, p.128.2 Ibid., vol.1, p.131. 114Americans in British Literature, 1770 1832Hall s depiction of upstate New York in the 1820s offers a tableau of humanityin its various stages according to economic and cultural development as theorizedby French and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers from the middle of the eighteenthcentury through the early years of the nineteenth century.His depiction of the areaplaces the Indians who, as I have argued in the previous chapter, typified the firstage of humanity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings in a landscape thatincluded every successive stage of development.This chapter will briefly examinethe theories developed by French philosophes and Scottish thinkers to explain theprogressive evolution all human societies were thought to travel.Figures such asAdam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and William Robertson identified four successivestages hunting and gathering, the pastoral, the agricultural, and the commercialwhich they considered an unvarying pattern in the course of human societies.I willthen go on to explore the possibility of an untheorized but discursively rich fifthstage, which amateur ethnography posited beyond these four.This fifth stage notan economically determined one, but a socially developmental one I have identifiedin the works of this period emerges clearly in Frances Trollope s DomesticManners of the Americans (1832).Trollope suggests that beyond these theories thatfocus entirely on the mode of a society s subsistence and its effect on its culture, liesthe stage of refined manners which the Americans, because of their simultaneousinvolvement in all of the stages that precede it, have not entered [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]