Liberalism and Landscape

This chapter recovers the shifting ways in which landscape occupied the political and aesthetic imaginations of the group of radical liberals with whom Vaughan Williams spent his formative years. It compares his outlook with that of his close friend G. M. Trevelyan, tracing the way in which both men struggled to adapt their liberal values after the First World War. This generation of liberals was concerned with bringing the life of the mind directly to bear on the world at hand—a worldview that included particular assumptions about the processes of history, the future, and the role of the exceptional individual in the work of social reform, and which was made tangible through an affective relationship with landscape. Walking, cycling, and mountaineering became forms of spiritual exercise within a landscape that was ‘storied’ by family and national histories, and which exhibited the same processes of incremental change that were characteristic of certain liberal approaches to political, legal, and aesthetic reform. For Trevelyan, Vaughan Williams, and their liberal intellectual peers, a circumscribed vision of the landscape served as a simulacrum of that feature of English political and legal history (at least, in Whig accounts) that tended toward incremental change, as well as the liberal sense of continuity within change that arose as an expression of the importance of personal freedom, and relatedly, of national self-determination.