Introduction

1In “The Lie of the Land: Notes about Landscapes,” Vernon Lee refers to the merits of “confusion” in impressionist art. The text features in her first collection of travel essays, Limbo, and focuses on how best to represent landscapes in both visual art and writing. I will argue that this sense of productive confusion is at the heart of her travel essays, creating a space of association which disrupts the linearity of chronological and visual representation. The reliance on subjective perception leads to an aesthetics ruled by layering and association, creating connections which transcend time and place while being rooted in the geographical settings’ emotional significance. The essays, brief snippets from her travels around Europe, initiate the reader in this process of discovery, as much of places themselves as of inner narratives, which is depicted as a spiritual experience. I will show how Lee builds an aesthetics of confusion through layered time periods, and visual and emotional associations. This process can also be linked with Lee’s work on aesthetic empathy, which acts as a sort of connective tissue between people, places, art forms and experiences.

1. Lee’s travel essays: transmitting the genius loci

3The short pieces on individual settings reflect Lee’s childhood experience of moving around Europe, and in many of the featured countries she could lay claim to feelings of being at home: France was her country of birth, Germany that of her education, and Italy her place of residence for much of her life. This constitutes one of the connecting lines which shape the overarching logic in her travel writing. She regularly refers to her personal and literary heritage as a traveller, and despite describing the benefits of aesthetic confusion in “The Lie of the Land”, her texts form a coherent stylistic and geographical whole.

4Lee is also a theoretical traveller, and throughout the texts she develops her ideas on the experience of travel itself, especially through concepts like the genius loci and the “sentimental traveller,” which feature as titles of two of the books. The introductions to her collections explore the significance of travel, as do essays like “On Modern Travel.” Through these collections she identifies the special aesthetic qualities of places, which she connects with the broader concept of the genius loci, the spirit of place, favoured by the “sentimental traveller”: a person who travels as much in their imagination as in real life, and who experiences an emotional connection with places. However, she also seeks to define the type of traveller she is not: “I had been brought up to despise persons who travelled in order to ‘sight-see.’ We never saw any sights” (Sentimental Traveller 7). Lee presents her childhood, spent “moving not travelling,” as a nomadic passage from one European country to another (Sentimental Traveller 6). This allows her to develop the “pan-European” perspective, treating Europe as “single entity,” which Hughes connects with her sense of “queer borders” and defines as “her repudiation of national boundaries as well as her sexuality.” Lee’s queer borders are not only national and social, as “she similarly ignored borders between past and present, actuality and imagination” (Hughes 187), merging time periods and representations. The essays cross borders by focusing on the emotions associated with places, beginning with the desire for travel:

Since I believe that living in gipsy-carts (or trains de luxe, motors, and Cook’s hotels) is of all modes of life the most sacrilegious to the Genius Loci; and as regards myself, that I have grown into a Sentimental traveller because I have travelled not more, but less, than most folk—at all events, travelled a great deal less than I have wanted… (Sentimental Traveller 3)

5Her snobbery about commercial tourism is another consequence of this mobile upbringing which has given her a deep connection with places and a tendency to treat them with spiritual reverence. The emotional power of places is at the heart of the essay collections, as they “become objects of intense and most intimate feeling” (Genius Loci 3), taking on a semi-religious significance: “The Genius Loci, like all worthy divinities, is of the substance of our heart and mind, a spiritual reality. And as for visible embodiment, why that is the place itself, or the country” (Genius Loci 5). Lee also hints at a didactic aspect of the essays, hoping to initiate the reader in the same emotional and spiritual connection with places:

The emotion which has been stirred in me by localities may be transmitted, though the images cannot; and those whose feelings have been heightened by the transmission of mine will find in what they do see, and make in what they do not see, places and things to delight their hearts. (Sentimental Traveller 281)

6While she rejects guidebooks, which were not a feature of her cosmopolitan upbringing, she views her essays as a guide to sentimental travel. The “transmission” she offers connects the reader with her emotional and spiritual experiences of travel.

2. Confusion of optical lines: Lee and impressionism

8It is within this reflection on the sense of place that Lee turns her attention to impressionism. While her treatment of the artistic movement is lukewarm—she sees it as “rather a necessary phase in the art, than a definite achievement” (Limbo 71)—the essay demonstrates impressionism’s power to capture a subjective response to landscapes. Lee lauds the optical effects in the impressionists’ representation of landscapes, arguing that the painters have “done a great and pious thing in reinstating the complexity, the mystery, the confusion of Nature's effects” (Limbo 68).

9She notes that impressionism neglects the specificity of landscapes themselves, which is part of the “lie of the land”, comparing this with the previous generation of English painters (she gives Clive Newcome as an example) who were “busy with compass, measuring-rod and level” in their preoccupation with accuracy (Limbo 67). Lee questions the value of this attention to detail, as nature itself “does not thin out, make clear and symmetrical for the easier appreciation of foolish persons, but packs effect upon effect, in space even as in time, one close upon the other, leaf upon leaf, branch upon branch, tree upon tree, colour upon colour” (Limbo 70).

10Nature is described through subjective “effects”—a key word in the titles of Monet’s paintings—rather than objective realities, producing spatial and chronological confusion rather than neat comprehensibility. Describing these overlapping effects, Lee’s text reproduces the feeling of nature’s confusion, listing colours and textures to produce a sort of syntactic impressionism through parataxis: “a harmony of purple, blue, slate, brown, pink, and russet, of tints and compounds of tints without a name, of bare hedgerows and leafless trees, sere grass and mist-veiled waters…” (Limbo 70). The paintings appear to embrace incomprehension, with their blurring and nameless colours, and it is the mixture of elements that brings out the beauty in the images: “a mere mist of glorious orange, as we see it flame against the hillside confusion of mauve, and russet and pinkish sereness” (Limbo 68).

11Reading Lee in relation to impressionism also allows us to place her ideas in parallel with Walter Pater’s impressionist criticism. Pater summarises the impressionist stance through his reformulation of Matthew Arnold: “in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly” (Pater xix). Lee’s comments on seeing in “The Lie of the Land” appear to enter a dialogue with Pater:

[The impressionist painters] have seen, or are still seeing, all the things which other men did not see. And here I may remark that one of the most important items of this seeing is exactly the fact that in many cases we can see only very little. (Limbo 68)
Well, Nature shows a great many things which are not unchanging and not by any means unperplexing; she shows them at least to those who will see, see what is really there to be seen; and she will show them, thanks to our brave impressionists, to all men henceforth who have eyes and a heart. (Limbo 69)

12For Lee, impressionist painting expresses the reality of our limited individual perspectives. This approach rejects the idea of objective reality to focus on subjective truths, placing importance in the process of perception itself and in individual reactions to art. Lee’s idea of a confusion of visual or sensory elements which precede intellectual understanding can be linked with the “myth of the innocent eye” (Vouilloux 7, quoting Ernst Gombrich) expressing the epistemological postures of Impressionism.

13Scenes elsewhere in the essays echo this visual confusion, placing a focus on subjective perception and immediacy and suggesting the effects of impressionist painting. In “On Modern Travelling,” Lee describes the sense of movement and mystery of seeing “a landscape of which the smaller details are effaced” pass by when travelling by train at sunset, making “everything […] a mere vision” of “bends of poplared river with sunset redness in their grey swirls” (Limbo 102). Misty scenes of the Harz mountains also form an impressionistic tableau:

Immediately below, limes and great lilac-trees sprouting out of the rock; and beyond, in the autumn mist, the low hills, freshly ploughed, pale yellow and tan, and furred at the top with their woods; and, almost invisible, the Harz. (Sentimental Traveller 29)

14The passage produces a similar sense of overlapping effects to Lee’s descriptions of impressionist painting, mixing colours, depths and sensations. The blurring effects and the faint line of the mountains also hint at the typical features of impressionism. Lee describes German forests through accumulation, like in “The Lie of the Land”: “woods upon woods, and in their gaps, misty hills, also wood-clad” (Sentimental Traveller 47). Despite the mystery of the forests, with their “elusive shapes in the uncanny light and bewildering perspective”, the German landscape at times seems to lack confusion: “hill horizons drawn with the ruler, wooded hill-angles made with the T-square, washes of as few colours as possible, with no mysterious tints upon tints or messy passages; perspective itself unable to bring surprises or raise doubts as to the real shape of anything” (Golden Keys 214). Lee wonders if this combination of straight lines and mysterious forests, respectively described as “prose” and “poetry”, is at the heart of “the contradiction and the harmony of the great German soul” (Golden Keys 215).

15Optical confusion, or its absence, in the landscapes becomes emblematic of Lee’s wider impressions of German culture. It can also appear as part of an immediate emotional effect, where the blurred lines are both visual and psychological. In “The Churches in the Silted Valley” she reads about tragic deaths at sea, making a note of several epitaphs:

The afternoon of my visit to the three churches was one of sun-suffused mists, the first day of autumn, such as steeps our spirit in sadness and yet serenity. I walked to and fro under that sea-warped beech avenue, picking up cornelian and agate-coloured flints alongside that church, and turning, upon that knife-blade of hill, now towards the sea and the salt-marsh and red seafaring village in front, and then towards the green pastoral valley of the three churches behind. The epitaphs I had copied and the many others I had spelt out had got blurring my soul, as that wide, misty, autumn sunshine blurred the landscape. (Golden Keys 87)

16Lee’s emotional experience combines with the visual effects produced by the weather and the fusion of valley and sea. This leads to a merging of landscape and emotion, where the impressionistic effect isn’t just optical, but empathic. As Alison Rutledge notes, Lee’s treatment of travel is rooted in the idea that “one’s perception of place is the merging of internal and external” (Rutledge 356), and the language she uses to describe the genius loci alludes to this empathic connection: “Words such as ‘knits’ and ‘meshes’ allude to her ideas about the role of empathy in creating connection, not only between self and object in the present, but also between the self and objects of the past” (Rutledge 357).

18According to Rutledge, the travel essays, in striving for deep personal connection with places, “provide real-world case studies” in Lee’s theories about empathy, allowing her to “communicate her ideas to a wider audience than her more technical writing would reach” and “put her ideas into practice for her readers” (Rutledge 355). Lee’s travel essays have a didactic function, clarifying her theories and showing her readers aesthetic empathy in action. The sense of confusion she takes from the impressionist painters can be related to her empathic merging of place and emotion: another sign of the underlying coherence in Lee’s confusion.

3. Confusion of temporal strata

19The idea of confusion can also be extended to Lee’s treatment of time in the travel essays. References to childhood travel, real and imagined, play an important role. Lee describes her fascination as a child with the “imaginative love” inspired by images of Italy in the journal The Keepsake, giving the same title to her essay (Sentimental Traveller 276). Optical effects play a part in this initiatory process, both in generating a fascination for travel through the fixed images of the journal, and in the text’s evocation of settings whose power goes beyond the written page and generates almost magical images: “supplying fata morgana places to shimmer and shift across the dullness of my daily life” (Sentimental Traveller 279).

20She also refers to her heritage as a travel writer, describing a piece of childhood reading “which helped to make [her] a sentimental traveller”: a series of articles by a “roving clergyman” which describe “the author’s tramps up the side-valleys of the Rhineland.” It is not their literary quality that makes them memorable, as Lee is uncertain whether they “were good or bad literature, or even attractive or boring reading,” but their author’s ability to pass on his love for his subject which leads her to conclude that “he must have been a Sentimental Traveller, probably without guessing it” (Sentimental Traveller 280). This metanarrative key builds the line of transmission between her and the reader, offering the initial link in the chain of associations.

22In “The Keepsake” the spiritual aspect is rooted in childhood instincts and connected with the “mystic gift of consecration, of steeping things in our soul’s essences” which she associates with “our poverty of experience in those early years” (Sentimental Traveller 277). This immature, partial perception introduces another sort of confusion, relying on “slight resemblances, trifling fragments, [which] must stand for whole impressions” (Sentimental Traveller 277), and becoming a sort of impressionist “innocent eye,” but where emotion is more important than vision. She acknowledges that “no description can make you see things unless you have seen them before” and that her writing would therefore be “dilettanteish and futile” if its principal goal were not simply to share emotions (Sentimental Traveller 281).

23Just as Lee’s childhood reading inspires her writing, childhood experiences merge with present travel. She describes a journey to Avignon where she reflects on earlier travels, carrying a “childish recollection” of her “first impression of the South,” and of “the first distinctly southern plant” she saw, a medlar flower. Seeing the same plants in a courtyard in the present, she imagines that “they may have sprung, seeded themselves, as these trees will do, from the fruit of that magic southern tree of my childhood” (Golden Keys 175).

24Similarly, a boat journey on the Rhine become a journey into Lee’s childhood memories of Germany: “a journey into the past. Mine?” (Sentimental Traveller 19). The essay layers both time periods and real and imagined images: “The steamer carried me upstream also among prints and cheap oil-landscapes seen in my childhood, views of the Rhine and its villages and castles, the picture arising in my memory as the original hove in sight” (Sentimental Traveller 20).

25She creates a personal Germany, merging images and stories from the past with present reality. The visual effect is striking, combining fixed images retrieved from memory and moving images as the journey progresses. As Lee travels upstream the superimposed images of past and present disrupt linearity: “Into the stories of my nurse Franziska did that Rhine steamer carry me, panting against the yellow sunset curdles of the current” (Sentimental Traveller 21).

26Hughes notes that the association between Germany and childhood in Lee’s texts appears through frequent mentions of “orality: hearing and being fed” (Hughes 190). The Rhine journey carries her towards an impressionist merging of sunset and river, but also towards the bedtime stories of the past. It is perhaps self-reflective passages like these which led to Lee—like the impressionist painters themselves—being “accused” of impressionism, in Lee’s case by Virginia Woolf:

Her method then, so far as the portrait of the place is concerned, is purely impressionist, for if she were to concentrate her mind upon the task of seeing any object as exactly as it can be seen there would be no time for these egotistical diversions. (158)

27Woolf appears to rewrite Pater’s impressionist motto once again. Lee herself distinguished her approach to aestheticism from that of Pater by focusing on the idea of empathic merging, suggesting an open connection between subject and object, rather than a projection of the individual ego onto the aesthetic object (Rutledge 354). In contrast with Woolf’s accusation of self-involvement, Lee presents this merging as a universal experience:

This same power of sentiment and fancy, that is to say, of association, enables us to carry about, like a verse or a tune, whole mountain ranges, valleys, rivers and lakes, things in appearance the least easy to remove from their place. As some persons are never unattended by a melody; so others, and among them your humble servant, have always for their thoughts and feelings, an additional background besides the one which happens to be visible behind their head and shoulders. By this means I am usually in two places at a time, sometimes in several very distant ones within a few seconds. (Limbo 75)

28Lee offers her own experience as a “case study” inviting the reader to engage in sentimental travel. The sense of being in two places at once appears in the next essay in Limbo, describing the “phenomenon” of “Tuscan Midsummer Magic” through an intercultural parallel:

The only word which expresses the phenomenon is the German word, untranslatable, Bescheerung, a universal giving of gifts, lighting of candles, gilding of apples, manifestation of marvels, realisation of the desirable and improbable—to wit, a Christmas Tree. And Italy, which knows no Christmas trees, makes its Bescheerung in midsummer, gets rid of its tourist vulgarities, hides away the characteristics of its trivial nineteenth century, decks itself with magnolia blossoms and water-melons with awnings and street booths, with mandolins and guitars; spangles itself with church festivals and local pageants; and instead of wax-tapers and Chinese lanterns, lights up the biggest golden sun by day, the biggest silver moon by night, all for the benefit of a few childish descendants of Goths and Vandals. (Limbo 94)

29German Christmas celebrations are placed in parallel with the nature and animation of Italian summer. Both are described through an accumulation of effects, contrasting winter lanterns and bright summer days. Hughes emphasises the importance of Germany in Lee’s texts as a whole as a “substrate of her subjectivity prior to her Italian awakening” (Hugues 189). This passage provides a neat demonstration of Germany’s importance within Lee’s aesthetic process. It also reminds us of the biographical logic underpinning Lee’s aesthetic confusion and drawing connections with the descriptions of Germany in other texts.

30As well as a journey into her own past, Lee’s temporal confusion includes a layering of historical and political narratives about places. Rutledge refers to Lee’s concept of “the historical emotion,” indicating a merging of past and present which appears as a “mental descent into a sort of historical trance” (Rutledge 360). In “Goslar, once Imperial,” Lee’s impressions of Goslar involve a temporal layering which combines vastly different approaches to the setting, connecting it both with childhood and with more immediate political questions. Her first impression is “Christmas tree-ish and fairy book-ish,” highlighting the “pleasant childishness” of “a dear little old town out of a fairy-story” (Sentimental Traveller 39). Gradually “a different note” emerges, extending the supernatural aspects through memories of German and Swiss literary renderings of Walpurgis night:

…this childish fairy-tale town of Goslar is the metropolis of the witch district, the city where the Holy Roman Empire of the Othos and Henrys marches with the dominions of gnomes and dwarfs, of ghosts and warlocks. Where have I read it? In Faust, in Heine or in Keller’s “Spiegel das Kätzchen”? (Sentimental Traveller 40)

31The landscape echoes Lee’s layering of Germany and Italy in Limbo, with “the almost Italian lines of these magic Harz hills, volcanic and mysterious like the Euganeans, but fringed with firs and filled with the grotesque and terrible creatures of German wonderland” (Sentimental Traveller 43). Literary representations of witchery merge with the mysterious surroundings which seem set for Mephistopheles to enter the frame: “It was the hour of Faust and Wagner’s return from the fields, and one expected the eerie poodle to appear and circle closer and closer…” (Sentimental Traveller 43).

32Alongside these increasingly menacing supernatural layers, Lee adds another link in the chain of associations with witchcraft:

I began to be haunted by the thought of all the thousands of poor women, moonstruck or slandered, whom the German cities tortured and burned throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries… (Sentimental Traveller 40)

33Lee’s moral sentiment contrasts with the innocent fairy-tale atmosphere at the start of the essay, and highlight this essay’s particular form of confusion, both temporal and discursive. This finds an echo in the later text “A Village Church in Thuringia” (The Golden Keys), where Lee takes up the theme of witch-hunts once again when reading about a trial in a local chronicle relating seventeenth- and eighteenth-century crimes:

[…] they did not think her much worse than her accuser the Peukerin, but deemed it advisable to remove an unpopular character from the neighbourhood, and at the same time show due respect for so religious and edifying a belief as that in witches. After all, did not some of our own most enlightened neighbours acquiesce in the sentence of Captain Dreyfus because he was evidently not a good sort, and because a faith in court-martials is necessary for the well-being of great nations? (Golden Keys 198)

34Lee brings her reading about witch-hunts into a modern moral dialogue around the Dreyfus affair, where her irony about court-martials may also hint at the anti-militarist views she expresses elsewhere. She places her moral positions within a free exploration of the German settings, combining ethics and aesthetics. The temporal merging, placing history alongside present experience, extends across her texts, drawing a connection between The Sentimental Traveller and The Golden Keys: references to Germany allow Lee to connect childhood instincts and modern moral queries.

4. Confusion as transcendence: Germany and music

35Lee’s use of confusion includes the optical aspects she analyses in impressionist painting, as well a sense of interconnecting time periods and emotional experiences. However, the artistic movement itself is, according to Lee, overly focused on “what is actually seen” (Limbo 56):

This terrible over-importance of the act of vision is doubtless the preparation for a new kind of landscape, which will employ these arduously acquired facts of colour and light, this restlessly renovated technique, in the service of a new kind of sentiment and imagination, differing from that of previous ages even as the sentiment and imagination of Browning differs from that of his great predecessors. (Limbo 71)

36She sees Impressionism as lacking in imagination or spiritual depth but acting in preparation for a richer contribution to art: “But where there is a faithful, reverent eye, a subtle hand, a soul cannot be far round the corner” (Limbo 72). While Lee questions the impressionists’ choice of landscapes which are only appealing at a specific moment, she also sees a more magical element in their paintings:

One would indeed be glad to open one’s window on the fairyland of iridescent misty capes, of vibrating skies and sparkling seas of Monsieur Claude Monet; still more to stand at the close of an autumn day watching the light fogs rise along the fields, mingling with delicate pinkish mist of the bare poplar rows against the green of the first sprouts of corn. But I am not sure that the straight line of sea and shore would be interesting at any other moment of the day; and the poplar rows and cornfields would very likely be drearily dull until sunset. The moment, like Faust’s second of perfect bliss, is such as should be made immortal, but the place one would rather not see again. (Limbo 65)

37This passage hints at a potential for enchantment of reality, noting the Impressionists’ ability to capture a moment of exceptional beauty that transforms otherwise uninteresting landscapes (“fairyland,” “misty capes”), or more largely a moment of subjective perception. This ambiguous power is described through a reference to Faust, part of another network of associations across Lee’s work including the references to Goethe in her depictions of the Harz as well as the essay “Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art” which relates to her fantastic fiction.

38Lee’s harshest judgement of impressionism is that it demonstrates “a lack of soul appealing to soul” (Limbo 72), as landscapes themselves contain a sense of spiritual depth beyond the visual: “The lie of the land has therefore an importance in art, or if it have not, ought to have, quite independent of pleasantness of line or of anything merely visual” (Limbo 62). For Lee, visual art is not merely visual. While landscapes are made up of “undulating lines,” these connect with deeper inner layers and other modes of perception and representation. Landscapes merge with subjective experience:

It is extraordinary how much of my soul seems to cling to certain peculiarities of what I have called lie of the land, undulations, bends of rivers, straightenings and snakings of road; how much of one’s past life, sensations, hopes, wishes, words, has got entangled in the little familiar sprigs, grasses and moss. The order of time and space is sometimes utterly subverted; thus, last autumn, in a corner of Argyllshire, I seemed suddenly cut off from everything in the British Isles, and reunited to the life I used to lead hundreds of miles away, years ago in the high Apennines, merely because of the minute starry moss under foot and the bubble of brooks in my ears. (Limbo 76)

39The power of place is rooted in confusion: personal identity and spirituality merge with the visual details of landscapes, and a familiar setting can produce a Proustian return of the past within the present. Lee establishes a link between external views of “undulations, bends of rivers, straightenings and snakings of road” and the interior landscape of “one’s past life, sensations, hopes, wishes, words” (Limbo 76). While impressionist art hints at this confusion, Lee’s texts explore its spiritual dimensions, perhaps giving it the “soul” she feels it lacks. Geographical and temporal strata contain the keys to an inner story, and access to different periods in one’s life, as well as to something unreal:

Nay, the power of outdoor things, their mysterious affinities, can change the values even of what has been and what has not been, can make one live for a moment in places which have never existed save in the fancy. (Limbo 76)

40The subtle connections between different natural settings give them a transportive power, acting as a portal for imaginary travel. In Lee’s travel essays places act as a gateway to a deeper understanding of the self. Just as nature produces a sense of confusion and connection between self and setting, intermedial merging also produces a feeling of transcendence. Lee associates Germany with music, declaring “Music always haunts me in such German places” (Golden Keys 214). She sees music as a means of moving beyond reality which German landscapes do not always provide: “And must not this race make out of melodies and chords the patterns, the longed-for unreality, which this country cannot give them through the eye?” (Golden Keys 215). Music provides the aesthetic drama she feels the “ruler”-drawn landscapes lack, compared with other places which “sing in the melody and counterpoint of mountain outlines and involuted valleys” (Golden Keys 214). She associates German music with a mixture of natural and architectural atmospheres: “mixed homeliness and romance of scenery and architecture which is to me the explanation of Germany’s supremacy in music” (Golden Keys 204).

41Music appears to reinstate the confusion which the landscapes lack at a visual level. A visit to a church in Thuringia leads to a parallel between the emotional experience of spirituality and the auditory beauty she associates with the country:

The last morning I spent at Schloss Wolframsdorf was a Sunday, so I accompanied my friends to the church down in the village. I went, I confess, from mere idle curiosity to witness a Lutheran service in rural surroundings. But what took place in me—unawares to my companions—was an inner drama, very solemn and sacred, filling me with emotion as of a great organ, and, bringing to a focus, in some way consecrating for myself, my farewell impressions of Thuringia and Germany. (Golden Keys 215)

42Lee’s inner drama hints at the impressionist “moment of perfect bliss” in Limbo. The image of a church organ suggests an empathic merging with the surroundings (“filling me with emotion as of a great organ”) reminiscent of the kinaesthetic engagement with the “mountain rising” Lee uses to define aesthetic empathy. Music illustrates a moment of spiritual connection:

I have had such emotion once or twice before in my life. It is not exactly religious, although, as I said, charged with a sense of solemnity and sacredness, and I suppose it is somewhat of the kind which other people may get from Bayreuth; only in my case it has never been produced by any ready-made contribution of artistic suggestions (least of all Wagner’s!), but only by the play of my own silent thoughts (excited by music and the spoken word) among very poignant and complex memories of past centuries and thoughts of human destiny. (Golden Keys 199)

5. World War I: The broken line

44As well as offering a form of spirituality, Lee’s treatment of confusion is grounded in her work on empathy: “her search for a version of aestheticism that embraces ethical behavior toward others led her to the burgeoning field of psychology” (Rutledge 353). Lee draws a connection between aesthetics and ethics, and as Sally Blackburn-Daniels notes “Lee’s Victorian cosmopolitanism fluidly evolved into a committed anti-war stance” (quoted in Mitchell and NíBheacháin). Lee’s fluid borders present an aesthetics of political harmony which can be connected with her anti-militarist views: she was a member of the Union of Democratic Control, and wrote several anti-war texts, the most famous of which is The Ballet of Nations, a play dedicated to pacifist writer Romain Rolland.

45The Golden Keys is the only travel collection Lee published after the war. In the concluding essay, “In Time of War,” she presents World War I as a limit to the sense of connectivity she establishes, or a traumatic break in the line: “[…] among the many things, spiritual even more than material, which the war will have wrecked and my generation can never see re-made, is the cult of the genius of places” (Golden Keys 241).

46War destroys the ability to connect emotionally, both with places and with people, creating a hardened border which Lee describes as “war’s monstrous iron curtain,” that “cut[s] us off so utterly from one another” (Bach’s Christmas Music 1). The pre-war experience of travel has been lost, in both practical and imaginary terms:

But as to them, dear clean, old-fashioned German towns, from Treves and Münster to innermost Franconia and the Harz, in which we two English friends were wont to take, year after year, our happiest holidays; them I shall, most likely, never again set foot in. […] For though they stand intact in the material world and quite unchanged, no doubt, since we were there together, the thought of them has been sacked, burnt, defiled ten thousand times over by millions of indignant wills and by imaginations thirsty for reprisals. (Golden Keys 247)

47While real journeys to Germany now seem impossible, the rupture is more emotional than physical, as it is caused by the collective imagination. Lee’s response to the war merges ethical principles with personal sentiments, creating a contrast between the two friends’ experience of travel and a wider societal perception of German places. The trauma of war makes sentimental travel inaccessible. However, the opening dedication to Mona Taylor, written in 1924, maintains this elegiac tone while also emphasising the virtue of the genius loci, which exists “in the human heart”: “Since he has none of the appeals, however gloriously veiled, to savagery and self-righteousness which are made by, and for, most of his more venerable, or at least more authorized, fellow-gods” (Golden Keys ix). Perhaps the six intervening years make it possible for Lee to rebuild the line of connection with the genius loci that had been broken by the war.

Conclusion

48Reading Lee’s travel essays through her idea of “confusion” brings out the many shifting lines in her texts. The overlapping lines and intersections of visual representations and geography are refracted through her personal experience and subjective perception. The permeable borders she establishes between artforms mirror her subjective treatment of geography, creating “queer borders” which reflect her creation of a personal, blurred European landscape. The texts are a space of associations, linking her readers with different aspects of her life and work, a dynamic manifestation of her sense of empathy.

49Building on the idea of confusion also brings out the role of impressionism in Lee’s texts. By using it as a point of comparison with her own ideas about artistic and literary representation in her first collection of travel essays, Lee places her comments on impressionism in parallel with her ideas on the representation of place. Reflecting on the artistic movement and its ability to represent the “lie of the land” is one stage in the development of Lee’s approach to the genius loci, which takes form throughout the essays.

50By extending Lee’s idea of confusion from the impressionist painters’ ability to capture landscapes to her own writing, confusion emerges as coherence throughout her travel essays. While Lee lauds the blurring and disruption of linearity she sees in impressionism, confusion acts as an underlying structure in the texts, and her comments on the artistic movement offer a key to her metatextual reflections on the aesthetic and didactic elements of her own writing. Lee wonders if “these modern painters have done more for us by the beauty they have taught us to see in Nature than by the beauty they have actually put before us in their pictures” (Limbo 76). In viewing the painters as teachers of aesthetic appreciation, Lee hints at her own didactic programme of transmitting the capacity for sentimental travel. Despite the suggestion that impressionism can lack “soul”, the productive confusion which Lee creates in her texts allows her to draw an empathic connection between intermediality and spirituality.