[In the following review, Eder offers a mixed assessment of Landscape and Memory, noting that the work is burdened by excessive detail and anecdotal reference.]

Landscape is more than a nourishment that the earth provides to our imaginations. It is a nourishment that our imaginations provide to the earth. Against the extreme ecological notion of a primal state of wilderness sullied by human civilization, the historian Simon Schama writes:

“The wilderness, after all does not locate itself, does not name itself. It was an act of Congress in 1864 that established Yosemite Valley as a place of sacred significance for the nation, during the war which marked the moment of Fall in the American Garden. Nor could the wilderness venerate itself. It needed hallowing visitations from New England preachers like Thomas Starr King, photographers like Leander Weed, Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins, painters in oil like Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, and painters in prose like John Muir to represent it as the holy park of the West. …”

Landscape and Memory is a series of forays into what Schama calls “the long history of landscape metaphors.” We are born in the world but also the world is born in us. In the 18th Century, artistic tourists used a Claude-glass, a brown-tinted mirror in which they could frame hills and forests that would contain, ready-made, the dusky romantic ambience of the painter Claude Lorrain. The Robin Hood legend provided a vision of the bucolic forest so fashionable that none other than Henry VIII led a court procession into the woods, where he was fed a venison breakfast by a green-clad “outlaw”—16th-Century greenwood chic.

Schama, whose approach to history has a cultural, social, political, economic and mythical sweep, is a writer of restless ideas and poetic insight. He is also a prodigious wielder of facts. In his books on two such solid subjects as the French Revolution and the Netherlands’ Golden Age, massiveness had its own logic and energy, and poetic insight needed to do no more than its part.

In this study of how myth and memory frame our landscapes, the subject is more elusive. Schama's insight is ravishing, but the finally unstoppable detail with which he fills it out gives it far too much to ravish. There are too many German foresters, forest mystics, Italian landscape designers, painters of the Sublime, Alps, Alpine romantics and assorted eccentrics whose anecdotal accounts disperse and often submerge the provocative connection with which Schama begins his book and all too occasionally comes back to.

This initial vision comes with the image of a child in a landscape. The child is himself; his favorite book is Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, the hill being an ordinary English hill out of which historical and mythical figures emerge for the benefit of a dreamy little boy. Schama's “hill” was the sedgy, mucky Essex shore of the Thames estuary. Here, for the author at his best, is part of his description:

Closer to home, the little port of Leigh still had shrimp boats in its harbor and cockle sheds on the dock. In St. Clements were buried its fishy fathers: not merely Richard Haddock (died 1453) but Robert Salmon (died 1641), whose epitaph claimed he was the ‘restorer of English navigation.’ Beyond the sheds, grimy sand, littered with discarded mussel shells and hard strings of black-blistered seaweed, stretched down to the gray water. When the tide went out, exposing an expanse of rusty mud, I could walk for what seemed miles from the shore, testing the depth of the ooze, paddling my feet among the scuttling crabs and the winkles, and staring intensely at the exact point where, I imagined, the river met the sea.

English glory sailed out of that imagined point; as a schoolchild Schama produced a 12-page “History of the Royal Navy.” At the same time he was working on a different link of land and myth. Son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant, he turned in sixpence at his Hebrew school, each one buying one “leaf” for Israel's tree-planting program. He was putting history into the landscape. We knew that a forest was the opposite to a desert, he writes. “The diaspora was sand. So what should Israel be, if not a forest, fixed and tall?”

A family tradition takes him to the puszcza, the great forest between Poland and Lithuania. His forebears were Jewish loggers—we get a photograph of lumberjacks in black hats and side-curls—and the landscape contains their memory; as well as all the tormented memories of Polish, Lithuanian and Russian history in that “haunted land where the greatcoat buttons from six generations of fallen soldiers can be found.”

He writes of the bison that once roamed the forest, and the appearance of bison and forest in national epics that kept alive Polish and Lithuanian identity. He writes of the perverted twist when the Nazis invaded Poland and Goering took over the forest for his private hunts, and the forest dwellers were taken away and shot. Landscape myths can nourish, they can be corrupted, they can corrupt. Schama writes at great and ultimately oppressive length of the forest myth in German history; what started as a romantic forging of national character ended as Nazi blood-mysticism. “It is, of course, painful to acknowledge how ecologically conscientious the most barbaric regime in modern history actually was. Exterminating millions of lives was not at all incompatible with passionate protection for millions of trees.”

Schama writes of the cult of Arminius, whose Saxon warriors ambushed the Romans from behind trees and who became a hero of the Aryan cult and a special retrospective protégé of Himmler; of the dark forest mysticism of the painter Albrecht Altdorfer; and of the ferocious anti-myth, anti-forest fury of the contemporary Anselm Kiefer. He stays a long time in those dark German woods; it is a relief to get to the lighter English forest legends and to California sequoias, a symbol of the outsize American destiny.

A middle section of the book turns from trees to water. Schama goes into the Nile cycles of flood and rebirth, and the great fountains of Rome—there is a brilliant passage on Bernini's baroque masterpiece in the Piazza Navona—and on to the elaborate watercourses designed by Italian engineers. He writes of Thames watermen and the annual whitebait feast that became an obligatory calendar date for 19th-Century English politicians.

He goes on to mountains: the 19th-Century cult of Alpine tourism, the sculptures on Mt. Rushmore—with an enticing account of the long and unsuccessful struggle of Rose Arnold Powell to get Susan B. Anthony's face up alongside of the four men—and other associations of myths and crags. A final section deals with notions of Arcadia, as a place both of happy nymphs and shepherds, and of the darker legends of goatish Pans and wolf-men. He suggests the same duality for Central Park: bucolic by day, wolfish by night.

Much of the material is interesting; much of it takes on a list-like burden of small anecdotes and minor figures. Schematically, they can be made to fit into Schama's theme of how memory and myth give significance to the landscape. But they become a weary plod, a ramble whose purpose begins to fade and whose pleasure only recurs now and then.