Module 9 - Part 1: Overview

Other parts of this module include:
Index  |  Part 2: Explorations and Exercises  |  Part 3: Texts and Contexts  |  Part 4: Web Resources

Nature and the Self in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature 

Focus on the English Romantic Lyric

"The French Revolution derived from new ideas about the sacredness of the individual; it also helped generate such ideas." - Introduction, Revolution and Romanticism in Europe and America, p. 651

". . . the word Society had come to embody the impulses that desecrated nature and oppressed the poor." - Introduction, p.657

"Nature provided an alternative to the human, a possibility for imaginative as well as literal escape" - Introduction, p.656

John Constable, Weymouth Bay
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John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral
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New definitions: Common sense

The cover of Tom Paine's Common Sense
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The Enlightenment led to Romanticism, but Romantic artists separated themselves from their intellectual precursors by rejecting many of the terms that had been exalted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus nature and sense mean one thing for writers like Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson and something totally different for William Wordsworth or John Keats. Common sense, in 1776 still a sufficiently powerful term for Thomas Paine to use for his call to the inhabitants of the colonies to free themselves from the rule of George III, assumed that a consensus of thoughtful persons, the collective judgment of a mature society, could be trusted to guide behavior. In a pair of essays "On Genius and Common Sense," published in 1821, the great critic William Hazlitt values common sense in the old-fashioned way as an "impartial, instinctive result of truth and nature"; but he goes on to see genius in the uncommon. Hazlitt calls Wordsworth "the greatest, that is, the most original poet of the present day, only because he is the greatest egotist. . . . He does not waste a thought on others."

James Gillray, Promised Horrors of the French Invasion, 1796
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The impact of the French Revolution on English Romanticism

The disintegration of the French Revolution was one reason for the downgrading of the common. Wordsworth is the exemplary figure in this transformation, for he was a witness to the first heady defense of the rights of the individual on French soil. By the time he left France in 1793, however, he was fraught with personal guilt over abandoning his French lover and their newborn child and appalled by the swiftness with which individual rights had ceded to mob rule. As he matured and aged, his poetry increasingly reflects an ambivalence toward the reliability of the self as a source for imaginative and moral power. Putting all one's faith in the human ability to draw sustenance from the natural world seemed risky; yet relying on the public world seemed even more suspect.

For the nineteenth-century artist, then, what was common could easily be confused with the rule of the mob. It seemed to lack originality and imaginative scope; and sense was important not as a quality of intellect but of sensation. Wordsworth, for example, praised a man for being "no common soul" ("A Yew-Tree," 1787–95). Heightened sense perception—to feel, to hear, to see, to taste, to touch—supplanted intellectual sense, and nowhere was sense perception more keenly aroused than in the natural world, preferably in isolation from the distraction that other human beings inevitably caused.

New definitions: Nature

The young William Wordsworth
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This view of nature, first enunciated by Rousseau (whose writings we know Wordsworth to have read), influenced the visual arts as profoundly as it did the art of poetry. Increasingly, during the course of the nineteenth century, artists began painting directly from nature, en plein air. In a section of his Confessions not in our anthology, Rousseau declares,

I have never been able to do anything with my pen in my hand, and my desk and my paper before me; it is on my walks, among the rocks and trees . . . that I compose in my head" (I.114).

Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal contains many references to Wordsworth's habit of composing poems out of doors, even to the point of writing while he was on his horse (p. 806). This does not mean that, like Monet with his paints, he was intent on capturing the scene before his eyes with his pen. It is Wordsworth, after all, who defines poetry as emotion "recollected in tranquility" (Preface to Lyrical Ballads). Rather, being in the open air seems to have released his imaginative powers.

The impact of the Industrial Revolution on English Romanticism

Joseph Wright of Derby, The Iron Forge Viewed from Without
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Poets and artists felt so passionately about the natural world in large part because they saw it disappearing before their eyes. Especially in England, where the industrial revolution first took hold, watermills despoiled the waterways and shorelines, and factories crowded out farms. It is no accident that the poets and painters of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries treasured the beauty of ruins, embodiments of traditional values made pathetic by their vulnerability to time, yet softened by seeming to return to the green world. By contrast, the contemporary instances of human intrusion, the forges and mills that harnessed nature's powers in order to profit from it, did not blend into the natural world but rather seemed to assault it.

William Gilpin, Landscape with Ruined Castle
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Solitude in nature

J. Turner, Tintern Abbey
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Wordsworth's penchant for solitude set the tone for the English Romantic lyric. "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" provides a clear example of the distance he sought from others. Although most readers speak familiarly of "Tintern Abbey" when speaking of this poem, the edifice, once a meeting place for worshippers who came together there for a common, sacred purpose, is not Wordsworth's subject. In fact, Tintern Abbey was in ruins when Wordsworth visited it on the banks of the River Wye. The site was the more picturesque for its debilitated state and though it harbored homeless persons and, for another observer, might have been the occasion for a meditation on the social problems associated with homelessness, Wordsworth typically focuses on the solitary figure, not the group. Smoke coming from domestic fires does not draw him to look for inhabitants of the area; it is a sign rather of individuals who want to keep apart from others.

        With some uncertain notice, as might seem
        Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
        Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
        The Hermit sits alone. (ll. 18–21)

The loneliness of solitude

Caspar David Friedrich's solitary tree
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Wordsworth fears in "Tintern Abbey" that his "genial spirits" (l. 113) might decay but for the presence of his sister. Being alone in Nature does not offer the sustenance that he once believed it would. By 1802, in "Resolution and Independence," he faces a future in which "Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty" (l. 35) loom before him. Solitude begins to equal solipsism, the philosophical notion that there is nothing knowable outside the self (note the word's root—the Latin solus, alone). "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness" (ll. 48–49).

Wordsworth's preoccupation with the lonely participant in a semi-religious landscape is hardly unique. Most Romantic artists were equally fixated on emblematic and isolated instances. Listening to the nightingale's song, John Keats, for one, imagines other solitaries in centuries past thrilling to the lone voice in the night as well:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
("Ode to a Nightingale," ll. 65–67)

But the speaker ends in disillusionment, alone with his "sole self" (l.72). In a similar vein, Heinrich Heine's lonely pine tree, dreaming of "a palm tree," personifies longing. The pine has no options: shrouded in a wintry landscape, it has no power of movement, no agency, yet it seems capable of envisaging its opposite, another lonely tree on the opposite side of the earth, burning and "silently mourning." 

Oceanic nature as a mystical goal

The dilemma of the romantic self unfolds in poem after poem. Turning inward and prizing subjectivity, the poet risks solipsism; preferring nature to society, the poet risks isolation. The Romantic poets know, of course, that they are not trees or birds, however much they may sympathize with natural forms. Thrown back upon their own resources, they desire union not with the common mass of humanity but with an ever-elusive natural power. Sometimes, like Lamartine or Rosalía de Castro, the poet grieves for a loved one irrevocably lost and seeks to obliterate the sense of isolation by merging with some universal force. Thus poems like "Tintern Abbey," "The Lake," or "Mild is the Air" incorporate desperate prayers to a sublime and perhaps indifferent nature. The possibility of that indifference makes the faith of the Romantic artists weaker than that articulated by traditional religious mystics, whose vocabulary they often share.
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  The Wordsworths' garden at Dove Cottage
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The limits of the self in nature: An English fantasy  

The desire to seek companionship with Nature paradoxically reflects the advanced civilization of nineteenth-century Europe, and particularly of England. Writing in 1929, in the aftermath of a disastrous war and during a period of unprecedented, and ultimately alienating, discoveries about the operations of the natural world, the critic Aldous Huxley looked back at Romanticism, and especially the poetry of Wordsworth, as a mark of Western cultural insularity. Only a poet who lived in the temperate Lake District where the Wordsworths settled could look to nature as a kindly presence.

It is a pity that [Wordsworth] never traveled beyond the boundaries of Europe. A voyage through the tropics would have cured him of his too easy and comfortable pantheism. A few months in the jungle would have convinced him that the diversity and utter strangeness of Nature are at least as real and significant as its intellectually discovered unity. . . . Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image. - Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics," p. 342