THE ABSENCE OF PLOT from the modern novel is often commented on, like the absence of characters. But nobody has called attention to the disappearance of another element, as though nobody missed it. We have almost forgotten that descriptions of sunsets, storms, rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys used to be one of the staple ingredients of fiction, not merely a painted backdrop for the action but a component evidently held to be necessary to the art. The nineteenth-century novel was full of “descriptive writing”; a course called that was still given at Vassar when I was an undergraduate. How innocent and young-ladylike that sounds, bringing back the push-pulls and whorls of Palmer Method penmanship.
We have come a long way from the time when the skill of an author was felt to be demonstrated by his descriptive prowess: Dickens’ London fogs, Fenimore Cooper’s waterfalls, forests, prairie, Emily Brontë’s moors, Hardy’s heath and milky vales, Melville’s Pacific. Yet in their day these were taken as samplings of the author’s purest creative ore, his vein of genius—more even than character-portrayal or plot handling. In the old triad of plot, character, and setting, the setting, comprising Nature and her moods, supplied the atmosphere in an almost literal sense; it was the air the novel breathed, like the life-sustaining air surrounding Mother Earth.
The set-pieces of description in the English and American nineteenth-century novel correspond with the primacy of landscape in English painting. The Mill on the Floss brings back Constable and vice versa. In the fresh delicate strokes of George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Hardy, there are affinities with the water color and the sketch: Cotman, Turner, the notations of Ruskin, and again Constable, his skies, woodland, weirs. But the English novel is also redolent of the prepared oil painting. Hardy’s landscapes with cattle, his markets and fairs suggest the English animal painters. Dickens evokes coaching scenes, and his lurid sunset Thames recalls Turner.
On the Continent, there were the hunts of Turgenev and Tolstoy, the forest rides of Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s peasants reaping and threshing, the sawmill in Stendhal. On the whole, though, there is less easel scenery in Continental fiction than in our own; a simple test is whether you can skip the “boring parts”—i.e., the descriptive passages—without missing some of the action. It is easier to do this with Melville or Hardy than with Flaubert, where Nature is more functional, as in the famous contrapuntal scene of the Agricultural Fair. And with an author like Adalbert Stifter (Colored Stones), the test works in reverse: if you skip the snowstorm in “Rock Crystal” or the Hungarian plain in “Brigitta,” you will have no story left, for these tales are deposits of Nature, like mineral specimens on which a few spores of human life have survived.
Yet allowing for differences in the treatment of landscape and the elements among the “old” authors, most of them had in common a notion of Nature as belonging to the cast of characters of a novel—sometimes as a chorus, jeering or sympathetic, sometimes as one of the principal actors, even the prime antagonist, the role it inevitably plays in stories of the sea. The obvious exception is Jane Austen. There Nature appears as a shower interrupting a walk, a source of wet feet, drafts, and colds, and this matches the scarcity of physical description of her characters. You know how much money her people have but not the color of their eyes. Another exception is Dostoievsky. Yet in Jane Austen’s moral scheme, Nature or, rather, the natural—the reverse of affectation—is in fact a guarantor of value, just as it is in Shakespeare, whereas in Dostoievsky, the unnatural (an unnatural crime, unnatural sons, unnatural desires and impulses) has become the most natural thing in the world, and no evident reason can be found in the nature of things—though perhaps one exists, finally—to argue against a student’s killing an old pawnbroker. For the modern town-dwellers of Dostoievsky (and this is where he is modern) there is nothing “outside.” Even virgin America, in The Possessed, instead of being an Eden, is a scene of gang labor and sordid exploitation, not an unspoiled wilderness but a pestilential cabin.
Among the writers of our own century, it is chiefly Faulkner who sees Nature as a force in human destiny, and he also shares with the nineteenth-century Naturalists an interest in genetics and the inheritance of traits; the word “nature,” after all, derives from natus: birth, natality. It is your “born” hand. Joyce too, though in an urban setting, insists on what is “outside”—river, sea, strand, elm (“telmetale of stem or stone”), the snow in “The Dead” falling softly over Ireland, a universal blanket or shroud. In Finnegans Wake the snoring Earwicker is the hero of a cosmic Nature myth, where the thunderstorms popular in nineteenth-century fiction become the actual onomatopoeic growl of thunder in the most primitive Indo-European speech forms. Joyce, however, is not interested in genetics (which have a “plot,” mutation, a “storyline”) but in the static Family of Man: death and resurrection, sleeping and waking. At the same time, his famous seesay (Ulysses) is also a seesaw; what is “outside,” for Stephen Dedalus, has lost its absoluteness and sovereignty and is only a flickering series of notations on the perceptual screen. This fall into relativity is even more emphatic in Virginia Woolf. It is felt in Proust too, though with a difference, since he learned from George Eliot and Ruskin, for both of whom Nature was a moral law. But for Proust what is outside is inconstant, depending on the “way” you elect to take, like the peculiar optics of the church steeples near Combray, which appear to move as the viewer’s position changes.
Such confusing stunts, including mirages, quicksands, the ventriloquism of the echo, “painted” turtles, the mocking-bird, all the monkey tricks of animal mimicry, constitute Nature’s freak show and tend to produce the opposite of a sense of sacred awe. This is evident in the case of Nabokov, a professional lepidopterist and amateur of botany and ornithology. There is a great deal of Nature in him but also a great deal of affectation. For him the natural world is the clever artifact of a showman closely resembling the artist-as-prankster; the curio cabinet of his fiction reveals a schoolboy’s hoard of specimens, human and non-human, collected and mounted, with a special partiality for the ephemerids, like the nymphet Lolita, impaled on pins. At the other pole, perhaps illustrating a class difference, is the sentient Nature of Lawrence, bred in the coal pits, whose language trembled with wonder on approaching a single wild flower.
For Lawrence, as for Faulkner, something formidable exists beyond man-in-society and beyond the natural sciences as well, something both innate and transcendent. Faulkner’s sole inheritor on the contemporary American scene is Mailer, who treats himself on the one hand as a natural force and on the other as a culture-hero, a hell-harrower, Herakles cleaning the Augean stables and putting on the shirt of the Centaur when making out his alimony checks. He can describe a bear-hunt (Why Are We in Vietnam?), make symbolic use of a deer park, and introduce a living elephant into his latest non-fiction epic (Miami and the Siege of Chicago). His competitor, Bellow, tried something of the sort with Henderson the Rain-King and with the eagle in Augie March, but Nature is not Bellow’s “scene”; when he touches this wild material, it turns into fable, not myth. Henderson in the lions’ den is a figure in a Talmudic vaudeville.
On the Continent, this side of the Iron Curtain, the natural world is in almost total eclipse. There was no Nature in Gide, not much in Mann or Malraux; there is none in Sartre, very little in Moravia. With the exception of Silone, among the Continental writers considered important today, the outdoors, at best, has a sort of hallucinatory presence. The blinding sun in L’Etranger which causes the hero to commit a murder, the sinister North African mountain in Claude Ollier’s La Mise en Scène, the frightening squashed centipede on the wall of La Jalousie are all in some way cryptic, signifying the retreat of the outside from cognition. The tropisms of Nathalie Sarraute, which refer to biology, are little darting movements of attraction and repulsion of the life-substance enlarged by the novelist’s microscope. For the “new” writers, far from being a touchstone of value, Nature is a source of disquiet, an unknowable quantity; the more minutely an object is studied as it impinges on the perceptual screen, the more mysterious it becomes, owing to the lack of perspective. Nature is not a reference-point, outside man, giving the scale, but inseparable from the viewer and his cognitive processes, themselves thrown into doubt.
Surprisingly at first sight, considering the empty landscape of the recent novel in France and Italy, there is quite a bit of weather, usually hot. But where the weather in the nineteenth-century novel supplied mood music for the characters’ reveries, aided or interfered with their projects, as it does in life, here it subjects them to a more or less uniform pressure (Moravia, Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Le Clezio, Oilier); it is “close,” confining, an atmosphere productive of aberrations, as in a terrarium. And this is true even when, exceptionally, the oppressive climate is northern as in Butor’s L’Emploi du Temps, set in the pervasive gray damp of an English industrial town, itself as hallucinatory to the hero as a rainy jungle of the Amazon.
In general, landscape, where found at all in the recent Western novel, tends to be exotic, tropical, or sub-tropical, Mexican, North African, Central African, Greek-islandish, Capricious, and this of course reflects average contemporary experience, for which the outdoors is strictly a vacation area, pictured in travel brochures and airline advertising. Already the safaris and duck-hunts of Hemingway had less in common with the hunts of Turgenev and Tolstoy—or with Lawrence’s “The Fox”—than with the present-day escape industry, in which seasonal expatriates and fashion models, following the sun, look for unspoiled corners of the earth to despoil. Even his early fishing-stories, set in the North Woods, struck a mannered and self-conscious note; compare Huckleberry Finn. What betrays the bad faith of Hemingway is the invariable intrusion of the social into a natural context: hierarchies, exclusions, competitive brio. He is concerned with behavior, which he confuses with action and conduct. Among his American followers, anti-social behavior may be inserted in the outdoors, with incongruous effects; consider the skin-diving hero of James Jones’s Go to the Widow-Maker (the title is from Kipling) masturbating, in his snorkel, in a deep-sea cave.
But to understand the disappearance of what might be called the normal outdoors—sunsets, birds, trees, fields, pastures, waterfalls—from the contemporary novel, it is important to recall that it was not always an important presence. The great explosion of Nature into fiction occurred in the nineteenth century. Early in the century descriptive writing had abounded not in prose but in the verse of the Romantic poets, though actually, in England, the plein air movement of poets and poetry had begun in the Age of Classicism. It coincided with the Industrial Revolution (begun circa 1750), that is, with the erosion of the countryside by the dark satanic mills. Thomson’s The Seasons is usually given as the demarcation point, following Wordsworth’s claim that between Paradise Lost and The Seasons (about sixty years), English poetry, with two exceptions, does not contain “a single new image of external nature and scarcely presents a familiar one that seems to be drawn directly from experience and worked on by imagination.” In fact the Romantic poets may have represented the last spurt of an impulse found in Thomson, Cowper, Collins, Akenside, even Crabbe, not to mention Blake sitting naked with his wife in his garden. Still we see Nature-worship less in Blake’s tiger or Collins’ weak-eyed bat than in the effusions of their successors. Hymns to Mont Blanc, “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree...on a desolate part of the shore commanding a beautiful Prospect.” Wordsworth had the habit of leaving his verses behind him, to be reabsorbed by Nature in her metabolic process, as though his bardic utterance were some sort of organic material: “Written with a Slate Pencil upon a Stone, the largest of a Heap lying near a deserted Quarry.” He kept copies, however, which went in the normal way to the printer.
As everyone knows, the Romantic poets were fond of the common wild flower—the celandine, oxlip, field daisy, snowdrop—of autumn leaves, larks, and cuckoos, that is, of Nature in its most ordinary and minute particulars. But the words “desolate,” “deserted” point to the true Romantic taste in the outdoors, a taste you do not find in the previous generation, mostly stay-at-homes. For Wordsworth and his circle, the “little unpretending rill,” the “Brook! whose society the Poet seeks,” the field of yellow daffodils, but even more kindling to fancy, lakes, mountains, lonely shores—what used to be known as “scenery.”
Scenery, a word seldom used nowadays, could be defined as Nature arranged in purple passages for the traveler. In principle, you have to travel to find scenery, which was the only kind of Nature Byron responded to; Shelley too had a liking for Promethean vantage-points of a sort not found in rural England. But Wordsworth and his friends accepted the ethical task of showing that scenery was also distributed democratically, in small units, in your own back yard; the lesser celandine should produce the same moments of exaltation, of communion with the infinite as a mountain pass or the roaring ocean. This is the burden of Coleridge’s beautiful poem “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” where he regrets that owing to an injury he cannot accompany his friends to a waterfall and wild dell where the adder’s tongue and mountain ash grow but comforts himself for the loss by seeing “good” in the humble-bee and the bean-flower and ivy of his own domestic bower, shaded by lime and walnut. More prosily, Wordsworth actually wrote a poem to the “Spade of a Friend (an Agriculturalist). Composed while we were labouring together in his Pleasure-ground.”
There is no doubt that Romanticism, as practiced by this circle, was a social doctrine—a protest against industrialism and the reification of man by technology. In “The Excursion” (1814) Wordsworth declaims against the pollution of the countryside by the manufactories. A bell of doom rings out over the afternoon fields calling children and women, men and boys to work the night shift of the cotton mill; yet the poet is under no illusion that rural toil, as he observes it, is much better. He has gone beyond the whistling farm-boy of The Seasons running happily behind the plow. For Wordsworth, “Our life is turned Out of her course, wherever man is made An offering, or a sacrifice, a tool Or implement, a passive thing employed as a brute mean.” This is an echo of Kant, and in the poet’s criticism of industry, he foreshadows Tolstoy: “A bondage lurking under the shape of good—Arts in themselves beneficent and kind But all too fondly followed and too far—.” In this poem, he is also worried by the population explosion. The balance of Nature, such as he had known it in his boyhood, is being undone by industry, by the robotization of the farm laborer, and by demographic increase. The only remedy he perceives is universal education plus migration to the colonies; he fastened his hopes for England on the Empire...As for the poet himself, opting out was the sole resource. The Romantic protest forlornly anticipated the hippie movement by more than a hundred and fifty years: Coleridge’s and De Quincey’s opium, the colony of friends in the Lake Country, where Coleridge, city-bred, rejoices that his child will grow up by “lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags of ancient mountain...”
This savage scenery, which was associated with a sense of freedom, also revealed itself to the Romantic painters. Nature painting, as such, came in with the Romantic movement: peaks, cliffs, caverns, storms at sea. Landscape had entered painting in the Renaissance, as a background to a portrait or as the sympathetic setting of a sacred event—a Nativity or Baptism or Transfiguration. Snow-covered distant peaks, appropriately, were first seen in the Swiss painters of the Renaissance, e.g., Hans Fries. And before the Romantic period there was the landscape painting of Poussin, classical in design but tinged with Romantic feeling; there were Claude Lorrain, Cuyp, Ruysdael, Gainsborough, Richard Wilson...
Roughly speaking, the pre-Romantics saw Nature in her ordered aspect, as the classic rus of the Eclogues and Georgics, while the Romantics saw it as wild, insubordinate, elemental. The classic rus, whose goddess was Pomona, was a celebration of the routines of Nature, the calendar of agriculture. It is the same classic rus you find in a great deal of pre-Romantic verse, above all in Crabbe and in Thomson’s The Seasons. The classic rus is the harbinger of Romantic Nature, both in poetry and in painting. It is the barn swallow preceding a great flight of eagles. Or the market cart as a Trojan horse out of which would spring the wild horses of Gericault and Delacroix.
Yet this distinction, which would admit into the rus the hunters in Breughel’s snowy scene, has a hard time with Claude, on the one hand, and Ruysdael, on the other. Another difference, perhaps more significant, is that in Romantic painting for the first time (or almost, leaving out the animal painters) you find landscape with no people in it. No gods or goddesses, no peasants, no picnickers. Just empty Nature, clouds, trees, waves, rock, waterfalls. Here Ruysdael must be counted as the great precursor; those lonely brown woodlands traversed by mysterious roads, like the arteries of some unknown life-system, appear at first glance utterly uninhabited, and the tiny figures that can usually be descried at second glance were put in by an assistant, to satisfy seventeenth-century convention: Ruysdael, it seems, did not know how to paint the human form. In his forest landscapes, aside from some tawny vegetable-like cottages, the ribbony roads leading nowhere were the sole allusion he was capable of making to man’s presence in the universe. The painter was alone with Nature. This did not occur again for more than a century.
Solitude marks the change, just as in poetry. The Romantic poet, wrapped in a cloak, contemplating the sea, the mountains, the desert, was the unique spectator: Shelley on the Euganean Hills far from the “polluted multitude.” And something of the sort seized the novel a little later in the century. The characters were held offstage, while the author communed with Nature, penning a description of the setting and the accompanying weather. A nineteenth-century novel frequently opened with a panorama of the region, which eventually narrowed to pick out a single small figure crossing the poetic space. Think of Cooper’s The Prairie or the wonderful aerial perspective of the first chapter of Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, with the “camera” swooping down to focus on Don Abbondio. Or Egdon Heath and the reddleman. Or the “questionable” sound of the weaver’s loom coming from a stone cottage at the start of Silas Marner, not far from a deserted stone-pit.
Generally, in a novel, the convergence on a single figure or group of figures in a bare unpopulated landscape foreshadows a grim outcome, for the novel is a social medium; the poet may be led to inspired musings by an encounter with a leech-gatherer, but such a meeting in the first chapter of a novel would symbolize doom. Nature, whether man-ordered (Horace’s Sabine farm) or pure and undefiled, like the Muses’ spring, has always figured in literature as the opposite of Society. The town is the moral wilderness, if it is only a village or hamlet, but this moral wilderness is the novel’s stamping-ground, and indeed there is a territorial imperative that appears to call country-bred heroes and heroines to the town in order to complete their novelistic destiny: Emma Bovary, Julien Sorel, Tess, Pip, Jude, Renzo in I Promessi Sposi.
In parenthesis, it ought to be said that in modern times the old opposition between country and city, virtue and vice, still holds but with the difference that farmland and pasture and orchard are no longer equated with Nature in her purging, purifying aspect. This is particularly true in America, where “the great outdoors” is by convention limited to the West, the Southwest, the North Woods—ranch country, Hemingway country, rattlesnake country, bear country, ABM country. This notion, which has belligerent moralistic overtones, identifies Nature with bigness. When Senator Joe McCarthy was preparing for his great crusade against “Communists-in-government,” he did not retire to the Wisconsin dairyland to replenish his forces by contact with Mother Earth. He went west to Arizona, where he found “real Americans without any synthetic sheen on them.” This ranch life, doubtless based on a frozen-food locker, was Joe McCarthy’s version of Romantic pastoral.
It is possibly no accident that Romanticism in politics and literature originated, with Rousseau, in Switzerland—the home of “scenery.” Rousseau’s natural man, alienated by institutions from his true self, is of course a fictive creature, like McCarthy’s “real Americans,” viewed as the salt of the earth, non-iodized. Yet if the reality of this fiction is accepted, if man-made institutions are regarded as a conspiracy against Nature or against man’s natural goodness incorporated in the nation, then obviously the tall timber or the desert is a better school for re-education than the farm. But if, on the contrary, country life with its routines is looked on as a repository of precious traditions, stored like preserves in the buttery, the farm, with its dependencies of woodland, grist-mill, carpentry-shop, and so on, becomes the point of contact between man and animals, man and the seasons, man and the vegetable and aqueous worlds. That is how Tolstoy saw it, opposing what was false to what was natural, in human behavior as well as in medicine, art, law, and farm methods, and the natural, for Tolstoy, included a great deal that had been learned, over centuries, and that it would be unnatural to forget, as people in society are wont to do. Thus civilization is an organic accumulation or compost, to which the common people, that is, the peasantry, have more ready access than the bureaucrat or the worldling, both of whom may appear as boors or primitives in comparison to the God-fearing rustic. The earmarks of the natural are not always apparent to logic (serfdom, an “historical” institution, was an unnatural state of affairs, i.e., evil, whereas the village commune, another long-standing institution, was natural and good), but common sense, more prevalent among simple people than among the educated, was the faculty, almost like an animal instinct, by which the truth could be recognized. The characteristic, in fact, of truth for Tolstoy was its recognizability; the truth (compare Socrates) is what we have “always” known. Hence truth and Nature are the same; both are there, at once outside man and in his heart.
This view, which is easily confused with the doctrines of Romantic politics since both oppose Society in its urban forms, does not assume, however, a natural goodness in man or in Nature either; rather the reverse, as can be seen from Tolstoy’s picture of war as a blind force unaccountably sweeping the world and moving bodies of armed men back and forth across the map slaying and killing, like the destructive sexual passions, which rise and subside. War is a truth, seemingly permanent, which cannot be explained away by historians seeking proximate causes, which, if not present, would have obviated this or that conflict.
Despite Tolstoy’s dislike of Shakespeare, there is much that is Shakespearean in his sense of Nature, including the importance he assigns to the truth-finding faculty of common sense—in Shakespeare usually embodied in women, fools (“naturals”) and bystanders. Yet for Tolstoy, passion however destructive, is always superior to tepid good conduct, and this no doubt is a prejudice of epic and dramatic authors. In Stendhal, passion, the capacity to feel it, is the great and unique virtue: Madame de Renal, the Sanseverina, Count Mosca’s jealousy. It is the untainted font or spring that gushes up from elemental sources, like the libertarian energy released by the arrival of Napoleon’s army in Milan. In a way this is surprising, for Stendhal is one of the most worldly of novelists, interested in power and the dynamics of social leverage. Julien Sorel, in Le Rouge et le Noir, is a bundle of contradictions. The son of a carpenter in the Savoyard region of the River Doubs (his career seems a parody of Our Lord’s, down to his martyrdom and burial in a marble-garnished grotto, mourned by two weeping women and a faithful disciple), he is a breath of mountain air in the salons and drawing-rooms of the Restoration. At the same time, this priest-educated child of Nature is handicapped by an inability to feel; he cannot respond appropriately to the “supreme moments” of passion offered him in all genuineness by Madame de Renal. Whether the inability to feel what you are supposed to feel is natural or unnatural is hard to decide with Stendhal, who probably did not know himself. Julien’s malady is in part attributed to the choking-off of the energies of the Revolution by the “black” hand of reaction; the same point is made in La Chartreuse de Parme, where Fabrice, a “natural child,” a byblow of the French Revolutionary armies, a spontaneous being who can feel, is walled up in the prison of a tower, like a bird in an aviary.
Sudden tonelessness of feeling, a sort of psychic frigidity, is related, in Julien, to social ambition; as a “new man,” he is worried about how he should be behaving, and Nature in a careerist milieu is not a very reliable prompter. That frigidity and self-watchfulness are found repeatedly in the nineteenth-century novel: in Emma Bovary, Frédéric Moreau, Dickens’ Pip, whose great expectations have stunted the lively natural boy brought up in the country “by hand.” Tolstoy and George Eliot noticed the phenomenon, which they connected with intellectual and bureaucratic activity (Mr. Casaubon, Count Karenin) and which, peculiarly enough, was accompanied in the sufferer by a sense of immense solitude, as though estrangement from Nature and total immersion in it, as in the case of the Ancient Mariner, could produce the same effect.
Most of the best authors of our own time have advocated, in one way or another, a return to Nature or a radical simplification of society; D. H. Lawrence, Orwell, Mailer, Solzhenitsyn might all be classed as cranks or drop-outs. Faulkner, when in the city, insisted on styling himself a “farmer.” At the same time the worst political movements have at least one plank in their platforms advocating the restoration of something natural, whether it is the right to carry weapons (“Register Communists, not guns”) or the right to untampered-with drinking water (“Stop fluoridization”). The back-to-Nature impulse—natural foods, natural farming, freedom from state interference—is probably felt in equal measure by long-haired hippies in a desert community and members of the John Birch Society. Moreover, the logic of this impulse is generally antisocial and defiant of the majority. A return to Nature implies not merely a rejection of the mechanics of modern life but an actual conviction of being poisoned by their effluvia, whether identified as smog or the mass media or doctored H20 from a state reservoir. A desire to burrow in the ground, below the contamination level, is seen in the vocabulary of radical youth, with their so-called underground press, and in the stockpiled shelters of the Minute Men.
When we are conscious of a loss of Nature in our lives, we are conscious, most of all, of a loss of solitude. If we complain about the disfigurement of the countryside and the rash of ugly houses that have broken out like a skin disease on the face of Nature everywhere, we are not only appalled by the wholesale destruction of scenery but by the sense of invasion this gives us—where can a man hide himself? The Romantic poet brooding over a maelstrom, the Solitary Reaper, “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”—such images already (the contrary of Robinson Crusoe) identify the human footprint with pollution.
A man in Nature, truly so, is a man alone, plowing a furrow, climbing a mast, tracking an animal. Or if the man is not alone literally but participating in a group action, such as reaping or hauling in a fish net, he can still be “at one” with Nature, because the rhythm of the bodies makes them work as a single body—a human implement. An awareness of being “at one” with Nature, however, itself begins to constitute an intrusion. That is, two fishermen pulling in a net on the seashore appear natural, but two poets brooding side by side on the same strand would be ridiculous—one solitude too many.
At this point a definition is called for. What are the criteria by which we can recognize Nature? First of all, everyone would agree that a pool in a forest was Nature while a goldfish bowl was not. Second, if Tolstoy was right (and I believe he was), Nature is antithetical to Society but not to civilization. The works of man—agriculture—are so woven into the primal fabric as to be a second nature. This is plain even to the most insensitive tourist in an “old” country like Tuscany where windbreaks and olives and grapevines seem inseparable from the geological pattern of peaks and valleys making up the original scenery. The land has been husbanded or married by man. Its mountains have been quarried and mined; its rivers fished and dammed.
Take it visually. A weir in a river appears as a natural fact, and so does a watermill or a windmill or a haystack. To the painter’s eye the windmills are a feature of the landscape of Holland, just as though they had grown there. And a thatched peasant’s cottage seems as much a part of Nature as a bird’s nest; indeed, it is a sort of bird’s nest. The painter’s eye does not distinguish between a house designed by a bird for itself and a house designed by a cottager for himself. They are both products of Nature.
The reason is that a peasant’s thatched cottage, like a bird’s nest, was not designed by an individual but by the species. And the form and materials of the dwelling at once identify the species of the occupant, just as with birds: the conical whitewashed trulli of Apulia, the bamboo and straw huts of Indochina, the chinked log-cabins of the North...This is only another way of saying that the design is traditional and that local resources—brick, wood, tufa, reeds—have been taken advantage of; in the mountains behind Carrara marble is used for sills. And it is why a palace, like Versailles, despite the aging process, can never be a part of Nature, while a peasant’s house can, even if it is not very old. Versailles was a rhetorical vehicle for self-expression of a series of kings. People often wonder why modern houses should stand out as eyesores in the country though not in the city. This is because in modern design every house is conceived palatially, i.e., as a manifesto of the personality of the owner or the ideas of the architect who drew the plans for it. It makes no difference whether these “palaces” are the result of cheap production or not; they are no longer the nests of the poor.
In the same way, for the painter a castle can be an intrinsic part of Nature, for real castles are simply border forts, designed by a species for protection from its enemies. Like the web of a spider or a flycatcher plant. A castle can be solitary, silhouetted against the sky, while a palace can only be lonely, and often is mythically—the palace of the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast” or a tycoon’s palace on Fifth Avenue. A cottage on the Polish plain can be solitary, behind its dense paling of lilacs and raspberry bushes, while a ranch house can only be lonely, even if its next-door neighbor is only fifty feet away or whatever the zoning law allows. The horror of modern ranch houses or of modern colonial cottages is the stench of loneliness they give off.
The question of ruins is interesting. It is probable that if Versailles were to go to rack and ruin, be invaded by nettles and wild flowers, it could be viewed as a natural spectacle, less moving than a ruined abbey or temple, more perhaps like a shipwreck. The taste for ruins, a Romantic symptom, became epidemic in nineteenth-century verse and fiction (“Tintern Abbey,” “Ozymandias,” the eerie scene at Stonehenge at the end of Jude the Obscure, the Roman amphitheatre in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Daisy Miller in the Colosseum); the wreck of great undertakings symbolized the vanity of human wishes and the final word spoken by Nature. To evoke such sentiments, the dimensions of the ruin seem to be important. A derelict hut is merely unsightly and testifies less to the awesome powers of Nature than to the neglect or misery of the owner. It is customary to muse on the amount of labor invested (the Pyramids) by anonymous, insect-like men. Abandoned quarries, of which there must have been a great number, and mine-shafts overgrown with grass play a melancholy part in English nineteenth-century fiction and verse: Stephen Blackpool, Dickens’ pariah weaver, meets his end by falling into the Old Hell Shaft in the country near Cokestown; the deserted stone-pits filled with water by the house of that other pariah weaver, Silas Marner, yield up a robber’s skeleton and Silas’ money-bags, and at those same stone-pits, in wintertime, a woman has frozen to death.
Abandoned, deserted, overgrown—the test of Nature’s presence is some vivid indication of man’s defeat, a test not met, say, by a junkyard or by beer cans floating on the sea. Nature is present if a man can feel himself solitary in the spot he is, alone in the world which is nevertheless alive with his fellow-creatures, insects and animals, fish and fowl. What we receive from Nature and the consolation she is supposed to offer us is the sense of being in the presence of something greater than ourselves—larger, more perduring, grander. The immemorial oaks. And though immense vistas, mountain peaks, and the “peaks” of achievement represented by the grandiose columns of defunct edifices can lift or depress the spirits by measuring the diminutiveness of man, smallness in the sentient world, the world of live things, is suggestive of time everlasting, eternal return. The immemorial bees or the dragon-fly, not the immemorial hog.
Nature is not just the circumambient ensemble of non-human life but history on a grand scale—duration. She gives us the awareness of being an instant reverberant in time, clear and distinct as the echoing sound of our footfall in a silent forest or the plash of a stone dropped into a pool. The repetitive cycle of Nature is a promise of eternity. And man in Nature is aware of his singularity in the midst of species; this is solitude. Other men do not disturb him, so long as they blend with Nature in some work-nexus of species-activity; for instance, a row of anglers on a riverbank, each lost in contemplation, the parallel rods making what appears to be a natural and immemorial Sunday pattern.
Yet this sense of being a part of a great Whole (“...the winds and rowling waves, the sun’s unwearied course, The elements and seasons...all declare For what th’eternal maker has ordained The pow’rs of man...” Akenside, “Nature’s Influence on Man,” 1774) has its dark side, especially when pantheism is substituted for the design of the Maker. The permanence of species is made up of individual deaths. Hence the biological cycle, as witnessed by human consciousness, is full of menace, and Nature is seen as the unmoved spectator of human grief. Tennyson, at the age of fifteen, on hearing that Byron was no more, rushed out into the woods and scratched on a rock the words “Byron is dead,” as though the wounds inflicted on the senseless stone could make the Whole cry out with him.
Nineteenth-century literature is extremely ambivalent on the subject of this two-faced spouse embraced instead of religion. On the one hand, rapture, the desire to be an Aeolian harp played on by the winds of the infinite; on the other, fear. Wordsworth’s wonderful account, in The Prelude, of the sensation he had as a boy in a purloined rowboat of being chased by a lowering mountain peak (“...behind that craggy Steep...a huge Cliff, As if with voluntary power instinct Uprear’d its head...With measur’d motion, like a living thing, Strode after me.”), the indescribable threats emanating from Egdon Heath, from the moors, mine-pitted too, of Wuthering Heights, from the accursed coal country, masked with wheat and beetroot, of Germinal, from the red-lit autumnal Thames River, a fishing-ground for cadavers, of Our Mutual Friend, from the moonlit Adda, so still and serene, that Renzo crosses in a boat in I Promessi Sposi. Not to mention the treacherous sea and the numerous thunderstorms and downpours, like the one in L’Assommoir that attacks the wedding-party huddling beneath a bridge on the Seine.
Nature is not friendly to the lonely hero; it is out to “get” him, singling him out, it often appears, with mere idle destructiveness, as a lightning-bolt chooses to strike a particular tree. And it is true that these nineteenth-century heroes have no lightning-rods; they are orphans in the storm. The quality of being unprotected—by education, family, good sense, worldly experience—is particularly evident in the heroes and heroines of Manzoni, Emily Brontë, Conrad, Hardy, Zola, that is, in those authors where Nature, all but personified, is a predominant force. The more the characters are isolated in Nature, the bleaker their lot. Nor is it just a question of poverty. Compare the penniless Fanny in the populous “social” milieu of Mansfield Park with the helpless Tess. Or Dickens’ Esther Summerson with the human scarecrow Jude. Or within a single novel, Lucia in I Promessi, who has the protection of institutions, however dubious, with the lone Renzo at the mercy of the elements. In Society, virtue, like truth, compels recognition; outside this context, virtue is not even a quality; in Nature, there are only strength and frailty. From a novelistic point of view, there seems to be safety in numbers, and of course in real life this applies to the human species: it is only for men in numbers, the race itself, that Nature can promise survival, or at least that has been so up to now.
Curiously enough, landscape painting here shows a development similar to that of the novel. Once the crowds of human figures were subtracted from it—reapers, skaters, shepherds, cottagers, huntsmen, and dogs—the landscape became melancholy and almost saturnine, the more so if such man-made natural facts as watermills, bridges, haystacks, wagons, huts were subtracted too. Without these punctuation marks, aids to composition and indicators of scale, the painter, alone with Nature, confronted an incomprehensible abstraction. This has worked both ways: contemporary non-figurative painting, when it does not base itself on geometry, tends to be “read” as landscape.
Any work of literature in which Nature is deployed as a force—War and Peace, I Promessi Sposi, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick, the novels of Hardy, Conrad, Zola, The Wild Palms, Doctor Zhivago—is strangely twofold, at once a dark epic and an idyll. They are cosmic myths, sometimes quite frightening ones. And like cosmic myths, they tend to have a standard plot. Forces are loose in the world—war, drink, disease, monomania, sexual passion—which behave like floods or tornadoes. The “senseless” apparition of Napoleon in Russia is very like the apparition of the Imperial army in I Promessi Sposi. “Passano i cavalli Wolkenstein, passano i fanti di M’erode, passano i cavalli di Anhalt...passa Furstenburg...” They enter the peaceful Milanese, with its cottages housing spinners plying their useful trade; they ravage it and they leave it. Without rhyme or reason. With them comes the plague, which rages and then subsides. The plague is a symbol of them, and they of the plague. Nobody can foresee when the impetus of either will spend itself, as with one of Hardy’s “twisters”: “The President of the Immortals...had ended his sport with Tess.” Those dreadful visitants from the Germanic lands are viewed by the country people as a periodic natural scourge, and yet the havoc they wreak, the crimes they commit are felt to be “against Nature,” though rape and plunder are just as natural to their time-honored profession as buboes are to the pest. The industrious spinners of the region are simply another and weaker species, like the solitary weavers of English fiction—poor crazed Silas Marner at his toil is likened to a spider. The indigenous great and strong, personified in the Innominato (the Nameless One), are another traditional natural element preying on the humble. When this operatic daimon finally desists, having seen the light—Lucia—it is as though an insensate whirlwind had been calmed and redirected by a spirit.
The Innominato has something in common with Captain Ahab, who has pitted his destructive will not just against the White Whale but against the ship’s community, for which whaling is work or labor—the point of man’s normal interaction with Nature and in which each “hand” has its assigned part. Ahab’s sin, like that of the Ancient Mariner, is an economic crime: the wilful part endangering the whole by a deed of personal violence against one of God’s creatures.
In the novels of Zola, economics is itself a superhuman force. A human being or family or social group is slowly consumed by agriculture, coal-mining, the theatre, alcohol (the workman’s demon), by the sex market, by art (L’Oeuvre), by speculation (La Curée), or simply by a mania for shopping (Au Bonheur des Dames). Many of these subjects seem remote from natural scenes of the sort found in earlier authors, yet Zola is the only Naturalist to have a real conception of Nature. What happens to his characters is a sort of rich decomposition, which illustrates not only the modern waste of human resources but also their fertility. In his vision, even a department store has organic life, like that of a voraciously feeding plant, stealing the nourishment and light of its small neighbors of the ribbon and drygoods business. All the institutions described by Zola are heavy feeders—an idea also found in Dickens, though with less precise knowledge of their habits.
Hunger and its perversion, greed (Le Ventre de Paris), together with work, the means of satisfying their demands, are Zola’s great themes. He is at his best with poor working people. His passion for documentation allowed him to descend without impiety to the underworld of labor, where his lyricism discovered the sources of primal energy—not Virtue, but Nature with her sleeves rolled up. One of the most lyrical passages of nineteenth-century fiction is the scene in L’Assommoir of the quarrel in the laundry, where half-naked washerwomen, like strong goddesses, pink and damp, fight with each other in a mist of steam and a Cytherean foam of soapsuds. In the same book, Gervaise’s wedding lunch is an epic of eating, a banquet of spiteful and inebriate gods and satyrs, which ends with somebody’s throwing the apple of discord. In Germinal, the mine-shaft where pit-ponies labor condemned for life to eternal darkness is certainly the bottom of hell but it is also Vulcan’s forge. Zola’s half-medical interest in genealogy is Homeric; he was writing a modern theogony containing, as happened with the Olympians, many misalliances. The idea of an interrelated primal novelistic stock, the children of Kronos, reappears in Faulkner and is suggested in Tess’s connection with the ancient Durbervilles. At the same time, Zola’s mythic force is connected with his pictorial faculty; his scenes compose into pictures, which often recall the Impressionist painters—the boulevards of Pissarro—as well as Degas’ gas-lit world. As happened with those painters and somewhat differently with Cezanne, whose friend he was (it used to be thought that L’Oeuvre was based on Cezanne’s “failure”), his sense of light and weather irradiates the most ordinary and humble material. Naturalism without Nature is simply depressing.
The effects of the Industrial Revolution on innocent natural life were apparent to writers, as I have indicated, almost from the beginning. What was not so noticeable was that, owing to the population shift to the cities, farms and isolated cottages were reverting to Nature in the other sense—burdock, brambles, sheer vegetation. The classic rus came under double attack. This trend, which has continued right up to the present time, makes nonsense of our old sense of a benign and ordered harmony in which the human species is inserted. It is not only a question of polluting the little unpretending rill but of the encroachment of a new sort of wilderness on the human construct. In the actual countryside, as opposed to the suburbs, there are probably more untrodden ways than there were in Wordsworth’s time—abandoned logging trails, overgrown paths, derelict farms, orchards, and pastures.
Well-meaning efforts to save the scenery from real-estate developers and oil refineries, to create wild-life preserves and national park areas (strictly regulated and policed by rangers) do not and cannot re-establish Nature in her natural place. Modern moves to conserve a patrimony of mountains, gorges, rocky promontories, unspoiled beaches, are like moves to save stage scenery—prop trees and painted flats. It was a Romantic heresy to worship Nature in its elemental majesty, far from the vulgar herd, and to identify the poet with the soaring skylark, on the one hand or shrinking celandine on the other. To the extent that Nature has to be defended from man (with the inevitable recourse to police power), instead of being intrinsic to his species-existence, it is simply a backdrop, a photogenic setting, and has nothing to say, one way or another, in determining values or revealing truth. Indeed, the notion, still harbored by every reactionary heart, including my own, that Nature is itself a value, has become subject to opinion, like any other matter of taste, as is shown by the fact that nobody will give his life to defend Yosemite or the Appalachian Trail. At most a small contribution, a bequest, or a letter to the newspapers. This proves that Nature is no longer the human home.
It cannot be a coincidence that modern physics, by interfering with Nature, has for the first time posed a threat to the species and perhaps to most other forms of organic life on earth. And here is another “coincidence”: the scientific development leading to nuclear fission and then rapidly to fusion is presented as—and maybe really was—a logical process beyond the power of the human will to arrest, in short as possessing resistless qualities assigned to natural phenomena such as hurricanes. In fact it seems that hurricanes can now be “salted” and epidemic disease perhaps brought under control, whereas technical advance is a force “outside” man and “bigger” than the brains that conceive it. Technology, originally associated with the civilizing arts of building and weaving, has replaced Nature as the Number One opponent of human society. And technology too has its two faces, its “good” and its bad—good in quotation marks because the benignant side of modern technology (“Atoms for Peace”), unlike that of sunlight or rain, is not yet demonstrable.
The untoward, uncanny appearance of such a pseudonatural sovereign force on the human scene was noted by Zola and by Hardy—the two nineteenth-century authors who connected the work-process with the laboring of Mother Earth. Take the description in Tess (which would be omitted in a modern “shortened version”) of the new mechanical reaper: two broad arms of painted wood forming a revolving Maltese cross and appearing in the field at sunrise like a second Phoebus with a “look of having been dipped in liquid fire.” Or in the same novel the description of the new itinerant steam-thresher and the engine-man with a heap of coals by his side: “a dark motionless being, a sooty embodiment of tallness...a creature from Tophet...in the agricultural world but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun.” The ousting of traditional hand tools by usurping machinery (“the engine which was to act as the primum mobile of this little world”) coincide with the depopulation and dehumanization of landscape, and the author wrapped in contemplation of solitary Nature—the encroaching heath-was in fact saying a last farewell to the pantheistic illusions that fevered Wordsworth’s brain in the Simplon Pass, where rocks, crags, raving streams, clouds, and so on “were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity...” As for the poetic effusion itself, far from being an utterance of the Universal Soul, it was coming to be seen as the product of a rather widely distributed sub-species of humanity possessing a gland like the silk-exuding one in spiders that makes them spin webs.
September, 1969