The era of villa culture was little more than a moment in Western history.1 The natural world and its intersection with food production and political power that the villa celebrated evolved in surprising directions as the Renaissance waned. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a dramatic change in the understanding of how the world and the universe were to be modeled. This change arguably grew out of the appreciation of the material world that grounded villa culture, but in the end it created a sensibility that was far from a down-to-earth point of view.
The First Nature concept had thrived historically within the same frame of reference. It was grounded in the visible material world that human beings experienced in their daily lives. That world was distinct from the conceptual world of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the cosmic imagery of the Platonists, and the heavenly perspective of Christian and other theologians. Renaissance culture had flowered within the First Nature framework, and it understood and celebrated the world on a human scale. The seventeenth and subsequent centuries introduced two scales beyond the limits of unaided human sight and so beyond the experience of daily life: the tiny and the vast scales of the microscope and the telescope. Of the two inventions, the telescope was the more immediately consequential. What it revealed to the observer established a new foundation for the cosmos. Its developers brought to prominence new techniques of analysis and established a new model for thinking about the world.
The sensibility of the post-Renaissance period was in many ways a reaction to that era’s founding principles. Painting, architecture, and sculpture embraced a gigantism alien to Renaissance artists. The wars of religion that racked Europe beginning in the mid-sixteenth century put theocratic principles at the center of human concerns once again and destroyed any notion of a common human character or purpose shared across religious affiliation. Most decisively and most mysteriously, a fundamental turn occurred in what was still thought of as philosophy. With the exception of Aristotle and the first few generations of his followers, Greek philosophers had ruled out any constructive interaction between theory and observation. Indeed, the Greek insistence on the illusory nature of the world of becoming nullified any possibility that pragmatic observation could guide right thinking. Late Renaissance philosophers—men and women we would call scientists—were the first to see that observation, especially the controlled observation characteristic of experimentation, could provide valid insights into intellectual first principles. Pursuing this new approach to the investigation of the world and the cosmos, Galileo and others canceled out the humanistic grounding of the Renaissance and introduced a new measure, a new method, and a new model. The mechanistic world picture they postulated ended those Renaissance movements that might have reestablished First Nature as a principle for integrating human communities and the landscape on which they depended.
The invention of the telescope in the seventeenth century resolved old controversies about the cosmos and added new ones. Before the telescope revealed their true nature, the dark spots on the moon had been the subject of endless philosophical debate. Generally speaking, intellectuals had believed that the dark areas on the moon’s face proved that the heavenly body closest to earth shared some of earth’s fallen and corrupted nature. The dark spots, in other words, confirmed in the minds of generations the essentials of both Plato’s and Aristotle’s view of a distinction between natural law on earth and the physics that governed the upper planets. The telescope revealed that these dark areas were nothing more than landscape features with distinct reflective properties. Their presence had nothing to do with the substance of the moon and held no clue to its divine or mundane character.
The most controversial accomplishment of the celestial observers who watched the heavens through their telescopes was the deconstruction of the geocentric universe. This development was shocking and of great consequence. Just as modern creationists are fully invested in the dogma of the immediate divine manufacture of the world, religious authorities in the seventeenth century were committed to a geocentric universe. Theologians believed an earth-centered solar system to be the only planetary arrangement compatible with the relationship between God and humans that they understood. Without earth at the center of the universe, and hence at the center of divine attention and concern, how could God truly be the all-seeing, all-knowing deity they worshipped?2
Observations of the heavens accumulated after the idea of a heliocentric system was well advanced in the scientific community. The new data showed that the principle behind the old Ptolemaic system was wrong in another significant way. Aristotle had argued that bodies in motion above the earth naturally trace circles, while objects moving on earth trace straight lines. He saw these differences as proof of the incompatibility of celestial and earthly physical principles. But observations showed that the planets failed to exhibit the precise circular orbits Aristotle had predicted. Based on minute and detailed observations by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler theorized that planetary orbits were elliptical.
Newton was the first to account theoretically for elliptical orbits and also the first to unite the mathematical description of planetary orbits with the linear physics that Aristotle believed existed only on earth.3 Newton’s law of gravitation, which rested on the work of many other researchers in the seventeenth century, stated that the attraction between two objects is proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates them. The theory works for planets being pulled through their orbits by the sun as well as for apples falling to earth.
Newton articulated three laws of motion. The first law described the states of rest and motion and established that a moving object will continue to follow its original trajectory unless some force intervenes. The second addressed the way intervening forces change motion. It related the intervening force to the mass of the moving object and its acceleration, or change of velocity. (Aristotle had a similar idea, but his theory related force, mass, and velocity, not acceleration.) Combining these two laws allowed Newton to describe celestial and terrestrial motion in compatible ways. Motion in a straight line is the norm in both. Since the planets do not move in straight lines, a force must be acting on them to bend their paths. This force is the gravitational attraction between each planet and the sun.4
When these discoveries were added together, the universe suddenly became very different from the one that had been accepted as firm fact for two millennia. The Newtonian universe was heliocentric, not geocentric, and that in itself was hard for the orthodox to swallow. From the earth to the stars, the physics of the entire universe was uniform, an idea that shocked those who knew their Aristotle. The governing force in this homogeneous universe was gravity. In the universe of the ancient Greeks, planets moved because deities pushed them around. Christian adaptations of the system substituted angels. In Newton’s universe, the power source may have worked in a mysterious way, but the results were predictable and definitely not divine, magical, or uncanny. Even if no one really understood how objects attracted each other, the pull of attraction was evident. Gravity was a fact of daily life on earth, and promoting it to the role of planetary power source did not change its essentially mundane character.
The intelligence exemplified in the order of the universe and expressed in the formulas of the new scientists did not reside in the material that made it up. Plato’s Timaeus, which described the universe as living, intelligent, and divine, ceased to be read.5 God’s thought might have created the universe, but his thought could no longer be expressed in the symbols and analogies dear to medieval Christians.6 It could, however, be captured in simple, concise mathematical formulas.
At this point in history, it might have been possible to preserve a First Nature cosmology based on the landscape of daily life.7 The planets had lost their immaterial and divine attributes. The physical principles that governed earth had been restored to primacy as universal forces, a status they had not enjoyed since the time of the pre-Socratics, when love and strife presided over the metamorphoses of earth, air, fire, and water. But times had changed. There was a new ideal in the minds of the intelligentsia, and it soon exerted its power.
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, a perceptive analyst of the governing ideas of the Newtonian revolution, recognized that the seventeenth-century understanding of the material of the universe and the mechanistic process of its activity strongly militated against any effort to restore the landscape to its ancient role as a cosmological symbol.8 Mathematics and mechanics, not a productive agrarian landscape, underpinned the universe that seventeenth-century scientists codified.9
Newton’s gravity, promoted to cosmological driving force, was a resource that humans harnessed to do mechanical work. When falling water turned the wheels of water mills, they were harvesting gravitational energy. Galileo demonstrated that the regular swing of a pendulum reflected the pull of gravity on its heavy bob. If the same gravity that turned the mill wheel or swung the clock’s pendulum also powered the universe, then it was reasonable to see the universe as a mechanism of some sort. This analogy was brought to life in the early eighteenth century by two English clockmakers who designed an orrery, a mechanical device that replicated the movement of the planets around the sun. The mechanics of the orrery were based on the clock, which was one of the leading technologies of the seventeenth century.
The analogy of the clock or, more commonly, the watch played a part in many discussions of the Newtonian universe. The analogy was a keystone of the Deist argument about the relationship between God the creator and the solar system he brought into being: Like a watchmaker, God designed and built his cosmos, then wound it up and left it to run on its own. His design and his workmanship were both perfect, so the watch he made runs on forever without needing repair or resetting. For Deist theologians, this analogy represented a universe where order and reason are supreme and where God is aloof and takes no hand in the day-to-day conduct of his creation by causing miracles or answering prayers.
The watch analogy appealed even to thinkers who rejected the impersonal God of the Deists. In one of the first expressions of the theory that is now called intelligent design, the Christian apologist William Paley retooled the watch analogy to prove the “necessity of an intelligent Creator.” He wrote: “The inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker. Every observation … concerning the watch may be repeated with strict propriety concerning the eye, concerning animals, concerning plants, concerning, indeed, all the organized parts of the works of nature.”10
In such a worldview, the mechanical was exalted because it reflected the inner workings of the greatest and most enduring machine, the universe itself. The biological, which resisted mechanical explanation, was another matter. The English philosopher John Locke fantasized about the mechanical processes that he believed would someday be discerned within what appeared superficially to be physiological processes.11
The search for the mechanisms of life put a premium on the structures of living forms and their grouping into coherent, rational systems. The microscope was an important tool in this investigation, and the greatest successes in eighteenth-century biology came in the anatomy of animals and the structures of plants. “The mechanical philosophy was certainly extended to living things…. But the ‘animal machine’ doctrine had limited applicability in an age when the best possible model was, literally, a piece of clockwork. Even with the help of the microscope, the mechanical philosophy could make little headway in the understanding of the more complex processes of life.”12
With mechanistic cosmology in the ascendant, it was only natural that objects or processes with perceptible mechanical characteristics or at least analogues would be exalted at the expense of those that had none. Machinery seemed progressive, so industry gained an intellectual edge. Biological processes appeared mysterious and disorganized, so their manifestations, including agriculture, appeared retrograde. From the seventeenth century on, the mechanical and the industrial were cutting-edge cultural phenomena; farming was antiquated and ripe for capture by any mechanistic theory that convincingly described its dynamic.
Because the study of plant and animal structure was gaining orderliness and explanatory power through a mechanical approach, the mysteries of human interaction were expected to yield to the same kind of investigation. One area that seemed especially apt for analysis of this kind was that of buying and selling. Money coursed through the body politic in mysterious but measurable ways as it influenced and responded to the interaction of farmers and merchants, buyers and sellers, commoners and princes. If the principles that governed the behavior of money could be understood with the clarity and the predictability of gravitational attraction, then societies could hope to rationalize production, stabilize prices, simplify taxation, and achieve other useful goals. The benefits promised to be enormous. At the end of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith took on this subject in his authoritative and still influential book The Wealth of Nations. He was not a pioneer. The book came at the end of a long debate that was both theoretical and pragmatic about the nature of the economic force that was increasingly competing with warfare as a measure of the power and influence of European states.13
Money was an ancient feature of well-organized societies, and eighteenth-century Europeans were sophisticated in their understanding of its nature, power, and limitations. What prevented many of them from seeing money as the universal engine of economic activity was not ideological blindness or unfamiliarity with the marketplace but, instead, the massive presence of an essential but largely nonmonetary economic engine in their midst. Money may not be everything, even today, but it is a great deal more like everything in the twenty-first century than it was in the eighteenth. Those things on which we cannot or will not put a monetary value are personal, for the most part. In the eighteenth century, there was no need to turn to the private sphere to find things that were priceless. Most of the essentials of life could be appropriately described as falling into that category.
Traditional farming was what eighteenth-century critics typically referred to as “subsistence agriculture.” This term, which harked back to Aristotle’s misconceptions about the development of the city from agricultural foundations, was intended to stigmatize this kind of farming as retrograde and ineffectual, but what the designation really meant in the eighteenth century was that agriculture existed mostly outside the realm of monetary exchange. The generally small crop surpluses that sustained Mediterranean cities gained an economic value through commercial exchange; farmers paid occasional taxes in cash rather than in kind, but most agriculture in the eighteenth century continued to be carried on as it had been for generations, with little or no money changing hands. People ate what they produced and bartered goods and services. What “subsistence agriculture” really meant was nonmonetized production.
Theorizing about economic activity on the basis of cash flow in the eighteenth century meant leaving agriculture, the largest employer and the largest institution, almost completely in the dark. A school of economic thinkers in France in the middle of the eighteenth century tried to deal with this difficulty by creating a theory of value that rested on the materials of subsistence rather than on the process of exchange. Called physiocrats, these theorists were led by a onetime court physician, François Quesnay, whose aim appears to have been to find an economic analogy for the circulation of the blood through the human body.14 The physiocrats believed that primary value resided in the land and that agriculture realized an annual dividend on this national store of wealth.15 That wealth was consumed when city dwellers bought food. It was also consumed, Quesnay argued, when people bought manufactured goods. The physiocrats thought of manufacturing as consumption rather than production.
This consumption view of manufacturing, the darling of the rival mercantilist school of economics, provoked fierce opposition. Nor did the physiocrats always help their own case. Much attention has been paid to a complex and confusing chart that Quesnay drew up to track the flow of economic activity through farm labor, food production, and consumption. From a modern economic point of view, the chart makes little sense, and it may be that even to the physiocrats themselves, it was not fully comprehensible. It was certainly pilloried by their enemies, but the physiocrats were not wrong-headed cranks; they were serious people who made an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to theorize about an important social institution that in their era had hardly been colonized by the cash economy.16 It did not make sense to them to explain contemporary agriculture in terms of a medium of exchange that was hypothetically applicable to all buying and selling but which in pragmatic terms had made little inroads into farmers’ lives.
Modern economics, the “dismal science,” rests on the linked axioms that money is a means of exchange and that economic systems rely not on incalculable intrinsic values but on exchange values, established by markets.17 We think of these statements as noncontroversial descriptions of reality, but historically the universal use of money and the acceptance of exchange value over intrinsic value required substantial intellectual adjustment and often wrenching social change. It is no accident that the seminal eighteenth-century theorist of money was not a Frenchman but a Scot. Adam Smith was much more comfortable taking exchange value as the foundation for his economic theories than Quesnay. Not only did Smith have greater insight into the economic process, but there was a much longer history of the penetration of money into agriculture in Britain than in France.18
In sixteenth-century Britain, land tenure and the rights of farmer-tenants had followed substantially the same lines as those still dominant in eighteenth-century France. For a variety of reasons, however, British landowners were both precocious and successful in annulling the traditional rights of their tenants. In a series of actions, British landlords slowly eliminated common lands that had for centuries served tenants on their estates. Once privatized and enclosed, these lands were turned into money-making ventures for the landlords. The farmers who had used them were in many cases dispossessed. Through these “enclosures,” British landlords mobilized their estates to produce cash flow instead of continuing to accept rents in kind and traditional labor dues. Wool production was one of the capitalist ventures that British landlords moved into with increasing zeal.19 By the eighteenth century, entire villages were being displaced to make room for herds of sheep. The enclosures and what came to be known as the clearances, which were particularly severe in the Scottish Highlands, created agricultural exiles who staffed the growing mines and mills of Britain, manned the imperial armies, or sold themselves into indentured servitude on New World plantations. In eighteenth-century Britain, then, where the monetization of agriculture was well advanced, it was much easier to conceive of money as a universal economic measure and unit of exchange. To catch up with what theorists regarded as the more advanced economy of Britain, France was urged to reorganize agriculture and the laws governing property. This did in fact occur, though it took the French Revolution with its overhaul of the traditional system of land tenure to bring it about.
When money activity emerged as the standard measure in economics, theorists began to question its nature. Yes, money was a medium of exchange, but it did not appear to be a neutral substance like a liquid, say, that would take the shape of whatever contained it. Nor did its action appear to be organic, like the circulation of the blood. Money appeared to be more like gravity, a force rather than a substance, and a force that shaped events. The operations of money appeared to follow some inner principles that were independent of law and social policy. Adam Smith summarized these mysteries as the work of an invisible guiding hand.20
His description suggested the workings of Providence. God moves in mysterious ways, yet everything he does serves a purpose, disguised from us perhaps, but known to him. Added to the moral force of this analogy was the purely mechanical similarity between the invisible hand of the economy and the invisible force of universal gravity. A concept with resonances both in the language of religion and in the progressive field of physics combined within itself the two strands of the Deistic model of cosmic order. The “invisible hand” symbolized both God’s purpose for the creation and the mechanical means he had chosen to carry it out. This concept gave economics intellectual currency and cultural power. If economic activity depended on universal forces that were providentially guided, then societies needed to give them full scope to realize their purposes. In making this argument, French economists of the eighteenth century branded it with a lasting slogan, “Laissez faire, laissez aller.” Leave the system alone, and it will steer economic affairs on their proper course.
The rise of economics as a discipline in the eighteenth century meant that social decisionmaking suddenly gained a new guiding principle. Alongside the developing conversations about political rights and political power, there were also animated and contentious conversations about economic policy. The debate between the physiocrats and the mercantilists was only one of these; many others focused on the role of manufacturing, the value of high versus low wages, and the imposition of taxes and tariffs, to name just a few. These conversations, like the political debates in France, also had their role in thoughts and actions of the people. When Louis XVI and his family were forced to leave Versailles and take up residence in Paris, they were escorted into the city by a mob intent on two things: expanding political rights and lowering the price of bread.21
During the seventeenth century, the conversation about famine protection and the availability of bread at an affordable price migrated from agriculture to politics and economics. From that point forward, the role of economic discussions in policy debates in governments expanded. Increasingly an economic rationale became the last word in those conversations. More than any other emergent force in the eighteenth century, economics with its calculus of means and ends trumped reasoning about resource use. This was to prove especially damaging to land and labor. The ascendancy of northern Europe during the colonial era meant that materialistic science and bottom-line economic thinking shaped world markets and social policy. First Nature, the Neolithic consensus, had been shared across all classes in society. In the colonial era, in contrast, the reigning ideology was imposed by the intellectual, political, and agricultural elites, who held power, however narrowly, over the disenfranchised.
The mechanical view of the world that physics fostered and other sciences strained to engage, imitate, or incorporate was indirectly reflected in the way people viewed the landscape. As agriculture lost its stature in the minds of theorists, it also began to lose its traditional place in the broader cultural imagination. This change was felt in many ways and can be traced in forms of expression that range from the musings of travelers to the writings of poets.
Writings about the landscape produced in the eighteenth century show a sharp divide. In the early part of the century, the human world, the agricultural realm, and the province of uncultivated nature were one continuous field with no internal boundaries. The poet’s or traveler’s mind flowed from one to another without difficulty. By the end of the century, key writers had created a sharp divide within this continuum and separated the agricultural world from the world of nature. The middle ground between the human and the biological communities articulated by First Nature disappeared. The long-celebrated order and beauty of the rural landscape became a minor poetic theme; the sense of satisfaction and reassurance that poets had until recently felt in it was dismissed as unimportant; and the role of mediator that the farm landscape had long played was spurned as a new generation of poets declared themselves ready to confront nature face to face.
This abrupt and dramatic change of sensibility was as consequential for ecological understanding and action as eighteenth-century mechanistic or economic theory. In the field of ecological conceptualization, poets proved themselves to be the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” establishing within a remarkably few years an entirely new set of rules and expectations to govern the relationship between human and natural communities. The decisive changes after midcentury had roots in both France and Germany. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a trendsetter in so many fields, was an important force in the changing response to landscape and to nature. The more decisive influence, however, came from German poets of the late eighteenth century, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The English philosopher Edmund Burke and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant provided theoretical underpinnings for the new poetic ideal.
The radically new view of nature was first nurtured by scenery that had never before appealed to Europeans. It featured a well-known landscape that was visited only when necessary and more often endured than admired. The high Alps had been crisscrossed by paths since the Paleolithic period, but through travelers had always found the terrain forbidding and uncomfortable. Leopold Mozart and his son, Wolfgang, were among the many international travelers of the early eighteenth century whose itinerary took them across the Alps on their way to Italy. Mozart’s biographer Hermann Abert, who was thoroughly familiar with the appreciation of that region that became universal among poets of following generations, expressed surprise that he was unable to find any trace of this later sensibility in the letters of the precocious Mozart and his father. The later writers, he noted, always included in their travelogues
a series of more or less colorful images of the Alps. Of this we find not a single word in the accounts of either Mozart or his father…. Far more frequent are the references to the difficulties of crossing the Alps, to the snow and dirt and so on. Bozen struck Leopold as “dreary,” while Mozart even described it as a “pigsty.” There is not a single trace of the Romanticism usually associated with mountain scenery, and the Mozarts are still clearly in thrall to the essentially classical view of nature typical of the generation before Rousseau, in whom the wild beauty of the mountains inspired only terror and unease…. Only after the Mozarts had descended into the Valley of the Po, do we find more frequent accounts of their impressions of nature. Leopold had earlier written that his favorite scenery was the Swabian countryside, with its delightful mixture of woods and fields and parks, and in Italy, too, it is clear from his praise of Naples that what attracted most was the jocund charm of its park-like landscapes. As a true disciple of the Enlightenment, he never forgot the element of fruitful fecundity. Vesuvius, by contrast, left little impression on him.22
Goethe traveled through the Alps on his way to Italy in 1779. His impressions could not have been more different from theirs.
Above the summits before us a light was revealing itself, the source of which we could not understand. It shone through the night like a glow-worm and we realized at last that it was none other than Mont Blanc. It had a strange, supreme beauty; it covered us with light and the stars were massing round it. It had not their twinkling glimmer, but it looked like a vast shining body, belonging to a higher sphere. It was difficult to believe that it had earthly roots.23
Out of tune as the Mozarts’s reactions were with the new sensibility, their responses to the Alpine landscape were entirely in keeping with the sensibility of French poets of the early eighteenth century. To critics, these men and women appeared nostalgic, patronizing to those who did the hard work of agriculture, complacent and assured in their own superior social positions. Some poets may have been guilty of some of these failings, but by and large, the French poetry of the early eighteenth century reveals—as art had done since the Paleolithic—an appreciative attitude toward the landscapes that surrounded and sustained them. A poem written by a cardinal of southern French origin celebrates the fruitfulness of his native Provence.
The worker’s treasure and the shepherd’s pride,
the olive in my mind’s eye is linked with the orange tree.
How I love to contemplate the blue mountains
which form long amphitheaters before my eyes
where winter still reigns while blond Ceres
has covered our fields below with the gold of her hair.
It is sweet to remember the Rhône River as it opens its arms
to separate our islands, then gathers in again her scattered treasures
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As the sun sets, I admire the celebrated vineyards
where festoons of perfumed grapes hang from the vines,
while towards the north the oaks ever green
confront the thunder and brave the wintry blast.24
France itself inspired André Chenier to write a celebratory poem in much the same spirit. After contrasting France’s moderate climate with the climates of less-blessed countries in the extreme north and south, he surveyed its natural resources.
The oaks, the pines, and thick elm trees
Shade our summits with useful branches;
And the fortunate riverbanks at Beaune and Aix
and the rich Aquitaine and the high Pyrenees,
make rivers of delicious wines—
matured on their shores—flow from bruising presses.
Sweet-smelling Provence, beloved of the winds,
breathes her perfumed breath over the sea.
All along her coast, the orange and the lemon,
delicious treasures, gleam in their golden cloaks.
And further inland, on the slope of rocky hills
The fat olive forms its sweet liqueurs.25
These large themes do not overpower the poet, who takes the whole of Provence or the whole of France in stride. In another mood, a writer may realize that the world exceeds the reach of human consciousness. Faced with the same realization, a poet at the end of the century would dwell on the contrast between the spiritual human being and the overpowering might of brute nature, but in the early eighteenth century, poets accepted human limitations without losing their self-possession or their inherent optimism.
I love the depths of the ancient forests,
the robust old age and solemn height
of the oaks that Time and Nature, without us,
have raised high above our heads.
One breathes in these somber, majestic woods
a certain air of the venerable and the sacred;
it must have been the atmosphere of these mysterious places—
their profound silence and their solitary peace—
that made the Gallic people believe for so long
that the gods spoke only in the depths of the woods.
A man is unequal to their vast extent;
they halt his steps; they cloud his understanding;
a humble atom lost in so vast a space.
Even in the middle of the estate of which he is master,
he remains a lonely voyager on an immense surface.
A man can only truly possess a small place;
beyond the limits of his senses, he can find no pleasure;
if he owns too much land, his domains escape him.
So, proud by instinct, but conscious of his frailty,
he narrows the space he sets aside for himself;
he comes, on the slopes that he loves to walk,
To lay out a garden, to cultivate an orchard.26
Another extraordinary poem, by the Italian Giuseppe Parini, written in the middle of the eighteenth century illustrates the role that traditional agriculture still played then as a mediator between the poet and the natural world. Parini’s poem describes the strength and invigoration that the poet feels when he is in the cultivated fields of his home region. A poet of Uruk might have felt erotically energized among the same fields, but Parini, whose poetic sensibility is like that of his French contemporaries, feels calm and reassured. When he is among familiar fields, all is right with the world.
Parini’s poem contrasts the security and comfort the home fields inspire in him with his very different experience of the city. Despite the city-country opposition, the poem is about both cultural and personal responses to two agricultural regimes. The countryside where the poet feels at home is planted in wheat. What characterizes the city—Milan, in this instance—is not hustle and bustle but the cultivation of rice and hay in artificially flooded fields under the city’s walls. What the poem offers, then, is more than just a view of the power of traditional agriculture to make humans feel at home in nature; it also contrasts this with the failure of exploitive, nontraditional agriculture to do the same.27
In the healthy air among my lovely hills,
I will pass tranquil days among the blessed folks
whom honest work has made robust and strong.
With an unburdened mind cleansed by pure waters,
I will celebrate in verse the healthy peasants
scattered through the fields at harvest time,
and their tireless bodies among the ripening grain
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
saying “O fortunate folk who in perfect temper
breathe this air that is purged and purified!” …
Nature has given gifts of ample sky and pure air
to the city, but whom do these gifts serve
among all the luxury, the greed, and neglect?
It was not enough for you
that you had stagnant marshes all around.
You needed to bring the rivers
right under your city walls to flood your hayfields.
You sacrificed the common good
to feed a rich man’s horses—
horses that trample honest men and women in the streets.28
In a later verse the poet returns to the healthy workers in traditional agriculture to contrast them with the pallid workers in the rice industry, undernourished and afflicted with malaria.
Look at the faces painted with deathly pallor
of the exhausted workers among the accursed rice;
and tremble citizens that these people suffer among you.29
Written in the middle of the eighteenth century, such a poem would seem impossibly old-fashioned by the century’s end, when farming landscapes had lost their hold on the imagination, to be replaced by geographies unmarked by human cultivation and beyond the power of human beings to inhabit or influence.
Both Rousseau, the French innovator, and the German poets of the later eighteenth century were thoroughly familiar with the French poets who were their near contemporaries. They could hardly have failed to be. Eighteenth-century France was the intellectual and artistic center of Europe. Cultivated men and women studied its literature, wore Parisian fashions, and may well have preferred the French language to their native tongue. Apparently for personal reasons, Rousseau rebelled against this overwhelming cultural force. For essentially nationalistic reasons, German theorists and artists resisted it as well.
Rousseau was the first French author of importance to portray the landscape of the Alps in the manner that would become the hallmark of the new sensibility. While he did not fully share the enthusiasms of later romantic poets, he is clearly an important forerunner. In this passage from his autobiographical Confessions, he describes his reactions to different kinds of landscape: “It has never been the case that flat landscapes, however beautiful they may be, appeared so to my eyes. I need the torrents, the rocks, the pines and the deep woods, the mountains, the rough paths to climb and descend, precipices on both sides that make me truly afraid.”30
In one of his most influential fictions, Rousseau has one of his central characters talk about the bracing effects of mountain scenery on his physical and mental states: “In essence, it is an impression shared generally by all people, though not all of them are aware of it, that in the high mountains, where the air is pure and clear, one feels greater ease in breathing, more lightness in the body, and greater serenity in the spirit. Pleasures are less powerful and the emotions are more moderate. Our thoughts take on a certain grandeur and sublimity proportionate to the affecting objects all around us.”31
Fear, the emotion that Rousseau himself sought in his mountain forays, grounded the experiences that his character values: “This solitary place was for me a savage and desolate refuge, but one filled with those sorts of beauties that please receptive souls and appear horrible to others. A waterfall swollen with snow melt not twenty feet from us roared with the sounds of crashing rocks, sand, and debris as it poured out a stream of chalky water. Behind us a chain of inaccessible spires divided the rock shelf where we stood from that part of the Alps that is covered with glaciers.”32
The steep slopes, the violent rush of the waterfall, the desolation and isolation of the region had for centuries appeared “horrible to others.” Why, then, was this landscape so celebrated by the poets of the late eighteenth century that their responses became clichés in the nineteenth century? Harsh landforms satisfied a sensibility that had revolutionary characteristics. They combined intense emotion with a sense of transcendent purpose. A search for the transcendent necessarily rejected the calm, the orderly, and the everyday, the intellectual and emotional spaces that had long been occupied by the agricultural landscape. The high emotional pitch of these newly sought experiences ruled out mediation. So, not only did the agricultural landscape lose its ability to bridge the gap between humans and nonhuman nature, mediation of any sort in the encounter with nature was rejected as undesirable, even illegitimate.
Modern men and women are the inheritors of this radical tradition. Like many of the ideas of the nineteenth century, it remains a largely unexamined given in modern thinking about nature. Many in Europe and the United States continue to identify nature with the wild, with wilderness, and to think of it as transcendent, offering heightened experiences. There is a widely held belief that human intervention in nature destroys its defining characteristic of wildness. These attitudes eliminate any middle ground where humans and nature might interact constructively. In effect, this new characterization of nature meant and continues to mean that the First Nature agricultural landscape has lost its traditional role as the meeting ground of the human community with the natural world.
Two philosophers who speculated about the new eighteenth-century sensibility offered explanations of its psychological roots. One was the Englishman Edmund Burke and the other a Prussian, Immanuel Kant. Neither was much concerned with poetry, landscape in general, or the Alps in particular; instead, their subject was a concept in rhetorical theory known as “the sublime.” Literary critics in the era of Rome’s fall, deeply influenced by the revival that Plato’s philosophy was then experiencing, focused attention on the sublime, and one of them, Longinus, wrote a treatise on the subject that resurfaced to influence men and women during the eighteenth century. Longinus thought of the sublime as a moment of exalted feeling combined with superior insight; it was something that a skilled orator might introduce at the climax of a speech. For Edmund Burke, the sublime was fundamental to human experience. It was not a mere technique in the toolbox of the speechmaker; it was a profound human emotion that could be evoked by art.
Burke distinguished the sublime from the beautiful in more or less the same way that Longinus had contrasted the overwhelming force of the sublime speaker with the less compelling power of the normal orator. In Burke’s view, beauty appeals only to the civilized traits of an individual, or, we might say, to the conscious mind. Beauty rests on our capacity to appreciate order, regularity, and symmetry. The sublime, on the other hand, “pertains to the passions concerning, ‘self preservation,’” so it appeals to the deepest instinctual strands in our nature. The primary emotional response in situations where self-preservation is at issue is terror, as a number of English theoreticians before Burke had acknowledged. While these theoreticians had assumed that the sublime was really the sigh of relief a person felt after escaping mortal threat, Burke’s view was different. The “delight” that people felt in fearful situations was not what they experienced when they realized they were safe. Instead, as one author explains it, the delight “is the fear felt as they draw near to it, in other words, as they masochistically approach death. Not only terror but also pain itself (as long as it is not excessive) delights. As tension, moreover, terror and pain become exactly like lust, as Burke depicts it—‘rapturous and violent.’”33
Immanuel Kant based his theorizing on Burke’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.34 Kant framed his argument in more complex terms than Burke had done. Burke was mainly interested in the individual’s awareness of mortality. Rather than talk about death in the abstract, Kant framed death within a conversation about nature. For him the sublime—with its borderline approach to pain and extinction—was a feature of every human interaction with the natural world. In his view, the sensation of sublime terror was “evoked by objects or occurrences which reveal our powerlessness as natural beings to overcome the forces of Nature.”35
For Kant the idealized flirtation with death does not end at this point. Kant’s encounter with the terrifying in nature climaxes in a declaration of moral superiority. The individual recognizes the power of nature but at the same time realizes the confines of that power within the purely material sphere. Though as “natural beings,” humans are weak, we also have an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual side. We have innate freedom and the capacity for both rational thought and ethical action.36 Kant’s individual encountering nature gains a new appreciation of all these distinctly human traits and a corresponding contempt for the brutal, materialistic realm of the natural. In Kant at least, though not in all romantics, Newton’s soulless, mechanical, and material universe becomes a presence in the world of human experience.
Kant’s identification of nature with the threat of mortality and the terror that threat evoked changed the entire valence of the natural world in both poetic and philosophical conversation. In the First Nature formulation, the cultivated world was a place where the civilized virtues of order and regularity prevailed. In Burke’s philosophy, this realm was merely beautiful and evoked nothing more than the superficial delights associated with conventional pleasures. The wild landscape, however, promised the superior experiences of fear and pain and introduced the linked themes of death and moral ascendancy into what was coming to be conceived not as a partnership but as a face-off between humans and nature.
The early eighteenth-century taste for modest pleasures grounded in ordered fertility was displaced by a taste for intense sensation aroused by a forbidding landscape that threatened death. First Nature emphasized sociability, life, and vitality; the new sensibility of the late eighteenth century venerated the solitary, the extreme, and the deadly. A radical redefinition of the essentially human turned the confrontation between the human being and nature into a hierarchical one. Face to face with nature, humans proved their spiritual, rational, and ethical superiority. The same confrontation brutalized nature by emphasizing its material and mechanical character and its mindless capacity to do harm.
The consequences of this appreciation were, and remain, extremely significant, not just for the aesthete appreciating the power of the avalanche but for all of us as we engage the natural world. The First Nature landscape, “which stands ready to guide us step by step from … ordered beauty to the more somber and intricate aspects of life and nature, is absolutely cut asunder.”37 The new taste for the violent and terror-inspiring aspects of nature eroded the last intellectual underpinnings of First Nature. With this the great Neolithic cultural consensus collapsed.