This chapter concerns certain aspects of man’s relationship to the earth and his natural surroundings in the poets’ life-times. The subject is a highly complicated one and I mean to concentrate largely on one part of it, the theories of natural beauty that became ideals for poets and for painters in the period.
Interest in natural surroundings increased at the time for a variety of sometimes conflicting reasons. There was the reaction against the eighteenth-century ideals of order in civilization—neo-classical harmony, hierarchic society, the rule of Man over Nature which some saw symbolized in the highly formal gardens of Le Nôtre. This produced an interest in the uncontrolled, from forest and mountain scenery to deliberately irregular gardens. Châteaubriand’s noble savages in the American forests were natural man in natural surroundings. Rousseau, whose Child of Nature had certain social qualities, praised the irregular English garden as opposed to the French ordered one—it represented constitutionalism and man’s alliance with Nature. There was also a concurrent reaction against the anxiety about the later versions of Man’s Control over Nature which appeared in industrial defilement of the landscape and what Wordsworth called ‘the increasing accumulation of men in cities’: these men’s minds were being blunted to ‘a state of almost savage torpor’; Wordsworth hoped to rescue them through the use of the power of the human mind combined with ‘certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it’, which in The Prelude, became the presence of mountains and sky and rivers, darkness and light. The desire for the unlimited and uncontrolled produced an interest in cataracts and mountains and winds and avalanches, and the kind of men that went with them—Salvator Rosa’s banditti summed up for ever in Horace Walpole’s immortal letter on his tour of the Alps with Gray in 1739: ‘Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings, Salvator Rosa!’ It worked on men’s minds with the accounts of explorations into the dangerous and the unknown—James Bruce’s Travels to discover the Source of the Nile (1790), Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799)—Park was a friend of Scott—or the Quaker William Bartram’s Travels through North and South Carolina (1791), which both poets eagerly read. The reaction against industrialism produced a different preoccupation: the feudal nostalgia for agricultural man, living and working in harmony with Nature, the vision of Cobbett’s Rural Rides and of Wordsworth’s Cumberland statesmen, and of Constable’s Hay-Wain—a vision even then containing an element of the pure nostalgia which has become an increasingly important component of English artistic emotion about landscape ever since. The changes brought about by enclosures produced a regret for lost beauties which led to the careful preserving topographies and Bewick’s engravings and some of Clare’s best writing. These preoccupations were not necessarily separate. At the highest level Sir Walter Scott can describe the clash and change of cultures by placing the Scottish robber barons—Rob Roy—in proper Romantic wild scenery, and yet treating careful agricultural workers and town dwellers with equally affectionate skill. And as preoccupation with the earth produced tourists and travellers and guides and drawings, so the interest in the peasantry and the cataracts became amalgamated in the search for the picturesque. By 1788 Wilberforce was already writing that ‘the banks of the Thames are scarcely more public than those of Windermere’. Wordsworth and Coleridge were involved in all this at many levels. Wordsworth wrote a Guide to the Lakes, and was full of precise ideas about the advisability and impropriety of man-made improvements to landscape; both were close friends of Sir George Beaumont, patron of Constable and many other artists, painter and founder of the National Gallery; both were passionate walkers and tourists. Both, too, used images of the movement of light on landscape to convey their most deeply felt ideas about the nature of imagination, the relationship between the natural world and the mind of man.
A book which had a profound influence on the aesthetic thought of the next hundred years was Edmund Burke’s treatise On theSublime and the Beautiful, published in 1756. In this Burke argued that man had two fundamental ‘instincts’ which lay behind all his passions and emotions—self-propagation and self-preservation. Objects perceived by the senses (which communicated with these subconscious instincts, not with the mind) appealed to one or the other. Pleasing things which were sensually desirable, with qualities of softness or smoothness or harmony, appealed to the instinct of self-propagation and were called Beautiful. Those which appealed to the human apprehension of fear, pain, thwarting forces, or infinity were concerned with the instinct of self-preservation, and were Sublime. One of Burke’s most important contributions to the discussion of aesthetic emotion was his analysis of why terrifying, infinite, or empty things were attractive to the human mind. He ascribed some of the sense of the sublime to a sense of a real power or danger faced without damage: ‘Whatever leads to raise man in his own opinion produces a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind. And this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects—the mind always claiming to itself some of the dignity or importance of the things which it contemplates.’ He listed the attributes of the sublime, which were
(1) Obscurity (which induced Terror)—as seen in Milton’s darknesses
(2) Power
(3) Privations—Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude, Silence
(4) Vastness—height and depth
(5) Infinity—a ‘tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful Horror’ and artificial infinity which included
(6) Succession—an endless progress beyond limits and
(7) Uniformity—a round and therefore artificially endless church, the Pantheon, as opposed to the cruciform cathedrals.
Several of these later qualities—architectural infinity, as well as the senses of obscurity, privation and vastness—can be seen in De Quincey’s artistic reconstructions of the endless seas and palaces of his opium dreams, or in John Martin’s engravings of Milton’s Pandemonium or the Fall of Nineveh. The same qualities are present, combined into great poetry, in Wordsworth’s description of his undergraduate walking tour in the Alps, where he saw
the immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
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,
Of first and last and midst and without end.
To Burke’s categories of the Sublime and the Beautiful later writers and painters added the category of the ‘picturesque’, which was neither smoothly pleasing nor imposing and horrifying but consisted of certain qualities which produced—initially—attractive non-classical paintings. Uvedale Price, an early proponent of the theory, wrote ‘the two opposite qualities of roughness and of sudden variation, joined to that of irregularity, are the most efficient causes of the picturesque’. Controversy raged as to whether this really was a new category, but popular taste confirmed it. A pioneer was the Reverend William Gilpin, whose descriptions of his sketching tours round the English counties introduced the concept of picturesque travel. In his Tour of the Lakes Gilpin made an Analysis of Romantic Scenery, dividing every view into three parts: Background, containing Mountains and Lakes; Off-skip, comprising Valleys, Woods, Rivers; Foreground, comprising Rocks, Cascades, Broken Ground and Ruins. Only certain objects were picturesque—they had to have the required roughness or oddity but not be positively ugly. Mountains were picturesque in ‘the pyramidical shape and easy flow of an irregular line’ but saddlebacks, alps, and indeed most mountains were suggestive of ‘lumpishness, heaviness’ and were thus disgusting. Gilpin still has an idealizing eye but can only use it on certain subjects. The Thames at Twickenham in his view ‘in spite of its beauty and even grandeur … still falls short, in a picturesque light, of a Scottish river with its rough accompaniments’. He admired at Tintern Abbey the ruins in the Foreground where, to the beauty of the architecture ‘are superadded the ornaments of Time. Ivy, in masses uncommonly large, has taken possession of many parts of the walls; and gives a happy contrast to the grey-coloured stone …. Nor is this undecorated. Mosses of various hues, with lychens, maiden hair, penny-leaf and other humble plants, overspread the surface … all together they give those full-blown tints which add the richest finishing to a ruin.’ He believed that trees should have ‘form, lightness and proper balance’ to be truly beautiful, yet he showed an enthusiasm for decayed or damaged trees akin to the literary interest in Gothic and grotesque figures. ‘How many forests have we wherein you shall have for one living tree, twenty-four evil-thriving; rotten and dying trees; what rottenness! what hollowness! what dead arms! withered tops! curtailed trunks! What loads of mosses! dropping boughs and dying branches shall you see everywhere! … Yet these are often the very capital sources of picturesque beauty.’ Uvedale Price, in A Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and Beautiful, has three characters who go on a walk past various scenes, typically picturesque: a hovel beneath a gnarled oak with an aged gipsy, a rusty donkey, mellow tints and dark shadows, a hollow lane with crumbling banks under the roots of ‘junipers, heath and furze which with some thorns and a few knotty old pollard oaks and yews clothed the sides’. The parsonage, ‘a singular mixture of neatness and irregularity’, was a picturesque building, and the parson’s daughter who had a squint and uneven teeth but was ‘clear and clean and upright’ was a picturesque human being. Price was criticized by his opponent in the argument, William Payne Knight, for not making her hobble and giving her irregular hips and shoulders whilst he was at it.
Coleridge’s note-book entry in 1803 is recognizably looking for the same visual stimuli:
That sweet delicate birch with its tri-prong Root—and the other twisty little creature near it. O Christ, it maddens me that I am not a painter or that Painters are not I! The chapped Bark of the lower part of the Trunk, the Bark like a Rhinoceros rolled in mud and exposed to the tropic Heat/the second Fall to Sheep forced through water and vaulting over each other throwing off the pearly streams from their heavy fleeces.
Picturesque travel and literature produced a kind of strange language of description. Thomas West’s Guide to the Lakes is typical, both in the way in which the ‘views’ were presented from recommended ‘stations’ as pictures created by and for the tourists, and the language used to recommend these views. The ‘next grand view’ of Coniston, for instance, ‘is had in the boat and from the centre of the lake’ and shows ‘verdant meadows, inclosed with a variety of grounds rising in an exceedingly bold manner. These objects are beautifully diversified amongst themselves, and contrasted by the finest exhibition of rural elegance (cultivation and pasturage, waving woods and sloping inclosures, adorned by nature and improved by art) under the bold sides of stupendous mountains ….’ Later he writes: ‘To the north is a most awful scene of mountains heaped upon mountains, in every variety of horrid shape. Amongst them sweeps to the north a deep winding chasm, darkened by overhanging rocks, that the eye cannot pierce, nor the imagination fathom—.’
Coleridge, a linguistic precisian who knew his Burke, had an amusing encounter with some tourists in Scotland in 1803, well described by Dorothy Wordsworth. They were near a waterfall:
C., who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a ‘majestic waterfall’. Coleridge was delighted with the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc. and had discussed the subject with Wm. at some length the day before. ‘Yes, sir,’ says Coleridge, ‘it is a majestic waterfall.’ ‘Sublime and beautiful’ replied his friend. Poor C. could make no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.
The description of Dunald-Mill-Hole by a Mr A. W. in 1760 begins enthusiastically ‘The entrance of this subterraneous channel has something most pleasingly horrible in it’, which reminds one of the Gothic enthusiasms of the girls in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen could mock the picturesque too, as in Sense and Sensibility, when the sensible Edward says ‘I like a fine prospect but not on picturesque principles. I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees—’, but the memoir prefixed to Northanger Abbey records that ‘At a very early age she was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed her opinion on books or men’. She used Gilpin to help with the setting of Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, and Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey itself gives Catherine a lecture on the picturesque: ‘Foregrounds, distances and second distances; side screens and perspectives; light and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar … that she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.’
Another writer who was interested in picturesque landscape—and made extensive use of it—was Mrs Radcliffe, also satirized in Northanger Abbey. In The Romance of the Forest (1792) she composed, not unskilfully, a picturesque scene of a chateau over a lake ‘environed by mountains of stupendous height, which, shooting into a variety of grotesque forms, composed a scenery singularly solemn and sublime’. But her travel diaries—and in particular her account of a ride over Skiddaw in 1794—have an actuality, an accuracy of pace and structure closer to Wordsworth’s than to the guidebooks. She is good on the thinning air and effective with height. ‘At length as we ascended, Derwent-water dwindled on the eye to the smallness of a pond, while the grandeur of its ampitheatre was increased by new ranges of dark mountains, no longer individually great but so from accumulation—a scenery to give ideas of the breaking-up of a world.’
Before considering Wordsworth’s own Guide to the Lakes it is interesting to consider a little more thoroughly the various effects on tourists and art of seeing landscape very much in terms of paintings, already composed, or about to be composed. The painters of landscape whom the enthusiastic British travellers on the Grand Tour had discovered in the eighteenth century and had used in their creation of the new vision of landscape were Claude, Nicolas and Gaspar Poussin, and Salvator Rosa. Sir George Beaumont had a collection of Claudes which he left to form part of the National Gallery’s initial collection, one of which he took everywhere with him in his travelling carriage. Claude appealed because of the delicacy and poetry of his ideal landscapes, his creation of luminous distances, representative of the infinity for which the Romantics longed, but seen in terms not of awe but of a harmony between man and Nature, vision and object which even in his work has an element of nostalgia, and to them seemed much more part of a vanished past. Claude apparently painted his great landscapes not in the studio but from Nature, and the quality in them which appealed both to English painters such as Richard Wilson and, I think, to the poets, was their treatment of light—light creating and transforming foliage, water and distances, light as an object of contemplation. Lord Clark says that one of the chief lessons of Claude is ‘that the centre of landscape is an area of light’. Nicolas Poussin painted highly complex and allusive studies of mythological figures in landscapes, which, along with the calmer, milder processions and temples of Claude, had a profound effect on Keats: they were intellectually and geometrically subtle, but Hazlitt, who noted that Poussin’s landscapes were subdued to his ruling idea, wrote that his scenery had ‘the unimpaired look of original nature, full, solid, large, luxuriant, teeming with life and power’. Lord Clark compares Poussin to Milton, and his sense of order and energy in Nature may have affected Wordsworth and Coleridge as Milton’s did. Salvator Rosa was a Byronic figure himself, a friend of bandits and outlaws, and his scenes with bandits, wild trees and precipices provided the inspiration for much wilder romanticizing. These painters also had a great influence on the nineteenth-century English masters of landscape, Constable and Turner. Constable was shown Sir George Beaumont’s Claude—Hagar and the Angel—as a boy and ‘looked back on this exquisite work as an important epoch in his life’. He made detailed copies of both Claude and Poussin for much of his life, and Turner, who was influenced by Claude in his early classical work and fascination with light on the sea, left instructions that one of his paintings should always be hung next to a Claude. He was also influenced indirectly by Salvator Rosa’s alpine scenery and the tradition of British art inspired by it.
Again, the popular picturesque tradition suggests how persuasive was this aesthetic tradition in the world in which Wordsworth, Coleridge and Constable moved. In 1778 The Monthly Magazine wrote that ‘To make the Tour of the Lakes, to speak in fashionable terms, is the ton of the present hour’. Thomas West’s guide presented the fashionable tourist’s journey, in pictorial terms, ‘from the delicate touches of Claude, verified on Coniston Lake, to the noble scenes of Poussin, exhibited on Windermere water, and from there to the stupendous romantic ideas of Salvator Rosa, realized in the Lake of Derwent’. In Uvedale Price’s Dialogue, mentioned above, the three travellers end their picturesque tour in a picture gallery, where they compare a Salvator Rosa with a Claude, as typical examples of the sublime and the beautiful. In the Claude ‘everything seems formed to delight the eye and the mind of man’: in the Salvator ‘to alarm and terrify the imagination’.
The insistence on painting as an inspiration caused certain emphases to be made in landscape description, and inspired the use of certain mechanical viewing devices. Colour and shape in landscape were emphasized and even changed to suit preconceived ideals. Sublimity required darkness, with occasional violent contrasts of light or livid light. Claudian beauty, and the picturesque tradition deriving from it created a great interest in surfaces and textures but tended to restrict colours to Claude’s golds and browns. Brown was particularly evocative: Sir George Beaumont painted from Nature, but included a fiddle in his sketching apparatus, since ‘a good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown’, and said that every landscape should contain one brown tree. He asked Constable once ‘Do you not find it very difficult to determine where to place your brown tree?’ to which Constable replied ‘Not in the least for I never put such a thing into a picture’. And when Sir George ‘recommended the colour of an old Cremona fiddle for everything’ Constable retaliated by placing one on the green lawn outside the house. But the colour had deep poetic associations and meaning beyond the effect of varnish on paintings or fiddles. Milton used it to suggest mysterious shade,
and where the unpierced shade
Imbrowned the noon-tide bowers,
Thomson in The Seasons talked of ‘brown night’ and the end of Coleridge’s Dejection ode describing a wind-torn scene typical of the picturesque tradition crossed with Salvator’s sublime, in my opinion greatly inferior to the rest of the poem, achieves a sudden moment of concrete vision when it addresses the Mad Lutanist, ‘in this month of showers, Of dark-brown gardens …’ where the word is accurate and traditionally powerful together.
Gilpin was cautious about colour. What he could see, he did not consider always suitable for inclusion in pictures which although they ‘should avoid such images as are trite and vulgar’ should seize only those which are easy and intelligible.
Thus he could see that trees appeared blue and purple, as well as brown, but feared they might displease the traditionally-minded spectator:
The appearance of blue and purple trees, unless in the remote distance, offends, and though the artist may have authority from nature for his practice, yet the spectator, not versed in such effects, may be displeased.
He was equally cautious about form, remarking that nature worked on ‘a vast scale, and, no doubt, harmoniously, if her scheme could be comprehended’. But since ‘the immensity of nature is beyond human comprehension’ the artist devised ‘little rules which he he calls the principles of picturesque beauty to adapt such diminutive parts of nature’s surfaces to his own eye, as come within its scope’. Thus an artist was free, within limits, to use his imagination to alter the scenery, or amalgamate various scenes, to make a better picture. He could shift trees, or substitute withered stumps for spreading oaks, or vice versa. He could alter a hillock, a cottage, a road, or a hedge, which might indeed be altered tomorrow—but he might not plant a great castle or a river where one was not. Dr Syntax makes a good satirical use of these advantages in drawing a guide-post, broken and mangled by someone into ‘an uninforming piece of wood’:
But as my time shall not be lost
I’ll make a drawing of the post;
And though your flimsy taste may flout it,
There’s something picturesque about it.
’Tis rude and rough without a gloss
And is well cover’d o’er with moss;
And I’ve a right—(who dares deny it?)
To place yon group of asses by it.
Aye! this will do: and now I’m thinking
That self-same pond where Grizzle’s drinking,
If hither brought ’twould better seem,
And faith I’ll turn it to a stream
I’ll make this flat a shaggy ridge
And o’er the water throw a bridge:
I’ll do as other sketchers do
Put anything into the view ….
Thus tho’ from truth I haply err,
The scene preserves its character.
Wordsworth talked of ‘the inferior wonders of an artist’s hand’ when, according to Christopher Hussey, author of The Picturesque, ‘gravely deliberating the spiritual motives that could possess that good friend of his but essentially picturesque painter Sir George Beaumont when he had the impertinence to paint an imaginary castle in one of Wordsworth’s favourite scenes’. Dorothy, on the other hand, seemed to share the picturesque desire to shift objects when she observed the castles along the banks of the Rhine in 1820. ‘What a dignity does the Form of an ancient castle or tower confer upon a precipitous woody or craggy eminence! Well might this lordly River spare one or two of his castles, which are too numerous for the most romantic fancy to hang its legends round each and all of them—well might he spare, to our purer and more humble streams and lakes, one solitary ruin for the delight of our Poets of the English mountains!’
Gilpin’s principles of picturesque beauty led later to painters’ aids, such as, for instance W. H. Pyne’s encyclopaedia of above a thousand subjects (with aquatints, 1845) of Picturesque Groups for the Embellishment of Landscape. Volume I covered, amongst others, Army, Banditti, Brickmakers, Butchers, Camp Scenes, Carts, Ferry Boats, Fire Engines, Games, Gypsies, Gleaners, Gravel Diggers, Grinders. Volume II contained Post Chaises, Racing, Ropemakers, Rustics, Smugglers, Statuary, Threshing, Timber Wagons, Toll-gates, Travellers Reposing, Trucks, Wheelwrights and Woodmen.
Behind these artifices can be seen the same aesthetic and social curiosity that created Wordsworth’s marvellous studies of beggars and soldiers met in the road, or Constable’s casual delineations of rural occupations. The apparently repellent occupation of the butchers was vouched for by Rembrandt’s marvellous studies of ox carcasses—to which I shall return.
Besides encyclopaedias there was equipment. A dead painter found after an accident on Helvellyn in 1805 caused much local gossip, and gave rise to poems by Scott and Wordsworth. The Wordsworths retailed to Sir George Beaumont the contents of his pockets, which included ‘a Gold Watch, Silver Pencil, Claude Lorraine glasses etc.’.
The Claude glass was a plano-convex mirror of about 4 inches diameter on a black foil and bound up like a pocket book. It was used to determine the tonal values of planes and reflected scenes in tiny pictures, accentuating the tones by reducing the colours to a lower ratio. The poet Gray carried one on his tours. Thomas West recommends in his Guide that travellers take a telescope to look at inaccessible summits and a ‘landscape mirror’—he offers detailed instructions for its use:
Where the objects are great and near, it removes them to a due distance, and shews them in the soft colours of nature, and in the most regular perspective the eye can perceive, or science demonstrate.
The mirror is of the greatest use in sunshine; and the person using it ought always to turn his back to the object that he views. It should be suspended by the upper part of the case, holding it a little to the right or left (as the position of the parts to be viewed require) and the face screened from the sun.
The mirror is a plano-convex glass, and should be the segment of a large circle; otherwise distant and small objects are not perceived in it; but if the glass be too flat the perspective view of great and near objects is less pleasing, as they are represented too near. These inconveniences may be provided against by two glasses of different convexity. The dark glass answers well in sunshine; but on cloudy and gloomy days the silver foil is better.—Whoever uses spectacles upon other occasions, must use them in viewing landscapes in these mirrors.
Philippe De Loutherbourg, whose Avalanche in the Tate Gallery creates an atmosphere akin to Coleridge’s romantic tale, The Old Man of the Alps, with simple tragedy amidst the vast forces of Nature, created the Eidophusikon, in 1781—a lit up scene of four-dimensional pictures which has been called the forerunner of son et lumière. There were five scenes—dawn, noon, sunset, moonlight, storm at sea and shipwreck—with, as an alternative finale, the region of the fallen angels with Satan arraying his troops on the banks of the Fiery Lake. A contemporary record suggests how much this must have appealed to the taste for the wild and unlimited. In the foreground of a vista was seen ‘stretching an immeasurable length between mountains ignited from their bases to their lofty summits with many-coloured flame, a chaotic mass rising in dark majesty, which gradually assumed form until it stood, the interior of a vast temple of gorgeous architecture, bright as molten brass, seemingly composed of unconsuming and unquenchable fire. In this tremendous scene the effect of coloured glasses before the lamp was fully displayed.’ It was accompanied by sounds and peals of thunder and horrid groans, and may well have had the same effect on the poets as John Martin’s similar paintings which might have been thought to appeal to them. But Wordsworth concurred with Lamb’s use of Martin as an example of the poverty of imagination in modern art, and Coleridge said ‘It seems to me that Martin never looks at nature except through bits of stained glass. He is never satisfied with any appearance that is not prodigious.’ He enjoyed the ‘transparencies’—another product of the pictorial imagination—continuous designs on thin paper, rolled in front of a lamp showing figures moving in landscapes, as toys for feast-days. I have already referred to Coleridge’s transparency of Napoleon’s defeat. Mrs Coleridge and the Southeys celebrated this memorable event with transparencies too.
Wordsworth, who said that picturesque analysis of scenes ‘was never much my habit’, nevertheless wrote his Guide to the Lakes originally as an introduction to the Select Views of the Reverend Joseph Wilkinson, printed by Ackermann in 1810, although he felt himself impelled to apologize to his knowledgeable friends for the poor artistic quality of the prints themselves—he preferred the works of William Green (78 Studies from Nature, 1809). His Guide itself is a remarkable piece of descriptive prose, accurate, immediate, beautifully constructed and evocative. He shows a keen knowledge both of Burke, and of Gilpin, although he condemns the picturesque ‘craving for prospects’, and his description, for instance, of the small lakes and their edges combines the eye of the visual analyst with the language of the aesthetic theorist, and, more than that, a sense of the history and present solidity of the earth he is looking at, and the psychology of his own response to it:
As the comparatively small size of the lakes in the North of England is favourable to the production of variegated landscape, their boundary-line also is for the most part gracefully or boldly indented. That uniformity, which prevails in the primitive frame of the lower grounds among all chains or clusters of mountains where large bodies of still waters are bedded, is broken by the secondary agents of nature, ever at work to supply the deficiencies of the mould in which things were originally cast. Using the word deficiencies, I do not speak with reference to those stronger emotions which a region of mountains is peculiarly fitted to excite. The bases of these huge barriers may run for a long space in straight lines, and these parallel to each other; the opposite sides of a profound vale may ascend as exact counterparts or in mutual reflection like the billows of a troubled sea; and the impression be, from its very simplicity, more awful and sublime.
Sublimity is the result of Nature’s first great dealing with the superficies of the earth; but the general tendency of her subsequent operations is towards the production of beauty by a multiplicity of symmetrical parts uniting in a consistent whole.
His visual accuracy is unassuming and striking:
Among minuter recommendations will be noticed especially along bays exposed to the setting-in of strong winds, the curved rim of fine blue gravel, thrown up in course of time by the waves, half of it perhaps gleaming from under the water, and the corresponding half of a lighter hue.
Or the casually appropriate simile for the larger island on Rydal-mere:
The line of the grey rocky shore of that island, shaggy with variegated bushes and shrubs, and spotted and striped with purplish brown heath, indistinguishably blending with its image reflected in the still water, produced a curious resemblance, both in form and colour, to a richly-coated caterpillar, as it might appear through a magnifying-glass of extraordinary power.
Wordsworth used his Guide as a weapon in the battle he saw himself engaged in against artists and improvers and businessmen for the preservation of the landscape. He particularly disliked three things—the erection of artistic buildings or pillars to decorate landscapes in the style of paintings, the introduction of new houses, particularly white-washed ones, which did not blend with the landscape, and the planting of trees which were not natural inhabitants of that part of the world.
Thomas West argues enthusiastically for ‘placing objects on the eminences’ in the Lakes. ‘Columns, obelisks, temples etc.’ attract the eye and ‘nothing sets off the beauties of nature so much as elegant works of art’. Therefore they appeal to ‘anyone who has a taste for moral beauty’ and, moreover, ‘the practice is certainly patriotic; for such elegant ornaments will at least naturally contribute to diffuse a serenity and cheerfulness of mind into every beholder; and thence (if we may be pardoned the figure) like electrical conductors they may be supposed to bring down a little of the happy placidity of better regions, to add to the natural quantity shooting about on the earth …’. Obelisks and properly formed summer-houses (octagonal) are recommended, or a series of columns through which the setting sun could be seen, fitting in with the ‘sublimity of the surrounding mountains’. ‘Perforated doors and windows, in the imitation of old Gothic ruins, it is true, could yield part of this effect; but their gloomy and irregular appearance renders them, in the case before us, generally improper.’
Wordsworth, in this context, if he saw Nature with the eyes of art did not believe the works of art added to nature. He professed himself ‘disgusted with the new erections and objects about Windermere’. Dorothy, in the Alfoxden Journal, describes a walk round the squire’s grounds at Crookham with ‘quaint waterfalls about, about which Nature was very successfully striving to make beautiful what art had deformed—ruins, hermitages etc. etc. In spite of all these things the dell romantic and beautiful, though everywhere planted with unnaturalised trees. Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the valleys according to our fancy.’
Wordsworth’s battle against the whitewashed houses was ever fiercer. In 1799 Coleridge was writing in his journal of this ‘damn’d whitewashing’. In 1805 Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to Lady Beaumont complaining of various desecrations of Grasmere. The Dale ‘has not yet been intruded on by any of the Fancy-builders—there is only one offensive object, the house of Mr Mounsey, the King of Patterdale, and that is chiefly ugly from the colour which has been so cried out against that he intends to change it next summer …. You may remember that I spoke of the whitewashing of the church, and six years ago a trim Box was erected on a hill-side; it is surrounded with fir and Larch plantations that look like a blotch or scar on the fair surface of the mountain. Luckily these deformities are not visible in the grand view of the Vale—but alas poor Grasmere! The first object which now presents itself after you have clomb the hill from Rydale is Mr Crump’s newly-erected large mansion, staring over the Church Steeple … Then a farm-house opposite to ours … has been taken by a dashing man from Manchester who, no doubt, will make a fine place of it, and as he has taken the Island too, will probably erect a Pavilion upon it, or, it may be, an Obelisk. This is not all ….’ She goes on to complain of a hideous sunk fence and of Sir Michael Fleming, who not only had decided to axe all his trees but ‘has been building a long high wall under the grand woods behind his house which cuts the hill in two by a straight line; and to make his doings visible to all men, he has whitewashed it, as white as snow. One who could do this wants a sense which others have. To him there is no “Spirit in the Wood”.’
Wordsworth’s objections to white colouring are strictly picturesque, but also on the grounds of unnaturalness:
The objections to white, as a colour, in large spots or masses in landscape, especially in a mountainous country, are insurmountable. In Nature, pure white is scarcely ever found but in small objects, such as flowers; or in those which are transitory, as the clouds, foam of rivers, and snow. Mr Gilpin, who notices this, has also recorded the just remark of Mr Locke, of N—, that white destroys the gradations of distance; and, therefore, an object of pure white can scarcely ever be managed with good effect in landscape-painting. Five or six white houses, scattered over a valley, by their obtrusiveness, dot the surface and divide it into triangles, or other mathematical figures, haunting the eye, and disturbing that repose which might otherwise be perfect. I have seen a single white house materially impair the majesty of a mountain; cutting away, by a harsh separation, the whole of its base, below the point on which the house stood.
He himself, he continued, particularly disliked the effect of white objects at twilight:
The solemnity and quietness of Nature at that time are always marred, and often destroyed by them. When the ground is covered with snow, they are of course inoffensive; and in moonshine they are always pleasing—it is a tone of light with which they accord: and the dimness of the scene is enlivened by an object at once conspicuous and cheerful.
Neither a ‘cold, slaty colour’ nor a ‘flaring yellow’ were suitable alternatives: the safest was ‘something between a cream and a dust-colour, commonly called stone colour’. His admiration for the humble Lakeland cottages was partly picturesque—they had ‘so little formality’ and much ‘wildness and beauty’, and had the appropriate surfaces of rough, unhewn stone and lichens, mosses, ferns and flowers. They were, like his ideal work of art, organic in appearance, they might ‘rather be said to have grown than to have been erected’, and, in their very form calling to mind the processes of Nature ‘do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb, appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields; and by their colour and their shape, affectingly direct the thoughts to that tranquil course of Nature and simplicity, along which the humble-minded inhabitants have, through so many generations, been led.’
He particularly disliked larch trees also, whether planted for ornament or profit—they made excellent pit-props. They were too vivid a green in spring, and in autumn ‘a spiritless, unvarying yellow’. He wanted the native, deciduous trees to be left alone, particularly in the valleys—oak, holly, hazel and ash. If larch must be planted, let the ‘vegetable manufactories’ be ‘confined to the highest and most barren tracts where their “dreary uniformity” would be broken by rocks, and the winds would imprint upon their shapes a wildness congenial to their situation’.
Wordsworth’s views on the whole controversy being conducted at this time about the right and proper way to ‘improve’ gardens and estates were extreme though sensible. The current fashion for the ‘English garden’, he told Sir George Beaumont, would be really valuable if it led people to stop ‘improving’ in any manner and, as Sir George had declared his intention of doing with his own house, leaving it to Nature so that ‘your House will belong to the Country and not the Country be an appendage to your House’. Improvements to parks, gardens, and houses were very much the fashion, as Mansfield Park and, later, George Eliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life bear witness. The ‘English’ garden derived from the reaction against the landscape sculpturing of ‘Capability’ Brown. Addison had written ‘Our British gardeners … instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors on every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinions but for my part I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure ….’ Sir William Temple, Swift’s patron, in The Gardens of Epicurus (1685) introduced the idea of Chinese Sharawadgi—‘artificial rudeness’—and the ‘Chinese’ irregular garden led to the landscape park. Pope laid down three conditions for an irregular garden—‘surprise, variety, concealment’. This entailed, among other things winding paths and vistas which led the eye away from the path travelled by the feet. Thomas West applies these gardening principles to Lakeland views:
What charms the eye in wandering over the vale is, that not one straight line offends. The roads all serpentize round the mountains, and the hedges wave with the inclosures. Everything is thrown into some path of beauty or agreeable line of nature.
The dale-landers, according to West, were all ‘men of taste’ and decorated their villages with ‘natural elegance’. ‘Not one formal avenue or straight-lined hedge or square fishpond offends the eye in all this charming vale.’ The fashion went too far, and attracted satirical and commonsense adverse comment. Thomas Love Peacock, in Headlong Hall in 1812, wrote a parody of a picturesque discussion in which Marmaduke Milestone, representing that great landscape gardener and designer of Regent’s Park, Humphry Repton, depresses the pretensions of a profound critic who adds unexpectedness to the picturesque and the beautiful as qualities required in the laying out of grounds.
‘Pray Sir,’ said Mr Milestone ‘by what name do you distinguish this character when a person walks round the grounds for a second time?’ Wordsworth read and approved Some Observations on Gardening ‘by the Author of the Democrat’. This condemns the improver of the ‘Capability’ Brown school who tries
… to make his domain appear park-like, and down goes every hedge within a quarter of a mile of the house. The noble hedge-rows of elm and oak, which, growing in the irregular fences, give every well planted county in England the appearance of a forest, are destroyed, except a few that contrivance is able to torture into those unmeaning unnatural masses called clumps, and the whole estate that is in the view of the house is divided by sunk fences. The kitchen garden is posted half a mile off, which, till the skreen of firs grows up to hide it, has the appearance of a burying ground near a great town. And you go out of the hall door into the wet grass, unless you are indulged with an undulated gravel walk by the boundary that divides the appropriated field of the owner from the ornamented farm, if that can be called ornament which is in fact devastation.
It is surely better for a person of moderate fortune to have his kitchen garden (always a busy and interesting scene) near his house ….
This writer was also indignant about the banishing of the lime and horse chestnut, ‘trees of singular beauty … partly from their leaves being very early deciduous, which makes them unfit for the owner of a fine place at present, as it is now agreed that London is only pleasant in the spring and the country-seat never tolerable before the first of September; and partly from a fanciful disgust to the shape of both, one being called too formal and the other too heavy: as if natural shapeliness bordered on the deformity of the sheared yew …’.
Wordsworth himself designed for Lady Beaumont a winter garden based on one described by Addison in The Spectator, and gave much loving and detailed attention to the creation of ‘the feeling of the place … of a spirit which the winter cannot touch, which should present no image of chilliness, decay or desolation, when the face of Nature everywhere else is cold, decayed and desolate’. His description of the centre of the garden is vivid and evocative:
We are then brought to a small glade or open space, belted round with evergreens, quite unvaried and secluded. In this little glade should be a basin of water inhabited by two gold or silver fish if they will live in this climate all the year in the open air; if not any others of the most radiant colors that are more hardy: these little creatures to be the ‘genii’ of the pool and of the place. This spot should be as monotonous in the colour of the trees as possible. The enclosure of evergreen, the sky above, the green grass floor, and the two mute inhabitants, the only images it should present, unless here and there a solitary wild-flower.
The colourlessness of Wordsworth’s winter garden was a deliberate poetic device, but it reflects what was a general trend in gardening. Picturesque painting had an immense influence on gardens, and was more concerned with surfaces and lighting than with colour, with the result that gardens were designed in Claude’s golds and browns. It was not until Victorian times that gardens became colourful again.
Beyond the parks and gardens the landscape was being changed by acts of enclosure. Enclosure had been carried out intermittently throughout English history. After the Restoration the Government ceased to interfere with the enclosure of open fields by private landlords, and until George II’s reign enclosure was carried out by private agreements. But from the 1750s onwards, land was enclosed by private act of Parliament in rapidly increasing quantities. There were eight private acts of enclosure in the whole of England before 1714, eighteen under George I, 229 under George II (1727–60), and in the next forty years 1,479 acts dealt with 2 million acres. From 1800 onwards, the high prices of the war years brought more marginal land into cultivation and the ‘wastes’ began to be enclosed—500 acts between 1760 and 1801 enclosed 750,000 acres of waste: during the nineteenth century another 1,300 acts took in one and a quarter million acres of heath, indiscriminately chosen. The enclosures made a visual transformation of the landscape, as well as far-reaching social changes. The old pattern of open fields, with grassy cart-roads and paths, and strips of cultivation, the commons and rough places, became a chequer board of small squarish fields enclosed by hawthorn hedges and crossed by straight, wide roads. All this happened within a relatively short time.
Reactions to the enclosures varied. Coleridge was distressed by the poverty induced by the dispossession of Scottish peasants: a gentleman touring caves in the West Riding of Yorkshire admired the solitary secluded vale and hillside of Breada-Garth, remarked that ‘No monk or anchoret could desire a more retired situation for his cell, to moralize on the vanity of the world, or disappointed lover to bewail the inconstancy of his nymph’, but went on to worry about the lack of use of the rich soil. Before Malthus people in general worried about underpopulation and the aesthetically solitary gentleman ‘could not but lament that, instead of peopling the wilds and deserts of North America our fellow-subjects had not peopled the fertile wastes of the north of England. We have since then been informed, that a plan is in agitation for having them inclosed, when no doubt it will support some scores of additional families ….’
Visual reactions varied, too. Southey’s fictional Don, travelling through ‘Dorsetshire, a dreary country’, remarked: ‘Hitherto I had been disposed to think that the English inclosures rather deformed than beautified the landscape, but now I perceived how cheerless and naked the cultivated country appears without them. The hills here are ribbed with furrows, just as it is their fashion to score the skin of roast pork.’ But there was a health argument against enclosures: ‘It has been ascertained by the late census, that the proportion of deaths in the down-countries to the other parts is 66–80—a certain proof that inclosures are prejudicial to health.’
Bewick regretted the loss of the Northumberland commons: the poet John Clare wrote in his Journal on 29 September 1824:
Took a walk in the fields saw an old wood stile taken away from a favourite spot which it had occupied all my life the posts were overgrown with Ivy and it seemed so akin to nature and the spot where it stood as tho it had taken it on lease for an undisturbed existance it hurt me to see it was gone for my affection claims a friendship with such things but nothing is lasting in this world last year Langley Bush was destroyed an old whitethorn that had stood for more than a century full of fame the gipsies shepherds and Herdmen all had their tales of its history and it will be long ere its memory is forgotten.
His poem ‘Ye injur’d fields which once were gay’ is full of the same regret.
Wordsworth, writing to Sir George Beaumont in 1811, kept an open mind:
I heard the other day of two artists who thus expressed themselves upon the subject of a scene among our Lakes. ‘Plague upon those vile Enclosures!’ said one; ‘they spoil everything!’ ‘O’ said the Other, ‘I never see them.’ … Now for my part, I should not wish to be either of these Gentlemen, but to have in my own mind the power of turning to advantage, wherever it is possible, every object of Art and Nature as they appear before me.
He goes on to make a relevant and deeply interesting comparison with painting.
What a noble instance, as you have often pointed out to me, has Reubens given to this in that picture in your possession, where he has brought as it were a whole Century into one Landscape and made the most formal partitions of cultivation; hedge-rows of pollard willows conduct the eye into the depths and distances of his picture; and thus, more than by any other means, has given it that appearance of immensity which is so striking.
Both poets at some very profound level naturally used visual images for the poetic imagination they cared so much about. I have tried to show that this was a characteristic of the thought of the time—something which led in truly visual terms to Constable’s trees and moving clouds or Turner’s paintings of almost pure light. But in their hands it became something new and powerful. The rest of this chapter is concerned with their use of the images of landscape. Here is Coleridge on Rubens’s poetic imagination in a landscape with the setting sun:
Rubens does not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles—nothing that a poet would take at all times and a painter take in these times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that ruinous chateau, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite no surprise; but he—and he Peter Paul Rubens alone—handles these everyday ingredients of all common landscapes as they are handled in nature; he throws them into a vast and magnificent whole, consisting of heaven and earth and all things therein. He extracts the latent poetry out of these common objects—that poetry and harmony which every man of genius perceives in the face of nature, and which many men of no genius are taught to perceive and feel after examining such a picture as this. In other landscape painters the scene is confined and as it were imprisoned—in Rubens, the landscape dies a natural death; it fades away into the apparent infinity of space.
Here are picturesque standards, in poetry and painting, used and transcended in Coleridge’s vision of imaginative unity—although it is interesting to remember in this context that Constable’s friend Fisher wrote to Constable that Coleridge had said some parts of his last picture were good. ‘I told him if he had said, all parts of your last picture were good, it would be no compliment, unless he said the whole was good. Is it not strange how utterly ignorant the world is of the very first principles of painting? Here is a man of the greatest abilities, who knows almost everything, and yet he is as little a judge of a picture as if he had been without eyes.’
Wordsworth was also a shrewd analyst of the picturesque aesthetic. In 1825 he was explaining to a correspondent that when he had observed that ‘many objects were fitted for the pencil without being picturesque’ he had meant not the Dutch school but ‘the higher order of Italian artists’. He went on to discuss the fact that the Dutch painters treated objects that ‘would not by a superficial observer be deemed picturesque, nor would they with any propriety, in popular language, be termed so’—objects which tended to arouse disgust such as ‘insides of stables—dung carts—dunghills and foul and loathsome situations’ but on canvas could be made picturesque. This controversy about ‘disgusting’ objects was very much part of current discussion. Wordsworth went on to say that ‘our business is not so much with objects as with the laws under which they are contemplated. The confusion incident to these disquisitions has I think arisen principally from not attending to this distinction.’ Whether a thing was beautiful or not depended not on the thing but on the imaginative attention of observer or artist—and it was Wordsworth’s attention, as observer and artist, to the primary importance of laws of contemplation that led to his emphasis on his ‘own mind’ as subject matter and the new vision of the Lyrical Ballads as form.
There are two connected aspects of contemporary aesthetics which I particularly want to look at in the writings of the poets themselves. One is the use of the concepts of ‘sublime’ landscape, particularly of infinity, by the poets in their creation of a whole living universe, unified in its diversity. The other is their deepening of the picturesque theorists’ view that it was the structure of light and response to light that created the unity of a painting, and their use of light as a primary image for the imagination. The two are usually aspects of the same vision, as in Coleridge’s description of the Rubens painting above, where Rubens’ light and imagination, like Nature, form the landscape into a whole which becomes infinite: ‘The landscape dies a natural death; it fades away into the apparent infinity of space.’
Wordsworth’s ‘pantheism’ has been much talked about: the Tintern Abbey vision of ‘something far more deeply interfused/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns/And the round ocean and the living air/And the blue sky and in the mind of man.’ Tintern Abbey is permeated by the vision educated in the knowledge of the sublime and the picturesque. But more permanently satisfying and moving than statements about spirits is Wordsworth’s living sense of the unity of matter beneath the changing and shifting forms of natural objects, man rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees, and his further sense of the unity of these in the way in which the imaginative vision sees one in the other, one form as an image of another form. In his poems, as in his Guide to the Lakes, and in Dorothy’s beautifully written journals, the sense of the history and changing reality of concrete objects works with the sense of changing vision.
On the Tour in Scotland in 1803 Dorothy made many picturesque observations of Nature which suggest the atmosphere of the mystery of concrete objects and persons suggested by Wordsworth’s poems. Looking from Dumbarton Castle on the Clyde she saw some sheep and a sentry in a red coat on top of a perpendicular cliff, and noted the effects of perspective and emotion together:
The sheep, I suppose owing to our being accustomed to see them in similar situations, appeared to retain their real size, while, on the contrary, the soldier seemed to be diminished by the distance till he almost looked like a puppet moved with wires for the pleasure of children … I had never before, perhaps, thought of sheep and men in soldiers’ dresses at the same time, and here they were brought together in a strange fantastic way. As will be easily conceived, the fearlessness and stillness of those quiet creatures on the brow of the rock, pursuing their natural occupations, contrasted with the endless and apparently unmeaning motions of the dwarf soldier, added not a little to the general effect of this place, which is that of a wild singularity, and the whole was aided by a blustering wind and a wild sky.
Here the elements of the picturesque—the unexpected concatenation of sheep and men, craggy rock and regular movements—combined with the artificial infinity and unrelatedness of the human component with his unnatural ‘endless and apparently unmeaning motions’—produce a Wordsworthian image of man’s isolation in nature which moves on in its own way—and of the poetic vision’s reunifying of the scene. Her description of a sea loch at Arrochar calls up more direct echoes of another Wordsworthian image of natural and spiritual infinity:
I thought of the long windings through which the waters of the sea had come to this inland retreat, visiting the inner solitudes of the mountains, and I could have wished to have mused out a summer’s day on the shores of the lake. From the foot of these mountains whither might not a little barque carry one away? though so far inland, it is but a slip of the great ocean: seamen, fishermen and shepherds here find a natural home.
Compare the Immortality ode:
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
Wordsworth’s own description in his Guide of the tarns combines a picturesque opening with the Wordsworthian vision of the sublime and the Wordsworthian sense of the history of the solid objects around him to recall another great poem
One of these pools is an acceptable sight to the mountain wanderer; not merely as an incident that diversifies the prospect, but as forming in his mind a centre or conspicuous point to which objects, otherwise disconnected or unsubordinated, may be referred. Some few have a varied outline, with bold heath-clad promontories; and, as they mostly lie at the foot of a steep precipice, the water, where the sun is not shining upon it, appears black and sullen; and round the margin, huge stones and masses of rock are scattered; some defying conjecture as to the means by which they came thither; and others obviously fallen from on high—the contribution of ages! A not unpleasing sadness is induced by this perplexity, and these images of decay; while the prospect of a body of pure water unattended with groves and other cheerful rural images by which fresh water is usually accompanied, and unable to give furtherance to the meagre vegetation around it—excites a sense of some repulsive power strongly put forth and thus deepens the melancholy natural to such scenes. Nor is the feeling of solitude often more forcibly or more solemnly impressed than by the side of one of these mountain pools; though desolate and forbidding it seems a distinct place to repair to; yet where the visitants must be rare.
This is the setting for The Leech-gatherer, another image of human solitude amongst the timeless change and decay of Nature: in the poem the man, and the still water, and the mysterious stones like sea-beasts crawled out into the sun are all somehow seen as one, providing an image of a kind of persisting sublime poverty, an ‘apt admonishment’ to Wordsworth troubled by melancholy thoughts of ‘mighty poets in their misery dead’. It is an image again of eternity in change and decay.
Other images, different and complex, could be produced almost endlessly from Wordsworth’s work. In The Prelude Wordsworth combines social and political concern with a vision of infinity in his description of ‘the windings of a public way’. He imagined that the ‘disappearing line’ that
crossed
The naked summit of a far off hill
Beyond the limits that my feet had trod
Was like an invitation into space
Boundless, or guide into eternity.
And the ‘wanderers of the earth’, solitary beggars met on it, have ‘the depth of human souls/Souls that appear to have no depth at all/To casual eyes’. The water image for the infinity of the soul casually buried here is explicitly elaborated in many other places. In The Excursion in the mountain retreat of the solitary, human life is likened to
a mountain brook
In some still passage of its course … [the visitor sees]
Within the depths of its capacious breast,
Inverted trees, rocks, clouds and azure sky;
And on its glassy surface, specks of foam
And conglobated bubbles undissolved,
Numerous as stars; that, by their onward lapse,
Betray to sight the motion of the stream
Else imperceptible.
Through what perplexing labyrinths, abrupt
Precipitations, and untoward straits,
The earth-born wanderer hath passed ….
The earlier description of the alpine pass quoted above (here) is another example of the same use of water to suggest infinite change and infinite sameness, and Coleridge in a letter to Sara Hutchinson describes the Waterfall that divides Great Robinson from Buttermere Halse Fell in the same terms. He describes the water rushing over a ground
so fearfully savage, and black, and jagged, that it tears the flood to pieces ….
What sight it is to look down on such a Cataract!—the wheels, that circumvolve in it—the leaping up and plunging forward of that infinity of Pearls and Glass Bulbs—the continual change of the Matter, the perpetual Sameness of the Form—it is an awful Image and Shadow of God and the World.
The famous passage in Biographia in which Coleridge describes the original intention of the Lyrical Ballads uses a natural image of light on landscape for the imagination:
During the first year that Mr Wordsworth and I were neighbours our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunlight diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature.
Throughout Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals the accidents of light and shade constantly create other worlds within the known world. In a Highland hut she is amazed by the beauty of the rafters, in which the hens perched, seen through gusts of smoke:
They had been crusted over and varnished by many winters till, where the firelight fell upon them, they were as glossy as black rocks on a sunny day cased in ice …. They had a bright fire, which I could not see; but the light it sent up among the varnished rafters and beams, which crossed each other in almost as intricate and fantastic a manner as I have seen the under-boughs of a large beech-tree withered by the depth of the shade above, produced the most beautiful effect that can be conceived. It was like what I should suppose an underground cave or temple to be, with a dripping or moist roof, and the moonlight entering in upon it by some means or other, and yet the colours were more like gems.
Or crossing Westminster Bridge in 1802 ‘The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke, and they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a fierce light, that there was even something like the purity of one of nature’s own grand spectacles.’ Or in Grasmere ‘I observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun, which made them look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, like animals of another kind, as if belonging to a more splendid world.’ Or the ‘mountain lightness’ at the top of the White Moss. ‘There is more of the sky there than any other place. It has a strange effect sometimes along with the obscurity of evening or night. It seems almost like a peculiar sort of light.’
Gilpin saw colours like a moving vision on a mountain side. ‘They are rarely permanent, but seem to be a sort of floating silky colours—always in motion—always in harmony—and playing with a thousand changeable varieties into each other. They are literally colours dipped in heaven.’ Coleridge, a man fascinated by lights, chemical lights, firelight, the supernatural still and awful red that burned in the charmed water in The Ancient Marinerwrote again and again about it in his notebooks. A typical observation, made in October 1803 makes it clear how much the effect of light on the forms of landscape was seen by him, in terms of painting to a certain extent, as an image of the relationship between human imaginative vision and the forms of non-human life:
Heavy masses of shapeless Vapour upon the mountains (O the perpetual Forms of Borrodale!) yet it is no unbroken Tale of dull Sadness—slanting Pillars travel across the Lake, at long Intervals—the vaporous mass whitens, in large Stains of Light—on the Lakeward ridge of that huge arm chair, of Lowdore, fell a gleam of softest Light, that brought out the rich hues of the late Autumn—The woody Castle Crag between me and Lowdore is a rich Flower-Garden of Colours, the brightest yellows with the deepest Crimsons, and the infinite Shades of Brown and Green, the infinite diversity of which blends the whole—so that the brighter colours seem as colors upon a ground, not colored Things.
Light unifies the vision, the things are colours in a painting, not ‘colored Things’, not pure objects. The vision is informed by Coleridge’s feeling, however much seen for itself.
Wordsworth had very early used light and his own feelings as a guide in the creation of imaginatively unified scenes. In the Valley of the Reuss in 1790 he saw an Alpine sunset, which he described in the Descriptive Sketches, with a special footnote to explain his deliberate contravention of the established rules of the picturesque:
Whoever in attempting to describe their sublime features, should confine himself to the cold rules of painting, would give his reader but a very imperfect idea of those emotions which they have the irresistible power of communicating to the most impassive …. Had I wished to make a picture of this scene I had thrown much less light into it. But I consulted nature and my feeling. The ideas excited by the stormy sunset I am here describing owed their sublimity to that deluge of light; or rather of fire, in which nature had wrapped the immense forms around me; any intrusion of shade, by destroying the unity of the impression, had necessarily diminished its grandeur.
This manages to suggest the original creative Fiat Lux, or fire in which the world was forged—a deluge not of water that destroyed but of light that created a unified vision by drowning the landscape in unrelieved fire.
Much later at the end of The Prelude Wordsworth describes another vision of pure light—his own of the moon shining over hills, islands and promontories of mist over the main Atlantic, seen from Snowdon, above it, and uses it as an image of the high imagination, of
a majestic intellect, its acts
And its possessions, what it has and craves,
What in itself it is and would become
There I beheld the emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power
In sense conducting to ideal form ….
Again this vision of imaginative infinity has its corollary in Dorothy’s description—this time of a view in Scotland:
We had not climbed far before we were stopped by a sudden burst of prospect, so singular and beautiful that it was like a flash of images from another world. We stood with our backs to the hill of the island, which we were ascending, and which shut out Ben Lomond entirely, and all the upper part of the lake, and we looked towards the foot of the lake, scattered over with islands without beginning and without end. The sun shone, and the distant hills were visible, some through sunny mists, others in gloom with patches of sunshine; the lake was lost under the low and distant hills, and the islands lost in the lake, which was all in motion with travelling fields of light, or dark shadows under rainy clouds. There are many hills, but no commanding eminence at a distance to confine the prospect so that the land seemed as endless as the water.
Coleridge used the image Shakespeare used of the sun of Shakespeare’s own imaginative vision, his eye which ‘would have given one of his Glows to the first Line, and flatter’d the mountain Top with his sovran Eye’. The theorists of the picturesque were interested in the power of the eye to perceive light. In the Dialogue between Uvedale Price and W. Payne Knight, Price says: ‘The picturesque is merely that kind of beauty which belongs exclusively to the sense of vision …. The eye, unassisted, perceives nothing but light, variously graduated and modified.’ In the picture gallery the protagonists of the Dialogue look at Rembrandt and the ‘blended variety of mellow tints’ in his painting of the dead flesh of an ox carcass, and talk of the Dutch painters’ treatment of ‘ugly and disgusting objects in Nature. In the originals of these, animal disgust and the nauseating repugnance of appetite overwhelmed every milder pleasure of vision, which a blended variety of mellow and harmonious tints must necessarily produce on the eye, in nature as well as in art, if viewed in both with the same degree of abstract and impartial attention.’ Seymour, the uninstructed homme moyen sensuel of the Dialogue, could not bring himself to this degree of abstraction—his human feelings made him remain conscious of the squalor and poverty of the subjects:
I can imagine a man of the future, born without the sense of feeling, being able to see nothing but light variously modified, and that such a way of considering nature would be just. For then the eye would see nothing but what in point of harmony was beautiful. But that pure, abstract enjoyment of vision, our inveterate habits will not let us partake of.
Abstract. The word has not its modern meaning in art and aesthetics and yet it foreshadows it, as picturesque theory, and much more intensely Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s vision of light on the landscape foreshadows the use of light by Turner and the Impressionists, the steady shift of aesthetic interest which led to the use of light, and of the artist’s own visual responses as the subject matter of paintings, as the poet’s imagination became the subject matter of poems, until painting at least was as inconceivably ‘abstract’ as Mr Seymour foresaw.
I may here be making an impermissable verbal connection, but it does seem that this painters’ interest in ‘abstraction’ is related to Coleridge’s own linguistic interest in abstract thoughts and abstract words. We have seen in the political and literary chapters of this book how important it was to the poets to shift the interest from the generalizing abstract concepts of the eighteenth century to the particular—the particular problem, the concrete image, the actual landscape. Coleridge was sharp with Rousseau’s Reason, Pitt’s abstraction, Walter Scott’s visual and literary vagueness. But at the same time, as we have seen in the introductory chapter, he knew his own ‘abstract’ habit of mind to be in some ways a mode of connecting himself to the deepest roots and underlying patterns of behaviour, language and expression. What was required was a mode of vision which would combine the particular life of individual vision with the sense of underlying form and unity that could be ‘abstracted’. Between the eighteenth-century interest in ideal vision and generalizations and the twentieth-century abstract interest in the analysis of the mind, the eye, which led to abstract art, the Romantics were uneasily searching for a viable compromise. They were fortunate and unfortunate—unfortunate because, as Hazlitt saw, they came to have to rely far too heavily on their own individual personal vision as an authority and a guarantor of true feeling, fortunate because they were not limited by a constricting theory but really confronted their experience and tried to see what it was they saw. There is an extremely profound piece of aesthetics in a letter written by Coleridge to an unknown correspondent after Wordsworth had criticized his Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouny as a Specimen of the Mock Sublime:
I could readily believe that the mood and Habit of mind out of which the Hymn rose—that differs from Milton’s, and Thomson’s and from the Psalms, the Source of all three, in the Author’s addressing himself to individual Objects actually present to his Senses, while his great Predecessors apostrophize classes of Things, presented by the Memory and generalized by the understanding—I can readily believe, I say, that in this there may be too much of what our learned Med’ciners call the Idiosyncratic for true Poetry. For from my very childhood I have been accustomed to abstract and as it were unrealize whatever of more than common interest my eyes dwelt on; and then by a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the Object.
The idiosyncratic mountain, that is, lacks a value perhaps inherent in Milton’s, the Psalms’, Thomson’s generalized classes of things, and conferred by Coleridge’s sense of the identity between himself and the thing seen which he called ‘abstract and as it were unrealize (d)’. This kind of abstraction deeper than the recognition of the concrete idiosyncrasy of objects is also recognizable in Wordsworth’s description of the ‘abyss of idealism’ he experienced in childhood which is recalled in the glorious light images of the Immortality Ode:
I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own material nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or a tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality.
It was the tension between the identity of subject and object, eye and light, and the sense that the outer world was outer and other, between the ‘blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized’ and the individual mountains that created their greatest poetry: Wordsworth’s descriptions of the forms of mountains in and out of the child’s mind in The Prelude, or ‘the earth and that uncertain heaven received/Into the bosom of the steady lake’. In Peele Castle the picturesque light is the ‘light that never was on sea or land/The consecration and the Poet’s dream’, but reality is different. In the Dejection Ode the imagination is ‘a light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud/Enveloping the Earth—’ and must come from the poet’s own soul:
It were a vain endeavour
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose sources are within.
The strain of creating one’s own values, and indeed one’s own surroundings as their aesthetic implied, is tremendous, and it is significant that both the Immortality Ode and the Dejection Ode express among other emotions regret for the lost unifying vision:
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
And still I gaze and with how blank an eye!
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
The sunshine is a glorious birth
But yet I know, where ’er I go
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Whither is fled the visionary gleam
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
To study the use of visual imagery, the meaning of painting and landscape and aesthetic theory in the period is to make both poets’ achievement in realizing their worlds seem more gigantic, and the sense of loss of visual intensity and increase of abstraction of the wrong kind in the Dejection Ode more important and more poignant.