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Nature and Art in the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Carl Woodring
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Abstract

The polarities of the nineteenth century, from the glorification of nature to art for art’s sake, with an intervening positivism, bear upon our own time. Because civilization had driven nature from the individual, the Romantics sought reunion, through the imagination, with perceptible external forms. Photography, accompanying the simpler doctrines of realism and positivism, relieved the imagination of the burden of creating a world external to the mind. Darwin, by demonstrating that nature works by accident, displaced Wordsworth’s affective version of the Deists’ universe fitted to human needs. Naturalism and the replacement of nature by art rose together. Today the environmentalism of Wordsworth and the self-sufficiency of Wilde are each half alive.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 2 , March 1977 , pp. 193 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, Title 4 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), I, 467, n.

2 “Nature,” in Three Essays on Religion (London: Longmans, 1874), p. 5.

3 Pope, “Intended for Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.”

4 George Macaulay Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782–1901) (London: Longmans, 1922), pp. 8–11. “Rooted in earth,” says Francis D. Klingender, “the steam engine of the eighteenth century was massive, slow, and ponderous. The steam engine of the nineteenth century was light, swift, and agile” (Art and the Industrial Revolution, rev. Arthur Elton, London: Evelyn, Adams, & Mackay, 1968, pp. 105–06).

5 The process can be traced from Shaftesbury's Characteristicks of 1711 and Addison's Spectator essays on the imagination in 1712. Walter John Hippie, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime, & the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1957), subsumes earlier studies. For a longer bibliography than Hippie's, see Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVlll-Century England (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960).

6 Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty …, 3rd ed. (London: Cadell & Davis, 1808), pp. 26, 78.

7 Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, ed. M. K. Joseph (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p. 55.

8 Invariable Principles of Poetry (1819), rpt. in The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, v (London: John Murray, 1901), 532.

9 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York: Morrow, 1974), p. 17.

10 Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966), p. 103.

11 For the additional steps toward Romantic irony, through Hume and Sir William Drummond, see C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Scepticism (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1954).

12 G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 175–76, 194–95.

13 For a prominent example, see Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), pp. 169–88.

14 J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 164–65, points to similarities and differences between Wesley's view of violence in nature and Emily Bronte's.

15 Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 271–323.

16 Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sir Frederick Pollock, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1901), II, 9, 43.

17 Quoted, in contexts of independent value to the present exploration, by Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951), p. 138; and by Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters (New York: Putnam's, 1969), p. 194.

18 Journal, ed. André Joubin, 3 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1932), li, 59, 87.

19 John Russell Sullivan, Jr., in a Columbia Univ. diss, on ghost stories ( 1976), traces the belated attempts of M. R. James (1862–1936) and such disciples as E. G. Swain to turn the tables by locating spooks in photographs and other objects of mechanical reproduction.

20 John Watkins, The Life, Poetry, and Letters of Ebenezer Elliott (London: Mortimer, 1850), p. 173.

21 “Anthony Trollope,” Century Magazine, 26 (1883), 390.

22 Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Paris, 1864–65), trans. H. Van Laun (Edinburgh, 1871), Introd., et passim.

23 In the fourth of Butler's books on evolution, Luck, or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification? (1886, dated 1887), Ch. x (“The Attempt to Eliminate Mind”) relates the “mechanistic” conclusion of the lectures by Huxley and Clifford referred to above (n. 16) to the sheer luck of survival described by Darwin.

24 Douglas Percy Bliss, A History of Wood-Engraving (London: Dent, 1928), pp. 202, 241–51; Ruari McLean, Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing, 2nd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), pp. 227–34; Geoffrey Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), pp. 76–81, 134–53.

25 The Renaissance, ed. Kenneth Clark (Cleveland: World, 1961), p. 132.

26 “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper's, Nov. 1893, rpt. in Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's, ed. Karl Beckson (New York: Random, 1966), pp. 134–51.

27 James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London: Heinemann, 1890), pp. 142, 143.

28 Richard Ellmann, ed. (New York: Dutton, 1958), p. 44.

29 Harold Rosenberg, Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975).

30 On the pédérastie connotations, see Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).