Nature-Cult in Romantic, Poetry - A Modern Study

Nature-Cult in Romantic, Poetry:

A Modern Study

BY DR. P. GUHA-THAKURTA, M.A., Ph.D.

‘Return to Nature’ was the slogan of the Romantic Movement. It implied a new romantic attitude towards both external and human nature, but this attitude was only a part of the larger naturalistic movement that manifested itself as a reaction against the superfluous conventions and artificialities in the life, art and literature, of the pseudo-classical age. Romanticism surely meant, if it meant anything at all, a widening of the imaginative outlook, a sharpening of emotional sensibility and a greater intellectual freedom of ideas and beliefs; but unfortunately it took those who felt its first spell into strange by-paths of feeling and imagination from the broad highway of ordinary, normal, human experience. The newly awakened free spirit led the romanticists into either vagueness and obscurity of thought, or fantastic exuberance of imagination or even into indolent, morbid dreaming and reverie. So the new feeling towards Nature, as a part of the Romantic Movement, shared the effects of the general confusion. The subject of poetic interpretation of Nature by the English and Continental Romantic poets unmistakably offers many interesting questions of psychology and aesthetics to the modern age, which, however, it would be impossible to discuss at length within the limits of this paper. Nor would it be possible to make any comprehensive and exhaustive treatment of the various ways in which Nature has been utilized by the chief Romantic poets, because the subject itself is too complex to admit of any exact classification. Moreover, one kind of nature-poetry ostensibly merges itself into other kinds; different kinds will be found side by side or overlapping each other or blended, not only in the work of a single poet but often in the same poem or passage. We shall only attempt to find out here the poet's general attitude or feeling towards Nature, his individual reaction to all the phenomena of the external world, and his dominating tendencies in laying Nature under contribution for his poetry.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Shelley, Byron and Keats, are all poets of Nature, all equally exemplifying the outstanding features of the Romantic Movement in England, but each was also very decidedly distinct from the others in many ways. Broadly speaking, the interpretation of Nature has been fundamentally a matter of individual temperament and mood. The degree of imagination involved in these different methods of treatment is also variable. In fact, the essentially genuine romantic quality of all nature-poetry is the power and quality of the poet's creative imagination, either working objectively or subjectively. Indeed, nothing in the entire realm of Nature is really too trivial for poetic treatment, if it is properly and artistically handled with fitness and propriety. An ordinary sunset, a cluster of spring flowers, the wild west-wind, or the simple song of a nightingale, can be transfigured into poetry by a real creative artist, if his imagination and inner balance do not fail him. But the romantic cult of Nature, with all its subtle sense of mystery and mysticism and all its primitivistic instinct for the elemental simplicities of life, gradually became a real obsession with the poets when they began to ignore the everyday realities of normal human life and experience. So it would be dangerous to assume that anything believed or set up as a reaction to neoclassicism was genuinely romantic. For, when the poet's subjective attitude towards Nature became too temperamental, his ego became an obtrusive element; and when his objective outlook on the external world happened to be too fantastic and wild, imagination no longer remained the creative and transforming power in his poetry. We must not forgetthat the whole Romantic Movement, of which the attitude towards Nature constitutes only one single phase, had very distinct limitations of its own. Little attempt was made by its protagonists to apply their new ideas and theories to concrete problems of the day in the light of universal truths and standards. Romanticism harped on Man rather than Men, sought the way of escape from the existing conditions of life rather than a reconstruction of that life in its reaction against the town or ‘boudoir’ literature of the previous age; too readily accepted what was primitive, wild, strange and picturesque, as the only essential glories of life. Among all its exponents, we always notice the tendency to exalt the merely bizarre and to replace the old conventions of ‘correctness’ by extravagances at all costs. Perhaps some of it was inevitable. No great movement in the history of mankind ever took place without obscuring for the time being the important and vital aspects of human life and consciousness. In the over-zealous enthusiasm for fresh air, some windows were bound to be broken, as Lowell remarked. It is not our intention here to criticize Romanticism as a philosophy of life or religion. But it should be clearly understood that whenever the romanticist sought to erect upon his poetry a philosophy of life or conduct, he invariably failed. True Art does not admit either metaphysics or undisciplined imagination. The chief thing to remember is that fresh air was badly wanted and that literature and life needed a real synthesis of principles in every way, and the Romanticists only partially succeeded in achieving it.

Before attempting to analyze the specific romantic tendencies in the treatment of Nature by the principal English poets of the period, let us see how each one felt towards Nature and interpreted Nature, and how one differs from the other in temperament and spirit. Wordsworth may be regarded as the chief representative of the new romantic feeling towards Nature. The stages in the growth and development of his love of Nature are clearly marked out in his ‘Tintern Abbey’ lines, which only state briefly what is set forth at greater length in the ‘Prelude.’ From a healthy boy’s delight in the freedom of outdoor life and open air, it passes on to a sensuous, animal love of external beauties, and from it finally to an ardent, ‘spiritual’ devotion to Nature. The spiritual meaning was not only added to natural beauty but even substituted for it. It was because of an essential kinship between the spiritual faculty in man and the ‘indwelling Soul’ of the Universe, and also because ‘the External World’ and ‘the Mind’ are exquisitely fitted to each other (see lines 62-71, Introduction: ‘Excursion’) that Wordsworth felt human communion with Nature was possible and through such communion alone, he found, as Mr. Myers puts it– "an opening, if indeed there be an opening, into the transcendent world." To grasp this point is to get the key to Wordsworth's interpretation of Nature. Wordsworth further believed that this communion with Nature was possible only when the poet went to her in the right mood–the mood not of analysis and intellectual speculation but of receptivity and religious meditation. It is perfectly obvious that Wordsworth's receptivity became a sheer, wanton abandonment, and religious meditation was nothing but a pantheistic reverie. This, indeed, is the serene, blessed mood–the mood of mystical raptures when the burden of thought is lifted and the power is granted to ‘see into the light of things’. One moment of such mood ‘may give us more than ages of toiling reason’. Thus Wordsworth carries his claims on behalf of Nature to the verge of ridiculous paradox when he says,

"One impulse from a vernal wood
Will teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can."

Thoroughly anti-scientific and anti-rationalistic in temper, he is in radical opposition to all kinds of philosophy which assume that intellect is the only organ of truth. This is brought out most clearly in his short poem, entitled ‘A Poet's Epitaph’. Special emphasis is laid by him again and again upon the fundamental need of a right relationship with Nature–sometimes one ‘of a wise passiveness’ (‘Expostulation and Reply’), and often one ‘of a heart that watches and receives,’ (‘The Tables Turned’). Aubrey de Vere ("On the personal character of Wordsworth's poetry": Wordsworthina, p. 147) points out that Wordsworth looked at Nature "as the mystic of old perused the pages of Holy Writ, making little of the letter, but passing through it to the spiritual interpretation." This statement, though a little misleading, contains an element of truth. To Wordsworth, a rock, a flower, a sunset, a mountain torrent, are only the varying manifestations of the one great principle that he discovers as underlying the external, universe. The primrose or daffodil is a symbol to him of Nature's message to man; a sunrise for Wordsworth is not simply a glorious pageant of color, but it signifies a moment of spiritual consecration. The poet, in this height of mystical and pantheistic mood, becomes ‘a dedicated spirit’.

Wordsworth and Shelley, unlike their other contemporaries, have this point in common, that they both tried to spiritualize Nature. This ‘spiritualization’ of Nature was only a continuation of Rousseau's naturalistic philosophy and implied an ‘imaginative melting of man into outer nature’ in a mood of superlative ecstasy. So Wordsworth and Shelley were not merely poets of Nature, but they became prophets of Nature. They were concerned less to depict than to explain; less to marvel at her beauty than to exult in her inner significance. They were always moving in this manner from the concrete external fact to the idea. Shelley's way of achieving such an end is, however, sufficiently distinctive from Wordsworth's. There is very little of the restless visionary in Wordsworth's pantheistic reveries. Shelley's mind is constantly overhung with wonderful visions of an Arcadian dreamland where ‘Love’ is the panacea for all the evils of the world. Shelley's method is therefore more diffusive and expansive. Wordsworth's pantheistic ecstasy over Nature has more depth and concentration than Shelley's intensely exuberant rhapsodies. It is always so fatally easy for a romantic mysticism of this kind to slip unconsciously into a parochial moralizing or a ‘passion for reforming the world’. One deplores the didacticism of Wordsworth all the more, because, in several instances, he does show his capacity for expressing most artistically the delights that are derived from the world of Nature. Wordsworth can take a pleasure fully as keen in the placid lake:

"The calm

And dead still water lay upon my mind

Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,

Never before so beautiful, sank down

Into my heart and held me like a dream."

Wordsworth can, if he chooses, throw the very spirit of June into a couplet:

"Flaunting summer when he throws
His soul into a briar rose."

Wordsworth can awaken, as Shelley has remarked, ‘a kind of thought in sense,’ when he writes:

"The winds that would be howling at all hours
And are up gathered now like sleeping flowers."

Shelley, without Wordsworth's quasi-philosophic grounds for the Nature-cult, held at the root almost the same idea that Wordsworth held, –that the external Universe was alive. He represents ‘this vast Being’ in his ‘Asia’ of ‘Prometheus Unbound.’ He calls her ‘Life of Life.’ She is Shelley's personification of the vital spirit which pervades both animate and inanimate Nature. Wordsworth conceived this vital spirit in Nature as Thought evolving in life, Shelley conceived it as Love, –‘Love whose smile kindles the universe’, This ‘Love’ in Shelley's Nature-cult becomes the transcendental force 'kindling all things into beauty’ –which he indefinitely pursues in his ‘Alaster’ or ‘Ephipsychidion’ and whiich always eludes and baffles him. Evidently, in Shelley's interpretation of Nature, we hardly find the homeliness of Wordsworth's steady affection or even the concrete sensuous touches of Keats. Shelley's dream pictures float away, like exquisite bubbles, which melt even as we watch them. The weakness of Shelley's Nature-poetry lies in the fact that his idealism and warm human sympathies are clad in shadowy fantasies. Thought and feeling, emotion and imagination, are etherealized. He is the Oberon of poets; and even in the most universal of his impassioned songs–in such matchless little lyrics as ‘The world's great age begins anew’, where our rough guttural speech breaks into a lyric cry–even there, it seems as if he were only lamenting the lives and inequalities of mankind. Shelley's reciprocity with Nature often reaches a condition where the landscape itself merges readily into the state of his soul. The spirit of the west wind becomes identical with Shelley's own and so the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ no longer remains a mere simile but becomes an interfusion of landscape and the poet’s spirit. ‘The Cloud’ and ‘The Skylark’ also reach the same point of a blending together of the poet's spirit and natural phenomena.

Coleridge, sympathizing as he did intellectually with Wordsworth's transcendental cult of Nature, is, however, far more readily influenced by the sensuous appeal in Nature. To him Nature was not separate from man, but Nature was ‘ourselves’. The visible world seemed to him only the image of human thoughts and feelings. Man alone gives life to Nature. When he is dull and dead of heart, he gets no response:

"I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within."

This specific attitude of Coleridge towards Nature finds emphatic expression in his ‘Dejection: An Ode.’ Coleridge holds that Nature can give nothing to those who do not come to receive. Seldom has the hopeless, desponding, misanthropic mood of a Romantic poet in England found such tragic utterance as in Coleridge's ‘Dejection’ ode.

The medievalism of Scott is blended with his passionate love of the Earth. His Nature-cult was more the nature of Earth-worship than Nature-worship and the Earth in particular of special localities, endeared to him by a hundred associations. This qualification differentiates his Earth-worship from that of Meredith, which is general, cosmic, not specific or humanized. He loved his country's soil, as a child loves, for its associations; and he told Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather once a year, he thought he would die. But Scott's sense of beauty in Nature was inextricably mixed with medieval or historical associations. "Show me an old castle and a field of battle and I was at home with it." To Wordsworth, the pageant of the Middle Ages was only a dream of ancient strivings that stirred the imagination and touched him as another chord of that ‘still, sad music of humanity’ which came to him from a distance while he sat in philosophic aloofness. He would ruminate vaguely over ‘old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago’, but to Scott the unhappiness concerned him far less than the variety and excitement, and battles for him were never ‘long ago’ but ‘exhilarating actualities’ close at hand. That nebulous atmosphere of dateless climes loved by some Romantic poets, Coleridge, for instance, in his ‘Christabel’ or Keats in his ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, was to some extent alien to Scott's nature. Yet Scott was not without his romantic love of wildness and isolation from humanity. Provided that no man should intrude on his isolation, he could be content to spend time indefinitely in the solitude of Nature, as he does in ‘The Lady of the Lake’ or ‘Rokeby’. In this particular attitude of lonely delight in the wilderness, or retreat to Nature as an escape from work-a-day world, Scott resembles Byron. Nature intoxicates Byron with an almost heady delight:

"To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot had ne'er or rarely been."
To climb the trackless mountains all unseen
With the wild flock that never needs a fold,
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean–
This is not solitude: ’tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll’d."

In this love of Nature, there is very little pantheistic musing or sense of subtle mystery but only a live sense of the wildness and solitary wonders of Nature. Byron takes ‘the pleasure in the pathless woods’ and learns ‘the language of another world’ in ‘the dim and solitary loveliness’ of Nature. This solitary pleasure, this romantic longing for ‘another world’ and misanthropic melancholy are the only things left to Manfred, who loves to talk with the ‘witch of the torrent’ when he most hates to talk with man. Byron again does not share Wordsworth’s belief in the restorative power of Nature to soften and subdue the ills of life. Nature has not enabled, Byron writes in his Journal of 1816, "to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, around, above and beneath me". Byron revels rather in Nature's grand and awe-inspiring aspects, in the vast space of silent heaven, in the boundless expanse of ocean, in the gloom of dark forests or in the more terrifying manifestations of tempest, thunder and avalanche.

As for Keats, he had no theory of universal Love or universal Thought pervading the external world; he had little sense of those mystical mysteries which speak to the ‘contemplative’ soul out of the external show of things. His was a simple, direct passion for natural beauty just for its own sake–the beauty of forest and field, of flower and sky and sea. Haydon speaks of him: "He was in his glory in the fields. The humming of the bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheeks glowed and his mouth quivered." It was this intense, wholehearted sensuous love of all forms of natural beauty which inspired and incited Keats. Another aspect of his love of Nature is found in his belief that the whole material world is peopled by living beings who speak out of the waves of the sea and the trees of the wood of the mountain and the stream. This may be described as what has been called Keats’ ‘Greek-god fellowship with Nature’. His ‘Ode to Nightingale’ throws out Nature in sharp contrast with the life of man and the pathetic brevity and littleness of human life is emphasized. The Nightingale is the ‘Immortal Bird’ with which the tiny space of personal existence or of the passing generations vanishes into nothingness. Similar sentiments find expression in other poets also, as in Matthew Arnold's ‘Youth of Nature’: "They are dust, they are changed, they are gone. I remain." This romantic tendency of contrast led poets to ascribe indifference or cruelty to Nature. Tennyson saw nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ and another Victorian poet dwelt on the modern scientific conception of Nature as a further argument in favour of his romantic pessimism and melancholy:

"I find no hint throughout the Universe
Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse ;
I find alone Necessity Supreme!"

(James Thomson: ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, XIV).

Moreover, Keats’ ‘Nightingale’ Ode embodying as it does the very stuff and spirit of medieval romance, is voluptuous and intensely passionate in its emotion. At times, the emotion threatens to overpower the poet and a hysterical euphuism here and there jars on the reader. This romantic emotion though considerably focussed and controlled in such lines as the very often quoted

" . . . magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn" –

breaks out now and again in a wistful, Arcadian longing and pensive retreat, when the poet wants to,

"Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan–
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-ey’d despairs."

The naturalism of Wordsworth is blended in Keats with a hypersensitive aestheticism:

"A little noiseless noise among the leaves,
Born of the very sigh that silence breathes."

His well-known lines in the ‘Ode on a Graecian Urn’

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. –

simply suggest the aesthetic symbolism of Schelling or Shaftesbury. This identification of truth and beauty as a prominent misleading factor of romanticism has been at the root of Ruskin's philosophy, Pater's aestheticism, Oscar Wilde's doctrines of creative criticism, Morris’ social gospels and Benedetto Croce’s ‘impressionism’ in art.

Not to carry our discussion too far, we may note that the romantic treatment of Nature has been, for the most part, steeped deeply in the poet's own personal feeling or mood. It seems as if to see or describe any external object in Nature, without reference to temperamental joy or grief, was absolutely impossible with romanticists. This subjective animation of Nature feeling was not a new thing in European Romantic poetry. Rousseau more than others emphasised this particular phase of Nature-cult. M. Masson says that "the Nature that Jean Jacques worships is only a projection of Jean Jacques". Speaking of some external objects of Nature, Rousseau himself exclaims: "Unfeeling and dead things, this charm is not in you; it could not be there. It is in my own heart which wishes to refer everything to itself." So Nature was what Rousseau and Coleridge could put there. Tieck asks: "Do you think we are really able to describe Nature as it is? Every eye must see in it a certain connection with the heart, else we do not see anything, at least nothing that would please us, if told in verse." (Kritische Schriften, Vol. I, p. 82). We could not find anywhere any better elucidation of this particular phase of the cult of Nature. Thus the poet himself becomes the predominating factor in his intercourse with Nature. Nature is made the plaything of his varying mood. Another German romanticist, Herder, said: "I rustle with the wind and become alive–give life, inspire, inhale fragrance and exhale it with flowers, dissolve in water; float in the blue sky; feel all these feelings." This kind of exultant liberation of the poetic ego is adequately represented by Byron and Shelley in England. Novalis had ample justification in giving a warning to his friend Tieck: "The poet must give life to Nature, but he must not play with his moods, Poetry must be carried on as a serious art .…..A poet must not roam about idly the livelong day in search of images and sentiments". (Meissner: Novalis’ works; vol. III, pp. 59-60). Strongly allied with this romantic ego is the romantic melancholy, and the longing for Arcadian companionship with the wilderness. Byron's entire Nature-cult as exemplified in ‘Childe Harold,’ ‘Manfred’ and ‘Don Juan’ is an admixture of the romantic ego, romantic misanthropy and romantic worship of wild Nature. The other important phase of the romanticist's attitude towards Nature is the pantheistic feeling–the idea of a spirit greater than man's spirit residing even in the tiniest of external objects, such as the little ‘flower in the crannied wall’. Among the chief romantic protagonists, Shelley and Wordsworth in their highest moods of exaltation held the belief that God was in Nature and God was revealed in Nature. This aspiration of the poet towards the infinite as identified with God merely intensified his pantheistic feeling and such a tendency of looking at Nature invariably produced an irresponsible, leisurely reverie and indeterminate vagabondage of the emotions. So instead of producing any real sound basis for religious or meditative life, the Romantic poets broke out time and again only in ‘inarticulate ecstasies over the wonders of Nature’. The poet as an interpreter of Nature then ceased to be a poet; he became a theologian a metaphysician, a mystic or a dreamer of dreams. Tennyson ostensibly begged an answer from all the high-priests of naturalistic philosophy when he wrote:

"Little flower–if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."
Who could answer?