The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

5

TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)

Nature and the Natural in

European Literature

EXPLORING ISSUES Creationism versus Evolution

CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature 5

5

Nature and the Natural in European Literature

One of the central features of nineteenth-century

Romanticism was its love affair with nature. In nature, with

its shifting moods and rhythms, the Romantics found

solace, inspiration, and self-discovery. To Enlightenment

thinkers, “nature” meant universal order, but to the

Romantics, nature was the wellspring of divinity, the phe-

nomenon that bound humankind to God. “Natural man”

was one who was close to nature, unspoiled (as Rousseau

had argued) by social institutions and imperatives.

The Romantics lamented the dismal effects of growing

industrialization. In rural settings, they found a practical

refuge from urban blight, smoke-belching factories, and

poverty-ridden slums. The natural landscape, unspoiled

and unpolluted, revealed the oneness of God and the uni-

verse. This pantheisticoutlook, more typical of Eastern

than Western religious philosophy, came to pervade the lit-

erature of European and American Romantics.

Wordsworth and the Poetry of Nature

In 1798, William Wordsworth (1780–1850) and his British

contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) pro-

duced the Lyrical Ballads, the literary work that marked the

birth of the Romantic movement in England. When the

book appeared in a second edition in 1800, Wordsworth

added a preface that formally explained the aims of

Romantic poetry. In this manifesto, Wordsworth described

poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,”

which takes its origin “from emotion recollected in tran-

quillity.” The object of the poet is,

to choose incidents and situations from common life

[and] to throw over them a certain colouring of the

Darwin’s Origin of Speciesgenerated much controversy in its own
time and long thereafter. In the last 150 years, fossil research and
molecular biology have provided overwhelming evidence to support
the theory of evolution. Nevertheless, controversy continues. The
debate centers on the question of origins, that is, whether human
beings were divinely created or are the product of a series of
biological “accidents” governed by natural selection. Creationists
hold that biological design argues for the existence of a Designer
whose intelligent contrivance produced the world as we know it.
While the defenders of Intelligent Design view Darwin’s theory as
evidence for a random and undirected universe, Darwin himself,
observing the “grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator... ”

speculated that natural selection and biological evolution might be

part of a divine design.

Many religious faiths have no difficulty in accepting the idea that

biological evolution governs the diversity of living things over

billions of years, and thus find evolution and religious belief

compatible. However, those who hold to the literal truth of Scripture

find Darwin’s theories in direct contradiction of their religious

beliefs. The ongoing controversy, which flourishes mainly in the

United States, centers on public education: whether creationism

should be taught along with evolution in the classroom. The debate

has provoked a number of related issues, including the definition

and validity of “good science,” and contemporary interpretations of

the Book of Genesis.

as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful

to the possessor, in the same way as any great mech-

anical invention is the summing up of the labor, the

experience, the reason, and even the blunders of

numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic

being, how far more interesting... does the study of

natural history become!

And in the final paragraph of his opus, Darwin brings rom-
antic fervor to his description of nature’s laws:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank,

clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds

singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting

about, and with worms crawling through the damp

earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed

forms, so different from each other, and dependent

upon each other in so complex a manner, have all

been produced by laws acting around us. These laws,

taken in the largest sense, being Growth and

Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by

reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct

action of the conditions of life, and from use and

disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a

Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural

Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the

Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the

war of nature, from famine and death, the most

exalted object which we are capable of conceiving,

namely, the production of the higher animals, directly

follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its

several powers, having been originally breathed by

the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that,

whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to

the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning

endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

have been, and are being evolved.