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

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CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature 27

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Nature and the Natural in Asian Literature

• The Romantic embrace of nature and natural imagery was not
  confined to the West: in Chinese literature, as reflected in Shen
  Fu’s confessional prose, nature became a source of inspiration
  and personal solace.
  •Chinese poets and painters described the natural landscape by
  way of a few carefully chosen words and images.

Romantic Landscape Painting

• It was among Western Romantics that the landscape became
  a major vehicle for the expression of the artist’s moods and
  emotions.


• Constable’s contemplative scenes of English country life and
  Turner’s sublime vistas are the visual counterparts of the poems
  of Wordsworth.


• The elegiac landscapes of Friedrich in Germany and Corot in
  France reflect the efforts of Romantic artists to explore nature’s
  shifting states as metaphors for human feeling.

American Romanticism

• American Romantics endowed the quest for natural simplicity
  with a robust spirit of individualism. The transcendentalists
  Emerson and Thoreau sought a union of self with nature; Walt
  Whitman proclaimed his untamed and “untranslatable” ego in
  sympathy with nature’s energy.


• In the American landscapes of Cole, Bierstadt, and Church,
  nature becomes symbolic of an unspoiled and rapidly vanishing
  world; in the art of George Catlin, the native populations and
  traditions of America are lovingly documented.


• Among Native Americans, yet another (less Romantic but
  equally mystical) view of nature flourished, as evidenced in
  magnificent ceremonial objects.


• American folk art, as typified by the paintings of Edward Hicks,
  made use of natural imagery for decorative and symbolic
  purposes.

The Progress of Industrialization

•Nineteenth-century Europe experienced a population boom;
increased production of coal, iron, and steel encouraged
expansion of industry and commerce in the West. In this
industrially based society, goods were increasingly made at
factories rather than in homes.

• Advancing industrialization encouraged urbanization and
  spurred Western efforts to find markets and resources in other
  parts of the world.

Early Nineteenth-Century Thought

• German philosophers, influenced by Asian philosophy and
  Kantian idealism, viewed nature subjectively and in the direction
  of mysticism.


• Hegel proposed a dialectical model according to which all
  reality, all history, and all ideas progressed toward perfect
  freedom.


• Darwin argued that by means of natural selection, all living
  things, including human beings, evolved from a few simple
  forms: species either develop into higher forms of life or fail to
  survive.
  •While the theory of natural selection displaced human beings
  from their elevated place in the hierarchy of living creatures,
  it advanced the idea of the unity of nature and humankind.

Nature and the Natural in European Literature

• Nature provided both a metaphor for the Romantic sensibility
  and a refuge from the evils of nineteenth-century
  industrialization and urbanization.
  •William Wordsworth, the leading nature poet of the nineteenth
  century, embraced the redemptive power of nature. Exalting the
  natural landscape as the source of sublime inspiration and
  moral truth, Wordsworth and his English contemporaries
  initiated the Romantic movement.


• The Romantics stressed the free exercise of the imagination,
  the liberation of the senses, and the cultivation of a more natural
  language of poetic expression.


• Shelley compared the elemental forces of nature with the
  creative powers of the poet, while Keats rejoiced that nature’s
  fleeting beauty might forever dwell in art. Blake’s deeply spiritual
  poems reflect a visionary and moral perception of nature.