Simplicity, Sublimity, Divinity: The Romantic Notion of Nature

The unappreciative reader of works spanning from 1785 to 1830 might be tempted to call the Romantic poets a bunch of self-absorbed, sentimental pansies, on account of those attributes which are among the most characteristic of them: namely, an emphasis on emotion and the individualism of each man. However, there is one concept many times more essential to the Romantic Age than those above mentioned: nature. So inherent is it in the works of the Romantic period, that many refer to the poems of the age simply as "nature poetry." Whereas before the 1780s, nature served as a backdrop to the poem at best, the Romantic age witnessed its transformation into a central theme or otherwise recurring motif. A thorough understanding of the circumstances which gave rise to Romanticism helps in understanding the period's pronounced focus on nature. Furthermore, analysis of the works of major poets, such as Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge and Shelley, and artists of the age, including Turner and Constable, indicate that there were two major qualities alternately ascribed to nature - simplicity and sublimity - and that both, furthermore, relate to a discernible trend during the Romantic age of associating nature with the divine.

To understand the Romantic preoccupation with nature, one must first understand the two conditions which influenced it. The first of these is the Enlightenment. As Isaiah Berlin details in his book The Roots of Romanticism, men of the Enlightenment, encouraged by the scientific discoveries of figures such as Newton and Galileo, abandoned as faulty previously held sources of knowledge - revelations, traditions, dogma, and so forth - and turned to human reason as the one thing capable of attaining truth (22). Popular belief held that the application of reason could bring order to the chaotic realms of morals, politics and aesthetics - in brief, the human world - in the same way that Newton had brought order to the physical universe (Berlin 24). Thus arose an era of strict rationalism, which attempted to explain, predict and control human nature. The philosophies of the Romantic era were born in opposition to this rationalism. These were formulated by men such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau who wrote in his Émile, "The one thing we do not know, is the limit of the knowable" (Rousseau). Romantic thinkers, sharing Rousseau's view, placed emphasis on the mysteries of the world, and particularly those concentrated in the depths of nature, in opposition, as Mark Micale notes, to salons, the symbol of the intellectual Enlightenment, which were concentrated in large Parisian cities (2029). The words in "The Tables Turned" by William Wordsworth - "Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;/Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things" (25-27) - and the encouragement therein given to "quit...books" (1) may be thus understood in the context of the division between Romanticism and the Enlightenment.

The other condition which led to the Romantic absorption in nature was the industrialization taking place across Europe, and the shift from the rural to the urban. The Romantics saw industrialization as unnatural, yet another instance of man taking "nothing as nature made it" (Rousseau). In his poem "And did those feet," William Blake represents the industrialization with the term "those dark Satanic Mills" (8) indicating the level of corruption the Romantics associated with urbanization. Furthermore, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth outlines a number of reasons for preferring "humble and rustic life" over city life, among them that "in [rural life] the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." As with the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution played an important role in the rise of Romanticism.

While both these preconditions gave way to Romantic thought, they contributed two different characteristics to the Romantic conception of nature. The Enlightenment, by focusing on strict order and control of nature, led the Romantics to revolt with a view of nature as something wild, mysterious and irrepressible. This view of nature can be seen in artwork such as J.M.W. Turner's watercolour, Interior of Tintern Abbey and John Martin's Manfred on the Jungfrau, both of which show the superiority of nature to man and man-made things. The alternate view of nature, as influenced by an industrialization which the Romantics felt distanced men from their natural, "humble" beginnings, was that nature was a place of simplicity. The Hay Wain, a painting by John Constable where he "captured soothing, arcadian scenes of the English summertime...across a rustic landscape," demonstrates this view (Micale). These two characteristics may seem mutually exclusive; we tend to think of simple as small, and as such have difficulty imagining how a simple and calm nature may be associated with the exhilarating, breath-taking nature of sublimity. Yet these two ideas did merge into one notion of nature; this fusion of the two is what allowed William Wordsworth to write both "Lines...," in which he describes the "sense sublime....deeply interfused" (96-97) in nature, as well as "I wandered lonely as a cloud," wherein he commemorates the simple joy brought on by a "host of golden daffodils" (4). Clearly then, these two views did not result in a division within the collective Romantic conscious whereby a few of the Romantics saw nature in one way, while the rest saw it in the other.

Perhaps what helped in fusing them in the Romantic conscious was the way both of these alternate attributes - simplicity and sublimity - relate nature to divinity in a complex way. In the Romantic view of nature as sublime, it's superiority to mankind demonstrates that nature is an aspect of God: bigger, better and beyond humanity. Wordsworth's "Lines..." which takes place at an abbey which is never mentioned, implying that nature itself is the abbey, the very home of religion, strongly implies this relation between God and sublime nature. Another strong case in point is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In this poem, the all-encompassing force of nature, consisting of "a hot and copper sky" (111), the "broad bright Sun" (174), a "wide wide sea" (232), and
the elements rain, wind and snow, serve to either punish or reward the ancient mariner in accordance with his sins or good deeds; in other words, nature in the poem is Providence, the manifestation of God's will on earth.

The relation between divinity and the simplicity of nature, on the other hand, has to do with the fact that nature is the creation, the masterpiece, of God. It needs no improvements, such as those prescribed by industrialization and rationalism, to complicate it, because it is God's work, and therefore already perfect. This concept is conveyed very clearly in the work "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen. In this modern fairy tale, a boy named Kay gets in his eyes a shard of glass from a mirror which has the power to distort reality, making "the most beautiful landscapes [look] like boiled spinach." The mirror is the product of a demon, and in the story symbolizes the rationalism of the Enlightenment (Cooper): after Kay is taken over by it, he recites mathematics in place of prayers and seeks perfection with a magnifying glass. Most significantly to the understanding of Romantic ideas, he rejects roses, a symbol of divine love in the story, because they are flawed, being "cankered [and]...quite crooked." The protagonist of the story, a little girl named Gerda, on the other hand, untainted by the demon's glass, continues to love roses as ever despite their imperfection. As such, as she journeys to save Kay, robbers and royalty alike strive to help her, and angels form out of the steam of her breath as she prays! The story is a dense metaphor which conveys the Romantic notion that a simple approach to nature, such as that assumed by a child, which doesn't seek flaws in nature to be fixed, as the Enlightenment does, brings one closer to God.

There is another key element in the linking of the simplicity of nature with divinity, and it can be seen in the cover illustration of William Blake's Songs of Innocence. It takes merely a glance at the illustration - which includes the pastoral image of a piper, branches laden with fruit winding across the page, and the concealment of a snake in the shadow of the tree - to ascertain that the simplicity of nature was also connected to the Garden of Eden, an idealized past in a natural setting, closer to God. Thus, analogous to how Blake sets up a dichotomy between experience and innocence, Romantics in general set up the dichotomy between the city life as spiritually impure and the simple, rustic life as divine. As Jeffrey Foss states in his work, Beyond Environmentalism: a Philosophy of Nature, the Romantics had a sense of mankind having lost their hold on perfection (211). We had achieved this loss by way of knowledge - by defiance and impatience towards the natural ways - as manifest in the science behind industrialization and rationalism; therefore the only way to repent, and regain that ideal state of happiness of earlier times, was to reject technology, and return, as Foss described "to our state of original innocence" (211), which included living the rural life. Nature, in its purest form, then, was a paradise akin to the "ancient trees" (Blake 5) of Eden described in "And did those feet." This analogy between nature and the Garden of Eden is clearly spiritual in nature; it directly refers to Christian beliefs, and therefore further explains the connection made between the simplicity of nature and God.

Consider the way the world was heading until the Romantics came along: understanding nature by system of reason, manipulating and controlling it by way of science - these were generally unquestioned objectives throughout Europe. Romantics rose up against these trends in a movement that would later be termed "return to nature." In nature, they saw the sublimity of an essence that was far greater than humanity, and that would assert its force upon the hubris of mankind, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias." They also saw in nature the peace of uncrowded paths and smokeless skies, the purity of a time before the application of reason had blasted human life into a thousand complications. Above all, however, they felt nature as something sacred. We can try to understand this by analyzing the preconditions that birthed Romanticism and picking out the details in the poems which might give a clue as to why the writers felt a divine connection with nature, but perhaps there is a better way: "behold/A rainbow in the sky" (1-2) as William Wordsworth wrote in "My heart leaps up," and you may sense that "natural piety" (9) which was at the heart of Romanticism.

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