There are many and
complex explanations of what does really happen to us when we
become truly 'engaged' by a work of art, but most of them seem to
suggest that what takes place is a complex interaction of the
mental and the physical. It is almost as if the artist
enabled us to explore our own senses in a detached way, and then
persuaded us to carry the exploration forward from the purely
physical level to something far more all- embracing and therefore
more satisfying.
Nature in art first
and foremost encapsulates the natural features which have not
changed much over the centuries and for the most part, they are
works of enjoyment in which the artist singles out the particular
pleasures that give them their greatest joy. In the poems of
Milton it was the brightness of a Spring morning; for William
Cowper it was the sight of 'animals running free'; for Coleridge it
was the exhilaration of climbing a mountain. Emily Bronte so loved
her wild and windswept Yorkshire moors that she makes you feel that
you are walking with her over them. These experiences sink deep
into the memory, never to be forgotten: as Robert Louis Stevenson
lay dying in Samoa he pined to see again the hills of home in
Scotland and feel the winds 'austere and true'.
The tradition
of pastoral poetry,which started with Edmund Spenser's Shephearde's
Calendar in 1579, celebrated a rustic ideal, where people
'hating the tradeful citys hum' fled from the insinuating
corruption of the courtly life to find peace, harmony and the
pleasure of simple things, and where a contented peasantry went
about their ways w'th a bucolic jollity.
Then, the way of
looking at the countryside changed. In 1770 William Gilpin
published his Observations on the River Wye and several parts of
South Wales in which he set about 'not barely examining the face of
a country, but examining it by the rules of picturesque beauty'.
Two years later there followed his guide to the picturesque scenery
of The Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland and in
1777 Paul Sandby published his engravings, A Collection of
Landscapes, from which people south of the border could appreciate
the grandeur and isolated beauty of the Highlands of Scotland. The
Romantic movement had been born: henceforth the appeal of natural
beauty was to lie in rugged mountains shrouded in clouds, windswept
moors, shadows, caves, darkness, moonlight, dawn and twilight. With
the publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 Wordsworth and
Coleridge established a new and different way of describing the
beauty of nature and the landscape, and the effect they could have
upon the human spirit.
However, it is not
just the grandeur of majestic scenery or the wildest elements that
can stir the spirit. It is often in those Secret and Special Places
that a poet will find the greatest contentment. For Coleridge it
was his Lime-tree bower. For Wordsworth it was when he broke away
from his fellow ice-skaters to find 'a silent bay'; for William
Barnes it was his Orchard in Linden Lea; for Yeats it was 'The Lake
Isle of Innisfree'.
Woods, rivers,
mountains, ravines, cliffs and great trees are infused with
memories and associations that have over the centuries assumed a
mystical and mythical quality. There are things that cannot be
explained rationally but survive in folklore, in custom and
tradition, in stories handed down from one generation to the next,
and a historic sense that the destiny of man is bound up with the
spirits of Nature. William Cowper's poem 'The Yardley Oak' was
popular in the nineteenth century because its growth from an acorn
to its full stature and to its dying from its top downwards was
seen as a parallel to the decay of England - the spirit of the tree
was intertwined with the spirit of Albion. William Blake's vision
of the golden pillars built over the fields from Islington to
Marylebone is a victory over the druid past, and Derek Mahon finds
in a forest clearing that:
Nature is often best
enjoyed alone, perhaps on a walk through the countryside, when one
is surrounded with the beauty of nature and immersed in the
atmosphere of the place so that one's enjoyment becomes a source of
refreshment and one can be aware of a presence greater than
oneself. For some that presence is God, for others some pagan deity
or some universal spirit, through which one hears. Over the
centuries man has hungered to bring nature under control and to
impose some tidy order over the chaotic confusion and wildness in
the natural world. Such attempts to tame nature are usually
temporary victories.
In his poem 'Going,
Going', which was commissioned in 1972 at the request of Robert
Jackson, later an MP and a member of a government enquiry into the
'Human Habitat', Philip Larkin saw that all he loved most around
him was slipping away under concrete and tyres. A sense of angry
regret prevails. But that was not the view of poets such as John
Dyer and John Dalton, writing in the early eighteenth century; they
welcomed the Industrial Revolution, 'for industry brings all her
honey to the hive'. Blake was certainly opposed to
industrialization, but his 'dark Satanic mills' refer, it is now
thought, not to the belching chimneys of the wool and cotton mills
in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but to either the Church of England or
the Newtonian system.
Farmers too, the
very custodians of the countryside, now recognize their
responsibility for the devastation of the bird life over the last
twenty years. In that time it has been estimated that the number of
skylarks has fallen by fifty percent. Perhaps only poetry can
describe how the beauty of birdsong can crystallize a unique moment
of contact with nature, and evoke a sense of regret when it can be
made no more.
Hopkins expresses
his personal agony when his beloved poplars at Binsey were felled,
and Charlotte Mew, when she saw the great plane trees coming down
at the end of her garden, pleaded 'Hurt not the trees'. Francis
Nowell Mundy, who was a Derbyshire magistrate and country gentleman
published a poem in 1776 called 'Needwood Forest' in which he makes
a great oak speak out against the axe. But the love of trees
is not simply a matter of protecting the landscape but also the
recognition of a much more elemental pull that they have upon the
human imagination. Great oaks became symbols of stability and
national endurance, and the greenwoods were the sanctuaries for
free men standing out against oppressive tyrannies. Forests and
woods are part of a primeval past, impregnated with mystery and
myth, places where solemn rites were performed, where sacrifices
were made, where outlaws lived and where wild animals hid for
security. In the eighteenth century James Hall, the Scottish
antiquarian, trained saplings in the shape of arches to prove his
conviction that gothic architecture was derived from the
perpendicular alley formed by trees: to him the tree was a symbol
of the resurrection of man.
