Review: THE NATURE-LOVING VICTORIANS

Reviewed Work(s): Nature and the Victorian Imagination by U. C. Knoepflmacher and G.

B. Tennyson
Review by: Richard D. Altick
Source: The Virginia Quarterly Review , AUTUMN 1978, Vol. 54, No. 4 (AUTUMN 1978),
pp. 748-754
Published by: University of Virginia

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26436420

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 THE NATURE-LOVING VICTORIANS

By Richard D. Altick

Nature and the Victorian Imagination. Edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher

and G. B. Tennyson. California. $25.00.

sadly mutilated form, as environment and

WORDSWORTH'S Nature survives today, in
ecosystem, a maternal figure that has stirred the
communal guilt of our generation. When still relatively in
violate in the first half of the 19th century, though in some
locales the air was already poisoned by factory smoke and the
rivers ran thick with industrial waste, Nature dominated the
English sensibility. From their Romantic precursors, the Vic
torians inherited an emotional attachment to landscape that,
if Wordsworth were still to be believed, could serve as an
adjunct to formal religion, often indeed as a surrogate faith, a
source of reassurance and orientation in an increasingly com
plex and ugly world. But this conviction was fading, along
with the accompanying hope, strong among the Romantic
poets, that under the auspices of a common view of Nature art
and science would somehow fuse to provide man with a
strong, comfortable, and enduring Weltanschauung. A whole
cluster of new scientific disciplines was fragmenting what
until lately had been looked upon as a single study, "natural
philosophy," the very term implying a former confidence in
coherent principles that now was shattered.
The blunt fact was that Nature, in its special Words
worthian sense, itself seemed to be dying, the victim of the
new science. Impulses from a vernal wood were drowned out
by the clatter and roar of machinery, and the Romantics'
therapeutic Nature was being replaced by a Darwinian preda
tor, red in tooth and claw. Nature's simple plan, to borrow
one final cliché from the poets, had proved too simple, and

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 DISCUSSIONS OF NEW BOOKS 749

not much of a plan, if any spiritual teleology at all c

deduced from its manifestations.
The most observant Victorian minds witnessed this in
exorable process of disintegration and discreditation with dis
may. Yet they clung to the notion that communion with
Nature somehow could be good for them. As the scientific
approach required more and more intellectual rigor, they
continued instead to prize the old untutored responsiveness.
As the editors of this important symposium observe,

Arnold and Ruskin and Hardy, though they denied Words

worth's nurturing and beneficent Nature, nonetheless hailed
the older poet's ability to assert, in Arnold's words, "the
freshness or the early world. " Victorian literature and art and
architecture rely on retrospection to look back at that earlier
world of Nature. Though partially discredited and bereft of
some of its "mysteries,' it would continue to be cherished for
its symbolic representations and sacramental meanings in the
face of the rapid advances of science into a very different
natural order. Victorian biology, physics, and chemistry
created systems that would affect all future thinking about the
physical universe; yet the imagination of poets, novelists,
painters, designers, and architects remained essentially con
servative, clinging to the icons of the past, adapting and
reshaping earlier modes of expression. ... For most Victori
ans, "Nature'' remained above all a repository of feeling, a
sanctuary they were all too eager to retain.

The 24 contributors to Nature and the Victorian Imagina

tion, drawn mainly from the discipline of literary history but
also including students of the history of art, architecture, and
science, describe the diversified forms that this stubborn alle
giance to an obsolescent concept of Nature assumed among
the Victorians. Their essays ideally should be read alongside a
similar compilation in two volumes, The Victorian City: Im
ages and Realities, edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff
(1973). Together, these collections in effect review the dis
turbing cultural dichotomy produced by the incursion of the
man-made city, a great wen on the hitherto smiling face of
Nature.

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750 THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

In the long run, the city proved to be the more powerful

stimulus to the artistic imagination, first in fiction and then in
painting. Because it was new to the English experience, it
provided a challenge to the powers of comprehension and
description. But it was to . Nature, scaled down to human
proportions and domesticated to suit the needs of a home
centered society in a small island nation, that Victorians af
flicted with what Hardy called "the ache of modernism"
customarily resorted. In poetry, fiction, sentimental essay and
song, and genre and landscape painting, the cottage was an
abiding symbol of man's intimate connection with Nature.
However damp, cramped, and squalid the rustic dwelling was
in actuality, it was, after all, set into—not merely in—the
countryside; as it weathered and aged it became an integral
part of the landscape. Acquiring connotation by association, it
stood as a reminder of pastoral innocence and purity in con
trast to the encroaching, corrupting city. The hearth in partic
ular, no matter in what kind of home it was found, epitomized
the virtues of domesticity, the closest that 19th-century man
in his social role could get to the ideal of unspoiled Nature. By
a like assimilation of Nature and architecture, in late Victo
rian mansions of the well-to-do, wallpaper, furniture, decora
tive textiles, iron ornaments, carved screens, and stained glass
all were designed to depict or imitate flowers, vine leaves, and
birds, thus bringing a breath of Nature indoors. At this zenith
of the arts and crafts movement, the same decorative impulse
could also be seen at work in the semi-detached villas that
lined the roads of the garden suburbs laid out by the first town
planners. These oases of cozy domesticity, shaded by plane
trees and ornamented with herbaceous borders, were urban
society's symbolic equivalent of the rural cottage. Back to
Nature, now, by commuter train.
In Victorian fiction one finds the same predilection. The
low-key landscape of hedges, fields, and woods was preferred
to the sublimity of the Byronic, and later Ruskinian, moun
tainscape. This was less true of the pictorial arts, which, along
with literature, provide the focus of Nature and the Victorian
Imagination. (The book is dedicated to E. D. H. Johnson, a

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 DISCUSSIONS OF NEW BOOKS 751

professor of English at Princeton, who has been engaged fo

number of years in an intensive study of British art again
literary and cultural background. It is appropriate, as w
evidence of the present fruitfulness of interdisciplinary
ies, that three of the most informative and stimulating ess
are on aspects of landscape art—all written by professor
literature.) Early photography, represented at the outs
the volume by a "photo-essay" documenting the cam
first capturing of Nature, concentrated for the most pa
relatively close-up subjects in the form of ivy-grown r
wooded paths, rustic mills, and ancient trees. No such li
tions affected Victorian painting, however, and the mou
sublime, typified by John Brett's Val d'Aosta, was a freq
subject. But it was in response specifically to the chang
view of Nature that Victorian artists, notably the Pre-R
aelites, experimented, though more cautiously than did
adventurous contemporaries the French Impressionists,
new ways of representing the external world.
In literature there were marked revisions in the use of
Nature as a vehicle for philosophical or religious themes. It is
true that the taste of the poetry-buying public remained
conservative: John Keble's The Christian Year, a combination
pastoral poem and Anglican breviary, was a bestseller for
many years, and Tennyson's In Memoriam brought its author
fame, fortune, and the laureateship, its readers luckily failing
to perceive that in total effect its nature imagery was more
Manichean than optimistically Wordsworthian and that what
they took to be its undogmatic piety actually veiled a tor
mented and unresolved doubt springing from the implica
tions of the new science. But elsewhere the familiar Words
worthian typological triad of child, landscape, and bemused
adult observer, the child being of course the Rousseauistic
child of Nature, was significantly modified. In Arnold, Hop
kins, Pater, George Eliot, and Dickens, the adult's desire to
recover his primal wholeness by following the child back to
his blissful origin in Nature contends, not often successfully,
with his awareness that Nature is unconcerned with such
human longings and, further, that the child is not, as Words

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752 THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

worth would have it, wise father to the man, but merely a pre
adult lacking adult understanding. Similarly, Browning, a
frequent subverter of Romantic convention, replaces Nature
as a repository of spiritual truth with Nature as a psychologi
cal touchstone, a phenomenon for dramatic characters to
react to, thereby revealing their elemental temperament. And
in poems like " 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' " he
abandons the customary Romantic landscape to describe a
wasteland scene whose grim surrealistic ugliness turns the
sublime and the picturesque inside out.
The publisher's dust-jacket assertion that this book is "a
full exposition of the Victorians' response to Nature" is an
amiable exaggeration. It does range widely, from their fasci
nation with the sublime and fearsome as exhibited in their
enthusiasm first for Arctic exploration and then, after mid
century, for mountain climbing, to (in a footnote) that quin
tessential petit-bourgeois expression of delight in domesti
cated Nature, the potted aspidistra. An offhand list of topics
not covered is not a criticism of the book's limitations but a
further proof of the richness of its subject. There is little or
nothing, for example, on the impact of the telescope and
microscope on the Victorian imagination. Tennyson was a
devout student of Nature as seen through both instruments.
He was, incidentally, among the thousands of curiosity seek
ers who flocked in the early 1830's to see enlarged microscopic
fields projected on London showplace walls by the newly
invented limelight. The effect on the popular imagination of a
monstrously magnified drop of polluted Thames water must
have been fairly lively.
There is nothing on the influential popularization of science
by the Royal Institution for the benefit of the upper crust of
London society and by the Polytechnic Institution for that of
the masses. Nor do we read of the development of natural
history museums or of what is one of the most impressive
evidences of the Victorian devotion to Nature, the presence of
so many thousands of amateur naturalists. Elizabeth Gaskell's
Job Legh (Mary Barton) and George Eliot's Mr. Farebrother
(.Middlemarch) had their real-life counterparts in people like

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 DISCUSSIONS OF NEW BOOKS 753

the Scots stonemason-geologist Hugh Miller and in in

able country parsons; the Reverend Octavius Picka
bridge, for example, knew more about the Arachnid
anyone else in the country. Among most of these enthu
one feels, the pursuit of Nature was as much of an imag
indulgence, in the best sense of the term, as it was
exercise in scientific empiricism. At the very least, th
ticed their hobby mainly in the field, not in a labor
sealed off from any intimations, religious or secular,
Nature that Wordsworth knew.
The social history of the period abounds with furth
dence of the attraction Nature had for the city-pent ma
at any rate was assumed to have—for one must never
estimate the element of empty social ritual involved i
of these supposed "responses." Exhibitions of "anima
ture," which had been perennial attractions as far b
Tudor times, now were institutionalized as pub
nageries; parks and botanical gardens were slowly int
into the grimy industrial towns; and with the coming
railroad, one of the most popular of all mass recr
activities was the cheap holiday excursion to the scen
tryside or the seashore.
To all these forms of the search for Nature, highmind
Philistine (such as the Cockney invasion first of t
District and then, horror of horrors, Mont Blanc), John
was a passionately concerned witness. In any multi-f
survey of what Nature meant to the Victorians, he is
bly the central figure, as he is in this book. We meet hi
after time: declaring that an enlightened architecture
assume the function of Nature in the midst of urban ar
dogmatizing on the "moral aesthetic" of landscape pa
exalting the mountain as the supreme subject of art
preting the religious symbolism of the rainbow; reno
his early Wordsworthianism, including, for all to
standable personal reasons, his belief in the paradisal
of childhood; and being maddeningly eccentric on th
of science itself. "No [botanical] name terminating in
he announces, "will be attached to a plant that is neith

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 754 THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

nor pretty," and "neuter names terminating in 'urn' will

always indicate some power either of active or suggestive
evil." His "intense joy in observing Nature," we are told, was
neutralized by "his equally intense revulsion at the sexuality
of the biological world."
In the midst of his tragic crotchets, Ruskin on occasion was
a shrewd judge of his fellow men. The minds of some could
rise to an understanding of scientific principles, but science or
their own limitations then blocked the way to the "higher
contemplation" which alone justified its practice. Far better,
he thought, that since science had "a tendency to chill and
subdue the feelings, and to resolve all things into atoms and
numbers," they should steer clear of it. "For most men," he
wrote in Modem Painters, "an ignorant enjoyment is better
than an informed one; it is better to conceive the sky as a blue
dome than a dark cavity, and the cloud as a golden throne
than a sleety mist." Somewhere in this vicinity lies the reason
why the Victorians' feeling for Nature took the forms it did,
sometimes exhilarated and eloquently expressed, at other
times crude or vacuously sentimental. As a people, they con
trived to make themselves more at home with Nature than
with the science that Ruskin so misunderstood and feared.

HALF COLLEGE GRADUATE AND HALF

ALGONQUIN

By Michael Meyer

Young Man Thoreau. By Richard Lebeaux. Massachusetts. $12.50.

Thoreau and the American Indians. By Robert F. Sayre. Princeton.
$14.50.

self than anybody else, it is perhaps natural for his

BECAUSE Henry David Thoreau wrote more about him
readers to think that his life is an open book. He tells
us on the first page of Waiden, for example, that his narrative

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