Into the enlightenment: the Romantics revered a wild world
They sought out the sublime, rejecting the Enlightenment ideal of ordered nature and a benign, almost mechanical humanity.
The romantic period in art is often considered as a revolt against the spirit of the 18th-century Enlightenment — as is implied in the title of Kenneth Clark’s The Romantic Rebellion (1973). It had taken the lessons of the scientific revolution, summed up in the work of Sir Isaac Newton, and applied them more broadly as a paradigm of nature as well as of human life, both individual and social.
The Enlightenment rejected superstition and religiously inspired fear in favour of a rationalistic and optimistic view of the world in which individuals were basically reasonable and personal interests tended to coincide with those of society. Some thinkers were atheists, but more were drawn to various forms of deism, conceiving God too as a reasonable entity, not a vengeful and angry patriarch. The more extreme rationalists, like Julien de La Mettrie, the author of L’homme Machine (1747), believed that even humans could be explained as a kind of clockwork.
This reductive model provoked reactions even among fellow materialists such as Denis Diderot. But the artists and poets we associate with the romantic movement rejected the proposition that human beings are inherently rational, let alone that they are mere machines that can be set and programmed in a predictable manner. They were fascinated by the dark universe of the irrational and the ineffable within human experience, from moods and memories and dreams to sexual passion, intoxication, drug addiction and madness.
It was romanticism too that rediscovered the Middle Ages and the beauty of its architecture, long dismissed as ugly and barbaric. Goethe was one of the first to rediscover the gothic, standing before the Cathedral of Strasbourg, which he saw in 1770 and celebrated in Von Deutsche Baukunst (1773). As the very title of this work suggests — actually wrong since gothic is originally French — romanticism was also responsible for articulating the modern anthropological concept of culture, especially in the writings of Goethe’s friend Herder.
It is to the Enlightenment that we owe ideas like universal rights, while romanticism emphasised the distinct sets of values which different peoples have formed for themselves in the course of living together for centuries in particular places. We still value cultural uniqueness and we regret the way that the whole world is turning into a post-cultural consumer society, and yet from Nazism to the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia or tribal butchery in Third World countries, we can see the damage that can arise from an intoxication with cultural identity.
The rediscovery of the Middle Ages brought about one of the most remarkable literary revivals in history, that of Dante, who was first translated into English at the end of the 18th century and has since been retranslated so often that the critical bibliography of English versions published half a century ago already ran to two volumes. Dante’s work, virtually unknown to the Enlightenment except to readers of Giambattista Vico, now became a central inspiration for William Blake, Delacroix, Rodin, TS Eliot and many others.
Shakespeare also benefited from the romantic rediscovery of work that did not appear to conform to rational rules. ST Coleridge, in lectures on Shakespeare delivered between 1810 and 1820, advanced new aesthetic criteria, based on the concepts of imagination and organic form, and these ideas were taken up by French romantics too, who began to promote Shakespeare in opposition to their own rule-based classical theatre. In Germany, meanwhile, Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare was an integral part of the romantic revival of the German language itself.
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In art, Coleridge’s idea of the organic is particularly useful when we look at the landscapes of John Constable. Constable’s work is absorbed in the shapes of things that have been formed over time through natural processes. He loved the shapes of trees and rocks and the banks of rivers, and the clouds of which he made so many oil studies. He preferred to paint in his landscape in East Anglia, where he knew the environment and its changing moods intimately.
This is not to say that Constable was unaware of the tradition of landscape painting that had preceded him. He was a keen student of Claude among others and the Art Gallery of NSW even has a copy that Constable made of a small Claude painting of a goatherd (1823) that was probably particularly fascinating to Constable because the original was said to have been painted en plein-air; it was made in about 1636 for Giulio Rospigliosi, the future Pope Clement IX, and is in the National Gallery in London. Constable kept the copy until his death in 1837, leaving it to his daughter, Isabel.
It was the Dutch, however, and particularly Jacob van Ruisdael, who helped Constable to a vision of landscape as the portrait of a particular land, expressing the romantic attachment to culture and local tradition, and also provided models for painting a flat, green, wet and cloudy landscape not very different from that of Holland. Constable’s A Boat Passing a Lock (c. 1823-26) in the NGV collection is a beautiful example of a landscape evoking the quality of human life within the all-encompassing living presence of nature, not only in earth and water but in the ever-changing moods of the weather.
If pictures like this, with their luxuriant plant life and waterlogged timbers lining the canal, epitomise a fascination with the organic processes of nature, JMW Turner’s painting expresses another aspect of romantic sensibility, the love of the sublime. The aesthetic of the organic has much in common with the concept of the picturesque, which was articulated by Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, and is particularly important in understanding the great gardens laid out this time — in effect taking the informal English garden even further from the strictly ordered French classical garden.
Earlier in the 18th century, however, the concept of the sublime had been redefined for the modern period by Edmund Burke — later better known as a parliamentarian and statesman — in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). This book was important both in philosophy, for its influence on Immanuel Kant, and in aesthetics and the theory and practice of landscape painting.
Burke contrasted the beautiful, which ultimately makes us feel happy and serene, with the sublime, which is terrifying and yet exhilarating. The vastness of the night sky, the ocean, the desert, icy mountainous wastelands, but also storms, wild fires and other phenomena whose scale and power dwarf us, are examples of the sublime in nature. They represent dangerous, uninhabitable, life-threatening conditions from the human point of view, and yet there is something uplifting about their majesty. Romantic landscapes are full of such subjects and sites.
In Germany, Caspar David Friedrich painted mountains, vast skies, a monk standing on the shore of a sea, ice floes breaking up in the Arctic, and time and again human figures, with their back to us — known in German as Rueckenfiguren — who prompt viewers to take their place in the admiration of the vastness of the spectacle. Perhaps the most famous example is his Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818).
In England, John Martin loved to join terrible events from history or scripture with apocalyptic landscapes, as in The Fall of Babylon (1831), The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852) or his evocation of the end of the world itself, The Great Day of his Wrath (1853). In the US, the sublime was a pervasive theme in Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series (1833-36).
In Australia, themes of sublimity were prominent in several colonial artists, but most importantly in the work of Eugene von Guerard, who combined a sense of grandeur with an exacting concern for scientific accuracy, as we have especially appreciated since Ruth Pullin’s two important exhibitions devoted to the artist’s paintings (2011) and sketchbooks (2018). Encountering the vastness and antiquity of Australian topography was an important part of the imaginative adaptation to a new land.
The sublime had not been unknown to classical landscape, least of all to Claude. But because his art was one of balance and proportion, the sublime had its place in the background, as the horizon of human experience, a reminder of infinite and incomprehensible dimensions beyond the habitable landscape that occupied the foreground and middle ground of the painting. Turner, whose self-portrait has just appeared on Britain’s new £20 notes, was fascinated by Claude and famously gave two paintings made in emulation of Claude to the then new National Gallery on condition that they be hung with two pictures by the master himself — as they are today.
But Turner was increasingly drawn to Claude’s sublime backgrounds, and especially those that end in a rising or setting sun over the water. His most extreme compositions are sometimes reduced to a kind of metaphysical swirl of light, and yet if we look more closely we can see not only that these compositions are made up of light and water, but indeed that these elements, fire and water, are the key to all of his work.
Perhaps the best way to express the contrast between Constable’s and Turner’s visions of nature is through the ancient cosmological model of the four elements. Constable’s world is all earth, water and air: everything is moist land, water and skies full of clouds; Turner’s world almost completely eliminates the element of earth, the things that grow on it, and even the earthy browns and greens of organic nature. His cosmos is made up of the inorganic elements of water, air and fire.
And this observation is not just the key to understanding his most nearly abstract pictures, or even the studies of the burning of Houses of Parliament, reflected in the waters of the Thames. It also helps us to understand such famous paintings as The Fighting Temeraire (1838) or Rain, Steam and Speed (1844).
In the first of these, against a dramatic and also symbolic marine sunset, a grand old man-o’-war of the time of Trafalgar is being taken away to be broken up, its massive bulk now towed across the water by a modern steam tugboat. The picture is full of pathos, and yet there is more to it than that.
Turner’s intuition is even more clearly expressed in Rain, Steam and Speed, whose tone is celebratory rather than elegiac. Here a steam train races across a newly built bridge in a dawn mist that obliterates all the banality of the immediate environment: but what is it about the train that fascinates him? It is that its power comes from the interaction of his two favourite elements, water and fire. The steam engine had contrived to unlock the sublime power of nature; a century later atomic power would inspire a similar sense of awe and wonder.