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ON BRITISH NATURIST POETRY |
| One
of the questions rarely asked by critics today relates to the changes
undergone by naturist literature lately. In The Concept of Nature
in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, Joseph Warren Beach remarks
that the very name and concept of nature are absent from twentieth-century
poetry, if we look at this poetry from the angle of the philosophical
and protoreligious concept of nature in the eighteenth century. That concept, that religion of nature was, broadly, based on Newton’s idea of the domination of one single law in everything around us—the law of gravitation. In that concept, which stressed order in nature, people, whose Christianity was wearing away, could find new ‘evidence’ of God’s existence and thus some remnant of religious emotion. This relative comfort was going to be shattered by two new developments. One was the rise of the nineteenth-century geology with its evidence of catastrophes which had led to the disappearance of whole species, and the other one was Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the mindless force governing the evolution of species. The effect of these developments in literature was a decline of nature poetry and nature literature, for that matter. The Anglo-American writers’ attitudes to post-Darwinian nature ranged between one of optimism (Swinburne) and one of pessimism (Hardy), both anthropomorphic still, before they found a prolific focus in a new concept, that of the mindlessness of nature, of nature’s non-human otherness. Looked at from another angle, this conceptual evolution is fairly accountable for in the sphere of the novel, in particular. But not exclusively. The nineteenth-century novel had set itself to only report things as they were. By the end of the century, writers such as Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, the Brontës, J. Austen, Dickens, G. Eliot had exhausted the basic critique of industrial and bourgeois life, without any bright perspectives for the individual or for bourgeois society being brought into however distant sight. Theories of social change (Marxism, socialism, anarchism) were still far from having practical relevance, while social utopias, such as W. Morris’s or J. Ruskin’s were rather artificial and beyond what ordinary people could clearly comprehend. A new type of utopia was needed, one founded upon something already present ontologically in nature, upon the resuscitated authority of human and physical nature. Charles Darwin, with his work The Voyage of the Beagle, was the support on which naturism was built. John Alcorn offers a working definition of the word. He considers the naturist world as “a world of physical organism where biology replaces theology as the source of psychic health and moral authority.”1 In that world, the naturist, following Darwin, shows “man as part of an animal continuum.”2 Man’s instincts are praised as able to ensure man’s happiness, while the life of the mind stirs little interest; so do abstractions. The conventional morality, dogma, or ethic of the commercial society are rejected. Sexual liberation becomes a constant topic. Formally, the naturist novelists built loose plot structures around elaborate landscape descriptions achieved by means of the moving camera effect of cinematographic art. The term “naturist” is an appropriate one for an aesthetic attitude which reflects a single basic insight about human experience displayed by writers sometimes labelled “late Romantics,” “primitivists” (especially W. H. Hudson, H. M. Tomlinson, D. H. Lawrence), “naturalists,” “social realists,” “evolutionary utopians,” “liberal humanists” (S. Butler, E. M. Forster). The predominant preoccupation of the twentieth-century philosophers with such concepts as “duration” (Bergson), “event” (Whitehead), “mind” (Dewey), “absurd” (Camus), “existence” (Heidegger) relates in each instance to one dimension of experience which clearly definite ideas fail to grasp. This quality of concreteness is abundantly present in the writings of Thomas Hardy, particularly in his novels. The topography of Wessex, revealed to the reader by means of a detailed map of the area, first offered at the front of Far From the Madding Crowd, and later through the sensuous immediacy of his landscape, its vegetation, teeming with insect and animal life, the physical attitudes of its human inhabitants, are the prevailing ingredients for Hardy’s fiction. The renewed attention Hardy pays to nature confers upon it an aesthetic value judged on its own terms relying on intensity, proportion, harmony, purity of look and spirit, own subconscious consciousness, sublimity, modernity, not necessarily “natural beauty.” Here are two extracts: 1.
… the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath... 2.
The grassy margin of the bank, and the nearest hedgerow boughs,
were powdered by the dust that had been stirred over them by hasty
vehicles, the same dust as it lay on the road deadening their footfalls
like a carpet; and this, with the aforesaid total absence of conversation,
allowed every extraneous sound to be heard. His
writings are important for the generations of writers after him,
including those of the twentieth century, less for his ideas, opinions
and attitudes, than for the impression they give. “Marvellous”
he repeated, looking up at me. “Look! The beauty - but that
is nothing - look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile!
And so strong! And so exact! This is nature - the balance of colossal
forces. Every star is so - and every blade of grass stands so -
and the mighty kosmos in perfect equilibrium produces - this. This
wonder; this masterpiece of Nature - the great artist”. ‘
“Never heard an entomologist go on like this”, I observed,
cheerfully. “Masterpiece! And what of man?” Stein,
we remember, is the one who can give an answer to the question “How
live?”: “The way is to the destructive element submit
yourself, and with the exertion of your hands and feet in the water
make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me—how
to be?”6 The scenery of Nepenthe. It got on his nerves; it unstrung him. Does that surprise you too? Do you feel its effect upon yourself? The bland winds, the sea shining in velvety depth as though filled with some electric fluid, the riot of vegetation, these extravagant cliffs, that change of colour with every hour of the day? Look at that peak yonder—is it not almost transparent, like some crystal of amethyst? This coast-line alone—the sheer effrontery of its mineral charm—might affect some natures to such an extent as to dislocate their stability. Northern winds might seem to become fluid here, impressionable, unstable, unbalanced—what you please. There is something in the brightness of this spot which decomposes the old particles and arranges them into fresh and unexpected patterns. That is what people mean when they say that they “discover themselves” here. You discover a mechanism, you know, when you take it to pieces. You catch my meaning?7 Or D. H. Lawrence with purely physical sensing and knowing in Women in Love: ...
the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive
happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge
in one sort, mindless, progressive knowledge through the senses.
Knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in
disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have,
which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution.
This was why her face looked like a beetle’s: this was why
the Egyptians worshipped the ball-rolling scarab: because of the
principle of knowledge in dissolution and corruption.8 Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of those strange white wonderful demons from the North, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow? 9 But
the renewed attention to nature had come from the Romantic poets,
particularly from Wordsworth’s nature worship. Wordsworth’s
response to nature remains within the epistemological world as long
as it derives ideas and feelings from his observation of a natural
setting and builds a false appearance to it. For Wordsworth nature
is ruled by a transcendental order which throws the elements of
nature and the mind of man together. I
heard a thousand blended notes To
her fair works did Nature link For Wordsworth, in spite of all the beauty and joy of nature - whose items the poet capitalises - man cannot avoid acquiring a “philosophic mind” on sensing his mortality, as in “Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”: And
O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves Like Wordsworth, Hardy too, uses a natural setting as a source of thoughts about man and of deep emotion. An example of this kind is “The Prospect” (1912), where the cold end of the year and of vegetal nature foretells man’s own mortality without any comment from the speaker: The
twigs of a birch imprint the December sky There
are, not too frequent indeed, occasions when Hardy shows man as
not emotionally affected by nature, when he is not committed to
the “pathetic fallacy,” as Ruskin called it. Speaking
about the fallacy of false appearance in poetry, John Ruskin finds
it to be of two kinds: “the fallacy of wilful fancy, which
involves no real expectation that it will be believed” and
“a fallacy caused by the excited state of feelings, making
us, for the time, more or less irrational.”13 Analysing the
latter, Ruskin says that all violent feelings have the same effect
of creating a state of mind which attributes to a thing the characteristics
of a living creature: “they produce in us a falseness in all
our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterise
as the ‘pathetic fallacy.’”14 He adds that only
the second order of poets delight in this fallacy, while “the
greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness”15
and that “the pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as
it is pathetic”, that is as long as the distortion operated
has psychological validity, as long as it is appropriate to the
observer’s true emotion, and “feeble so far as it is
fallacious.”16 For him “the dominion of Truth is entire,
over this, as over every other natural and just state of the human
mind.”17 The best poetry then will try to oppose, or at least
appear to do so, the pathetic fallacy, to go beyond the nineteenth-century
poets’ view of a life in nature different from but compatible
with man’s, and reach the view of “an alien, even an
unfeeling existence”18 in nature. When
the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, If
it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink, If,
when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the
door, What
the speaker expects to happen when he is gone is the mere recognition
of his having noticed the things, of his having existed there as
part of the scene. His sense of life as going on and on, unperturbed,
subject only to the all-encompassing will of Nature, while including
and transcending man’s frail endeavours and initiatives, gives
him the strength to live, indifferent to whether he is in harmony
with Nature or not. At
once a voice arose among An
aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small. So
little cause for carolings The
world of the bird, his knowledge or, rather, wisdom, is not ‘at
one’ with any man’s; it is incomprehensible but hopefully
superior. As
the waters roll An explicit moral of many animal poems written at about that time is offered, not too poetically, at the end: And
my heart accused itself The
apparent separation of the two worlds: man’s, on the one side,
and the water element’s with the fish belonging in it, on
the other side, is not an isolation, not an alienation, but a recognition
and a granting of self-identity to the alien element, resulting
from the disantropomorphising attitude of the poet in his rating
of forms of existence, in defiance of any chain-of-being status. A
snake came to my water trough The speaker grants the snake, this “someone”, equal status to his own: Someone
was before me at my water-trough, The snake is the son of the earth. He contains within himself the heat of a tropical area (Sicily) on a hot July day and also the energy of a volcano (Etna) in full activity: He...
flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, The snake is described in all his physical immediacy. His slow movements, his self-containment and his mystery lend him an aura of majesty, of Godlikeness: He
drank enough The speaker wavers between two opposing attitudes. One comes from the ‘voices’ of his social consciousness, resulting from his education, which urges him to kill the animal, as gold snakes are considered venomous in Sicily. The other one comes from a somewhat guilty unconscious liking for the snake, a liking which has to be ‘confessed’: But
must I confess how I liked him, And
depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, He weighs his attitude, his unknowing inclination to awe before the snake:
The speaker’s gesture of throwing a log at the water-trough is prompted by the ‘horror’ and ‘protest’ against the snake’s withdrawal into the “horrid black hole” at which he “stared with fascination”, though. Yet it is a gesture reminiscent of ordinary man’s, prompted by his education, one which he regretted immediately as being “mean”: And
immediately I regretted it If Lawrence’s fish had a different God from man’s, belonging to another order of existence, his snake is superior to the speaker. The latter sees him as “a king in exile,” deserving to regain his crown, as “one of the lords of life.” He admits his “pettiness” in front of this god of our submerged unconscious and libidinal life32: And I wished he would come back, my snake. For
he seemed to me again like a king, And
so, I missed my chance with one of the lords The
snake is given symbolic significance by Lawrence by both the quality
of the language used in describing his appearance and movements
and by the conflict he induces in the speaker. The language used
helps the reader to recognise at the end that the snake is “one
of the lords of life,” not life in general, not even the best
aspect of life, possibly, since we cannot avoid considering the
traditional symbolic associations of the snake with evil or the
devil. The conflict produced in the speaker has to be taken as a
whole to contribute to the symbolic significance and to qualify
the snake as both positive and threatening. In
the beginning and
remembering that the snake is a “god,” we grasp Lawrence’s
dialectic which “takes us over from water to animals to gods.”34
Pursuing one of his favourite themes, the “universal analogy” and its incommunicability,37 D. Thomas, a primitivistic but far from primitive poet, sees himself as silently, subconsciously communing with the natural elements, with all forms of physical being (plant, water, wind) by means of the same “governing” life force in “The Force That Through the Green Fuse” (1934): The
force that through the green fuse drives the flower The
force that drives the water through the rocks The
hand that whirls the water in the pool We
see the life force exploding all living things into birth, maturity,
death, each stage implying all the others. The impersonal physical
force that “drives the water through the rocks” is identical
to the one that drives the speaker’s blood. But it also constitutes
a death trap represented by whirlpools, quicksand, windstorms. The
lips of time leech to the fountain head: ‘The
dumbness’ of the speaker makes it impossible to tell “the
universal secret of destruction” or his dream that “time
has ticked a heaven round the stars” and in this way, with
Thomas’s modern turn, of lost certainties in the universe.
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