The fashion for landscape painting that developed in 18th century England, and which was also expressed in the poetry of Wordsworth, tells us something about the psychology of the intelligentsia at that time. The Romantics longed for wild, untamed landscapes that breathed the spirit of freedom. This idea is at least as old as the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his notion of the noble savage. Those who followed Rousseau thought of the countryside as pure and uncorrupted by the evils of town and court life. This in turn was a reaction against a decadent aristocratic society that was too sophisticated, too artificial, and too unnatural. Rousseau put forward the idea of the return to a natural state, where man's natural instincts would be free to develop.
Rousseau's ideas formed part of the general ferment among the French intelligentsia before the Revolution. Here the love of nature was really a code for revolution. These artists wished fervently for a storm that would blow away all the cobwebs and stale, suffocating air. The depiction of stormy weather in landscape paintings contained a subliminal message that stood for the great storm that finally broke out in 1789-93. The wild, untamed forces of nature stood for the revolutionary forces that were to be unleashed to sweep away a decaying social order.
The fashion for landscape painting in England was part of this yearning to return to nature and thus to turn one's back on the evils of capitalism, to return to a purer and more innocent age. This was later expressed in the poetry of William Wordsworth and the school known as the "Lake poets", after the picturesque and unspoilt Lake District in North West England that provided the inspiration for Wordsworth's best poetry. However, as we shall see, the real content of this "nature poetry" underwent a radical change in the course of Wordsworth's lifetime, and the cause of this transformation must be sought, not in nature, but in society and politics.
Despite the frenzied hostility of the English ruling class, the events in France aroused the most enthusiastic support of the foremost artists and intellectuals across the Channel. Literature, which had played so prominent a role in the battle of ideas, could not escape the consequences of its actions.
From his youth, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was infatuated with nature. But in the poetry of the young Wordsworth, nature appears as a wild, uncontrollable force, akin to the forces unleashed by the French Revolution, which he greeted with enthusiasm. In 1790, one year after the storming of the Bastille, the 19-year old Wordsworth went to France, where he gazed in wide-eyed amazement at the spectacle of "human nature being born again". The young Wordsworth carried the British flag on a Jacobin demonstration - a fact that was duly noted by Pitt's secret police.
Perhaps the most remarkable poetic tribute to the French revolution is Wordsworth's famous autobiographical work The Prelude, where we have a vibrant and truthful picture of what a revolution is:
" [...] 'Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated; and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion, filled the walls
Of peaceful houses with unique sounds.
The soil of common life, was, at that time,
Too hot to tread upon."
(The Prelude, ix, 163-9)
The Prelude is Wordsworth's greatest masterpiece. It is at once a celebration of revolution and nature. The two ideas are here so mixed up as to be inseparable. Just as the experience of the elemental forces of nature inspired him in his infancy, so the experiences of the young Wordsworth in revolutionary France burned themselves on his consciousness and gave rise to a powerful spiritual uplift:
"O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For great were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!" (The Prelude, x, 690-4.)