Writing on the Wall (27 page)

Despite Tolstoy’s dislike of Shakespeare, there is much that is Shakespearean in his sense of Nature, including the importance he assigns to the truth-finding faculty of common sense—in Shakespeare usually embodied in women, fools (“naturals”) and bystanders. Yet for Tolstoy, passion however destructive, is always superior to tepid good conduct, and this no doubt is a prejudice of epic and dramatic authors. In Stendhal, passion, the capacity to feel it, is the great and unique virtue: Madame de Renal, the Sanseverina, Count Mosca’s jealousy. It is the untainted font or spring that gushes up from elemental sources, like the libertarian energy released by the arrival of Napoleon’s army in Milan. In a way this is surprising, for Stendhal is one of the most worldly of novelists, interested in power and the dynamics of social leverage. Julien Sorel, in
Le Rouge et le Noir,
is a bundle of contradictions. The son of a carpenter in the Savoyard region of the River Doubs (his career seems a parody of Our Lord’s, down to his martyrdom and burial in a marble-garnished grotto, mourned by two weeping women and a faithful disciple), he is a breath of mountain air in the salons and drawing-rooms of the Restoration. At the same time, this priest-educated child of Nature is handicapped by an inability to feel; he cannot respond appropriately to the “supreme moments” of passion offered him in all genuineness by Madame de Renal. Whether the inability to feel what you are
supposed
to feel is natural or unnatural is hard to decide with Stendhal, who probably did not know himself. Julien’s malady is in part attributed to the choking-off of the energies of the Revolution by the “black” hand of reaction; the same point is made in
La Chartreuse de Parme,
where Fabrice, a “natural child,” a byblow of the French Revolutionary armies, a spontaneous being who
can
feel, is walled up in the prison of a tower, like a bird in an aviary.

Sudden tonelessness of feeling, a sort of psychic frigidity, is related, in Julien, to social ambition; as a “new man,” he is worried about how he should be
behaving,
and Nature in a careerist milieu is not a very reliable prompter. That frigidity and self-watchfulness are found repeatedly in the nineteenth-century novel: in Emma Bovary, Frédéric Moreau, Dickens’ Pip, whose great expectations have stunted the lively natural boy brought up in the country “by hand.” Tolstoy and George Eliot noticed the phenomenon, which they connected with intellectual and bureaucratic activity (Mr. Casaubon, Count Karenin) and which, peculiarly enough, was accompanied in the sufferer by a sense of immense solitude, as though estrangement from Nature and total immersion in it, as in the case of the Ancient Mariner, could produce the same effect.

Most of the best authors of our own time have advocated, in one way or another, a return to Nature or a radical simplification of society; D. H. Lawrence, Orwell, Mailer, Solzhenitsyn might all be classed as cranks or drop-outs. Faulkner, when in the city, insisted on styling himself a “farmer.” At the same time the worst political movements have at least one plank in their platforms advocating the restoration of something natural, whether it is the right to carry weapons (“Register Communists, not guns”) or the right to untampered-with drinking water (“Stop fluoridization”). The back-to-Nature impulse—natural foods, natural farming, freedom from state interference—is probably felt in equal measure by long-haired hippies in a desert community and members of the John Birch Society. Moreover, the logic of this impulse is generally antisocial and defiant of the majority. A return to Nature implies not merely a rejection of the mechanics of modern life but an actual conviction of being poisoned by their effluvia, whether identified as smog or the mass media or doctored H
₂
0 from a state reservoir. A desire to burrow in the ground, below the contamination level, is seen in the vocabulary of radical youth, with their so-called underground press, and in the stockpiled shelters of the Minute Men.

When we are conscious of a loss of Nature in our lives, we are conscious, most of all, of a loss of solitude. If we complain about the disfigurement of the countryside and the rash of ugly houses that have broken out like a skin disease on the face of Nature everywhere, we are not only appalled by the wholesale destruction of scenery but by the sense of invasion this gives us—where can a man hide himself? The Romantic poet brooding over a maelstrom, the Solitary Reaper, “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”—such images already (the contrary of
Robinson Crusoe)
identify the human footprint with pollution.

A man in Nature, truly so, is a man alone, plowing a furrow, climbing a mast, tracking an animal. Or if the man is not alone literally but participating in a group action, such as reaping or hauling in a fish net, he can still be “at one” with Nature, because the rhythm of the bodies makes them work as a single body—a human implement. An
awareness
of being “at one” with Nature, however, itself begins to constitute an intrusion. That is, two fishermen pulling in a net on the seashore appear natural, but two poets brooding side by side on the same strand would be ridiculous—one solitude too many.

At this point a definition is called for. What are the criteria by which we can recognize Nature? First of all, everyone would agree that a pool in a forest was Nature while a goldfish bowl was not. Second, if Tolstoy was right (and I believe he was), Nature is antithetical to Society but not to civilization. The works of man—agriculture—are so woven into the primal fabric as to be a second nature. This is plain even to the most insensitive tourist in an “old” country like Tuscany where windbreaks and olives and grapevines seem inseparable from the geological pattern of peaks and valleys making up the original scenery. The land has been husbanded or married by man. Its mountains have been quarried and mined; its rivers fished and dammed.

Take it visually. A weir in a river appears as a natural fact, and so does a watermill or a windmill or a haystack. To the painter’s eye the windmills are a feature of the landscape of Holland, just as though they had grown there. And a thatched peasant’s cottage seems as much a part of Nature as a bird’s nest; indeed, it is a sort of bird’s nest. The painter’s eye does not distinguish between a house designed by a bird for itself and a house designed by a cottager for himself. They are both products of Nature.

The reason is that a peasant’s thatched cottage, like a bird’s nest, was not designed by an individual but by the species. And the form and materials of the dwelling at once identify the species of the occupant, just as with birds: the conical whitewashed
trulli
of Apulia, the bamboo and straw huts of Indochina, the chinked log-cabins of the North...This is only another way of saying that the design is traditional and that local resources—brick, wood, tufa, reeds—have been taken advantage of; in the mountains behind Carrara marble is used for sills. And it is why a palace, like Versailles, despite the aging process, can never be a part of Nature, while a peasant’s house can, even if it is not very old. Versailles was a rhetorical vehicle for self-expression of a series of kings. People often wonder why modern houses should stand out as eyesores in the country though not in the city. This is because in modern design every house is conceived palatially,
i.e.,
as a manifesto of the personality of the owner or the ideas of the architect who drew the plans for it. It makes no difference whether these “palaces” are the result of cheap production or not; they are no longer the nests of the poor.

In the same way, for the painter a castle can be an intrinsic part of Nature, for real castles are simply border forts, designed by a species for protection from its enemies. Like the web of a spider or a flycatcher plant. A castle can be solitary, silhouetted against the sky, while a palace can only be lonely, and often is mythically—the palace of the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast” or a tycoon’s palace on Fifth Avenue. A cottage on the Polish plain can be solitary, behind its dense paling of lilacs and raspberry bushes, while a ranch house can only be lonely, even if its next-door neighbor is only fifty feet away or whatever the zoning law allows. The horror of modern ranch houses or of modern colonial cottages is the stench of loneliness they give off.

The question of ruins is interesting. It is probable that if Versailles were to go to rack and ruin, be invaded by nettles and wild flowers, it could be viewed as a natural spectacle, less moving than a ruined abbey or temple, more perhaps like a shipwreck. The taste for ruins, a Romantic symptom, became epidemic in nineteenth-century verse and fiction (“Tintern Abbey,” “Ozymandias,” the eerie scene at Stonehenge at the end of
Jude the Obscure,
the Roman amphitheatre in
The Mayor of Casterbridge,
Daisy Miller in the Colosseum); the wreck of great undertakings symbolized the vanity of human wishes and the final word spoken by Nature. To evoke such sentiments, the dimensions of the ruin seem to be important. A derelict hut is merely unsightly and testifies less to the awesome powers of Nature than to the neglect or misery of the owner. It is customary to muse on the amount of labor invested (the Pyramids) by anonymous, insect-like men. Abandoned quarries, of which there must have been a great number, and mine-shafts overgrown with grass play a melancholy part in English nineteenth-century fiction and verse: Stephen Blackpool, Dickens’ pariah weaver, meets his end by falling into the Old Hell Shaft in the country near Cokestown; the deserted stone-pits filled with water by the house of that other pariah weaver, Silas Marner, yield up a robber’s skeleton and Silas’ money-bags, and at those same stone-pits, in wintertime, a woman has frozen to death.

Abandoned, deserted, overgrown—the test of Nature’s presence is some vivid indication of man’s defeat, a test not met, say, by a junkyard or by beer cans floating on the sea. Nature is present if a man can feel himself solitary in the spot he is, alone in the world which is nevertheless alive with his fellow-creatures, insects and animals, fish and fowl. What we receive from Nature and the consolation she is supposed to offer us is the sense of being in the presence of something greater than ourselves—larger, more perduring, grander. The immemorial oaks. And though immense vistas, mountain peaks, and the “peaks” of achievement represented by the grandiose columns of defunct edifices can lift or depress the spirits by measuring the diminutiveness of man, smallness in the sentient world, the world of live things, is suggestive of time everlasting, eternal return. The immemorial bees or the dragon-fly, not the immemorial hog.

Nature is not just the circumambient ensemble of non-human life but history on a grand scale—duration. She gives us the awareness of being an instant reverberant in time, clear and distinct as the echoing sound of our footfall in a silent forest or the plash of a stone dropped into a pool. The repetitive cycle of Nature is a promise of eternity. And man in Nature is aware of his singularity in the midst of species; this is solitude. Other men do not disturb him, so long as they blend with Nature in some work-nexus of species-activity; for instance, a row of anglers on a riverbank, each lost in contemplation, the parallel rods making what appears to be a natural and immemorial Sunday pattern.

Yet this sense of being a part of a great Whole (“...the winds and rowling waves, the sun’s unwearied course, The elements and seasons...all declare For what th’eternal maker has ordained The pow’rs of man...” Akenside, “Nature’s Influence on Man,” 1774) has its dark side, especially when pantheism is substituted for the design of the Maker. The permanence of species is made up of individual deaths. Hence the biological cycle, as witnessed by human consciousness, is full of menace, and Nature is seen as the unmoved spectator of human grief. Tennyson, at the age of fifteen, on hearing that Byron was no more, rushed out into the woods and scratched on a rock the words “Byron is dead,” as though the wounds inflicted on the senseless stone could make the Whole cry out with him.

Nineteenth-century literature is extremely ambivalent on the subject of this two-faced spouse embraced instead of religion. On the one hand, rapture, the desire to be an Aeolian harp played on by the winds of the infinite; on the other, fear. Wordsworth’s wonderful account, in
The Prelude,
of the sensation he had as a boy in a purloined rowboat of being chased by a lowering mountain peak (“...behind that craggy Steep...a huge Cliff, As if with voluntary power instinct Uprear’d its head...With measur’d motion, like a living thing, Strode after me.”), the indescribable threats emanating from Egdon Heath, from the moors, mine-pitted too, of
Wuthering Heights,
from the accursed coal country, masked with wheat and beetroot, of
Germinal,
from the red-lit autumnal Thames River, a fishing-ground for cadavers, of
Our Mutual Friend,
from the moonlit Adda, so still and serene, that Renzo crosses in a boat in
I Promessi Sposi.
Not to mention the treacherous sea and the numerous thunderstorms and downpours, like the one in
L’Assommoir
that attacks the wedding-party huddling beneath a bridge on the Seine.

Nature is not friendly to the lonely hero; it is out to “get” him, singling him out, it often appears, with mere idle destructiveness, as a lightning-bolt chooses to strike a particular tree. And it is true that these nineteenth-century heroes have no lightning-rods; they are orphans in the storm. The quality of being unprotected—by education, family, good sense, worldly experience—is particularly evident in the heroes and heroines of Manzoni, Emily Brontë, Conrad, Hardy, Zola, that is, in those authors where Nature, all but personified, is a predominant force. The more the characters are isolated in Nature, the bleaker their lot. Nor is it just a question of poverty. Compare the penniless Fanny in the populous “social” milieu of
Mansfield Park
with the helpless Tess. Or Dickens’ Esther Summerson with the human scarecrow Jude. Or within a single novel, Lucia in
I Promessi,
who has the protection of institutions, however dubious, with the lone Renzo at the mercy of the elements. In Society, virtue, like truth, compels recognition; outside this context, virtue is not even a quality; in Nature, there are only strength and frailty. From a novelistic point of view, there seems to be safety in numbers, and of course in real life this applies to the human species: it is only for men in numbers, the race itself, that Nature can promise survival, or at least that has been so up to now.