![]() ![]() Nonetheless, the division seems to persist. ![]() Wordsworth’s own relationship with geology, for example, is intriguing, fluctuating, and not at all as prejudiced as popular views might have held-as John Wyatt’s study Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge 1995) demonstrates. The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulĤHowever, the generalisation about Romanticism’s sustaining that split between men of Science and men of Letters is not one that stands up to close examination. The anchor of purest thoughts, the nurse, Of eye, and ear, well pleased to recognize William Wordsworth expressed this in his poem "Tintern Abbey", published in Lyrical Ballads (1798):Īnd mountains and of all the mighty world Romanticism countered that version by constituting nature as a composite of material forms shaped by and instinct with spiritual meaning, impressing itself on the soul by its aesthetic beauty and associative emotional influences, so as to lift the spirit and powerfully affect for good the moral life of humanity. Why should that be a tension? The rupture between these two became most acute in the Romantic period in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Europe indeed it has been argued that Romanticism produced the rupture in reaction against Enlightenment science and its increasingly materialistic account of the natural world. Gilpin, Ruskin and Turner are involved in a triangular conversation.ĢI should add that though this paper has an historical focus throughout, the larger predicament that it probes-our own complex responses to mountains-is one that I am sure is a shared preoccupation today.ģBefore I come to discuss these particular figures, I just want to return to the tension I outlined a moment ago, between the objective visual and geological truth of mountains and the subjective, mental and emotional experience of mountain scenery. It comes in Modern Painters, his monumental defence of Turner’s art against all those traditionalists whose ideas of landscape were so influenced by the Picturesque conventions established two generations earlier. ![]() My title was suggested by a nearly similar phrase used by Ruskin-"the truth of mental vision" (Modern Painters IV, Ch2, § 11). The other two are the art critic John Ruskin and the artist J.M.W. The first of these is the master of the Picturesque in late eighteenth-century England, William Gilpin. I shall focus particularly on three writers and artists some two centuries ago in England, who were strongly opinionated about-indeed often passionate about-the representation of mountains by landscape artists, and whose work was very influential. It is a familiar tension to painters and photographers. Can mountains have a "truth", let alone an "emotional truth"? In what sense can any emotion be said to be "true"? The phrase is one I want to apply to an exploration of some attempts to represent mountains in English prose and painting, where the writer or painter tries to reconcile the objective, visual, geological truth of mountains with the subjective, mental, emotional experience of mountain scenery. 1Let me begin by explaining my title: "The emotional truth of mountains." The phrase has a number of internal contradictions or complexities produced by abruptly compressing psychological, philosophical and geological components into close relationship. ![]()
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