| 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...
The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet
the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness
as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity
in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black
fraternisation towards which each advanced half-way...
Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing
majestic without serenity, impressive without showiness, emphatic
in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity.
... Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to
a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the
sort of beauty called charming and fair.
... Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than
by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often
arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon
was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the
wind its... friend.3
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.
For a long time there was none, beyond the voice of a weak bird
singing a trite old evening song that might doubtless have been
heard on the hill at the same hour, and with the self-same trills,
quavers, and breves, at any sunset of that season for centuries
untold. But as they approached the village, sundry distant shouts
and rattles reached their ears from some elevated spot in that direction,
as yet screened from view by foliage.4
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.
Thomas Hardy displays an exuberant awareness of the earth, of the
landscape, of the world of nature, which the naturists were to inherit.
Here is Joseph Conrad with Stein’s butterfly in Lord Jim:
“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?”
“Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece”, he said,
keeping his eyes fixed on the glass case. “Perhaps the artist
was a little mad. Eh? What do you think? Sometimes it seems to me
that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place
for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should
he run about here and there making a great noise about himself,
talking about the stars, disturbing about the blades of grass?...”5
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
And here is Norman Douglas with his introduction of the self-contained,
mightier-than-man nature of Nepenthe in South Wind:
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
or:
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.
In “Lines Written in Early Spring,” for example, Wordsworth
laments over the decay of man by comparison with nature, although
so much linked to it. The pleasant sights of nature urge the speaker
to pity man, whose actions have ruined his own condition of late,
going against “Nature’s holy plan”:
I
heard a thousand blended notes
While in a grave I sate reclined
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To
her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran.
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.10
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
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they:
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet.
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That has kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race has been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears.
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.11
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
Like branching veins upon a thin old hand;
I think of summer-time, yes, of lost July,
When she was beneath them, greeting a gathered band
Of the urban and bland.
Iced airs wheeze through the skeletoned hedge from the north.
With steady snores, and a mumbling that threatens snow,
And skaters pass; and merry boys go forth
To look for slides. But well, well I do know
Whither I would go!12
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.
In one of the “most purely beautiful of all his poems,”19
entitled “Afterwards,” Hardy avoids the pathetic fallacy.
Although the speaker realises the harshness of life and the wearing
off of the best part of it, the poet reveals a patience and a silent
strength only an animal can display. He is the countryman for whom
the countryside is not beautiful but just there for him to immerse
in and, unknowingly enough, to enjoy its sights and sounds:
When
the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad grass leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?
If
it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
‘To him this must have been a familiar sight’.
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should
come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone’.
If,
when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the
door,
Watching the full-starred heavens, that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’!20
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.
It is clear enough, from this poem at least, that Hardy’s
poetic vision stands in between Wordsworth’s, which is based
on a distance between object (the landscape) and subject (the poet)
and the naturist’s, which tries to avoid this separation by
placing the personal subject within the impersonal world of Nature,
to “obliterate the observing, thinking, feeling first-person,
the Wordsworthian ‘I’.”21
Darwin’s view of the world was basically melioristic. The
evolution of man involving his continual rise through the cumulative
effect of small variations towards his present condition, not a
perpetuation of a condition given him at the beginning, represented
a hope for a better world. In Darwin’s view, man’s advance
was to be based on the hidden geological truth of various places,
of the environment which provided the wisdom to survive. Hardy too,
imagines expressions of hope to come from no human or superhuman
agency, including the speaker himself, but from the “ecstatic
sound” of bird-song he hears in “The Darkling Thrush”:
At
once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy, illimited.
An
aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small.
In blust-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So
little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around.
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.22
The
world of the bird, his knowledge or, rather, wisdom, is not ‘at
one’ with any man’s; it is incomprehensible but hopefully
superior.
D. H. Lawrence wrote what could be called animal poems, in which
he set the pattern and style for the new naturist poem. In “Fish,”
we are looking at an alien life (the fish) in an alien element (water)
with which he is in perfect oneness, devoid of knowledge, self,
in pure unconsciousness:
As
the waters roll
Roll you.
The waters wash.
You wash in oneness
And never emerge,
Never know
Never grasp
Your life a shine of sensation along your sides,
You lie only with the waters
One touch.23
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
Thinking: I am not the measure of creation.
This is beyond me, this fish
His God stands outside my God.24
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.
The same artistic tendency to disantropomorphisation is obvious
in the best-known animal poem, D. H. Lawrence’s “Snake”
(1932). The speaker and the snake meet at the trough, where they
have come for water, and the speaker, the second comer, must observe
the snake’s right of priority of arrival over the right of
property:
A
snake came to my water trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with the pitcher
And must wait, must wait and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.25
The
speaker grants the snake, this “someone”, equal status
to his own:
Someone
was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.26
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,
And stopped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.27
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
And lifted its head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air.
And slowly turned his head.
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.28
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,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my
water trough,
And
depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth? 29
He
weighs his attitude, his unknowing inclination to awe before the
snake:
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.30
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
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.31
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,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And
so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.33
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.
Analysing the language, we notice a shift from the presence of two
separate realms—the man and the snake—towards a communion
of the two orders: the snake “reached down,” “sipped
at the water,” “departed thankless,” “seemed
to lick his lips.” The anthropomorphic image is rounded off
when the speaker says that “Someone was before me at my water-trough,”
to consecrate an equation of snake and man. But later the snake
becomes superior to the speaker, being described “like a god”
and “like a king in exile,” “a lord of life,”
to be worshipped and appreciated as “my snake.”
The conflict in the speaker is between what the “voice”
of his “education” and other voices in him tell him:
to “kill” the snake, to “break him,” to
“finish him off,” and the truth that he likes the snake.
The voices speak of his being society-conditioned to repress all
that springs from “the burning bowels of the earth.”
We can assume therefore the inner conflict of the speaker to be
between his “human education” and what society has taught
him (to fear the snake and drive him back into “the secret
earth”) and his affection for the earthly or elemental desires
and emotions, hidden beneath the surface, where society would like
them to stay, out of convenience. Instead of facing the problem,
the speaker rids himself of it by hastening the snake’s withdrawal.
Lawrence’s description of the snake’s movements into
the “earth-lipped fissure of the wall-front,” at which
he “stared in fascination” is done in clear sexual overtones.
His revulsion at the snake’s movement may be the result of
repression. The psychological threat lying in acceptance of passions
he has been taught to repress is greater than the psychical threat
the snake might pose for the speaker. The latter remains with a
“pettiness” “to atone for,” in Lawrence’s
view.
Another remark is in order here. Noticing that Lawrence ended his
poem Fish by saying
In
the beginning
Jesus was called The Fish
And in the end (,)
and
remembering that the snake is a “god,” we grasp Lawrence’s
dialectic which “takes us over from water to animals to gods.”34
The neo-pantheistic vision of Dylan Thomas accommodated modern ideas
taken from Darwin, Freud and Frazer, combined with a preoccupation
with theology and paradox. In A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire,
of a Child in London, death is seen as the reality of a “return
to the beginning of things,”35 a return to the elements, such
as earth and water, to the all-powerful darkness, to the “bird,
beast and flower” (echoing Lawrence’s volume Birds,
Beasts and Flowers—1932, the poems of which reflect the consciousness
of nonhuman life) which contributed to the making of mankind. An
eternal becoming in nature, a ceaseless life sustained by a biological
and a theological vision is what D. Thomas would like the reader
to consider:
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sack cloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death.36
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
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The
force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax...
The
hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; 38
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.
All mortality reaches out powerful for life force to impregnate
it in an image of universe-wide scale sexual analogy:
The
lips of time leech to the fountain head:
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores, 39
‘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.
Thus, naturist poetry pressed forward into the modern period with
suspicions regarding communication among people, with doubts about
the meaningfulness and relevance of rational discourse, with resistance
of conceptualisation, with ideas about human ‘relatedness’
being grounded in unconscious physical organism.
J. Alcorn brings back to memory the story of the wise monk about
to deliver a discourse in front of his disciples. A bird alighted
on the window-sill and began to sing: “The great hall was
filled with bird-song; the monk and his students listened in silence;
the bird finished its singing and flew away. Thereupon the monk
abruptly dismissed his disciples saying ‘The sermon is over’.”40
The story gracefully illustrates the blessed spirit of the naturists.
Notes:
1. J. Alcorn, The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (London and
Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1977). X.
2. Ibid., X.
3. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (Harmondsworth, Middlessex:
Penguin Books Ltd. 1983), 53-55.
4. Thomas Hardy, The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan London Limited. 1972), 9.
5. Joseph Conrad, 1976, Lord Jim (Harmondsworth, Middlessex: Penguin
Books Ltd. 1976), 158-9.
6. Ibid., 163.
7. N. Douglas, South Wind (New York: The Modern Library Inc. 1925),
223.
8. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth, Middlessex: Penguin
Books Ltd. 1971), 285-8.
9. Ibid., 287.
10. D. Wright, The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse (Harmondsworth,
Middlessex: Penguin Books Ltd. 1970), 108-9.
11. Ibid., 138-9.
12. J. Wain (ed.), Selected Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy (London
and Basingstoke: Macmillan London Ltd. 1972), 101.
13. John Ruskin, “Modern Painters” (ch. XII. Of the
Pathetic Fallacy), in A.Cartianu, St. Stoenescu (eds.), Proza eseistica
victoriana. Antologie (Bucuresti: Tipografia Universitatii. 1969),
747-7.
14. Ibid., 747.
15. Ibid., 747.
16. Ibid., 747.
17. Ibid., 760.
18. R. Langbaum, The Modern Spirit. Essays on the Continuity of
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University
Press. 1970), 104.
19. J. Wain, op.cit. (1966), XIV.
20. Ibid., 87.
21. J. Alcorn, op.cit. 4.
22. J. Wain, op.cit. (1972), 20-1.
23. R. Langbaum, op.cit. 114.
24. Ibid., 114.
25. A. W. Allison et al. (eds), The Norton Anthology (New York:
W.W. Norton. 1975), 486.
26. Ibid., 486.
27. Ibid., 486.
28. Ibid., 487.
29. Ibid., 487.
30. Ibid., 487.
31. Ibid., 487.
32. R. Langbaum, op.cit. 115.
33. A. W. Allison et al., op.cit. 488.
34. R. Langbaum, op.cit. 118.
35. C. Brooks, R. P. Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, Inc. 1961), 196.
36. Ibid., 195.
37. M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets. A Critical Introduction (London,
Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. 1969), 204.
38. C. Brooks, R. P. Warren, op.cit. 385.
39. Ibid., 386.
40. J. Alcorn, op.cit. 123.
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