Noble
Savage
Romanticism’s Rejection of the
Enlightenment:
Thomas
Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679)
John
Locke ( 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704)
Anthony
Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
(26 February 1671 – 4 February 1713)
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778)
David
Hume (May [26 April] 1711 – 25 August 1776)
Adam
Smith (1723-1790)
William
Cowper: (26 November 1731 – 25 April
1800)
Archibald
Alison (1757-1839)
Rousseau's
Emile (1762)
Benjamin
Franklin could mock some of its inconsistencies in Remarks Concerning the
Savages of North America (1784)
Ralph
Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882)
Henry
David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862)
Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)
Walt
Whitman (1819–1892)
Chingachgook and Uncas from James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking
Tales (1823)
Nature (1836)
Queequeg from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851)
Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)
Leaves of Grass 1855
George
Perkins Marsh Man and Nature (1864)
Photo
Expedition by William Henry Jackson and artist Thomas Moran into Wyoming’s
Yellowstone (1871)
Rachel
Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are
credited with advancing the global environmental movement.(1962)
In
English, the phrase Noble Savage first appeared in poet Dryden's heroic play,
The Conquest of Granada (1672):
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
The
Enlightenment
We
improve nature by imposing order and reason on it.
The
French formal garden (jardin à la française),
is a style of garden based on this principle.
It seeks to impose order and geometric symmetry on nature. It reached perhaps its fullest flower in the
17th century in the Gardens of Versailles.
The garden was designed by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV[1]. The style, which had it
origins in the formal gardens of renaissance Italy, was widely copied by other
courts of Europe.
http://www.gardenvisit.com/biography/andre_le_notre
Qualities
of the French Formal Garden Style
·
A
geometric plan using the most recent discoveries of perspective and optics.
·
A
terrace overlooking the garden, allowing the visitor to see all at once the
entire garden. As the French landscape architect Olivier de Serres
wrote in 1600, "It is desirable that the gardens should be seen from
above, either from the walls, or from terraces raised above the parterres.[13]
·
All
vegetation is constrained and directed, to demonstrate the mastery of man over
nature.[14] Trees are planted in straight lines, and carefully trimmed, and
their tops are trimmed at a set height.
·
The
residence serves as the central point of the garden, and its central ornament.
No trees are planted close to the house; rather, the house is set apart by low
parterres and trimmed bushes.[15]
·
A
central axis, or perspective, perpendicular to the facade of the house, on the
side opposite the front entrance. The axis extends either all the way to the
horizon (Versailles) or to piece of statuary or architecture (Vaux-le-Vicomte). The axis faces either South (Vaux-le-Vicomte, Meudon) or east-west
(Tuileries, Clagny, Trianon,
Sceaux). The principal axis is composed of a lawn, or
a basin of water, bordered by trees. The principal axis is crossed by one or
more perpendicular perspectives and alleys.
·
The
most elaborate parterres, or planting beds, in the shape of squares, ovals,
circles or scrolls, are placed in a regular and geometric order close to the
house, to complement the architecture and to be seen from above from the
reception rooms of the house.
·
The
parterres near the residence are filled with broderies,
designs created with low boxwood to resemble the patterns of a carpet, and
given a polychrome effect by plantings of flowers, or by colored brick, gravel
or sand.
·
Farther
from the house, the broderies are replaced with
simpler parterres, filled with grass, and often containing fountains or basins
of water. Beyond these, small carefully created groves of trees (), serve as an
intermediary between the formal garden and the masses of trees of the park.
"The perfect place for a stroll, these spaces present alleys, stars,
circles, theaters of greenery, galleries, spaces for balls and for
festivities."[16]
·
Bodies
of water (canals, basins) serve as mirrors, doubling the size of the house or
the trees.
·
The
garden is animated with pieces of sculpture, usually on mythological themes,
which either underline or punctuate the perspectives, and mark the
intersections of the axes, and by moving water in the form of cascades and
fountains
In
the middle of the 18th century, the popularity of the garden à la français began to wane.
In its place we see the development of new “English Garden.” The English
garden presented an idealized view of nature drawing upon landscape paintings
such as those by Claude Lorraine[2] and Nicolas Poussin[3]. It was also influences by classic Chinese
gardens which had recently been described by European travelers. The Chinese style rejected symmetry in favor
of more “natural” and rustic scenes. By
this time English and French parks and estates had the traditional à la française style closest to the house, but the rest of the estate
was transformed into the new style, called variously jardin
a l'anglaise (the English garden), "anglo-chinois", exotiques,
or "pittoresques". This was very much in
keeping with the Romantic sentiments of the day; the gardens were inspired not
by geometric order and architecture but by painting, literature and romantic
philosophy.
Third Earl of
Shaftesbury (1671 1713)
Offered
diffuse and unsystematic views on the nature a beauty and moral
experience. He held a Platonic theory of
beauty. While not logically incompatible
with a Enlightenment Thinking or a “theory of taste”, few if any of these
empirically inclined thinkers accepted the Platonic doctrine of the Forms. Shaftesbury claimed that the object of a
judgment of beauty is the Platonic Form of Beauty. He propounded theory of a single “faculty of
taste.” This faculty, he claimed, can
function either as a moral sense for making moral judgments or as a sense of
beauty (making aesthetic judgments). The
sense of beauty has a cognitive function , that is, it is a mode of coming to know something
true about the objective world. This
contrasts with Francis Hutcheson, et alia, who claim that the faculty of taste,
and thus the sense of beauty. is a non-cognitive, reactive faculty that produces
the feeling of pleasure. While Shaftesbury
does not deny that feeling plays a role in judgments of beauty, they are not
the whole if it.
He
also is among the first in this era to focus attention on the sublime, The sublime
is related to his conception of the world as the creation of God. The vastness and incomprehensibility of that
creation could only be described as sublime. (overwhelming in a way that a
charming/beauty is not). Nevertheless,
he tried to maintain a unified theory by classifying the sublime as one kind of
beauty.
Shaftsbury
also introduced the notion of “disinterestedness” to accounts of beauty,
sublime and other “aesthetic” experiences. This concept becomes integral first
to the concept of taste and later to the concept of the aesthetic. He insisted on the significance of
disinterestedness for morality as well. In order for an action to have moral
merit (not simply good consequences), the person acting must be disinterested,
that is, must have solely by selfish motives.
Shaftesbury was reacting to the views Thomas Hobbes. Similarly, when one judges something to be
beautiful, one must be doing so, free from the desire of practical gain. Shaftesbury
additionally contrasts the contemplation of beautiful things in the world of
sense with the desire to possess them.
The contemplation of beautiful things (disinterested attention) and the
desire to possess them (an interested attention) are distinct, though perhaps
not wholly incompatible.
Archibald
Alison (1757-1839)
Alison’s
Essays on the Nature and Principles of
Taste was published 1790. He
proposes a Faculty of Taste (sort of) which abandons the idea of special
internal senses of beauty and the sublime.
Instead he claims that ordinary cognitive and affective faculties (like Edmund
Burke had) and the psychological mechanism of the association of ideas (unlike
Burke) account for aesthetic experiences.
Unlike Francis Hutcheson, claims that the association of ideas (hence
cognitive dimension) is an essential aspect of the faculty of taste. By faculty of taste he meant "that ...
by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is Beautiful or Sublime in the works of
Nature or Art." By
"perceive" Alison means “awareness” (thus, he could speak of
perceiving (feeling) pain), not a cognitive perception.
Association
of Ideas
Taste
is composed of sensibility (emotional response) and imagination (the
association of ideas). Human cognition
is so constituted that certain features of the material world cause them to
experience what he calls the "emotion of taste.” There is an objective condition
that needs be met for any judgment of beauty, according to Allison. The object so judged must be a sign of or expressive
of a
quality of mind. We find art beautiful
because in our enjoyment of art, our mind is brought into communion with the
mind of the artist. Nature, on the other
had we could only find beautiful if we are bought into communion with some mind
or Mind. Thus his psychological theory of
beauty presupposes a theological commitment.
Our observation of beauty in nature is itself evidence of the “mind” of
nature’s Creator. What he suggests is
that it is the Mind of God we commune with in nature. In fact, that we find
nature beautiful at all would itself be evidence for the existence of God. This provides all the more reason to seek the
Divine in Nature.
The
Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class
European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 the 1840s.
It was thought to be an educational rite of passage. Is was primarily
associated with the British nobility and wealthy landed gentry.
The New York Times recently described the
Grand Tour in this way:
Three hundred years ago, wealthy young
Englishmen began taking a post-Oxbridge trek through France and Italy in search
of art, culture and the roots of Western civilization. With nearly unlimited
funds, aristocratic connections and months (or years) to roam, they
commissioned paintings, perfected their language skills and mingled with the
upper crust of the Continent. —Gross, Matt., "Lessons From the Frugal
Grand Tour." New York Times 5 September 2008.
The
primary purpose of the Grand Tour was the education and refinement of the young
aristocrat. In the 18th century 'good taste' mattered. Indeed it was indispensable to demonstrating
one's qualifications as a gentleman.
This required exposure to, command of and the acquisition of fine books,
work of art, music, and even gardens.
The Tour was to provide this education in both to the cultural legacy of
classical antiquity and the Renaissance.
It also provided an opportunity to view specific works of art, to hear
certain music and to acquire notable collectables oneself. A grand tour could last from several months
to several years and was undertaken with an older tutor, whose job it was to
keep the young man out of trouble and mindful of the purpose of the trip..
During
the mid-18th century however, the idea of purely scenic pleasure touring began
to take hold among the English upper class.
There are probably a number of reason for this, but not the least among
them is that travel abroad had become more dangerous, given the political
instabilities in France and elsewhere. William Gilpin's work[4] on the value of “the
picturesque” was a direct challenge to the ideology of the Grand Tour. It suggested that an exploration of rustic, rural
Britain could compete with classically oriented tours of the Continent.[5]
Derived
from the Italian pittoresco, “from a picture,” the
term picturesque defines an object or view worthy of being included in a
picture. The picturesque was formulated into an aesthetic category in late
eighteenth-century Britain, where it was primarily applied to the practices of
landscape painting and garden and park design; in addition, it provided a
conceptual framework with which to view actual landscapes. One of the
earliest theorists of the picturesque, Uvedale Price,
situated the picturesque between the serenely beautiful and the awe-inspiring
sublime. A picturesque view is thought to contain a variety of elements,
curious details, and interesting textures, conveyed in a palette of dark to
light that brings these details to life. In the mid-eighteenth century,
tourists who followed the cult of the picturesque traveled to untamed areas of
the British Isles in pursuit of this visual ideal. The irregular,
anti-classical, gothic ruins became sought after sights. But it must not be
thought that these were mere pleasure trips.
Were they only that, they could not compete with the Grand Tour in terms
of personal growth and development. The
Tours of the Picturesque were thought to compete because, it was alleged, one
could gain comparable personal improvement in terms of virtue and character by viewing
and being enveloped by nature, natural scenes and rustic settings.
God
made the country, and man made the town.[6]
[1785
Cowper[7] Task i. 40] The Task (1785)--'The
Sofa' (Book I, line 749)
This
“back to nature” ideal was not unique to the Romantic Era is had precedents
even in ancient times.
divina natura dedit agros,
ars humana aedificavit urbes,
divine nature gave us the fields, human
art built the cities.
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella (AD 4 – ca.
AD 70) Cf. [Varro De Re Rustica iii. i.]
Or
even more proximately.
“God the first Garden made, & the
first City, Cain”. [1667 A. Cowley in J. Wells Poems 2]
But
we see this now being formalized in the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28
June 1712 – 2 July 1778)
Romanticism’s
Rejection of the Enlightenment (The times, they are a changing.)
Rousseau
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau was a philosopher, novelist, botanist and musician. His views on nature were part of a much
broader body of thought on human life and freedom and were initially conveyed
in two novels that made him famous, Julie,
or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse- 1761)
and
Emile
(1762). He is perhaps most well-known
for his position, similar to Shaftsbury and Hume, was that humans were born
good. He went on to argue that they are
corrupted by the effects of "civilization" which teaches them greed,
calculation and “worldliness.”
Civilization was an urban disease.
It was communion with nature in rural locations that brought peace and
harmony to life:
"It is on the summits of mountains, in the depths of
forests, or desert islands that nature reveals her most potent charms."[8]
In
Rousseau's philosophy, society's negative influence on men centers on its
transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride. Amour
de soi represents the instinctive human desire
for self-preservation, combined with the human power of reason. In contrast, amour-propre is artificial and
encourages man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and
allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others.
In Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences have not been beneficial to
humankind, because they arose not from authentic human needs but rather as a
result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the opportunities they create for
idleness and luxury have contributed to the corruption of man. He proposed that
the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed
individual liberty, and he concluded that material progress had actually
undermined the possibility of true friendship by replacing it with jealousy,
fear, and suspicion.
Rousseau
traces man's social evolution from a primitive state of nature to modern
society. The earliest solitary humans possessed a basic drive for
self-preservation and a natural disposition to compassion or pity. They
differed from animals, however, in their capacity for free will and their
potential perfectibility. As they began to live in groups and form clans they
also began to experience family love, which Rousseau saw as the source of the
greatest happiness known to humanity.
As
long as differences in wealth and status among families were minimal, the first
coming together in groups was accompanied by a fleeting golden age of human
flourishing. The development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and
the division of labour and resulting dependency on
one another, however, led to economic inequality and conflict. As population
pressures forced them to associate more and more closely, they underwent a
psychological transformation: They began to see themselves through the eyes of
others and came to value the good opinion of others as essential to their
self-esteem.
Rousseau
posits that the original, deeply flawed Social Contract (i.e., that of Hobbes),
which led to the modern state, was made at the suggestion of the rich and
powerful, who tricked the general population into surrendering their liberties
to them and instituted inequality as a fundamental feature of human society.
Rousseau's own conception of the Social Contract can be understood as an alternative
to this fraudulent form of association.
In
contrast to the optimistic view of Enlightenment thinkers, for Rousseau, social/
scientific “progress” was in fact pernicious to humanity. Society corrupts men only insofar as the
Social Contract has not de facto succeeded, as we see in contemporary society
as described in the Discourse on
Inequality (1754).
“The passage from the state of nature to the civil state
produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct
in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked.
Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and
right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that
he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before
listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of
some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great,
his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his
feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses
of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be
bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative
animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.”
It
must be counteracted by the cultivation of civic morality and duty. At the end of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have
value in the eyes of others comes to undermine personal integrity and
authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, and hierarchy. In the last
chapter of the Social Contract, Rousseau would ask "What is to be
done?" He answers that now all men can do is to cultivate virtue in
themselves and submit to their lawful rulers. To his readers, however, the
inescapable conclusion was that a new and more equitable Social Contract was
needed.
Rousseau's idealization of rural life was not new. It had existed in Greek and Roman writers
Theocritus, Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, and
Cicero who had advocated the simple life of Arcadia as an antidote to the
pressures of the city. Romans like
modern Europeans with second homes, had country villas for periodic
escape. In Rousseau's time, rural
innocence was also fondly imagined and mimicked at the French Court[9]. Inspired by classical literature and the
paintings of Watteau and Boucher, courtiers dressed as presences acted out
pretty theatricals of arcadian fantasy with their
royal employees at picnics and fete champetre[10].
But Rousseau’s version of Arcadia was different. His writings on nature transformed what had previously
then recreational fancies for the privileged into ontology for every man. In his eyes Nature was a kind of
transcendental, feminized being in whose presence the solitary would find the
nurturing consolations of teacher and a mother.
It was in nature with a capital N that people would realize their true
natures with a lowercase and (Christiansen 1988 96-7)[11]
Rousseau
was a frequent walker who, on one occasion, journeyed from France to Turin via
the Alps on foot, as the poet, Wordsworth, was to do later. Rousseau used his walks as forms of spiritual
exercise in which he cultivated habits of intense reflection. Late in life he wrote:
“My whole life has been little else than along reverie
divided into chapters by my daily walks. (Roussau
1782, 1989:11)
Reverie
was a key word in his philosophical vocabulary that was, he believed, the
mechanism through which he apprehended nature.
After one successful excursion on the island of Saint Pierre in Lake Brienne - a favorite retreat where he spent two months, but
said he could have spent two centuries - he wrote:
Such is the state which I often experienced on the island
of Saint Pierre in my solitary reveries.
Whether I lay in the boat and drifted where the water carried me, or set
by the shore of the stormy lake, or elsewhere, on the banks of the lovely river
or the stream murmuring over the stones. (Rousseau 1782 1989: 88-9)
However
Rousseau's orientation to nature was not all transcendental reverie. He was, after all, a scientist/
botanist. He was also a political
theorist. We find in Rousseau an
idiosyncratic mysticism wedded to a scientific inquisitiveness towards nature. Where the enlightenment had preached reason
and self-control, Rousseau celebrates emotion, feeling and sentiment. Rousseau’s seem to regard nature as a kind of
benign goddess, a goddess that rewarded the solitary pilgrim rather than
worshipers gathered in congress. Whatever
the criticisms made at his time or since, Rousseau’s ideas were immediately
influential in exporting a Religion of Nature that still influences European
and American thought and art. In the
U.S. for example we can see his influences in Ralf Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau and John Muir, passionate literary advocates in philosophical works and
memoirs of their own encounters with nature as well as Ansel
Adams and Walt Whitman.
But
for his ideas to engage the American mind requires that first it develop the conceptual
framework needed to see the beauty in nature.
By the early 1800’s American attitude to nature was still very much an adversarial
one. It had not “conquered” the
wilderness yet still was still very much aware of the fact that this was a job
that still needed to be done. Further,
it did not have the history of landscape paintings which arguably, taught
Europeans how to see nature as beautiful.
Paul
Shepard notes the following in his Man in
the Landscape
Andrew Robertson, an English drawing teacher, wrote about 1835:
The author once took an American gentleman possessing no common power of understanding, and quickness of observation, to an emience commanding one of the most beautiful, varied and extensive views, near London. The whole scene was a garden in cultivation, every field enclosed by hedgerows. As these receded in the distance less and less could be seen of the fields, but the trees could be seen to the extreme distance. "And you call this beautiful?" said my friend. "In America we would consider it one of the most desolate scenes that the mind can conceive. It resembles a country that has never been cleared of wood."
The difficulty was not only that the American Forest was formidable, but that an adequate body of literature and painting did not exist for the cultivation of sensibility to particular places. Scenery is no scenery without the right cultural baggage. There were few Americans who could carry the aesthetic momentum of European art into the American landscape as the instrument of tourism as well as, say, Chateaubriand[12]. He had the virtue and nobility of the wilderness through the eyes of Rousseau and was ready to put Rousseau's art of reverie to work in the wilderness west of Albany, New York. Rousseau had said, "It is on the summits of mountains, in the depths of forests, or desert islands that nature reveals her most potent charms." Chateaubriand went into the primeval forest to see unspoiled savages in their paradise.[13]
The concept of the noble savage has
particular associations with romanticism and with Rousseau's romantic
philosophy[14]
in particular. The opening sentence of Rousseau's Emile (1762), which
has as its subtitle "de l'Éducation ("or,
Concerning Education") is
“Everything
is good in leaving the hands of the Creator of Things; everything degenerates
in the hands of man.”
In the 18th century culture of
"Primitivism" (belief that life was better or more moral during the
early stages of mankind or among primitive peoples and has deteriorated with
the growth of civilization), the noble savage, uncorrupted by the influences of
civilization, was considered more worthy, more authentically noble than the
contemporary product of civilized training. Although the phrase “noble savage”
first appeared in Dryden's The Conquest of Granada (1672), the idealized
picture of "nature's gentleman" was an aspect of eighteenth-century
Sentimentalism (European idea that emphasized feelings and emotions, a physical
appreciation of God, nature, and other people, rather than logic and reason),
among other forces at work.
The attributes of the "noble savage" often included:
�
Living
in harmony with Nature
�
Generosity,
fidelity and selflessness
�
Innocence
�
Inability
to lie
�
Physical
health, disdain of luxury
�
Moral
courage
�
"Natural"
intelligence or innate, untutored wisdom
The
term "noble savage" expresses a concept of humanity as unencumbered
by civilization; the normal essence of an unfettered human. Since the concept
embodies the idea that without the bounds of civilization, humans are
essentially good, the basis for the idea of the "noble savage" lies
in the doctrine of the goodness of humans, expounded in the first decade of the
century by Shaftesbury, who urged a would-be author
“to search for that simplicity of
manners, and innocence of behaviour, which has been
often known among mere savages; ere they were corrupted by our commerce”
(Advice to an Author, Part III.iii).
His
counter to the doctrine of original sin, born amid the optimistic atmosphere of
Renaissance humanism, was taken up by his contemporary, the essayist Richard
Steele, who attributed the corruption of contemporary manners to false
education.
In
the later 18th-century the published voyages of Captain James Cook seemed to
open a glimpse into an unspoiled Edenic culture that
still existed in the unspoiled and un-Christianized South Seas. By 1784 it was
so much an accepted element in current discourse that Benjamin Franklin could
mock some of its inconsistencies in Remarks Concerning the Savages of North
America (1784).
It
should be notes that contemporarly, the concept of “the
noble savage” is seen as a condescending form of patronizing racism. No less stereotypical than that of the “bloodthirsty
savage.” It has been criticized by many
for its blinding over generalization.
[1] It’s worth mentioning that Louis the XIV was the “sun” King who also is credited with professionalizing ballet and transiting it from the Ballet de Cour to an independent art from by establishing the Académie Royale de Music which later became the Paris Opera.
[4] In 1768 Gilpin published his popular Essay on Prints where he defined the picturesque as '"that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture" and began to expound his "principles of picturesque beauty", based largely on his knowledge of landscape painting. During the late 1760s and 1770s Gilpin travelled extensively in the summer holidays and applied these principles to the landscapes he saw, committing his thoughts and spontaneous sketches to notebooks. Gilpin's tour journals circulated in manuscript to friends, such as the poet William Mason, and a wider circle including Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole and King George III. In 1782, at the instigation of Mason, Gilpin published Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770 (London 1782). This was illustrated with plates based on Gilpin's sketches, etched by his nephew William Sawrey Gilpin using the new aquatint process. There followed Observations on the Lake District and the West of England and, after his move to Boldre Remarks on Forest Scenery, and other woodland Views ... (London 1791).
“One poor woman we followed, who had engaged to shew us the monks' library. She could scarcely crawl; shuffling along her palsied limbs and meagre contracted body by the help of two sticks. She led us through an old gate into a place overspread with nettles and briars; and pointing to the remnant of a shattered cloister, told us that was the place. It was her own mansion. All indeed she meant to tell us was the story of her own wretchedness; and all she had to shew us was her own miserable habitation. We did not expect to be interested as we were. I never saw so loathsome a human dwelling. It was a cavern loftily vaulted between two ruined walls, which streamed with various coloured stains of unwholesome dews. The floor was earth, yielding through moisture to the tread. Not the merest utensil or furniture of any kind appeared, but a wretched bedstead, spread with a few rags, and drawn into the middle of the cell to prevent its receiving the damp which trickled down the walls. At one end was an aperture, which served just to let in light enough to discover the wretchedness within. — When we stood in the midst of this cell of misery, and felt the chilling damps which struck us in every direction, we were rather surprised that the wretched inhabitant was still alive, than that she had only lost the use of her limbs
[5] The morally improving effects of exposure to nature. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/moral-call-of-the-wild/ This is the thinking behind the founding of the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.
[6] There is a saying that if God made the country, and man the town, the devil made the little country town.
[1870 H. Tennyson Memoir 25 Jan. (1897) II. 9… Joke J
[7] William Cowper: (26 November 1731 – 25 April 1800) [1] was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him "the best modern poet", whilst William Wordsworth particularly admired his poem Yardley-Oak.
His religious sentiment and association with John Newton (who wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace") led to much of the poetry for which he is best remembered. His poem "Light Shining out of Darkness" gave the English language the idiom "God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform."
[8] Shepard, Paul (quoted in) Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature University of Georgia Press, Jul 1, 2010 p. 132
[9] See Peasantville: Marie-Antoinette's Fake Rustic Village at Versailles or Duc de Condé and others, who had fake peasant houses on their estates, as well. http://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover-the-estate/le-domaine-de-marie-antoinette/the-queen-hamlet/the-queens-hamlet
[10] A form of entertainment in the 18th century, taking the form of a garden party, particularly popular at the French court where at Versailles areas of the park were landscaped with follies, pavilions and temples to accommodate such festivities.
[11] Andrew Holden, David A. Fennell The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and the Environment; Routledge, 2012 p101-102
[12] François-René de Chateaubriand (4 September 1768 – 4 July 1848) a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature. When the French Revolution broke out, Chateaubriand was initially sympathetic, but as events in Paris became more violent he decided to journey to North America in 1791 which he recounts in his Voyage en Amérique.
[13] Shepard, Paul Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature University of Georgia Press, 2010 p.
[14] Though in point of fact he never uses this phrase.