Suburban Fields Forever

Before reading Cosgrove’s “Sublime Nature: Landscape and Industrial Capitalism,” I knew that the romantics’ extolment of natural and uncultivated places in many ways was a reaction to the social and economic ills of industrial capitalism, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the romantics themselves were implicated in these changes. As Cosgrove explains, with the transition from a patron-based to a market-based economy for the arts and literature, artists found themselves in the position that had been previously occupied by tradesmen, having to appeal to an anonymous customer base largely drawn from the ranks of the emerging middle class. So, to prevent the erosion of the privileged status of his work, Wordsworth claimed that he didn’t write for the public’s tastes  but for their “embodied spirit.” (Well, at least Wordsworth’s readers had the satisfaction of knowing that the tastes of their embodied spirits were satisfied even if their corporeal bodies were not.) Cosgrove goes on to say that the romantics’ conception of genius as organic  comported with their attitudes toward nature. Cosgrove stops short of saying that the romantics’ ideology was consciously self-serving, but his chapter did cause me to look in a new light at their penchant for writing extensively on aesthetics.

I also liked Hugh Blair’s concise and direct definition of the sublime (226). Leave it to a Scotsman to define a complex term like the sublime without befouling a single tree. Not that Cosgrove faults Wordsworth et al for the verbosity of their prose, but he does imply that “romantic expression” might have broadened its perspective. Cosgrove notes that for all the romantics’ celebration of the organic, they failed to accept that society is also organic. His criticism is even more pointed when he (sarcastically?) applauds the “success” of “romantic expression . . . in avoiding analysis of capitalist relations while criticising their consequences.” This seems to me like shorthand for saying that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Cosgrove doesn’t say just how the romantics could have gone about this analysis. Should Wordsworth have written a lyrical poem about a child pulling a coal tub in a mine galley? Well, maybe yes. Isn’t this essentially what Dickens later did?

But Cosgrove does provide some psychic relief to those of us who wondered whether we were lording over nature when we plant lilacs on our front lawns. Cosgrove depicts the home garden as a relatively recent innovation, an attempt by the new, urban middle class to bring take advantage of their new wealth to bring the sublime closer to home. In fact, these collections of exotic plants and dense shrubberies were not landscapes at all, since they did not direct the eye across the land but focused it on the vegetation. Thus, instead of exerting hegemony over the land, the home garden required attention to the “processes and forms of nature.” A welcome insight, just in time for spring.