Archibald Alison Landscape Painting Natu

........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 29 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.
0)
MARTA ORACZ1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2020.29.2.05

University of Silesia
ORCID: 0000-0003-3120-2214
Archibald Alison,
landscape painting,
nature poetry and the
landscape of the mind
Abstract. The subject of this article is the landscape of the mind. At the turn of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, in landscape painting and in nature poetry, the surrounding nature became an insig-
nificant element of the artist’s or poet’s work, acting only as a trigger for introspection. In landscape
painting, nature was supposed to express emotional states. The viewer was to embark on a mood sug-
gested by the painting and immerse himself/herself in contemplation of his or her internal states. In na-
ture poetry, such as William Wordsworth’s Prelude, the vision of nature was subjective: its colouring was
an effect of projection of the emotions of the speaker in the poem, it was a reflection of the landscape of
his mind. The theoretical context to be used in this essay for the discussion of the landscape of the mind
in landscape painting and nature poetry is the aesthetic theory of Archibald Alison.
Keywords: landscape painting, nature poetry, theory of associations, feelings, projection, beautiful,
sublime.
1. Introduction
In the late eighteenth century, landscape painting and nature poetry gradually disen-
tangled its links with the external world; the artist, the viewer of painting, and the
speaker in a poem, instead of contemplating nature, were supposed to focus on the land-
scape of the mind,2 i.e., on their inner feelings and associations. The gradual shift from
the external to the internal world, both in visual arts and in poetry, went hand in hand
with similar changes in interest in the field of aesthetic theory. In the aesthetic philoso-
phy we observe a departure from the interest in the objective standards of beauty and
focus on the inner sphere of man, man’s cognitive capacities, man’s subjective aesthetic
judgement, imagination and feelings. An important proponent of the thesis that art and
1 Address for correspondence: Wydział Humanistyczny, Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach, ul. Grota-
-Roweckiego 5, 41-200 Sosnowiec, Poland. E-mail: [email protected]
2 I borrow the term “landscape of the mind” from Norman Lacey’s critical study of William Words-
worth’s poetry Wordsworth’s View of Nature: And its Ethical Consequences (Lacey 1948: 98-99).
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........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 29 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
poetry should explore the inner regions of the soul was Archibald Alison (1757-1839).
The aim of this article is to analyze Archibald Alison’s studies in aesthetics with special
emphasis on his views on the beauty of nature. I want to show that a similar approach
to the aesthetic value of nature that Alison promoted was visible in the artistic practice
of his age, in the landscape painting and in nature poetry (with reference to the latter,
I have chosen William Wordsworth, whose poetry is the most obvious example of the
new approach to nature). I want to show that aesthetic theory, landscape painting and
nature poetry started to focus on the landscape of the mind rather than on the external
scene. In other words, I want to show that the paradoxical tendency to divert one’s eyes
from nature (i.e., the natural scene outside, the external world) was becoming a larger
trend in the latter part of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, a trend that
embraced aesthetic theory, landscape poetry and nature poetry.
I have chosen Alison’s theory of taste as a representative aesthetic theory of the
Romantic period. I compare his views to those represented in landscape painting of the
same era and in nature poetry of the turn of the eighteenth century, using the example
of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
2. Landscape painting and the internal world

In the current part of my article I discuss Archibald Alison’s views on landscape paint-
ing with special emphasis on his discussion of the landscape of the mind. I also present
some opinions of the landscape painters themselves, who spoke in unison with Alison:
the painters also claimed, that instead of representing a topography of a particular
terrain,3 a picture should rather inspire the viewer to explore the inner landscape of
his or her soul.
Archibald Alison, in his major work in the field of aesthetics entitled The Essays on
the Nature and Principles of Taste, devotes several passages to landscape painting and
explains that landscape art is, in fact, not supposed to imitate nature but to promote the
viewer’s interest in and curiosity about the landscape of the mind.
Alison speaks against the imitative landscape painting, which was popular in Britain
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Imitative painting, of which the British
topographic landscape is a prime subject, is for Alison inferior art, no matter how much
skill of hand it demonstrates: “In the copy of a scene we can admire the skill (i.e., the
mere mechanical dexterity of the artist)” but not “the genius” (Alison 1790: 89-90). He
calls the authors of such paintings with a contemptible name “mere copiers of nature”
(Alison 1790: 88) and denies them any touch of genius. Furthermore, he claims that the
3 A critical study of topographic painting and tis social and intellectual context is to be found in Michael
Clarke’s The Tempting Prospect. A Social History of English Watercolours, pp. 21-73.
68
works of those “copiers” are for the unsophisticated audience unversed in visual arts
(Alison 1790: 89).4
The weakness of imitative art, often overlooked by the uneducated viewers, is its lack
of unity due to abundance of details. Such an imperfection disqualifies imitative paint-
ings in the eyes of the demanding audience. They would not enjoy “the crowd of inci-
dents”, i.e., all the circumstantial details of a scene meticulously recreated in a picture.
All the minute particulars rendered by a dexterous craftsman appear to the demanding
viewers “as inconsistence or confusion” (Alison 1790: 84). They prefer a painting whose
motifs are carefully selected, those only which are “congenial to our emotions” (Alison
1790: 84). The unity of emotion which, according to Alison is a true value of a good art,
is disrupted in a literal copy of nature such as, for instance, a topographic landscape
painting. In external nature there is “confusion of expression […] which prevents him
[a man of Taste] from indulging to the full, the peculiar emotion which the scene itself
is fitted to inspire” (Alison 1790: 84). In other words, in a natural scene the dominant
mood is often destroyed by elements which are incompatible with the overall atmo-
sphere: “solemnity of noon” may be disrupted “by noise and bustling industry” while
“the tranquillity and melancholy of evening [may be disrupted] by vivacity and vulgar
gaiety” (Alison 1790: 84). The uniform atmosphere of a painting is essential as it triggers
an analogous mood in the viewer and encourages him or her to explore the inner state
inspired by the picture. Meanwhile, a spectator cannot be referred to his inner feel-
ings by a landscape painting which is a copy of a real place, since such a painting lacks
emotional coherence, with too many details disrupting the mood. Pruning out from the
real scene anything that hinders its emotional unity is an accomplishment of a genius.
A genius selects “from a thousand scenes, the circumstances which are to characterise
a single composition, and may unite into one expression, the scattered features with
which Nature has feebly marked a thousand situations” (Alison 1790: 87). He chooses,
continues Alison, “the circumstances” which “give whatever force (…) he pleases to the
expression he wishes to convey” (Alison 1790: 87). In other words, the work of a true
artist is the careful presentation of elements, not necessarily coexisting in one exter-
nal scene, which are similar in their mood and which together build up an emotionally
coherent whole. Every detail which would interrupt the unity of mood created in the
work of art is removed so as not to disturb the viewer, whose mind is set on reaching the
emotional pitch tuned with the mood in the work of art.
4 A belief in a standard of good taste, in contrast to subjective taste and relativism in taste, was an ele-
ment of the eighteenth century aesthetics. Alison, who contrasts a good taste with a taste of the less
educated viewer, is certainly a representative of the eighteenth century philosophy of beauty. However,
there are also elements in his thought which suggest that he believes in relativity of taste. An indepth
study of this problem was done by Steven A. Jauss in his article “Associationism and Taste Theory in
Archibald Alison’s Essays.”
69
Considering the viewer, once he or she embarks on the mood inspired by the paint-
ing (i.e., by the elements of its coherent composition and the corresponding uniform
emotions), he or she utterly abandons himself or herself in a reverie of emotions that
pass on, in an associated train, in the imagination. As Alison puts it,
When any object, either of sublimity or beauty [here, the painting representing a certain mood:
solemn or cheerful], is presented to the mind, I believe every man is conscious of train of thought
being immediately awakened in his imagination, analogous to the character or expression of
the original object. (…) our imagination is seized, and our fancy busied in the pursuit of all
those trains of thought, which are allied to this character or expression. (Alison 1790: 2-3)
The mood of the picture eventually turns out to be a starting point for a long process
of association of feelings that occurs in our imagination; for, when we contemplate a
picture, and our heart is set on a certain kind of mood, we suddenly become distracted
from the painting itself and lose ourselves “amid the number of images” and passions
associated with those that the artist suggested in the painting. This emotional, or, this
ecstatic state, lasts for a while until we “waken from this play of fancy, as form the
charm of romantic dream” (Alison 1790: 3). Thus the indicator of quality of a landscape
painting is its ability to emotionally awaken the viewer’s emotions so as to make him or
her oblivious of the painting itself, to divert the viewer’s attention from its visual beauty
and to turn his or her eyes inwards to the imagination, to become involved in dreamful
contemplation of his or her internal states. The painting itself, paradoxically, is a work
of genius only if it acts as a trigger and is not in the centre of attention.5
The external reality is even far less important to the viewer than what the picture
represents. For a truly good landscape painting, as we may infer from Alison’s discourse,
is not supposed to direct our attention to the external world; to recreate, in our minds,
all topographical details of a particular terrain. Instead, a landscape painting, ought to
5 Thomas Dick Lauder in his “Essay on the Origin of Taste” (written as an introduction to Uvedale Price’s
essays On the Picturesque) criticizes Alison for the fact that his theory of aesthetics leads to an illogical
statement that the object of art becomes, eventually, absolutely unimportant and overlooked, once a
viewer is involved in his imaginative reverie. “In the long train of meditations to which Mr. Alison refers,
in the delightful reveries in which he would make the sense of beauty consist, it is obvious that we must
soon lose sight of the external object which gave the first impulse to our thoughts, and, though we may
afterwards reflect upon it with increased interest and gratitude as the parent of so many charming im-
ages, it is impossible, we conceive, that the perception of its beauty, can ever depend upon a long series of
various and shifting emotions.” Feeling as I do, the full force of this observation, I am disposed to think
that Mr. Alison’s error may be accounted for by the fact, that his own highly poetical and imaginative
mind must have been so prone to yield to those delightful reveries of which he makes so much account,
as to have led him to overlook the full influence of the primary emotions of beauty by which they were
generated” (Dick Lauder 1842: 6).
70
be a gate to our internal world of sensibility. It is supposed to open up our mind’s eye
to see the landscape of our soul, rather than to make our organic eye more acute to the
particulars of the external world. As Alison puts it, the landscape painter must employ
in his work the language which is not intended to speak “to the eye, but to affect the
imagination and the heart” (Alison 1790: 89).
The standards for landscape painting set forth by Alison in his Essays on the Nature
and Principles of Taste were not wholly new. Several years before his theoretical work, an
increasing number of painters were practising the ideas he promoted. In the latter part
of the eighteenth century, romantic (or ideal, or poetic, or imaginative) landscape paint-
ing developed, of which the most important representatives were Alexander Cozens, his
son and student, John Robert Cozens, Thomas Gainsborough, William Gilpin, Richard
Wilson and many more (Hardie 1967: 76-77). Cozens Sr. developed a method of so called
blotting, i.e., making random blots on a sheet of paper which were to unlock the artist’s
imagination by suggesting shapes. By means of this exercise of fancy the artist was
to be less dependent for inspiration on external nature.6 Gainsborough did not look
to actual, external nature for most of his ideas. Discussing Gainsborough’s method of
painting, Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses explains that the artist “framed a kind of
model of landscapes on his table, composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of
looking-glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water” (Reynolds
1891: XIV). Furthermore, he had a habit of painting by night, by candlelight (Reynolds
1891: XIV). All this was done to compose a scene coherent in expression; the light of a
candle was to add a particular emotional note and saturate the whole view with colour
communicating dreamy atmosphere. Gilpin was also reluctant to faithfully recreate
an external scene in his pictures. Rather, he would select from the real landscape only
those elements which fitted the composition and gave uniform character to his painting
(Gilpin 1789: 31-32; Gilpin 1792: 128-129; Gilpin 1808: 166-167).
Gilpin, Gaisnborough, and both Cozenses, and many other British landscapists not
only relied more on imagination than on the external nature for composition and colour-
ing, but also believed that what was most important in their paintings was a clearly
defined emotional climate, and not the accurate topography of the terrain. As Gilpin says:
In passing through a country you may not have opportunities of giving the exact portrait of
any one particular scene, but this is not necessary; perhaps the most useful illustrations of
6 An analysis of this technique is beyond the scope of this article, whose main interest is the theory of
A. Alison. The blotting technique and the role of imagination is described by Cozens in his manual for
painters entitled A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape.
Cozen’s imaginative approach to painting and his application of the aforesaid method is also discussed in
details in Kim Sloan’s study Alexander and John Robert Cozens. A Poetry of Landscape in chapter “Teaching
at Eaton College and the Various Species of Landscape, &c. in Nature” (Sloan 1986: 36-62).
71
local scenery are those which give the character of the views by pleasing arrangement of
ideas taken from the general scene of the country. (Gilpin qtd in Hardie 1967: 77)
Not the topographic details but the overall character of the scene was important,
insofar as it struck an emotional note in the viewer and made him or her embark on a
dreamful reverie.
3. Landscape of the mind in nature poetry: The beautiful

and the sublime
Alison’s discussion of the sublime and the beautiful, the basic categories in aesthetics
introduced in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke, is relevant to the interpretation
of William Wordsworth’s nature poem The Prelude. Hence I first clarify Burke’s concepts
of the beautiful and the sublime, then consider Alison’s views on these subjects and
then explore how The Prelude can be seen as a poetic counterpart to the Romanticism of
the earlier discussed landscape painters.
I need to explain shortly the features of the beautiful and the sublime after Edmund
Burke, because his study on this topic was a pioneer one; later theoreticians, including
Alison, followed Burke when it comes to considering the qualities of the beautiful and
the sublime.
Sublime forms are those that evoke awe and terror in the viewer and they possess
such features as vastness, magnitude, obscurity. Beautiful forms, meanwhile. are those
which cause the feeling of love in the viewer (Burke 1757: 109). Their characteristic
features are smallness, smoothness of outline and gradual variation in the shape, i.e.,
the beautiful forms are not composed of angular parts (Burke 1757: 138) such as those
that we can see, for instance in steep and craggy mountains. A rising sharply high and
rugged peak is classified as the sublime one. As to the colours, “soft and cheerful” ones
are linked with the beauty (Burke 1757: 100). Colours of beautiful bodies, explains Burke,
“must not be dusky or muddy, but clean and fair” (Burke 1757: 141). Such is, for instance,
the colouring of a bright summer day. Meanwhile, “dark and gloomy” hues are typical
for the sublime aesthetics. So, for instance, the colouring of the “gloomy sky”, and that
of night, is “solemn” that is to say, exciting sombre feelings and anxiety in the viewer.
Such characteristics, which, for Burke, are inherent in the object,7 are automatically
associated by the viewer with the aforesaid feelings in his mind (Burke 1757: 100).
7 Sublime and beautiful characteristics that arise their respective feelings of fear or pleasure, may, but
do not necessarily have to be inherent in the object, according to Wordsworth. Sometimes the source of
fear and pleasure is in the mind of the spectator and is projected on external objects making them sub-
lime or beautiful. Sometimes the sublimity and beauty are the values inherent in the objects and they
evoke the correspondent feelings of fear and pleasure in the viewer. In that case, however, the viewer
has a limited ability to discern either beauty or sublimity: it depends on the state of his mind. If he is
72
Having considered Burke’s evaluation of the beautiful and the sublime, we can now
proceed to the discussion on the beautiful and the sublime in Alison’s aesthetics of the
natural scene and in William Wordsworth’s nature poem The Prelude.
3.1. Alison – Mind is the creator of the beauty and the sublime
Alison calls beautiful those objects which give us pleasure, while he describes as sublime
those elements of landscape which awake in us fear or solemn feelings (Alison 1790: 3).
So, for instance, he claims, we can discern beauty in “the gay lustre of a morning in
spring, or the mild radiance of a summer evening” or sublimity in “the savage majesty
of a wintry storm, or the wild magnificence of a tempestuous ocean” (Alison 1790: 3).
We feel pleasure and awe respectively in the presence of such scenes. Still, the division
of landscape into either of the categories and their respective emotional values becomes
more complicated as we read on in Alison’s Essay. This is because, despite his definitions
of the beautiful and the sublime, Alison also insists on the importance of individual
perception. “The simple perception of the object,” explains Alison, “is insufficient to
awake these emotions, unless it is accompanied by this operation of the mind [i.e., the
work of imagination]” (Alison 1790: 2). It is the viewer’s perspective and his or her role
in making a scene beautiful or sublime that I shall now discuss here in the context of
Alison’s Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste.
The viewer’s contribution is dependent on a number of factors: his or her mental
habits; his or her state of mind, however temporary; and his or her individual history,
memories and associations. Considering associations, the trains of “pleasing or of
solemn thought” that we associate with a scene “arise spontaneously within our minds”
and charge an external scene with emotions “with which the objects before us seem
to afford no adequate cause” (Alison 1790: 3). Alison is saying here that, because our
emotions go beyond what is presented to us, we in effect become painters with our
imagination, completing a scene through what our emotions suggest. The trains of
associated thoughts of either kind (pleasant, solemn) are not the same in all the viewers
and depend on their personal history or on the specific country and culture in which
they were brought up. So, for instance, “The scenes themselves may be little beauti-
ful” (Alison 1790: 17), but we can see them as such if we project on them our sentimen-
tal memories, for instance those from our childhood or from the national history. Our
recollections are enriched by the association between the scene before us and our
imagination and then, in turn, those recollections suffuse the scene before us. It is
the associations with which our memories are enriched that give, “a kind of sanctity
overwhelmed with fear, for instance, he will notice the sublime elements of the landscape, but overlook
the beautiful ones. The subjective nature of sublime and beautiful in Wordsworth will be explained in
detail in the current part of the article.
73
to the place where they dwelt, and converts every thing into beauty which appears to
have been connected with them” (Alison 1790: 16). Sublime associations projected on
an otherwise neutral scene, can be those of a heroic battle. “No man, acquainted with
English history,” explains Alison on the nature of sublime projections of the mind, “can
behold the field of Agincourt, without some emotion of this kind” (Alison 1790: 17). The
aforesaid heroic associations in the mind of the spectator “diffuse themselves […] over
the scene, and give it a sublimity which does not naturally belong to it” (Alison 1790:
17). Another factor that plays an important role in our creative perception of a natural
scene is either the habitual or the temporary disposition of one’s mind. The state of
mind, permanent or temporary may act in a different way than enriched recollections
discussed above. While recollections made us adorn a scene with some objectively inex-
istent beautiful or sublime features, the permanent or temporary mental state we are in
may make us overlook the beauty or the sublimity of a natural scene. The scene might
possess the features which Alison mentions as beautiful or sublime [e.g., the “gaiety of
the morning” or “the savage majesty of a wintry storm” (Alison 1790: 3)], but we may fail
to notice them due to the selective perception determined by our personality type or
our actual mood (Alison 1790: 64). So, for example, “the gaiety of Nature” is recognized
as beautiful and discerned by a cheerful man, but it remains obscure to “to the man
of sadness” (Alison 1790: 64). A melancholy man, looking at a particular scene would
overlook its beauty and would not be able to enjoy the pleasant feeling that someone of a
positive temperament would derive from it. Such selective perception, which may make
us open to or blind to the beauty or sublimity of a scene, may be short-term or habitu-
al (Alison 1790: 65). “Every man must have had opportunity to observe,” claims Alison,
“that the perception of Beauty” as well as the sublime, “depends also on the temporary,”
as well as on permanent “sensibility of his mind” (Alison 1790: 65).
To sum up, for Alison, the paramount factor that makes us see a scene as either
beautiful (causing pleasure) or sublime (awaking awe and solemn feelings) is our mind
rather than the external features of a scene. We project our memories, associations,
momentary or long-lasting emotions and it seems the most important contribution to
the way we see a landscape. The landscape which we see is, to a large extent, a land-
scape of our mind.
3.2. The landscape of the mind in William Wordsworth’s Prelude

I now wish to explore the landscape of the mind in the context of William Wordsworth’s
The Prelude. I will demonstrate that beautiful and sublime character of the landscape
and its atmosphere in the aforesaid nature poem is generated by the viewer’s feelings.
I will make the point that nature, in the poem, arouses antithetical feelings in the
speaker: at one time, pleasant, at another, fearful.
74
Wordsworth suggests that all nature is charged with feeling. The elements of the
natural scene, i.e., plants, fruit or rocks, are, he believes, “linked (…) to some feeling”
(Wordsworth 1850: III 124-38). He endows the natural scene with anthropomorphic or,
to be precise, anthropo-psychic features when he writes that “nature’s daily face” puts
on its various expressions, ranging from “terror” to “love” (Wordsworth 1850: III 124-38).
This suggests that nature adopts various expressions (“face of nature”), and Wordsworth
attributes to nature a body language through which it communicates its mental states or
moods. These moods, namely, terror and love (which are deeper versions of the earlier
discussed feelings of fear and pleasure), correspond to the two basic aesthetic categories
introduced by Edmund Burke and elaborated upon by, among others, Archibald Alison.
These categories are, of course, that of the beautiful (love) and the sublime (terror) (see
J. B. Owen “The Sublime and the Beautiful in The Prelude”).
Regarding the beauty of nature, it is related in Wordsworth to the feeling of love, but
also that of cheerfulness. These pleasant feelings associated with the beauty of nature
are discussed in Book II of The Prelude, where the speaker recollects his nostalgia for
the village landscape and for his infant outdoor games, after he had moved to the city.
Describing the rural scene of his native place (its topographic details) he immediately
recollects his cheerful childhood sports (Wordsworth II 1850: 51-3). “Attachment” of the
beauty of a place in nature to childhood sentiments and childish pleasurable, joyful feel-
ings is an effect of the association process, the one which I have discussed in the context
of Alison in his Essays on the Nature and the Principles of Taste. Thus, technically speak-
ing, Wordsworth “associates” (Alison 1790: 3) in his mind the native Windermere land-
scape with the emotions characteristic of beauty: pleasant feelings of teenage period
(Wordsworth 1850: II 55), the childish delight (Wordsworth 1850: II 52) and the boister-
ousness of his boyhood (Wordsworth 1850: II 47). It is these emotions, harboured in the
speaker’s mind and projected on the particular place in nature, that make the scene
beautiful. The scene itself does not need to be beautiful and there does not need to be
any natural feature in the scene which is itself pleasant. It is the role of the perceiver
that is paramount in creating the beauty of the landscape.
No lesser importance is attributed in The Prelude to the role of the human mind in
making a perceived scene sublime. In Wordsworth, sublimity is linked with fear, and
the viewer’s fearful emotion can charge the landscape with sublimity. For example,
there is the famous passage concerning the act of stealing of the boat (Book One of The
Prelude). Wordsworth brings back childhood memories and relates how he stole a boat
tied to a tree. He describes his escape in the stolen vessel. The author informs us that he
was aware of the unethical character of his deed. He says,
It was an act of stealth

And troubled pleasure. (Wordsworth 1850: I 361-362)
75
Conscious of the evil nature of his exploit, he cannot feel pure joy: his pleasure is
tainted by an admixture of a sense of guilt (“troubled pleasure”). His sense of guilt is
intermingled with fear of punishment. Possessed by this fear he starts imagining that
nature around him speaks to him in a scolding voice: “nor without the voice/ Of moun-
tain-echoes did my boat move on.” His impression is that the otherwise normal, acous-
tic echo-effect is a reprimand that he receives from nature, but in fact it is the voice of
his own conscience. He projects his guilt on the surrounding mountains. Furthermore,
his fear of punishment is manifested in the following vision of the natural scene: as he
pushes off the shore and starts rowing he fixes his eyes,
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,

The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky. (Wordsworth 1850: I 361)
As he rows on, his position changes and he can see “from behind that craggy steep”
another “huge peak” start to emerge; the peak is “black and huge” (hence: ominous,
dark; darkness (Burke 1757:100), and large size (Burke 1757: 93) being linked with the
sublime) and it “upreared” its giant head “as if with voluntary power instinct.” It seems
to the speaker that the huge, dark summit
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. (Wordsworth 1850: I 382-385)
The phenomenon that Wordsworth refers to is an optical illusion, i.e., the apparent
motion which results from the change of the position of the observer: as the speaker
in the poem advances off the shore, having his eyes fixed in one point on the horizon,
he knows that he is moving but he fears that he is not fast enough. His fear is that
the mountain will overtake him. Thus he attributes his own motion to the mountain.
Furthermore he projects his own mood on the external world endowing the mountain
with ominous properties: his belief that the mountain is following him, apparently
with an intention of punishing him for his deed, is a construct of his troubled mind,
overwhelmed with terror. The size and dark hue of the mountain is enhanced by the
extreme dread in the viewer; or rather, the viewer focusses his attention on the most
sublime elements, darkest colours and enormous shapes, unconsciously ignoring every-
thing that does not harmonize with his mood. The perception of the scene is certainly
selective, tendentious, and, to a large extent, dependent on the projection by the viewer
of his own mental state. Here, Wordsworth’s poem dramatizes the theory that Alison
76
proposes: we chose to see and contemplate some qualities in nature, while we remain
indifferent to others, “because these alone are the qualities which accord with the [our]
Emotions” (Alison 1790: 65).
A further example that emphasises the above discussed point, i.e., that the mood
pervading natural scene in Wordsworth’s poetry is an emanation of the perceiver’s
state of emotions, is to be found in Wordsworth’s poem “Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood.” There is a short passage there which well illus-
trates how the mind makes a scene sublime. “The clouds that gather round the setting
sun,” writes Wordsworth, “do take a sober colouring from the eye” (Wordsworth 1802-
1804: 196-197).8 The tonality in the landscape (the gathering clouds, which portend the
onset of darkness) is the projection of our mood; the creeping darkness, symbolically
is linked with the feelings of fear, related to the sublime. This feeling is transferred
from the viewer (“the eye”) to the surrounding world. It is thus the mind and mind
alone that is in focus of Wordsworth’s nature poetry. It is the internal landscape rather
than the outside one that the speaker in the poem contemplates. The outside world is
only an effect of what Wing Sze Leng calls the “spreading” of the mind “onto the world”
(Sze Leung 2015: 91).9
Wordsworth thus creates the landscape of the mind. He echoes the Alisonian rule
that a state of mind, as well as the individual associations and trains of thought, deter-
mine the viewer’s response to forms in nature and, investing them with his or her
mood, the viewer enjoys their sublimity or beauty. The role of the external natural
scene is that of a mirror reflection of the viewer’s mind. A particular place in nature
may contain forms and colours that are evocative of sublime or beautiful feelings, but
it is the viewer who chooses to discern only those features of the landscape (either only
beautiful ones or only sublime ones) which harmonize with his mood. At other times,
the scene itself is neither beautiful nor sublime, but is charged by the viewer with the
pleasant or awe-inspiring memories and associations and hence it appears to him as
beautiful or sublime.
4. Conclusions
By the end of the eighteenth century there developed a trend in landscape painting and
in nature poetry whose practitioners turned away from a mere representation of nature
in itself. No matter how paradoxical it seems to be that a landscape painter or a nature
8 Norman Lacey refers to this fragment when he coins the phrase “landscape of the mind” (Lacey 1948:
98-99) which became an inspiration for the current article.
9 Sze Leung borrows the metaphor of the mind spreading “onto the world” from David Hume (Hume,
David. 1739. A Treatise on Human Nature http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4705/pg4705.txt,
12 December 2019) and uses it also in his analysis of William Wordsworth’s poetry (Sze Leung 2015: 91).
77
poet should divert his or her eyes from nature, it became an artistic practice at the end
of the eighteenth and turn of the nineteenth centuries. This practice was supported
by aesthetic theory. A representative of the eighteenth century aesthetic thought who
defended this approach to nature was Archibald Alison. Alison believed that the natural
scene should not be an object of imitation but a trigger for inner musings, a starting
point of associative process or a vehicle for projections of poet’s, painter’s or viewer’s
emotions. Furthermore, he believed that human perception is subjective, that man
creatively manipulates nature and selects from it only those elements which can inform
or augment his or her habitual or temporary mental state.
Such theoretical concepts as those of Alison underlay the art and poetry of his era
in terms of some key figures. So, for instance, such landscape painters as Alexander
Cozens or Thomas Gainsborough, relied on their imagination more than on the exter-
nal world. Furthermore, Gainsborough and William Gilpin believed that a landscape
painting ought not to imitate nature but should have a uniform mood so as to speak
to the viewer’s innermost feelings, and, by spurring his passions, to make him, as
Alison puts it, fly “on the wing” of fancy, quit the visible objects, and let the external
nature and the landscape painting itself subsumed by the workings of the viewer’s
mind and emotions (Alison 1790: 42-43). A similar tendency to focus on the inner land-
scape rather than on the external nature can be seen in the nature poetry of William
Wordsworth. In Wordsworth’s Prelude the natural scene is coloured by the speaker’s
mind: his recollections, associations, and his emotions. His perception of nature as
beautiful or sublime is an effect of what the poet’s mind puts into it. Nature is a recep-
tacle of the poet’s joys and fears. What he sees is the landscape of the mind rather than
the objective natural world.
The landscape of the mind seems to have been a part of the eighteenth century milieu:
it became a subject of landscape painting and nature poetry, and a topic of discussion in
the aesthetic theory.
References
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Britain, 1760-1800. Aldershot: Scolar Press.
Bathe, J. 1991. Romantic Ecology. Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Oxon, New
York: Routledge.
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Beautiful with an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, and Several Other Additions.
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Clarke, M. 1981. The Tempting Prospect. A Social History of English Watercolours. London:
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Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. London: R. Blamire,
in the Strand.
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***
Marta Oracz graduated from the University of Silesia. In 2002 she was granted a PhD
degree in Literature. She works at the University of Silesia. Her field of study is British
literature and culture. She is interested in eighteenth century literature, philosophy,
aesthetic theories and landscape painting.
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........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 29 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.

MARTA ORACZ1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2020.29.2.05

2. Landscape painting and the internal world

3. Landscape of the mind in nature poetry: The beautiful

3.2. The landscape of the mind in William Wordsworth’s Prelude

It was an act of stealth

Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

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