Abstract
In the first volume of Modern Painters, published in 1843, John Ruskin argued that the ‘ceaseless and incomparable’ complexity of the natural world would always elude the artist:
The detail of a single weedy bank laughs the carving of the ages to scorn. Every leaf and stalk has a design and tracery upon it; every knot of grass and intricacy of shade which the labour of years could never imitate[.]
What the eye perceives is a ‘beautiful incomprehensibility’: beautiful, because the created world bears the impress of its Divine author; incomprehensible, because its complexity is a type or image of the infinite power of God:
the Divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone, as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven…. to the rightly perceiving mind, there is the same infinity, the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, the same perfection, manifest in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of the dust as in the kindling of the day-star.1
Infinity and unity are the key words in Ruskin’s account of the natural world.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London, 1903–12), III. 338, 493.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, in Darwin. Norton Critical Edition, ed. Philip Appleman, 2nd edn (New York and London, 1979), p. 131.
A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Alan Manford (Oxford and New York, 1985), pp. 212, 209.
The Return to the Native, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford and New York, 1990), pp. 253–4.
See the poem ‘Before Life and After’, number 230 in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London, 1976). All subsequent references to the poetry are to this edition, with the number given in brackets in the text.
Gillian Beer, in Darwin’s Plots (London, 1983), discusses the scene in terms of plenitude and liberty; see pp. 254–6.
See, in addition to Gillian Beer, Tess Cosslett, The ‘Scientific Movement’ and Victorian Literature (Brighton, 1982), Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture (London and Wisconsin, 1989), and George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists (Chicago, 1991).
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard L. Purdy and Michael Millgate, 7 vols (Oxford, 1978-88), 3, 5.
Two on a Tower, ed. Suleiman Ahmad (Oxford and New York, 1993), pp. 33–4; A Pair of Blue Eyes, edn cit., p. 209.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford and New York, 1988), pp. 279–80.
The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London, 1984), p. 489; cf. also pp. 399–400.
T H. Huxley, ‘Autobiography’, in Autobiographies of Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley, ed. Gavin de Beer (London, 1974), p. 109. The emphasis on fidelity to the facts of the natural world, however unpalatable, tended to shift the notion of the ugly; what was fitted to its life could be seen as beautiful, or — more ambigously — as fascinating: the sublime on a minute scale. The new scientific world suggested a need for new aesthetic categories.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, edited by James A. Secord (London, 1997), p. 181.
The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Dale Kramer (Oxford and New York, 1987), p. 127. All subsequent references are to this edition.
Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. Suzanne B. Falck-Yi (Oxford and New York, 1993), p. 254.
The Well-Beloved, ed. Tom Hetherington (Oxford, 1986), p. 76.
See Lawrence on Hardy & Painting, ed. J. V. Davies (London, 1973), p. 22.
Jude the Obscure, ed. Patricia Ingham (Oxford and New York, 1985), p. 27.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2000 Phillip Mallett
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mallett, P. (2000). Noticing Things: Hardy and the Nature of ‘Nature’. In: Mallett, P. (eds) The Achievement of Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-65271-6_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-65271-6_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-65273-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-65271-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)