Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 11 - The Worship of Nature - full transcript

(# BEETHOVEN: Concerto for Piano,
Cello and Violin in C Major)

For almost 1,000 years,

the chief creative force
in Western civilisation was Christianity.

Then, early in the 18th century,
it suddenly declined.

In intellectual society
it practically disappeared.

Of course, it left a vacuum.

People couldn't get on without a belief
in something outside themselves.

And during the next 100 years
they concocted a new belief

which, however irrational
it may seem to us,

has added a good deal
to our civilisation -

a belief in the divinity of nature.



It's said that one can attach 52 different
meanings to the word "nature”.

In the early 18th century, it had come
to mean little more than common sense,

as when in conversation we say,
"But, naturally.”

But the evidences of divine power,
which took the place of Christianity

were manifestations
of what we still mean by nature.

Those parts of the visible world,
which were not created by man,

and can be perceived through the senses.

Now, this particular change
in the direction of the human mind

was very largely achieved in England.

And I suppose it's no accident
that England was the first country

in which the Christian faith
had collapsed.

In about 1730 the French philosopher,
Montesquieu, noted,

"There is no religion in England.

"If anyone mentions religion,
people begin to laugh.”



Montesquieu saw
only the ruins of religion

and, although he was a very intelligent
man, he couldn't have foreseen

that these ruins were part of the
subtle way in which faith in divine power

was to trickle back
into the Western European mind.

(# BEETHOVEN: Concerto for Piano,
Cello and Violin in C Major)

The ruins of the Age of Faith
had become a part of nature.

Or rather they had become
a sort of lead-in to nature

through sentiment and memory.

They helped to evoke
that curious frame of mind

which, in the early 18th century,
was the usual prelude

to the enjoyment of natural beauty -
a gentle melancholy.

Beautiful poetry was inspired
by that mood.

Listen to Collins's Ode To Evening.

Then lead, calm vot'ress,
where some sheety lake

Cheers the lone heath,
or some time-hallow'd pile,

Or upland fallows grey
Reflect its last cool gleam.

Or if chill blust'ring winds
or driving rain

Prevent my willing feet, be mine the hut

That from the mountain's side
Views wilds and swelling floods

And hamlets brown
and dim-discover'd spires,

And hears their simple bell,
and marks o'er all

Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil.

Very beautiful, but not very like nature,

any more than were the pictures
of Gainsborough and Cozens,

which accompanied it.

The author of that poem, William Collins,
isn't a familiar name outside England.

And the same is true of
all the 18th-century English nature poets,

even James Thomson, who was in his day
the most famous poet in Europe.

An emotional response to nature

is one of the few extensions
of our faculties

that don't go back
to an individual of genius.

It first appears in minor poets
and provincial painters,

and even in fashions.

For example, the fashion that took
the straight avenues of formal gardens

and changed them into twisting paths
with pseudo-natural prospects,

what were known all over Europe
for 100 years as "English gardens".

Perhaps the most pervasive influence
that England has ever had

on the look of things in Europe,

except for men's fashions
in the early 19th century.

Trivial?

Well, I suppose that all fashions
seem trivial, but are serious.

When Pope described "this scene of man”

as "a mighty maze of walks
without a plan”,

he was expressing a profound change
in the European mind.

So much for nature in the first half
of the 18th century.

Then, in about the year 1760,
this English prelude

of melancholy minor poets
and picturesque gardens

touched the mind of a man of genius -

Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

His name involves a change of scene

because, although to some extent he
derived his love of nature from England,

it was among the lakes
and Alpine valleys of Switzerland

that his absorption in nature
first became a mystical experience.

(# BEETHOVEN: Concerto for Piano,
Cello and Violin in C Major)

For over 2,000 years, mountains
had been considered simply a nuisance.

Unproductive,
obstacles to communication,

the refuge of bandits and heretics.

It's true that in about 1340
the poet Petrarch had climbed one

and enjoyed the view at the top,

and then been put to shame
by a passage from St Augustine.

And at the beginning of the 16th century

Leonardo da Vinci had wandered about
in the Alps,

ostensibly to study botany and geology,

but his landscape backgrounds show
that he was moved by what he saw.

No other mountain climbs are recorded.

And to Erasmus, Montaigne,
Descartes, Newton -

practically any of the great civilisers
I've mentioned in these programmes -

the thought of climbing a mountain
for pleasure would have seemed ridiculous.

Perhaps I should add that this is not
altogether true of the painters.

For example, Pieter Bruegel,
on his way from Antwerp to Rome in 1552,

made drawings of the Alps,
which show something more

than a topographical interest
and were later used in his paintings.

However, the fact remains
that when an ordinary traveller

of the 16th and 17th centuries
crossed the Alps,

it never occurred to him to admire
the scenery - until the year 1739,

when the poet Thomas Gray, visiting
the Grande Chartreuse, wrote in a letter,

"Not a precipice,
not a torrent, not a cliff,

"but is pregnant
with religion and poetry.”

Amazing!
Might have been written by Ruskin.

In fact, I don't think that the full force
of Alpine poetry was expressed

till the time of Byron and Turner.

But in the middle of the 18th century
a good many people

seem to have recognised
the charm of the Swiss lakes,

and enjoyed them in a comfortable,
dilettantish sort of way.

There even arose a Swiss tourist industry

that supplied travellers in search of
the picturesque with mementoes

and produced one remarkable,
almost forgotten artist, Caspar Wolf,

who anticipated Turner by -
what? - 30 years.

But, like the 18th-century
English nature poets,

this is a provincial overture,

which might never have become
a part of contemporary thought

without the genius of Rousseau.

Whatever his defects as a human being -

and they were clearly apparent
to all those who tried to befriend him -

Rousseau was a genius.

One of the most original minds of any age
and a writer of incomparable prose.

His solitary and suspicious character
had this advantage,

that it made him an outsider.
He didn't care what he said.

As a result, he was persecuted.

For half his life he was hounded
out of one country after another.

In 1765 he seemed safely established
in a small principality, Métiers.

But the local parson stirred up
the people against him

and they stoned him.
They broke his windows.

He took refuge on this island
in the lake of Bienne.

And there he had an experience so intense

that one could almost say
it caused a revolution in human feeling.

In listening to the flux and reflux
of these waves, he tells us,

he became completely at one with nature.

He lost all consciousness
of an independent self,

all painful memories of the past,

or anxieties about the future.
Everything except the sense of being.

"I realised," he said, "that our existence

"is nothing but a succession of moments
perceived through the senses.”

I feel, therefore I am.

A curious discovery to have been made
in the middle of the Age of Reason.

But a few years earlier,
the Scottish philosopher, Hume,

had reached the same conclusion
by logical means.

It was an intellectual time-bomb

which, after sizzling away for almost
200 years, has only just gone off -

whether to the advantage of civilisation
now seems rather doubtful.

It had a certain effect
in the 18th century,

and became part of
the new cult of sensibility.

But no-one seems to have realised

how far abandonment to sensation
might take us,

or what a questionable divinity
nature might prove to be.

No-one except the Marquis de Sade,

who saw through the new god,
or goddess, from the start.

"Nature averse to crime?" he said.

"I tell you that nature lives
and breathes by it.

"Hungers at all her pores for bloodshed,

"yearns with all her heart
for the furtherance of cruelty.”

Well, the Marquis was
what used to be called a rank outsider.

And his unfavourable view of nature
is hardly mentioned in the 18th century.

On the contrary, Rousseau's belief
in the beauty and innocence of nature

was extended from plants and trees
and so forth, to man.

He believed that natural man was virtuous.

It was partly a survival
of the old myth of the Golden Age,

partly a feeling of shame
at the corruption of European society.

But Rousseau gave it a theoretical basis

in a work entitled A Discourse
On The Origin Of Inequality Among Men.

He sent a copy to Voltaire,

who replied in a letter, which is
a famous example of Voltairean wit.

"No-one," he said, "has ever used so much
intelligence to persuade us to be stupid.

"After reading your book, one feels
one ought to walk on all fours.

"Unfortunately, during the last 60 years,
I have lost the habit.”

It was a dialectical triumph, but no more,

because belief in the superiority
of natural man

became one of the motive powers
of the next half century.

And less than 20 years after Rousseau
had propounded his theory,

it seemed to have been confirmed by fact.

The French explorer, Bougainville,
discovered Tahiti.

And two years later, Captain Cook
stayed there for four months

in order to observe the transit of Venus.

Well, Bougainville was a student
of Rousseau and it isn't surprising

that he should have found in the Tahitians
all the qualities of the "noble savage”.

But Captain Cook? Captain Cook was
a hard-headed Yorkshireman.

And even he couldn't help comparing
the happy and harmonious life

that he had discovered in Tahiti

with the squalor and brutality of Europe.

Soon, the brightest wits of Paris
and London were beginning to ask

whether the word "civilisation”
was not more appropriate

to the uncorrupted islanders
of the South Seas

than to the exceptionally corrupt society
of 18th-century Europe.

You may remember that some such idea
was put to Dr Johnson

by a gentleman who expatiated to him
on the happiness of savage life.

"Do not allow yourself to be imposed on
by such gross absurdity,” said Dr Johnson.

"It is sad stuff. If a bull could speak,
he might as well exclaim,

"'Here am I with this cow and this grass.

""What being can enjoy
greater felicity?"

Well, without going as far as Dr Johnson,

who had momentarily forgotten
the attribute of the soul,

the student of European civilisation
may observe that Polynesia produced

no Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare,
Newton, Goethe, what have you.

And although we may all agree
that the impact of European civilisation

on places like Tahiti was disastrous,

we must also allow that the very fragility
of those Arcadian societies -

the speed and completeness
with which they collapsed

on the peaceful appearance
of a few British sailors,

followed by a handful of missionaries -

shows that they were not civilisations

in the sense of that word,
which I have been using.

Although the worship of nature
had its dangers,

the prophets of the new religion
were earnest and even pious men

whose whole aim was to prove that their
goddess was respectable and even moral.

And they achieved this
by the curious intellectual feat

of approximating nature and truth.

Far the greatest man to apply his mind
to this feat was the poet Goethe.

The word "nature” appears
throughout his writings,

on almost every page
of his theoretical and critical writings,

and is claimed as the ultimate sanction
for all his judgments.

It's true that Goethe's "nature”
is slightly different

from Rousseau's "nature".

He meant by it not how things seem,

but how things work
if they are not interfered with.

He saw all the living things...
And he was a distinguished botanist

who made his own drawings
of the plants he observed.

He saw everything
as striving for fuller development

through an infinitely long process
of adaptation.

I might almost say that he believed

in the gradual civilisation
of plants and animals.

It was the point of view
that was later to lead to Darwin

and the theory of evolution.

But this analytic and philosophic
approach to nature

had less immediate effect
on people's minds

than the purely inspirational approach
of the English Romantic poets,

Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Difficult to illustrate
this rather Germanic state of mind

by an English picture.

The ones before you are by
the great German landscape painter,

Caspar David Friedrich.

Coleridge looked at nature
in the high mystical manner.

This is how he addressed
the Swiss mountains

in his Hymn Before Sunrise
In The Vale of Chamouni.

O dread and silent mount/
I gazed upon thee,

Till thou, still present
to the bodily sense,

Didst vanish from my thought:
entranced in prayer

I worshipped the Invisible alone.

Wordsworth's approach to nature was
religious in the moral Anglican manner.

"Accuse me not," he said, "of arrogance,
If, having walk'd with nature

"And offered,
as far as frailty would allow,

"My heart a daily sacrifice to truth

"I now affirm of nature and of truth
that their divinity

"Revolts offended at the ways of men."

Well, that nature should be shocked
by human behaviour

does seem to us rather nonsense.

But one mustn't lightly accuse Wordsworth
of arrogance or silliness.

By the time he wrote those lines,
he had lived through a great deal.

As a young man he went to France,
lived with a spirited French girl,

and had a daughter,

and became involved with the French
Revolution, an ardent Girondiste.

But for a chance, he might easily
have had his head chopped off

in the September Massacres.

He returned to England, disgusted with
the political aspect of the Revolution,

but not the less attached to its ideals.

He set out to describe in verse the truth
about the hardships of poor people,

as they had never been described before.

He wrote poems without a glimmer
of comfort or hope.

He walked for miles alone
on Salisbury Plain and in Wales,

talking only to tramps and beggars
and discharged prisoners.

He was utterly crushed
by man's inhumanity to man.

And, finally, he came to Tintern -

the abbey is in the valley
behind me there.

Of course, he had always been observant
of natural beauty.

His earliest poems show us that.

But in August 1793, like Rousseau
on the island of St Pierre, he recognised

that only total absorption in nature
could heal and restore his spirit.

He returned to Tintern five years later

and recaptured
some of those first feelings.

Though changed, no doubt,
from what I was when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something
that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved.

For nature then to me was all in all.

I cannot paint what then I was.

The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion:

The tall rock, the mountain,
And the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms,
were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm.

By thought supplied, or any interest,

Unborrowed from the eye.

(# BRAHMS: Concerto for Violin
and Cello in A Minor)

Unlike many of his successors
in the 19th century,

Wordsworth had earned the right
to lose himself in nature.

So, after all, had Rousseau,

because the author of The Solitary Walker

was also the author of
The Social Contract,

the gospel of revolution.

A sympathy with the humble,
the voiceless - be they human or animal -

does seem to be a necessary accompaniment
to the worship of nature,

and has been ever since St Francis.

Robert Burns, at the first dawn
of Romantic poetry,

would not have written
A Man's A Man For A' That

if he hadn't also felt deeply distressed
at disturbing a fieldmouse's nest.

The new religion was anti-hierarchical.

It proposed a new set of values.

And this was implied
in Wordsworth's belief

that it was based on right instincts
rather than on learning.

It was an extension of Rousseau's
discovery of immediate feeling,

but with the addition of the word "moral”,

because Wordsworth recognised
that simple people and animals

often show more courage
and loyalty and unselfishness

than sophisticated people.

Also, a greater sense
of the wholeness of life.

"One impulse from a vernal wood

"May teach you more of man,

"Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.”

What was it that made Wordsworth
turn from man to nature?

It was the reappearance in his life
of his sister, Dorothy.

They first set up house together
in Somerset.

Then, driven by a strong instinct,
they returned to their native country,

and settled in this cottage at Grasmere.
It was in this garden

and in the tiny sitting room, that
Wordsworth wrote his most inspired poems.

The journal which Dorothy kept
in these years

shows how often his poems originated
in one of her vivid experiences.

And Wordsworth knew it.

"She gave me eyes,
She gave me ears,

"And humble cares,
And delicate fears."

In the new religion of nature

this shy, unassuming woman was
the saint and prophetess.

Unfortunately, the feelings
for each other, of brother and sister,

were too strong for the usages
of this world.

"Thou, my dearest friend,

"My dear, dear friend;
and in thy voice I catch

"The language of my former heart,
and read

"My former pleasures
in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes

"Oh, yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,

"My dear, dear sister!
And this prayer I make

"Knowing that nature
never did betray

"The heart that loved her."

The burning heat of Romantic egotism.

Both Byron and Wordsworth
fell deeply in love with their sisters.

The inevitable prohibition was
a disaster for both of them,

and Wordsworth suffered most

because, although Byron became restless
and cynical, he did write Don Juan,

whereas Wordsworth, after
the heartbreaking renunciation of Dorothy,

gradually lost inspiration,
and although quite happily married

to an old school friend,

wrote less and less poetry
that one can read without an effort.

And Dorothy became simple-minded.

So far I have illustrated
Wordsworth's poems and ideas

from the camera's view of nature.

But, at the same moment that English
poetry took its revolutionary course,

English painting also produced two men
of genius, Turner and Constable.

A few months before Wordsworth
had settled in the Lake District,

Turner had painted this picture
of Buttermere.

Turner, for all his love
of the spectacular,

was capable all his life
of total surrender to a visual impression.

What could be more Wordsworthian

than the humble passivity
with which he has immersed himself

in this quite ordinary scene?

However, Wordsworth's real kinship
was not with Turner, but with Constable.

They both were countrymen

with strong appetites rigidly controlled.

They both grasped nature
with the same physical passion.

"I've seen him,"
said Constable's biographer,

"admire a fine tree with an ecstasy

"like that with which he would catch up
a beautiful child in his arms."

Constable never had the least doubt
that nature meant the visible world

of tree, flower, river, field and sky,

exactly as they presented themselves
to the senses.

And he seems to have arrived intuitively
at Wordsworth's belief

that by dwelling with absolute truth
on natural objects

he would reveal something of
the moral grandeur of the universe.

Only by concentrating on the shining,
variable surface of appearance

would he discover
that "motion and the spirit that impels

"All thinking things,
all objects of all thoughts

"And rolls through all things."

Then, both Wordsworth and Constable
loved their own places

and never tired of those things which had
entered their imaginations as children.

Constable said, "The sound of water
escaping from mill dams,

"old rotten planks,
shiny posts and brickwork -

"these scenes made me a painter,
and I am grateful.”

We've got so used to this approach
to painting

that it is difficult for us to see
how strange it was -

at a time when all serious artists
aspired to go to Rome -

for anyone to love shiny posts
and rotten planks

more than heroes in armour.

Constable hated grandeur and pomposity,

and, like Wordsworth,
his cult of simplicity

sometimes seems to me to go too far.

This cottage in a cornfield
perhaps isn't quite interesting enough.

A Constable like this is the forerunner
of a quantity of commonplace painting,

just as Wordsworth's poems
on small celandines and so forth

anticipated a quantity of bad poetry.

It was rejected from the Academy
when it was painted.

"Take away that nasty green thing,"
they said.

But, for 100 years,

it would have been one of his works
most likely to be accepted.

When Constable
really trusted his emotions,

his rustic subjects do achieve
that quality by which, as Wordsworth said,

"The passions of men are incorporated

"with the beautiful
and permanent forms of nature.”

In such a picture as The Leaping Horse,

the classically simple structure
of the lock, the weight of water,

the movement of the barges...

...they're all expressive
of man's dignity and determination,

just as the sky and agitated trees
are expressive of his emotional struggles.

(# SCHUBERT: Piano Quintet
in A Major - "The Trout")

The simple life.

It was a necessary part
of the new religion of nature,

and one in strong contrast
to earlier aspirations.

Civilisation, which for so long had been
dependent on great monasteries

or palaces or well-furnished salons,

could now emanate from a cottage.

Even Goethe at the Court of Weimar
preferred to live

in a small and simple garden house.

And Dove Cottage was extremely humble
and remote.

No carriages rolled up to that door.

Which reminds me of how closely

the worship of nature
was connected with walking.

In the 18th century, a solitary walker was
viewed with almost as much disapproval

as he is in Los Angeles today.

But the Wordsworths walked continually.

De Quincey calculated that by middle age
the poet had walked 180,000 miles.

Even the unathletic Coleridge walked.

They thought nothing of walking 16 miles
after dinner to post a letter.

And so, for over 100 years,

going for a walk was the spiritual
as well as the physical exercise

of all intellectuals,
poets and philosophers.

I am told that in universities
the afternoon walk

is no longer part
of the intellectual life.

But, for a quantity of people,

walking is still one of the chief escapes
from the pressures of the material world.

And the countryside
where Wordsworth walked, in solitude,

is now crowded - crowded with pilgrims,
as Lourdes or Benares.

The resemblances of Wordsworth
to Constable, which seem so obvious to us,

didn't occur to their contemporaries,

partly, I suppose, because Constable
was hardly known till 1825,

by which time, alas,
Wordsworth had become a priggish old bore,

and partly because
Constable painted flat country

whereas Wordsworth,
and indeed the whole cult of nature,

was associated with mountains.

This, combined with Constable's
lack of finish,

was what led Ruskin to underrate him,

while devoting a good part of his life
to the praise of Turner.

(# BRAHMS: Tragic Overture)

Turner was the supreme exponent

of that response to nature
felt by Gray in the Grande Chartreuse,

what one might call
the picturesque sublime.

I suppose that the new religion required
assertions of power and sublimity

more obvious than those provided
by daisies and celandines.

But don't think that I am trying
to belittle Turner.

He was a genius of the first order, ♪

far the greatest painter
that England has ever produced.

And although he was prepared to work
in the fashionable style,

with plentiful exaggerations,

he never lost his intuitive
understanding of nature.

No-one has ever known more
about natural appearances,

and he was able to fit into
this encyclopaedic knowledge

memories of the most
fleeting effects of light -

sunrises, passing storms,
dissolving mists -

none of which had ever been
set on canvas before.

For 30 years
these brilliant gifts were exploited

in a series of pictures,
which dazzled his contemporaries

but are, perhaps,
too artificial for modern taste.

All the time, Turner was perfecting,
for his own private satisfaction,

an entirely new approach to painting,

which really was only recognised
in our own day.

It consisted of transforming
everything into pure colour.

Light rendered as colour,
feelings about life rendered as colour.

You know, it's quite difficult
for us to realise

what a revolutionary procedure this was.

One has got to remember that for centuries
objects were thought to be real

because they were solid.

You proved their reality
by touching or tapping them.

People still do.

And all respectable art aimed at
defining this solidity,

either by modelling or by a firm outline.

"What is it," said Blake,
"that distinguishes honesty from knavery,

"but the hard and wiry line of rectitude?”

Colour was considered immoral -
perhaps rightly,

because it is an immediate sensation

and it makes its effect
independently of those ordered memories

that are the basis of morality.

However, Turner's colour was
not at all arbitrary,

what we call decorative colour.

However magical it seems,
it always started

as the record of an actual experience.

Turner, like Rousseau,
used his optical sensations

to discover the truth.

I feel, therefore I am.

It's a fact,

which you can verify by looking at
the Turners in the Tate Gallery,

that the less defined,
the more purely colouristic they are,

the more vividly they convey
a total sense of truth to nature.

Turner declared
the independence of colour,

and thereby added a new faculty
to the human mind.

(# DEBUSSY: Nocturnes - Nuages)

I don't suppose that Turner was conscious
of his relationship with Rousseau.

But the other great prophet of nature,
Goethe, meant a lot to him.

Although he'd had
practically no education,

he painfully read Goethe's works,
in particular his Theory Of Colour,

and he sympathised with Goethe's
feeling for nature as an organism,

as something that works
according to certain laws.

This, of course, was one of the things
about Turner that delighted Ruskin,

so that his enormous defence
of the artist,

which he called by the wholly misleading
title of Modern Painters,

became an encyclopaedia
of natural observation.

Just as the Middle Ages
produced encyclopaedias

in which inaccurate observations
were used to prove

the truth of the Christian religion,

so Ruskin accumulated
very accurate observations

of plants, rocks, clouds, mountains,

in order to prove
that nature worked according to law.

Well, we can't believe
in Ruskin's moral law.

But when he says... "The power which
causes the several portions of a plant

"to help each other, we call life.

"Intensity of life is also
intensity of helpfulness.

"The ceasing of this help
is what we call corruption.”

...he does seem to me to have drawn
from his observations a moral

at least as convincing as most of those
that can be drawn from holy writ.

And it helps to explain why, for 50 years
after the publication of Modern Painters,

Ruskin was considered
one of the chief prophets of his time.

All these aspects of the new religion
of nature meet and mingle

where the old religions had also
focused their aspirations - the sky.

Only, instead of the influential
movements of the planets,

or a vision of the celestial city,

the nature-worshippers
concentrated on the clouds.

But clouds are very difficult
to deal with, intellectually.

They are proverbially lawless. Even Ruskin
gave up the attempt in despair.

So, for the time being, this sky appealed
less to the analytically-minded

than to those worshippers of nature
who abandoned themselves

to Rousseau's sensuous reverie.

"The whole mind,"”
said an early writer on Romanticism,

"may become at length something like
a hemisphere of cloud scenery

"filled with an ever-moving train
of changing, melting forms."

Wordsworth put it even better
in a famous passage

in the first book of The Excursion.

Far and wide the clouds were touched,

And in their silent faces could he read

Unutterable love. Sound needed none

Nor any voice of joy, his spirit drank

The spectacle; sensation, soul and form

All melted into him; they swallowed up

His animal being, in them did he live,

And by them did he live,
they were his life.

Constable said that in landscape painting
clouds are the chief organ of sentiment.

He did hundreds of cloud studies,
noting on the back

the month, the time of the day,
the direction of the wind.

Ruskin said, "I bottled clouds
as carefully as my father..." -

who was a wine merchant -
"...had bottled sherries."”

And, for Turner,
they had a symbolic meaning.

He identified skies of peace

and skies of discord.

Clouds the colour of blood
become symbols of destruction.

His chief aim in life was
to see the sun rise above water.

He owned a number of houses
from which he could see this happening.

And he was particularly
fascinated by the line

where the sky and the sea join each other,

that mingling of the elements
which seems,

by its harmony of tone, to lead to
a general reconciliation of opposites.

(# DEBUSSY: La Mer)

In order to observe these effects -

the sea, the sky
and the point where they join -

Turner lived by the seaside in east Kent,

believed by the neighbours to be an
eccentric sea captain called Puggy Booth,

who even in retirement
could not stop looking out to sea.

A dialogue between the sea and the sky?

Well, it's no accident that the
accompaniment of those Turner sea pieces

was Debussy's La Mer,
written - what? - 80 years later.

Turner was the first great artist
to paint absolutely outside his own time.

Pictures like this have no relation
to anything that was being done in Europe

or was to be done for almost a century.

In 1840 they must have looked
as incomprehensible

as the works of Jackson Pollock
a century later.

The enraptured vision
that first induced Rousseau

to live in the world of sensation,

had one more triumph
in the 19th century.

Curiously enough, it also came
from looking at ripples.

The sun sparkling on water
or the quavering reflections of masts.

And it took place in 1869
when Monet and Renoir

used to meet at a riverside cafe
called La Grenouillère.

Before that meeting, they had both
followed the ordinary naturalist style.

But when they came
to those ripples and reflections,

patient naturalism was defeated.

All one could do was
to give an impression.

An impression of what?

Of light - because that's all we see.

It was a long time
since the philosopher, Hume,

had come to the same conclusion.

And at that time,
the Impressionists had no idea

that they were following up
a philosophical theory.

But the fact remains that Monet's words,

"Light is the principal person
in the picture,”

gave a kind of philosophic unity
to their work,

so that the great years of Impressionism
have added something

to our human faculties
as well as delighting our eyes.

Our awareness of light has become
part of that general awareness,

so marvellously described
in the novels of Proust,

which seemed, when we first read them,
almost to give us a new sense.

When one thinks of how many
beautiful Impressionist pictures

there are in the world,

and what a difference
they have made to our way of seeing,

it is surprising how short a time
the movement, as a movement, lasted.

You know, the periods in which
men can work together happily,

inspired by a single aim,
last only a short time.

It's one of the tragedies
of civilisation.

After 20 years,
the Impressionist movement had split up.

One party thought that
light should be rendered scientifically

in touches of primary colour,
as if it had passed through a spectrum.

And this theory inspired
a very distinguished painter, Seurat.

But it was too remote from
the first spontaneous delight in nature,

upon which, in the end,
all landscape painting must depend.

And Monet, the original
unswerving Impressionist,

when he found that
straightforward naturalism was exhausted,

attempted a kind of colour symbolism
to express changing effects of light.

Finally, he turned to
the water-lily garden,

which he had made in his grounds.

The enraptured contemplation
of the clouds reflected in its surface

was the subject
of his last great masterpiece.

He conceived it in one continuous form,

like a symphonic poem.

It takes its point of departure
from experience,

but the stream of sensation becomes
a stream of consciousness.

But how does the consciousness
become paint? That is the miracle.

By a knowledge of each effect so complete
that it becomes instinctive,

and every movement of the brush
is not only a record

but a self-revealing gesture.

Total immersion -

this is the ultimate reason
why the love of nature

has been for so long accepted
as a religion.

It is a means by which we can lose
our identity in the whole

and gain, thereby,
a more intense consciousness of being.

I feel, therefore I am.