Sharing The Poet's Obsession

By ROBERT HUGHES

"William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism" is one of those singular exhibitions that take you into the heart of a cultural moment, explore it in close detail and yet leave you eager for more. On view at the New York Public Library until Dec. 31, it has been jointly organized by Rutgers University and the Wordsworth Trust in England.

Quite apart from the fact that many of the ideals and the deepest nostalgias of American culture (such as the longing for moral examples within nature that is the root of the whole ecology movement) wind back to Wordsworth and his fellow poets, one cannot help feeling reverence at the sight of the manuscripts ranked in their vitrines. How often do you get to see Shelley's rough draft of "Ozymandias" or holograph manuscripts of Keats' "To Autumn," Byron's Don Juan, Burns' "Auld Lang Syne" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" in one room at once? But the curators have also assembled an extraordinary range of paintings, drawings and prints to show what effect the new current of natural vision, directed toward subjects both common and sublime, had on English artists -- how it was refracted and amplified in their work, and where the obsessions of artist and poet crossed.

Turner and Constable, of course, dominate. It will be some time before the U.S. sees a finer group of Turner watercolors than those assembled for the show. They cover all the phases of his work, from early picturesque scenes of ruins such as Tintern Abbey through the grandly managed complexities of his Alpine views with every pebble and wreath of mist in place, like The Passage of the St. Gothard, 1804, to the mists and chromatic blooms of his amazingly modern late watercolors.

Likewise, one could hardly ask for a better short introduction to Constable than the one this show gives us -- not only the fresh landscapes of the pastures of Dedham Vale and the sparkling little manifesto of a painting, Water-meadows at Salisbury, 1829, rejected by the Royal Academy of Arts as "a nasty green thing," but also the cloud studies and several of his grandest oils, such as The Lock, 1822-24. There are also such painters as John Sell Cotman, Samuel Palmer, Francis Towne and Thomas Girtin, whose images of landscape exhale the sweet breath of exact vision through its quintessential medium, the watercolor sketch, while the apocalyptic side of English Romanticism gets full play in William Blake and John ("Mad") Martin.

All through, the show carries the powerful conviction that the substance of Romantic thought was as much the invention of painters as of poets. Constable was Wordsworth's equal and ally, not his plagiarist, when he wrote that the light in his paintings "cannot be put out because it is the light of Nature -- the mother of all that is valuable in poetry, painting or anything else where an appeal to the soul is required." Natural vision, the sense of English terrain, exalted hopes of freedom, fear of the apocalyptic violence that lurked in human nature and, above all, a sense of rebirth in all departments of life -- it is not easy to reimagine the ferment of those times. Throughout Europe, the 1790s were a hinge on which the very idea of culture as a force in human affairs turned. A new principle entered art and poetry: renewal through radical change.

This was the underlying motif of Romanticism, and after it appeared nothing in the domain of imagination could be the same again. Its supreme metaphor was, of course, the French Revolution of 1789. Wordsworth, Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge looked across the Channel and saw amid the debris of the French monarchy and the gore of the September Massacres nothing less than the renewal of Man, and Woman too. Those who believe art must be apolitical are fated to have trouble with the English Romantics. Inspired by Thomas Paine, Lafayette, Washington and the Jacobins, Blake and Shelley prophesied the cleansing of the doors of perception and the fall of tyrannies. Martin painted such republican effusions as The Bard, 1817, an Ossianic Welsh sage ranting from a cliff at English legions passing in the gorge below, prophesying the death of empire.

The nature of mankind was no longer the cut-and-dried affair that it had seemed to the rationalizing Georgian imagination; it lay in potentiality, the inner depths of what Freud would later call the unconscious. Its origin was the lost child glimpsed within the adult; its proper environment the sense of wonder and openness with which the human mind, contemplating the natural world, grasps its relation to God. The grander the spectacle of nature, the more the poet (or painter) is drawn to self-understanding.

If one were to connect poets to painters, then Shelley links to Turner, through their common images of luminous transparency. "Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/ Stains the white radiance of Eternity" could have been written with a Turner watercolor in mind. Constable pairs with Wordsworth, through their mutual love of "simple" nature, the felt substance of a known place that is the constant of human experience and evokes, in Wordsworth's phrase, the "spots of time" to which imagination is anchored. The exhibition, and its accompanying catalog by Jonathan Wordsworth (a direct descendant of William), Michael C. Jaye and Robert Woof, traces these and a myriad of other affinities. The unity of English Romanticism has never been argued so well, or shown so plainly, in a single exhibition. This is not a show to miss.