For almost 1000 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.
Well, 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.
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 Western European mind.
The ruins of the age of faith had become a part of Nature.
Or rather, they'd 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 votaress where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone heath or some time-hallowed pile,
Or upland fallows grey
Reflect its last cool gleam.
Or if chill blustering 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-discovered 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 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.
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 Brueghel, 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 those in search of the picturesque with mementos
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, MÃ♪tier.
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 realise," 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.
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.
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.
Even he couldn't help comparing the happy and harmonious life that he had discovered in Tahiti
with the squalor and brutality of Europe.
And 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 absurdities," 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?"
Without going as far as Dr Johnson,
who had momentarily forgotten the attribute of 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 judgements.
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 drawings of 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 Chamonix.
"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'd 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 Girondist.
But for 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'd 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'd 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.
CECIL DAY-LEWIS: "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."
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 field mouse'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.
Wordsworth suffered most.
Because, although Byron became restless and cynical,
he did write Don Juan.
Whereas Wordsworth, after the heart-breaking 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.
Dorothy became simple-minded.
So far, I've 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's immersed himself
in this quite ordinary scene?
However, Wordsworth's real kinship was not with Turner, but with Constable.
They both were country men,
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 could 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.
Unlike 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 the 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.
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'm 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
as 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 until 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.
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 a 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.
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 had 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 thing 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 the vision of the celestial city,
the Nature-worshippers concentrated on the clouds.
But clouds are very difficult to deal with intellectually.
They're 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.
CECIL DAY-LEWIS: "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.
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 café called La Grenouillere.
Before that meeting, they'd 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 the 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."