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Romantic Lyrics in Landscape: Constable and WordsworthAuthor(s): Bette Charlene WernerSource: Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Spring, 1984), pp. 110-129Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770599Accessed: 11-12-2016 23:21 UTC

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BETTE CHARLENE WERNER

Romantic Lyrics in Landscape: Constable And Wordsworth

C ONSTABLE'S painting The Gleaners, Brighton and Words- worth's poem "The Solitary Reaper" illustrate both artists' practice of choosing simple, basic aspects of human experience and nature's more familiar views as subjects for their art. For both Constable and Wordsworth meaning resides in and can be revealed in the most ordinary scenes. Constable's harvest scene shows an enduring and recurrent, in a sense timeless, human occupation. Two women stand and bend, sun-scorched and wind-blown, in the stubble of a wheatfield, gathering the last of the harvest. They exemplify the ongoing, common human experience of work, as they toil to take sustenance from the earth. They participate in the basic rhythm of sowing and harvest that uses, as it harmonizes with, the cycles of the natural world. The painting is a simple image of the natural-human life at its foundations, responsive to the seasons and the changes of the land. Wordsworth's poem, too, is a simple icon. Its scene shows a girl who sings as she works alone in a field, cutting and binding grain. Her work is the same common labor that Constable's gleaners engage in. Her song flows from the natural human impulse to sing to the rhythm of work. Although the poet refuses to define and delimit the nature of her song, suggesting that it might deal with heroic events far away and long ago, he says still that it may also as well be a "more humble lay" that treats of the "Familiar matter of to-day."' The basic patterns of human experience are common. If her song deals with grief, grief is natural. Perhaps she

1"The Solitary Reaper," lines 21-22, in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, III (Oxford, 1946), 77; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

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CONSTABLE AND WORDSWORTH

sings of "Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again" (lines 23-24). In "The Solitary Reaper," Wordsworth, like Constable, celebrates the ordinary and finds value in the commonplace. Both Constable and Wordsworth insisted that simple, everyday sub-

jects were proper matter for art. Constable's memoirist, C. R. Leslie, recalls the painter's advocacy of the position that good art need not treat heroic subjects: "Good art was with him high art, however humble the subject."" He attests further to Constable's conviction that significance could be revealed in the most ordinary aspects of human experience: "He felt that the supernatural need not be the unnatural" (p. 282). Such convictions guided Constable's practice in painting, as he himself observed: "Things are better as they are. My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge and in every lane."3 In a lifetime of painting Constable strove to depict with fidelity the ordinary hour-to-hour changes in sunlight and shadow and the regular patterns of the seasons in nature. He celebrated too the value of the ordinary in human life as he painted the daily occupations of the people of his native Stour Valley, farming, milling, boat building, and slowly moving their produce on barges along the river. The Gleaners is one perspective of such simple, rural life-a limited, but abstracted, view in which meaning emerges from contemplation of the commonplace. Constable's approach to his art in allowing significance to shine

through quite humble subjects suggests Wordsworth's, as opposed to Coleridge's, approach to writing the Lyrical Ballads. As Coleridge describes the plan of the Lyrical Ballads in his Biographia Literaria, the collection was to include poems of two classes. One group (consisting of his own contributions) was to employ supernatural incidents and agents directly. The other (comprising Wordsworth's compositions) was to treat subjects drawn from ordinary life, the characters and incidents "such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity."4 Poems in this second group were to be given the attention of a meditative and feeling mind. Though the poet was committed to the truth of nature, his mode of presentation was supposed to cast the scene in a novel light in order to awaken the mind from lethargy and so excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural. Wordsworth's aim, like Constable's, was to show the supernatural in the natural. In explaining his intention, Wordsworth gives several reasons for

choosing to write of humble, rustic subjects. The explanations illuminate his poem "The Solitary Reaper" as well as Constable's painting

2 C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1951), p. 284; hereafter cited in the text. 3 Letter of January 1832 to Leslie, in Memoirs, p. 203. 4 Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), II, 5.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The Gleaners. Wordsworth claims that in such life "the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their ma- turity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language."5 Being stronger and simpler, they can be more directly com- municated (Preface, pp. 386-87). No social artifice prevents a direct perception of the simple humanity of Wordsworth's solitary reaper. Her song is uncontrived, expressing directly the natural melody of the passages and patterns of human experience. Constable's scene, too, is unmannered and uncontrived. It has been stripped to an essential sim- plicity that communicates with clarity and directness a basic experience of life. Wordsworth contends further that due to the simple and necessary character of rural occupations the impressions created by their depiction will possess durability (Preface, p. 387). The reflective speaker in "The Solitary Reaper," as well as the poem's reader, leaves with a lasting impression: "The music in my heart I bore, / Long after it was heard no more" (lines 31-32). The viewer of Constable's harvest scene derives an enduring mental view. Wordsworth says finally also that simple, rustic life makes alppropriate subject matter because in such a condition "the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature" (Preface, p. 387). The solitary reaper of his lyric is not a portrait figure posed against an artificial backdrop; she belongs to the living landscape of a valley field that brims with her song. In The Gleaners, too, the human figures are part of a larger scene, notes in the natural landscape's melody of sky and field. In choice of subject matter both Wordsworth and Constable successfully employ the language of everyday. For both Constable and Wordsworth no subject is unsuitable for art.

Constable characterized his struggle for acceptance of landscape painting as a combat against the seemingly "plausible argument that subject makes the picture."6 Wordsworth once responded to an account of how two artists felt the Lake Country landscape was spoiled by unsightly enclosures, by expressing his gladness at not sharing their attitude: "I should not wish to be either of these gentlemen, but to have in my own mind the power of turning to advantage, wherever it is possible, every object of Art and Nature as they appear before me."7 Both Wordsworth and Constable show the sudden charm that imagi-

native lighting can throw on a common scene. Wordsworth allows the modifying colors of imagination to illuminate his picture of a peasant

5 Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, in The Poetical Works, II (Oxford, 1944), 386; hereafter cited in the text as Preface. 6 Letter of November 17, 1824, to Fisher, in Leslie, p. 131. 7 Letter of August 28, 1811, to Sir George Beaumont, in Martha Hale Shack-

ford, Wordsworth's Interest in Painters and Pictures (Wellesley, Mass., 1976), p. 30.

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girl at work. The poetic speaker's musing meditations on the meanings of the reaper's song, the allusions in his reverie to other times and places, and his comparison of her natural notes to the songs of birds are an imaginative light playing over ordinary ground. Constable's practice is similar. As opposed to his imaginative conception, his realistic apprehension of the nature of the landscape in the vicinity of Brighton was quite unappreciative. He wrote on the back of one sketch made there in 1824, the summer that he probably painted The Glean- ers :8 "The neighbourhood of Brighton consists of London cow-fields, and hideous masses of unfledged earth called the country" (Leslie, p. 124). Even granting that the scene of this painting, in showing a cultivated hillside, does not exactly match the deprecating description, it seems likely that the words do provide some notion of Constable's realistic appraisal of the scene. Still, Constable believed that there was no subject that remained unlovely when it was touched by the "CHIAR'OSCURO OF NATURE."' It was his express intention to use lighting for this general effect, "by richness of Light and Shadow" to provide "interest to a subject otherwise by no means attractive."'0 In The Gleaners the prosaic yellow-brown of a stubbled hillside is bur- nished with sunlight and deepened with shadows. The interplay of bright and dark in the windswept clouds forms a design in momentary, mutable lighting as well. The artist uses the play of imaginative lighting to create as well as to record a view. If Constable has treated the land-

scape of The Gleaners with imaginative lyricism, it is according to his conviction: "I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may,-light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful" (reported by Leslie, p. 280).

Another feature common to Wordsworth's poem and Constable's painting is that in each work a particular incident is depicted and developed to its fullness. Meaning emerges from the free development of the individual occurrence. The Romantic poet's and painter's responses to nature are different from those of their Neoclassical predeces- sors. For poets following Neoclassical tradition, the prescription that a poem should resemble a picture meant that both should possess significant form. The artist's concern was not to copy the peculiarities of appearances but to pattern particulars in a way that would embody the

8 John Sunderland dates the painting 1824 in Constable (New York, 1971), plate 37. C. J. Holmes lists it under 1824 as a work for which external evidence for dating is inconclusive, in Constable and His Influence on Landscape Painting (New York, 1902), p. 246.

9 He discusses chiaroscuro as an artistic principle in the Introduction to En- glish Landscape, in John Constable's Discourses, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich, Suffolk, 1970), p. 9.

10 Letterpress to English Landscape, in Beckett, p. 12.

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real. According to Neoclassical theory, art properly imitated the universal form which was only imperfectly and partially embodied in each particular manifestation. Romantic artists reversed the emphasis of this theory. They insisted upon the priority of the particular and celebrated in their art the infinite varieties of the natural. Believing that the uniqueness of nature should be reflected in art, Constable once wrote: "The world is wide; no two (lays are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world;

and the genuine p1roductions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other" (Leslie, p. 273). Meaning for Wordsworth and Con- stable is not an ideal abstraction revealed in the exemplum of a natural event. Rather, it is something that can be known only through full comprehension of the particular in all its singularity. Constable's painting The Gleaners depicts a particular passing mo-

ment near midday in the late summer season. The scene is sun-dried and golden, but the wind is blowing and storm clouds are forming. There may be rain in the offing. The season, the time of day, and the momentary configuration of the clouds are the immediate subject of the painting. The scene is clearly also a particular locale-not just nature or farmland, but a specific part of the English countryside near the coastal town of Brighton. Wordsworth's poem is also particularized. It relates a singular oc-

currence. A traveler through the Scottish highlands pauses at the view of a valley he has reached and stops for a while to attend to the scene. The solitary reaper is allowed her own particular song in a strange dialect. The poet neither invents its words nor specifies meanings for his own effects. He permits its strains to linger in all the ambiguity and singularity of their own reality. Neither Constable's nor Wordsworth's scene is managed or con-

trived. The very inspiration for Wordsworth's poem arose from a chance occurrence. His reading of a descriptive detail from Thomas Wilkinson's tour guide quickened the memory of a scene from his own walking tour of Scotland.11 The encounter the poem describes is one that the traveler chances upon. He is surprised into attentiveness by a scene that comes upon him unprepared: "BEHOLD her, single in the field, / Yon solitary Highland Lass !" (lines 1-2). He pauses in his walk, startled into passivity at the perception of a scene he refuses to disturb: "Stop here, or gently pass!" (line 4). The scene remains enlivened; the girl still stoops and stands with her sickle, and her song continues, even as the traveler turns away again to continue his climb

11 The records relevant to the poem's composition are cited in notes to "The Solitary Reaper," in The Poetical Works, III, 444-45. Hereafter The Poetical Works are cited as P W.

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through the hills. The scene has a life of its own, independent of its viewer.

Constable's scene, too, strikes the viewer as a scene from life just chanced upon. The women working in the fields are absorbed in their own activity. They appear not as figures arbitrarily placed in an art work for compositional purposes, but as the natural inhabitants of the rural fields. Constable seems in this work to have taken to heart the

advice of his early teacher, John Thomas Smith, who told him: "Do not set about inventing figures for a landscape taken from nature; for you cannot remain an hour in any spot, however solitary, without the appearance of some living thing that will in all probability accord better with the scene and time of day than will any invention of your own" (Leslie, p. 6). The scene in The Gleaners has a living integrity that the painter has neither tampered with nor contrived. Observing no "handling" in nature, Constable has refused to let it control his own frank depiction.""

Both Wordsworth's poem and Constable's painting achieve univer- sality through their full development of the particular. The poet universalizes by making comlparisons with other lands and times and seasons. He expands his range of applicability spatially when he com- pares the Highland girl to a nightingale singing to travelers on Arabian sands and to a cuckoo, whose song breaks "the silence of the seas / Among the farthest Hebrides" (lines 15-16). He makes a temporal extension as well, for while the reaper sings in the harvest season of fall, the bird's song belongs to springtime (line 14). In questioning the wellsprings of her lyric, the poet reaches even further back into the time of prehistory, preserved only in oral tradition:

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago.

(lines 18-20)

There is a sense of everlastingness, an unbroken continuum evoked in the poem, too: "... the Maiden sang / As if her song could have no ending" (lines 25-26). The motion of her work is unceasingly rhythmi- cal as she swings her sickle and then stoops to bind the cut grain.

A painter's resources for universalizing are to some degree more restricted than those of a poet. As long as he resolves upon a basically realistic representation, an artist cannot introduce allusions or make comparisons that might deepen or extend the meanings of his work. Wordsworth commented on a writer's comparative freedom in this

12 Leslie remembers Constable's saying, "My pictures will never be popular, for they have no handling. But I do not see handling in nature" (p. 280).

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respect, contrasted with a painter's constraints, in a prefatory note to one of his sonnets: "But the movements of the mind must be more free

while dealing with words than with lines and colours ; such at least was then and has been on many other occasions my belief, and, as it is allotted to few to follow both arts with success, I am grateful to my calling for this arid a thousand other recommendations which are denied to that of the Painter."'" In "The Solitary Reaper" the poet describes the scene factually, but at the same time he exercises his mental freedom to ponder, wonder, and muse in a way that universalizes and deepens his meaning.

There is, however, a similar movement away from the particular toward the universal made in Constable's The Gleaners as well. A

degree of abstraction is inevitable in the act of painting. Simple brush strokes suggest, rather than delineate, the figures of the two women at work in the field. The two figures become something besides specifically characterized individuals. They typify humanity by their common human labor. Their bent and standing poses suggest the same essential, ongoing rhythm of work that Wordsworth's reaper exemplifies. The clouds in the painting may well represent the fleeting configuration of a particular moment in time, but their windswept character intimates also their essential changeability, their indefiniteness, their ability to form, dissolve, and re-form. The cloud-streaked sky evokes a sense of continuing motion and the ever-recurrent patterns of nature.

Another similarity between The Gleaners and "The Solitary Reaper" is that both show the artist's understanding of an experience as founded in sense perception. In The Gleaners a hot, late summer sun shines on dust-dry soil. The wind blows, vexing the skirts of the women and whirling the sails of the windmills. A touch of coolness brushes the sun-parched hillside with a hint of oncoming rain. By linking a certain series of sense impressions, the artist evokes an overall feeling for the landscape as formed and determined by natural elements.

Wordsworth's poem also has a primary basis in sense impression. A single glimpse of the solitary reaper first catches the traveler's eye, prompting him then to meditate inwardly upon it. Perhaps more pene- tratingly, the sound of a melancholy strain haunts his hearing, leaving a lasting echo in inward consciousness. Wordsworth, who was

well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts,14

13 Wordsworth's prefatory note to the sonnet "Composed in Roslin Chapel During a Storm" (1831), in PW, III, 528.

14 "Tintern Abbey," lines 107-09, in PW, II, 262; hereafter cited in the text as TA.

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proceeds in the poem from description of striking outward impressions to inward thoughtfulness. The need for initial receptivity is apparent from the imperatives of the lyric's opening stanza-BEHOLD, Stop, and listen (lines 1, 4, 7). Both poet and painter are first passive and purely receptive to natural impression.

Both Constable and Wordsworth were convinced that an artist

should be receptive to nature as the true source of inspiration. After an apprenticeship of "running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand," Constable arrived finally at the conviction: "There is room enough for a natural painture."'5 His work shows his subsequent resolve to portray the truth of nature under the same bright clear light in which he actually saw it. In his Introduction to English Landscape, Constable writes of two possible approaches to art or literature. One is through the study of old masters, a pursuit bound to produce inferior results, at best yielding only passable imitations of imitations. The other is the approach of the artist who "seeks perfection at its PRIMI- TIVE SOURCE, NATURE." The artist who chooses this way, Con- stable says, will find before hiii ever-expanding fields, unexplored and

"fertile in beauty."", He insists that "the study of Nature in her most minute details is indispensable, and can never be made in vain."17 The Gleaners in its fidelity to nature is the work of a man who clearly believed that "the landscape painter must walk in the fields with a humble mind."l"

Wordsworth, too, acknowledged the necessary passivity of the mind open to inspiration from nature. Moments of deep understanding come only after receptivity to outer impressions, in quietness and inward turning, when

we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul : While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

(TA, lines 45-49)

Nature is the pure source of inspiration for Wordsworth, as for Con- stable. Both artists are receptive to natural influences, contemplative of their values. Just as Constable paints a harvest scene with fidelity to the way it reveals itself to him, Wordsworth records a scene in "The Solitary Reaper" in all the truth of its own uncontrived reality.

15 Letter to John Dunthorne of May 29, 1802, in Leslie, p. 15. 16 Beckett, p. 10. 17 Leslie's records of Constable's Lecture II before the Royal Institution in

1836, in Beckett, p. 57. 18 Constable expressed this conviction in his last lecture on English landscape

at Hampstead, July 25, 1836. See Leslie's notes in Beckett, p. 71.

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Neither Wordsworth nor Constable believed, however, that mere slavish copying of natural appearances meant authenticity in art. Wordsworth spoke against the practice of Sir Walter Scott, who car- ried a notebook around to record the minutiae of experiences. Words- worth contended that "Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charnis."'"' The writer, he said, should instead have taken all into his heart and then later consulted his memory for the essentials of the experience: "That which remained-the picture surviving in his mind-would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in large part by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic.""'' Constable criticized the paintings of F. R. Lee, of the Royal Academny, on a similar basis: "They pretend to nothing but an imitation of nature; but then it is of the coldest and meanest kind . . . All is, thence, utterly heartless.""' Neither Words- worth nor Constable believed that art should aim at exact, but unfeeling, realism.

Both Wordsworth and Constable held that the mind must be an

active agent as well in its interaction with nature. Wordsworth rejoiced at "How exquisitely the individual Mind / . . . to the external World / Is fitted" and "The external World is fitted to the Mind."22 He re-

garded the mind as creator and receiver both, "Working but in alliance with the works / Which it beholds.""' Constable, too, believed there was a matching between the human mind and the external world. He maintained that man's nature "is congenial with the elements of the planet itself, and he cannot but sympathize with its features, its various aspects, and its phenomena in all situations."24 When successful in his work, he felt strongly that the happy effect was due to a reciprocity between mind and nature. Thus, he explained to Maria Bicknell: "How much real delight have I had with the study of landscape this summer! either I am myself improved in the art of seeing nature . . . or nature has unveiled her beauties to me less fastidiously. Perhaps there is something of both."25 Constable approved of an associate's insistence that "the whole object and difficulty of the art (indeed, of all the fine arts) is to unite imagination with nature."' In one of his own lectures on

19 Shackford, p. 32. 20 Shackford, pp. 32-33. 21 Letter of January 20, 1833, to Leslie, in Leslie, p. 217. 22 Home at Grasinere, MS. D, lines 816-21, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, N.Y.,

1977), p. 105. 23 The Prelude, II, 273-75, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revised by Helen Darbi-

shire (Oxford, 1959), p. 58; hereafter cited in the text as P, followed by book and line numbers.

24 Leslie's notes of Constable's last lecture at Hampstead on landscape, in Beckett, pp. 72-73.

25 Letter of July 22, 1812, in Leslie, p. 34. 26 Letter of July 4, 1829, to Fisher, in Leslie, p. 177.

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landscape he made a Wordsworthian distinction between the observations of the outward eye as opposed to true inner seeing, contending finally that "we see nothing till we truly understand it."27 In The Gleaners mind and nature are both operative, as the artist

not only perceives the scene but paints it with the shaping spirit of his own inspiration. Clouds, air, and earth become patterns in color, form, and painted texture. Constable described the artist's need to become inventive and actively creative when he wrote to his friend John Fisher about the problem of transferring the view of "a valley filled with imagery fifty miles long" to a canvas of a few inches: "It is the business of a painter ... to make something out of nothing, in attempting which, he must almost of necessity become poetical.""- The painted lyricism of The Gleaners arises from the active shaping mind and creative hand of an artist. "The Solitary Reaper" also testifies to an interaction between mind and nature. If at first the traveler of the poem is startled into passivity by the impressions he encounters, his subsequent response is an active mental process of questioning and surmise. Mind responds to nature and thus finds and creates meaning. For Wordsworth and Constable the result of a right relationship

between mind and nature was a kind of paradise. Neither artist celebrated the memory of a lost Eden or looked ahead to a far-off golden age; instead each turned his attention to the real world about him. Hymning the spousal verse of the marriage of mind to the goodly uni- verse, Wordsworth found his paradise present: "A simple produce of the common day."29 Constable once claimed, "We are no doubt placed in a paradise here if we choose to make it such."30 The beauty and magnificence of nature which he describes as breaking upon Adam's "astonished sight intensely," he contends, "remain in the world for those who look upon it rightly.""' The qualities Constable sought to illuminate in his painting are the paradisal aspects of the natural world, its "light- dews-breezes-bloom-and freshness."2" In the happy, productive days of his early married life Constable felt himself the inhabitant of a simple, earthly Eden: "I have a kingdom of my own, both fertile and populous,-my landscape and my children."33 If he never saw the living scenes which inspired Claude Lorrain, he was content nonetheless, for,

27 Leslie's notes of Constable's Lecture III, in Beckett, p. 64. 28 Letter of May 29, 1824, in Leslie, p. 124. 29 Home at Grasmere, line 808 (p. 103). 30 Leslie's notes of Constable's last lecture at Hampstead on landscape, in

Beckett, p. 73. 31 Beckett, p. 73. 32 Constable listed these qualities as aims in painting in an undated note cited

in Leslie, p. 218. 33 Letter of May 9, 1823, to Fisher, in Leslie, p. 101.

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he said, "I was born to paint a hapl)ier land, my dear old England."34 Constable found in the ordinary workday scenes of his native Stour Valley the same sort of homely paradise Wordsworth found in Gras- mere Vale. If neither The Gleaners nor "The Solitary Reaper" pictures the particular EI'den of the painter or the poet, both scenes still share a quality of fresh and awakened apprehension of the natural world. The Gleaners makes the light-and-shade-struck impact of a moment of heightened seeing. "The Solitary Reaper" records the reverberating echo of an experience of deepened hearing. In their celebration of the value of ordinary life, both The Gleaners and "The Solitary Reaper" picture a paradise that is the simple produce of a common day. There is an expressive and subjective quality in both Wordsworth's

and Constable's works. In Wordsworth's poem a mood of melancholy pervades. The reaper sings "a melancholy strain,", its "plaintive numbers flow" (lines 6, 18). The story of her song may be of an ancient battle or yet again of some more recent cause for human suffering, "Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again" (lines 23-24). The poet hears in the reaper's voice as he has heard before in nature's own murmuring songs "The still, sad music of humanity" (TA, line 91). There is a pervasive quiet sadness, undefined and pensive, that drifts through the verse. The elegiac tone may be heightened by a reminiscence of gravestone commemorations in the salutation "Stop here, or gently pass !" (line 4)."" The process of reap- ing marks an ending, a close to the season of growth. The mood of the poem remains ambiguous though, mellowed by the poet's comparison of the reaper's song to the songs of birds that are welcome and thrilling (lines 10, 13). The "Vale profound" overflows with the full richness of the sound (lines 7-8). In The Gleaners there is an expressive quality in the clouds, which

Constable regarded as "the chief organ of sentiment" in a painting.3" Holding with conviction that "painting is with me but another word for feeling" (Leslie, p. 86), Constable painted expressive skies. The scene in The Gleaners holds the hovering possibility of a storm. The sky is darkening. A turbulence is depicted that may resolve itself in either brightening or rain, as the storm clouds may or may not blow over. Both gloom and sunshine play on the present scene. The ambivalent impression created by the cloud forms in Constable's painting matches the melancholy ambiguity of mood evoked in Wordsworth's lyric.

.4 Letter of May 9, 1823, to Fisher, in Leslie, p. 101. 535 Geoffrey Hartman makes this contention in Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814

(New Haven, 1965), p. 12. .6 Letter of October 23, 1821, to Fisher, in Leslie, p. 85.

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The association of Constable's clouds with an element of subjective expressionism accords well with a biographical interpretation of his painting. After the productive decade from 1816 to 1826, when Con- stable enjoyed the full happiness of a new family life and painted many of his great canal scenes, the skies in his paintings began to darken.7 The serene, gray summer morning sunshine of The White Horse gave way finally to the distressed sky of Hadleigh Castle. The association between dark and tumult in Constable's paintings and his own psy- chological condition was first made by one whose acquaintance with the artist should have afforded insight. After Maria's death, John Fisher, commenting on Constable's painting The Marine Parade and Chain Pier, Brighton, wrote to his friend: "Mellow its ferocious beauties. Calm your mind and your sea at the same time, and let in sunshine and serenity."'38

The clouds in The Gleaners are emotionally evocative. They suggest the alterations of tunmult and tranquility in the inner weather of the artist's mind as well as the ambivalent and changeable moods of nature. There is a strain of Romantic lyricism in Constable's skies.

There is a marked scientific aspect as well. Constable took pains to represent the clouds with scientific accuracy. His biographer Leslie suggests that the realism with which Constable painted the skies may have been due in part to his early habits of observation as a windmiller (Leslie, p. 4). Two windmills near East Bergholt were part of Golding Constable's properties. When John Constable proved disinclined and unsuited for the career in the Church his family had planned for him, his father next proposed to make him a windmiller. Constable worked for about a year in his father's mills before deciding to pursue art as a serious calling. Early experience may have contributed to Constable's proclivity for realism in depicting the skies.

Particularly during the years of 1821 and 1822 Constable set himself the task of learning to represent cloud forms exactly. He wrote of his new resolve to his friend Fisher in the fall of 1821 : "I have done a good deal of skying, for I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that among the rest."" His interest may well have been prompted by reading or hearing about Luke Howard's cloud classifications in The Climate of London, which appeared in 1818-1820.40 Constable's scientific ap-

37 Graham Reynolds defends this thesis in Constable, the Natural Painter (New York, 1965), pp. 86-89.

38 Letter of December 7, 1828, in Leslie, p. 170. 39 Letter of October 23, 1821, in Leslie, p. 85. 40 Kurt Badt argues that this was actually the case, based on the timing of the

publication of the Howard work, the evidence that Constable noted one of How- ard's categories, cirrus, on the back of one sketch, and the absence of reasons developing within Constable's work that would account for his sudden and pro-

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proach was to make numerous studies from nature. He painted his cloud sketches in oils on large sheets of heavy paper and labeled the backs of them with information regarding the time of day and the weather conditions. In October 1822 he was again doing a good deal of "skying." He wrote to Fisher: "I have made about fifty careful studies of skies, tolerably large to be careful."41 On still another occasion he attested to his continuing particular interest in painting skies, char- acterizing himself as "the man of clouds."42 Constable believed that painting should be a science. In one of his

lectures on landscape he insisted that the profession of landscape painter should be "scientific as well as poetic."4: In a later lecture he pursued the same theme: "Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape be con- sidered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.'"44 Constable's "skying" endeavors can be seen as the data gathering of an objective scientist. The clouds of The Gleaners are emotive only after being scientifically

studied. They characterize a certain time and season; they record a given configuration in the weather. The painting shares much of the scientific quality of Constable's earlier cloud work. The sky predominates in the painting, and the attention given to it is considerable. The Gleaners evinces Constable's careful concern for accurate documenta-

tion in scientific painting. There is a certain obstinate literalness about Constable and Words-

worth. While both did concede the need for the artist to employ imagination, neither was willing to abandon the level of ordinary reality for total expressionisin. Both introduce into their depictions the light of imaginative awareness, but insist upon the abiding reality and necessity to live with the literal. Constable maintained that "imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities."45 The same matter-of-factness is a marked feature of Wordsworth's artistic creed; the whole tenor of his poetic practice at least up through 1807 was to contend with reality in a way that sought meaning and value within nature and not beyond it in any transcendent religious system. Even after the experiences of depth in his "spots of time" Wordsworth returns to insistence on the literal. The

nounced preoccupation with skies (John Constable's Clouds, London, 1950, pp. 50-61) ; hereafter cited in the text.

41 Letter of October 7, 1822, in Leslie, p. 93. 42 Letter of November 2, 1823, to Fisher, in Basil Taylor, Constable: Paint-

ings, Drawings and Watercolors (London, 1973), p. 218. 43 Leslie's notes of Constable's Lecture I on landscape, in Beckett, p. 39. 44 Lecture IV on landscape, in Beckett, p. 69. 45 Leslie's notes of Constable's Lecture I on landscape, in Beckett, p. 39.

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experiences have their significance in terms of solid realities. The traveler in "The Solitary Reaper" passes from perception of the

literal scene to a reverie of surmise and possibility, but the meditation is given in the interrogative, not the declarative, mood. Two initial comparisons serve to universalize the meanings of the particular scene without denying its distinct identity (lines 9-16). The poetic speaker turns next to a questioning mode: "Will no one tell me what she sings ?" (line 17). The answers suggested are only tentative. Given as alternate possibilities, they are phrased musingly as questions. The first possibility is introduced by the provisional word Perhaps:

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago.

(lines 18-20)

The meditator then reverses his position by introducing a different possibility that apparently cancels the first, beginning with the hypo- thetical Or: "Or is it some more humble lay, / Familiar matter of to- day ?" (lines 21-22). The cancellation is only partial, though, and both possibilities stand on the same free-floating footing, for the whole speculation is phrased as a question. The subsequent question seems at first to act as weight that favors the song's being of the humble present, "Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again?" (lines 23-24). In a way it reopens both possibilities again, though, with the suggestion that human life, whether long ago or in the present, is fundamentally the same. The poet refuses finally to insist upon the truth of any given possibility, asserting only what he can surely verify: "Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang" (line 25). The poetic speaker returns then to the solid declarative mood of an objectively given scene. Similarly, Constable's painting, too, may evoke musing responses.

The sun-streaked thrust of hillside and the cloud-tossed sky suggest emotional correlatives. But whatever interpretations they provoke will provide only overtones, perhaps enhancing, but not denying, literal reality. Constable insists upon a basic objectivity in his realistic landscape.

While there are strong similarities between Constable's and Words- worth's art, there are also marked differences that are apparent in a comparison of The Gleaners and "The Solitary Reaper." There is a communal note to Constable's work. Wordsworth's is a scene of solitude.

Wordsworth's poetic landscape is often one quite undisturbed by human life, and his poetry is filled with lonely travelers, like the leech gatherer of "Resolution and Independence," who plies his wearying

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trade on the empty moor; and like the Cumberland beggar, who, despite his connections with human charity, remains society's outcast. In The Prelude a primal loneliness is recurrently evoked by images of solitude. The poet tells, for instance, of a dream in which a phantom Arab figure on a dromedary traverses a boundless, windy desert plain (P, V.71- 140). He describes another solitary figure in the blind beggar, who remains alone even in the middle of a London crowd, gazing with sightless eyes that seem to commune with another world (P, VI.619- 49). The isolated human figure appears once again as the girl with a water pitcher on her head, struggling against the wind on the moor, that the poet remembers from his childhood (P, XII.225-61). One associates the wayfaring poet with his lines, "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Wordsworth describes himself as one who felt "perhaps too much, / The self-sufficing power of Solitude" (P, 11.76-77). In "The Solitary Reaper" Wordsworth develops his familiar theme

of loneliness. The diction of the poem's first stanza specifies and re- peatedly emphasizes the solitude of the figure of the reaper. She is

described as sinfgle and solitary, as she works and sings by herself, alone (lines 1. 2, 3. 5). The allusion to Arablian sands suggests a far-away, lonely wasteland (lines 9-12). The mention of the farthest Hebrides, islands set apart in the silent seas, is another image of solitude (lines 13-16). The traveler who chances upon the sight of the girl has no companion to answer his questions or to share in his surmising: "Will no one tell me what she sings ?" (line 17). He walks away finally un- answered, alone. There is, in contrast, a social aspect to Constable's painting The

Gleaners. Despite the considerable sweep of land and sky in the picture, it is a humanized landscape. There are two figures rather than one at work in the fields. With this small touch the activity changes from lonely occupation to communal endeavor. The two windmills establish the human presence in the countryside. The roof of a human dwelling shows just over the rise of a hill. The communal character of The Gleaners matches the style of Con-

stable's other landscapes. The painter typically includes in them many signs of human presence. He paints cottages and churches, watermills and windmills. The Stour River of his great barge scenes is cut into canals, and made navigable with a series of locks, dams, and sluices.46 The English landscape that Constable most delighted in is one that is cultivated and domesticated, adapted to human use. Leslie explained Constable's lack of feeling for mountains as a lack of sympathy for

46 Classifying Constable as "an industrial landscape painter," Reynolds makes a point of the signs of human intervention with nature in Constable's paintings, in Constable, the Natural Painter, pp. 16-19.

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their solitudes: "I have heard him say the solitude of mountains op- pressed his spirits. His nature was peculiarly social and could not feel satisfied with scenery, however grand in itself, that did not abound in human associations" (Leslie, p. 18). While Wordsworth came to have sympathy for other men only when

he saw them ennobled through placement in a natural landscape, Con- stable came to prize the landscape itself for its primary human associations. Wordsworth describes how repeated seeing of the human form in natural settings, in the shadow of a hill, struck by the radiance of a sunset, or as "A solitary object and sublime" silhouetted against the horizon, ennobled mankind in his eyes (P, VIII.262-81). Constable describes a reverse process. He tells of how he came to be a landscape painter because of his desire to depict the scenes made meaningful by the simple experiences and human associations of his childhood.47 Constable's description of his home country near East Bergholt, Suf- folk, is filled with mention of its humanized character: "The luxuriant meadow flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, and well cultivated up- lands, the woods and rivers, the numerous scattered villages and churches, with farms and picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular spot an amenity and elegance hardly anywhere else to be found."48 It is traces of human life that give meaning to the landscape of Con- stable. It was for a domesticated nature that he felt deepest sentiment. If for Wordsworth love of nature led to love of man, for Constable, in a sense, love of man led to the love of nature. There is another difference between The Gleaners and "The Solitary

Reaper" in their degree of immediacy. While The Gleaners records a scene as perceived directly without the lapse of intervening time, "The Solitary Reaper" is an image of a view reconstituted in memory. It was not Wordsworth's practice to record immediate impressions. His own system of composition is suggested in his criticism of Walter Scott. He preferred to allow an experience to sink deeply into consciousness. He believed that the passage of time would erase inconsequential features from the impression and leave the essential core of its meaning clear. He spoke of the dominance of the bodily eye as a kind of thralldom. The poet's imagination was impaired when he was "Bent overmuch on superficial things," pampering himself "with meagre novelties / Of colour and proportion" (P, XI.116-18). In moments of insight the outer eye was stilled:

Oft in these moments such a holy calm Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes

47 Constable describes this impetus for his art in his Letterpress to English Landscape, in Beckett, p. 13.

48 Beckett, pp. 12-13.

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Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw Appeared like something in myself, a dream, A prospect in the mind.

(P, 11.348-52)

The process of internalization fron ill>pression to inner vision could comne partly also through the agency of memlory. Poetry was for Words- worth, in fact, basically an act of rememnbering.4 In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he (describes the p>oetic process as a kind of re-creation. A remneiibered experience is contemiiplated until soniething like the original emnotion is 1prodluce(d in the mind. Then conllposition begins. While it takes its origin froim feeling, the feeling in Wordsworth's jpoetry is qualified b)y memory (Preface, pp. 400-01). One can see the process operating in "The Solitary Reaper." Since

Wordsworth's conl1position was prolmpted when his reading of Wilkin- son's descril)tion reminded him of his own similar exl)erience, the lyric may be seen to have truly had its origins in emotion recollected in tranquility. The process of remembered re-creation effected an aesthetic distancing. The poem is not the record of an immediate impression, but rather the controlled and fornialized ldepiction of what was abstracted as the essential nature of an experience. Kurt Badt has proposed a theory of the relationship between Con-

stable's sketches and his exhibition p)ictures that correlates with the Wordsworthian mode of poetic composition (pp. 43-45). Badt observes that Constable's works fit into three categories: (1) pencil sketches, (2) landscape sketches painted in oils or, less frequently, water colors, and (3) large, finished exhibition pictures. The pencil sketches, he notes, are usually details precisely and faithfully depicted in a conven- tional spirit: "They are clean and to the point, but nothing more than that" (p. 43). Badt groups together Constable's oil and water-color sketches painted out-of-doors. They are also painted from the model, nature, but they are animated, expressive, and revelatory of immediate feeling. The big exhibition pictures draw from both these sources. For example, the tools in the foreground of the painting Boatbuilding at Flatford Mill were objective details taken from pencil sketches. The oil or water-color sketches, on the other hand, served as subjective patterns for the overall finished paintings. Their agitated brush strokes and bold, blocked-in masses of color were worked into more finely realized de- signs. Badt's interest in Constable's cloud studies leads him to suggest that they form an independent fourth category in his work, halfway between the subjectivism of the sketches and the objective refinement of the exhibition paintings. The mnain significance of his observations

49 Christopher Salvesen develops the implications of this perception in The Landscape of Memory: A Study of Wordsworth's Poetry (Lincoln, Neb., 1965).

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for comparison of Constable and Wordsworth, however, is that the relationship between the sketch and the exhibition picture is the same as that between direct expression of an emotion and the same emotion as recollected in tranquility. In making the sketch, the painter works under the immediate impetus of a direct apprehension. In painting the finished picture after the passage of time, the artist paints an interpretation of the meaning it has for him in memory. If this perspective of comparing sketch to exhibition painting is

applied to The Gleaners, it will be noted that the small painting has its true affinities with the immediate impressions of the sketches rather than with the distanced effects of the larger paintings. Comparing The Gleaners with The Cornfield, for example, one observes at once the roughness of quick brushwork and the distress of the painted surface of The Gleaners as compared to the carefully worked fine detail and finish of The Cornfield. A few strokes of paint suggest the outline of the human figures in The Gleaners, whereas the boy in The Cornfield is much more carefully modeled. In The Gleaners broad-brushed strokes of color suggest the general surface of the wheatfields, whereas the individual stalks of grain are delineated by lines of light in The Corn- field. The Gleaners gives at most the impression of the artist's assuming a carefully chosen vantage point, not nearly the evidence of thoughtful patterning that appears in The Cornfield. One's eye'sweeps quickly over the single expressive thrust of earth in The Gleaners. As one looks at The Cornfield, one is invited to become involved in various possible patterns of seeing-following the curving pathway from the foreground to the cornfield in the middle distance and then on through its rhyming counterpart of meadow into the background, or being drawn instead into the curved pattern of turned figures in the foreground. One can follow patterns in shades of color-golds, browns, and greens, or trace the asymmetrical balance of the trees. The contrast between The Gleaners and The Cornfield exemplifies Constable's own comment on the difference between a sketch and a painting. A sketch, he says, is like seeing something in only one view, and "it will not serve to drink at again and again."'0 While The Gleaners has a more direct emotional expressiveness, The Cornfield displays the gain in significant depth achieved through the artist's thoughtful and creative recollection. The Gleaners differs, then, from "The Solitary Reaper" if regarded

from the standpoint of memory. It bears something of the excitement and urgency of immediate impression. "The Solitary Reaper" is distanced. It is the thoughtful second view of a scene made after the first emotion has subsided and been allowed to keep, then recollected in tranquility.

50 Letter of November 2, 1823, to Fisher, in Leslie, p. 109. 127



Quoting from Wordsworth's poem "Praised Be the Art," Constable claims that the aim of landscape painting should be to give" 'to one brief moment caught from fleeting time' a lasting and sober existence."51 He achieves this aim in his painting The Gleaners. It records, as "The Solitary Reaper" does, a Wordsworthian "spot of time." "Spots of time" for Wordsworth are moments of deepened aware-

ness.52 According to the poet, they are scattered everywhere in human life, beginning from earliest childhood. They are experiences through which one comes to know "to what point, and how, / The mind is lord and master" (P, XII.221-22). Both nature and mind are operative in their formation. Impressions fromi without are subsumed into the quietude of consciousness during these moments of insight. They hold a preeminence in the mind. They possess a restorative virtue to which the mind can turn later for nurture and repair. It is the artist's aim to preserve them, enshrining in his work "the spirit of the Past / For future restoration" (P, XII.285-86). The Gleaners preserves a moment fromi time in which impressions

from the senses-touched by dust-dry soil, warmed by the sunshine, cooled by a gusting breeze, and struck with vibrant colors-cohere into a picture of an afternoon at the end of a harvest season. The prospect deepens into an inner vision of human life in harmony with nature. While outer vision at first predominates in the painted view, the artist has abstracted and depicted the more universal prospect in his mind as well. The painting portrays a moment that stands out, having a kind of preeminence in its power to provoke assent to the basic value and goodness of ordinary life. It possesses restorative virtue in its lyric assertion of the dignity and joy of human life in harmony with the simple rhythms of earth. "The Solitary Reaper" also enshrines a "spot of time" that stands

out from the ordinary passage of time. The picture of the girl alone at her work of harvesting and the strains of her melancholy song produce an impression that reverberates with evocative implication as it sinks into the awareness of the speaker of the poem. The scene holds him for a timne motionless. It leaves a permanent imprint of melody in his mind. "The Solitary Reaper," like The Gleaners, describes a moment when

with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

(TA, lines 47-49)

A comparison of The Gleaners and "The Solitary Reaper" reveals

51 Constable's Introduction to English Landscape, in Beckett, pp. 9-10. 52 Wordsworth's description of the "spots of time" occurs in P, XII.208-86.

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some fundamental similarities in the artistic convictions and practice of Constable and Wordsworth. Typical subjects for both are the ordinary and basic aspects of human life and the everyday appearances of nature. Neither artist "manages" his work; he honors the integrity of the particular material he treats. Each develops a unique, particular incident to its fullest extent. Insofar as a universal application emerges, it develops out of the particular. Both Constable and Wordsworth have a strongly sense-based art. Both believe and practice the tenet that nature herself is the source of inspiration to which the artist must be receptive. Yet both also grant importance to the role of the artist's active mind and imagination. There is an expressive element in the work of both. Both, however, are finally quite insistently literal.

There are also some basic differences between Constable's The

Gleaners and Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper." Constable's view of nature is more social than Wordsworth's. Constable's view is also

more immediate, while Wordsworth's is distanced in time and re- created in memory.

The Gleaners and "The Solitary Reaper" are, nevertheless, both "spots of time." They illuminate awareness, when outer seeing deepens into inner vision. They picture light-struck and music-haunted moments when time stands still.

Temperance, Michigan

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