All language subtitles for Civilisation.11of13.The.Worship.of.Nature.720p.BluRay.YIFY

(MUSIC) BEETHOVEN: Triple Concerto

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.

(MUSIC) BEETHOVEN: Triple Concerto

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.

CECIL DAY-LEWIS: "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.

(MUSIC) BRAHMS: Concerto for Violin and Cello

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 134O

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, M�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.

CECIL DAY-LEWIS: "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."

(MUSIC) BRAHMS: Concerto for Violin and Cello

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."

(MUSIC) SCHUBERT: Quintet in A Major "The Trout"

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.

(MUSIC) BRAHMS: Tragic Overture

Turner was the supreme exponent
of that response to Nature

felt by Gray in the Grande Chartreuse -
what one might call the picturesque sublime.

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

more obvious
than those provided by daisies and celandines.

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

He was a genius of the first order,

far the greatest painter
that England has ever produced.

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

he never lost
his intuitive understanding of Nature.

No-one has ever known more
about natural appearances,

and he was able
to fit into this encyclopaedic knowledge

memories of the most fleeting effects of light -
sunrises, passing storms, dissolving mists -

none of which
had ever been set on canvas before.

For 30 years these brilliant gifts were exploited

in a series of pictures
which dazzled his contemporaries,

but are perhaps too artificial for modern taste.

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

an entirely new approach to painting,

which really
was only recognised in our own day.

It consisted
of transforming everything into pure colour -

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

You know, it's quite difficult for us to realise
what a revolutionary procedure this was.

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

because they were solid.

You proved their reality
by touching or tapping them.

People still do.

And all respectable art
aimed at defining this solidity,

either by modelling or by a firm outline.

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

but the hard and wiry line of rectitude?"

Colour was considered immoral

perhaps rightly,
because it is an immediate sensation

and it makes its effect independently
of those ordered memories

that are the basis of morality.

However
Turner's colour was not at all arbitrary -

what we call decorative colour.

However magical it seems, it always started
as 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.

(MUSIC) DEBUSSY: La Mer

In order to observe these effects -
the sea, the sky, and the point where they join -

Turner lived by the seaside in east Kent,

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

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

"A dialogue between the sea and the sky."

Well, it's no accident that the accompaniment of
those Turner sea pieces was Debussy's La Mer,

written, what, 80 years later.

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

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

or was to be done for almost a century.

In 1840
they must have looked as incomprehensible

as the works of Jackson Pollock a century later.

The enraptured vision that first induced
Rousseau to live in the world of sensation

had one more triumph in the 19th century.

Curiously enough,
it also came from looking at ripples -

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

And it took place in 1869,
when Monet and Renoir

used to meet at a riverside caf�
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.

(MUSIC) DEBUSSY: Nocturnes

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."