Freestanding

Such nature or rusticity as the

heath represents appears as the

exception rather than the rule

of human existence. Nature has

become the object of an excur-

sion, a change of scene.

[And yet] only those fortified

by urban civility, Hazlitt seems

to say, can withstand rural boor-

ishness. and even the positive

aspects of country life - its

calm and its beauties - are best

appreciated from the standpoint

of urban, urbane values.

Having demonstrated this in his

Satires, Horace would have had

little objection to Constable's

figuring it out, some time later;

and if we must listen daily to a

redneck party's rejection of the

urbane, it is certain, its claim

to arise in nature is no more

than unhinged from it. How well

the history of English painting

portrays its contests as alive.

Ann Bermingham
Landscape and Ideology
  The English Rustic
  Tradition, 1740 - 1860
University of California Press
Berkeley and London, 1986©