In Romantic art,
therefore,
nature gains a new importance
It is the supremely threatened thing, the long-lost home from which we have been sundered, the symbol of an Edenic inno- cence that manufacture, materialism and Enlightenment have jointly destroyed. From Wordsworth to Hopkins, from Beetho- ven to Vaughan Williams, from Constable to Cézanne, the im age of nature returns with its promise of a more than worldly consolation. And invariably it is associated with membership in its vanished or vanishing forms: the pious routines and rites of passage of a folk culture at peace with itself. movement, how- From the very beginning of the Romantic ever, consciousness stands apart from the natural world. The Romantic artist is a wanderer. The old moral order that lies en folded in nature has withdrawn from his grasp. Goethe's Faust typifies this stance, and nothing is more prophetic of the course of modern culture than Faust's relation to Gretchen, the nno en C dise ther dre as S 268 ther abo riag nity