Wordsworth and the Romantic switch
At some point during the nineteenth century, in Australia and elsewhere, householders threw out the old rule books that prescribed balance, symmetry and system for their houses. Out went rigid geometries, along with established hierarchies of forms and decorations and many other restrictive, outdated, unnatural notions. Under the influence of a great mass of Romantic writers, poets and other spruikers in many parts of the world, notably England, France and what is now Germany, people reorientated their thoughts to nature, feelings and emotions, and the rich unsophisticated past of their own countries, not distant places in time and space like ancient Italy and Greece. With more people having more wealth and independence than ever before and being able to buy what their wanted, they naturally opted for new, typically suburban, houses that had the qualities they thought worthwhile, not what their old lords and masters or the educated classes prescribed. They chose to build houses that were in tune with the new romantic sentiment, a sentiment that had spread from poets and philosophers to all the arts, including architecture.
Prominent amongst these Romantic revolutionaries, who unended centuries of dogma, was the famous poet William Wordsworth. Despite there being a long history of nature poets in his country and elsewhere, he brought some distinctive qualities that arguably made a big difference to the way that people thought not only about poetry and nature directly, but it ultimately helped crack the classical façade of buildings, constructing a new approach of asymmetry, expansive roofs, and honest expressive materials, redolent of the country even when nestled near the city. A recent biography of Wordsworth explains the key qualities that he brought, that made the shift possible; why he had such an impact[1]:
· Engaging with landscape and nature was a deeply personal experience, where you could trust your own feelings and memories above any abstract notions or principles delivered by books, created by others, most especially experts and analysers. Nature itself was not some concept distant from yourself but indeed you were part of it, and it was part of you, and you could trust your personal response. Nature was immediate, personal and highly variable. It was by concentrating on the particularities and singular distinctiveness that you could understand and appreciate and properly engage.
· Worthwhile engagement required what we would now call empathy and openness, with usually periods of long quiet contemplation or reflection required so you can sift what is essential, deep, clear, and enduring from that which is not. We need to orientate towards affection for nature and not keep it at a distance, treating it as something to be consumed, standardised, or turned into something imagined on our own fixed and limited terms. Indeed, our relationship with our natural surroundings is inevitably unstable, needing to continually and actively reassessed and rethought.
· Need to “see into the life of things”, with an intuitive grasp of what holds living things together, the essential harmony that nature exhibits. This goes beyond any rational, surface-level appreciation and instead requires an appreciation of the unconscious intercourse that we all have with our surroundings, the memories and dreams that underpin our engagement. Our own childhood recollections and the current responses of children provide a vital conduit that we can all draw on, as Wordsworth did so often in his poems. Contrary to what poets of previous times believed, nature could not be understood or appreciated on only an intellectual level, so all efforts such as poetry to communicate an pure sense of delight alone will fail.
Of course, Wordsworth was not alone, he built on the ideas and efforts of a broad range of people, with essential input from immediate friends and family including his sister, Dorothy, with whom he walked, talked and wrote to create the most famous works, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who provided some essential philosophical breadth amongst many other things.
From a distance of two hundred years or so, the change from the order and discipline of classical homes to the heightened emotions and sometimes drama of romantic ones is not so obvious to the casual viewer but such a change was immense and contentious at the time, so much so that many did not accept the new approach, particularly in major public buildings where the battle of the styles went on through much of the remainder of the century with both Classical and Gothic buildings being commissioned. When you consider that for hundreds of years, there had been a fixed notion of architecture, indeed the concept of architecture was formed with a particular idea in mind, that is the discipline, system, and elements of ancient Rome and Greece as reinterpreted or reinvented by the Renaissance, it is not hard to see that such a change from this would be challenging. During this time, there was only one way of imagining buildings. All previous building before the Renaissance was considered barbaric, something only the Goths or such people would do. It took a lot to overcome this notion - a big shift in sensibility or intellectual framework. How could the buildings of monks and medieval clerics, or the humble cottages of uneducated impoverished rural folk be considered something worthy of increasingly educated and wealthy people and a civilisation that could tame nature with wonderous new machines, construct huge complex cities, and wrap the whole globe into a one vast empire (in the case of the British)?
Maybe it was the brilliance of some genius poets and philosophers that led to the switch. Or possibly, the ground had to be prepared beforehand or the conditions were ripe for a new way of looking at dwelling spaces. The newly affluent and influential middle classes of the industrialising countries were exerting their considerable strength and numbers, choosing homes, churches and commercial buildings that suited them, not what had long satisfied the previously dominant upper classes. There was a rising identification of people with their own countries or regions and a rejection of the vague notion of a pan-European civilisation to which all must belong. So it was the detail and texture of the old buildings, the qualities that make the common buildings of the towns and countryside singular and distinctive, that mattered more than any fixed ‘rational’ notions of beauty imposed by others. Industrialisation itself left many feeling that the heart had gone out of the world and human affairs were left dry and lifeless, both at a practical level in everyday, increasingly factory, work and more philosophically as the universe appears increasingly mechanical, something to be regulated for our own material needs alone. A bunch of dreamers who could offer spiritual solace would get a good reception in such a desert.
In the end there may be no simple answer. Wordsworth and the other romantics may have provided the necessary spark to set the world on fire or the world may have been waiting for them or someone similar and would take what they could find to satisfy their needs.
[1] Jonathon Bates, Radical Wordsworth: The poet who changed the world, William Collins, 2020.