Luminism in the Work of Henry David Thoreau: The Dark and the Light

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 11,No. l, Spring 1980 Luminismin the Workof HenryDavid Thoreau: TheDarkandthe Light Barton Levi St. Armana The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object nr one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the ph1lo~opher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond ,i,asa small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Thoreau" The term "luminism" has become popular with recent historians of American art, but it still remains elusive and problematical.1 Unlike equally slippery "isms" such as "Romanticism" and "Impressionism," it was not originally adopted by the artists to which it has been applied, but rather was coined one hundred years after the fact to describe a special quality of their work. John I. H. Baur first formulated the term in a pioneering article entitled "American Luminism: A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Painting," published in 1954.2 Here Baur identified this forgotten phase of native art, primarily concerned with the detailed recording of the effects of light, as a movement which ..reached its fullest expression in the l850's and 60's, particularly in the work of two men, Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin J. Heade" (p. 92). Thus luminism is an imposed rather than organic category, and though it may sometimes seem as mysterious as an outbreak of measles-appearing in some of a particular artist's paintings but not in all or most of them-I still believe that it describes something real and measurable. From Baur's essay onward, there has been a general agreement that the meaning of luminism has its analogues somewhere within the corpus of nineteenth-century American literature, yet so far these analogues have been sought in a random and capricious manner.3 Indeed, there is little use in discussing a luminist ''sensibility" or "philosophy" when we know 14 f ;,u ~ ~ 2 ,:, r, ~ ;::::. < / , g (~ :c ~ '. 3 c.. (t to 0: 2 ~ ;Burr on Lni St. ,-1mw11d Lummism and Thoreau 15 so little about the luminist painters themselves, as the standard biographies of Lane and Heade so well indicate. 4 Barbara Novak, who has been chiefly responsible for canonizing the use of the term and expanding its literary possibilities, writes that "Fitz Hugh Lane's art concurs with Emerson's concept of light as the reappearance of the original soul," while at the same time she acknowledges that there is not the slightest evidence that Lane ever accepted any part of Transcendental theory: "There is no direct proof that Lane knew Emerson's essays or that he ever heard him on any of the frequent occasions when Emerson visited Boston, and even Gloucester ."5 It is this tendency to undisciplined overstatement that has prompted Theodore Stebbins to suggest that "in the future it may be preferable to define luminism stylistically rather than philosophically, and in particular, to limit the term so that it refers specifically to the meticulous, tightly polished style in the landscape painting practiced in America chiefly from 1860 to 1880" (p. 105). Separating subjective feeling from objective style, what do we obtain when we see American luminism purely as a stylistic paradigm? Following the lead of Claude Levi-Strauss in his essay on "The Structural Study of Myth," 6 I would propose seven "mythemes" or "gross constituent units" which most critics have agreed upon as constituting a luminist approach in mid-century American painting: 1. Precision of detail 2 Preoccupation with tonal gradations 3. Effect of light on polished surfaces 4 Mutability of atmospheric effects 5 Marine, lake, marsh, and coast views, often featuring harsh and barren beach scenes and planar recession. 6 Horizontal framing 7. Anonymity of the artist, emphasized by absence ofbrushstroke. Where do we find these same units in American writing on landscape in the l850's and l860's? Excluding Emerson, who uses landscape only as a means of wholly subsuming the real object in an ideal state of mind, the choice is an obvious one. In Walden and Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau minutely focuses his attention on landscapes dominated by water, surrounded by a changing atmosphere of mist and haze which varies according to the season of the year. Moreover his objective, scientific approach often makes him a mere recorder, as close to an anonymous artist as possible. In both these works Thoreau surveys the panoramic scene before him, drifting in his boat on Walden Pond or looking down from the hump-like spine of the Cape on the barren and seemingly endless sweep of beach before and behind him. 7 In Walden, especially, he is concerned with multiple strata of reflection and the ever-changing effect of light on polished, mirror-like surfaces. In the following passage he expresses his concern with his exact placement at a particular point, from which he surveys the effects of shifting atmos- 16 Barton Levi St. Armand pheric phenomena, a technique which can be directly related to Reade's method of studying the same beach or marsh scene under constantly varying meteorological conditions: I was seated by the shore of a small pon_d, about a mile and half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its son ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. 8 The lifting of the natural veil of the atmosphere gives rise to a "magic realism" which combines the effect of those mirrored surfaces, still spaces, tonal skies, and chromatic brilliancies that are the objective hallmarks of one class ofluminist paintings, typified by the lake scenes of Heade, Sanford Gifford and John Kensett: This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm m August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, midafternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear port10n of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hilltop near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. (pp. 70-71) The reflective quality of the landscape here implies the most profound inversion of all: that earth becomes heaven, a true natural paradise, and that the elements become so commingled and refracted, that it is impossible to tell where one leaves off or the other begins. Water and air take on the same properties, and become a single transforming medium. Speaking of the duality of Walden Pond's changing hues, Thoreau reveals a determined preoccupation with capturing a scene's particular tonal gradations : an exercise which most modern readers might tend to skip over-as they do Melville's cetology in Moby-Dick-because of its very density of detail: Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred this to the reflection of the verdure; but it ts equally green there agamst the railroad sandbank, and in the Lurninisrn and Thoreau 17 spnng, before the leaves are expanded, and 1t may simply be the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris. This is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also transmitted through the earth, melts first and fonns a narrow canal about the still frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green of the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. (p. 148) It was on precisely such direct observations that luminist painters based those landscapes which were considered by contemporary critics such as James Jackson Jarves to be harsh and untrue in their coloring, simply because the scenes themselves appeared to be exceptional, peculiar and eccentric in their choice of atmospheric phenomena. In a passage from The Art-Idea (1864), Jarves had written of American artists that: To such an extent is literalness carried, that the majority of works are quite divested of human association. "No admittance" for the spirit of man is written all over them. Like the Ancient Mariner's "painted ship upon a painted ocean," they both pall and appall the senses. Their barrenness of thought and feeling become [sic] inexpressibly wearisome after the first shock of rude or bewildering surprise at overstrained atmospherical effects, monotonous in motive, however dramatically varied in execution. The highest aim of the greater number of the landscapists seemingly is intense gradations of skies and v10lent contrasts of positive color. The result is destructive of any suggestion of the variety and mystery of nature. 9 Jarves even out-Ruskined Ruskin, his mentor, by taking the PreRaphaelites to task for their microscopic realism, because he sought in all painting that elusive manifestation of spirit which the nineteenth century called "expression." Thus Jarves' quoting Coleridge is significant, because it was the duality of Coleridgean aesthetics (the differentiation between the mechanical fancy and the higher, divine "esemplastic" imagination) which was the ultimate foundation of Ruskinian "truth to nature." As Ruskin himself wrote in Modern Painters, "The fancy sees the outside, and is able to give a portrait of the outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail. The imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted, in its giving of outer detail:' 10 For Thoreau, "A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air," and the dilemma of his wavering Transcendental vision in Walden and Cape Cod is the dilemma of luminist painting as well. By concentrating on a precise rendering of outside detail, by unswerving attentiveness and obedience to the real, Thoreau hoped that the veil of phenomenality itself could be dissolved and that the numinous, in the form of "expression," would be made manifest. Part of Thoreau's strategy, like that of the luminist painters, was himself to become a perfect reflecting mirror of the most 18 Barton Levi St. Armand minute changes in very "real" phenomena. But Absolute Idealism led Ruskinian critics like Jarves to assert that these phenomena simply were not "spiritual" enough to be the proper subjects of art. The moral imperative of painting as the uplifter of the soul still prevailed, for some landscapes seemed to teach lessons which bordered on nihilism and blasphemy. In Walden Thoreau has few fears about the quality of the limpid depths in his own nature, so most of his landscapes remain not threatening, but rather of a softly luminist variety, more in line with Lane's peaceful harbor scenes than with Reade's threatening coastal studies. In the occult symmetry of the pond, Thoreau discovered an oblique but fundamentally true correspondence with the eccentric contours of his own soul, and for him this occult symmetry implies the highest type of reflective beauty. "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature," he writes. "It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows" (p. 156). Thoreau's object in rendering the luminist simplicities of Walden in all its moods is as much directed toward capturing the ghost, effect, character or "expression" of the spirit behind this landscape's face as it is to tracing (in Emerson's phrase) the "perfect probity" of his own interior life: Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You would thmk that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below the line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As you look over the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey the surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. (p. 156) Even the marked horizontality which is one of the formal characteristics of luminist painting, particularly of the work of Heade, becomes an integral part of Thoreau's drawn-out descriptions of these varying strata of water, mist and sky. The prevailing light is a penetrating, italicizing and objectifying agent which equalizes all objects, while color here is subdued into a unity of tonal values alone. There is no sense of the melodramatic power which makes itself visible in the cyclical rhythms of a typical early romantic landscape by Thomas Cole, for there are no expectations that we will Lummism and Thoreau 19 surprise Nature at her grandest or most sublime mood. Rather, she is abiding, quiescent-possessed of an almost Oriental stillness and calm, since Thoreau is approaching her as an inquiring poet-naturalist rather than as an eager romantic idealist. "Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them" (p. 176). Here we are reminded that Martin Johnson Heade, too, was an ardent sportsman who contributed a series of letters to Forest and Stream up to his death in 1904 (see Stebbins, p. 156 and Appendix A, pp. 202-04). But Thoreau, of course, does harbor certain preconceptions, as he has indicated; in Walden Pond he finds a mirror of self in which all polluting elements are ultimately refined and washed away, as in a self-administered baptism of the spirit: In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;-a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush,-this the light dust-cloth,-which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above tts surface, and be reflected in its bosom still. (pp.157-58). Thoreau himself explicates the meaning of the luminist landscapes he has limned. Significantly, he was also the author of poems variously entitled "Smoke," "Haze" and "Mist," but in his case the veil of the atmosphere never obscured intention. Atmosphere was no magic screen that hung before an inviolable Holy of Holies, but an instrument of knowledge to be used by the questing artist with dispatch and vigor: "It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do" (p. 74). It is with similar delight that Thoreau, the archsurveyer and measurer, announces that Walden is not bottomless but "has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual depth" which he himself had easily fathomed "with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half' (p. 240). For in fathoming Walden Pond he had succeeded in sounding the depth of his own self, finding that it, too, had a solid foundation in reality. Through his scientific "attentiveness and obedience," he perceived that when he laid a rule on a map of the pond, itbecame obvious, "to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth, notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far 20 Barton Levi St. Armand from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves" (p. 242). Here, then, was the true value of Thoreauvian physiognomy; from these purely material features, the reader is left to draw the spiritual moral that, in spite of the irregularity of outside appearances, Thoreau's soul, his inner being, obeys an occult but universal law of natural harmony. Thoreau's soul has depth as well as merely length and breadth, and the point of the intersection of the various planes is precisely that mathematically pure, elegant, and demonstrable point d'appui of reality for which he has been so patiently and determinedly seeking. The luminist preoccupation with precise measuremems finds here its higher justification in a working out of "Higher Laws:' Yet the symmetries of Walden and the tempering of the Transcendental philosophy which lies behind it-a tempering by seeing-depend to a great extent upon the special properties and unique local color of the landscape itself. Luminist technique is always dependent on the successful adaptat10n of an individual to his surrounding environment, on his ability to know a landscape and its limits as deeply and as thoroughly as he knows himself. When Thoreau fixes upon a less soothing, more alien subject, as he does in Cape Cod, he enters a domain of hard luminism where his intensity and objectivity of vision, as in Heade's famous painting Approaching Storm: Beach Near Newport (c. 1865), produce a growing caution and increasing diminution of the observer. It was of this work, "with its weirdly pinnacled rocks, its metallic water and threatening, green-tinged light," that Baur wrote: "There may have been more dramatic storms painted, but seldom has the sense of foreboding been more ominously realized, or the implication of impending catastrophe" (p. 94). The wasteland Thoreau beholds in Cape Cod also becomes a dark mirror which reflects back not a purified and luminous image of his own self, but rather the emptiness, indifference and elemental vacuity of the space that surrounds and oppresses that self. The artist's stance now becomes that of assuming a defensive anonymity, of becoming as objective and noncommittal as possible about the hard reality of those things he must depict. Cape Cod thus opens with a description of the aftermath of a shipwreck, an event which seems to be implicit in Heade's Approaching Storm. We find such chilling descriptions as Thoreau's sight of the "livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl... to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless,-merely red and white,-with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights; or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand." 11 Yet, it was precisely this kind of objectivity and anonymity which Jarves ascribed to the English Pre-Raphaelites who "to a great degree, lose their own individ- Luminism and Thoreau 21 uality or consciousness in their zeal for rigid representation, and in this are the opposite of Turner, who largely endowed his works with his own life" (pp. 142-43). As Thoreau explains, he can maintain such objectivity because he is being entirely faithful and "true" to the spirit of place-the character of the landscape- upon which he has happened: "On the whole," Thoreau admits, 1t was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity? If the last day were come, we should not think so much about the separation of friends or the blighted prospects of individuals. I saw that corpses might be multiplied, as on the field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any degree, as exceptions to the common lot of humanity. Take all the graveyards together, they are always the majority. (pp. 20-21) We can literally see the "egotistical sublime" of Walden withering before this new economy of scarcity. In its tense cosmic objectivity, Thoreau's Cape Cod parallels the gathering gloom of a Naturalist vision which became dominant in the post-bellum era of American social and intellectual thought. Thoreau, like Emerson in his essay, "Fate," begins to build altars to the Beautiful Necessity of Force. Speaking of the discovery of a body in the water, he writes that "I saw that the beauty of the shore itself was wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he could perceive, at last, how its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still" (p. 21). The peculiar type of rare and sublime beauty is, of course, the terrible beauty of a luminist work such as Heade's Approaching Storm, and Cape Cod is full of Naturalist details- "the sea nibbling voraciously at the continent" (p. 23); "the tawny rocks, like lions couchant, defying the ocean, whose waves incessantly dashed against and scoured them with vast quantities of gravel" (pp. 25-27); "an exceedingly barren and desolate country, of a character which I can find no name for: such a surface, perhaps, as the bottom of the sea made dry land day before yesterday" (p. 34)-which are also to be found in the alien, almost prehistoric solitude of another whole class of luminist works. In Cape Cod, Thoreau makes concrete "the bare swells of bleak and barren-looking land" which were the Plains of Nauset, or the silence of the beach, whose "solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined" (p. 63). This solitude is no longer the healing isolation of Walden Pond and its environs, but a panoramic emptiness so alien and profound that "A thousand men could not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of the scenery as their footsteps in the sand" (pp. 63-64). Here is Thoreau's "Approaching Storm": Far below us was the beach, from half a dozen to a dozen rods in width, with a long lme of breakers rushing to the strand. The sea was exceedingly dark and stormy, the sky completely overcast, the clouds still dropping ram, and the wind seemed to blow not so much as the exc1tmg cause, as from sympathy with the already agitated ocean. The waves broke on the bars at some distance from the shore, and curving green or yellow as 1f 22 Barton Levz St. Armand over so many unseen dams, ten or twelve feet high, like a thousand waterfalls, rolled m foam to the sand. There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe (pp. 58-59) No matter what the exact meteorological phenomenon, Thoreau retains that precision of sight and description which is so much a part of luminist technique, even though the mirage-like mutability of the Cape sometimes makes measurement itself seem absurd. His view is consistently linear, stretched out tautly along the horizontal and dominated by an attention to planar arrangement and spatial recession: "On our right, beneath us, was the beach of smooth and gently-sloping sand, a dozen rods in width; next, the endless series of white breakers; further still, the light green water over the bar, which runs the whole length of the fore-arm of the Cape, and beyond this the unwearied and illimitable ocean" (pp. 62-63). The sense of place is perceived under all varieties of atmospheric change. Thus, "All the aspects of this desert are beautiful, whether you behold it in fair weather or foul, or when the sun is just breaking out after a storm, and shining on its moist surface in the distance, it is so white, and pure, and level, and each slight inequality and track is so distinctly revealed; and when your eyes slide off this, they fall on the ocean" (p. 66). We again find the prevailing interest in tone, and in the horizontal nature of strata or layers of color and atmosphere which Thoreau displayed in Walden, with exactly the same stubborn adherence to scientific "truth" and objectivity of approach: Commonly, in calm weather, for half a mile from the shore, where the bottom tinges 1t, the sea is green, or greenish, as are some ponds; then blue for many miles, often with purple tinges, bounded in the distance by a light, almost silvery stripe; beyond which there is generally a dark blue rim, like a mountain ridge in the horizon, as if, like that, 1t owed its color to the intervening atmosphere. On another day, it will be marked with long streaks, alternately smooth and rippled, light-colored and dark, even like our inland meadows in a freshet, and showing which way the wind sets. (pp. 119-20) Indeed, to Thoreau, "The ocean is but a larger lake" (p. 124), and it contains the same possibilities for soft luminist effects which we have discussed in relation to Walden, since "At midsummer you may sometimes see a strip of glassy smoothness on it, a few rods in width and many miles long, as if the surface there were covered with a thin pellicle of oil, just as on a country pond" (p. 124).Ultimately, however, it is the latent, sleeping power of the sea which fascinates Thoreau, its awesome capacity for sudden metamorphosis and elemental fury, its ability to reveal splinters of the void: Yet this same placid Ocean, as civil now as a city's harbor, a place for ships and commerce, will erelong be lashed into sudden fury, and all its caves and cliffs will resound with tumult It will ruthlessly heave these vessels to and fro, break them in pieces in its sandy or stony jaws, and deliver their crews to sea-monsters. It will play with them like seaweed, distend them like dead frogs, and carry them about, now high, now low, to show to the fishes, givmg them a mbble. This gentle Ocean will toss and tear the rag of a man's body hke the father of mad bulls, and his relatives may be seen seeking the remnants for weeks Luminism and Thoreau 23 along the strand. From some quiet mland hamlet they have rushed weepmg to the unheard-of shore, and now stand uncertain where a sailor has recently been buried amid the sand-hills (pp. 124-25) Moving beyond mere technique to a comprehension of his own insignificance , Thoreau also leads us to a deeper understanding of the meanings implicit in a similar landscape like Reade's Approaching Storm. It seems to be at first glance an insoluble paradox that a mode of painting which deals with the effect of light under changing conditions of cloud and atmosphere should have such a dark and chilling dimension to it, but it is only by such a paradox- and the fact that luminism deals as much with a thinning or disappearance of the cushioning veil of atmosphere as it does with light itself-that we can understand how it could embrace works as different from one another as Lane's shimmering Gloucester scenes and Reade's ominous beach studies. In both extremes of luminism, the hard and the soft-the dark and the light, if the paradox holds-we are faced with a common denominator: the fact that the artist, as observer, has somehow diminished or disappeared entirely from the scene. As Barbara Novak writes, "In removing his presence from the painting, the artist acts as a clarifying lens, allowing the spectator to confront the image more directly and immediately" (p. 97). But there are two ways in which the artist can accomplish this feat: either by merging with the landscape, so that he totally absorbs and focuses its light as if he were a living camera obscura or by becoming an impassive, detached daguerrean operative, producing a mirror-image which reflects as accurately as possible the scene's glaring intensity. Thoreau's Walden is a type of the first instance, as his Cape Cod is an example of the latter strategy. James Jackson Jarves, with his pronounced dislike for "the barren externalism and dry-bones literalism of the extreme Pre-Raphaelites" (p. 245), thought such a strategy a prime example of infidel materialism, for as a Ruskinian he still demanded some "ideal" or poetic justification for the existence of landscape art. "But mere materialists," he writes, "find so many snares in the exercise of the spiritual, creative, or interpenetrative faculty, that they seek to confine themselves to the direct facts of nature, avoiding other idealism than that of the naked eye in its recognition of integumentary beauty. Naturalism readily degenerates into matter-of-fact realism, or delights in inferior truths and subordinate aims. It is, then, objective in character, and confines itself mainly to illustration" (p. 203). Once aga~n the basis of Jarves' ideal aesthetics is a belief that the landscape harbors some spirit which can be conveyed to the sensitive observer through the skillful, equally spiritual use of the medium of paint. Jarves is so convinced of this dichotomy between the real and the ideal that, in comparing a fruit-piece by the still-life painter George H. Hall to a flower-composition by John La Farge, he can assert: 44 painters of horticulture like Hall exhaust their art on the outside of things, with the fidelity 24 Barton Levi St. Armand of workers in wax. The more natural, the greater the lie, because they try not for a type or suggestion, but for actual deception. An untrained eye may be deceived, but such success is positive condemnation. Art has fallen to the low condition of artifice." La Farge's violets and lilies, however, "are as tender and true suggestions of flowers-not copies-as nature ever grew, and affect our senses in the same delightful way. Their language is of the heart, and they talk to us of human love and God's goodness." Thus "Hall's fruit is round, solid, juicy-huckster's fruit; only it proclaims paint and painter too loudly to tantalize the stomach. The violets of La Farge, and, indeed, his landscape entire, quiver with poetical fire. We bear away from the sight of them, in our inmost souls, new and joyful utterances of nature" (pp. 204-05). Even as Jarves was asserting this genteel aesthetic, there were rumblings and stirrings which indicated that it had outlived its usefulness. At the bottom of the page on which Jarves makes this assertion, a contemporary annotator of a copy of The Art-Idea, now in the collection of the Providence, Rhode Island, Athenaeum, indignantly reminds us that in fact "The highest Art a fruit-piece can aspire to is an exact representation of nature!- The beauty of an apple is of surface, not soul." Thus the entire neo-platonic premise on which Ruskinian idealism was based-on the idea that nature is impregnated at all levels with a soul, or a ghost, or a spirit, which the artist is obliged to capture and render as "effect" or "expression" -was beginning to be challenged, just as biology, geology, and the Origin of Species were challenging Genesis, Revealed Religion, and orthodoxies of all kinds. When this first premise of Absolute Idealism was questioned, the Romantic typology which had been based upon it crumbled as well. The reason that Jarves dismissed those paintings which we now designate under the title of luminism as shallow and "realistic to a disagreeable degree" was simply that they violated an accepted genteel tradition of landscape painting. Luminism implied a wholly radical, blasphemous vision that challenged the accepted mercy and goodness of God as well as the blessedness of his creation. In Thoreau's Cape Cod, we find a fairly explicit rendering of this uncompromising new vision, which was to become more and more dominant in the literary realm through the ascendency of such writers as Crane, Norris and Dreiser. Thoreau writes in a chapter entitled "The Sea and the Desert" that: The seashore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-traveled and untameable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime. It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with crabs, horse~shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up, -a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. The carcasses of men and beasts together he stately upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching m the sun and waves, and each tide turns them m their beds, and tucks fresh sand under Luminism dnd Thoreau 25 them. There is naked Nature,-mhumanly smcere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray. (p. 182) With no correspondences possible between inner truth and outer reality, with the penetrative imagination up against impenetrable substance, only distance, expanse, barren vista could be emphasized. Ironically, a perfect vantage point and an extraordinary clarity of detail have drained the self ofits egotism; gone is the protective curtain of painterly chiaroscuro which wrapped the individual in a dream of romantic grandeur. The Higher Law has become an Inexorable Order. The confrontation with his own origins has reduced man-whether Homo sapiens or Homo-erectus-to the ultimate horizontality of the primal ooze, "creeping along the endless beach." What kind of lessons did "naked Nature" teach in this instance, save that survival was more important in the cosmic scheme of things than salvation, and that man and his beliefs were equally subject to the erosion registered on the rocks and the sand? Or as Thoreau's Wellfleet oysterman put it: "'I am a nothing. What I gather from my Bible is just this; that man is a poor good-for-nothing crittur, and everything is just as God sees fit and disposes'" (p. 84). Since Nature was denuded of all veils, the bony skeleton itself showed through, and Thoreau unflinchingly anatomized it. When the penetrative imagination failed, the artist was forced to expose structure rather than reveal spirit. His "dry-bones literalism" is similar again to that of the Pre-Raphaelites, of whom Jarves wrote: "They also forget that nature, their teacher, invariably in the landscape hints at more than she discloses, leaving in the mystery of her forms in masses a delightful scope of suggestiveness to the natural eye, which is to it as is hope to the religious faculties, or as is imagination to the intellect, an angel of promise to draw one onward in pursuit of the ideal" (p. 142). Surely there was nothing delightful, hopeful, or divinely elevating in this precisely-rendered passage by Thoreau or in its artistic counterpart, Reade's Approaching Storm. Both scenes violated Jarves' contention that "The painter, like the moralist, should· accept the spiritual law that the naked fact is not always to be given in its absolute exactness of matter; otherwise it would obscure or detract from more important facts, ,and arrest attention as it were on the threshold of the temple of art" (p. 142). When the naked fact was given in its absolute exactness of matter, sometimes the result was the reduction of man to a "nothing," while the God who inhabited the temple of art became a fearsome Oriental deity, destroyer as well as preserver. Or God was transformed into no God at all, but Economy, Necessity, System, Ecology, or Evolution. If we are to interpret the basis of the "sense of foreboding" or feeling of "impending catastophe" that John Baur originally felt when contemplating Heade's Approaching Storm, we can only do so by moving from a formal analysis of Thoreau's luminist description of the seashore to a 26 Barton Levz St. Armand consideration of his culturally prophetic ideas about the voracity of this neutral ground. Such a threatening voracity is an integral part of the intent and the meaning of the chapter he entitles "The Sea and the Desert." Compare for example, Thoreau's straightforward acknowledgement of this voracity to Barbara Novak's admirable but eclectic attempt at explaining the formal dynamics ofHeade's Approaching Storm, which is but the painted version of Cape Cod's "naked Nature": Approaching Storm: Beach Near Newport is an excellent display of all the various qualities of Heade's sensibility. His luminist planarism appears in the sharp edge of the honzon at the right and in the linear clarity of the ripples of the distance. A surrealist u~e of empty space is evident at the left, where a charged pull recalls again de Chirico's slanted perspectives-suspended between surface and distance at an angle that bars the viewer from entering onto the sliding plane. The sky and the foreground waves are handled softly and proto-Impressionistically, for in Heade's work, erasure of stroke and affirmation of ~troke alternate and. as here, are often present in the single picture. Most compelling of all. the rocks at the left, perhaps more responsible than either storm or space for the ominous tone of the picture, are executed in relentless detail, each concavity and convexity wriggling with a curious presence. They are the rocks of fantasy. If we are to look for thetp somewhere in the history of art, we are most likely to find them in the Gothic period .. We are also reminded that this approach is fundamentally primitive and conceptual and that the luminist tie to the primitive sensibility is an important one. We need only consider the large sailboat at the right to find further evidence of the clear planarity of the primitive vision. The rocks at the left also relate to the primitive vision in their accumulation of equally emphasized detail. (pp. 127-28) Reade's rocks are no more fantastic than those "hard, sienetic" ones described in Cape Cod by Thoreau, who observes that ""Objects on the beach, whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they actually are" (p. 108). And while Heade is no more a "primitive" than is Thoreau himself, both artists court Matthew Arnold's charge of "barbarism" by daring to go beyond the superficial conventions of their age. The consequences of their lifting of the veil of Absolute Idealism, whose simulacrum in painting was a brown or white sauce of mistiness that too often passed for genuine mysticism, was all that Ruskinian critics like Jarves had ever feared or predicted: Nature without Soul, and the Death or Disappearance of God. Jettisoned too was that Romantic typology which read the volatile truths of the Book of Nature in terms of the received truths of the orthodox Books of Scripture, thereby finding "Sermons in stones, and good in everything ." Yet those of a more liberal stripe, like Emily Dickinson's "Dear Preceptor," Thomas Wentworth Higginson, welcomed Thoreau's radical luminist vision for the sanitary freshness it could offer, since any God it might offend or diminish was already an unknown one to this free-thinking reformer. In an early review of Cape Cod, Higginson wrote that what is praise-worthy about Thoreau's vision is its "stern realism" and "formidable accuracy," for "no other [author's] observing powers were like his; no one else so laboriously verified and exhausted the facts; and no other mind rose from them, at will, mto so subtle an air of meditation-meditation Lummism and Thoreau 27 too daring to be called devout, by church or world, yet too pure and lofty to merit any lower name." 12 We might contrast Higginson's praise of Thoreau's "photographic" realism ("Cape Cod is photographed at last") to Jarves' observation that '"any training that would make us so see nature would exhange half of its beauteous mystery as a whole, with its proper emphases of parts and its lovely gradation of distances, for a photographic, unidealistic rendition of the forms, hues, and appearances of things great and small in one monotonous standard of mechanical exactness" (p. 142). Whether it be ''stern realism" or "a photographic, unidealistic rendition,'' American luminism does indeed exist, because it is verified so exactly by congruent landscape descriptions in Walden and Cape Cod. But just as Transcendentalism is not one unitary philosophy, so is luminism not one easily categorized style. As we have seen, it contains its hard and soft side, its dark and light dimensions. Luminism is not a method but rather a product, the result of a constant attempt to limn reality, whether invested with spirit or totally devoid of divine resonances. It is an aesthetic stance that quite literally takes as its motto the injunction: "Wait and See." Fusing Transcendental attentiveness with pragmatic obedience, the power of this art derives not simply from the slavish reproduction of detail but from the organic appropriateness of each individual rendering. It is as functional a product of its environment as the razor-clam is of Thoreau's morgue-like beach. As F. 0. Matthiessen wrote of Thoreau's mastery of words, "the reader's pleasure does not spring from the specific recordings, however accurate, but from the imperceptible interfusion with these of the author's own knowledge and feeling, and of his skill in evolving an appropriate form:' 13 Finally, luminism is a revolt against the older Genteel tradition represented by Ruskin and Jarves, because sometimes there was a God to be found beyond phenomenality, and sometimes there was only phenomenality itself. In the latter instance, the artist's sole recourse was pure "reflection," a '"meditation too daring to be called devout," because to be true to himself, the artist could only see through a glass, darkly. No matter how sparse the scene that confronted him, the luminist was obliged to render it faithfully , to the point of producing what Jarves called a "matter-of-fact realism" or what today we might even term "minimal art."14 As T. W. Higginson wrote of Thoreau's Cape Cod, "No doubt there are passages which err upon the side of bareness. Cape Cod itself certainly errs that way, and so often does our author; and when they are combined, the result of dessication is sometimes astounding. But so much the truer the picture" (p. 381). Luminism is in fact the missing link between late Romantic idealism and early literary Naturalism. The old categories of the sublime and the picturesque, which made terror delightful and beauty reasonable by anchoring them to specialized associa- 28 Barton Levi St. Armand tions, could be proven false by a VlSltto the nearest pond or a casual stroll upon the beach. There one might find, by practicing both a "mechanical exactness" and a steadfastness of vision, mirages that challenged the limits of human perception itself-or an all-engulfing, impenetrable void. Neither Walden nor Cape Cod is a "pure" luminist work, for Thoreau, like Lane and Heade, could be quite "painterly" and impressionistic when spontaneous romantic response to the landscape demanded a correspondingly loose and suggestive technique. But both works contain definite luminist "passages," evidence of an instrumental response to particular environments which Thoreau shared with brother-artists like Heade and Lane. That these environments were themselves "neutral grounds" where land and water interpenetrated demonstrates that luminism itself was a continuing search for equilibrium, a determined quest for a graspable truth.15 What luminism consistently sought for, as Thoreau put it in Walden, was: a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we call reality... a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. (p. 80) Baur was quite correct in calling luminism "A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Painting," but dazzled by the gleam of this extraordinary cimeter, he failed to "see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces"- the light and the dark, the soft and the hard, roman tic possibility and naturalist limitation. In going about their business, and applying a "Realomcter" to their felt-experience of Nature, artists like Heade and Lane produced varied "luminist" landscapes which were appreciated for qualities other than their uncompromising skill, or shunted aside by a Ruskinian idealism horrified by a scale of values "false to nature" -that is, false to a benign, Christian, Victorian Nature. Luckily Thoreau's literary expressions of his own craftsmanship were not so neglected and survive as a means by which we can vet the abiding integrity of the common cultural quotient which is American luminism. Notes 11 wish to acknowledge here the stimulating influence of those students who over the years have participated in my seminars on nineteenth-century American painting and literature at Brown University. I am especially grateful to the work of Stephen Cole, David Miller, David Watters, Nancy Harley and Elizabeth Kugler in helping to shape my current ideas on the scope and nature of luminist practice. 2John I. H. Baur, "American Lumimsm. A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Painting," Perspectives US.A. No. 9 (Autumn, 1954), 90-98. Luminism and Thoreau 29 3SeeBarbara Novak, "On Divers Themes From Nature. A Selection of Texts," in The Natural Paradise:Painting in America 1800-1950, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York, 1976), pp. 59-105 4See John Wilmerding, Fitz Hugh Lane (New York, 1971) and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven, 1975), In his Nineteenth Century American Painting (New York, 1970), James Thomas Flexner warned that" 'Lumanism' [sic] has become a term to conjure with in writings on American painting, but each critic-historian uses 1t to enforce a somewhat different spell" (p. 74, n. !). Donald B. Kuspit in "Nmeteenth -Century Landscape: Poetry and Property," Art in America, Vol. 64, n. l (JanuaryFebruary , 1976), 64-71, claims that "Luminist pictures are a kind of ideological justification of the atmosphere necessary for business, if also an exaggerated, idealistic rendering of this atmosphere," and that the movement is part of the degradation and domestication of American landscape, its subjection to the nineteenth-century Cult of Progress. The boats depicted by Lane and Heade are the vessels of a shallow Yankee commerce operating in a bourgeois, provmcial amphitheatre, and "Transcendentalism ...is part of this theatricality" (p. 69). Gail Davidson, Phyllis Hattis and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. maintain that luminism "existed within the mdigenous development of landscape painting," and that it was "the major concern of the Hudson River School in the period 1860-1875." "Introduction," Luminous Landscape: The American Study of Light 1860-1875 (Boston, 1966), pp. 3-4. But William H. Gerdts, in an important essay entitled "On the Nature of Luminism," argues that in spite of the style's "distinct, if understated, nationalism," it was actually part of a "larger tradition of Western pamting" which he calls "International luminism." American Luminism (New York, 1978), pp.1-11. 5Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1969), p I IO Hereafter quotes from this work will appear in the text. Novak uses Emerson on Thoreau to gloss Fitz Hugh Lane's "dreamlike surrealism" and relates Lane's precise canvasses to Thoreau's interest in exact measurement. GCJaudeLevi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," in Structural Anthropology, trans. from French by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York, 1963), pp. 206-37. 71am mdebted to Elizabeth Kugler in particular for the suggestion that Thoreau's excursions to Cape Cod (October 1849, June 1855, and June 1857) were made at the same time that other scientists, literary men, and artists were also turning to the shoreline for observation and reflection. In this decade Melville published "The Encantadas" and Maury his Physical Geographyof the Sea, while Darwin composed the Origin of Species and Whitman listened on "Paumanok's gray beach." 8H. D. Thoreau, Walden: or, Life in the Woods, intro. by Norman Holmes Pearson (New York, !966), p. 70. Hereafter quotes from this work will appear parenthetically in the text. 9James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea, ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 189-90. 10John Ruskin, "Of Imagination Penetrative," Modern Painters, Vol. II (New York, 1886), p. 166 As George Landow points out, "Ruskin's own elaborate version of the Coleridgean distmction between imagination and fancy ...was derived not from Coleridge but from Wordsworth 's prefaces and Leigh Hunt's Imagination and Fancy." The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, 1971), p. 382. 11 H. D. Thoreau, Cape Cod (New York, 1951), p. 16. Hereafter quotes from this work will appear parenthetically in the text. 12T. W. Higginson, Review of Cape Cod, Atlantic Monthly, 15 (March, 1865), 381. 13F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. 166. Although Baur should receive major credit for first defining the nature of American luminism, it must not be forgotten that this idea was implicit m Matthiessen's discussion of Thoreau's "level style," Whitman's "perfectly transparent, plateglassy " approach, and William Sidney Mount's "scrupulous precision." See especially the secttons of American Renaissance entitled "New England Landscapes" (pp. 157-66) and "Whitman's Landscapes" (pp. 596-625). 14Certamly luminism can also be related to such later American reaffirmations of fact as Prec1sionism and contemporary Photo-Realism. Henry F. Gaugh's description of the "three essential trends" which charactenze Richard Estes' urban landscapes repeats the ma_Jor stylistic developments of Heade's late work. "gradual phasing out of the human figure; non-pho- 30 Barton Levi St. Armand tographic structuring of composition through selection and emphasis of detail that has strong geometric and abstract underpinnings; and meticulous application of paint with regard to fluctuations of color and light." "The Urban Vision of Richard Estes," Art in America 66 (November-December, 1978), 135-36. 15Compare Walt Whitman's 1876 description of the seashore as "that suggesting, dividrng line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid-that curious lurking something (as doubtless every objective form finally becomes to the subjective spirit) which means far more than its mere first sight, grand as that is-blending the real and the ideal, and each made portion of the other." Specimen Days (Boston, 1971), p. 67. ...