Vying for "Brilliant Landscapes": Claude Mirrors, Wordsworth, and Poetic Vision

Abstract

In a chaise particularly exhibitions of convex-mirror are amusing. We are rapidly carried from one object another. A succession of high-coloured pictures is continually gliding before eye. They are like of imagination; or landscapes of a dream. (Gilpin, Forest Scenery 3.225) Rooted in theories of picturesque and in a conception of as defective, Claude mirror idealized, or de-naturalized, natural. (1) Such idealization foregrounds a tautological understanding of itself: a scene was insofar as it resembled a landscape already governed by rule (Galperin 19). The Claude mirror perpetuated this tautology by privileging represented (or reflected) over real. As Jonathan Bate points out, limitations of glass and select views also carv[ed]-up ... perceiver's environment (147), analogous divided English countryside after General Land Enclosure Acts of 1801, 1836 and 1840. The potential of Claude mirror divide and compartmentalize, render manageable, contributed its popularity among picturesque tourists. As Malcolm Andrews observes, Claude mirrors and such visual filters as telescopes, magnifying glasses and camera obscuras formed a subtle psychological protection tourist freshly exposed daunting and often disorienting landscapes. These terms 'fix', 'Station', and 'composed' indicate precisely of this protection, stability given these new experiences by selection and isolation of landscape components. Untamed landscapes can thus be controlled (67). Perceptual or psychological control, however, was only part of appeal of landscape mirror. Unlike other visual filters which had scientific purposes, Claude mirror was not instrument of precision optics but an apparatus that enables one transpose (Maillet 163). For picturesque tourist looking for novel transpositions of reality and lucky accidents (Price 39) of natural design, disorientation was more desirable and rewarding than composure and stability. The Claude mirror, therefore, de-familiarized natural world and facilitated visions of imagination, as Gilpin designates them. Promising aesthetic pleasure for all and at a relatively low cost (Maillet 141), Claude mirror; use Maillet's term, democratized a de-familiarizing engagement with world. According Coleridge in Biographia, Wordsworth's task in Lyrical Ballads was de-familiarization, to give charm of novelty things of every day, and excite a feeling analogous supernatural, by awakening mind's attention from lethargy of custom (169), (2) and he was at one time preoccupied with picturesque. Some scholars such as Nicola Trott (115), John Nabholtz (289) and Stephen Spector (101) questioned whether Wordsworth shook [picturesque] habit off (Prelude XI.254), but Charles Kostelnick believes he transformed it for his own purposes by resisting sight as chief arbiter of pleasure and judgment. According Kostelnick, in The Prelude, Wordsworth shifts from view vision, from emphasis on surface arrangements that titillate eye [to] ... pictures that spring from [within] (22). The poet's mind, shaping power of imagination unaided by material lenses, becomes the mirror of fairest and most interesting qualities of nature (Preface 259). This mirror, moreover, reveals not world as it is but reflections of in dissimilitude and dissimilitude in similitude (263)--a phrase that carries within its reflected structure essence of Wordsworthian de-familiarization. To such philosophy interposition of Claude mirror undermines authority of Romantic poet as seer. Wordsworth's resistance picturesque is thus a strategic and targeted reaction Gilpin's technological circumvention of poetic imagination in pursuit of brilliant landscapes. …