The Post Diluvian Sublime
Dwight used the word ‘sublime’ endlessly, sometimes in tedious mechanical contrasts with beauty. However, considering the intimate professional knowledge of the wrath of God his published sermons reveal, it is surprising to find that the Travels are very sparing in making the obvious metaphorical connection between wild scenery, the Burkean sublime, and the wrath of God. Certainly the wild bore the unmistakable imprint of its maker, but the divine traces Dwight most commonly notes signs of the Deluge and Providentialism in the workings of nature are dispatched in straightforward empirical terms, linked to scientifically well-informed observations on matters such as the rounding of pebbles and the rotting of leaves. The text contains many penetrating observations of soil, climate, geology and landforms.
Dwight reveals an extremely acute eye for former islands and shorelines, beach-terraces and rounded pebbles in the glacial landscapes of New York. He adduces them as evidence of the Deluge7 in neutral tones without aesthetic embellishment. Likewise Providentialism in the natural world is blandly read in such matters as the fact that leaves dry on the trees rather than undergoing ‘putrefaction’ on the ground (III, p. 176), the life cycle of insects (II, p. 278), and the existence of mountain gaps at key points of human movement. In a few places Dwight makes the conventional association between the wild and danger. Here he moves beyond the general eighteenth century aversion to unimproved land to a more specifically Calvinist awareness of a ‘howling wilderness’ which has been subdued by the march of Protestant civilization (Kamensky 1990). Thus in western Vermont he observes the wild, solitary, and gloomy Otter Creek and notes that ‘savages’ employed by the French had used the route to infiltrate New England. “They could not have chosen a route better suited to the gloomy purposes and lowering (sic) revenge of a savage bosom”.
Dwight was well aware of the contemporary aesthetic register of the Romantic Movement. He had little temperamental affinity for it, but he occasionally essays it, resulting in the most striking and colorful passages of the Travels. Approaching Niagara Falls, he sees one of the most beautiful collections of clouds ever seen by a votary of nature … The richest crimson … pink and … rose … gold burnished into the highest brilliancy … gayest crimson and … vivid purple, alternated … as to defy the utmost efforts both of the pen and the pencil. (IV, p. 45) He reveals himself perhaps, in this and similarly strained passages, as something less than a votary of nature. At ‘the cataract’ itself there is a brief effusion of sublime vocabulary – majestic, mighty, stupendous, enormous, gloom, grandeur, amazing, astonishing – and Dwight’s “bosom swells with emotions never felt; his thoughts labor in a manner never known before.” However, Dwight is not carried away. He pompously and self-consciously affirms an American superlative: The spectator cannot but reflect that he is surveying the most remarkable object on the globe. Nor will he fail to remember that he stands on a river, in most respects equal, and in several of high distinction superior, to every other … (IV, p. 63)
The sublime is useful, after all, to vindicate the superiority of the American scene, but it does not engage with Dwight’s fundamental and Arminian sense of virtue human striving, effort and discipline. Dwight is clearly uncomfortable with wild scenes, so often “shaggy, wild, and horrid” where the prospect is not “cheered by a smiling object” (IV, p. 8). Such moments serve as the prelude to the discovery of cultivated and tamed landscapes, either as a destination on his current journey or in an imagined future. After such real or metaphorical arrivals, Dwight shifts from a stilted language of sublimity to the more congenial language of beauty in the moral world of human piety, effort and improvement. For example, near the White Mountains he foresees a time when: The hills, and plains, and valleys around me will be stripped of the forests which now majestically and even gloomily overshadow them, and be measured out into farms enlivened with all the beauties of cultivation … whatever is rude, broken, and unsightly … will … be leveled, smoothed, and beautified by the hand of man … nature … will suddenly exchange the dishabille, and be ornamented by culture with her richest attire. The meadow will glow with verdure and sparkle with the enamel of flowers. Flocks and herds will frolic over the pasture, and fields will wave with harvests of gold. (II, pp. 94-95)
Suddenly we are in a golden landscape compounded of an eclogue of frolicking herds and a georgic of hard-won harvests, expressed in the feminized terms of a classically-tinged nostalgia for the future (Briggs 1988, p. 373). Dwight completes the passage with the hyperbolic praise of New England his readers have come to expect. “I hesitate not to pronounce the region before me to be, in many respects, the most interesting landscape which I have ever seen.”
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