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Trevelyan's English Social History and the Relationship Between 5 Man and Nature

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Trevelyan's English Social History and the Relationship Between 5 Man and Nature Contents Introduction 2 Chapter 1: Trevelyan's English Social History and the relationship between 5 man and nature. 1.1 The importance of rural landscape for the man’s spiritual 5 life in England between XVI and XVIII centuries. 1.2 English lifetimes 10 1.3 The attachment to the land 17 1.4 The Forest 22 1.5 Wilderness versus cultivation 26 1.6 The Landscape in an anthropological vision 28 1.7 The call and claims of natural beauty 32 Chapter 2: Trevelyan's idea of alliance between literature and history 39 2.1 History and truth 42 2.2 Romantic politics 46 2.3 Rhetoric and elocution in history and literature 48 2.4 Fate and History 52 2.5 Trevelyan’ s approach to history 55 2.6 History and the reader 60 2.7 The life of Trevelyan 66 2.8 Literary, historical and poetical influence in Trevelyan's works 74 Chapter 3: Shakespeare's poetical England 78 3.1 England at the time of Shakespeare 81 3.2 Elizabethans’ culture 85 3.3 The English Renaissance 88 3.4 Elizabethan England 91 3.5 The Elizabethan theatre and Shakespeare's female characters 95 3.6 Shakespeare and the natural world 104 Conclusions 113 Bibliography 115 1 Introduction All his life, Trevelyan remained convinced that it was in the countryside that Britain's history had been made and that it was nature which had provided the inspiration for its poetry and literature. He believed that walking was the best means whereby a man could have back his own soul in sacred union with nature. All these feelings for the countryside, be them poetic, historical or religious were set down in his earliest essays and they continued throughout all his works. Trevelyan's earliest historical writings are suffused with this mystical love of the countryside. In fact the opening chapter of England Under the Stuarts evokes the outdoor pursuits of country gentlemen, especially their delight in hunting and fowling. We can find the same attraction in Trevelyan's writing about Lord Grey of the Reform Bill. Here the writer explored the tension between the claims of rural quietude and public duty, again evocated in his later biography of Grey of Fallodon. His studies concentrated on the profound transmutation toward a more mechanical world and a more democratic world, that of the great city instead of the country village and a world closer to science than to poetry and literature. He developed this argument in his History of England, which contained many lyrical passages of rural evocation, that anticipated the later Social History. Trevelyan observed: "What a place it must have been that virgin woodland wilderness of Anglo Saxon England still harbouring God's plenty of all manner of beautiful birds and beasts and still rioting in the vast wealth of trees and flowers- treasures which modern man, careless of his best inheritance, has abolished, and is still abolishing, as fast as new tools and methods of destruction can be invented"1. The greatest work was Must England's Beauty Perish on behalf of National trust to protect England's nature and the nation's spiritual values. He concluded this lecture by saying: "Without vision, the people perish and without natural beauty the English people will perish in the spiritual sense".2 1 G.M.Trevelyan, History of England, Longmans & Co., New York, 1942, p. 87 2 David Cannadine, G.M.Trevelyan, A life in History, London, Penguin Books, 1992, p.155 2 He frequently wrote to The Times underling the need to preserve the region's increasingly exploited natural beauty. As a senior figure in the National Trust he invented the Council for the preservation of Rural England. Moreover he became the President in 1930 of the Youth Hostels Association whom intention was to help young city dwellers to obtain a greater knowledge, to provide care and love of the countryside and to recover their long- lost rural roots. His maxim was "be at one with nature"3. In 1931 he hold the Rickman Godlee Lecture at London University. His subject was "The Call and Claims of Natural Beauty" in which he reconfirmed the importance of man's relation to the natural world. He began with a familiar account of the threat to the countryside and of the need for town dwellers to recover their long-severed links with nature. He felt strongly that the major poets, such as Milton, Chaucer, Wordsworth and especially Shakespeare had been inspired by rural life and countryside. He affirmed that the countryside was the sure and certain source of spiritual values: Through the loveliness of nature, through the touch of sun or rain, or the sight of the shining restlessness of the sea, we feel: Unworried things and old to our pained heart appeal. This flag of beauty, hung out by the mysterious Universe, to claim the worship of the heart of man, what is it, and what does its signal mean to us? Natural beauty is the ultimate spiritual appeal of the Universe, of nature, or of the God of nature, to their nursling man.. It is the highest common denominator in the spiritual life of today."4 In 1926 Trevelyan published History of England. In it both English character and history are well mixed and the famous passage "England is the country, and the country is England"5 reveals a deep anthropological thread. He analyses the growth of a national community by coming to concern himself with the history of his society. This successful work like the others written from 1938 and 1944 represented social and anthropological works of history. He restated the Whiggish view that personal freedom became universal in English country which was one of the reasons for the ideological attachment of Englishmen to the very name of freedom. The democracy of those days was good-natured and the writer explained English history in a rural metaphor: "a continuous 3 David Cannadine, G.M.Trevelyan, A life in History, op.cit., p.157 4 G.M.Trevelyan, The call and claims of Natural beauty,Rickman Godlee Lecture for 1931, essay in Autobiography, Longman, 1950, p.106 5 David Cannadine, G.M.Trevelyan, A life in History, op cit., p.221 3 stream of life, with gradual change perpetually taking place."6 He analysed flora, fauna, places and people of all England and he described trees, plants, flowers and herbs which were introduced into early seventeenth century. Each country had been described and studied with its own economical, geographical and social peculiarity. From Westmorland and Wales to Northumberland the writer tried to record history by leaving out politics and giving space to literature, painting and architecture. The writer and voyager Fynes Moryson left us a splendid itinerary of these places during the Seventeenth century. The redundant theme of this itinerary is the natural set of the territory where Morrison joined the description of the geographical structure of the diverse landscapes with a bizarre tale about the diverse coins used in each country. Chaucer's poetry was deep with rural images of the countryside and farms similar to Shakespeare' s success which was rooted in the forest and the field of Tudor times. Trevelyan in his works depicted England through the words of important writers and poets and through the images of famous painters. Trevelyan's love for the preservation of an unspoiled nature and his faith for the beneficial powers of nature would have been understandable without the new way of thinking extended in England from the XVI to the end of XVIII centuries. This argument, about the interest of nature and the relationship with the man, is usually considered a recent phenomenon. On the contrary Trevelyan demonstrated to us that the numerous considerations on the relationship between nature and man dated from the beginning of the Modern Age. In fact between the XVI and the XIX centuries there was a change in thinking and classifying the natural world that surrounded men and women of every social class. In this process the place occupied by the man in the natural structure changed and a new feeling towards animal, plants and landscapes emerged from this transformation. Trevelyan tried to trace out a map of the process taking place in England by searching the intellectual origin of the National Trust and of the Council for the Protection of Rural England. We will pick out this map by analysing his essay The Call and Claims of Natural Beauty.7 The writer had another purpose, he wanted to rejoin the study of history with those of literature. Following this purpose, we will lastly present concerning works of Shakespeare, his poetical counterpart. For this reason the present work aims to analyse both historical and literary sources to 6 G.M.Trevelyan, English Social History, Longmans, Green 1942, p. 230 7 G.M.Trevelyan, An Autobiography and Other Essays, Longmans, London, 1949 4 demonstrate that the supremacy of man on the vegetative and animal world was a needed precondition for the development of the human history. Chapter I Trevelyan's English Social History and the relationship between man and nature. 1.1 The importance of rural landscape for man’s spiritual life in England between XVI and XVIII centuries. Sixteenth-century England was ahead of Germany and France in having eliminated the servile status of the peasant, of which little was left in the reign of Henry VII and practically nothing in the reign of Elizabeth. But the agrarian changes of the epoch were beginning another evolution less to the peasants advantage, which in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually got rid of the peasant himself.
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