Virtuous Nature

Thinkers such as Rousseau in France were spreading the idea that cvilized life and the character of social life were responsible for bad human qualities such as vanity, envy, greed and self-regard. Going considerably further back, the notion of the simple life as being inherently superior to the civilized life is found in Virgil and Horace and reflected in Renaissance writing before gaining new acceptance in the eighteenth century. These ideas took root in the works of, for example, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth. Wordsworth's early experiences in the Lake District convinced him of the beneficial effect of the beauty of the natural world; it made him a natural democrat as well as a poet.

Nature and the natural came to be identified with the good and the virtuous; we still speak of 'natural justice' and 'natural rights'.

The perceived aesthetic qualities of the landscape changed in the nineteenth century when the Sublime view of mountain landscapes as 'frightful precipices' etc was displaced by Ruskin's assertion that mountains represented God's handiwork (his artwork, in effect), placed there for the benefit of mankind. Ruskin took the equivalence of 'nature' with 'good' a stage further and made it an article of faith for artists; trust to nature (God) and your works will be noble and moral. Art as religion, or at least as spirituality.