Romanticism as seen by Anita Brookner may have famously had its 'discontents', may indeed have been, according to Isaiah Berlin, the cause of all the problems of 'the age', but in England at least it revolutionised attitudes to the natural world.
In place of the medieval view of Nature as a mysterious force which simply got on with things in its own God-given way (Natura naturans — 'nature naturing') the Romantics endowed the natural world with intent, a life of its own operating independently of human affairs according to its own rules. Wordsworth gives 'Thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ'. And Coleridge's Ancient Mariner affronts Nature by shooting the Albatross but regains its healing force by blessing it 'unaware'.
Bolder spirits, while deeply respecting the natural world, tested themselves against it. One hundred and ninety-five years ago, the 29 year old English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley set out to sail with a friend from Livorno to Lerici in the Gulf of Spezia. Shelley was keen to return to Spezia as soon as possible and so his boat, the Don Juan — named in honour of Byron who was also visiting the Ligurian coast at that time — was readied for the sea on Monday afternoon 8 July.
Shelley, brilliant, mercurial, daring and innovative but an inexperienced sailor, was undaunted by the deteriorating weather and not deterred by the advice of his friend and mentor Edward Trelawney, an ex-naval man, or the misgivings of a local fisherman who pointed out 'those black lines and [clouds like] dirty rags hanging on them out of the sky — they are a warning; look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mischief.' The Don Juan nosed out into the fog gathering over the water and was quickly lost to sight.
Trelawney remembered the weather as strangely 'oppressively sultry. There was not a breath of air in the harbour. The heaviness of the atmosphere and an unwonted stillness benumbed my senses ... It was almost dark, although only half-past six o'clock. The sea was ... the colour ... [of] a sheet of lead, and covered with an oily scum. Gusts of wind swept over without ruffling it, and big drops of rain fell on its surface, rebounding as if they could not penetrate it. There was a commotion in the air, made up of many threatening sounds, coming upon us from the sea.'
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