SOURCE: Moore, L. Hugh. “The Aesthetic Theory of William Bartram.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 12, no. 1 (March 1983): 17-35.

[In the following essay, Moore argues that Bartram is a prime example of a writer trying to describe nature within the context of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory.]

From its publication in 1791, William Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida has been praised for its scientific and literary merit. Francis Harper and Joseph Ewan, among others, have demonstrated the value of Bartram's contributions to zoology, botany, and ethnology, the precision of his observations, and the logic of his speculations. Harper, for example, verified the combat and bellowing of alligators from his own observations.¹ Bartram's list of birds is the most complete prior to Alexander Wilson's, whom he tutored. The Travels, according to Witmer Stone, is “The first ornithological contribution worthy of the name written by a native American.”² John R. Swanton called his observations of Southern Indians “one of the best early works” and used the facts in the Travels to refute Bartram's theory of an ancient race of mound builders.³ Elliott Coues praised his nomenclature as effectively binomial and found that he was the first to relate animal size to environment.⁴ Even the lush descriptions have been validated. John R. Small rediscovered the Ixia coelestina in North Florida thus verifying Bartram's “azure fields of cerulean Ixia.”⁵ Finally, Joseph Ewan called Bartram “the one indigenous colonial artist of merit for natural history.”⁶

Commentators have long responded to the charm of Bartram's descriptions and the excitement of his narrative and have noted the value of the Travels in the tradition of the literature of travel and discovery. Early reviewers judged it as a worthy natural history, but many deplored its “rather too luxuriant and florid” style.⁷ That Wordsworth, Coleridge, Chateaubriand, and other poets were impressed by both style and content has been abundantly demonstrated by John Livingston Lowes, Lane Cooper, and N. Bryillon Fagin in their studies of the influence of the Travels on their work. Coleridge called it “a work of high merit in every way.”⁸ Thomas Carlyle recommended the Travels to Emerson as having “a wondrous kind of floundering eloquence in it. All American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book, and keep them as a kind of biblical article.”⁹

Literary scholarship has focused on Bartram's life, his themes, and, to a lesser extent, his style. Ernest Earnest has studied the influence of classicism and romanticism in his work,¹⁰ and Fagin has written a general study of his personality, themes, and techniques.¹¹ Richard Gummere has studied his classicisms,¹² and William Sullivan his romanticism.¹³ And, in the most detailed literary study yet, Frieder Busch has analyzed the devices Bartram used to achieve a sense of movement.¹⁴ For the most part, however, literary analysis of the Travels has lagged behind scientific study. Few have investigated the ways in which Bartram achieved his much admired literary effectiveness or analyzed the book as a conscious work of art.

The major literary influence on Bartram was eighteenth century aesthetic theory of the beautiful, sublime, and picturesque, an aesthetic tradition comprehensive enough to enable him to present his diverse Southern landscape effectively. That he was thoroughly familiar with this theory is obvious from the frequency with which the terminology appears in his works and the books he owned or had available to him. As a member of the Library Company, a founder of the Derby Library, and a recipient of books from his British correspondents, especially Peter Collison, John Bartram had a wide selection of books beyond those on natural history that William would have had access to: John Woolman's Journal, Ramsey's Travels of Cyrus, Franklin's Essays, Pope's Moral Essays, and Windsor Forest, the latter quoted in William's letters and echoed in the Travels, Thompson's The Seasons, Sir John Hawkins' The Life of Samuel Johnson, William Hayley's Life of William Cowper, and Addison's Tatler and The Spectator essays. Additionally, his four years (1752-1756) at the Academy of Philadelphia brought him into contact with contemporary English literature as well as the classics, especially through his tutor, Charles Thompson. No doubt, too, he read the essays and poetry in The American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle of the British Colonies published by the provost William Smith. Contemporary aesthetic theory could also have reached him through the influence of poets like Thomas Godfrey, Jr., whose Prince of Parthia he subscribed to, and the works of his fellow students, Francis Hopkinson and Nathaniel Evans. Further, the influence of English poets working within this tradition was pervasive in the intellectual climate of Philadelphia. Benjamin Smith Barton, for example, for whom Bartram did the drawings in Elements of Botany, prefaced this text book with lines 79-97 on the joys of botanical research from Mark Akinside's The Pleasures of Imagination, a compendium on the beautiful and sublime in nature.

An analysis of the Travels reveals that Bartram structured his work around current theory of the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque. Bartram is the best example we have of a writer who could present nature and develop a theory of its benefits by writing within eighteenth century literary theory. Taking ideas from theorists like Addison, Burke, Hutcheson, and many others, he developed his original aesthetic theory. This vast body of theory represents attempts to explain the different types of aesthetic pleasure that inhere in very different objects, to classify the qualities that elicit such reactions, and to analyze the emotional, mental, and spiritual responses of the individual to objects within the environment. Whether grounded in sensational, faculty, or associational psychology, all saw the aesthetic response to nature as a way of relating man to the universe, to God, or to both. The Travels reveals that Bartram was fully aware of the subtleties of current aesthetic theory, that this tradition colored his perception of the Southern landscape and his scientific observations, and that he used it to structure his work and present his observations and philosophy.

Further, the Travels, viewed in the context of eighteenth century aesthetic theory, contributes importantly to the speculation on the categories of aesthetic pleasure from nature and the way in which the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque yield psychological, moral, philosophical, and religious values. Like other aestheticians—Hutcheson, Richardson, Burke, Stewart, Price, and Knight for instance—Bartram inherited concepts which he modified and explained in original ways. Bartram's is certainly the most impressive, complete, and consistent aesthetic theory produced in America up to his day. Because of the influence the Travels exerted on American travellers, naturalists, and explorers it influenced the way later observers saw American nature. Naturalists like William Baldwin, Humphrey Marshall, Benjamin Smith Barton, Alexander Wilson, Francis André Michaux, William H. Keating, John LeConte, and Thomas Say went to Bartram for zoological and botanical information, but they received his aesthetic theory as well. They tended to see the natural world as Bartram directed. Through these and many others such as Thoreau, Muir, and Burroughs Bartram's aesthetic reaches into the present informing perception of the wilderness.

Bartram subtly set up the three categories of beauty, sublimity, and picturesqueness in the philosophical essay with which he introduces his Travels, a speculation on the meaning of his experience that he did not allow himself in the objective presentation of his Florida trip in The Report to Fothergill. Here he states “… I attempt only to exhibit to your notice, the outward forms of Nature, or the productions of the surface of the earth; without troubling you with any notions of their particular causes or design by Providence, such attempts I leave for the amusement of Men of letters and superior genius.”¹⁵ The introductory essay gives notice that the Travels is to be philosophical as well as a “true and natural account.” The qualities of plants all of which “manifest the divine and inimitable workmanship” of “the Great Author” are precisely the qualities of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. Beginning with sublimity he mentions “pompous Palms,” “glorious Magnolias,” which “struck us with the senses of dignity and magnificence” and lead to “an awful veneration.” Next comes beauty: “the harmony and gracefulness” of the Carica papaya, the “mirth and gaiety” of the Kalmias, the fragrance of the Ilisium. Then comes the picturesque, the only category into which Bartram allowed utility: the Triticium amd Zea, for food, Linium for clothes, Hyssops for “medical virtues,” “none stately or splendid” (qualities of sublimity and beauty respectively), but all “excite love, gratitude and admiration for the great Creator” who provided them for “our sustenance, amusement and delight” (pp. lii-liii). In the Travels, Bartram, by implication, provides his full definition of these aesthetic categories in his original combination and modification of the ideas of the major eighteenth century aestheticians.

Theorists of the Eighteenth Century separated the aesthetic response into the categories of beauty and sublimity with several later adding the picturesque. All agreed that beauty was of the emotions not the understanding, a distinction basic to their theories. Joseph Addison said, “But there is nothing that makes its way more directly to the Soul than Beauty which immediately diffuses a secret Satisfaction and complacency through the Imagination. … It gives gaiety … it strikes the mind with an inward Joy, and spreads a Cheerfulness and Delight through all its faculties.”¹⁶ In a statement that would have appealed to Bartram's primitivistic views, Francis Hutcheson stated that a “sense of beauty” was “independent of all customs, education, or examples,” for it is inherent.¹⁷ To Edmund Burke, beauty was “that quality or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love or some passion similar to it.”¹⁸ Consequently, proportion and symmetry have no role. Addision, deploring the mathematical regularity of parterres and topiary, recommended naturalness for the garden. In Burke's view, “mathematical ideas are not the measure of beauty.”¹⁹ For the same reason, they rejected utility as a characteristic of beauty as being of the mind not the emotions. For Hucheson, a sense of beauty was independent of pratical considerations, a gratuitous gift of God for our happiness not our welfare.²⁰

A consideration of the specific emotional effects of beauty is the logical next step in developing a theory. Addison found it soothing, especially the beauty of a garden, “It is naturally apt to fill the mind with Calmness and Tranquility, and to lay all its turbulent Passions at Rest.”²¹ Beauty in Burke's theory produces “… that sinking, that melting, that langour which is the characteristical effect of the beautiful as it regards every sense.”²² For Thomas Reid, the emotional effects of beauty had social and psychological value: “the emotion produced by beautiful objects is gay and pleasant. It sweetens and harmonizes the temper, is friendly to every benevolent affection, and tends to allay sullen and angry passions.”²³ Reid's concept became a common idea throughout the century.

But the ultimate justification of beauty was moral and spiritual. To Hutcheson, aesthetic pleasure is identical with moral pleasure and reinforces it. He located absolute beauty only in nature where it is diffused throughout, giving evidence of a benevolent creator.²⁴ Goodness, he continues, determined “the Great Architecht to adorn the stupendous theater [a frequent term in the Travels] in a manner agreeable to the spectators … so that he designed to discover himself to them as wise and good, as well as powerful; for thus he has given them greater evidence through the whole earth of his art, wisdom, design, and beauty.”²⁵ Similarly, to Burke, beauty is the first means by which the Creator allows us to “discover the adorable wisdom of God in his works.”²⁶ Finally, for Reid, it is “the signature of His divine wisdom, power, and benignity. …”²⁷

The next step in designing an aesthetic theory was to determine what qualities elicit the emotional and spiritual effects of the beautiful. Some variation of the doctrine of unity within variety became the most usual explanation of the origin of beauty. “The figures which excite in us the ideas of beauty,” Hutcheson states, “seem to be those in which there is unity within variety.”²⁸ This principle is what charms the botanist: “In the almost infinite multitude of leaves, fruit, seed, flowers of any species we often see a very great uniformity in the structure and situation of the smallest flowers.”²⁹ From the animal world he finds another example in their adaptive structure, “from the mechanisms apparently adapted to the necessities and advantages of any animal which pleases us though there may be no advantage to ourselves ensuing from it. …”³⁰ Hugh Blair saw this principle as the basis for pleasing landscapes; “perhaps the most beautiful objects that can anywhere be found is presented by a rich, natural landscape, where there is a sufficient variety of objects.”³¹ Burke, too, like Bartram, stressed variety more than unity in his high valuation of novelty.³² His list of the qualities of beauty consists of smallness, smoothness, gradual variation with no angularity (Hogarth's line of beauty), and clear, bright colors.³³ Archibald Alison added soothing sounds to the list, and Blair the sentimental beauty of compassion, mildness, friendship, and generosity.³⁴

Bartram reveals his concept of beauty in his description of the South, descriptions which reveal and understanding and modification of the aesthetic theory of his day. The beautiful for Bartram is associated with the idyllic part of his natural landscape, far removed from “the seats of strife” (p. 71). Only in the context of idyllic beauty does he notice small plants such as “the fair lily of the valley” near the blissful strawberry fields of the Vale of Cowe (p. 224). Amid sublimity as at Flat Rock he passed over the small, even unusual plants like Diamorpha which occur there. Burke's smoothness also contributes to beauty. The Carica papaya, “the most beauteous of any vegetable production” is “smooth and polished” giving it a “charming appearance” (p. 83). In idyllic scenes his lakes became smooth and his savannas “lawns.” “What a beautiful retreat is here,” he said of the Isle of Palms with its “limpid waters” and “blooming lawns” (p. 99). Bartram as a painter achieved some of his most notable effects with color, and his are as bright and clear as Burke called for. The lupin is a “celestial blue” (p. 14), a pond is “sparkling” (p. 127), the St. John's has an “unparalleled transparency,” “a crystal flood” (pp. 142-144). On the Ocone he finds “illumined green fields” and “glittering rills” (pp. 243-244). Color abounds in his idyllic regions from the soil strata to the brilliant azure and gold of fish sporting in Florida springs.

Bartram's aesthetic of beauty permits more geometric regularity than does those of Addison and Burke. An impressive magnolia has a “perfectly erect trunk in the form of a beautiful column “with a head like an obtuse cone” (p. 55). For the most part, however, his idyllic landscapes exhibit Hogarth's line of beauty. His “serpentine” rivers (p. 28) “meander” through fields of gently “waving” grass and “swelling hills” (p. 242). Vines such as Ipomea twist into “hanging garlands” (p. 87). Blending science and aesthetics he describes “the elegantly sinuated” Convolvulus (p. 67).

Odors in the Travels never evoke sublimity, but they were to Bartram a major source of beauty. He thus expands aesthetic theory, for most limited beauty to the visual, merely giving passing notice to the pleasures of smell and sound. Fragrances greatly contribute to the idyllic charm of the Isle of Palms: “A fascinating atmosphere surrounds this blissful garden; the balmy Lantana, ambrosial citra, perfumed Crinium, perspiring their mingled odours, wafted through Zanthoxilon groves” (p. 99). Even in scientific descriptions he adds odor as an identifying characteristic to a far greater degree than did his contemporary botanists like Humphrey Marshall and William Baldwin. Collinsonia has “a lively aromatic scent partaking of lemon and aniseed” (p. 261).

Sounds, too, contribute to the beauty of his idyllic scenes, and to the scientific authenticity of the works. Elliot Coues found his ability to render bird songs one of his most impressive achievements.³⁵ Bartram's major purpose, it seems clear, however, was aesthetic: “the songs of the nonpareil are remarkably low, soft and warbling, exceedingly tender and soothing” (p. 169). Even frogs afford “a pleasing kind of music” (p. 174). The qualities of beauty listed by Burke and other literary theorists thus contributed to the scientific as well as the literary value of the Travels.

Variety becomes in Bartram's theory the most important single quality of beauty. At times, he, like Addison, seems to make variety or novelty a separate category rather than subsuming it as a quality. A species of Silphium, for example, is “most conspicuous both for beauty and novelty” (p. 253). Any beautiful landscape has more variety than unity. The land near Wrightsborough is agreeable for its “variety of objects and views” (p. 204). Near Chata Uche the “variable sylvan scene” forms a “delightful territory” with the “chains of low hills,” “expansive savannah,” and lawns watered with rivulets and glittering brooks (p. 245).

Beauty affects Bartram first emotionally, then spiritually. The “native sylvan music” of birds has a “soothing” effect, and he is “cheerful and invigorated” when “nature presents her cheerful countenance” (p. 244). The Seminoles who live in such a world possess sentimental or moral beauty. Their visage and deportment bespeak “joyous simplicity” “like the grey eve of a serene and calm day …” (p. 135). Such natural beauty leads him to praise the beneficence of its Creator. Birds raise an anthem of praise. “My heart and voice unite with yours in sincere homage to the great Creator, the universal sovereign” (p. 68).

Bartram uses the idyllic beauty he finds everywhere in nature to balance the horrors of nature, a reconciliation by subtle balance rather than by statement. After the turmoil of the alligator battle and the danger it represents to himself he immediately presents a peaceful scene of “delightful shades” dominated by the Carica papaya unexcelled “in elegance, delicacy and gracefulness” (pp. 83-84). After traversing a “burning sandy desert,” he is revived by the harmonious music of nature (p. 115). His aesthetic theory, at least in part, helps lead him to a reconciliation of the two polarities of nature. It further provides him with a means of pointing up the ecological horrors of exploitive British agriculture. He intensifies the scene of the land “nakedly exposed and destitute” with trees “violated, defaced and torn to pieces” by contrast with the wondrous beauty of undisturbed nature and of Indian agriculture (p. 100).

The sublime, to eighteenth century theorists, was the most intense aesthetic experience possible, one that for most operated on principles distinct from beauty. It overpowers the senses, the reason, and the imagination. The imagination, Addison said, “loves to be filled with an Object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its capacity,” and “we are flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul at the Apprehension of them.”³⁶ To Burke it is “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,”³⁷ producing “a sort of swelling and triumph, that is extremely grateful to the human mind.”³⁸ Hugh Blair details the overwhelming nature of the experience:

It produces a sort of internal elevation and expansion; it raises the mind much above the ordinary state and fills it with a degree of wonder and astonishment, which it cannot well express. The emotion is certainly delightful, but it is altogether of a serious kind; a degree of awfulness and solemnity … very distinguishable from the more gay and brisk emotion raised by beautiful objects.³⁹

The major theorists saw sublimity as ennobling the perceiver and leading him to religious devotion. The mind, said Burke, always claims to itself “some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates,” and this glory reflects divine strength and wisdom by admitting us “unto the counsels of the Almighty by a consideration of his works.”⁴⁰ It is, as Mark Akinside said, “Heaven's image in the hearts of man.”⁴¹ The sublime experience, to Alexander Gerard, gives “a striking indication of the omnipotence of its author.”⁴² Reid took this idea further into the realm of morality when he stated the sublimity leads to “a serious recollected temper, which inspires magnanimity and disposes it to the most heroic acts of virtue.”⁴³

The qualities that produce sublimity derive from the irregularity and wildness of nature. Addison's list of scenes which exhibit the “rude magnificence which appears in many of the stupendous works of Nature” echoes throughout the century: “the prospectus of an open champion country, a vast uncultivated Desart, of high Heaps of Mountains, high Rocks and precipices, or a wide Expance of Waters.”⁴⁴ Similarly, Akinside located it in the “vast majestic pomp” of nature.⁴⁵ In Burke's influential theory, the idea of terror was essential to sublimity. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, what ever is in any sort terrible is a source of the sublime.”⁴⁶

Burke's list of sublime qualities reappears in one form or another in theories of most eighteenth century theorists. It is the one closest to the practice of Bartram. The qualities productive of sublimity are: terror, obscurity, power, privation, vastness, infinity, succession, difficulty, light, color, sound, suddenness, and the idea of pain. Obscurity is a powerful cause because “It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.” Privation includes “vacuity, Darkness, Solitude, and Silence.” Vastness of any kind confounds us by suggesting infinity. Light produces the experience if it is sudden or if dark and gloomy and color if sad and fuscous. Loudness—“the noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery”—can produce the awful experience of sublimity.⁴⁷ From such ideas, Bartram developed his own theory of sublimity, a theory which gives form to his observations and structure to his Travels.

Bartram wrote a natural history travel book, not a speculative aesthetic philosophy; but the way he describes his Southern landscape, what he notices and fails to notice, and his ideas on the religious, moral, and philosophical effects of his wilderness pilgrimage all are in accord with a well thought out aesthetic theory. Sublimity to Bartram was to be found only in wild nature. In “the high lonesome forest” he finds “an awful reverential harmony, inexpressibly sublime and not to be enjoyed anywhere but in these wild Indian regions” (p. 115). As “inexpressible” and the frequently used “incredible” indicate, sublimity goes beyond the intellect.

It is so pleasurable, fascinating, and enchanting that it carries him far from practical considerations. “Seduced by these enchanting scenes of primitive nature … I had roved far away from Cedar Point, but awakening to my cares, I turned about, and in the evening regained our camp” (p. 69). Sublimity produces intense pleasure—the “sublime and pleasing” Mount Hope and the “enchanting prospect” of Lake George (p. 64). It produces astonishment and wonder—the Dionea is an “astonishing production” and the Indian mounds are “wonderful remains of the power and grandeur of the ancients” (p. 241). It vexes the mind; at the Alachua Savannah he is “agitated and bewildered” at the astonishing wild scene” (p. 120). It stimulates the imagination—the high forest at Three Sisters Ferry “agreeably employs the imagination and captivates the senses by their magnificence and grandeur” (p. 196). It invigorates: “A magnificent grove of stately Pines succeeding to the expansive wild plains we had a long time traversed, had a pleasing effect, rousing the faculties of the mind, awakening the imagination by its sublimity, and awakening every active, inquisitive idea by the variety of the scenery and the solemn symphony of the steady Western breezes, playing incessantly, rising and falling through the thick and waxy foliage” (p. 110). Finally, the sublime experience excites awe. Of the river cypress he says, “we are struck with a kind of awe, at beholding the stateliness of the trunk, lifting its cumbrous top towards the skies …” (p. 58).

The effect of nature's sublimity for Bartram results in both a love of nature and of God but in a more complex way than does beauty. The “terror and devastation” of the storm at sea which begins his journey points up “how vain and uncertain are human expectation” (1). And a hurricane which sweeps the Altamaha illustrates how “finite and circumscribed is human power” (p. 33). The plains of Alachua manifest God's sublimity. “On the first view of such an amazing display of the wisdom and power of the supreme author of nature, the mind for a moment seems suspended and impressed with awe” (p. 121).

If for Bartram the sublime humbles man's pride, it also exalts him with a feeling of preeminence as he identifies with the power of nature. The grandeur of Mount Hope leads him to pay homage to “the universal sovereign” and to pray for “pity and compassion” to be worthy of the power entrusted to mankind by manifesting “a due sense of charity that we may be enabled to do thy will, and perform our duty towards those submitted to our service and protection” (p. 65). Later, on the St. John's, his “terror and astonishment” at the “innumerable band” of tropical fish rushing into the fountain leads to love and concern for and a brotherhood with them. Bartram's concept of sublimity thus reinforces his Quaker love and compassion for all living creatures.

Bartram's enumeration of qualities that elicit the sublime response is more inclusive than any of the eighteenth century aestheticians. Vastness, magnitude, and power played a crucial role. The objects in his sublime landscape as, for instance, the one at Wrightsborough have “vast” savannas, “gigantic” oaks and magnolias with “mighty trunks” (p. 25). Huge trees and enormous vines seemingly shade out the bluets and spring beauties. He never observes mosses despite the fact that his father had made an extensive study of them and was honored by having a genus named for him. He describes few insects and these only in swarms. His fullest description is of the ephemera which ascend “in clouds of innumerable millions” (p. 52). His small tropical fish arrest his attention primarily because they occur in “unspeakable numbers” (p. 131). His “stupendous” Indian mounds on the Little River he believes to be the work of a powerful nation whose “period of grandeur perhaps long preceded the discovery of this continent” (p. 25). Here and elsewhere Bartram introduces the vastness of time, which David Hume thought one of the most effective causes of the sublime. Since Francis Harper could find no trace of these mounds, they may be more literary than actual. Evidence from J. R. Swanton and others indicates, further, that Bartram greatly overestimated the antiquity of such mounds.

Significantly, in spite of his scientific accuracy, he characteristically appears to use measurements for the literary effect of magnitude. His account of alligator behavior has been verified except for his estimate of the number of eggs and the size of the adults. He reports two hundred eggs per nest, whereas forty is the usual number. The twenty foot alligator also strains credulity. He is likewise undependable in his estimate of the sizes of plains, rivers, and trees, invariably overestimating. He doubles the actual size of his magnificent Alachua Savannah. His practice of writing “yards” for “feet” may be mere carelessness, but it contributes to the vastness of his landscape by a factor of three. That he changed his field record for literary effect becomes obvious on comparing the Report to Fothergill with the Travels. He compressed two trips up the St. John's—one in May and June, another in August—into one June trip, a time when he could not have seen nests, eggs, and young. This technique allows him to heighten the incredible numbers, but it falsifies his zoological observations.

Sounds, colors, light, and movement play an important role in Bartram's sublimity. The “incredible loud and terrifying roar” of the bellowing alligators “resembles very heavy distant thunder” that causes “the earth to tremble” (p. 82). On a less terrifying note the “solemn symphony of the steady Western breezes, playing incessantly, rising and falling through the thick and waxy foliage” (p. 110), suggests succession and infinity. Bartram expands Burke's ideas on colors. His sublime landscape has the dark sombreness of dense shades and storms, but he also has the “fiery azalea, flaming on the ascending hills”—“the color of red lead, orange and bright gold”—seen in “incredible profusion” through dark shades. “We are alarmed with the apprehension of the hills being set on fire” (pp. 204-5). The light and movement that call forth the sublime experience are brilliant and rapid. There are the frequently described flashes of lightnings, but he also mentions “the sudden transition from darkness to light” from the forest to the plains (p. 119). The “rapidity of its motion” which “appears like a vapour” of the rattler's tail (p. 167), and the writhing alligators contribute to the grandeur of these adventures.

Variety in Bartram's aesthetic becomes a major component of sublimity, a quality related to the complexity and ultimate mystery of nature. His aesthetic theory thus explains and justifies the inclusiveness of the Travels. Here he departs from the more unified sublimity of Addison, Burke, and Hutcheson which is more dependent upon one grand and overwhelming impression. Any scene which Bartram labels sublime includes great diversity. The prospect from the high bluff at Hawkinsville encompasses unlimited marshes and meadows, “magnificent forests of “grand Magnolias, glorious Palms, fruitful Orange groves, Live Oaks,” a “grand elevation” above the curving river “ornamented by a sublime grove of Palms consisting of many hundreds of trees together,” dark swamps, “glittering ponds,” high hommocks, “solitary groves,” “capacious coves,” and “floating fields of Pistia” (pp. 88-89). Perhaps the same impulse that led him to ignore the mundane and the simple found expression in the unusual importance he attached to variety.

Similarly, a complexity that is beyond human understanding contributes to the sublime mystery of Bartram's South. He often applies the terms “singular” and “curious” to plants and animals whose structure and adaptation defy understanding and suggest a spirit moving through nature. The pelican's pouch, the Dionea's predation, the Pistia's life cycle, the wood rat's “conical pyramids,” the mimosa's sensitivity manifest “that inexpressibly more essential principle, which operates within” (p. lvi). Along with the diversity and complexity of nature Bartram emphasizes the mysterious. His theory of a vanished ancient race of mound builders, a theory which Swanton has refuted, relates to his tendency to heighten the mysterious. So too does his picturing in his imagination “the secret labyrinths” and “subterranean lakes” (p. 143, of the Florida springs, the unseen world that so impressed Coleridge.)

Terror for Bartram was not merely a literary concept; it was an essential aspect of nature, one that his aesthetic theory helped him to reconcile. Burning deserts, dreary swamps, somber mountains, solitary wastes contribute to the fearsome spectacle of the wilderness. In the famous scenes depicting the horrid combat of alligators Bartram used visual, auditory, and tactile imagery and diction to achieve a memorable scene of sheer terror:

Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells, His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder. When immediately from the opposite coast of the lagoon, emerges from the deep his rival champion. They suddenly dart upon each other. The boiling surface of the lake marks their rapid course, and a terrific conflict commences. They now sink to the bottom folded together in horrid wreaths.

(p. 75)

In all such episodes, in keeping with Burke's idea that danger that presses too closely is not sublime, Bartram never terms the actual event sublime. Only in retrospect, when he is out of physical danger, does it contribute to the sublimity of the landscape. After his encounter with the alligator Bartram finds “peaceful repose” in “a magnificent forest” that provides a “sublime contrast” with the “dreary swamp” (pp. 88-89).

His literary theory prompted Bartram to underscore the terror in his wilderness adventure with animals and Indians, an emphasis that he must then reconcile with his philosophy of “the benevolent and peaceable disposition of animal creation” and his primitivistic view of Indian character. He does this by precariously balancing polarities. The fearsome rattlesnakes are, in the end, “generous” and “magnanimous” for none struck him (p. 169) and he counters the fierceness of Indians with their magnanimity and mercy (p. 308).

Solitude was to Bartram the most difficult aspect of the terror of sublimity to bear, the one that he had the most difficulty in reconciling. It became increasingly burdensome toward the end of his travels when he was no longer praising God as his protector and preserver. In the “solitary waste and gloomy wilderness” (p. 209) of Georgia, he laments” … I could not help comparing my present situation in some degree to Nebuchdadnezzar's when expelled from the society of men, and constrained to roam in the mountains and wilderness, there to herd and feed with the wild beasts of the forest” (p. 228). Yet in the immediately preceding paragraph he had stated that “scenes of primitive unmodifield nature always pleased me” (p. 227). Bartram's painful resolution of this conflict, as well as the process of the working of sublime horror, are suggested allegorically in the life cycle of the ephemera. The eggs are deposited in the deep where the larvae exist in “a viscid scum” of their dark “oozy bed.” But the “genial heat” effects their “resurrection from the deep” and they “arise into the world in “clouds” (p. 52). In the solitary wilderness Bartram confronted one of the major aesthetic problems of eighteenth century literary theory: an explanation of the way in which the unpleasant, the painful, and the tragic can give pleasure. The aesthetic tradition in which Bartram was writing aided him in placing his painful desert solitude into the context of the sublime Alachua Savannah and Vale of Cowe. The concept of the sublime, at least in part, reconciled the opposing forces in Bartram's Travels.

The picturesque arose as a separate category in British aesthetic theory in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, partially in response to an increasing interest in travel to rural areas and in landscape gardening and painting. After all, travel into the sublime grandeur of the Alps was difficult, and gardeners despaired of achieving sublime effects in their restricted space. Addison had to a limited degree anticipated the picturesque in his view that an imitation of what is “Little, Common, or Deformed” could be acceptable to the imagination though not as delightful as the imitation of “the Great, Surprising, or Beautiful.”⁴⁸ To William Gilpin, the prolific author of books of picturesque tours, the picturesque was “any quality of being illustrated in a painting.”⁴⁹ Goats and cart horses were to Gilpin more picturesque than sleek race horses, ruins more than well maintained buildings. “Is there a greater ornament of a landscape, than the ruins of a castle?”⁵⁰ Sir Uvedale Price justified in theory the addition of the picturesque to beauty and sublimity. It was a convenient way to account for objects that please but yet are not beautiful or grand: “… the picturesque fills up a vacancy between the sublime and the beautiful, and accounts for the pleasure we receive from many objects on principles distinct from them both. …”⁵¹ Further, “it corrects the languor of beauty and the tension of sublimity.”⁵²

The picturesque became the aesthetic category connected with rural life, agriculture, and with an old, pastoral landscape not vast enough for sublimity nor gentle enough for beauty. As Humphrey Repton, the most influential landscape gardener of his day, put it, “the scenery of nature, called landscape, and that of a garden, are as different as their uses; one is to please the eye, the other is for the comfort and occupation of man: one is wild while the other is appropriate to man in the highest state of refinement.”⁵³ The picturesque became a most useful concept for Bartram and helped him reconcile the polarities of a major tension in his life and art: his love of wild primitive nature versus his appreciation of agricultural development and civilization. His futile attempt to support himself in the sublimity of Florida forests and swamps had been his effort to reconcile these forces in his life. For the remainder of his life after his attempt to become a farmer near St. Augustine and after his travels he chose Repton's Middle Distance at his garden at Kingsessing, revisiting the beautiful and sublime South only in dreams and memory. Eighteenth Century aesthetic theory gave him a metaphor for the conduct of his life as well as literary concepts and techniques that influenced his scientific discoveries and poetic descriptions.

In the Travels it is the idyllic beauty and sublime grandeur of the wilderness that Bartram stressed. He could, however, occasionally see nature as well as inhabited regions as picturesque. Some of his drawings and paintings could serve as illustrations for the books of William Gilpin, Thomas West, or the host of travellers who, with sketch pad and camera obscura, were searching England and America for picturesque prospects. Plate three in Joseph Ewan's The Drawings of William Bartram, for example, depicts a purple finch poised on a blasted, cracked stump of star anise which sprouts a single, twisted flower. In plate 14 stems and tendrils of the African cucumber twist about the page, in the center of which are the large, gnarled seed pods. In prose, too, he could see picturesquely, as in his descriptions of the wood ibis which Audubon thought more fanciful than accurate:

… he stands alone in the topmost limbs of tall dead Cypress trees, his neck contracted or drawn in upon his sholders, and beak resting like a long scythe upon his breast: in this pensive posture and solitary situation, they look extremely grave, sorrowful and melancholy, as if in the deepest thought.

(p. 95)

The concept of the picturesque becomes Bartram's aesthetic justification for agricultural development which he occasionally advocates. Early in the Travels he claimed his chief joy consisted “in discovering, and introducing into my native country, some original productions of nature, which might become useful to society” (p. 48). He could even find the site of Augusta “the most delightful and eligible of any in Georgia for a city,” for he described it in picturesque, not sublime, terms: it was a “fertile hilly country” with a navigable river (p. 200). Twice in the Travels he described a white plantation with approval. One at Medway had forested canals and avenues, “floriferous and fragrant trees and shrubs,” and “Pyramidal laurels” with a distant view of “extensive plantations of rice and corn” from “the humble but elegant and neat habitation of the happy proprietor.” This “charming and animating” scene fills the traveller with joy. Such farms seen a part of the wild grandeur of nature. The “delightful habitation” at St. Simons looked over the “awfully great and sublime” sea (p. 39).

The Indian, more successful at living in natural beauty and sublimity, adapted himself and his pursuits to it. This adaptation becomes the major reason for Bartram's view of the moral and spiritual superiority of his natives, a superiority that David Taitt did not find in his extensive travels in the region.⁵⁴ Such a surrender to nature seems a chief motive for Bartram's trip. “I resigned my bark to the friendly current. …,” he states, as he descends the St. John's which “unfolded fresh scenes of grandeur and sublimity” (pp. 31-32).

Indian agriculture did not destroy nature's beauty or sublimity. They lived in a rural picturesque landscape in harmony with natural beauty and sublimity quite distant from the “destruction and devastation” wrought by the British (160). At the Alachua capital of Cuscowilla, small garden plots on the verge of an “infinite green plain,” seemed to unite with skies and waters of the lakes (p. 123). “Such a landscape,” he concludes, “such a rural scene is not be imitated by the united ingenuity and labour of man” (p. 123). Obviously he is referring to the white man. The Indians live in their landscape “blithe and free as birds of the air”—“the most striking picture of happiness in this life” (p. 134). This scene provides Bartram's most striking picture of man and nature in harmony.

William Bartram's knowledge of eighteenth century aesthetic theory on the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque accounts for the inclusiveness of his observations, the multiplicity of his themes, and the structure of his book. He found, within this rich, aesthetic tradition, a means to incorporate into his Travels his love of the wilderness, his religious views, his primitivistic attitude towards Indians, animals, and plants, his scientific curiosity, and even a practicality that led him to observe rich soil, useful plants, and navigable rivers.

Notes

1. Francis Harper, ed., The Travels of William Bartram. Naturalist's Edition (New Haven, 1958), p. 355. All references to the Travels are to this edition.

2. “Work of William Son of John Bartram,” Bartonia 12 (Supplement) (1932), p. 20.

3. “The Interpretation of Aboriginal Indian Mounds by Means of Creek and Indian Customs,” Report of the Smithsonian Institute (1927), p. 495.

4. “Fasti Ornithologiae Redivivi—No. I Bartram's Travels,” Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science, XXIV (1875), pp. 338-358.

5. “Bartram's Ixia coelestina rediscovered,” Journal of the New York Botanical Garden, XXXII (1931), pp. 155-161.

6. Joseph Ewan, William Bartram. Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756-1788 (Philadelphia, 1968), p. 4.

7. Anon. “Monthly Review of New American Books.” “Travels through North and South Carolina, East and West Florida, etc., etc.,” Massachusetts Magazine or Monthly Museum, IV (November, 1792), p. 687.

8. Specimens of Table Talks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2nd ed. (London, 1836), p. 33.

9. The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson 1834-1872, vol. II (Boston, 1884), p. 198.

10. John and William Bartram Botanists and Explorers (Philadelphia, 1940).

11. William Bartram Interpreter of the American Landscape (Baltimore, 1933).

12. “William Bartram, A Classical Scientist,” Classical Journal, L (January, 1955), pp. 167-170.

13. “Towards Romanticism: A Study of William Bartram.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Utah, 1969.

14. “William Bartram's Bewegter Stil.” In Litteratur and Sprache der Vereinigten Straaten ed. by Hans Helmche (Heidelberg, Germany, 1969), pp. 47-61.

15. Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773-1774. A Report to Dr. John Fothergill. Annotated by Francis Harper. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. New Series. XXXIII (November, 1943), p. 138.

16. The Spectator ed. by G. Gregory Smith. 8 vols. (London, 1897-98). VI, Section 412, p. 61.

17. An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design. 1725 ed. by Peter King (The Hague, 1973), p. 82.

18. On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful. 2nd ed. (New York, 1937), p. 74.

19. Burke, p. 83.

20. Hutcheson, p. 37.

21. Addison, VI, p. 17.

22. Burke, p. 100.

23. The Works (New York, 1822), p. 416.

24. Hutcheson, p. 9.

25. Hutcheson, p. 93.

26. Burke, p. 88.

27. Reid, p. 424.

28. Hutcheson, p. 41.

29. Hutcheson, p. 43.

30. Hutcheson, p. 45.

31. Lecture on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 4th ed. 3 vols. (London, 1790), vol. I, pp. 108-9.

32. Burke, pp. 29-30.

33. Burke, pp. 92-96.

34. Blair, Vol. I, p. 101.

35. Key to North American Birds (Boston, 1885), p. xviii.

36. Addison, VI, p. 57.

37. Burke, p. 35.

38. Burke, p. 46.

39. Blair, Vol. I, p. 15.

40. Burke, pp. 46-47.

41. The Pleasure of Imagination, Book I, line 437 in The Works of Mark Akinside, M. D. (New Brunswick, N.J. 1808), p. 24.

42. An Essay on Taste 1759 (Gainesville, Fla., 1963), p. 18.

43. Reid, p. 407.

44. Addison, VI, p. 59.

45. The Pleasure of Imagination, Book I, line 440, p. 24.

46. Burke, p. 35.

47. Burke, pp. 52-71.

48. Addison, VI, p. 81.

49. Essay on Picturesque Beauty (London, 1792), p. i.

50. Gilpin, p. 27.

51. Essays on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful and on the Use of Pictures, for the Purpose of Informing Real Landscape. (London, 1810), p. 114.

52. Price, pp. 88-89.

53. The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphrey Repton, Esq. (London, 1840), p. 530.

54. Journal of David Taitt's Travels from Pensacola, West Florida, to and through the country of the Upper and Lower Creeks, 1772. In Travels in the American Colonies, ed. by Newton D. Mereness (New York, 1916), p. 501.