A personal view by Kenneth Clark
*
'For almost a thousand years the chief creative force in western civilisation was Christianity. Then, in about the year 1730, it suddenly declined-in intellectual society practically disappeared. Of course it left a vacuum. People couldn't get on without a belief in something outside themselves, and during the next hundred years they concocted a new belief which, however irrational it may seem to us, has added a good deal to our civilisation-a belief in the divinity of nature.'
Sir Kenneth Clark's examination of this new force takes him to Tintern Abbey and the Lake District of Wordsworth, to the Swiss Alps and the ideas of Rousseau-and to the landscapes of Turner and Constable.
Poems of William Collins, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth spoken by C. Day Lewis
Shown on Sunday
The narrative of this programme is printed in 'The Listener' of May 8
(Colour)