By Ignatius Krecker

An aspect of the Sublime which allows a range in artistic expression and interpretation is indeterminacy. In Landscape and Western Art, Malcolm Andrews writes that the Sublime escapes a desire for easy consumption found in the picturesque because “it is pictorially inframeable, and it cannot be framed in words. The Sublime is that which we cannot appropriate, if only because we cannot discern any boundaries. … [T]he vocabulary associated with the experience is one of surrender to a superior power.… In the act of surrender we acknowledge the feebleness of our powers of articulate expression and representation” (Andrews 142). Thus, a fundamental aspect of the Sublime lies in both recognizing and accepting our position relative to some overwhelming, inexpressible sensation and yet presenting that experience as well as possible. This indeterminacy and grappling with the unframeable provides a lens through which artists and poets can take a broad range of approaches from the marvelously optimistic to the overwhelming in negativity or ambivalence. Whereas William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798) provides a more optimistic approach to this sensation, Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (Der Mönch am Meer, 1808-10) delves into the sheer depth of this feeling of being overwhelmed. Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” lingers on and celebrates the grandeur of the titular sight.

In his introduction to the scene "a few miles above Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth writes that, after a five year absence, he has returned to the place where “once again/ do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,/ that on a wild secluded scene impress/ Thoughts of more deep seclusion” (lines 4-7). Thus, for Wordsworth the very sight of the cliffs not only presents objects that are themselves “wild” and “secluded” but also lead him to a yet deeper imagining of seclusion. In the next stanza, Wordsworth relates that, though he had been away from this setting, the sights sustained his interior life in a very significant way, as “oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din/ of towns and cities, I have owed to them/ in hours of weariness, sensations sweet” (lines 25-27). Thus, for Wordsworth the mere memory of the place transcends its physical location and a need to be there. While his return is significant for him and provides an entrance into solitude which he clearly appreciates, he also bears the imprint of the place in his memory which sustains him through the trials he faces in modern urban and domestic life.

Whereas “Tintern Abbey” is a reflection of Wordsworth’s nearly ecstatic experience of a nature, Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea provides a much more daunting experience of sublime indeterminacy. Andrews describes the painting as “a virtual compendium of Burkean ‘privations’—darkness, solitude, silence, obscurity. There is something appalling in its emptiness, in its utter lack of any consoling, reassuring presences” (146). Whereas Wordsworth is absorbed in the joy of a beautiful, verdant landscape populated by the remains of an idyllic abbey, albeit ruined and re-inhabited by the homeless, Friedrich presents a much bleaker scene whereby the barren white coast contrasts with the jarringly black ocean, which itself seeps up toward the sky in an ominous black fog, blurring the horizon. The result is a grim, endless, black sea which seems to absorb all around it, to include the titular monk, whose black habit blends in with the sea, thus obscuring the only human figure in the painting. The result is a dreadful sense of desolate loneliness. Whereas Wordsworth presents a sense of indeterminacy in his striking memory of and interior sustainment by an idyllic landscape and Friedrich presents an inverse portrayal of absolute desolation and isolation in the wilderness.

In technique and storytelling, Millais’s Isabella (1848-49) demonstrates the shift toward highly determinate detail introduced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. While Wordsworth revels in the joys of the cliff overlooking the ruined Tintern Abbey, despite his description of its new “inhabitants” and Friederich shows the daunting, imposing, all-encompassing scope of nature, Millais combines a medieval sense of scale, depth, and arrangement with a modern, exacting attention to detail. The product is something that is simultaneously more precise in its attention to granular details like the human form and specific environmental details and emphatic in its specific moment of a discrete narrative. Thus, Isabella is both more understandable in the the decipherment of specific human and narrative details, yet also less human and more constricted in its focus.