"Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them"
About this Quote
Le Gallienne slips a quiet radicalism into a sentence that looks, at first glance, like pastoral comfort. “Perhaps we too seldom reflect” is a velvet-gloved rebuke: the problem isn’t that we don’t know nature is alive; it’s that we’ve trained ourselves not to think about what that kinship demands. By making reflection the missing practice, he indicts modern attention itself - distracted, instrumental, always converting the nonhuman world into scenery, resource, or metaphor.
The phrase “the life of Nature is one with the life of man” carries the poet’s characteristic bridge-building, but it’s also a doctrinal challenge to the era’s confident hierarchies. In late Victorian and early modern Britain, “Nature” was being cataloged, fenced, industrially consumed, and rhetorically romanticized all at once. Le Gallienne’s move is to refuse both the scientist’s distance and the tourist’s sentimentality. “One with” suggests not resemblance but shared continuity: a single current of vitality in different forms.
His sharpest turn is “how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.” That “merely seeming” presses on the reader’s pride. It hints that the human exceptionalism we cling to may be a social story, not an ontological fact. The intent isn’t to flatten humanity into mud and leaf; it’s to puncture the fantasy that our lives are exempt from the terms that govern everything else: dependency, vulnerability, seasonality, decay.
It works because it sounds gentle while smuggling in an ethical demand: if the difference is “seeming,” exploitation becomes self-harm, and reverence stops being aesthetic and starts being practical.
The phrase “the life of Nature is one with the life of man” carries the poet’s characteristic bridge-building, but it’s also a doctrinal challenge to the era’s confident hierarchies. In late Victorian and early modern Britain, “Nature” was being cataloged, fenced, industrially consumed, and rhetorically romanticized all at once. Le Gallienne’s move is to refuse both the scientist’s distance and the tourist’s sentimentality. “One with” suggests not resemblance but shared continuity: a single current of vitality in different forms.
His sharpest turn is “how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.” That “merely seeming” presses on the reader’s pride. It hints that the human exceptionalism we cling to may be a social story, not an ontological fact. The intent isn’t to flatten humanity into mud and leaf; it’s to puncture the fantasy that our lives are exempt from the terms that govern everything else: dependency, vulnerability, seasonality, decay.
It works because it sounds gentle while smuggling in an ethical demand: if the difference is “seeming,” exploitation becomes self-harm, and reverence stops being aesthetic and starts being practical.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
|---|
More Quotes by Richard
Add to List
