Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

Le Gallienne is taking a quiet axe to a sentimental habit: the Victorian reflex to treat the landscape like a stagehand for human feeling. The line is framed as a collective awakening - "we have, of course" - a lightly ironic throat-clearing that signals both confidence and impatience. He assumes the reader knows the old trick: pathetic fallacy, the moon weeping on cue, storms timed to personal tragedy. Then he denies it with a brisk finality: we have "ceased" to think that way, and Nature, pointedly gendered as "she", has "no concern" with us.

The intent is not to banish emotion from art so much as to strip away a comforting cosmology. If Nature is not "sympathetic", then meaning can't be outsourced to weather. Human drama loses its cosmic backing track; it has to stand on its own moral and psychological legs. That withdrawal of sympathy is the subtextual jolt: the world is not arranged to echo us, validate us, or even notice us. It's an early-20th-century posture - post-Darwin, post-industrial, increasingly secular - where Nature becomes system and process rather than companion.

There's a second, sneakier move here. By saying we've "long since" stopped believing in Nature's concern, Le Gallienne flatters modernity's self-image as grown-up and disenchanted. Yet he can't quite let go of the old intimacy: calling Nature "she" and describing a "mirror" betrays the very anthropomorphism he's rejecting. The sentence works because it stages a break-up while lingering on the pet names.