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Our American ancestors, Kammen says, regarded nature primarily as something to be tamed and controlled—hence the "relative paucity" of seasonal writing between Philip Freneau and Henry David Thoreau, and the relatively "modest" amount of seasonal art prior to the mid-19th century. "Only when agricultural mechanization began to take hold and make a discernible difference during the 1850s and 1860s," Kammen writes, "did some Americans, especially in the East, begin to feel wistful, nostalgic, or moralistic about the enchanting nature and glories (rather than the challenges) of seasonal change."
This nostalgia meant money in the bank for those who knew how to package it, especially in the art world, where the four seasons became a commercially viable commodity (think Norman Rockwell calendars). The four seasons motif was used to sell cookbooks, restaurants, hotels, resorts, and anything else that could be ingeniously linked with it.
Indeed, by the 1970s, the seasonal motif "had become so hackneyed in commercial culture that no self-respecting artist could possibly contemplate painting a four seasons' suite." But art thrives on unpredictable reversals, and just when this theme had been consigned to the realm of irredeemable kitsch, artists began to find it seductive: "the final quarter of the twentieth century turned out to be an astonishingly fecund time for American art of the four seasons." (A great bonus of this book is the 48-page insert of beautiful color plates representing artwork from several centuries; in addition, 65 black-and-white photographs and illustrations are scattered through the book.)
It would be misleading to suggest that early Americans were uniformly narrow and utilitarian in their perception of the natural world. The great theologian Jonathan Edwards was also a keen student of nature, savoring its beauty and its intricacy. In the early 19th century, many writers extolled the seasons as evidence of God's hand, proclaiming the connections in lofty prose. But, Kammen argues, the confidence that underwrote such rhetoric began to fade. Commenting on Amherst College president Edward Hitchcock's lectures on the four seasons, Kammen observes, "Other naturalists during the second half of the nineteenth century might be Christian believers, but never again would anyone elaborate a seasonal case that 'by bringing before the imagination the most brilliant objects of the natural world, we get some faint conception of its magnificence; or rather, we learn that the most splendid scenes of earth are only faint emblems of the New Jerusalem and the Glory of God which forms its light.'"
Here Kammen surely overstates his case. In the 20th century, to take only one example among many, C.S. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory: "When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. … We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her; into that splendour which she fitfully reflects." If Lewis' words do not explicitly touch on the motif of the four seasons, there is nevertheless an unmistakable affinity between his perception of nature and Edward Hitchcock's from the century before. Other counterexamples are ready at hand—the poet Luci Shaw, for instance: "All the field's a hymn! All dandelions give glory, gold and silver."
Still, there's some truth to Kammen's contention that writers who attributed the natural wonders of the seasons to God gave way, beginning in the last half of the 19th century, to others who "replaced religion with careful empirical notations of natural phenomena, often romanticized by touches of pantheism." Few of the most prominent 20th-century naturalists writing about the seasons were traditional Christians, he notes, and many of their readers replaced religion with "the Gospel of Nature."
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