Arcadia, Tom Stoppard: analysis of Hannahs diatribe on moving from thought to feeling (p.39)

An example of the theme of Classicism against Romanticism is the argument between Lady Croom and Mr Noakes about the changes being made to the garden. This shows the striking difference between the tidiness and the order of the Classic style, and the strong and gothic appearance of the Romantic style. We meet this theme in Hannah’s search for poetic meanings behind the hermit of Sidley Park, what she actually exclaims with passion to Bernard in this speech.

In fact, the reason why Hannah decides to write about the hermit of Sidley Park is to study more thoroughly Romanticism. Because it is logical and concrete, Hannah prefers the Enlightenment to Romanticism, just as Lady Croom. She considers the Enlightenment as a time of great progress, but still with Romanticism taking all the progress away in her mind, as a “decline from thinking to feeling”; she sees in Romanticism excesses and irrationality, both represented by the hermit.

Usually, we think of the ‘natural’ as something ‘without human intervention’. But in the quote “The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside. And then Richard Noakes came in to bring God up to date”, Hannah seems to suggest through her history of gardening that the definition of ‘natural’ is a matter of fashion. So we can think that if two time periods have different ideas about what nature might be, it could mean that their science will as well be studied in different ways.

So while Hannah’s speech makes us clearly understand that she would at any time chose to think if she had to choose between thinking or feeling, Bernard on his side, more suspicious of her purposes, replies that she seems “quite sentimental over geometry” (p.40).